Equilibrium (6 page)

“I’ll just be a minute.” He scrabbled up the loft ladder, and she stared at the ascent of his fantastic firm-looking bottom. He peered over the railing and nodded toward his bicycle on the indoor training stand, the source of the early morning whirring sounds. “Great shop Troy brought me to. Way better than driving into Manchester.”

Who? Laura touched her face, reconnecting with the anchor of reality and translating the boy’s name: Troy, her son, the other bike enthusiast. “Glad it worked out,” she said. Now they’d have to work on Darcy.

Aidan nodded and climbed down the loft ladder, shrugged into a white T-shirt. The apartment’s radiator clanged into gear, even though the temperature was kept a steady ten degrees warmer than the rest of the drafty house. Laura chanced a last peek at his chiseled abs, imagined touching his heated skin.

In the kitchen, she threw on the overhead light, not wanting the room to reflect any of the inappropriate notions flowing not so much through her mind but through her body.

A buzzing sound, and Aidan slipped his cell from his back pocket. On call at Memorial? He checked who was phoning, shook his head, and pocketed the cell.

Aidan opened and closed his hands at his sides. “How can I help?”

She uncovered the hill of melded dough she’d pulled from the fridge and tilted her chin toward the right-hand cabinet. “You can take out the parchment paper for me.”

“Will do.” Without her asking, he tore off two strips of the brown paper and laid them on the waiting cookie sheets.

His mother must’ve taught him well.

“When I was a kid, my mother and four sisters used to bake every Sunday. Parchment was the extent of my job. That and eating. I excelled at the eating,” he said, as if reading her mind.

Laura paused with her hands in the silverware drawer, rewinding to the last words she’d said out loud.
Take out the parchment paper
didn’t segue naturally to Aidan’s comment about his mother. “And your dad? Does your dad cook?” Jack had left anything remotely kitchen-related to her. He’d scurry through to pinch a taste of whatever she was cooking, and then throw his hands up and back out of the room.

“Yes.” He gave the parchment an extra press into the baking sheet. “My dad
cooked
. He passed away . . . let’s see, I was fifteen. So, wow, thirteen years ago.” He smiled. “Doesn’t seem like that long ago.”

“I’m sorry about your dad.” Even an old loss deserved condolence. Laura added this new information to the Aidan file. Becoming the man of the house at fifteen explained even more than his unexpected foray into emergency medicine at thirteen. No wonder her son was warming to Aidan.

Laura left the teaspoons on the counter and reached past Aidan into the cabinet. Then, hands clasped around pastry bags, she tensed with the full-body-tingle feeling of being watched, of Aidan’s warm gaze sliding from her braid to her waist and lingering on her backside before gliding back up her spine. She turned back around and couldn’t mistake his half grin, the facial expression equivalent of a shrug.

Or she could be losing her mind.

Aidan held up a spoon and a pastry bag. “What do I do with these?”

“Spoon dough into the opening?” she said.

“Like this?” Aidan scooped dough and played at trying to force the dough through the smaller opening.

She shook her head, laughed, and shoveled dough into her bag’s wide mouth opening. “No, like this.”

Aidan winked and followed her lead. “After my dad died, my sisters and I didn’t sleep much. We’d stay up talking, get hungry, and they’d end up baking all night. Big brother,” Aidan said, pointing to himself, “got to oversee the operation. We never had all the right ingredients, so they’d improvise. The worst results were the most fun, at least for me. I’d make my sisters play ‘I dare you to eat it.’ ”

“Oh, you’re bad.” She smiled at how thinking about teasing his sisters splashed a mischievous grin across his face. “Your family sounds great. I mean, really close.”

“Yeah, too close sometimes.” He stood beside her, pastry bag at the ready, and watched her squeeze dough along the tray into satisfyingly well-ordered rosebuds.

She kept her gaze on the cookies, her piping, but her awareness focused on his inches-away nearness and the way his movements paced hers. Her awareness deepened her breath. Her robe gaped open and, for a second, Laura let herself imagine the warmth of Aidan’s steady hands on her chest before covering herself. “I didn’t have any siblings, never knew my dad, and my mother died when I was eighteen.”

Aidan stopped piping and angled toward her. “Laura . . .” he said, his voice soft with concern.

She waved her pastry bag at him. “Not a big deal! I’m just giving you my bio to be fair. You know, since you had to fill out an application.”

He nodded, but she couldn’t figure out his underlying reaction. So what if her childhood wasn’t ideal? Whose was? You worked with whatever family you were given. Sometimes family taught you a lesson in reverse: how
not
to behave. She sighed, thinking of how her friendless mother had died alone, felled by a massive heart attack two weeks short of her fortieth birthday.

Aidan headed to the oven with his cookie sheet.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Heard ovens work swell for baking.”

“Just a minute.” She filled a small peach bowl with warm water, tested the temperature with her finger, and then crooked a finger at Aidan.

He jogged back across the room in response to her correction and set his tray back at the starting position, then stood at attention, awaiting further instruction.

“Wet your finger in the water.”

He stared helplessly at his dangling hands. “Which one?”

“For goodness sake.” She snatched up his right hand, dunked it into the bowl of water, then brought his index finger to a mound of cookie dough and pressed the first circle flat. “Now continue.”

She looked up from the tray and made contact with Aidan’s dark eyes. She couldn’t mistake the way he was looking at her, piercing the surface of her being and trying to go deeper. Waiting to gauge her response.

How long since a man had made love to her? How long since she’d even been touched? Is that what had happened to her mother? Heart failed from lack of use?

Heat didn’t contain itself in Laura’s cheeks. Sleep deprivation, nightmares, and overwhelming worry couldn’t account for the sheer magnitude of what she was feeling, despite its wrongness. After all, she was the elder, the responsible party. Her heart pounded an alarm in her ears, and she made herself look away.

He dipped his fingers into the bowl of warm water. “So, yeah, what were you saying?” He didn’t wait for a response before fingerprinting the rows of gingersnap dough.

Pressing her fingers along her identical rows of dough made her wish instead for the tactile experience of touching his skin. She sighed, threw open the oven door, and forgot to wait a beat before stepping into the fire breath. She slid their baking sheets onto the metal rack, shut the oven door, and set the timer.

Aidan leaned against the counter, scraping the curved glass bowl with a spoon, and then popped a sizable glob into his mouth.

Horror should’ve struck. He was eating raw eggs and risking salmonella poisoning. Instead, an irrational thought slammed her: she wanted some, too.

“Any left for me?” Her logic center was shutting down, the way a teenage girl’s mind responded to a cute boy. Likely, the way Darcy reacted to Nick. Laura could only hope she’d sufficiently brainwashed her daughter about the dangers of premarital sex. At the moment, Laura couldn’t recall any of her own warnings. The image of Aidan pressing his mouth to hers, her fingers in his hair, his beautiful body—

She nabbed a tablespoon from the drawer, scraped up a glob of her own, and leaned against the counter, mimicking Aidan’s stance. She gazed into the center of the kitchen and sucked batter from the spoon till nothing remained but the cold taste of metal.

“Your mom,” Laura said. “Did she ever remarry?”

“Nope.”

“Thirteen years is a long time.”

“She says no one can compare to Dad. They were childhood sweethearts, married at eighteen. Mom still wears her wedding band.” Aidan set his spoon and the bowl in the sink, then ran the hot water.

Laura had always thought of Jack as the love of her life. And after nearly a year without him, the loneliness hadn’t subsided. If anything, it had gotten worse. On the day Jack had died, her body had turned as cold as Jack’s side of the bed. But tonight she was craving another man’s touch. What kind of person did that make her? “Your parents sound very romantic.”

Aidan shut off the water and turned toward her. “My father was a great guy. But I tell my mother all the time he’d want her to find someone else.” His direct gaze slid a heartbeat of warmth between her legs, and her mouth fell open.

The oven timer beeped, like a parent flickering a porch light. “Cookies,” she said ridiculously as she tried shaking the cobwebs from her pheromone-saturated brain cells.

She took out two trays of perfectly browned gingersnaps, his and hers, and inhaled their sweet heated spice. The notion of reality split down the center. Earlier this same night a nightmare had spilled from dreamland to a wide-awake horror show. Now she stood in her midnight kitchen, sure she was wide-awake, but playing at the kind of fantasy she’d refer back to all the next day.

The phone squealed a jarring trill behind their heads, and they both jostled. She frowned at the phone, knowing only Elle would call her at this late hour, and only she would answer her friend’s call. Oh, what the heck. She nabbed the receiver off the wall, if only to prevent a second irritating ring. “Hi, Elle.” Silence at the other end of the phone met her greeting. “Hello?”

Laura was about to put down the receiver, but the sound of a throat clearing followed by a rather congested exhalation stopped her. “May I speak with Aidan, please?” A woman, and she wanted to talk to Aidan, the man with the disorienting gaze. Aidan had given Laura’s phone number to Memorial, for emergency purposes only. She doubted the call was work-related.

“Whom should I say is calling?” Maybe Laura was acting nosey, but hey, it was still her house.

The woman hesitated. “Kitty.”

A middle of the night call from a snuffling ex.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I’d really appreciate—”

“He’s right here.” She thrust the receiver at Aidan. “It’s Kitty.”

He stared at the phone, and his entire body tightened, starting with his eyes and washing down until his toes must’ve curled. He nodded and took the receiver, covering the mouthpiece with his palm. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, but she’d already turned off the oven and was hightailing it out of her suddenly crowded kitchen.

Two was company, and three irked her beyond reason.

 

Upstairs presented a quandary. Even though Aidan had looked anything but pleased with his midnight caller, he’d taken the call anyway. Kitty still held a couple of his reins, however flimsy.

When Laura turned off all the lights, sensory deprivation washed blood down the walls. She jumped out of bed, yanked the pretty little hydrangea nightlight from the hallway, and jammed it into the bedside outlet.

Then she plumped an extra pillow behind her back and reclined halfway under the covers, waiting for a few precious hours of sleep to claim her from the predawn clash between darkness and light.

Chapter 7

G
oing out with the same boy for six weeks in high school practically set a record. Mom should’ve been cooking an anniversary dinner for Darcy and Nick. Instead, Mom had invited all their best friends over for the anniversary-eve commemoration of Daddy’s Death Day. Nick, Cam, and Heather for Darcy. Maggie and Elle for Mom. And Michael, Troy’s best friend since nursery school. Right this minute, Mom was fussing over shish kebabs, making sure she cooked the meat the way her father had liked it, bright pink at the center. She thought it was a little sick since he wasn’t the one eating them.

Troy and Michael weren’t home yet from the middle school track practice, and Cam had dragged Heather outside on the pretense of a predinner walk. Despite the fact Heather was so not interested, Darcy had to admire Cam’s perseverance. But Mom’s girlfriends’ annoying voices resounded from the kitchen, so Darcy couldn’t even pretend she was alone with Nick in the living room.

Nick sat alongside Darcy in the one marginally comfortable dent of the rickety old couch, playing with her hair. They fit perfectly, snuggling under the cranberry throw, for privacy, not warmth. This week, the weather had flipped from winter to spring. The red line on the living room window thermometer hovered above seventy, a veritable heat wave.

“Hey, kids!” Elle peered around the corner, a surprise attack. And the reason Darcy had made sure to make herself and Nick scarce whenever Mom’s friends came around. Her mother was enough of a fright. “Darce, your mom would like you to come set the table. ’Kay?”

“I’ll help, too.” Nick dropped his hand from the nape of her neck, and the throw fell from her shoulders. He walked ahead of them, showing off the back of his jeans.

Elle waited until Nick left the room, then turned to Darcy, all girly and conspiratorial. “So cute!” she whispered loudly, as only she could. Yeah, he was adorable, but not deaf.

Elle put an arm around her, guiding her into the kitchen. “Your mom tells me you guys are an item.”

“One of the distinct parts of a whole?” Darcy shot off the dictionary meaning, getting the designated reaction. Elle removed the unwanted arm and gave Darcy the appropriate five feet of personal space. Who cared if Elle widened her eyes at her mother? But Mom didn’t need to smile and sigh in agreement. Mom pointed at the silverware drawer. “Do you have any idea where Troy is? I’m starting to worry.”

“No clue.”

Nick took the utensils from her hands, playing the helpful boyfriend.

“Dining room tonight.” Mom gestured toward the narrow galley that somehow fit a farmer’s table with seating for ten. “Did Troy mention anything to you about a track meet? I mean, I think he’d call, but you never know.”

“I said, I don’t know.” Oh, this was novel, her mother worrying about the good child for a change. “Wait.”

Her mother paused, clutching a fistful of napkins.

“I know for sure he doesn’t have a meet today, just practice. And he already told the coach he’d skip the meet this weekend, due to Dad’s De—the anniversary.” Mom might think she preferred honesty, but Darcy knew better than to share the term Dad’s Death Day with her.

“Okay, thanks, baby.” Mom caressed her cheek, and Darcy cringed. Mom didn’t seem to know where her body left off and Darcy’s began.
My body, your body. See the difference?

Nick required similar tutoring. Darcy leaned against the dining room table, sensing Nick’s heat before he came up behind her. He reached around her body to arrange the place setting just so. Not bad at all. He even knew to put the smallest fork on the outside of the arrangement, awaiting the salad.

She inhaled, intending to get a hit of Nick, but coughed on the unmistakable scent of patchouli-redolent Maggie instead. Didn’t she need to save a rain forest or something? Maggie stood in the doorway, stock-still, reviewing Nick around his edges. Her flowered skirt shifted slightly, swaying from the melody of Woodstock coming through the speakers in her 1960s brain.
Get back to the garden, sister.

Maggie nodded her whole body, completing her visual assessment of his energy field. “A bit heavy on the root chakra, mostly red and orange.”

Maggie sashayed her flowered bottom past them and into the kitchen.

Nick stared toward the spot Maggie had vacated. “What was that?”

She couldn’t blame Nick for cracking up. Not everyone had heard the Buddhist lessons of her mother’s New Age friend. Darcy liked the idea of energy vortexes circulating the life force of the universe through her body, although she’d never admit it to her logic-loving mother. “Chakra one, seat of sexuality, survival. Chakra two, how you express your feelings.”

“Meaning?”

She leaned over and cupped a hand around his ear. “You’re horny.”

“That’s because you don’t stroke me,” he whispered.

Heat flashed through her body, a surge of wanting to cry. How long before Nick figured out she was too much of a baby to give him what he wanted? How long before he tired of snuggling and kissing? How long before he broke up with her?

Nick twittered his fingers at the hem of her T-shirt. She grabbed his hand and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

Mom, Elle, and Maggie fell silent when she entered the kitchen, as if she’d tripped their off buttons.

Darcy glanced over her shoulder, and Nick bit at his fisted knuckles. “I have eyes at the back of my head,” Mom said without parting her lips, even though Darcy hadn’t done anything wrong.

Darcy dragged out the beat-up cow-stenciled stool and stepped onto the lowest wrung, feeling three sets of eyes burning her back. Her mother, Elle, and Maggie never failed to bug her when they worked in unison. Three against one wasn’t playing fair.

Darcy took down a stack of mismatched sherbet-colored plates, her mother’s idea of pastel mood therapy.

Mom untied her patchwork apron and hung it on its hook. “We’re going to have to start soon. I don’t want the meat overcooked.” She opened the door to the back deck. The aroma of grilling meat wafted inside, and Darcy’s stomach rumbled.

The mudroom door flung open, and Troy burst through, as if the smell had called him to dinner. He raced past them through the kitchen, stomped up the stairway, and continued the stampede across the second floor.

Michael slipped into the mudroom. Since the fall, Darcy had to remind herself Troy’s turned-cute-over-the-summer friend was a few months younger than Troy, and not a few years older. Michael shook his dark hair from his eyes. “Hey, Darcy. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Nick leaned against the doorframe.

Michael glanced at Nick. “Alone?”

“I don’t think so, buddy.” Nick folded his arms, his muscles primed, reminding her of Daddy’s reaction when another dad had flirted with Mom at last year’s high school open house. Daddy had smiled at the man, if only to show his teeth, and his eyes had said,
Back off or I’ll kill you.

Nick’s eyes spoke the same language. Darcy imagined the raw smell of blood, a disaster only she could prevent. Her fingers jittered.

“It’s about Troy,” Michael said.

“Nick can stay. I don’t mind,” she told Michael, but she was really reassuring Nick. Darcy placed her hand between Nick’s shoulders and rubbed his back. Nick stretched an arm around her shoulder. He tugged her to his side, and his fingers pressed against the muscle of her arm.

On the way home from that open house, Mom had teased Daddy that he’d acted like an overgrown boy. Nothing extreme. But she’d kept her hand on Daddy’s leg till they’d pulled into their driveway. Then they’d gone straight up to bed.

Michael slid his gaze to the shaking ceiling. “Troy’s kind of hyper or something.”

“He’s always had tons of energy.”
Hyper
was not a word anyone in her house used lightly, too close to
manic
. Michael knew better.

“After practice, he kept running, like he didn’t want to stop. No, like he couldn’t stop. Then he sped off ahead of me on his bike. Didn’t even stop at a red light.”

Troy usually stopped on yellow.

“He didn’t want to be late for dinner?” she said, and instantly regretted the way her statement curled at the end.

“Yeah, right,” Michael said, and his deadpan expression reminded Darcy he was just a stupid kid.

Why was Michael getting all worked up? Why was he trying to get
her
all crazed? Nobody told her what to think, but the thought of her little brother—

“Screw you, Michael! I’ll go see for myself.” Darcy untangled herself from Nick, bolted through the kitchen, and raced up the stairs. So what if Troy ran a few extra times around the track? Extra energy didn’t necessarily mean anything bad. Not always.

She paused at Troy’s closed bedroom door, remembering one of the many times her father had rapid cycled between depression and mania. Daddy had been sitting in the kitchen, forehead resting on his arms, still as a stone. Darcy had tried to tiptoe around him. And then,
boom
! Next thing she knew he’d jumped up, sprinted for the door, and started running in circles, while she, her mother, and Troy had sat out on the deck. They’d tired from hours of watching him before he’d even slowed. “Troy? Dinner’s up. Let’s go.”

Darcy creaked the door open, expecting to see her brother jogging around the room.

Troy hunched over his desk beneath the watchful eye of his favorite poster, Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue. He scribbled in a wire-bound notebook. The pen scratched in agreement with his twitching legs, his rocking body.

She’d never seen her brother look so much like Daddy before. “Hey, what’s going on?” she said, trying for a light tone. Instead, her voice came out in a whisper.

He mumbled to the notebook, waving her away with his free hand.

Earth-smelling air flowed through six wide-open windows. The slight breeze circulating throughout the room should’ve cooled her down and stopped her from itching with perspiration. Troy continued his nonstop writing. She’d learned about hypergraphia years ago after Daddy started wearing wrist guards to save him from worsening tendonitis. His writing compulsion would evolve from pounding the computer keys to filling notebooks with a frenzy of swirls and loops.

“Just gotta finish this.” Troy jumped up with the notebook, and Darcy startled. He read to himself in front of Darcy’s favorite Einstein poster, the one declaring that imagination was more important than knowledge. The sentiment was lost on her brother.

“Oh, this is so great!” Troy snapped the notebook shut, unleashing a flood of words. “D’you remember when we were like six and eight, and we went camping at Hermit Island in the boys’ and girls’ tents, and Dad was, like, so clueless, and you and Mom slept through that storm, and me and Dad ended up in a freakin’ puddle, and me and Dad slept in our old van, and he gave me all the blankets, and he didn’t even sleep?”

“Kinda.” He’d lost her at
tents
.

“The scarlet moon howls, and the sun flames, a color burst descent brightening the skies. Children’s book illustrations are so emotionally evocative, so in sync with the—”

“Troy.” She spoke his name clearly, like Mom often did when Dad grew unreachable.

He ran his fingers through his hair. “Dad was the only other person in the whole world who liked tapioca pudding, and now it’s too late to thank him for that and for that vase I broke and all those cool rubber bands and—”

That’s it; she’d better get her mother. Mom would know what to do with Troy. Tents, a moon, a flaming sun. She never could handle her dad when he talked at her instead of to her.

“Darcy, Troy! Dinner’s ready!” Mom yelled up the stairs in her singsong sticky-sweet voice.

“Do me a favor. This might sound weird. Could you bring me up a dinner?”

“Troy.”

“Maybe I should go to the library. What time does it close on Friday?” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, I can get Dad’s info online.”

“We have to go down to dinner.” If she told her mother Troy was acting all hyped out, the entire crowd downstairs would get involved, convinced Daddy’s genes had finally kicked in. Maybe her brother was just a little jazzed due to the anniversary, showing off the far reaches of normal? Mental illness wasn’t an exact science. What if she were wrong?

Worse. What if she were right? She had to tell Mom.

“I can’t go downstairs, not now. Say I’m sick.”

Nobody got out of one of her mother’s family dinners unless they were at death’s door. “Mom would be out of her mind. I mean, you know, upset. You have to come downstairs for dinner.”

As if on cue, her mother called up the stairs a second time. If they didn’t go down, she’d come and get them. The woman took stairs two at a time if she sensed noncompliance.

Was her little brother scared, too, worried about their shared family history?

“We’ll do it together.” She took his hand and gave it a squeeze, hoping he didn’t notice the tremors running through her hand. The image of her mother calming her father superimposed over their entwined fingers. So her brother experienced a little mania, so what? Once didn’t necessarily mean anything, right?