Crimson Rain

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! You can just stop clicking that thing. I know there’s not a call coming in.”

“Bye, Mom.” Gina smiled as she hung up the phone. Her mother was still sharp at sixty, and at times almost psychic.

About Paul, however, she was completely off base. Paul would never have an affair. Gina knew him too well, and the one thing she knew for certain was that he simply wasn’t the type.

Paul watched Lacey as he dressed, who lay on the bed and followed his every move, a mock lewd grin turning up the corners of her mouth. Her lips were swollen now from lovemaking, and with her bright red lipstick rubbed off, she looked like a little girl—an innocent child, though he knew she was neither a child nor innocent, but a woman who knew things that other women never even thought about.

Pulling his pants on, he shoved in the tail of the white dress shirt he’d worn to Soleil Antiques that day. His hands fumbled. He was depleted from their lovemaking, and she was beginning to get to him again. Lacey played with a nipple, her eyes smoldering. Incredibly, she was ready for more.

Paul was tempted, but he had to get home. Gina could never know what he was doing; it would hurt her to the core, and he didn’t want that. Keeping a mistress was something entirely apart from his marriage to Gina. It was like—well, like living two different lives, each of them necessary and valid but for entirely different reasons.

Lacey sat up and reached for him. He dodged her, laughing.

“Enough! What are you trying to do, put me in cardiac arrest?”

She slid from under the satin sheets and pulled bikini briefs over legs so long, they seemed two-thirds of her height. Bending over, she let her full breasts hang as she placed them in a more comfortable position inside her bra. Paul’s mouth went dry.

“Cardiac arrest?” Lacey chuckled, straightening. “Not you! You’re a bear. A big, strong bear.” Then, squinting, she studied him through the most beautiful green eyes he had ever seen. “No…you’re too tall and thin to be a bear. More like a handsome black panther. An aging panther, of course, with that gray hair popping out along your temples—”

He couldn’t help himself. Reaching over, he slid a hand inside the bra and cupped one of her breasts. Stepping closer, he pulled her to him, closing his eyes and resting his chin on her head. “Oh, God, you feel so good.”

Despite himself, he began to grow hard again. He glanced at the little clock decorated with hand-painted cherubs on the night table, one of the few things Lacey had brought with her from her own apartment. She hadn’t owned much, having just moved to Seattle in the summer. When he’d offered to help her pack to come here, she had said, “I don’t have enough to bother with. I think I’ll just put most of it in storage.” It had made him feel good to be able to give her a better life than she’d had in Atlanta, growing up in a home where her hardworking parents could never quite make ends meet.

It was ten forty-five, according to the clock. He calculated quickly. It would take him twenty minutes at the most to drive home, and if he left here by eleven-thirty he could be there before midnight. That gave him another forty-five minutes.

He pulled Lacey down on the bed, his tongue seeking hers, his body working quickly against her, the bra and bikini panties slipping off easily as he molded himself to her skin.

When the phone rang again, Gina thought it was Paul. Gina muted the sound of the television and picked up the cordless phone by the bed.

“Hi, Mom.” Rachel’s high, young voice came over the wires.

“Honey?” Gina sat straighter as alarm bells went off. “Why are you calling so late? Is something wrong?”

“No…just nervous, I guess. Flying, you know.”

Gina went into automatic mother mode. “Well, but think how many times you’ve done it, and you’ve always arrived safe and sound! I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

She couldn’t let Rachel know how anxious she herself always felt when her daughter was in the air.

“I made reservations for dinner at the Space Needle,” she said. “You can look forward to that, at least.”

Rachel’s smile seemed to carry through the phone. “Great! I’ll get my first solid meal in days and a view of Seattle, too. Is, uh—is Dad coming?”

“Of course he is. He wouldn’t miss picking you up with me. He never has, has he?”

“No. I just thought…he’s pretty busy lately, isn’t he? I haven’t had many e-mails from him in the past few weeks.”

“Well, you know how busy your father always is at this time of year.”

“Sure, I guess that’s it. Hey, Mom? I really need to shop for some clothes. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. We’ll go on Saturday.”

“There’ll be Christmas crowds, though.”

“I’ll fend them off the same way I did last year,” Gina said, smiling. “They won’t stand a chance.”

She had expected Rachel to laugh, but all she said was, “Mom, really,” in a tone that sounded like disgust.

Last year, while cleaning off the front steps, Gina had slipped on a patch of ice, spraining her ankle. When she and Rachel had gone shopping, she was recovering but still used a cane. Much to her delight, she discovered that the crowds in the stores had parted for her as if she were Moses parting the Red Sea. She had thought Rachel had enjoyed that, too, but now she wondered if her daughter had been embarrassed by her.

“I, uh…I could wrap an Ace bandage around my ankle, if that would make you feel better,” she tried with a hint of humor. “No one would ever guess there was nothing wrong with me.”

Rachel’s voice took on an edge. “For heaven’s sake, who are you, my mom’s evil twin? Watch out, or we might have to cart you away—”

She bit the words off, as if suddenly realizing what she’d said. Not before her remark had shocked Gina, however. Rachel was always so careful not to talk about her twin, or say anything that might even remind Gina of her.

“Sorry, Mom,” Rachel said softly.

“Oh, honey, it’s all right. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

But was that true? she wondered. They had never really known how much Rachel had suffered over the loss of her sister. She was too silent, keeping too much inside. Not even Victoria had been able to bring much out. The best Gina and Paul could do was provide Rachel with all the love they had to give. And, of course, reassure her that what had happened to Angela would never happen to her.

Gina talked with her daughter a few minutes more, and then said goodbye. As she turned off her reading light, she pulled the down comforter up over her shoulders, feeling a chill. It was bad enough that Paul withdrew every year at this time. What if Rachel began to do that, too?

As Paul drove home, he automatically began the mental transition from Lacey’s chrome-and-glass apartment to the elegant house on Queen Anne Hill. Often he would relax by listening to classical music on a CD, but tonight, as he drove past homes decorated to the hilt with Christmas lights, the usual holiday depression set in. He couldn’t keep himself from wondering how things had turned out this way, after such great hopes for the future. Hadn’t he started out life with all the usual excitement of a college graduate with an MBA? And hadn’t he thought, like most, that he had the world by the tail?

Even meeting Gina had required little effort. They’d run into each other in a campus café during their last year at the University of Washington, begun dating and were married shortly after graduation. They wrote down their goals for themselves and their marriage on crisp white paper, and mapped out their lives in the way of young couples in the eighties: Gina would work for a while until Paul became established and they had a nice nest egg. Then she would quit to stay home and raise children. They would have two children—a good number in an age where having too many was frowned upon as not being politic, in a world where populations had exploded and having big families was an environmental no-no.

They wouldn’t get bogged down in work for work’s sake, they agreed, the way their parents had. Having been born in the sixties, they remembered fathers who wore business suits and ties, fathers with gray faces who trudged back and forth to the office every day and kept their noses to the grindstone to buy a house with a mortgage that wouldn’t be paid off until long after they were dead. They remembered mothers who from the age of eighteen had stayed home and been housewives, who had so many children to raise they’d become more and more worn-out as the years went by, their dreams turned to so much dust.

Paul and Gina swore they would never end up like that. Life in the eighties was going to be different. These were the Reagan years, the years of renewal, a good economy, the years when he who had the most toys won. Paul and Gina would have well-paid jobs that would give them time off to travel through Europe, take vacations, go skiing at Aspen. When Gina finally did leave her job, it would be only after they had a solid nest egg. And she wouldn’t take off forever, the way her mother had. She’d get the children to a certain age and then reenter the work force while she was still employable and could command an excellent salary.

As the first months of their marriage passed, however, Paul and Gina’s Life Plan had taken sharp, unexpected turns. Gina learned she was infertile—a congenital defect, the doctors said. As for Paul, though his antique business brought in the kind of money they’d dreamed about—enough, along with Gina’s work as an interior designer, to enable them to buy the house on Queen Anne Hill—their work took up so much time that he and his wife barely knew each other six months after the honeymoon. They had the house of their dreams but rarely lived in it, except to sleep after the long commute home each night. They had the prerequisite two cars, but traveled in them only to work and back on bogged-down freeways.

After eight months of this, Gina began to have an itch. She wanted a baby. She didn’t want to wait. They had enough money to take care of a child, and she needed more in her life than just work.

So they adopted the girls, a move that was supposed to change their lives. And it did. The hell of it was, it had changed a dream into a deadly nightmare—one from which, Paul knew, he would never awaken, as long as he lived. Was it any wonder he couldn’t fully live in that world—couldn’t participate in a place of so many dark memories, without some kind of light shining through?

Every day he thanked God for Lacey, who had brought him light, as well as laughter. Without her, he would never have survived. In fact, there were moments when he felt she was all that kept him alive.

2

Gina buttered a piece of toast, put it on a plate and slid it across the black granite breakfast bar to Rachel, who gobbled it down as if she hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks.

Which she apparently hadn’t, except for last night at the Space Needle. Gina studied her with a worried frown. Rachel had clearly lost several pounds since summer vacation. She had never been overweight, but was blessed with a trim, athletic figure that was largely from all her years of rowing. Rachel had been a rowing fanatic, latching onto the sport in her first year of high school. Gina and Paul had thought she would go to the University of Washington on a scholarship, but Rachel had surprised them in her senior year by stating that she was no longer interested in rowing, and wanted to go to college in a warmer climate. She had chosen Berkeley, in Northern California. Gina had thought at the time that her daughter simply wanted to spread her wings, put some distance between herself and home. And she had to admit, the change would probably do Rachel good.

Now, however, Gina wasn’t so sure. Sitting there on the stool, with her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and no makeup on, Rachel looked much as she had in grade school. Gina remembered how they would sit this way in the mornings, the two of them chatting companionably till Rachel’s ride arrived. Her eyes would light up at the idea of going to a movie on the weekend, or planting spring bulbs with her mother, the two of them digging in the moist earth side by side, no words needed between them.