Her Mother's Shadow

by Diane Chamberlain

  “We’ll be presenting your award along with others at the annual awards ceremony in September, so mark the twentieth on your calendar.”

  “I will,” she said. “Thank you so much for letting me know.”

  She paged Jim the minute she hung up the phone, and he called her back almost instantly.

  “How did you know?” she said, without even saying hello.

  Jim laughed. “I’m a longtime friend of Sharon Casey’s, and she knows I’m seeing you and couldn’t stop herself from spilling the beans.”

  “You didn’t influence the outcome, though, I hope.” For a moment she felt the wind leave her sails.

  “Honey,” Jim said, “you’ve earned this all on your own.”

  She spent that night at his house. They’d both had to work late, but Jim had still been determined to take her out for a celebratory dinner, and now the lobster she’d devoured far too close to bedtime rested heavily in her stomach. Unable to sleep, she got up and put on her robe. She walked through the house and out the sliding glass door, skirting the pool and hot tub, until she reached the bench overlooking the city. The night was clear and cool, and La Jolla was a blanket of twinkling lights below her.

  Nurse of the year. It was still so hard to believe.

  “Hey.”

  She turned to see Jim walking toward her in his satin robe, and she smiled at him. “Hi,” she said.

  “Too excited to sleep?” He sat next to her on the bench, putting his arm around her.

  She rested her head on his shoulder. “I used to live in a trailer park,” she said. “I never told you that. It was too embarrassing. I lived there when I was married to Zach. I lived in a trailer park, and I had a husband who murdered someone, and I got fired from my job as a school nurse because I was such a mess I couldn’t concentrate, and my son essentially divorced me as his mother.” She shook her head. “And now, by some miracle, I’m nurse of the year.”

  Jim took her free hand in his. “Not by some miracle,” he said. “Can’t you get it through your head that you’ve earned this? That you’re worthy? No, you didn’t have an easy time of things. You didn’t have money. You didn’t have stability. That’s all the more reason why you need to give yourself credit for what you’ve achieved.”

  She shut her eyes. He was right. She’d worked hard. She’d set goals for herself and exceeded them. But none of that erased her one failure: her son.

  “I want to talk to you about Freddy,” Jim said, reading her mind.

  “What about him?”

  “It’s time, don’t you think?” he asked. “Time to find him? Wouldn’t you love to have him at the awards ceremony?”

  She laughed, though the sound was bitter. “I can just imagine,” she said. “He hates me, and I get in touch with him and say, ‘Hey, come look what I did. I deserted you and then went on to make a name for myself. Come see me get my award.’”

  “You didn’t desert him.”

  “I’m sure he felt like I did.”

  Jim was quiet for a moment. “I know you want him in your life,” he said. “You don’t even know if he’s still angry with you, and you’ve made it very hard for him to find you. You’ve moved a couple of times. You took back your maiden name. I’m willing to bet that Freddy grew up and realized you did the right thing by taking him to the shelter that night.”

  “I doubt it,” she said.

  “Do you think about him?”

  La Jolla and its display of lights blurred in front of her. “Only every day,” she said. “I pray for him. I pray that the scars from that night have healed. That he’s doing okay. What’s the chance of that, though, given the start he had in his life?”

  “If he inherited your fighting genes, he will have turned out just fine,” Jim said.

  God, she wanted to see her son! Hold him. Beg him to forgive her for trying to do what she thought was right. “If I wanted to find him, how would I do it?” she asked. “Hire a detective or what?”

  Jim stood up. “Come with me,” he said, holding his hand out to her.

  She took his hand and walked with him into the house. He led her downstairs to the small study and told her to take a seat next to the desk.

  “We’ll Google him,” he said, seating himself in front of the computer.

  Faye leaned sideways to see the screen. “You mean, put his name in a search engine?” she asked.

  “Have you ever tried it?” Jim logged on to the Internet.

  “I never thought of trying it.” She’d spent hours researching chronic pain information on the Internet, but it had never occurred to her to research her son.

  Jim typed in the name “Fred.” Then he glanced over at her. “What’s his last name again?” he asked.

  “Pointer.” She moved her chair behind his to be able to see better, and she watched him type in the surname that had once been her own and which she had come to loathe. He clicked on “search,” and scrolled through the many references that appeared on the screen. Several of them contained both the words “Fred” and “Pointer,” but never together as a name.

  “Try ‘Frederick Pointer,’” she suggested.

  This time, several Frederick Pointers appeared, but they all seemed to be part of someone’s genealogical research, and the men had died long before her Freddy had even been born. There was one reference to a runner in a 10K race, and Faye sucked in her breath as Jim clicked on the link to read more about the race and its participants. Sure enough, a Frederick Pointer had been in the race—he’d even placed fifth—but he was thirty-five years old. She shook her head.

  “Freddy would only be twenty-seven, now,” she said, discouraged.

  “Don’t give up,” Jim said. “Let’s see if we can find him in one of the address locators.”

  Jim’s fingers flew across the keyboard as though he did this all the time. In a moment, the name, Frederick L. Pointer, was on the screen along with an address in Princeton, New Jersey. Faye lifted her hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God,” she said.

  “Does the middle initial fit?” Jim asked.

  She nodded. “Leonard,” she said. She searched the address for more information, for something that would tell her if this was her son. There was a phone number, but no other clue to his identity. She straightened up again. “It doesn’t make sense that he’d live in Princeton,” she said.

  “We could call the number and find out.”

  She shook her head. The thought was terrifying to her. If the number did belong to Freddy, and he hung up on her, she would lose any chance she had of ever talking to him. She would rather simply imagine that it was him, imagine the call, imagine the warm reception. Better to imagine it than to know a sad reality.

  Jim had returned to Google. “Just on a whim, let’s see if there’s a picture of him on the Web,” he said. He typed in the words “Pointer” and “Princeton.” Several pictures, none of them containing a human being but rather mechanical drawings of one sort or another, appeared on the screen. Jim scrolled down the display, though, and the image of three young men suddenly appeared. Faye drew in her breath.

  “That’s him!” she said, pointing past Jim toward the screen. “Oh, my God, Jim, I think it’s really him.”

  Jim stood up and let her have his seat directly in front of the monitor, and she realized that her hands were shaking as she sat down. She clasped them together in her lap as she studied the picture. Freddy was the man in the middle. “His hair’s darker,” she said. “He was nearly blond when he was a child. But look at those eyes! Oh, he’s beautiful.” She hadn’t thought about loving this boy in many years, but now her chest swelled with her love for him. She touched the screen, touched his hair, the shoulder of his dark suit, and tears ran down her cheeks.

  “You know what?” Jim leaned over her shoulder and squinted at the screen. “I think that’s the chapel at Princeton in the background.”

  For the first time, she noticed that Fred and the other two men stood in front of a church. “That’s
too big to be a chapel,” she said.

  Jim laughed. “I think it’s one of the biggest in the country, if my memory serves me well. I’ve attended more than one conference in Princeton.”

  So had she. Was it possible that she’d been in the same town at the same time as her son?

  Jim reached around her shoulders to type on the keyboard, and she leaned her head back against the warmth of his belly.

  A Web site for the Princeton campus appeared, and in an instant, Jim had found a picture of the chapel. Sure enough, it was the same church.

  “He does live in Princeton,” she said. Her eyes still on the monitor, she reached behind her to grab a fistful of Jim’s robe. “Oh, Jim, I want to know everything!” she said. “Did he go to school in Princeton? Are the two guys in the picture his closest friends? What’s happened in his life since the last time I saw him? Can we get back to that picture of him?” She was nowhere near done studying the grown-up face of her son.

  Jim tapped a few keys to return Freddy’s picture to the screen, then stood up straight and rested his hands on Faye’s shoulders. “Do you want to call him?” he asked. “Or do you want to write to him?”

  She shook her head, thinking. Planning. “I need to go in person,” she said. “This is something I can’t do over the phone.” She sat back in the chair and grasped Jim’s hands in her own. “All I want is a second chance to know my son.”

  She felt Jim kiss the top of her head. “Of course you do,” he said. “And you’re going to get one.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Lacey lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, aware of Bobby’s presence in the room at the end of the hall. She could feel his nearness in her bones. It had been a mistake to ask him to move in. She’d been caught up in the moment, wanting to please Mackenzie, and maybe wanting to test herself. She’d felt strong when Mackenzie had brought up the idea in the sunroom. After all, she was involved with Rick, spending time with him, focusing on him, waiting for those feelings of love and desire to magically emerge. But the truth was, her body yearned for the man at the end of the hall.

  At one in the morning, she gave up trying to fall asleep and got out of bed. She was wearing the boxers and tank top she often slept in, and she padded quietly down the stairs in her bare feet. In the kitchen, she reached into the cabinet next to the sink for the bottle of insect repellent and the flashlight. Then she walked outside, softly shutting the door behind her.

  She never felt afraid out here. Even though she had witnessed her mother being gunned down in front of her, she never feared such a thing would happen to her. It had been an aberration, a rarity of enormous proportions in the Outer Banks. And in Kiss River, where only an occasional tourist ever ventured, she never felt endangered. God, she was going to miss living here!

  The night was hot, but breezy. A half-moon lit the sky as she walked toward the lighthouse and the sea. She could still feel the heat of the sun in the sand beneath her feet, and she dug her toes into the fine powder as she walked. The ocean was gentle tonight; she could tell by the way it whispered instead of roared, and as she neared the lighthouse, she could see that the water was lapping at the steps instead of devouring them. She walked through the calf-high water and up the steps into the dark octagon of the tower. The tiled floor was always cool. Sometimes she would come into the octagon just to cool off. Tonight, though, she wanted to climb.

  She didn’t bother with the flashlight, even though it was quite dark in the interior of the lighthouse. Instead, she climbed the stairs in the pale wash of light from the sky. When she reached the top step, she turned and sat down to face the ocean. There were no lights on the water except for those reflected from the sky, and the moon lit the jagged edges of the bricks that surrounded her.

  She often wondered what would have happened if the Kiss River lighthouse had remained intact. Like the Corolla light farther north, it probably would have been refurbished and opened to the public. The keeper’s house might already be a museum, and the gravel road leading to the parking lot would have been paved. With a jolt, she realized that, once the keeper’s house was turned into a museum and open to tourists, the Coast Guard would have to find a way to block the lighthouse off from public access. Then even she would not be allowed up here. The thought was unbearable. Funny how something she had once hated had become something she loved.

  She remembered how Bobby—the Bobby she’d known in the summer of 1991—had found her hatred of the lighthouse strange.

  “What’s it ever done to you?” he’d asked her once, after she’d unleashed a ten-minute tirade against Kiss River and its light. They’d been standing in line at one of the amusement parks, waiting to ride the roller coaster for the fourth time. Jessica was there, of course, and Bobby had his arm possessively around her, his hand on her neck. Jessica’s long blond hair fell over his forearm, making Lacey regret chopping her own hair off. She could have just dyed her hair black or blond and left it long, but she’d gone a little crazy with the scissors in her hand, furious with her father for calling her “Annie” over and over again, as though he’d forgotten her own name. She’d wanted to look as little like her mother as possible.

  Some other guy, whose name she couldn’t even remember now but whom she slept with on the beach later that night, had been with them as they waited in line for the roller coaster. His breath stank of alcohol and she remembered wanting the sex, the physical closeness, the human touch, but not the kissing.

  “It’s taken my father away,” she’d said in answer to Bobby’s question. “First, my mother gets killed. Then my father gets, like, totally obsessed with the stupid Kiss River lighthouse.”

  “What do you mean, obsessed?” Bobby had asked.

  “It reminds him of my mother, so he takes pictures of it practically every day. He’s head of the committee that’s trying to save it from falling into the ocean. He knows every fact about it. I mean, everything. He knows more than anyone else and he still tries to learn more. It’s sick.”

  “He forgot her birthday because of it,” Jessica said, adding fuel to Lacey’s fire.

  “He’s so busy thinking about the lighthouse, he can’t think about anything else,” Lacey said.

  “He sounds wacko,” the other boy said, and she’d felt just the tiniest edge of guilt at her portrayal of her grieving father.

  “He is wacko,” she agreed. “I really, really wish that stupid lighthouse would just fall into the ocean. Get it over with. Make him come back to the real world again.”

  Bobby let go of Jessica to rest his hand on Lacey’s arm. “You need a little something to relax you,” he said, sounding like a doctor. His hand was warm and smooth against her skin, and she remembered how it had felt on her small breasts and the inside of her thighs only a few weeks earlier, the night she’d lost her virginity to him.

  He pulled a few pills from his shirt pocket and held them out so that only she could see them. “Take a couple of these,” he said quietly. “They’ll make you feel better.”

  She shook her head. She drank, but she couldn’t make herself take drugs, although she’d faked it a couple of times so she didn’t look like a complete dork, taking the pill and pretending to place it in her mouth while she really pocketed it in her very short shorts.

  “Sounds like her father’s the one who needs some of those,” the other boy said. “You could, like, slip them in his OJ or something.”

  The slamming of a car door jerked Lacey from her memories. She turned to look toward the parking lot. Bobby’s van was there, along with a strange car that did not belong to anyone in the house. The parking lot was dark, but not too dark for her to see Bobby get out of his van and pull a slender, blond-haired woman into his arms. She’d thought he’d been asleep in his room. Had he actually been out with this woman? This stranger? Were they kissing? From this distance, she couldn’t tell. The only thing she was sure of was that the old jealous feeling was back, the same feeling she used to have when she’d see Bobby and Jessica toge
ther. It spread out from the center of her chest and tightened itself around her throat.

  The woman took a step away from Bobby and opened the car door. In the light spilling from the car, Lacey could clearly see Bobby hand her a thick wad of green-tinged bills. Her first thought was that the woman was a prostitute. Her second, even worse, was that he was buying drugs from her. Either way, she knew then that she’d made a mistake inviting Bobby Asher into the keeper’s house. Was it Mackenzie’s needs she’d been thinking of or her own?

  The woman got into her car and drove out of the parking lot, and Bobby walked toward the house, his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans, under what he probably assumed was the cover of darkness. Lacey stayed rooted to her seat on the top of the lighthouse, unable to move. Maybe she had witnessed a completely innocent exchange. Maybe Bobby owed the woman money for a carton of cigarettes.

  Or maybe Jessica had been right when she said it would be a mistake to bring Bobby into Mackenzie’s life. Maybe, despite his protestations to the contrary, he was the same man he used to be, after all.

  CHAPTER 32

  At breakfast that morning, Lacey watched Bobby pour his third cup of coffee and eat his second bowl of cereal and wondered if she was being used. She was feeding him, giving him a roof over his head, letting him work in her sunroom and providing him with a pass to her gym, and all he had to do was hang out with an eleven-year-old kid he would not even acknowledge was his. Before inviting him into their lives, she should have had a session or two with her counselor to examine her real motives.

  It was a rare breakfast at the keeper’s house, because everyone was present. Usually one of them would have eaten alone or skipped breakfast altogether and taken off for work. This morning, though, it was raining, the sky so dark that they had the kitchen light on, and no one seemed in a rush to go anywhere. It was a strong and steamy rain, and through the screen door they could hear it pummeling the sand outside. They’d shut all the windows on the east side of the house, but it was just too hot to shut the kitchen door, as well.