Blackjack and Moonlight: A Contemporary Romance (27 page)

“Where’s my travel blow-dryer?” She was muttering to herself, her head well into the cupboard under the sink.

“Elise? Let me come with you,” Jack said again.

She ignored him.

“Gotcha.” She stood up, clutching the cord-wrapped handle of the dryer. He filled the doorway. Hell, he filled the bathroom. The pressure of his concern squeezed her throat, her lungs. She needed to get away. “Excuse me,” she said in a cold voice to make him move. She ducked her head to keep from seeing his sympathy.

She stuffed the hairdryer into a corner of the open suitcase. She couldn’t worry about Jack. She needed to concentrate on getting packed.

Suddenly she couldn’t focus on the suitcase. Jack’s mother had died when he was a teenager. He probably understood more than she did what a health crisis did to you. He just wanted to support her at a tough time. It wasn’t like he was suggesting a romantic getaway. She sat on the bed.

“I’m sorry, that was mean of me,” she said, staring at the floor.

“That’s okay. You’re upset,” he said.

Jack sat next to her and curved an arm around her shoulders. He just wanted to help, so why did it make her itch to escape? There was also sadness in his tone. She could hear it—fear and sadness. She took a deep breath and pushed her shoulders back to quell the urge to cry. His arm fell away.

Look at the situation clearly.
Her mother might be okay, but she might not make it through the surgery. By the time Elise got there, her mother might be dead. Why didn’t that thought upset her more? It was like she was cold inside, unable to feel anything.

“I’m not very close to my mother,” Elise said. “She doesn’t know about you. Well, she didn’t know about any of the guys I dated, so it’s not like I’m keeping you a secret.”

Except that she kind of was, and she had no idea why. “Anyway, I appreciate your offer to come with me, but there’s no reason for both of us to disrupt our lives. I’ll rent a car and drive to Eugene. I’ll call you when I get settled and know more about how she’s—how the surgery went. Okay? I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Jack put his arm back around her waist. “Okay.”

Was there a rebuke in his voice? It stung. She didn’t want him to know how little she’d seen her mother over the past few years. Elise realized she’d used her work and the distance to Oregon as excuses to keep from visiting. She couldn’t say it was Peggy’s difficult attitude—that wasn’t fair to her mother. In light of how close Jack was with his family, Elise felt ashamed she could dismiss her own mother so casually.

“I have to go by myself,” she said softly. “D’you understand?”

“Of course.” She heard the hesitation in his voice.

“I haven’t been very close with my mother and I feel bad about that. Let me go alone. If I need you, I’ll let you know.”

From the way he relaxed against her, that was what he wanted to hear—that he didn’t have to travel with her to Oregon. Just as well. She knew what she needed to do, and it was best if she did it alone.

And best to do it right away. She stood up, shoving the rest of her stuff into her case.

“I’d better leave.” She picked up the suitcase. She jumped when Jack’s hand curled around her fingers, dislodging them and taking the bag’s handle away from her. She glanced up at him for a second. His face reflected all those emotions—shock, anxiety, fear—that she refused to feel herself. She immediately looked away.

“She’s stable but she’s in intensive care,” Elise told Jack in a carefully colorless voice.

“How are you holding up? Did you get any sleep at all?” His tone sounded gentle, but his voice had a frantic edge that bordered on frustration.

Why should his voice make her eyes prickle? She’d been shocked when she broke down as soon as she left him at the airport. She wasn’t a crier. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d wept like that. The loss of control had embarrassed her, and she’d steeled herself against the urge to check if Jack was still on the sidewalk, watching her through the windows. She might have run back to him, run into his arms and refused to leave. Even a day later the risk of showing that much weakness made her stomach twist.

“Yeah, I slept on the plane.” A little. Enough. “And I stopped frequently on the drive south.” For coffee, bathroom breaks, and to fight missing him.

“So you’re okay. Under the circumstances.”

His voice made her ache for him to leave Philly now, fly west, meet her in this special cell-phones-permitted waiting room down the hall from ICU, put his arms around her and make everything all right. Only he wouldn’t come. Or if he did, he’d resent her for being needy. Just think of all those phone calls to Dad after the move to Oregon. They hadn’t worked either.

Elise swallowed hard, shoving all that longing as far down as she could, leaving her hollow and chilled. “Yup. Under the circumstances.”

He sighed. “What do the doctors say?”

“That she’s lucky. Her neighbor brought her to the ER yesterday afternoon. Grace. That’s her neighbor. I gather she told them Peggy had been ignoring symptoms for a while—you know, out of breath, nausea, pain in the left shoulder and up in her jaw.”

“Your mom’s name is Peggy?” His tone reminded her that most people weren’t on a first name basis with their parents.

“Calling her Peggy was my adolescent shred of rebellion that no one seemed to care about. She’d object but I—I don’t know. After a while it was just her name.” Elise couldn’t stop herself from sounding defensive.

Jack didn’t say anything for a moment. “Okay. So what else did the doctors say?”

“They had to put in three stents, but they can’t know how much damage the blockage did to her heart muscle for a couple of days. It could be she comes out of this essentially unchanged.”

“Except for changes to her lifestyle.” She could hear the smile in his voice.

Her face flushed hot. Did she even know what risk factors her mother had? Peggy could have started smoking and Elise wouldn’t necessarily hear about it. Or taken up yoga. Or skydiving. Until Peggy woke up, Elise wouldn’t know.

Time to change the subject. “How are you doing?” she asked.

The silence grew into an awkward pause.

“I’m worried about you. And missing you. I wish I’d gone with you,” he said.

“There’s no point,” she told him in a rush. “The doctors are pretty clear that she’s going to be okay. All the drama was over by the time I arrived.”

“Elise, there’s more to this situation than just the question of whether she’s going to live.”

She frowned at the tenderness in his voice. She wished he’d stop trying so hard to comfort her.

“Elise?”

“I’m here. I’m just exhausted.” A true statement. Emotionally and physically exhausted.

“Okay, what happens now?”

“They’ve got her sedated but they’ll start to take her off the meds so she regains consciousness gradually. She should be awake and alert later today. They’re talking about transferring her to the cardiac unit in a couple of days.”

“Oh. Well, that sounds good, I guess.” From his reaction her voice must have gone back to sounding computer-generated.

She pushed her hair back and stared hard at an anodyne poster of the Oregon coastline. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m not doing a very good job of conveying this. Really, the news is good. I’m just numb with the effort of getting here. You know?”

“I understand.” His voice softened. “And I’m sorry. It’s the impotence of being here in Philly when I desperately want to be there for you.”

Such a Boy Scout. Remembering Jack’s penchant for helping little old ladies across the street made her smile crookedly.

She rubbed her forehead, then glanced at the clock. “Look, I need to take my suitcase to my mother’s condo, okay? And I have a sneaking suspicion you called a recess so that you could talk to me. While I’m honored that you would do that, if I were one of the lawyers stuck in that courtroom, I’d be tapping my foot waiting for the judge to come back.”

He laughed, a more relaxed and reassured sound. “You’re far too perceptive. Call me this evening when you can. Call my cell any time.”

His cell phone. In his pants pocket. He probably had it set to vibrate while he was on the bench.

Just like that, you’re back to sex.
The pang, the ache of missing Jack, remembering him in her house, her bed, her body, flooded her senses for a second. The tension of the trip, anxiety about Peggy’s surgery, her not wanting to leave Philly—all dissolved in the memory of sex.

So good to be back on familiar turf.

“Ooh, by ‘later’ you mean I should call you after you’re in bed? I could help you get to sleep,” she said in her sultriest voice.

This time the silence felt completely different. She grinned. Finally he said in a strangled voice, “You are incorrigible. Go be with your mother.”

“Aren’t you glad that black robe is nice and loose?”

“Scamp.”

“Yes, Judge.”

Elise listened to the clicks as Jack disconnected before finally turning her phone off. A second later the pain of missing him slammed back into her chest.

Elise was working through deposition transcripts when her mother finally woke up. Peggy Carroll had been gradually improving, her progress measured by the diminishing number of devices keeping her alive. She was still on a ventilator, though, and when she finally opened her eyes, Elise could tell how it panicked her to find she couldn’t talk.

“Hi, Mom,” Elise said, grabbing her mother’s hand and squeezing it gently. “Don’t try to talk. I’ve pressed the button and the nurse will be here in a moment.”

Peggy squeezed back and blinked a couple of times.

“Ah, here’s Heather now.” Elise moved away to let the nurse, an older woman with compassion and experience carved into a weathered face, take her place. They looked at each other for a moment. Heather’s eyes suggested she’d seen everything more than once and could still laugh about it. Elise felt better just looking at her.

“Hey there, Peggy.” Heather’s husky voice was pitched low and intimate. “You had heart surgery a couple days ago, okay? I’m going to get a doctor to check you out. As soon as she says you’re doing as well as we think you are, we’ll remove the intubation. Squeeze my hand if you understand.”

Peggy’s eyes were still wide with emotion—stress? nerves? fear?—but she calmed down at Heather’s reassuring tone. Heather took a long time explaining Peggy’s condition, the operation, and her stay so far in the ICU. Eventually, Peggy’s eyelids drooped and she appeared to be asleep.

“She’ll wake up again in a little while,” Heather told Elise. “I’m hoping they’ll let her go off the vent today. She still won’t feel much like talking, but the sore throat improves pretty fast.”

Elise nodded. She wanted her mother well as quickly as possible, but she was ambivalent about having her mother able to talk again. In Elise’s last few visits to Eugene, she and Peggy had been like dogs circling each other, neither wanting to make the first move lest it be misinterpreted as hostile.

Peggy’s long salt-and-pepper hair had been combed and braided neatly to lie over one shoulder. It gave her the look of a peacenik from some bohemian Portland coffee shop, which was ironic because she was pretty dismissive of Oregon’s former hippie cliché. For her job as an account manager, she wore her hair in a complicated bun that was both chic and old-fashioned at the same time. Away from work, it was invariably in a ponytail. Even running errands on the weekend, she looked neat and proper.

Elise took her mother’s hand, careful not to wake her up. The fingers were cool and soft. Her skin was aging well. Still supple and creamy pale with no brown spots. Good genes or an elaborate skin care regimen. Elise made a mental note to ask her mother when the opportunity arose. She hoped it was good genes—that would be a nice harbinger for her own middle age.

Elise put Peggy’s hand back on the blanket—a loose white cotton weave with the hospital’s name worked in blue in the bottom third. To prevent people from stealing the blanket when they left the hospital? Who’d want to sleep with the same blanket they’d nearly died under?

Elise went back to her seat. There was a pile of papers next to the chair by the window, and a discarded FedEx box leaned against the wall. Kim had bundled up all the work Elise could think of that was portable, and overnighted it to the hospital. Elise took comfort from the boring routine of reading deposition transcripts and taking copious notes. Focusing on a lawsuit beat worrying about Peggy’s health. Or missing Jack. Although she never stopped missing Jack.