Moonlight on Monterey Bay (19 page)

“It should tell me that that time of my life, a time that shaped me, doesn’t fit into my relationship with Sam.”

“You can’t be sure it doesn’t, Maddie. Don’t ever underestimate the power of love and what it can do to a person’s thinking.”

Maddie nibbled on her bottom lip. The baby’s birthday was coming up. Five years. Five long years in which she had healed, had put her life together. Lily seemed to sense her thoughts and gave her a quick hug. “I love you, Mad. You’re so special, and I know somehow this is all going to work out. It
has
to.”

Maddie nodded, then caught the ball that Davey kicked her way and tossed it back to him. She loved Lily’s kids so much. And every single time she was with them she thought of the children she would have herself one day. Now she looked back at Lily and forced a smile to her face. “This is much too serious a talk for a gorgeous day like this. Come on, let’s take the kids over to the meadow and fly a kite.”

And that, she thought later, was the ultimate solution: avoidance. She simply would not think about any of it, except for the joy Sam was bringing into her life in daily, delicious, stupendous doses.

ELEVEN

Joseph walked into Maddie’s office and tried to look stern.

“I thought I told you to take the day off,” he said. Then, before she could answer, he gestured toward the window. “And why the pickup truck outside? You’re not trying to run off with our valuable early-attic antiques, are you?”

Maddie laughed and picked up some keys from her desk. “I just stopped by to check my mail.”

She wore jeans and an old UC Santa Cruz sweatshirt with a faded banana slug on it. Joseph thought she looked beautiful.

“And the truck?”

“I’m picking up some things at the nursery for Sam’s yard,” Maddie answered. “And a tree for me.”

Joseph’s smile faded and concern shadowed his
face. He glanced at the calendar on the wall. “Tomorrow is the birth date. I should have remembered.”

“No, Joseph, you shouldn’t have. My annual pilgrimage is a very selfish thing. It makes me feel better to plant my tree each year on the baby’s birthday, but you don’t need to remember or feel guilty if you don’t remember. There’s too much guilt in this world as it is.”

Joseph walked over and wrapped her in his arms, hugging her hard.

When he pulled away, Maddie’s eyes were misty and her voice thick with affection. “Now what was that for, Joseph?” she asked. “Are you going soft on me.”

“Sometimes I need to let you know that even though you drive me crazy at times, I love you as if you were my own daughter. And I couldn’t be prouder of you if you were.”

“I know, Joseph.” Maddie touched his cheek. “Thanks.”

“Now get out of here before I
do
get mushy.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” she said, blowing him a kiss before she disappeared through the doorway.

The plantings were perfect, Maddie decided. The consummate finishing touch. She pulled them from the back of the pickup, one by one, and dragged each around the house to Sam’s deck. And she wasn’t about
to trust them to some gardener Sam picked out of the Yellow Pages. She’d do it herself and surprise him when he showed up later in the day. Besides, it would keep her mind occupied. And she needed that more and more each day.

Two hours later, down to the last plant, Maddie sat back on her heels and surveyed the yard. It looked beautiful, casual and lush and natural, as if a strong ocean wind had blown a host of seeds onto the land and they had grown in perfect harmony where they landed.

“I hope I’m in the right place,” a voice intoned from the distance. “Madeline’s botanical gardens, I presume?”

Maddie looked over her shoulder and smiled. “What do you think?”

Sam strode across the lawn until he reached her side. What he thought was that the vision of Maddie sitting there in the grass, with a smudge of dirt on her chin and loose wisps of dark hair clinging to her flushed cheeks, was the most beautiful sight in the world. “I think that I have finally found a gardener I can’t live without.” He leaned over her and kissed her on the top of her hair.

“Do you like it?”

“Sure I do.” He tossed his suit coat up on the deck railing and came back to where she sat. “In fact I don’t know what I like the most—the flowers, the tree in the middle of my driveway, or you in the middle of
the dirt. It’s a toss-up.” He sat down behind her, straddling her, one leg bent on either side, and nuzzled the skin on her neck. The mixture of earth and soap and sunshine floated up and teased his nostrils. “Heady stuff,” he murmured into her ear.

“The flowers?”

“Nope. You. The smell of you.”

“You’re crazy, Sam.”

“Crazy about you.” He lifted her braid and kissed the back of her neck. “Do you want me to bring the tree back here?”

“No, that’s mine. I’ll take it over to my place.”

“Okay.” Sam pushed aside the uncomfortableness he felt at her reference to
her
place. Any separation—semantic or geographic—had an edge to it. And the fact that it bothered him, bothered him all to hell.

“Come on.” He got up and pulled her up beside him. “We need to celebrate this botanical masterpiece with a drink.” He wound his fingers through hers and led the way up the deck steps and into the house. Maddie went to the bathroom to wash the dirt off her hands, and by the time she returned, Sam had discarded his suit for jeans and a T-shirt and was sitting out on the deck with a glass in his hand. Soft music played on the stereo in the distance.

“You’re getting to look like a real Santa Cruz guy,” she said, coming up behind him and tugging on the hair that now curled over the collar of his shirt. “Another year or two and who knows?”

“Just call me laid-back Sam.”

“I won’t say what first popped into my head,” she said with a mischievous grin.

“No need, m’love. Those eyes tell all.” He reached for her hand. “Come sit with me,” he said, and drew her down beside him on the outdoor couch.

Maddie curled her long legs up beneath her. She took a glass of mineral water from the tray and sipped it slowly. “Joseph has had some inquiries about buying the business,” she said. “He’s thrilled, and we have you to thank, Sam. It’s because of this house and the attention it’s received.”

“No, it’s because of what you did here.” Sam took a long swallow of his drink, then set it back on the table. “But that’s good about the offers. Will you stay on there if it sells?”

“I don’t know. There are a lot of things I’d like to try my hand at. Gardening is one, if I could earn a living at it. I love working with plants and the earth. And later it would allow me time with the kids.”

Sam frowned. “Kids?”

“My kids. When I have them.”

He nodded. “Oh, sure,” he said.

“I think that’s important—spending time with them.” She wondered later if she had subconsciously skewed the conversation this way, a subtle reminder to Sam as to what she was all about, and what he didn’t seem to be about. But it was all vague in her mind, as if someone else were leading the conversation.

“I’d like to be with my daughter more,” he said quietly.

Maddie was silent.

“She’s secure in England, where she is,” he added.

Maddie nodded. “She probably is.” She fiddled with the edge of her sweatshirt, then said, “But it’s only here she’d get to know her father. Maybe here on this very beach, Sam, building sand castles, laughing with you, being a part of your life for a little while—”

“If I thought it would be good for her—”

“Sam—” The idyllic mood was already gone, romance postponed to some later date. Maddie could feel it in her own body, in the tightening of his, so she plunged in, spilling out undefined feelings that had been rumbling around inside her for days. “Sam, I think it’s a cop-out.”

The furrow in Sam’s forehead deepened. “What’s the
it
here Maddie?”

“The reasons for the distance from Sara. I think those excuses—about her security and her relatives and her stepfather and her being five years old—are simply rationalizations. You’re still her father, and you’re still a part of her life, whether it’s for a few weeks a year or longer. And I think you’re simply afraid of it all, of the commitment, of repeating past mistakes, of—” She felt the heat bubbling up inside of her, heard her words floating around on the early-evening air. “Sam,” she said, nearly collapsing on his
name, “do you realize how lucky you are to have Sara in your life?”

The sun was sinking down behind the hills, and the sky over the water began to deepen to a midnight blue. Maddie didn’t notice. Something had been let loose inside of her, and although a part of her said to hold back, the other, the stronger, refused to pull in the reins.

Sam listened, his own emotions moving slowly and steadily up to the surface. He loved Sara so much it hurt sometimes, worried about her from a distance. “Maddie,” he said, “you don’t understand about this, about having a child—”

He didn’t have to look at Maddie to know he had unleashed some awful kind of torrent in her, but he did look, and what he saw was heart-stopping green eyes brimming with sorrow, a face he had come to love crumbling beneath the force of an emotion he didn’t begin to understand. “Maddie—”

She shook her head, and hushed him with a wave of her hand. Her voice was strained. “Sam, I do understand. I understand the emotion, the pain, the separation. Sam, I had a baby, too—a beautiful baby girl—”

Sam’s breathing slowed. He turned and looked into her beautiful, sad face. “I don’t understand.”

Maddie sucked in some air and plunged on in, her voice wobbly but clear. “Tomorrow is her birthday. She’ll be five years old.”

Sam was unsure how to respond, but Maddie kept talking, her voice thickening with emotion.

“It wasn’t planned, the pregnancy. When I found out, the man I thought I loved held me, told me it would be all right, and then the next day he was gone, leaving me money for an abortion. It was an awful time. My mother was still living, but she was very sick, and I was taking care of her.

“I decided to have the baby, but I knew from the start that I couldn’t keep her. My mother needed me all the time by then, and there wasn’t any money. No relatives who could help. No father.”

Sam put his arm around her, gently, carefully. “Maddie, you don’t have to go on.”

“Yes I do, Sam.” She touched his arm gently, as if to apologize for something, he didn’t know what. And then she continued.

“People helped me. Angela, the lady you met that day in Capitola, found a wonderful couple who desperately wanted a baby. She took care of the legalities, and helped me in other ways too. She was there with me, helped with my mother, and then afterward. After my mother died, she suggested I come down here to Santa Cruz.

“I thought I was okay, but after the baby was born, I crumbled up inside, like a flower without water and sun. I was brittle and brown and dry. It was only after I moved here that I began to heal. Joseph and Sadie, Lily and Jack, the ocean, they all
helped to put the pieces back together and breathe life back into me.”

“And the baby?” Sam asked.

“She’s with a wonderful family. And I know in my heart it was right. But it still, even now—” She looked off toward the darkening sky. A sad smile slipped across her face. “Do you know sometimes, like on her birthday, I still can feel it, the fullness in my breasts, the connection between her body and mine? Silly …”

Her voice drifted off, and inside of Sam an enormous ache welled up for her pain and her sadness. “Are you in touch with the family?” he asked, his voice tight.

Maddie shook her head. “I’ve built my own connections with her. That tree in your driveway is her tree. Each year on her birthday I go out to one of the parks and I plant a tree for her. The tree … well, it’s life, you know?”

Her damp eyes grew large with sadness. Sam thought he would drown in them. “Oh, Maddie,” he started, but found he couldn’t say more.

“And each year I write her a letter,” Maddie went on, knowing if she paused for too long, she wouldn’t continue, and somehow it was vital to her to let Sam know, to tell him who she really was. “In the letter I tell her about me, about my year, my thoughts, about her tree and where it is, about what my love for her means, how it helps me. How I pray for her—”

“And the letters … you mail them to her?”

“No. I don’t know where she is. I don’t want to know. I didn’t think that would be fair to her or to her parents, and I didn’t know if I would be able to stand it. I put my letters in a box, and some year, when she’s older, I’ll have Angela give them to her adoptive mother, and she can decide, she can do what’s best with them.”

Sam thought about the tree in the driveway. Her child’s tree, a young oak tree that would grow up strong and healthy and sturdy, just as she prayed for the child she had given birth to. His heart swelled, his arms tightened around her shoulders. “You’re some lady, Maddie Ames.”

“It’s survival,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. And then they came, in bucketfuls, down her cheeks, onto her sweatshirt.

He held her, rocked her, and kissed the tears away.

“Do you know something, Sam? I’ve never cried for her. Never before—” Her voice broke, smothered by sobs of grief.