Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,53

called me.” She doubted that she would. “And thanks for calling me, Maggie. It means a lot to me.” She knew there was no one else to do it.

They hung up a minute later and she thought about him, and the crash she’d seen, all day. It was so exactly what she was afraid of. He had gotten lucky again. She was sure he must have had fifty lives, or a hundred. Nine seemed like far too few for the way he lived. He needed a thousand.

Chapter 9

Aden wasn’t home from Boston yet on the anniversary of his father’s death. It was the first one, and the day got Maggie in its grip and wouldn’t let go from the moment she woke up in the morning. She had barely slept the night before, as images of the crash raced through her mind. She remembered what Brad had said to her when they were about to crash, and his face when she saw him drowning, too far away for them to get to him in time, as the currents had pulled him away from the life raft. She still didn’t know how he had slipped out, but it didn’t matter now. It had happened and they had to live with it.

She spoke to Aden twice that day, and he admitted that he wasn’t doing well either. There was something so powerful and overwhelming about the actual date, as though the loss was different on that day than on others, which in fact it wasn’t. But the date bound them to the anniversary of what had been the worst day of their lives, and it was all she could think of. There were no good memories attached to the day, unlike Brad’s birthday. This was pure hell, remembering what had happened.

Phil Abrams sent her a card, and some of their friends had dropped off small bouquets of flowers. Paul sent her a text message telling her that he was thinking of her, but he didn’t call. It was hard to guess the right thing to do in the circumstances, without intruding on something so personal. It troubled her that she had unwittingly opened the door to Paul again after his racing accident, and she didn’t want to overdo it. He was being careful with her too.

A few days later, Aden came home from school for the holidays. He was staying just through Christmas, and then he was going skiing with friends in Vermont. One of his roommates had a family home there and had invited a mixed group to come skiing with them, and Aden was eager to go. Maggie had said he could, and didn’t expect him to hang around with her all through the holidays, which would have been boring for him.

The first thing they did the day he got home was start setting up the outside lights to decorate the house, as Brad had done so expertly in the past. Maggie pulled out pictures of it, to copy exactly what he used to do. And they came fairly close. She stood on a ladder to help Aden as she had done with Brad. Aden tried to get on the roof, but it was too icy. They did a good job anyway. They even had a lit-up snowman in front of the house, and a Santa Claus, which was their pièce de résistance. It was corny, but Maggie, Aden, and the neighborhood children loved it.

The next day they bought a tree and brought it home and decorated it with their favorite ornaments, including all the ones that Brad had liked. After the barren Christmas they’d had the year before, right after his death, this year was a vast improvement. She had bought Aden all the new ski equipment he wanted, and a racing helmet, which he flatly said he wouldn’t wear.

“Good, then you can forget the trip to Vermont,” she said with an iron look in her eye. “I’m not compromising on that. I know how you ski. I’m not having you get brain damage because you don’t think it’s cool to wear one. There are resorts in Europe where it’s required, I’ve been told. People can die from not wearing helmets.”

“They can die from slipping in the bathtub too,” he pointed out angrily. “Do you want to forbid me to take a bath? Dad didn’t wear a helmet when I skied with him.”

“No, and he didn’t ski like you. He was a very cautious skier, and