Full Circle (14 page)

They held to a communal silence until Adam was back inside the Oxford Ring Road and heading through Summertown toward his boardinghouse. He said, “I'm sorry I've been so quiet.”

“You don't need to apologize. Not for that. Ever.”

“I owe you an explanation. It's just . . .”

“Adam.” She waited until he stopped at a light and could look over to continue. “You made the trip. You climbed the hill. But you didn't find what your mother said you would. It's only natural that you feel deflated.”

Behind them, a car honked. Adam turned his attention back to the rain-swept road. “It's more than that. I feel like I let Mom down.”

He drove slowly and listened to the ticking clock and the tires slice through the wet. Adam expected her to come back with something about how he had done exactly as his mother had asked. How none of this was his fault. On the level of logic, he knew all this was true. Even so, he felt far more unsettled than when they had started off. Partly from what he had failed to find on the knob. But more because of what he had. He made the turn into Norham Gardens. The lane was quiet and empty beneath dark winter trees. Adam parked the car and glanced at the woman seated beside him. Six days.

Kayla said, “I have a problem. It's about Honor.”

“Your father's wife.”

Kayla avoided his gaze by fastening her attention upon the thistles he had brought down from the mountaintop. They were tied with her hair ribbon and set upon the dash. “This trip home is the first time I've seen Honor in over a year. The last time I came back was to tell Daddy that Geoffrey and I were getting engaged. I arrived to learn he was thinking about getting married again.”

“You didn't come back again for your own father's wed-ding?” When she did not respond, Adam said, ”That's pretty cold, Kayla.”

“Daddy married for the second time four years after Mom died. I'll never forget the way he told me about her. Nothing about who this woman was or how great she was. Only that he was lonely. I called her Mrs. Two. I know, it sounds horrid, but I was sixteen and angry that my father was being disloyal to my mother's memory. That's how it felt. And Mrs. Two was a nightmare. She was addicted to labels. She had the most wretched laugh. Like an old-fashioned cash register, you know how the keys clanged? That was her laugh. If she had any heart at all, it was measured in carats and hidden in the back of her jewelry safe. Ten months after they married, I used university in America as my excuse to flee. She lasted another year, then filed for divorce. She made all sorts of horrid claims, going for Daddy's jugular. The only thing that saved Daddy was that Joshua had detectives tracking Mrs. Two for months. They discovered some fairly awful things.”

“Good old Joshua.”

Kayla was silent for a time, then turned and looked at him. “It's so easy to break rules with you.”

“Go on with your story.”

“Honor was impossibly young and beautiful. And Daddy was so happy.”

“You thought he was going down for round three. You felt you had to warn him. This is natural, Kayla.”

“It wasn't like that. Well, maybe a little. I came home to talk about
my
love.”

Adam dropped his gaze to the hand held by both of his. “Your love.”

“Yes.”

“Geoffrey.”

“He said he was so fascinated with me and my project that he would toss aside his consultancy contract and take the managerial position without salary. He
said
. . .”

Her voice trailed off. Adam listened to rain spatter the car's roof. “What does this have to do with Honor?”

“She warned me. Or tried to. She asked me questions that
hurt
.” Kayla's words came in a sudden rush. “Was I right to trust him so fully after just coming to know him. Was he genuinely able to satisfy my lifetime longings. Was he a man who revealed his motives as well as his desires. I'd come home to tell Daddy how happy I was. Instead, I discovered him with a woman he had not been able to write me about, since he knew how much I loathed Mrs. Two, and he wanted this one to be genuinely different. And this new woman kept pressing me with questions.”

Adam read the rain's trickling script on the front wind-shield. “You thought she was out to undermine you with your father. This strange woman who had inserted herself into your father's life while you were away.”

Kayla stared at the rain and whispered, “I'm so ashamed.”

“I've only met Honor that one time. But it's enough to know she hasn't just forgiven you. She's forgotten it.”

Adam knew she wanted to brush his words aside. So he was up and moving before she could respond. He stepped into the rain and firmly shut the door. Moved to the trunk and pulled out his battered grip. Went back to the driver's door and watched her slip over the middle divider and start the car.

He gently touched her shoulder. “Thank you for helping me with this, Kayla. It means more than you will ever know.”

She closed the door, then sat and stared at him, a bleak look through the rain. He smiled once more and planted his fingers upon the side window, right at the level of her lips.

chapter 15

A
dam changed clothes and called his mother while standing by his bedroom window. From her first word, he knew it was not a good day. He stifled his worries and his own need to talk, as he had on so many other such times. A few words of reassurance was all he permitted himself, only the things that would ease her through this bad time. He then dialed the nurses' station from memory. The hospice aides all knew him, knew where he was, and treated him gently. No, nothing new. Just a bad day. Yes, of course they would phone if there was any change. Adam gave them his new cell-phone number as a contact and asked that they pass it on to his mother.

He slipped the phone into his pocket and raised the tall sash window as far as it would go. He stood close enough for the rain to dampen his face. But his breath did not come any easier.

From the floor below came strident calls of farewell. Children shrieked and thundered along the downstairs hallway. Doors were slammed, first in the house and then in a car out front. The silence afterward was deafening.

Adam descended the stairs and knocked on the parlor's closed door. At the sound of the faint voice within, he opened and asked, “Do you mind some more company?”

“Do I mind? My dear young man, there is no harsher hour to my week than the endless minutes after my family departs. Come in, come in. I fear you shall need to make your own tea, as Mrs. Brandt is off visiting her own children.”

“I'm fine, thanks.”

“My son and daughter-in-law want me to come live with them. But my dear late husband is here, do you see. He positively adored this old place. I fear were I to leave, I would lose this final shred of his company.” She waited until Adam was seated in the horsehair chair across from her to inquire, “Does that sound quite mad?”

“To be honest, everything about love strikes me as border-line insane.”

“Does it indeed?” A slender cane of wood the color of frozen honey leaned against the arm of her chair. Sylvia Beachley reached over and began rubbing the ivory head. “Now what, may I ask, would bring you to say such a thing?”

“I'm an analyst. A good one. I sift through information. I find patterns. I determine a course that reduces risk and points toward a winning solution.”

“Ah. Risk. A winning formula. How very interesting.”

“When it comes to love, though, I can't work out a perspective that makes sense. Even when I say what feels most right, even when I do what feels best, I still walk away feeling . . .”

“Wronged. Damaged. Vulnerable. Wounded.” Dr. Beachley stroked the cane's head for a long moment, then said, “The tutorial system followed at Oxford is a most curious practice. The tutor's task is not to help students graduate or increase their grades. It is to prepare them for
life
. To help them identify core issues, such as what their gifts are, where their passions lie, and how they might make the most of the days they have here on earth. There are certain rules which dominate a tutorial. One, there is no wrong question. Two, whatever the course, the student commits to accepting the challenge and studying. Studying hard.”

“Is that what we're having? A tutorial?”

“That is for you to determine, young man.”

“I'd like that a lot.”

“How very interesting. Do you know, I've recently been presented with quite a serious dilemma from another of my students. One to which you may very well hold the key. I have been sitting here wondering whether you came here for this reason, as it were. But an issue of trust is involved, and I have wondered . . . But all that in due course.” She thumped her cane. “Very well. Young man, the first rule of analysis, then, is to
determine your parameters
. Do you understand this term,
parameters
?”

“Borders. Boundaries.”

“Precisely. You must define the structure within which you operate. There must be limitations, assumptions, givens. But with love, what can these be? How can you establish the proper dimensions of affection?”

“Experience.”

“Experience is decidedly the crucial aspect which most affects our self-determination. But what if the experience of love is bad? What if all we know of past love is pain?”

Adam did not feel what he would have expected, which was, to flee. The professor did not pry. She did not claw at his memories. Nor did she ask him to dump the issues in her lap. It was an astonishing sensation, being stripped until he sat there, emotionally naked, without pain or shame. “Then love becomes something to avoid.”

She thumped her cane upon the floor. “Very good. So in this case, the parameters within which we operate are solitude. Isolation. Aloofness. An emotional vacuum. But then arises a stimulus from
outside the parameters
. Suddenly the observer is faced with a calamity. What if the parameters are wrong? What if the defining factors that have ruled a lifetime of research and work and action are totally invalid? What then?”

“I don't know that they're wrong.” Adam's voice sounded raw to his own ears.

“No, certainly not. There is always the chance that the
experiment
was wrong. That factors unrelated to the correctness have entered in. The controls were breached.”

For some reason, the words rocked him. Not what she had said. But what she implied. “Control.”

Dr. Beachley directed her smile at the cane's head. “Oh, I say. You
are
good.” She thumped her cane a second time, a gentle drumbeat that reverberated at the core of his being. “For the sake of argument, just for a moment, let us say that the issue we face is indeed that the parameters are flawed. That in order to proceed to the correct analysis, the entire course of study must be changed. This would mean even the most basic of issues are open to change, would it not? Even the
definitions
we have developed, concepts like
risk
and
winning
.”

She twisted her head so that she could elevate her gaze to his. “What then, Master Wright? How, then, shall you seek
new
parameters?”

He was silent.

“It would mean looking
beyond
yourself, would it not? Seeking
outside
your experiences.”

Adam did not speak.

“But how is this possible? Who are we to trust with such a vital issue as defining the concepts, the core structures, that shape our lives?”

Her gaze was milky with age, her voice cracked and seamed as her face. Yet the power, the sheer brute force, held him captivated. Speechless.

“This, then, is your first assignment, young man. If you are to search beyond your experiences, where should you look? Who could you possibly trust enough to help you define what love is, whether it is worth the
risk
of loving, how you might
win
at this most daunting of challenges?”

Kayla arrived to find the house silent. A note from Honor was propped on the kitchen cabinet, saying her father had been called to an urgent meeting, and Honor had driven him for moral support. Kayla placed Adam's thistles in a tiny crystal vase and reread the note. Honor's concern for Peter came through loud and clear. Kayla unpacked, napped, and returned down-stairs in time to watch the early winter dusk take control of the Cotswold valley. The rain had stopped while she slept, and a pale light bathed the dew-soaked world. Kayla's gaze gradually shifted from farmhouse smoke rising in feather-strokes to her own reflection. Memories of her first meeting with Honor misted the rain-streaked glass. She used the ringing phone to turn away.

Adam asked, “Am I calling at a bad time?”

“Hi. No, it's fine.”

“I've been downstairs talking with the professor. And some­thing she said . . . Kayla, you need to apologize to Honor. Today.”