by JoAnn Ross
“There’s a window of opportunity,” Raine agreed. “But just like adoption, it’s not a decision to be made lightly, Gwen.”
“Which is why you need to be very, very sure about this, darling,” Lilith added.
“I know. That’s why I need to go see her,” Gwen insisted, her eyes glistening. “So I can make up my mind.”
Savannah exchanged a worried glance with her sister, then with her mother, then finally directed her gaze toward Ida, whose complexion appeared oddly putty colored.
“Are you all right?” she asked her grandmother.
“I wish everyone would stop asking me that,” Ida snapped. “Besides, how can anyone be all right? This is a mess.”
“I-I-I’m s-s-sorry.” The tears began to fall. Gwen’s hands were clasped together so tightly her knuckles were white. “I’ve really tried not to think about her. But I do. And I know you’ll all think I’m behaving irresponsibly, but I have this h-h-huge empty feeling in me that won’t go away.”
She scrubbed at the free-falling moisture, appearing so like a child herself that Savannah felt like crying too. Gwen closed her eyes. Her lashes looked like thin threads of copper silk against her splotchy, freckled cheeks.
“I can’t stop wondering what she looks like now. If she’s got h-h-hair. If she’s h-h-happy.”
Savannah didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone look so wretched. Gwen hadn’t even been this distraught the day at the hospital when she’d handed her infant daughter over to Terri and Bill Stevenson. She knelt beside the chair the teen was slumped in and took her in her arms.
“It’ll be all right,” she said reassuringly. Somehow, whatever Gwen’s decision, the family would find a way to work the problem out, as they had so many others over the years.
“I just need to see her, Savannah,” Gwen repeated through her tears. Her voice was shaky, but determined. “To m-m-make sure.”
After a great deal of discussion, and a decidedly uncomfortable telephone call to the Stevensons, it was decided that Savannah would drive Gwen to Sequim first thing in the morning.
Both Dan and Raine objected when the parties involved opted against bringing attorneys into the meeting at this point, but after a great deal of argument—which became heated for a few moments—they were overruled.
“I’ll keep my cell phone on,” Dan promised as Savannah walked with him out to the Tahoe. His voice was resigned, but she could tell he still wasn’t happy with the arrangement for the private meeting she’d worked out with the Stevensons.
“If you or Gwen need any legal advice, or if you just need a friend to talk to, all you have to do is call. I can be there in thirty minutes.”
And he’d come, Savannah thought. Without hesitation, without question. Because he cared. She tried to think how long it had been since she’d been able to count on anyone but her grandmother or sister.
Too long, she realized. Perhaps even forever. It was nice knowing that she could count on Dan O’Halloran. Nicer still knowing that she could count on herself.
Savannah was beginning to view her divorce not as something she’d suffered through and survived—like mumps or a tax audit—but as a born-again experience. She’d been gifted with a new beginning, a chance to reinvent Savannah Townsend. And so far, she thought with a burst of pride, she was doing a pretty damn good job of it.
“We’ll be fine.”
“Oh, you’re a lot better than fine, sweetheart.” They’d reached the truck. Ignoring the interested side glances from the others, he drew her into his arms. Ignoring the looks from her family, Savannah went.
He didn’t kiss her. Just held her, offering comfort and strength. Allowing herself to accept both, just for a minute, Savannah circled her arms around his waist and rested her head against his shoulder.
She watched him leave and felt a sudden, cowardly urge to go with him. Despite how far she’d come in a few short months, as she got ready for bed, Savannah couldn’t help dreading tomorrow. She washed her face in the old pedestal sink in the bathroom she shared with Henry and thought how, if given the choice, she would rather have discovered Kevin sleeping with the entire LA Lakers cheerleader squad in their custom-made king-sized bed that looked out over the sea than watch Gwen suffering such emotional pain.
While she brushed her teeth, she decided that it would be easier to go through a dozen divorces than risk shattering the fragile new family bonds of her longtime friends, whose idea to adopt this particular baby had been hers in the first place.
Even with all those unpleasant prospects tumbling around in her mind, as she crawled between the sheets that smelled of the Mrs. Stewart’s bluing Ida used in the wash, Savannah thought back to the kiss she’d shared with Dan. Had it been only a few hours ago? It seemed much, much longer.
But even the distance of time hadn’t stopped the moment from being permanently etched in her mind. She knew that years from now, when she was Ida’s age, looking back on the fortunes and follies of her life, she’d recall in vivid detail sitting atop the world with Daniel O’Halloran and feeling as if she could have reached out and grabbed a handful of the glittering stars that had been stitched against the night sky like brilliants on velvet.
Unfortunately, Gwen’s return home had sent her crashing back to earth.
A rose bush climbed a white lattice trellis outside the window, its fragrance perfuming the room. The late summer roses were overblown, as if to put on one last spectacular display before autumn frost would curl their serrated green leaves and turn the blossoms from wine red velvet to a sad dead brown that would crush between your fingers, then blow away like dust. Like her old life.
The house was dark and mostly quiet. If she was very still, she could hear the faint nighttime rustling of bird wings in the monkey puzzle tree on the front lawn, the distant bark of a dog, Henry’s muffled snores from beyond the violet papered wall. She could not hear anything from Gwen’s room. But Savannah sensed the teen’s silent weeping and knew that she wasn’t the only person in the house finding sleep difficult tonight.
The lady or the tiger? Savannah worried as she spent the long night staring up at the shadows moving across the swirled plaster ceiling. Each door held potential heartbreak.
The day dawned pastel pink and silver. A veil of soft, hazy mist lay low over the cove. The mood in the kitchen was strained, cautious, as if a wrong word could set off a deadly chain reaction. Ida remained uncharacteristically silent, as though determined not to influence what Savannah knew could be the most important decision Gwen would ever make. Henry had chosen to stay upstairs, displaying either surprising sensitivity or, more likely, a desire to avoid any more emotional storms.
The morning sun flashed buttery yellow bars on the asphalt as Savannah drove along the narrow, twisting road that ran along the coastline to Sequim. Gwen didn’t say a word. But the brittle metallic tension surrounding her was so palatable, Savannah imagined she could taste it.
Bill and Terri Stevenson were refugees from California who’d bought a house built in the late 1800s as a summer estate for a wealthy Seattle lumber baron. A former wine master at a world-renowned Napa Valley vineyard who’d grown weary of fighting the accountants who seemed to be running the larger wineries lately, Bill had opted out of the rat race. These days he was focusing on the work he loved, turning his carefully tended grapes into award-winning wines while his wife Terri, a graphic artist, designed labels featuring the century-old stone castle-like building that harkened back to the original owner’s German roots. Terri also handled the equally successful advertising and marketing end of the business.
It was a modern-day cottage industry, one that allowed the couple to work at home and lavish attention on their newly adopted daughter.
Since the day was bright blue, they all sat outside, as they had that first day, on a little patio overlooking the duck pond and the sweep of vineyards set in dark soil that stretched nearly to the strait. Only a few months ago, the vines had been bright and spring green with
promise; now they were dark, their limbs bending with ripening, deep purple grapes approaching harvest.
Baby Lily, dressed in a frilly dress the color of lilacs and pink ruffled socks, was strapped into an infant swing beneath a blue and white fringed awning. The day the infant had been born, Savannah thought her face had resembled a sweet, round pink pumpkin. She’d changed considerably since then. Her satiny skin was the peachy cream of a true redhead, like her birth mother, and a fuzz had sprouted on her formerly bald head like coppery thistledown. The sweet scent of Johnson’s baby powder suggested she’d been bathed shortly before Gwen and Savannah’s arrival.
Oblivious to her surroundings or the tension in the air, she was cooing happily to herself, sounding a bit like the doves that gathered beneath Savannah’s bedroom window each morning. It would have been obvious to anyone that this was a contented child, a baby who was well and truly loved.
For the first time in her life, as they exchanged small talk, Savannah understood the old saying about the elephant in the living room. It hovered there, huge and menacing as they discussed the prospect of a good harvest despite the need for more rain in what was known as the Olympic Sunbelt, Gwen’s summer at science camp, and Savannah’s ongoing restoration of the lighthouse. It was as if all the participants at the possibly life-altering meeting were avoiding the subject they’d all come together to discuss.
Finally Bill, after sharing his hopes for this year’s merlot, broke the conversational ice.
“We’ve been worried about you,” he told Gwen.
She tossed up her chin. Insecurity radiated from her slender body that had lost all its baby weight. “Worried that I’d change my mind?”
The girl who, not so long ago, had dared Jack, Raine, and an Olympic County judge to throw her back into the revolving door of the state’s foster care system, had returned. Which only revealed, Savannah thought, how frightened she really was beneath that truculent exterior.
“No,” he said in the quiet, thoughtful way that was such a contrast to his wife’s more ebullient personality. “We’ve been worried about how you’ve been dealing with your decision. For your sake.”
“You’ve had a great deal to overcome already in your young life, Gwen,” Terri said gently. “We hated thinking that giving up your baby may have caused you any more pain.”
“Not that we regret adopting Lily.” Bill’s tone was calm; the emotion swirling in his normally calm brown eyes was not.
“She’s the best thing that could ever happen to us.” Terri’s voice choked up. Her eyes swam. “The answer to all our prayers.” She reached blindly for her husband, who linked his fingers with hers.
His hands were rough and dark, his knuckles scraped, and Savannah either saw, or imagined she saw, dirt around his ragged cuticles. They were not the hands of some San Francisco yuppie who one spring day awakened with a whim to make a nice little wine to serve at small gatherings of the kind of attractive, articulate friends so often depicted in wine advertising.
They were the hands of a working man, a man more comfortable laboring in soil than pushing a pen behind a desk.
But she’d also seen how gentle those very same hands could be when he’d placed his daughter into her swing.
“We told you that we’re proponents of open adoption,” he reminded Gwen. “We haven’t changed our minds. We adore Lily, which is why we can understand how much you must love her, too. The way we see it, a child can’t have too much love.”
Savannah could tell from Gwen’s expression that his response was not what she’d expected. She’d come here today to fight; by offering to share their lives, they may have managed to disarm her.
When the tears the teenager had so stubbornly held back on the drive from Coldwater Cove began to trail silently down her face, Savannah realized that they were right back where they’d been three months ago. Once again her grandmother was right. It was a mess.
“You realize that if you keep it up, you’re going to wear a damn hole in the rug,” Henry told Ida.
Her nerves about as jumpy as a frog in a French restaurant, Ida spun back toward him, her hands on her narrow hips. “It’s my house.”
“It’s also your blood pressure.” He pointed the remote at the TV he’d been watching and hit the mute. “Speaking of which, when was the last time you had it checked?”
“I’m a doctor. I can check it myself.”
“So?”
“So what?” Just when she was beginning to think that having this man living under her roof might be tolerable, he’d begun to irritate her all over again.
“So when did you check it? At your age, you can’t be too careful.”
“I’m younger than you.”
“Mebbe. By a few years. But like you said, old’s old.”
If there was one thing Ida hated worse than having someone try to tell her what to do, it was having her own words tossed back in her face. Especially when she couldn’t quite remember them. Though it sounded like something she might have said, she allowed.
They stared at each other.
She might not be as young as she once was, but her will was still strong as cold forged steel. Unfortunately, it was beginning to look as if she’d met her match in Henry Hyatt.
He finally shrugged. “Stubborn as a Missouri mule.”
He turned the sound back on, the noise of the Seahawks game grating on her nerves.
Ida left the parlor and began pacing the wide planks of the front porch. What was keeping them? She’d never been patient. A change-of-life surprise baby, she’d come barreling into her parents’ life just at the time they’d begun looking forward to slowing down and perhaps bouncing a grandchild or two on their knees. Looking back on it now, her mind on babies anyway because of Gwen’s pickle, Ida realized that trying to keep up with a child who didn’t know the meaning of the word slow would have been a challenge.
Her weary mother had, on more than one occasion, accused Ida of possessing the attention span of a hummingbird. Which, now that she thought about it, was much the same thing she’d always said about her own daughter. It was the first time in fifty years that it had ever occurred to her that she and Lilith might have anything in common. It was a thought that merited some consideration.
Once she’d quit worrying about Gwen.
She stared toward the direction of Sequim, as if she could will Savannah’s little red car to appear. But the only car on the road was Melvin Baxter’s old clunker of a Buick he insisted on calling a classic, when what it really was was a wreck. The sky between the mountains and the cove was a clear robin’s egg blue, marred only by the puffy white contrail of a jet flying high overhead, the plane’s body glinting like quicksilver.
Quicksilver. That had been the word her mother had used to describe her mind, which had admittedly hopped from subject to subject, never seeming to find a topic worthy of interest. Her grades had been mediocre at best, which, since she was a girl and not expected to have a career, wouldn’t have worried her parents overmuch had it not been for their concern that her unfortunate habit of speaking her mind would greatly diminish her marriage potential.
Then, on a Christmas Eve she’d never forget, two weeks before her fifteenth birthday, Ida’s life had drastically and inexorably changed. As she’d been doing since she was old enough to ride along on the wooden sled, she’d gone out into the New Hampshire woods with her father to cut down their Christmas tree. A typical taciturn New Englander, John Lindstrom had not mentioned the pain that had been lurking beneath his ribcage when he’d awakened that morning.
Indeed, there’d been scant time for conversation as Ida had been downstairs impatiently waiting for him, already bundled up in woolens and boots.
Her mother had always been a perfectionist when it came to the family’s annual tree, and it had taken a great deal of trekking through knee-deep snow to find a spruce Ingrid Lindstom wouldn’t be able to find fault with.
They’d been returning down the mountain with their lu
sh blue-green prize when her father’s knees had suddenly buckled and he’d come crashing to the snowy ground in the same way the tree had fallen to the ax.
The next few hours of terror passed in a mind-numbing blur, but, frightened as she’d been, the instant Ida rushed into the emergency room behind her father’s stretcher, she felt suddenly whisked from her boring, black-and-white world into a Technicolor wonderland. She could have been Dorothy, landing in Oz.
The bustling, foreign world of medicine that caused her mother to fret so was the most fascinating thing Ida had ever seen. She was fascinated by the nurses, whose starched white uniforms rustled like dry leaves and whose crepe-soled shoes made not a sound as they moved through the halls in a brisk, efficient manner. Even today, Ida could recall in vivid detail the little boy who had fallen through the ice while skating and had miraculously escaped anything worse than a probable head cold.
Another man had been sitting on a gurney, his long legs dangling over the side. He was pressing his hand against a blood-soaked white towel as he’d awaited stitches for a nasty cut on his forehead. Ida overheard his wife telling the nurse that he’d received the wound when he’d leaned too far forward to put the star on the top of the tree and had fallen off the ladder.
There were more people crowded into the emergency room, more than she would have expected for such a small population, all of them dependent on the larger-than-life white-jacketed individuals who moved among them like gods who’d strolled down from Mount Olympus to play with the mortals.
It was only years later, when she was in medical school, that it would dawn on Ida that the doctors had all been men. Not that it would have mattered if she had realized that the only women in the emergency room had been wives, mothers, or nurses. She’d discovered her true calling on that memorable Christmas Eve, the one thing in all the world that could capture and hold her attention.
The god attending her father informed the family that John Lindstrom would live. He would, however, have to remain in the hospital for the next six weeks. “To allow his heart to rest,” the doctor had explained to his relieved wife and spellbound daughter.