Danielle Steel: Miracle

Quinn had tried to make up to Jane for the long years when he'd been busy and absent, and thought he had in some ways, as best he could, during the year and a half they had shared after he had retired. But there was no way he could make it up to Alex. It was also noticeable to him that she had married a man who scarcely left home, except to go to the office. She had married a Swiss banker right after college. They had gone to Yale together, and married almost minutes after they graduated, thirteen years before. They had two boys, lived in Geneva, and Quinn had commented to Jane right from the first that it was Alex who told Horst what to do, and what she wanted. They were inseparable, and seemed happy, sedate, and secure, though uninspired and unexciting. Quinn found his son-in-law painfully boring. Alex had been careful not to fall into the same trap she thought her mother had. Instead, she had married a weak man, to do her bidding, as different as possible from her father. Horst rarely, if ever, traveled, and worked in the bank his grandfather had founded. He was a responsible young man, who loved his wife and sons, and had no great ambitions. Alex had known when she married him that she would never be sacrificed to his career or accomplishments or passions. To Quinn's practiced eye, Horst had none. He simply existed, which was what Alex had wanted.

Her sons were six and nine, two beautiful little blue-eyed towheads, just like their mother, and Quinn scarcely knew them. Jane had gone to Geneva frequently to visit them, and Alex had brought the boys to San Francisco once a year to visit her mother, but Quinn had rarely been around when they came to town, and he always seemed to be in some other part of the world when Jane went to Geneva. Often, when Quinn was away, Jane took the opportunity to visit her daughter. Looking at it in retrospect, it was easy for him to see why Alex was angry. And she had no intention of letting her father make up for it, or atone for his sins, both real and perceived. As far as Alex was concerned, she had lost not one, but two parents. Quinn had died in her heart years before she had lost her mother. And the trauma of losing her brother when she was eleven years old had remained an open wound for her. It made her particularly protective of her children, despite her husband's pleas to give them just a little more freedom. Alex was convinced she knew better. And more than anything, because of her brother's accident, she hated sailboats.

Jane had never been fond of them either, but Quinn suspected she would have been happy for him, about the new boat he was building. Jane had always wanted him to be happy, to fulfill his dreams, and to achieve everything he had wanted to accomplish. Alex no longer cared what he did. As a result, Quinn was a man with no family, no ties to anyone, he was as solitary as he looked as he stepped out of the cab on Vallejo Street in a cul-de-sac filled with trees that all but obscured the house he and Jane had lived in for their entire marriage, and that Alex had grown up in. He had wanted to buy a bigger one as his fortune grew, but Jane had always insisted she loved this one. And Quinn had too while Jane was still there to come home to. Now, as he turned his key in the lock of the big rambling English-style house, he dreaded the silence.

As he stepped into the front hall and set his bags down, he could hear a clock ticking in the living room. The sound cut through him like a knife, and felt like a heartbeat. He had never felt as alone or as empty. There were no flowers anywhere, the shades and curtains were drawn, and the dark paneling in the living room, which had once glinted and shone, now made the room look tomblike. He couldn't remember the house ever seeming as dark or as depressing. And without thinking, he went to the windows, pulled back the curtains, opened the shades, and stood staring into the garden. The trees and hedges were still green, but there were no flowers, and it was a dark November afternoon.

The fog had come in while they were landing, and it was swirling through the city. The sky looked as gray as he felt, as he picked up his bags and walked upstairs. And when he saw their bedroom, it took his breath away. She had died in his arms in their bed five months before, and he felt a physical pain as he stared at the bed, and then saw her smiling in a photograph next to it. He sat down on the edge of the bed, with tears rolling down his cheeks. It had been a mistake to come home, he knew, but there was no one else to sort through her things, and his own, if he was to sell the house in the spring. And he knew there was work to do on the house. Everything was in good order and worked well, but thirty-seven years in one house was almost a lifetime. He felt he had to organize the work and sort through their things himself, no matter how painful. Some of the rooms needed a coat of paint, and he wanted to consult a realtor to find out what he had to do to sell it.

It was a long hard first night home for him, and he longed for Jane with such loneliness and agony that at times he wanted to run into the street in his pajamas, just to flee it. There was no escaping. He knew he had to face it. There was no reprieve. His life without her was his sentence. Life without parole. He knew his solitude was forever, and felt he deserved it. And that night, he had the same dream he had experienced frequently before he left on his travels. It was a dream in which Jane came to him, held out her arms, pleading with him, and she was crying. At first the words were indistinct, but even without them, the look on her face tore his heart out. And then the words would come clear to him, and they were always the same, with subtle variations. She would beg him not to leave her, not to abandon her again. And each time he had the dream, he promised her he wouldn't. And then like a nightmare, not a dream, he would see himself pick up a suitcase and leave anyway, and all he could see after that was her face, crying after he left her. He could still hear her sobs when he woke up, at whatever hour, and her words would echo in his head for hours afterward, “Quinn, don't leave me… Quinn, please …” her arms outstretched, her eyes devastated. And whenever he woke from that dream, he felt panicked. How could he have done that to her? Why had he left so often? Why had his own pursuits always seemed so important? Why didn't he listen?

The dream entirely dismissed the reasons for his trips, and swept away the empire he was building. And all that was left afterward, in the dream, was his own crushing sense of guilt and failure. He hated the dream, and the fact that it had returned almost immediately, as soon as he came back to San Francisco. There was something so tragic about Jane in the dream, although in real life she had been tenderly empathetic and understanding, and had never reproached or implored him the way the woman in the dream did. Quinn hated the dream, and in some ways, he knew that guilt was the chain that bound him to her, as much as love had. But the fact that the dream had returned with a vengeance the moment he got home did not cheer him. It was a burden he knew he had to live with.

The next morning, he showered, shaved, dressed, swallowed a cup of coffee, rolled up his sleeves, and began digging into closets. He was still trying to get the dream out of his head, and felt haunted by it. He began with the easy closets downstairs, where Alex had stored all the mementos of her childhood. Jane had been urging her to take them for years, but she preferred to leave them with her parents. There were ribbons and trophies from her horseback riding days, and a few for tennis tournaments she'd been in, in college. Endless photographs of her friends, most of whom Quinn didn't recognize, from kindergarten to college. There were tapes, and home movies, a few battered old dolls, and a teddy bear, and finally a box at the back that he wrestled toward him. It was sealed and he used a penknife to open it, and when he did, he found that it was full of photographs of Douglas, many with Alex. The two of them laughing and smiling and cavorting, several of them skiing, and a whole pack of letters from him, when he had gone to camp in Maine, and she had gone to one in California, closer to home. And as though directed to by angels' wings, Quinn found himself opening a brittle, yellowed old letter, and he saw with a start that the date was the one on which Doug had died. He had written to Alex only that morning, hours before the sailing accident that had ended his life at thirteen. Tears streamed down Quinn's face as he read it, and suddenly he realized what they had all felt afterward, what he hadn't allowed himself to feel. In spite of the fact that he had loved his son, he had kept him at a distance. Quinn had barely allowed himself to know him.