Waiting For Eden (Eden Series) (22 page)

Her hair was softly styled and her make-up was subtle, with a soft pink lipstick and matching wedge sandals.  This was no small feat for Tracey, who favored Daisy Duke
cut-offs and the tightest tees imaginable to man that accentuated her amply curved breasts and firm tanned thighs. 

The scent of lavender misted through the air when she came to a stop at the kitchen counter, and casually leaned a hip against it.  “Hi
, boys,” she said with a coy smile at their astonished looks.  “What’s happening?”

“You got a job interview or something?” asked Aaron, letting loose a whistle while scratching his head.  It was puzzling, Jamie agreed, for it was
n’t often that Tracey was looking clear-eyed and put together.

She giggled like a teenager and tossed back her fine blond locks.  Keister waddled his way over to her and barked shortly for attention, but she ignored him.  She was never the animal loving kind.  “Sort of, you could say.  I made
me and Jamie some special reservations.” 

Jamie’s stomach dropped at her words.  “What are you talking about?”  He glanced over at his brother, whose eyes were steeling over perceptively.  Yep, his little brother had a crush going again, this time a big one.  All this shit was coming to a head, and going nowhere good in a hurry.  Jealousy between siblings could wreck a lot, and quickly.

“I worked a double last week, and put money away.  I was hoping to go somewhere nice for dinner.  And then… well, Jamie, how does staying over at that Victorian bed and breakfast outside of Roulette sound?  You know, the one with the lake and the fountain?  They even give couples massages there, I heard.”

“I know the one,” Jamie managed, clearing his throat, “but I’m not sure where this is all coming from.”

“Yeah, Tracey,” muttered Aaron, “you two have been less than the best of love birds lately.”  Aaron sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, and Jamie noticed the sudden tick in his brother’s jawline. 

“When are you two gonna give this a rest?”
asked Aaron tightly.  He continued with a shake of his head.  “You totally suck together you know.”

Tracey swung on him defensively, with blue eyes flashing.  “We do NOT suck, Aaron,” she answered forcefully.  “We just need a… a boost.  We’ve been through some hard times.  I want to start over, and try again.  I want to clean up, and I want to make another baby, Jamie.  I think it’s time.  It will be a perfect next step for us. We were so good together.”

“Another baby, Tracey?  For Christ’s sake!”  Jamie sunk his head in his hands, trying hard not to lose his cool.  His ears had gone hot and there was that familiar nauseous dread in his stomach. He was beginning to think that every single woman on the planet was completely crazy.

~~~~~~~

The bowl containing the chicken corn chowder slipped from her fingers and fell with a hollow thunk to the porch step.  Alex was vaguely aware of the warm cream and potato chunks spreading over her pinkies in the open-toed sandals which she had selected for the impromptu visit.

Jamie… and this s
ultry blonde girl… and
another
baby?  Aaron must have heard the soup bowl clatter because his head swiveled in her direction and his dark, grey eyes pinned and held her through the screened door. 

“
Hey there, come on in, Alex,” he barked out with a harsh laugh at her shocked expression.  “You and Tracey oughta meet, hell, it’s perfect timing actually.  Hey, Tracey, this is Jamie’s new girlfriend from D.C.  You two meet yet?  I suspect they’ve
really
been practicing some baby-making lately.”

Somehow, Alex managed to open the door and step inside that kitchen, though her legs were leaden and numb.  She could feel her
heart thrumming up in her ears, and her pulse gushed through them like the sound of roaring water.  One glance at Jamie’s ashen face and she knew that there was something seriously amiss. 

She hadn’t, in fact, heard wrong.  A baby?  She looked at the blond –
Tracey
- whose face had gone bright red.  Her lips were trembling and her eyes were wild.

All hell broke loose at that moment.  The blond was shrieking like a cat at Jamie, Jamie was calling his brother a fucking
, little-son-of-a-bitch, and Aaron was laughing like it was all really funny. A frightened Keister began to howl forlornly at the raised voices and tension in the air.

“You’re screwing
her
, Jamie? Really? A city bitch?  When I am right here, all the time, waiting for you?”  Tracey shrieked before wheeling around to gape at Alex.  Jamie launched himself across the room to grab a chortling Aaron by the shirt, turning chairs as he went.

“You, just get out,” ground out Tracey, piercing Alex with a wicked glare.  “We had a baby.  You have no right to be here, so leave.”

Alex, for once, found herself speechless.  No witty comeback, no icy voice, no sarcasm sharp enough to cut.  She looked toward Jamie, who had his brother in a headlock like rough-housing teenagers.  “I told you everything, Jamie,” she whispered.  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“It wasn’t the right time, Alex,” he muttered back through clenched teeth.  “I had no idea she would show up here today with her delusions.  You don’t know the whole story
, yet, but I will tell you.”

Tracey and Aaron yelled more obscenities in unison, and additional chairs fell by the wayside with a clatter as the curses flew.

It was time to exit.  Alex felt like she was in the middle of a Jerry Springer episode.  She flew out of the kitchen door, and it slammed with a squeaking bang behind her.  When she passed a startled Diana coming up the walk, Alexandra didn’t stop to chat or pick up the broken bowl.  She ran as fast as her sandals would let her.

~~~~~~~

“I’ve never been so disappointed or humiliated in my entire life,” said Diana coldly.  Aaron was nursing a black eye and Jamie a split lip.  Tracey still cried softly in the corner, and her mascara
was now smeared down both cheeks.  “What kind of boys did I raise?  Everyone here is out of control.  Except for Alex, who had the sense to quietly leave the premises.”

“Will you shut up about that witch!” Tracey wailed. 

“Tracey, we have been trying to get you into rehab for no less than four years.  You have been on binge after binge, with no hint of an attempt to take responsibility for yourself.  Yes, you suffered a tragedy.  It’s not the end of the world.”

“She suffered way more than you realize,” Aaron declared in her defense.  “And Jamie just kept her hanging on.”

“You know that’s not true, little brother,” replied Jamie coldly. “This situation is nothing short of a nightmare.  I care about her welfare, but that’s it.  After the baby died…”

“That’s it,” ground out Tracey. “I’m outta here, I have heard enough from all of you.  All I wanted to do today was move on.  Start over.”  She wiped at her mascara-streaked cheeks.  “Look what happened to my face.”

“I’ll go with you Tracey,” said Aaron.  “You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I WANT to be alone,” spat Tracey. “Away from all the
Sheldons.”  She stalked from the kitchen and out of the door.

The silence that followed the tumultuous commotion and Tracey’s dramatic exit was thick and pregnant with uncertainty. Diana, who never swore, struck the wooden table with her palm and stated quite simply, “This is complete and utter bullshit.  What have we been reduced to here?”

“She’s right,” muttered Jamie.  “This should never have happened.”

“Jamie,” she added, “Your kindness is only lending to her hopes, even though I understand why you do it.  It’s time to say goodbye to her completely.  We really have done all we could.  All of us.”

“She’s gonna end up dead if we cut her out of this family,” proclaimed Aaron hoarsely.  There was real fear in his voice.  “She has no one else, but us.  Jamie should have told her about Alex a long time ago.”

“There really was no Alex until just…. recently,” argued Jamie.  “Alex and I haven’t always been on the best of terms
, either.  There’s no casual way to just explain this story, and this history.”

“Tracey didn’t deserve that,” muttered Aaron insistently.

“You’re the one who dug in the knife and made it a hell of a lot worse!” growled Jamie.

Diana sighed and held up her hand to cut off the exchange.  “Aaron, there is an age difference between you and Tracey, but I am sensing that you don’t care a whit.  Why don’t you just go after her?  Like, now?”

Aaron suddenly looked uncomfortable.  “She’s still stuck on him,” he muttered with a nod toward his older brother.  “I can’t get her to look my way.”

“If you didn’t treat it like a competition and sibling rivalry, I would bet that she would look at you differently.  Jamie’s not the enemy, but what I do often see is you being an ass.”

“Thanks Mom,” Aaron growled, and got up from the table.  He grabbed his black, Chevy ball cap and stuck it on backwards, then scooped up his car keys.  “I’m out too,” he announced, and took his leave.

Diana looked at Jamie with raised eyebrows over her coffee mug.  “Do you think he will go after her?”

Jamie shrugged.  “I hope so.  He’s definitely got it bad, but God she’s such a mess.  Don’t know where she would be heading.”

“Hopefully not the nearest bar,” Diana echoed
his own thoughts entirely. 

Jamie lowered his head into his hands.  “What do I do about Alex? My God, what a
SNAFU.”

“I can pay her a visit,” Diana offered.

“That would look pretty bad, having my mother do my explaining.”

“Not really.  Just let me soften things up and then you two can talk it through.  If you go first, she may run you off with a shotgun.”

Jamie laughed in agreement, and went for the coffee pot himself.

Waiting for Eden

~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter 18

The cigarette lighter in the car wasn’t working
, her Ipod was on the fritz, and the cherry lipstick she had in her new purse had melted and caused a permanent mess in the interior compartments.  Could anything else go wrong with this day, really?

Tracey simply could not believe that Jamie Sheldon was screwing some
out-of-town, wealthy-looking, city bitch.  It didn’t work, it didn’t fit his personality, not to mention the fact that he was hers, and had been for six years.  Six years!! 

And the bitch was pretty.  Like, really pretty. 
She had been wondering what Jamie was up to ever since the day she had tried to search his room.  Now it seemed her suspicious were all dead center.

Tracey was livid.  She was jealous as hell.  She wanted to kill.  She needed to calm down, and without a doubt, required a drink to do so.  The Cherryville Pub was only a mile up the road, so she made a bee-line for it, her booted foot pressing the accelerator a little deeper in anticipation. 

The bar was basically empty but for a solitary biker, but it still smelled as if a cigarette was lit in every corner of the joint.  That was okay with her.  It was a soothing, familiar scent.  She ordered a Miller Lite on tap with a house tequila shot on the side from a nondescript, middle-age bartender with circles under her big, brown eyes and a mouth full of crooked, yellow teeth. 

The tequila wasn’t exactly smooth, but it was cheap.  The beer was frothy heaven in a chilled glass.  The bartender wandered off to smoke, obviously not the talkative type, which was fine with her at the moment.  The yellow teeth were gross.

The jealousy that was squirming in her belly at that very moment was pure and desolate torture. She knew now that she would never be good enough.  Tracey looked at the fingers that were wrapped around her beer glass and frowned at the quality of her nails.  The paint job sucked. The bracelets that jingled around her wrist were plastic – coated with a silvery substance to make them look a bit more like the real thing, but quite obviously not. Her once-cute thumb ring had a gouge out of it and was starting to corrode.  It left a green streak on her skin.  How had she not noticed these little things before?  How could she even think they were cute?

Some people were just born with the money or smarts to never have to struggle.  Not her.  She couldn’t stand the unfairness of it.  She had loved Jamie Sheldon like no one else for six years.  He drew her like a magnet ever since the first time she waited on him and his Dad at the diner. 

He’d been a hard catch.  She was a few years younger, and according to him –“not his type.”  Now, little miss silver spoon – what was her name… Alex Winters? – waltzes in with her Michael Kors accessories and Lancôme-infused fairy dust, and wham, country boy Jamie is sucked right into her essence like a tool.

A little thought wiggled into the background of her mind as she took another long pull of Miller
Lite, all while raising a finger for the loitering waitress to bring another.  There was something about the name Alex Winters.  Something about the way she looked too.  Something that was familiar, and Tracey felt like she needed to remember it… ASAP. 

After the next beer arrived, foaming over its top and pooling around the base, it came to her.  T
he really hot guy that she had waited on several weeks back had been looking for a certain Alexandra Winters.  And not because she was a good person.  Little miss city was in trouble.
Wanted
.  Hell, yes.

Tracey flipped her purse up on the bar and started rummaging through the mess inside, praying that the lipstick hadn’t ruined anything she had written on a scrap of paper.  What was his name?? 

She sucked her lip between her teeth and conjured up his image.  Black hair, dark eyes, tall with a killer build, and totally oozing with the scent of money.  Men like that didn’t look twice at her, even with the rack she boasted.  But he had.  He had really
looked
.

Her fingers grasped a wrinkled up paper shred, and Tracey carefully unfolded it.  Antonio Marco.   Pay-dirt.  Although a little cherry red lipstick smeared the right corner, the numbers weren’t even smudged a bit.  Well it was going to be Antonio’s lucky day.

~~~~~~~

The steaming water coursed over her head, turning Andrea’s long blonde hair into a wet and heavy shank that lapped at the small of her back.  She shivered as the sensation produced full body
chills and hardened her vividly pink nipples.

Hmm.  P
erhaps the tingling she was experiencing was actually the uncertainty of what was surely soon to come. 

Marcus was unreadable, even more so than usual. 
Upon her arrival, he seemed agitated, although his voice was smooth, calm and unwavering.  Andrea couldn’t discern if it was from the excitement of closing in on his ultimate mark with a big payoff at hand, or something altogether different.  It was almost as if he was speedballing, but she knew he did not often mix the tight end of business with recreation.  She nibbled her lower lip, pondering.

The first time she had experience
d a speedball had been unforgettable.  Marcus had scared her witless, ruthlessly tying her four limbs tightly to the bedposts with leather belts before proceeding to withdraw a needle from his bag. 

He informed her that injecting a speedball with the correct amounts of coke and heroin was only for the very experienced.  He told her if she overdosed on the heroin, he would try to bring her back with more coke… maybe.

Marcus had then proceeded to tease her naked, inner-thighs with the sharp tip, even drawing beads of blood, ever closer to her exposed clitoris, until her sobbing pleas had finally annoyed him into injecting the drugs into the vein of her arm.

The full force of
it hit her at the same moment yet another belt snapped across her breasts and belly.  The resultant mix of pleasure and pain was both intense and exquisite. 

When her whimpering moans incited his cock to full length, he had fucked her until she saw stars.  How many times had she come?  She couldn’t remember.  But every time she replayed that episode in her mind, she was instantly wet.  Pain and pleasure.  Pleasure and pain.  That was Marcus Allen, and he
had become her entire world.

~~~~~~~

With a little sigh, Diana Sheldon left a disgruntled Keister alone in the truck bed, curled up in an angry ball against a torn, wool blanket with a Navaho pattern.  He knew better than to bother yelping or even initiating an escape attempt by this point in his canine life.   The metal Chevy walls were not meant to be scaled by his stubby, dog legs. His toenails found no grip, no purchase at all in the slick fiberglass bed.  He turned his head sorrowfully away from the biscuit the woman left as a bribe and stared forlornly at nothing at all.

Brow furrowed as she walked away from the truck toward the
old farmhouse, Diana Sheldon knew her task ahead would be even more difficult than appeasing hurt feelings.  The intricacies of family drama and relationships in turmoil were not something she relished dipping her nose into unless it was absolutely necessary.

And yet, it was hard not to mother-hen,
and to just watch her children walk into the same trouble and mistakes she had seen all before, time and again as was their way.  But finding an immediate solution to the Tracey-Alexandra problem was paramount.  She wanted her boys to remain a close, loving unit.  The alternative was unthinkable. 

This was a tricky situation indeed. Death did something rotten to families, and although time surely lessened the aching, sapping pain, a bitter aftermath was left forever in its wake.  It remained like poison coiled in the veins, and no matter how much you thought you were over that death, its latent venom could foam up at any
given instant and strike, snake-like, wreaking havoc.  And if you didn’t manage to pull yourselves together, you ultimately pulled apart.

Deep in her heart, Diana sensed that Tracey was a lost cause, and deeply broken from the inside out.  The girl had lost her mother at a young age, her infant daughter, and over time since that tragedy, the man she had loved since her teenage years.  She had no education, and came from a long line of alcoholics.  Her father was abusive, through childhood and beyond.  The drink called its siren song to her, and Tracey answered every time, without fail. 

Jamie, although hurt and broken from the death himself, had tried to support her.  With his own inner will and compassion, he had tried to lift Tracey, and lend her strength.  He’d fallen short, though not from lack of trying. 

Diana believed he never truly felt
real
love for Tracey, the kind that brought souls together and bonded them no matter what.  Their slow disintegration had been painful for the whole family, her younger son Aaron included.

And now there was Alexandra Winters to consider. 
She too, had experienced the venomous side of death.  She was vulnerable, and unsure of her place here in the untamed mountains of northern Pennsylvania.  But one thing was certain; the way in which Alex and her son Jamie looked at one another was breathtaking.  It was real.  It could be forever.

The back screen-
door squealed and Alexandra poked her head out.  Her hair was disheveled and her expression was nearly comical – it was obvious that she hadn’t expected Diana, and didn’t know whether to be gracious, upset, or nonchalant about the visit.  When a chilled glass of lemonade appeared and Alex waved at Diana to come on in, it was apparent that she had chosen to go with gracious.  Diana was quietly pleased, for she found it a true sign of class and, perhaps more importantly, of a gentle heart. 

Diana entered into the coolness of the back kitchen, shaded from the day’s heat by several dense hemlocks towering not far beyond the windows.  It was a very sweet and fresh kitchen
, now that Alex had spruced it up with some country primitives and a few well-chosen antiques left over from the Wilkens family.  They had been good people, if a bit reclusive and…a little different.   

At Diana’s perusal, Alex added, “I plan to replace the tile flooring with something a little more modern, and put in a slate sink.  I always wanted a traditional slate sink.  Have you ever seen one?”

“Oh, they are gorgeous if you can find the right installer.  I’d go shopping with you any day, Alex.  Could probably give a few pointers too, if you wish.”

At Diana’s earnest expression, a smile broke through Alex’s attempt at a cool facade without her ability to restrain it. “I would love that.  It’s just…” Alex shrugged and laughed a little at the trivial path of their conversation.  She motioned toward the table, and the women sat together with their frosted glasses of lemonade.

“Well, whatever transpires between you and Jamie, you will still be living here, Alex, and I will still be liking you quite a bit, without a doubt,” Diana answered with her own smile.  It lit her face as slender glints of sunlight slanted through the window above the sink and hit the chestnut highlights in Diana’s hair with a warm glimmer, much like cognac in a snifter.

The tiny lines around the corners of her eyes nearly disappeared in the soft glow, and
suddenly, she looked about twenty years old.  Alex resisted the abrupt urge to reach across the table and hug the woman, and blinked back the resultant threat of tears back as best she could.

“I am not here to persuade you, but only
to offer my perspective,” Diana began, taking hold of Alex’s hand.  The contact was soothing, and Alex realized her own fingers were trembling with suppressed emotion.  She managed a nod, and bit down on her lower lip.

“It’s a standard story, really… Tracey and Jamie were young, and careless.  Dating for awhile… and then suddenly pregnant.  Frightened. My son made the decision to support Tracey and the baby.  The alternative… abortion…adoption… was just unthinkable to Jamie.  He had lost his own father just a few years earlier.”

“How many years ago did this…baby… happen?”  Alex managed to whisper.

“It’s been three already.  They lost her at birth.  Intrauterine growth restriction and
then even steroids couldn’t boost the baby’s lungs enough to keep her breathing.  She was on a respirator but then her other organs began to fail, as well.”

“Her,” Alex released with a sigh, a tear rolling down her cheek.

Diana realized she was tearing up again herself, as if she hadn’t been through the tortuous memory of her granddaughter’s death a thousand times.  “We got to hold her for a little before she passed.  But not long.”

“It must have been horrible.  I can’t imagine.”

“It did something to both of them.  Tracey never recovered.  And let me tell you, she was already a mess before the baby.  Her addictions may have even been the reason for the problems… but well, we just don’t know.”  Diana released Alex’s hand and drew in a deep breath, then exhaled it with a sigh.

“The reason I came to visit you today was not to do Jamie’s apologizing for him.  He’s an adult and can handle himself just fine.  It’s just…. This topic is painful and hard to discuss in a coherent manner.  There aren’t rational emotions involved when it comes to the death of a child.