The Night We Met

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  "Nothing wouldn't have brought you all the way out there."

  I considered lying to him. Very briefly. Because I didn't want to upset him.

  I hadn't acted with Roger in any way that would have dishonored Nate. But if I lied to him, I would be doing so.

  "Roger Kempton hit on me today."

  Nate stiffened. "Isn't he a little young?"

  "He's thirty-four."

  "And?"

  I turned, peering up at Nate, my heart so ful I could hardly speak. "I was flattered," I told him. "But I wasn't the least bit tempted, Nate. I felt nada, nothing, zip."

  His expression relaxed and he grinned, ran his finger along my lips. "Not even a twinge?"

  "Nope. All I could think about was how much I love you. Everyone else wil always pale in comparison."

  "Oh, woman, what did I ever do to deserve you?" he groaned, pushing me gently down on the couch.

  I could have asked him the same question. And would have if my mouth had been free for speaking.

  In the fal of 1995, Jimmy called to say he was getting married. I hadn't even realized he'd had a girlfriend after Anita, who hadn't worked out.

  "How long have you known this girl?" was the first question I asked, motioning Nate to pick up the other phone so he could listen in.

  "Forever," my son said. "You know her, too. Remember Lindsay?"

  I did. And two months later, when my twenty-five- year-old middle child stood at the front of the church with his bride in a Christmas wedding, I sat in the front row holding back tears as I remembered back to his fifteenth year. He'd come into the kitchen one night while I was finishing some gourmet meal I'd prepared during Elizabeth's naptime that day. It'd been during one of the darkest times of my life—the year without Nate. And my son, whose voice was stil cracking and who hadn't yet started to shave, told me in all seriousness that he'd met the girl he was going to marry.

  Funny how life worked sometimes. After al the years, al the women, it turned out he was right.

  The following spring, Keith showed up at Beth's thirteenth birthday dinner with a pretty blonde in tow.

  "Everyone, this is Emily," he said.

  "Oh! Hi!" Beth greeted her with a grin, pulling out the chair next to her. "Sit here."

  Emily sat. Keith took the adjacent chair. And that was that.

  Until after dinner.

  "We have something to tell you," Keith said after Beth had opened her last present. "Emily graduated from UC this month and we're going to get married."

  My jaw dropped. I might have embarrassed myself totally, made some less than congratulatory remark, like it would've been nice to meet her at any point in the last three years, had Nate not been sitting next to me. He put his hand on my thigh under the table, and probably to make sure he was getting enough of my attention to distract me, slid his fingers higher, too.

  I asked if I could do anything to help with the wedding.

  "Wel , that's just it, Mom," Keith said. "Emily and I were hoping you'd help her with everything. Her mom took off when she was a kid and it's just her and her dad, and he's not real good with stuff like this."

  I glanced at Emily, saw the apprehensive but hopeful look on her face, fel in love, and forgave them everything.

  The wedding wasn't big, but it was beautiful. We held it at the resort in August of that year, with Emily's father officiating. Jimmy and Lindsay were a joy to watch, obviously so besotted with each other.

  Lori and Charles couldn't make it. They'd already booked their vacations that year—a six-week world cruise. It had been several years since we'd seen them, but we stil talked on the phone at least once a month.

  Alice, June and Bonnie came out with their husbands, no kids. William and Shelly did, too. It was great to have so much of my family together again.

  Beth, one of the attendants, was beautiful in her long pink gown that hugged a figure that was starting to look a bit too womanly for my liking.

  Or Nate's. He watched our daughter like a hawk al night, interrupting anytime a young man got close enough to ask her to dance.

  "Lighten up, daddy," I said to him about halfway through the evening when he'd taken a break from the piano to once again waylay our daughter. "She's growing up."

  "Over my dead body." Nate's voice was gruff as he said the words. And then he chuckled. "She's not going to be easy, is she?"

  "Nope." I ran my finger along the nape of his neck. "But not much that matters ever is."

  Chapter 18

  Nate turned sixty-two in 1997, twenty-nine years after I married him. I threw a party for him at the resort. With enough notice, Lori and Charles were able to make it. All of my family, sans nieces and nephews, were there, as well. Alice had turned sixty that year, and was complaining of osteoporosis.

  I hated to see my siblings aging.

  But if I had a moment or two of terror as I considered the years to come, I hid them well. And concentrated on al the love surrounding me as we celebrated. The shelter' was doing well. Maria was now working there as a housemother; she was a legal citizen due to her common-law marriage and on probation, maintaining custody of her children, while her husband and his brother spent the next twenty-five years in prison. The shelter had received enough funding for another year. The resort was expanding again. Keith and Emily were expecting their first child. And at fourteen, Beth was tal er than I was.

  That same year, a one-hundred-and-fifteen-year-old man, John Bell, received a new pacemaker. And actor Tony Randall, at age seventy-seven, fathered his first child. I made sure Nate was apprised of both facts. My husband often mentioned retiring, but never did anything about it. And he took to the slopes that winter, just like always.

  Princess Diana died that year. And Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death for the Oklahoma City bombings. In today's world, no one was safe. Not princesses and not small children playing in day cares. I wondered what the sisters at St. Catherine made of it al . How they found peace.

  And then, two days before Christmas, I got a call from my oldest son. He and Emily were at the hospital. They'd just given birth to a 7 pound 6 ounce boy. And I understood al over again that to combat al the evil in the world, there were miracles, and to overcome hate, there was love.

  They were naming the baby Nathaniel Keith.

  I didn't say anything, but I thought they were giving that guy impossible odds with two such huge pairs of shoes to fill.

  Calling out to Nate with the phone stil in my hand, I grabbed my coat and purse, and paced impatiently while he started the car and brought it around to the front of the house, where the walk had been shoveled. We made it to the hospital in record time.

  And at forty-eight, I was a grandma.

  Jimmy and Lindsay had a little girl the fol owing year. They called her Kyle Elizabeth, and Beth promptly changed her name back to the one on her birth certificate.

  I didn't spend quite as much time at the shelter as I once had, but only because I was busy being a grandma. I babysat any chance I got, and was thrilled to find I hadn't lost my touch. I could still change a diaper and simultaneously wipe a nose.

  Nate was as eager as I was to spend time with the grandkids. He even paid for a three-day cruise for both of our sons and their wives at Christmas so we'd have the babies to ourselves.

  Where I seemed to have lost my touch was with teenagers. My fifteen-year-old daughter was giving me a hel ish time. She had two interests, soccer and boys, and had determined that I knew nothing about either. If I said something was black, she insisted it was white. And if I was proven correct, she'd either sulk for days or go into a fit of hysterics.

  With her father, however, she was an angel.

  They said every cloud had a silver lining.

  Once again, Nate was mine.

  Elizabeth wanted a car for her sixteenth birthday. We gave her a ticket to fly to London and spend a week with Lori and Charles. And told her she wouldn't be getting her driver's license for at least a year. She started to argue�
��until Jimmy, with baby Kyle on his lap, piped up that he'd had to wait, too. That took the wind out her sails. She cal ed al her friends and bragged about going to Europe.

  That fall and early winter, late in '99, Nate went skiing with all three of his kids. I stil skied a bit, but I'd never been the athlete they al were. Elizabeth kept up with her brothers, daring to take slopes I didn't even want to know about.

  And maybe that was why I found it odd that she turned down a trip with her brothers and their wives to Tahoe the first weekend in December. She said she had to study for finals. Which she did. But schoolwork generally came easily to Elizabeth—to all three of my kids— and Nate and I were going to look after the babies, which wouldn't leave the house al that conducive to study. Still, she was in her sophomore year of high school, the critical year for gaining col ege scholarships, and the babies would have naps.

  On Saturday morning of that weekend, she was up by nine—at least two hours before she normally rol ed out of bed.

  "Hi." With her long hair up in a series of fashionable clips, and wearing sweat pants, a long-sleeved shirt that left a strip of her belly bare and oversize Disney-character bedroom slippers, she slid into a chair in the kitchen. I was just finishing the last of the breakfast dishes. I'd made bacon and eggs for Nate.

  He was in the living room, on the floor with our grandbabies and an assortment of expensive learning toys.

  "You're up early." I smiled at her over my shoulder. "Would you like some breakfast? There's eggs left. Or I can make some oatmeal."

  "Oatmeal would be nice." She laid her head on the table. "And some toast?"

  Glad to have my daughter in . the room with me, I happily complied. Feeding my children satisfied me. It always had. And while I moved about the kitchen, Elizabeth chatted. About school. A boy she thought was cute. Another who was a jerk.

  All talk that was good for my soul. She was letting me in.

  "Thanks, Mom," she said when I set her breakfast before her, complete with jam, napkin, spoon and glass of juice.

  "You're welcome." I wanted to sit with her, but was afraid to cramp her style so she'd back off.

  Instead, I spent a long time rinsing out one pan, wiping a few crumbs, putting a knife in the dishwasher.

  She asked what her father and I were doing that day. Talked about the order in which she'd chosen to study her subjects, giving me a verbal outline that encompassed both Saturday and Sunday. She wondered if I thought her plan would work.

  I assured her it was fine.

  "And hey, as a reward for spending my weekend on the grind, would it be okay if I slept at JoAnn's?"

  "Tonight?"

  "I'l be home by noon tomorrow, I promise."

  Elizabeth didn't get up for church anymore. And I wasn't going the next day due to the babies. Still, I hesitated.

  "Doesn't she have to study?"

  "She's at it al day, too."

  "Let me guess, you both got up early."

  "Yep. We synched our alarm clocks last night."

  It al sounded so normal. So teenage. Yet something didn't feel right to me.

  Elizabeth was busy eating. She hadn't looked up once since she'd mentioned JoAnn. Not only that, she usually asked if she could spend the night with a girlfriend. Not sleep at her house.

  Teen vernacular changed daily. I understood that. But...

  "I don't think so, honey," I said. "Not tonight. It doesn't seem fair to your brothers that you turned them down and then go off to spend the night with your girlfriend."

  "Come on, Mom! It's one night instead of a whole weekend."

  I could see the logic in that. "And since it's only one night, it's not going to kil you to stay home. I'm really proud of you for putting your studies first this weekend. If you go to JoAnn's and the two of you gab half the night, then you aren't going to be fresh for tomorrow's day with the books."

  She swore at me. Something that had started the summer before. I didn't validate it with a response.

  "I'm going to ask Dad," she said, but ate every morsel of the food I'd prepared before she went in to do so.

  I wasn't worried about Nate. He backed me up every single time. Elizabeth knew that, too. I think she just said things like that to get at me. So I tried not to let it happen.

  Clearing the table, I finished in the kitchen, preparing myself for the treatment I'd likely get from my daughter that day. It might be what I'd termed the snipes. Biting my head off whenever I made a comment or even walked into a room. Or maybe she'd play the injured-baby role, designed, I figured, to gain my sympathy. It sometimes worked. The worst, to me, was the cold war. She'd treat me as though I weren't there, refusing to answer if I spoke to her.

  Well, she'd get over it. She always did. And I'd have Nate and the babies with me all day.

  It was the cold war in the morning. Moving to the snipes over lunch. And the pathetic baby by dinnertime. I couldn't remember a day I'd gotten all three. Oddest of al , by the time Elizabeth went to bed, tired from studying, she gave me a hug good-night.

  I got hugs most nights. Had from the boys, too, even when they were teenagers. But never from Elizabeth on her angry days.

  Her way of punishing me, I suppose.

  But she'd hugged me good-night. Could it be that she was growing up?

  Usually Nate and I went to bed late on Saturdays. The habit had probably started when the boys were teenagers. We had a rule about not going to sleep until all our children were safely at home. But that night, with everyone accounted for, we went up just after eleven.

  Nate's step was a little slow as he climbed, and I knew that chasing around after two toddlers had exhausted him. Heck, I was aching myself.

  Elizabeth's door was closed—which was something she'd begun doing the year before.

  That had never deterred me. Quietly, not wanting to wake my testy child and incur more wrath, I opened the door, just as I did every night, needing to see her peaceful before I could fall asleep.

  Some nights'! had to stay up reading far longer than I wanted to, waiting for her to turn off her light and fal asleep before I could peek in.

  And any night I hadn't done so, Nate had.

  "I'l look in on the little ones," he said now. "You need to go to her tonight."

  He knew me so wel . After the day I'd had with the daughter I adored, I did need a moment with her when my heart could be completely open, unprotected. When I could just stand there a moment in the darkness and love her.

  Turning the knob, as I had thousands of times before,

  I slowly pushed open the door. The very first thing I noticed was a small piece of her curtain caught in the window. It hadn't been that way earlier.

  She'd had her window open? In December?

  Had she been smoking in her room? No—I would've noticed the smell on her skin, her hair.

  Fully inside now, I approached the bed, defending my heart against the wounds Elizabeth inflicted at random. It hurt, anyway when I saw the shape beneath her covers and the hair on her pil ow. The shape was a couple of pillows. And the hair? I pul ed. Out from the covers came a doll I'd given her when she was seven because it had hair exactly like hers.

  "Nate!" My voice was soft enough not to wake the babies, but urgent just the same.

  "What?" His earlier lethargy was completely gone as he appeared beside me.

  "Look at this."

  He glanced from the bed, to the window and back. "I'l be damned."

  I called JoAnn's mom. There was no answer. I can't say I was surprised.

  "I'm guessing that young lady's family is gone for the weekend," I told Nate, hanging up the phone in our bedroom.

  He'd changed into sweats when we'd settled in to watch a movie that evening, but was now pulling on a pair of jeans. I kept mine on, too.

  "The girls might be there, but if they saw our number on caller ID, they're not answering," I said.

  "I had the same thought." Nate grabbed his wallet, shoved it into his pocket. "I'm going there
first."

  I nodded, running downstairs behind him. We weren't the type to sit at home and wait, but one of us had to stay with the babies. And Nate was much safer out alone at night than I was.

  "Drive careful y." He was at the back door, holding his keys, and turned to look at me.

  His features softening, he hooked a hand around my neck, drawing me against his chest. "Don't worry, Liza. We'l find her."

  I tried so hard not to cry. "I just hope she's okay," I said as the tears came anyway. "She was so angry with me. You don't think she ran away, do you?"

  Elizabeth had left the ladder she'd used .US escape propped up against the side of the house.

  With his forehead on mine Nate asked, "Do you?"

  I couldn't get beyond the fear and the panic. "I don't know."

  "Why'd you tell her she couldn't spend the night with JoAnn?"

  "I don't know. I just had this feeling..."

  "And when have your feelings ever led you wrong?"

  Never. Not once. That knowledge had grown solid over the years.

  "What this tells me is that the two of them had something planned. Wherever she is tonight, it isn't because she's lashing out at you. It's where she planned to be al along."

  "Alone with JoAnn because her parents are gone?"

  "Or at a party," he said, his voice grim.

  "Call me when you get to JoAnn's," I told him, thankful now that he'd insisted on getting us car phones. "In the meantime, I'm calling some of her other friends, to find out if there was anything going on tonight."

  She was going to hate us for this. I didn't think her friends' parents, would, however. They al had teenage daughters, too.

  The only thing we accomplished that night, besides wasting a lot of gas, was to alert three of Elizabeth's friends' parents that their daughters were not where they were supposed to be. Two of the girls had told their parents they were staying at each other's houses. Another, like Elizabeth, had climbed out her window.

  We all determined that there were boys involved in the night's escapade, but none of us had last names or phone numbers. Elizabeth had yet to go out on a real date where I'd be privy to that information. And we al agreed to cal everyone else as soon as we heard from any of our daughters.