One Mountain Away (22 page)

A house was meant for a family. The final unit of the old bottle factory was designed for a single man who was tired of yard work and housekeeping nobody else appreciated. The condo that would be his was to be the simplest of the six, with a small bedroom for Maddie when she stayed overnight and a larger one for himself. The rest of the renovation would be open and airy, stripped down to nothing except lovingly recycled materials and surfaces he could wipe down in minutes.

As he turned off the electric sander he heard his phone ringing, but by the time he picked up, the ringing had stopped. He checked caller ID, but the number was unfamiliar. Curious now, since the call had come in on his home number, he waited a moment and picked up the receiver to see if the caller had left a message. Moments later he was on his way to the Moon and Stars yoga studio.

Taylor was just finishing up a class in a long room with mirrored walls when he walked in. He knew enough yoga to recognize the posture of her students as Savasana, the “corpse” pose used for relaxation at the end of a class. When she saw him in the doorway, she went perfectly still, then gave the class some final instructions before she hurried over to greet him.

“Maddie?” she asked softly.

“She had a seizure on the playground and fell off the climbing dome. She’s at the hospital. Sam’s with her.” He hesitated.

She knew him too well. “What else?”

“And your mother is, too. She happened to be there. She called me.”

“What are you talking about?” She honestly seemed lost.

“Your mother was at the park when Maddie fell. She called me. Sam tried your cell phone and couldn’t get you.”

“She was at the park?” Taylor held up her hands. “Don’t! I don’t care. How badly was Maddie hurt?”

“I don’t know, honey. I missed the call. I just got the message, and when I tried to get your mom, I got voice mail.”

“Let me get my things.”

Once they were in his car he offered Taylor his phone. “Try calling your mom again. I programmed her number into my speed dial before I left. She’s number four. See if you can find out what happened.”

Taylor didn’t take his phone. Instead, she pulled out her own and hit several buttons. “Sam called. It’s right here in the call history. But there’s no message because my voice mail’s been screwed up. It takes forever for them to fix anything. I’ve tried and tried!”

Ethan waited impatiently at a light. “I’d like to know what’s going on, wouldn’t you?”

“It won’t help to know. We just need to get there.”

“It would help me.”

“What was she doing there, anyway? Were they holding a charity tennis match? Somehow I don’t think so. Has she been stalking Maddie?”

“I don’t know what she was doing there today. I didn’t talk to her.” His mind was racing in circles, but all of them ended and began with the truth. He couldn’t pretend otherwise.

He took a breath, because he knew what was coming. “I saw her from a distance at the park when I picked up Maddie a few weeks ago. I went to see her afterward, and I asked her exactly what you just did. She’s never approached Maddie or told her who she is. But she goes there sometimes just to see her.”

“Damn!” Taylor hit the dashboard with her palm. “She has no right!”

“She’s Maddie’s grandmother.”

“No, she is not! She gave up the right to be
anything
to my daughter.”

“We’re going to have this conversation later. I can’t drive safely and have it now, Taylor.”

She began to cry and tried to fight it. He glanced quickly at her, and saw both the tears and the fury. Everything inside him twisted into knots.

“If she hadn’t been there,” he said, because somebody had to, “if she hadn’t had the presence of mind to call me and ask me to find you, we wouldn’t even know what had happened.”

Taylor cried silently beside him.

* * *

The trip to the hospital seemed to take forever, but it probably only took minutes. At the emergency entrance the paramedics capably and quickly got Maddie inside. She hadn’t regained consciousness. She had never known for even a moment that the grandmother she’d never met sat beside her the entire way, holding her hand.

Once they arrived, Charlotte knew better than to try to assert herself. While she had been required to turn off her cell phone in the ambulance, she knew Ethan might already have gotten her message and could be on the way to the hospital with their daughter. The last thing Taylor needed to see when she arrived was her mother conferring with hospital personnel about Maddie’s treatment.

She was spared explaining when the hospital staff whisked Maddie away to be examined without her. Some minutes later, as her legs were about to give out from pacing, a nurse returned to say the doctor on call had ordered an immediate CT scan, and since she was still unconscious, they preferred that Charlotte take a seat in the emergency waiting room until she was needed.

Charlotte lowered herself to a chair in an empty row and rested her head in her hands. Part of her knew she should leave now, before Taylor arrived. Another part thought she should stay, so she could tell whoever arrived first exactly what had happened and what was being done about it. She was so shaken she couldn’t make a decision, and so drained she wasn’t sure she had the strength to go outside where she could finally turn on her cell phone and call a taxi.

Before she could decide, she looked up and saw Taylor jog through the emergency room doors, heading straight for reception, which was only about twenty feet from where Charlotte sat.

“Let me check,” the woman at the desk said calmly, after Taylor told her why she was there. “You’re the mother? Do you have identification?”

“You need proof?” Taylor asked angrily. “At a time like this?” She riffled through her purse and began to slap cards on the desk.

Charlotte saw that Ethan had followed their daughter inside, and now he put his hand on Taylor’s shoulder. “We’re worried and upset,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m Maddie’s grandfather.”

The woman ignored Taylor. “Your wife was with her, but I think they’ve taken your granddaughter for a CT scan. The doctor will be out as soon as there’s something to tell you. You’ll need to present your insurance card and fill out the paperwork over there.” She pointed to a window just beyond reception.

“I want to be with my daughter,” Taylor said, punching every word for emphasis. “Now.”

The woman looked her over, then her gaze softened. “I’ll see what I can do. Why don’t you sit over there while I find somebody who can talk to you?”

She pointed to the row of nearly empty chairs where Charlotte was just getting to her feet. Charlotte hadn’t been sure she could feel worse, but now, at the fury in Taylor’s eyes, she knew how foolish that had been.

Ethan took Taylor’s arm and edged her away from the desk. It looked as if he was trying to talk to her, his voice low, but Taylor shook off his hand. She focused on Charlotte standing at the end of the row, and for just a moment she looked stricken. Then, before Ethan could say another word or Charlotte could move in her direction, she strode toward her.

“Why?” she demanded, when she was facing Charlotte. “Why were you watching my daughter? Why were you
there?
”

“I knew she’d been having a hard time, Taylor,” Charlotte said quietly. “I just wanted to see how she was doing. I thought—”

“You
thought?
You have no
right
to think about Maddie? What gave you the right, Mother? You didn’t want her, or rather, you didn’t want
me
to have her. You wanted me to have an abortion, or, barring that, you wanted me to give her away. And when I said I wouldn’t? You told me to get out. I was sixteen, pregnant, and you told me to get out of the house unless I did what you wanted!”

Charlotte’s eyes filled, and the tears spilled over. She said the only thing she could. “I wish I could take back that day, Taylor. You have no idea how badly I wish I could.”

“And I don’t care. Because when I had her too early, when she was fighting for every single breath, you said if I had only done what you wanted me to, my poor imperfect daughter, my brave little girl fighting for her life, would never have been born! And wouldn’t the world have been a better place, Mother? One less imperfect child.”

Ethan put his hands on Taylor’s shoulders. “Stop it, Taylor. This isn’t the time or place.”

“There is no time. There is no place.”

Charlotte felt as if somebody had sucked the air out of her lungs. For a moment she struggled to breathe. When she could finally draw a breath, she faced Ethan and managed to speak. “You told her what I said that night? You told Taylor what I said just to
you
outside the intensive care nursery the night Maddie was born?”

Taylor gave a bitter laugh. “Nobody told me! I overheard you. I was there. I’d gotten up to see her, but neither of you knew it.”

Ethan looked sick, but before he could say anything, Charlotte did.

“Taylor, I was devastated. She was suffering. All I could think about was—”

“Stop!” Taylor stepped out of her father’s grasp. “Leave, okay? I’m going to see if I can find out what’s going on here, and when I come back, I want you gone. Just the way you’ve been gone for my daughter’s entire life. Just the way you were gone for most of mine.”

She turned and strode toward the reception desk. Charlotte closed her eyes and swayed.

Ethan reached out to grab her. “Sit,” he said.

She tried to shrug off his hands. “No, I’d better leave. I’ll call somebody to pick me up.”

He looked doubtful she was capable of either. She knew her cheeks were as colorless as air, and with his hands locked on her arms, he’d probably determined how thin she really was.

He dropped his hands at last and stepped away.

“Will you let me know…?” Her voice trailed off.

He nodded, although they both knew that if Taylor found out he’d been in touch with Charlotte again, she would be furious.

“I’m not going to be anybody’s pawn,” he said. “Not yours or our daughter’s. But I’ll let you know. You deserve that.”

She felt behind her to find her purse. “Maddie never opened her eyes in the ambulance. I held her hand, but she never saw my face.”

“I’ll call you.”

She moved away, still unsteady on her feet. She skirted the reception desk, where Taylor was once again arguing with the woman behind it, and disappeared through the doors.

Outside, she leaned against a pillar and tried to breathe slowly. She told herself she had done everything she could for Maddie, and that riding in the ambulance with her granddaughter had been the right thing to do. But her profound sense of loss was all too familiar. It was the same feeling she had experienced on the day that Ethan and Taylor had walked away from her forever.

Chapter Twenty

First Day Journal, May 14

It’s not easy to look back at my life and see when problems began and solutions fell by the wayside. Yet at the time I believed the patterns were forming without my help. I was there, like an actor repeating my lines, but I never realized I was also the playwright.

Now I am there again.

Taylor is not an easy baby. Even after our week of separation I try to nurse her, but she screams for more, and formula never quite agrees with her. We walk the floor together at night, but even when she is between bouts of colic and earaches, she seems dissatisfied, as if I should know how to comfort her and she holds me accountable.

My years and experience with the King boys have no impact on a baby. She prefers Ethan, who’s less worried about how to please her. She will sleep in his arms, while in mine she stiffens and screams.

Since I feel like such a failure at home, I go back to school in the fall and take a heavy load of classes. The wife of one of my professors offers child care, and Taylor loves it there. No one else finds her behavior discouraging. Experienced and relaxed, they keep her happy and entertained, and sometimes when I retrieve her at the end of my day, she cries to stay.

I finish my classes on Taylor’s first birthday. My baby girl loves the gifts we’ve chosen, and my homemade cake dissolves in a pool of crumbs and slobber on her high chair. For once I fulfill my role as her mother exactly as I’m supposed to, and I am encouraged. As my graduation present Ethan buys tickets to Hawaii. His parents agree to babysit for the week we’ll be gone.

The trip is a second honeymoon. Without school, work or our baby, we’re lovers and friends once again. Ethan has been unfailingly supportive as I learn to be a parent. He seems born to the job.

We talk about our future. I’m torn between spending the next year at home and finding a place for myself in the world. I have my education and degree, but neither is as important as my ambition. I have a new reason to succeed. Now I desperately want to provide Taylor with all the things I never had, hoping, I think, that it will make up for my lack of mothering skills.

Ethan wonders how we’ll manage two busy schedules and a baby. He’s considering his own future and looking for employment. To my disappointment, he’s only looking in the Blue Ridge, determined to stay in the mountains he loves. The firm where he interned wants him to remain, but I think his career will be better served in a larger one where he can make his mark and still design the structures he most loves. He agrees, but reminds me we might need to move as far away as Tennessee. What’s the point of my beginning a career in Asheville, he asks, if I’ll just have to leave? Why not begin once we’re settled?

I love being with him, and I’m beginning to relax. Now that she isn’t colicky, Taylor’s easier to mother, and Ethan seems to thrive on my love. Maybe I can settle into a simpler life.

We return home to find that Ethan’s mother has completely rearranged our house and Taylor’s schedule. She’s sweetly apologetic, of course, but she hints that since I have little experience with babies or keeping a house for a professional man, she’s given me the benefit of her superior breeding and knowledge. An angry Ethan tells her we don’t appreciate the changes, but her message is clear. I’m not good enough to be married to her son, or to be the mother of her granddaughter, and as much as it pains her, she’s been forced to set our shabby little world to rights.