Thick as Thieves(4)

She took Arden’s silence as a no.

“Just as well,” Lisa said. “You’re under no obligation to tell him now. If he didn’t know about the child, he doesn’t need to know about its fate. That episode of your life is behind you. You can start afresh. Clean slate.”

Again she covered Arden’s hand and pressed it affectionately. “First thing on the agenda is to get you away from here. I want you to move in with me until you figure out what you want to do with your life.” She gave Arden time to respond, but when she didn’t, she continued. “Since Wallace died, the house seems so empty.”

Lisa’s husband, who had been much older than she, had died two years earlier. No doubt their huge, rambling house in an elite neighborhood of Dallas did feel empty.

“I’ll give you all the privacy you wish, of course, but Helena will be delighted to have you there to fuss over. She and I will pamper you until you’re completely recovered.” She smiled and patted Arden’s hand again before checking her watch.

“You can’t have much to pack. If we get away soon, we’ll be there by dark. Helena will have dinner waiting.” She was about to leave her chair, when she paused. “And, Arden, you’re not under a deadline. Give yourself time to think things through. Really think through an idea before you act on it. Don’t rush headlong into something.

“In all honesty, I had a bad feeling about your move to Houston, and, at that point, I didn’t even know about your relationship with this married man. Granted, the job held promise, but your pulling up stakes and relocating seemed impulsive and doomed from the start.”

The attending physician in the ER clasped her hand. “Ms. Maxwell, I’m sorry.”

“No.”

“Your daughter was stillborn.”

“No!”

“Don’t blame yourself. Nothing you did caused it. It was an accident of nature.”

Doomed from the start.

Feeling as though her breastbone was about to crack open, Arden pushed back her chair and went over to the sink. Opening the blinds on the window above it, she looked out at the backyard in which Lisa and she had played.

The fence was missing slats. The grass had been overtaken by weeds. Her mother’s rose bed, to which she’d given so much tender loving care, was a patch of infertile dirt.

She sensed Lisa moving up behind her even before her sister encircled her waist and rested her chin on her shoulder so she could share the view through the window. “I remember the day Dad brought the swing set home for you.”

It was still anchored in the ground with concrete blocks, but it was rusty, and the chain was broken on one of the swings.

“I was around twelve years old, so you would have been two. There was a little seat for you with a bar across your lap.”

Lisa rubbed her chin against the knob at the crest of Arden’s shoulder. “You were too young to remember that, but surely you remember when I taught you how to skin-the-cat.”

Lisa had been almost too tall by then, but she was athletic enough to demonstrate how easy it was. She’d spotted Arden on her first fearful attempts, then had challenged her to do it on her own.

Her palms damp with nervous sweat, she’d braced herself on the crossbar, taken a deep breath, and somersaulted over it. But she fell short of making the full rotation. Her hands slipped off the bar, and she’d landed hard on her butt.

Pride smarting as much as her bottom, she’d fought back tears. But Lisa had insisted that she try again.

“Tomorrow,” Arden had whined.

“No. Right now.”

On the second try, she’d succeeded. Lisa had practically smothered her in a bear hug. She recalled now how special Lisa’s approval and that congratulatory hug had been.

The family had celebrated her feat with dinner out at the restaurant of her choosing: McDonald’s, of course.

That had been a happy day, one among the last happy family times that Arden recalled. Their mother’s fatal accident had occurred within months.

But losing her hadn’t been as sudden and unexpected as their father’s abandonment.

This past March marked twenty years, twice the age she had been when Joe Maxwell left his two daughters, never to be seen again. His desertion remained the pivotal point around which Arden’s life continued to revolve.

It did no good to speculate on how differently Lisa and she would have turned out as individuals, or what kind of futures they would have had, if he hadn’t forsaken them. He had.

Softly, sympathetically, Lisa said, “You’ve been through a terrible ordeal, and I don’t want to pressure you when you’re so vulnerable. But, Arden, this isn’t the place to recover. Believe me, it isn’t. You were younger. You can’t appreciate how bad it was after Mother died. Or maybe you can, but you’ve blocked it from your memory. I haven’t. I remember.

“When Dad disappeared, and I moved us away from this town, I swore it would be forever. People who lived here then will remember us. Why subject yourself to gossip and speculation? To say nothing of the fact that this house is literally falling down around you.” She flipped her finger over a chip in the Formica countertop.

“So many times, I’ve thought about selling it, but I would get sentimental, think of Mother in these rooms, cooking in this kitchen, humming as she folded laundry, and I couldn’t bring myself to let it go. Though God knows we could have used the money, selling it would have made severance with Mother seem so final. Besides that, the house belonged to you, too. Selling it wasn’t a decision I felt comfortable making for both of us.”