––––––––
I met Anne the next day at our usual hiking spot. She immediately noticed how distraught I was, and rather than hike, we ended up in a small park in Mill Valley with Mount Tam rising behind us and talked. I told her everything that had transpired in the last few days, and she listened with rapt attention and a face laced with compassion. She had seen this coming; she had warned me. She really didn’t have much advice for me, and I wasn’t looking for advice so much as for a boost of courage. I had no choice but to go through the firestorm I had unleashed. She assured me this wasn’t my fault, despite my many protests to that effect. Despite her condolences and reassurances, I was racked with guilt and a sense of culpability. Nothing she could say would ease those heavy weights of judgment I’d hung around my neck.
She muttered condolences and hugged me good-bye. At the gas station down the street, I dropped in a couple of quarters. I knew I was asking for trouble by calling Raff. He had managed to return half-time to work, and I hoped to rally his support before my mother turned him against me. What was I thinking? Even if I could get him to talk to me, I knew he would give me his pat line: “Lisa, I can’t deal with the stress. Don’t talk to me about your problems; I have enough of my own.” His secretary answered, but when she tried to connect me, she came back on the line and told me in a polite but dismissing tone that Raff was busy at the moment. She would pass on the message that I called, with no promises that he would get back to me.
I drove home, deciding to immerse myself in work. I had to do something with all this anger and hurt. Fueled by frenetic energy, I mucked out the barn, took the sodden straw out in wheelbarrows to the rose garden, and worked it in as mulch around the bushes. I trimmed hooves, gave shots and worming medicine, cleaned out the two water troughs, tightened the loose latch on the goat pen gate, and swept out the barn. It was nearly dark out by the time I walked down the gravel drive to the mailbox, Buster and Angel bouncing along at my side, the air redolent of lilac. When I sifted through the pile of papers, I almost missed the small brown postal notice tucked in between the bills and the local market specials flyer. A registered letter that had to be signed for, from my mother’s business manager.
The moment my eyes locked onto the name on the notice, my knees turned to jelly. My heart pounded hard in my chest, and I struggled for breath. A sweeping sensation of doom fell hard on my body, crushing me in fear. “I can’t do this,” I muttered aloud.
I fell in a heap next to the mailbox. The air, warm and still, felt portentous, the harbinger of a storm coming on the horizon. My hands shook so hard, I dropped the mail in a heap to the dirt and stared down the empty road. The smell of gravel dust and sagebrush surrounded me, a heady aroma. Dizzy, I steadied myself and stood, then turned to look at my property in the fading light—the rough-sided barn; my beautiful ranch home draped with perennials in bloom—roses, penstemon, hydrangeas, and dozens of others crowding the windows and sides of the house; the pond off in the distance, where the frogs were kicking off their evening chortling. I stood there until darkness sucked away every last shred of light, erasing my world as if it had only been a fanciful illusion.
I felt a warm tongue on my wrist. Buster looked up at me, wondering if we were going for a walk. His tail swung in hopeful anticipation. I gave him a perfunctory pat and stumbled my way back to the house. I tossed the market flyer in the recycling bin and hesitated, considering throwing the postal notice for that registered letter in there too. But I knew that would only delay the inevitable. Whatever my mother had set in motion, whatever legal procedures, they would not be sidetracked by any resistance on my part.
I dropped into the chair by the kitchen phone. I was numb, void of emotion. As if that little piece of paper had drained the life out of me, every drop. I found the sticky note on which Jeremy had jotted his phone number. It took all my nerve to punch in the numbers.
Jeremy’s employee, Daniel, answered the phone and said Jeremy had run down to the store but would be back soon. Maybe the disconsolate tone of my voice alerted him to my distress, because rather than call back, within the hour Jeremy showed up at the door. I hadn’t heard him drive up, as I had been in the shower, letting hot water pound my shoulders. But from my bedroom I heard Angel yipping in the yard, so I threw on some clothes and found Jeremy standing on the stoop, waiting for an invitation to come in.
Without a thought, I threw my arms around him and broke down. He muttered words of comfort as I soaked his flannel shirt with my hot tears and wiped my running nose with the back of my hand. His arms hung loosely around me in an awkward embrace. I dared look up to meet his gaze, and rather than see a victorious “I told you so¸” I was taken aback by something foreign and much more disturbing.
Fear.