A Seahorse in the Thames (20 page)

“Not a whole lot. We did some shopping, sat and watched the ocean. I made lasagna for him. I used your recipe, Mom. He had three helpings. We went for a drive.”

When I say, “We went for a drive,” I cast a knowing look toward Priscilla, which I hope she picks up on. I need to tell her where we went. She nods her head toward me to suggest she understands.

“Well, we’ve had a wonderful time,” Mom says, changing the subject again, which is fine by me. “We took Isabel to see a friend of mine who has a litter of Jack Russells. Oh, you should have seen her with those puppies, Alexa. It was the cutest thing.”

“Go get your digital camera, Mum. You can show Alexa the pictures.”

“Okay,” Mom says and she hurries into the house.

I know we haven’t much time.

“Kevin called me,” I say to Priscilla in a low voice. “I met with him and Gavin last night at their request. Stephen came with me.”

“He did?”

“He insisted.”

“Well, what happened?”

“I tore up the check and gave it back to Gavin. Told him we knew everything. He didn’t deny any of it. I told him he should go to the police.”

“Oh my goodness! Do you think he will?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. I can tell he wants to, but he’s afraid. Maybe he will. In time.”

I can say nothing more because Mom reappears with her camera and she is clicking through the images. “Here we go,” she says. “Now isn’t that cutest thing you’ve ever seen?”

The check, Gavin, the past—Priscilla and I simply cease talking about it. I seriously wonder if we will ever discuss it again. We look at the pictures, which are indeed precious. Isabel comes running over to look at them.

“Now take a picture with me and Clement!” she says when we have seen them all.

“Okay, sweetie. Smile for Grandma!” Mom points the camera toward Isabel holding Clement in her arms and presses the shutter. “Now I want one of all three of you. Get closer, Alexa.”

I move in close to Priscilla and Isabel so that our faces are close together. Clement’s sequined head is tickling my chin. Mom snaps the photo and then shows the image to us. It’s a lovely photo. Perfect. One that I will want a copy of.

We have a nice dinner at the Hotel Del Coronado, a beautiful Victorian hotel on the beach. Then we come back to Mom’s place so that Priscilla has plenty of time to get her and Isabel’s suitcases ready for the morning flight out. Mom, who has noted troubles with saying goodbye, doesn’t want to take Priscilla and Isabel to the airport in the morning, and since I very much want to do it, we make plans for me to pick them up at nine in the morning.

My heart feels heavy as I drive home. The thought that I will call Stephen, unless he calls me first, cheers me, though. When I get home, I make a cup of tea and wait to see if he calls me. Fifteen minutes later, the phone rings and it is indeed Stephen.

“Hey, thanks for breakfast,” he says.

“Not a very healthy one. I’m sure you mother didn’t approve.”

“I ate it before she got here.”

“So you had a good day? Feeling better?”

“It was all right. And yes, the headache’s not bad at all today. But it’s hard to be thirty-two and have your mother wash your underwear. I suppose it’s probably good to be humbled every now and then, though.”

I laugh.

“So how was your day?” he says.

I tell him about Rebecca’s postcard and my last evening with Priscilla and Isabel. I make no attempt to hide the sadness in my voice about them leaving.

“You just let too much time pass between this visit and your last one,” he says. “I am sure you and your sister won’t let that happen again. Am I right?”

“You are definitely right. They might even come home again for Christmas.”

“Well, there you go.”

I pause for a moment as an idea comes to me.

“Stephen, would you like to come with me tomorrow to take them to the airport?”

“Really? I can’t even carry a suitcase!”

“You know that’s not why I want you to come,” I say, smiling.

“I would love to.”

I think he is smiling, too.

I am at Stephen’s by eight the next morning and we are at Coronado by fifteen minutes to nine.

Mom is pleased to meet Stephen, I think. He’s so personable and easy to like, but his broken elbow and ankle seem to puzzle her. Like she finds it very odd that I am so deeply attracted to a wounded man. Oh, if only she knew.

Priscilla on the other hand has an immediate connection with Stephen that has less to do with us being twins and more to do with the fact that Priscilla has been right all along. There are worse things than falling in love with a sick man. I think it may be worse to not fall in love at all. In any case, they are fast friends. I’m glad Priscilla has had this chance to meet Stephen. I want her to know him, to see in him what I see; his very real faith in the midst of very real troubles. It’s the part of him I’m willing to share with anyone and everyone I know and love. It’s the part of him that I simply must know more about.

Mom is crying when we leave her house. She hands me back my cell phone like it is a piece of spoiled meat. “Take this,” she says.

“Bye Grandma!” Isabel calls out as we walk down the cement path to my car.

Mom stands at her screen door and blows kisses with one hand and dabs at her eyes with the other.

At the airport, I’m not a whole lot different from her. So much has happened in the six days Priscilla and Isabel have been here. I feel like I’ve aged far more than a mere week. My tears begin to flow as soon as their bags are checked.

Priscilla reaches for me and we embrace. She is crying, too. “If we can’t come at Christmas, maybe you can come see me,” she says. “Maybe you can come by my place on your way to see Rebecca, eh?”

We laugh as our tears trickle down our cheeks.

We part and I reach down to hug my niece.

“Goodbye, honey.” I wrap her in my arms. “Aunt Lexie loves you so much.”

“Clement wants to kiss you!” Isabel unwraps herself from my embrace. She thrusts the mint green seahorse head toward me and places his smiling lips on mine. The crinkle of his fabric prickles my face. Isabel makes a loud kissing sound. “Now you kiss Clement!”

I kiss the seahorse head, unable not to grin at how this must look to anyone walking by.

“Nice to meet you, Stephen,” Priscilla says, grabbing Isabel’s hand. “
Au revoir
, Lex.”

“Nice to meet you, too,” Stephen says.

I rise from my goodbyes to Isabel and stand as close to Stephen as I can. He places his good arm around me and I marvel at how good it feels.

“Goodbye!” I say.

Priscilla and Isabel turn away and begin walking toward the security checkpoint line. My sister turns once and waves.

Then they disappear into a sea of people. I lean into Stephen and just let the tears come. They are not sad tears. They are just the tears that come from the ache of loving people. The most wonderful pain in the world.

A
warm July sun is melting away the morning cloud cover over the beach at Encinitas. Sunlight is peeking through the mini-blinds above the kitchen sink in Stephen’s apartment, as I mop his kitchen floor. It doesn’t take very long. He’d tried to talk me out of it, but he is too fatigued these days to put up much of a fight. I’ve been winning all those battles lately. He is not far away from me though, just there on the sofa. He had been watching me but I think he has drifted off to sleep. I know he hates being so tired all the time, but I love watching him sleep. I don’t think he knows how much I love it. And I don’t think I will tell him. He would probably find that very odd.

It has been three weeks since he began his radiation treatments. I suppose you could say they are going well. He continues to tolerate them and he seems to be having fewer headaches, but it’s too early to tell if the tumor is indeed shrinking. He is just past the halfway mark.

The first few treatments were pretty unremarkable, but by the third day, Stephen was starting to feel the effects. He was told the treatments would pretty much knock him flat. And they have. I had to go back to work the day he started them and it bothered me that he had to have other friends take him to his appointments. But I did manage to take one afternoon the second week so that I could take him to at least one of them.

Stephen’s tumor is called a medullablastoma. It’s considered a fast-growing tumor and quite a troublemaker. It shows up three-fourths of the time in children, so it is not particularly common for thirty-two-year-old man to have one. It’s what Stephen had when he was a child and, as I constantly remind myself, survived. Unlike the tumor he had as a boy, this one is growing on the floor of the fourth ventricle of his brain and it is this location that makes it inoperable. It’s too close to the brain stem for any doctor to want to touch it. But the literature that Stephen has been given says that this kind of tumor is very responsive to radiation treatments. Every day that goes by, every time Stephen comes home sick and fatigued from his treatment is another day closer to being cured, if that is indeed in his future. There is nothing more we can do at this point except hope. If the radiation fails, there is chemotherapy. If neither of these do the trick, Stephen’s healing will only be found in heaven. But I cannot let my mind wander there.

Stephen has had so many people from his church volunteer to help him, I sometimes feel like I’m not needed. He insists that while he appreciates all the help from his church family, it’s only my company that makes him want to brush his teeth and put on cologne. I of course found that rather endearing. At first he resisted my seeing him such a weakened condition, but now that he knows that is the only way he can be seen, he has reluctantly given me a key to his apartment so that I can come in any time, whether he is resting or not. He has also broken down and allowed me to wash his underwear. Better me than his mom, he says.

Since Priscilla and Isabel left, my dates with Stephen have consisted of doing his laundry, fixing him dinner, renting movies and watching him sleep. I love our dates.

It was hard going back to work. I felt like a completely different person. And I guess it’s because I kind of am. I am in love, for one thing, as wonderful a life-changing event there is. I also have the strangest sensation that I’m being stripped of my outer skin, as though I am shedding, becoming new. Stephen says it’s the hand of God reaching down to pull away the shell of my old life, the one where I had no peace or purpose. It’s all very complex and amazing to me. Stephen has been too weak to attend church, but I read to him from his Bible, and every time I come across something I don’t understand, we stop and talk about it. I have a lot to learn but I am getting the idea that when Jesus died, it was for this express purpose of making me new. I don’t understand it, but I can feel it happening inside me. I am changing from the inside out.

Coupled with this is no longer having Rebecca on which to foist my need for existing. I didn’t realize how much I was dependent on her to give my life meaning until she left. When I told Frances Rebecca had indeed gotten married and was moving to Italy, Frances could hardly think of anything to say. She was like all the rest of us. Shocked, surprised, but eventually glad that Rebecca had slipped away to follow love. I think she may have switched gardening services, though. The day I went to move out Rebecca’s things, the man I saw mowing the Falkman Center lawn was a complete stranger to me; as well as being overweight, balding and sporting a wedding band on his left hand.

I told Marietta she could keep Rebecca’s fish and I also gave her Rebecca’s books and magazines. I kept the baby book of course. I gave away the clothes she didn’t take except for a couple of sweaters and blouses I thought she might want to have with her in Italy. She has not written to me again. But I’m learning not expect Rebecca to do what I would do. She never did. Not before the accident and not after. Everyday I check my mailbox hoping she has written to me. Someday I know I will come home from work or from Stephen’s and the letter will be there.

Mom asks if I have heard from Rebecca, although I can’t believe she thinks I would keep that from her. Mom seems like she is warming up to the idea of being vulnerable; that is, feeling free enough with her love and devotion to risk being hurt again. She simply can’t get enough of Isabel. In three weeks she has sent four packages to Isabel, one of which was the baby doll she had talked about getting when Priscilla and Isabel were still here. Priscilla’s last email to me two days ago was nothing short of a desperate plea to tell Mom to stop. Or at least slow down. On the upside, Mom has purchased a pay-as-you-go cell phone. She never turns it on, except to make a call, but it’s a start, I think, to living in the here and now.

The other amazing thing is, Mom told me at lunch the other day that she thinks she and I should go to Europe in the spring. Guess where? England and Italy. She even went to the post office and picked up passport applications. I miss Priscilla and Isabel like crazy. And I so much want to hug Rebecca, my married sister, and whisper in her ear, “It’s done!”

And even if she says, “What’s done?” I won’t care. It will be enough to know that it is and to see her married, happy and making spaghetti in her own kitchen.

As for my Dad, he and I met for a late breakfast last weekend. He drove down alone and we met for lunch at a place in Del Mar that he likes. He wisely came without Lynne. It’s going to take some time for me to be able to talk to her and be in her presence without thinking unkind thoughts about her. The weird thing is, she thinks—just like Dad did—that I have always known about her longtime affair with Dad. I think that’s why she has always been aloof around me. She assumed I hated her. Why develop a friendship with someone who loathes you? But I don’t hate her. I don’t want to hate her. I just need time to adjust to the knowledge I now possess.

Dad asked me to forgive him, as tenderly as he asked it of Priscilla. I think when he told Priscilla that people can change, he meant he is no longer the kind of person who would leave the woman he is married to and the children—or child—he shares with that woman. I told him I think forgiveness is a process. It is something Priscilla and I both want to be able to extend to him but like any great work of art and sacrifice, it will not happen overnight. I don’t know if he will ever tell my mother that it was not her response to Rebecca’s accident that drove him away, that it was something else entirely, but it’s my prayer that someday he will. It won’t change the past, but it might make it possible for my mother to live out the rest of her days without bitterness against God for the demise of her marriage. She and dad let the marriage fail. It wasn’t crushed by God’s providential hand. It’s possible she might even allow herself the luxury of loving again if she knew the truth. Like Priscilla said, sometimes knowing the truth makes living it with easier and sometimes it doesn’t.

Of all the recent events that have happened, perhaps the most remarkable is a call from Kevin McNeil a few days ago. He wanted to let me know that his father had indeed gone to the police. He didn’t tell Kevin ahead of time that he was doing it, he just called Kevin from the El Cajon police station where he confessed to accidentally killing James Leahy and then disposing of the body. The police had asked to speak with Kevin to verify Gavin’s story, but Gavin had been adamant that his son was completely innocent. After the fight that day, and after Mindy and Rebecca had left, Gavin had sent Kevin to the bank to make a deposit to cover the checks he wrote—at least that was the ruse he gave Kevin. While he was gone, Gavin carried James’ body out to his truck, drove an hour away to some undeveloped land he owns in neighboring Imperial County and buried him. Gavin had explained his absence by telling Kevin he drove James to Los Angeles and put him on a plane to New York. Apparently, charges against Gavin are pending as the authorities work to find James’ next of kin and his remains.

I asked him how Lenore was taking all of this and he said Lenore doesn’t know. He had paused for a moment and then told me that his mother suffers from dementia and that she sometimes thinks Leanne is still alive and she wonders why she never visits. I told him I was sorry. What else could I say? Then he did the oddest thing. He thanked me. He told me in spite of everything his father seems oddly at peace. And he said his father hasn’t been at peace since James Leahy set foot in his house, until now. Kevin had always attributed it to losing Leanne, but it was more than that.

It doesn’t really surprise me that Gavin McNeil could find peace like that, in that way, in his confession. We are all of us looking for the glint of hope in a often shadowy world. I think this is why Rebecca left as suddenly as she did. She saw the shimmer of what looked like fleeting loveliness and she grabbed it before it could slip away. And then I look at Priscilla and I see that she, too, has found her shining ray of beauty within the devotion she has for Isabel. I can see how she came to that place where she realized Isabel is a treasure not meant to be hidden away, but rather shared with the world—like the real Clement—a thing of beauty sprung from darkness and enjoyed by all who came to stop and look.

Even I have found my own glimmer of hope, my own seahorse in a dark and mysterious river. And I can’t help but feel that I’m on to something far grander than what Rebecca and Priscilla have found. I’m certain I’ve discovered something that truly lasts beyond this lifetime. The love I have for Stephen begins with the amazing love of God I see shining out of him. It is calling to me, catching my eye, bidding me bend down and take hold of it though all around me the river’s course is uncharted and perilous from time to time. I can’t help but kneel down to embrace it. The alternative, which is walking away and pretending I see nothing sparkling in the dark water, holds no appeal for me.

As I watch Stephen sleep away his fatigue, knowing that tomorrow he will go to battle all over again—as well as the next day and the next—I’m reminded of what he said to me over the phone just a few weeks ago, when he came home from the oncologist and told me the outlook was favorable.

I had said,” But no guarantees?” And he had laughed, in that kind way of his, and had said.” You know there are no guarantees.”

But glimmers of hope
, I had said, my heart swelling with expectation.

Oh, yes. Always those.