A Very Exclusive Vineyard
Morgan Law
Copyright © 2011 by Morgan Law
Smashwords Edition
This is a work of fiction. References to people, places, organizations, cultures, racial/ethnic groups, incidents, and other publications either are products of the author’s imagination or are intended only to lend a sense of reality and authenticity to the novel. Characters in the work are fictional and are not intended to portray actual persons, living or dead.
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e-mail: author@booksbyMorganLaw.com
website: booksbyMorganLaw.com
ISBN-13: 9780983614616
ISBN-10: 098361461X
Prologue
Something was wrong with Kevin’s brain. He had sensed it within seconds of waking up that morning, and the feeling had persisted. He had a vague feeling he should be alarmed, but he wasn’t. If he were in pain—or in any kind of physical discomfort—he might have been seriously worried. As it was, though, he didn’t have any clear symptoms. Instead, this was something so slippery and subtle that he would have been hard pressed to describe it to anybody.
He simply felt strange—like he was walking around in a cheap, rented body. His arms and legs had felt awkward and jerky all day, as if he were a wind-up doll, and he was definitely out of focus mentally.
His roommate had noticed something, too. While he was drinking his morning coffee, with his souvenir Mardi Gras mug feeling clumsy and foreign in his hands, Tim had laughed at him from the kitchen doorway. “You look like something a cat threw up, old son.”
When Tim had pressed him about what was wrong, Kevin had been tempted to describe his odd symptoms, but then his head had suddenly felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls. Instead, all he had said was that he felt a little weird.
Now, as Kevin pulled out of the apartment parking garage, granules of ice rattled dryly on the roof and windows of his sleek little silver Mazda. “Sleet,” he growled. Tim had warned him about the weather earlier—hadn’t he? The memory had such a hazy, distant feeling to it that Kevin was confused. Maybe it was something he had dreamed instead of something they had talked about.
Either way, this was definitely a bad storm, and Kevin knew he would have to go slow and be extra-careful. After five or six blocks, it occurred to him that he really should go back home, but the thought fell apart as quickly as it had formed, and he kept right on driving.
As he turned south onto the Loop 1 expressway, Kevin frowned unhappily. The freeway was already in bad shape, and it was obviously going to get worse rapidly. He also could not help noticing that for once, people were apparently taking a storm seriously and were staying off the streets. He tried to hold onto those insights long enough to explore their implications, but they drained out of his mind like water through a colander and vanished.
Since focusing on anything seemed to be almost impossible at the moment, he decided to give up trying. He allowed his mind to drift and kept on driving south.
Kevin did not even notice a maroon eighteen-wheeler charging up behind him until just before it nudged his bumper. The Mazda swerved violently, and Kevin almost lost control. Thankfully, his driving reflexes were working better than the rest of his brain, and he neither overcorrected nor hit his brake. A couple of heartbeats later, he had wrestled the car back under his command.
“Shit!” he cursed aloud. “Shit!” Then, white-faced and unnerved, he looked in the rearview mirror. The big truck was still right behind him.
A second surge of adrenaline coursed through Kevin’s bloodstream, and he mashed on the accelerator. Suddenly, for the first time all day, he felt awake—and good and scared. Since the big rig could not conceivably have hit him by accident, Kevin could only assume that the trucker was a nutcase. It was true that Kevin had been in the left lane, and in deference to the weather, he had been driving well below the speed limit. Under the circumstances, however, he couldn’t believe his slow speed would have been enough of a problem to provoke a road-rage incident.
Whoever was driving the truck, and whatever his mental state might be, Kevin clearly needed to stay out of his way. As he edged the Mazda up to sixty-five to put distance between him and the truck, he scanned the horizon anxiously, hoping to see other traffic. The center of town was well behind him by then, however, and to his dismay, the icing freeway remained eerily unpopulated.
The trucker had apparently noticed the same thing. Emboldened, perhaps, by the complete absence of witnesses, he now began toying with Kevin quite openly. He raced the big rig forward until it almost kissed the Mazda’s bumper. Then he abruptly slowed and allowed the gap between the vehicles to widen to fifteen or twenty feet. After only a few seconds of respite, he sped up and repeated the menacing gambit.
Beads of sweat blossomed on Kevin’s forehead. His breathing went shallow from rising panic as he realized that he might literally be dealing with a homicidal maniac. The only good news was that his mind was working better now—no doubt from all the adrenaline. He recognized with some clarity that his best hope of escape was to get the hell off the freeway, but then his gut tightened sickly as he remembered how few off-ramps would be coming up.
The third time the truck fell back, Kevin began slowing for the first available exit. To disguise his intention, he let off on the gas gradually and did not touch his brakes. As he watched nervously in the rearview mirror for a reaction, the maroon behemoth closed on him again until it was a scant four feet from his bumper. Then it slowed to match Kevin’s deceleration and hung right there on his tail.
At the precise moment Kevin should have committed to the exit, the truck leaped forward and struck the rear of the Mazda again. This time the collision was much more than a little bump. Kevin heard glass shatter and felt metal crumple. The little car lurched, skidded, and spun out sickeningly towards his right. Again Kevin ignored the temptation to slam on his brakes, and he instinctively steered into the skid. As the Mazda spun through 180 and then 360 degrees, he thought he had lost it. Partway through the second spin, however, the tires found traction, and he was able—barely—to jockey the car back under control.
Kevin had lost track of the semi as he spun, but he assumed it had passed him and continued southbound. Now, as he forced himself to check, its grille filled his rearview mirror. The front of the truck towered behind his smashed rear bumper like a beast threatening to pounce and crush the life from him.
Now terrified, Kevin gave in to the impulse to run. As rapidly as he dared, he accelerated through fifty, fifty-five, and sixty, increasingly wary of the ice.
The eighteen-wheeler sped up smoothly in tandem, never falling more than eight or ten feet behind the car. In desperation, Kevin put on another burst of speed. The little car gained a few precious feet, but the trucker reacted immediately. Within seconds, the rig was right back in position on the Mazda’s tail.
At seventy-five miles an hour, as he approached an overpass that had neither entry nor exit ramps, Kevin lost his nerve. Freezing rain was coming down along with the sleet, and the road now had both the look and feel of black ice. It would be suicidal to go any faster on the glassy road, and he damn well knew it. He leveled off his speed and frantically tried to come up with another plan.
The sole purpose of the upcoming span was to route through-traffic over a buttonhook loop of the two-way access road, which was centered directly beneath it. Since the next exit was well over two miles away, Kevin vowed to head directly for the access road, without the benefit of an exit, the second he reached level ground again on the other side of the overpass. Meanwhile, in preparation for crossing the icy concrete bridge span, he allowed his speed to drop to forty-five and then to forty. He would hold his speed there all the way across the overpass. Then he would slow even further—to thirty or thirty-five, he imagined—just before he whipped off-road to the right. With his decision made, he put away all other thoughts and concentrated on getting safely across the treacherous, un-sanded overpass.
As Kevin started up the incline, the trucker sped up, swung out into the left lane, and started overtaking the Mazda. Kevin was nearing the peak of the arch when the semi swerved back into the right lane and hammered hard into the Mazda’s left front quarter-panel.
Kevin’s air bag did not deploy because he had stupidly had it disabled a few months before. He watched in growing horror as the little car shot off to the right like a bullet and blasted through the guard rail as if it were made of tin foil.
The Mazda seemed to hang suspended for one weightless, silent moment, and then it dropped like a rock. As the ruined car raced towards the sleet-covered access road below, Kevin had just enough time for one last hellish scream.
* * * * *
For Ash Thorne, everything started coming unraveled the day of the ice storm. Two nights earlier, she and her fiancé Kevin had made plans to see each other in the afternoon. That, however, had been before the forecast turned ugly.
Just before noon, Ash started trying to call Kevin to make sure he was not coming over, but all she could get was an out-of-service message. She supposed it was either associated with the weather or that Kevin had let the battery on his cell phone go dead—which happened with irritating regularity.
Around two o’clock, she made the first of several calls to Kevin’s roommate Tim. To her enormous frustration, his calls were going directly to voicemail, and it was not until after four that Tim finally returned her series of increasingly frantic messages. He had just gotten home from an all-day study session in an apartment a few doors down, and he had not seen or heard from Kevin, either.
“Please tell me you don’t think he would have tried driving out to our house in this mess,” Ash pleaded.
Tim paused and then sighed. “Hell, Ash,” he finally answered. “I hope not, but who knows? I didn’t ever talk to him except for a few minutes over coffee this morning. For whatever it’s worth, he did say something about feeling weird, and he looked like he was pretty dragged out. Did you guys go out partying last night?”
“No. I don’t even know where he was last night.”
“Well, I don’t want to be telling any tales here, or getting the boy in trouble, but he was definitely not himself this morning.”
“Do you think he was coming down with the flu or something? Maybe he’s sitting in the waiting room over at the Student Health Center with a dead cell battery.”
“Maybe. He didn’t say anything about feeling sick, though—just about feeling weird. Mainly, I don’t think he was quite firing on all his cylinders.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. He seemed…fuzzy. Like, when I mentioned the storm, he apparently had no clue it was coming in.”
“How could he possibly have missed knowing that?”
“I have no idea. Anyway, I told him he shouldn’t even think about driving in it.”
“And what did he say?”
There was a second of silence, and then Tim cleared his throat. “Well, he didn’t really say anything. He just looked sort of spaced out, like he hadn’t really been processing what I was saying. I don’t know what his deal was, Ash, but I guess I’m damn worried about him now, too.”
After they rang off. Ash’s anxiety ratcheted up with every minute that passed. At 5:02 according to the screen on her iPhone, another call came in. Ash’s heart immediately froze. It was not Kevin calling, but his invalid father up in Colorado. In a low, mournful voice that he could not keep from cracking, he explained to Ash that Kevin had been in an accident—a very bad accident.
There were no witnesses. The police believed Kevin had been traveling at an unsafe, high speed when his beloved little Mazda spun out of control on the ice. The car had broken through the guardrail at the top of one of the freeway overpasses between his apartment and Ash’s home and had crashed onto the frozen roadway below.
By the time Kevin’s father called Ash, the entire Central Texas area was iced in, and driving to the downtown Austin hospital where Kevin had been taken was completely out of the question. All Ash could do was to call periodically and wring as much information as she could out of his ICU nurses.
As usual, it was Ash’s mother Remi who was there for her both physically and emotionally that night. Her father—also as usual—was out of town on a business trip. Remi sat up with Ash all through the long night and the endless morning that followed. When the roads finally became passable, it was Remi who drove Ash in to the hospital.
Part of Ash would be trapped forever in the corridor outside of the ICU cubicle listening to a young internist run through the litany of Kevin’s injuries. When he was finished, he jammed his hands into the pockets of his starch-rigid, white lab coat, sighed, and offered his unhappy prognosis.
After the doctor left, Ash stepped into Kevin’s cubicle and stared vacantly at the monitors and machines that seemed to be the only living things present. They blinked, beeped, dripped, sighed, clicked, and made ugly sucking sounds while Kevin lay silent and unmoving.
None of it seemed real. The tube-wreathed lump in the bed could not possibly have been her Kevin. Her Kevin was tall and blonde and happy and strong. He was constantly in motion, as if he were wired directly into the master energy source that fuels the universe. He was more vital and alive than anyone she had ever known.
Ash’s knees did not want to support her any longer, and she wilted, shaking, into the visitor’s chair beside Kevin’s antiseptic-looking bed. She had refused her mother’s offer to stay at the hospital with her, and now she wished she hadn’t. Ash had never been seriously ill herself—or been around anyone who was. All alone in the little fishbowl room so full of Kevin’s absence, she was confused and stunned and hurt and had no idea what she should do.
Suddenly, she remembered a magazine article she had once read. It had described a number of cases involving deeply comatose patients who eventually recovered and gave accurate accounts of activities and conversations that had taken place in their rooms while they were unconscious and unresponsive.
Immediately, Ash felt an inner shift. It was like stepping through a portal from a harsh and barren mental landscape into a green and peaceful valley. She now knew what to do. No matter what ultimately happened, she could and would give Kevin the simple but precious gift of knowing she was there beside his battered body, loving him. It might be the last gift she would ever be able give him—and one he might all too soon carry with him into eternity.
Ash suspected that Kevin’s white-coated young physician would reject the whole idea of awareness during coma, and she found that she didn’t care. She chose in that moment to embrace without reservations the belief that Kevin could hear her and know she was there, and she pledged to do everything in her power to shower her loving presence on him both night and day. It was a giving and a gift that no turn of fate, however evil, could steal from the two of them.
Although Ash’s revelation left her feeling oddly serene, her heart was still leaden in her chest. What little she could see of Kevin looked grotesquely pallid and shrunken and slack. Her courage wavered, and she felt foolish and inadequate again. She sat stiffly on the edge of the visitor’s chair with her eyes closed tightly, willing herself not to cry.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” The nurse’s voice from the corridor outside was both calm and kind.
Ash turned to face the nurse and nodded, but then she turned quickly away. She knew it was irrational, but it suddenly seemed imperative that her next words be spoken to Kevin. That, in turn, changed the dynamic of the moment for her: it meant she could not allow her own self-consciousness to inhibit her any longer.
She leaned forward and laid the palm of her hand gently on the bulge under the cotton waffle-weave blanket that was Kevin’s shoulder. Then, with a supreme effort, she made herself speak to his inert form. “I’m here, Kevin,” she whispered through dried and cracking lips. The act felt completely alien to her, but only during that first, awkward moment. As soon as she spoke, a wonderful, light feeling of rightness began to well up inside her, and her next words were strong and sure beneath the softness of her voice. “It’s Ash. I’m here, and I love you. I love you no matter what.”
That was the beginning of a completely different relationship between Ash and Kevin. It would last almost as long as their original relationship—the one between two whole people—had lasted.
Ash stopped attending her college classes and soon withdrew altogether. She spent every possible moment with Kevin—helping the nurses groom and care for him, reading to him, talking to him, or simply sitting beside him in silence. Once he got out of ICU, she spent most of her nights on the foldout bed in his room.
After Kevin had languished in a deep coma for three weeks, he was transferred to a skilled nursing facility, where Ash continued her vigil. She could count on one hand the times when she had a strong feeling—for no reason she could identify—that Kevin knew she was there. She was immensely grateful for those fleeting moments, for they were her only defense against despair as she watched his strong young body continue to wither and fail.
Late in February, Ash held Kevin’s pasty, contracted hand as he took his final, faltering breaths. The death had long been expected, but she still stumbled like a zombie through the week of the funeral. It was a numb, gray, wooden time that seemed almost as endless as Kevin’s descent into death, and it left her utterly drained and wounded.
Chapter 1
Ash lurched out of a sweaty, unsatisfactory sleep to find her mother sitting at the foot of her bed. She had been having a bad dream of some kind, and she felt both tired and dull.
“It’s time to get up, honey,” Remi said. “Your father’s already left to pick up the U-Haul.”
Ash sighed. “Okay. I wasn’t sleeping very well, anyway.”
As she looked down on Ash, Remi thought as she so often did that her daughter was one of the most striking young women she had ever seen. Nicer still, she did not seem at all conceited—or even to be aware of her extraordinary beauty. Her hair alone was like a living work of art. It was not a single shade, but a naturally streaked mélange of colors ranging from light brown through strawberry to summer-blonde. It hung well below her shoulder blades, and the colors seemed to change and re-create themselves magically with the slightest change of light.
Nor had Remi ever seen anything quite like her daughter’s liquid, yellow-green eyes. They were huge and vaguely Oriental in shape, and darker green flecks seemed to float in the irises like three-dimensional, luminescent islands in a bottomless golden sea. Remi suspected that most men would happily drown there
Now, Remi frowned with fresh concern over the listlessness in Ash’s voice. The cost of her tireless watch at Kevin’s bedside had been heartbreakingly clear to Remi as those terrible weeks had crept by, and since Kevin’s death five months ago, Ash had been in physical and emotional free-fall. Instead of working through her grief, she seemed to be slipping farther and farther away from any real engagement with life and into an increasingly zombie-like existence. She ate like a sick sparrow, and she spent an alarming amount of time staring blankly into space.
Already slender, Ash had lost weight to the point of gauntness. Her face had thinned dramatically, further accentuating her high cheekbones. Her eyes no longer sparkled with health and life, and her lion-colored hair had lost its bounce and sheen. Her carriage remained proud and unbeaten, and her almond skin had paled by only a trace, but she chronically looked and acted exhausted.
Ever since she considered Ash to be an adult, Remi had done her best to avoid over-mothering or interfering in her life, but worry about Ash’s condition now trumped that policy. “Are you sure I can’t talk you into going up to the urgent care center to see a doctor this morning?” she asked softly. “You look so tired and sad and unwell that I’m really very worried about you. With this move piled on top of everything else, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to let a doctor look you over and give you a prescription for an anti-depressant or something before we leave.”
Ash shook her head. “No way, Mom. There’s nothing wrong with me that a doctor can fix, and you know perfectly well that I won’t take drugs—any drugs—unless there’s absolutely no other choice. I’m surprised you’re even asking.”
“I wouldn’t, if I weren’t so concerned. Maybe this is one of those rare times when a little short-term help from drugs would be a good thing.”
Ash smiled wearily. “I can’t believe my own mother is trying to push feel-good pills on me.”
“No, I’m not!” Remi protested. “I feel the same way about drugs that you do. But I can’t stand to watch you spiral down any farther than you already have, and I don’t know what else to suggest. You’ve been stonewalling me for months on going to see a grief counselor, you aren’t getting any exercise, you don’t eat enough to count, and you don’t seem to be interested in anything at all.”
Ash’s mouth twisted in acknowledgment of the ugly truth. “I really can’t argue with you, Mom, and I do appreciate the suggestions you’ve made about seeing a counselor and making myself go to the gym and all. I think they’re all good suggestions.”
“But you haven’t taken any of them to heart.”
Ash shrugged helplessly. “I just haven’t felt up to it.”
“That’s the insidious thing about grief and depression, honey,” Remi said, in a voice both sad and gentle. “Once they get their hooks into you, they start feeding on themselves. If you can’t manage to break out of that cycle, it can get to be the emotional equivalent of a pool of quicksand that keeps on sucking you down.”
Ash eyed her mother with heightened interest. “That has a ring of personal experience to it. Is there something I should know?”
Remi hesitated before she replied—to Ash’s finely attuned sensibilities, for a telltale beat too long. “Not really. I’ve been pretty down a couple of times, but compared to what you’ve been through, I’ve generally been lucky in life.”
“I’d actually like to hear about your down times and your good times both, Mom. You almost never talk about yourself, you know.” At forty-one, Remi was still a very attractive woman with classic, patrician features and thick, dark brown hair that she wore in a jaw-length bob. Although Ash could easily see where she must have been much sought-after in her youth, her mother’s past remained largely a mystery to her.
A flicker of a smile lifted the corners of Remi’s lips. “After we get past this move—one day when you want to be bored to tears for an hour or so—we can sit down and talk about me.”
“I’m considering that a promise, then, and I won’t let you wiggle out of it. And by the way: now that I’m all grown up, I expect to hear every bit of the juicy stuff.”
Remi’s heavy mood lifted for a moment, and she laughed. The relief was fleeting, though, like a shaft of sunlight that broke through boiling clouds for a moment and was quickly snuffed out again. She ached for her beautiful daughter, for the suffering both she and her fiancé had been forced to endure. She tried with little success to sound lighthearted. “I’m afraid there’s not much juicy stuff to tell you—which I may regret in my dotage—but I’ll tell you what there is,” she said. “In the meantime, why don’t you do your mother a favor and go see about getting on some kind of medication to help you get back on track.”
“If you insist on nagging me,” Ash retorted mildly, “I’m going to throw it right back at you and suggest you go get a pill stash of your own.”
“What? Why?”
“I’d have to be deaf not to know you’ve been having big-time trouble sleeping,” Ash said. Then, lowering her voice and speaking in a confidential hush, she added, “And I hate being the one to tell you, but you’re starting to get dark, smudgy circles under your eyes.”
Although Remi had not noticed the sooty area that was developing under her hazel eyes, the news hardly came as a surprise. Sometime over the winter—she could not recall with any clarity when—she had started having nightmares. What she had assumed would be a nasty but fleeting episode had instead become a chronic and worsening problem. Virtually every night now her rest was seriously disturbed, and her body was paying for it. She felt the increasing toll every morning when she woke up. She felt it when she exercised, and she especially felt it an hour after dinner most evenings when she had to fight to keep from nodding off
The cause of the bad dreams remained an enigma to her. She had been incredibly healthy her whole life, and she had no accompanying symptoms that would suggest the nightmares were a byproduct of illness. A psychological cause seemed to Remi—at least in the abstract—to be more likely. Identifying one to her satisfaction, however, had proven to be difficult. For one thing, she remembered almost nothing about the dreams after she woke up from them. She was also more than half convinced that she had a mental block of some kind that was preventing her from thinking about them with any clarity. Whenever she tried, her brain would go rogue on her, and her thoughts would simply drift away. She had an unformed suspicion that the nightmares were related to her general level of unhappiness, but that was as far as she could seem to get.
All Remi knew for certain was that her enthusiasm for life was slowly but surely being leached away, and that her wretchedness was now almost more than she could bear alone. Because she would rather have flogged herself than add to Ash’s ordeal, however, she had been doing everything in her power to conceal her growing misery.
Her concern for Ash still came first, and Remi now forced a cheerful shrug for her benefit. “When you’re as old and creaky as I am, it hardly matters if you have raccoon eyes,” she said.
Ash groaned. “You aren’t old and creaky, Mother. And it does matter if you have raccoon eyes—just as much as it matters that I’m so messed up.”
Remi’s eyebrows formed into hopeful arches. “Are we teetering on the brink of a breakthrough here?”
“‘We?’ I don’t get the ‘we’ part, since you still haven’t owned up to having serious issues of your own.”
For several months, Ash had been hearing the sounds of Remi’s nocturnal distress, which sometimes raised gooseflesh on her own depleted body. Once she realized the problem was getting worse instead of better, she had started asking Remi with some frequency whether she was feeling all right, whether something was bothering her, or whether anything was wrong. Remi, however, had consistently replied that she was fine.
Now, sensing a moment of vulnerability, Ash continued in a much softer voice. “This would be a really good time for you to drop the loving-mother-spares-her-grieving-daughter-any-worry thing that you’ve been doing,” she said. “You thrash around and whimper in the night, and sometimes you yelp like you’re being hurt. I couldn’t ignore it even if I wanted to—which I don’t—and I very much wish you would talk to me about it.”
“You’ve gone through a horrible, horrible time, honey, and the last thing you need is to go borrowing trouble from me.”
“I love you all the more for trying to spare me, but I would much rather know than not know. I’ve been trying to get you to open up to me for weeks and weeks now.”
“I can’t. Not when you’re still suffering so much over Kevin.”
“I promise I can take it, Mom—whatever it is. So please: tell me what’s going on.”
Remi’s face drooped, and she blinked slowly in defeat. She finally reached out, took Ash’s hand in hers, and sighed. “All right then, sweetie. You win. I’m too tired and beaten down to keep trying to put up a good front any more, so here it is. I’ve been having some problems, too.”
“You’re not sick with cancer or something awful like that, are you, but you didn’t want me to know?”
“No. I don’t think it’s anything like that. As far as I know, I’m still healthy as a horse, except for being so tired from not sleeping well. I don’t think…I really don’t think a disease is the cause.”
“Then…what?”
Remi sighed heavily. “The short answer is, ‘I don’t know.’ The main problem I’ve been having is nightmares, but as far as figuring out what’s causing them, I’m basically at a loss. For one thing, I never remember them when I wake up, except for being aware that they were awful.”
Ash thought back to her own first wakeful moments that morning and felt a tiny flutter of unease. “That’s weird,” she said. “As it turns out, I had something like that happen last night. But back to you. I hate to even think it, but can brain tumors cause nightmares?”
Remi shrugged. “That’s possible, I guess, but I don’t have any other symptoms that might point to a tumor, like headaches or losing my balance, or trouble finding words. ”
“So…what? You’re thinking this is a psychological problem, then?”
Remi nodded mutely.
“What kind of a psychological problem?”
Remi shook her head. “I have no idea, honey. What I do know is that we’d better shelve any further discussion about this until later. Paul will be back with the U-Haul any minute, and I’m sure he would be considerably less than delighted to find us wasting valuable time talking to each other. ”
Ash grimaced. “Right. Silly me! Of course he’d be less than delighted. But the conversational door is now officially open between us, isn’t it?”
“Yes. We’ll definitely talk. And can we also agree to keep our minds open to the possibility of getting professional help once we get through this move?”
“As in, from a doctor, counselor, shrink, or whatever?”
“Yes.”
Ash pursed her lips in thought. Finally she smiled slyly and said, “Okay. Since I’m betting that professionals will be in very short supply out in the farthest reaches of West Texas, I will agree to keep an open mind.”
Remi huffed and scowled. “Well, you clever little weasel!”
Grinning unrepentantly, Ash said, “Did I tell you I might switch to prelaw when I go back to school? I’m just kidding, of course. Quit fussing over me now, and go pack a box or something.”
Remi levered herself off the bed and gazed down on her only child. “I never fuss over you,” she said. “I just hyper-mother sometimes. Which reminds me: I have fruit, cereal, and whole grain English muffins set out in the kitchen for you. Come grab whatever you want.”
“You’re the best, Mom! I’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”
As the door shut behind Remi, however, Ash made no move to rise. Instead, she let her eyelids droop closed. As she rested against the day ahead, she thought again about her mother’s tortured nights.
Most caring daughters, she assumed, would have talked to their fathers about their mothers’ problems—but most caring daughters did not have Paul Thorne for a father. Ash strongly doubted any good would have come of a discussion with him. Her frank assessment of her parents’ relationship was that they barely knew each other now—if indeed, they ever had.
Paul was a technical consultant of some sort in the wireless broadband industry. He apparently made very good money doing whatever it was—which she supposed was only fair, since his job made him an absentee husband and father who was home only one or two days a week. That made little difference to her, though. Even when Paul was at home, he was rarely to be seen. He spent most of his time closeted in his home office and habitually worked through the dinner hour and late into the night.
Since Paul was chronically AWOL from their lives, it was entirely possible he had not even noticed Remi’s problem. Worse, the sad truth was that if he had noticed something wrong, he would not necessarily have bothered to ask Remi about it. Even on his best days, he was profoundly lacking in the warmth and empathy departments.
In any event, since Remi was opening up to her, it was highly unlikely that Ash would ever bring the subject up with Paul. She now found she was relieved that she hadn’t, because she realized that talking to him would have felt like a betrayal of her mother.
Since Ash loved her mother dearly and felt close to her, she also found it more than a little strange and unsettling to have no real idea what might be causing her bad dreams. People undoubtedly lost sleep all the time because of the stress of moving, but loss of sleep was a different matter than chronic, terrible nightmares. Besides which, Remi and Ash had made so many “career moves” with Paul that it was almost second nature to them. She therefore tended to discount stress related to the move as the villain.
On the other hand, she could see where increasing frustration and disenchantment with their entire, semi-nomadic life with Paul might be playing a significant compounding role. A few weeks earlier, in an uncharacteristically candid moment, Remi had complained to her with obvious bitterness about their tumbleweed existence and the isolation it produced.
“Every time I start feeling settled and making a few friends,” Remi had railed, “we have to jerk up our poor, stunted little roots again and go off to someplace new. Every single time, Paul promises it will be the last move, but of course, it never is. I don’t think even he believes that anymore.” A moment later she had added, “That said, since I would rather live almost anywhere on Earth than where we’re headed now, I should actually be hoping this won’t be our last move.”
Even so, the severity of Remi’s sleep disturbances seemed to Ash to be disproportionate to the total package of stress associated with their rootless lifestyle and getting through the mechanics of packing and moving again—which led Ash to wonder whether some X-factor associated with this particular move was upsetting her mother. On the surface that seemed plausible, since she knew that both Paul and Remi had been raised in the tiny town of La Sima. It was entirely possible that Remi had some historical baggage that was fueling her reluctance to move back. Ash tried to recall whether she had seen or heard anything specific that would tend to support the hypothesis, but absolutely nothing came to mind. In the course of thinking about it, however, she was surprised to realize that she could not remember either how or when she had first learned they were moving to La Sima.
She knew she had been oblivious to almost everything but Kevin and her grief, but a memory gap like this one did seem fairly extreme. She was certain she already knew about the impending move the day Remi had complained to her, but beyond that, she drew a blank. If she had not been so exhausted and depressed for so long, she would be worried about it. As it was, although she did find it very odd, in her still dark frame of mind, it did not rise to the level of being a significant concern. In point of fact, worrying about her mother was still just about the only thing that seemed to matter to her. For her own part, she could not have cared less about why they were moving, what their new home would be like, or even whether she was losing her mind.
“Ash!” Paul’s sharp voice and three loud raps on the bedroom door snapped her to attention.
“I’m up,” she called. “I just need a couple more minutes.”
“Well, get a move on, will you?” Paul grumbled. “There’s still packing to do before we can start loading.”
“Okay, okay,” Ash said. After another moment, she summoned the strength to swing her legs over the side of the bed, got up, and plodded into the bathroom. She took a shower, but as usual since Kevin’s accident, it was a flat experience that had almost no effect on her levels of energy and alertness.
Thankfully, as she was blow-drying her hair, Remi knocked at the door and handed in a steaming mug of green tea. “I love it when you pamper me like this,” Ash said. “You make me feel like a little lost princess.”
Twenty minutes later, after nibbling at the edges of an English muffin and sipping at a second mug of tea, Ash started working side by side with Remi. Together, they packed the linens, the kitchen, and the bathrooms. Paul, meanwhile, broke down the entertainment center and the beds. He was obviously unhappy in his self-assigned tasks, for at regular intervals Ash heard him cursing angrily. “What a grouch,” she murmured.
Shortly before noon, one of Paul’s associates from work arrived to help him load heavy items into a large U-Haul truck. Paul did not bother to introduce the man, which suited Ash fine, since she very soon came to dislike him. Repeatedly, she caught him eyeing her and her mother with a greasy, speculative look that made her feel vulnerable and faintly contaminated. Her discomfort soon drove her to change from short cutoff jeans and a tank top into conservative khaki shorts and a matching camp shirt. The man’s behavior did not change, but Ash at least felt more shielded from his gaze. She was greatly relieved when Paul finally walked his colleague out, and he drove away.
After they finished packing, the women started cleaning. Mid-afternoon found Remi scrubbing vigorously at the floor of her shower. “The cleaning is probably what I hate most about moving,” she complained to Ash.
“Why don’t we ever hire a maid service to do it, then?” Ash asked.
Remi shrugged. “I always ask, and Paul always says, ‘No.’”
“Why? What’s his problem with it?”
“I have no idea. Far be it from Paul ever to give a reason. He just says, ‘No,’ and that’s the end of it. And since I refuse to turn over a less than clean house to the new owners, you and I get to enjoy hours of cleaning on top of the packing.”
“I’m sure the buyers will appreciate your thoughtfulness, Mom—or perhaps compulsiveness is more what’s really driving you. Either way, if you insist on disinfecting the house molecule by molecule, you aren’t going to have any energy left for the drive and the other end of the line.” Ash had been operating on autopilot, swabbing out the toilet with little interest in the quality of her work. Now, she frowned in distaste as a tiny splash of Lysol-water made a dark ring on the leg of her shorts.
Remi sighed. “You’re right, of course, but I’m still not going to stop. I won’t feel right unless I leave it really clean.”
They were still scrubbing and polishing at four thirty when Paul walked into the kitchen whistling. “I’m all finished,” he announced. “The U-Haul is loaded and dogged down, and the Lexus is set up on the auto transport. So it’s time to wash the soot off your faces, my lovely Cinderellas, and ride off in your little silver carriage.”
Remi stared up at her husband with both disbelief and guarded resentment showing on her face. Her own shoulders were sagging under a heavy load of fatigue and depression, but Paul looked morning-fresh and sounded ridiculously bouncy and cheerful. The muscles in her jaw tensed angrily. “Well, unfortunately, we’re not quite done,” she said. “It will take us at least another half-hour to finish up in here.”
Beneath his blonde military buzz cut, Paul’s expression turned stormy. Frowning, he shook his head. “No, Remi,” he said. His voice was flat and cold. “The house is clean enough. You’re done.”
Remi blinked at him once and then a second time while she tried and failed to come up with a heated, rebellious reply. Whatever verbal barb she might have hurled at him was stillborn in her brain, and the will to defy dissolved like a sugar cube in a spoonful of water. As if from a distance, she heard herself caving in to her husband in the hated, mousey little voice that always seemed to come out of her after he issued one of his orders.
“If you honestly think it’s clean enough, then I guess we’ll wrap it up,” Remi said. Even as she spoke, she wondered what had possessed her to give in to him like that yet again. The thought, however, like her little spike of rancor, passed almost as quickly as it had come. She stared down blankly up her cleaning tools and supplies, suddenly unsure whether she had enough energy left even to gather them up and take them out to the car.
Paul’s mouth curled into a crooked grin. “It baffles me why you all worked yourselves up into this ridiculous cleaning mania in the first place, but whatever. It’s all over and done with now. The house is fine, and once we get on the road, you won’t give it another thought.”
At his mention of the road, Remi’s head popped back up, and she exchanged a guilty glance with Ash. Only minutes before Paul came in, they had been talking about the long drive to West Texas and how exhausted they already were.
“Leaving tonight isn’t a very good idea, Mom,” Ash had said. “Neither one of us is fit to drive. We’d be like a rolling time bomb out there.”
By contrast, Paul seemed unaffected by the full day of packing and loading, and he was plainly still itching to start the trip. Now, as he caught the look that passed between mother and daughter, his mouth turned down again, and all traces of boyish good humor vanished. He studied them for a moment, his cobalt blue eyes cool on theirs. “So what’s the problem now, girls?” he asked at last. His voice was crisp, with a definite edge.
Remi and Ash both shifted uncomfortably. “The problem is that Ash and I are both completely whipped,” Remi confessed at last. “We don’t think it would be safe for us to drive, so we were talking about waiting until early morning to start the trip.”
“We agreed we would leave tonight,” Paul snapped. “That’s been the plan all along, and both of you knew it. If you had spent more time working yesterday and less time sitting on your butts, you wouldn’t have a problem.”
The women sneaked another uncertain glance at each other, and then both of them dropped their eyes. “It’s not like we’re doing this on purpose or trying to sabotage your plans,” Ash murmured in their defense. “Everything just took longer than we expected, and after working all day, we’re pooped.” She could not bring herself to meet her father’s impossibly blue eyes and kept her gaze on the floor instead.
“All three of us have already put in a long, hard day,” Remi added, daring to look up again. “You must be exhausted, too, even if you don’t look it.”
“No,” Paul sneered, “I’m not. Unlike my poor little Cinderellas, who are apparently incapable of planning ahead, I’m fine.”
Anger flared up anew in Remi. “Why are you making such a big deal out of this, Paul? But if you want to play blame games and it makes you happy, then it’s totally our fault. Okay?”
“I thought we had already established that,” Paul retorted. His voice was like a whip.
Remi’s voice rose and began to quiver. “All right! That’s enough, Paul! It doesn’t change the fact that Ash and I are too tired to be driving. We need to rest and get some sleep before we get out on the highway.”
Paul did not reply. He only looked at the two women with unconcealed contempt.
His silence made Remi cringe inwardly, and her stomach wall started pumping out acid, but she nevertheless plunged ahead. “Why don’t we get a couple of rooms up at the Hampton Inn, grab showers, and sleep for a little while. We could get up and be on the road by midnight or one. What would be wrong with that?”
Paul’s eyes locked into hers. When he finally spoke, his voice was measured and chilly, and he spoke to her as if she were an errant four year old. “We agreed on a plan,” he said. “We made arrangements in La Sima based upon that plan. Did we not?”
Remi licked her lips anxiously and nodded. “Yes, we did.”
“And we have guaranteed rooms waiting for us in La Sima, do we not?”
“Yes.”
“What happens if we don’t check in there tonight?”
“We have to pay for them anyway.”
“That’s right. We still have to pay for them. And do we have workers scheduled to help unload the truck tomorrow morning?”
“Of course we do,” Remi almost whispered. “But if we’re balancing a little money and inconvenience against safety, safety should obviously come first.”
Paul shifted his piercing gaze to include Ash and went on in his cool, condescending tone. “Before we throw away that money, and before I have to try to reschedule our laborers literally at the very last minute, I want you to humor me and reevaluate how you’re feeling. I know how strong both of you are, and I can’t believe you’re all that tired. I think you’ve just talked yourselves into feeling worn out. Sure, you did some work today, but I know damn well you can handle this.”
Then his voice and face both moderated. “The hard part is already behind you. The real work is done. All you need to do is to stop being so negative and give yourselves permission to feel better. Take a few minutes and give your second winds time to kick in. You’ll bounce right back, and if we get on the road quickly, we should roll into La Sima sometime around one. So…come on, girls. Make Daddy Paul happy on this. Tell me you feel okay, and you’re not going to wimp out on me tonight.”
As Paul finished speaking, Ash realized that she was feeling better. She was by no means in top form, but she did feel less fatigued than she had a short time before. She sought out her mother’s eyes, hoping to read whether Remi, too, was getting her second wind and rethinking their objection to leaving now. She saw only an odd, unfocused blankness on Remi’s face.
Shrugging, Ash turned back to Paul. “Maybe you’re right, after all. I am definitely starting to feel better.”
Paul smiled. “See? What did I tell you, beautiful? Are you ready to go ahead, then?”
“I…yeah. I guess I’m okay with going on tonight—if Mom agrees, that is.”
Remi neither agreed nor disagreed, because she was trying to cope with a truly bizarre sensation. She could only liken it to having been fogged with an anesthesia. She didn’t feel bad, she didn’t feel good, and she didn’t feel numb. For several moments, it was as if she either had no body or all status messages from her body to her brain had been suspended—including the reports of exhaustion that had been registering much of the afternoon.
Paul was clearly impatient for her to respond to Ash’s query, but Remi was too stunned to speak. She stared at him helplessly.
“Has the cat got your tongue there, Remi? Or maybe you just can’t stand admitting that I’m right. And you know damn well that I’m right, don’t you? So how about it? Go ahead and eat a little crow, and let’s just get started, shall we?”
Remi’s nerve pathways seemed to be firing normally again, but she hesitated for another few seconds, trying to shake off her peculiar feeling. In that time, she realized that as much as she hated for Paul to be right and to give him any more fodder for his smugness, she did feel considerably better. She also had a vague sense of déjà vu, as if the seeming disruption of her nervous system paralysis was something she had experienced before—perhaps on more than one occasion. She could not, however, call up a specific memory of another time it had happened.
She found the whole interlude alarming, but it was not the time either to think or talk about it just then. She forced herself to put it away and made a mental note to explore it further, when things were calmer again. Right now, Paul’s eyes were boring into her, demanding an answer, and the bottom line was that she did feel fresh enough to make the drive. Given that, and given that it would please Paul—which always made her life decidedly more pleasant—she didn’t see how she could refuse.
“Well,” Remi said slowly, “I don’t think I have to eat any crow, because for a while there, I did feel like I might topple over and never get up. But I do seem to be getting my second wind now, so I guess we might as well go on. I can make it if Ash can.”
Paul smiled broadly and blew a two-handed kiss at the women. “Terrific!” he exclaimed. His voice was genial and enthusiastic again. “I knew when push came to shove, I could count on my girls. So it’s all settled, then. I thought I’d go in front in the U-Haul and let the two of you follow me in the Honda. Does that suit you?”
“Sure,” Remi said. “Whatever.” Even as she spoke, however, an attenuated but unmistakable wave of fatigue broke over her. It swamped her, and it showed no sign of retreating. A prickle of unease quickly followed. Her body was suddenly giving her strange, ping-pong messages about how it felt, and she had no idea why. Maybe she had been dead wrong earlier when she assured Ash that nothing was wrong with her physically. Maybe she had a brain tumor or neurological disorder of some kind after all, that was causing her nightmares as well as problems with body-brain communication.
There was a more pressing issue, however. If she stabilized at her current level of tiredness, kept yo-yoing in and out of exhaustion, or got worse, falling asleep at the wheel loomed as a significant risk. Unfortunately, Remi also felt certain that if she tried to take back what she said, Paul would fly into a rage. She hated herself for it, but she simply did not have the strength to fight him, even if it meant being a menace on the road.
Chapter 2
Ash took the first shift driving her mother’s Honda Civic. She followed Paul west on Highway 290 through the Texas Hill Country. Both tourists and hunters paid good money to enjoy what nature had provided there, but the oak-studded, rocky region held little attraction for Ash. The geography was nothing new to her, and her focus at the moment was getting through the area without having a wreck.
The surge of renewed energy she experienced before they left Austin proved to be disappointingly short-lived—especially since she and Remi had committed themselves to covering over five hundred miserable miles. She noticed herself falling off sharply somewhere between Stonewall and Johnson City, and even before their first fuel stop, she felt like she had been cast into a highway-driving version of purgatory.
Both women had assumed Paul would be stopping at a restaurant somewhere along the way to have dinner and a take a break. Instead, he pulled into a hamburger stand in Ozona and bought sandwiches and soft drinks at the drive-through window. All Ash and Remi had time to do was stretch their legs for a few minutes and switch places in the Honda. Then, with no discussion, Paul handed two bags of food to the women, returned to the U-Haul, and drove off.
With Ash’s help, Remi ate one-handed as she followed the U-Haul truck and auto transport down a now inky, almost unpopulated Interstate-10. She was furious with Paul for not stopping for a sit-down dinner, and her temper flared even higher when a clump of shredded lettuce and a mustard-coated dill pickle chip slid messily down her blouse.
“Oh, hell!” Remi cursed under her breath. “What is the matter with that man, that he wouldn’t even let us stop long enough to have a civilized meal?”
“I wish I knew, Mom,” Ash said softly. “I really do wish I knew.”
A few minutes before midnight, quite awhile after they had left the interstate for a succession of state highways, Paul pulled into a brand new, well-lighted gas station at a fork in the road called Puma Junction. Remi followed him in but stopped at a different island. She shut off the engine and sagged limply behind the steering wheel. “I’ll pump, if you’ll go in and pay,” she proposed to Ash.
“Okay,” Ash agreed. “I have to go to the bathroom, anyway.”
“Would you pick up a bottle of green tea for me? I desperately need caffeine.”
“Sure.”
When Ash got out of the car, her long, shapely legs protested against the hours of confinement. “Aw, cripes,” she wailed. “I’m almost paralyzed, and I’m so tired I can barely see straight. If I didn’t have to pee so bad, I’d sit down on the curb and cry.”
Remi gathered her own flagging resources and spoke with exaggerated heartiness. “Go take care of your bladder and get a tea or something for yourself, too,” she advised. “Everything will seem better after that.”
“I appreciate your lame little attempt to cheer me up,” Ash said, “but there’s no way it’s going to work. I’m having far too much fun wallowing in my pain.” Her mother’s soft laughter followed her as she hobbled stiffly away towards the mini-market.
The night cashier, whose name tag read “FRANK MACKLIN,” was a heavy-featured man who appeared to be in his late twenties. He had puffy, pale skin and scars from serious adolescent acne. He wore his poorly cut, mouse-brown hair in an outdated Prince Valiant style that was never intended for hair as thin as his. He had the oily, furtive look of someone chronically embarrassed by dandruff.
When Ash approached him to pay for her purchases, the man leaned halfway over the counter and leered at her. “Hey, tall babe,” he said slickly. “Got plans for the rest of the night? I get off work in a couple of minutes, and we could go have us some fun.”
“What?” Ash gasped.
“I said let’s go out and have some fun together—make it a special night. What do you say, sweet cheeks?”
Ash could not believe the unattractive and crudely spoken store employee was actually coming on to her in the middle of the night, in the very center of cultural and geographical nowhere. “No!” she barked. “No way!” To avoid any chance of incidental physical contact with him as she paid, she dropped two twenties next to the cash register to cover the fill and two bottles of green tea.
“Your loss,” the cashier snapped. He was obviously not taking her rebuff well, and he was now making a show of undressing her with his hungry eyes.
Instinctively, Ash showed no sign of submissiveness. She kept her now narrowed eyes on his and spoke in a strong, flat voice. “I would like to have my change now,” she said.
The man spoke back in an aggressive, greasy tone. “Oh, sure thing, of course. Anything that pleases you, I’d just love to do.” Incredibly, he parted his lips and flicked his tongue at her suggestively.
Ash recoiled in disgust. “One more word or obscene gesture, Mr. Macklin, will earn you a formal complaint with your employer,” she said. She deliberately used his name to underline the seriousness of her threat.