As Good as It Got (11 page)

“Mom, he never tells you anything. How the hell am I supposed to go home now for vacation before school starts again? How am I supposed to live in that house with them all cozy there together?”

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“Oh. Well.” Cindy sank onto a hard-backed chair, painted blue, next to the phone table. “I’m sure it’s a mistake. I’m sure when I get back from here he’ll—”

“Mom, you’re out. She’s in. You have to understand that.”

She was nearly crying, heaving breaths to try to stop it, this girl—woman now—who hated showing vulnerability. Like her father. “What am I going to do? Where will I go home to?”

“No, no. It won’t come to that. Your home is your home, with me and your father.” Cindy shook her head vehemently.

“That . . . woman will be out when I get back.”

“Mom,” Lucy practically shouted. “Get . . . a . . . clue. Your marriage is over.”

Cindy inhaled slowly, preparing to be patient. “Sweetheart, it’s more complicated than—”

“Complicated my ass, it’s simple. He’s got Pattycakes, you’ll find someone else, but what about
me
?
I
can’t just go out and find another set of parents.
I’m
the one who’s fucking screwed here.”

“Lucy!” Her voice burst out in breathless shock—more shock, God please have mercy—her face hot, a strange buzzing in her ears. “Your language.”

“Good, Mom.” A hysterical giggle, thick with misery. “My life is falling apart and you’re worried about my
language
.”

Cindy couldn’t do more than work her mouth. Speech seemed out of the question. There was too much to take in.

She wanted off the phone, she wanted to bury herself in her bed, pull the covers over her head the way she had as a little girl, waking in the middle of the night with a splitting headache, starved for oxygen. She wanted to wake up now and find the fantasy mother she often dreamed of at her bedside, As Good As It Got

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stroking her hair, telling her she was silly to be afraid of a bad dream, that she was loved more than life itself.

“I’m sorry.” Lucy was crying in earnest now, then taking deep breaths, fighting again for control. “I’m sorry, Mom.

This is just so
hard
.”

“I know.” She managed a whisper, guilt deep and dark inside her. She and Kevin had done this to Lucy. Their problems had grown so much bigger than just the two of them. “I promise you, it will all work out. Your father seems to need to . . . explore right now, but it won’t last.”

“Mom.”

“I know him, honey. Better than you do. Just trust me on this. Okay?”

A sniffle. A sob. Quieter then, her breath slowing. Cindy’s smile spread. Reassuring her daughter made her feel calmer too. Everything would be okay.

“Thanks, Mom. I gotta get back to work.”

“I understand. And you’re welcome. Now don’t worry.

Promise me you won’t.”

“Okay, Mom. I’ll try.” She hung up before her mother’s
I
love you
could make it over the line.

I love you
. Cindy sat motionless until the phone startled her with its
bomp-bomp-bomp
chastisement. She put the receiver carefully back in place, feeling like she was in a post-earthquake landscape, waiting for the aftershocks.

Lucy had to be mistaken. Kevin wouldn’t install his mistress in her house. Especially without asking her. Even he wasn’t that bad. It was a mistake. That was all.

She felt her insides unlock and allowed herself a breath and another smile. A mistake. That was all.

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A light tap at the door made her sigh. Betsy was the warm-est, sweetest person she’d ever met, but Cindy couldn’t bear to talk to her right now. Betsy would want to know what the conversation had been about. She’d give Cindy that concerned look and ask her all kinds of probing questions that would make Cindy sound like an idiot for believing in her husband and in her marriage. Max had faith in her no matter what she said. Maybe she should find out if there were any way she could become a dog and move to a kennel.

“Cindy?”

Cindy lifted her head. The voice was male. “Yes?”

“Can I come in?”

Patrick. What could she say?
Only if you don’t make me feel
ridiculous.
“Yes. Of course. Come in.”

The door opened a few inches and his head appeared around it, as if he were afraid he’d catch her in some embarrassing moment and have to withdraw quickly. “Betsy had to leave for a while. She told me you were on a call from your daughter. It got kinda quiet in here, so I thought I’d check.

Make sure you were okay.”

She smiled at him, even though her insides still felt cracked and unstable. “I’m fine.”

He glanced at her hands, then into her eyes, which were undoubtedly broadcasting her troubled feelings, which made her nervous, so she looked down at her hands, and found them twisted and tight. He knew she was lying about being fine.

“Take a walk with me? I want to show you something you’ll like.”

She looked back up at his fine strong face and wondered if he’d been planning to show Ann the same thing that morn-As Good As It Got

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ing, or if this was special, for Cindy. And then she realized that was a completely juvenile and pointless thing to wonder, the kind of thing she wondered about boys in grade school, where she spent so much time dreaming of the day Boy X

or Boy Y or Boy Z would find her irresistible, which none of them ever had.

“I think I have a class right now.” She couldn’t remember what. Her brain seemed only to be able to hang on to useless, meandering thoughts at the moment. She was probably acting like someone with Alzheimer’s. If she could sleep at night, people might not think she was such a ditz.

“So?” He grinned and bent down to whisper close to her ear. “Play hooky with me.”

“Oh.” She laughed nervously. Something about the way he said that had sounded sort of naughty. Or would have from the lips of a guy who liked women. “That sounds fun.”

“Then let’s go.” He gestured her out through the comfortable blue-green living room, then out through the door on the opposite side of the cabin so they were walking up the gentle hill away from the sea. They crossed a mown field to another narrow path of matted grass and then, when they entered the woods, of soft leaves and moss.

As Cindy walked, the phone call with her daughter kept looping through her mind. Patrick could show her the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, complete with sprightly lep-rechaun, and she’d just nod. Lucy couldn’t be harmed in all this, Kevin had to see that. He shouldn’t let his trampy girlfriend into their house, shouldn’t let her answer the phone and upset everyone. But then that was Kevin—and most men from what she gathered—doing what he wanted and 94 Isabel

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expecting everyone to accommodate him. She’d spent a lot of her life accommodating Kevin, done it mostly happily out of love, but in retrospect that made her part of what was now hurting Lucy.

“Here.” They’d left the path, and Patrick held back a spruce branch for her to pass into a small mossy clearing strewn with rocks, ferns, and downed trees so old they squished into moist splinters under her feet. Ahead, dangling from a branch, she saw a strange lantern-looking object with yellow plastic flowers pasted around it, half filled with a bright red liquid, like the lone decoration left on a Christmas tree.

“Hummingbird feeder.”

“Hummingbirds?” She turned in astonishment and found him directly behind her, so she stepped back into the prickly embrace of a spruce, and had to rebound with a quick side-step. “I thought hummingbirds were tropical.”

“Not all.” He gestured to a flat stone roughly chair height, mostly bare of moss, and they sat there, so close together their shoulders touched, and their hips, and all along their thighs, because there wasn’t more room than that. She expected to feel awkward, and did a little, but actually it was nice being next to him, since Patrick could hardly take the contact sexually. He smelled good. Not expensive and sophisticated like Kevin, but manly in a different way that seemed to have been absorbed from the woods rather than dabbed on.

“Will the birds come, do you think, while we’re here?”

“I’ll tell you what.” He held his hands up, palms away, fingers spread, sort of like a photographer framing a shot. “If we only allow the possibility that they will show up, then we’ll affect the universe in a positive way, and make it easier for them.”

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Cindy’s heart started to beat a little faster. Something in her personal universe that had always felt off seemed about to click into place. She wanted to look at Patrick but was pretty sure the sight of his handsome face this close would unnerve her, and she had to say this before the chance passed without her grabbing onto it: “That’s how I think. That’s how I feel about the world.”

“It took me a long time to learn. With all I went through

. . . ” He chuckled, though not bitterly, as she might have expected. “No wonder I clung to the negative. It becomes a habit, you know? But in Thailand, with the monks, I learned how I, myself, was playing a part in my own downfall. So I totally let go, all the bad thoughts and expectations and worry. After that, boom, only a matter of time until my life turned around.”

“Oh.” Cindy’s breath caught in a small gasp. “No one else

. . . well, other people don’t get it. At least not the people I know. They think I’m silly.”

“They’re jealous.”

“Jealous?” Cindy put a hand to her chest, delighted just by the idea. “Of
me
?”

“Not that many people can throw off the negativity surrounding us.” He was looking at her intently, she could feel it, but she kept her eyes on a daddy longlegs exploring the world of a lichen-covered stump, drinking in every syllable of every word. “It’s safer to be cynical, Cindy. It’s easier to hate, to point to misery in the world and then use that hate and misery as a sign that we can only expect more.”

“Yes.” That was Kevin. In a nutshell. And her brilliant parents. In an even smaller nutshell.

“It takes courage to be vulnerable. To say ‘I love. I like. I 96 Isabel

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am happy with who and how I am. Good things will come to me. I deserve them.’”

“Yes.” Now her eyes were drawn to his, because there was nowhere else she could look and be satisfied. What he described, she’d tried to do all her adult life, without ever dignifying it with such beautiful, strong words. “Too many people don’t want to hear good things.”

“Worse, they want to destroy the words and attitudes that can make those good things happen.”

“Yes.
Yes
.” She knew she was saying
yes
too much, but she wanted to say it a thousand times more besides, yes yes
yes
!

Tears rose, along with an absolute tsunami of gratitude for the man beside her. “Thank you, Patrick.”

“Hey, you’re welcome. For what?”

“Understanding.” She smiled, calm and peaceful, sure she could give Centered Betsy a run for her money. “My husband
will
come back to me.”

“He will.” His earnest and beautiful gaze took on a slight edge. “If that’s what you want.”

Of course it is
was her automatic response, but she only thought it this time, staring into his deep gray eyes.

“He’d be a fool to lose you, Cindy.” He was nearly whispering, and was it her imagination or had he leaned closer? She should move back. She should, but she didn’t. She simply had the thought that she should and left it at that, as if her brain had lost control of her muscles.

“Most people . . . ” She cleared her throat. “Most people think I’d be a fool not to lose
him
.”

“You have to follow what’s in your heart. Only you know what that is. You have to be at peace with you. No one else.”

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He could not have spoken any more directly to her innermost soul. She wanted to seize this moment, bottle it forever so when she felt stupid and young and uncertain, she’d have his deep gray eyes and his validating words to bring back how she felt right now. “You don’t know how much it means to hear you say that.”

“That’s what I’m here for, Cindy. To help.”

She was going to say that she was pretty sure he’d helped her more in the past several minutes than anyone could for the next two weeks, but something buzzed by at top speed, like a bee, only too large and too loud, and Patrick’s eyes shifted past her. “Look. There, behind you. Turn slowly.”

She moved as carefully as she could, then let out an “Oh”

no louder than a baby’s sigh. A hummingbird, the first one she’d seen except on TV nature programs. Not three yards away, drinking from the feeder as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be doing, while she couldn’t get past the idea that something so graceful and exotic should be feasting on brilliant fragrant rain-forest flowers, surrounded by vo-luptuous women in colorful dresses with more of those same flowers tucked behind their ears. Not here, in the browns and greens and grays of the Maine coast, putting on a show for Cindy, who wore Kevin’s Princeton sweater and jeans that were too short.

The bird’s wings beat into a blur, its green shimmery body hovering, undulating, liquid in the light, darting forward, back, forward, back, inserting its beak into the center of the yellow plastic flower each time, enchanting and endlessly thirsty.

“Ruby-throated hummingbird.” His voice barely sounded 98 Isabel

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in her hair, tickled the strands above her ear. The warmth of his breath made her shiver. “Isn’t he amazing?”

“He?” she whispered back.

“Patch of red at its throat. The females are all green. Look.

There’s another. A female. To the left.”

She nodded. She’d seen it. And couldn’t stop looking, feeling the warmth of Patrick at her back, the chill of the stone seeping through her pant leg, the cool stillness of the woods and the faint whirring buzz of the birds as they darted back and forth, occasionally resting on a branch gnawed bare by porcupines, then feasting, fast-motion, again.