Though Not Dead (52 page)

It was a shallow creek, with a meandering current full of eddies and dim backwaters beneath low-hanging branches that dragged ripples in its surface. The water gave a low chuckle of sound as it passed. It had nothing of the verve and dash of Zoya Creek, which ran in back of Kate’s house. And none of the salmon or the grayling or the trout, either.

The sting of the tomatoes on his taste buds brought literal tears to his eyes. All fresh produce in Alaska was picked green in Chile and New Zealand, and shipped green, and eaten green quick before it rotted. Unless you had a greenhouse, there was nothing like this to be found in Alaska.

Kate’s greenhouse had burned in the fire. He wondered what Kate would say if he built her a new one. He imagined her curled in his lap on the edge of this lazy little creek. He imagined feeding her one of these tomatoes, one bite at a time. Hadn’t he read somewhere that some cultures considered tomatoes an aphrodisiac? A tradition to be propagated, if so, in more ways that one.

Through the trees the low mounds of terraced landscapes dipped and swayed over a hazy horizon. Not a mountain worthy of the name in sight. Not a glacier. No grizzly was going to stumble over him in this quiet little backwater, no bull moose saunter out of the undergrowth. A bird chirped, a melodious, inquiring sound. It definitely wasn’t an eagle.

He got his phone out and called her again. Voice mail. Crap. “Hi, it’s me, still here, out among the flatlanders. Had car trouble, got delayed a day.” He paused, and disconnected.

He rinsed his hands in the creek, got back in his dad’s car, and drove on down the road.

He came to Medford at sunset and checked into a Motel 6 outside of town. The next morning, another sunny day in a place where it didn’t seem like they had much else in the way of weather, he was up early. He found the visitors’ center, where they gave him a map of the town, and with its help he navigated his way to a sleepy neighborhood consisting of old frame houses with wraparound porches. Every porch had a swing, and every roof had dormer windows. The streets were overshadowed by tall trees, oak and maple and larch and yew, the yards lined with flowering shrubs. The scent of roses was very strong through the open window.

He expected to see Wally and the Beav coming down the sidewalk at any moment.

He found Oak View without difficulty and stopped the car in front of the white-painted mailbox of 1120.

The door to the house opened before he got to the top of the stairs. A pleasant-looking man with a worn face and shrewd eyes warmed by a latent twinkle said, “Hi. May I help you?”

Jim halted. He realized that his heart was pounding, and he took a couple of deep breaths, trying to slow it down.

“Those stairs aren’t that steep,” the man said, and came out onto the porch to hold out his hand. “I’m Norman Beck,” he said.

“Jim Chopin,” Jim said.

Beck’s handshake was warm and dry and still had plenty of strength in it. “How can I help you, Jim Chopin?” Beck said.

“Honey, who is it?” a voice said, and Jim looked over Beck’s shoulder to meet a pair of blue eyes exactly like his mother’s, and a jaw line exactly like his own.

“You’re Shirley,” he said.

Her voice caught in her throat.

“I’m James,” he said. “Beverly’s son. My father sent me to find you, and I’m hoping you’ll tell me why.”

*   *   *

Norman Beck supplied them with coffee and pastries and left them alone on the porch, sitting next to each other on the swing.

“Why did my father send me to you?” Jim said. It had taken so long, this unexpected and uncharted voyage of discovery into his own past. He was suddenly in a fever to have all the answers, now, immediately, before he drove another mile, another inch.

Next to him Shirley sighed, closing her eyes and leaning her head back. She nudged the swing into motion with her foot. It creaked a little as it drifted back and forth.

She was as like his mother to be her twin, long-limbed and square-jawed, but there were distinct differences that could be put down mostly to style. Her thick white blond hair was in a pixie cut, the fine wrinkles at eye and mouth and throat had never seen a scalpel or Botox, and she was dressed in chino capris and a cropped T-shirt in pale peach. She wore tiny gold hoops in her ears and a plain gold band on her left hand. Her nails were clipped short, filed smooth, and unvarnished.

She opened her eyes as if his gaze had weight, and smiled at him. It was a smile with a lot of baggage, a lot of pain, and some plain ordinary everyday weariness.

Or maybe it just all came under the heading of history.

“We looked like twins, but I was actually a year older,” she said. “That was the start of it all, really.”

Beverly had been born barely a year after Shirley, who had preceded her sister in school in such a blaze of intellectual and social glory that Beverly had been outshone in everything she did. Honor student? Shirley got there first. Cheerleader? Beverly fell from a dismount during the tryouts, and Shirley was elected head cheerleader and dated the captain of the football team. Prom queen? Shirley wore the crown, Beverly made the court by one vote. National merit scholar, valedictorian? Shirley took all the awards, while Beverly’s GPA never got over 2.9.

“She could have excelled. She was every bit as good a student as I was through junior high,” Beverly said, “but by the time we got to high school I think she decided what was the point?”

UC Berkley? They were both accepted, but Shirley was premed, while Beverly majored in humanities. Shirley was a leading light on the collegiate social scene, while Beverly alternately amused and annoyed everyone with her tenacious efforts to work her way up the California social strata. She reached what she considered the zenith of her college career when she was admitted into the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.

Her roommate was Eloise Locke Chopin.

Who was, of course, the sister of James Brant Chopin, older than Beverly but not unsusceptible to the adoration of a younger woman who made a point of hanging on his every word.

“Nephew, she married him,” Shirley said.

“Was it his idea?” Jim said.

It surprised a laugh out of her.

Soon after they married, Jim’s grandparents and sister were killed in the Kern County earthquake. “Beverly was all he had left,” Shirley said. “He desperately wanted a child. They tried for years before finally going to a doctor, who told Beverly she was infertile.” Shirley stopped then, as if she had run into a wall.

A woman walked down the sidewalk in front of the house, a terrier on a leash. She gave them a curious look. “Hi, Shirley!”

“Hi, Angie,” Shirley said.

Lacking an invitation, Angie and her dog walked on.

Some inkling of the truth was beginning to dawn on Jim, but before he could say anything Shirley took up the tale. “If she disliked me before, imagine how she felt then. Here was something else I could do that she couldn’t.”

“You had children?”

“Two.” Shirley smiled. “One is a pediatrician with Doctors Without Borders.” She looked at him, a glint in her eye. “The other is a cop in San Diego.”

“You’re kidding.”

She shook her head. “Are you sure you want to hear this, Jim?”

He ran suddenly sweaty palms down his jeans. “I’m sure.”

“All right.” She gave a faint sigh. “James would have adopted. Beverly, never. I was divorced by then, of course. It’s a strong marriage that survives medical school, not to mention residency and a fellowship. She came to me and asked me if I would bear a child for them. James and I spent a weekend together at a lodge in Carmel. When it was over, I was pregnant.”

“With me,” he said, his voice hollow and a little echo-y. It was as if his known universe had receded somehow into a vast distance.

“With you,” she said.

He had to get up and pace the length of the porch. “I get it now,” he said. “I get it all.”

“Get what?”

He stopped and looked at her, almost with hostility. “Why she has hated me every day of my life.”

Shirley went very still. “Hated you?”

“Hated me.” He flung the words at her like a weapon. “Distant, disapproving, unaffectionate. I was ten years old at a sleepover at a friend’s house before I knew parents hugged their children. And she wasn’t only determined I would have no relationship with her. She actively interfered in the relationship I had with my father. She was always there, in between us. If Dad wanted us to take in so much as a baseball game, she was there before him with some goddamn society function they just couldn’t miss. So-and-so was going to be there, Dad had to meet him, it meant business for the firm. It was all for the future of the family, she said. I’d understand when I was older. But I never did. Do you know why I live in Alaska?”

Another challenge. Her voice was calm when she answered it. “Why?”

“Because it was as far away from her as I could get and still be in the country. You know why I still live there?”

“Why?”

“Because the rudest thing you can do to a new Alaskan is ask them where they’re from. Most cheechakoes leave their history at the Beaver Creek border crossing and never look back.”

“And you’re one of them?”

“Damn right.”

“But you’re here,” she said.

“Dad died. Nothing less would have brought me back.”

Her eyes were full of pity. She patted the seat of the swing. The strength went out of his legs and he slumped next to her. Mercifully, for the sake of his composure, she did not offer an embrace, or an apology. Instead she spoke calmly, rationally, almost clinically. She sounded, he thought, like a doctor. “There is something else you should know.”

“Great,” he said. “Can’t wait. Serve it up.”

She smiled a little, but she refused to let him off the hook. “That weekend I spent with your father? It turned out to be much more than the simple act of planting a seed. We had not spent a great deal of time together before then.” She hesitated. “But it is possible to realize you care for someone in only forty-eight hours.”

The image of Kate flashed before his eyes, the first time he’d seen her in the Roadhouse, when the scar on her throat was still red and angry, when her regard for him was little more than contempt laced with hostility, and spoke without thinking. “It’s possible to realize you care for someone in five minutes.”

“Then you will understand me when I say that by the time that weekend was over, your father and I both realized he’d married the wrong sister.”

“Then why the hell didn’t he divorce her?”

She shook her head. “Divorce simply wasn’t in your father’s vocabulary. There was a man who took his vows seriously. Forsaking all others. Everybody says it, but only your father meant it.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

Her smile turned into a wince. “I never saw either one of them again. Beverly made sure of that, and for my own sanity, I moved away. Eventually I remarried, to a wonderful man with whom I was very happy.”

“And Norm?”

“When Colin died, I was sure I’d never marry again. And then I went to a retirement seminar, where I met Norm.” She smiled. “Never say never.”

She started the swing moving again.

An errant breeze rustled the leaves of the maple in the yard. A hummingbird with emerald green feathers darted up to the feeder hanging in the opposite corner of the porch, his wings a blur. Norm came to the screen door, looked at them, and went away.

“She actually searched my room,” Jim said. “She was looking for Dad’s writing box, for whatever it was she knew he had left me that would lead me to you. Why didn’t she want me to find you? It’s not like she gave a damn about me one way or another, especially after I wouldn’t fall in line with her plans.”

“Which were?”

“What you might expect. Become a lawyer so I could go to work for Dad and in the fullness of time take over the firm.” He shook his head. “To this day I don’t know if I didn’t do it because I didn’t want to do it or because I just wanted to get back at her somehow for never loving me.” He looked at Shirley. “So why would she care?”

This time her smile was a little sad. “Just one more thing her sister could do that she couldn’t. She’s had a lifetime of it, Jim.”

He looked at her, and thought, Just one more thing.

Including inspiring love in her husband.

He stayed to lunch, and then to dinner, talking more to Shirley Beck in a day than he had to Beverly Chopin in a lifetime. That evening, as they stood on the porch saying good-bye, Shirley said, “Try not to be too hard on her. She may not have given you life, but she raised you to be who you are today. We are who our parents make us.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” he said, and kissed her good-bye. Norm hugged him, which was one more hug than he had ever received from his father.

He drove straight back to LA, all night and all day. Beverly heard the garage door go up and came out to meet him, her eyes wary.

“Beverly,” he said, and walked past her into the house and up the stairs to his room. He tried Kate again on her cell, and when it went to voice mail he called Alaska Airlines and got a seat on the last flight north that evening. It meant an overnight layover in SeaTac, but he didn’t care if he spent it stretched out on the floor of the D Concourse. He’d been too long from home.

He hung up and started to pack, aware of but unconcerned by Beverly’s presence in the doorway.

“You found her then,” Beverly said.

“I did,” he said, almost lighthearted.

“I suppose she told you everything.”

“Pretty much,” he said, and closed his suitcase.

“I suppose you think I should have told you.”

“Not necessarily.” He put the suitcase on the floor. “Dad didn’t tell me, either.”

She had expected an attack, and this absence of recrimination disconcerted her.

“Could you have Maria call me a cab?” he said.

She gave him a baffled look and went downstairs. He tried Kate on her cell again, and this time when voice mail kicked in he said, “I’m on my way home, should be back by tomorrow night. I’m hoping you’re not answering because you’re already there.”

He carried his suitcase downstairs. His mother was standing in the hallway, looking irresolute for the first time in his memory. “So you’re leaving,” she said.