One Mountain Away (49 page)

When she realized he wasn’t going to add a name, she nodded once more. “Would you like me to bring something back for you? I could make sandwiches and bring fruit.”

“I’m only allowed to visit her for a few minutes at a time. I have time to run to the cafeteria in between and grab something. It’s easier to eat there than here. I’ll be fine.”

She wanted so badly to do something for him, he could see that. But he was just going through the motions now, and his heart and body felt disconnected. There was nothing anybody could do.

“We’re going to bring her home,” Ethan repeated. “That’s what we need to concentrate on now. Her doctor says he’s going to try to make that happen soon. At a certain point they’ll have done all they can here.”

He could almost see Harmony grasping for something to hang on to, hoping this was a bad dream. “I believe in miracles, don’t you?” she asked.

He told her the only thing he could.

“I do, but I also know that sometimes we see a miracle and don’t recognize it. Charlotte and I found each other again. You and Charlotte found each other. How many more miracles can we ask for?”

* * *

At Charlotte’s house Harmony let Velvet out and cleaned up after the puppies. She gave them fresh water and kibble, and cuddled each one. They had grown increasingly rambunctious and loved to play. They had chew toys and tug toys inside, but they were always delighted to have time in the grass, tumbling pup over pup.

Harmony loved all the puppies, but her favorites were the two that probably would never become service dogs. She thought Vanilla was the sweetest dog in the litter and hoped she went to a home where her gentle personality was appreciated. Villain, charming in his own brash way, was going to need a lot of obedience work or he would end up as somebody’s junkyard dog. But his energy and enthusiasm had finally stolen her heart.

She was crying again when she stood. Charlotte adored the puppies. Until she’d gotten too sick to manage, she had handled most of their care. Now, when she died, Harmony would have to take them to Marilla’s and care for them there until it was time to pass them on to the puppy raisers.

She hadn’t told Charlotte about Marilla’s offer of a job and a place to live, because she knew Charlotte would insist she immediately take advantage of the opportunity before it slipped away. The renovations on the garage apartment were well under way, and it was going to be adorable. Two tiny bedrooms, but what more did she need? Plenty of storage and counter space in the kitchen, room for a sofa and a couple of chairs in the living room.

Brad had consulted her about paint colors and laminate for the counters. He had asked if she wanted a shower or a shower-tub combination, and refused to listen when she told him it didn’t matter, because they might need to hire someone else with different tastes.

Now she wished, more than anything, that Charlotte would still need her for months and months. She wished she could tell Charlotte about the offer, and they could laugh together because Charlotte had discovered she was going to be around for years.

But that was not what Ethan had tried to tell her.

She washed her hands in the kitchen, then she opened the refrigerator to take out the salad Ethan had bought for her. She’d come home to find an ambulance in the driveway, and she had never had a chance to eat.

The evidence of her foolish optimism filled every shelf. The refrigerator was packed with groceries she had bought on her shopping trips—organic produce for juicing, any fruit or vegetable her internet search had turned up that might fight cancer. She had driven all over town, shopping here and there and hoping, hoping. She supposed she’d been trying to plug a dike with her finger, like the story her mother used to tell about a Dutch boy trying to save his little village. But she had wanted so badly to do something.

She dished the salad onto a plate and slid the croissant that went with it into the toaster oven. Charlotte liked to tease her about her aversion to the microwave, but she saw no reason to take chances. On the other hand, maybe her fear of radio waves was like the hocus-pocus of juicing, too. No microwave equals no cancer.

She, of all people, should have known that sometimes nothing can be done for the people you love. She hadn’t been able to convince her mother to leave her father, and she hadn’t been able to cure Charlotte’s leukemia.

But maybe, as Ethan had tried to tell her, she’d set her sights too high.

She stared out the window and considered. In the end she put the salad back in the refrigerator, turned off the toaster oven and went to find her car keys.

* * *

Taylor was working outside on the patio she and Maddie had created after moving to this house. They had discovered the flagstone at the curbside two streets away, ready to be hauled to the dump. She had painstakingly lifted block after block into her car, and by the time she had carted enough home for the patio she’d envisioned, her back had ached for a week.

The project had taken most of that summer. Marking boundaries with string. Shoveling out inches of soil. Watering and tamping the ground. Adding sand and tamping again. Then the jigsaw puzzle joys of placing stones, twisting and turning until she and Maddie were satisfied. Once the patio was done they had been so proud. When fall arrived Taylor had splurged on big clay pots, one for each corner, and ever since she had kept them filled with flowers. Bulbs and pansies in spring, trailing petunias and whatever caught her eye in summer, chrysanthemums in fall and evergreens to adorn with popcorn and cranberries at Christmas time.

She always waited until the plants were on sale and chose the healthiest. Today pansies and spent tulips were giving way to fountain grass, sweet potato vine, verbenas and English daisies. Maddie had lost interest early in the process and was in her room reading.

Taylor was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear footsteps until they crunched on her gravel driveway. She looked up and saw a tall, blonde woman coming toward her, carrying a plant in a plastic pot.

“You may have the wrong house,” Taylor said, getting to her feet.

“Are you Taylor Martin?”

Taylor nodded and waited.

“Then this is the right house. My name’s Harmony Stoddard.” The woman paused. “I’m a friend of your mom’s.”

Taylor slowly stripped off her gardening gloves, examining the woman warily as she did. She remembered the name from her conversation with Sam at the park. This was the mysterious boarder, the pregnant woman living with Charlotte. She wasn’t at all what Taylor had expected, younger and distinctive in a way her mother would never have approved of when Taylor was a teenager. She had a ring in one side of her nose and a tattoo. The pregnancy probably wasn’t apparent to anyone who didn’t know, but Taylor guessed she might be into her second trimester, judging from the slight thickening of her waist at the hem of her tank top.

“Did my mother ask you to come?”

“No.”

“But you did, anyway.”

“I got to thinking about something.” Harmony held out the pot in her hands. “This tomato plant? It comes from seeds your great-grandmother used to save every year and plant in her garden. Charlotte says the plants grew so tall and got so many tomatoes it took weeks to can them all. Her gran called them tomato trees, and after she left home and moved to Asheville, Charlotte thought they were lost forever.”

Taylor thought this conversation was extraordinary, but she resisted asking the other woman to get to the point.

“It turns out,” Harmony said, “that other people kept the seeds, or even, maybe, that every year a plant or two just keep growing and bearing fruit and spreading seeds, even when they weren’t being picked, until somebody came along and rescued them. She didn’t know it, though, not until this morning, when someone brought her this one.” Harmony cleared her throat. “She was so pleased.”

“I guess I don’t see what this has to do with me.”

“Your mother’s not going to live long enough to see this plant bear fruit. At first I thought I’d take it to the place where I’ll be moving…when she dies.” She stopped for a moment and cleared her throat again. “Then I realized that no, as much as I wish I were, I’m not Charlotte’s daughter. And this plant belongs to her family. So I brought it for you. If you take care of it and it gets tomatoes this year, then you can save the seeds and grow them every year, like your great-grandmother did. Maybe your daughter will grow them, too.”

Taylor didn’t know what to say. Harmony was so earnest, so convinced Taylor would value the plant. She finally shrugged. “I don’t really have enough sun here. Why don’t you keep it?”

Harmony set the pot on the ground. “Would you like me to help you find a spot? Maybe in a corner you haven’t considered. Or maybe out front? It looked sunny enough out there.”

“You came all the way over here, found me—which must have taken some work—all because of a tomato plant?”

Harmony sent her a fleeting smile, but her eyes stayed sad. “I guess it’s about roots, Taylor. About the past bearing fruit, even when something’s had to work really hard just to survive. The way these plants did. The way your mother did.”

“She’s not the only one.”

“I know.”

Something Harmony had said earlier finally registered. “You said…she’s not going to live long enough to see tomatoes on the plant? Or something like that? Has she…?”

“She’s in the hospital.”

Taylor wanted to collapse on a bench and think about that, but she wasn’t going to give this young woman the satisfaction. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“You said she wasn’t the only one who had to work hard just to survive. I guess you’ve had to do the same thing. I know things haven’t been easy for you—”

Taylor held up her hand. She didn’t want to hear a replay of her life by a stranger, but Harmony took a different tack.

“My life’s been hard, too. My father’s a violent man, a bad man. My mother’s so kind, with the gentlest heart, but he spent their whole marriage stripping away her confidence, her convictions, all her spirit. He tried to do the same to me. I had to abandon her so I could get away from him. I came here, to Asheville, and I’ve tried to build something like a life for myself, but it’s taken a while to get strong enough.”

“Look, I—”

This time Harmony held up her hand. “Your mom is the only reason I’m strong enough now to move on. I was a stranger, but she realized I was in trouble. She opened her door, and she’s been with me every step of the way. She gave me time and space, and she made me feel like nothing was going to be too hard for me to find a solution. I owe her everything.”

“It’s ironic she could do that for you when she couldn’t do it for me.”

“But don’t you see? She did it
because
of you. She knew she’d made a terrible mistake she couldn’t fix. Not with you. When she had the chance to help me, she didn’t stop to think twice.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“But it’s not really good enough,” Harmony said. “She misses you so much. She has paintings you made as a little girl in her kitchen. Pictures of you in her bedroom. She has a shelf of the books you loved as a girl in the room where I’m staying, ribbons and trophies you won for sports in a cabinet in the den.”

Taylor didn’t know what to say to that. She tried to imagine being part of Charlotte’s decorating scheme, and she couldn’t. Had her paintings been up on the walls of her childhood home? Had her mother displayed her trophies and ribbons? She couldn’t remember.

Suddenly remembering seemed important. And more important? How had she so thoroughly contained all her memories? Now, as she allowed them to seep back in, the images were a flood gathering speed.

Yes, her paintings
had
been up on the walls. Their hallway
had
been covered with them, proudly framed and prominently placed, until the embarrassed teenage Taylor had forced Charlotte to take them down. Every report card had gone on the refrigerator, every school photo. Sometimes Charlotte had been too busy to see Taylor in plays or at horse shows or swim meets, but she had always taken the time to hear a blow-by-blow description afterward. And she’d always tried to take Taylor out for pizza or ice cream to celebrate. Even when Taylor’s team didn’t win or she didn’t get the starring role.

Until the day, that is, when Taylor had decided she was too old to go with her. Sometime after their trip to Manhattan, things had changed. Charlotte’s conviction that her way was the only way had moved from annoying to infuriating. Taylor had felt she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move and certainly couldn’t think for herself. She’d become a defiant teenager, strong-willed and angry at all the pointless rules. The harder Charlotte had tried to keep her in line, the harder she had rebelled.

Finally she had ignored her mother completely. And that was the day she began to sneak out to meet the boy who became Maddie’s father.

Harmony cleared her throat. “And the puppies she’s raising? They’re all about you, or rather, your daughter. She hoped maybe you would let her give one of them to Maddie. They’re going to be trained as seizure alert dogs. She thought—”

“Seizure dogs?” Taylor had investigated the idea, but when she’d realized what the cost would be, she had put it out of her mind.

“I’m going to be a mother a lot sooner than I ought to be,” Harmony said. “My own mother told me not to call her again, that it’s not safe for either of us. But every single day I wish I could, that somehow she could find the strength to break free of my father and find me here. If she did? I could forgive her anything, even forgive her for not standing up to my father, just to have her back in my life.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you would be so angry at the way she treated you that you couldn’t.”

Harmony moved closer; then, before Taylor realized what she was doing, she took Taylor’s hand and laid it gently on the slight bulge at the waistband of her jeans.

“I’m going to be a mother, whether I planned it or not. You’re a mother, whether
you
planned it or not. If you’re perfect, don’t tell me, because I know I can’t live up to that.”