The Heart of the Matter (13 page)

As she hesitated, swallowing the lump in her throat, Barry asked, his voice sobering, “Is something wrong with Matt?”

“No,” she said quickly, “Matt’s fine. Everyone’s fine, except Jason, who seems to be having a psychotic episode.” There was a loud silence on the other end of the line as she paused to swallow again. “Barry, what do you know about Jason’s tests having been confused with someone else’s at the lab?”

“Ah…nothing,” he said after a moment’s thought. “No one’s told me anything. Why? What happened?”

She explained briefly about the call Jason had received that morning. “Would you please tell him what you know?” She handed Jason the phone. When he resisted, looking in obvious indecision at her instead of it, she took
his hand and forced the phone into it. Then she marched away.

Jason had a sense of having cut his life off at the knees. He felt a painful, downward jolt and heard the office door slam.

“Jase? Jason!” Barry was saying.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I’m here. What the hell’s going on, Barry? Do I have high cholesterol or not?”

“I don’t know. The last I heard about it was the test results I got that made me send you to Laura. If there was a mistake, no one’s told me. Just sit tight. I’ll call the lab right now and find out what’s going on. I’ll call you right back.”

Jason sat down again and tried to analyze what had just happened.

He’d accused Laura of lies and deceit on the basis of a two-minute phone call from a stranger—and without giving her the opportunity to defend herself, that was what just happened.

He’d been a father too long to be ruled by irrational anger and snap decisions. So what had happened to him?

He wasn’t sure. High cholesterol, though a potential problem, was generally highly treatable and sometimes even easily managed. Though he’d been a little concerned about the state of his health, he hadn’t been in fear of disability or death. So why had he reacted as though the news had been that he wasn’t dying, after all?

Maybe because loving Laura seemed to have taken on such a life-or-death aspect in his life? And the notion that she’d been dishonest with him in any way had made him irrational?

He put a hand to his face and groaned, sure he’d done something fatal to their relationship.

He sprang off the chair and headed for the door, determined to try to apologize and explain his behavior.

The phone rang shrilly, stopping him in his tracks. He strode back to the desk and picked it up. It was Barry.

“Okay, look,” he said, his voice breathless and apologetic. “I’m sorry all to hell. It seems to be all my fault, though you’d think that after having worked for me for seven years that someone would know better than to put an important document on my desk without telling me it was there.”

Barry paused and expelled a breath. Jason waited.

“You’re fine. Healthy as a horse. Seems the lab confused your results with another patient who’d been in on the same day. It wasn’t until a few days later, when the other patient came in again for another procedure, that someone noticed a discrepancy and discovered the problem. They called me, I was in surgery, so they brought the results to my receptionist, who put both reports on my desk.”

“Both reports?”

“The one for me and the one for Laura. Laura and I were supposed to conference that afternoon on another patient and my receptionist thought giving it to her then would be quicker. Meanwhile, my new PDR pages came in and were stacked on top of the reports, and I moved them to the credenza behind my desk, intending to look through them later, and apparently picked up the reports with them and didn’t realize it.”

Jason listened to the unfortunate but very logical chain of events and, having seen Barry’s desk on more than one occasion, felt sure that was precisely what had happened.

“Jase, I’m sorry,” Barry said. His usually light-hearted tone was absent and in its place was a very abject selfdeprecation. “You’re probably entitled to sue me for malpractice.”
He sighed. “I suppose Laura’s had you eating sprouts and weed tea, or something, and tied you to the NordicTrac.”

Jason couldn’t reply. Three weeks ago he’d have laughed with Barry over that remark, but today he knew that healthy food could be delicious and new every day if Laura prepared it, and he knew how conscientiously she directed his exercise and monitored his progress—and he knew how much better he’d felt since he’d been watching his diet and exercising regularly instead of just every Wednesday evening.

“Jase?” Barry asked.

“Yeah,” Jason replied halfheartedly.

“Is everything okay? I mean, Laura sounded angry when she called.” There was a pause while Barry seemed to consider why that should be. Then he began anxiously, “You didn’t…?”

“Barry, I’ve got to go,” Jason said abruptly. He heard a door slam upstairs and footsteps coming down. Angry, hurrying footsteps.

“Jason, I’m sorry.” Barry started to say.

“I know. And you’re forgiven. But you owe me big, buddy. Really big.” He slammed the phone down and hurried to yank open the office door. He was just in time to see Laura put Sergei’s carrier down so that she could open the front door. She carried her suitcase in the other hand.

“Laura, please don’t,” he said, sprinting across the living room toward her.

But she ignored him and, picking up Sergei’s carrier, walked out onto the porch, letting the door close behind her.

Jason caught it before it latched, yanked it open and grabbed her by the arm at the top of the steps. She appeared
calm, though her eyes were red-rimmed and her nose shiny.

“Laura,” he pleaded. “Let me explain.”

“Like you let me explain?” she asked coolly, pulling her arm from his grip. He wouldn’t have freed her, but Sergei protested the jostling with a plaintive meow.

Jason followed her down the steps. “I was being a jerk,” he said. “Please. Be smarter than I was.”

She stopped halfway down the steps to look him in the eye. “I am, Jason. I’m leaving.”

“Come on, Laura,” he said in exasperation. “You’re not taking my car. Are you going to
walk
to Massachusetts?”

“No,” she replied, going down the last few steps. “I’ve called a cab.” She pointed into the distance where something yellow was moving down the road. “And here he comes.”

“You know,” he said, desperate to get through to her, “you can tell yourself that you’re being righteously indignant because I made a mistake. But the truth is that you finally
have
found a relationship that’ll work for you, and you’re taking the first excuse offered to back out. Three growing boys too much to deal with, after all?”

She put Sergei and her bag down and shoved him hard with both hands. He attributed his ability to hold his ground to his exercise regimen.

“I
love
your boys!” she shouted at him. The sound reverberated through the forest and across the lake. “This has nothing to do with them. It’s
you!
You, who’s turning out to be like every other man in my life!”

“Imperfect, you mean,” he said quietly.

She raised both hands, then dropped them emphatically. “You accused me of withholding medical information from you to serve my own purposes!”

He nodded. “I admitted that I acted like a jerk.” He ran a hand over his face and tried to piece together an explanation that made sense. “When I passed out during that basketball game that started all this, it scared me. But worse than that, it scared my kids. They’ve already lost their mother, and I became determined that they weren’t going to lose me. I hated the diet and exercise, but I did it for them.”

She was listening, but her expression hadn’t changed. The cab drew closer so he hurried on. “When the lab called, all I could think about was that they’d been frightened for nothing, and that it sounded like you’d been a part of that.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but he forestalled her with a raised hand. “I know. I should have known better. You’ve been kindness itself to them and, after our initial prickly meeting, very loving with me. But I’m human, Laura. And I’m not always emotionally sound myself. Loving you made me feel as though I’d finally regained my feet in life and…it looked as though you’d betrayed me in a way that also used my children. I felt before I thought Please try to understand that.”

The cab pulled into his driveway. Laura studied him a moment, then shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m just not big enough right now. Maybe later. This all moved so fast, maybe time apart will help us put things in perspective.”

“Damn it, Laura,” he said in pain and frustration, “you’re just like your damned cat. You’ll stick your head out of the cage for food and an occasional pat on the head, but you’d rather live in the wire box than step outside.”

Hurt registered in her eyes. “How dare you blame me!”

“I’m not blaming you for my mistake,” he said, following
her to the cab. “But you just promised to marry me. Is this the full extent of your willingness to understand and forgive? If our relationship dies here, it
is
your fault!”

“Laura?” A small voice came from behind Jason. He turned to find his three boys standing behind him, wide-eyed and pale. Buttercup, sensing a problem, was leaning against Adam’s leg.

Matt came forward on his crutches and got between him and Laura. “Where are you going?” he asked, his voice tight with worry.

Jason saw Laura swallow, toss her things into the back of the cab, then turn her attention to Matt. She leaned over him to kiss his cheek, then looked into his dark eyes.

“I have to go home, Matt,” she said, struggling to keep her voice even. “But I’ll come and see you, I promise.”

“But…” His chin began to quiver. “Aren’t we getting married?”

“Well…we need to talk about that a little more first,” she hedged, casting his father a dark glance for being responsible for this painful moment. “You have to finish your vacation while I go back to work, then we’ll see what happens.”

He dropped the crutch on his good side and caught her sleeve. “But I don’t want you to go. I’ll be afraid if you go.”

“No, you won’t,” she said firmly, framing his face in her hands and brushing a tear away with her thumb. “You know I’m not a Power Ranger, I’m just Laura. When you’re brave, it isn’t because of me, it’s because of
you.”

“I know you’re not a Power Ranger,” he said as she turned to climb into the cab. “You’re the mom.”

Laura fell onto the seat with the weight of the pain she was causing Matt.
You’re the mom.

Jason lifted Matt onto his hip and took his crutches in his free hand.

“Goodbye, Laura,” he said, and took a step back to let the cab back out of the driveway.

Laura watched from the side window as Adam and Eric and the dog went to Jason as he and Matt buried their faces in each other’s shoulders.

She sobbed all the way to town, then all the way home on the bus back to Farnham.

There comes a time when a man has to take a stand, political correctness be damned. It is possible to be understanding and kind without being docile and blindly cooperating. Women do it all the time.

—“Warfield’s Battles”

T
he Farnham house was like a tomb. Jason unpacked the car and the boys carried bags in with a listlessness that expressed what he was feeling inside. Even Buttercup looked depressed.

Jason’s own sense of defeat, however, was beginning to undergo a major change. The incident yesterday had been all his fault; he would admit it to the whole world. And maybe he did deserve to lose Laura for it. But his boys didn’t.

He’d tried to call her for hours last night, but her answering machine had picked up and she hadn’t called him back. Voice messaging had picked up her calls at the hospital this morning.

It was now midafternoon of a bleak and rainy day—the first change in the sunny summer pattern that suggested the gradual change to fall was beginning.

Adam came out of the house to help him with the last
of the bags. “I put on the coffee,” he said, intending, Jason guessed, to cheer him. “Love stinks, doesn’t it?”

At the moment it would have been easy to agree. But he didn’t want to set Adam on a brambled path. “Actually, it’s usually pretty great. It’s confusing, sometimes exasperating, and almost always makes you give more than you thought you had in you. But when it works—it’s great.”

Adam took the grocery box from him. “Yeah. I really liked being with Brianna. I miss her already. But I bet some rich dude where she lives is gonna make her forget all about me.”

Jason reached into the back seat for forgotten hats and jackets. “I don’t think so. Of course she’ll spend the time until next summer with the kids who are near her, but I think you made an impression on her. Phone her, let her know you’re thinking about her and that you’re looking forward to seeing her next year.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to tell girls—women-when you like them.”

Jason draped the jackets over his arm, put Adam’s hat on his head and closed the door. “Who said that?”

“You know. Guys.”

They headed up the driveway side by side. “A lot of people think it’s safer to keep your feelings to yourself.”

“Yeah. Then you don’t feel like a dufus if they don’t like
you.”

“The thing is, you do. It always hurts if you love somebody and they don’t love you back. So if you’re going to feel like a dufus, I think you may as well do it with guns blazing.”

“Ah…what?”

“You know. Laying it on the line. Telling them what’s in your heart so they don’t have to try to figure it out and
maybe come up with the wrong answer. It takes guts to make your position clear, and you might get creamed for it. But you might not. And you have the satisfaction of knowing that in something as important as love—you gave it all you had.”

Jason opened the front door for Adam, then stood there for a moment, rooted to the spot, as he heard the echoes of his own advice.

“Yo, Dad,” Adam called from the middle of the living room. “I’m in.”

Jason tossed the jackets at a chair and grinned at his son. “Do you mind keeping an eye on your brothers for an hour or so? Maybe two?”

“No. But where are you going? To see Laura?”

Matt and Eric, who were rooting through the things they’d brought in from the car, perked up and turned to him.

“I am.” Jason looked from face to face. “But you have to understand that I did something very stupid and she’s really mad at me. I’m going to try to explain and get her to come back, but I
was
wrong. It was all my fault. And she might not come.”

Matt looked puzzled. “You don’t go away when we do stupid stuff.”

“Yeah, but adults don’t expect other adults to be stupid.”

Eric shrugged. “You always tell us nobody’s perfect. That you just try to be as good as you can be.”

Adam smiled widely at him over the box he still held. “And if she won’t come back, you’ve still got us.”

Jason found the will to smile. He looked at each of his boys. “Sometimes I forget to tell you how much that means to me—how important you are to my life.”

“We know, Dad.” Eric came to put an arm around him.
“We were fine before Laura. It’s just that she made things even nicer. Like the flowers she put everywhere. I liked that.”

“Yeah.” Matt hobbled over to hug his other side. “And the kitchen always smelled good.”

“Yeah.” Adam shooed him away with one of the hands gripping the box. “Go. But if she won’t come back, will you see if she’ll give you that pumpkin chiffon pie recipe?”

Laura looked up at the clock in her office. It was almost five. She’d made it through an entire day. Good. That was good.

She’d thought about Jason and the boys a million times, but she’d carried on. Despite loneliness and longing, and pangs of guilt because she knew she’d been stupid and unreasonable, she’d met three patients, caught up on paperwork, and had taken a call from Julie Fuller, who formally rescheduled the food conference for the middle of October.

In the middle of the morning, then again somewhere around three that afternoon, she’d toyed with the idea of returning Jason’s call, then she’d come to her senses.

She couldn’t love him; she’d just proved that. Life had made her suspicious and mistrustful and generally a poor bet as a marriage partner. And she couldn’t possibly raise three boys when she held that kind of attitude.

No. The break had been made. That was best for everyone. She would let it be.

A knock on her door sent her heart jolting against her ribs. Had Jason given up on the telephone and come in person?

“Yes?” she asked.

The door opened and Barry walked in. “I tried to call
you at home,” he said, making himself comfortable in the chair facing her desk, “because I thought you were still on vacation. Then someone said you were in today.”

Bitterly disappointed, she opened a file on her desk and pretended to search through it, hoping to discourage any lengthy conversation. “Lots to do,” she said in a preoccupied tone. “Did you need something?”

“Yes.” He waited for her to look up from the file. “I came to apologize for misplacing the information about the mix-up in Jason’s test.”

“Mistakes happen,” she said, going back to the file. “Things get lost. Fortunately for us it wasn’t life or death.”

He was silent until she looked up again. He looked into her eyes. “Wasn’t it?”

To her complete horror, she burst into tears. She rested her elbows on her desk and put her face in her hands.

“I’ve called New Hampshire and I’ve called here, and I can’t reach Jason,” he said quietly. “I figured something grim had happened. And I remember your tone when you called me yesterday morning. What is it? Did he blame you for keeping the information from him?”

She pushed out of her chair and turned to the window, still sobbing. “He thought I knew and hadn’t told him because I didn’t want to lose him and the boys.” She snatched a tissue from a box on top of the file cabinet and put it to her mouth while more sobs erupted. Then she quieted and drew a ragged breath. “I think what bothered him most,” she went on in a strained voice, “was the thought that I’d used the boys for my own ends. The sad truth is that if I had known, I might have done just that because I never wanted to feel again what I feel now. Hollow. Empty. Only now it’s worse because I know what it’s like to have everything.”

“So…he asked you to leave?” Barry asked.

“No.” She told him about her decision to leave, their argument, and her inability, at least at that moment, to see it his way. “And…now it’s too late.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“I’m sure,” she said, looking out at the rain on the window and people on the street hurrying by under umbrellas, rushing home to warm houses with lights shining inside. She sighed and leaned a shoulder against the molding. “It occurred to me this afternoon that he was very gracious about it when I apologized for accusing him of fooling around with two blondes when his sister and his niece were visiting. But I wasn’t able to respond in kind when he made his mistake. He’s probably just thinking that he’s had a narrow escape.”

The office door closed and Laura turned, sniffing, thinking that Barry had probably gotten bored with her selfflagellation and left.

But he remained in her chair. It was Jason who had closed the door and stood halfway between her desk and the door. He wore jeans, a Boston College sweatshirt and a very grim expression. His hair and the shoulders of his shirt were wet, and he’d brought the fragrance of rain in with him.

Her heart began to thud as he came around the desk toward her. “If you want to know what I’m thinking,” he said, stopping a small distance from her, “ask me. Don’t presume to know, because it’s obvious from what I’ve heard that you don’t know me well enough to read my mind.”

“I wasn’t trying to read your mind.” She straightened and crushed the tissue in her fist, trying to pull herself together. “I was just explaining to Barry…”

“Barry doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Jason
said. “If you want to explain what you’re feeling, you should do it to the man you made love to for forty-eight hours straight.”

“Ah…” Barry stood. “Maybe I’ll leave you two to sort this…”

Jason pointed a finger at him. “Stay right there. I’m going to need you to get by Security.”

Barry sat down again but raised an eyebrow. “What?”

Jason ignored him and concentrated on Laura. “Actually, you don’t have to explain because I heard it all. You’re sorry. I’m sorry. The boys are miserable. I don’t see why we can’t fix it.”

She wanted to believe it could be that easy, but her life had proved otherwise. Men went away and stayed away. Or lost interest. Or changed their minds. “Then you heard it all but didn’t listen. The men in my life.”

He closed his eyes and shifted his weight, obviously grasping at the threads of his patience. “Left you. I know. But if you’ll recall, you’re the one who left me. And yet—” he spread both hands to indicate his presence “—I’m the one who came back to
you.
Doesn’t that prove something?”

It did. But the notion that she shared a love that had survived a quarrel and her own irrational departure didn’t mean she could make it last forever.did it?

She remembered that he’d compared her to Sergei who stuck his head out of the cage but never quite got the courage to walk out of it entirely, and thought that was precisely how she felt now.

“It does, Jason,” she said, leaning toward him but afraid to touch him. “It proves that you’re great husband material. And you had a successful marriage that proves it. I’m the unknown quantity, and maybe if it was just you and me we were talking about, we could take the
chance that as much as I love you, it would work out. But we have to think about the boys. They…”

He grabbed her arm and she stopped abruptly, expecting that he intended to make some forceful point in their argument. But he simply pulled the lab coat off of her and tossed it onto her chair. Then he lifted her up into his arms.

“Jason, what…?” She struggled, but he held firm.

“Barry, will you get her purse?”

Barry stood and frowned at him. “You’re going to rob her?”

Jason gave him a pitying look. “Just get her purse and follow me.”

Barry looked around, then spotted it on the floor behind her desk. He lifted it and winced. “Geez. Can I call for a gurney?”

Jason stepped aside to let him open the door.

“Jason, you are not carrying me out of this hospital,” Laura said, pushing against him.

“You had your chance to walk out under your own power,” he said, smiling as everyone at the nurses’ station looked up in wide-eyed curiosity.

Laura noticed over his shoulder that the nurses fell into line behind them. She put her hand to her face. “Jason, please…”

“Just be still until we’re out of here.”

He rounded a corner and an older man walking with his IV pole stopped to stare at them. Through her fingers, Laura saw that he joined the nurses.

“Jason, this is kidnapping,” she said firmly. “While this was cute in Doris Day movies, it doesn’t play with today’s women. I could have you arrested.”

“Well, here’s your chance,” he said. “Hey, Gordy.”

Laura lowered her hand to find a local police officer
standing in their path. He’d probably come in with an ER patient. But he did not look at all threatening. He was smiling. “Hey, Jase. What’s going on?”

“I’m being kidnapped,” Laura said.

The officer looked the three of them over, then frowned.

Laura gave Jason a superior look, presuming he was about to face a reckoning.

Her hopes were dashed when Gordy asked, “What’s with the purse, Barry? You’re not bringing it to our next game, are you? And I don’t think you’re supposed to wear a brown bag with black shoes.”

Barry hit him with it. He pretended to fend it off.

“Beat it,” Barry said. “We’re out of wheelchairs this afternoon, so we’re carrying this patient to her car.”

Laura couldn’t believe it when the officer accepted that excuse and stepped aside.

“Out of wheelchairs?” Jason scorned the fib as they passed the gift shop.

“I’m sorry,” Barry grumbled. “I’m carrying a purse. I’m a little distracted at the moment. Will you speed it up and get us the hell out of here?”

A young couple, two older ladies and a volunteer had wedged themselves into the gift shop door to watch them pass. Then they joined the parade behind the man with the IV pole.

Laura dropped her head to Jason’s shoulder and covered her eyes.

Barry opened the outer doors for Jason, and they stopped as rain fell in noisy sheets from the protective overhang.

“Car keys are in my pocket,” Jason said to Barry. “I’m halfway down the row. Would you get it, please?”

Barry groaned. “Great. Carrying a purse
and
reaching
into your pocket. Your friendship is entirely too much trouble.”

The keys in hand, Barry ran for the car, the purse tucked under his arm, the strap dangling.

“Isn’t this Neanderthal approach a little out of character for you?” Laura asked Jason. She raised her head off his shoulder and frowned at the little crowd collected behind them in the lobby. They were all standing on the sensor so that the doors remained open. “We’ve gathered an audience.”