Melinda had friends, but none so close she’d called any of them more than a couple of times the entire six months she’d been in Juneau. They were the kind of friends who were perfect companions for a dinner at one of the trendy new restaurants that seemed to open on a weekly basis in Minneapolis, or a night at a comedy club when she was desperate for a break from work. But none were the kind of friends who cared enough to listen if she’d wanted to talk about her mother and how she’d refused to leave the town that had broken her heart because her husband’s ashes were scattered there.
Mary Ann couldn’t leave him, not even when it was her beloved daughter who asked. Not even when she had to wait five months for a mammogram and four more months for a diagnosis. By then the particularly aggressive cancer had left her breast and settled in her bones and liver. Even then Mary Ann wouldn’t leave and vehemently refused to let Melinda come home to care for her.
For the first time in her life, Melinda didn’t listen to her mother and took an extended leave from work. They had a week together at home and three days in the hospital and she was gone. With her heart breaking with every step, Melinda hiked to the tree where they had scattered her father’s ashes. She knelt in the damp mulch that surrounded the tree and cradled the wooden jewelry box that held her mother’s ashes.
“Daddy knew how much I needed you and how lonely I would be with both of you gone. But I don’t think he had any idea how much you missed him or how lost you were after he was gone.” She let out a hiccuped sob as tears spilled down her cheeks and dripped on her coat.
“I know Daddy has already found Daniel, but I need you to promise me you’ll tell him again that everything I did was to protect our baby. He can’t wonder about that. He has to know and I don’t think Daddy would tell him the way you will.”
As she scattered her mother’s ashes a weight settled on Melinda, the heavy awareness of what it was to be alone, truly alone. There was no one she could turn to with family questions or a shared “remember when . . .”
Melinda understood the how and why of friends drifting away. Six months was a long time. Friendships needed care and nurturing to develop into something deeper. FaceTime wasn’t the same as spending time looking into someone’s face.
So far she’d found ways to cope with the loneliness, some more successful than others. As much as she loved her volunteer work at the hospital, she paid a price every time she left. The babies haunted her and not only in her dreams, but when she should have been concentrating on a security problem for a client.
She’d tried garnering some enthusiasm for redecorating her apartment—the one the company had leased for her seven years ago, but it still looked exactly as it had the day she moved in. Her only contribution was a shelf filled with books, the same ones her father had once checked out of the library over and over again. She owned copies now, some new, some not so new, all of them paid for with her first check from Wyndham and Parker Security Systems. Next to the books was a framed photograph of her mother and father’s wedding. Most days she purposely avoided looking at the photograph. Instead of seeing the love, she saw how alone she was.
She dated, but rarely went out more than twice with the same man, as much because of her job as a lack of interest in the men she met. She’d had a three-month relationship with a political science major in college that broke up when he put a bumper sticker on her car promoting a candidate she considered a fascist. He said it was a joke. She told him she wasn’t laughing.
Melinda made her way to the front door of the beach house, sidestepping flowers that dipped their heavy heads onto the walkway, dropping seeds the birds ate and scattered in yards and gardens throughout the cove. She barely registered the show being put on over the ocean where the sun lit the sky in oranges and pinks and a bold stripe of purple as it neared the end of that day’s journey. The warm light coming through the sliding glass door filled the living room.
Freed from her carrier, Heidi took off down the hall to her litter box. Melinda headed for the kitchen and the kitten food. A spasm hit before she made it to the doorway. She put one hand over her mouth and the other across her stomach as a second and then a third followed. No, she silently pleaded. Not now. Please.
She swallowed, once, twice . . . then, acknowledging there was nothing she could do but give in, took off running toward the master bathroom.
Five minutes later, her face washed and teeth brushed, but still in the middle of berating herself for the insane way her body released stress, she looked at herself in the mirror. Why couldn’t she just cry like everyone else? Crying was accepted, even encouraged. No one ever said, “Why don’t you just throw up?”
And yet there were times she cried. Like now. Not gentle or dignified tears. These were the kind accompanied by breath-stealing sobs, companions of a broken heart. She could count the number of times she’d cried so hard she was convinced she’d never recover. But she had. And she’d gone on just as she always had.
She backed against the wall opposite the mirror, her full weight pressing against the towel and towel rack. As she slid to the floor, both came with her, the bar releasing with a popping sound. Heidi appeared in the doorway. She studied Melinda for a long time, tilting her head to one side and then the other.
Melinda reached for the towel on the floor beside her and buried her face in the thick terry cloth. Heidi crossed the room and climbed on her lap. She stood on her back paws and reached for the towel, catching her claws in the loops and pulling until Melinda uncovered her face and acknowledged her.
Melinda looked into her eyes and, with one last hiccuped sob, put her hand on Heidi’s head and scratched her ears. “How pathetic am I that you’re my only real friend and the whole time we’ve been together I’ve been trying to find a way to get rid of you?” Melinda winced at the thought. She could just imagine what Jeremy would think if he heard her planning to give away yet another helpless infant. He already believed she had the nurturing instincts of a cowbird.
“What am I going to do, Heidi? I can’t leave. Not now. Shiloh needs me.” She reached for a length of toilet paper to blow her nose. “And I need her.”
The sun was long gone, the sky a fleeting crimson remnant of its escape by the time Melinda roused herself from the bathroom floor and took Heidi into the kitchen to feed her. This time the meal was followed by an impossibly loud burp.
“Keep this up and I’m not going to be able to take you anyplace nice to eat.” Fresh tears touched the corners of her eyes as she attempted a smile.
Desperately tired, fighting a stabbing headache and throbbing sinuses, Melinda cleaned the kitchen and went into the living room, not bothering to turn on a light. When she curled up on the sofa, Heidi nestled into her side, always ready for a nap.
Melinda closed her eyes but sleep eluded her. She had to come up with a way to approach Jeremy that would let them start over and put their ugly encounter behind them. She tried, but couldn’t fault his stubbornness. He believed he was protecting Shiloh from someone who would upend their world. What he couldn’t see yet was that no matter how much he wanted to erase all of yesterday, it wasn’t going to happen.
If necessary, she would rent an apartment and stay in Santa Cruz until he changed his mind about letting her see Shiloh. For as long as she could, she would work from home and if her job suffered, she would get another. She had the savings she’d put away for Shiloh.
All she needed was a place to stay, nothing fancy, a room above a garage would do, where she could work and wait until Jeremy changed his mind or Shiloh turned twenty-one.
She’d lost her father, the window to her intellectual soul. And her mother, who’d loved her without question, the way no one ever would again. And she’d lost Daniel, her soul mate in a world too jaded to recognize the concept. She would not lose her daughter. Not again.
Her life had been impossibly hard and filled with crushing disappointments, but she would go back in a heartbeat. She was loved in that world and she loved in return. Chores were never a burden, secondhand clothes were good enough. Pleasure came from a sandwich made with tuna on day-old bread and a spirited conversation over which Founding Father had the most influential wife. A good-bye hug from her mother was enough to make Melinda believe the birds sang just a little louder on her way to school in the morning.
Melinda closed her eyes and drifted back to a place where she’d been loved, throwing her emotional arms wide in welcome even as her mind shouted a warning that she could not go there without paying a crushing emotional toll.