Good With Children

Desert, whose head was entirely shaven beneath her ski hat, ignored the approach of her roommate and continued spinning the burning balls. Total concentration was required, and still poi spinners got burned. Samantha asked, “Did you bring the rabbits?”

“Yes,” Rory said, with resignation, letting herself in the back gate. She and Samantha were of one mind about Lola—the python had to go. Samantha now refused to have anything to do with the snake beyond assisting—from a safe distance—at feeding time. She’d been bitten the previous summer and she was convinced the snake would have killed her—by constriction—if both Desert and Rory hadn’t been there to pull it off. As it was, she’d needed sixteen stitches to close the bite.

Rory agreed that the snake might have killed Samantha. In fact, Lola had frightened Rory more thoroughly than anything else ever had in her entire life. And Rory was not afraid of snakes.

She wanted to plead with Desert not to do anything that might jeopardize her job. But Desert wouldn’t welcome an interruption to her practice. And on second thought, Rory didn’t think she was up to coping with Desert at the moment.

Desert, christened Naomi Katz, had come to Colorado at the age of eighteen. She’d immediately rechristened herself and had begun living off a trust fund provided by her grandfather, a diamond broker, and also by her mother’s family. Rich and beautiful, she’d trained in Boulder as a massage therapist and as a fire dancer, had moved to Sultan and bought the two-storey Victorian where she, Rory and Samantha now lived. Its exterior was painted bordello pink.

Sometimes, Rory and Samantha asked themselves why they put up with Desert.

But they loved her. And pitied her. And wanted to help her somehow; help her to not make life hard for herself. Desert’s boyfriend was a recent acquisition—they’d been together nine weeks. Rory and Samantha were holding their breaths, dreading the ending. Dreading it for themselves as well as for Desert, who was sensitive and, well, troubled.

Rory said to Samantha, “Can you take these? I’ve got to go show some clients to the Empire Street house.”

“Sure.” Samantha took the rabbits, clutching the bundle against her with one arm. “Go.”

RORY GORENZI WAS ATTRACTIVE, but Seamus had come from Telluride, where beautiful was the norm. He didn’t want another girlfriend; he only wanted to sort through the things his ex-girlfriend had said. He wanted to attend to the flaws she’d pointed out. And they were flaws. He didn’t want to marry again—his experiences with other women reminded him not that Janine had been the perfect wife and mother, but that she hadn’t been. No, that wasn’t fair. She’d been the mother of their kids and, so, the perfect mother for them.

But she’d always needed to prove something. He’d known she was sensitive beneath her sometimes-abrasive exterior. One of his male employees had once said to Janine, “You have more testosterone than I do.”

She’d said, “Thank you!” and had clearly been pleased by the compliment.

She’d been an athlete, but that wasn’t the only thing that had made her challenging. It was the way she’d presented herself. Her certainty that her way was right. She’d been insecure and determined to hide the fact, and in their twelve years of marriage she’d never revealed the source of that insecurity or the reason for it.

She’d been smart—a legal-aid lawyer employed by the Women’s Resource Center, defending the battered and the terrified. And she’d never struck him as particularly maternal, although she’d nursed each child for at least nine months. She’d spoken of it so casually, saying once, “When I get this one off my tits…”

Janine had been difficult, and since her death Seamus had vacillated between the notion that no relationship could be as trying as his marriage had been and the idea that no woman would be as good for his children as Janine had been. And how good was that, really?

Better than you, Seamus.

But that hadn’t been so true, back when his wife was alive. He’d spent time with his kids, talked with them and listened to them.

Janine had listened, too—long enough to get the gist of situations. Then, she’d pronounced judgment. You’re not going to take that from anyone, she would order the seven-year-old who’d just had his lunch money stolen.

Lauren seemed determined to remember her as a sort of warrior mother, an Amazon who had demanded warrior-like behavior from her children, as well. Even these days, Seamus occasionally heard his oldest say, “Mom wouldn’t have stood for that,” or “Mom wouldn’t have put up with that.”

But actually, she might have. To be as much bite as bark required a certain resolve that she lacked. Janine had been a great skier, a hard-riding cyclist, a distance runner, a strong ice-climber and, above all, a fantastic talker. She had talked big. It was the one quality that had come to define her and that Seamus had eventually found most annoying.

Seamus went inside the Sultan Mountain School to see if Kurt was around. Lauren accompanied him, leaving Beau, Caleb and Belle outside with Seuss.

As they stepped into the lobby of the Victorian building, Seamus spotted Kurt, talking to two men in mountaineering clothes and showing them something on a topographical map on one wall. Seamus saw that the map was composed of many geological survey maps joined together.

“You don’t want to go that way,” Kurt was saying. “Too much avalanche danger. I’d recommend taking the V-Dot Road….”

Lauren said, “There’s not going to be anything to do here.”

“You’re going to have plenty to do.”

“I don’t want to spend three months snowshoeing.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Ms. Gorenzi has in store for you.”

“Is she going to be our teacher?” Lauren seemed suspicious. Of what, Seamus couldn’t be sure, until his oldest daughter added, acidly, “Or our new nanny.”

“Seamus.” Kurt had spotted them. Tall, gray-haired, unpolished, he joined Seamus and held out his hand. “Roads clear?”

“Not bad. Snow-packed on the pass. The usual. You’ve met my daughter, Lauren.”

“I think she was a few heads shorter back then. Nice to see you.” Kurt shook Lauren’s hand. “Where are you in school?”

Very politic, Seamus observed, as Kurt knew Lauren’s age.

“Still in high school,” she said, taking the implied compliment—that she was perhaps a college student—in stride.

“In the Sultan Mountain School, no less.” Seamus smiled at his friend, now recognizing traces of Rory in Kurt’s features. “We met your daughter.”

“Where is she?”

Any disapproval was well-concealed, yet Seamus wondered if it was there, nonetheless. Father-daughter tensions? Kurt had high standards—for himself and others.

“She went to feed her snake,” Lauren said.

“Her roommate’s,” Seamus corrected, as if it were important.

“Ah.” Kurt made no further comment.

“And she’s coming back to take us to the house.”

The front door swung open, and Rory came in, curls flying loose from her ponytail, expression mildly agitated. “Hi. Ready to go?” she asked without preamble.

Seamus wondered if Rory was trying to avoid her father’s notice for some reason.

Kurt seemed to sense it, too. “Everything all right?” he asked mildly.

“Yes.” A tight smile. “And here?”

Kurt nodded.

The phone rang, and a young man behind the hotel’s old reception counter picked it up. “Sultan Mountain School,” he said. Then, “She’s here.”

“It’s Desert.”

Irritated, Rory walked to the phone and said, “Hello?”

“When are you going to be able to practice? We’re planning to do our new combo with the staffs on Friday, and we still don’t have it right.”

“I’m at work now, Desert.”

“This is a responsibility, too.”

Rory taught belly dance and fire-dancing at workshops approximately once a month and gave two students weekly private lessons. The troupe was a commitment she’d made, but it wasn’t a job. “I can’t talk now. I’ll see you later.”

“Well…okay.”

Kurt turned away from Seamus Lee and his family, saying, “Let me know if you need anything.”

CHAPTER TWO

THEY SAT in the living room of the Empire Street house. That is, Lauren sat at the dining room table filling out a questionnaire regarding her personal goals in connection to the Sultan Mountain School, while Seamus did the same at the coffee table. Caleb was already off with a group of kids his own age at a snowboarding class, and Belle was in the next room happily watching a video. Rory sounded out Beau on what he wanted from the school, on his interests. Seuss, the puppy, lay in his crate, head tilted to one side.

Seamus heard Rory say to Beau, “Part of our curriculum requires involvement with the local economy. This means doing something like a job. I have one possibility that’s really the ultimate spot, you know? But I can only give it to somebody trustworthy, who respects the need for confidentiality. You have to be prepared to act like an adult. I figured because of the work your dad does, you might understand and be able to do that.”

Seamus couldn’t stop himself from glancing in their direction. Beau was sitting on a Victorian footstool and Rory occupied the end of a fainting couch. The teenager’s gaze was focused on the floor. Janine had been blond, but only Lauren had inherited her coloring. The boys all had dark brown hair, like his, and so did Belle.

Without looking up, Beau asked, “What is it?”

“It’s working for a woman who makes custom skis. This is a highly competitive industry, and designs and manufacturing methods are closely held secrets. But she’s agreed to take on a Sultan Mountain School student. With your background in math and science, you might be some real help to her.”

“Okay,” Beau said, still not lifting his head.

Rory felt Seamus Lee’s eyes on her. She already knew he found her interesting as a woman. It was clear in the way he looked at her and in his behavior toward her. She found him attractive, as well, but that was beside the point. Seamus was a participant in the Sultan Mountain School, and she mustn’t offend him, or worse, become entangled with him. The latter would certainly cause her father to brand her unprofessional and she didn’t need that.

She wasn’t keen for a relationship, in any event. Though she had had more success keeping boyfriends than holding a job, the men she’d been closest to inevitably had disappointed her. She was tired of men who considered skiing as much as possible to be a life goal. They seemed, well, immature. Seamus Lee, being a father, being the person he seemed to be, was probably relatively mature. He had a real life, and a significant vocation as an artist. And any success whatsoever at raising his children meant that he thought of someone other than himself at least part of the time.

She liked this man for spending time with his children, for knowing his children.

But his interest in her just now was inconvenient.

And she had already begun to wonder exactly what his relationship with his children was like. In her presence, he’d revealed his ignorance of the name of his youngest daughter’s stuffed animal. To Rory, Belle had introduced her “stuffy,” as she called it, as Mouse—and she hadn’t bothered to tell her father its name at all.

They were like a family, and not. The children seemed to tiptoe around Seamus, seemed to want to please him, and yet…well, it was a bit strange, that was all.

In any case, she’d never experienced a truly successful parent-child relationship. Her parents’ marriage had been brief and it was still a mystery to her. And, well, her grandmother was one way and her mother had been another, and her father was different, still.

Rory knew that her mother had been athletic, as her father was, and comfortable in the outdoors. Her grandmother said that Rory’s mother had been into everything natural. Rory thought she herself was probably more like Gran. Gran had been a lounge singer, had worked on cruise ships, had been worshipped by many men—admittedly, Rory hadn’t yet experienced that—and was a true free spirit. Rory’s mother, Kristin Nichols Gorenzi, had died after skiing into a tree. Rory’s father hadn’t been there. Another man had—her mother’s lover. Gran had told Rory this.

Rory’s mother had been pretty, small and blond, with a bright, wide smile. Rory couldn’t even imagine what her mother had been like. But she could believe that the fact she’d died while skiing with another man had helped drive Kurt Gorenzi from his daughter’s life.

“Why don’t I call the ski shop,” Rory said to Beau, “and if the owner’s keen, I’ll take you over tomorrow to meet her. She has one other employee. He’s college age, and he’s really nice. He actually helps my fire-dancing troupe a lot.”

“Your what?”

It was Seamus who’d spoken. Rory glanced up. His green eyes were long-lashed, and his sharp, elegant features and wavy long black hair reminded her of Viggo Mortensen in The Lord of the Rings.

“Oh, my roommates and I are fire dancers. Actually, we belly dance, too. It’s both. We call it fire fusion. Our troupe is named Caldera.”

Seamus continued to gaze at her intently, as if he were trying to see inside her. “A woman of unusual talents. How did you get into that?”

“In college…Well, when I was in college—” another failed enterprise “—I saw a troupe perform. And then I took some classes and I was hooked. I actually preferred belly dance and fire-dancing to school.”

The puppy cried and Beau stood up. “I’ll take him out.”

“Thank you, son,” his father said and forced his eyes back to his questionnaire.

Again, Rory caught it—that hungry look, this time on Beau’s face. It was a hunger for words from his father, anything resembling attention from his father.

“What exactly do you do with fire?” Seamus asked.

“Poi and staff twirling. Poi are balls that are attached to tethers—cords. We swing them in patterns, making them go around each other. It’s…quite difficult. But fun. Poi comes from New Zealand, originally, but I don’t think they light the poi on fire. Maybe they’re percussion instruments of some kind there? I’m not sure. Fire-dancing is practiced all over the world. The belly dance we do is called American Tribal Style, which was developed by a woman in San Francisco.”

“Aren’t you afraid of being burned?” asked Seamus, abandoning his questionnaire entirely.

I’m perplexed by how little attention this man is paying to his kids. What is wrong with him? Obviously, her original assessment of him as an involved father had been somewhat off the mark. She was reminded of her own father; and, consequently, she felt for the Lee children.

“Well—I’ve been burned. It happens.” She pulled up her sleeves to display minor scars on her forearms. “We try to avoid it. And we’re extremely good at first aid. But we practice and practice and practice, repeatedly, without fire, before we ever light up.”

Seamus tried to shift his attention away from Rory’s heart-shaped face, which struck him as elfin and mysterious. She plays with fire….

Too much like Janine.

But completely unlike his wife, too.

Because he could tell that Rory wasn’t a boaster. She was clearly…just Rory. Already, he felt completely at ease in her presence.

Beau had opened Seuss’s crate, and the puppy rushed out, wiggling all over. He jumped on Beau and the boy petted him enthusiastically.

“Don’t do that,” Rory said before she could stop herself. Engage brain, then mouth, she reminded herself too late.

“Why not?” Seamus asked.

“Because soon that dog’s going to be eighty pounds or more, and you don’t want anything that size jumping on people. So don’t reward him with attention for it now.”

Beau looked up at her, with his father’s eyes. He stopped petting the puppy and tried to hold him by his collar.

The puppy’s lead lay on top of the crate, and Beau fastened it to his collar. They headed out the front door.

Seamus gazed at the questionnaire. What are you hoping to get from your experience at the Sultan Mountain School?

He bent over the coffee table and wrote, I’m doing this for my kids. I want to get them away from Telluride, from the atmosphere of entitlement there. I want them to live someplace where things are a bit different and to understand that they’re not better than other people, just luckier than most of them. Maybe I should’ve taken them to Rio de Janeiro instead, to the favelas. But I thought a town here that hasn’t yet been spoiled by money might be the answer. For myself, I’d like to feel more competent in the outdoors and more aware of my environment. Some avalanche knowledge would also be a good thing.

The next question: Anything special you’d like to do during your time at the Sultan Mountain School?

He reminded himself that Kurt might read his answer. See Rory Gorenzi fire dance, wouldn’t be the most tactful response. He wrote, Surprise me, and then put down his pen.

Lauren finished filling out her questionnaire, brought it to Rory and sat down on a stiff velvet couch.

“Well, he’ll be good protection,” Seamus finally said, thinking about the dog.

Rory reminded herself that saying too much tended to get her in trouble. But she had to say this. “Actually, that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings people have about dogs. In truth, we protect them. We’re their only protectors. Yes, a trained protection dog can bite and hold on to an assailant. And, yes, some people will think twice about messing with you, if you’re accompanied by a big, powerful dog. But our role with all pets is that of their protector. The best way to protect dogs is by obedience training them.” As she spoke, Rory thought of Lola. Yes, in taking Lola into her home and her life, Desert had agreed to be the snake’s protector. It didn’t matter that Lola was a reptile and would never have a special attachment to Desert, and that the python might kill any of them randomly, for reasons unknown to them.

Rory turned her attention to Lauren Lee. The girl was tall, coltish and blond. She carried herself in a way that suggested she was used to being admired, used to popularity.

Rory picked up her questionnaire, skimming the answers.

Since I’m here, I’d like to improve my snowboarding, progress into backcountry snowboarding, become more self-sufficient.

Since I’m here?

Lauren, perhaps, would have preferred to remain in Telluride.

“Tomorrow,” Rory said, “avalanche conditions willing, you and I can go up to Colorado Bowl and snowboard.”

“You snowboard?” Lauren asked, possibly the longest sentence she’d yet uttered to Rory.

“I do. We’ll snowshoe up, packing our boards. Why don’t you have your stuff together at eight? We’ll check our packs to make sure we have everything.”

THAT EVENING, while Beau stayed with Caleb and Belle, Seamus and Lauren walked the puppy around the block and returned through the alley between their house and what turned out to be Rory Gorenzi’s home. Seamus knew where they were when he and Lauren saw swirling fire inside the pink house’s chain-link fence. The fire seemed to streak through the air as two women made tethered fireballs swing and arc around each other. The young man Seamus had seen that morning at the Sultan Mountain School sat drumming. He was dressed for frigid weather, but his hands were covered only with thin fingerless gloves. The women wore winter athletic tights and jackets, and their heads were covered with hats.

Their walk had been quiet, with observations related to air temperature (frigid), the amount of ice on the streets (lots), and Seuss’s strength (considerable). A conversation for strangers. Seamus knew his daughter—and yet he didn’t. They lived in the same house, and yet their paths almost never crossed.

Elizabeth’s right, he thought. I don’t know them.

It had always seemed right for his children to have full schedules. Lauren spent many weekends and summers away at camps—soccer camp, dance camp, cheerleading camp. So did the others, all but Belle, and Belle had a nanny. They all, of course, had Fiona, too, that remarkable woman who had entered their lives like Mary Poppins the year before Janine’s death. The children all had Fiona, always.

Except at the moment.

His name’s Mouse, Belle had told Rory. He’s a stuffy.

Stuffy. How long since he’d heard that word? Belle must have learned it from Lauren. The kids were much closer to each other than they were to him. Protective of each other, as well.

Lauren gazed at the three fire-spinners. “I’d like to do that.”

Seamus thought it looked dangerous and remembered what Rory had said about getting burned. But he didn’t discourage his daughter. Hadn’t he brought the children to Sultan to embrace a different lifestyle? Though, of course, there must be a fire dancer or two in Telluride. Certainly, such troupes had performed there.

Janine would have wanted to try spinning poi, just to prove she could and that she wasn’t afraid. Everything she did was intended to illustrate her strength, her independence.

Including the damned gun.

Seamus and Lauren lingered at the fence, watching. Seamus’s mind shifted to Ki-Rin, to the character he had created—the character who was his livelihood. He could easily develop an anime character like Rory to fit into the world of Ki-Rin. Perhaps a fire goddess of some kind…Fifteen minutes later, the women finished dancing and extinguished their poi.

Rory glanced up and saw them. She walked over to the fence.

Seamus said, “Very impressive.”

“It was a good practice. Everything went right.”

“Can we hope for a glimpse of the snake?” he asked.

“Beau would be disappointed,” Rory told him, “if you got to see Lola and he didn’t.”

Of course, she was right. Understanding his kids better than he did.

She told Lauren, “I better get to bed, so I’m ready for snowboarding tomorrow.” And to Seamus, she said, “You’ll be starting avalanche school. It will be a four-day session, with classroom activities in the morning and field practice in the afternoon.”

“The kids should have it, too,” he remarked. “At least, Lauren and Beau.”

“They will. Just not on the same schedule as you.”

Watching her smile, Seamus wondered if she had some surprise up her sleeve. “I thought you would be teaching all of us,” he said.

“I will—on different days. All the instructors rotate. I’m your program coordinator.” Her breath steamed as she spoke, and Seamus thought again how pretty she was.

There was no reason for his attraction to Rory Gorenzi to feel so inappropriate. Except that this was the first extended amount of time he’d spent with his children—all of them together—since Janine’s death. He feared that the temptation to pursue Rory was just another way to avoid their company.

I need to avoid them.

He had found Janine after the accident. Forensic evidence had proved that neither he, nor anyone else, had killed her—and had established that it wasn’t suicide.

No way would it have been suicide, in any case. Janine would never have taken that way out, and she hadn’t wanted to go.

It had been an accident. A stupid accident. Because she’d decided she needed to carry a gun. Because she’d wanted to carry one. Because she’d needed to prove to the world how tough she was.

The anger simmered within him all over again, and he tried to block it out. And hoped that none of his children would mention the subject of their mother for the next three months.

“I WANT FIONA!”

Belle’s sobs were something Seamus hadn’t anticipated. Even less had he anticipated that his own daughter would not be comforted by his arms.

Lauren reached for her. “Baby Belle, it’s okay. Look. You’re upsetting Mouse. He’s going to cry, too.”

“He misses Fiona!” Belle said.

Seamus thought in amazement of the slim, sure elderly woman now kayaking in Baja. Fiona, with her long white braid and her love of poetry and opera and ballet and openness to learning about all that was new.