Emily's Ghost (47 page)

She hauled out a cast-iron
frying pan, then poured oil over the bottom and turned the heat on
high. Moving around the kitchen in a state of maximum distress, she
began assembling a meal that was neither imaginative nor healthy,
just her father's favorite: fried pork chops, mashed potatoes, and
canned peas. (Her father had never farmed his five acres -- he'd
worked for the railroad all his life -- so the charm of fresh
vegetables had pretty much eluded him.)

Why couldn't Lee have
dropped in yesterday for the trout meuniêre instead?

She was opening the second
can of peas when Lee walked in, without his host.

"Where's my dad?" she
asked. She glanced at the wall clock, then answered her own
question. "Oh.
Wheel of
Fortune."

"My mother's addicted to
it, too," Lee said. "Need any help in here?"

"No, really ... I'm sorry,
I haven't offered you a drink. Would you like anything?"

"I'll pass," he said,
lifting himself up onto a high wood stool.

"I'm afraid we're not an
ap
é
ritif kind of
family," she said coolly.

His eyebrows lifted. "It's
good to see you completely recovered."

She knew exactly what he
meant. "Okay, I'm being defensive. You caught me by surprise; I
wasn't expecting you."

"I didn't assume your
family would keep my coming a secret."

"Oh, I'm sure they have
some stupid idea in their heads that -— well, you know what I mean.
You heard my father out there."

"And
you
heard my mother when you were at
my place. I doubt that she sounded much different. That's how
parents are with unattached kids."

Emily thought of Margaret
Alden by her peonies. No, it wasn't quite the same.

Lee picked up on her
hesitation instantly. "Are you suggesting my mother didn't approve
of you?"

Emily shrugged and dumped
the peas into a saucepan. "I don't really know how she felt about
me."

"She felt strongly enough
to visit you at the hospital. As did Hildie. And the kids. And
Grace."

"They
did?
I didn't know that. I ... I do
remember some visits. I know I remember Mrs. Gibbs ... but mostly
it's a blur."

"Do you remember
mine?"

It seemed to her that it
cost him something to ask her that. She heard it in his voice, in
the way he kept it low and controlled.

"Yes," she answered
quietly. She walked away, to the refrigerator, which she opened and
stared into blankly.
Why am I here?
She had no idea.

She closed it carefully,
as if she were closing a door to a chamber of her heart, and
without turning around, said, "I remember one time ... I don't
remember your words, but I remember the sense of them ... that you
were calling me back ...."

"And you
came
back --"

"No, that's just it, I
didn't."

"Don't you understand,
Lee? I
didn't
come back," she repeated, staring straight ahead. "Not
voluntarily. I kept right on going ... something drew me ...
irresistibly ... an indescribable feeling of joy ... I had no
intentions of coming back." It was the most painful thing she'd
ever said, to him or anyone else.

With a deep sigh she
turned around to face him. "I don't know what happened at the end,"
she said with a helpless look. "I think I got tossed back –
rejected -- as if I were undersize or something." She tried to
smile and make light of it, but it was the first time she'd spoken
of her near-death experience, and the smile seemed to be trapped in
the lump in her throat.

"I vowed I wouldn't tell
this to anyone," she added. "And yet here I am, chatting all about
it over pork chops -—"

As if to demonstrate how
bad her timing was, the smoke alarm went off from the smoking oil.
The piercing squeal brought George Bowditch thundering into the
kitchen. "Holy hell, who put the battery back in?"

Rattled, Emily switched on
the stove exhaust and turned down the flame.
"I
did, and it
stays
in. There, it's stopped
already. Lee, set the table. Dad, finish your program. We eat in
ten minutes. Dammit, anyway!"

The two men exchanged
glances. Her father shrugged and left the room. Lee scanned the
glass-fronted cabinets and took down dishes for the meal. It was
impossible for Emily to read his thoughts as he set the table for
her in silence. Was he shocked by her admission that she'd wanted
to die? Annoyed that he'd let himself wander into this loony bin?
Wishing she were more like Sarah or Jean? Or was he just being a
good Samaritan and counting the minutes until supper was
up?

The strained silence as
they sat down to eat didn't last long. Emily's father, a true
native of the Granite State, was an expert on politics. Everyone in
New Hampshire knew why Lee had almost lost the Massachusetts
primary, and everyone knew why Lee had pulled through by the skin
of his teeth.

"I'm so glad it was
Stanley," Emily said during a lull in the conversation. She had a
flashback of Stan sitting beside her hospital bed and a sharp sense
that she'd felt great affection for him. "You must have been
stunned when you picked up the
Journal
the day the story broke,"
she said to Lee.

"I had advance word,
actually. Stan sent me a copy of the story along with a note
apologizing for being so slow out of the gate."

That tidbit was meant
entirely for Emily, to let her know that whatever problems Stan had
had about Lee, he was trying to put them behind him. "I
really
am
glad,"
she said, and she meant it.

The three of them lingered
over dessert -- leftover blueberry cobbler -- talking more
politics. In fact it was Emily's father who did most of the
talking, with Lee an attentive audience. Politics had never been
Emily's strong suit, so she was just as happy to sit back and watch
the arch-Republican spar with the lifelong Democrat.

There's something about
the way men argue,
she mused.
They don't pull their punches or second-guess.
They're blunt; heck, they're brutal. Yet at the end they can shake
hands with no hard feelings.
Was there a
lesson in here somewhere?

Lee caught her thoughtful
look; she saw the color creep up from his neck as he cleared his
throat and became particularly engrossed in her father's comments.
George Bowditch carried on a little while longer about the need for
a strong defense budget, and then he looked from his daughter to
his visitor to his daughter again.

"Time for the news," he
said, rising abruptly from the dining table. "I'll have my decaf
out there, Em."

Lee stacked the dishes on
the counter while Emily scraped them clean for the dishwasher. They
chatted about the new bay Gerry was adding to his service station
-- a nice, safe topic guaranteed to get them through a moment
alone. When they rejoined Emily's father, he looked surprised,
almost annoyed, to see them pop out from the kitchen so
soon.

Admit it,
Emily told herself.
You're afraid to be alone with the man. He's entitled to an
explanation, and you're too cowardly to give him one. How do you
say, "I passed you up for a ghost, sorry about that"?
When she did try, the smoke alarm went off.
Surely that was a sign of some kind.

The three of them sat
silently through the rest of the news and then the entire
MacNeil/Lehrer report. Clearly her father had decided that he'd had
enough of one or both of them; he seemed to ignore their presence
altogether. Probably it was because he was used to living alone
now. Whenever the family piled in on him for the day and stayed too
long, he never felt any qualms about throwing them out.

At the end of the news
analysis her father ejected himself from his BarcaLounger and said,
"It's late. I'm turning in. Good night."

"It's only eight-thirty,
Dad," she said, looking up in surprise.

"Best put out an extra
blanket for Lee. It's supposed to go down tonight."

Emily whipped her head
around. "You're staying the
night?"
she asked Lee, amazed. Her father hated having
any overnight guest who hadn't actually been born in the
house.

"Didn't I mention that?"
her father asked blandly. "Come get the blanket out of my
room."

Upstairs her father took a
wool Hudson's Bay blanket from the shelf in his closet and handed
it to his daughter. "This makes us even for the time I walked in on
you and the Betts boy," he said with a wry smile.

And then he turned off his
hearing aid.

When Emily came back
downstairs, still in a state of shock, Lee was standing with his
back to her, hands in his pockets, looking at a cheap little print
of
Whistler's Mother
that had been hanging on the wall behind the sofa for as long
as she could remember.

At least it's not Elvis on
velvet.
But she became suddenly aware of
the crazy mix of Yankee carpentry and discount furniture that
filled the rooms of her father's house. There was no rhyme or
reason or color scheme. The place had evolved, just like Lee's
house on the Vineyard, except without taste. Out of the blue she
had an image of her father having high tea with Lee's
mother.
Ha!
was
her first reaction. Her second was,
Dad
could hold his own. We all could.
It was a
revelation.

Lee turned around, and she
found herself looking into his eyes, seeing her smile reflected in
them. "He's great," Lee said simply, mirroring her thoughts about
her father.

"I'm not sure I even knew
it, not until tonight," she admitted.

"Emily . . . I didn't mean
to put you through this. I don't plan to stay -—"

"But you've got to stay!"
she said in a knee-jerk panic. "This isn't like at your house. If
you walked out, my dad would expect to know why. His feelings might
be hurt. He might be afraid he'd been rude, which, of course,
he
has
been, only
he doesn't really mean it. It's just his way."

"So I'm ... staying?" Lee
ventured, confused.

"Yes," she said, humbled
by the sound of her own babble. "If you would."

He was standing very near
her. She caught herself sneaking a lungful of air, as if she were
about to take a deep plunge into a depth of some kind, she didn't
know what.

"Emily, the reason I'm
here . . . it seemed absurd to try to mail this to you ... and I
didn't know whether you wanted your family to know about it ...."
He took his hand from his pocket and came out with the rose-colored
crystal, still on its chain, now with two of its links cut through
and twisted, and offered it to her.

"Oh. That's why you came?"
she asked, crestfallen. So it wasn't out of either morbid curiosity
or a sense of unrequited love? It was just from simple
courtesy?

She looked down at the
pale gem lying in the palm of her hand. The chain seemed less
weighty somehow; the crystal, less mysterious. It looked like just
another gaudy trinket, the kind you found in the jewelry counters
of secondhand stores everywhere. Fifteen dollars. You could get it
for twelve.

When she looked up her
cheeks were stained with tears.

"I'll get my duffel bag
from my car. Will you tell me which is my room?" he asked in a
strained voice.

Was it all a dream, then,
after all? Fergus never was? And Lee was never to be? Stricken and
confused, she looked up at Lee and whispered, "Your room ... yes
... it's upstairs ... to the left."

She waited until he'd
finished in the only bathroom and settled in the bedroom next to
hers before she ventured out in her pajamas to wash up. When she
returned to her room, which looked out on the back, she tucked
herself into the rocker at the window and stared at the same stars
she'd wished on as a child.

Is it possible he
doesn
't
care
anymore?
All evening long she'd been
trying to avoid him. It never occurred to her that he might have
been trying to avoid
her.
Yet he had driven up here, hadn't he?
Ah. To return the necklace.
But he had blushed and stammered once or twice tonight,
hadn't he?
Ah. Because he was afraid she
might be getting the wrong idea.

Emily had been assuming
he'd stayed away after she awoke from her coma because he cared too
much. But what if he just hadn't cared
enough?
As for her suspicion that he
was warming up to Ben and Sarah and to Jean and Gerry just to get
closer to her -— it was insulting to her family
and
to Lee. The more she thought
about it, the more she was staggered by her sense of her own
importance.