Authors: Antoinette Stockenberg
"I'm sorry, Tracey. Don't think I'm looking forward to this, because I'm not."
"But you don't understand. My mom doesn't trust me as it is!"
"
Well, duh. I wonder why?''
"Please, please don't tell, Mr. Hawke!" she begged him. "My father would never tell!"
That pretty much clinched it for Hawke; now he was damn well going to tell. One way or another, he planned to make sure that Maddie got her daughter under control. How she was going to do that, he had no idea. But he didn't want Tracey turning into a female version of her slick and evasive father. He wanted Tracey to turn out, well, like Maddie. Maddie without the Corvette, anyway.
Since he hadn't responded to Tracey's last gambit, the girl repeated it. "My father understands me," she said in a plaintive wail.
"Yeah, but I'm not your father."
She sucked in her breath. "No, you're just like my mother!" she cried, and ran ahead to rejoin her friend.
"Thank you, Tracey," he said into the darkness behind her, and he meant it. In profound ways, he and Maddie
were
alike. He knew it once; he remembered it now. Their hearts and souls were carved from the same chunk of the cosmos.
If only he could make Maddie see it.
He shepherded the
two
down
Cranberry Lane
. As they got nearer to
Rosedale
cottage, he saw that every light in the house was on. There were only two possibilities for that: either Tracey was afraid of the dark, or her mother was afraid of Tracey being out in the dark.
In the next thirty seconds, he had his answer. Maddie came flying out of the house, leaving the door open behind her, and ran into the street. She was little more than a dark shadow as she stood in the moonless lane, but he was able to hear the tension in her voice as she spied Tracey and Julie and called out to them.
"Tracey? Is that you?"
"Yeah, it's me, Mom," the girl said, glancing behind at Hawke as she answered.
"Why are you outside? Didn't I tell you to—"
Maddie stopped short. She could see him walking behind the two girls; Hawke had no doubt about that. Whether she recognized him or thought he was a stalker was another question altogether.
He kept on approaching as she said to her daughter, "Inside.
Now.
Julie, you too. I'll take you home later."
And then there were two.
Before he was able to get close, she said, "If you've come for more sugar you're flat out of luck; my daughter's put us on Sweet'n Low."
He wanted to smile but he did not. He said, "No, it's your daughter I've come about."
The breeziness in her voice evaporated. "Tracey? Why?"
Boy, this stinks with both socks on, he thought. He'd never ratted on anyone in his life. Still, what he'd just seen had left him appalled. He might as well have been watching the girl holding a grenade with the pin pulled out. Maddie would have to be told.
"Were you home earlier?" he asked, though he knew she wasn't.
"
No
... my car was here, but I was off at a planning meeting with one of the contributors in the lighthouse project. He got a flat on the way back and didn't have a spare, so we had to wait for a tow truck. I called Tracey to tell her we'd be late. She was supposed to stay inside; I'm very annoyed that she didn't."
Hawke didn't hear anything after the word contributor. Contributor! A surge of almost inane relief went through him, but it made it even harder to say what he had to say.
He decided to give it to her straight. "Look, I'll be the first to admit that I don't know what goes and what doesn't go with parents nowadays, but I'm pretty sure that kids, drink, and drugs are still a no-no."
Her response to that was a complete blank; she didn't know what he was talking about.
He was only an arm's length away from her now. He felt his blood run predictably faster at the nearness of her.
But he was there for the sole purpose of giving her really rotten news, so he plowed on stoically. "I just found Tracey and Julie and a couple of kids—brothers; the younger one's name is Ross—in the lighthouse tower, having a little picnic. They had everything but the ants," he added, hoping she'd get his drift.
She did. "Alcohol?" she whispered, stunned. And then, without waiting for his answer, "Which drugs?"
"Pot, as far as I could tell. I didn't frisk 'em."
Not for a million bucks, he thought, thinking of Julie's savvy comeback.
"I see." In a voice that was trying hard to stay calm, she said, "The lighthouse
.
It's always been a favorite place for the kids to hang out. Whenever we have a community beach cleanup, that's where we find the most empty liquor bottles—you know, the airplane-sized ones? Somehow we've never found any half-smoked joints, though," she added in a painful attempt at levity.
It was her way of absorbing the hit—rattling on about the lighthouse instead of her daughter. Although he knew it was small comfort, he said, "It's a rite of passage for some kids, Maddie."
She let out a sharp sigh of distress. "But the kids do it so much more
... so much younger
... God, I can't believe this! I—"
She checked herself and said in a numb tone, "I was hoping it would never come to this. I was hoping so much."
Her voice was filled with such sudden, bewildered emotion that he wanted to take her in his arms on the spot and tell her he'd make it all better, which would be a little like a stagecoach driver offering to fly a 747. All he knew about kids was what he knew about himself as a kid, and since he'd
chosen to forget most of his childhood, that wasn't a whole lot.
He stood there feeling helpless as she murmured, "I can't go in there now; I can't. I feel too much like shaking her until her teeth fall out. I have to calm down
... have to stay cool
... or we'll end up bitter enemies."
"Walk with me," he said on the spot. "We'll work on a plan."
Her head shot up. In the dark, he could only imagine the
frown on her face. The skepticism came through in her voice, though, loud and clear.
"You don't have children, do you?"
"You know I don't," he said tersely. Actually, there was no reason for her to know one way or the other.
She seemed to falter, then suddenly got defensive. "Well, take it from me: every parent in
America
is wrestling with this problem."
"Every parent?"
Just as suddenly, her bravado collapsed. "No
... not every one," she said. He could hear tears welling in her voice. "Sometimes I wish it
was
all of them. I'd feel less of a failure then."
"That's nuts," he said, amazed to hear her talk that way, especially now that she'd explained about the Corvette. Hawke had followed her comings and goings close enough to know that she carted Tracey and her friends around everywhere and then remembered to pick them up again. That put her way ahead of any mother he ever knew.
Nonchalantly, he began to mosey down the flower-filled lane, praying that she'd fall in with his step. She did, and his heart went cartwheeling down the path ahead of them. Maddie was close enough to touch; Maddie was walking alongside. Maddie was talking with him again. Maddie, the one, the only, the great, great love of his life.
Maddie, my Maddie. I love you.
Convinced for a second that he'd said it out loud, he felt his cheeks do a sudden burn and was grateful for the cover of darkness that was wrapping them both with its warm, honeysuckle breath.
Tongue-tied out of fear of saying something that might make her skitter away, he waited for her to speak first.
"I don't know what happened," she said in a
n achingly frustrated voice. "
One day she was a sweet, outgoing, loving kid, and the next day—this. I blame the divorce, I blame the murder. I can't blame her."
The allusion to her divorce cut through Hawke like a blade; she shouldn't have married anyone but him. He put the thought aside and concentrated on the rest of her remark. "Maybe she knows that she has immunity," he suggested. "Maybe she's testing it."
He saw her turn toward him in the dark. She said, "That's very perceptive, coming from a nonparent."
He shrugged, pleased to
be considered a perceptive non-
parent. "I know how it was with me, although in my case the immunity came from the fact that my parents didn't give a shit."
"I remember," said Maddie. "You said they weren't around much for you."
"Not at all."
They walked along in silence for a bit, with Hawke getting newly drunk on the sweet scents around them. How had he not noticed the overwhelming fragrance during the parade down to her house?
"Honeysuckle," he said, as though he were laying a bouquet of it in her arms.
"And wild roses."
He smiled. He was so happy. They walked a little farther down the lane, which was about to end in the blacktopped road that led to the lighthouse. Why did they make dead-end lanes so short?
He slowed to a crawl.
She matched his pace.
Her voice became low and musing. "You never married, then."
"Married?" he repeated, rather stupidly. "Who?"
"Whom," she corrected, and he heard the first smile she'd allowed herself since seeing him.
"Whom. You're right; I screw up my whoms in broadcasts all the time." It made him joyously, deliriously happy to have his grammar corrected by her.
As an afterthought, he came back and answered her question. "The right one never came along, I guess."
Actually, she came along but then she went.
"Maybe because you're always on the move."
"And maybe not."
He sensed her stiffen and immediately cursed himself for being a blockhead. She didn't
want to hear about him and her and what they used to be or might have been. She wanted to solve the problem that was Tracey. And he, big shot, had promised her a plan.
"Peer pressure is everything at that age—don't you think?" he suggested.
"But Julie's the one that Tracey hangs around with most, and Julie's not wild."
"She struck me as a little more street smart than your daughter," he hazarded.
"Oh, that's just the black nail polish and all the bracelets. She's really fairly sweet."
Or a damned good actress, he thought. He said, "Do you know her mother?"
"
Definitely.
She's a stay-at-home mom, very dedicated."
"Divorced?"
"Do you think it makes all that much of a difference?" she asked a little testily.
It was hard for him to say, "A bit," but he did.
"Well, we can't all be the Waltons," Maddie answered, more in sorrow than anger. "And besides, Julie will have a stepfather and a stepbrother soon; her mother's getting remarried."
"Great," Hawke said with faked enthusiasm. In his mind, merged families meant a whole new set of problems. "And the boys, the brothers—what's the deal with them?"
"Well, Ross seems harmless enough. He and Tracey took sailing lessons together at the Boys and Girls Club last summer. But Kevin
... Kevin's fifteen going on twenty-one. I can't pin it down, really. It's not as if he has a rap sheet or anything; it's more an attitude."
"Oh, yeah. Kevin had plenty of that."
It occurred to Hawke that he may have seen a little too much of his own attitude in Kevin for him ever to trust the boy. When Hawke was fifteen, he was—what? Cooling his heels in juvenile court for smoking dope. Was that before or after he'd got thrown out of school? He had to think.
Before. After he was thrown out, that's when he was arrested for car theft.
Maddie sighed and said, "I won't let her see Kevin anymore, naturally. That should be more than enough to put me in her all-time Witches' Hall of Fame."
She had another thought. "Were you able to tell whether Kevin was
more interested in my daughter,
or in Julie?"
"Couldn't say," he answered honestly.
What he could say was that Tracey seemed a little more star-struck than Julie, who had no doubt promised her heart to a thirty-year-old pen pal in a federal prison somewhere.
They had arrived at the dreaded blacktopped road; it was either turn around and retrace, or part company.
Call it the honeysuckle or call it the roses, but by now Hawke was fairly pulsing from the nearness of her. Her favorite perfume used to have a flowery scent, and he had come to associate flowers with making hot, sweaty, mind-bending love. In the past two decades he'd had sex in many gardens, trying for that ecstasy, but it was never the same.
Tonight, it could be the same. He was overcome with a surge of desire so strong that it left his voice shaky as he said, "Maddie, have you ever wondered—"