Paul drove home, he automatically began the mental transition from Lacey’s chrome-and-glass apartment to the elegant house on Queen Anne Hill. Often he would relax by listening to classical music on a CD, but tonight, as he drove past homes decorated to the hilt with Christmas lights, the usual holiday depression set in. He couldn’t keep himself from wondering how things had turned out this way, after such great hopes for the future. Hadn’t he started out life with all the usual excitement of a college graduate with an MBA? And hadn’t he thought, like most, that he had the world by the tail?
Even meeting Gina had required little effort. They’d run into each other in a campus café during their last year at the University of Washington, begun dating and were married shortly after graduation. They wrote down their goals for themselves and their marriage on crisp white paper, and mapped out their lives in the way of young couples in the eighties: Gina would work for a while until Paul became established and they had a nice nest egg. Then she would quit to stay home and raise children. They would have two children—a good number in an age where having too many was frowned upon as not being politic, in a world where populations had exploded and having big families was an environmental no-no.
They wouldn’t get bogged down in work for work’s sake, they agreed, the way their parents had. Having been born in the sixties, they remembered fathers who wore business suits and ties, fathers with gray faces who trudged back and forth to the office every day and kept their noses to the grindstone to buy a house with a mortgage that wouldn’t be paid off until long after they were dead. They remembered mothers who from the age of eighteen had stayed home and been housewives, who had so many children to raise they’d become more and more worn-out as the years went by, their dreams turned to so much dust.
Paul and Gina swore they would never end up like that. Life in the eighties was going to be different. These were the Reagan years, the years of renewal, a good economy, the years when he who had the most toys won. Paul and Gina would have well-paid jobs that would give them time off to travel through Europe, take vacations, go skiing at Aspen. When Gina finally did leave her job, it would be only after they had a solid nest egg. And she wouldn’t take off forever, the way her mother had. She’d get the children to a certain age and then reenter the work force while she was still employable and could command an excellent salary.
As the first months of their marriage passed, however, Paul and Gina’s Life Plan had taken sharp, unexpected turns. Gina learned she was infertile—a congenital defect, the doctors said. As for Paul, though his antique business brought in the kind of money they’d dreamed about—enough, along with Gina’s work as an interior designer, to enable them to buy the house on Queen Anne Hill—their work took up so much time that he and his wife barely knew each other six months after the honeymoon. They had the house of their dreams but rarely lived in it, except to sleep after the long commute home each night. They had the prerequisite two cars, but traveled in them only to work and back on bogged-down freeways.
After eight months of this, Gina began to have an itch. She wanted a baby. She didn’t want to wait. They had enough money to take care of a child, and she needed more in her life than just work.
So they adopted the girls, a move that was supposed to change their lives. And it did. The hell of it was, it had changed a dream into a deadly nightmare—one from which, Paul knew, he would never awaken, as long as he lived. Was it any wonder he couldn’t fully live in that world—couldn’t participate in a place of so many dark memories, without some kind of light shining through?
Every day he thanked God for Lacey, who had brought him light, as well as laughter. Without her, he would never have survived. In fact, there were moments when he felt she was all that kept him alive.
2
Gina buttered a piece of toast, put it on a plate and slid it across the black granite breakfast bar to Rachel, who gobbled it down as if she hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks.
Which she apparently hadn’t, except for last night at the Space Needle. Gina studied her with a worried frown. Rachel had clearly lost several pounds since summer vacation. She had never been overweight, but was blessed with a trim, athletic figure that was largely from all her years of rowing. Rachel had been a rowing fanatic, latching onto the sport in her first year of high school. Gina and Paul had thought she would go to the University of Washington on a scholarship, but Rachel had surprised them in her senior year by stating that she was no longer interested in rowing, and wanted to go to college in a warmer climate. She had chosen Berkeley, in Northern California. Gina had thought at the time that her daughter simply wanted to spread her wings, put some distance between herself and home. And she had to admit, the change would probably do Rachel good.
Now, however, Gina wasn’t so sure. Sitting there on the stool, with her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and no makeup on, Rachel looked much as she had in grade school. Gina remembered how they would sit this way in the mornings, the two of them chatting companionably till Rachel’s ride arrived. Her eyes would light up at the idea of going to a movie on the weekend, or planting spring bulbs with her mother, the two of them digging in the moist earth side by side, no words needed between them.
Where had that easy companionship gone? Rachel had come home this time seeming sullen. Detached. Gina felt the loss like a shaft through her heart.
“Rachel, what’s wrong?” she said now. “You’ve changed somehow since summer.”
“And?”
“And I’m not sure I like all of it. Last night, at the airport, for instance—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I was just tired. I didn’t mean to snap. And why didn’t Dad come? You said he was going to.”
“I thought he was. But I told you, honey, something came up.” Gina ran her fingers through her short-cropped brown hair, inadvertently messing up the style she’d worked at so carefully this morning.
“Came up? At Soleil?” Rachel rolled her eyes.
“Yes, at Soleil,” Gina said, annoyed. “Where else?”
Rachel shrugged and studied her toast, picking off tiny pieces and putting them in her mouth one at a time, chewing slowly. “Nowhere, I guess.”
Gina sighed. So far, this visit was not going at all well. “Rachel, if you’ve got something to say, please just say it.”
Her daughter slid off the stool and took her plate and coffee cup to the sink, grinding the rest of her toast in the disposal. With her back to Gina she said, “I just think there’s something wrong.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know…like maybe Dad is sick, or something.”
“Is that what you think? That he’s sick?”
Rachel came back and slid onto the stool. Her eyes held a glint of anger. “Well, he’s not acting at all like himself. Haven’t you even noticed?”
“No, I haven’t.” Gina’s brow furrowed. “What would make you say that?”
Rachel shrugged again. “For one thing, he hasn’t been e-mailing me hardly at all this semester. One of my friends at school found out her father had cancer, and the only way she knew was that he stopped talking to her on the phone. He was too sick to call the way he always did.”
“Well, sweetheart, I can assure you that your father does not have cancer. He’s
