The Courage Tree - Diane Chamberlain [126]
“I’m sorry,” he said, starting to believe Lucas was telling the truth.
“Thanks,” Lucas said. He drew in a long breath. “Well, I was actually a botany professor at Penn State back then,” he said. “And…well, I’ll get to that in a minute.” He looked perplexed and offered Joe a half smile. “It’s hard to know what to tell you next. I knew I had inherited my illness from my mother’s side of the family,” he said. “I asked her who else in the family had kidney disease. She mentioned a couple of my cousins, along with an uncle and her father. And then she told me that she’d always worried about a son she’d deserted when she was very young.”
Joe held his breath. What the hell was he saying?
“I’m talking about you,” Lucas said.
Joe stood up. “That’s crazy,” he said.
“You and I are brothers, Joe.”
Joe didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Too many lies had come from this man’s lips, and this one was too far-fetched for him to swallow.
“I don’t blame you for looking so shocked.” Lucas nearly smiled. “I was, too. She was always such a good mother, such a moral person. It seemed completely out of char—”
“Why didn’t she ever try to find me?” Joe asked. He’d never said those words out loud before, but they’d played on his mind every day for over thirty years. “She knew where I was.”
“She was ashamed, and it was very difficult for her to talk about,” Lucas said. “She told me she got married when she was eighteen and that she was a heavy drinker and used drugs. She didn’t get along with her husband and she felt saddled by her baby. By you.”
“So, she left,” Joe said, sitting down again. “I was a year old.”
“Yes, that’s right. She moved to the Philadelphia area and eventually got herself straightened out. She met my father there, and they got married and had me. My father knew about the baby she’d left behind, but he was the only person who did, until she told me. I felt a need to find you, to meet you, to see if you had inherited this disease or…” His voice trailed off, then he shook his head. “Whew. I guess I have to tell you everything. I guess—” He stopped talking as a nurse walked into the room. Joe waited out the silence impatiently, as the nurse checked Lucas’s IV bag, then left the room again.
“We don’t look a bit alike,” Joe said. He was still clinging to denial.
Lucas smiled. “If you could see our mother, you’d know that we’re brothers,” he said. “You have her eyes.”
“Does Janine know any of this?”
“No,” Lucas said. “And please, Joe, the rest of what I have to tell you needs to stay between us. I know you don’t like me, but I’ll have to trust you with this. Please. I think you’ll understand when I tell you. Okay?”
Joe was uncertain how to answer him. “I guess that depends on what it is you’re going to say,” he said. He felt no brotherly love toward Lucas.
“Fair enough,” Lucas said. He eyed the glass of water on his night table, and Joe recognized the same look of thirsty longing that Sophie often wore when she’d already had her allotment of water for the hour.
“When Jordan got sick,” Lucas said, “I began doing some research on my own time. I was very interested in herbs and other plants that were thought to have medicinal qualities, and I did a lot of reading about those that were thought to help people with kidney problems.”
“So that’s why you thought Schaefer might have been on to something with his Herbalina,” Joe said.
Lucas smiled again. “No, that’s not quite it. I actually began taking some of the herbs myself. I noticed no improvement, or at least, very little. But then I began giving some of them to Jordan. There was a definite improvement in her condition. She was able to go longer between her dialysis treatments. I kept playing around with the formula, finally coming up with the idea of using it as an IV infusion, but Sandra wouldn’t let me do that to