Lost Cause

“You’re not a pretty sight,” the doctor added, scanning Gary’s face with interest. “But you’d be a dead man if you hadn’t worn a helmet.”

Funny thing. He almost hadn’t. He’d slung his leg over his Harley, picked up the helmet, hesitated, then shrugged and put it on. He wore it most of the time, but he’d been in the mood to toss it aside.

Lucky I didn’t, Gary thought, as the doctor left the room. Or maybe not.

Shock punched through the pain.

Goddamn. Had he been trying to kill himself?

He closed his eyes and saw again the road, unwinding before the narrow beam of his headlight. As always, he’d exulted in the power of the Harley between his legs, but it alone hadn’t been enough. He’d sought out this road, perhaps because it was carved from the face of a cliff. Sometimes, he just plain needed to be reckless, to toy with oblivion. Tonight had been one of those times.

Or had it been last night? He realized he had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. Hours? Days? With indifference, he dismissed his speculation and returned to his main preoccupation.

Speeding down the canyon road, he’d felt the pull of the darkness beyond the white strip of guardrail. He’d known it before; who didn’t have those fleeting thoughts: What would it feel like if I sailed off the road? Maybe fantasies like that were a brief surfacing of the subconscious awareness of danger.

But tonight… Tonight, it had been stronger than that. He’d wanted danger. Maybe he’d wanted to die.

Bleakly, he examined the possibility. Could you be suicidal without realizing it?

Yeah, he decided; you could. But he didn’t think he’d gone that far. Flirting with death was one thing, marrying her another. He didn’t feel ready to cash it in. But he also had a little trouble pinpointing what appeal living held.

Maybe his attitude wasn’t so good. He’d been calling his despair cynicism. Loneliness was his choice.

A choice that meant darkness, the seductress, called to him. Or was it ignoring him, and he was the one sidling closer?

Either way, lying in that hospital bed, he saw he did have a choice now. Let himself keep sidling, or figure out how other people made themselves happy and try some of it on for size.

He shifted in bed and had to go still until the pain eased back on the throttle. One leg hadn’t shifted at all, weighted down as it was with plaster.

Okay, he thought, with a flicker of humor: he wouldn’t be trying anything on for size for a while.

But once the cast was cut off and he could throw away the crutches he predicted in his future, he had to find a way to give his life some meaning, or another time he would toss aside that helmet.

The nurse came in and showed him how to give himself minishots of morphine, then went. Gary punched the button and felt a wave of relief that clouded his mind and made his eyes heavy.

As he drifted, he heard himself saying, Was that my name? Chauvin?

That’s right, someone said. Lucien Chauvin.

He’d always known that he’d once been Lucien, not Gary. When he was younger, he hadn’t understood how that could be or who the people he remembered were, but later he was told about the adoption.

Your sister, Suzanne Chauvin, hired me to find you, the other man said.

He heard himself again. This sister looking for me? Too little, too late. Don’t need her, don’t want a sister.

As the comfort of sleep rolled over him, Gary’s last sensation was surprise.

He’d lied.

THE VOICE ON THE PHONE was light and pleasant. “Ms. Chauvin, I’m calling from The Complete Family Adoption Agency. My name is Rebecca Wilson, and I’ve been given your file. I’d like to set up a home visit.”

Suzanne’s heartbeat did a hop, skip and jump. “Wow, that was fast!”

“Having second thoughts?”

“Not a one! I was just afraid months would go by. I’d love to have you come over.” But she’d need time to clean house first.

They settled on a day almost three weeks away. Plenty of time to organize every closet and cupboard the social worker wouldn’t look into anyway. Suzanne wasn’t that bad a housekeeper, but she wanted the house to shine when Rebecca Wilson came. If she didn’t impress her, the agency wouldn’t give her a child. She had to impress her! She just had to.

She’d start today. The sun had peeped out after a rainy week, so she would rake up the soggy, fallen leaves and then consider loading her temperamental lawn mower into the trunk of her car and taking it to the shop. Once again it had refused to start Sunday when she’d tried. Maybe, if she were really lucky, she’d get it back soon enough to mow one more time before the ground got too wet—and before the home visit.

Bursting with energy and ambition, she changed into scroungy gardening clothes and pulled up the garage door. She’d get the automatic opener replaced this week, just in case she had reason to open the door when Rebecca Wilson was here. She wouldn’t want to look as if she couldn’t afford to maintain her house, let alone take care of a child.

She stole a glance toward her neighbor’s before stepping outside with her rake and a box of plastic garbage sacks. She tried to work outdoors when Tom Stefanic wasn’t in his yard. Not that he wasn’t perfectly pleasant when they exchanged their occasional neighborly greetings, but, darn it, his lawn was smooth enough to be the 18th hole of the U.S. Open, his flower beds were edged with military precision, his driveway power-sprayed weekly. No moss grew on his roof, the leaves barely dared drop from his trees. In fact… She studied the two flowering cherries along the street in front of his house with suspicion. Neither bore a single leaf, even though her trees were still festooned with slimy dead leaves hanging like dirty, wet socks. She knew he had a blower. Did it vacuum, too? Would he have vacuumed his trees? she wondered incredulously.

But his garage door was shut, and she heard no sound from the backyard. Maybe he was gone today. Determined to put him out of her mind and pretend the contrast between their respective properties wasn’t painful, Suzanne breathed in a lungful of damp, earthy-smelling air.

She loved autumn almost as much as spring. The leaves had been spectacular, until the heavy rains the last couple of weeks had finished them off. There was something satisfying about tucking in flower beds, so to speak—trimming the dead stems of the perennials, pulling out last weeds, mulching. Partly she looked forward to a break from outside work, and partly she enjoyed anticipating the new growth that would poke from the dark earth in just a few months.

Would she have a child by then? A little boy or girl to crouch beside her as she worked? Or one old enough to actually help, even to mow?

She still wasn’t all that fixed on how old a child she preferred. Suzanne thought she’d like to adopt a girl, just because it might be easier as a single mom, but she hadn’t ruled out a boy if the agency had one who needed a home. Her sister, Carrie, had just married a man who had a six-year-old, and Suzanne would adopt Michael’s clone in a second if she could.

She worried that the agency would look with more favor on her if she’d made up her mind about what she wanted, but then sometimes she convinced herself she was more likely to be given a child sooner if she wasn’t too demanding about specifics. After all, if she were having a child the normal way, she couldn’t be, could she? When you got pregnant, you didn’t know if you would have a boy or girl, a towhead or a brunette, a child with a placid nature or one who couldn’t sit still. And you didn’t care; you just wanted a baby to love.

She’d turned thirty-two this summer, and she was beginning to think she would never have children. Of course she could have gone the route of finding donor sperm, but she didn’t feel that compelling a need to actually be pregnant. In fact, she liked the idea of adopting.

Carrie was right. Adopting a child who needed her would be Suzanne’s way of atoning for not being able to hold on to her baby sister and little brother when they were taken away after their parents’ deaths. What she couldn’t do for them, she could do for someone else.

Raking wet leaves, she smiled thinking about Carrie. She was so lucky to have found her. Okay, to have been able to afford to hire a P.I. to find her. And to have discovered that Carrie was living so near, right in Seattle! Not twenty miles from Suzanne’s home in Edmonds. They might have met by accident.

Wouldn’t that have been amazing, she marveled, not for the first time. They looked enough alike to have recognized each other if they’d come face to face.

Well, she would have known who Carrie was in a heartbeat. Carrie, who hadn’t been told by her adoptive parents that she was adopted, might have been more confused.

But they hadn’t met that way. Suzanne had gone seeking her, and found her just this past spring. With very few glitches, it seemed as if they’d known each other all their lives. Carrie had planned to live with Suzanne this year, while she went back to the University of Washington to get her teaching certificate. But in the end, she and Mark Kincaid, the P.I. who’d found her, had decided to marry in August, so she never had moved in.

Suzanne was rather sorry. She’d imagined them having the year together to make up for all the ones they’d missed, with her growing up with Uncle Miles and Aunt Marie and Carrie with her adoptive parents. But at least they weren’t far apart. They talked almost every day, and did the kind of things together that sisters did, like shopping and visiting art fairs. And Suzanne was glad that Carrie was marrying Mark.

As she did almost every day, Suzanne spared a thought for her little brother, although of course he wouldn’t be so little anymore. He was twenty-nine now. She hadn’t seen him since he was three years old. After Aunt Marie and Uncle Miles decided they could keep only one of the three orphaned children, a social worker had come to the house and taken Carrie—then Linette—and Lucien away. Carrie had been asleep, but Lucien… Standing in the middle of her front yard, Suzanne shuddered at the memory. Lucien had sobbed. Every time she thought of him, she saw his tear-wet face, framed in the car window as it pulled away from the curb.

And she remembered with guilt her own gratitude that she wasn’t being taken away.

When she hired him, Mark had found Lucien, too, but her brother didn’t want any contact with his sisters. Carrie had tried calling him, but he’d told her rather rudely that their overture was too little, too late.

Suzanne was trying to resign herself to the fact that she would never see him again, never be able to give him the photo album she’d prepared with pictures of their parents and of them growing up, never be able to explain how sorry she was that she couldn’t, somehow, have kept them all together, even though she’d been only six herself when their parents had died.

Suzanne knew that guilt was illogical; even if her mother had always said that, as the big sister, Suzanne should take care of her little sister and brother, she’d been far, far too young to influence even her own fate. But she couldn’t quite quell the nagging guilt anyway.