Coast Road Read online

  “Do you believe that?” Jack asked.

  “It doesn’t jibe with medical science.” He lowered his voice a notch. “My colleagues pooh-pooh it. Me, I don’t see that talking to her does any harm.”

  “What do we say?”

  “Anything positive. If she does hear, you want her to hear good stuff. The more optimistic you are, the more optimistic she’ll be. Tell her she’s doing well. Be upbeat.”

  “What about the girls?” Jack asked. “We have two daughters. They’re thirteen and fifteen. They’re already asking questions. Maybe I should keep them away. There’s no point in frightening them if there’s a chance she’ll be waking up later or even tomorrow. Should I say she’s still out of it from the anesthesia, and keep them home?”

  “No. Bring them. Their voices may help her focus.”

  “How does she look?” he asked. “Will they be frightened?”

  “The side of her face is swollen and scraped. It’s starting to turn colors. One of her hands was cut up by the glass—”

  “Badly?” Jack cut in, because that introduced a whole new worry.

  Apparently agreeing, Katherine added, “She’s an artist. Left-handed.”

  “Well, this was her left hand,” Bauer said, “but nothing crucial was cut. There won’t be any lasting damage there. Her leg is casted and elevated, and we’ve taped her ribs to prevent damage if she becomes agitated, but that’s it.”

  “Agitated,” Jack repeated, wondering just how much more there was. “As in seizures?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes just agitated. We call it ‘posturing.’ Odd physical movements. Then again, she may be perfectly quiet right through waking up. That’s what’ll scare your daughters most. They’ll be as upset by her silence as by anything physical they see.”

  Jack tried to ingest it all, but it was hard. The picture the doctor had painted was the antithesis of the active woman Rachel had always been. “When can I see her?”

  “Once we make sure she’s stable, we’ll transfer her to Intensive Care—no,” he explained when Jack’s eyes widened, “that doesn’t mean she’s critical, just that we want her closely watched.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was four-ten. “Give us an hour.”

  JACK and Katherine weren’t alone in the cafeteria. A handful of medical personnel were scattered at tables, some eating an early breakfast, others nursing coffee. Voices were muted. The occasional clink of flatwear on china rose above them.

  Jack had paid for one coffee, one tea, and one thickly coated sticky bun. The coffee was his. The rest was Katherine’s. Her polished fingernails glittered under the overhead fluorescents as she pulled the warm bun apart.

  Jack watched her for a distracted minute, then studied his coffee. He needed the caffeine. He was feeling tired all over. But he couldn’t eat, not waiting this way. Rachel dead was unthinkable; Rachel brain-damaged came in a close second.

  Taking a healthy drink of coffee, he set the cup down and checked his watch. Then he stretched up and back in an attempt to unkink his stomach. He checked his watch again, but the time hadn’t changed.

  “I can’t picture her here,” he said, absently looking at the others in the cafeteria. “She hates hospitals. When the girls were born, she was in and out. If she’d been a farmhand, she’d have given birth in the fields.”

  Katherine nodded. “I believe it. Rachel’s one of the free spirits of the group.”

  The group. Jack had trouble seeing Rachel in any group. During the years of their marriage, she had been a rabid nonjoiner—and that in a city where the slightest cause spawned a gathering. She had rejected it all, had rejected him, had packed up her bags and moved three hours south to Big Sur, apparently to do some of the very things she had refused to do under his roof.

  Stung by that thought, he muttered a snide “Must be some group.”

  Katherine stopped chewing for an instant, then swallowed. “What do you mean, ‘some group’?”

  “For you to be here, what, all night?”

  She returned a piece of the sticky bun to her plate and carefully wiped her hands on a napkin. “Rachel’s my friend. It didn’t seem right that she should be in the operating room with no one waiting to learn if she lived or died.”

  “They were only setting her leg. Besides, I’m here now. You can leave.”

  She looked at him for a minute. With a small, quick head shake, she gathered her cup and plate and picked herself up. In a voice just confident enough to drive home her point without announcing it to the world, she said, “You’re an insensitive shit, Jack. No wonder she divorced you.”

  By the time she had relocated to the far side of the room, Jack knew she was only partly right. He was insensitive and ungrateful. Topping that off with rude, he could begin to see why the two women were friends. If he had used that tone on Rachel, she would have walked away from him, too.

  Taking his coffee, he went after her. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “I was being insensitive. You’re her friend, and you’ve been here for hours, and I thank you for that. I’m feeling tired, helpless, and scared. I guess I took it out on you.”

  She stared at him a minute longer, then turned back to her roll.

  “May I sit?” he asked, suddenly wanting it badly. “Misery-loves-company kind of thing? Any friend of Rachel’s is a friend of mine?”

  It seemed an eternity of pending refusal before she gestured toward the table’s free chair. She sipped her tea while he settled, then put the cup down. Staring at it, she said a quiet “For the record, you are not my friend. Rachel is. She’s earned that right. I don’t take people to heart readily, and you’re starting at a deficit. You’re not the only one around here who’s tired and helpless and scared.”

  He could see it then, threads of fatigue behind the neat facade. He hadn’t meant to make things worse. He was glad for Rachel, having a close friend like this. No doubt Katherine knew more about who Rachel was today than he did.

  He looked at his watch. It was only four-thirty. They had time to kill. He was curious. “Rachel never told me she was in a book group.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re divorced,” Katherine reminded him, then relented and said more gently, “She helped form the group. We organized five years ago.”

  “How often do you meet?”

  “Once a month. There are seven of us.”

  “Who are the others?”

  “Local women. One is a travel agent, one sculpts, one owns a bakery, two golf. They were all here earlier. Needless to say, we weren’t talking books.”

  No, Jack realized. They weren’t talking books. They were talking about an accident that shouldn’t have happened. Turning to that for lack of anything else to attack, he said, “Who hit her? Was the guy drunk? Did the cops get him, at least?”

  “It wasn’t a guy. It was a gal, and she wasn’t drunk. She was senile. Eighty-some years old, with no business being on any road, least of all that one. The cops got her, all right. She’s in the morgue.”

  Jack’s breath caught. In the morgue. The fact of death changed things. It made reality suddenly more real, made Rachel’s situation feel more grave.

  He let out a long, low groan. His anger went with it.

  “She was someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother,” Katherine said.

  “I’m sure.” He sank back in his seat. “Christ.”

  “I do agree with you there.”

  THEY actually agreed on another thing—that Jack should be the one to see Rachel first—and he was grateful. Entering a predawn, dim, starkly sterile room whose railed bed held the pale shadow of the woman whose personality had always been brightly colored felt bad enough in private. Having his own uncertainties on public display would have made it worse. Not that there was total privacy. The fourth wall of the room was a sliding glass door. A curtain that might have covered the glass was pushed back so that medical personnel could see Rachel.

  Quietly, he approached the bed. His mind registered one machin
e against the wall and multiple IV poles beside the bed, plus Rachel’s elevated leg, which, casted, was three times the size of her normally slim one. But his eyes found her face fast, and held it. The doctor had warned him well. Even in the low light coming from behind her, he could see that around a raw scrape, the left side was swollen and starting to purple. The color was jarring against the rest of her. Her eyes were closed, her lips pale, her skin ashen, her freckles out of place. Even her hair, which was shoulder length, naturally blond and thick, looked uncharacteristically meek.

  He reached for the hand nearest him, the right one, free of sutures and tubes. Her fingers were limp, her skin cool. Carefully, he folded his own around it.

  “Rachel?” he called softly. “It’s me. Jack.”

  She slept on.

  “Rachel? Can you hear me?” He swallowed. “Rachel?”

  His knees were shaking. He leaned against the bed rail. “Come on, angel. Time to wake up. It isn’t any fun talking if you don’t talk back.” He squeezed her hand. “Your friend Katherine said I was a shit. You used to say it, too. Say it now, and I won’t even mind.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Not even a blink?” He opened his hand. “How about moving a finger to let me know you can hear? Want to try? Or are you going to keep us all guessing about what you hear and what you don’t?”

  She showed no sign of having heard him.

  Nothing new there, he thought. She had gone right ahead and done her own thing for years, certainly for the six they had been apart. So, did she hear him? Or was she deliberately ignoring him? He didn’t know what to say next.

  Lifting her hand to his mouth, he kissed it and held it to his chest. With the slightest shift, it covered his heart, flesh on cotton, but close.

  “Feel that?” The beat was heavy and fast. “It’s been that way since I got the call. Samantha and Hope are scared, too. I talked with them, though. They’ll be fine.” When that sounded dismissive, he said, “I’ll call them again in a little while.” That didn’t sound right, either, so he said, “I’ll drive down once I leave here. They’ll believe me better if I tell them you’re okay in person. Duncan’s there now. So, what’s the scoop? Is he just the baby-sitter, or what?”

  He wondered if she was laughing inside. “I’m serious. I don’t know the guy. Do you two date?”

  She said nothing.

  “Sam informed me that she wasn’t going to school. She’ll go.” He thought aloud: “Or maybe I’ll just drive them back up here to visit. It won’t kill them to miss one day of school.” But they were approaching June fast. “When do finals start?” Rachel didn’t answer. “No sweat. I’ll ask.”

  He rapped her hand against his chest. “Wake up, Rachel.” She slept on.

  He brought her hand to his mouth again. Her skin was as soft as ever, but it lacked a distinct scent, which wasn’t like Rachel at all. If she didn’t smell of whatever medium she was working with, she smelled of lilies. He had started her on that, way back when he hadn’t had enough money and had resorted to stealing lilies of the valley from the shady side of his landlord’s house. For their second wedding anniversary, he had found perfume like it. No, not perfume. Toilet water. Perfume would have been too strong for Rachel. Even when he started earning money, he avoided perfume. Light and floral. That fit Rachel.

  Light and floral was worlds away from her antiseptic smell now.

  Not that she would still be wearing the same toilet water. She would have switched. Wouldn’t have wanted the memories, though more than a few were good.

  “Wake up, Rachel,” he begged, suddenly frightened. He had lived without her for six years, but all that time he had known where she was. Now he didn’t. Not really. It was as unsettling a thought as he’d had of late. “I need to know how you’re feeling,” he warned in a slightly frantic singsong. “I need to know what to tell the girls. I need you to talk to me.”

  When she remained silent, he grew angry. “Damn it, what happened? You’re the safest driver I know. You used to save me from accidents all the time—‘Maniac on the left,’ you’d say, or, ‘Jerk on your tail.’ Didn’t you see a car behind you?”

  But she might not have. She had been driving north on a road that wound in and around, from the lip of one canyon to the lip of another. She would have been squeezed on the east by cliffs, and on the west by a single lane of oncoming traffic, then a guardrail and a harrowing drop. Once she rounded a sharp curve, she wouldn’t see the car behind her until it, too, rounded the curve. If it did that at high speed, she wouldn’t see it until seconds before the collision. And then, where could she go?

  Feeling the panic she may well have felt, he whispered an urgent “Okay, okay. Not your fault. I know that. I’m sorry I suggested it. It’s just … frustrating.” Frustrating that he couldn’t rouse her. Frustrating that the doctors couldn’t, either. Frustrating, too, that the offending party was dead and beyond punishment, but he sure couldn’t say that to Rachel, not if there was a chance she could hear. She was a softhearted woman—hardheaded but softhearted. She would be crushed to learn that someone had died. If she needed to hear upbeat things, that wasn’t the news to tell.

  And what was? You’ll be pleased to know that my firm’s falling apart. But Rachel wasn’t vindictive. So, that wouldn’t do it. Nor would I’ve lost the touch; nothing I design is right anymore. Rachel had no taste for self-pity. Nor was she one for jealousy, which meant that he couldn’t tell her about Jill. Besides, what would he say? Jill was nearly as softhearted as Rachel. She was nearly as pretty and nearly as bright. She was nowhere near as spirited, or as talented, or as unique. She would always pale by comparison.

  What was the point of telling Rachel that? She had left him. They were divorced.

  Feeling useless and suddenly more tired than he would have thought possible, he said, “Your friend Katherine is here. She was the one who called me. She’s been here since they brought you in. She wants to see you, too. I’m going to talk to the doctor. Then I’ll go get the girls. We’ll be back in a couple of hours, okay?” He watched her eyelids for even the slightest movement. “Okay?” Nothing.

  Discouraged, he returned her hand to the stiff hospital sheet. Leaning down, he kissed her forehead. “I’ll be back.”

  DAWN was breaking to the east of Monterey when he left the hospital. Once he was past Carmel, the hills rose to stave it off. Inevitably, though, the sky began to lighten. By the time he reached the Santa Lucias and Highway 1 began to wind, a morning fog had risen from the water and was bathing the pavement with a shifting mist.

  Jack kept his headlights on and his eyes peeled, but neither was necessary. He couldn’t have missed the accident site. Traffic was alternating along one lane while a pair of wreckers worked in the other. One mangled car had already been raised, but it wasn’t Rachel’s sturdy four-by-four. A mauled section of guardrail lay nearby.

  Feeling sick to his stomach but needing answers, he pulled up behind the wreckers and climbed out. The air was cool, moist, and thick in ways that should have muted the brutality of the scene, but what little the shifting fog hid, Jack’s imagination supplied.

  Rachel’s car lay against boulders a distance below. Its top and sides were dented and scraped. Water shot up from the rocks not ten feet away, but the car itself looked dry.

  “Better move on, sir. If one stops, others do. Before we know it, we have a jam.”

  Jack pushed shaky hands into his pockets. “My wife was in that car. Looks like it went head over tail. It’s a miracle she’s alive.”

  “She’s all right, then?” the trooper asked in a more giving tone. “We never know, once they leave the scene.”

  “She’s alive.”

  “For what it’s worth, she was driving within the speed limit.”

  Jack looked back at the road he had just climbed. It wound up from a basin lined left and right with cypress, dark and spectral in the fog. “Too bad. If she’d been going faster, she might have been down there when she w
as hit. Then she’d have gone off onto evener ground.”

  “She might have gone head-on into trees or traffic. There were a number of cars traveling south. Be grateful for small favors.”

  Jack tried, but Rachel hadn’t asked to be hit. She hadn’t done anything to deserve it. He didn’t need to be told that she was driving safely—or that she had been wearing a seat belt. If not, she’d have been dead down there on the rocks.

  The workers were struggling to hitch cables to her car and haul it up.

  “When’ll those guys be done?” he asked the trooper. “I’ll be bringing our daughters back this way, and I’d rather they not see this.”

  “Couple of hours, I guess. Can you wait that long?”

  He hadn’t planned to, but he could. If he found the girls asleep, it might actually work out fine. He could use the time to figure out the most sensitive way to break the news.

  chapter three

  JACK DIDIN’T SEE MUCH of the rest of the drive. Fog continued to float across the road, lifting and lowering across the rugged terrain, allowing now and again for a glimpse of sea stacks in gray water on his right or the ghost of chaparral against rocks on his left, but an ashen pall lay as thick in his mind as in his eye. The world around him seemed dense, a heavy weight on shoulders that were tired and tense. It was twenty-four hours since he had last slept. Life had been a nightmare. And now he had to face the girls.

  Part of him still pictured his daughters as the towheaded little monkeys who had adored him before things fell apart. They were more blond now than towheaded, more adolescent than little, more female than monkey. Yet the same old something twisted deep in his chest whenever their names came up.

  They weren’t babies. Hugs alone wouldn’t be enough. But hugs hadn’t done it for a while. They were more cautious than adoring with him now, strangers in many respects.

  Thinking about that as he drove through the fog, he had a sudden, brutal sense of the limits of his relationship with his daughters. Taking them to a movie, or to watch a wedding in Chinatown, or to breakfast in Sausalito at Fred’s was one thing. Filling in for Rachel, dealing with heavy-duty stuff, was quite another. He faced a trial by fire.