Nina had performed a miracle.
“Relax,” Nina ordered as she leaned against his right leg. “Let resistance do the work for you.”
“Easy for you to say,” Aidan rumbled as the familiar pain stretched and tore its way from ankle to groin and back again. “I thought this was supposed to get easier.”
Nina, a tough no-nonsense woman with powerful hands and a soft spot for chocolate kisses, gave one of her ear-splitting barks of laughter. “You never heard me say that, O’Malley. It’s going to get a hell of a lot tougher before you can even think about it getting easier.”
Aidan inhaled sharply as she maneuvered his leg into an unnatural position and leaned her weight against it. “Whatever happened to positive reinforcement?”
“We don’t have time for positive reinforcement.” She rotated his foot. He was surprised it didn’t come off in her hands. “You want results, you work hard. There’s no other way.”
He knew it. She knew that he knew it. But after almost two years of two steps forward, three steps back, he was getting tired of the routine. The only thing that kept him showing up at this torture chamber in the basement of the hospital was the glimmer of hope Nina held out that one day maybe he might be able to recover some of what he had lost. So far you couldn’t prove it by his progress. The pain was still there and the instability; he still needed the goddamn cane. Three good reasons to push a little harder when reason and logic told him it was useless.
“Hey!” Nina slapped him on the back of his thigh. “You’re not paying attention, O’Malley. Time for some circuit work.”
“Swell.” He eased his bad leg off the table and stood up. “And don’t forget the whips and chains.”
“Shh,” said Nina, finger to her lips. “I thought the whip was our little secret.”
He liked Nina. They had been through a lot together since the first time he was wheeled through the doors and handed over into her care. The anger had still run hot inside his chest, and it mingled with sorrow and the knowledge that his best hadn’t been good enough. Not even close. Billy was still dead and he would carry the scars, both inside and out, for the rest of his life.
Nina heard the things he didn’t say. She understood. But where others offered tea and sympathy, Nina demanded action. A full commitment to pain and humiliation and sweat and maybe, if he was lucky, some noticeable gain for his efforts. He asked himself on a daily basis if it was worth it, and each time the answer was the same.
“You’re not with me,” Nina said, halfway through the leg presses. “Focus, O’Malley. Concentrate on what you’re doing.”
Damn. How the hell did she always manage to know when he was drifting out of the moment? He’d been replaying the scene on the street corner with Maddy Bainbridge, cursing himself for not saying to hell with physical therapy and taking her for coffee. Who would have thought the formidable Rose DiFalco would have such a laid-back daughter? Maddy’s hair was long and curly. Blond? Light brown? He wasn’t sure. The overall effect had been a shimmer of golden light. Her eyes were a deep, almost shocking blue. She was tall, softly rounded, the kind of woman you didn’t find in the pages of fashion magazines devoted to ideals of size-zero perfection.
“Too much!” Nina chided. “Back off a little and start again . . . three sets of ten . . . let’s go . . .”
He grunted against the tugging sensation in his quads.
“Keep going . . . you’re building muscle . . . equalize the load . . . come on . . . a couple more and you’re outta here. . . .”
Pain. Mindblowing endless stretching tearing pain. He could smell his sweat above the smells of floor wax and alcohol and Nina’s faint lavender soap. The muscles still remembered. That was the sad part. Down deep, hidden in the sinew, memory twitched along the nerve endings.
Before the accident he would have made it his business to see Maddy Bainbridge again. Women liked him. They always had. And he liked them right back. He didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep. His first priority was his daughter, and his second was his job as a firefighter. Everything else ran a distant third. Only once since Sandy’s death had he believed himself in love, and that had ended badly in a hospital room six weeks after the accident that took his brother’s life.
And now here he was with a daughter who’d be leaving for college next year and nothing but painful memories of his last night on the job. He had a bad leg, a bad arm, and a bad attitude to go with it. Gina and Denise had probably already filled Maddy Bainbridge in on all the gory details, and she was most likely saying a prayer of thanks to the patron saint of close calls.
Besides, he thought as he headed for the showers, she wasn’t his type. She felt too much. He had seen it in her eyes, heard it in the rough velvet sound of her voice. If he had been looking for one more reason to stay away, he could quit looking right now. It was in her eyes. All of it. Every damn thing he didn’t want to know about her and never would.
Chapter Ten
AIDAN SAT IN the parking lot behind the Shore View Home for Adults and nursed a cardboard container of coffee. He’d already made short work of two Egg Mc-Muffins and was trying not to think of the havoc he was wreaking on his cholesterol level. His muscles ached from Nina’s prescribed torture. It seemed to him that the process should have gotten easier by now, but each session seemed to uncover new and different ways to remind him of everything he’d lost and would probably never regain.
“And aren’t we off to a great start, O’Malley?” he muttered out loud. Ten-thirty in the morning and he was ready to pack it in and head for a sunny beach where they didn’t know from heavy gray skies and winds that carried in them the promise of more snow.
He should have left years ago. Hell, he thought as he drained the last of the coffee, he should never have come back at all. He should have tucked his baby girl under his arm and headed out west to California or maybe south to Florida. Someplace warm and sunny. Someplace where a man’s heart couldn’t turn to ice even if he wanted it to.
Two nurses stepped outside the back door, shivering in their pale blue uniforms with the cheery Christmas sweaters draped over their shoulders. He watched as they both lit up cigarettes, exhaling plumes of smoke into the cold, moist air. One of the nurses caught his eye. She said something to her companion, who looked across the parking lot at him and smiled.
He had dated an X-ray technician at Shore View a year or two before the accident, a slim wiry woman with hands of steel. He had liked the woman, loved the hands, and let her go when she was ready without thinking twice. Then there was the receptionist he’d taken out to dinner. They left before dessert, so hot for each other that they didn’t even make it into his car before he had her skirt up around her waist and her legs wrapped around his hips. She had ended up marrying a quiet accountant who was able to give her the one thing Aidan couldn’t deliver: his heart.
The nurses’ smiles grew wider and he shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel. Actions had consequences. Wasn’t that what he had been trying to teach Kelly since she was old enough to know right from wrong? Every decision had the half-life of uranium in a small town. Every promise made, then broken, every promise you didn’t make but should have—they were all recorded in some secret small-town ledger.
The taller of the two nurses took a long drag on her cigarette, then flipped it into the bushes. The shorter one exhaled a perfect smoke ring, then tossed her cigarette butt into the tall red can at the bottom of the steps. They flashed him one more smile, then disappeared back into the building.
He didn’t have to see Irene today. Her bills were up-to-date. There hadn’t been any medical emergencies that required either his signature or his attention. Irene wasn’t expecting him until Friday, and that was assuming she gave a damn at all.
Still, the pull was there. The need to connect with his blood. It had sprung to life yesterday in the kitchen when he looked at his kid and realized she wasn’t a kid at all and maybe hadn’t been for a long time. It had grown stronger when he
saw that rusted teapot for sale on the auction site and memories fell back in on him, memories of places and people that had been long gone before he was even born. Places and people that had been made real for him by his parents’ stories, by old photographs like the one of the original O’Malley’s that he hoped to find hanging proudly in Room 5A, the place his grandmother called home these days.
“MRS. O’MALLEY?” THE girl’s voice found her through the decades. “Did you hear my question? I could repeat it for you if—”
“Of course, of course.” She lifted her chin slightly in the way Michael used to find so endearing, and pulled her thoughts back to the here and now. “You asked me about—?”
“These photos.” The girl fanned a sheaf of newspaper clippings and placed them on the bed table so Irene could see them. “You were quite a successful amateur photographer years ago.”
Irene’s breath caught deep in her chest. The memories . . . dear God, the memories! There was Michael, her beloved husband, and standing next to him—not even reaching his waist—her two sons, all three gone too soon. And there was the house in Paradise Point, the one with the leaky roof and the door that would never stay closed. But it was the restaurant that made her heart ache, the place where friends and family had gathered down through the years, the place where she had been almost happy.
She closed her eyes as the flat black-and-white images came to life. She saw them gathered around the dark pine tables, heard the sound of their laughter, smelled the rich mix of wine and bread and spices mingled with the briny smell of the sea just beyond their door. Oh, there had been good times along the way . . . she hadn’t imagined them, had she? Please tell me they were real. . . .
“I’m sorry,” she heard the young girl from Seton Hall say. “You’re tired. I shouldn’t have kept you so long. I’ll grab these papers and—”
“No!” Irene covered the clippings with her hands, as if the memories they evoked could be absorbed through her skin. “Please stay a little longer.”
The girl leaned closer. “Those pictures are great. You were a terrific photographer.”
Irene smiled. “I always loved it.” Making memories, that’s what Michael called it. Making memories because he knew it couldn’t last forever. How strange, more than fifty years later, that this photo should be placed in her hands twice within one week.
The girl studied a picture of the interior of O’Malley’s. “I love all those teapots tucked in those tiny alcoves and hanging from the ceiling beams. Did you collect them?”
“Hundreds of them,” Irene said. “We had some Wedgwood and Staffordshire, Rosenthal, Lenox—we kept those on the shelves you see running along the back of the main dining room. The rest I found in Bamberger’s Basement and thrift shops, so if they broke—” She shrugged her tired shoulders. Who knew it could take so much effort to do so little? “Nobody would miss them.”
“What about this one?” The girl leaned closer and pointed to a photo of the bar where guests used to spend time chatting with Irene or Michael while they waited for their tables to be ready. “I never saw anything like that before.”
A slender curved spout of copper flared outward from a slightly flattened copper bowl fitted with a small round lid. The pot hung suspended from a matching stand that boasted a small burner to keep the tea or coffee warm. How many hours had she spent tracing the elegant leaves and flowers that intertwined up and down the length of the stand, drawing a soft cloth over the swells and crevices, burnishing the copper until it shone like the stars.
“That’s a samovar.” Irene struggled to push away the memories, but they fought hard to be acknowledged.
“Samovar?” The girl wrinkled her nose. “What’s that?”
“A teapot,” Irene said, running her arthritic thumb across the yellowed clipping. “A Russian teapot.”
“Russian? Where’d you get it?”
“Where did I get any of them? I had a United Nations of teapots.” Michael gave it to me the year before he died. He wanted me to remember the family I left behind, to keep them in my heart. If only I had been able to push aside the memories and make room for him.
“It’s beautiful. Do you still have it?”
“No.” How old she sounded. How terribly sad. How could one simple question awaken so many memories.
“How come? What happened to it? Did you give it to one of your kids?”
Bless young people. Nobody over twenty-five would ask an old woman such a personal question. “We lost everything in the Hurricane of fifty-two.”
The child’s eyes widened. “When you say everything, you mean like the restaurant and the teapots and—”
“Everything.”
A 105-mile-per-hour gust of wind had roared across the inlet on Easter Sunday morning, taking everything in its path. The dock. The boats bobbing next to it. O’Malley’s pub. The husband she had wanted so desperately to love. All of it, lost forever in the blink of an eye.
“Wow,” the girl said once more and then, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean wow like, ‘Wow, isn’t that cool.’ I mean, wow like that’s really terrible.” She fumbled with the switch on her tiny tape recording device. “I’m really sorry.”
She didn’t want to think about the hurricane. She didn’t want to think about the night they had told her Michael was lost forever. Her grief had roared inside her chest like the hurricane itself. She had feared it would snap her bones like branches on a brittle maple tree. Her fault. All of it. She had been so eager for his help, so hungry for his love and protection, so selfishly wildly needy that she had thought only of herself. He had offered her security in a dangerous world, and she had grabbed it with both hands, turning forever away from her old life and embracing the new one. He had loved her as she was, pregnant with another man’s child, with nothing to give him that would be his alone. Not even her heart. She had given her heart to Nikolai, and he still claimed it, even after death.
If only she had loved her husband the way he had deserved to be loved. Michael had made her life possible, and she had never once thanked him for the most precious gift of all: the gift of family. There had been too many losses . . . too many mistakes . . . and she was so very tired. . . .
The girl gathered up her tape recorder and notebook, then shoved them into her huge brown tote bag. A ring of keys dangled from her right index finger.
“You bite your nails,” Irene said. “One of my sons did that.”
The girl grinned and the shiny gold stud through her lower lip clicked against her front teeth. “You sound like my mother.”
“Your mother’s grandmother would be more likely.”
The girl looked at Irene’s hands, which were folded neatly in her lap. Her eyes widened. “Your hands are beautiful.”
Irene looked down at them, the long fingers, the faint memory of half-moons and diamonds. She had been beautiful once, as well. The pampered daughter of the privileged class in a world that was looking to destroy them and everything they stood for. She had come to understand their reasons, but she had never understood the methods they had employed. To see your parents struck down before your eyes. To watch your sisters being raped. To be torn from your dead lover’s arms and be left for dead yourself but be unlucky enough to live.
She had blocked those months from her memory. Somehow she had made her way from village to village, always running, always afraid. Running with others just like her, aristocrats with jewels sewn inside their coats, with letters of introduction strapped to their legs, with only fear and desperation in their hearts and bitter memories of a world gone mad.
Once, long ago, he took my hand in his and pressed his lips against my palm. . . . We’ll find a way, Irina, I promise you. . . . How beautiful he was, how young . . . so long gone . . . like all of them . . . like my heart . . . dead and gone. . . .
“I really enjoyed this,” the girl was saying, her curious gaze intent upon Irene. “Your stories were great. I’d never heard about that Easter Sunday hurricane. I’ll
make sure I incorporate it with the other material for my dissertation.” She hesitated a second. “I might even send it into the local newspaper if that’s okay with you.”
Irene nodded. She was starting to drift away into that cottony old-lady world where she lived much of the time.
“I’m really sorry. The nurse was right. I’ve tired you out.” The girl’s voice danced behind Irene’s head . . . or was it drifting in through the window? She couldn’t tell. She moved in and out of time and space these days, a girl of eighteen trapped in an old woman’s body, haunted by an old woman’s fears.
An old woman whose family paid the price for that young girl’s dreams.
Maybe she had imagined the boy with the bright blue eyes . . . the sound of her mother’s laughter . . . the child . . . dear God, the child . . .
Maybe she had imagined it all.
“I’M SORRY!” THE girl who bumped into his chest couldn’t have been more than eighteen, if she was lucky. A small, round girl with shiny blond hair and serious eyes. She reminded him of his daughter. “I didn’t see you standing there.”
Aidan steadied her by the elbow, then smiled. “No problem,” he said. “I’m Irene’s grandson. I was about to knock when you—”
“Oh, no!” She looked down at the explosion of newspaper clippings at her feet. “I had them all in order, too.” She bent down and a tape recorder went flying out of her gigantic tote bag. Aidan managed to catch it before it bounced, but her wallet, car keys, and notebook slid across the floor on a wave of photocopies.
He started to make a joke, meant solely to defuse her embarrassment, but he had seen that look on Kelly’s face more times than he could count and stopped himself. Say the wrong thing and she would burst into a flood of tears. You would think he’d have gotten a handle on female tears by now, but they still did him in. Better to avoid them at all costs.
Shore Lights Page 12