A Place of Hiding (41 page)

She smiled at him brightly and shook her head.

 

Deborah sat beneath the silver sky not far from the looming statue of Victor Hugo, whose granite cloak and granite scarf billowed back forever in the wind that blew from his native France. She was alone on the gentle slope of Candie Gardens, having walked up the hill from Ann's Place directly after leaving the hotel. She'd slept badly, far too aware of the proximity of her husband's body, and determined not to roll next to him unconsciously during the night. This frame of mind didn't welcome Morpheus: She rose before dawn and went out for a walk.

After her angry encounter with Simon on the previous evening, she'd returned to the hotel. But there she felt like a guilt-stricken child. Furious at herself for welcoming the smallest sense of remorse into her consciousness when she knew she had done nothing wrong, she soon left again and she didn't return till after midnight, when she could be reasonably assured that Simon would be asleep.

She'd gone to China. “Simon,” she told her, “is being completely impossible.”

“Ain't that the definition of m-a-n.” China drew Deborah inside and they made pasta together, with China at the cooker and Deborah leaning against the sink. “Tell all,” China said affably. “Auntie is here to apply the Band-Aids.”

“That stupid ring,” Deborah said. “He's worked himself into a state about it.” She explained the entire story as China poured a jar of tomato sauce into a pan and commenced stirring. “You'd think I'd committed a crime,” she concluded.

“It was stupid anyway,” China said when Deborah was finished. “I mean even buying it in the first place. It was an impulse thing.” She cocked her head in Deborah's direction. “Just the kind of thing you'd never do.”

“Simon seems to feel that bringing the ring round here was impulsive enough.”

“He does?” China stared at the cooking pasta for a moment before replying matter-of-factly. “Well. I c'n see why he hasn't been exactly desperate to meet me, then.”

“That isn't it,” Deborah protested quickly. “You mustn't . . . You'll meet him. He's eager to . . . He's heard so much about you over the years.”

“Yeah?” China looked up from the sauce to regard her evenly. Deborah felt herself growing sticky under her gaze. China said, “It's okay. You were going on with your life. There's nothing wrong with that. California wasn't your best three years. I can see why you wouldn't want to remember if you could help it. And keeping in touch . . . It would have been a form of remembering, huh? Anyway, sometimes that happens with friendships. People are close for a while and then they're not. Things change. Needs change. People move on. That's just how it is. I've missed you, though.”

“We should have stayed close,” Deborah said.

“Tough to manage when someone doesn't write. Or call. Or anything.” China shot her a smile. It was sad, though, and Deborah could feel it.

“I'm sorry, China. I don't know why I didn't write. I meant to, but time starting passing and then . . . I should have written. E-mailed. Phoned.”

“Beat a tom-tom.”

“Anything. You must have felt . . . I don't know . . . You probably thought I forgot you. But I didn't. How could I? After everything?”

“I did get the wedding announcement.”
But no invitation to the wedding itself
was unsaid.

Deborah heard it, nonetheless. She sought a way to explain. “I suppose I thought you'd find it odd. After Tommy. All of a sudden after everything that happened, I'm marrying someone else. I suppose I didn't know how to explain.”

“You thought you had to? Why?”

“Because it looked . . .” Deborah wanted a good word to describe how her shift from Tommy Lynley to Simon St. James might have appeared to someone who hadn't known the whole story of her love for Simon and her estrangement from him. It had all been too painful to speak of to anyone while she was in America. And then Tommy had been there, stepping into a void that even he had not known at the time existed. It was all too complicated. It always had been. Perhaps that was why she'd kept China as part of an American experience that included Tommy and thus had to be relegated to the past when her time with Tommy ended. She said, “I never did speak much about Simon, did I?”

“Never mentioned his name. You watched for the mail a whole lot and you looked like a puppy whenever the phone rang. When the letter you were waiting for never came and the phone call didn't either, you'd disappear for a couple of hours. I figured there was someone back home you were putting behind you, but I didn't want to ask. I figured you would tell me when you were ready. You never did.” China emptied the cooked pasta into a colander. She turned from the sink, steam rising behind her. “It was something we could have shared,” she said. “I'm sorry you didn't trust me enough.”

“That's not how it was. Think of everything that happened, all the things that show I trusted you completely.”

“The abortion, sure. But that was physical. The emotional part you never trusted with anyone. Even when you married Simon. Even now when you've been hassling with him. Girlfriends are for sharing, Debs. They're not just conveniences, like Kleenex when you need to blow.”

“Is that what you think you were to me? What you are to me now?”

China shrugged. “I guess I'm not sure.”

In Candie Gardens now, Deborah reflected upon her evening with China. Cherokee had put in no appearance while she was there—“He said he was going to a movie, but he's probably scamming on some woman in a bar”—so there was no distraction and no way to avoid looking at what had happened to their friendship.

On Guernsey they were in an odd reversal of roles, and that created an uncertainty between them. China, long the nurturing partner in their relationship, ever caring for a foreigner who'd come to California wounded by a love unacknowledged, had been forced by her current circumstances to become China the supplicant dependent upon the kindness of others. Deborah, always at the receiving end of China's ministrations, had taken up the mantle of Samaritan. This alteration in the way they interacted with each other put them out of sorts, further out of sorts than they might have been had there existed between them only the hurt caused by the years during which they had not communicated. So neither quite knew the right thing to do or say. But both of them, Deborah believed, did actually feel the same at heart, no matter how inarticulate was her effort to express it: Each was concerned for the other's welfare, and each was a bit defensive about herself. They were in the process of finding their way with each other, a way forward that was also a way out of the past.

Deborah rose from her bench as milky sunlight struck the cinder path leading to the garden's gate. She followed this path between lawn and shrubbery and skirted a pond where goldfish swam, delicate miniatures of the fish in
Le Reposoir
's Japanese garden.

Outside in the street, morning traffic was building, and pedestrians were hurrying on their way into the centre of town. Most of them crossed over the road into Ann's Place. Deborah followed them round the gentle curve that exposed the hotel.

Outside, she saw, Cherokee was leaning his hips against the low wall that marked the boundary of the sunken garden. He was eating something wrapped in a paper napkin and drinking from a steaming take-away cup. All the time, he kept his attention on the hotel façade.

She went up to him. So intent was he upon his observation of the building across the street that he didn't notice her, and he started when she said his name. Then he grinned. “It actually works,” he said. “I was sending you a telepathic message to come outside.”

“Telephonic generally works better,” she replied. “What're you eating?”

“Chocolate croissant. Want some?” He extended it to her.

She covered his hand with hers and held it steady. “Fresh, as well. How lovely.” She munched.

He extended the cup from which the fragrance of hot coffee plumed. She sipped. He smiled. “Excellent.”

“What?”

“What just happened right here.”

“Which was?”

“Our marriage. In some of the most primitive Amazon tribes, you would've just become my woman.”

“What would that entail?”

“Come to the Amazon with me and find out.” He took a bite of croissant and observed her closely. “I don't know what was going on with me back then. I never realised how hot you are. It must've been because you were taken.”

“I'm still taken,” Deborah pointed out.

“Married women don't count.”

“Why?”

“It's pretty tough to explain.”

She joined him in leaning against the wall, took his coffee from him, and indulged in another sip. “Try.”

“It's a guy thing. Pretty basic rules. You can make a move on a woman if she's single or married. Single because she's available and, let's face it, she's generally looking for someone to give her a thumbs-up about how she looks, so she'll accept a move. Married because her husband's probably ignored her one time too many, and if he hasn't, she'll let you know right up front so you don't have to waste your time. But the woman who's
attached
to some guy but not married to him is totally off limits. She's immune to your moves, and if you try one on her, you're going to hear from her man eventually.”

“That sounds like the voice of experience,” Deborah observed.

He gave a quirky grin.

“China thought you were out scamming after women last night.”

“She said you came over. I wondered why.”

“Things were touchy over here last evening.”

“Which makes you available for a move. Touchy is very good news for moves. Have some more croissant. Have some more coffee.”

“To seal our Amazon marriage?”

“See? You're thinking like a South American already.”

They laughed together companionably.

Cherokee said, “You should've come to Orange County more often. It would've been nice.”

“So you could have scammed on me?”

“Nah. That's what I'm doing now.”

Deborah chuckled. He was teasing, of course. He no more wanted her than he wanted his own sister. But the undercurrent between them—that man-woman charge—was pleasurable, she had to admit. She wondered how long it had been missing from her marriage. She wondered
if
it was missing. She merely wondered.

Cherokee said, “I wanted your advice. I couldn't sleep worth horse dung last night trying to decide what to do.”

“About?”

“Calling Mom. China doesn't want her involved. She doesn't want her to know anything about it. But I'm thinking she has the right. This
is
our mom we're talking about. China says there's nothing she can do here and that's true. But she could
be
here, couldn't she? Anyway, I was thinking I'd call her. What d'you say?”

Deborah considered this. At its best, China's relationship with her mother had been more like an armed truce between armies engaged in an internecine struggle. At its worst, it had been a pitched battle. China's loathing of her mother had deep roots in a childhood of deprivation, which itself had grown from Andromeda River's passionate devotion to social and environmental issues that had caused her to disregard the social and environmental issues directly affecting her own children. As a result, she'd had very little time for Cherokee and China, whose formative years had been spent in thin-walled motels where the only luxury was an ice maker next to the proprietor's office. As long as Deborah had known China, she'd possessed a deep reservoir of anger against her mother for the conditions in which she'd raised her children while all the time waving placards of protest for endangered animals, endangered plants, and children endangered by conditions not unlike those her own two children endured.

“Perhaps you ought to wait a few days,” Deborah suggested. “China's on edge . . . well, who wouldn't be? If she doesn't want her here, it might be best to respect her wishes. For now, at least.”

“You think it's going to get worse, don't you?”

She sighed. “There
is
this business with the ring. I wish she hadn't bought it.”

“You and me both.”

“Cherokee, what happened between her and Matt Whitecomb?”

Cherokee looked at the hotel and appeared to be studying the windows on the first floor, where curtains were still drawn against the morning. “It was going nowhere. She couldn't see that. It was what it was, which wasn't much, and she wanted it to be more so that's how she made herself see it.”

“It wasn't much after thirteen years?” Deborah asked. “How can that be?”

“It can be because men are assholes.” Cherokee drank down the rest of his coffee and went on. “I'd better get back to her, okay?”

“Of course.”

“And you and I, Debs? . . . We've got to work harder to get her out of this mess. You know that, right?” He reached out, and it seemed for a moment as if he intended to caress her hair or her face. But he dropped his hand to her shoulder and squeezed. Then he strode off in the direction of Clifton Street, some distance from the Royal Court House, where China would stand trial if they didn't do something soon to prevent it.

Deborah returned to her hotel room. There, she discovered that Simon was in the midst of one of his morning rituals. He generally had either her or her father's assistance, however, and using the electrodes by himself was an awkward business for him. Still, he seemed to have managed their placement with a fair degree of precision. He lay on the bed with a copy of yesterday's
Guardian,
and he read its front section as electricity stimulated the useless muscles in his leg to prevent them from atrophying.

This was, she knew, his primary vanity. But it also represented a remnant of hope that someday a way would be found that he could walk normally again. When that day arrived, he wanted his leg to be capable of doing the job.