Finding Jack, page 22
“You’re lucky you caught me when I was over at the bank or I wouldn’t have been in until Monday.”
“Manicure Monday,” Linda said cheerfully. “She’s busy all day long and the women of Featherton are happy again. You’re lucky she came in.”
“Have a seat over here.” Cheryl pointed to a manicure station tucked into the corner.
I settled into the chair as she pulled out her supplies. “Thank you for taking me last minute.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss the chance to get a look at whoever finally snagged the doc.”
Ah. Well, now I knew why Linda hadn’t made the phone call in front of us, and what she’d offered to lure Cheryl: live bait.
“I haven’t snagged anyone,” I said.
“She has,” Jack called.
I glanced over at him, only able to see the underside of his jaw as Linda rinsed his hair. “Just for now,” I said to Cheryl, low enough that he couldn’t hear me. But I didn’t want to think about what happened after the weekend ended, so I smiled and asked her about herself as I studied the small salon. It was a hyphenate, I discovered. Like the grocery-bait shop and the real estate-yarn goods place, this was the salon-beauty supply. Shelves covered the back wall with not just the requisite shampoos and conditioners (she carried only drugstore brands) but a small assortment of nail polishes, cheap cosmetics, lotions, hair elastics, and…shot glasses? I decided not to ask, but I would definitely be picking up one as a souvenir.
I turned back to smile at the manicurist. “I’ll go with a clear coat.”
Linda snorted loudly. “No, you won’t. Cheryl decides what color you’ll get, and you’ll like it or else.”
Cheryl was an artist, I discovered, and didn’t have much use for manicures herself, but it was a nice way to supplement her income from the chainsaw sculptures she made of fallen logs.
“You’re going to answer some questions for me while I work on your cuticles here, and then I’ll pick your color. Now. Let’s start with your favorite book of all time.”
I answered her questions for the next few minutes, including my preference for milk or dark chocolate, how I liked to spend my days off, and my Meyer-Briggs personality profile. Jack shouted the answers to any of the questions he knew, and each time, Cheryl would crook an eyebrow at me, and I would nod that he was right. Because he was.
“I’ve decided on your color,” she said, and plucked a bottle of a coral that verged on orange from her bin.
It was the exact opposite of anything I would have chosen for myself, but I was too scared of her to say anything, so I let her get to work while I watched Jack. “How’s it going over there?”
He grunted something I couldn’t make out. It sounded like he’d fallen under the spell of Linda’s shampooing. I smiled. Having someone else shampoo my hair was one of my favorite luxuries.
I amused myself by studying the rest of the salon. There was no theme to the décor. The floor was a serviceable gray tile, worn but clean. Linda’s only cutting station had a plain mirror in an outdated black plastic frame, and a pile of magazines, no gossip rags in the mix. It was all cooking and gardening magazines.
“Done with this hand,” Cheryl said. I fixed a polite smile on my face to examine them when she let go of my fingers, but I lost it as my jaw dropped when I looked at my nails. She’d painted them white but stamped them with a pattern of vivid coral rose vines. I’d never had nail art in my life, but I was immediately in love.
“Oh my gosh, I want my nails like this forever.” I turned them back and forth to admire them as she went to work on my other hand.
“Now you see why she’s always booked up. The ladies all have standing appointments, and she’ll only let them come in every two weeks so she can fit everyone in. Even in a place as small as Featherton, they keep her busy.”
“You’re a genius,” I said. “Jack? I want to go to Cheryl’s place to see her sculptures tomorrow.”
Linda grinned at me. “The poor guy fell asleep.”
I looked over to see that Jack’s body had indeed relaxed into the chair while Linda massaged his scalp. “If the town is keeping Cheryl busy, they must be running him ragged.”
“I don’t think so,” Cheryl said. “Anybody who needs a specialist goes over to Sandy or even out to Portland if they have to. It’s pretty easy to get an appointment with Dr. Hazlett if you need to. Same day, usually. We keep him busy enough for a country doctor, I guess, but just barely.”
“Except for flu season,” Linda said.
“Except for flu season,” Cheryl agreed.
“Flu?” Jack repeated in the groggy voice of someone who dozed off.
“Hush,” Linda said. “Relax while I rinse this conditioner out, then we’ll get you dried.”
By the time she had him settled into the barber chair with a cape around his neck, Cheryl finished my other hand and had started on the top coat. I watched as Linda combed through the long strands of his hair. The water had made it seal-dark and shiny, and it hung past the tops of his shoulders.
“I’ve been itching to get my hands on this since you got to town,” she said, picking up a section of his hair and peering at it more closely.
“You and half the women in Featherton,” Cheryl said.
Linda shot her a quelling glance. “I mean in a professional capacity.”
“I didn’t,” Cheryl said, which made Jack squeeze his eyes shut like he thought it would make him invisible, and I laughed.
“Cut it off,” I said. “Then maybe the ladies will leave you alone.”
“I don’t know,” Linda mused, combing through it some more. “I kind of worry if we sheared him that none of the single ladies in town will survive a clean-cut Jack.”
I rose and came to stand beside her, studying Jack in the mirror as she pulled his hair back. “You’re right. Right now, he’s barely resistible. I’m in trouble if he goes clean-cut.”
He met my eyes in the mirror for a long second, and the jokes drained right out of me. I wasn’t kidding anymore. I had almost no defenses against this man or his deep, thoughtful gazes that seemed to see beyond everything I said to all the things I didn’t.
“You’re safe,” he said at last, reaching behind him to undo the Velcro of the cape. “I’m not cutting it.”
“Hey, I still need to dry it,” Linda protested as he rose from the chair.
“I always just let it air dry,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s getting late, and I need to figure out what to do with this woman for dinner.”
“I can draw you a diagram,” Cheryl said, and when Linda hooted with laughter, I wasn’t sure whether it was Jack or I who was more embarrassed as he tossed some bills on Linda’s counter on our way out of the salon.
“Sorry about that.” He smiled down at me when we reached the safety of the sidewalk. “I can’t promise it won’t happen with someone else. Anyone my mom’s age or older around here likes to bust my chops.”
“Why won’t you cut your hair?” I asked. The question surprised me. I’d wanted to know for almost as long as I’d known Jack, but I hadn’t known I was about to ask.
“That’s a long story.”
“I’ve got a few days.” I held my breath, hoping he wasn’t about to retreat again the way he had in so many other conversations.
He tucked a strand of it behind his ear. “Tell you what. Let’s grab some stuff at the grocery store and make dinner at my house. I’ll tell you the story, and if you’re still in the mood we can watch a movie after or something.”
“Works for me.”
He pulled out his phone. “I’ll text you directions because Google Maps doesn’t acknowledge its existence. That way you can follow me and leave if you want to.”
“Why would I want to?”
But he didn’t answer, instead tapping at his phone and nodding when my cell buzzed. “There. Let’s hit the grocery store and get this over with.”
Chapter 36
Two hours later we sat at the small table in his little cabin in the woods. It was a one-bedroom caretaker’s cabin located a hundred yards from a much larger custom log home. The big house belonged to a tech executive who was rich enough to afford it but too busy to use it much, according to Jack. He had the run of the place so long as he kept an eye on things and made sure the cupboards stayed stocked. He’d offered to prep and serve dinner up at the main house, but I wanted to stay in the little cabin, in his space.
I glanced around as I twirled the fettucine on my fork. Jack had made alfredo sauce while I prepped a salad, but I suddenly didn’t have much of an appetite. My eyes wandered the cabin for the hundredth time, trying to ferret out more details about Jack, who he was, what went on in his mind. But the small living room and kitchenette told me no more than what he’d shown me weeks ago on FaceTime.
“Something wrong?” he asked, and my attention snapped back to him. His expression was neutral except for his watchful eyes. I had a feeling they didn’t miss much—now or ever.
“I’m waiting to hear the story of why you don’t cut your hair.”
He sighed. “Dinner probably isn’t the time for it. It’s sad.”
“Is there ever going to be a good time for it?”
“I guess not.” He pushed his noodles around on his plate. They were good, but he didn’t seem to have any interest in the food. “You know I was a pediatric oncologist. I picked that specialty when I was young and dumb because I thought I could make a difference. When I was a kid, I had this best friend named Lucas who lived three houses down, and he died of kidney cancer when we were nine. It sucked. When I did my oncology rotation, something clicked for me. I was young and full of energy and most importantly, wildly arrogant. You have to be to succeed as a specialist.”
He took a few bites, lost in his thoughts. I ate quietly and let him wander until he was ready. “I was willing to take risks that older and more seasoned doctors wouldn’t. I pushed for experimental treatments that patients could only get at the elite hospitals in the country, but I wanted them here, in Oregon, for kids whose families couldn’t uproot everything to go to the Mayo Clinic or Johns-Hopkins. And it worked more than it didn’t. The board quit fighting me and started giving me free rein in trying these experimental protocols. It went to my head. I started to believe that I could work miracles.”
“Because you were working miracles?” I interjected softly.
He shook his head. “There are no miracles. Only science, and only statistical anomalies that broke my way a few more times than they should have. But I didn’t see it at the time. I was unstoppable, and we were sending kids into remission in cases where no one thought we could. Then we got Clara.”
He reached up to smooth a hank of hair with the mindless distraction of someone who had made the same gesture a thousand times. “Clara was ten when she came in with an osteosarcoma. Bone cancer,” he said, when I shot him a questioning look. “She was a tiny thing and already obsessed with gymnastics. She came to her first appointment in a leotard because the mass was in her hip and she said it would make it easier for us to examine it without having to show everyone her underwear every time.” He smiled. “She was a pistol. And gifted. Her mom told me that Clara had already been placed on her gym’s athlete development track because her natural talent was so raw that they could already see it.”
I knew how this story ended, how it had to have ended for him to go hide on a rural mountainside. But even if I wasn’t sitting in the place he’d escaped to, I would have known the outcome because it was carved into every line of his face.
“It was bad,” he said. “The conventional protocol was clear. Cut it out, then treat the area with radiation to kill anything that was left behind. But it would have meant taking enough of her hip that she would have to keep getting hip replacement surgeries for the rest of her life.”
“And no gymnastics.”
“No gymnastics. So I did an insane amount of research, convinced one of the most brilliant surgeons from the hospital where I did my residency to come and operate in a way that left the greatest amount of bone in place, and then put her in a clinical trial for a new immunotherapy treatment. I was convinced it would work. I could have taken a safer route that would have killed the cancer, but this was going to cure her and let her keep competing.” He pushed the noodles around his plate some more. “Have you ever known anyone with cancer?”
“No one close to me. One of my high school teachers died of breast cancer a couple of years ago, but no one in my family.”
“You’re lucky. Like wildly lucky, statistically. I’m glad you haven’t seen how ugly this disease is up close. It eats people up. That’s what it does. It eats away everything healthy and good inside of them, and it is so evil that it will do it even when winning means it kills its own host, and it dies. So it was my job to kill it first. That means my patients are miserable and so sick from the medicines I give them that sometimes they beg to die.”
He pushed his plate away and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a minute, the way I sometimes did when I got tension headaches. “Clara, she was terrified. She had this huge mop of curly brown hair, and when it started falling out, I found her crying in her room one day. She told me that the only two things that made her pretty were her gymnastics and her hair, and now she was losing both. So I told her hair was stupid anyway, and I would shave mine off until hers grew back. She said, ‘No way. One of us has to stay pretty,’ and she made me promise I wouldn’t cut mine until hers grew back, and that for every inch hers grew, I’d cut an inch off mine.”
“But hers never grew back,” I said, guessing the end of the story. I reached over and slipped my hand into his. There was nothing else to say.
“No. Because I was arrogant. Because I didn’t follow the protocol that could have saved her. Because I believed I could heal her and keep her competing. And now she’ll never do any of it.” He pulled his hand from mine and rose, scooping up a light jacket as he reached for the door. “I’m sorry. I need some air. Stay as long as you like, but I understand if you decide to leave.”
The door shut behind him, leaving me at the table with two half-eaten meals and a salad neither of us had managed to pick at. I cleared the dishes and put all the food away.
I sat on the sofa to wait for him, studying the sparse cabin again. He’d fled here for refuge, but it had become his prison. He was trapped on this mountain by his pain and his guilt.
I had no idea if and how that would ever change. All I knew for sure was that it needed to. But as long minutes stretched into hours with no sign of Jack and my texts unanswered, the less sure I was that it ever could.
Chapter 37
A little over two hours had ticked past on my watch. I was debating whether or not I should text Sean to ask how worried I should be that Jack still wasn’t back when my phone went off.
“Hey,” I said, snatching it up as soon as I saw Jack’s name on the caller ID. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I walked the main road so far that I was closer to Sean’s place than mine, so I called him, and he picked me up.”
It was a gut punch. I’d spent the whole time he was gone trying to figure out how to connect with him, and he’d spent it running away. Again. Like he had from so many of our conversations. “You’re with Sean now?”
“Yeah. Look, I’m going to crash with him tonight. I’ll be back in the morning, but the roads aren’t lighted up there, so go ahead and stay tonight. It’s not a great drive into town if you don’t know the road. Take my bed or the sofa, whatever you want. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
“Sure, great.” It was all I could get out before I hung up. I turned the phone off completely and dropped it in my purse before I stood and looked around the living room. I could fit on the sofa, but it would be tight. I wandered to Jack’s small bedroom. It was as stark as the rest of the house, a double bed with a plain navy comforter on it, bare walls, and a dresser with a small pile of change on top.
I retrieved an afghan from the living room and curled up on top of Jack’s comforter. I wanted to make sure he made it home in the morning, and then…
A tear rolled across my nose and dropped to the blanket. More were coming, and I knew it. But it hurt. It hurt that Jack had finally told me about the pain he’d been carrying with him for two years but didn’t trust me to share. He’d taken off literally at the first possible second. From his job. From his life.
And now, from me.
While we’d laughed and shared and teased all day, I’d felt a growing sense of need, a desire to know everything about the man whose kisses made me lose all sense of time and place only to find myself in his eyes again. I needed Jack in my life, and my brain had been trying to figure out how to make it work the whole time we were together.
None of that mattered.
Even if I convinced Jack to leave Featherton and bring his talents to San Francisco, I’d never have all of him. He’d bricked himself behind a wall of pain I couldn’t break down. Not by jokes and distraction, not by coming to meet him on his turf, and not even by sitting and listening and carrying the weight of his pain with him in the quiet of his home.
At first, I wasn’t even sure what I was crying for. Missed opportunities, maybe. But mostly for the tragic waste of it all, for the brilliant doctor I could see that he’d been and should be again. But he wouldn’t be. He was going to stay here, holed up on this mountainside, keeping in all the pain, but also locking away all of his gifts.
I cried it all out, waiting for sleep to overtake me, but it wouldn’t come. Instead, I ran through all of our conversations and every single touch, every kiss. Every look. Every word I’d fought to drag from him, then had hoarded and replayed over and over during the last two months.
As evening wore into the deepest part of the night, I admitted the hardest truth: I’d seen this pattern of running from the hard things before. In my mom. I’d watched it play out and wreak havoc on people who hadn’t deserved the pain. Like my dad. Like the many who had come after him. I hadn’t known how to fix it then, but I’d sworn never to make their mistake.
