Chapter Eleven

The following morning, Eleanor slept late. By the time she came downstairs, lured by the rich scent of coffee, the sun was well above the horizon. The house was quiet, and it took her a moment to remember that this was the day Tessa had planned to take Laya on a day of mother-daughter bonding on the southern side of the island. A note on the kitchen counter in Tessa’s nearly horizontal script wished her a great day by herself and promised that the Flanagan women would be home in time for dinner, with pizza in hand.

Eleanor stood at the counter, her fingers tracing the curve of Tessa’s writing. She should have been excited—she hadn’t had a day off in weeks. But spending time with Tessa and Laya hardly felt like work. Anyway, what was it Tessa had said the night in the hot tub? Wasn’t much fun visiting paradise if you didn’t have someone to share it with. This seemed especially true now that Tessa’s withdrawal seemed to have ended. Eleanor still didn’t know what had been behind her employer’s moodiness. Maybe Sasha was right and Tessa had wicked PMS. Wouldn’t be the first woman Eleanor had lived with who displayed temporary hormonal insanity. Laurie had suffered from endometriosis, a condition that caused debilitating cramps and borderline personality disorder two or three days each month.

Not that she was living with Tessa. This time next week she would be back in L.A. spending her nights at Sasha’s apartment and her days with Laya while Tessa went off to work in the city each day. This was a somehow depressing thought, and she turned to the coffeemaker, green light glowing on its base. Tessa must have ground the beans and measured the water before she and Laya left. Eleanor poured a cup and added cream and sugar, then tasted it carefully. Not bad. Apparently Tessa knew how to make coffee, even if she didn’t drink it herself. Definitely a good quality in a woman. Or a good quality in an employer, anyway.

By the time she’d finished her cup of coffee, she’d decided that a day on her own, with hour after hour pursuing whatever activity she chose instead of entertaining a mercurial six-year-old, was a gift. The garage near the gate, she knew, held certain treasures, including an expensive racing bike that Tessa had confessed she rarely used but that Robert kept tuned and ready. Since joining Tessa’s employ, Eleanor had managed to find time to run but hadn’t been on a bike much. What better way to see the island and get in a low-impact workout at the same time?

Within a half-hour she had scoped out a route on her map, filled a small backpack with sunscreen, snacks, water and her current Austen fare—Emma, her favorite of the six novels—and was wheeling Tessa’s beautiful road bike from the garage. With a wave at Robert, who had solicitously asked after her itinerary, Eleanor tightened the helmet strap and swung her leg over the seat. Her pioneering bike trip in Hawaii. Nice.

The first couple of miles, she rode past open fields and sprawling villas set back off the road, security gates and encircling walls matching those of Mele Honu’ala. As she rode through humid island air, inhaling the pungent scent of vegetation with each breath, Eleanor wondered who owned these mansions and how much time they spent on the island. L.A. and Hawaii were both studies in contrasts, with the wealthiest Americans living and working side by side with the poorest. But she couldn’t help admiring the view of the ocean in the distance, the well-tended homes as she approached the village of Kilauea, the beautiful stone church just before the junction with the state highway.

Too soon she was turning onto Highway 56, the only route between Tessa’s house and Hanalei, her intended destination. She picked up the pace as she rode along the wide shoulder, careful to stay as far from the car lane as possible. Road riding wasn’t her favorite type of cycling. In Boston, she’d regularly rode out the Charles River bike path, a car-free eighteen-mile loop between downtown and Watertown. The trail, along with the variety of landscapes and people-watching it afforded, was one of the few things she missed about Boston. This fact surprised her. She’d thought she was happy in the largest city in New England, or as happy as someone with a desperately ill family member could be. But since leaving the city, she’d found she didn’t particularly miss the grouchy New Englanders and entitled college students who crowded Boston’s streets in warm weather, cold winter winds that sliced through even the warmest coat, tourists who crowded the Commons and Faneuil Hall every fall on their way to tour the autumn leaves beyond the city’s confines.

She missed her family, of course, but she hadn’t felt like she really belonged with them for a while. Her mother’s emotional distance and her father’s obvious preference for her sister’s company, not to mention Julia’s happily hetero mate, had gradually combined over the years to create in Eleanor a definite sense of otherness whenever she was around her nuclear family. Now, with her mother gone, her father ensconced in a new relationship, and Julia engaged in a life Eleanor could picture all too well but couldn’t imagine ever wanting herself, there seemed nothing left to anchor her to New England. No reason to spend every other weekend driving the familiar stretch of I-93 between Boston and Newport, listening to books on tape as she drove the three and a half hours each way.

After more than a decade of arranging her time according to her mother’s chemo or radiation treatments, participation in a new trial, or visits to specialists across the eastern seaboard, she had come unmoored. That part of her life was over, and with it, so were her twenties. Now she would have to find something else to do. Fortunately, she had a built-in plan. While L.A.’s heat, sprawl and laidback culture were a needed change from her old life, the green mountains and pristine beaches of Kauai gorgeous, she was just marking time until grad school. Then her real life would restart and she would put down roots in Madison, a college town known for its residents’ collective irreverence.

Only one problem: Eleanor wasn’t entirely certain she wanted to be a child psychologist anymore. She wasn’t the same person who had visited the clinic off the Mass Pike in the mid-’90s. She hadn’t been that person for a while, and yet she had held on to the notion that someday, somehow, she would achieve her “life’s dream.” Lately she’d been thinking about having a child of her own, someone in whose smile her mother might live on, someone she could take care of and nurture the way her parents had done for her and Julia. She and her sister had been luckier than most, despite losing their mother early. Maybe her life’s work should include taking care of her own children, not just those of other people. Not that the two were mutually exclusive. Look at Tessa—she’d continued to act after Laya was born, and was now pursuing an entirely different career path.

In any case, Eleanor thought as she rolled along toward the little town of Hanalei, she supposed it was no use worrying now. Soon enough she’d be in Madison, starting the five-year program she’d committed to. Being back in school would help her decide if a Ph.D. was really what she wanted. Nothing like homework and deadlines and stress to help you see what was important in life. Then again, her mother’s illness had already done that, to some degree. And after watching her mother suffer, she wasn’t sure she wanted to spend five years kissing faculty ass as a lowly grad student. After all, no one could be sure how long they had. What if she spent the next half decade worrying about supplemental reading and department politics only to be diagnosed at the end of it with breast cancer herself? Her mother had only been forty-two at the first diagnosis. No way for Eleanor to know if diseased cells were even now wending their way through her bloodstream.

When she reached Hanalei, she guided Tessa’s bike down a side street to the local beach, where Tessa had taken her and Laya for a stroll to the end of the pier the day they hiked the Na Pali Coast. Her legs were tired, and she was happy to lock the bike to a rack and find a space on the beach to spread out her towel. She was also glad to be there alone. Even disguised in a floppy hat and wide sunglasses, Tessa had been recognized by locals and tourists alike while they wandered Hanalei and the beach park. Most people had refrained from approaching, but the stares and whispers and pointed fingers had been enough to make Eleanor long for the peace of anonymity. Which today, on her own, she could enjoy.

Stretching out on the towel, she closed her eyes and tried not to imagine what Tessa and Laya might be doing on the other side of the island.

While she was glad to have an entire day with Laya, Tessa missed Eleanor’s company. A few days before, when she’d still been on her short-lived avoid-Eleanor kick, she’d called John Alvarez, an outfitter she knew on the southern end of the island, and arranged for a guided half-day kayak and tubing tour of the Hule’ia River. As they navigated the tranquil river, John, owner of Kipu Falls Ranch, provided Tessa and Laya with a running commentary on the flora and fauna of the National Wildlife Refuge they were traversing. When Laya commented on adding the Hawaiian stilt they caught a glimpse of to her “life list” of birds, Tessa wished she could share the moment with Eleanor, who she was certain would have understood her simultaneous pride in Laya’s intellectual ability and uneasiness regarding her social skills.

Laya was “totally bummed” at not having her nanny along too, a comment that led to Tessa initiating a conversation about Eleanor’s future plans as they floated along the gentle river, paddling around submerged trees and watching the shores for wildlife.

“I know she’s not staying forever,” Laya said, pushing back her fishing hat. “But it’s only June. We still get to have her for a while.”

Tessa couldn’t argue with that.

After a half day of kayaking, tubing and swimming beneath picturesque waterfalls, they made their way back to civilization and stopped for lunch at a little shop in Poipu, a resort community at the southeastern end of the island. Unfortunately, the teenage girl behind the counter recognized Tessa and proceeded to text everyone she knew within a fifty-mile radius. By the time their order was ready, the sidewalk outside the shop was jammed with tourists and locals craning for a look. The owner, thankfully, sneaked them out through a back door, and Tessa drove to the nearby Sheraton, where they took their picnic to the hotel beach and borrowed a pair of guest-only chaise lounges.

Laya wanted to go swimming again, this time in the ocean. They spread out their towels on the beach and waited for their food to digest so that they wouldn’t “get cramped.” As her daughter dug holes and built sand sculptures with her bare hands, Tessa kept her hat low and read a newspaper someone had left on one of the lounge chairs. The beach wasn’t crowded and no one seemed to recognize them this time, not even when she joined Laya in the water for a round of body-surfing. Laya was slippery as an eel in the shallow water, and just as comfortable. Was a love of saltwater programmed into her DNA too?

Later, on the way home, they stopped to pick up a pizza and do some shopping at Hilo Hattie’s in Lihue. They picked up a gift basket and more “Wish You Were Here” postcards for Ama and Dani (Laya had phoned the couple half a dozen times already since their tearful parting at the Burbank airport) and matching Hawaiian shirts for themselves. Laya insisted they get a third shirt for Eleanor so that she would know she was part of the family. Tessa found herself imagining what it would be like if their family really did include Eleanor, then banished the thought. Eleanor was a paid employee, nothing more, nothing less.

When they reached the house, Robert met them at the gate and told them that Eleanor had taken off that morning on a bike ride to Hanalei. Tessa placed the pizza in the oven to stay warm and sent Laya, whose eyes had kept drifting shut on the drive home, to her room for a nap. Soon enough, Eleanor would return to compare days over dinner. Laya would be excited to tell her nanny all about their adventures. Would Eleanor be as eager to share details herself? Maybe she’d been relieved to have an entire day on her own. Maybe she was tired of spending all her time with just the two of them.

To distract herself, Tessa picked up a book, The Complete Guide to Getting Funded, and turned to where she’d left off. Since she was a newbie to the grant-making business, she thought she might as well learn what she should be doing from as many angles as possible before the foundation announced that it was ready to begin receiving applications from worthy causes. That day was still a ways off. They had yet to define their specific areas of interest—needy children was apparently much too broad, according to the consultant they were working with—let alone hire an executive director. So far Tessa hadn’t liked either of the men the Byerly sisters had vetted and sent her way.

Jane had accused her of being sexist, and though Tessa hadn’t bothered to explain that while a woman could certainly be prejudiced toward a man, no member of an oppressed minority possessed the power to systematically subjugate a member of the majority, she also didn’t deny that she would prefer a woman director. After her years in Hollywood, where female directors and executive producers were still rare and the old boys network alive and thriving, she was tired of dealing with powerful men. It was her foundation. She would hire who she wanted.

The sun had begun its downward trek by the time Laya came stumbling down the stairs rubbing her eyes.

“Where’s Elle?” she asked, looking around the room as if her former teacher might be hiding behind a potted plant.

Good question. Tessa closed her book. “Tell you what. You go wash your hands and put on a sweatshirt and I’ll try her cell. She probably just lost track of time.”

Grumbling that she wasn’t cold, Laya nevertheless did as she was told. When Tessa pressed the send button on her cell, a phone started up in the kitchen. She followed the sound of “Life in the Fast Lane,” the ringtone Eleanor had assigned to her as a joke (or so she claimed), and discovered the cell on the counter still hooked to its charger. Now what?

Before her concern could overly foment, she buzzed Robert on the intercom.

He picked up immediately. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Has Miss Chapin returned yet?”

“No, ma’am, I haven’t seen her. Should I take the truck out for a look?”

“That’s okay,” Tessa said. Then she paused. “Actually, on second thought, why don’t you, if you don’t mind. And could you take your cell? That way I can let you know if she turns up.” Or vice versa. But she didn’t want to think about that possibility.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said and signed off. She’d told him he didn’t have to call her ma’am, but Robert was a retired police officer from Maui and had never seemed able to overcome the habit.

When Laya came back downstairs, she was frowning. “Mom, is Eleanor all right? You don’t think she’s hurt, do you? Remember the time I fell off my bike?”

Did she. A few months earlier, her daredevil daughter had crashed her training wheels-bedecked kiddy bicycle into the stone wall at the bottom of the drive and come up dripping blood. A quick trip to the celebrity wing of Cedars-Sinai had revealed that nothing was broken, thanks to the elasticity of children’s limbs. Still, Tessa didn’t think she’d ever forget the way her heart had initially stopped at the sight of the red stains on Laya’s T-shirt.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” she told Laya. “Robert’s out looking for her. Why don’t we set the table? By the time we finish, they’ll probably be back.”

But they weren’t. Tessa put the pizza on the kitchen island and she and Laya dug in half-heartedly. They were nearly done with their first pieces when the door to the garden finally opened and Robert led a scraped and bloodied Eleanor into the kitchen.

“Elle,” Laya exclaimed, and jumped down from her stool.

“Careful, honey,” Tessa said, sliding from her own stool as Laya stopped uncertainly before Eleanor, whose bike shorts were torn and stained, her left elbow sticking out at an odd angle. “Jesus, what happened to you?”

“I had a little accident,” Eleanor said, looking sheepish.

“Are you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital?” Tessa hovered nearby, wanting to go to her but staying back. A cut above Eleanor’s right eye had leaked blood down the side of her face, along her neck and beneath her sky blue tech shirt.

“No, I’m fine. Just banged up.” She reached out with her good arm and mussed Laya’s hair. “Hey, champ. How was your day?”

“Awesome! We kayaked on this river near this wildlife refuge—”

“Laya,” Tessa interrupted, her eyes on the gash on Eleanor’s forehead. “You can tell Elle about our day later. Right now she needs to get cleaned up.”

“Your mom’s right,” Eleanor said. She glanced up at Tessa. “By the way, I’m really sorry. Your bike is, well…” She trailed off, looking to Robert for help.

He still hulked in the kitchen doorway, broad chest barely covered by his customary tank top. “It needs some work,” he said neutrally. “I found her walking back along the main road. I was going to call,” he added, “but the miss here didn’t want you to worry.”

“Thanks, Robert.” Tessa nodded at him. “Can I ask another favor? Would you mind staying with Laya for a little while? I think Miss Chapin might require some assistance.”

“I’m fine,” Eleanor protested.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Laya said, rolling her eyes.

Tessa ignored Eleanor and directed her comments to her daughter instead. “I thought you could keep each other company. Besides, Robert might like some pizza.”

“Sure thing, ma’am,” he said, and smiled down at Laya. “I meant to tell you about some turtle sightings from the other day, anyway.”

The girl’s eyes widened, and she apparently forgot to be annoyed as Robert settled his heft on an empty stool and reached for a piece of pizza.

“It’s okay,” Eleanor insisted as Tessa ushered her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. “I can take care of it.”

“Somehow I doubt you’re coordinated enough to pick gravel out of your own elbow.”

Eleanor smiled ruefully. “Coordinated is probably not what I’d call myself right now.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital? I could call a helicopter and we could be in Lihue in no time.”

“No, really. My pride is hurt worse than my body.”

Tessa doubted that but kept quiet as she led Eleanor through her bedroom into the master bath that sat between her room and Laya’s.

Eleanor gazed at the slate-tiled floor, twin sinks, walk-in steam shower and stand-alone whirlpool tub. “This room always makes me think maybe capitalism isn’t completely evil.”

“I know. A small family could live in here.” Usually she didn’t feel guilty about the way she lived, chalking it up to luck of the draw, but Eleanor somehow managed to remind her what was real and what wasn’t. “Have a seat,” she said, pointing at the toilet.

As she crossed the bathroom, Eleanor caught sight of herself in the mirror. “Wow,” she said, fingering the cut on her brow. “That’s going to leave a scar.”

Tessa rummaged in a cupboard below the sink, coming up with hydrogen peroxide, Neosporin, Q-tips, tweezers and a small plastic tub. She stacked them on the counter. “This probably isn’t going to feel very good.”

“That’s okay,” Eleanor said, perching on the toilet lid. “It’s what I get for being stupid.”

Tessa ran a clean washcloth under warm water and eyed Eleanor as the small tub filled. “You, stupid? Doubtful.”

“You won’t say that when you hear how I crashed your bike.”

Leaning against the sink, Tessa turned off the water and arched one eyebrow in the gesture that had made her famous. “Try me.”

Eleanor’s expression was half-smile, half-grimace. “Well, you know how there are all these chickens around?”

“Uh-huh.” Kauai was famous for its renegade wild chicken population. Nonnative to the island, the birds had been brought by early settlers. In 1992, Hurricane Iniki was thought to have blown apart many of the chicken coops on Kauai, according to one theory, thereby freeing the birds and causing a surge in the number of wild chickens roaming the island.

“There was this rooster on the side of the road, and, um, apparently I got a little too close to one of his lady friends,” Eleanor explained. “He attacked, and I crashed.”

Biting back a smile at the ridiculous image, Tessa said, “The important thing is that you’re okay.”

“If it was you who had provoked the mighty rooster, I’d be laughing my butt off.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” She set the tub of water on the counter near Eleanor and held out the damp washcloth. “Ready?”

“Not really.” But she took the warm cloth from Tessa’s outstretched hand and began to slowly clean away the dust and blood.

Tessa stayed where she was and tried not to stare too obviously. What was wrong with her? To distract herself from the slide of the cloth over Eleanor’s flesh, she said, “Which Austen book are you on?”

“Emma,” Eleanor said, wincing as the cotton threads brushed over the exposed skin on her hip, where her bike shorts had been shredded in the fall. “It’s my favorite. What about you? Are you an Austen fan?”

“I am. I’m half-Irish, you know, so I’m genetically predisposed not to like English writers. But she’s so good.”

Wringing dirt and gravel from the washcloth, Eleanor glanced up at her. “What about Sarah Waters?”

“Love her, too.”

“I know. Who knew Victorian England could be so delightful? I mean, sexy. Sorry—whenever I read Jane Austen I find myself saying things like, ‘Upon my word’ and ‘What a welcome sensation.’”

“The English, always so understated and controlled. I think that’s why I find them a bit dull, to be honest.”

“You probably wouldn’t like New Englanders much, then.”

“I don’t know. If you’re representative of the lot, I haven’t found much not to like so far.” As Eleanor looked down, a blush coloring her neck beneath the bloodstains, Tessa added, “Anyway, perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite British author is a multiracial woman. Have you read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys?”

“Sophomore year for a Women’s Lit class. I don’t remember the multiracial part, though.” She squeezed her eyes shut as she rubbed her swollen elbow.

“Born in the Dominican, but to a Welsh father and Creole mother.” The first time she’d read Rhys’s best-known novel, told from the perspective of a character based on Rochester’s insane wife in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Tessa had recognized in the short work the story of her own family torn apart by secrets, jealousy, rage. “Rhys once said she felt that Charlotte Brontë had something against the West Indies and it made her angry. That’s why she wrote the novel.”

“You’re a serious reader, aren’t you?”

“Surprised?”

“Maybe a little,” Eleanor admitted.

“Like I said, you can’t believe everything you read online.”

“Apparently not.”

When the scrapes had been washed, Tessa offered to check for foreign objects. Eleanor seemed to hesitate a moment before nodding. Tessa knelt on a thick rug beside her and carefully picked tiny shards of gravel from her torn skin, cleaning the abrasions with hydrogen peroxide as she worked. She had to grasp various body parts to accomplish her task: calf, thigh, hip, elbow. Resolutely she kept her eyes lowered, wondering if she imagined the tautness in Eleanor’s body matching her own growing tension. This was the first time they’d touched so intimately, and she had to force herself to focus on Eleanor’s injuries to prevent her mind (and, more importantly, hands) from wandering over the tantalizing expanse of freckled skin before her. But the temptation was delicious, if tormenting—a sensation to which she was becoming accustomed the more time she spent around Eleanor.

“You’re very fit,” she said at one point.

“Thanks,” Eleanor said, her voice a little husky. From pain, or something else? “You’re not so bad yourself.”

“I work out. But I eat more junk food than you do, so it’s a requirement.”

“I know, I’m a little obsessed. My sister’s the same way. We both run and buy organic vegetables and try to eat all the foods on the anti-cancer list.”

Tessa frowned. That particular concern had never occurred to her. “Do you worry about getting sick?”

“Sure. Women whose mothers have breast cancer have twice the risk of developing it. Plus I’ve got other risk factors—my mom was diagnosed the first time before she turned fifty, I like wine and I haven’t had a baby yet.”

Yet? Did that mean she wanted to have a baby? Tessa pictured Eleanor pregnant, her belly swollen, eyes and cheeks glowing. She would be even lovelier than she was already.

“I thought red wine was supposed to be good for you,” she said.

“It is, for heart disease. Not so much for breast cancer.”

“Have you noticed no one agrees on what can kill you anymore? I saw Ellen DeGeneres do a routine once where she made fun of fear-mongering on local news programs—‘Tonight at 11, how the food you’re eating for dinner may be killing you. And now, back to Wheel of Fortune.’”

Eleanor smiled. “I saw her do the same show in Boston. I love her.”

Tessa looked away from Eleanor’s smile and back at the scrape on her knee. Focus, she told herself. This wasn’t supposed to be fun.

When she finished a few minutes later, she reluctantly stood and stretched her legs. No doubt about it, she was getting old. It no longer felt good to kneel on the floor for a quarter of an hour. Not that such a position had ever felt good, exactly. A flash of Nadine, this time on her knees at the edge of Tessa’s bed in Malibu, popped into her head, and she blinked it away. What was up with the parade of memories lately?

“Thank you,” Eleanor said, and stood up. “You’re right, I never would have been able to reach my elbow.” Without warning, she reached out and pulled Tessa into a hug.

Conscious of the softness of Eleanor’s breasts pressed against her own, Tessa stood unmoving in the circle of her arms. Of course she would give excellent hugs, and of course it would feel amazing to be held by her. Better than amazing. Tessa’s desire, which she’d thought she had managed to tamp down, flared up again, and she worked to modulate her voice as she pulled away. “You’re welcome. As Laya’s mother, I’ve had to hone my nursing skills over the years.”

“I’ll bet,” Eleanor said, her eyes fixed on Tessa’s. Then she stepped back. “I guess I should let you get back to dinner.”

“You’re coming down, aren’t you? You should put some ice on that elbow and take some ibuprofen.” Doing her own stunt work had led to more than a working knowledge of swelling reduction tactics.

“I’ll be there in a bit. I just need to change into something more presentable,” she said, waving at her mangled shorts and blood-stained shirt.

“Of course.” Tessa moved toward the hallway, aware of Eleanor behind her. “I’m glad you’re okay. I—well, Laya was worried about you.”

Eleanor grinned and turned toward her bedroom. “Takes more than a chicken to keep a Vermonter down.”

As she headed downstairs, Tessa pictured a furious rooster throwing himself through the air at Eleanor as she guided the bike over the Kauai roadway. The image was laughable, but at that moment, she didn’t feel much like laughing.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 640