Mermaid (4 page)

“You’re pretty enough to be a movie star,” he said, his blue eyes still wide and his mouth slightly agape. He looked intrigued now, not sullen, and Mark was grateful to Edward for having sent Chris in. It was the most he’d heard the boy say all weekend.

“Thank you,” Jillian said. “That’s one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever had.”

“And true,” added Mark, suddenly feeling left out.

She smiled at him, making him go light-headed again as he noticed a tiny dimple appear at one side of her chin.

“Have some banana bread,” he suggested quickly before the magic could overcome him completely and turn him into a blithering idiot. “It’s pretty good. “

“Yeah,” said Chris. “It’s the only thing Edward can cook that tastes like food.”

Jillian accepted. “Thanks, I’d love some. That was quite a workout I had, and swimming always makes me hungry.” She bit into a piece and chewed appreciatively. “It is good. And it certainly tastes like food.” She looked puzzled as she asked, “Is Edward your cook?”

Mark shook his head. “He’s the caretaker here. His late wife Bessie was a fine cook, and Edward tries, he really does. He uses all of her old recipes, but somehow it nearly always goes wrong. But I’d hate to hurt his feelings by telling him he’s a lousy cook.”

He offered her the plate once more, and she accepted, then saw Chris shake his head, looking at his father as if he were a stranger—the kind of stranger he’d been warned against. Jillian frowned. What was going on? There was a tension between two that would have been evident even to someone who hadn’t done a lot of counseling of students and their parents.

Mark set the plate down and said, “It doesn’t matter that Edward can’t cook. I’m not such a I cook myself, so if I’m having guests, which isn’t often, I do the cooking.”

“How do you manage that without hurting his feelings?” Jillian asked, half her attention on the sullen little boy who sat perched on the edge of his hair as if undecided whether to stay or to go.

“I get him to make the dessert, and I cook out on the grill.”

“Or go out somewhere,” muttered Chris, but his father ignored him.

Bessie was old-fashioned enough to believe that barbecuing is strictly a man’s job, so when she was alive, that’s what my father or I always did.

Edward never wanted to learn to barbecue, thank goodness.

Jillian laughed. “Hey, I don’t think that’s so old-fashioned. I happen to agree. Unfortunately, I have a daughter who loves her hamburgers barbecued, so I find myself standing over a bed of hot coals more often than I stand over a hot stove, which I much prefer.”

Mark saw her looking longingly at the last slice of I banana bread. Very, very carefully so that his hand wouldn’t shake, he passed her the plate. Very, very carefully so that his voice wouldn’t shake, he said, “Doesn’t your husband like to barbecue?”

With a half-guilty grin, she accepted his offering. “My husband died seven years ago, Mark, before Amber was born.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, please. It was a long time ago, and the pain has faded. I’m not lonely. I have Amber and my mother.”

“My mother’s dead,” Chris said, looking do at his lap. He linked his hands together, and Jillian saw that he’d bitten his nails down almost to the point of drawing blood.

“I’m sorry, Chris,” she said quietly, reaching out to touch those tense hands.

Chris flinched away from her touch. “She was killed in an accident last Christmas,” he said, and transferred his gaze to his father’s set face, adding softly but with such deadly malice that Jillian cringed inside. “He was driving.”

M
ARK SHOT TO HIS
feet and stood irresolute for a moment, his face white as he looked from his son to the door as if wondering whether to try to stop the words he knew must follow or whether to bolt. He chose the latter, striding to the patio where he stood gripping the rail that edged the top of the cliff. Even though he was far enough away that he appeared as little more than a blurred shape to her since she wasn’t wearing her contact lenses, she knew his shoulders were so stiff and his neck so rigid that his muscles must be aching the tension as much as his heart must be from the animosity borne by his son. She looked at the boy. “It was an accident, Chris.”

He let a low, unchildlike, bitter laugh escape him as he glared at his father’s back. “He didn’t even get a scratch, and all I got was a broken wrist.” For a moment Jillian was bereft of speech. Then, gently she reached out and took Chris’s stiff hands in her own, “I’m sorry, Chris. That was a terrible loss for you. And for your dad. It’s good that you have each other.”

Chris snatched his hands out from under hers and lifted his anguished, angry face. “Baloney!” he said emphatically. “ ‘Good that we have each other’? Ha! You don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. For me it was a terrible loss, sure. That was my mom that got killed, you know. But I’m sure it was exactly what he wanted. In one easy twist of the wheel he solved his biggest problem, but he didn’t do it right. It should have been both me and my mom he killed, but he blew it and now he’s stuck with me.”

“Chris!” She wanted to argue with him, tell him he must be wrong, but recognized the futility of that.

“I’m sorry you’re feeling so bad, Chris,” she said gently. “You must miss your mom a lot, and feeling the way you do about your dad means you can’t go to him for comfort. I wish I could help.”

Her words seemed to surprise Chris. He darted a startled glance at her, and then rushed into an angry denial as if her compassion caused him even more pain.

“I am not feeling bad!” he cried, his face crumpling and his voice cracking even as he tried to control both. “I don’t need you or anybody else to help me. I missed my mom for a while, but I don’t anymore. I just don’t want to have to live with a man who hates me!” He shot up from his chair and glared at her, defying her to argue. But even if she’d been so inclined, he gave her no chance to do it. Instead he spun around and tore from the room, crashing into the table where the coffee service stood. The china pot and one cup shattered against the leg of Jillian’s chair as he slammed the door behind him.

Jillian bent at the waist and carefully began picking up what broken china she could reach, holding it in her hand, staring at the pieces as if she didn’t know what to do with them. When she looked up, Mark was standing over her, and she felt as if he were just as shattered as the dishes his son had knocked to the floor.

“I’ll take care of that,” he said, and she set the pieces on the tray he held out for her. “Sit back and tuck your tail up if you can: There may be bits of china under it. Did you cut your fingers at all?”

“No,” she said. “I was being careful.” But she tucked her tail as much out of the way as she could while Mark picked up shards of china from the thick pile of the carpet. She was certain when he spoke that he was glad to be able to look at the floor rather than at her. “I’m sorry you had to hear our family’s problems,” he said, dumping a handful of chips onto the tray. “It was rude of me to desert you like that and let Chris mouth off.”

She smiled when he glanced up momentarily. “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t believe there’s a family in existence that doesn’t have some problems. And most of them seem to be able to work them out, given enough time and enough love.”

He stood and looked at her for an instant and then startled her by reaching down and lifting her from her chair. He carried her out through the door into the warm sunshine by the pool.

His eyes were filled with pain and anger and bitterness. “I love my son very much,” he said. “I just can’t seem to make him believe that. Because he’s right, I was driving when his mother was killed. And as he sees it, since I took from him the very person he loved most in his life, I must have done it because I hate him.”

Jillian raised one hand and impulsively curved it around his jaw, her thumb touching the corner of his hard mouth. “Poor Chris. He’s such an angry little boy. I’m glad you love him, Mark. I think in time he’ll be glad of it too.”

As he looked at her his anger fading, and the pain and bitterness dwindling in the intense blue of his eyes, something deeper than compassion was stirred to life in her, and she shivered even inside the warmth of his thick terry robe.

He bent his head toward her, and she knew she had to stop whatever might be going to happen, because whatever it was, she wasn’t ready for it. Quickly she said, “Please I really have to get home now, but I think you should go to Chris. He needs you, Mark. Let me call someone to come and get me. There’s only one problem, though. I still don’t know where I am.”

This time he did it. This time he couldn’t stop himself. He set one foot on the front of a chair and rested her bottom against his leg. “Don’t you, Mermaid? I’ll tell you where you are. You’re in my arms, and I desperately want to keep you here,” he said raggedly, lowering his head to kiss her long and hard and deeply, feeling her fingers clutching the flesh of his shoulders. He didn’t know if she was trying to cling to him or trying to push him away, and he sensed that she didn’t know either. He only knew that he had to hold her, had to kiss her, and that he wanted never to have to stop.

Jillian felt his heart hammering against her breast, felt his arms tightening around her, and didn’t even consider trying to resist. When his tongue brushed over her lips, she parted them, opening her mouth to him. She was awash with sensation, drinking in the taste of him, breathing in the scent of him, need growing inside her like a neglected plant given sudden nourishment. His lips were hard. His body was hard. His muscles flexed as he slid one arm lower around her waist, one hand rising up to clasp a handful of her hair. Yet in spite of that hardness, in spite of the passion with which his mouth devoured hers, she felt the marvelous sensation of being engulfed with tenderness, and she knew she was responding to it far too wholeheartedly—and to his kiss as well.

“Mark...” She murmured his name as she put her hands around his face and lifted his mouth from hers. “Enough,” she said. “Please. No more.”

He was breathing hard as he lifted his head and gazed at her. “Jillian...I—” He broke off and placed her on the chair. He wouldn’t, couldn’t apologize for having kissed her, because she had kissed him back, had wanted it as much as he had. “Please. Don’t go. If you’ll just give me a few minutes—have some more coffee or something—while I see to Chris, then I’ll take you home. Just...wait for me.” His voice shook and his eyes pleaded with her.

She hesitated for only a moment, then nodded. What else could she do? Other than calling someone to get her when she didn’t know where she was, her only alternative was somehow to make her way to the water and try to swim home. But he, of course, didn’t realize that. And as she looked at him, saw the misery and the pleading in his blue eyes, something in her softened, and she smiled. “Of course, I’ll wait.”

As she watched him walk away, she thought that he was a man who would be well worth waiting for. Then she remembered and was caught up in a wash of sadness that was broken into only when she heard the sound of bare feet running toward her.

“Hi,” she said to Chris as he came to a stop near her, looking wary. “Did you see your dad? I think he was looking for you.”

“I doubt it. He hates the sight of me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“ ’Cause it’s true.” He glowered at her, and Jillian waited for him to go on. Instead he changed the subject entirely. “Can you really swim in that thing?”

“Yes. I do a show in a nightclub. I dive underwater and do a sort of ballet.”

“How do you breathe?”

“There are little air hoses concealed all over the tank behind pieces of coral or rock or within clumps of seaweed. I just duck behind something every couple of minutes and take a breath. And sometimes I come out at the top of the tank to let the people on the upper floor have a look at a mermaid.”

“Could you swim here? In the pool? I’d kind of like to have a look at a mermaid.” He didn’t look or sound quite so sullen now, and Jillian smiled.

“Sure. One private performance coming up, Mr. Forsythe.” She shrugged out of Mark’s bathrobe, slithered off the chair he had placed her on, slipped into the water, and headed for the bottom. With powerful pushes of her tail, she skimmed along just inches above the blue-painted concrete, then did a few loops and turns before shooting to the surface like a porpoise, spouting a jet of water from her mouth directly toward Chris’s bare feet. Chris laughed, obviously enthralled. “Do it again! Do some more!” Obligingly she dove.

Mark, hearing the sound of his son’s laughter for the first time in more than half a year, stood inside the doorway of his den and gazed out at the boy who squatted by the side of the pool laughing at the cavorting mermaid. For several minutes he watched them. Jillian slopped water over Chris’s lap as he dangled his legs into the pool, then encouraged him to enter the water with her. His hands were on Jillian’s shoulders when Mark approached the end of the pool. She was giving him the fastest swim he had ever experienced. His eyes were squeezed shut, but he was laughing happily. When she said, “Going down!” he closed his mouth and dove with her, her long hair swirling around his head.

She didn’t keep him down long but brought him back to the surface near the shallow end and said, “Okay, friend, that’s enough. I’m beat.” Neither one had noticed Mark standing a few feet away.

“Wow!” said Chris. “Thanks. That was great! I wish I could go to your nightclub.”

“It’ll be another few years before you can do that,” she said, hitching herself up onto the deck. “And by then I’ll be an old lady with gray hair. Nobody would want a gray-haired mermaid.”

Chris looked at her with adoration. “I would,” he said. “Besides you could dye your hair. My mom did.” He looked at her sideways. “I lied. I still miss her a lot, you know.”

“I do know, Chris,” she said evenly. “But I know something else that you probably haven’t realized yet. It gets easier as time passes. The days when you hurt so bad inside that you wanted to die, too, get farther and farther apart, and one day when you least expect it, you’ll discover that the hurt isn’t quite so big, that you can think about her and maybe even smile and remember the good times.”