“Rachel,” she said, her pale eyes round with wonder. She didn’t smile or rush forward, but held still. If she moved toward this vision, there was every chance it would vanish. If she was still, she could soak it up greedily and pray that her memory would hold it.
Rachel. Lord, when had she become a woman? She was beautiful. She was dressed like a cheap Gypsy in faded jeans and a purple sweater that hung to the middle of her slender thighs, but it made no difference; she was beautiful.
Her daughter, the child she had thought lost, was there before her, a woman. Emotions ran riot inside her, joy and regret and anger swirling and tumbling around in her brain and overwhelming her. She could only stand on the landing of the grand staircase and stare and say her daughter’s name. “Rachel.”
Rachel shivered, rooted to the spot. She wanted to rush forward and embrace her mother, but that was not the way of the Lindquists. They had never been the type for hugs and kisses and “vulgar” public displays of emotion. Instead, she tried to swallow down her fears and simply said, “Mother.”
It was a simple word full of complex feelings. There was so much between them, such a complicated history, so many memories, so much pain. Rachel pressed a hand to her pounding heart. Since she had received Dr. Moore’s call, she had thought of little besides her mother and how they would handle the situation. But now she realized that never once in all that time had she allowed herself to recognize the hope she’d harbored for this moment.
Bryan watched the exchange between mother and daughter with interest. What kind of family was this? His mother would have had him in a bear hug the instant he’d come through the door. Addie and Rachel stared at each other as if there were an invisible wall between them.
Perhaps there was.
The look in Addie’s eyes was guarded, almost defensive. Rachel appeared to be more frightened than joyful. Had she caught that second of blankness in her mother’s gaze when Addie had almost certainly failed to recognize her? Bryan tried to tell himself it served her right. She was the one who had left and not come back for five years. She deserved to be frightened. But he couldn’t stop the rush of sympathy that welled inside him. The expression in Rachel’s eyes was a little girl’s, hopeful and repentant. If she had looked at him that way, he knew he would have forgiven her anything.
“Rachel,” Addie said again, stepping down from the landing. She held herself perfectly erect.
This was the daughter she had devoted her life to. This was the daughter who had chosen to throw away all their dreams to chase after a two-bit drifter who had an adequate voice and a beat-up guitar. This was the daughter who had left her. Her deteriorating mind had no trouble recalling these facts while it ignored the attempts at peacemaking. All the old hurt and bitterness boiled inside her anew, obscuring the joy and the guilt. Her mind wasn’t capable of dealing with many emotions at once, and so it seized upon the strongest. Stubborn pride tilted her chin up as she stared into the face that so resembled the ghost of her own past. “What are you doing here?”
Rachel felt disappointment crush her. She didn’t try to stop the tears from springing into her eyes, but she did manage to keep the sorrow out of her voice. “I came to help you. Dr. Moore called me and told me about your illness.” Why didn’t you? Why couldn’t you put that damned pride aside long enough to tell me you needed me?
“Broderick Moore is a Nazi and a fool. There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t need your help,” Addie said coldly. She turned toward Bryan. “I have Hennessy to help me.”
Bryan took an involuntary step backward. He already felt like a voyeur, watching the interchange between mother and daughter; now he felt like an interloper as well. Rachel glared at him, her violet-blue eyes luminous with tears, and he held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. He shot a look at Addie. “Addie, you know I’m here only to look for Wimsey.”
“Well, I don’t know why you can’t find him,” she grumbled as her mind tuned out. “He’s all over the place.” She turned and started to shuffle down the hall, her green rubber garden boots scuffing against the marble floor. “I’m going to feed Lester. I’m sure you forgot to do it. No doubt practicing your smooth lines in front of a mirror again. Big Irish rascal.”
Bryan rubbed a hand along his jaw, realizing dimly that he had forgotten to shave. He didn’t know quite what to say to Rachel, who stood in the foyer looking like a piece of crystal on the verge of bursting into a million shards. It suddenly didn’t matter what kind of daughter she’d been, it was obvious Addie’s cold reception had hurt her, and almost certainly the decline of her mother’s mental state had shocked her. He couldn’t feel anything now but sympathy for her and the desire to take her in his arms and hold her.
“Dangerous thinking, Hennessy,” he mumbled to himself. “Don’t get involved. Make a note of that-don’t get involved.” He patted his shirt pocket, looking for his pencil, but it was gone again. “And don’t forget to shave tomorrow.”
“What was that?” Rachel asked. If she could not function in any other way, she could at least be polite, she thought ruefully. Wasn’t that one of the Lindquist rules of deportment? A hysterical little laugh threatened but never emerged from her throat.
Bryan blushed a bit. “Nothing.”
Rachel hugged herself, trying to ward off a chill that came from within. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything better than that,” she murmured to no one in particular. Her gaze followed her mother down the hall into the nether reaches of the big house. “She never wanted me here before. Why should she want me here now?”
“You tried?” Bryan blurted out. Shame crawled around in his stomach. It hadn’t occurred to him that Addie’s side of the story might have been biased.
Rachel gave him a cool look, her pride returning to rally around her. “There are lots of things you don’t know, Mr. Hennessy.”
Bryan pushed his glasses up on his nose and nodded. “Oh, yes. I readily admit there are lots of things I don’t know.” He tossed her his most inane grin in an effort to lighten her mood and said, “ ‘A man doesn’t know what he knows until he knows what he doesn’t know.’ Thomas Carlyle. I’ve adopted that as my motto.”
“I see,” Rachel murmured, though she clearly didn’t.
Bryan was unconcerned. The point was, Rachel’s eyes had lost their tragic quality. She was no longer staring after Addie with an expression of shattered hope. She would have to deal with those feelings later, he knew, but at least the intensity of the impact had been defused.
He stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and gazed up at the chandelier, his blue eyes drowsy with thought. “Of course, John Wooden once said, ‘It’s what you learn after you think you know it all that counts the most.’ For instance, did you know that an alligator’s length in feet is the distance between his eyes in inches?”
Rachel opened her mouth to comment, then closed it and simply stared at him. How had he gotten on this topic? Who in his right mind would try to measure the distance between an alligator’s eyes? The man was a lunatic. A rumpled, handsome lunatic.
She shook her head, deciding she had to be a little off the beam herself to be going on this way about how sexy this strange man was. Finally she decided to ask a question that seemed more pertinent. “Who’s Lester?”