More Than Friends (11 page)

she ventured down to the kitchen for aspirin and herbal tea, but the fact that the kitchen looked so normal, when nothing was normal at all, upset her. She returned to her office, wrapped herself in an afghan, and shivered.

If she caught three hours' sleep, that was pushing it.

Nonetheless, she was in the kitchen the next morning when Zoe and Jon came down and saw them off with a promise to pick Zoe up after school. Yes, she would drive to the hospital, she had decided. She loved Michael--who was just the same, the nurse told her--too much not to go. Whether she would be able to talk to Teke was something she would face at the time.

Sam came down dressed for work, just as the children were leaving. Not knowing what to say to him, she went up to shower. The bathroom was filled with steam by the time she turned the water off. She was reaching for the towel draped over the door when she saw his tall, gray-garbed figure.

"Yes?" she asked in alarm, and covered herself with the towel.

"Can we talk a minute?" he asked.

"I'm not dressed."

"Come on, Annie."

She knew he was thinking that she was his wife, that he'd seen her undressed thousands of times, that he knew every inch of her body. But what he had done had made him a stranger. She felt self conscious. She didn't move. She didn't speak. She simply stared at his blurred form until he got the message. As soon as he left, she toweled herself off and put on a robe. Then she opened the bathroom door. "Yes?" He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his

elbows on his knees. His suit looked formal against the rumple of the sheets, not so formal against the other side of the bed, the neat, unslept-in side. Either way he looked handsome. She resented that tremendously.

"What are your plans for the day?" he asked with due humility.

"I don't know."

"You'll be at school?"

"For a while."

"Are you going to the hospital?"

"I'll take Zoe and Jana there after school. Jon will drive in with Leigh after practice."

Sam looked at his hands. "Can we meet for coffee?"

"I won't be staying that long."

He looked up. "Then an early dinner? In town? Here?" She shook her head. Her insides ached every which way around her heart. "I can't, Sam," she said.

"Won't."

"Can't. There's a war going on inside. I'm bleeding in places I haven't found and won't be able to find until the dust settles a little."

He considered that. After a minute he pushed himself up and stood, so straight and resignedly Sam that Annie was tempted to throw herself at him and beg his forgiveness. Only she wasn't the one to be begging forgiveness. She hadn't done anything wrong. At least she didn't think she had.

She was so confused.

She watched him go, thinking she should wish him good luck in his press conference but refusing to speak, thinking that she should be pleased at having turned him down for dinner but feeling no pleasure at all. Lest she start crying again, she

busied herself getting dressed, but by the time she was done she knew that she couldn't go to school. She couldn't stand before two hundred freshmen and discuss D. H. Lawrence.

D. H. Lawrence. Right there in the syllabus. Sons and Lovers. One man and two women, one earthy, one introspective. She couldn't possibly talk about that.

Cursing fate, she called in sick. Then she changed from her suit into a pair of jeans, threw on sneakers and a sweater, and climbed into the car. Thirty minutes later she was in Rockport, at the small, timeworn cottage she had called home for the first twenty-one years of her life.

The drive was rutted, not so much from the weather as from neglect. Peter Muggins couldn't be bothered with things like repairing pavement, mowing lawns, or maintaining picket fences. He was an artist. He let things flow. With a small, sweet, sheepish smile, he gave nature its run of the place.

Annie parked behind his rusted old station wagon and let herself in the side door. The kitchen was chaotic. Pete didn't believe in washing dishes until there was nothing clean left in the cupboard. He didn't believe in putting away staples only to have to take them back out for the next meal. He didn't believe in throwing junk mail into the trash when it could be used for drawing on. Ahhhh, but what drawings he made. Annie might fault him for the littered countertops, but never for his drawings.

Pastel Pete, they called him for his artistic preference. He supported himself by selling watercolors in local galleries, but he was best known for the seasonal murals he drew on the south wall of the bank in the center of town, and for his eccentricity. He rarely obeyed rules, yet he was so sweet, with his pink cheeks and his blond-white hair and beard,

that no one minded. It was generally accepted that he was an endangered species, to be protected by an indulgence of his need for space.

Annie left the kitchen. Originally there had been three other rooms in the cottage, a living room and two bedrooms. Soon after Annie had married, though, Pete had taken a sledgehammer to the walls, and the end result was a single large studio with jagged edges where walls had once been. One coat of thick white paint--deemed a suitable canvas by Pete--on everything in sight, and the redecorating was done. Eighteen years later the walls were a treasure of drawings, of landscapes, seascapes, and portraits, running the gamut from whimsy to realism. Annie shuddered to think of the time when her father would be gone and those walls might come down.

"Pop?" she called when she didn't see him.

Seconds later his head appeared around one of the jagged-edged walls. He smiled and waved her close with a hand. He was sitting on the floor working on yet another section of wall. Though the colors were characteristic of his style, Annie couldn't make out what he was drawing. She saw sparkles-pale yellow, green, pink ones on a field of blue--but the sparkles weren't Fourth of July-type sparkles. They had life to them somehow.

"They're from another world," he said in a voice that got softer and more gravelly with each year that passed. He was seventy, making his voice soft and gravelly indeed.

"Ahhhh." She squatted beside him to better study the patch of wall.

"They wilted a little during the trip to earth. Thirteen hundred light-years is a long time. But they're reviving."

"Why are they here?"

"Just visiting."

"That's a long trip for just a visit."

"They need comfort. Their home planet is shaky. They're wanting to know that life exists somewhere else, just in case." Annie smiled. She leaned toward her father and let him fold her in his arms. He wasn't a large man-five nine, tops--but he was solid. That solidity was familiar and sure.

"Something shaky with you?" he asked.

She made a sound that said yes.

"Need a little comfort?"

She made another sound like the first.

"Want a brandy?"

She smiled. Brandy was her father's weakness. "You swore you never touched the stuff until dinnertime."

"I swore I never drank alone. Dinnertime's when I'm with Peter Jennings. Now I'm with you. Want one?"

She shook her head against his shoulder.

"Tea?"

She shook her head again.

"Cocoa?"

She sighed. When she'd been a child, cocoa had been a panacea. Somehow she didn't think it would do the trick now. "I'll just sit a while, I think," she said, but she didn't move from his arms.

"Jock-o'-my-Jon okay?" he asked cautiously.

She smiled at the nickname, which he'd been using since Jon had been six and a T-Ball star, and nodded.

"Pretty little Zoe?"

She nodded again.

"Big bad Sam?"

Her smile faded.

When she didn't answer Pete said, "Uh-oh." He paused. "What'd he do?"

She sighed. "Something that upset me."

"He doesn't often."

"No."

"I like Sam."

"So do I."

"Then it'll get better," he said in a soothing way. Annie took full measure of the soothing, but it was an ephemeral thing. When it was gone, she eased herself from his arms and got to her feet. While Pete went back to work, she wandered around.

For the most part, the walls of the house were a random assortment of thoughts. Like his kitchen, the assortment was chaotic, until one reached the back wall.

Most families had picture albums or, increasingly, videocassettes to document their lives. Pastel Pete had a full wall of his house. Sketched right on the flat white paint were drawings of Annie as a child, a teenager, a young woman. There were drawings of her as a bride, of Sam, of the children at various ages. There were also drawings of Annie's mother, who had left when Annie was two. The images on the wall were all Annie had to remember her by. Annie studied them. By Pete's hand her mother had been small and fragile, with long dark hair and a gentle smile. Had it not been for her eyes, she would have looked the part of the innocent. But eyes were Pastel Pete's forte. If there was feeling there, he captured it--indeed, often captured it elsewhere and put it there, though no one ever called him on it. That was one of the things people indulged in Pete, in large part because they couldn't fault the accuracy of his insight.

In Annie's high school graduation picture, he'd captured excitement and fear in her eyes. In her college

graduation picture, he'd captured headiness; in her wedding picture, utter bliss.

Annie's mother's eyes were spirited. They spoke of a woman who wouldn't be tamed, a woman who needed continual change and challenge. Peter Muggins had been a colorful, if brief stop along the journey of her life. Annie's arrival had prolonged that stop, but not even she had been enough to prevent the inevitable moving on.

Annie couldn't say that she had been an unhappy child. She had adapted to her mother's absence, and Pete was as dear as a father could be. It wasn't until she became a teenager that she'd felt the loss. That was when, grappling with her own nascent womanhood, she'd begun to blame herself.

If she were more beautiful, her mother might have stayed. If she had long, flowing dark hair. Or green eyes. Or a heart-shaped face. If she was different somehow, more interesting somehow, her mother might have stayed.

Through those teenage years, Annie felt inferior to almost everyone around her. She grew introverted. She took to reading and writing poetry in her journal. Her father, a man of few words and much soul, was her very best friend.

Then came Teke. And Sam.

Annie thought of him now, pictured him in his office with clients on either side, a bouquet of microphones gathered in a cluster on the desk, and beyond it a circle of the Boston media's elite. Did you expect this victory, Mr. Pope? one of the reporters would be asking.

A lawyer never expects a victory, Sam would answer modestly. He does his homework, plots his case, and argues his heart out, then stands back while our system of justice has its way.

Do you see this decision as affecting other states?

I see other states ruling similarly, though not because of this case. The concept of making allowance for the trauma of crimes like sexual abuse is one whose time has come.

From the far side of the room, another reporter would call, Will you be representing other women's groups?

Perhaps.

And another. Would you say that you were better able to argue this case because you have a wife and a daughter?

By all means. I would want my wife and daughter protected in the very way these women here have been.

Where is your wife, Counselor? yet another reporter would ask. She usually attends your press conferences.

She couldn't make it, Sam would say.

Why not?

She works.

Does she get jealous when you work with groups of women, like this one?

No, he would say, but smugly now. She knows what she has to do to keep my attention.

What is that, Counselor?

She has to be beautiful, seductive, and interesting. She has to bring in her share of the money. She has to dress up when I want her to dress up, and dress down when I want her to dress down. She has to wash my socks and pick up my shirts from the laundry. She has to dust the house every morning. And she has to have a homemade meal, hot and ready on the table, every night.

But she doesn't do all that, a reporter in the image of Virginia Clinger would point out. She doesn't do half that. She may have a career, but she's a sham of a wife. She mismatches your socks, serves you ready

made from the market for dinner, and she's far too pale to be pretty. It's a wonder you haven't strayed before. Or have you, Mr. Pope?

Not wanting to hear the answer, Annie turned from the wall of drawings and went for cocoa after all.

five

Maxwell, Roper and Dine since the days Roper and Dine had been alive and John Stewart had been the only Maxwell in the firm. Stanley had made a fortune in zippers. Though the fortune had shrunk in recent years, it remained impressive enough for Stanley to be coddled by the firm.

That was why J.D. ignored the pressure he felt to race back to the hospital after the press conference Thursday and took Stanley to lunch instead. J.D. had been handling the account for years. He had a solid rapport with Stanley and a vivid understanding of the kind of money the firm stood to reap as the executor of his estate. Clients like that weren't put off unless the circumstances were dire. Nor were they taken to Dino's Sub Shop for lunch.

J.D. took him to the Federal Club. Over crab bisque and medallions of lamb, they discussed Sam's case and Stanley's estate. Stanley saw them as related. Chauvinist that he was, he feared that the ruling in Sam's case would give license to women to complain, which was what his own daughters did all the time. He was convinced that

they would spend him into the poorhouse if he didn't guard his money well.

J.D. let him talk, which meant suffering through the long lapses between sentences that typically punctuated Stanley's speech. His mind didn't work as quickly as it once had. Neither did his body. At eighty-six it protested most movement, which meant that the walk back to the law firm--Stanley didn't believe in taking cabs--was accomplished at a snail's pace.