The Year Everything Changed (31 page)

The monitor beside the bed let out a pinging noise. Jeff smiled. “See?”

She returned his smile, a quiet knowledge laying a comforting hand on her shoulder. They were going to be okay.

Chapter Forty-nine
Ginger

Ginger got out of the car at Rachel’s house and took a minute to stretch stiff aching muscles. She was long past the second wind that had seen her through the hours at the hospital with Rachel. Christina met her at the door. “You look awful.”

“You should see Rachel. I don’t think there’s a place on her body that isn’t black and blue or on its way.”

“How was she doing when you left?”

“Physically, the broken ribs seem to be the worst. Her left breast is purple where the seat belt came across and it’s swollen twice the size of the right one. Mentally, I think she’s still in shock, more numb than traumatized.”

“Any change in Jeff?”

She’d called with the results of the surgery while Rachel was with Jeff in intensive care. “The same. They’re talking about moving him in a week or two if there aren’t any complications.”

“Why?”

“So he’ll be closer to home.”

A tall blond man came up behind Christina. “This is Logan, Jeff’s brother,” Christina said. “Logan—Ginger.”

They shook hands. “I came to get some things for Rachel,” Ginger said.

“I can take them back for you,” Logan said. “I was just about to leave for the hospital.”

“I didn’t know you were here or I would have called with the list,” she said. To Christina she said, “Where are the kids?”

“Upstairs.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I didn’t, Logan did.”

“Well?” she questioned.

“I told them the truth.”

“How did they take it?”

“They asked a few questions, then wanted to know when they could go to the hospital. I told them they probably couldn’t right away but that I’d ask.”

“The doctor said Rachel could be released as soon as tomorrow, so I thought I’d look for a hotel near the hospital. Not that she’s going to stay there, but at least it will give her a place to get cleaned up.”

“I can do that, too,” Logan said. “You can stay here and get some sleep.”

“I’d rather be at the hospital. I want to be there if Rachel needs me.”

The doorbell rang. Ginger answered. It was Elizabeth, suitcase in hand. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Same thing you are. She’s my sister, too, you know.”

Ginger introduced Elizabeth to Logan before giving her an update.

“How high did they remove his leg?” Elizabeth asked.

“Mid-thigh.”

Elizabeth winced. “Too bad he couldn’t have kept the knee, but he’ll do fine. They have some incredible prostheses now.”

“How do you know about artificial legs?” Christina asked.

“You live forty-nine years, you pick things up along the way.” She gave Christina an unexpected, spontaneous hug.

“Wait a minute,” Logan injected. “What’s this about Rachel being your sister? She doesn’t have any sisters. She’s an only child.”

“I’ll tell you about it on the way,” Ginger said. And then, feeling oddly on the outside, blurted out, “Don’t I get a hug, too?”

“What the hell,” Logan said. Before Christina or Elizabeth could move, he put his arms around Ginger.

Ginger was speechless. So, in addition to being tall and handsome and caring, he had a sense of humor. She liked the way the family was expanding.

As soon as Logan let Ginger go, Elizabeth took his place. “I certainly never thought I’d see this day.”

Christina opened her arms. “I believe that sound you hear in the background is hell freezing over.”

“Why don’t you give me the rest of the directions before you fall asleep?” Logan said.

They were still forty-five minutes from Santa Rosa. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. Your head has been bobbing for the last ten miles.”

“I’ll sleep when we get there.”

“Then talk to me. Tell me about this sister thing.”

She did, telling him everything except about the money, leaving that to Rachel.

“I wonder why she never said anything,” he said.

“I think we were all a little shell-shocked in the beginning. And why talk about something that’s going to be out of your life in six months?”

“That’s not the way it looked to me.”

“Things change.”

“Sounds like your father got around.”

A powerful defensive streak stiffened her spine. “Be careful,” she warned. “We’re all a little sensitive where Jessie is concerned.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know he existed until a couple of months ago.”

She looked at the car beside them, at the woman driving, at the child strapped in the car seat. “It was my loss,” she said softly.

Minutes passed. “I’m sorry,” Logan said. “I was out of line.”

So, he had a sense of humor, asked directions, and apologized when he was wrong. “You’re a firefighter?”

“Going on twenty years.”

“That must mean you like what you do?”

“Most of the time.”

“Meaning?”

“Not every call ends the way you want it to.”

“Firefighters got Jeff out of the car and carried him up the hill.”

“That’s what we’re trained to do.”

“ ‘Just doin’ my job, ma’am.’ ”

“Yep.”

Firefighters and modesty supposedly went hand in hand, but throw in someone who looked like Logan—tall and muscular with perfect teeth, gorgeous eyes, and a drop-dead smile—and she wasn’t buying it. “Are you for real?”

Logan laughed. “As real and as ordinary as this car.”

“What’s wrong with my car?”

“Nothing. It’s just not what you’d call a classic.”

Oh, God, she liked him. This was not a good thing. “Wife?”

“Are you asking if I have one or if I want one?”

“If you have one.”

“Did once, don’t anymore.” He shifted lanes. “What about you?”

“Kids?”

“Nope. What about you?” he repeated.

“Neither—wife or kids.”

He glanced at her. “So, why all the questions?”

She shrugged. “Just figured it was time I got to know the relatives.”

“You’re quick. I like that.”

“You’re bossy,” she said.

“And?”

“I’m not crazy about that.”

He grinned. “Hits too close to home?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t seem very worried about your brother.”

“I’m not—at least not now. Jeff’s a survivor. He has some tough times ahead, but he’ll come through okay. Rachel’s the one who needs help. It’s going to fall to her to hold everything together while Jeff recovers. And she’s the one stuck with the nightmares. It’s my understanding Jeff was unconscious for most of what happened.”

“We’ll be there for her.”

He pinned her with a look. “Will you? Really? For the long haul?”

“Yes,” she said with absolute conviction. “We really will. All three of us.”

Chapter Fifty
Christina

Christina stopped to look at the drawings decorating the refrigerator. John’s was the outline of his hand made into a turkey, the head his thumb, the fingers the tail feathers. Cassidy had made a Pilgrim couple, the woman with flaming red hair and dangling earrings, the man sporting a buzz cut and headband. She was crazy about her niece and nephew but not so enamored she was blinded to the truth—neither was a budding Rembrandt.

She reached inside for the cream, poured it into the small ceramic pitcher shaped like a cow, and put it on the tray with mugs of coffee. She’d spent so much time in Rachel’s kitchen the past three weeks that she was almost as familiar with it as she was the one at home.

Only it wasn’t her home. It was Jessie’s. It just felt like home. But soon, probably the first of the year, Lucy would put the house on the market and it would be someone else’s home. And she’d be in L.A. looking for a new place to live, starting a new life.

Elizabeth came into the kitchen. “Need some help?”

She picked up the tray. “I got it.”

“Wait a second. I want to talk to you.”

Christina put the tray down again. “What’s up?”

“What are we going to do about Thanksgiving? Jeff should be home by then, and there’s no way Rachel can take care of him and fix a dinner, too.”

She should have known this was coming. Elizabeth was half Martha Stewart and half organizational freak—a lethal combination for those related to her who just didn’t give a damn about holiday traditions. Christina’s last four Thanksgivings had been unmitigated disasters—the best of which was the one she’d spent at a friend’s house where everyone celebrated by getting stoned. The turkey hadn’t made it into the oven until eight o’clock that night, its only stuffing the plastic bag of giblets, plastic included. “There has to be a restaurant around here that does catering.”

Elizabeth looked horrified.

“God, you’re so predictable. Okay, what did you have in mind?”

“We could do the cooking.”

“We?” Christina questioned.

“The three of us.”

“Like that’s going to happen. You’re assuming a lot if you think I can cook.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Okay, so we throw some Stove Top stuffing in a pan and open a can of gravy. What are you going to do with Sam and Stephanie and the boys?”

“Would it be so bad if I brought them?”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“And me and Rachel. That’s seven. With Rachel’s four that’s nine. Then there’s Logan—”

“He said he won’t be here. He has to go back to work next week, but he’ll be here for Christmas.”

Christina was fighting a battle she didn’t want to win. “Sure. What the hell. Why should I care?”

“Be careful,” Elizabeth said sarcastically. “You might give someone the wrong impression with all that enthusiasm.”

“Well, what did you expect me to say? It’s not like I know how to do any of this stuff.”

“I’ll teach you.”

Christina picked up the tray again. “I’m thrilled.” She pushed open the swinging door between the kitchen and family room with her hip. “Hey, guess what,” she said to Rachel and Ginger. “Elizabeth has decided we should all have Thanksgiving here.”

A stunned silence followed. Rachel was the first to say something. “Would you do that?”

“
Should
we is more like it,” Ginger said. “Jeff will be home by then. You don’t need a houseful of people when—”

“Oh, but I do,” Rachel protested. The bruises around her eyes had faded to a yellow-green that she’d stopped trying to hide with makeup. “Jeff can’t wait to get some normalcy in our lives again. And the kids would love it.”

“What about you, Ginger?” Elizabeth asked. “Are you going to Denver for Thanksgiving?”

“I’m going home for Christmas this year. I never do both.”

Elizabeth beamed. “Then it’s a done deal. I’ll pick up what we’ll need before I leave today. Does anyone have any family recipes, any traditions they want to include?”

Christina groaned.

“Oh, shut up,” Ginger said without malice. “We’re on to you, you know. If Elizabeth hadn’t thought of this, you would have found a way to suggest it yourself.”

“Not likely. My domesticity begins and ends with cleaning moldy takeout from the back shelves of the refrigerator. And remember, I was raised in Mexico. Mexicans don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.”

“I hate canned sweet potatoes,” Ginger said.

“I love mince pie,” Rachel added.

They all looked at her as if she were some kind of alien creature. Christina made a face. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Well, I like fruitcake,” Elizabeth confessed.

“Okay,” Ginger said, “if we’re admitting dirty little holiday secrets, I like giblet gravy.”

“
Euww
,” the others said in unison.

Rachel laughed. “Sounds as if we’d better stick to the basics.”

Elizabeth nodded. She could handle basic; she could handle elaborate. The meal itself didn’t matter, the company did. They had one more meeting after today, in December, to listen to Jessie’s final tape. After that, geography would create barriers between them when Christina moved to Los Angeles, Ginger to Kansas City, and Rachel . . . she didn’t know about Rachel other than how hard the road ahead was for both her and Jeff. They would likely stay through Jeff’s recovery. After that, it made sense to leave California, if only to escape bad memories.

“Basic it is,” Elizabeth said, already planning special touches. If this was their only Thanksgiving together, it would be one none of them would ever forget.

They settled into the chairs and sofa in Rachel’s family room that overlooked a tree-filled canyon and were warmed by a fire in the stone fireplace. Their mugs of coffee creamed and sugared, a plate of cookies nearby, Christina opened the manila envelope she’d picked up at Lucy’s office. “I told Lucy I’d write a summation to prove we actually listened to today’s tapes, but she said it wasn’t necessary.” She reached for the portable tape player she’d brought with her.

“By the way, she sends her best,” she said to Rachel. “And she wanted me to tell you that if there’s anything she can do, just let her know.”

Elizabeth leaned back in the Queen Anne–style recliner and sipped her coffee. Over the past four months, as she listened to Jessie’s voice on the tapes, she’d gone from resentful to curious to melancholy. She’d forgiven her mother because not forgiving her was burdensome. More important, she allowed herself to feel love for her father again.

“Ready?” Christina asked.

Elizabeth started to nod, then impulsively said, “Let’s go outside.” She looked at the others. “I love fall.”

“Me, too,” Christina said.

“It’s my favorite season, too,” Rachel and Ginger said simultaneously.

Minutes later they settled in again, this time in weathered Adirondack chairs. Surrounded by a landscape of gold, crimson, yellow, and orange, they listened to a now-familar voice that transported them to another time and place.

Jessie’s Story

I’d never cared much for whiskey, not even the aged and mellowed kind. It always seemed a little like punishment the way it burns all the way from the back of the tongue to the stomach and then hangs around to burn some more. It became my drink of choice after Frank died, the first thing I reached for in the morning and the last thing I had in my hand when I fell down at night. I’m ashamed to say I was drunk at Frank’s funeral and to this day can’t remember anything past the church being filled to overflowing and the snap and slap and crack of rifles being raised and lowered for a twenty-one-gun salute.

I didn’t go to the house afterward, although I told everyone I would. I couldn’t take one more person telling me what a good kid Frank had been and what a shame it was the way he died. Never had a chance. What a waste. So young. Life just beginning. How proud I must be. I remember I wanted to kill the son of a bitch who said that bit about being proud.

I didn’t know Barbara was at the funeral until she slipped into my car at the cemetery and took the keys. She drove me home, not minding or thinking less of me that I cried most of the way.

I made a couple of attempts at finding a reason to get up in the morning, at caring that bills had come due and gone unpaid so long that cars were disappearing out of my garage and furniture out of the house. Most everything I owned had been repossessed except the house itself and a closet full of clothes. When I tried to write a check for a case of whiskey and it was refused it scared the hell out of me. How was I going to face life sober? I needed the numbness the whiskey provided, the punishment of feeling it burning a hole in my stomach.

I had a gun—everyone in L.A. did back then, or at least everyone I knew. The more I thought about using it, the more appeal it had. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was damn close. Oblivion didn’t seem so bad compared to where I’d been living. As soon as the whiskey was gone I’d use the gun and my pain would be over. I didn’t hold any hope of seeing Frank. I’d called on God, offered Him my soul, but there wasn’t anyone on the other end of the line.

Barbara must have sensed something because she showed up that night after her concert. I tried, but I couldn’t get rid of her. She just sat and watched me drink and held my hand when I’d let her. Finally she got me talking, and I spilled like rice out of a gunny sack with a split seam. She flat refused to believe it was my fault Frank had joined the Army. Her reasoning didn’t change my mind, but it let me know that not everyone saw what I’d done in the same light.

The whiskey was gone, and I still had enough pride not to ask her to get more. She stayed with me for three days, holding me, talking to me, loving me. I’d never had a better friend. I’d never had anyone do more or ask less in return. It damn near tore my heart out three months later when she told me she was pregnant. She was riding a wave, a song away from her dream of a number-one record, and in the music business second chances were as rare as real overnight successes.

I offered to find someone to take care of it, but she wouldn’t listen. She was determined to have her baby and just as determined that the baby would be raised far away from show business. She was smart enough to know the break in my slow dance with whiskey was just that. I was still a couple of years away from leaving that partner in the dance hall.

I always wondered if Barbara didn’t have some kind of premonition that she wasn’t going to be around long enough to raise a child. She was the only one I ever knew who could squeeze seventy seconds out of a minute and still worry she didn’t have enough time.

She got her hit record the next year and saved me a seat at every concert after that. I had enough sense to step back and let her go when her star shot into the heavens. She would call me on the baby’s birthday from wherever she was in the world, and we would talk about everything except her little girl. Three years before she died I hired someone to find Ginger. All I wanted was to know she was being loved and cared for the way she deserved. The detective thought I’d want proof, so he brought back some photographs of Ginger on a swing, grinning ear to ear like her life was nothing but sunshine and rainbows. I thought about it a long time before I gave one of the pictures to Barbara. She cried and tried to convince me they were happy tears, but I’ve always wondered if such a thing is possible.

Barbara kept the picture. It was in the plane debris and among the personal things she’d left me in her will. When the box arrived I was in Mexico, trying to work out export problems with the government for a strawberry crop that was rotting in the fields. By the time I arrived home the following week Carmen had looked at everything and put the clues together to make an educated guess at my relationship with Barbara. She refused to believe the affair was over before I’d married her and used it as a reason to leave me and take Christina home with her to Mexico City.

I was in my fifties when we met, Carmen barely into her twenties. She was the niece of my partner and from a powerful, wealthy family in Mexico City. And she was pregnant. Despite the threat of being disowned by distraught parents, she refused to name the father. I offered her a place to stay, she thought I’d proposed, and as easily as that I was married again. The marriage was doomed before it began.

We could have and should have had it annulled when Carmen lost the baby a month later. But by then we were living in San Diego, and she wasn’t ready to go home. The taste of freedom she’d experienced away from her family was as intoxicating as cheap tequila and produced the same kind of headache years later when being with me in San Diego lost its charm.

I was an old man in her friends’ eyes, an embarrassment. We had nothing in common except a child we both adored.

“Come with me to Mexico City,” Carmen offered unenthusiastically.

“My business is here.”

“You don’t have to sell the strawberries here, you can sell them somewhere else.”

“The business is based on bringing them into the States.” It was an old argument. “That’s how we make our money.”

“What money?” she shot back. “There hasn’t been any money around here for months. I tried to use my credit card last week, and the clerk told me I couldn’t, that the bill hadn’t been paid.” She stood in the middle of our small kitchen and folded her arms across her chest, glaring at me. “Do you have any idea how humiliating that was for me?”

“Things will turn around. They always do.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to go home. I want to be with my family. And they want me back with them.”

This was the first I’d heard of it. “You’ve talked to your mother and father about this?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “They miss me and they want to be near their granddaughter.”

Christina was sitting at the table, book and crayons spread out in front of her, intently coloring Mickey Mouse’s ears a bright green. “I’m not going to lose her,” I said.