Three Wishes

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Those aren’t dumb things.”

  “They’re material things. I don’t want to waste a wish on something material.” She had decided that much after talking with her friends. Not that she faulted them. To them, talk of three wishes was make-believe, and make-believe was just for fun. “What about you?” she asked Tom. “If you had three wishes, what would they be?”

  He thought about it for a while. His frown deepened. Finally, looking resigned, he said, “I’d wish to turn back the clock and redo certain things.”

  “What things?” she asked, but less surely. She sensed that if he answered, they would be treading new ground.

  He studied the quilt for a minute. Then he raised his eyes to hers. “I’ve always been competitive. I was that way as a little kid. I was that way in college and law school. I was that way as a lawyer, right from the start, driven to do better and be better. I went for the best cases, even when that meant taking them from lawyers who may have been just as good but weren’t as forceful. I strode my way to the top, and when I had to climb on other people to get there, I reasoned that my clients were the winners and that was all that mattered.

  “When I wrote my first book, it was the same. I’d established my name as a lawyer, so I had access to the most powerful literary agent, no questions asked. We had a publicist working even before my manuscript was sent to editors. That book could have been a dud and it would have been published, we were so successful at creating hype. Some editors called in bids even before they finished reading the thing.”

  “That book was good,” Bree said.

  He smiled sadly. “Lots of books are good. Lots of books are better. So why did mine hit it big? Because I was clever. Once that book hit the top of the best-seller lists, anything I wrote that was marginally good was guaranteed to make it, too, because the hype continued to build. Success fueled success. There were reviews and interviews. There were profiles in magazines. There were publishing parties in New York and screening parties in L.A. I was,” he said with something of a sneer, “rich and arrogant and famous.”

  Bree sat forward and took one of his hands. He studied the mesh of their fingers.

  “I wasn’t a nice man. Did you know I was married?”

  “No.”

  “Not many people did. Her name was Emily. We were college sweethearts. She worked to support us while I was in law school. So how did I thank her? Once I graduated, I buried myself in the law and ignored her. Two years of that, and she asked for a divorce, and would you believe I was startled? I had no idea she was unhappy, no idea at all. That’s how attentive I was.”

  Bree didn’t know what to say.

  “She remarried soon after, and no wonder. She was a great girl. She has four kids now. From what I hear, she’s really happy. I’d turn back the clock with her, too.”

  “You still love her?” Bree didn’t see how that could be. She hadn’t died, gone to heaven, and returned, only to fall in love with a man who still loved his ex-wife. Then again, what did she know?

  “No. It’s not about love. It’s about the bastard I was even after the divorce. She came to a book signing of mine once. The line was around the block when I got to the store. I saw her standing there and should have pulled her out of line and brought her inside with me. But I was all caught up in myself. I waved and walked on, like it was my due and not hers.” He looked to the side. “I did things like that a lot—saw someone I knew and rather than acknowledging the relationship, treated the person like just another one of my fans. It happened in restaurants, in airports, at parties. I have a knack for condescension. I have a history of dropping people.”

  “Had,” Bree whispered.

  His eyes returned to their hands. “After Emily, I had two long-term relationships with women. The first was with a female associate who worked at my firm. We were together for three years. I dropped her when my first movie came out, because I didn’t see her fitting in with a Hollywood crowd. The second was a production assistant on the second movie. She was Hollywood through and through—long legs, blond hair, blue-jeans glamour. I was with her for two years, when she started making noises about marriage.” He snapped his fingers. “That was it. I was outta there. But not before I told her that if she thought she had anything that a thousand other women didn’t have, too, she was nuts.” He let out a disgusted burst of breath. “I was not nice at all. And then there’s my family.” The eyes that met Bree’s were filled with self-reproach. “I haven’t talked much about them, have I? They are my one, single greatest source of shame.”

  She might have denied it, might have tried to lighten his burden with empty words. But she wanted their relationship to be an honest one. This was Tom’s moment of confession.

  “I come from a small town in Ohio,” he said. “There were six of us kids, five boys and Alice. She was the youngest. I was right above her. My father worked for the highway department, and not in administration. He plowed snow and patched roads and pitched roadkill into the back of the truck. We were working class all the way. I was the first to make it out. I got a football scholarship. Boy, were they proud of me. They treated me like a king when I came to visit. It wasn’t more than once or twice a year, and then only for a few days at the most. There was always something to keep me away—spring training, a trip with my friends, catch-up studying—and they accepted that. It didn’t occur to them that I didn’t want to be small-town anymore, that I was separating myself from everything they stood for. My two oldest brothers got on my case once, and I let them have it, told them how hard it was trying to make it in a cutthroat world and the fact that they didn’t understand just went to show how little they knew.” He raked his teeth over his upper lip. “Only I didn’t say it like that. The words I used were more crude.”

  He stared at her, inviting her disdain.

  She said nothing.

  Still staring, still daring, he said, “After I hit it big, I sent money, mostly around holiday time, usually to make up for not going out there myself. At one point, I didn’t see them for two years. In the middle of that time, I actually did a media thing in Cleveland. They could’ve driven up in two hours, or I could’ve driven down. But I didn’t even tell them I was coming. They found out after the fact. My mother took it hard.”

  Memory broke his stare, visibly taking him back. “She was a plucky lady—petite, like my sister Alice, but strong-willed. I used to think my dad wore the pants in the family. He came home from work, planted himself in that big old armchair of his, and let us wait on him. Only she was the one telling us what to bring him. She kept the house and paid the bills and made us do our homework. Long after he’d fallen asleep in that chair, she was folding laundry or mopping the floor or cutting hair.” He smiled. “It wasn’t until I was eighteen that I ever went to a barber.” He grew quiet.

  Still Bree said nothing. She would have given anything to have a mother who did those kinds of things. She would have given anything to have someone care that way.

  Tom’s quiet lingered, then yielded to sorrow. “I never could think of her as being sick. Being sick just wasn’t part of who she was. Maybe that’s why I didn’t go back.”

  “What was wrong with her?”

  “Cancer. Maybe she couldn’t think of herself as being sick, either, because she let it go for so long that by the time she finally went to the doctor, it had spread to her bones. I remember when they called to tell me. There were three messages on my answering machine before I finally called back, and then, even though I’d been totally independent and separate from them for nearly twenty years, it was like I’d been hit in the stomach.” He broke off. Self-loathing returned. “I recovered. She didn’t. I kept myself busy. She got weaker.” He swallowed. “Oh, I said all the right things about getting a second opinion, a specialist from New York, an experimental protocol from Houston. I might have wanted those things if I’d been in her shoes. But she didn’t. She wanted to stay where she was with the doctor she knew. So I went back to my own arrogan
t life, thinking that I’d done all I could. Only I never visited.”

  “Never?” Bree asked in disbelief and, yes, disappointment. She couldn’t conceive of having a mother—let alone a good one—and not treating her well.

  “I did visit, just not enough. I went once in the beginning, another time about halfway through. It was painful. Easier to stay away.” He looked Bree in the eye, challenging again. “That’s the kind of person I was. I did what suited me. They used to leave messages saying that she was weakening, or that the cancer had spread more, and I’d send a card or leave a phone message, because it was easier that way. I always had an excuse. Either I was working on a book or off doing publicity. The pathetic thing is that I wasn’t writing. I didn’t have time to write. I was too busy being a star.”

  The line between his brows deepened. “I was vacationing with a group of equally famous and sybaritic friends when she died. We were on a boat on the Adriatic. My family had no idea where I was. They left message after message on my answering machine. When I didn’t answer any of them, they had no choice but to go ahead with the funeral.” His voice broke. “I showed up a week later.”

  “Oh, Tom.”

  He held up a hand. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I got off easy. Hell, I missed out on the pain of having to go through the whole drawn-out ordeal of a funeral.” His Adam’s apple moved. “The thing is, there’s a purpose to the ordeal. Funerals are outlets for grief. I was trying to deny the pain and my guilt, and I didn’t have that outlet. And suddenly the pain and the guilt and the grief cleared all the other nonsense from my head, and I had a clear vision of what my life had become. That answering machine I mentioned? While I was sailing merrily through the Adriatic, while my mother was being embalmed and my family was trying to reach me, no one else was. Once I erased their messages, there was nothing. I was in pain, and no one came around. And it was my fault. Absolutely my own fault. I was a lousy friend, a lousy person.”

  Without a second thought, Bree came forward and curved her hands around his neck. His pain was real as real could be. She was desperate to ease it.

  He raced on, the dam broken. “I tried calling my father, but he wouldn’t talk with me. Neither would my brothers. My sister did. We’d always had a special relationship, being the last of the six. But it was awkward with her, too. So I got on a plane and flew out there. I went straight to the cemetery.” He took a shaky breath. Tears brimmed on his lower lids. “Looking at that grave with the dirt that hadn’t had time to grow grass . . . looking at that stone that had just barely been carved . . . I thought . . . I thought that was the most awful moment in my life, but I was wrong. I hadn’t been there more than ten minutes when my father arrived. He came up the hill with his head down and his shoulders huddled, like he was ninety years old. He couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away when he looked up and stopped dead in his tracks. He straightened his spine, took a cold breath, and told me what he thought of me. Then he turned right around and walked back down the hill.”

  Bree held her breath. “Did you go after him?”

  “I called, but he didn’t stop, and it was weird, after all those years, but I just couldn’t leave my mother, couldn’t leave her alone in that place, so I stayed awhile. Then I went to the house. He was there. I saw him through the window. He was there, but he refused to open the door when I knocked, and he’s right. Looking at me—knowing the opportunities I had that the others didn’t have—knowing everything I didn’t do when I could have—knowing all that I squandered—knowing how I let my own mother down at a time when there was literally no tomorrow . . . all that must be hell for him.”

  Present tense. “Still? You haven’t talked with him since then?”

  “I try. I call every few weeks. He won’t talk.” He looked down. “That was ten months ago. I went back to New York after that, but I hated it. Nothing fit me the way it had before. I didn’t call people, they didn’t call me. I sat alone in the loft that I had thought was so chic, and I hated the chrome and the leather and the gloss, and in the middle of that . . . starkness, all I could do was think about the people I wanted to be with, who I couldn’t be with because, one by one over the years, I had picked them off and tossed them away like they were pieces of lint messing up my Armani tux.”

  He stopped talking. Slowly, he raised his eyes. They were bleak, challenging her to say what a worm he was.

  But Bree couldn’t. She didn’t know the Tom who had done those things. The one she knew had been attentive to a fault. He had given up nights of sleep to see to her, had put his own needs second to hers. “You haven’t tossed me away,” she said, going at the tension in his jaw with small strokes of her thumbs.

  She felt a faint easing in him. “Things are different here. The change has been good.”

  “Things here are basic. And you’re basically good.”

  “I don’t know as I’d go that far,” he said, but she could see that he was pleased, pleased and so very close to her that when the first glints of warmth reached his eyes, she felt them.

  Her thumbs slid up and back under his jaw. “What about writing?” It was time she asked about that.

  In a reprise of disdain, he grunted. “I haven’t written anything worth reading in four years.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Tell me honestly. Which of my books did you think were stronger, the first or the last?”

  She thought back. “It’s hard to compare. The last one was shorter—”

  “And more shallow and less well plotted. I went through the motions of writing, but I wasn’t involved. That last book was awful.”

  Bree wouldn’t have used the word awful. But he was right about depth and plotting. “Still, lots of people read it.”

  “They sure did. It sat right at the top of the best-seller lists, so I told myself it was great. Now I can say that it wasn’t. That’d be my second wish. To rewrite that book and the one before it.”

  “And the third wish?”

  His eyes softened. A small smile touched his mouth. “A kiss.”

  Pleased, she smiled back, pointed to her lips, raised her brows.

  “Yes, you,” he said.

  Something about the reality of what was about to happen caught a tiny train of her thought, and for an instant, just an instant, she wondered if she was buying trouble, playing with fire, with a man like Tom. Then the instant passed. It didn’t have a chance against all he had come to mean to her.

  “Consider this your lucky day,” she said, and didn’t have far to go, not with Tom meeting her halfway, but it wasn’t his mouth she thought of first. It was his hands, one cupping the back of her head, the other threading through her hair in gentle possession, then both moving to shift her head, hold it, caress it with exquisite intimacy. She had guessed that his hands could do anything they tried, and she was right. His hands knew how to kiss.

  Not that his mouth did a bad job. It was gentle but firm, soothing, challenging. It opened hers and ate from it, staying one step ahead in anticipation of her needs, and when those needs escalated to the point where her insides were humming and breath was scarce, it knew to withdraw.

  Too fast. She clutched his shoulders and tried to steady herself. Too hot, too fast. He put his forehead to hers. There was heat there, too.

  He dragged in a long, deep, shuddering breath and let it out with a tortured moan that said he wanted more but had no intention of taking it then.

  Different. So different from other men. And sweet.

  What if he loved me? Bree thought, then chased the thought away and simply enjoyed the moment for its closeness, which was so much more than she’d ever had that it was beautiful even if there wasn’t love.

  After several minutes’ cooling, Tom pulled the pillows down from the wrought iron at the head of the bed and set them where they belonged. He switched off the light, helped Bree slide under the quilt, and stretched out on top of it. He lay on his side, facing her. Incredibly, given the pleasure of it, they
weren’t even touching when they fell asleep.

  As November nights went, this one was cold. Had Bree’s furnace gone on, Tom would have been fine. But the room was chilly when he woke up, and Bree seemed plenty warm, all bundled up. So he slipped under the side of the quilt where she wasn’t, pulled it up to his neck, and went back to sleep.

  Bree opened her eyes at dawn. Her head lay on Tom’s arm, her cheek on his shirt just above his elbow. He lay on his side with his eyes closed, dark lashes resting not far from the yellowing remnants of a bruise and a fading suture line. She reached up to touch it but stopped just shy and drew her hand back. Holding it tucked to her throat, she looked more.

  His hair fell onto his forehead from a mussed, off-center part. His ear was neatly formed and small-lobed, his sideburns neither short nor long. A day’s growth of beard added even greater texture to his face than that already left by the sun. His tan was just starting to fade.

  That tan had been the cause for much speculation. LeeAnn had bet it was from the jungle, Flash from a tanning parlor, Dotty—with a disapproving sniff—from a beach “for naked people.” Bree had always figured that a man didn’t have to be nude to get tanned on his face, throat, and arms, which was as much as any of them had ever seen of Tom, until now.

  Now, with his shirt unbuttoned, Bree saw that the tan covered his chest—no surprise, since she knew that he had spent much of the summer in the yard behind his house, preparing the ground and laying stone for the terrace she so admired. She imagined that his chest muscles had grown while he was doing that work, though she assumed they hadn’t been small to start with. But they were certainly impressive, tight and well formed, his skin dusted with tawny hair that spread wide before tapering. His entire torso tapered along with it, right down to a lean waist and hips that were angled slightly forward.

  She let her hand go this time. The backs of her fingers brushed the hair at the center of his chest and found it surprisingly soft, but the warmth coming from the skin beneath it was no surprise. Even more than the quilt, he had kept her warm while the rest of the room got colder and colder.