When You're Expecting Something Else (10 page)

Anne answers immediately and I launch into breathless speech. As I tell her about Sal and how creepy he is, I glance back at the table where I’d left him. His roving eyes have wasted no time, settling already on an attractive woman seated alone at the next table.

“I love guys like that! What’s his handle?” Anne cries, surprising me into silence.

“What! What are you saying? You don’t want love and marriage and children?” I stutter, stunned. It takes me a few minutes to regroup my thoughts.

Anne rambles on. “No, not me. I like to play around. I want the simple life, not a lot to worry about and all. He’s probably great in bed. That’s good enough for me,” she says.

“What planet am I on?” I mumble into the phone. Maybe it’s the shock of her enthusiasm, or the disappointment from my first date, but I start laughing and can hardly stop. Suddenly, the whole experience feels surreal to me, and I feel a strange sense of déjà vu. Anne thinks I’m sobbing

“I’m sorry, Connie! I hope I haven’t offended you. I’m sorry, really. I should have been supportive of your feelings. Forgive me?” She is suddenly serious and contrite.

“I’m just regrouping my thoughts,” I choke out between spasms of laughter.

Finally I stop laughing. We talk a little more, and then make plans to meet for happy hour at a local wine bar for another evening of girl talk. I can hardly wait. She has such an interesting approach to life, a lifestyle I want to hear more about. I have so much to learn. I’m intrigued, and really glad I didn’t get invested more than a sentence or two into my first computer date. How weird is this? We couldn’t have been more mismatched if we’d tried.
 

“Oh, by the way, I almost forgot to tell you,” she says just as I’m about to click off. “Jared Wise was discharged to home care earlier today.”

“Wow, he’s really stable enough for home care? No transitional unit?” I can hardly believe that poor, broken Jared is ready to leave the hospital. Usually ICU patients have to go to a step-down unit for a few days before discharge.

“His rich aunt has hired this whole team of care providers. The doctors had to go along. They’ll follow up with him at home with the Registered Nurse there. Marta Lewski, the one you met, she’ll be his primary. She’s pretty nice, and seems to care a lot about him,” Anne said.

“That is so great!” I reply, really meaning it.

*****

Jared Wise the Third opened his eyes and stared blankly into the big beautiful blue eyes of Marta Lewski, feeling as if drowning in a sea of blue sky, trying to make sense of where he was, and why he was drifting in the cloudless abyss. His throat felt dry. When he tried to talk, his tongue felt twice its normal size, dry and thick, glued to the top of his mouth. A raspy sound escaped his cracked lips.

“Oh, Jared, you’re waking up. Here sip some water. I’m Marta. I’m the nurse who’s been taking care of you,” Marta said, pouring water from the bedside pitcher into a small plastic cup, positioning the straw so Jared could sip.

A nurse? Why was a nurse taking care of him? He sipped the water as if starving from thirst, while his eyes darted around, puzzled. He was home, in his own room, dressed in a blue and white-striped patient gown. His right hand reached out to touch the ribbing on the front, wondering about the gown since he’d never worn anything like it before, just boxers and a tee shirt for bed. He shook his head trying to clear the fog.

It wasn’t so much pain that he felt in his head, just an oppressive heaviness, like he’d forgotten to take off the helmet he wore when he’d played high school football. Shifting his position to get a better look at the blue-eyed beauty named Marta, he moaned. His right leg had turned into a mummified appendage, difficult to move, feeling as if it belonged to someone else. His left leg moved more easily, but it too was wrapped in bandages. A hard cast covered his left arm from the wrist to the elbow.

Again, he tried to talk, coughing the straw away. No words came out, just mumbled sounds as if his brain just couldn’t connect with his tongue and voice box. An IV tube ran across his chest. His green eyes darted in confusion to see that his bedroom had been converted to a sick bay. His brows puckered, while his right hand, his good hand, the one without bandages, traced the tube to a port on his neck.

“You have a CVP line. That’s a central venous port to get fluids into your body,” Marta explained, not sure if he would understand. “You were in a car accident and got badly injured, but you’re getting better now. You were in ICU at Pacific West Hospital, but now you’re home and I’m taking care of you.”

Jared nodded, comprehending just enough of what she said to know he was in dire straits. What car wreck? He closed his eyes and tried to remember.

“Your Aunt Margaret is traveling right now, but she wants only the best of us taking care of you,” Marta said, intentionally adding to his confusion, thinking it’s never to soon to begin new mental programming.

Jared struggled to remember his Aunt Margaret, but no image came, only vague, fleeting memories of Maggie, the childhood nanny who used to mother him whenever he got sick when he was a little boy. He tried to recall his aunt, but all he saw was black as he drifted back into darkness.

Chapter Twelve

“Where the hell is Jared? He doesn’t answer his phone and he hasn’t sent in the updated final for
Blue Kettle
yet. It’s not like him to miss a deadline.” Bradley Lawton, founder and CEO of Right Wing Computer, or RWC, paced back and forth in front of his desk, raking his long, thin fingers through his wavy, dark hair. He’d met Jared in the Computer Science Program at Stanford University when they were both freshmen and worked on a project together. That was going on eighteen years now.

“You know Jared, he gets sidetracked. Just like his grandfather used to, two eccentric inventors, you know that. When’d you last talk with him?” asked Terry Lockwood, an RWC project engineer who also worked on the
Blue Kettle
project.

Bradley searched his brain. When was the last time he’d actually seen Jared? It’s not like they were inseparable friends. Jared was eccentric, not quite a loner, but not someone you’d try to keep tabs on. Jared was a free spirit who did what he wanted to do. But he was reliable and trustworthy. It wasn’t like him to just disappear. At least not for long. “It was just before Kelly and I went to South America last month. That’s the other thing, Jared missed the twins’ fourth birthday last week. He’s never forgotten the girls. Something’s wrong, I’m telling you,” Bradley said.

That he and his wife Kelly and their twin daughters had gone on vacation for a month without contact with Jared didn’t excuse Jared from his commitments. Besides,
Blue Kettle
was Jared’s pet project, his latest patent, and he’d been the one pushing for tighter deadlines. “He might get side tracked like his grandfather, but that’s only when he’s working on a new design. Once he’s beyond the creative phase, he’s more like a dog with a bone. He doesn’t slack off. I’m really getting worried. I’m going to stop by his house this evening,” Bradley said, voicing his final decision.
 

“Not tonight. We’ve got the meeting with the city counsel tonight,” Terry said. “I know you hate dealing with the logistics of the move, but we need their approval more than we need to push
Blue Kettle
right now. Jared’s got us far enough advanced to hold the line a few more weeks if necessary.” RWC was in the process of expansion and moving to a new location. It was the other hot button that Bradley stressed about.

“Oh right,” Bradley sighed, reluctantly putting his concerns about Jared aside for time being.

*****

In Boston, Massachusetts, Maggie Martin watched the sunset from her back veranda, restlessly swirling a glass of chilled Chardonnay, twirling the delicate crystal stem between her fingers. The crystal had been a gift from Jared Wise for her last birthday, her fifty-fourth.

Where the heck was Jared, anyway? He wasn’t answering his cell phone or his emails, and that wasn’t like him at all. She put her glass down and tried to call him one more time before folding her phone closed for the umpteenth time this week. This time she hadn’t even bothered to leave a message.

“Are you still fussing about Jared?” her husband Carl asked, joining her at the outside table. He handed her the lightweight shawl she’d asked him to fetch for her. Then he poured them each a little more Chardonnay. Usually one glass was enough, but today Maggie was in a two-drink mood.

“I know he gets absent minded sometimes, but he’s not in the developmental phase right now. He said
Blue Kettle
was already in the hands of RWC weeks ago. Besides, even when he’s preoccupied with a design, he never goes this long without checking in. He’s my little boy, you know. I worry about him,” she said with a wan smile. She hated having to explain her worry to Carl.

“He’s not a little boy anymore, Maggie. Sometimes you’ve just got to let go,” Carl said.
 
He’d never really understood the depth of Maggie’s bond to Jared, though he knew Maggie had been the young boy’s nanny, and she loved him as if he was her own son. Jared’s parents died when he was five. That’s when the boy had been shuttled off to live with his eccentric old grandfather. Maggie had been hired as a nanny, and eventually became the one who oversaw the whole workings of the
 
Wise household because the old grandfather was just too eccentric to keep things organized.

Maggie, who couldn’t have children of her own, had put her heart and soul into loving the orphaned boy. It’s not that Carl was jealous per say, he just didn’t get it. He’d met Maggie long after Jared had moved to California with his grandfather, and it’d long been a sore spot with him that she always seemed to love him too much. It gnawed at him.

“Something’s wrong,” Maggie said, knowing in her heart that Carl could never understand how she could just know something like that. She took another sip of wine and made the decision that if she still hadn’t heard from Jared by the time she and Carl returned from the Caribbean cruise they had booked, leaving tomorrow, then she would fly out to California and check up on him herself.

*****

In Utah, with the sun still high and bouncing off reddish rock spires, George Collins hollered to his wife to bring it in. Lydia loved to push the envelope when it came to rock hounding. They’d been at it for hours already, ever since watching the sunrise over breakfast a few yards out from the campground where their motor home was parked. But, as beautiful as the Utah sky was in daylight, the magic didn’t truly start until the pitch of night, when myriads of brilliant stars littered the black sky.