Danielle Steel: The House on Hope Street

Carole went to pick the girls up from school shortly afterwards, and as soon as they walked in, Jamie gave them the news his mother had shared with him. “Bill doesn't want to see us anymore.”

“Good,” Megan said loudly, and then looked faintly guilty as she glanced at her mother. She could see that her mother looked very unhappy.

“That's not a nice thing to say, Meg,” Liz said quietly, and she looked so sad that Megan said she was sorry.

“I just don't like him,” she added.

“You hardly know him,” Liz said and Megan nodded, and the girls went upstairs to do their homework. They only had three more weeks of school before Christmas vacation. But there was no holiday spirit in the house, and it broke Liz's heart when she brought out the decorations.

She decided not to put lights on the outside of the house this year, or in the trees the way Jack always did. They just put up decorations inside the house, and two weeks before Christmas she took them to buy a Christmas tree, but no one's heart was in it.

She hadn't heard from Bill in two weeks by then, and she suspected she never would again. He had made his decision, and intended to stick by it. And she had finally admitted it to Victoria, who was devastated for her, and offered to take her to lunch, but Liz didn't even want to see her.

And as Christmas approached, the entire house seemed to be weighed down, they were all sinking slowly into the mire of depression. It was nearly a year since Jack had died, and it suddenly felt as though it were yesterday. The children talked about him constantly. And Liz felt as though she were ricocheting between her agony over losing Bill and her memories of her late husband. She stayed in her room most of the time, and they didn't entertain friends. She turned down all the invitations to Christmas parties. She even decided not to have her mother come out, and told her she wanted to be alone with her children, and although her mother had sounded hurt, she said she understood it. And she invited another widowed friend to come and stay with her.

The only things Liz and the children did to acknowledge the holiday were hang ornaments on the tree, and bake Christmas cookies, and all she did was pray that the holiday would soon be over.

She thought about taking them to ski between Christmas and New Year's, but they weren't in the mood for that, and they decided to stay home, as they all sank slowly into the quicksand of painful memories that engulfed them.

She was sitting at her desk in the office the week before Christmas when a client called, sounding breathless, and asked if she could come in to see her. Liz had some free time that afternoon, and made an appointment for her. And what she heard when the woman came in didn't please her. The woman's husband was endangering her six-year-old son, he had taken him on the back of his motorcycle on the freeway without a helmet, flew in a helicopter with him, although he'd only just gotten his license, and let him ride his bike to school, in heavy traffic, and again without a helmet. The client wanted Liz to take visitation away from him, and to further make the point, she wanted to go after his business. But as soon as she said it, it had a familiar ring to Liz, and she shook her head firmly.

“We're not going to do that to him,” Liz said without a moment's hesitation. “I'll ask for mediation, and we'll get them to work out a list of things that he can't do with your son. But we're not going to take him to court, and we're not going after his business.” She said it so vehemently that the client looked at her with suspicion.

“Why not?” For a minute, she thought her husband had gotten to her.

“Because the price is too high,” Liz said simply. She had lost ten pounds in the last three weeks, and she looked tired and pale, but she looked so definite and so grim that the woman listened. “I had a case like that once before, not involving a child. But the only way to get the man's attention was by freezing his assets and his business.”

“Did it work?” the woman asked hopefully, it sounded good to her, but not to Liz.

“No, it didn't. He killed his wife, himself, and my husband last year on Christmas Day. If you hit your husband too hard, he may hurt you or your son. And I'm not going to be a party to that.” There was a long silence between them as the woman nodded.

“I'm sorry.”

“Thank you, so am I. Now here's what we are going to do.” They made a list of dangerous activities that he wouldn't be allowed to do, and Liz called the court-appointed mediator while the woman sat there. But the mediation office was swamped and the first appointment they could give her was on January eleventh. It was three and a half weeks away, and to help the situation along, Liz agreed to write him a letter of warning in the meantime.

“It won't do anything,” the woman looked at Liz bleakly. “If you don't hit him over the head with a hammer, he won't get it.”

“If we do, maybe you or your son will,” Liz repeated. “And I know you don't want that.” It was an impressive threat, and the woman left Liz's office feeling helpless. But at least Liz felt she hadn't jeopardized her client or her son when she went home that night, and the kids finally seemed in better spirits.

It had been the last day of school that day, and Carole had promised to take the four younger ones skating. Peter and his new girlfriend had a date for dinner and a movie. And Liz was looking forward to a quiet evening alone when the phone rang at nine-thirty. The voice on the other end was hysterical, and it took her a minute to recognize it. It was the client she had seen that afternoon, for whom she had scheduled the mediation. And to give her a sense of security, she had given her her home phone number. The woman's name was Helene, and she sounded nearly incoherent.

“Helene, calm down, and try to tell me what happened.” It took more than five minutes to understand the story clearly. Her husband, Scott, had taken their son Justin joyriding on the hills in San Francisco on his motorcycle. She wasn't sure if he'd been drunk or not, but it was a possibility, and the child hadn't been wearing a helmet, when they were hit by a truck. Both of Justin's legs were broken, and he had a head injury, although by some miracle he had landed in a patch of grass outside someone's house. He was in pediatric intensive care at Children's Hospital in San Francisco, and his father was in critical condition and still in a coma. The police had come to her house to tell her. The only comforting part of the story for Liz was that even if she'd agreed to take the son of a bitch to court, they wouldn't have gotten there yet, and it wouldn't have changed what had just happened. It wasn't her fault, but whether or not it was, Helene's little boy was in grave danger.

“Where are you now?” Liz asked as she stood up and reached for her handbag still sitting on the end of her bed.

“I'm at the ICU at Children's.”

“Is someone with you?”

“No, I'm alone,” she sobbed into the phone. She was from New York, and wanted to move back, as soon as her husband would agree to let her.

“I'll be there in twenty minutes,” Liz said, and hung up on her without waiting for an answer. She grabbed her coat on her way out the front door, glad that she had decided not to go skating with her children. She'd been feeling guilty about it, but she'd been so tired and depressed that she had opted not to.

She parked her car outside the hospital eighteen minutes later, and when she got to the ICU, she found Helene sobbing in the arms of a nurse. They had just taken Justin upstairs to put pins in both his legs, but the nurse said he was conscious and the head injury was nothing more than a bad concussion. The child, and his mother, had been very lucky. But sitting in the hospital with her, as they waited, reminded her of Bill again. She wondered how he was, and what he was doing. She knew there was no point thinking about it anymore, it had been more than three weeks now, and she knew he wasn't going to call her. He had made up his mind, and stuck to it. Bill was that kind of person. And the terrors she and her family represented were just too much for him.