Starting from Scratch (9 page)

“W
hat do you mean you can't stay for a meeting?” Rocky stared at Elisha. “You always stay,” he protested.

This was the third late-afternoon meeting in as many days. Twice she'd reluctantly put things on hold and remained, to pilot the meetings as well as participate in them because Rocky liked handing the reins over to her. But not tonight. She couldn't. Who knew how many more evenings with Henry she had left?

She hated the thought, but running from it accomplished nothing and robbed her of precious time. “I know. But I've got a family emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?”

She really, really didn't want to go into it. So far, she hadn't shared news of Henry's condition with anyone. “Dinner.”

Rocky seemed baffled. “Dinner's an emergency? Lise, you're not making any sense. Now, I know that it's a little late to be calling a meeting without any warning, especially since I'd said yesterday that there wouldn't be another one today, but this really wasn't my idea. My ‘won't-stay-retired' father wanted all the senior editors to get together for a little brainstorming session. Seems he thinks that adding another line to the stable is a good idea and he wants to see what you all come up with.”

This time she intended to remain firm. Her resolve was stronger than Rocky's and they both knew it. “My brain doesn't storm after five o'clock anymore, Rocky. It just lies there.”

His look told her that he wasn't buying. “I know this is the third meeting in a row, Lise, and I'm really sorry about it. But if you're going to come up with an excuse, it has to be a better one than you're not up to brainstorming. We've all seen what you can do. Hell, I've seen you work practically around the clock that time we needed John Spencer's book in the lineup after Randall flaked out on us,” he said, mentioning one of their former editors.

“That was a onetime event,” she pointed out. “I don't do that on a regular basis. I'm not a robot.” She realized that she was beginning to sound a little testy and she didn't mean to, not with Rocky. Despite his title, he was just the messenger here. It wasn't his fault. “Besides, I really do have previous plans.”

Leaning his posterior against her desk, Rocky crossed his arms before his shallow chest and looked at her, a shadow of a man dressed in black. “The dinner.”

“The dinner.”

Rocky softened slightly. “With a guy?”

She almost laughed out loud. That part of her life was behind her. “Rocky, there hasn't been ‘a guy' in my life in the way you mean for a very long time. It really is family.”

“So, if it's family, it can be put off.”

“No,” she said firmly in a tone she never used with him, “it can't.”

“Elisha, what's going on? Something's up and you're not leveling with me.”

She looked away. “Nothing's up.”

“Lise, I'm a hell of a lot more intuitive than the average man on the street, certainly more so than my father ever was. I'm too damn sensitive for my own good and my sensitivity level tells me that something's wrong.” He turned her face toward him. “Now, out with it.” And then he stiffened. “Oh, damn, are those tears? Tell me those aren't tears.”

She measured the words out evenly. Anything else and she would have choked. Emotion had come swarming out of nowhere to overwhelm her. “They're not tears.”

Rocky frowned. “I don't believe you.”

One tear trickled out. Annoyed, she rubbed it away with the back of her hand. “I'm just repeating your own damn dialogue, Rocky—”

He caught her hands in his and forced her to look at him. “Okay, I'm not your boss, not the guy whose head is going to be on the chopping block if I don't deliver my best senior editor to the meeting—”

Elisha was clutching at straws, trying desperately to divert the conversation from the direction it was headed. “You never called me your best senior editor,” she sniffed. She hated herself for giving way to tears when she was trying so hard to be strong. So hard not to think of anything beyond the single moment she was living in.

“Didn't want you to get a swelled head,” he told her gently. “But you are. And stop interrupting.” He resumed his speech, “Don't think of me in any professional capacity at all. Just think of me as your friend. Someone you've known for twenty-four years. Someone who cares about you.” When she began to turn her face away, he inclined his head, peering at her. “Someone who's shared his own traumas with you.”

And then, because she couldn't hold them back any longer, the words just burst out, almost on their own. “Henry has cancer.”

“Is it serious?” His tongue felt thick in his mouth. “I mean, of course it's serious, cancer is always serious. But it can be treated, right?” He watched her carefully.

“I keep hoping…” And then, just for a fraction of a second, Elisha's hope deserted her. “It's pancreatic cancer.”

The air stood still around them. The street noise below grew distant. His eyes intent on her face, Rocky said nothing and seemed stricken.

Finally, he drew in a breath, as if that could somehow protect them both. “How much time…?”

Elisha shook her head violently, not allowing him to finish the question. Not wanting him to. “I haven't asked him. I don't want to know,” she confessed. “I just want every minute I can find to count.” She looked at him, knowing he understood even if she was being incoherent. “So, you see, I—”

“Go,” he said, waving her toward the door. “Go see your brother. Be with him.”

She lost no time in gathering up her jacket and purse, then stopped. She
was
leaving him in the lurch and as much as she wanted to leave, she hated to do that to him. “What about your father?”

“I'll deal with him.”

He'd said that way too cavalierly. She smiled at him, gratitude in her eyes. “Rocky, you're afraid of your father.”

Sparse shoulders shrugged beneath the burgundy cashmere sweater. “So, I'll let him bully me around a little bit. He won't do it in front of the others. Thank God he's got this thing about maintaining decorum before ‘the troops.'” His mouth twisted in an ironic smile. “You would have thought the man was a career soldier instead of someone who'd donated a little time to the army reserves in his twenties.” And then Rocky tried to smile, offering Elisha what he hoped was some kind of positive energy. “Let me know if there's anything I can do.”

Miracles were out of Rocky's realm. Still, she was grateful for the offer. “I might need a shoulder.”

“I've got two.” As if to emphasize the fact, he raised and lowered his in an almost comical fashion. “They're not too wide and they're kind of bony, but they're yours if you need them.”

She could feel the tears coming again. She needed to leave before they materialized. Once was more than enough. “Thanks, Rocky.”

She was almost at the door when he called after her. “Wait.”

Elisha turned around, afraid that his fear of his father had gotten the better of him. Afraid that she was going to have to ignore any last-minute plea that might be rising to his lips. She really needed to see Henry tonight. It had been three days since the last time and those were three days she wasn't going to be able to recover.

A sense of fatalism warred with her natural tendency toward optimism. “What?”

“Henry lives on the island, right?”

“Right.”

“So—” he crossed to her “—you're going to need transportation.”

“I'm getting a cab.” That was the one thing she could always count on. The city was always full of taxis looking for a fare.

But Rocky was shaking his head. “Forget the cab. We have a limo at our disposal.” He wasn't telling her anything she didn't know. The limo was used to pick up out-of-town authors at the airport, as well as to chauffeur them around when they were visiting. In the off times, Rocky used the limo to take him to and from his apartment. “I'll have Tom drive you.”

“You don't have to do that.”

“Sure I do. I just cost you time, arguing about coming to this afternoon's meeting.” She knew Rocky felt bad about what she'd told him. This was his way of trying to help. “Besides, Tom is a genius when it comes to maneuvering through traffic. You'd swear you were on a motorcycle instead of in a limo. And he knows more shortcuts than Rand McNally. I guarantee he'll get you there faster than any cabdriver. And in comfort, too. You won't spend half the ride to the island trying to figure out ‘what that smell is.'”

“Comfort's not very high up on my priority list, but okay. I'll take you up on your offer.” Impulsively, she kissed his cheek. “And thanks.”

Caught off guard, Rocky brushed his long, thin fingers along his skin where her lips had touched him. The look on his face told Elisha he wished he could do more. “Don't mention it.”

Giving her an encouraging smile, he took out his cell phone and pressed the preassigned number that would connect him to his limo driver.

Behind them, in the hall, senior editors and an assorted number of staff members were beginning to file by, on their way to the conference room. Rocky purposely kept his back to the doorway.

E
lisha discovered optimism only went so far. Even hers. In their second or third meeting, Ryan Sutherland had accused her of being a terminal optimist, saying that the only cure for that was reality.

She hated the fact that the man was right.

As the days and hours of the past month had dried up and blown away, she had begun to feel like someone addicted to pistachio nuts who had been presented with a bag filled with them. And none of the nuts had an opening, not so much as a tiny, split crack that she could pry apart in order to get at the green meat housed within.

None of the doctors she'd had Henry go and see had anything encouraging to say.

It was like living in a world stocked with an endless supply of futility.

Henry, being Henry, had decided to continue living his life by going to work, treating each day as just that, a day. A single day in his life. He wanted to go on working at the law firm for as long as he was able.

Though he was a hell of a lot braver than she was, she believed that a part of her brother had to hope that by continuing as before the diagnosis, by putting little importance to this devastating sentence, this hideous six-letter plague would somehow just wind up fading back into the darkness from whence it had emerged.

Henry might have continued with his life, but things changed for her. She still went in to work, but she lit candles, she prayed. She made endless deals with God in which hers was the only voice that was heard.

“It's okay,” she said as she deposited into an envelope yet another check for one of the myriad charities that sent letters of entreaty to her. “You don't have to move the earth, or send a dove past my window to show me you're listening. Just make Henry get better. That'll be my sign.”

Never heavy to begin with, Henry began to lose weight and it showed, really showed. Elisha stepped up her prayers and contributions. She couldn't outrun the nervous, restless feeling that tumbled throughout her body like a malfunctioning dryer.

At the end of the month, she told Rocky she was taking Friday off in order to turn it into a three-day weekend. Her intent was to surprise Henry and the girls by whisking them off to Walt Disney World in Orlando. Rocky had insisted on lending her his father's private plane and paying for the accommodations at the Disneyland Hotel.

She didn't argue.

The trip was hard on Henry physically, revitalizing emotionally. Being Henry, he'd soldiered on without complaint, pretending not to be as tired as he was. Like her, he wanted this to be a memorable outing for Andrea and Beth.

The entire time they were at Walt Disney World, Beth hung on to his hand as if someone had dropped a tube of superglue between them. Her ten-year-old enthusiasm bubbling up, she dragged her father off first in one direction, and then another, wanting him to see the same exciting things that she did.

He saw them through her eyes and loved it.

He loved it all, even the lines. Because he was with the three people who mattered most in his life and he was all the richer for it.

Elisha could see her brother's pleasure, his satisfaction in his drawn face. Though she knew the trip was tiring for him, she honestly felt that this was a great deal better for him than staying home, keeping a death watch.

In contrast to Beth's exuberance, Andrea was almost eerily quiet, observing it all like a section of background scenery. It was easy to see that she was torn between denial and dreaded acceptance of her father's fate. Having fun almost made her feel guilty.

But, because it meant so much to Henry, the girl did her best.

They all did.

Pretending for one another, Elisha noted. Pretense was all they had. That, and the moment.

They spent two nights at the Disneyland Hotel in a major suite. Rocky had insisted on that, too. She smiled to herself, the only genuine smile since she'd swung by early Friday morning to pick the three of them up and take them to the airport. In the limo that Rocky had provided. There was no doubt about it. Rockefeller Randolph was one in a million.

Too bad that all the good guys were either taken or gay, she thought. If Garry had displayed half the thoughtfulness, half the sensitivity that Rocky did most of the time, she would have proposed to him on their first date. But there were no princes in her world. No one to ride up on a white charger to whisk her away to his castle in the sky. That was something she'd come to terms with years ago. But being subjected to Rocky's generous spirit inexplicably made her ache for what she once had believed was possible.

Dammit, there she went again, thinking of herself. She wasn't the major player here, Henry was. She was just a lesser, supporting character. And she was going to be as supportive as she possibly could be.

Elisha looked at her brother sitting beside her on the plane. After three days, they were finally on their way home. Henry looked wan. Maybe she should have made the minivacation for only a day or a day and a half at the most. With each passing day, his strength left him a little more, dribbling away like tears of heartbreak. She didn't want to be the cause of any more depletion.

She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “Was the trip too much for you?”

Sitting in the seats directly opposite them, Beth had fallen asleep more than fifteen minutes ago, her head leaning against Andrea's arm. Andrea sat perfectly still, her eyes staring straight ahead at her father and yet, through her father. Her face was expressionless. She looked like an ice sculpture.

Andrea worried Elisha.

“It wasn't too much for me,” he assured her, stopping to take a breath in the middle of his words. “Nothing's too much for me as long as I spend the time with all three of my favorite girls.” His mouth quirked in a fleeting smile. “Thanks for doing this for me.”

She moved her fingers in the air, as if to stir away the thanks.

“You don't have to thank me, Henry. I wanted to do this. I've been meaning to get away and visit the Mouse for some time.” And then she lifted and lowered her shoulders in a halfhearted shrug. “But you know how it is. Time just had a way of getting away from me.”

He turned his head to face her. “Yes, I know how it is. And I can say this to you. Don't let it,” he said with feeling, though it was hard for him. Someone was shooting arrows into his stomach. Large, pointy, stinging arrows. “Don't let time slip through your fingers, Lise. Don't retreat from life. And, above all, don't live it through the books you work on.”

“I don't,” she protested, then lowered her voice when Andrea looked in her direction. She thought of the two books she had worked on last and then laughed at the idea of vicarious living. “Besides, I don't exactly see myself as an aging sleuth or a gungho ex-commando, scaling the sides of villas in Switzerland,” she said, mentioning both Sinclair Jones's and Ryan Sutherland's most famous characters.

Trying to picture her as one or the other, Henry started to laugh. Almost immediately he began to cough, clutching his abdomen.

Her entire body was on alert as fear scissored through Elisha.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked, ready to summon the steward that Rocky employed on board. “Water? Um—”

Words dried in her throat.

Helpless, she was utterly helpless and she hated it. Henry was right in his assessment. Somehow, without fully realizing just when it had happened, she had slipped off to the sidelines. There she had allowed life to whirl madly out of control around her while she handled one literary emergency after another. In the meanwhile, the big picture, her life, just went on evolving without any thought to it on her part, without any intervention on her part whatsoever.

That had to change. But later. Not now. Now belonged to Henry.

Getting himself under control, determined not to allow the sharp pain he felt to overwhelm him, Henry waved back her concern.

“No, I'm fine. Really,” he added, trying to muster more feeling into his voice because Andrea was watching him with wide, frightened eyes. “Really,” he repeated, smiling at his oldest daughter. “Just drew in a little air and saliva, that's all,” he explained. “Went down the wrong way.”

Exhaling, he settled back in his seat once more and allowed Elisha to fuss over him for a moment because he knew she needed to. He smiled as he watched her adjusting the blanket that she'd thrown over his legs. “I'm not some infirm old man, Lise.”

“I know that,” she said sharply. “Can't a big sister fuss over her little brother once in a while?”

“This would be the once, not the while,” he teased.

Elisha didn't much feel like teasing back. Not when all this adrenaline was coursing through her veins like molten lava flowing down the mountainside from an erupting volcano.

Sitting back, she looked at him. “Maybe you should take Monday off,” she suggested. When she saw the protest rising to her brother's lips, she quickly headed it off. “After all, it's not like they're going to fire you for skipping a day.” And then she smiled at him. “You're too important to them.”

“They'll get along fine without me.” He raised his eyes to hers and added softly, so that Andrea could not hear, “You all will.”

“No,” she replied as fiercely as she could without waking Beth, “we won't.”

There was nothing but kindness and understanding in his eyes. He remembered how he had felt when Rachel had died. Like the world had ended. But it hadn't. It went on. It was something Elisha and the girls would learn, too. “You're going to have to.”

She stiffened her shoulders. “Don't tell me what I have to do,” Elisha retorted, then she softened, fussing with the blanket again. “Just because you're not feeling well right now, Henry, doesn't mean you get to boss me around.”

“So if I ask you to thank Rocky for me for all this,” he bantered, “you won't do it?”

She blew out a breath and then laughed lightly. She'd already thanked Rocky. Several times. But this time, it would be coming from Henry. Rocky would appreciate that. “That I'll do.”

Henry settled back, a wistful expression slipped over his face. He wasn't going to see his girls grow up, wasn't going to see them fall in love. Wasn't going to see them get married. Wasn't even going to be able to see that happen for Elisha.

He turned his head to look at his sister's concerned face. “He would have made a great guy for you. Too bad he's gay.”

She laughed, really laughed, the tension breaking for a moment. It was uncanny how much they thought alike. “I was just thinking the same thing.”