“Maybe her problem’s still with you.”
She waited until he rounded the truck and slid in behind the wheel before saying in an indignant tone, “Why? I could have blamed her for what happened with Julian. I mean, why wasn’t she with us on the beach that night? Was she afraid of getting sand in her pretty little open-toed shoes?”
“She’s angry about that night, about the baby she wanted but you had, about the fact that you’ve come through with stem cells that could save his life.” He cupped her face, fingers skimming her ears. “Don’t agonize over this, Charlotte. She’s afraid. She can’t take it out on Julian so she’s taking it out on you.”
“On you,” Charlotte insisted. He was right about everything else.
“Okay, on me, but I have a hard skin.” He started the truck. “I’m hungry.”
* * *
The Island Grill was packed. As luck had it, a window table opened minutes after they arrived, adding an ocean backdrop to blue linen, a vase of balsam, and the scent of sizzling steak. Having had steak the day before, Leo ordered swordfish, Charlotte ordered scallops, and they shared—and during the time they ate, no less than three people approached to quietly ask if Julian had gotten his call. All three were longtime family friends, which explained why Nicole kept them in the loop.
None of the three were year-round Quinnies, and still they weren’t bothered by Leo, Charlotte observed. He was well dressed, well groomed, and ten times better looking than any other man in the place, which made her wonder if Nicole was plain old envious. There was nothing rakish about Julian. Distinguished, yes. But not exciting.
Leo was exciting. At least, Charlotte thought so, but then, she knew how he could be in private. Here at The Grill he was comfortably reserved. Though he was polite when people approached, he didn’t seem to care if they did. He didn’t look around for familiar faces, didn’t need to see people he knew. He didn’t order the most expensive wine on the list, though he could easily afford it. And while he looked the part of someone comfortably disposed, no outsider would have taken him for a number-one New York Times bestselling author, which served him well this night.
Their strawberry-rhubarb crostini was brought to them with two spoons by no less than the owner of the restaurant. Michaela Bray never failed to startle Charlotte. While the food here was unfailingly straightforward, the fifty-something woman had pink streaks in her short, silver hair, exquisitely made-up blue eyes, and a tattoo that crept up the side of her neck. She had only last week returned to Quinnipeague after tending to a sick mother in Sacramento, so Charlotte hadn’t interviewed her yet. They had set a time; she assumed Michaela was delivering their dessert herself to confirm it.
But she pulled up a chair, leaned in close, and murmured, “Don’t both of you look at the same time, but there’s a woman in a red blouse at the back corner table. She’s media.”
Charlotte looked only at Leo, who barely glanced around. Though he showed no outward change, she felt a new tension in the leg that touched hers.
“Why’s she here?” he asked, eyes on Michaela.
“Her parents are renting for a couple of weeks.”
“So she’s not working,” Charlotte said, wanting to define the threat.
“Not officially,” Michaela warned, “but she let everyone know she just finished a piece on Clooney for People. When you get ones like that who are full of themselves, you know that if they get whiff of a scoop, vacation or not they’ll grab the nearest camera. No Quinnie will let on who you are,” she told Leo, “and you’re not loud, so she won’t hear it by accident.” She stood, leaning back in for a last, “Just wanted you to know,” before straightening again and saying to Charlotte in a fuller voice, “Friday at ten?”
Charlotte nodded. “I’ll be here.”
The crostini was the restaurant’s signature dessert, but neither of them could appreciate it fully—Leo, because he was working too hard to be nonchalant, and Charlotte, because she was wondering how to help him.
When they were back in the truck, she asked, “Does that happen much—you know, outsiders?”
He backed out of the space, shrugged, and, shifting gear, set off for home.
“Would it be so awful if the outside world knew?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He drove down the neck before leveling off and asking, “Do you?”
“No.”
They continued on past the clam flats. “But if I go public, and readers come here in droves, I’m not the only one who suffers. Tourism is great, but not when it decimates the feel of the place. That’s why Quinnies keep my secret. They’re scared, too.”
Charlotte had a thought. “So you’re deliberately letting it die?” When he shot her a quick look but said nothing, she added, “Not really wanting Next Book to happen?” Still he was quiet. “What about the offers you’ve had? You got a privacy clause once. You could do it again.”
“Don’t put money on that,” he warned. “My lawyer says they’re hounding him. He says they want the publicity of a public appearance when the paperback comes out.”
“If they want a second book enough, they’ll agree to whatever you want, and if they don’t, another publisher will.”
“Like I have a second book to sell?” he murmured. “I do want it to happen, Charlotte. I’m just not inspired.”
“What inspired you with Salt? That book was so rich. All from Our Lady of Phoenix?”
The epithet made him snicker. “No.”
“Then what?”
“My dreams.” He kept his eyes on the road.
“You didn’t have it with her?” she asked in surprise.
“I thought I did. Looking back now—” He shook his head no. “It was all a dream. With her, with Salt. I wouldn’t have chosen that ending, but the rest of it was what I’d always wanted to happen.”
The fact that he didn’t look at her, that he seemed self-conscious, touched her deeply. She thought of the opening line of Salt: Every man wants love, if he can get past the fear of exposure. Here was exposure. Salt might be fiction, but the man behind it was sensitive and complex. And then there was that looking back now. If he was saying that Charlotte was the one who had shown him what true love really was, this was huge.
He parked behind the house and helped her out of the truck, but then, seeming lost in thought, wandered off. She followed him into the garden, where the scent of lavender rose above the rest.
Sitting beside him on the dirt, she tucked his hand in the crook of her arm. “You don’t have to hide, Leo. You have so much to be proud of.”
“One thing.”
“More than one. You have depth.”
He studied their fingers, rubbing a long thumb against hers. “I’ve let you in more than anyone else.”
“More than her?” Charlotte asked, needing confirmation of that at least.
“Our Lady of Phoenix?” A wry smile in the dark. “No comparison. I was young. If I’d been a little smarter, I’d have known she wouldn’t stay. The signs were there. She didn’t like Quinnies. She hated Bear. She was allergic to fish.” He smiled sadly. “I never talked to her like this.”
“The conversations in Salt were imagined.”
“They were what I wanted a relationship to be.”
We have it, Charlotte thought, but she knew that he knew.
“I’ve gotten better, haven’t I?” he asked.
“From the uniword guy on the roof?”
His smile was as beautiful a thing in the dark as the crescent moon. “Uniword?”
“Grumpy. Guarded. But yeah, you’re better.” She paused, thinking back to those first days, and swept her chin toward the herbs. “So when are you going to let me photograph all this?”
“How about tomorrow?”
She gasped. She had been fully expecting a refusal. “Seriously?”
“The herbs need to be thinned. I’ll have to get supplies at the hardware store so I can pot and deliver.”
“Deliver?”
<
br /> “To Quinnies who’ll grow them. Now’s the time to divide the plants.”
“You’ll let me use pictures in the cookbook?” She had to be sure she understood.
He nodded.
“For Nicole?”
“For you. Come at dawn. The light’s best then.”
* * *
Charlotte was dying to tell Nicole. Forget bragging rights, though she certainly could claim those. This would make Nicole feel better about the cookbook. More important, it would make her feel better about Leo.
Nicole was in fact waiting for her at the kitchen table, her fingers opening and closing around a handful of tiny red leaves. When she spoke, though, her voice was low and filled with fear.
Mark Hammon had called earlier that evening and wanted Julian in Chicago the next day.
* * *
In the frenzy of packing, last-minute instructions, and getting Nicole and Julian to the pier, Charlotte pushed everything else aside. Pictures of herbs were petty. This was life and death.
To Nicole’s credit, where Julian was oddly scattered, she held it together. Only after the mail boat sputtered to the dock and he boarded, did Charlotte pull her into a tight hug.
“You are incredible,” she said quietly. When Nicole’s resistance gave way to trembling, she said, “You’re strong. He’ll do fine; you’ll get him through.” Holding her back, she gave her a stare. “Do not argue with me about this. You are so doing the right thing. I will always love you for that.”
Nicole’s eyes were awash with uncertainty. She was the one to do the pulling this time, clinging to Charlotte until the mail boat beeped. “You’re the best,” she finally whispered and, drawing back, took a breath. Putting on a confident face, she turned and climbed aboard to join Julian.
Chapter Twenty-six
AS SHE WATCHED THE BOAT disappear that Thursday morning, Charlotte wondered what condition Julian would be in when she saw him again. Given the experimental nature of UCB treatment, he could end up anywhere between cure and death. Add to that the testing, waiting, and worrying that she knew would come in Chicago, and she figured her own days would crawl.
That didn’t happen. Leo had put off thinning the herbs for a day, knowing she wouldn’t have had the heart to leave the house that morning, so she began at the top of her to-do list, interviewing a few last Quinnies, collecting late recipes, cross-checking for releases and going after ones that hadn’t yet come in. She still had most of her profiles to write, but she knew she could do that under pressure at the end.
More important first, since Nicole was stressed about it, was reading the rest. Not that it took much effort. Nicole was a good writer. Her style was warm and personal, much as in her blog, and it set a perfect tone for the book. Charlotte found herself smiling as she read, hearing Nicole’s voice with its enthusiasm and pop, all the more remarkable considering the darkness in her life during the writing. She caught a few typos and removed the occasional “like” or “I mean” that interfered with the flow, though she was careful not to change the flavor.
After e-mailing those files to Chicago, she pored over the notes Nicole had left and, emulating her style, which actually turned out to be a hoot, wrote the last few chapter intros from scratch.
And then, yes, came the photos. Leo had been absolutely right about the time. The light of dawn gave a magical glow to the garden. But then, midmorning light was flattering to the taller plants, while noon light more evenly lit the leafier ones. All told, she took hundreds of pictures, both of the garden and of Leo working there. None of the latter would appear in the book; he had made that clear at the start.
“Trust me,” she said at the time. “These are for me.” And they were. After transferring Leo shots to a separate SD card, she spent hours editing the rest.
Once she had sent Nicole enough material to keep her spirits high, she turned to her own work and the southwest of France. She hadn’t thought about the assignment in weeks, but it was suddenly rushing at her. After two nights in Paris, she would be taking the high-speed train to Bordeaux to profile the owners of a small winery. Her editor called to confirm travel arrangements and to share thoughts on the piece, after which Charlotte spent hours at her computer getting background information. She e-mailed a heads-up to her amie Parisienne, Michelle, with whom she would be staying at the start and the end of the trip, and since she was heading to Tuscany after that, she touched base with the editor who was paying her for that piece.
All told, she would be gone for three weeks. For the first time in her life, the thought of being so far for so long was unsettling, and she had Leo to blame. More than once as she studied him, with his dark head bowed to computer or phone, his lean legs splayed, his clever hands holding or poised, she heard the clock ticking so loudly that she considered rescheduling her flights and staying on Quinnipeague until after Labor Day.
But that would only defer the inevitable. Her work was part of who she was.
That said, with Nicole gone, she made no pretense of sleeping alone. She stopped at the big white house each day, the caretaker of this, too, and though Leo often went with her, he wasn’t comfortable there. His own home was truly his castle; it was where he felt safe. And he had plenty to do. If he wasn’t studying e-book sales analytics, relaying lawyer-to-publisher new thoughts on the paperback release, or surfing the Web for marketing ops, he was removing summer storm debris from his roof or cleaning the boat. He seemed to have temporarily given up on Next Book, though she guessed it was in his mind as he walked around in the night, dressed in those long gym shorts or nothing at all. He got regular deliveries of other authors’ books and read while she slept, leaving whatever novel, memoir, or biography it was open and facedown on the bed. Always, he had breakfast ready when she woke.
Three weeks without Leo, three weeks back in the life she had known before him, three weeks with no guarantee he would want her when she returned—the fear never quite left her. And she knew he was feeling it, too. She could see it in his occasional lost look, and that, too, needled its way to her heart.
And then there was Bear, in some regards the more vocal of the two, who growled his way into a blissful purr when she rubbed the lean leg that he favored or stroked the silky spot on his brow. She had no idea how she could have ever thought him vicious. He was a softie, but an old one. She did worry about him—and about Leo come the day Bear died—and about herself if she learned of it after the fact.
Yes, Bear was definitely a player in her desire to stay, but so was the island. Quinnipeague in August was a lush green place where inchworms dangled from trees whose leaves were so full that the eaten parts were barely missed. Mornings meant thick o’ fog that caught on rooftops and dripped, blurring weathered gray shingles while barely muting the deep pink of rosa rugosa or the hydrangea’s blue. Wood smoke filled the air on rainy days, pine sap on sunny ones, and wafting through it all was the briny smell of the sea.
At Leo’s, still and always, the smell of herbs rose above. She would miss this, too.
No. Time didn’t crawl. It was slipping away with alarming speed.
* * *
Slipping away. Nicole had thought the same words often of late. Memories of her father, communication with her mother, interest in food and clothes and even the cookbook—she was losing a grip on the familiar.
Part of it was leaving Quinnipeague with its link to her past.
Part of it was the silence on her mother’s end.
Part of it was spending hour upon hour at the hospital, where individuality gave way to utilitarian scrubs and sterile gowns.
Mostly, though, it was Julian, whose preoccupation had grown deeper since they landed in Chicago. Time and again, she found him staring blindly at the carpet, the window, or whatever TV was in view. When he opened his iPad, he was more apt to zone out on the home page than read any of the journals he had loaded there. He responded when she spoke, looking at her then, even smiling, but he didn’t initiate conversation on his own.
* * *
Friday morning, members of Hammon’s team did scans of Julian’s brain and spinal cord. Both tests were brief and noninvasive. The spinal tap that afternoon was more involved. He tolerated it well right up to the recovery, which required that he remain lying down for ninety minutes in the care of a nurse who was constantly asking—hovering, nagging—if he felt a headache or tingling or numbness. I’m a doctor, he finally snapped. I know what to look for, thank you. Nicole might have reminded him that the woman was only doing her job, that he demanded the same attentiveness from his own team, and that doctor-patients could be pains in the butt, if indulging him hadn’t been more important. Mercifully, there were no headaches, and the only tingling or numbness he felt were the same-old-same-old from his illness.
Saturday, after a morning of blood work, he began to drag—literally, his left foot worse than ever, though whether from MS or simply the enervating effect of giving so many vials of blood, Nicole didn’t know. But she couldn’t complain. Clearly, Mark wasn’t leaving anything to chance. He wanted to be sure that every one of Julian’s vital organs was functioning well before attempting something as risky as this transplant would be.
While the tests were being done, Nicole either sat in a nearby waiting room or stood alone in a corridor just beyond the room where Julian lay. And this waiting wasn’t so bad. Though she knew that each test inched the process forward, she was in a personal holding pattern, wherein Julian was alive as long as the testing went on. Moreover, the fact of others tending to him gave her a break, because if Hammon was the director of the event, she was its facilitator. She had a written schedule, a watch, and a mandate to keep track of where they had to be when and get them there on time. This was no small feat with Julian spacing out.
Sweet Salt Air Page 33