“Alzheimer’s is admittedly something we all worry about, especially on those days we can’t find our car keys.” When he folded his hands on his desk, Savannah found herself studying them, as she had Bill’s yesterday. They were capable hands, she decided, in their own way as reassuring as the plethora of framed diplomas covering the walls.
“But I don’t believe that’s Dr. Lindstrom’s problem.”
“Is that good news? Or bad news?” Savannah asked.
“Obviously, in the case of dementia, all diagnoses are relative.”
“Excuse me if I don’t find any diagnosis of dementia very comforting,” Lilith interjected.
“I understand.” The look he gave her suggested he just might. “It’s one of those words that doesn’t come with any positive connotations. Still, if we were talking about my grandmother—”
“Which we’re not,” Raine broke in.
“Actually, we could be,” he countered mildly. “My maternal grandmother was diagnosed with multi-infarct dementia five years ago. MID is the second leading cause of progressive mental deterioration, or, in layman’s terms, tissue death in the brain.”
Savannah heard her sister let out a breath. “What causes it?”
“MID is caused by damage or death to brain cells due to a deprivation of oxygen and nutrients.”
“That sounds like a stroke.” Savannah felt the blood leave her face.
She’d secretly worried about this, but had been afraid to let herself even consider the possibility. A friend—a pastry chef at the resort she’d worked at in Atlantic City—had suffered a stroke that had left the thirty-seven-year-old woman unable to speak and completely paralyzed on one side. When she had finally gotten her voice back months later, she’d sounded like a slow-minded toddler, and when Savannah had left, she’d only been able to get around with a walker.
“Surely we would have noticed if Mother had suffered a stroke,” Lilith insisted.
“Not necessarily. Transient ischemic attacks, or TIA—which are essentially ministrokes—aren’t that easy to spot, especially in the elderly, since the symptoms—dizziness, clumsiness, fainting, numbness, forgetfulness—are brief, usually lasting less than five minutes, and they tend to get dismissed as a normal process of aging.”
“She fell off a kitchen stool this past spring,” Raine said flatly. “She was hospitalized, but no one ever diagnosed a stroke.”
“I’ve only been on staff for three weeks, so I don’t have any personal knowledge of the incident. But looking at her chart, I can understand why the admitting physician wasn’t overly concerned, especially since she didn’t reveal any other symptoms at the time.”
“I don’t know anything about strokes,” Lilith murmured.
“That’s not surprising. In this information age, you can’t turn on your television without hearing about the dramatic new techniques in preventing or treating cardiovascular problems or cancer. But while approximately half a million people a year have strokes, they don’t garner the same press. I suppose part of the reason is that strokes are harder to pin down. Most people, when they have a heart attack, suffer much the same damage.
“But strokes are different. Unique. Our brains consume the largest percentage of our body’s energy—about twenty-five percent,” he said, slipping into a pedantic mode that made him sound like a medical school professor, which, Savannah noted from one of the diplomas, he’d once been. “There are twenty billion neurons in the brain and each of those makes, on average, ten thousand connections. Our brains are the miracle of our human frames, the supercomputers of the universe, so to speak. They’re also our greatest human mystery.
“In fact, it was only about three hundred years ago that physicians first started noticing that some people without any signs of head injuries would suddenly complain of head pain and collapse. Since the condition seemed to appear from out of the blue, a stroke of bad luck, so to speak, they started calling it a stroke. And the name stuck.”
“That’s an interesting bit of medical history,” Raine said dryly. She was clearly impatient, as was Savannah. But of the two of them, Raine had always had the greater need for controlling her environment and everyone in it. “But what’s my grandmother’s prognosis?”
“These things are very individual.” Savannah suspected the doctor’s vague answer only irritated Raine further. “But TIAs
are
the most predictive risk factor for a more serious cerebral-thrombosis stroke.”
Lilith, sitting between Raine and Savannah, moaned softly. Raine took hold of her left hand, Savannah her right.
“Thrombosis is caused by narrowing of the arteries to the brain, right?” That was what Savannah’s friend had suffered.
“Exactly.” Dr. Burke nodded in a way that reminded her of the gold stars her third-grade teacher used to put on her spelling tests. “In fact, it’s the same type of atherosclerosis that results in heart attacks.
“Unfortunately, not only do TIAs multiply the risk for cerebral thrombosis tenfold, approximately a third of patients who experience them suffer a stroke within five years. Half within a year.”
“Well, I asked for a prognosis,” Raine muttered grimly.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” the doctor said. “In many cases, MID is not only preventable, it’s treatable. Daily low-dose aspirin can help prevent the internal blood clots that cause TIAs. It also appears to stabilize mental decline. Some test study subjects also show improved cognition.”
“I don’t believe this.” Lilith’s face was also now a study in frustration. “That sounds remarkably like a neurologist’s version of ‘take two aspirin and call me in the morning.’”
“I realize it sounds simplistic,” Dr. Burke countered. “But aspirin has been proven to be an extremely effective preventative. Of course, in the case of a cerebral hemorrhage, it can increase bleeding, but that’s definitely not what we’re dealing with in Dr. Lindstrom’s case.
“In her favor is the fact that she doesn’t have additional risk factors. She’s not overweight, her cholesterol is within the acceptable range, she’s never smoked, only drinks occasionally and exercises regularly, and she has a positive, forward-thinking attitude that helps her deal with stress. Those are all very encouraging factors.”
Savannah desperately wished she could be encouraged.
They continued to question him for another half hour, during which he impressed Savannah by neither retreating behind a wall of medical jargon nor appearing offended when Raine fell back into her cross-examination mode, grilling him as if he were a hostile witness she had on the stand.
Afterwards, they found Ida sitting at a cafeteria table with a trio of women in scrubs. Savannah smiled when she heard her grandmother advising one of the women on the best way to treat colic.
But as they left the hospital, Savannah heard the doctor’s words replaying inside her head and suddenly felt the same way she had when she’d let go of Ida’s hand during a shopping trip she’d taken with her grandmother—just the two of them, which had made the day extra special—to buy birthday presents for Raine at Nordstrom’s in Seattle.
She couldn’t recall how old she’d been, but she must have been very young because she remembered, with absolute clarity, feeling like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, right before they’d found the wicked witch’s house. Right before they were put in the cage to be fattened up for eating.
As she remembered the rush of relief she’d felt when she’d been lifted out of that teeming sea of adult legs, Savannah desperately wished that there was something she could do to save her grandmother, the same way Ida had rescued her.
I
t was late afternoon, almost evening. Raine had returned to the farm, Ida was up in her room, napping, Savannah hoped. After hearing the less than encouraging diagnosis from the others, Gwen had also gone upstairs, ostensibly to get a start on this year’s reading list for her honor’s English class. Savannah suspected she was doing what the rest of them were doing—worrying.
Henry was nowhere to be found, but a note on the refrigerator said that he’d be back in time for dinner, which he’d pick up from Papa Joe’s on the way home. Savannah found that little act of charity the sole positive note in a miserable day.
Feeling too cooped up and edgy to stay in the house, she went out on the porch and was surprised to find Lilith still there.
“I thought you’d gone home.”
“I’m not in any hurry, since it’s Cooper’s monthly poker night and my den will be full of cops.”
“I’ll bet you never thought you’d be married to a policeman.” Savannah sat down on the steps.
“I never thought I’d be married again, period.” Lilith opened her purse, then seeming to remember she’d quit smoking on her wedding day, closed it again. “But then again, Cooper’s special.”
“He is that.”
“And you know what they say about second marriages being a prime example of the triumph of hope over experience. Of course in my case, my third marriage was proof of love triumphing over experience.”
“I think I’ve had enough experience for one lifetime.”
“That’s what you say now,” Lilith said. “But you’ll get over it.”
“That’s just the point. I don’t
want
to get over it. I can’t think of a single reason to get married. Except to have children,” she said in afterthought, thinking of how Amy seemed to have made such a difference in Raine’s life.
“I’m glad I had you and Raine. But it undoubtedly would have been easier on all of us if I’d married Cooper the first time.”
As much as she honestly loved her father, Savannah couldn’t argue with that.
They fell into a companionable silence, watching as dusk draped long purple shadows over the town. The old-fashioned gaslights on Harbor Street flickered on; the pink and blue neon bordering the Orca Theater’s marquee, which had seemed terribly old-fashioned when Savannah had been a teenager, had come back into vogue.
“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” Lilith asked.
“She has to be.” Savannah would not allow herself to think otherwise.
Lilith nodded. “I honestly can’t imagine life without Mother. She’s always seemed as strong as the trees surrounding the town. It was always so good to know that whatever trouble I got into, she would be here, whenever I needed her.”
“When any of us needed her.”
They sighed.
“I wonder how old you have to be before you stop being your mother’s daughter,” Lilith murmured.
Savannah had been wondering that same thing herself lately. “I don’t think you ever do.” She paused, then decided that since burying her feelings deep inside her to keep the peace had definitely proven harmful, she’d be straight with her mother now.
“When I first came home, I think there was a part of me, a part I was afraid to admit even to myself, who blamed you for everything that had gone wrong in my life.”
“Well, of course you did.”
“You knew?”
“You don’t have to look so surprised. My own life may have been a disaster for years, but that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t recognize when my daughters were making mistakes. It was obvious that in your own individual ways, both you and Raine were struggling to be the opposite of me.”
Her faint smile seemed to be directed inward. “Raine, of course, is the most like me. I was five when your grandmother divorced my father. That hurt me more than I think Ida realized at the time, but I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I wasted a great many years desperate for men to find me attractive, to make up for the loss of my father.”
“You
are
attractive,” Savannah pointed out. “And Raine has never depended on her looks.”
But she could have. The funny thing was, her sister had never realized how lovely she was. Determined to be admired for her mind, Raine had set her feet firmly on her legal career path and hadn’t allowed herself so much as a sideways glance until she’d come home to Coldwater Cove and fallen in love with Jack.
“Owen Cantrell was the most brilliant, egocentric, ruthless man I’ve ever met,” Lilith revealed. “I’ve no doubt that his being an attorney is one of the reasons Raine chose law as a profession. As she grew older, it was obvious that she was trying to win her absent father’s approval—and love—by being equally ruthless.”
As much as she loved her sister, Savannah decided that that unflattering observation made some sense. “But Reggie isn’t anything like Owen Cantrell. I’ve never doubted that my father loves me. In his own way.”
The same way a two-year-old loves a shiny new toy. When it came to penning lyrics that the rebels and wannabe rebels of the world could identify with, Savannah suspected that Reggie Townsend was as brilliant as Raine’s famous defense attorney father. But Reggie’s attention span was incredibly short, and he’d never demonstrated an ability for long-term commitment.
She had not a single doubt that if there ever came a moment when performing in front of adoring crowds no longer gave him a rush, a moment when music wasn’t fun anymore, her father would hang up his electric guitar without a backward glance.
“Reggie’s my favorite ex-husband, but he’s certainly been no model of stability for you, darling. Why, he’s been married more times than I have. It’s only understandable that you were trying so hard not to repeat your parents’ serial marriages, you willingly blinded yourself to your own husband’s lack of decency.”
It was the same conclusion Savannah had come to. The same one she’d shared with Dan atop the Ferris wheel. But accustomed to her beautiful, willful mother’s life-long disregard for the consequences of her actions, she was surprised by Lilith’s uncharacteristic insight.
“When did you get so smart?”
Lilith laughed the trademark crystal laugh that had been as popular with movie-going fans as her screams. “What a polite, Savannah-like way of asking when I started to grow up.” She lifted a fond hand and smoothed Savannah’s hair back over her shoulder. “I’ve discovered that wisdom—the little I’ve acquired at any rate—is one of the few advantages of turning fifty.”
How strange, Savannah thought, that such a light maternal touch could cause an easing of the tension that had practically twisted her into knots during the long stressful day at the hospital.
“I love you,” she said on a burst of heartfelt emotion.
“I love you, too, darling.” Lilith’s voice turned husky. “And I do so want for you to be happy. As happy as I am. As your sister is.”
They were sharing a mother-daughter hug when Dan’s Tahoe pulled up in front of the house. He and Henry emerged, the older man carrying two red-and-white pizza boxes.
“How did things go?” Dan asked.
Once again, as she had with Gwen, Savannah shared the condensed version of the doctor’s diagnosis.
“Could have been worse,” Henry volunteered. “I know lots of folks who’ve had TIAs and never had a major stroke.”
Savannah wanted to find comfort in his words, yet couldn’t help thinking that a great many of those people could well be patients at Evergreen.
“It’s tough.” Dan sat down beside her, untangled her hands, which she was unconsciously twisting together in her lap, and linked his fingers with hers. “But Ida’s a tough old bird. My money’s on her.”
“Mine, too.” Lilith, who had been watching them with open maternal interest, stood up. “I’ve been meaning to talk with Gwen about a new school wardrobe. Obviously she can’t wear last year’s maternity clothes.”
Gracing both Savannah and Dan with a satisfied, almost feline smile, she deftly shepherded Henry into the house.
“My mother,” Savannah said wryly, as she retrieved her hand, “has never been known for her subtlety.”
“I can’t imagine her any other way. She’s one of a kind. Like her daughter.” He leaned over and sniffed at her neck. “Thank you.”
She pulled back just far enough to look up at him. “For what?”
“For smelling so damn good.” He combed his fingers through the long waves Lilith had smoothed earlier. “Do you know, it’s gotten so I wake up imagining your perfume on my pillow?”
So he’d been dreaming of her, too. “It’s undoubtedly pollen,” she said mildly. “Perhaps you should start closing your window at night.”
Dan reluctantly decided against suggesting that perhaps she ought to just start spending the night in his bed so he could wake up with the real thing instead of some lingering remnants of the dreams that had him starting each morning with a cold shower.
“Now there’s an idea.”
Because it had been too long since he’d kissed her, because he’d been thinking of little else all day, he touched his mouth to hers, encouraged when her arms lifted and wrapped around his neck.
Her lips heated. Clung. Then parted to allow him to deepen the kiss. Which he did.
A nagging voice in the back of his mind was trying to send a warning to his body that the house behind them was full of people who could, at any minute, decide to come out on the porch.
As a woman of the world who could undoubtedly recognize sexual undercurrents, Lilith wouldn’t. But Gwen was a teenager, so impulsiveness was a given, and while Henry had actually been behaving like a human being lately, it was not unthinkable that he’d come outside just for the sheer pleasure of screwing up the moment.
As for Ida, she’d managed to put the fear of God into the entire male population of Coldwater Cove High. Every boy in school had known that getting caught going beyond first base with either Raine or Savannah was a sure-fire way to make your life a misery.
Obviously she wouldn’t expect her divorced granddaughter to still be a virgin, but Dan suspected the contrary female wouldn’t hesitate to make her displeasure known if she thought for a moment that he might be taking advantage of the recent upheavals in Savannah’s life.
Which he wasn’t. But damn, how he wanted her. Dan knew he was in deep, deep trouble when even the prospect of Ida Lindstrom’s ire didn’t do a thing to lesson the hunger that had him in a vice grip.
Reluctantly relinquishing her lips, he settled for skimming his mouth along the fragrant skin just beneath her slender jaw. “Lord, you taste good.” Down the line of her throat. “Even better than you smell.”
Dan might be a little uncertain about all his feelings where this woman was concerned, but he knew damn well that he was too old to be making out on Savannah Townsend’s front porch.
“Come home with me, Savannah.” She hitched in a breath as he touched his mouth to the hollow of her throat and felt her pulse leap. “I want you.”
“I know.” She briefly closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they gleamed with arousal in the gloaming. “I want you, too.” Dan watched as that arousal was slowly replaced by regret and knew that she wasn’t ready. Not yet.
“But?”
“It’s too soon. While I admittedly haven’t gone out with a man for years, I have the feeling that I’m not the kind of woman who goes to bed on the first date.”
She smiled, a slight, tentative smile that still had enough warmth to knock him back on his heels if he hadn’t already been sitting down. “Which we haven’t even had yet.”
“Objection sustained.” He ran his hand over her shoulder, which today was clad in a black silk that brought out the fire in her hair. As soft as the silk was, Dan suspected that her skin would be a great deal softer.
“I’ve been remiss.”
His hand continued down her bare arm. The night was getting cool. If she wasn’t going to allow him to take her somewhere private and warm her all over, he was going to have to let her go into the house.
“How about coming sailing with me tomorrow evening?” he asked. “It’ll give me something to look forward to while I’m in court all day battling for my client’s custody of a batch of frozen bull sperm.”
“You are kidding.”
“Hey, it’s not exactly on a par with fighting for truth, justice and the American Way. But the sperm in question just happens to belong to a champion rodeo bull owned by a syndicate that went bust when the members decided to branch out and invest in Thoroughbreds. A couple test tubes of that stuff would probably have paid for your new roof.”
“What an appealing thought,” she murmured. “But I’ll be wallpapering the kitchen of the assistant keeper’s house tomorrow evening.”
Still drawn by her scent, he leaned closer again and nibbled on her earlobe. “No, you won’t.”
She stiffened in his arms. Then drew back. “Excuse me?”
The fire had turned to ice. Dan had already discovered enough of what pleasured Savannah to know he could melt it. “You’re not wallpapering the kitchen because it’s already done.”
She folded her arms and gave him an accusing look that wasn’t quite the display of gratitude he’d been hoping for. “Are you telling me that you hung my wallpaper?”
Hell. She definitely was not pleased.
“I knew your schedule was tight enough that losing today would cost you, so I thought I’d give you a hand.”