“Oh, I know what you mean,” Lacey said. He didn’t need to finish the sentence. “It’s like you can see clear through them when the sun hits them.”
“Exactly,” Bobby said. “They’re unusual, right? And I remembered seeing them once before.”
“Where?”
“One of those parties we went to that summer. You remember what those parties were like, don’t you?”
She nodded. Drugs, sex and rock and roll, with very little emphasis on the music. She’d had a love-hate relationship with those parties. The easy sex she gave away, along with the huge quantities of alcohol she’d consumed, had tortured her conscience. And sometimes her brother would be there. He’d yell at her, tell her she and Jessica didn’t belong at the older kids’ parties, and how right he’d been about that. But she’d tell him to leave her alone. She’d hated it when he was around, because she would need to be secretive about what she was doing to prevent him from telling their father what she was up to.
“Jessica was in one of the bedrooms,” Bobby continued. “We’d had a fight or something, I don’t remember, but we had chilled on seeing each other for a while. It was killing me, because I knew she was in there with someone else.”
Lacey’s hand was wrapped so tightly around her glass of lemonade that her fingers hurt. She was afraid to think about where this story was going.
“The house was pretty dark, but there was this light on in the living room,” Bobby said. “When I heard the door open to the bedroom, I kind of was…I don’t remember, exactly, but I was hanging out around there, trying to look cool, but really wanting to see who she’d been with. The guy came out, and the light in the living room shone right in his eyes. He blinked, it was so bright, but right before he blinked I saw how strange they were. He looked right at me, although I don’t think he knew Jessica was my girlfriend.”
Her hand over her mouth, Lacey felt momentarily numb, her physical pain forgotten. “Are you sure it was Clay?” She was whispering.
He nodded. “I’m ninety-eight percent certain,” he said.
Lacey let out her breath, resting her head against the back of the chair. Could Clay truly have slept with Jessica? It seemed unbelievable. Jessica had been barely fifteen and he’d been seventeen. In retrospect, the age difference did not seem that great, but at the time, it had seemed insurmountable. And what about Terri? She couldn’t picture Clay cheating on her. Back in those days, she’d thought of her brother as straitlaced, a bit of a moralistic stuffed shirt. Maybe she’d been wrong.
“If he did actually sleep with her…” Lacey’s mind was racing. “Do you think he might suspect that Mackenzie is his?”
“I don’t think he has a clue,” Bobby said. “Jessica let everyone believe Mackenzie was mine right from the start, so the thought probably never entered his mind. But I believe that’s why Jessica was so adamant that Mackenzie go to you.” He sat up straight, his hands cutting the air to make a point. “She knew Mackenzie was an O’Neill. If she died, she wanted Mackenzie to be part of your family—part of Clay’s family. And that was the only way she thought she could do it.”
“That would also explain why she refused to tell you that you were Mackenzie’s father.” Lacey was thinking out loud. It all was beginning to make terrible sense.
“And why she couldn’t tell you the truth, Lace,” Bobby said. “She couldn’t tell you she’d slept with your brother.”
“Oh, my God,” Lacey said, struggling to take it all in. “And he’s gotten so close to her these past few weeks.”
“I’ve been glad about that,” Bobby said. “They really care about each other.”
“I think we need to talk to him,” she said.
Bobby looked surprised. “Are you up for that?” he asked. “Do you want to wait until you’re feeling better?”
“I’m not going to be able to relax until I talk to him about it,” she said. “Not in an accusatory way, though,” she added quickly, “because, who knows, we could still be wrong. But I think he needs to know what we’re thinking.” She shut her eyes with a sudden realization. “Oh, Bobby,” she said, “if she’s Clay’s, then I’ve dragged you into something that had nothing to do with you.”
He smiled, leaning forward again to take her hand. “Do you think for one minute that I regret that?” he asked.
CHAPTER 47
They made a decision to wait a few days before talking to Clay about their suspicions, so they would have a chance to think through what they would say. They also needed to find a time when neither Gina nor Mackenzie would be around. The best-laid plans, though, sometimes went awry. That same evening, Gina took Rani to visit Henry and Mackenzie was upstairs doing her homework when Clay came into the living room, flipped on the TV to a news station and sat down on the sofa.
He turned to Lacey and Bobby. “How are you two doing?” he asked, conversationally, and she and Bobby looked at each other. Lacey knew they were both wondering the same thing: should they seize the opportunity or not? Lacey made the decision for them both, and she hoped Bobby didn’t mind.
“There’s something we want to talk to you about,” she said.
Clay looked concerned by the serious tone in her voice. “Are you worried about Mackenzie working with the dogs during the school year?” he asked.
Lacey shook her head. “Heavier than that,” she said, and Clay used the remote control to click off the TV.
“Let’s leave the TV on,” Bobby suggested, looking at Lacey for confirmation. “We could use the background noise.”
She understood. He was worried Mackenzie might be able to hear them.
Clay clicked on the set again. The newscaster was talking about the first day of school in North Carolina, using footage of weepy kindergartners in their new classrooms as they were being deserted by their mothers.
“So,” Clay said, “what’s going on?”
Lacey would have liked Bobby to tell him, but she thought it would be better coming from her, so she jumped in quickly. “Bobby and I think there’s a possibility that you’re Mackenzie’s father.”
She watched all color leave her brother’s face, and she waited for him to protest, but he surprised her.
“I wondered,” he said quietly. “She has my eyes.”
Lacey felt torn between astonishment and relief. He already knew. She was not going to have to go into the details of Bobby seeing him leave the bedroom at that long-ago party.
Clay looked at Bobby. “You’re the more logical candidate,” he said. “You were with Jessica all summer long. I was just with her once.”
“I’m the proud owner of extremely lethargic sperm,” Bobby said. “I’ve never been able to impregnate anyone even when I was trying to. I love Mackenzie, but I’ve had my doubts that she was mine from the start.”
The color was returning to Clay’s face and now coins of hot pink were on his cheeks. He turned to Lacey. “Did Jessica ever tell you that we’d…hooked up?” he asked.
She shook her head. She wanted details. She wanted to know what had gotten into him that he would bed her fifteen-year-old friend. But what had happened twelve years ago didn’t matter now. It truly didn’t. What mattered at this moment was the probable result of that night: Mackenzie.
“No, she didn’t,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure that’s why she wanted to leave Mackenzie with me. It was as close as she could get to leaving her with you.”
Clay fiddled with the remote where it rested on the arm of the sofa, and Lacey noticed the faint tremor in his fingers.
“Mackenzie’s a great kid,” he said. “I don’t care if she’s my daughter or Bobby’s, she’s part of our family.”
“I think we’d better have a DNA test done,” Bobby said, resting his elbows on his knees and looking from Clay to Lacey. “I know we both care about her, but I think we need to know one way or another for sure.”
Clay nodded. “And if it turns out to be me, what do we tell her?”
For the first time, Lacey
understood why her father had waited until she was sixteen to tell her that Tom was her biological father. She could not have coped with that news at fourteen. “We tell her the truth,” Lacey said, “but not now. She’s been through too much these past few months.” She turned her head against the back of the recliner so that she was looking squarely at Bobby. “That is, if you can handle playing the role of dad a while longer.”
“I could handle it till the day I die,” Bobby said.
CHAPTER 48
“I missed these cool summer evenings while I was in North Carolina,” Faye said. She and Jim were sitting in his hot tub across from one another, the bubbles warm around their shoulders and the heavy, dark coastal clouds so low in the sky they seemed to be suspended directly above Jim’s house. “I’d forgotten how miserably hot it could be there.”
“Fred’s cottage didn’t have air-conditioning?” Jim asked.
Faye laughed. “I’m amazed his cottage had running water,” she said. “And the bugs! I’m still scratching mosquito bites.”
She’d stayed with Fred for five days. Good days, for the most part, as she got to know the stranger who was her son. In the day and a half since her return to San Diego, it seemed all she had talked about was Fred, analyzing her son and her visit, and Jim had not complained once. He knew she couldn’t help herself. And she was still at it.
“It’s so strange, Jim,” she said. “If I’d met Fred in Princeton, with his wonderful life, his excellent career, his law degree, his beautiful house, I would have been so awestruck at how perfectly he’d turned out. Instead I met him in the middle of a lie. I saw him at his worst. I’m worried he may have inherited some of his father’s psychological problems.”
“Did you talk to him about that?” Jim asked.
She shook her head. “I will at some point, but we just needed to get to know each other again first.”
Jim ran his foot up her shin beneath the bubbling water. “And now, I’d like to get to know you again,” he said.
“Later.” She smiled. “I promise.”
“You’re on a roll, aren’t you?” he said, giving up. “One thing that drew me to you was your tenacity, so I guess I can’t complain about it now.”
“Thanks,” she said. “For not complaining. For listening to me go on and on.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “What else is on your mind?”
“You know how I told you that every young male patient who came into the pain program would make me think of Fred?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, we got a new patient today. An eighteen-year-old boy. Young man.”
“Ah,” Jim said. “And he reminded you of Fred.”
“That’s the funny thing.” She ran her hands through the water. It felt soft against her fingers. “I didn’t think of him at all. I think that spell must be broken now that I’ve seen Fred in the flesh again. Instead, I was thinking about that young woman, Lacey O’Neill.”
“What made you think of her?” Jim asked.
“The new patient was bitten on his shoulder by a dog a year ago. He’s healed fairly well, but the bite left him with severe chronic pain. Isn’t that ironic?” She raised her eyebrows to Jim. “I don’t think I’ve had a single dog bite in the program and then, suddenly, he appears.”
Jim hummed the Twilight Zone music.
“So, it made me wonder how Lacey’s doing with her recovery, from both the dog attack and from Fred’s…misuse of her.” She thought of Lacey often, unable to forget the rage in her face the night she’d stormed out of Fred’s cottage. Faye knew a lot about rage. Her program was filled with patients whose anger fed their pain. Anger at an illness. Anger at the driver of the other car who gave them their back injury. Anger at God for making them suffer. Anger that only served to prolong their pain. One of the parts of the program she’d designed—one facet most resented by her patients until they truly understood its purpose—was to learn to let go of that anger.
“I don’t really know her,” Faye said about Lacey. “I may just be thinking about how I’d feel in her situation. But she was so furious when she left Fred’s that day, that—”
“I don’t blame her,” Jim interrupted.
“No, I certainly don’t, either,” Faye said. “But she was ready to pour her anger into testifying about her mother’s murder in order to keep Zach in prison forever. To write something truly scathing to the parole board. And then she was attacked by that dog, and—”
“What are you trying to say, honey?” Jim moved across the hot tub to sit next to her, his arm around her shoulders. “You think Zach should get out on parole?”
She shook her head. She wasn’t speaking clearly, because her thoughts were not yet well formed.
“It’s not that I want Zach to get out,” she said. “It’s that I want Lacey to be well. She’s suffered too much in too many ways at the hands of my family, and I can’t believe my son added to that suffering the way he did. Her rage is well founded, just as it is in all the patients I work with, but it can only harm her in the end.”
“You know what I’ve figured out about you, Faye?” Jim asked.
“What’s that?”
He touched her temple, making a little circular motion with his fingertip. “You’re the sort of person who can’t rest easy until you’ve taken action on whatever’s spinning around in your brain,” he said.
He was right. That was why she’d been able to transform the chronic pain program from a simple idea into a reality. It was why she’d gone to see her son. And she knew right then that it was why she would call Lacey O’Neill.
CHAPTER 49
“How do you think it’s going in there?” Bobby was sitting on Lacey’s bed the night after their conversation with Clay, gently massaging vitamin E oil onto the developing scars on her legs. They knew that Clay was talking to Gina in their bedroom, telling her that Mackenzie might possibly be his daughter.
“I think Clay is lucky that Gina is madly in love with him, and they’ll be okay,” she said, wincing at the pain he was causing her. She knew it was important to massage the scars to prevent adhesions from forming, but that knowledge didn’t stop the procedure from hurting. She was lying on her back in her panties and T-shirt, well aware that her chewed-up legs looked anything but sexy these days. She suddenly chuckled. “This is so romantic, isn’t it?” she said. “Having you massage my revolting legs?”
“I think it’s very romantic, actually,” he said. “And it could be even more so if you’d let me massage the rest of you, too.” He shifted on the bed so he could lift the hem of her shirt up a few inches. He ran his slick hand over the skin of her stomach, from the bottom of her ribs to the top of her panties, and it felt wonderful to have him stroke her there, one of the few places on her body where touch could give her pleasure instead of pain. Bobby had been so good to her since the attack, but he hadn’t kissed her until tonight, as if fearing she was too fragile to be touched.
“Lacey!” he said suddenly, and her eyelids flew open at what sounded like alarm in his voice.
“What?”
“You devil!” he said. “You have a pierced belly button.”
She laughed, glancing down at the tiny tiger’s eye protruding from the skin above her navel. “Surprise,” she said.
“And here you were giving me a hard time about my earring.”
She reached up and touched the gold hoop. “I love your earring,” she said. And I love you, she wanted to say, but she and Bobby were not quite there yet. Not quite ready for those words. One day they would be, though. She knew that, and she could wait.
Her phone rang, and Bobby lifted the receiver from the cradle and handed it to her.
“Hello,” she said, closing her eyes again as he continued to rub her stomach.
“Is this Lacey?” a woman asked.
“Yes.”
“Lacey, this is Faye Collier. Fred—Rick’s—mother.”
Why was Rick’s mother calling her? Her mem
ory of the woman was vague with all that had happened since their meeting at the cottage. Her memory of Rick himself was growing vaguer by the day, and for that she was grateful. If anything good had come from the past two weeks, it was that she had learned which of the two men in her life was by far the best.
“Why are you calling?” Lacey asked, hoping she did not sound rude.
“I just wanted to see how you are,” Faye said. “I think about you every day and hope that you’re healing well. Are you having much pain?”
“Define ‘much,’” Lacey said, annoyed by the question as well as by the call, but then she knew she truly was sounding rude. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just about gotten Rick out of my mind, and I’m not sure why you’re calling me. And yes, I have a lot of pain.”
Bobby looked concerned. “Who is it?” he whispered, and she mouthed the words “Rick’s mother.”
There was a long pause on Faye’s end of the line. “I’m not calling to defend Rick,” Faye said. “What he did was inexcusable. I know you’ve suffered so much because of my family, and that’s why I’m calling. Just to see how you are. I guess I need to know you’re okay.”
It was Lacey’s turn to hesitate. She found sharp, ugly responses coming into her head, but nothing that had happened to her was this woman’s fault.
“I’m all right,” she said. “My doctor says I’m healing well. It’s just going to take a long time.”
“What pain meds are you on?” Faye asked.
Lacey ran down the list of medications she was taking.
“Good,” Faye said. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but I’m the head of a chronic pain program in a hospital in San Diego, so I know something about what works and what doesn’t. How much are you taking of each of them?”