Coast Road

by Barbara Delinsky

  Thirty minutes south of the accident scene, Rachel’s canyon rose from the sea. Its road was marked by an oak grove and a bank of mailboxes nine deep. Only one of the nine was painted, the fourth from the left. This year it was fire-engine red, Hope’s choice. Last year it had been Rachel’s butter yellow; the year before that, Samantha’s purple.

  He turned off the highway, downshifted, and began the climb. The road was unpaved, narrow, and steep. It hugged the hillside and wound steadily upward, broken only by driveways that careened down and around into private homes. The higher he drove, the thinner the fog. Oak yielded to sycamore and madrone, which mixed farther on up with cedar. Redwood had replaced that by the time he reached Rachel’s.

  Her home was a cabin of weathered cedar shingles. It meandered over a small space of the hillside, up a bit here, down a bit there. Pulling in on a rough gravel drive, he climbed from the car, and for a minute he stood there unable to move, breathing in something different, drawn to it. Fresh air, he decided, snapping to with an effort. He stretched and rubbed his face with his hands. He needed a shave, a shower, and some sleep. What he got when depended on what he found inside.

  Wide wood planks that the elements had blanched led to the front door. His loafers echoed in the silence, but he didn’t need to rap on the door. It opened before he reached it. The man filling its frame was far older than Jack had expected—mid-sixties, he guessed, from the pure white of his hair and beard and his weathered skin—but neither detracted from his presence. He was a large man, taller than Jack’s own six-two by several inches, but that wasn’t what kept Jack from putting out a hand. It was the forbidding look that met his.

  “The girls are asleep,” Duncan Bligh said in the same hard voice he had used on the phone. That it was lower now did nothing to soften it. “How is she?”

  “Comatose,” Jack replied, low also. He didn’t want the girls waking up and hearing him. “Her condition isn’t critical. Her body is working okay. The bang on the head is the problem.”

  “Prognosis?”

  He shrugged and hitched his chin toward the inside of the cabin. “They calmed down, I take it?”

  “No.” Duncan pushed beefy arms into a flannel vest. “They just wore themselves out.” He strode past Jack, muttering, “I got work to do.”

  Jack raised a hand in thanks and good-bye, but Duncan had already rounded the house and was striding up the forested hillside. “Nice meeting you, too, pal,” he muttered. Going inside, he quietly shut the door and leaned against it to get his bearings.

  It was the first time that he had been this far. Most often, when he picked up the girls for a visit, they met at a McDonald’s just north of San Jose. In the instances when he drove all the way down, the three of them were usually waiting for him at the bank of mailboxes. He could count on one hand the number of times he had been to the cabin, and then, only to the door.

  From there he’d had glimpses of color. Now the glimpse became a blur of natural wood, furniture that was green and lilac, purple planters, wild colors framed on the wall. The living room opened into a kitchen, but the back wall of both rooms was a window on the forest. The view here was simpler, more gentle to his eye. Pale shafts of sun broke through the redwoods, a bar code of rays slanting toward the forest floor.

  Soundlessly mounting several steps to the left of the living room, he went down a hall and peered into the first room. Between the guy posters on the wall and a general sense of chaos, it had Samantha’s name written all over it. The bed was mussed but empty.

  Up several more steps and on down the hall, another door was ajar. This room had watercolors on the wall and a softer feel entirely. Both girls were asleep in Hope’s double bed, two heads of blond hair as wild as their mother’s. Hope was in a ball, Samantha was sprawled. In a gulley between them was a puff of orange fur that had to be the cat.

  When none of the three showed signs of waking, Jack returned to the main room and sank into the sofa. Slipping lower, he rested his head against its back. His eyes closed, his body begging for sleep, but his mind kept going. Within minutes he was back on his feet and lifting the kitchen phone.

  He called the hospital first and, speaking quietly with the ICU nurse, learned that Rachel’s condition hadn’t changed.

  Next he called his partner at home. In response to a breathless greeting, he said, “Working out?”

  “Treadmill,” David Sung gasped, and Jack pictured him in the dining room that had been filled with exercise equipment after David’s last wife had taken off with the Chippendale table and chairs.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I have a problem. Rachel was in a car crash last night. I’m down here with the girls.”

  “Down where? In Big Sur?” The beat on the treadmill slowed. “Not Big Sur. Ess Eff. We have a big meeting here in two hours. What kinda car crash?”

  “A bad one.” Jack kept his voice low and an eye on the far end of the living room so that he would know if one of the girls appeared. “She’s in a coma.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I stopped at the hospital on my way down, but I need to bring the girls back there. We’ll have to cancel the meeting.”

  “A coma,” David repeated, still breathless. “Bad?”

  “Any coma’s bad.”

  “You know what I mean. Is she on life support?”

  “No. But I can’t get to that meeting.”

  There was a pause, then the blowing out of air and an exasperated “We can’t cancel. We’ve already rescheduled twice.” Another pause, another exhalation. “You’re not ready for the presentation, are you?”

  “Oh, I’m ready,” Jack said, and it all rushed back, what had kept him tossing and turning before Katherine had called, “but they won’t like what I have this time any more than they did last time.”

  He had been hired to design a luxury resort in Montana. The client wanted something with reflective surfaces that would disappear under that big open sky, but Jack had been to Montana. Glass and steel were all wrong. Even stone was pushing it. He wanted wood.

  When his first design was rejected, he incorporated granite with the wood. When that was rejected also, he had tried fieldstone and torn it up, glass and torn it up, steel and torn it up. He had gone back to wood and made the design more dramatic, but even he wasn’t wild about it. The best rendition was the very first.

  Only, that was beside the point. “Look,” he told David. “I need your backup here. That’s what this partnership is about. I can’t be there. This is a family emergency.”

  “There’s one hitch. You’re divorced.”

  “Not from my kids.”

  “Okay. I get that. I do get it, Jack, but these guys have been waiting, and there’s many millions at stake. If I tell them you can’t be there because you have to be with your kids, they won’t buy it.”

  “My wife’s life hangs in the balance, and they won’t buy it? Fuck them.”

  “Do that, and they’ll take their business elsewhere.”

  Jack ran a hand around the back of his neck. The muscles there were wire tight. “Let them.”

  “Y’know, pal, I’d have said the same thing a little while back, but right now I’m worried about Sung and McGill. This is a major project for the firm. Two others went with our associates who went out on their own last month.”

  “We still have more than we can handle.”

  “But this is a good one,” David coaxed. “We’ve been doing educational institutions for years, but resorts are hot and lucrative. We’re talking jumping to a new level. We can’t let a project like this go by default.”

  “Then you take it over.”

  “Hell, I’d have done that weeks ago, only they want you. They want you, and you’ve lost your edge.”

  Jack was suddenly so weary that his bones ached. “I can’t handle this now. Tell them … whatever, but I can’t be at that meeting. I’ll call in when I know more.” He hung up the phone, knowing that his partner would be swearing
and not wanting to hear it. Dealing with Rachel’s accident, dealing with his daughters—trying not to think about the future—was all he could handle just then.

  But Rachel and the girls were all sleeping. Stretching out on the sofa, with one arm over his eyes and one on his stomach, he followed suit.

  HOPE came awake as she always did, slowly growing aware, getting a feel for morning before she opened her eyes, listening and thinking before she moved a muscle. She felt bits of sun, weak but warm. She listened to the soft sound of Guinevere’s breathing close behind her neck. She began to think—and her eyes flew open.

  Swinging her head around, cheek into cat fur, she saw her sister sleeping beside her, and it was suddenly real, what had happened last night. Samantha hadn’t slept with her in years. She would have thought it beneath her, if things had been less scary.

  Guinevere tipped back her head and gave her a nudge.

  She nuzzled the cat for a minute, gathering courage. Moving the mattress as little as possible, she sat up and carefully drew the tabby into her arms. Silently, she backed off the bed and started for the door. Stopping suddenly, she returned, pushed her feet into her cowboy boots, and tiptoed from the room.

  The sight of her father in the living room brought instant relief. She had wanted him there so badly. Samantha had said he wouldn’t come—that he hadn’t been there when they needed him for ages; that he was too busy with work. But Hope had sensed he would come. She did that sometimes—sensed things—and it wasn’t necessarily wanting that brought it. She had sensed that something was wrong long before Katherine had called looking for Rachel, had felt an unease when her mother left. She had thought it was about Guinevere. The vet had warned that the end would be silent and swift, and Hope was prepared. She had been the one to insist that Guinevere die at home, with her. But she wanted her mother to be there when it happened.

  It wasn’t until Samantha had said into the phone, “Hi, Katherine,” that Hope connected the eerie feeling inside with her mom’s well-being, and then it was like the bottom had dropped out of her world. She had felt the same thing when they moved to Big Sur without her father—shaky, like she was suddenly standing on only one leg.

  Lowering herself to the rug not far from her father, she folded her legs and gently settled Guinevere in her T-shirted lap. The tabby looked up at her, purring softly. Hope imagined that Guinevere felt the same reassurance seeing her as she felt seeing her father.

  Only, he didn’t look very well, she decided. His hair was messy and his beard prickly. The shadows under his eyes said that he hadn’t slept much, which made her nervous.

  But he was sleeping now. That said something. If Rachel was dead, he would have woken them right up—wouldn’t he have? If she was dead, he would have come sooner—wouldn’t he have?

  But Hope didn’t know how long he had been there. She had tried to stay awake, had tried to do what her mother did when she was feeling lonely or down, which was work. But she could only recheck her homework so many times, and the book she was reading hadn’t held her thoughts. So she had fallen asleep.

  She hated the thought that her mother might have died while she slept. If that had happened, she would feel guilty for the rest of her life.

  She was debating waking her father when his eyeballs began darting around behind his lids. Seconds later, his whole body tensed and he jerked awake. He stared at the ceiling, sat quickly up, pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. He was in the process of pushing them into his hair when he spotted her.

  He sounded shaky. “You should have woken me up.”

  “I figured that if you could sleep, Mom’s okay,” she said, holding her breath, watching him for the slightest sign of denial.

  “She’s okay,” he said. “She needs to do a lot of mending, but she’s okay.”

  “Did you talk with her?”

  “No. She was sleeping. But I think she knew I was there.”

  “She isn’t dead?”

  “She isn’t dead.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He seemed about to speak, then stopped, and her heart stopped right along with it. She drew herself straighter and didn’t look away. She was thirteen. If her mother was dead, she wanted to know. She could handle the truth.

  Something crossed his face then, and she knew she had made her point. His voice was different, more reassuring. “No, Hope, she isn’t dead. I would never lie to you about that. Deal?”

  She nodded, breathing again. “When can we go?”

  “Later this morning.” He looked at the cat. “So this is the thing that showed up at the front door one day all bitten and bruised?”

  Hope fingered the tabby’s ear. “The bites healed.”

  “Gwendolyn, is it?”

  “Guinevere. Did you learn anything about Mom’s accident? Sam said she didn’t know how anyone could survive driving off a cliff.”

  “Your mother didn’t drive off the cliff. She was hit by someone else, and she did survive, so Sam was wrong.”

  “Is her leg in a cast?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Will it heal?”

  “Sure. Broken legs always heal.”

  Hope hated to contradict him, but she knew better than he did on this. “Not always. Things can go wrong. There can be permanent damage. That’d be awful for Mom. She’d have trouble with the hills.”

  Those hills meant the world to Rachel. She loved hiking them with Hope and Samantha. Hope had one favorite spot. Samantha had another. But Rachel? Rachel had dozens. Like the eucalyptus grove. Rachel said that a person didn’t have to be sick to be healed by the smell of eucalyptus. Hope couldn’t count the number of hours she had sat in that grove with her mother, smelling that smell, listening to the distant bleat of Duncan’s sheep, thinking about things that needed healing. Hope usually thought about Guinevere. And about Jack. She wondered if Rachel did.

  “Your mom’s leg will heal,” Jack said now. “Trust me on that.”

  Hope wanted to but wasn’t sure she could. He had missed every one of her birthdays for the last eight years, and only six of those had come after the divorce. He had promised he would be there those first two times, then had been out of town, away, somewhere else. It didn’t matter that he called and apologized and celebrated with her later. He had broken a promise.

  Samantha said he cared more about buildings than kids. Samantha said that Rachel was ten times more trustworthy than Jack.

  Only, Rachel wasn’t there.

  “This comes from the doctor,” Jack insisted. “Her leg will heal.”

  Hope lowered her head, smoothed Guinevere’s ruff, and was starting to silently repeat the words in a precious mantra when Samantha’s voice came from the door.

  “WHEN DID YOU get here?” she asked Jack.

  He looked up and, for a minute, muddled by fatigue and nerves, thought he saw Rachel. It was partly the hair—blond but no longer as fine as Hope’s, now as wavy and textured as Rachel’s when they had met. It was partly the figure, more defined even in the six weeks since he had seen her last. Beneath a T-shirt similar to the one that swam on Hope, Samantha stood confident and as subtly curved as her mother. But it was the voice that clinched it, the echo of caution, even hurt, that he had heard in Rachel on their last night together—and suddenly he was back in their bedroom that night, sorting through the closet for ties to pack while Rachel spoke from the door.

  He could see her clear as day, with her tousled blond hair and gentle curves. She had just left the studio they shared on the top floor of their pink Mediterranean-style home in the Marina, and was wearing an old pair of slim jeans and one of his shirts. The once-white shirt was spattered with a dozen different colors, not the least of which was the aquamarine she had repainted their bedroom walls with several months before. Her face was pale and held the kind of disappointment that put him on the defensive in a flash.

  “I thought you weren’t going,” she said.

  “So did I, but I had to change plans.”
He pushed ties around on the rack, looking for ones to go with the suits he had laid out.

  “We’ve had so little time. I was hoping you’d be here for a while.”

  He didn’t turn, didn’t want to see her pallor. “So was I.”

  “Couldn’t you just … just … say no?”

  “That’s not the way it works,” he answered, more sharply than necessary, but she sounded so reasonable and he felt so guilty, and he was tired; it had been that kind of week. “I’ve been hired to design a convention center. A big convention center. The basic design may be done, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is fleshing it out for function and fit, and to do that, I have to feel the city more.” He tossed down a tie and turned to her, pleading. “Think of your own work. You make preliminary sketches, but so does every other artist. Okay. Your skill sets you apart. But so do the choices you make on depth, attitude, medium, and you can’t make those choices without spending time in the field. Well, neither can I.”

  She kept her voice low, but she didn’t back down. “I limit my travel to one week twice a year, because I have responsibilities here. You’re gone twice a month—three times, if you go to Providence tomorrow.”

  “This is my work, Rachel.”

  She looked close to tears. “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “It does, if I want to succeed.”

  She folded her arms on her chest—he remembered that, remembered feeling annoyed, because she was such a slim thing, shutting him out with that gesture, and still barely raising her voice, which made what she said even stronger. “That leaves me alone here.”

  Only in a manner of speaking, he knew. “You have the girls. You could have friends if you wanted to do things besides paint. You could be out every night, if you wanted.”

  “But I don’t. I never have, never once, not when we met, not now. I hate dressing up, I hate small talk, I hate standing around on spikey heels munching on pretty little caviar snacks.”