Invincible Page 3

  “You remind me of my younger sister, Lydia,” he said, tucking a curl behind her ear. “She’s thirteen, too. I couldn’t imagine Lydia putting up with a tenth of what your dad put you through tonight. I’ve had my own problems with well-intentioned parents. I guess I wanted to help.”

  Kristin rose to her father’s defense. “He just wants me to win.”

  “There are more important things than winning,” Max said.

  “Name one thing,” she challenged.

  “Having fun. Enjoying the game,” he replied.

  “It wouldn’t be much fun if I didn’t win,” she pointed out.

  “Wouldn’t it?”

  She made a face. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it much. I’ve been too focused on winning.”

  “Next time you play, think about having a good time. And winning,” he said with a grin. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine. Gotta go.” He winked at her and waved a hand at someone behind her.

  When she turned to look, she saw a female player—someone on the women’s tour, rather than the junior tour—waiting for him on the sideline. He dumped his racquet in his bag, stalked over to the woman and kissed her on the lips.

  He never looked back.

  That was all it had taken for Max Benedict to capture her heart. A few minutes hitting tennis balls together. A considerate word of encouragement. A stray curl tucked behind her ear. A wink as he walked off the court. She’d loved him from that moment on.

  Kristin grunted with disgust, then realized she was standing in an airport waiting area full of people who might wonder what she found so disgusting. She grimaced and crossed to stare out the windows at the traffic crawling by. What a fool she’d been all those years ago. She’d been well aware her feelings of love weren’t mutual. To Max, she’d been a substitute for the little sister he apparently missed while traveling on the tour.

  He’d often come to hit with her on the practice court during that summer at Wimbledon, at times when her father wasn’t around.

  Max made her believe in herself. He made her believe she could have fun on the tennis court. He made her believe she could win.

  She became invincible.

  She won the Girls’ Singles Championship that summer at Wimbledon and the next two years, as well. She won at Roland Garros in Paris. And she was the Girls’ Singles U.S. Open Champion at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. She was the bright future of American tennis. The public was fascinated by the tall, honey-blonde phenom, a killer without mercy on the tennis court—who looked like an angel off of it.

  Her tennis career ended abruptly at age sixteen, when she lost in the Wimbledon Girls’ Singles Championship match to the rival she’d beaten the previous two years. When she’d discovered, with frightening, daunting clarity, that she wasn’t so invincible after all.

  Kristin heard a commotion and turned around.

  “Mom?” Felicity burst into tears as she bolted out of the doorway from customs.

  Kristin barely had time to take two steps and open her arms before her daughter threw herself into them. She could feel Flick trembling and felt her insides clench at the sound of her daughter’s wrenching sobs. She tightened her grip to offer comfort. Why was Flick so distraught? What was going on?

  “Mrs. Lassiter?” the chaperon who’d accompanied Flick through customs inquired. The elderly woman was small and compact and wore a tailored wool suit that might have been comfortable in Switzerland but looked out of place in Miami.

  “I’m Special Agent Lassiter,” Kristin said, to avoid having to explain that it was Ms. not Mrs., since she’d never been married.

  “There was an incident on the plane—”

  “It wasn’t my fault!” Flick protested. “I told them I didn’t want anything to eat, but they wouldn’t believe me.” Flick was tall for her age, and because her vocabulary was so grandiloquent—Flick’s own description of her extravagantly colorful speech—she was often mistaken for a child far older than she was.

  Kristin could imagine the rest. “I’ll be glad to pay for any damages.”

  “The flight attendant had some difficulty calming the woman sitting next to Felicity,” the chaperon said. “She wants her silk blouse replaced.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Kristin said.

  The chaperon handed her a card. “Here’s her personal information. You might want to be gone when she exits customs,” she said with a sympathetic smile.

  “Thanks. And thanks for bringing my daughter home.”

  Kristin put her arm around Flick’s narrow shoulders, looked around and said, “Where’s your luggage, Flick?”

  “She didn’t check any bags,” the chaperon said. “I have a flight home to catch, so I’ll leave you two to sort this out.”

  Kristin frowned as she watched the chaperon hurry away, then turned to her daughter and said, “Why didn’t you bring anything with you?”

  “The headmistress is packing everything up. She’s going to ship it to me,” Flick explained. “She said she didn’t trust me in the dormitory.”

  Good lord! She’d wondered why Flick was still wearing her school uniform. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a spot of blood on the collar of Flick’s white blouse, above the red V-neck wool sweater she wore with a blue red-and-green-plaid wool pleated skirt. “All right. Let’s go home.”

  Flick stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at Kristin, her blue eyes brimming with tears. “I don’t want to go home, Mom. I want to go see Gramps in the hospital.”

  Kristin stared at her daughter in shock. “How did you know—? How could you possibly—? Who told you Gramps is in the hospital?”

  “I’m not stupid, Mom. Gramps emailed me every day—until last Wednesday. Nothing Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday. I knew something was wrong. So I tried calling him. Which got me in trouble with Mrs. Fortin. But he didn’t call me back. So I knew something was wrong.

  “Then I called you and asked why Gramps didn’t call me back and you said—”

  “I said he wasn’t feeling well. But that doesn’t mean he’s in the hospital, Flick.”

  “But he is, isn’t he?” her daughter challenged. “Because if he wasn’t, Gramps would have called me back, no matter how sick he was. What’s wrong with him, Mom? How bad is he hurt? Was he in a car accident, or what?”

  Kristin felt trapped. She’d hoped to shield Flick from the truth for long enough to let her father regain more of his faculties. But that obviously wasn’t possible now. “He’s had a stroke, Flick.”

  “A stroke? What’s that?”

  “A blood vessel broke in his brain.”

  “Is he dying?” Flick cried.

  “No, but the stroke caused some of his brain not to work right. That’s why Gramps hasn’t called you back. The stroke affected his speech, so he can’t talk very well yet.”

  “Yet?” Flick said, looking, as she always did, for the loophole that allowed her to escape anything she found unpleasant.

  “With therapy, he should get much better. But, Flick…”

  Kristin cupped her hands gently on either side of her daughter’s anxious face and said, “His right side is paralyzed. He can’t walk or write—”

  “Or type,” Flick interjected, pulling free. “So he couldn’t email me back.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I got myself kicked out of that ludicrous school,” Flick said, her eyes narrowed in fierce determination. “Gramps is going to need my help to get better.”

  Ludicrous: Worthy of scorn as absurdly inept, false or foolish.

  It was the first time Kristin had heard Flick use the word. It seemed her daughter’s vocabulary had grown in the four months since she’d seen her at Christmas. It wasn’t always an advantage having a child who was so smart. Like now, when her daughter had manipulated her world to arrive home, instead of being at school where she belonged.

  Kristin put an arm around Flick and walked toward the airport garage where s
he’d left her car, listening attentively as her daughter talked a mile a minute about everything that had happened since she’d last seen her mother.

  Kristin heard a word—superfluous—that she didn’t know and realized she was going to have to look it up when she got home. She’d spent more time practicing on the tennis courts as a child than she had studying. She’d been homeschooled and had done the least work she could to get a high school diploma.

  It was only after Flick was born that she’d realized she was going to need a college degree. She’d gone to the University of Miami and received a B.A. in Communications, figuring she could use the public relations and promotional writing courses to help Harry promote his tennis academy. After 9/11 everything changed, and she decided to join the FBI.

  Flick, on the other hand, had started reading at four. By the time she was seven, Kristin had resorted to parenting books to try and figure out how to manage her brilliant daughter. One night, she’d caught Flick reading her most recent parenting book under the covers. It was a toss-up who was learning to manage whom.

  But despite her intelligence, Flick was still a child. Kristin had kept her daughter in the dark about her grandfather’s stroke early last week, the day after Max’s visit, in fact, in an attempt to shield Flick from the worst of it. She’d hoped her father would be well on the road to physical recovery before Flick saw him again.

  Her father’s face—eye, cheek and mouth—sagged on the right side, giving him a frightening appearance, which worsened when he tried to speak. Her nine-year-old daughter might be intellectually ready to help her grandfather. But Kristin wondered how she would react when she saw him in his hospital bed.

  “Please, Mom,” Flick pleaded. “Let’s go see Gramps.”

  Kristin was torn. “Flick, I’m not sure—”

  “Please, Mom!”

  Kristin realized that if she didn’t take Flick to see her grandfather, her creative daughter would find some way to get to the hospital on her own. “He’s very sick, honey. I’m afraid seeing you will upset him.” And you.

  “I won’t upset him, Mom,” the girl promised. “I just want to talk to him.”

  Talk to him? He can’t talk! Kristin knew her daughter didn’t comprehend the seriousness of her grandfather’s illness. But there was no keeping the two of them apart.

  Harry Lassiter had been a part of Flick’s life from the day she was born, a surrogate father. No wonder her daughter was so desperate to see him. And Flick’s appearance might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

  Kristin’s father, a man who’d kept himself in excellent physical condition his entire life, was infuriated by his helplessness after the unexpected stroke. Harry had resisted the idea of physical therapy that could only promise improvement, rather than perfect health. Maybe Flick’s presence would encourage him to try harder to get back on his feet, even if he needed help walking from now on.

  Kristin studied her daughter’s eager face. The bright blue eyes, strong chin and straight black hair from her father. The high cheekbones and uptilted nose from her mother. When she set her mind to something, the nine-year-old was a force to be reckoned with.

  Harry Lassiter was as helpless to deny this extraordinary child whatever she wanted as Kristin was herself.

  Hopefully, her father would be swept up by the whirl wind that was her daughter. By the time he came down again, he’d be standing on his own two feet.

  For the first time in a very long time, Kristin smiled. Maybe things were finally going to turn around. “Come on, Flick. Let’s go see Gramps.”

  3

  Kristin perched on the edge of her father’s bed at Jackson Memorial Hospital and said, “Dad, I have a surprise for you. You have a visitor.”

  “On ahn un,” her father replied.

  Don’t want one.

  Kristin knew what he’d said only because she knew how her proud father felt about anyone seeing him like he was now. “I know you don’t want to see anyone. You don’t have a choice.”

  His gray eyes blazed with anger, and one cheek lifted as the side of his mouth turned down in a snarl. “No!”

  That was clear enough. But Flick was waiting in the visitors’ lounge down the hall. God knew how long the inquisitive nine-year-old could last in a hospital waiting room without getting into trouble. Kristin had warned Flick to behave herself and hurried to her father’s room to prepare him for seeing his granddaughter. She didn’t have a lot of time to argue with him.

  Her stomach knotted as she watched the once-invincible Harry Lassiter visibly struggle to say, “I ih e ere?”

  Why is she here?

  Kristin had debated whether to tell her father that Flick had gotten herself thrown out of school. It was one more thing he didn’t need to worry about. But she didn’t want to set a bad example by asking Flick to lie, and Flick would likely blurt it out anyway.

  “Flick was worried when you stopped emailing. She got herself thrown out of school so she could come find out what happened to you.”

  Kristin thought she saw the flicker of a smile cross half her father’s face. If so, it was the first since his stroke.

  He sighed audibly. “Aw igh.”

  “Well, all right,” Kristin said with a smile of her own, relieved that he’d given in so easily. “I’ll be right back. I left her—”

  “Gramps!”

  Kristin turned to find Flick poised in the doorway, a look of horror on her face.

  “Ow! Ow! Ow!” her father howled, creating a gar-goyle face that caused Flick to whimper, before he turned away with a sound of anguish, flailing with his one good hand under the sheet.

  Out! Out! Out!

  Kristin fought the urge to grab Flick and run—from her father, from her job, from her self-destructing life.

  But she stood her ground. Because in her head she heard: Never run from a challenge. Remember, you’re invincible.

  “You’re scaring Flick, Dad,” Kristin said in a firm voice. “Flick, come here,” she said in an equally firm voice.

  Flick tore fearful eyes from her grandfather’s supine body and stared dazed at her mother.

  “Come here,” Kristin repeated, holding out her hand to her daughter. “I know Gramps looks different. I would have prepared you, if you’d waited in the lounge. Because of his stroke, the right side of his face droops. That’s why he looks so…funny. So…weird. So…odd,” Kristin finished, after searching for the right word and never finding it.

  “Dad, look at us,” she commanded her father. “I want Flick to see your face in repose.” His face would still look strange, but not so horrible as it had when he’d howled. Kristin kept a reassuring hand on Flick’s shoulder, to stop her in case she was tempted to run.

  Kristin caught the stab of betrayal in her father’s eyes as he slowly turned back to face his granddaughter.

  Grandfather and granddaughter stared at each other somberly for a full thirty seconds before her father said, “Iz oo, ik.”

  “I missed you, too, Gramps,” Flick said.

  “Air oo, uh?”

  “Yeah,” Flick agreed. “You scared me pretty bad.”

  Kristin barely managed to avoid rolling her eyes. Trust Flick to be totally honest.

  “I’m okay now,” Flick continued. She left the security of Kristin’s side and crossed to her grandfather, bracing her hands on the bed to lift herself up and plop her rump down next to his hips. “But your face does look bizarre.”

  Bizarre: Strikingly out of the ordinary. That was the word Kristin had been seeking. Trust Flick to root it out of her enormous vocabulary.

  Kristin glanced at her watch, a twenty-five-dollar Timex with a brown leather band that Flick had given her for Christmas, which lit in the dark and kept perfect time. If she didn’t leave soon she was going to be late for her meeting with SIRT. “Dad, I’ve got a meeting. We have to leave, but—”

  “Ik an ay ere.”

  Flick can stay here.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” Kris
tin said, staring worriedly at her daughter.

  “I’ll be fine, Mom,” Flick said. “Visiting hours aren’t over till four. I checked.”

  “You’re sure it won’t be too much for you, Dad?”

  “Gramps, you need to comb your hair,” Flick said, eyeing his tousled blond hair with her head tilted. “It’s a mess. Where’s your comb?”

  “No om. Us.”

  No comb. Brush.

  Flick hopped down and rummaged through the drawer in the small metal chest beside the bed. She found a boar-bristle hairbrush, set it on the bed, then climbed back up beside him. “Where do you want your part?”

  He turned relieved eyes to Kristin and said, “O. I ine.”

  Go. I’m fine.

  Kristin hurried from the room before she could reconsider. She couldn’t miss her investigative meeting with SIRT. And maybe, if Flick had enough trouble communicating with her grandfather, he’d reconsider the speech therapy he’d been refusing.

  Kristin headed east from Jackson Memorial on the Dolphin Expressway and kept her fingers crossed as she merged onto I-95 North toward the Miami Field Office. On paper, the MFO was only a seventeen-minute drive straight up the Interstate from the hospital. But all it took was one fender bender to turn I-95 into a parking lot in the middle of the day.

  She exhaled when she found traffic moving freely. But she hadn’t driven more than a mile before she found herself slowing to a crawl. “Come on!” she muttered, pounding the steering wheel of her Camry. She checked her watch. She’d given herself an extra twenty minutes to get there, just in case, and it looked like she was going to need every second of it.

  She turned the radio to a station that played upbeat Latin music and imagined herself sitting on a warm beach under a colorful umbrella with an ice-cold mojito in hand. She was doing a lot of imagining these days, because her life kept shifting out of her control.

  During the past week, she had been asked to spy in London, called 911 to come get her father after his stroke, been involved in another shooting incident at work, in which her partner was seriously wounded, and picked up her errant daughter at the airport after she’d been thrown out of school.