The Perfect Mum

One who wasn’t scary, but could be. At a little over six foot, he wasn’t unusually tall, but he was broad. Big shouldered, with strong legs and powerful arms and neck. His face was blunt featured, even crude, but somehow pleasing, the only reason Kathleen didn’t slam the door in a panic.

He was the kind of man she couldn’t picture in a well-cut suit, the antithesis of her handsome, successful ex-husband. This man had to work with his hands.

“May I help you?” she asked finally.

“I’m Logan Carr.” He looked expectant, adding when she didn’t respond, “I’m the cabinetmaker.”

“Oh, no!” She’d made an appointment with him so that he could give her a bid. She, of course, had completely forgotten.

Somehow this was the last straw. One more thing to have gone wrong, one more thing to think about when she couldn’t. Suddenly he was a blur, and she was humiliated to realize she was crying.

He stepped forward, taking advantage of her nerveless hand to come uninvited into her house and to close the door behind him. The next thing she knew, she was engulfed in powerful arms and a flannel shirt, her wet cheek pressed to his chest.

And did she, dignified, gracious but reserved, wrench free and demand he leave?

No. She buried her face in that comforting flannel and let herself sob.

Dear Reader,

Kathleen Monroe is at the heart of this trilogy. After all, she’s the one who bought the old brick house in Seattle where three woman live as they embark on new phases of their lives.

As a writer, I love nothing more than exploring how people react to the greatest stresses I can throw at them. You notice I say “people,” not “characters.” That’s because I do try to create people as real as you and me. Sometimes they’ve done ignoble things but are capable of growth and even sacrifice for their loved ones. I’d like to believe almost everyone can and will do the same.

Which makes me a romantic, I fear! So, sure, I’m writing about an angry teenager who is starving herself to death, a woman described by one of her roommates as a “princess” because she is beautiful, charming and spoiled, and a homely cabinetmaker who knows in his heart he isn’t good enough for the “princess.” Doesn’t sound like a match made in heaven, does it?

But, oh, just wait…. If I do say so myself, Logan Carr is one of my all-time most appealing heroes. Question is, can Kathleen measure up?

Good reading!

Janice Kay Johnson

The Perfect Mum

Janice Kay Johnson

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

A CHILD SCREAMED, a piercing note of terror that seemed to shiver the window glass.

Kathleen dropped her coffee mug and shot to her feet, tripping over her bathrobe. Even as she raced for the kitchen doorway, heart doing sickening things in her chest, she thought, Was that Emma? Not Ginny, surely. Even her giggles were soft!

The scream became a gurgle, a sobbed, “Auntie Kath! Auntie Kath!” and Kathleen knew. Ginny was terrified because she’d found…

Emma. Something was wrong with Emma.

Hiking her robe above her knees, she leaped up the stairs two at a time. “Ginny! What’s wrong?”

Their cat hurtled down the stairs, ricocheting off Kathleen’s shin before vanishing below. Wild-eyed and wearing nothing but a sacky T-shirt, Jo emerged from her bedroom, the first at the head of the stairs. One of Kathleen’s adult roommates who helped pay the rent, Jo was a graduate student and didn’t have to get up as early as the others this semester.

“What is it?”

Kathleen didn’t answer.

Six-year-old Ginny, the timid mouse in their household, darted from the bathroom. Hiccuping with sobs, she snatched Kathleen’s hand.

“Auntie Kath! It’s Emma!”

A whimper escaped Kathleen’s throat when she reached the bathroom. Her daughter lay unconscious on the floor, blood matting her hair.

“Emma! Oh, God. Emma.” She fell to her knees, barely conscious of Jo and Ginny crowding behind her.

A faint pulse fluttered in Emma’s throat, but her face was waxen and still.

“She’s so cold.” Gripping her daughter’s hand, Kathleen swiveled on her knees. “What happened, Ginny? Did you see?”

Tears running down her face, Ginny nodded. “She…she was looking at…at herself in the mirror.” Another sob shook her small body. “Her eyes rolled back, and she fell over! Auntie Kath! Is she dead?”

Even in her fear, Kathleen spared a moment to shake her head. Ginny had lost her dad to cancer a year ago. Death must often be on her mind.

“No, Ginny. I think Emma fainted. You know she hasn’t been eating enough.” Understatement, she thought grimly. In fact, sixteen-year-old Emma had been anorexic for the past year, and this spring had managed to stay barely above eighty pounds. An ounce below, she’d been warned, and she was going into residential treatment. “She must have hit her head on the tub.”

Jo, bless her, laid her hands on Ginny’s shoulders and gently steered her out of the bathroom. “I’ll call 911,” she said briskly. “Don’t try to move her, Kathleen.”

“I won’t.” Her daughter’s hand was icy in hers. “Hurry, Jo. Oh, God, please hurry.”

The wait seemed forever, although Jo must have been back in no more than a minute or two. She was still pulling a sweatshirt over her head.

“I’ll stay with her. Go get dressed, Kathleen. You’ll want to go to the hospital with her.”

Dazed, Kathleen looked up. “Dressed?”

“Hurry.” Her dark-haired roommate—and sister-in-law to be—crouched beside her. “You’ll be okay, Emma,” she said softly, her hand delicately stroking Emma’s cold cheek.

Yes. She had to get dressed. Kathleen stumbled to her feet and backed out of the bathroom, her gaze fixed on Emma’s white, gaunt face. She did look dead. And why not? She’d been dying for months, killing herself with her refusal to eat.

Kathleen bumped into the wall and turned, blindly heading toward her bedroom. Her fault. This was her fault.

She should have seen it coming, checked Emma into treatment. Her face crumpled. Why hadn’t she? Because she’d sincerely thought Emma was recovering? Or because she didn’t want to believe she couldn’t handle her own child’s problems?

In her bedroom, she grabbed clothes from her dresser and scrambled into them without caring what she put on. Not bothering with socks, she shoved her feet into Swedish clogs, yanked a hairbrush through her hair and ran back to the bathroom.

Jo looked up. “Her lashes just fluttered. I think she may be regaining consciousness. I sent Ginny for an ice pack from the freezer.”

“Where are they?” Kathleen asked desperately, even as she heard a distant wail.

Jo rose. “I’ll let them in.” She gave Kathleen a quick hug. “She’ll be all right, Kathleen. Just hold on.”

The EMTs were actually coming up the stairs when Emma’s eyes opened. She stared blankly up. In a slurred voice, she asked, “What happened?”

“You collapsed. And hit your head.”

Slow and heavy, Emma whispered, “I was…a…little…dizzy.” Her lids sank shut.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Kathleen whispered, feeling again how icy her daughter’s hand was. “You’ll be fine.”

For the first time, she knew she was lying.

KATHLEEN PACED THE SMALL waiting room, too scared to sit down or to pretend to read a Good Housekeeping or Sports Illustrated magazine, as a couple of other people were doing. They watched her surreptitiously, and she saw pity along with kindness in their eyes.

Looking as if she’d been running, Jo appeared in the doorway, Ginny clinging to her side. “How is she?”

“I don’t know!” Kathleen wailed. “They’re taking X rays.”

Jo opened her arms and Kathleen fell into them, marveling at how natural it felt even though she’d never been comfortable with casual hugs or physical intimacy. It was a moment before she felt movement down by her thigh and remembered that poor Ginny was here, too.

Face wet, she pulled back and said quietly, “You didn’t put Ginny on the school bus?”

“How could I? She was too upset. Here, Hummingbird.” Jo hoisted the child onto a chair. “Your mom is coming.”

“You called Helen?”

Jo looked at Kathleen as if she were nuts. “Well, of course I did! You don’t think she’d want to know?”

“Well, I suppose…” Kathleen said uncertainly.

This was new to her, having this oddly assorted family. After leaving her husband, she and Emma had lived for a few months in an apartment, before she decided the arrangement wasn’t temporary and they needed a real home. Of course they could have moved in with her father, but she’d been glad to leave her parents’ house in the first place, and wasn’t about to go back at her age. With Seattle real estate prices and her own lack of job skills, she couldn’t afford a mortgage on her own. So she’d advertised for roommates.

She had been amazingly lucky. Kathleen had had her doubts about the wisdom of taking on Helen and small, sad Ginny. Helen was engulfed in grief and Ginny was so withdrawn, Jo admitted to thinking of her as a ghost, drifting insubstantially around the house. The truth was, Kathleen had felt sorry for Helen and offered her a room out of pity, not common sense. Sad though Helen still was, she had become a good friend.

In her late twenties, Jo had seemed like a better choice. Unencumbered with children, she’d gotten tired of being an “acting” librarian and decided to go back to school to get her master’s degree so she could be the real thing. She’d seemed to be pleasant, private and quietly ambitious. Better yet, she had turned out to have some construction skills and had been a big help in remodeling first the upstairs and then the downstairs bathrooms in the old house in the Ravenna district.

She had also become engaged in short order to Kathleen’s brother, Ryan.

Now, clinging to her hand, Kathleen was intensely grateful that they’d decided to put off the wedding until summer to give his kids time to adjust to the idea of having a stepmom. After all, Melissa and Tyler had suffered enough trauma when their mom decided over Christmas vacation that she couldn’t keep them and had sent them to live with Ryan.

Kathleen was dreading having to find a new roommate who would come close to measuring up to Jo.

Especially since the three women and two kids had really come to feel like family in such a short time. They depended on each other. How could they replace one member of their household as if she was…was a washing machine that had quit?

“I left a message for Ryan, too,” Jo told her. “I don’t know when he’ll get it.”

“Something’s wrong,” Kathleen decided. “They’d have come back for me if it wasn’t.” She pressed her fingers to her mouth. “I should go ask. I’m so scared, Jo.”

“I know.” Her roommate gave her another hug. “But she was already talking to you on the way over, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, but her eyes looked funny. And her voice…” Kathleen had to stop, then try again with quiet desperation. “Her voice was slurred. As if she was drunk.”

“She did hit her head,” Jo reminded her.

“Yes, but…”

“Mrs. Monroe?”

Kathleen whirled.

A dark-haired, plump woman in a white lab coat, stethoscope around her neck, stood in the waiting room doorway.

Kathleen’s heart drummed in her ears. “Yes?”

“I’m Dr. Weaver. Emma wants to see you, but I’d like to speak to you first.”

Kathleen nodded dumbly and followed her, leaving Jo and Ginny in the waiting room.

Dr. Weaver stopped in the wide corridor where they were alone, and said quietly, “Emma tells me she’s been in counseling for her eating disorder.”

“For the past year.” Kathleen told the doctor Emma’s history, the name of her therapist and internist.

“Ah.” Dr. Weaver’s face was compassionate. “Well, I suspect she’s been conning them somehow. She weighs seventy-seven pounds.” The doctor talked about electrolytes, liver and kidney function and the danger of heart damage, concluding, “Emma needs to be in a controlled, residential setting where her food intake is monitored. She should gain as much as ten pounds before she can safely be discharged.”

Kathleen seemed able to do little but nod. The lump in her throat made talking difficult, but she said, “We’ve discussed putting her in a residential program, but she seemed…” She bit her lip, breathed deeply. Don’t cry. A semblance of control regained, she said simply, “I kept telling myself that she was doing better.”

The doctor nodded. “People with eating disorders are some of the best liars and manipulators in the world. They’re a little like drug addicts. They’ll do anything to protect their habits.”

“Has she suffered permanent damage?”

“We’ll need to run further tests to have a better sense of where she is. I think she can recover. Her youth is in her favor. The odds of complete recovery diminish the longer someone with her problem goes without effective treatment. You did the right thing getting her into counseling so soon.”

“For what good it’s done,” Kathleen said bitterly.

The doctor gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. “Unfortunately, resisting is also part of the process. Teenagers with this problem don’t listen to you or a counselor and say, ‘Oh! I see the light.’ They kick and scream and dig the trenches deeper. That’s what she’s been doing. It doesn’t mean she hasn’t been hearing more than she is willing, yet, to accept.”

Kathleen nodded again, teeth worrying her lower lip. “Does she have a concussion?”

“Certainly a mild one. This may be good for her, Mrs. Monroe. A wake-up call even she can’t ignore.”

Kathleen had to laugh, if without much humor. “Oh, I don’t know. Emma can ignore quite a lot.”

They agreed that Emma should be checked into the hospital for the night, giving Kathleen time to make arrangements for her to enter a treatment program for eating disorders. Fortunately, Emma’s counselor and internist were associated with the program Kathleen had chosen—and hoped never to have to use.

She went out to tell Jo the news and found Helen, her other roommate, there as well. Dressed for work in brown slacks and a cream silk blouse, a rose and brown and rust scarf artfully knotted around her throat, she looked far from the timid and tired woman she had been when she came to look at the house seven months ago.

“Kathleen! Is she all right?”

They all crowded around while Kathleen told them what she’d learned. “I’ll need to make some calls, but first I’m going to see Emma. They won’t let anyone else in,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Ginny slipped behind her mother. Her expression anxious, Helen said, “Oh, dear. Ginny isn’t convinced Emma will be okay.”

“I’ll ask,” Kathleen promised. “Maybe they’d let Ginny pop in just for a minute.”

Emma lay in a curtained cubicle, a couple of blankets covering her up to her chin. For a moment, Kathleen stood unseen, and her heart seemed to stop. Lying like this, laid out on her back, eyes closed, Emma could have been dead. Her face, once piquant and a little chubby, was marble pale and gaunt. Not the slightest healthy color flushed her cheeks. Even her lips were bluish.

How did I not see how near death she was? Kathleen asked herself in silent despair. How could I have kept pretending?

Easily, she knew. Oh, how easily, because the alternative was too difficult, too painful.

The curtains rattled when she stepped forward and Emma’s eyes, huge in her thin face, opened. “Mom,” she croaked.

Kathleen pinned on a smile. “Sweetie, you scared us.”

“I’m sorry. I must have slipped or something. Maybe I spilled some water.”

The floor had been bone-dry when Kathleen sat at her daughter’s side. “Maybe,” she said, smoothing hair from Emma’s forehead. Her hair was brittle and colorless, too, a ghost of its former rich gold threaded with gilt and amber and sunlight.

“Can I go home now?”

Here came the hard part.

Kathleen shook her head. “Dr. Weaver wants to check you into the hospital for the night. You do have a concussion, you know.”

“But I’m fine!” Emma struggled to sit up. “If they’re worried about me passing out or something, you can watch me, can’t you? Or Ginny? She always follows me around anyway.”

“It’s not so bad here.” Kathleen hesitated, but didn’t have a chance to continue.

“Make them take this out!” Emma brandished her hand, in which an IV needle had been stuck and taped down. In agitation, she exclaimed, “There’s sugar or something in that! I’d already had breakfast, and now they’re, like, pumping all these calories into me! I’ll have to diet for weeks to make up for it!”

Diet? The idea would have been laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic and even grotesque. How could she cut any more? She barely ate a few leaves of lettuce, non-fat Jell-O and unsweetened herb tea now.

“Honey…”

“I’ll take it out myself!” Emma began clawing at the tape.

“Stop!” Kathleen grabbed her wrist and wrenched her hand away, surprised at frail Emma’s strength. Holding her arm down, she said, “You collapsed because you’ve starved yourself. You will not take this IV out!”

“That’s not true!” Emma glared at her. “You know I’ve been eating. You see me.”

Near tears, Kathleen shook her head. “No. I don’t. You don’t eat enough to keep a…a mouse alive. You’ve been doing your best to kill yourself, but I won’t let you. You’re not coming home. You’re spending the night in the hospital, and tomorrow you’re going into residential treatment.”

Screaming in rage, Emma tore her hand from Kathleen’s grip. “You promised!” she yelled. “You said if I stayed above eighty pounds, I didn’t have to go! You’re a liar, liar, liar!”

Kathleen drew a shuddering breath in the face of her daughter’s vitriol. “I’m not the liar. Dr. Weaver says you don’t weigh anywhere near eighty pounds. You’ve been tricking us somehow. But you knew the consequences, Emma. You’re not getting better. You’re getting worse.”

“I hate you!”

“I love you,” Kathleen said, eyes burning, and turned to leave.

Emma threw herself onto her side, drew her knees up and began to sob.

Kathleen’s heart shattered into a million pieces. She wanted, as she’d never wanted anything in her life, to say, All right, you can come home, if you promise to eat. She wanted to see incredulity and hope and gratitude light her daughter’s face, as if her mother could still do and be anything and everything to her. Of course she’d promise.

And then she would lie and scheme to keep starving. She would exercise in the middle of the night to burn off calories she’d been forced to swallow, she’d take laxatives, she’d hide food in her cheek and then spit it out.

She would die, if she had her way.

Paralyzed, hurting unbearably, Kathleen didn’t turn around.

This was harder, even, than leaving Ian, harder than facing her own inability to provide a decent livelihood, harder than facing the fact that she, too, was responsible for Emma’s self-hatred. But if she truly loved her daughter, she had to be firm now.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pushed aside the curtains and fled.

In the tiny, antiseptic rest room open to family members, Kathleen locked the door, sat on the toilet and cried until her stomach hurt and she’d run out of tears. The sight of her face in the mirror should have stirred horror, but she stared almost indifferently at the puffy-faced woman gazing dully back. She did splash cold water on her face and brush her hair before facing the world again.

At the nurse’s station, she stopped. “I’m Emma Monroe’s mother.”

Quick compassion showed in the other woman’s expression. “Are you all right?”

Kathleen nodded, although they both knew she wasn’t. “I’m sure my daughter will take out the IV, if she hasn’t already. You’d better check it regularly.”

“We will. Thank you.”

Kathleen explained about Ginny, and the nurse came with her to get the child.

Taking Ginny’s hand, she smiled kindly. “Let’s just go back and say hi to Emma. You can’t stay, because she’s getting ready to go upstairs to be checked into the hospital, but I know she’ll be glad to see you.”

“Thank you,” Helen said, watching her daughter be led away. “She’s really scared.”

Kathleen nodded. Her head felt disconnected to her body. Huge, and yet, eerily, weightless, as if it were a hot air balloon and she were the tiny wicker basket, dangling beneath, swaying in space.

Jo’s arm came firmly around her. “You look awful,” she said frankly. “Is Emma mad?”

Kathleen nodded again. Her head kept bobbing, as if it didn’t know how to stop. “I told her.” Her voice sounded far away, too, perhaps because it was being drowned out by the roar of the burners that kept the balloon inflated.

“That she’s going into treatment?”

Kathleen was still nodding. A dull throbbing suggested that a headache was building, a storm threatening her sense of unreality.

Jo turned her so that Kathleen had to meet her eyes. “You’re doing the right thing. You know you are.”

“Do I?”

Once, she had been a confident woman who believed, the vast majority of the time, that she was doing the right thing. She had a perfect life, didn’t she? A handsome husband, a smart daughter, a beautiful home, and she worked hard for several charities, doing her share of good. She had glided serenely through life—the life she had chosen, had craved from the time she was a small child and could see the wretchedness of her parents’ crummy jobs and shabby house.

Now, Kathleen could see how smug she had been. Pride goeth before the fall, she thought bleakly. Perhaps, pride caused the fall. With her nose so high in the air, it was easy to trip over an uneven bit of sidewalk, something that should have been right before her eyes.

“I need to make phone calls.” She looked vaguely around. “I didn’t bring my cell phone.”

“I have mine,” Jo offered.

Returning, Ginny raced to her mother. Voice shrill, she said, “There was blood all over! Emma took out that needle in her hand, but they put it back.” Her fingers gripped her mother’s slacks and she gazed up in appeal. “Why does she have to have it in, Mommy?”

Helen knelt and took her daughter by the shoulder. “You know why, don’t you? Daddy had an IV, too, remember?”

Ginny’s lip trembled and she nodded hard.

“It doesn’t mean Emma is dying like Daddy. All it means is that the doctors want to get medicine or just water into someone’s body. Daddy hurt so much, it was the best way to give him painkillers.” Her voice wobbled only a little. “But Emma isn’t even getting medicine. She’s getting water and maybe some vitamins and sugar, because she doesn’t eat enough. That’s why she’s mad. You know how she gets when someone tries to make her eat.”

The six-year-old nodded, her expression relaxing. “She yells at Auntie Kath.”

“Uh-huh. Well—” Helen glanced up wryly at Kathleen “—this is her way of yelling at the nurses. Right now, she can’t stamp her foot or race to her bedroom and slam the door, can she?”

“No-o.”

“So she took out the needle and said, ‘You can’t make me!’”

Creases formed on Ginny’s high, arching forehead. “Only, they can. Can’t they, Mommy?”