At six-fifteen she approached James’s door in the Intensive Care Unit, having gotten directions from a nurse.
He was lying in a room banked with flowers. Tubes led into his nose and the veins in both his hands. He seemed to sense Amanda’s arrival and turned to look at her.
She approached the bed. “Hello, James,” she said.
“You came,” he managed, his voice hoarse and broken.
She nodded, unable for the moment to speak. And not knowing what to say.
“I’m going to die,” he told her.
Amanda shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. She didn’t love James anymore, but she had once, and it was hard to see him suffer. “No.”
His eyes half-closed, he pleaded with her, “Just tell me there’s a chance for us, and I’ll have a reason not to give up.”
Amanda started to tell him there was someone else, that there could never be anything between the two of them again, but something stopped her in the last instant. Some instinct that he really meant to die if she didn’t give him hope, and she couldn’t just abandon him to death. She bit down on her lower lip, then whispered, “All right, James. Maybe we could—start again.”
8
Jordan was due to arrive a little more than twenty minutes after Amanda reached her apartment. Gershwin was hungry and petulant, and the boxes containing the fur jacket and the skimpy bikini James had sent were still sitting on the hallway table. Amanda had intended to return them to the department store and ask the clerk to credit James’s account, but she hadn’t gotten around to it.
Now, without stopping to analyze her motives—certainly she meant to tell Jordan about her promise to James—she stuffed the boxes into the back of her bedroom closet and hastily changed into a silky beige jumpsuit. She had just misted herself with cologne, when the door buzzer sounded.
After drawing a deep breath to steady herself, Amanda dashed through the apartment and opened the door. Jordan was standing in the hallway, a tired grin on his face, a bottle of wine and several bags from a Chinese take-out place in his arms.
Looking at him, Amanda thought of how it would be to have him walk out of her life forever, and promptly lost her courage. She told herself it wasn’t the right time to tell him about James.
Smiling shakily, she took the wine and fragrant bags from him and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.
He shrugged out of his overcoat and hung it on the coat tree while Amanda carried the food to the table. She hadn’t put out place settings yet, so she hurried back to the kitchenette for plates, silverware, wineglasses and a cork screw.
Jordan looked at her strangely when she returned. “Is something wrong, Mandy?”
Amanda swallowed. Tell him, ordered the voice of reason. Just come right out and tell him you’re planning to visit James in the hospital until he’s out of danger. “Wr-wrong?” she echoed.
“You seem nervous.”
Amanda imagined the scenario: herself telling Jordan that she meant to pretend she was still in love with James just until he was stronger, Jordan saying the idea was stupid, getting angry, walking out. Maybe forever. “I’m okay,” she lied.
Jordan popped the cork on the wine bottle. “If you say so,” he said with a sigh, and they both sat down at the table to consume prawns, fried noodles and chow mein. Their conversation, usually so free and easy, was guarded.
When they were through with dinner, Jordan made Amanda stay at the table, nursing a second glass of wine, while he cleared away the debris of their meal. Returning, he put gentle hands on Amanda’s shoulders and began massaging her tense muscles.
“Will you stay tonight?” she asked, holding her breath after the words were out. She needed Jordan desperately, but at the same time she knew guilt would prevent her from enjoying their lovemaking.
Jordan sighed. “You’ve been through a lot lately, Mandy. I think it would be better if we let things cool off a little.”
She turned to look up at him with worried eyes. “Is this the brush-off, Mr. Richards?”
He smiled and bent to kiss her forehead. “No. I just think you need some extra rest.” With that, he turned and crossed the room to the entryway. He reached for his overcoat and put it on.
Amanda stood up quickly and went to him. Even though Jordan didn’t know what was going on, he sensed something, and he was already distancing himself from her. She had to tell him. “Jordan—”
He interrupted her with a kiss. “Good night, Mandy. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Amanda tried to call out to him, but the words stopped in her throat. In the end she simply closed the door, locked it and stood there leaning against the panel, wondering how she’d gotten herself into such a mess.
True to his word, Jordan called her the next morning at work, but their conversation was brief because he was busy and so was Amanda. She threw her mind into her job in order to distract herself from the fact that she had, in effect, lied to him. And a chilling instinct told her that deceit was one thing Jordan wouldn’t tolerate.
At six-thirty that evening, Amanda walked into James’s room in Intensive Care, after first making sure Madge wasn’t there. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, and was carrying a bouquet of flowers from the gift shop downstairs.
He smiled thinly when he saw her and extended one hand. “Hello, Amanda.”
She took his hand and bent to kiss his forehead. “Hi. How are you feeling today?”
“They’re moving me out of the ICU tomorrow,” he answered.
But he looked very sick to Amanda. He was gaunt, and his skin still had a ghastly pallor to it.
“That’s good.”
“You look wonderful.”
Amanda averted her eyes for a moment, feeling like a highly paid call girl. What she was doing was all wrong, but how could she turn her back on another human being, allowing him to give up and die? That would be heartless. “Thanks.”
James’s grip on her hand was remarkably firm. “You’re better off without that Richards character,” he confided. “He might have made his mark in the business world, but he’s really nothing more than an overgrown kid. Killed his own wife with his recklessness, you know.”
Amanda was willing to go only so far with this charade, and listening to James bad-mouth Jordan was beyond the boundary. Somewhat abruptly she changed the subject. “Is there anything you’d like me to bring you? Magazines or books?”
He shook his head. “All I want is to know I’m going to get well and see you wear—and not wear—that blue bikini.”
Feeling slightly ill, Amanda nonetheless managed a smile. “You shouldn’t be thinking thoughts like that,” she scolded. She had to get out of that room or soon she’d be smothered. “Listen, the nurses made me promise not to stay too long, so I’m going now. But I’ll be back after work tomorrow.”
When she would have walked away, James held her fast by the hand. “I want a kiss first,” he said, a shrewd expression in his eyes.
Amanda shook her head, unable to grant his request. She smiled brittlely and said in a too-bright voice, “You’re too ill for that.” Ignoring his obvious disappointment, she squeezed his hand once and then dashed out of the room, calling a hasty farewell over her shoulder.
Only when Amanda was outside in the crisp December air was she able to breathe properly again. She went home, flung her coat onto the couch and took a long, scalding hot shower. No matter how she tried, though, she couldn’t wash away the awful feeling that she was selling herself.
In an effort to escape, Amanda telephoned the real estate agency on Vashon Island the next morning to see if the Victorian house had been sold. It hadn’t, and even though she had no means of buying it herself, the news lifted her flagging spirits.
She visited James that night, and the next, and he seemed to be improving steadily. He told her repeatedly that she was his only reason for holding on.
By Friday, when Eunice was due to arrive, Amanda was practically a wreck. She had been avoiding Jo
rdan’s calls for several days, and she could barely concentrate on her job.
Marion noticed her elder daughter’s general dishevelment when they met at the airport in front of the gate assigned to Eunice’s flight. “What on earth is the matter with you?” she demanded. “You have bags under your eyes and you must have lost five pounds since I saw you last week!”
Amanda would have given anything to be able to confide in her mother, but she didn’t want to spoil Eunice’s homecoming—her sister would need all of Marion’s and Bob’s support. She shrugged and managed a halfhearted smile. “You know how it is. Falling in love takes a lot out of a person.”
Marion’s gaze was slightly narrowed and alarmingly shrewd. “You’re not fooling me, you know,” she said. “But just because I don’t have time to drag it out of you now doesn’t mean I won’t.”
Bob was just returning from parking the car, and he smiled and gave Amanda a hug. “You’re looking a little peaky,” he pointed out good-naturedly.
“She’s up to something,” Marion informed him just before the passengers from Eunice’s flight began pouring out of the gate.
Amanda was the first to reach her brown-eyed, dark-haired sister, and they embraced. Tears stung both their eyes.
After the usual hassles of getting the luggage from the baggage carousel and fighting the traffic out of the airport, they drove back to the family home. Eunice chattered the whole time about how glad she was to be in Seattle again, how miserable she’d been in California, how she wished she’d never met Jim, let alone married him. By the time they reached the quiet residential area where Bob and Marion lived, Eunice had exhausted herself.
She stumbled into the room she and Amanda had once shared and collapsed on one of the twin beds.
Amanda took a seat on the other one. “I’m glad you’re back,” she said.
Her sister sat up on the bed and began unbuttoning her coat. “I didn’t exactly return in triumph, like I thought I would,” Eunice observed sadly. “Oh, Amanda, my life is a disaster area.”
“I know what you mean,” Amanda answered sadly, thinking of the deception she hadn’t had the courage to straighten out.
Eunice yawned. “Maybe tomorrow we can put our heads together and figure out how to get ourselves back on track.”
With a smile, Amanda opened her sister’s suitcase and found a nightgown for her. “Here,” she said, tossing the billow of pink chiffon into Eunice’s lap. “Get some sleep.”
When Eunice had disappeared into the adjoining bathroom, Amanda returned to the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the table, sipping decaffeinated coffee, and Bob was in the living room, listening to the news.
“How’s Eunice?” Marion asked.
Amanda wedged her hands into the front pockets of her worn brown corduroy pants. “She’ll be okay once she gets a perspective on things.”
“And what about you?”
“I’m in a fix, Mom,” Amanda admitted, staring at the darkened window over the kitchen sink. “And I don’t know how to get out of it.”
Marion went to the counter, poured a cup of coffee from the percolator and brought it back to the table for Amanda. “Sit down and tell me about it.”
Amanda sank into the chair. “Some very good things have been happening between Jordan and me,” she said, closing her fingers around the cup to warm them. “I never thought I’d meet anybody like him.”
Marion smiled. “I feel the same way about Bob.”
Amanda touched her mother’s hand fondly. “I know.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“About a week ago,” Amanda began reluctantly, “someone from the hospital called and said James was asking for me. He was in the ICU at the time, so I didn’t feel I could ignore the whole thing. I went to see him, and while I was there, he told me he’d given up, that he was going to die.”
Marion’s lips thinned in irritation, but she seemed to know how hard it was for Amanda to keep up her momentum, so she didn’t interrupt.
“Essentially, he said I was the only reason he had to go on living, and if I didn’t want him, he was just going to give up. So I’ve been visiting him and pretending we’ll be getting back together again once he’s well.”
Marion sighed heavily. “Amanda.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but I feel guilty enough without being the reason somebody died!”
Marion reached out and covered Amanda’s hand with her own. “I suppose you haven’t told Jordan any of this.”
“I’m afraid to. Maybe it would have been all right if I’d mentioned it that very first night after I spoke to James, when Jordan and I were together for dinner, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too afraid he’d make me choose between him and James.”
“I didn’t think there was any question of a choice,” Marion said. “You’re in love with Jordan Richards, whether you know it or not.”
Amanda bit her lower lip for a moment. “I guess I am.”
“Tell him the truth, Amanda,” Marion urged. “Don’t put it off for another second. March right over to that phone and call him.”
“I can’t,” Amanda said with a shake of her head. “It’s not something I can say over the telephone, and besides, his little girls will be there. This is their first night together, and I don’t want to spoil it.”
“You’re going to regret it if you don’t straighten this out,” Marion warned.
“I think it might already be too late,” Amanda said brokenly, and then she rose from her chair, emptied her coffee into the sink and set the cup down. “You just concentrate on Eunice, Mom, and don’t worry about me.”
Marion shook her head as she got up to see her daughter to the door. “Talk to Jordan,” she insisted as Amanda put on her coat and wrapped a colorful knitted scarf around her neck.
Amanda nodded and hurried through the cold night to her car.
The light on her answering machine was blinking when she arrived home, and after brewing herself a cup of tea, she pushed the Play button and sat down at the little table in her living room to listen.
The first call was from James. He’d missed her that night and hoped she’d come to visit in the morning.
Amanda closed her eyes against the prospect, though she knew she would have to do as he asked. Maybe if she used Eunice’s visit as an excuse, she could get away after only a half hour or so.
The next message nearly made her spill her tea. “This is Madge Brockman,” an angry female voice said, “and I just wanted to tell you that you’re not going to get away with this. You took my husband, and I’m going to take something from you.” After those bitter words, the woman had hung up with a crash.
Amanda was struggling to compose herself, when yet another voice came on. “Mandy, this is Jordan. I’ve survived supper, and the kids’ baths and story time. I have a new respect for mothers. Call me, will you?” There was a click, and then the machine rewound itself.
Despite the fact that Madge Brockman’s call had shaken her to her soul, Amanda reached for the phone and dialed Jordan’s number at the island house.
He answered on the second ring.
“Hi, Jordan. It’s Amanda.”
“Thank God,” he replied with a lilt to his voice.
“How are the girls?” She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve and resisted an impulse to sniffle.
“They’re fine. Mandy, are you all right?”
“I—I need to see you. Could I c-come out there?”
Jordan hesitated, then said, “Sure. If you hurry, you can still make the last ferry. Mandy—”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Amanda broke in, and then she hung up the phone and dashed into her bedroom. She pulled her suitcase out from under the bed and tossed in two pairs of jeans, two sets of clean underwear and two sweaters. Then, after snatching up her toothbrush and makeup bag, she made sure Gershwin had plenty of food and water and hurried out of the apartment.
Several times on the way to West Se
attle Amanda’s eyes were so full of tears that she nearly had to pull over to the side of the road. But finally she drove on board the ferry and parked.
Safe in the bottom of the enormous boat, she let her forehead rest against the steering wheel and sobbed.
By the time she’d reached Vashon Island and driven to Jordan’s house, however, she was beginning to feel a little foolish. She wasn’t a child, she told herself sternly, and she couldn’t expect Jordan to solve her problems. She might have backed out of the driveway and raced back to the ferry dock if Jordan hadn’t come outside to greet her.
He was wearing sneakers, jeans and a Seahawks sweatshirt, and he looked so good to Amanda that she nearly burst into tears again.
Without a word, he opened the door and helped her out, then fetched her suitcase and overnighter from the back seat. Amanda preceded him into the house, wondering what she was going to say.
There was a fire snapping on the hearth, and after setting her luggage down in the entryway, Jordan helped Amanda out of her coat. “Sit down and I’ll get you some brandy,” he said hoarsely after kissing her on the cheek.
Amanda took a seat on the raised stone hearth of the fireplace, hoping the warmth would take the numb chill out of her soul.
When Jordan sat down next to her and handed her a crystal snifter with brandy glowing golden in the bottom, her heart turned over. She knew she’d waited too long to explain things; she was going to lose him.
“Talk to me, Mandy,” he said when she was silent, studying him with miserable eyes.
“I can’t,” she replied, setting the brandy aside untouched. “Will you just hold me, Jordan? Just for a few minutes?”
Gently he pulled her into his arms and pressed her head to his shoulder. He moved his hand soothingly up and down her back, but he didn’t ask any questions or make any demands, and Amanda loved him more than ever for that.
Amanda had just about worked up her courage to tell him about her promise to James, when a small, curious voice asked, “Who’s that, Daddy?”
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