Miracle (3 page)

“I was hoping you would agree to November. Or perhaps we could have her ready for you in October,” Tem Hakker said cautiously. Quinn Thompson drove a hard bargain.

In the end, after some discussion, they compromised on September. Or at least by then Tem Hakker thought she would be ready for sea trials. And with luck, she would be ready to sail away by the end of the month, or at the latest the first of October. Quinn said he would live with that, if he had to. And he had every intention of flying over to see the work in progress as often as he could, and hold them to the date they had agreed on. It was nearly a year away, and Quinn could hardly wait to sail her.

Quinn left the yard at noon, having written a hefty check, and he called the captain of the
Victory
before he left to tell him the news and thank him.

“Good job, sir,” the captain said, sounding ecstatic. “I can't wait to see her.” He had every intention of writing to Quinn after that, to broach the subject of a job with him, but he didn't want to do it over the phone. Quinn was already thinking of it himself.

He had a million details and plans on his mind now. And he waved at the Hakkers as he drove away. They were every bit as pleased with the deal as he was, perhaps even more so. A boat of that scope and magnitude was not normally as easy to sell as it had been to Quinn Thompson. He hadn't hesitated for an instant, and as he drove back to the airport to catch his flight, he knew he had a new home as well as a new passion. All he wanted to do now was sell the house in San Francisco, and do whatever work he needed to do, to do so. There were a few things he knew he had to clean up before he sold it. But his mind was full now with all the details of the boat. He knew it was going to be a new life for him, for whatever years he had left. And it was going to make going back to the empty house that much easier, or at least he thought so.

He had had a small sailboat years before, and had encouraged both of his children to learn sailing. Like her mother, Alex had hated it, and after Doug's death in a boating accident at a summer camp in Maine, Jane had finally convinced him to sell the boat. He never had time to use it anyway, and had acceded to her wishes. For more than twenty years he had been content to sail on other people's yachts from time to time, always without Jane, since she didn't like boats. And now suddenly a whole new world had opened up to him. It seemed the perfect scenario for his final chapter, and just the way he wanted to spend the rest of his days, sailing around the world on a boat that was better than any he had ever dreamed of. He was still smiling to himself as he boarded the plane to London, and he spent the entire night making notes about it in his hotel room. The prospect of his new boat had changed the entire mood and tenor of Quinn's existence.

As Quinn boarded the plane to San Francisco at Heathrow the next day, he realized that soon San Francisco would no longer be home to him. All he had left there were memories of Jane, and the years they had shared, and he could take all of that with him. Wherever he went, whatever he did, she would always be with him. He had her precious journals in his briefcase, and shortly after take-off he took one of her poems out to read it. He read it again and again, as he always did, and then sat staring out the window. He didn't even hear the flight attendant speak to him and ask him what he'd like to drink as she offered. He was lost in his own thoughts, until she finally caught his attention. He declined the champagne, and asked for a Bloody Mary, which she brought to him before serving anyone else. The seat next to him was empty mercifully, and he felt relieved, as he hated talking to people on planes. The flight attendant commented to the purser about him when she went back to the galley. She said he looked like someone important. But when the purser glanced at him, he said he didn't recognize him, and agreed that he was a good-looking man, but he didn't appear to be particularly friendly. In fact, he wasn't.

“Probably just another CEO, tired after a week of meetings in London.” It was what he had been once upon a time, not so long ago. But now he was someone very different. He was a man with an extraordinary new sailboat. Neither of them could have imagined it as they looked at him, but more important, he knew it. It was the only thing he had in his life to be pleased about, as he flew toward San Francisco. His wife had died, his daughter hated him, or thought she did, his son had died years before. He was alone in the world with no one to love him, or care about what he did. And in a few hours, he would be walking into an empty house, the house he had shared with a woman he had thought he knew and didn't. A woman who had loved him more than he felt he deserved, and toward whom he felt both grateful and guilty. In fact, he was certain of how unworthy he was, as he read her poem again, and then slipped it back into his briefcase. He closed his eyes then, and thought of her, fighting to remember every detail of her face, her voice, the sound of her laughter. He was desperately afraid that the memories would slip away from him in time, but he knew they wouldn't as long as he had her journals. They were his last hold on her, the key to the mysteries he had never understood, nor cared to discover. The poems and journals, and his regret and love for her, were all he had left of her that mattered.

3

T
HE PLANE LANDED IN
S
AN
F
RANCISCO RIGHT ON TIME
, and Quinn passed through customs quickly. Despite his long absence from the States, he had nothing to declare, and he looked somber as he picked up his valise and briefcase, and hurried outside with his head down. He wasn't looking forward to getting home to the empty house, and he had realized with a pang on the plane, that he had managed to time his return to just before Thanksgiving. It hadn't even occurred to him when he made his plans, but he had no choice anyway. His charter of the
Victory
had come to an end, and he could no longer come up with a valid reason to linger in Europe, particularly if Alex refused to see him.

She had been polite but firm. Her outbursts at him had occurred before and after the funeral. And since then, any contact he'd had with her had been distant, formal, and chilly. In her own way, she was as stubborn as he was. She had been furious with him for years anyway. She and her mother had discussed it endlessly, and despite all of her mother's efforts to soften her point of view, Alex had continued to maintain her harsh, judgmental position. She claimed her father had never been there, for any of them, not even when Doug died. Quinn had come home for three days for the funeral. He'd been in Bangkok, concluding a business deal, when he got the news, and turned around and left again the morning after the funeral, leaving eleven-year-old Alex and her mother to grieve and mourn, and cling to each other in their solitary anguish.

He had been gone for a month that time, putting together an enormous deal that had made headlines in the
Wall Street Journal
, returned briefly again, and then took off to spend two months in Hong Kong, London, Paris, Beijing, Berlin, Milan, New York, and Washington, D.C. Now that she was an adult, Alex said she could hardly ever remember seeing her father, let alone talking to him. Whenever he was home, he was too busy, exhausted and jet-lagged, and sleep-deprived, to spend time with her or her mother. And in the end, he had managed to cheat her of even a decent amount of time to say good-bye to her mother. Quinn had heard it all before, during, and after the funeral, and would never forget it. There was no turning back from what she'd said and the bitter portrait of him she had painted. And the worst of it was that, as he listened to her, Quinn knew without a doubt that he couldn't deny it. The man she described was in fact the person he had been then, and was until he retired. And whatever changes had occurred since then, most of them positive, Alex was not willing to acknowledge.

Quinn had tried to make up to Jane for the long years when he'd been busy and absent, and thought he had in some ways, as best he could, during the year and a half they had shared after he had retired. But there was no way he could make it up to Alex. It was also noticeable to him that she had married a man who scarcely left home, except to go to the office. She had married a Swiss banker right after college. They had gone to Yale together, and married almost minutes after they graduated, thirteen years before. They had two boys, lived in Geneva, and Quinn had commented to Jane right from the first that it was Alex who told Horst what to do, and what she wanted. They were inseparable, and seemed happy, sedate, and secure, though uninspired and unexciting. Quinn found his son-in-law painfully boring. Alex had been careful not to fall into the same trap she thought her mother had. Instead, she had married a weak man, to do her bidding, as different as possible from her father. Horst rarely, if ever, traveled, and worked in the bank his grandfather had founded. He was a responsible young man, who loved his wife and sons, and had no great ambitions. Alex had known when she married him that she would never be sacrificed to his career or accomplishments or passions. To Quinn's practiced eye, Horst had none. He simply existed, which was what Alex had wanted.

Her sons were six and nine, two beautiful little blue-eyed towheads, just like their mother, and Quinn scarcely knew them. Jane had gone to Geneva frequently to visit them, and Alex had brought the boys to San Francisco once a year to visit her mother, but Quinn had rarely been around when they came to town, and he always seemed to be in some other part of the world when Jane went to Geneva. Often, when Quinn was away, Jane took the opportunity to visit her daughter. Looking at it in retrospect, it was easy for him to see why Alex was angry. And she had no intention of letting her father make up for it, or atone for his sins, both real and perceived. As far as Alex was concerned, she had lost not one, but two parents. Quinn had died in her heart years before she had lost her mother. And the trauma of losing her brother when she was eleven years old had remained an open wound for her. It made her particularly protective of her children, despite her husband's pleas to give them just a little more freedom. Alex was convinced she knew better. And more than anything, because of her brother's accident, she hated sailboats.

Jane had never been fond of them either, but Quinn suspected she would have been happy for him, about the new boat he was building. Jane had always wanted him to be happy, to fulfill his dreams, and to achieve everything he had wanted to accomplish. Alex no longer cared what he did. As a result, Quinn was a man with no family, no ties to anyone, he was as solitary as he looked as he stepped out of the cab on Vallejo Street in a cul-de-sac filled with trees that all but obscured the house he and Jane had lived in for their entire marriage, and that Alex had grown up in. He had wanted to buy a bigger one as his fortune grew, but Jane had always insisted she loved this one. And Quinn had too while Jane was still there to come home to. Now, as he turned his key in the lock of the big rambling English-style house, he dreaded the silence.

As he stepped into the front hall and set his bags down, he could hear a clock ticking in the living room. The sound cut through him like a knife, and felt like a heartbeat. He had never felt as alone or as empty. There were no flowers anywhere, the shades and curtains were drawn, and the dark paneling in the living room, which had once glinted and shone, now made the room look tomblike. He couldn't remember the house ever seeming as dark or as depressing. And without thinking, he went to the windows, pulled back the curtains, opened the shades, and stood staring into the garden. The trees and hedges were still green, but there were no flowers, and it was a dark November afternoon.

The fog had come in while they were landing, and it was swirling through the city. The sky looked as gray as he felt, as he picked up his bags and walked upstairs. And when he saw their bedroom, it took his breath away. She had died in his arms in their bed five months before, and he felt a physical pain as he stared at the bed, and then saw her smiling in a photograph next to it. He sat down on the edge of the bed, with tears rolling down his cheeks. It had been a mistake to come home, he knew, but there was no one else to sort through her things, and his own, if he was to sell the house in the spring. And he knew there was work to do on the house. Everything was in good order and worked well, but thirty-seven years in one house was almost a lifetime. He felt he had to organize the work and sort through their things himself, no matter how painful. Some of the rooms needed a coat of paint, and he wanted to consult a realtor to find out what he had to do to sell it.

It was a long hard first night home for him, and he longed for Jane with such loneliness and agony that at times he wanted to run into the street in his pajamas, just to flee it. There was no escaping. He knew he had to face it. There was no reprieve. His life without her was his sentence. Life without parole. He knew his solitude was forever, and felt he deserved it. And that night, he had the same dream he had experienced frequently before he left on his travels. It was a dream in which Jane came to him, held out her arms, pleading with him, and she was crying. At first the words were indistinct, but even without them, the look on her face tore his heart out. And then the words would come clear to him, and they were always the same, with subtle variations. She would beg him not to leave her, not to abandon her again. And each time he had the dream, he promised her he wouldn't. And then like a nightmare, not a dream, he would see himself pick up a suitcase and leave anyway, and all he could see after that was her face, crying after he left her. He could still hear her sobs when he woke up, at whatever hour, and her words would echo in his head for hours afterward, “Quinn, don't leave me… Quinn, please …” her arms outstretched, her eyes devastated. And whenever he woke from that dream, he felt panicked. How could he have done that to her? Why had he left so often? Why had his own pursuits always seemed so important? Why didn't he listen?

The dream entirely dismissed the reasons for his trips, and swept away the empire he was building. And all that was left afterward, in the dream, was his own crushing sense of guilt and failure. He hated the dream, and the fact that it had returned almost immediately, as soon as he came back to San Francisco. There was something so tragic about Jane in the dream, although in real life she had been tenderly empathetic and understanding, and had never reproached or implored him the way the woman in the dream did. Quinn hated the dream, and in some ways, he knew that guilt was the chain that bound him to her, as much as love had. But the fact that the dream had returned with a vengeance the moment he got home did not cheer him. It was a burden he knew he had to live with.