Adam changed clothes and called his mother while standing by his bedroom window. From her first word, he knew it was not a good day. He stifled his worries and his own need to talk, as he had on so many other such times. A few words of reassurance was all he permitted himself, only the things that would ease her through this bad time. He then dialed the nurses’ station from memory. The hospice aides all knew him, knew where he was, and treated him gently. No, nothing new. Just a bad day. Yes, of course they would phone if there was any change. Adam gave them his new cell-phone number as a contact and asked that they pass it on to his mother.
He slipped the phone into his pocket and raised the tall sash window as far as it would go. He stood close enough for the rain to dampen his face. But his breath did not come any easier.
From the floor below came strident calls of farewell. Children shrieked and thundered along the downstairs hallway. Doors were slammed, first in the house and then in a car out front. The silence afterward was deafening.
Adam descended the stairs and knocked on the parlor’s closed door. At the sound of the faint voice within, he opened and asked, “Do you mind some more company?”
“Do I mind? My dear young man, there is no harsher hour to my week than the endless minutes after my family departs. Come in, come in. I fear you shall need to make your own tea, as Mrs. Brandt is off visiting her own children.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“My son and daughter-in-law want me to come live with them. But my dear late husband is here, do you see. He positively adored this old place. I fear were I to leave, I would lose this final shred of his company.” She waited until Adam was seated in the horsehair chair across from her to inquire, “Does that sound quite mad?”
“To be honest, everything about love strikes me as border-line insane.”
“Does it indeed?” A slender cane of wood the color of frozen honey leaned against the arm of her chair. Sylvia Beachley reached over and began rubbing the ivory head. “Now what, may I ask, would bring you to say such a thing?”
“I’m an analyst. A good one. I sift through information. I find patterns. I determine a course that reduces risk and points toward a winning solution.”
“Ah. Risk. A winning formula. How very interesting.”
“When it comes to love, though, I can’t work out a perspective that makes sense. Even when I say what feels most right, even when I do what feels best, I still walk away feeling . . .”
“Wronged. Damaged. Vulnerable. Wounded.” Dr. Beachley stroked the cane’s head for a long moment, then said, “The tutorial system followed at Oxford is a most curious practice. The tutor’s task is not to help students graduate or increase their grades. It is to prepare them for life. To help them identify core issues, such as what their gifts are, where their passions lie, and how they might make the most of the days they have here on earth. There are certain rules which dominate a tutorial. One, there is no wrong question. Two, whatever the course, the student commits to accepting the challenge and studying. Studying hard.”
“Is that what we’re having? A tutorial?”
“That is for you to determine, young man.”
“I’d like that a lot.”
“How very interesting. Do you know, I’ve recently been presented with quite a serious dilemma from another of my students. One to which you may very well hold the key. I have been sitting here wondering whether you came here for this reason, as it were. But an issue of trust is involved, and I have wondered . . . But all that in due course.” She thumped her cane. “Very well. Young man, the first rule of analysis, then, is to determine your parameters. Do you understand this term, parameters?”
“Borders. Boundaries.”
“Precisely. You must define the structure within which you operate. There must be limitations, assumptions, givens. But with love, what can these be? How can you establish the proper dimensions of affection?”
“Experience.”
“Experience is decidedly the crucial aspect which most affects our self-determination. But what if the experience of love is bad? What if all we know of past love is pain?”
Adam did not feel what he would have expected, which was, to flee. The professor did not pry. She did not claw at his memories. Nor did she ask him to dump the issues in her lap. It was an astonishing sensation, being stripped until he sat there, emotionally naked, without pain or shame. “Then love becomes something to avoid.”
She thumped her cane upon the floor. “Very good. So in this case, the parameters within which we operate are solitude. Isolation. Aloofness. An emotional vacuum. But then arises a stimulus from outside the parameters. Suddenly the observer is faced with a calamity. What if the parameters are wrong? What if the defining factors that have ruled a lifetime of research and work and action are totally invalid? What then?”
“I don’t know that they’re wrong.” Adam’s voice sounded raw to his own ears.
“No, certainly not. There is always the chance that the experiment was wrong. That factors unrelated to the correctness have entered in. The controls were breached.”
For some reason, the words rocked him. Not what she had said. But what she implied. “Control.”
Dr. Beachley directed her smile at the cane’s head. “Oh, I say. You are good.” She thumped her cane a second time, a gentle drumbeat that reverberated at the core of his being. “For the sake of argument, just for a moment, let us say that the issue we face is indeed that the parameters are flawed. That in order to proceed to the correct analysis, the entire course of study must be changed. This would mean even the most basic of issues are open to change, would it not? Even the definitions we have developed, concepts like risk and winning.”
She twisted her head so that she could elevate her gaze to his. “What then, Master Wright? How, then, shall you seek new parameters?”
He was silent.
“It would mean looking beyond yourself, would it not? Seeking outside your experiences.”
Adam did not speak.
“But how is this possible? Who are we to trust with such a vital issue as defining the concepts, the core structures, that shape our lives?”
Her gaze was milky with age, her voice cracked and seamed as her face. Yet the power, the sheer brute force, held him captivated. Speechless.
“This, then, is your first assignment, young man. If you are to search beyond your experiences, where should you look? Who could you possibly trust enough to help you define what love is, whether it is worth the risk of loving, how you might win at this most daunting of challenges?”
Kayla arrived to find the house silent. A note from Honor was propped on the kitchen cabinet, saying her father had been called to an urgent meeting, and Honor had driven him for moral support. Kayla placed Adam’s thistles in a tiny crystal vase and reread the note. Honor’s concern for Peter came through loud and clear. Kayla unpacked, napped, and returned down-stairs in time to watch the early winter dusk take control of the Cotswold valley. The rain had stopped while she slept, and a pale light bathed the dew-soaked world. Kayla’s gaze gradually shifted from farmhouse smoke rising in feather-strokes to her own reflection. Memories of her first meeting with Honor misted the rain-streaked glass. She used the ringing phone to turn away.
Adam asked, “Am I calling at a bad time?”
“Hi. No, it’s fine.”
“I’ve been downstairs talking with the professor. And something she said . . . Kayla, you need to apologize to Honor. Today.”
Kayla carried the phone into the kitchen. She touched the thistles he had given her. Just like the previous day, his sense of timing held a soul-piercing strength.
“Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“You just go to her and you say the words.”
She set the mug back on the shelf. “I don’t have any. Words.”
“You mean, you don’t have the ones to make the mistake never have happened.” Adam gave her space to argue, then continued, “If she’s the woman I think she is, whatever you offer will be fine. Because it won’t be the words at all. And as far as she’s concerned, the mistake is already long gone.”
Kayla turned back to the rear windows. The vista beyond was now lost to the night. She shivered with the realization that this was real. That she could no more run from him now than run from herself.
She heard a soft tapping and knew he was pacing. His footsteps formed a cadence to his words. Kayla found her gaze tracking back and forth across the empty kitchen, as though following his motions.
Adam said, “When Mom got sick, I became eaten up by my own helpless fury. Week by week I watched everything I’d worked for, all my savings, all my dreams, just drain away. Mom must have known how angry I was. But she never said anything except to thank me.”
His confession drew the night into a parchmentlike fragility. Kayla stepped to the rear window. She stared at the blank glass, willing herself to ask the question, Why was he telling her this?
Her fingers tapped against the glass in time to his unseen tread. She did not ask the question. She already knew the answer.
“I’m the worst person in the world to talk about love, Kayla. But I know there are some people out there who have a better handle on it than I ever will. My mom, for one. Not long back I came into her room, and she was doing so bad I was afraid that visit might end up being our last time together. That night I apologized for being a shallow soul. That’s what I called myself. Mom smiled and said she was glad I was her son, and that she was proud of me. Three days later, I met your father. He offered me the job. I thanked him and turned him down and had to tell him why. But when I told Mom, she said it was time. And that night she had her first dream and said I’d come over and find the signs. And if I searched, I’d also find the answer for why I had to leave. Mom said it was her final request. I left because I couldn’t refuse her anything. Not even if it meant leaving her alone.”
“Adam . . .”
“There are a lot of mistakes you can’t undo, Kayla. Those are the tragedies. This problem with Honor is bad only so long as you leave it hanging. That’s why I called. To tell you to do this now. Tonight. For Honor. For your father. And especially for yourself.”