"How about some pasta. I've kept the marinara sauce hot, and I can throw together a salad."
"That would be fine."
The basement guest room was as expected. It had two high windows that looked into brick-lined window wells. The air had a damp, cool feeling like a root cellar. On the plus side, it was taste-fully decorated in varying shades of green. The furniture included a king-size bed, a desk, a club chair with a reading lamp, and a flat-screen TV. There was also a bathroom en suite.
While Jack pulled his clothes out of his carry-on bag and hung what he could in the closet, Christina threw herself into the easy chair. With her arms flat on the chair's arms and her feet sticking straight out into space, she regarded Jack critically. "You're skinnier than my dad."
"Is that good or bad?" Jack questioned. He put his basketball sneakers on the floor of the closet and carried his shaving kit into the bathroom. He liked the fact that there was a generous shower stall rather than a generic bathtub.
"How old were your daughters when they crashed in the plane?"
Although Jack should have expected Christina to return to the sensitive issue after his inadequate response, such a direct, personal question snapped him back to that disturbing sequence when he'd said good-bye to his wife and daughters at the Chicago airport. It had been fifteen years ago almost to the day that he'd driven his family to the airport to take a commuter flight back to Champaign while a band of rogue thunderstorms and tornadoes were approaching through the vast midwestern plains. He'd been in Chicago, retraining in forensic pathology after a health-care giant had gobbled up his ophthalmology practice back in the heyday of managed care's expansion. Jack had been trying to get Marilyn to agree to move to Chicago, but she had rightfully refused for the children's sake.
The passage of time had not numbed Jack's memory of the last good-bye. As if it had been yesterday, he could see in his mind's eye, watching through the glass partition, Marilyn, Tamara, and Lydia descend the ramp behind the departure gate. As they reached the maw of the Jetway only Marilyn turned to wave. Tamara and Lydia, with their youthful enthusiasm, had just disappeared.
As Jack was to learn later than night, only fifteen or twenty minutes after takeoff the small prop plane had plowed full-speed into the fertile black earth of the prairie. It had been struck by lightning and caught in a profound wind shear. All aboard had been killed in the blink of an eye.
"Are you okay, Uncle Jack?" Christina asked. For several beats, Jack had been motionless as if caught in a freeze-frame.
"I'm fine," Jack said with palpable relief. He'd just relived the moment in his life that he strenuously avoided thinking about, and yet the episode concluded without the usual visceral sequelae. He didn't feel as if his stomach had flip-flopped, his heart had skipped a beat, or as if a heavy, smothering blanket had descended over him. It was a sad story, but he felt enough distance that it could have involved someone else. Perhaps Alexis was right. As she'd said on the phone: Perhaps he'd processed his grief and moved on.
"How old were they?"
"The same as you and Meghan."
"That's awful."
"It was," Jack agreed.
Back up in the kitchen/great room, Alexis had Jack sit at the family table while she finished boiling the pasta. The girls had all retreated upstairs to get ready for bed. It was a school night. Jack's eyes ranged around the room. It was an expansive yet cozy room befitting the house's external appearance. The walls were a light, sunburst yellow. A deep, comfortable sofa upholstered in a bright green floral fabric and covered with cushions faced a fireplace surmounted by the largest flat-screen television Craig had ever seen. The curtains were the same print as the sofa and framed a bow window looking out on a terrace. Beyond the terrace was a swimming pool. Beyond that was lawn with what looked like a gazebo in the gloom.
"It's a beautiful house," Jack commented. In his mind it was more than beautiful. Compared to how he had been living over the last ten years, it was the epitome of luxury.
"Craig has been a wonderful provider, as I said on the phone," Alexis said as she poured the pasta into a colander.
"Where is he?" Jack questioned. No one had mentioned his name. Jack assumed he was out, perhaps on an emergency medical call or possibly conferring with his attorney.
"He's asleep in the upstairs guest room," Alexis said. "As I implied, we're not sleeping together and haven't been since he left to live in town."
"I thought maybe he was out on a medical call."
"No, he's free of that for the week. He's hired someone to cover his practice during the trial. His attorney recommended it. I think it's a good thing. As dedicated a doctor as he is, I wouldn't want him for my doctor right now. He's too preoccupied."
"I'm impressed he's asleep. If it were me, I'd be up, pacing the house."
"He's had a little help," Alexis admitted. She brought the pasta and salad over to the table and put it in front of Jack. "It was a hard day with the opening of the trial, and he's understandably depressed. I'm afraid he's been self-prescribing sleeping pills to deal with insomnia. There's also been some alcohoclass="underline" scotch, to be exact, but not enough to worry about, I don't think. At least not yet."
Jack nodded but didn't say anything.
"What would you like to drink? I'm going to have a glass of wine."
"A little wine would be nice," Jack said. He knew more than he wanted to about depression. After the plane crash, he'd fought it for years.
Alexis brought over an opened bottle of white wine and two glasses.
"Did Craig know I was coming?" Jack asked. It was a question he should have asked before he'd agreed to come.
"Of course he knew," Alexis said while pouring the wine. "In fact, I discussed the idea with him before I called you."
"And he was okay with it?"
"He questioned the rationale but said he'd leave the decision up to me. To be truthful, he wasn't excited about it when we discussed it, and he said something that surprised me. He said he thought you disliked him. You never said anything like that, did you?"
"Absolutely not," Jack said. As he began to eat, he wondered how far to take the conversation. The truth of the matter was that back when Alexis and Craig had gotten engaged, he didn't think Craig was appropriate for Alexis. But Jack had never said anything, mainly because he thought, without knowing exactly why, that doctors in general were a poor risk, marriagewise. It was only relatively recently that Jack's tortured road to recovery had given him the insight to explain his earlier gut reaction – namely, that the whole medical training process either selected narcissistic people or created them, or some combination of the two. In Jack's estimation, Craig was the poster boy in this regard. His single-minded dedication to medicine almost guaranteed that his own personal relationships would be correspondingly shallow, a kind of psychological zero-sum game.
"I told him you didn't feel that way," Alexis continued. "In fact, I said you admired him because you told me that once. Am I remembering correctly?"