Good Medicine (20 page)

Tobacco?
Jordan tried not to react. To a medical doctor, it sounded like so much hocus-pocus, and she was afraid Toby would feel the same way. But on the other hand, there was Rose Marie, alive and well, a
powerful testimony to the effectiveness of native healing. Jordan had to admit that Silas had some indefinable quality about him that could inspire great trust and confidence. Passion—he had passion. God, did he have passion.

“I'll talk to Toby.” She felt a tiny seed of hope sprout, and her dread eased just the slightest amount.

T
HAT AFTERNOON
, Toby came home from the fishing trip so tired he could barely make it from the wharf up to the medical center. He collapsed on the sofa and Jordan tucked a blanket around him. He was still deeply asleep when she finished up for the afternoon.

She looked at him lying there, gray and trembling even in sleep, and the fear she'd been keeping under control broke free, a wild and terrifying thing that gripped her abdomen and pummeled her heart. She couldn't lose him, she just couldn't. She'd do anything, endorse any far-fetched treatment if it would add even a day to her brother's life.

She showered and then, anxious not to wake Toby, sat quietly with an unread medical journal in her lap until he groaned and sat up, rubbing his hands over his thighs, grimacing with pain.

When he noticed her, his expression changed as he hid the pain, and he gave her a smile so sweet she felt tears burning behind her eyes.

“Hey, squirt. How long have you been sitting there perving on me?”

“No time at all,” she lied, getting up to put the kettle on. She made up cups of the rose-hip tea Christina had brought, lacing it with honey.

Toby tasted it. “This isn't exactly Seagram's, but it's not bad. Is it some kind of tonic?”

“Christina brought it for you. It's high in vitamin C.”

“And it's going to fix me right up, eh?”

“Not exactly. It might help, though. Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant. A guy named Norman Cousins cured himself of cancer just by taking mega doses of vitamin C.”

Now was the time. Jordan drew in a breath. “I got those blood results back today. And the other doctors were right.”

His shoulders slumped. “I didn't think they'd have made a mistake. I know there's no real treatment, Jordan.”

“A good diet, doses of vitamin B—”

“They told me that. And when I nailed them for a prognosis, they gave me the straight goods. They said a couple years, maybe five.”

“There's something you could try.” Jordan told him all about Rose Marie. “At that time, conventional medicine had no treatment for what she had. She came here unable to even walk, and her grandmother Sandrine cured her. She's dead now, but Christina's brother, Silas Keefer, learned to be a healer from Sandrine.”

Toby gave her a mischievous grin. “That's your boyfriend, right?”

“Who told you that?” As if she didn't know.

“None other than the gossip rats, Eli and Michael.”

“They're a little behind on the news. We had a thing going for about two minutes, but it's over. He dumped me.”

“Want me to beat him up for you?”

“I want you to ask him to help you get better.”

He shook his head. “When I found out about this, I decided I wasn't going to fall into the trap of running from one so-called healer to another. You can waste what life you have left doing that, Jordan.”

She wanted to scream at him. Instead she said in a rational voice, “It wouldn't hurt to try this one thing. You're here, it's not as if you have to travel to see him. Think about it, okay?”

“Okay, I'll think about it.” He was humoring her. Jordan was about to push him on it when his cell phone rang.

Toby answered, and while he talked, Jordan put kindling in the stove and lit a match to it, trying to figure out what to make them for dinner. She could probably manage macaroni and cheese from a package.

“Jordan.” The tone of his voice told her something was wrong. She turned, and he put his arms around her, holding her close against his trembling body.

“That was the nursing home. Dad died an hour ago, there wasn't any warning. He just laid down after lunch and died in his sleep.”

She didn't feel anything, Jordan told herself. After all, she'd thought about this, about what she'd do when it happened. She'd decided a long time ago not to go to
her father's funeral—what was the point, when she hadn't seen him in years, and had no feeling for him?

“They want to know what arrangements to make.”

She could hear the strain in Toby's voice, feel the tension vibrating through his frail, thin frame. She knew what he was going to ask, and she knew what she was going to have to do, because she couldn't let him go through this alone.

“Will you come to Vancouver with me, Jordan?”

“Of course.” It made her angry, because Mike was winning this one after all. But she had to go for Toby's sake.

T
HEY ARRIVED IN
V
ANCOUVER
the following afternoon and rented a car for the drive into the city. The Lower Mainland was having a hot and surprisingly dry summer. There were watering restrictions, and even the manicured lawn at the rest home was brown instead of green. It made Jordan nostalgic for the wild green island she now called home.

The staff knew Toby, and they greeted him with soft murmurs of sympathy. One of the older nurses hugged him, and there were tears in her eyes. “I'm so sorry about your dad, he was a great favorite here.”

Toby said, “Thanks, Lucy. This is my sister, Jordan.”

“Of course it is.” The portly woman took Jordan's hand in both of hers and patted it. “Hello, dear. I recognize you from the pictures in Mike's room.”

Jordan gaped at her.
Pictures? What pictures?

Lucy didn't seem to notice Jordan's reaction.

“I'll take you down there,” she said. “We locked the door—you just never know around here. Everything's just the way he left it. I put some cartons in there for you, but if you need more, just holler.” She led the way down a hallway lined with old people in wheelchairs.

The room was small, with a double window along one wall, wide open to the afternoon air, but there was still an odor of strong disinfectant. The narrow bed was neatly made, with a blue comforter folded at the bottom. On the dresser was a model of a sailboat and above it a corkboard covered with snapshots.

Her parents' wedding photo was at the top, the original of Jordan's—the one she'd cut up. Next to it was one of her mother smiling but harried. She was holding a fat, crying baby—Jordan—on one hip. Her free hand clasped that of a little boy in a sailor suit who was squinting into the camera and obviously struggling to escape.

Next to it was another black-and-white shot of their mother, more professional, probably taken by a street photographer. Tall and slender, she was striding along, wearing a fashionable tweed coat, a perky little hat and heels, and she was smiling in a dreamy sort of way. Jordan could see her own face in this picture. She touched the photo with her fingertips.

“That was just before Mom and Dad were married,” Toby said. He was standing at her elbow. “Dad told me she quit training to be a nurse to marry him.”

“Big mistake.” Jordan snorted, staring at the photo
and wondering when that young woman first realized she'd taken a wrong turn.

“Dad loved her,” Toby said, contradicting Jordan. “He didn't really start drinking until after she died.”

Jordan barely heard him. Incredibly enough, she was looking at a row of photos of herself, her graduation from high school—why had she never noticed that the hem on the white organdy gown was uneven? And there was that snap of her and Toby during her first year at med school. He'd appeared unannounced at her dorm and taken her to a Chinese café for lunch. The waiter had taken their picture.

“You must have given these to Mike,” she said. There she was, graduating from university, looking solemn. In the next, she was receiving her medical degree. Jordan was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, realizing that Mike had had these pictures of her.

“I had copies made for him.” Toby touched a photo of himself, shoulders hunched, face set in grim lines. “This was when I got out of jail. I was mad at the world in those days.”

“You had reason to be.” But now Jordan was staring at her own wedding photo. She and Garry had been married at the registry office, but his parents had arranged a small reception in their home. The Hughes had hired a photographer. Jordan wore a simple white sheath dress and jacket. She was sitting on the arm of a sofa, smiling up at Garry with much the same dreamy, hopeful expression her mother wore in her own wedding photo.

One of the few photos of Mike showed him stand
ing in front of a cake, smiling. His face was lined and haggard, and he had several missing teeth.

“That was two years ago. It was his five-year cake at AA,” Toby explained. “He was really proud of getting sober.”

Jordan looked at the picture and saw a stranger. She doubted she'd have recognized her father had he been brought into the E.R.

“We'd better get started.” Toby opened a drawer and began packing pajamas and the few worn shirts into a carton. Jordan began to unpin the photos and slide them into an envelope. It was like filing away their family history once and for all, and a terrible sadness filled her.

For the rest of that day, the photos flickered across her mind like a slide show. She and Toby spoke with the funeral director, arranged for a simple service the following day, and finally checked into a comfortable downtown hotel.

“I'm bagged, I'm going to order something from room service,” Toby said apologetically when she asked if he wanted to meet for dinner. “And I still have to call some of Dad's buddies and let them know about the funeral. Then I'm going to bed.”

With the empty evening ahead of her, Jordan thought of calling friends from St. Joe's but decided against it. Instead, she ordered chicken salad from room service, had a long, hot bath and curled up in bed with a magazine she'd bought at the airport, determined to ignore the brown envelope she'd shoved into her carryall.

After fifteen minutes, she swore at herself and retrieved it.

“Damn you, Mike Burke.” She dumped the photos onto the bed. “Don't think you can get around me this easily, just by tacking up a few sorry pictures. It doesn't make up for a thing,” she whispered in a fierce, shaky voice, picking up one shot after another, studying it, laying it down, only to pick up the next.

Before long, her heart was beating hard and her hands were trembling. She had the irrational feeling that there was a key hidden here that would unlock something she needed to know, not only about Mike but about herself.

She studied her father's young face in the wedding photo and reluctantly admitted that although she'd always sworn she looked like her mother, she had his stubborn jawline. What else had she inherited from this man who'd died a veritable stranger to her? Who, her brother had said desperately wanted her forgiveness, but had never been able to say it to her.

She saw so clearly the damage done to her father's life by his not being able to address and then act on his deepest emotions. And as she looked at the photographs, Jordan recognized that she'd done exactly the same thing.

With Mike, with Garry…and now with Silas.

She glanced at the clock. It was almost midnight. Silas would be sleeping.

Well, too damned bad. Getting dragged out of sleep by a woman who wants to say she loves you isn't the worst thing that can happen to a man. It was far worse
to die without ever having spoken your truth. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed Silas's number.

H
E SAT ON HIS FRONT STEPS
in the darkness, swatting mosquitoes and thinking over the things Christina had said. She'd left some time ago, but the sound of her voice reverberated in his head.

She'd come to tell him Jordan's father had just died, and that she and her brother Toby had gone to Vancouver to arrange the funeral. Christina had also said that Toby was seriously ill.

“She doesn't have any other family but this one brother,” Christina had told him. “And because she's never had anyone but him to care about her, I think it's hard for her to trust anyone. If you have feelings for her, cut her a break, why don't you?”

Silas looked up at the night sky. After Jordan's visit and the harsh words they'd exchanged, he'd tried hard to put her out of his mind. It hadn't worked.

How dare she casually dismiss what they'd had between them? After his anger faded, he'd told himself he felt only relief. He didn't want an emotional relationship, he was a loner, better off by himself.

But tonight when Christina said Jordan's father had died, all he'd wanted to do was hold her in his arms.

Jordan had told him she had no feelings for her father, but he knew that wasn't true. He'd tried to pretend he had no feelings for Angus, either.

The door to his cabin was open, and he heard the phone ring. Getting up, he went to answer it.

“Silas here.”

“It's Jordan.”

He felt as if his lungs had stopped working. He heard her quick intake of breath, and in that instant he could see her clearly: her blue eyes, the fine narrow bones of her face, long nose, bow-shaped lips… His heart turned over. She was the woman in his dreams, the other half of himself. Her image had been imprinted on his heart and soul before he was born, but he'd been afraid to recognize her—until now.

“I called to tell you that I'm in love with you,” she said in an aggressive, angry tone. “I don't care whether that embarrasses you or not, I don't even care what you say back. I just wanted you to know. I promised myself I'd be honest with you, and that's exactly what I'm doing.”

And before he could get his breath back, she hung up.