10
F
rom then on out, when I picked up Tate from basketball practice at night, he came out of the gym grinning, spinning a basketball on his finger, other players jostling around him.
“How did it go?”
“Good. I think. I let a guy go past me today and I should have been a better defender, but he wasn’t looking fast out there and I was afraid he was going to get cut if he didn’t get one drive in, at least.”
“You let him go by you?”
He squirmed. “Yeah. It’s Zeke. I don’t think he’s going to make it but at least he had a try.”
“Did he make a basket?”
“No, he air-balled it.”
The next day: “How did practice go?”
“Okay. I moved out of the way to let Ronnie shoot, and the coach yelled at me to ‘Defend, Tate, defend, you know what that is, do it.’ ”
Oh boy.
“Did you make your shots?”
“Yeah, I did. Road Runner was on fire.” He wriggled his eyebrows at me. “Mickey Mouse helped, too. Except for one shot. Patel was guarding me, and I shot but I missed so the coaches would think he was a fast defender. I don’t think Patel has a grip on his feet yet, Mom. I mean, in school he’ll trip when he’s walking down the hallway.”
The next night: “Maybe tomorrow you should play as best you can and let the other kids play the best they can.... The tryouts are coming up soon, as you know.”
“Yeah. I should.” His face brightened. “Man, Mom, it’s much funner to play basketball when there’s other guys on the court and not me all by myself imagining that I’m playing against a full team.”
“I’m sure.”
“I mean, when I’m out on our sport court I’ve got both teams all around me in my head doing different stuff, but now I know where all the other real life nine dudes are and what they’re doing. This is cool, Mom, it’s radical!”
I listened to him, excited, but my worry knocked up another hundred notches. I hadn’t wanted him to make the team, I didn’t want him hurt, but he wanted it, he wanted to make the team more than anything, he was off-the-charts hopeful, so I started to crack and I wanted him to make it, too.
It would devastate him not to make it, and yet, even though I had seen him shoot, though I thought he had a solid chance, I had no idea how he was doing compared to all the other kids, many of whom had been playing since kindergarten, and how he was doing with the other skills he needed to play basketball.
“I love you, Boss Mom, thanks again.” He sighed, grateful, relieved.
“I love you, too, Tate. And you’re welcome.”
“I called Dirk Hassells a couple of days ago to reconfirm our meeting, ostensibly, but basically to see if he had changed his mind or if I could change it for him.”
“And?” I asked.
Sydney Grants leaned back in her chair in her office, then flicked her black braids back and sighed. She was wearing an African-styled silk blouse in browns, beiges, and greens and a matching headband. “The conversation went poorly.”
I was in jeans, leather boots to my knees, a white T-shirt, and a skinny leather jacket. I tapped my fingertips together. I could strangle Dirk. How’s that for a hospice nurse?
“Dirk is still proclaiming that the care you provided his father caused his father to die much earlier than he would have, including all that morphine, and I quote, that you ‘poured down his throat.’ He was mad that you wouldn’t return his e-mails, calls, and texts. Mad that you were avoiding him when you were caring for his father. He even said you didn’t want to go out to lunch with him, refused to have conversations with him that weren’t directly about his father, and did not seem interested in who he was, and I quote again, ‘as a man. Jaden Bruxelle blew me off.’ ”
I laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. The whole thing was a mess and causing more stress in my life. This incident didn’t make me appear poorly to the other hospice nurses and doctors, I knew that. I had worked with them for years. Hospice nurses, because of the terminal nature of our business, will, like any other medical profession, sometimes get caught up in something that is not our fault at all. You are dealing with dying people. Family members are emotional, they want to blame someone. This kind of thing happens.
But it was hard all the same and contributed to the exhaustion I felt with my profession.
“He said you denied him personal time and physical comfort, hugs and such, even though you talked to his sister, Beatrice, all the time and her kids and hugged all of them. He said he was excluded from hugs. He said that twice.”
“He is disgusting.”
“He is. He says he’s going to bring in lawyers, blah blah blah. He insists on seeing you at the table. Another quote, ‘Make sure Jaden has her butt at the meeting, I want to talk to her, she’s avoiding me, she’s going to talk to me or else. Does she understand who I am? Does she know I’m rich, that I own a business? ’ ”
“He is a scary, odd, controlling duck.” My heart sped up again and I wanted to eat the smile off a cinnamon Gummi Bear. Stress!
“Definitely creepy. I’m sorry that you have to be there at the meeting, hospital regulations. We should go to trial. I think the jury would be entertained.”
“I would prefer it if he choked on his tongue.”
Sydney nodded. “That’s a special image I think I’ll hold on to.”
“I’ve paid Ernest Rodriquez to search for Brooke,” my mother said that night over the phone. She’d had a busy day on
Foster’s Village
. She had arranged for evidence to be planted so it would appear that her younger stepsister had stolen millions of dollars and would go to jail for years.
“I still don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, Mom.” I rocked back and forth on our old rocking chair, a rainbow arching over our fields through a light rain. “Tate wants to meet her, but I don’t think I want him to meet her. It’ll be upsetting, at the very least, and I can’t let him meet her if she’s all drugged up, which she probably is.”
“I know. Let’s see what Ernest finds out about her, then we can wrestle this lion to the ground and declaw it.” She paused and sniffled. “I must show you the new dress that Cooley designed for me. . . .”
My mother is not as into designer clothes as she appears. She clings to that type of thing for distraction because the pain of losing Brooke to drugs threatened to kill her for years.
When Brooke was out from one of her rehab jaunts, my dad, Caden, Brooke, and I moved up here to London Gardens so we could all be in a different environment, different school. My mother flew up every weekend.
My father stayed home and wrote his scripts. “I had no idea a man could feel this much pain and still breathe,” I’d heard him say to my mother about Brooke. “I had no idea a man could feel this much fear and not scream. I had no idea this level of desperation existed.”
I loved living full-time in Tillamina. I loved my new friends who wanted to run around outside and ride horses more than go shopping. I loved that people wore jeans and sweatshirts to school instead of the latest couture fashions, and no makeup.
I loved that everyone went to the football and basketball games at the high school and how downtown was a fifteen-minute walk and my dad let me go by myself. Though my grandparents were no longer alive, I loved their house with all the history, the stories, the antiques, ancient books and quilts, and the maple trees that lined the driveway that Faith and Jack had planted. I wondered if Faith loved watching the leaves change color as much as I did, if she watched the hawks, blue jays, and robins, too.
I loved Grandma Violet’s garden, the herbs and flowers our family had planted and tended for generations, in honor of the “witches in our family line.”
We thought London Gardens would be a new start for Brooke.
It wasn’t. It was simply a new place.
Anyone can find drugs at any time, in any town, in this country, and she found them.
She found a kid named Corey who had dropped out of high school. His parents were addicts. They lived in a trailer park. They did coke together. One night Corey almost died. He later told us he saw Jesus in his dream and that’s what got him off coke.
Corey eventually became the senior pastor of a megachurch. He personally apologized to my mother several years later, the tears unending.
Brooke kept using. She had not seen Jesus in her dreams.
We all loved Brooke dearly. Even when she was on drugs, she was kind to me. Brushing my hair, styling it, making me special gifts with whatever was in our art box—sequins, shells, beads, flowers from outside, shiny rocks. Her hands would shake, her eyes would be funny, she would giggle inappropriately, and make odd comments about seeing stars, snakes, and sugar, but she’d always hug me.
She made things for my parents, too, and Caden, and wrote, “I love you,” on the gifts.
I mourn for my sister and that “I love you,” to this day. I have never stopped missing her, though her drug addiction caused ceaseless pain in our family and devastated all of us.
I rocked harder in our old rocking chair, my mother and I talked a few more minutes, then hung up.
The rain was now a deluge, as if the clouds had been poked, the water streaming out, the rainbow gone.
“How are you doing, Tate?”
“Atom based radically. How are you, Dr. Robbins?”
Ethan smiled at me. “Fine, more than fine.”
While they chatted I took the time to surreptitiously, without drooling, stare at Ethan with barely concealed lust. He drums up my engines, I will not deny that.
I wanted to take off his glasses, his white doctor’s coat, and the blue shirt he wore beneath it. I wanted to rip off that belt, yank down his underwear, and I wanted to—
“Mom!”
I startled, pulling my eyes from Ethan to Tate. Tate opened his eyes super-wide at me as in,
Mom! Hello? Quit staring!
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Uh . . . oh . . . uh . . .” I could feel a steamin’ red flush flying up my cheeks.
“What I said was I wanted to go with Dr. Robbins to the research lab again at the hospital this Saturday, and can you drive me up there?”
“Yes, yes, of course.” I tried to stamp out my graphic sexual thoughts. “Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure,” Ethan said.
I swallowed what felt like a giant boulder in my throat. Can your throat create boulders that you choke on when utterly transfixed by the sexiness of a doctor not three feet away?
“Good,” I said. I closed my mouth, embarrassed. Why had “good” flown out of my mouth?
“Good.” Ethan smiled at me, then he dropped his head to study his chart and coughed.
“Good,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
“And a goody-goody-two-shoes to both of you,” Tate sang out. “I’m gonna go say hi to Dr. Sheila and Dr. Craig, and my favorite, Nurse Leena, the object of my rampant desires.” Tate wriggled his eyebrows at us, then ambled out. “Hey, Nurse Leena! Watch out, seductress, I am coming to prove to you that my love is enduring, passionate, bold, and . . .
peppery.
”
I heard people in the office laugh before the door shut. Someone called out, “And there he is, Tate Bruxelle, resident Romeo.”
“Peppery love?” Leena laughed. She has a booming laugh. “I love it. Add some salt and we have salt and pepper. . . .”
I stood up. “I should go, too, I know you’re busy.”
Ethan stood up. We were then about two feet away from each other. Two feet. I could take two steps and be eye to nipple with him. His nipple. That’s about where my eyes come to. If I touched those nipples, what would happen?
“Oh no, not busy, Jaden. Please sit down. Thank you. How’s your greenhouse?”
Ha. One of my favorite topics. We talked on that.
Then I said, “Tell me about your last kayak ride.”
And boom. Off and sailing.
He said, “How’s your work going?”
As usual. I was helping people die peacefully. Some cases harder than others.
I promised to bring him some herbs.
He brightened up and said, “I’d appreciate that.”
And all the while I wanted to kiss him. I fought an overwhelming impulse to leap up and hug him around the waist with my legs.
I finally stood up to leave, not wanting to overstay a welcome. I turned to open the door, he moved to open it for me, and he ran into me. We both paused.
My back was to his front, not touching, but so close I could feel the heat between us as if my body embers were on fire. I heard him take a deep inhale of breath. I exhaled and closed my eyes.
“Jaden . . .”
“Ethan . . .”
“I . . .”
“I . . .”
And another pause.
“Yes?” I said, nervous and pained.