Texas Redeemed

by Isla Bennet

  Valerie Jordan’s rain-dampened fingers fumbled over the key fob as she tried to lock her Chrysler crossover and walk backward across the east-wing lot toward the hospital entrance at the same time. “What doesn’t?” she asked her daughter, Lucy, who stood on the other side of the vehicle, burdened with a heavy backpack, an oversized hobo handbag and a huge red-and-white umbrella that had seen better days.

  “The chant, ‘rain, rain, go away.’ It doesn’t work at all,” the girl said darkly, her scowl emphasizing the subtle slant of her long-lidded eyes. She tried the passenger side door handle and rain splashed the interior when her grip and the blustery wind hauled the door open wider than she’d intended. “Car’s still unlocked, Mom.”

  “Shut it, please, and let me try again.” Getting used to a vehicle with so many gadgets that her old Grand Prix had lacked was a slow process. Valerie tried the lock button again, pressing twice firmly. The taillights flashed and the vehicle beeped, announcing that the doors were locked and the alarm activated.

  Lightning speared through the gray sky with a startling crackle and thunder reverberated in the October air.

  Lucy’s mouth contorted in a pout as she rounded the rear of the car and joined her mother in just a few strides.

  At twelve, she’d had one growth spurt after the other, and was now as tall as her mother and the tallest girl in the seventh grade by nearly a foot. She had the long-limbed, coltish build that Valerie had had as a teen. But she had her father’s sulky look, his smoky eyes and a softly cleft chin. Her toffee-brown hair had a curl to it, and she was known for sectioning a triangle at the front and pinning it back with the old jeweled hairclip that had belonged to her twin sister, Anna.

  “I hate hospitals.” Lucy looked at Valerie in a way she never had when she was a child and thought her mother could fix anything. “No offense.”

  “If you meant ‘no offense,’ you wouldn’t have said it,” Valerie retorted. The hospital’s doors slid open and they stepped inside.

  Lucy’s bad moods fell into either of two plain-and-simple categories: quiet or loud. Ask any parent within a twenty-mile radius and they’d disagree, but Valerie preferred the latter. A fired-up and vocal Lucy was the devil that she knew. But it was the devil that she didn’t know—the Lucy who could be withdrawn and deceptively calm like the eye of a cyclone—that worried her. The girl was the product of two magma-hot-tempered bloodlines, and Valerie knew that the only thing worse than setting anger free like a wild horse would be to tuck it away and let it brew.

  If serving after-school detention and then having a bus splash her with muddy rainwater didn’t get stuck in the girl’s craw, missing a get-together with her friends surely did.

  Because instead of hanging out at the diner, scarfing down one of Bud Frowler’s famous quarter-pound Angus cheeseburgers and Junie Peera’s “tie-dye” milkshakes—which were the same as any other milkshake, except they looked like victims of food coloring explosions—she’d be cooling her heels at the hospital while Valerie attended a board meeting.

  Between holding down the ranch and keeping up with Lucy, Valerie hadn’t time for much else. Still, Night Sky Memorial Hospital’s children’s foundation was especially important to her family, and she’d never considered giving up her position on the board.

  Valerie hustled to the nurses’ station to borrow a set of scrubs for Lucy, and then checked the nearest mirror for smeared makeup.

  She touched the silvery scar just shy of her left eye. A makeup counter saleswoman had said the crescent moon gave Valerie’s face character. But there was a story behind the scar many people probably wouldn’t want to hear.

  As Valerie and her daughter hustled toward the elevators that would take them to Pediatrics, Lucy slapped at the construction-paper cutouts of cartoonish spiders and ghosts that hung by strings from the ceiling.

  “Can I please not hang out in the kids’ ward today?” No surprise she didn’t like being in the place where she’d spent three months sick with meningitis—the infection that had taken away her twin and part of her hearing when she was six years old.

  “There’s always the hospital library.”

  “Not fun, Mom.”

  Unlike her parents, Lucy wasn’t interested in medicine or manning a ranch. Her niche was fashion. She was an artist, a wannabe designer, and wanted to have her own label one day.

  Lucy stomped into the Pediatrics waiting area restroom to change, then emerged wearing scrubs, corduroy boots and a bold multi-colored scarf. She plopped on the sofa and rooted around in her hobo for a green apple and a paperback, then pulled out her cell phone and began to fiercely type on the device’s keyboard with her thumbs.

  “Who are you texting?” Valerie asked.

  “Gramps.” She paused to adjust her behind-the-ear hearing aid and continued texting.

  “Gramps” was Nathaniel Turner, who’d been ready to move heaven and hell to be involved in Anna and Lucy’s lives when he’d learned the truth about the girls’ paternity during their illness. Family meant everything to Nathaniel Turner and Valerie just knew that a man with his influence would bring down anyone who tried to deprive him of grandparental rights. Peyton had left town before she’d realized she was pregnant. And with him in no uncertain terms out of the picture, she’d gone as long as she could without involving his grandfather in a situation that she’d set in motion with secrets and lies that had led Peyton to her bed.

  No, her car, to be precise. The Grand Prix, for years, had been a reminder, able to stir memories of a night of frenzied sex and dark destruction … a night that shouldn’t have happened.

  “Lucy, this isn’t about your birthday, is it?”

  “I’m asking Gramps to get you to let me have the best party ever,” the girl said bluntly.

  Valerie sighed, checking her wristwatch. Two minutes until the board meeting began. “I won’t be manipulated into changing my mind, Lucy.”

  Last night they’d had a heated argument about Valerie turning down Nathaniel’s offer to splurge on a lavish weekend party for Lucy’s thirteenth birthday in February.

  Lucy snapped the phone shut. “Everyone at school keeps asking me why I live like a farmer when my great-grandpa’s, like, the richest guy in Texas.”

  “It’s because you’re my kid, not his.” A fact she’d reminded Nathaniel of only weeks ago, when he’d broached the subject of preparing Lucy for a place in his company—as the leader of an entire division that didn’t exist yet. The man was waiting in the wings, ready to deliver all her dreams on a platinum platter.

  Valerie had turned him down, refusing to be strong-armed, refusing to even clue her daughter in on what Nathaniel had in mind. Granted, Lucy was creative, talented. Gifted, some said. But she was too young to be cemented in a career—especially one that’d remove her from the ranch and the lifestyle she knew.

  And it was more than a little apparent that Nathaniel saw Lucy as someone to take on business left unfinished by his son and grandson.

  “Let me go to the diner tonight, Mom. Isn’t detention punishment enough?”

  Valerie kneeled down to be eye level with Lucy. “You smart-mouthed a teacher. Not cool. Plus, you’ve a history test to study for.”

  “Just wait. When I grow up, I’m going to be ridiculously rich and famous,” she shot back. “I’ll move away, and go where I want when I want.”

  Valerie frowned. Peyton had also had a hankering to travel. He’d been desperate to the point of recklessness to be rid of his mother, who’d abandoned him but continued to pop into his life whenever her pockets came up empty. All the while he was buying her affection, he was slipping into a dark place from which only a few people could yank him back. She had thought she herself was one of those people, until the morning she’d come to the Turner mansion pregnant with nobody else to turn to, and found him gone.

  He’d disappeared, almost as if he’d never existed, and neither she nor his grandfather could find him when the girls had been sick … when Anna had
died. “Well, until then,” Valerie said, because any mention of Lucy’s phantom father always upset her, “study.”

  WITH THE HILL Country backdrop still visible despite the thick storm clouds rolling overhead, and situated just beyond the town’s Square, Night Sky Memorial Hospital was the same and yet different. Peyton rested his wrists over the steering wheel of his Lincoln Navigator as he waited behind another vehicle at the staff security gate.

  He made no promises about putting down stakes here, in a mountainous town that had remained the way he’d left it: geographically large with room to roam, but populated with roughly forty-five hundred people who, based on what he’d gleaned from old Sully Joe Keate during a quick stop at the town’s only gas station, weren’t too keen on outsiders and Big Business setting up camp in the place they wanted to keep strictly mom-and-pop. Night Sky’s infrastructure worries couldn’t top his priority list, though. The truth was that his grandfather had more years behind him than in front of him, especially now that he’d endured a stroke, and after almost fourteen years away, it was time for the prodigal son to return—even if temporarily.

  Johns Hopkins had granted his request for a leave of absence, giving him plenty of time to weigh his options in Texas. Doctor Miles Lindsey, Memorial’s chief of staff, had penciled him in for a face-to-face talk after they’d discussed a potential no-commitment visiting surgeon position. If anyone could have a poker voice, Chief Lindsey had perfected his. Peyton couldn’t gauge where he stood with him, but if he had a chance to practice medicine while grounded in this town, he would take it. So he’d made sure he at least looked the part, clean-shaven and decked out in a designer suit. But he was bone weary from the trip from Maryland, since he’d opted not to take a flight. He loved to drive every chance he got. He darted a glance at the rearview mirror and could see the fatigue in his face. Still, there was business to be done.

  After the meeting, he’d visit his grandfather. Then he’d check in at Blue Longhorn Motel if he wanted bare basics and privacy, or at Peridot, the only hotel in Wellesley County that had withstood the Civil War, if he wanted comfort and a continental breakfast that consisted of more than day-old doughnuts and watered-down coffee. If need be he’d find a room in Meridien, but from there the city was accessible only by means of the bridge, which was, even in autumn, quick to bottleneck with tourists coming to and fro like the tide.

  Peyton hadn’t brought much—clothes, laptop, paperwork and some keepsakes he hadn’t wanted to leave behind in the minimalist Baltimore apartment he’d sublet to a fellow surgeon who was freshly divorced and out on his ass. With an excess of amenities, a killer view of the city and the most incredible plasma screen television he’d ever laid eyes on, the place was a bachelor pad. But it had never been home, and handing over the keys hadn’t been hard.

  The car ahead of him continued toward the staff parking garage, and he drew in a steadying breath before relinquishing his own to a valet and entering the hospital.

  Though he’d spent more than enough time in this place—as a patient sidelined with sports injuries growing up and then as a visitor haunting the place after each of his grandmother’s three heart attacks—the hospital’s aesthetic changes made the place seem foreign to him, from the spacious, three-story glass foyer to the array of exotic plants and paintings, display cases and tapestry. A plump receptionist instructed a guide to give him a tour of the hospital and escort him to Chief Lindsey’s office.

  “Two of our most recent developments are the children’s library, built a few years ago, and the completely renovated and modernized trauma wing. It was just finished last year when I joined the hospital,” Shannon Dash, a member of the hospital’s public relations team, said as she led him through a labyrinth of halls. “It’s the finest hospital in the county, but our benefactor’s been making noise about funding a neuroscience center, hoping to break ground in the next two years—if, of course, the land issues are worked out and the new road built.”

  His response to Shannon was a slight nod of acknowledgment, and Sully Joe’s words came back to him.

  “Yup, if it wasn’t for the hospital and the old hotel and the mountains here that God gave us—and all the money folks’re piping into it—this town would just dry up,” the gray-whiskered man had said, his dentures clicking as he spoke. He'd taken his sweet time handing over Peyton’s gasoline receipt. “But we ain’t for givin’ up our property just so some folks can show off fat wallets.”

  Now that he understood his grandfather was at the center of a town debate, Peyton definitely wouldn’t dip into a conversation about the “benefactor” who was very likely Nathaniel. Not that it was any surprise that he’d put his stamp on the hospital that had cared so compassionately for his wife in her final days. The facility in Los Angeles, connected to the university where Nathaniel had intended for Peyton to earn his medical degree, lay in the palm of Nathaniel’s hand. A position had been unofficially offered to Peyton during a dinner party before he’d even graduated from UT Dallas, and he’d spent the remainder of the evening downing vodka to drown the greasy sensation in his gut that came with knowing his grandfather had bought his future—and finally realizing he couldn’t keep living that way.

  As he let Shannon lead him, he wondered whether Chief Lindsey was a man whose integrity was for sale to the highest bidder. And he hoped like hell this wasn’t the case, because after over a decade of earning everything he got, he refused to relapse into being silver spoon-fed his success.

  The children’s library was mammoth. Arches resembling stacks of colorful books towered high to the hand-painted dome ceiling. The outer room boasted a bold electric fireplace and grand curios that contained children’s books and artwork. The bookshelves, tables and desks with hutches were crafted from the finest wood. Autumn and Halloween décor offered a festive atmosphere.

  When he followed the guide into the library a large gold plaque stole his attention. He ventured forward. “The Anna Christine Jordan Foundation Award,” he read aloud. Below the plaque was a list of the recipients who’d received grants for medical care.

  “We were recognized by the state for this foundation. It’s very noteworthy—at least in these parts,” Shannon said with a satisfied toss of her glossy white-blond ponytail.

  Peyton frowned, looking closely at the plaque. How many people with the last name Jordan lived in Night Sky?

  “What do you know about this Anna Jordan?” he asked.

  Shannon’s brow wrinkled. “Uh, not much, I’m afraid. Just that this library was created in her honor after she died, and, of course, the foundation. Your meeting’s starting shortly—”

  He didn’t care about the meeting.

  “Find me someone who can tell me about this foundation,” he told her, feeling as if a blade was slowly being raked along his spine.

  “Oh … right away, then.” Confused but obviously eager to accommodate him, Shannon hurried off.

  Peyton waited, his mind whirling. The hum of whispered conversations, muffled giggles and cheery music from the intercoms swirled around him. A burst of color in his periphery made him pivot sharply, his senses on high alert.

  The person standing close flinched but didn’t back away. She was a willowy girl dressed in hospital scrubs, boots and a colorful scarf.

  “I—I didn’t see you walk over,” he said. A half-assed apology but the best he could do at the moment.

  She pointed to the plaque with a browning apple core. “Do you have a sick kid?” she asked in a butterfly-soft voice.

  “No, I don’t.” He was anxious for answers and wasn’t up for small talk with a child he doubted should be wearing hospital scrubs.

  Finally Shannon returned, accompanied by a middle-aged Hispanic man. “Manuel Esteban,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Doctor Peyton Turner. He’s interested in the background of the foundation. Doctor Turner, Manuel is a librarian here and can tell you more about this than I can.”

  Manuel had extended his hand to Peyton, bu
t faltered when the girl gasped. The apple core slipped from her hand and fell to the carpet.

  “Is there something we can do for you?” Shannon asked her.

  “Uh … uh …” An incoherent response from a girl who’d just a minute ago seemed perfectly comfortable launching a conversation with a stranger. “No. No, you can’t.”

  Peyton halted. Blood pumped hard at his temples and the world around him ceased to exist as he looked into the girl’s face. His sulky blue-and-pewter eyes saw an almost identical pair glowering back.

  She sprinted out of the library, leaving behind a discarded apple core and a speculation that was already turning Peyton’s life inside out.

  He looked toward the library’s vacant entryway. “Who—who was that kid?” he demanded, his voice jagged.

  Shannon was silent and looked to the librarian for an explanation.

  “That was Lucy. Her mother’s on the board here at Memorial. You see, Doctor Turner and Miss Dash, Lucy is Anna Christine Jordan’s sister.”

  FOLLOWING A DISCUSSION on hospital policy, a review of financial projections for the upcoming quarter and an update on the children’s foundation, the board chair announced a recess and summoned to the boardroom two servers who wheeled in carts loaded with refreshments.

  “Can I get you a bagel or …?” one of the members offered Valerie, his eyes clearly asking, as well, whether she was all right after the mention of her deceased daughter.

  She removed her reading glasses and hooked them onto the V opening of her black silk blouse. “I’m good,” she said, addressing both his spoken and unspoken questions.

  The irresistible scent of coffee and baked bread beckoned her and she made her way to the carts. Discussing the foundation, remembering all it stood for and the person it honored, never got any easier. She missed Anna every day but was grateful that something positive had come out of her death.

  Valerie had just taken a sip of her frothy latte when a figure in blue scrubs barreled into the boardroom and clenched her arm.