by Jan Feed
Tonight the house smelled like peppermint, so pungent it damn near made Ryan’s eyes water. Kathleen had stripped off goggles and rubber gloves when she came from the kitchen. Helen, meantime, had been working on the computer in the den, apparently designing order forms and practicing introductory letters. Both were preoccupied—Kathleen distracted enough to look as if she didn’t know who Emma was when he paused before seconds to ask where his niece was hiding.
“Oh, she’s upstairs somewhere,” Kathleen said vaguely. “She wasn’t hungry.”
Ryan swore. “She’s wasting away, Kathleen. When are you going to do something?”
That got to her. Her chin shot up and her eyes narrowed. “We go to counseling weekly. She sees a dietician on her own. What do you want me to do? Stick a tube down her throat?”
“Maybe the time has come for that,” he said grimly. “She looks sick.”
Speaking of timing—his stank. Ginny listened with anxious eyes, Jo stirred beside him as if to send a message, and Kathleen’s expression was less than receptive. She didn’t like criticism, and she’d like it even less in front of others. But he could see his niece wasting away, and not much being done about it.
“We’ve agreed—all of us, including Emma—that if her weight falls below eighty pounds, she’ll be hospitalized. She’s managed to keep it above that.”
“Eighty pounds.” Shocked, he shook his head. Sixteen-year-old Emma was five-four or five. How the hell could a human being survive weighing that little?
“They do check her bloodwork regularly. I’m not entirely negligent, Ryan.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that you were.” He grimaced. “She just scares me. She went up the stairs the other day as if every step was a gigantic effort. You’d see more spring in the step of a mountain climber at 20,000 feet above sea level without oxygen.”
Kathleen wasn’t in a forgiving mood. “You think I’m not scared?”
“No…”
Beside him on the couch, Jo spoke up in his defense. “We’ve all noticed that she doesn’t look good, Kathleen. You’re better informed than the rest of us. You know what’s worrisome and what’s not. All I see is that Emma’s cold most of the time, and she’s quit taking Ginny for walks.”
“But she always exercises,” Kathleen protested. “She wouldn’t quit!”
“I think she has. She goes straight to her room when she comes home from school.”
Kathleen grabbed for straws. “Maybe she’s doing calisthenics there.”
“Maybe.” Jo kept most of the doubt from her voice, returning her attention to her food, as if she’d said all she meant to.
Forehead pinched, Kathleen set down her plate as if her appetite had deserted her. Sounding defeated, she said, “I’ll talk to her counselor this week. What else can I do? They tell me not to try to monitor what she eats or to comment on how much time she spends exercising. If I ask questions or say anything, she blows up.” She lifted her hands and let them fall helplessly. “She’s my daughter, and I have to watch her starve herself to death.”
“Maybe she’s like an alcoholic who has to reach a crisis.” Ryan felt as though he were offering a pat on the back to someone who needed a wheelchair. He couldn’t blame her for being pissed off at him.
“Maybe.” Eyes blind, Kathleen stood up. “Excuse me. I’ll check on her and then I’d better get back to work. I shouldn’t have taken a break.” She walked out with her head high, but he wondered if she was going to her bedroom for a quick cry.
In the silence after she was gone, he felt like a damn heel. But later, after they’d left the house, when he said as much to Jo, she shook her head firmly.
“No. You love Emma, too. You have a right to say something. She does look awful, and I’m not sure Kathleen lets herself see. She wants so desperately to believe Emma is doing better.”
“But she’s not, is she?”
The night was clear and frosty, stars distant and brilliant. Fallen leaves crunched underfoot on the uneven sidewalk. Their breath lingered in white plumes when they passed under a streetlight.
Jo shook her head, then hunched into her parka. “She gets dizzy when she stands up. And have you touched her?” She shivered. “She’s not just moody, she’s shutting us out. Even Ginny.”
He nudged her to cross the street to his parked pickup. “Do you think Kathleen should do something?”
Tone subdued, Jo said, “I don’t know. How can I? Maybe she can’t help Emma beyond offering her the resources she already has. Maybe only Emma can help herself.”
Anger rasped in his voice. “But if she’s not…”
“Like Kathleen said, do you stick a tube down her throat, as if she were a turn-of-the-century suffragette?”
He made an impatient, choppy gesture. “That was political, a different thing.”
“Was it? Force-feeding those women stole their autonomy, made them children who could be compelled to do as their betters—men—thought they should.”
“But, damn it, Emma isn’t trying to say anything with her refusal to eat!”
Jo stopped beside the truck and faced him. “Isn’t she?”
Devastated by the small, simple question, Ryan tilted back his head and looked up at the black velvet of the sky, spangled with million-year-old stars. What if Emma had been trying to tell them all something, only they weren’t listening?
What if her last sob was her death?
Jo’s gloved hand crept into his. “I don’t know anything,” she repeated. “I’m not saying anyone has neglected Emma. I’m only guessing that Emma is expressing some huge, all-consuming need or fear through starvation. If she could find another way to say it…”
He made a ragged sound.
“She’s only sixteen.” Jo wrapped her arms around him and they embraced in the cold. “She hasn’t been anorexic long. She has a good chance of recovering, from what I’ve read.”
“You’ve been reading about it?”
“Haven’t you?”
“Yeah, but I’ve learned nothing.” Frustration choked him. “I can’t find answers.”
“I know,” she whispered.
He gripped her tightly, his cheek against the fleece cloche hat she’d tugged on as they went out the door. With his eyes closed, he smelled peppermint.
After a long minute, he was able to relax and let her go, turning away to open the truck door. They drove to his house in near silence.
There she divested herself of parka, hat and gloves, kicked off her clogs, then in stockinged feet carried her pack into the living room and sank cross-legged on the wood floor. Unzipping her bag, she took out books and binder and spread them over his coffee table.
“You look like a kid,” he said.
She glanced up in surprise.
“A kid?”
“Are you really comfortable?”
“Sure. I wouldn’t be sitting here if I weren’t.”
He shook his head, smiling. “Want something to drink?”
Reading already, she flapped a hand but didn’t look up. “Not right now, thanks.”
He left her for a while, writing up a bid for a job that would be very welcome come mid-January or early February, when construction work suffered an inevitable slowdown given Northwest weather. He didn’t believe in laying off his crew if he could possibly prevent it, even to the point of working for ridiculously low prices. If he could just make expenses on this one, it would be worth doing, to keep them from an idle month.
Satisfied at last, he printed the bid and a cover letter as well as copies for his own files, then wandered back to the living room, where he found Jo scribbling furiously, gaze darting between her writing and her open book.
She didn’t seem even to notice his presence, so he went to the kitchen and made coffee. When he set a cup in front of her, she grabbed it gratefully.
“Read my mind.”
“I doubt it,” Ryan said with amusement. “What are you working on?”
“Mm.” She str
etched her legs out under the coffee table. “I’m analyzing studies on human behavior that might be relevant to what makes people choose to use the public library or be turned off by it. How do people respond to layout, to the kind of order librarians tend to impose, to the institutional lighting or to the way other patrons behave or dress? What subtle motivators can we use to draw people in? Why do we lose some people? One guy who’s working on his 1962 Chevy borrows a manual from the library. His buddy would never think about the library as a source, even though he must have been dragged there as a school kid. Why?”
“Learning anything?”
“Oh, some of it’s predictable. For example, people worry about not fitting in, to be square pegs if the holes look round to them. So a guy wanders into the library, the only other patrons are a couple of nicely dressed women with young kids, the librarian in his shirt and tie looks disdainful, and our guy with grease under his nails quietly fades back out. He felt like an idiot when he was twelve and had to use the library to research the Egyptian pharaohs, and he doesn’t stick around this time long enough to discover how easy the computer is to use, that all he has to do is ask to be led right to that manual or résumé book or Hot Rod magazine. If he’d come at a different time of day, seen some other guys that looked more like him there, his whole experience would have been different.”
“Okay. What are you going to do about it?”
Jo flashed him a cheerful grin. “I have no idea.” She slurped coffee and wiped her chin when she spilled. “Well, I know some ways to reach reluctant patrons. With teenagers, we take books to youth centers, even the detention hall. We talk to women’s groups. Men are tougher. I’m not sure I know, except that we need to be very conscious of how we as librarians present ourselves—and what we have to offer—from the get-go. We tend to be readers. Snobs. But we don’t exist just to serve like-minded fellow citizens. I’m hoping to find some studies that pinpoint relevant behavioral triggers.”
“You don’t sound as if you believe in free will.” He considered her. “Are we really ‘triggered’ that easily?”
Face animated, she argued, “Yeah, I think context is more important than we want to believe. Say I see somebody injured on the sidewalk ahead. What if it’s dark and I’m alone? Daytime and lots of other people are around, too? When am I likeliest to help?”
“Ah…daytime,” he decided. “You’d have reason to be nervous at night.”
“Ding!” she said triumphantly. “Wrong. Turns out, in the daytime I’d look around and think somebody else will do it. I don’t have to. But if I’m the only hope for this guy, I’m more likely to take a chance and offer help. See? Context. The interesting part is, people don’t always react the way we think they will, mostly because what we think is actually determined by what we’d like to believe, if that isn’t too convoluted.”
Ryan nodded at the book. “This could make you a cynic.”
“Yeah. It could.” She sipped her coffee meditatively.
The silence was comfortable, although he used it to figure out how to ask questions she might consider threatening. Finally, he just decided to go for broke.
Trying to sound casual, he asked, “After you get your master’s degree, do you think you’ll go back to California?”
Another sign of how far they’d come was the fact that she didn’t get prickly. “You know, when I came up here, I assumed I would. Now, I’m not so sure. Libraries are better funded in other places, for one thing. The cap on tax increases in California puts such limitations on new programs and buying, it can be really frustrating. Also…” She hesitated, then shrugged. “I like it here. I even like living with Kathleen and Helen. I was thinking about it the other day. If things are still going well when I graduate, maybe I could stay on. Find a job locally. Both King County and the city of Seattle have great public libraries.”
He should be glad, not mad. But he was, and he knew why. He was agonizing over whether she might ever love him enough to marry him, and she was thinking how great her present living situation was. Had she ever, even once, considered a future with him?
Unclenching his jaw, he tried to sound mild. “I have plenty of room here, too.”
She went very still for what felt like half an hour but was probably only seconds. Then she drank her coffee in an obvious bid for more time, at last carefully setting down her mug.
“Is that an invitation?”
“It would be if I thought you’d take me up on it. Really, I was just hoping you might start considering the idea.”
Still not looking at him, Jo said, “Okay. But you know how I feel about commitment, marriage, children.”
They sounded like two people discussing the idea of switching brands of laundry detergent: interested enough to talk about it, but with no emotional investment.
He didn’t change that. “I’ve had the impression you might be changing your mind.”
She was silent, her head bent, the curve of her neck graceful. Her hair was bundled up in a ponytail, exposing the vulnerable nape. When she finally answered, it was with a cry from the heart. “I don’t know if I can.”
Ryan shifted on the couch so that he sat right behind her and could reach out and massage her shoulders. Appearances had been deceptive: she was rigid beneath his hands.
Muttering a profanity, he said, “I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Pushing. God. We’ve only known each other a few months, and I’m demanding you ditch your lifelong conviction.”
Almost inaudibly, she whispered, “I want to.”
He kneaded taut muscles and felt them becoming pliable. “What can I do to help?”
She rotated one shoulder, leaning into his hand. “You’re doing it.”
His grunt held amusement. “Giving you a back rub?”
Jo leaned back to look at him upside down. A tremulous smile was paired with big brown eyes welling with tears. “Being irresistible.”
Momentarily, his fingers tightened. He forced himself to relax, saying lightly, “You’re going to blow up my ego like a hot air balloon.”
“You don’t have a big enough one now.” She lay back, cradling her head between his knees. “You have no idea how unusual it is to find a man as sexy as you who seems oblivious to the fact. You’re smart, successful and sweet. What more could a woman want?”
“You tell me,” Ryan said quietly.
She closed her eyes, and he felt her muscles tense again. “The idea just…scares me. Maybe my parents did want to be married, maybe they loved each other. But look at all the other marriages! It seems like most fail.”
“Half. The other half of people who marry are happy.”
Her laugh was almost sad. “You’re a ‘half-full’ guy. I’m a ‘half-empty’ gal. Maybe that makes us incompatible.”
He smoothed her hair back from her face, loving the spring of it, the strength and sheen and rich color. Loving just to touch her. “I don’t feel incompatible.”
“Neither do I,” she admitted, burrowing one cheek against his knee.
“Then?”
“Being lovers isn’t the same as being husband and wife. Right now, we’re the spice in each other’s lives, not the oatmeal. What would it be like for our relationship to be predictable?”
Great, as far as he was concerned. He hated coming home to an empty house, hated wondering when he’d see Jo again, hated thinking of something to say to her and then having to phone instead of roll over in bed and whisper it into her ear.
“We see each other almost every day now,” Ryan reminded her. “Damn it, maybe this makes me boring, but I want to be able to count on you! What’s wrong with sharing the morning newspaper and the oatmeal?”
She pulled away from him, untangled her legs and stood, retreating several steps. Facing him, arms crossed protectively, Jo said tautly, “Nothing! Not the way you say it. But for most people, dullness sets in sooner or later.”
He leaned back. “Is that really what scares you?”
“Yes!” Jo paced ano
ther few steps away, then swung back. “No! I mean, that’s part of it. One thing I’ve always admired about Aunt Julia is her independence. She doesn’t have to consult anybody. If she wants to spend Christmas on Cook Island, she goes. She can be spontaneous!”
He was growing to hate Aunt Julia and her globe-trotting, glamorous lifestyle, which he suspected was largely myth. “Is going to a South Pacific island by yourself really that wonderful?”
Anxiety darkening her eyes, she deftly avoided the question. “Even together! We’d quit being spontaneous! I’d have school, then work, you’d have jobs lined up, the kids would come for vacation… What if we lose all the passion and any chance for adventure?”
Adventure. Ryan mulled that.
He loved working on a banister in a turn-of-the-century house, his patience and skill stripping away the dark layers of the years to reveal the golden glow of fine wood. He loved tucking his kids in at night, pacing the sidelines at soccer games, running beside a bicycle and letting go the first time to a gasp of fear and then a crow of delight. He loved the sight of Jo Dubray sitting cross-legged at his coffee table, or munching on a sandwich in his kitchen while sitting on the counter with her heels bumping the cabinet. Yeah, and he loved seeing her sprawled naked on his bed, laughing up at him.
That was enough adventure for him.
For the first time, he weighed the idea that maybe they were incompatible.
Then he considered how she held herself completely closed while she waited. He thought about the three months he’d known her and the ways they’d enjoyed each other’s company.
The most adventure they’d ever had together was that damn French film, and she’d been embarrassed afterward. Or in-line skating around Green Lake—that had been scary as hell the first time he’d trusted himself to wheels on the bottoms of his shoes.
At his guess, the biggest adventure of Jo’s life was quitting her job and moving to Seattle to go to graduate school. She’d never mentioned scuba-diving in the Caribbean or climbing in the Andes.