Around the Bend (17 page)

“Like the baby.”

She nodded, and in her face, I read the moments she wished she could undo, the moments she knew were lost forever. “Instead of talking, he put on a smile, kept on laughing, and inside it ate him up. But he wouldn’t talk about it. Lord knows I tried to get that man to talk. Maybe I should have tried harder.” She glanced out the window, at the busy city that surrounded the hospital, watching the helicopter approach for a rooftop landing. “No, I definitely should have tried harder. He missed out on so much. With me, with you. And that’s part of why I brought him along with us. So he could be there, to serve as a reminder to me.”

“Not to miss out on the good things in life.”

“No, not to miss out on you.” She took my hand, her grip tight and firm, her eyes locked on mine. “I don’t care if I have one day or a million days left. I don’t want to miss out on a single moment with the people I love. That’s what this trip was really about, Hilary.
You
.”

“Me?”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

My heart was so full, it seemed to take up my entire chest. For a second I couldn’t even speak. My mother loved me, had always loved me, not just in those late-night kisses, but in the moments when I hadn’t been looking.

I may have been thirty-six, but I still needed her. I always had, whether I’d wanted to admit it to her or myself. “That’s why I’m here, too, Ma. Because I need to spend time with you. To get to know you.”

The smile that curved across her face would stay with me forever, clutched in my memories like a butterfly. “I love you, Hilary.”

“And I love you.” I hugged her, without tears this time, and knew we had just covered more ground in this hospital room than we’d ever done in the minivan. When the moment of emotion had passed, I drew in a breath and gave her a grin. “How about some advice then, Ma?”

“Advice?” My mother couldn’t have looked more surprised if I’d stood on her bed and did the hokey pokey. “You want
me
to give
you
advice?” She put a hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”

Talk about doing a one-eighty. Maybe I was growing up, and it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. I might even be okay with it. “Yeah. And there’s no one I’d rather talk to right now than you.” I gave her a grin. “So, if it’s not too late to get your input on my love life—”

“No, Hilary,” she said, and a tear slipped down her cheek, “it’s never too late.”

“Good.” I curled up on her bed, and started to talk. Probably for the first time in my life I got honest. With myself and my mother.

Ma leaned back against her pillows and heard me, then did what any good mother would do—she gave me her two cents.

I left her room at the end of the day, feeling lighter and better than I ever had in my entire life. When I got back to the hotel room, I made a phone call and maxed out my Visa, taking the biggest risk of my entire life.

“Don’t hang up and don’t say no.”

“Okay.” The one word came out of Nick’s mouth easily, without suspicion or malice. If he’d been surprised to hear from me, he didn’t say anything. He’d simply shut off the sander in his workshop, then gone inside his office to take the call.

All I knew was that I was damned grateful he’d finally been on the other end when I’d called.

“I FedExed a plane ticket to you,” I went on. “Round trip, to San Francisco, with an open-ended return date. My mother and I should be there in two days and I’m hoping you will be there, too.”

“Why?”

No promises, no agreement. All right. I deserved that, I supposed.

“Because you and I have unfinished business.” I couldn’t quite come out and say everything I wanted to say. I wasn’t ready to answer the really big questions, and either way, talking about them over the phone wasn’t cool.

Besides, I didn’t even know where I stood with him. How he’d been spending his time or what he wanted next. And if I was going to ask him, it would be face-to-face, not over the phone.

“I can’t go back to the status quo,” he said.

“Neither can I. A lot has changed for me over this trip, Nick, and I’m ready for more. Maybe not right away, but down the road. Is that good enough?”

“I don’t know, Hilary. Seems to me we’re still in the same place.”

I sighed. “I’m working on a lot of stuff all at once, Nick.” I told him what had transpired in the last couple of days. And Nick, as Nick always did, listened. I curled up on the bed, tucked under the blankets, wearing a pair of worn flannel pants and a T-shirt of Nick’s that he had left behind, talking to him for half an hour, crying some of that time, sharing the feelings that I couldn’t in front of my mother.

“Do you need me to come now?”

I clutched the phone, and loved him more at that moment than I ever had before. Just because he would drop everything—again—if I simply said the word. “No. I’m okay. She and I are handling this. All I wanted was to talk to you, to hear your voice.”

“Talk all you want, hon. I’m not going anywhere.”

For a moment, I let Nick become my rock, something I’d never done before. Turned out he was a hell of a good stone to stand on.

“Are you really okay?” he asked when I was done. Nick’s voice was as comforting as an electric blanket while a good New England nor’easter blew on a January night.

“Yeah. I have to be.” But more than that, I realized I
was
okay. I’d changed in the last few days. Not so much out of a
matter of necessity, as simply becoming a different person. I could write a book.
How to Finish Growing Up by Taking a Cross-Country Road Trip.

“This is a new side of you,” Nick said, noticing the same difference in me. “An all-grown-up side.”

I laughed. “Think you can get used to it? Me being responsible, dependable?”

“Yeah.” His voice was deep. “Very easily.”

Whew. Once again, we were treading near forever territory and it ramped up my heartbeat, gave me that skittish feeling. But this time, I didn’t want to run, at least not as far, and not as fast.

A yawn escaped me, even though I tried to cut it off. “Sorry. I’ve been at the hospital all day and then had to run to the bookstore to buy some more joke books. I’ve been doing my best to channel Jay Leno and keep her mind off things.” I drew the blankets closer to my chin, too lazy to get out of the bed and adjust the thermostat. “Plus, it helps keep my mother’s spirits up so she’ll be encouraged to look at other therapies and options. And actually listen to her doctors this time.”

Nick chuckled. “You know, Hilary, I didn’t think you could surprise me anymore. But you just did.”

“How’d I do that?”

“A little over a week ago, you and your mother were like Russia and the United States during the Cold War. Now you’re Tony Blair and George Bush. You’re really working hard at this relationship and I’m glad, because I think you need her.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, I do.” I drew in a breath. Took another risk. Heck, I’d already come this far. Why not go another few miles? “And I need someone else.”

A heartbeat passed between us. “Who?”

“You.”

“Hold on a second. Let me check the Caller ID and make sure this isn’t a prank.”

“Shut up.” I laughed. “Sometimes I don’t know why I date you.”

“You love me, that’s why.”

“Maybe.”

“Aw, don’t chicken out on me now, Hil.”

The room still held a chill, a coolness no amount of blankets could break. I snuggled deeper into them, wishing Nick were there. “Think of me as art. A work in progress.” But I wondered if I would progress fast enough to hold on to this man, a man who deserved a woman who’d give him what he wanted.

He’d made it clear what that was. A full-bore relationship. One with commitment. Plans for the future, maybe even a white picket fence, kids, a golden retriever. I couldn’t string him along if I had no intentions of doing any of that. Did I?

I still wasn’t sure. I needed to see him, touch him, to know. Having him on this side of the country didn’t help me make up my mind. But one thing I knew for sure, I was done having closed doors between me and my mother, and me and Nick.

“Actually, honey, we’re both works in progress. Only you’re the one in the hot looking frame.” Nick chuckled. “I love you, Hil, even when you drive me crazy.”

“Well, you drive me crazy, too, Mr. Warner.”

He snorted. “You’re never going to get a career in sucking up.”

“Are you going to make me grovel?”

I could hear him smile on the other end of the phone. “Would you?”

“No.”

“Bummer. I would have paid good money to see that.”

I threw myself back onto the pillows and flung an arm over my eyes. “Remind me again why I stay with you.”

The soft sounds of Bruce Springsteen played in the background, the old radio he kept in his office, a gift from his father for his sixteenth birthday that he still held on to. “Because I love you like no one else will ever love you. Because I know you hate eggs and I know you love your margaritas on the rocks, not frozen, and that you can’t sit through
The Way We Were
without crying.”

Damn. The man did know me. But that was, after all, what made Nick good at his job. He got the details right.

“That’s not enough to base a marriage on.” Though didn’t I know people who had gotten married on less? My parents, married on their first date? Had they really been all that unhappy?

I thought of my mother, toting my cardboard father across the country. She still loved him, all these years later. Yes, he’d descended into depression but if he had gotten help, talked to a psychiatrist or tried medication, might their story have had a different ending?

Maybe I’d been reading them all wrong. And maybe Nick and I could write a different ending to our own story.

“You like sunsets, but not sunrises,” Nick went on, reading me as easily as a novel. “You love Thai food, but not Americanized Chinese. You can eat with chopsticks, but you never mastered ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano. And you wouldn’t sit through a subtitled film if I paid you, but you put up with Bruce Willis movies because you love me, too.”

“Well, you do have a few things right. Actually, an awful lot
of things.” My smile curved across my face and I inhaled, catching the lingering scent of him on the cotton of the T-shirt.

“And as much as I love all those things about you,” he said, the tease dropping out of his voice, “I can’t be the only one carrying us anymore or the only one who wants to take this to the next level. So I don’t know if I should take that plane ticket, Hilary.”

I drew in a breath. If I let him go now, if I didn’t say the words I needed to say, the ones I’d never said, there’d be no getting him back. I knew that, as surely as I knew the sun would rise far too early for my tastes. “Please come, Nick. Because…I love you.”

On the other end of the phone, everything went silent except the radio. “You love me?”

“Yeah. Are you going to make me say it again?”

“Probably.” I could hear him smile.

I swallowed. “Okay. I’ll say that and more. I love you more than I have ever loved any man I have ever known,” I went on, before he could say anything else, before he could say those three words weren’t enough to change the course of our relationship. Or they weren’t enough to get him on a plane, convince him to meet me in California. I had no idea when I’d be back in Massachusetts—given how hard it would be for my mother to travel that far—and I couldn’t wait that long to settle things with Nick. “In fact, I don’t think I ever fell in love until I met you.”

On the other end, I heard him draw in a breath.

“I love the way you look when you wake up in the morning. I love the way you roll into me, and hold me, and the way your body feels like sunshine, only without that blaring light I hate.”
Nick chuckled, but I kept going. “I love the way you can create things out of a block of wood and turn it into something that just knocks my socks off. I love the way you take care of everyone around you, like you’re a gardener tending to roses. I love that you want to do that with me—”

“Hil—”

“Let me finish. You were right to send me on this trip with my mother. She and I did have some issues that we needed to talk about and tonight, for the first time, we did. We talked about a lot. About her and I, about my father. About all those secrets that we pushed under the rug for far too long.” I drew in a breath, and thought of what had happened in my mother’s room, how the bridge between us had gained a few more struts, maybe even a railing.

“I’m sending you that plane ticket, Nick,” I went on, “and I don’t want to know right now if you’re going to use it. I want you to think about it because this is the rest of our lives here and that’s a long time.” I kept barreling forward, knowing if I stopped, I’d lose my nerve. Maybe lose him, and I prayed I wouldn’t lose him, not after coming this far. “Over the last few days, I’ve been on a really long trip. And I’m not talking about the miles, I’m talking about what’s happened inside me. You said I’ve grown up and well, I guess I have, Nick. But I’m not at the end of this journey yet and when I reach the end, I’m hoping you’ll be there, waiting for me, in California, to hear what I have to say. But if you’re not, I understand. Either way.” I drew in a breath, let it out, with a silent prayer and a hope. “I love you, Nick.”

Then I hung up the phone before I made any promises I couldn’t keep—

And before he could say no.

The surf laughed with my mother, its light froth tossing and tumbling along her legs, rolling in and out, not-so-warm, not-so-blue water with whitecaps whipped up by a storm threatening San Francisco Bay. But my mother didn’t notice. She darted in and out of the water, grabbing my hands and pulling me with her, as giddy as a preschooler.

“You’re acting like a kid,” I said to my mother.

“I know,” she replied, laughing and smiling. “Isn’t it wonderful?” She didn’t look at all sick, and had left that defeatist attitude back in the Utah hospital. “I’ve decided something, Hilary. I’m going to keep on living the way we have for this trip.”

A wave burst against my ankles, the cold still a shock even though I knew it was coming. I’d expected California to be warm, but apparently even here it took a while for the ocean to heat up in spring. “What do you mean?”

“Whatever time I have, I’m going to live as deep and as rich as I can. I’m going to see everything, enjoy all that I can. Take
the pictures, laugh at the jokes. Wear the cool shoes.” She gave me a grin. “And talk. To you, to the people that matter.”

I smiled at her. Her blue eyes were a mirror to my own. For years, we’d shared that common eye color—and yet, nothing in common.

Until now.

“I think that’s a great philosophy, Ma. Mind if I copy it?”

“Not at all.” She squeezed my hand, and it seemed we hadn’t just come across the country, but across light years.

I glanced at the sky, now darkening, the clouds moving with a menacing, gray tint. “There’s a storm coming. We have to get out of the water. We can come back to the beach tomorrow. I booked us a hotel right across the street.”

“You did?”

“Yes, and I booked several days there, too.” I nodded. “Believe me, we’re not getting back in that minivan anytime soon. We may even live here for a while. I don’t care if I never see a road again.”

My mother laughed. “I think my butt is permanently shaped like the passenger’s seat.” She brightened, then got that twinkle in her eye that I knew meant she was up to no good. “I have an idea.”

“I don’t think I want to hear this.”

“We could…buy an RV for the drive back.”

I groaned. “Get our own Green Monster to take home? I don’t think so, Ma. I’ve come a long way on the domestication scale, but I am not, in any way, shape or form, an RV-er.”

“The term is road warrior, dear.” She followed me out of the water and back up to the edge of the beach. A few of the other people who were picnicking on the beach gave us strange looks but my mother ignored them.

“I’m not a road warrior, either.” I handed her the sneakers we’d bought back in Utah, a comfortable pair that gave plenty of room for her feet and made walking much easier. She’d even let me glue on some decorative flowers to the toes, a concession to our new commitment to fashion. I slipped on my new wedge sandals, a compromise between flip-flops and real shoes.

“Oh, come on, Hilary. An RV would be a blast. And it would be perfect for traveling around to all the major bodies of water.” My mother’s goal, starting with the Pacific Ocean, the first one we’d nailed down. She also wanted to hit most of the major contiguous United States, and after our talk, I’d agreed to extend our trip for as long as possible, taking it slow, because of her legs. I’d talked to Ernie, who wasn’t happy about my indefinite vacation, but understood my need to be with my mother. “After all,” she continued, “it worked for Carla and Louie.”

I made a face, but in the back of my mind, I heard Louie’s advice about the cards being reshuffled. Who knew? Maybe my mother’s would be. Either way, I wanted to be with her, for whichever hand she was dealt. “Would I have to eat hot-dog casserole?”

“Only if you wanted to.”

I made a face. “What do you think?”

“Okay, no hot-dog casserole. But, if you agree to the RV, I’ll spring for a cappuccino machine and fix us our own personal mochas whenever you want.”

“Ma, you are
so
not playing fair.”

My mother grinned. “I’m your mother, dear. I’m not supposed to.” We paused by one of the benches, watching the
water some more. “By the way, I talked to Carla and Louie this morning. They’re really enjoying Reginald.”

“Ma, why did you give him up?”

My mother looked down at her hands, gripping the green wooden slats of the bench’s back. “I don’t know how much time I have, Hilary. And I want to spend it with—” she drew in a breath, then turned to face me “—the people I love.”

“Aw, Ma, we could have handled Reginald. You could have told me and I would have taken care of him for you. We would have made it work, even if we had to buy an RV to do it.”

“Carla’s already dressing him up in baby clothes. She’s spoiling him more than I did. She loves him to pieces.” My mother smiled, and I sensed that she had read some kind of longing in Carla that I had not seen. Maybe all those days as a road warrior, traveling the country far from her kids and grandkids, left an opening in Carla’s heart, a hole for family that Louie alone couldn’t fill. “Reginald is in hog heaven.” I laughed. “And you, you’re okay?”

My mother took my hand and nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine.” Then she glanced at her watch, the little pixie Anne Klein face ticking alone. “Speaking of which, I have to go.”

“What are you talking about? We have dinner plans.”

She shook her head, the smile widening. “No.
You
have dinner plans, or some kind of plans. Uncle Morty is coming to get me. You’re not the only one who gets calls on her cell phone, you know.” Then she turned and gestured toward the parking lot.

I followed her gaze and froze. Standing on the sidewalk was Nick. A bouquet of flowers in one hand, a tiny wooden box in the other. And one unanswered question waiting between us.