The Secret Between Us (22 page)

Then she drove the kids to school, with her daughter as distant as ever, and she felt like a fraud again. She could yell and scream all she wanted on the phone, but if the issue between Tom and her was trust, she was abusing his. He didn’t know about Grace.

Chapter 17

Deborah left the bakery with a warm sticky bun and the desperate wish that her father lived two hours away. Being thirty-eight years of age didn’t seem to count for anything when it came to fearing a parent. Parking behind his car, she entered the house quietly. His coffee was ready, his bagel set out. She put her bag on the table and was mustering the courage to go looking for him when she heard him come down the front stairs.

He gave her a brief glance—more uncomfortable than angry, she realized with some relief—and went straight to the coffee urn. “You have yours?” he asked without turning.

“I’m all set.”

He fixed his coffee and took the bagel to the table. Once seated, he saw the bakery bag. “Is your sister all right?” he asked quietly.

Curiosity was a good sign, Deborah decided. Subdued was better than belligerent. “She’s fine. Not happy, though. I forbade her to go downstairs for at least one more day.”

“And she’ll listen to you?” he asked with a wry twist of his mouth.

She took the question for the rhetorical one it was and said, “Dad, I need your help this morning.”

“Don’t ask me to call her. I’m the last one she’ll listen to.”

“Not Jill,” Deborah said. “It’s something else. I need to take off for a couple of hours. It’s about that call you received yesterday.” As succinctly as she could—while his humor held—she told him about the suit the widow wanted to bring, the detectives from the district attorney’s office, and what the report said about Cal running out of the woods in front of her car. She ended by telling him about Tom.

Drinking his coffee, he listened without interruption. When she was done, he asked, “Why meet with him?”

“Because he asked,” she said simply, then added, “He knows his brother was suicidal. He’s trying to deal with that.”

“Throwing oneself in front of a car doesn’t guarantee death.”

“For a Coumadin user, it might.”

“Was he depressed? Did he leave a note?”

“No note. And Tom doesn’t know if he was depressed.”

“Was he under unusual stress?”

“I don’t know. Tom might. I’d like to ask him.”

“Would he tell you the truth?”

“Yes. We have a good rapport. I think he sees me as a resource. When he learned his brother was on Coumadin, he asked me lots of questions about it.”

“Think it’s a setup?”

“No. I think he likes to bounce things off me.”

“Why you?” her father asked. “There must be other people in his life.”

Deborah was sure that there were, but whether Tom confided in them was something else. “I think it’s just that I live in the town where his brother lived. My daughter had him in school. Tom says he trusts me.”

Michael arched a brow. “His sister-in-law is suing you.”

Deborah didn’t need the reminder. “He says he didn’t know she was. He hadn’t met her until last week.”

“That’s odd.”

“It’s an odd family. Or was. Tom is all that’s left. He’s struggling with what’s happened.”

“That’s natural,” Michael granted. “But should you be the one helping him?”

“It feels right to me.”

“Like redemption?”

“Maybe,” she acknowledged. Whatever was proven about Cal’s intentions that night, the fact remained that he had been hit by her car.

Her father swallowed the last of his bagel. “I think Hal should go with you.”

For the first time in the discussion, Deborah disagreed. “Hal would inhibit the conversation.”

“It’s not like this guy’s your friend. What if he’s wearing a wire?”

“He won’t be,” Deborah said. “If we’re discussing his brother, he has more to lose than I do. He won’t want any talk of suicide on tape. Suicide would jeopardize a life insurance payment. Besides, he is kind of a friend.”

“A friend who gives redemption.”

Deborah didn’t know whether Michael was being facetious, but chose to take him seriously. “I can talk with him. He listens.”

“Hal should be with you.”

“I trust Tom.”

Michael was quiet. Then he raised guarded eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I need you to cover for me this morning.”

“You could have called. Or walked in here and said you had a conference with one of the kids’ teachers. You could have just not shown up, like yesterday.”

She felt duly guilty. “I’m sorry for that. I didn’t have much advance warning.”

“And today you do? I think you want my blessing for this, but I can’t give it, Deborah. You walk in here talking about being sued, and now you’re going to meet with the man who’s suing you? That’s crazy.”

“Is it?” she asked, because there was a very practical side to her meeting with Tom. “He’s not the one suing me. The widow is. He may be able to control her.”

“You said he barely knows her.”

“But if anyone can influence her, he can. He’ll tell her the down side of a suit. I need to do this, Dad. Grace and I won’t rest easy until the case is resolved.”

He stared at her for a minute. “It doesn’t matter what I say. You’ll do what you want.” Turning his back on her, he went to the sink.

Deborah sat for another minute. She had come for her father’s approval, but suddenly that seemed sad. “I’m an adult,” she said. “I have instincts. Sometimes I have to follow them.”

“What do you want from me then?”

She stood. “Respect. Acknowledgment that maybe what’s right for me wouldn’t be right for you.”

He half turned. “You girls exasperate me.”

“We can’t always live up to your expectations, but that doesn’t necessarily make us wrong. Times change. I need you to understand why I’m doing what I am.”

“I’m trying, Deborah, but it’s hard.”

“It’s hard for me, too,” she replied. The hollow feeling inside wasn’t new, but finally she had an inkling where it came from. “You keep saying you miss Mom, but don’t you think I do, too? She was always in my corner, and I’m in a tough place right now. I need you to support me. If she’d been here…” Throat tight, she stopped.

Gruffly, Michael said, “Well, she isn’t. You’re right. Times change.”

Deborah’s eyes filled with tears. “She was a good listener,” she managed to say, but that was all. Leaving her father at the sink, she returned to her car. She had driven barely a block when she pulled over, put her forehead to the wheel, and wept.

She missed her mother. Thirty-eight years old, and she might have been five, but too much had happened in her life of late. Deborah hadn’t even cried like this when Ruth died. She’d had to hold things together for her father and everyone else then. Now she sobbed until she ran out of tears.

That made her
late for her meeting with Tom at the park. His black car was the only one in the dirt lot. As she parked beside it, she spotted him standing by a stream some thirty feet away.

Putting on sunglasses to hide her eyes, she crossed the grass. “I’m sorry. I meant to be here on time.”

“I thought you’d decided not to come,” he said. “Your lawyer must have advised against it.”

She waved dismissively and looked down at the stream. The soft sound of its movement was soothing. “Funny. I have no problem with water like this. I love the ocean. Love lakes. Love taking a shower or bath. It’s just rain that upsets me.”

For a minute, he didn’t reply. Then he said, “You sound like you have a cold.”

So much for wearing dark glasses. “No. I just had a long crying jag.” There seemed no point in denying it. “That’s why I was late. I just sat there on the side of the road crying. Totally helpless.”

She could feel him studying her. “What caused it?”

She shrugged. “Life. It overwhelms sometimes.”

“But you cry and recover. Some people don’t. Why is that?”

She looked up at him then. He wore a wrinkled shirt, tails hanging over his jeans. His hands were in his pockets. His eyes met hers.

“I could say we are born with survival skills,” she said, “but it’s experience, too. Life treats each of us differently.”

A pair of chickadees flitted by. She watched them disappear into a willow on the opposite bank.

“But what about the person who refuses to acknowledge his emotions?” Tom asked.

“Is that what Cal did?”

The birds were joined by others in the tree, loudly calling to each other.

“Pretty much,” Tom admitted. “I was talking with Selena after we saw the medical records. She kept asking how he could have had those little strokes and still risked her life by driving with her in the car, like she was expendable. She kept asking how he could have kept so much of himself from her, as if he didn’t need her at all. But Cal always hid what he felt.”

“Always?”

It was a minute before he said, “My parents didn’t encourage emotional expression. My mom didn’t like crying, and once we were old enough to take care of ourselves, she just wasn’t there. What’s the point of crying, if there’s no one to hear?”

Having just stopped sobbing herself, Deborah said, “Catharsis.”

He shot her a look. “You know that and I know it, but Cal? He never saw the point, I guess.”

“Why wasn’t your mom there? Did she travel with your dad?”

“That was the official story, but the truth was, she was off doing her own thing. I never knew what that was, only that she didn’t like being tied down any more than my father did.”

“But they chose to have children,” Deborah argued and would have said something about the responsibility inherent in that if he hadn’t spoken first.

“They didn’t actively choose to have us. She used to tell me that we were both little surprises. I always believed she was relieved when Cal came along, so that she wouldn’t feel so guilty leaving me alone. By the time I was in high school, it was just Cal and me for days at a time.”

“Where was Social Services?” Deborah asked in alarm.

“Not at our house.” He qualified that. “In fairness to my parents, we had food and clothes and heat. We never lacked in the physical sense.”

“Only in the emotional. But why would it take a greater toll on Cal than on you?” Deborah asked, because Tom was clearly steady, solid both physically
and
emotionally.

Taking his hands from his pockets, he said, “Maybe I was a lousy parent to him.”

Deborah wondered if that was why he didn’t have a wife and kids of his own. “You were a child yourself.”

“I was old enough. I saw how normal people lived. I had friends. Their parents showed me kindness and warmth. Cal never had those kinds of friends. People never reached out to him.”

“He was very good-looking.”

“But he didn’t smile. He couldn’t converse easily. He didn’t have friends like mine, so I tried to give him what those parents gave me.” His eyes met hers. They looked haunted. “I did what I could. I guess it wasn’t enough. Cal closed himself off so he wouldn’t have to feel—at least, that’s what I chose to believe. It was easier for me to think he didn’t feel anything, than that he was in pain.”

He began to walk along the bank, eventually stopping at a bench. It had been green once, but was faded to a soft gray. Deborah doubted he even saw it. He was preoccupied.

She followed him along the shore. When she reached the bench, he said, “Cal fell in love once. He couldn’t have been more than twelve, but he was crazy about a girl in his class, and for a couple of weeks, she was crazy about him. For the few weeks they were together, he was a different kid. Then she fell in love with someone else.”

“He must have been crushed.”

“That’s what I’d have been, but who knew with Cal? He clammed up. No expression of sorrow at all. Except he barely ate. When he decided he’d had enough and started packing in his meals again, it was like he had never met her. He had grown an even harder shell.” Tom looked at her, bewildered. “Does this sound like a person who would
feel
enough to attempt suicide?”

Deborah wanted to deny it, but couldn’t. “The unhappiness was there.”

Tom slumped down on the bench. “My parents must have known it, but none of us did anything. We could have gotten him help. But we didn’t.”

“Was that your job?”

“Maybe not when I was a kid, but it’s been a while since then.” He looked at her, clearly agonizing. “He was my brother. I was supposed to love him, but how can you love someone who keeps so much to himself? We weren’t ever really friends. So do you love your brother
because
he’s your brother? And if you do love him, don’t you owe it to him to keep in touch and see if he’s okay?”

Deborah had no answers. She sat down beside him. “You said you were Cal’s only family. Does that mean your parents are dead?”

“Yes.”

“Your dad died of that stroke?”

“No. He recovered. But he lost his taste for life. He decided to go out in a blaze of glory. Drove off a bridge in the middle of the night with his wife at his side.”

“Suicide?”

“No. The autopsy said he had another stroke.” He made a wry sound. “You can imagine what Selena said when I told her that. All this time, she had thought they were killed by a drunk driver. Apparently, that was what Cal told her. Maybe she feels she’s avenging Cal’s death
and
theirs by suing you.” He looked at Deborah. “I knew she was upset when the accident report didn’t find you guilty, and I knew that she was thinking of suing. When she finally told me, I tried to talk her out of it, because I had this feeling that Cal was partly responsible for his own death, and I didn’t think she’d want that to come out. I did not know until last night that she had actually gone to the D.A. We had a huge argument about it then and another one this morning. When I used the word
suicide,
she went beserk.”