In his face, transfigured by light and love, she saw a flash of his old grin: He'd made it, and he loved her beyond anything she could hope to hear expressed in words. When she drew nearer, she moved, quite simply, into his soul. And for one blink in the universe of time, Emily ceased to exist. There was only joy. And a great, abiding love. And peace.
"Dr. Redd, come quickly! I think the patient's coming around.
Emily winced, as though she'd been splashed with ice water, and groaned.
"There you go, honey ... take it slow ... shh ... the doctor'll be right here ....
Emily's eyelids fluttered, then opened sleepily. "I ... oh-h ... what's happening?" she said in a dry whisper.
She was staring at a nurse with a grin as big as Texas. "You're coming out of a coma that's gone on way too long, honey. And I can name a lot of people who're going to line up to give you a piece of their mind."
For a long moment Emily just stared at the nurse. Her mind was an absolute blank. Coma? The last thing she remembered was crawling into bed exhausted after an all-night session at her computer. Hessiah Talbot's murderer. Yes. Her brother Stewart did it. Yes. Emily was quite sure. And just as soon as she handed over the story to be published, then Fergus --
Fergus. She'd been with Fergus. Just now ... Suddenly she became very still. She closed her eyes, focusing every atom of her being inward.
"She's slipping back."
She'd been with Fergus, been with him in a way she never knew existed. That much she knew. But she couldn't remember the experience; it was all hidden behind a veil. She drew her brows together, concentrating fiercely.
"Emily, Emily, don't go back." It was Dr. Redd's voice. "We're just about to call your family. Don't you want to see them? Come on, girl, stay with us. You can do it."
Her hand went up to hold the crystal, to summon Fergus, but the necklace was gone. "My necklace ..." she moaned, opening her eyes again. The doctor standing next to the nurse looked startled, then pleased at her alertness.
"Don't worry at all about it. It's perfectly safe. We had to cut it off with snips; no one could figure out how it opened. Don't worry. Any goldsmith --"
"No, you don't understand ... how could you ... how could you?" she said, scandalized.
"You're getting upset, honey," said the nurse, "and all for nothing. Now, how were we supposed to bathe you with that old thing around your neck, hmm?"
Emily closed her eyes again, shutting up the tears behind her lids. "Never mind ... you couldn't have known.
The nurse smiled and said, "That's better. Look, I'll tell you what. Senator Alden is holding the necklace for you. Do you want me to call him right now?"
"No ... no, you'd better not." She put her hand to her head wearily and was amazed to feel that her hair was both longer and shorter than she'd had it before the hospital. "Can you tell me the date, please?"
"October third, dear, believe it or not."
"There's nothing I don't believe anymore," Emily answered with a tired, limp smile.
Chapter 27
When it was over Emily went home, home to New Hampshire. After the good wishes and hugs from the hospital staff, after the happy embraces of her coworkers and friends, after a brief statement to the relentless press, after the roses and the cards and the calls, Emily went back to where she'd begun.
She couldn't face the condo. Not yet, and maybe not ever. She got Ben's wife Sarah to empty her drawers and much of her closet into a couple of trunks for her, and together they made the trip north in companionable silence. The car was filled with the smell of roses, roses she couldn't very well leave behind since everyone knew the card had been signed with Lee's name. She'd taken the roses, but she'd had to leave Lee. There was no other way. After her transcendent moment with Fergus, Emily felt that anything less than a complete break with Lee would be dishonest.
And Lee had made it easy for her. Emily learned from Sarah that he'd hung back deliberately from the well-wishers, not wishing to intrude among family. Both Ben and Sarah had encouraged him to intrude to his heart's content, but he'd just smiled and said it was enough to know that Emily had pulled through.
Afterward Ben had shaken his head, baffled. "The man checks in like clockwork every day, then takes off when she finally comes to. It's not like he's shy, so what goes on?"
Sarah had told her husband, "Leave him alone. And leave your sister alone."
Emily spent the first week with Gerry and Jean, helping her sister-in-law with her newborn. After that she went on to her father's ramshackle farmhouse, where she divided her time between listening to her father reminisce and scraping the peeling clapboard under the roof of the wraparound porch. The weather was very fine for doing both.
As usual after his one o'clock nap, her father came out to chat with her while she worked. Emily was sharpening the scraper blade with a file, aware that for as long as she could remember the house had needed paint on one side or another.
"Have you decided on a color yet, Dad?"
"Any color, as long as it's white," her father grumped, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
She looked up from her sharpening with a wry smile. "Still as flexible as ever, I see."
"What's right is right," he answered stolidly.
He grabbed hold of the arms of the ladder-back rocker that was a permanent fixture on the porch and eased himself into it. The afternoon sun, October low, threw him in golden relief, softening the stark whiteness of his hair and the craggy, weathered lines of his face. She was reminded of a night more than a decade ago when -- no longer young, even then -- her father had sat in the same rocker on the same porch with the same righteous look on his face, waiting for her to come home from a date in a car that had broken down three different ways in three hours.
George Bowditch had tried hard to raise good people; he'd tried hardest of all with Emily. Now, with his Agnes gone and his children all grown, it was obvious that his house was too big, the burden of maintaining it too great. Obvious, that is, to everyone but him.
"Don't you wish you'd sold this old place a couple of years back, when Boston yuppies were snapping up anything with a gable and a frieze?"
"Them damn fools? They'd be pickin' out the trim in designer teal and brick red and settin' up the cordwood all picturesque on the porch where the termites could step nicely into the parlor, thank you very much. No. I ain't sorry."
"The gutter's bad on the west side, Dad. The trim underneath here is pretty punky. I don't think it'll hold paint."
"Sure, I know it. Ben's promised to fix it first thing. Just do the best you can. And, Emily?"
Emily dragged the scraper across a long stretch of peeling paint, bringing down a rain of flakes into her hair. "Yeah, Dad?"
"I suppose you know I'm pleased to have you here," he said gruffly.
"Yeah, Dad," she said, smiling. "I know."
****
One day rolled into another, with the two of them falling into an easy, predictable routine: an early morning walk in the woods, followed by a meat and eggs breakfast, after which Emily scraped and primed a section of the porch while her father puttered inside. Then they had lunch, and while he napped she would put on a finish coat. She was rushing the work, but she had no choice; the weather could turn any day. Besides, it was time to return to her job. Bankruptcy was imminent.
Still, being an obsessive type, Emily wanted at least to finish the porch, and that included 122 peely balusters. She was on her knees, working on number 83, when one of the loaner clunkers Gerry kept handy at his garage pulled into the gravel drive. She waved her paintbrush at the big yellow Ford Fairlane, glad of her brother's company, and went back to painting.
But it wasn't Gerry who got out. When she looked up again, Emily was face-to-face with the man she'd fled, face-to-face with the emotions she thought she'd put to rest.
"Lee. This is a surprise," she said, her voice unnaturally calm. Oh, no! I'm a disaster! My hair's sticking out like a punk rocker's; I'm dressed in salv
age from an all-male rag box. Where can I run? Where can I hide?
Lee, not surprisingly, was impeccably casual in oxford shirt and khakis. "Hello," he said, shifting a large paper-wrapped parcel from his right arm to his left.
"Please don't say I look very nice," she warned, standing up and wiping her paint-stained fingers on her brother's worn-out fatigues. She was blushing to the core.
Lee's smile was tentative, as if someone were giving him directions and he wasn't exactly sure which way north was. "You look very ... independent," he ventured.
She laughed and said breezily, "Hey, you've seen our license plates: 'Live Free or Die.' What brings you to this neck of the woods, anyway -- in that hulk?"
He had one foot on the bottom step, but he declined to come up farther, and Emily's mind was somewhere else than on her manners. So they stood there in a kind of New Hampshire standoff, with him not pressing and her not inviting.
"I'm here for a couple of reasons, actually. Sarah and Ben invited me up for the night -—"
"My sister-in-law?"
"-—and on the way up my car developed a funny knock. Gerry insisted on taking a look at it and gave me the loaner -—"
"My brother?"
"-—so that I could still make my lunch date with Jean and the new baby -—"
"My niece?"
"-—Katherine. Yes. She's a doll."
Emily didn't know what to say. Here he was, lock, stock, and barrel, settled in snugly with her family. She had a passing sense of déjà vu, but she couldn't imagine where she'd learned about it.
"Katherine weighed eight pounds nine ounces," she said with startling irrelevance.
Lee smiled, shifted feet, shifted the package. "I think Jean mentioned that on the phone."
There was a pause, and then Emily said rather defiantly, "Are you just passing by, then?"
For an answer he held up the package, the size of a framed poster, to her. "This is from Helen."
Helen was one of the illustrators at the Boston Journal. Emily checked to see that her hands were dry and accepted the parcel from him, then tore off the brown paper. It was the original artwork for her piece on Fergus and Hessiah Talbot, beautifully framed and matted. Emily had steadfastly refused to open the Journal magazine section that she knew Sarah had packed along with her things. And now, just when she'd least expected it -- bang! Ambushed.
"It ... it's beautifully done," she said, her voice catching in her throat. She stared at the artist's rendering of the principal players in the drama: Hessiah herself, not really pretty but somehow intriguing; Mayor Abbott, dashing and driven; the handsome Lieutenant Culver; Hessiah's brother Stewart, aloof and dangerous; and, of course, Fergus O'Malley. The artist caught him perfectly, from his finely cut features to his flashing green eyes. "It looks very like him," she whispered.
"I recognized him right away," Lee agreed.
"I ... well, thank you for bringing this," she said, holding up the frame a little in acknowledgment. "You shouldn't have gone out of your way. I'll be heading back to my job sometime next week."
He looked up quickly, then turned casual again. "Phil will be glad to hear it."
So he knew Phil didn't know. "Phil's not the reason I'm going back," she said, rather perversely. "I've got a mortgage to pay." Not that Lee would know what a mortgage was.
He nodded sympathetically, then glanced around the crisp white porch. "This is nice work. Have you considered exterior painting as an alternate career?" he asked in a friendly, teasing way.
She allowed herself a small, wry smile. "Probably not. The pay's not great, the commute's too long, and my father stifles creativity. Speaking of careers, congratulations on holding on to yours. I read Stanley's exposé. It was devastating. If I were Strom, I'd have run for the hills instead of sticking out the primary."
"I supposed he figured what the hell, he had as good a chance as I did of winning."
"You're too hard on yourself, Lee," she said in a softer voice than she'd intended. "People are a lot more afraid of toxins than ghosts."
Their polite standoff ended when Emily's father harrumphed his way onto the porch behind her.
"Dad!" she said, surprised to see him up early from his nap. She felt exactly the way she'd felt at fifteen, when he wandered out one evening right into the middle of her first kiss with a boy named Tommy Betts. "Dad, this is Sen -— Lee Alden," she said, confused about the proper protocol. "My father, George Bowditch," she added to Lee.
"Mr. Bowditch, pleased to meet you, sir," Lee said, extending his hand.
Emily's father took it, saying, "My boys been tellin' me about you, Mr. Alden. Come in. Emily, you'll be wanting to clean yourself up now."
"I'm not finished yet, Dad," Emily said through a tight smile.
"Tomorrow's supposed to be a good drying day. C'mon, c'mon," he added, which had the immediate effect of driving Emily's blood pressure up ten points.
She stood her ground, more to resist the littlest-kid syndrome than anything else. "Mr. Alden is on his way to visit Ben and Sarah, Dad. I don't think we should keep him."
"Oh, pshaw. I'll take care of Ben. 'Tisn't every day I have a Democrat under my roof," he said with a siy glance at Lee. "How do you take your coffee, sir?"
Emily rolled her eyes and left Lee at the mercy of her father. Upstairs she scrubbed the latex paint from her hands and arms as well as she could and slipped into a pair of stone-washed jeans and a clean white shirt. Her hair, with the shaved part growing out, was in that indeterminate stage between avant-garde and normal. She combed it through, flopped it around a little, and gave up. As for makeup, she didn't need any; her cheeks were ruddy from the outside work. She hesitated over her tiny bottle of Joy perfume, then purposely dabbed a little scent behind each ear, just to prove she didn't care either way.
When she returned to the old-fashioned bay-windowed parlor, she found Lee Alden in her father's Barca Lounger -- a rare concession by her father to any guest -— flipping slowly through a photo album while from a Hiscock chair alongside, her father kept up a running commentary on family history.
Lee tried to stand up when she entered the room, but her father said, "Sit, sit," and flipped the next page for him. "This is her at a school play, I forget which grade. She was Mr. Frog. I remember the day the assignments were made; minute she steps off the bus, she starts wailing over the cruelty of it."
"Dad, Lee doesn't want to hear that old -—"
"But I think she looked real cute, don't you? Her mom taped those frog lips across her cheeks; how they flapped when she done her lines! How'd they go again, Em? 'Sittin' on a rock, just takin' stock, that's what I do, the whole day through, 'cause I'm Mr. Frog.' She wanted to be Ms. Frog, if you please, but the song needed two syllables before 'Frog.'"
"Dad!" she said, her eyes wide with reproach.
"It sounds as if your father's a big fan, Emily," Lee said politely. She wasn't fooled; his blue eyes were howling with laughter.
"Dad, if you're going to put me through the bearskin rug routine, then I'd just as soon go outside and paint."
"No, no," he said, waving the idea away. "Not now that you're all cleaned up." He looked up from the album at his daughter. "You did change, didn't you?" he asked suspiciously.
Emily said, "Very funny," and he turned to Lee with a shake of his head and said, "You clean 'em, you clothe 'em, and this is how they turn out. Her mother, now, she wouldn't have been caught dead in dungarees. Whenever I came courtin', Agnes'd be waitin' in a nice floral dress."
Emily went faint with embarrassment. Her father had never been one to mince words. It was one reason she'd never dated much, one reason she'd moved out as soon as she could. Her brothers had never minded the teasing, but of course, they were boys. She sat stonily silent, staring out the window. Let them come up with the damn small talk.
"Uh-oh, I went too far," said her father with a wink at Lee. "Em, I'm sorry," he said candidly, rubbing his knees in an almost distressed way. "I can't get it out of
my head that you're not my little girl anymore. Y'see, Senator, with my boys it was different. They all grew up in the normal way: got married, had kids -—"
"I believe it's time I started dinner," Emily said, slicing through her father's good intentions.
"It's chops, tonight, isn't it? For three, Em."
"Oh, but the senator—"
"Is staying. He didn't want to, but I prevailed."
On what possible pretext? she wanted to ask. She turned and headed for the kitchen without further comment. Behind her she heard her father whisper, "Ayah, here's a cute one. Look at her at fourteen, her first date. She's half a foot tallah than the little feller ...."
In the kitchen Emily slammed each chop into a bowl of beaten eggs, then into one with breadcrumbs. He can't stay. I can see why he stopped by -— to see that I was alive and functional, to satisfy his curiosity. But he can't stay. Dad shouldn't have put him on the spot like that. Sarah shouldn't have asked him up in the first place. And Gerry shouldn't have gotten in on the act. What is this, a conspiracy?
She hauled out a cast-iron frying pan, then poured oil over the bottom and turned the heat on high. Moving around the kitchen in a state of maximum distress, she began assembling a meal that was neither imaginative nor healthy, just her father's favorite: fried pork chops, mashed potatoes, and canned peas. (Her father had never farmed his five acres -- he'd worked for the railroad all his life -- so the charm of fresh vegetables had pretty much eluded him.)
Why couldn't Lee have dropped in yesterday for the trout meuniêre instead?
She was opening the second can of peas when Lee walked in, without his host.
Emily's Ghost Page 31