Coast Road

by Barbara Delinsky

  Concert pianist? To Jack’s recollection, Rachel had never actually sat down and played the damned thing.

  No. That was wrong. She had played it one night, near the end of their marriage. He had come home from work and had more work to do. The girls were asleep. Startled by the bits of sound coming from the living room, he had gone down and found her there. The plants were on the floor, the piano bench an actual seat for once. Her left elbow was on top of the piano, left palm on her forehead, right hand on the keys. She was picking out a slow, soft, sad tune that might indeed have been an echo of Beethoven.

  He had leaned against the archway, struck by the pensive picture she made. For the longest time, she didn’t know he was there, and he watched, just watched, wishing he had the time and skill to paint her that way. Then she looked up and brightened. “Done with work?”

  “No. But I heard you playing. You’re very good.”

  “I am not. That was the extent of my expertise. Three painful years of lessons, and I can’t coordinate the right hand with the left, so one-handed single notes are the best you get.”

  “It’s strange, seeing you there. What made you play?”

  She studied the keys, pensive again, sad. “I don’t know. I don’t feel like doing anything else. I feel … aimless.” Her eyes found his.

  “I’ll give you some of my aim,” he said, slapping the woodwork as he straightened. “I wish I had less. There’s at least two more hours of work up there.” As he started off, he called back, thinking about an important meeting he had the next morning, “Is my pin-striped suit back from the cleaners?”

  He had cut her off. Only now, looking back, did Jack realize that. He had cut her off for the sake of his own agenda, had done just what her mother always did.

  And Victoria was rattling on. “ … never seemed to be time for lessons and practice, and then she was too old. I had the most delightful lunch à la Rive Gauche”—pronounced the French way—“with a flautist. What was her name? … Geneviève, I believe. She was talking about what it took to play at that level and the touring that was involved … ”

  Jack moved his hand against Rachel’s jaw. He hadn’t given the piano playing incident a second thought. He wondered how many similar memories were hidden—wondered if they would be as condemning. He had cut Rachel off because he couldn’t deal with her problem. Selfish of him. Blind of him. Just like Victoria, who was managing the conversation even here. And Eunice? Eunice was her usual, caustic self. She didn’t say much but had a consistently negative way of saying it. Jack had visited briefly at Christmas, briefly being the operative word. An hour or two in the same house with his mother, his sister and brothers, and their families, and he was desperate to leave. The whole lot of them were negative. Their major delight in life was in finding fault and placing blame. He knew it was a cover-up for insecurity, but it got old fast.

  Still, he kept trying, hoping it would be different, angry when it wasn’t. Visiting there had been easier when Rachel was with him. Her physical presence reminded him that his life was different.

  “Positively grueling,” Victoria was saying, “and that was even before the recording dates. That’s such a large part of it now, you know; it’s become as commercial as anything we do, but you can almost understand it, what with the cost of sending an entire symphony orchestra on the road.”

  “It’s greed,” scoffed Eunice. “The food chain.”

  “Well, it’s a shame. This young woman had taken two days off and looked as though she needed another two weeks. Are you hungry, Eunice? I haven’t had a thing since breakfast, which was in Los Angeles ages ago.”

  “Los Angeles?” Jack asked.

  “Well, I flew Nice to Paris to London. Would you believe that Los Angeles was the closest I could get to here from London on such short notice, unless I wanted to go through Miami, which I did not, thank you; I don’t speak Spanish. So I spent the night at the Beverly Hills Hilton. I always like staying there. It isn’t the Pierre, but it’s close. I went down for an early breakfast, and who should be sitting two tables over but Paul. Now there is a stunning man. And decent? I remember what he said once when he was asked whether it was difficult being faithful to Joanne. ‘Why go out for hamburger when I can have steak at home?’ he said, or words to that effect.” She pressed her chest. “Isn’t that heartwarming? Not that I need steak for lunch, but is there anywhere nearby where Eunice and I can get a decent lunch—salad, quiche, whatever? Hospital cafeterias are pathetic. I don’t mind driving, either. There must be something worthwhile in the center of town.”

  Jack gave her a name and directions, and the two of them left. The silence was heavenly.

  Putting his elbows on the bed rail, he let his eyes roam Rachel’s face, touching on all the old familiar spots, divining the same solace he always had in the past with her when visiting family. He could take Victoria. After a while, he just tuned her out. He didn’t have to talk; she did it all. She didn’t want to hear, wouldn’t listen to anyone but herself.

  Eunice was harder for him. She was his mother. For a time in his life, she had bathed him, clothed him, fed him. He remembered precious few times when she had smiled, or hugged him, or praised him. He was the only one of his siblings who had broken out and made good. Eunice had never been interested in hearing the details of his career, and he hadn’t offered them. He continued to send her money, which she chose not to spend. The only way he had known that she was pleased with his marriage was the satisfaction with which she agreed to the festivities, and the fact that she blamed him for the divorce.

  In Eunice, he saw a woman he had often wished wasn’t his mother—and though he kept expecting God to strike him dead for thinking it, the thought still came. It might have been nice to have felt loved, might have been nice to have a mother who showed feelings and shared her thoughts.

  Rachel did those things. He had fallen in love with her, in part, because when they were together, they were the antithesis of their parents.

  At least, he had always thought it. Suddenly he wondered.

  IN A STROKE of luck, Katherine arrived soon after the mothers returned. Jack immediately enlisted her to stay while he went for the girls.

  “I can’t leave her alone with those two,” he whispered at the door. “Let her know you’re there. She needs someone sane at her side.”

  Having met Victoria before, Katherine stayed.

  DRIVING from the hospital to the school, he savored the silence. The return trip was louder. Between Hope telling him that the drinks were the best part of the picnic after the ooey-gooey peanut butter brownies that one of the mothers had made, and Samantha telling him that she had aced a biology test, gotten an A-minus on an English paper, and had the neatest lunch with Pam and Heather, there wasn’t time to tell them about the grandmothers until they were at the hospital.

  They grew quiet then. They flanked Jack in the elevator, watching the lights above the door, and walked beside him down the hall. They offered their cheeks to their grandmothers for the kind of mutant kisses that came, in Victoria’s case, from not wanting her skin disturbed, and in Eunice’s, from being awkward with physical gestures. They weathered Victoria’s seamless chatter and Eunice’s evaluative scrutiny from positions close to Jack and were visibly relieved when, with profuse apologies and another round of those barely-there kisses, the two women left.

  Jack felt so many things in the aftermath of their visit that he couldn’t begin to sort them out, except for one. Just because his mother would choke on a compliment didn’t mean he had to. Looking from one daughter to the other, he said, “Y’know, I’m really proud of you guys.”

  “Why?” Samantha asked.

  “For being kind. And respectful. They aren’t easy women, either of them, but they are your grandmothers.”

  “I hope I look the way Gram Victoria looks when I’m her age.”

  Hope, who was using the electric controls to raise Rachel’s head, asked, “Why does she talk so much?”
/>   Nervousness? Jack thought. Selfishness? Control? “It’s just her way.”

  “Thank God Mom doesn’t do that,” Samantha said. “I’d lose my mind.”

  Hope adjusted the pillows to support Rachel’s head. “If Mom was like that, I wouldn’t ever talk. I’d just get tired of trying.”

  “That’s pretty much what your mom did,” Jack said, watching Hope pull a fistful of something from her pocket. “She was a quiet lady when I met her. What have you got there?”

  “Unshelled peanuts.” She put several in Rachel’s hand and very carefully folded her fingers around them. “There was a whole bag of them at the picnic. Mom loves peanuts.” She started cracking one.

  Samantha screwed up her face. “You’ll get crumbs all over the sheets.” To Jack, she said, “So if Mom was quiet because her mother wouldn’t shut up, did you talk a lot because yours didn’t?”

  Jack thought back. “No. No one talked much in my house.”

  “Why not?”

  “My parents didn’t want it. They didn’t think we had anything to offer.”

  “They told you that?”

  “Not as politely. But that was the gist of it.”

  “Wow. Amazing that you and Mom talked at all!”

  IT WAS AMAZING, Jack realized. Driving back on the coast road that night, he thought about what he had felt meeting Rachel in that laundromat in Tucson, nearly eighteen years before. She had opened him up with a combination of quiet, sweetness, curiosity, and chemistry, and she had opened up herself. They told each other things they hadn’t told anyone else, and because that felt so good, it became self-perpetuating. They shared feelings and fears. It was quality communication, interspersed with silences that were made special by that exchange of honest thought.

  At some point they had stopped talking. He tried to look back and figure out when—it was surely before the piano incident—but then he reached the River Inn, where he had promised to take the girls to dinner, and by the time they got home, he wanted to paint, and then he was lost.

  THE NIGHT’S subject was quail. Rachel had painted a covey roosting low in a sycamore tree. Her work was detailed and exact—the male with his larger, curved plume and blue-gray feathers, the female with her reduced features and scaled belly. Using acrylics and a palette knife, she had re-created the exact texture of the feathers. Even before Jack studied the photographs affixed to the back of the canvas, he knew that the background had to be the duller tans and browns of winter, against which the birds would be simultaneously camouflaged and crisp. He hadn’t been in the Santa Lucias during that cool, rainy season, and wondered if he could do it justice. Then he realized that the justice had been done in Rachel’s rendition of the quails. He was like a male dancer in the ballet, boosting the prima ballerina into the air, supporting her in her landing.

  Several years ago, that might have bothered him. But he had a name in his own right. Supporting Rachel this way, being background, felt good.

  He worked with care, but it flowed. He used brushes exclusively, wanting nothing as crisp as the palette knife would carve, but there were wide brushes and narrow brushes. He used umbers, ochers, siennas, and grays, mixing and matching until he had the right feel for a background that would highlight the quails.

  By the time he was done, the adrenaline was flowing fast and hard. Tired as he was, it was a while before he fell asleep.

  HOPE was the first one awake on Saturday morning. She stood for a time watching her sister sleep, then stood for a time watching Jack sleep. Slipping a fleece jacket over her nightshirt and her boots on her feet, she let herself out of the house, picked a handful of newly blue lupine from the roadside, and ran through the forest to Guinevere’s grave. She brushed the dirt with her hand until it looked artful, and carefully arranged the flowers in a way she hoped Guinevere would like. Then, sitting on her heels, she wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked slowly, back and forth, back and forth, until worrisome images of her grandmothers faded and worrisome images of Samantha faded. Closing her eyes, she focused on Rachel and Jack and the safety she had felt when she was little.

  She wanted that again.

  SAMANTHA had planned to sleep her usual Saturday-morning late, but she woke up when Hope left her room and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Her head was a battlefield of emotions. The prom came first; she was totally excited. But she was angry at Jack for making her feel guilty about Lydia, and furious at the grandmothers for giving her an empty kind of feeling. That empty feeling made her worry more about Rachel.

  She missed her. They disagreed on lots of things, but at least Rachel cared. Samantha wasn’t sure Jack did, and she knew the grandmothers didn’t. There was always Katherine. But Katherine wasn’t family.

  Samantha wished she were twenty-one. If she were, she wouldn’t be worrying about a prom. She wouldn’t be worrying about whether or not to wear a bra, whether or not to wear nylons, whether or not to wear the three-inch heels Heather had lent her. If she were twenty-one, she wouldn’t be worrying about a zit on her forehead. Or about what to drink. Or about what to do when Teague kissed her.

  Rachel would have told her what to do. But Rachel wasn’t there, only Jack, and that annoyed her.

  JACK set off early with Hope. Samantha had pleaded exhaustion and stayed home, and a part of him wished he could, too. That part was tired of the drive to Monterey, tired of sterile corridors, hushed silences, smells of sickness. That part felt the monotony of visiting a comatose Rachel.

  But not visiting her would be worse. Besides, the day’s visit would be short. He had promised Samantha to be back by noon with food.

  They stopped at Eliza’s for hot coffee and brought it along, moving the cup under Rachel’s nose in the hope that the smell would reach her. They put on a T-shirt that Eliza had sent; it had Rachel’s name spelled in large, hand-painted letters. While Hope used a tiny scissors to cut exquisitely detailed snowflakes from white paper she had brought, they talked about the weather, about the grandmothers, about Samantha’s prom.

  Then Hope hung the snowflakes from the IV pole and whispered, “Tell her about the quails.”

  Jack hesitated. He hadn’t told Rachel about doing any painting. Hope loved what he had done, but Samantha refused even to look. If he viewed his daughters as the two sides of his wife—Hope the commonsense Rachel, Samantha the emotional one—he feared that on this issue, Rachel might side with Samantha.

  Suddenly it struck him that that might be good. If there were psychological reasons for her continuing coma, angering her might shock her out of it. If she didn’t want him finishing her paintings—didn’t want it bad enough—she would wake up and tell him.

  So he told her about the loons he had done Wednesday night, the deer he had done Thursday night, and the quails he had done Friday night. He gained momentum talking about the colors he had used and the effects he had sought, got caught up in excitement and satisfaction. His face was no more than a foot from Rachel’s the whole time, but he saw no movement.

  They left when Faye arrived, and stopped again at Eliza’s, this time for a big bag of sandwiches, and yes, Jack was impatient standing in line. He took a deep breath, told himself that he wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere, smiled at Hope, and wasn’t as frayed as he thought he would be when they reached the front of the line. He was actually in the middle of paying when he had a thought. “Pecan rolls for Duncan and Faith?”

  Hope’s surprised smile was all the answer he needed. He bought a dozen.

  JACK had initially thought he might do schematic drawings for the Hillsborough job, and there was more of Rachel’s work to do, but he barely lasted in the studio for twenty minutes. For one thing, there was another fax from David, the follow-up to a phone message, neither of which he wanted to answer. For another, it didn’t seem right closeting himself there and leaving the girls alone.

  Samantha had gone back to her room after lunch, so it was just Hope, curling beside him on the living room sofa with a book. Her presence
was a lulling warmth. He sprawled lower, put his head back, and slept for an hour. When he woke up, he stretched, then had a distinct urge to move.

  “Is Samantha still in her room?” he asked, sitting up.

  “Yes.”

  “On the phone?”

  “No. She’s making herself beautiful.”

  It was said with enough sarcasm that he chided, “You’ll be doing it, too, before long. Want to go for a walk?”

  She nodded and closed her book.

  Jack knocked on Samantha’s closed door. “Sam? Come for a walk with us?”

  “I just washed my hair,” she called out.

  “You could still come.”

  “Take Hope. I’ll stay here.”

  Jack stood at her door for another minute. As difficult as she was at times, he really did want her along. There was something about the three of them being together that seemed more important after the grandmothers’ visit. He wanted family, damn it, he did. He liked being with his daughters. They filled up the emptiness of childhood memories, made his life more full.

  There was also something about Samantha’s prom being that night. It was a milestone. He wanted to do something to mark it, wanted to somehow make up for Rachel missing it.

  “Are you sure?” he called a final time.

  “Positive,” she yelled.

  Fearing he would make things worse if he pushed, he let it go.

  HE HAD BROUGHT his hiking boots from the city the Thursday before. He hadn’t worn them since the divorce, but they felt good on his feet. He put water and snacks in a backpack, slipped it on, and left with Hope.

  She had temporarily traded her lucky boots for hiking boots of her own, and a good thing it was. The winding trek she led him on, between spreading redwood trunks, aspens, and fir, was arduous. At times they climbed, at others they walked straight. Where the sun broke through the overhead boughs, it touched them, but the air remained cool, particularly as they approached the stream. Jack felt the anticipation of it, heard the crescen-doing rush of water. When it came into sight, he discovered it was as much waterfall as stream, spewing over a rocky bed in tiered cascades.