Lover's Knot (2 page)

When she heard the first explosion she wasn’t sure exactly what it was. Yet another in the cacophony meant to alert the world to another carjacking? The front door slamming as the security guard lumbered out to stop the crime in progress?

She didn’t have time to consider that the explosion, or the one that followed, might be gunshots. Blessedly, Kendra slid to the ground and finally found the oblivion she had wished for.

A
s he made his way into the rehabilitation hospital where Kendra was a patient, Isaac Taylor flipped off his cell phone and slid it into the leather holster that was as much a part of his everyday wardrobe as clean boxers and dark socks. If he didn’t, he knew it would continue to ring.

He wasn’t supposed to be here. In order to come, he had cancelled two afternoon meetings, and one of those would undoubtedly come back to haunt him. ACRE was a nonprofit agency, but it operated with the work ethic of a Fortune 500 company. If you intended to beat the big guys at their own game, you had to think the way they did. Nobody took a job at ACRE because he wanted more time in the great outdoors ACRE was trying to save, one real-life acre at a time.

He was still thinking about the more important meeting as he crossed through the carpeted reception area and around the welcome desk. At noon he had been scheduled to persuade a landowner that ACRE’s offer for his property was more advantageous than that of a major development company. For more than a month his staff had prepared a volume of charts and surveys, tax codes, legal opinions and long-range analyses. Isaac had planned to present the volume with a focused, persuasive sales job. Instead, in twenty minutes, the landowner, a man named Gary Forsythe, would discover that Isaac’s assistant was standing in for her boss at the Bombay Club. Isaac doubted Forsythe would be pleased.

He was halfway down a corridor before he realized he had chosen the wrong one. In his thirty-seven years he had visited plenty of hospitals. From Bangkok to Boston, every one he’d set foot in had been an incomprehensible maze. He stalked back the way he had come, choosing the next in a series of corridors that radiated from the entrance like the framework of a spider’s web.

Kendra would be surprised to see him. For that matter, he was surprised he was here. When he’d learned she was to be released, he’d offered to bring her home, but she had refused. Instead she had arranged for a coworker at the
Washington Post
to do the honors. Kendra was slow, still a little wobbly, yes, but she wasn’t going to fall on her face getting up to their condo. She didn’t need Isaac.

But she
had
needed him the night she was shot.

She hadn’t said that, of course. One thing he could always depend on was Kendra’s unemotional, practical approach to life. This was something they shared. They were like the twin blades of a kayak paddle, each cutting cleanly through the water with an economy of motion, dipping low on one side, then the other. No rivalry, no recriminations, no resentment.

But she
had
needed him that one night, and he had failed her. Now that fact weighed heavily on both of them, a silent burden borne by two sets of shoulders. If he had left work when he should have, he could have arrived at the drugstore in time to get Kendra’s medication. If he’d left work in time, she wouldn’t have dragged herself out into the cold night air to be shot by a man who stole cars the way some men sold insurance or taught high school physics.

If he had just left work.

So he had left work today. He supposed it was a form of penance. Or it was an unspoken pledge.

You mean more to me than the job, Kendra. Look, here I am. In the flesh this time, no matter what it costs me
.

“Mr. Taylor?”

By the time he halted, he was already a good three feet beyond the woman who had spoken. He turned and recognized Rashi Gupta, the physician in charge of Kendra’s recovery.

He held out his hand. “Dr. Gupta, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice you.”

She took the hand briefly. “Yes, you seem like a man with a mission.”

Dr. Gupta was slender and attractive, forty, perhaps, with dark skin and almond-shaped eyes. She wore an unbuttoned white lab coat over a navy skirt and blouse, and a trio of gold necklaces twinkled in the fluorescent light. Her blackb hair waved over her ears and collar.

From their first conversation, he had known that medically Kendra was in good hands. He was less secure about the Indian doctor’s holistic approach. Had Kendra’s injury been a suicide attempt, he would have understood Dr. Gupta’s desire to probe the nuances of a relationship that had always suited both its partners. But the shooting had been wholly arbitrary. And he had yet to see what the doctor’s probing had accomplished.

He tried not to sound impatient. “I’m going to pick up Kendra in a few minutes. Or at least that’s what I thought?”

“Oh, yes, she will be going home as promised. Do you have a few moments to talk to me first?”

His inclination was to say no. He was anxious to get his wife home and comfortably settled so he could get back to work and find out what had transpired with Gary Forsythe. He knew that this afternoon, no matter what, he had to leave the office by five to spend the evening at home.

At his hesitation, Dr. Gupta stepped closer. “I must talk with you. Now or very soon. We can do it over coffee.” Without waiting for his assent, she started down the hallway in the direction he had just come from. She ducked into a small deli near the reception area, and he followed her through a short line, filling a cup with coffee that smelled as if it had been heating in the stainless-steel pot all night.

The room was only half filled, a mixture of staff and visitors. A small boy in a lime-green T-shirt screamed and tried to launch himself from a booster seat at the other end of the room. The child’s mother looked too exhausted to care.

“Do you wonder at the story there?” Dr. Gupta asked. “What member of the family is here, and what this young mother discovered today to make her so tired?”

Isaac never wondered about the lives of strangers. At some point in his own, he had learned the futility of trying to figure out motivations.

“I imagine the news in this place can be pretty dismal.” He pulled tops off half-and-half containers and dumped the contents into his coffee. “I know we’re lucky.” He looked up. “Unless there’s something you haven’t told us?”

Dr. Gupta paused before she spoke. “Not everyone in your situation would describe it as lucky.”

He was annoyed. “Kendra was shot. Twice. The bullet nicked the spinal cord, surgery was required to halt the bleeding, there was some paralysis, which has subsided with time and good care.” He forced a smile. “We can thank you for that last part. And we do.”

“Mr. Taylor, the bullet damaged more than your wife’s spine and internal organs.”

Now he was angry, a feeling he didn’t like. He looked away from her, observing the young woman grab the child’s shoulder. She gave him a hard shake, and the screaming intensified. Isaac’s anger ramped up a notch.

“If she shakes that baby again, we need to intercede.” His tone was casual. His feelings weren’t.

Dr. Gupta turned in time to see the woman reach for the child and pull him from the chair. Then, as they both watched, she settled the boy on her lap and stroked his hair, murmuring as she did. In a moment the screams subsided.

“People handle bad news in different ways.” Dr. Gupta faced him again. “Some of them take it out on their children. Our young mother seems to have enough sense to know she was wrong.”

Isaac went back to the subject at hand. “I know complete recovery will take time. The shooting was traumatic. Kendra’s still a little shaky. I support her decision to take a leave of absence from the
Post
.”

Isaac stopped, because even though he did support Kendra’s choice not to return to work for six months, he also knew the consequences. The
Washington Post
always had a pack of candidates hungry to become the next Wood-ward or Bernstein. She had worked hard to move up the journalistic ladder to investigative reporting, and a long hiatus would knock her down at least a few rungs.

Dr. Gupta hadn’t touched her coffee and didn’t now. “I’m afraid that saying your wife is only a little shaky is like saying she was only a little injured.”

“What would you like me to say?”

“Perhaps you can tell me how you feel about everything that has happened?”

“I’m not the patient.”

“No, you are the most important person in the patient’s life.”

He sat quietly a moment trying to figure out what she wanted. “I feel a lot of things,” he said at last. “Relieved she’s recovering, for one.”

“‘Relieved’ is an interesting word. It almost implies guilt, doesn’t it? As if you are relieved that after what you have done, the worst did not catch up to you.”

“Isn’t that a stretch?”

“Is it?”

He wished she was not quite so good at getting right to the heart of matters. “Shouldn’t you just say what you need to, so we can end this? I’d like to get my wife.”

“Your wife was extremely sick the night she went out to the drugstore. As it turns out, she had pneumonia, which very much complicated her recovery. She asked you to get the medication, and you were too busy. I imagine you have regrets about this?” The last sentence was clearly a question she expected him to answer.

“Of course I do.” He was almost surprised the words escaped his clenched jaw.

“But there is more….”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Her eyes were the color of milk chocolate and as expressive as her lovely, long-fingered hands. She used both now to prompt him, the fingers turned upward as if to beckon words hiding inside him.

He shook his head. “Okay, I was upset with her. After the worst was over and I knew she was going to recover. Is that what you need to hear? That I question why she went out in the first place? One dose wasn’t going to make much difference in her recovery. And as it turns out, after we spoke I left to get her prescriptions, hoping I could get there before the store closed.”

“Instead you arrived as she was being loaded into the ambulance.”

For just a moment, despite his attempt to remain logical and calm, he experienced the same panic he had felt that night. It fractured quickly inside him, but left him vulnerable. “Yes.”

“And now you ask yourself why she did this to you?”

“No, I don’t ask myself why she did this to
me
. I ask myself why she did it. And the answer is pretty clear. She wasn’t thinking straight. She was upset with me for not doing what I’d promised, what I should have done, so she left to take care of herself. She didn’t know I was rushing to the store, because I didn’t phone her back to tell her. I didn’t take the time because I had no idea she’d do something that foolish. That’s it. End of story.”

He pushed his chair back to get up, but the doctor put her hand on his arm.

“If the story had ended, Mr. Taylor, would you be so upset?”

He didn’t stand. “I’m not upset. We just aren’t getting anywhere.”

“Your wife’s recovery is my job. Not simply her physical recovery, her emotional recovery, too. One is going as expected, one is not. I am concerned that she seems to have given up on you as a source of support.”

He leaned forward. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am talking about her plan to move out to your vacation cabin in the Shenandoah Valley.”

For a moment he didn’t believe he’d heard her right. “I’m sorry?”

“She hasn’t told you?”

Her hand no longer weighted him to the chair. It didn’t have to. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Then I am sorry to bring you this news. But perhaps it’s best that we talk it over, so you are prepared.”

He couldn’t take this in. It was inconceivable to him. Kendra would need more physical therapy. She would need checkups. She would need
him
.

Or…perhaps not.

“It’s not a vacation cabin.” He wasn’t sure why he had chosen the most trivial point for starters. “We…I own some property out there. In Toms Brook, near the river. The cabin’s old. It’s not an A-frame chalet with views all the way to West Virginia. Is that the way she’s made it sound?”

“It’s livable?”

Isaac really didn’t know. Kendra had wanted an occasional retreat outside the city, and she had made friends in the Valley. She’d found a local handyman who had put in plumbing, renovated a small bathroom, updated decades-old wiring. The man had done the work for a quarter of what anyone in the D.C. area would have charged. She had asked Isaac to come and take a look at the project, but he had always found an excuse not to. He didn’t think the cabin was finished, but he really wasn’t certain. To his knowledge, Kendra had never even stayed there overnight.

“Apparently she thinks it’s livable,” he said. “Apparently she thinks a lot of things.”

“Do you understand why she’s doing this?”

“Why don’t you give me a clue?”

She lifted one beautifully shaped brow at his tone. “This will be something for the two of you to discuss. Kendra tells me you work long hours, that your job is important. Would you be available to her even if she was in town?”

“You want me to say I’ll drop everything and fly to her bedside the moment she needs a glass of water or a tissue?”

She sat back. “If you
need
to say it. But I doubt you do. Not to me, and probably not to your wife.” She paused. “And not like that.”

Isaac was rarely rude, and now he was sorry. The apology was in his voice. “You took me by surprise.”

“Perhaps what you
will
need to say is that you understand she feels her life is no longer under her control. That you know much has been taken from her in the past few weeks, and you sympathize with her need to come to terms with it.”

“You underestimate Kendra. She’s a strong woman.”

“Kendra no longer feels at peace in her own skin. She no longer feels whole. She no longer feels secure. She must find her way in this new world where a woman can nearly be killed for going out to the drugstore on a rainy night.”

“She’s a reporter. She understands violence.”

“There is much we don’t understand until it knocks at our front doors, Mr. Taylor. Do not underestimate the impact of those few terrifying moments on all the moments that will follow.”

Dr. Gupta glanced at her watch and shook her head. “I will be available to you, and I have colleagues who will be happy to talk to both of you as you work through all that has happened.”