Afterward, they shared a lunch of salmon in sorrel sauce and cold asparagus.
“I wish you could stay just two weeks longer,” she said, sipping her wine, her deep blue eyes watching him. “The chateaux concerts would begin then.”
It was as close as she came to the dangerous topic, and she let him ignore the comment without reprimand.
After lunch they sought out a road that Estelle remembered from a dozen years earlier, when she had been a student in Paris. She sat forward in the car, brow furrowed, map in her hand.
“Turn here,” she said.
He turned onto a narrow road, forested on one side, a rolling vineyard on the other.
“Now here.” She pointed to a barely noticeable opening in the woods. He turned onto the road, and she sat back. “This is it.” She smiled. They were in a leafy green tunnel, shut off from the rest of the world.
They drove for a while in silence. He felt pleasantly disoriented by mile after mile of overhanging greenery. They rounded a bend in the road and, suddenly, laid out in front of them was a sea of vermilion poppies. Acres upon acres of them, the breeze blowing across them like a wave on the ocean.
Cole stopped the car in the middle of the road. “Look at that,” he said.
“They’re still here,” said Estelle. “Les coquelicots. Aren’t they beautiful! Let’s get out.”
Her spontaneity surprised him. She’d often stop the car in the middle of the city when a boutique caught her eye or she needed a closer look at a painting in a gallery window, but rarely had he known her to ask for a closer look at nature.
He pulled the car onto the barely existent shoulder of the road and got out. He followed Estelle into the field at a distance. He wanted to watch her. She was wearing the dress she liked to travel in—yards of pale green fabric that wrapped around her in so many turns he could never figure out how to unwrap it without her help. Her hair was shades darker than the poppies but in perfect harmony with them. She turned around and waved.
He hadn’t known this childlike part of Estelle still existed. He caught up to her and took her hand, feeling dizzy from the flow and sway of the flowers.
They walked toward a cluster of trees that would shelter them from the road, and she didn’t complain when he sat in the midst of the poppies and drew her down next to him.
“Let’s make love,” she said, as if she hadn’t known that was his plan.
“Your dress will get dirty.” He laid her back into the poppies. “And your hair.”
“I don’t care,” she said, in that dusky voice that scared him sometimes. He never knew what was hidden beneath it, sometimes tears, sometimes anger. Whatever it was this time, he knew there would be a desperate edge to this lovemaking. She was breaking all her own rules. She wanted this to be the memory of her he took back with him to the States.
He slept now under a single sheet on the couch in the living room so he could hear the water slapping against the rocks of the jetty. The cooling breeze that streamed steadily through the window smelled of salt and seaweed and he slept more deeply than he had in months.
It took him only five minutes to drive to Blair the next morning. Quite an improvement over the fifteen it used to take from the Chapel House. He told himself that living in the condo might not be so bad after all, especially when he got those middle-of-the-night emergency calls.
The hospital looked good to him. The building was a striking arrangement of concrete and black-tinted glass that jutted out over the water of the Manasquan River. It was a good-looking building at any time, but particularly at night when it lit up the water with its lights.
Blair was gaining national attention for its transplant programs and eye surgeries. The addition of a fetal surgery program would put it on the map in obstetrics as well. That’s why Blair had been willing to pay him—and pay him well—for spending nine months in France, studying the latest techniques in fetal surgery. They’d even spared Estelle from the Research Department to go with him to help with the translation. The critical thing now was to get funding. He couldn’t tolerate the thought of all his effort in these past few years going to waste.
The carpet of the Maternity Unit was new, and the walls now had murals painted on them. Trees and grass and rainbows. He had the feeling he was in a dream, walking through some alien hospital on springy green carpet. He couldn’t remember the color of the previous carpet, or if this hall had been carpeted at all.
Elliot Lehman, the director of the Maternity Unit, was waiting for him in the reception area of the offices they shared. He shook Cole’s hand, a wide smile on his bronzed face, and handed him a piece of coffee cake and a pint carton of milk. “We have a lot to talk about,” he said. “Let’s go in my office.”
Cole settled into one of the maroon-colored chairs in front of Elliot’s desk. He loved the leathery smell of this office, an office that was just a bit bigger, a bit more comfortable than his own. He sipped at his milk, thinking that Elliot looked grayer. His eyebrows were nearly white. And there was something strange about his smile, something held back.
“The work you sent me looked excellent,” Elliot said.
“I feel completely confident with the open-uterus technique.” Cole sat forward, wishing he could read Elliot’s face. “Do you know what that means? Spina bifida . . . bone transplants . . . the fetus will be literally at our fingertips.”
“At your fingertips.”
Cole frowned. What was that supposed to mean? There’d never been any rivalry between them, on this or any other topic. “Well,” he said, “even if I’m heading the team I still think you should be a part—”
Elliot held up a hand to stop him. “I’m not going to be here,” he said.
“What do you mean you’re not going to be here?”
Elliot leaned his forearms on his desk. He seemed to be enjoying Cole’s confusion. “I’ve been offered the position of director of Perinatal Research at Stewart. And I’ve accepted.”
Cole’s mind raced with uncertainty. No Chapel House. No Elliot. His life was precariously out of balance. “Well, congratulations,” he said halfheartedly. “That’s quite an offer. But it’s hard to imagine Blair without you. The prestige of this unit is owing to you more than to anyone.”
“Thanks,” said Elliot. He was grinning. “That was only part of what I need to tell you.” He leaned across the massive desk, his meaty hands spread flat on the leather top, his fingers pointing in Cole’s direction.
Cole shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He couldn’t handle another piece of news like that.
“You’ve been selected to be my replacement. We’d like you to be the new director of Maternal and Fetal Medicine here at Blair.”
He stared at Elliot in disbelief. He had imagined that, years from now, when Elliot retired, he might take over. Or perhaps in four or five years he would take on the directorship of a smaller medical center. But he had never imagined that at the age of thirty-four he would be handed an opportunity like this.
A smile broke free from his face. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You have a few days to decide.” Elliot sat back in his chair. “You’re the right person for this, Cole. I hope you plan to accept.”
If he had been deaf and blind, he still would have known he was following Janni in the cafeteria line. She was as frenetic as always. At times she made little jumping movements while she waited, shiny dark hair bouncing, and she walked backward so she could talk to him without pausing.
She was wearing a denim jumper over a blouse with a tiny Mickey Mouse print running through it. Something new, he thought. He’d never seen this particular outfit on her, but it was typical of her clothes. He wondered what other adult woman would buy a Mickey Mouse blouse.
He watched her affectionately as she loaded her tray with nearly every raw and cooked vegetable on the counter. She frowned when he put a cheeseburger next to the milk on his tray.
“The latest study I read found a definite relationship
between eating meat and having pungent perspiration,” she said.
“And vegetarians sweat Chanel Number Five, I suppose?”
“Something like that.”
He had decided not to tell her about Elliot’s offer. He needed time to think, and he wanted to be the one to tell Jay. How could he tell his best friend that he’d taken a quantum leap ahead of him? It would be a decade before Jay could receive such an offer, the hierarchy in general surgery was so intricate.
The cafeteria was buzzing as usual, and he felt a little nostalgic. He’d actually missed this place, mediocre food and all. They found a table in the corner, out of the mainstream of people anxious to welcome him back.
“So how’s the new Chapel House resident working out?” he asked, remembering the voice that had chilled him on the phone the night before. He tried to picture the stranger in the house. He saw a faceless woman eating with the others at the old oak table in the kitchen, laughing with them in an intimate way.
“She’s great. Jay and Maris liked her right away, but I knew they would. She’d planned to stay at the house for a month or so while she was looking for a place to buy. She found a great house on a lagoon in Point Pleasant, but when it came time for her to move into it . . . well, I bet you can guess what happened.”
“She couldn’t leave the Chapel House.”
“Right.”
“Did she rent out the Point Pleasant house?”
“Yup.”
He laughed. He had acted out the same scenario years earlier.
“Wait ’til you see the changes she’s made in the Communicator. You won’t recognize it. She’s a runner, too. But she eats meat, can you believe it? You’d think she’d care what she puts in her body. Plus she’s doing the PR on your Fetal Surgery Program.”
“What?” He put down the cheeseburger. “I don’t even know her. How can they expect her to get the funding when she doesn’t know the first thing about me or the program?” He knew as he spoke that it wasn’t the PR that made him uncomfortable. This woman was moving into his territory much too quickly.
“Don’t worry. She’s good. And you’ll know her tomorrow. She has an appointment with you in the morning.”
He shook his head. “I’m seeing patients in the morning.”
“She’s coming to see you as a patient. She’s had a raging infection for weeks, but I talked her into waiting until you got back.”
“Janni, you savage. She’s probably got PID by now.”
Janni didn’t flinch. She took off her glasses and leaned toward him, her silky dark bangs grazing her eyelashes. “I want her to go to you.”
He shook his head, smiling at her. “You haven’t changed a bit,” he said with some relief. “You always have your own plans for your friends, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.” She sounded as though he had complimented her on an outstanding personality trait. “And my plan right now is to talk you into staying at the Chapel House.”
“Jance, don’t do that to me, please. It’s going to be hard enough as it is. I gave Estelle my solemn promise that this is it. I’m going to start boxing things up when I come over for dinner tomorrow night.”
“Well, that should make for an uplifting evening.” She put her glasses back on.
He asked about Maris. She was dating finally, Janni said, no longer moping around the Chapel House gym. He and Jay had installed a barre in the gym for Maris’s thirty-second birthday, and it and Tchaikovsky had become her escape.
“I hope I can still use the gym,” he said.
“That’s out of the question. You want to use the torture chamber, you have to be a resident.”
He stiffened. “Janni, I’m serious. I don’t want to be badgered about moving back in.” He let his eyes burn into hers to make his point.
She looked down at her plate, and he noticed her eyes glistening behind her glasses. She looked like a little girl who’d just been scolded.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I don’t want to feel as if I have to choose between Estelle and my friends.”
Janni nodded. “I know. It’s just the hysterectomy.”
“What do you mean, the hysterectomy?” He always felt guilty when she brought that up, as if he were responsible for the fibroid tumors just because he was the one to discover them. “That was two whole years ago.”
“Yeah, well, most of the time it doesn’t bother me, but every once in a while I think to myself, Janni, you’ll never, ever have a family of your own. And then I think, well, I’ve got Cole and Maris. They’re like a family. But now you’re leaving . . .” She shrugged, a wounded look on her face. “I couldn’t believe it when you wrote you’d be moving out.” She poked at the corn and spinach on her plate with her fork, the little Mickey Mouse figures smiling insipidly at him from her sleeves.
“Did you think I’d be living with you and Jay forever?” he asked.
“I guess I did.”
“Well, I’ll be around so much you won’t realize I’ve gone.”
Janni nodded, her expression as hollow as the sound of his words.
3.
Kit was surprised by the man who reached out from behind his desk to shake her hand. For a fleeting instant she thought she was in the wrong office. The doctor in the blue plaid shirt who motioned her into a chair looked nothing like her mental image of Cole. He had no trappings of a physician. No white coat, no stethoscope circling his neck. Because Cole and Jay were best friends, she had expected him to look like Jay—wild dark hair, a gently handsome face that was slow to register joy or sorrow. But Cole wore his dark brown hair short, and his expressions were quick and sharp. His pale eyes looked right through her, and his smile was so immediate that for a moment she was caught off guard. Maybe it had been a mistake to let Janni talk her into seeing him as a physician. He would have all the power in this first meeting.
“So you’re Kit Sheridan,” he said. “I’m glad to finally meet you.” He walked around his desk and sat in the chair across from her.
Nice touch, she thought. With one move he had equalized them, and she wondered if he allowed all his patients that degree of control.
She folded her hands in the lap of her beige skirt. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said.
“I can imagine.” He smiled, a little crookedly. “I have to say that I’m envious of you, living in the house. What room are you in?”
“Right across the hall from yours.”
“Oh, that’s a great room.” He wore a pained expression as though he couldn’t bear to remember it. “I used to sit on the window seat in there to read or catch up on paperwork.”
She felt guilty, as if she’d stolen something from him. “The whole house is remarkable,” she said.
He nodded. “Magical. I’m looking forward to having dinner there tonight, but it’s going to be hard, being there without belonging there anymore.”
“I think you belong there more than I do.”
“I don’t know about that. When Janni wrote that you’d moved in, I thought, ‘well, I’ll just have to get used to the idea that somebody’s taken my place. I’ve been usurped.’”
She looked at him suspiciously. Would he really let himself be that transparent or was he playing some kind of game with her? He seemed genuine enough.
“I’ve been resenting you a bit, too,” she said, deciding to trust him. “I was afraid that when you came back they’d forget I existed.”
He grinned. “It’s a toss-up as to which of us is more neurotic.”
“We’ll have to get over that if we’re going to work together to get the Fetal Surgery Program funded.”
“Ah yes. I’ve heard that my professional future’s in your hands.” He looked more comfortable now. He was slightly slouched in the leather chair, his hands folded across his belt buckle. She noticed he was wearing jeans.
“Well, let’s just say I’ll share the responsibility with you,” she said, pleased by the strength in her voice. “Will you have a chance to wo
rk on the proposal for the Devlin Foundation in the next few weeks?”
“It’s nearly done. Just needs the finishing touches.”
He was going to push for this thing. A twinge of anxiety tried to latch on to her, but she ignored it. “I’ll time the first press release with the submission of the proposal,” she said. “That should generate public support that can make a big difference in Devlin’s decision.”
He sat up a little straighter, his hands moving to the arms of his chair. “But what about public criticism? I’ve heard there’s been some flak from religious groups already.”
He was as anxious as she was about the whole thing. When she spoke her voice was reassuring. “All the competing medical centers are facing that obstacle,” she said. “We’ll work closely with the media to get them in our corner.” For the first time she noticed he was very good-looking. “We’ll get you on TV. On the news and maybe the local wake-up show.”
His eyes were very wide now. “Wow,” he said.
She smiled and only then realized that her face had been a solemn mask. “It’ll be easy. You’ll see.”
He made notes on her chart as she spoke, slowing her when she tried to rush. She pictured the other women in the waiting room, tapping their feet impatiently and glancing at their watches. She told him about the infection. She’d had them before, but this one wouldn’t let go. Stress, he suggested. She nodded. She couldn’t remember a more stress-filled year.
“Are you using birth control?” he asked.
“I’ve used an IUD since I was first married.” She told him the brand and he nodded his approval. “I plan to get my tubes tied the next time I need it replaced.”
“You don’t want children.” It was a statement, not a question.
She shook her head. “There are too many other things I want to do,” she said, and then bit her lip, imagining he was thinking she was a hard, selfish bitch.
“Why put off the tubal ligation then?”
“Well,” she said slowly, not really sure how to answer. “I don’t have any problems with the IUD. And frankly, sex is the last thing on my mind.”
He raised his eyebrows.
Secrets at the Beach House Page 3