Threads of Hope: Quilts of Love Series

by Christa Allan

  “And with that, I’m calling Paloma,” he said. She and Jazarah were making cookies. He pictured the kitchen decorated with chips and icing and his daughter probably finger-painting with cookie dough. That was a mess he didn’t mind missing right now.

  It was later than usual when Greg arrived at the fellowship hall, so he was surprised to see so many cars still in the parking lot. He opened the door and saw a man taking pictures. And Nina. Nina?

  She smiled when she saw him. “Don’t worry, I looked like you do now when they told me you were actually a part of this group,” she said. “I didn’t know, of course, that night at the benefit that you actually designed the quilt I liked. You’re a man of many talents, Dr. Hernandez.”

  And you’re a woman who continues to surprise me. Which he might have actually said had he not been distracted by the scent of gardenias that lingered after she’d reached out and patted his shoulder. “See, I’m not just another pretty face, am I?” he said, but Nina didn’t participate in his smiling. Greg saw the way her eyes searched his face, and he realized it wasn’t a joke to her. It was exactly what she thought of him. Ever since high school.

  She looked at him and, like someone who’d just decided to participate in the auction bidding, nodded. “My eyesight must have improved over the years. I see exactly what you mean,” she said and mirrored his grin with her own. “Okay, time to exude your boyish charm for the camera. I want you to meet Brady.”

  Greg recognized him as soon as he introduced himself. The man driving the white convertible the night of the benefit. The convertible with Nina in the passenger seat.

  “I photographed quilts the night of the benefit. Your group’s quite talented,” said Brady.

  “Thanks,” Greg replied, “I’m blessed to be surrounded by creative people. Who make cookies and keep me coming back.”

  The women at the table laughed. Brady walked over to Nina who was examining some quilts in progress. Greg watched Brady and Nina. Actually, he watched Brady watch Nina as she pointed to places around the room. Could he have missed some connection between the two? A connection more than a reporter and photographer? He waited as they spoke and looked for those suggestions of intimacy between a couple. Hands, eyes, laughter that lingered, or the space between them narrowing as if drawn together by their sheer magnetism. Greg witnessed none of those between the two, and the relief he experienced was its own signal.

  Greg joined Brady and Nina. He reminded himself to focus on the conversation and not the tilt of her head when she asked a question or the curve of her waist as she held a square up to examine or how she used her thumb to twirl the pearl ring on her ring finger as she spoke.

  The three of them walked around the room. Greg showed them patterns, sample squares, bolts of fabric, and pictures that had been taken of other quilts they’d sewn. “One of the goals we’re working on is to make a panel for everyone in the group who’s lost someone to AIDS. It’s taking a while longer than we expected because we work on those when we can. But it gives the group time to save money for another goal. We hope to be able to personally deliver those squares to D.C.”

  “Impressive,” said Brady. “You know, a friend of mine, someone I grew up with, died of AIDS five years ago. I don’t know if they’ve ever thought of creating a panel for him.”

  Crystal’s mother, Kelley, sitting nearby, turned to Brady. “Didn’t mean to be eavesdropping, but there is a way for you to find if there’s already a panel for your friend.”

  “Thanks, but if you mean going to a display, I don’t have time—”

  “No. No. You don’t have to travel at all. Watch,” Kelley said and asked Nina if she could use her iPad. “Even the Quilt is joining the 21st century. Look.” She showed them the web app that people can use to browse the entire collection of panels and even read personal stories.

  “What a great sidebar this will be for the first profile,” Nina said.

  “Guess I need a tech training session. I didn’t realize you were so app-aware, Kelley,” Greg said as he bookmarked the site on his cell phone.

  “I’m not,” Kelley said as she pointed to her daughter. “Crystal’s the one who’s always searching and researching.” She tucked the ringlets that curtained her daughter’s face behind as ears as Crystal steered her scissors around yellow and orange flowers on what was once a skirt.

  “Because if I didn’t,” Crystal said as she moved the skirt into a basket of other shorn clothes, “you would still be using a cell phone the size of a shoe box.”

  “True,” Kelley said and helped her daughter spread out a large chintz curtain.

  Brady took a few more shots, then left after he and Nina scheduled a series of interview times. Greg scanned the list she showed him. “You didn’t ask me,” he said.

  “You’re right. Interviewing the person who helps design all these quilts would be another angle.” Nina opened her calendar.

  “Is that what I am? An angle?” Greg shook his head as if dismayed by the revelation. “Sorry, Miss O’Malley, but you have it all wrong.”

  Nina’s eyes drilled into him. “I what?”

  “I’m not your angle,” he said. Greg knew he was about to learn more about Nina O’Malley than she would learn about him. “Jazarah, my daughter, is the angle. She’s HIV-positive.”

  Sitting in Carraba’s, the one restaurant that Nina could think of in a stunned state, she looked across the table at Greg as he listened to a voicemail about one of his patients. She wanted to tell him that she didn’t mind at all that he had a pretty face. In fact, she wondered why this man, who walked into a room and women knew he was there, might be interested in her. Or, Nina, maybe he’s not. Being nice to someone doesn’t equal a relationship.

  When Nina heard his daughter’s name, she felt like that spinning beach ball that appeared when a program on her laptop wasn’t processing information. Greg not only had a daughter, she was Ethiopian and HIV-positive. Nina realized that everything she thought she knew about Greg was about to be redefined.

  When her belated response to him was, “I’m confused,” he told her he understood. And that’s when he suggested dinner, so he could, as he said, “unconfuse” her.

  The waitress, whose name badge read “Roxie,” brought their meals, grilled salmon with tomato basil vinaigrette for him and tilapia with garlic for Nina. When Greg thanked her, she flashed him a lipsticked smile that could have melted pats of butter. “Need anything else?” She didn’t even pretend to look at Nina.

  “I’d appreciate a refill,” said Nina and held up her iced tea glass.

  Roxie barely turned in her direction. “Sure, I’ll be right back.” She picked up the glass like she was taking it in the kitchen to dust for fingerprints and strolled off.

  Nina laughed when she walked away. “I think Roxie would like for you to be quite needy.”

  “Really? Why?” He handed Nina the bread basket.

  “You’re oblivious. It’s endearing,” said Nina. “So, tell me about your daughter. Who, by the way, oozes personality.” A quality that definitely could have connected her genetically to Greg.

  “She does, doesn’t she? Makes me think that in ten or so years, I’m going to have to be quite a vigilant father.” He smiled and, though he looked at Nina, it was as if a picture of his daughter was behind her. “We brought her home, underweight and underdeveloped, and depended on prayer and love. And, so far, it’s working.”

  Nina ate a few bites of her tilapia contemplating how to send the train of their conversation down a different track so she could ask about his wife. Maybe the divorce was messy, maybe she cheated on him, or maybe she was home scraping his uneaten dinner down the waste disposal. The suggestion of that discombobulated her and sent her fork to her plate in a noisy landing.

  Of course, Roxie appeared with her fresh glass of iced tea at that moment, and Nina could almost hear Roxie’s brain telegraphing Greg, “Oh, you’re such a kind man to participate in Take a Klutz to Dinner night.” Roxie
set Nina’s glass on the table, then let her eyes linger on Greg for a while and announced she’d return later with a dessert menu. Hoping I’ll order something so calorie-evil, I’ll need a different size dress to leave the restaurant.

  Nina, you’re a journalist. If you can’t ask the hard questions, Elise will assign you to Cub Scout banquets. First, she put her fork down, then she spotted Roxie serving a table of eight, she knew she couldn’t wait or else she’d be detailing the ingredients of every dessert on the menu to Greg. She plunged in. “Did things not work out between you and your wife?”

  Greg’s reaction came in waves, starting with surprise, then confusion, then he sat back in his chair as if pushed there by the force of her question. He looked down at the table, but when his eyes met Nina’s, she heard the sad understanding of his response, “When you live with something for a long time, you start to assume everyone knows.” Greg placed his napkin on his now bare plate. “Lily died in an automobile accident right before Jazarah’s second birthday.”

  She was about to say she was sorry when a memory rushed forward, pulled by the weight of his words. The night of the benefit, her angry retort, “I prayed pain would bury itself in you,” and his reply that she no longer needed to utter that prayer. If shame had its own taste, it coated her mouth like mucous. The horror of her arrogance spilled out of her eyes and trembled in her hands. Her heart’s voice couldn’t be heard above the deafening roar of regret.

  Before she could speak, Greg silenced everything in her that screamed at her own meanness. He reached across the table, his hand quieting hers. “Nina, you didn’t know. You didn’t know.”

  With her other hand she blotted her face with her napkin. “That’s not an excuse for . . .”

  “You’re right, it’s not. But I forgive you, I really do.”

  “Forgive me? How can you? I don’t deserve forgiveness—”

  “If we deserved it, it wouldn’t be forgiveness. And I can do this because God does it for me. Sometimes on a daily basis.”

  28

  Nina left the table to rid herself of “the black streams of tears” flowing down her face. Greg called Paloma and asked if it would be a problem if he was home later than he anticipated.

  His nanny laughed. “Dr. Hernandez, you do not have a curfew, but I am glad you called. Jazarah saved you cookies, and she put them on the fireplace. ‘Like Santa,’ she said. So you must eat them . . . or something . . . so they will be gone when she awakes.”

  He promised he would and told her he’d be home within the next two hours.

  “Are you still at the quilting meeting?” She sounded concerned that he might be.

  “No, I’m having dinner with a friend, Nina O’Malley. Her dog, Manny, is the one I got the ER call about when we were on our way to lunch. If fact, she was in the waiting room the same time you and the little princess were. Tallish, short dark hair.” He looked up to see Nina ease into her chair, then tuck her bangs behind her ear, only to have them slide back down. A familiar gesture, one he used to see in Lily whenever she felt self-conscious. Greg smiled at her, then realized he had no idea what Paloma had said. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that.”

  “Have a good time, Dr. Hernandez.”

  “I already am. Thanks.” He ended the call, and Roxie appeared at his elbow asking about coffee and a dessert menu. They both ordered coffee and, to their waitress’s disappointment, passed on dessert.

  Roxie delivered the two coffees, telling Greg she’d “be delighted, for sure” to provide him refills, and swayed away.

  “Is it painful? To talk about her, I mean. Lily must have been a remarkable woman to open her heart to adopt an HIV-positive child.”

  Greg leaned forward, hands clasped on the table, and smiled. “No, not now. After she died, people sometimes apologized if her name came up in conversation or, worse, didn’t talk about her at all. As if she never existed.”

  His neighbors Dale and Amelia, whose son died of cancer at the age of twenty-eight, understood the importance of not smothering the memories of loved ones under blankets of silence. Greg knew it was that empathy that drew him to involvement in the We Care benefit and supporting The AIDS Memorial Quilt.

  Every panel represented a family sharing and celebrating the life of someone they loved. Greg told Nina about Lily’s passion for life, how when she loved, she gave it all away. Her drive to bring Jazarah home sometimes drove a wedge between them because when she decided to go after something, she was not going to be denied. Greg would argue, when the paperwork and the politics overwhelmed the process, that maybe they should wait or try to adopt in the states.

  One night, she must have printed copies of the picture she’d taken in New York of the quilt panel of the five-month-old little girl who died of AIDS. When he woke up the next morning, they were taped all over the house. On his bathroom mirror, the refrigerator, doors, cabinets. Even the rearview mirror of his car. He’d walked back inside that day, wrapped his arms around her waist, and whispered, “You win. There’s a baby waiting for us to pray her home.”

  They prepared themselves for having an HIV-positive child by talking to other families and reading whatever they could find that would help. They knew the virus could impair her immune system’s ability to control viral infections, bacterial lung and ear infections. But they also knew she would have a normal life expectancy because modern drug therapies made the virus almost undetectable. A week after starting her antiretroviral therapy, her virological suppression was at 90 percent. Within a month, it was 99 percent.

  “Ironic. Lily spent so much time and energy doing all she could to make sure Jazarah would live, and she was the one who died.”

  On her way to the office on Monday, Nina received two texts from Greg. One asked her to call him to discuss Manny going home. The other, saying how much he enjoyed their time together, asked if she had plans for Saturday. She smiled, remembering him walking her to her car after dinner. How no matter how old you are, there’s that geeky awkwardness of saying good night to someone you’re attracted to, which resulted in a clumsy kiss somewhere between her lips and her ear. For Nina, it was enough to let her know, she’d try again.

  Dinner with Greg had trumped the anxiety of Daisy returning, so that walking to her desk, Nina was surprised by the familiar scent of rain, which meant she was back. Her earth-friendly accessories surrounding her as before, Daisy settled in as if she’d never left.

  “Nina, I’m so excited to see you,” said Daisy, springing from her chair, her shock of sprouting hair now gathered into a neat bun at the nape of her neck.

  Setting her briefcase on the floor, Nina hugged Daisy, who seemed smaller and frailer than she remembered. “I’m glad you’re here, but I don’t know why you left in the first place,” Nina said. “Now, let me look at you. Did you even eat while you were in New York?

  “I so owe you an apology. Maybe several. You deserve an explanation. Do you have time to talk now?”

  “Let me find Shannon. She’s been helping me, and doing a bang-up job at it, too. I’ll be back.”

  After getting notes from her intern, who proved her savvy by delegating some of the work to another intern, Nina returned to her desk. “Did you want to talk here?”

  “Here is fine.” Daisy scooted her chair around the partition. “I’m going for the condensed version because, well, I’m exhausted. My flight was late yesterday, and I didn’t get to bed until after midnight, so I might not be too coherent.”

  “We don’t have to do this now—”

  “No, I want to. I’ve wanted to since I left.” She kicked off her sandals and sat, cross-legged on the chair, her cotton skirt pulled over her knees. “Here’s what happened . . .”

  Daisy’s mother had moved to New York months before with a man who promised he’d marry her as soon as he started his job there. The job started, but the marriage didn’t. “My mother called, hysterical, that she wants to move out, but she doesn’t want to be homeless again. And then she pummels
me with guilt about her being all alone, no one to help her . . . I talked to Elise because I thought there might be a way for me to get on staff in New York. I could get my mother situated, stay for a while, come back here . . . I told her I didn’t want to step on your toes because I knew how much you wanted to be there.”

  Elise had called Daisy the day after Janie made her grand announcement to tell her there was a possible opening. But it was Elise’s suggestion that Daisy not make a permanent decision until she arrived there, checked on her mother’s situation, and spent time in the New York office.

  “She told me she’d keep my job open here, so I didn’t want to create high drama. Janie already had her production going on, but there just wasn’t enough time for me to explain it all. And, if I ended up back here anyway—ta da!—then I would have put us both through that for no reason.”

  Daisy said that her mother lived in an apartment almost worse than the car they lived in for weeks. Janie offered to let them stay with her. “And that was the beginning of the end. My mother was making me crazy. Janie kept pressuring me to stay, mostly because I think she saw Brady slipping away. And, Nina, the New York office, is this place,” she moved one outstretched arm in a circle, “on steroids.”

  Nina sat straighter in her chair like someone about to be rewarded. She’d thrive in that energy.

  But it debilitated Daisy. “I told my mother that if she wanted to live with family, then she needed a Houston zip code. She balked at first. I’m not even sure why, because she wasn’t all that devastated leaving,” she gazed at the ceiling, “I think his name was Eric. Finally, I convinced her to come back with me. She’s been here less than twenty-four hours, and she’s already complaining. She’s been homeless so much throughout her life that I think having what could be a real home feels strange to her.”

  After she and Daisy finished talking, Nina called Greg to make arrangements for picking up Manny. As she waited for him to answer, she surveyed the office. Nests of submarine gray partition walls separated the staff writers from the ad writers from the classifieds. Days closer to deadline, the nest swarmed with the energy of people moving from hive to hive, the impatient rings of telephones, the electrical current of voices that punctuated the stillness between.