Key of Knowledge

by Nora Roberts

  Zoe glanced over her shoulder toward the sound of the sander. “The night we were at his place, after everyone else left. I was having a simple conversation with him, then he kissed me.”

  “He kissed you? That perverted maniac! Get the rope.”

  “Oh, ha, ha.”

  “Okay, did you have to fight him off? Was it a scarring experience?”

  “No, but . . .” She lowered her voice, though she could have shouted and not been overheard. “He really kissed me, and my head went wonky for a minute, so I kissed him back. I’ve got entirely too much on my plate for fun and games right now. Besides, he makes me nervous.”

  “Yeah, great-looking guys who take time out of their day to sand floors for me always make me nervous. Listen, I’ve got to talk to Dana. When I’ve taken care of her, I’ll run over and, if necessary, save you from Brad’s nefarious clutches. Unless, of course, you don’t think you can handle yourself.”

  “Okay, that was low. Very low.”

  “Just make sure he doesn’t wander over while I’m talking to Dana. Scoot.” She waved Zoe away, then headed in the opposite direction.

  Her first thought was: Oh! Her walls were coming to life with that pale, delicate burnt gold she’d chosen. It was right, just so right. Already she could see what a perfect backdrop it would make for art.

  Her second thought was how set and blank Dana’s face was as she worked.

  And that was wrong, just so wrong.

  “It looks wonderful.”

  Obviously jolted out of long thoughts, Dana turned her head. “Yeah. You’ve got a knack for bull’s-eyeing color. I figured this would look bland, even a little dingy. Instead it has this nice, quiet glow.”

  “You don’t. You don’t have any glow at all today.”

  Dana shrugged, and continued to work. “Can’t be Mary Sunshine all the time.”

  “I saw Jordan this morning. He wasn’t glowing either. In fact,” she continued as she walked to Dana, “he looked devastated.”

  “He’ll get over it.”

  “Do you really think that, or do you need to think it because it gets you off the hook?”

  “I’m not on any hook.” She stared hard at the wall as she painted. Gold over white, gold over white. “I did what was right for me. It’s none of your business, Malory.”

  “Yes, it is. I love you. I love Flynn, and he loves you.”

  “We’re just one big, gooey family.”

  “You can be angry with me if you want, if it helps. But you have to know I’m on your side. Whatever happens, I’m on your side.”

  “Then you should understand why I broke things off and you should support my decision.”

  “I would, if I thought it was what you really wanted.” Malory rubbed a hand over Dana’s back. “If it made you happy.”

  “I’m not looking for happy yet.” Her friend’s comforting stroke made her want to sit down on the floor and wail. “I’ll settle for a little stretch of smooth road.”

  “Tell me what happened between yesterday and today.”

  “I remembered—with a little help from Kane.”

  “I knew it.” As she snapped it out, Malory’s face went bright with anger. “I knew he was behind this.”

  “Hold on. He took me on a trip down memory lane. That makes him a son of a bitch, but it doesn’t change the facts.” God, she was tired. She just wanted to be left alone to paint the walls. Paint away the ache and fatigue. “He didn’t change what happened or make it worse. He didn’t have to. I just knew that after seeing it again, feeling it again, I was making a mistake.”

  “Why is it a mistake to love a decent man?”

  “Because he doesn’t love me.” She yanked the band out of her hair, as if doing so would relieve the headache simmering at the base of her skull. “Because he’s going to leave as soon as he’s done here. Because the more I’m with him, the deeper in I get, and I can’t control how I feel the way I thought I could. I can’t be with him and not be in love with him.”

  “Did you ask how he felt?”

  “No. And you know what? I just wasn’t up to hearing the old ‘I care about you’ routine. Sue me.”

  No one spoke for a moment. There was only the sound of Dana’s labored breathing, the hum of the paint machine, and the steady buzz of the sander from the other side of the house.

  “You hurt him.” Malory stepped over, flicked off the machine. “Maybe his feelings aren’t as simple and weak as you think. The man I saw this morning had been cut straight down to the bone. If you wanted payback, Dana, you got it.”

  She whirled around, vibrant with fury, trembling with insult. The roller fell out of her hand and left a dull gold smear on the drop cloth. “For Christ’s sake, what do you take me for? Do you think I’ve been sleeping with him just so I could kick him out and get back some of my own?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m just thinking, if you really want that smooth stretch of road, you don’t get it by running somebody else into a ditch, then leaving him there bleeding.”

  Dana heaved the hair band to the floor and wished viciously she had something more satisfying to throw. “You’ve got some goddamn nerve.”

  “Yes, I guess I do.”

  “This is my fucking spin on the wheel, Malory. I don’t need you or anyone else telling me who to let into my life, or who to close out.”

  “Seems to me that’s just what you’re letting Kane do. He had a direction he wanted you to take, and you’re going right along with it. You’re not even asking yourself why he gave you the push.”

  “So now I should stay with Jordan because of the key? You’re lecturing me about my own life, my own decisions, so I won’t risk screwing up your deal?”

  Malory drew a long breath. It wasn’t the time for her to lose her temper, or, she decided, to blame Dana for losing hers. “If you believe that, you don’t know me, and more, you don’t know what it is you’ve agreed to do. So you can keep on painting, and congratulating yourself for avoiding all those bumps in the road, or you can stop being a coward and settle this with Jordan.”

  Finished, Malory started out. “He shouldn’t be hard to find,” she called back. “He told Flynn he was going to see his mother this morning.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  HE brought her carnations. Tulips had been her favorite, but it was the wrong season. Still, she’d liked simple flowers the best. Tulips and daffodils, rambling roses and daisies. The carnations were simple, it seemed to him, and feminine in a soft, old-fashioned pink.

  She’d have appreciated them, made a fuss, and put them in her good vase—the one her mother had given her some long ago Christmas.

  He hadn’t thought to buy anything to put them in, so the florist’s paper would have to do.

  He hated the cemetery. All those stones and markers popping out of the ground like a crop of death in gray and white and black. All the names and dates inscribed on them were as much a reminder that no one beat fate in the end as a memorial to a lifetime.

  Morbid thoughts, he supposed, but this was the place for them.

  The grass was bumpy and weedy, so the green was marred with brown patches where it had worn away, spindly where it hadn’t been clipped close enough to the stones. Others had brought flowers to their dead, and some of the offerings were faded and withered. Some solved this remembrance of death by laying artificial blooms at the markers, but the bright colors struck him as false.

  More lie, he thought, than tribute.

  It was too windy here on the north end, and too cold, without the shelter of the small grove of trees to the east or the sunny rise just to the west.

  He’d had the marker replaced a few years before with smooth white granite. She’d have considered that a foolish expense, but he’d needed to do something.

  It held her name. Susan Lee Hawke. And the span of her life, that short forty-six years. Beneath, in script, was the line he’d paraphrased from Emily Dickinson.

  Hope perches in the soul

/>   She’d never lost hope. She’d lived her life believing in the power of hope, and faith, leavened with good, hard work. Even when the sickness had eaten away her beauty, had whittled her down to brittle bones she’d had hope.

  For him, Jordan thought now. She’d had hope for him, believed in him, and had loved him without qualification.

  He crouched down to lay the flowers on her grave.

  “I miss you, Mom. I miss talking to you, and hearing you laugh. I miss seeing that look in your eye that told me I was in trouble. And even when I was, you were there for me. You were always there for me.”

  He stared at the words on the stone. It looked so formal. She’d always been Sue. Simple, straightforward Sue.

  “I know you’re not in there. This sort of thing, it’s just a way of letting other people know you were around, that you were loved. Sometimes I feel you, and it’s such a strong feeling it’s as if I could turn around and there you’d be. You always believed in stuff like that, in the possibilities of what we are.”

  He rose, slid his hands into his pockets. “I’m wondering what the hell I am. I’ve screwed up. Not everything, just one vital thing. I’ve got the one thing I always wanted, and I lost the one thing I didn’t know I always needed. I’d say maybe it’s cosmic justice. Maybe you just can’t have it all. But you’d give me that look.”

  He gazed out toward the hills she’d always loved, and the way the sky held a strong blue over the flame of the trees. “I don’t know if I can fix it. Fact is, I don’t know if I should even try.”

  He closed his eyes a moment. “It hurts to be here. I guess it’s supposed to.” He touched his fingers to his lips, then pressed his fingers to the stone. “I love you. I’ll come back.”

  He turned, and stopped when he saw Dana standing on the edge of the access road, watching him.

  He looked so sad, she thought. More than that, it was as if the sorrow had stripped away his defenses and left the emotions behind them open and raw. It was painful to see him this vulnerable, to understand that they both knew she’d caught him unguarded in a moment meant to be private.

  No longer sure what she would say, could say, she walked across the grass to stand with him by his mother’s grave.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to . . . disturb you,” she began. “That’s why I was waiting over there.”

  “It’s all right.”

  She looked down at the grave, the fresh flowers spread over the grass. Perhaps she did know what to say. “Flynn and I come here once a year.” She cleared her throat. “His father, my mother . . . and yours. We, ah, try to come right after the first real snowfall. Everything’s so peaceful and white and clean. We bring her flowers.”

  She shifted her gaze from the flowers and saw he was staring at her. “I thought you’d like to know we always bring her flowers when we come.”

  He didn’t speak, but his eyes said everything. Then he simply lowered his forehead to hers.

  They stood like that, silent, while the wind whipped around them and fluttered the petals of the pink carnations.

  “Thanks.” He straightened slowly, as if he were afraid something in him might break. “Thank you.”

  She nodded, and they stood, silent again, looking out at the hills.

  “This is the first time I’ve been out here since I’ve been back,” he told her. “I never know what I’m supposed to do in a place like this.”

  “You did it. Carnations are nice. Simple.”

  He let out a little laugh. “Yeah, that was my thought. Why are you here, Dana?”

  “I had things to say to you, that maybe I didn’t say the right way this morning.”

  “If it’s along the lines of we can still be friends, maybe you could wait a couple of days on that.”

  “Not exactly. I don’t know if this is the appropriate time or place to talk about this,” she began, “but after Malory finished reaming me out this morning, I decided she had a few points, and that I owed you—myself—I owed both of us something better than the way I ended things.”

  “I hurt you. I could see it on your face. I don’t want to hurt you, Dana.”

  “Too late for that.” She lifted her shoulders, let them fall. “You were careless with me, Jordan. You were careless and you were callous. And though I might have spent some happy hours over the years dreaming about paying you back in kind, I realize that’s not really what I want. So my being careless and callous with you this morning wasn’t any more satisfying for me than it was for you.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I went back last night, courtesy of Kane.” She frowned up at his pithy comment. “I don’t think you should use that sort of language over your mother’s grave.”

  For some reason, the remark loosened a knot in his belly. “She’s heard it before.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  He shrugged, and there was something of the boy she’d loved in the gesture. Just enough of him to twist her heart again. “Where did you go?”

  “I went back to the day you were packing to move to New York. I experienced it again. Watched myself experiencing it. It was very strange, and no less horrible knowing I was watching a rerun. It was like standing on both sides of a one-way mirror. Watching us, and still being a part of it. Everything you said to me, everything you didn’t say to me, was just as painful as when it happened.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She tipped her face up to his. “I actually believe you are, which is why I’m here rather than burning you in effigy. But you see, it hurt, all over again. And I have the right, I have the responsibility to myself, to step back from that. I’m not willing to let my heart spill at your feet again, and I can’t be with you and keep it intact. Maybe we can be friends, maybe we can’t. But we can’t be lovers. I just needed to explain that to you.”

  When she stepped back, he laid a hand on her arm. “Would you walk with me?”

  “Jordan—”

  “Just walk with me for a few minutes. You said what you had to say. I’m asking you to listen.”

  “All right.” She put her hands in her pockets to warm them, and to avoid contact with his.

  “I didn’t handle it well when my mother died.”

  “I don’t know that you’re supposed to handle things like that well. My mother’s buried over there.” She lifted a hand to gesture. “I don’t really remember her. I don’t remember losing her. But I miss her, and sometimes still I feel cheated. I have some of her things—a blouse my father saved that was her favorite, some of her jewelry, and photographs. I like having them. The fact that I don’t remember her, that I was too young to remember losing her, doesn’t mean I don’t understand what it was like for you. You wouldn’t let me help.”

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t let you help. I didn’t know how.” He took her arm briefly to steady her over the uneven ground, then let her go as they walked toward the trees.

  “I loved her so much, Dana. It’s not the sort of thing you think about every day when things are normal. I mean I didn’t wake up every morning thinking, boy, I sure love my mother. But we were a unit.”

  “I know.”

  “When my father left us . . . well, I don’t remember him very well either. But I remember that she was a rock. Not cold, not hard, just sturdy. She worked like a fucking dog, two jobs until we were out of the debt pit he’d put her in.”

  Even now, he could almost taste the bitterness of it. “She must’ve been so tired, but she always had time for me. Not just putting a meal on the table or handing me a clean shirt, but for me.”

  “I know. She was so interested in everything you did, without breathing down your neck over it. I used to pretend she was my mother.”

  He glanced down. “You did?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t think I was hanging around your house when I was a kid just to annoy you and Flynn and Brad, did you? I liked being around her. She smelled like a mother, and she laughed a lot. She’d look at you—sometimes she’d jus
t look over at you, and there was such love in her face, such pride. I wanted a mother who would look at me that way.”

  It moved him to hear her say it, and the faint tang of bitterness washed away. “She never let me down. Not once. Not ever. She read everything I wrote, even when I was a kid. She saved a lot of it, and she would tell me that one day, when I was a famous writer, people would get a big kick out of reading my early stories. I don’t know if I would be a writer today if it wasn’t for her. Her steady, constant faith in me.”

  “She’d be thrilled with what you’ve done.”

  “She didn’t live to see me published, not with a book. She wanted me to go to college. I wanted it, too, but I figured on putting it off a year or two, earning more money first. She laid down the law—and she was damn good at that when it was important to her. So I went.”

  He was silent for a moment, and a cloud slipped over the sun, deadening the light. “I sent some money home, but not much. Wasn’t that much to spare. I didn’t come home as much as I should have. I got caught up. There was so much out there. Then I went to grad school. There were a lot of years I wasn’t there for her.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

  “Am I? She put me first, every time. I could’ve come back here sooner, earned a good living at the garage and taken some of the weight off her.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder so he would turn and face her. “That’s not what she wanted for you. You know it wasn’t. She was over the moon about what you were doing. When you had those stories published in magazines, she was thrilled.”

  “I could’ve written them here. I did write when I finally came home. I got my teeth into a book, wrote like a crazy man at night after work. When I wasn’t being crazy over you, that is. I was going to do it all, have it all. Money, fame, the works.”

  He spoke quickly now, as if the words had been dammed up too long. “I was going to move her out of that broken-down house, buy her someplace beautiful, up in the hills. She would never have to work again. She could garden or read, or whatever she wanted to do. I was going to take care of her. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

  “Oh, Jordan. You’re not to blame for that.”

  “It’s not a matter of blame. She got sick. I’d spent all that time away, now I was back, going to make it right. And she got sick. Just a little tired, she’d say. Just a little achy. Getting old. And she’d laugh. So she didn’t go to the doctor in time. Money was tight, time off work was tough to get, so she didn’t go until it was too late.”

  Unable to hold out against it, she took his hand in hers. “It was terrible. What both of you went through was terrible.”

  “I didn’t pay attention, Dana. I was wrapped up in my own life, in what I wanted, what I needed. I didn’t see that she was sick until she . . . Jesus, she sat me down and told me what they’d found inside her.”

  “It’s stupid to blame yourself for that. Stupid, Jordan, and she’d tell you exactly that.”

  “She probably would, and I’ve come around to that since. But during it, after . . . It happened so fast. I know it took months, but it seemed so fast. The doctors, the hospital, the surgery, the chemo. Christ, she was so sick through that. I didn’t know how to take care of her—”

  “Wait. Just wait. You did take care of her. You stayed with her, you read to her. God, Jordan, you fed her when she couldn’t feed herself. You were her rock then, Jordan. I saw it.”

  “Dana, I was terrified, and I was angry, and I couldn’t tell her. I locked it in because I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You were barely in your twenties, and your world was crashing down around you.”

  Even as she said it, she knew she hadn’t understood that at the time, not completely.

  “She was fading away in front of me, and I couldn’t stop it. When we knew she was dying, when there wasn’t much time—she was in such pain—she told me she was sorry she had to go, that she had to leave me. She said there wasn’t a single day of my life she hadn’t been proud of me, and grateful for me.

  “I fell apart. I just lost it. Then she was gone. I don’t know if I said good-bye, or told her I loved her. I don’t even know what I said or did.”

  He turned back, walking once more toward the stones that bloomed out of the patchy grass. “She’d made all the arrangements already, so all I had to do was