“I’m always asking him for stuff. He already thinks I have a screw loose. The request might sound more reasonable coming from you.”
“I doubt it.” Paul stood, came around behind my chair, and rested both hands on my shoulders. “He’ll just think I’ve joined the Hannah Club.” He kissed the top of my head. “But since you’re an invalid and completely at my mercy, I’ll give it a shot.”
Surprisingly, Paul reached Dennis at home. Widowed a little over a year, Dennis Rutherford divided his time between the Chesapeake County Eastern District police station where he worked and Connie’s farm. From my one-sided vantage point, pinned by pain to my chair and listening to Paul as he wandered around the kitchen with the portable phone pressed to his ear, I gathered that Dennis had reluctantly agreed to make some discreet inquiries, but that he wouldn’t guarantee to share the results with me. Paul promised to meet him for a beer and a long-overdue chin wag, or whatever male-bonding activities men get up to over beer when their womenfolk aren’t around. “There!” He laid the phone on the table and turned to me. “Satisfied?”
I aimed my sweetest smile in his direction. “Very.”
Paul covered his eyes with both hands. “Aieeee! It’s the saccharine death ray!”
“And only one of my extraordinary talents not presently under reconstruction.”
Paul circled the table, leaned down, and brushed his lips against the back of my neck. “Dennis also thought you’d like to know that the Baltimore police still don’t have enough evidence to charge your father with anything.”
I relaxed against him. “That’s good news.” I reached back and caressed his cheek, enjoying the prickly feel of it against my skin.
“It’s after eight. Can I help you upstairs?”
I took the hand he offered and pulled myself up unsteadily. “Thanks.” I had expected to hobble upstairs on my own-I was doing much better at stairs these days-but Paul surprised me by scooping me up as if I were a blushing bride. I wrapped my arms around his neck. He was panting slightly but trying not to show it when he arranged me gently on the bed in our room.
I laid the back of my hand dramatically against my forehead. “I feel like a heroine in a romance novel, a fragile lily doomed to expire from consumption.” I faked a dainty, ladylike cough.
He tucked the comforter around my legs and began to chuckle.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m just remembering something. When I was a kid, my dad loved opera. Long before there was a Kennedy Center, we’d take the train up to New York to hear the Metropolitan Opera. Saw Leontyne Price in Aida once.”
“You never told me that!”
“Never came up before.”
I wondered what there was about Aida to make somebody laugh. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Aida a tragedy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then what’s so funny about going to the Met?”
Paul parked himself on the edge of the bed. “Well, I’d been to a lot of operas-Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, La Bohème-but in all that time, I’d never seen a thin soprano. The first time I saw La Bohème-I must have been about ten-I goggled at the bloated diva who was practically bursting out of the seams of her Mimi costume and couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about.”
I must have looked puzzled.
Paul crawled onto the bed next to me, fully clothed. He plumped up a pillow and sandwiched it between his head and the wooden headboard. “If you recall, Mimi’s dying of consumption. I figured if she wanted to eat herself to death, that was her problem!”
I bent double with laughter, pressing the comforter against my abdomen. “Oh, help! You are a bad, bad boy!”
His arm encircled my shoulders and I leaned my head against his chest. “I certainly hope so,” he whispered into my hair.
chapter 19
Ever notice how you can go for days and days and nothing much happens? Get up, eat, sleepwalk through the day, eat, go to bed? Then all of a sudden-bah-bing-everything seems to happen all at once.
It began on Lincoln’s Birthday, the day I saw my plastic surgeon. This miracle-working woman, whose office was decorated with her own paintings and sculptures, had created another masterpiece. My breast. A beautiful, healthy pink mound that stood tall and proud upon my chest. I was thrilled to be the owner of a boob that I didn’t have to take out of a drawer every morning.
While the doctor warned me to examine myself often for telltale signs of rejection, I stood in front of the mirror, half listening, wearing not much more than a goofy grin and admiring my newly matched pair. I was enormously pleased; so pleased that after I left the office, I had to control an irrational desire to show off Dr. Bergstrom’s remarkable handiwork to everyone I met.
I fantasized strolling up Maryland Avenue from shop to shop. “Look at this,” I’d say to Jehanne, the curly-headed barista at Seattle Coffee. And she’d go, “Why, Mrs. Ives, wherever did you get that?”
I had permission to drive again, too. After we returned home from the doctor’s, I left Paul happily puttering in his basement workshop and celebrated my new freedom with a trip to the grocery store. I wandered up and down the aisles as if greeting old friends-the coffee bins, the dairy case, the gourmet food counter-then carried some English muffins, cheddar cheese, and a carton of half-and-half through the checkout, managing to keep my shirt on the whole time.
My second solo outing caught me totally by surprise. I had spent the early part of Friday afternoon getting my prescribed exercise by strolling along the Naval Academy seawall, a bulkhead of heaped-up boulders and concrete that edged the academy shoreline from the Visitors’ Center all the way to Hospital Point. I began my walk at the end of the seawall nearest the Visitors’ Center, stopping to enjoy a panoramic view of Annapolis harbor. In Feburary only a few hearty cruisers and die-hard sailing live-aboards were anchored in the scenic harbor. In summer, though, it would be a different story; boats would be anchored wall-to-wall, and you could practically walk to Eastport without getting your feet wet. I smiled. Eastport. Home of Severn Sailing Association, the school where Paul had spent many dollars and hopeless hours trying to turn me into an accomplished sailor.
I had stopped to rest at the submarine memorial near Trident Light and had just parked my buns on the topmost step, when the cell phone in my parka chirped. Ruth was calling from a pay phone in the Los Angeles airport to tell me she was on her way home. Worry and guilt had gradually eroded her ability to concentrate on her spiritual growth. She’d left Bali after discovering an escape clause in the travel agency’s contract that allowed partial refunds for bona fide medical emergencies.
Seven hours later, I met Ruth at BWI, gave her a hug, told her she’d need to heft her own luggage into my trunk, and drove her straight to University Hospital in Baltimore.
Mother was overjoyed.
Ruth was in tears.
I paced. I couldn’t keep my shirt on, quite literally. “You gotta see this, Mom.” I drew the privacy curtains across the glass partitions that separated Mother’s room from the adjoining ones. I unbuttoned my shirt and unfastened my bra. “Tah-dah!” I flashed my mom. “What do you think?”
Mother beamed. “Beautiful, Hannah. A work of art.”
From a bedside chair Ruth studied my chest with interest. “Weirdest show-and-tell I’ve ever seen.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so proud of anything in my whole life,” I declared while reassembling my clothing. “It’s a shame I can’t show off Dr. Bergstrom’s work to everybody.”
“Speaking of everybody, where’s Daddy?” Ruth wanted to know.
Mother managed a grin. “He’ll be back in a bit. He went home to bathe and change his clothes after I complained that he’d been wearing the same olive-green trousers for the last three days and I was sick of looking at them.”