Heart Echoes (11 page)

Chapter 21

River listened to Teal's rhythmic breathing. She was fast asleep beside him, weary from events of the past few weeks, undone by forces she could not control.

He hadn't been much help. He should have told her to sleep on this crazy decision to go to Oregon. He should not have debated her.

Not that they were strangers to disagreement. Secure in their relationship, neither was threatened by differing opinions.

So why the racing heartbeat, the sense of doom?

Because Teal had chosen Maiya's well-being over that of their family? No. That was a given, played out in countless ways all the time in their years together. He had joined the game late. Maiya had been ten, well-adjusted for her age, but when kid crises struck, date time with Teal was scratched off the calendar. Not postponed, deleted.

His stepdaughter was still a child, still in need of an up-close-and-personal mother. That biological father void still needed something tangible from the guy himself, not the surrogate.

River shifted carefully, removing his arm from beneath Teal's shoulders, and winced. The pain in his side had subsided but was still there.

Was that it? Was he threatened by the thought of Maiya's finding a piece of herself in Oregon, of even meeting her dad? Oregon was a big state and yet, why not? He conceivably could be there, perhaps in Cedar Pointe itself. But no. Getting something from him was Maiya's right. It would not diminish her relationship with Riv. She was that kind of kid.

Was River threatened by a fear of Teal and Maiya driving into inclement weather like Krissy had ten years before, pregnant with Sammy? Of another driver losing control on the highway and veering into them?

He took a breath, the stab in his ribs keeping it shallow. He took another.

No. That fear had struck with the earthquake, but he had stopped giving in to it some years ago. It was the first time Teal had been late meeting him. She arrived to find him curled in a fetal position on the floor, his heart racing, his body shaking in a cold sweat. At Teal's urging, he had seen a counselor.

Exactly what he had urged her to do and she ignored.

He had learned how not to let the fear debilitate him. In time it all but disappeared, until the quake. Was that it? The quake triggered the old fear . . . No. He sensed a deep ache and understood this was something new.

How was he supposed to live for weeks without Teal and Maiya? As much as he daily lost himself in his work, his girls were his life.

If his side didn't hurt so much, he'd take a deep breath and just get on with life like any other macho guy would.

River watched his neighbor Charlie turn skewers of chicken and beef on the grill. It was Sunday evening, four days before Teal and Maiya's departure. The Yoshidas had invited them over for dinner.

Charlie shut the lid and joined him at the picnic table, his brow still furrowed. “Teal and Maiya will be gone for five weeks? Five?”

River nodded. Somehow the
few
weeks had gotten extended to include most of Maiya's suspension time.

“You probably can't get away from school?”

“Not really.” His fall semester was jam-packed already. As the academy's liaison to the community, he regularly took his seniors out to public schools to talk about drug and alcohol abuse. He taught a class on independent living skills. Two campouts were on the docket. Preparations for the big annual fund-raiser filled every other waking moment. “Hopefully I can fly up there for one long weekend.”

The old man took a sip of iced tea and the wrinkles below his few wisps of gray hair smoothed out. “Your wife is a strong woman. Cindy and I saw that the first day we met her ten years ago. She'll be fine.”

“Yeah.” River didn't worry about faking an upbeat tone. Charlie was his sounding board, a great listener who reminded him of his own father. “I'm not so sure about myself.”

“We men are a needy lot.” He chuckled. “So, she is going home. What about her work and Maiya's schoolwork?”

“You know Teal. She has it all figured out. Her sister, who apparently scored a 2200 on the SAT, has agreed to tutor Maiya. Teal convinced her bosses to allow her to work on what she can long-distance. They divvied up her court dates and other cases. They promised not to fire her.”

“What about our lovely juvenile delinquent? Is this commuting her sentence?”

“Her mother thinks not. I, on the other hand, am trying to come to terms with it.” He shook his head, still disagreeing with taking Maiya out of the immediate sense of her discipline. “My only solace is that Cedar Pointe sounds like the equivalent of a cloistered nunnery. It won't exactly be a resort experience.”

Charlie shrugged. “What else is there?”

River saw through the wise man's nonchalant demeanor. “You mean besides Teal and me being at odds?”

“That should cover it.” He put his arms on the table and leaned forward. “A piece of advice?”

“No other reason for me to be unloading on you, Charlie.”

“She's rattled. The earthquake shook something loose. Maiya's behavior compounded it. You know Teal has been running her entire life. Especially since Maiya's birth.”

River stared at him. “But we got married. We have a solid relationship.”

“This isn't about that. This is about her coming to the end of the road. She's tired of running. It's time she found herself.”

“She's thirty-seven years old.”

“She never had the opportunity before now. She's been too busy surviving.”

“But she has me.”

“You're not enough. Sorry.”

That slender thread of machismo River had been grasping snapped in two. He wasn't enough for Maiya. He wasn't enough for Teal.

Charlie straightened back up and reached for his tea. “You are enough for her to come back to. She'll return. But you might want to consider engaging in a powerful lot of prayer between now and then.”

So he was needy and not equipped enough to take care of his family and was in for a rough time of it.

Maybe he should have stayed home.

Chapter 22

HIGHWAY 101, NORTH OF LOS ANGELES

Teal stole a glance at Maiya in the passenger seat as they sped along the highway. In the four hours since they waved good-bye to River, her daughter had not moved a muscle. She sat slumped down, arms crossed, mouth set, eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

“Hey,” Teal said, “Miss Happy Camper.”

“Give it up, Mom. This is me until the day we go home. You might as well get used to it.”

Teal bit back a snide
In your dreams, pipsqueak.

They had been at each other for a week, ever since Teal had announced her plans. Neither one of them was happy about the trip, but that was not a factor. They were going to Cedar Pointe.

Maiya said, “Why couldn't you just use your leave of absence and stay at home?”

“Asked and answered.”

Maiya puffed out a noise of disgust. “‘Being away is best' is not an answer. So what if you got called into the office now and then? So what if you couldn't find a tutor? So what if my friends are having good times in the same town without me? Big deal. They still are.”

She sighed. “Okay, fine. Reduce it to ‘I'm the mom and you're not.' End of discussion.”

“That is so unfair. You've
ruined
my life.” She shifted in her seat to face the window and went quiet, the air thick with her sullen attitude.

Teal sighed again. Thank goodness she had not mentioned her other reason to leave town: that it would allow her to totally focus on Maiya and mommy her. Maiya would dismantle that warm fuzzy in a nanosecond.

Not that Teal felt it anymore. It had passed last Thursday morning, the instant she told Maiya her decision. Her daughter shouted, “No way,” but of course no way did she have a choice in the matter. Between Maiya's tears and River's sad eyes, Teal wondered if the idea was indeed truly stupid.

But she asked her bosses for and was granted an extended absence. Heidi Stone and Zoe Canfield were in their fifties and her longtime mentors in personal matters as well as in business. They had hired her when she was a struggling single mom with a boatload of school loans. From the start they loved her and little Maiya to pieces. If not for their support for River, Teal might have dillydallied even longer before marrying him.

Yet they were also successful business owners who had to pay bills. They questioned her overreaction. True, suing the school district would not be a wise thing to do, but being out of the office for almost five weeks? She pushed back, insisting it was like a maternity leave. Of course her paycheck would be smaller, her loss more than theirs. They reluctantly let her have her own way. She figured if they fired her, her choice of Maiya over career was worth it.

It saddened her to think this might be a first. No wonder her daughter had gone off the deep end with a boy.

Preparing to go had consumed the days. River pitched in at home, cooking, doing laundry, and getting the car checked over, the oil changed. He helped them pack and encouraged Maiya as much as possible, never hinting in front of her at his dissenting opinion. With Teal he did not hold back. His parting words were “You can always turn around and come back.”

Already Teal missed him too much. Maybe it was best to stay a little bit mad at him. The thing was, if he hadn't brought Jake Ford into their home, they would not be in this mess. Nothing else would have caused Maiya to push the boundaries as she battled her way through adolescence.

Yeah, right.

A few minutes later Teal exited the highway and pulled into a gas station on the edge of a town. Maiya headed inside to use the restroom. Teal lowered the window and pulled out her cell to call River, hoping to catch him on his lunch break.

“Xena!” he answered on the second ring.

She rolled her eyes. “Hey.”

“How goes it, Warrior Princess?”

“I want to come home.”

He chuckled.

“Go ahead and say ‘I told you so.'”

“Never. What's up?”

While he ate, she described the ordeal of the trip, ending with “She's withdrawn. I'm snippy. This is not working.”

“Hm.” He swallowed. “Well, the good news is she doesn't see your Oregon adventure as a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“Hardly. But a major reason we left was so that I didn't have to keep playing the prison guard.”

“Then stop acting like one.”

“I'm not—”

“You're not what? Being snippy because her behavior is not what you want it to be?”

Teal opened her mouth to deny his accusation and then closed it. He had simply reworded her own description and he had done so in his typically gentle way.

He said, “Guards get snippy when their charges don't toe the line. They're not called to be mommies. Speaking of which, your mommy talk the other night got me to thinking about my mom. You know how she was this top-notch, no-nonsense English lit professor. She had a prison-guard side to her and it showed up at home often.”

Teal's defensiveness melted. She traced the steering wheel with her finger and blinked rapidly until her sight cleared. How like River to turn the subject from her own inadequacy as a mommy to a story about his mother. She loved him for it. The fact that he loved her pathetic self still astounded her.

“But,” River went on, “every so often, throughout my life, Mom would say, ‘For goodness' sake, River, you are not one of my students. Let's play.' And we would play at whatever. A board game, shooting hoops, going to a movie. She'd do it with my sister, too. Sometimes the three of us together.”

Teal wished she had known Liz Adams. If even half the stories about her were partially true, she would have made for a great mother-in-law.

River said, “The last time it happened I was twenty-two. It was before she got sick. I'd bailed out on college. Again. We played Scrabble, she beat me mercilessly, and then we went out for hot fudge sundaes.”

Teal found her voice, a quiet, low version of the usual one. “You're saying I should play with Maiya.”

“Yep. And I will too. I'll text her on your phone right now. We'll—”

“She's lost phone privileges.”

“Teal.” His tone would have stopped a killer in his tracks.

“We agreed that—”

“Just lighten up. I gotta go. Call me later.”

She held the phone until a new text message beeped its arrival.

The passenger door opened and Maiya slid inside. “Icky, skigusting bathroom.”

Teal smiled at the Maiya-ism, a phrase she coined when she was three, trying to pronounce
disgusting
.

Teal stared at her daughter's profile, a portrait of three in one. There was the little girl in the rounded cheeks, the hormonal teenager in the too-large silver hoops hanging from her earlobes, and the young woman in the chin tilted as if to forge a way through a complicated world.

Maiya turned to her. “What?”

“Will you please gas up the car while I use the icky, skigusting bathroom?”

“This is your trip.”

Teal held herself still, showing no reaction. What was she supposed to do about the lippy response? With no more privileges to lose and angry about being hauled off to Cedar Pointe, Maiya was having a heyday acting up.

What would River's mother do? Forget Xena. What would Liz Adams do?

Play. Ease up on the rules. For now.

It was either that or turn around and go home.

“Maiya, a part of driving is putting gas in the car. If you want to drive, put gas in the car.”

Her tilted chin sagged and swung around to face Teal. “I can drive?”

“You think I want to do seven hundred miles all by myself?”

Maiya practically jumped out of the car.

Teal met her at the pump and handed her a credit card and her phone. “River sent you a text.”

Maiya smiled.

Teal smiled back at her and headed toward the station to buy as much of Maiya's favorite junk food as the place offered.

Memories rolled toward her down the 101 like a fog growing denser with each passing mile. Two hours south of Camp Poppycock, Teal had decided to spend the night in a motel rather than finish the drive as planned.

Maybe the emotional fog would rise with the morning sun.

The motel in a Northern California town, naturally, did not compare to the one they stayed at the previous night in San Francisco. Maiya griped about it. Teal bribed her. If Maiya changed her attitude, she could make the drive up the coast, something she would not be allowed in the dark. Maiya could not say enough positive things about the place.

Since Teal's conversation with River, life on the road had improved to a great extent. In a no-man's-land between home and destination, mother and daughter shoved all the nasty stuff under the rug.

Playtime was almost over, though. The rug had to be picked up, shaken, and put away. They were left with a hardwood floor littered with nasty stuff, issues like River's absence, being grounded, school suspension, strained relations with extended family, and life off the grid.

“Mom!” Maiya squealed now from the driver's seat. “I don't remember this at all!” She turned toward her side window and the vista of ocean far below. “I was only six, but still, you'd think I'd—Mom! Look at that!”

Teal looked instead straight ahead at the highway and pumped her right foot against the floorboard. The two-lane hugging the winding, hilly Oregon coastline was no place for a fifteen-year-old driver to gaze at views.

“Honey! The road!”

Maiya whipped back to attention. “Oh, yeah. It's just so awesome.”

Teal blew out a long breath and took a quick peek sideways. A sweet familiarity washed over her. How could she have forgotten the magic? Ocean on one side, mountains and wilderness on the other, a permeating scent of green like a never-ending springtime.

Maiya said, “This coast isn't anything like ours. It's just so
huge
! And all those megarocks out in the water. What are those?”

She glanced again at the Pacific with its collection of boulders, some fat and round, some jagged towers. “Sea stacks. They were part of the cliffs at one time, before the ocean eroded away the land.”

“Wild.”

“Yeah, they are. You'll see all shapes and sizes. Growing up, I called them giants. They kept watch over Camp— I mean, Cedar Pointe.” Teal went still inside, thinking how she would sit for hours on end, gazing at her gentle guardians, giving them names, and feeling safe.

They would stop there first, at the spot where she first knew that someone bigger than her stepdad cared about her.

“Mom, is that it?” Maiya pointed at the windshield.

They were still thirty minutes away, but in the distance the land jutted out into their line of sight. Tiny buildings dotted the area. “That's it, the westernmost point on the continental States.”

“Cool.”

Teal smiled to herself. Somehow Maiya had picked up on River's fascination with geography and nature. Maybe the unusual aspects of Cedar Pointe would help keep her attitude from sinking too low.

It was too much to hope for. Maiya's attitude bottomed out as they descended the last hill and entered the town.

Braking, she groaned. “Please tell me there's more around the next bend. Like a stoplight. Maybe a stop sign. Any hint of civilization.”

It did not require much of a leap to see through her daughter's eyes the three blocks that stretched before them.

The speed limit had gone down to thirty. On the left, the land flattened out enough for a small parking lot above the ocean. A restaurant and shell shop bordered it. On the right was a motel. A little farther ahead were an art gallery, a café, a boarded-up storefront, a real estate office, a coffee shop.

“Well, around the bend is your aunt and uncle's coffee shop.”

“There's a coffee shop right over there.” She pointed.

“Coffee is a big thing up here in the Northwest.”

“What about a stoplight?”