by Tami Hoag
It made no sense. But then, little that had gone on in the past few days had made any sense. It was this blasted old house, she decided irrationally. The sooner she was out of it, the better for all concerned. Her life was pointed down a very narrow road. There was no room for a dreamer to tag along.
Bryan drew back, a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. She had dreamed about him. That bit of news was certainly a balm to his bruised male ego. He decided not to gloat; it wasn’t his style. Instead, he produced three small red foam balls from nowhere and began to juggle.
Rachel stared at him, bewildered. That was all right, he decided. It would do her some good to be thrown off balance on a regular basis. It was too easy to picture her letting her life settle into a rut of dreary, dutiful routine. If she didn’t learn to look around for magic and rainbows now, she certainly wasn’t going to start in a year or two. The struggle to cope with Addie’s illness would have worn her down and extinguished all belief in dreams and happiness. He just couldn’t let that happen.
“Did you have a question?” he asked.
“What?”
“When you came in here, did you have a question, or dare I hope you came seeking out my pleasant company?”
Rachel gave herself a mental shake and gathered her wits. She straightened away from the desk, looking suddenly very purposeful. She was wearing a soft blue prairie-style dress with a simple shirtwaist and gathered skirt. A big turquoise pin was fastened at the throat of the stand-up collar. Her hair, which had flowed like fine champagne down her back the night they’d kissed, was up now, secured in a sensible knot at the back of her head. Wild tendrils curled around her face.
Bryan thought she looked like a schoolmarm-a very pretty, vulnerable schoolmarm.
“Perhaps you’ve come to discuss our relationship,” he suggested.
Rachel nearly bolted. “We-we don’t have a relationship,” she said, sounding more rattled than resolute.
“I beg to differ,” Bryan argued with a charming smile. He caught the red foam balls and clutched them to his chest, his expression turning melodramatic. “Or were you just leading me on when you kissed my socks off?”
“I was not leading you on!” Rachel protested. He made the whole incident sound as if she had planned it.
“Well, then…” He shrugged innocently, implying that if she hadn’t been leading him on, then she had been seducing him with a purpose.
Rachel ground her teeth and refused to rise to the bait. She wasn’t getting involved with him. She wasn’t even going to argue about getting involved with him.
“I was wondering if you knew where my mother keeps the books for her antiques business. I’ve been looking all over for them. I have to get started on them so I can find out exactly where we stand financially.”
“Did you ask Addie?” He settled back down on the desk chair.
“Do you honestly believe she’d tell me?” she questioned, unable to keep all the bitterness out of her voice. She and Addie seemed no closer to a reconciliation than they had five years before. It didn’t help that Rachel had been to see her mother’s lawyer to find out where they stood legally and financially. Talking about power of attorney and conservatorships did not make for ice breaking.
“Have you spoken with her about selling the house?” Bryan asked.
“No.”
“She isn’t going to like it.”
“Then I’ll have to deal with her anger, because there isn’t any other way,” Rachel said stubbornly. The frustration of the past few days boiled up anew inside her. “I have a good job waiting for me in the city. We need the money.”
“There’s always another way, Rachel,” Bryan said, his disapproval of her plan subtle but clear.
“Oh, really?” Rachel arched a brow as her temper flared up. She crossed her arms in an effort to keep from trying to strangle him. “What is this wonderful alternative? Maybe you could enlighten me. So far I’ve discovered that this house is probably worth less than Mother owes the bank because it’s falling down around our ears. The electric company is threatening to discontinue service because she hasn’t paid the bill in months. The doctor bills we’re going to incur will wipe out my own bank account all on their own.”
“You need to have a little patience,” Bryan insisted. “Something will turn up.”
Rachel felt as if a switch had been flipped inside her, letting anger pour forth unchecked. Something will turn up. That had always been Terence’s line. He’d forever been telling her to lighten up, loosen up, that the future would take care of itself. She’d seen firsthand that wasn’t the case. Nothing ever just “turned up.” She had learned the hard way that the world had two kinds of people: People like Terence who believed in rainbows, and people like her who accepted responsibility.
It made her angry to think that Bryan belonged to the first group, the group she knew better than to get tangled up with. And deeper down it made her angry that she had to belong to the second group. Her life would have been a whole lot brighter with a rainbow in it, but she couldn’t have one, and she didn’t have time to go chasing it, at any rate. She had responsibilities.
She was angry with him. Bryan could feel the heat of it, he could see it burning in her eyes. He had stepped on a nerve. He opened his mouth to smooth things over, but Rachel didn’t give him the chance.
“It must be nice to be able to coast through life believing everything takes care of itself,” she said bitterly. “But I wouldn’t know, because I’ve always been one of those people destined to pick up after dreamers and shoulder the realities they can never seem to face.”
Bryan shot up out of his chair and grabbed her by the wrist as she turned to storm out. “Rachel, wait-”
“I can’t wait, Mr. Hennessy,” she snapped, glaring at him. “I’ve got work to do.” She jerked her arm from his grasp and rubbed at it as if to erase the memory of his touch. “I’ll let you get back to your juggling,” she said with a sneer.
Bryan closed his eyes and heaved a long sigh. Each click of her heels on the wooden floor made him wince until the sound faded away. He turned to stare up at the portrait that hung on the paneled wall.
“Got any bright suggestions?” he asked.
The pleasantly pudgy man in the painting was Arthur Drake III, the last Drake to own the house. He merely went on staring straight ahead, a secretive smile on his small mouth, one hand raised, palm up, as if gesturing to the viewer to behold the room around them. A badly tarnished brass plaque fastened to the bottom molding of the frame was engraved with a quote by Seneca: Gold is tried by fire, brave men by adversity.
“I guess this is adversity,” Bryan muttered. “Well see how acceptable I am.”
He sank slowly into the chair and swiveled around, letting his gaze take in the gracious room: the cherry paneling, the built-in bookshelves crowded with musty old leatherbound volumes, the fireplace, which had apparently been renovated at some point because the brick was newer than any other in the house.
What was he going to do about Rachel?
Kissing her seemed like a good idea.
“Right,” he murmured wryly in answer to his inner voice. “I’ll do it again next time she lets me get within a hundred yards of her.”Rachel finally found the books for her mother’s antiques business squirreled away inside an oak icebox in what was supposed to be Addie’s office. It was a sunny room at the front of the house, cluttered with stacks and stacks of old newspapers, and wastebaskets full of splintered glass figurines. The desk contained hundreds of old lace doilies. One drawer was brim full of ballpoint pens. But not one scrap of relevant business information had been housed there. Inside a file cabinet she had found cigar boxes full of buttons of every description, but not until she checked the icebox and looked beneath three dozen old Life magazines did she find what she’d been looking for.
She realized, as she eased down into the chair behind the desk, that while she had been looking for this financial information, she had been dreading act
ually finding it. It had become obvious to her that Addie was in no condition to run a business with anything remotely resembling efficiency. She feared the books on Lindquist Antiques would only confirm what she already knew to be true.
Shoring up her resolve with a deep breath, she brushed the dust from the cover of the old ledger and turned it back. The first few pages of columns were written in her mother’s neat, brisk hand. Sales and acquisitions were noted with proper care and detail. The columns of figures added up to the penny.
Rachel checked their accuracy with her calculator, feeling slightly inferior. Addie had always done math in her head as quickly and unerringly as any machine. She had always expected Rachel to be able to as well, and she had always seemed let down when Rachel hadn’t been able to live up to that standard. Rachel recalled with a pang the nights she had sat up in her bed with her covers over her head to hide the brightness of the flashlight as she worked on her math tables, determined to make her mother proud of her.
The only thing about Rachel that had unfailingly pleased Addie had been her voice. Addie had been a demanding taskmaster, forcing her to practice, practice, practice; correcting her slightest error; critiquing every note. But when Addie had sat and listened to a performance, a look of rapturous longing had stolen over her face. Pride and love had shone in her eyes. And afterward Addie had always roused herself, as if from a dream, and said, “You have the voice of an angel, Rachel. I am so very very proud of you.”
Rachel shook herself now from the bittersweet memory. She had fought against that pride in an attempt to gain her mother’s understanding, and she had lost. It had been a foolish thing to do, but she’d been young and rebellious and longing to have her mother love her for who she was, not how she sang. She rubbed at her temples now as she thought of how it had all backfired on her, how all her pretty rainbows had melted into grayness.
Maybe if Bryan had had to deal with a harsh reality or two, he wouldn’t be so quick to believe in magic either, she thought.
A relationship with Bryan Hennessy. She shuddered at the thought, though whether it was out of fear or anticipation she couldn’t have honestly said. She told herself it was righteous indignation. The nerve of the man insinuating that she had been pursuing him!
Turning another page in the ledger, she noticed that the handwriting had changed subtly. It wasn’t quite as neat or strong. A figure or two had been scratched out and written over. The penmanship worsened with every page, until she began to find words misspelled, letters transposed, mistakes in the math. And Rachel realized that what she was seeing was documentation of Addie’s decline.
Nearly a year had passed since the last entry had been made in the book, and that final column of figures had never been tallied. The page was wrinkled and dark from a coffee stain, as if Addie had perhaps become upset with her inability and had spilled the cup in her haste to escape the written evidence of the illness that was progressively stealing her mind.
Rachel set the ledger aside and picked up the inventory book, hoping against hope that it was more up-to-date. But what she found was a repeat performance. The entries started out logical and legible, and gradually declined to the point that what little she could make out made no sense. The book was no more up-to-date than the ledger had been, and it was too much to hope that nothing had been purchased or sold in the interim. She was going to have to inventory everything in the house, then they would have to have a sale of some kind to dispose of the bulk of the merchandise.
They would be able to take only Addie’s most personal possessions and a few antiques to San Francisco. Rachel knew they would not be able to afford much in the way of an apartment. There certainly wouldn’t be room for the hundreds of pieces of furniture Addie had accumulated, or the bric-a-brac… or the bird cages.
“Oh, Mother,” she whispered, planting her elbows on the desk and rubbing her hands over her face as a wave of helplessness crashed into her. “What are we going to do?”
Addie stood in the doorway to the office, motionless as she stared at Rachel. Spread out on the desk before her daughter were the books she had come to dread and hate. It was clear to her that Rachel had seen them. A cold knot of panic settled in her stomach.
“What are you looking for?” she asked, trying to sound commanding but sounding uncertain instead. She shuffled into the room, her garden boots scuffing on the worn rug. “Money to give to Terence, the slimy snake?”
“I don’t see Terence anymore, Mother,” Rachel explained calmly. She wondered how pleased Addie would have been to know her relationship with “the cheap folk singer” had died long ago, that the bloom of love had faded along with her dreams.
“Good,” Addie said, taking a seat on a dusty chair that sat beside the desk. “I never liked that boy. He wasn’t good enough for you.”
Rachel didn’t comment on the remark. Terence was in the past. There was no sense wasting energy thinking about the past when the future was going to take everything they had.
“Mother, we need to talk,” she said gravely. She was bracing herself for a fight, but when she looked into her mother’s eyes, she didn’t see the anger she had come to expect. She saw sadness. Somehow that was worse.
“I’m a little behind on those books,” Addie said.
“It’s all right. We’ll get them straightened out.”
“Here. Let me, Rachel. You were never good with numbers.”
For an instant there was a flash of her old efficient, businesslike self as Addie reached across the desk and picked up the ledger. She sat up straighter, her bony shoulders squared beneath the thin cotton of her housedress. Taking a pencil out of a cup on the desktop, she opened the book.
Gritting her teeth in determination, she began at the top of the page. She saw the numbers, took them into her brain, and tried to put them together, but they scattered and went off in all directions in her mind. She took a deep breath and tried again. She had always been so good at math. Now she could barely comprehend the numbers on the page before her. She tried to add two numbers together, and just before the answer became clear to her, it slipped away.
A terrible chill ran through her. She could excuse her forgetfulness. She was a busy woman with a lot on her mind. So what if she put her car in reverse instead of park once? So what if she went to the mailbox on Sunday? Busy people forgot things all the time. But this, this was something else. She couldn’t discount her inability to add these simple numbers together.
She stared at the figures on the page until they seemed to leap out of their columns and spin around one another in a whirlpool of black and red ink. Panic rose up in her throat, and she slammed the ledger shut. She wanted to throw the book aside and run out of the room, but her brain suddenly couldn’t separate all the intricacies of each task, and she clutched the book to her breast instead.
“Mother?” Rachel asked softly. Her own sense of panic was growing inside her, and it trembled in her voice. She had never seen her mother as anything other than strong, invincible, indomitable. And before her very eyes Addie was shrinking down on her chair, her face a mask of stricken confusion. Rachel reached out toward her, the fingers of her hand curling over the edge of the musty old ledger. “Mother?”
“Rachel,” Addie murmured, her voice straining. She felt too fragile and frail to speak louder than a whisper. She felt as if she might shatter like the many china figurines she had broken over the last few months as the connection between her brain and her fingers had shorted out. The shield of anger and indignation that had held her up so many times was gone, vanished as suddenly as her memory could vanish.
All her life she had been strong. She had stood on her own to raise her daughter when her husband had been killed. She had never asked for help from anyone. But now she turned instinctively to her daughter, her eyes full of anguish and tears. “Rachel, I’m so frightened.”
Rachel took her mother in her arms and held her as her mother had held her when she’d skinned her knee or had had a bad dr
eam. And she offered what comfort she could while she shared her mother’s pain and felt the pain of her own loss. She was losing her mother. Addie would never be the strong one again. It was Rachel’s turn. At that moment both of them realized it.
“I’m frightened too,” she murmured through her tears. “But we’ll manage. Together, like it used to be. Just the two of us. I’ll take care of you. I love you. I love you so much.”
Bryan stopped in the doorway, everything inside him going still at the sight. He had intended to barge in and sweep Rachel away from the books for a walk around the grounds. He wanted to show her that there was more to her life than worrying about money. But it looked as if she didn’t need him to tell her that at the moment.
He knew he should have stepped back out into the hall and allowed Rachel and Addie absolute privacy, but it seemed important that he see Rachel this way-as a loving daughter, as a caring person, not embarrassed by her mother’s illness, but heartbroken for a loss that could never be replaced.
Or perhaps what was truly important was the feeling coming to life inside himself, the feeling he had denied over and over the past few days. He was in love with Rachel Lindquist.
He did step back then, as if the realization had come in the form of a physical blow. He let himself out of the house and strode quickly toward the fence that ran along the cliff’s edge, breaking into an athletic lope that ate up the distance. When he reached the rusty iron railing, he stopped, sucking in great deep gulps of sea air. In each hand he grasped a spear point that decorated the top of the wrought iron pickets, twisting at them so that the oxidizing metal flaked against his palms.
Without really seeing it, he stared out at the ocean. The gray-blue waves rolled in, one after another. Fishing boats dotted the misty horizon. Gulls keened and swooped along the rocky beach below.
How had it happened so fast, he wondered. He hardly knew anything about her. Except that she loved a mother who had shunned her for five years, and she’d had dreams broken, and she tasted of need and sweetness. And when the moon shone in her eyes, he could see how badly she needed to believe in rainbows and how afraid she was to reach out for one.