Daphne politely fiddled with her drink but Mel slid the envelope over for her to read.
“So I didn’t follow. You remember how things were, Mel. I didn’t have a right. I respected her wishes.”
Cal passed his hand across his mouth, a slight tremor in his fingers. Hard to tell if it was faked or merely old age. Was Mel looking at himself twenty years from now?
“For two years, I didn’t know where you were, if you were alive or dead. So I stayed put, just in case either one of you wanted to get in touch. Then, when your mother did contact me, it was through her lawyer, asking for a divorce and all parental rights. I gave her what she wanted.”
Daphne’s earlier look of suppressed amusement at Cal softened to sympathy. Classic Cal had cast out his bait and was slowly reeling Daphne in. Time to snip the line. “Because, if you didn’t, Mom would have taken you to court, where your fraud and negligence would be on full display. You might have even been charged or fined, and no court in the land would have awarded you custody. You didn’t give her anything because you had nothing to give.”
Daphne’s fingers wiggled and he realized that he had a death grip on them. He instantly released them. She didn’t withdraw but rested them again on his thigh.
Cal looked straight at Mel through his thick lenses. The glasses made it seem that Cal was watching him from far away. “I didn’t expect you to forget,” he said quietly, “but I had hoped you would forgive.”
“The only one who could’ve forgiven you died forty years ago in that snowstorm in the mountains,” Mel said. Daphne shot him a look that he avoided. This was the one piece of his life he couldn’t bear revealing to her.
Cal just kept nodding as if his head was on a loose spring. He returned the envelope to his pocket. He drank from his light beer and nodded some more. He might’ve nodded his head right off his neck, if Daphne hadn’t spoken.
“Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because it is quite without a cure.” She took a sip. “Jane Austen, of course.”
As much as Mel appreciated Daphne’s love of a happy ending, Mel had no intention of letting his old man off the hook.
“Thanks for the drinks, Cal,” Mel said, sliding from the booth. Daphne hurried to follow. He hadn’t touched his drink. Cal would probably polish it off. “Safe trip home.”
If Cal was hurt by this brush-off, he didn’t show it. “Thanks for coming to see me,” he said. “It...means a lot. I’m happy you’re doing so well and not following in your old man’s footsteps. You’ve got a home, a business, family.” He indicated Daphne. “Someone who obviously cares for you. I’m proud.”
It was as if he was rattling off a list, “Things That Must Be Said.” Mel didn’t believe a word.
Mel put a hand on Daphne’s waist. “Thanks, Cal.”
As he and Daphne walked away, Mel whispered, “Wait for it, wait for it.”
Two steps from the exit, Cal called, “Not to worry. I’ll come by again tomorrow.”
* * *
MEL HAD FORGOTTEN all about the box until he and Daphne returned from dinner. It was still on the kitchen counter.
“Connie brought it over this morning. She found it in Mom’s stuff,” he explained to Daphne.
The box unnerved him. The cardboard was covered in an ivory marbled pattern, the classical look disrupted by a yellow recipe card taped to the top with the message: “To Mel. This is yours now. Love, Mom.” Brief, like her message to Cal, except Mel had also got her “love.” The letters were wavering, clearly done well into her sickness. She must have realized her time was short.
Daphne traced the marbled lines. “Did you want to open it with me or by yourself?”
“How do you know,” he said, “that I want to open it at all?”
“Because,” she said, “you never miss an opportunity.”
“Like father, like son.”
“I don’t blame your father for coming out to see you,” she said quietly.
Mel opened the dishwasher. Daphne had stacked the silverware differently than how he did it. “He’s running out of money, is what, and plans to hit me up.”
“That,” she said, “is very cynical.”
“But true. You saw how much he won. After paying his debts and buying the car, he can’t have much left. And he said he got a hotel for a week. That’s a thousand right there. He’s blowing through his winnings, and he knows it.”
“I am sure that this isn’t the first time in forty years he’s been short of money, and he’s never come to you,” she said. “Why would he now?”
“You don’t know him like I do.”
“No,” she said, “I’m seeing him forty years later.”
“He hasn’t changed,” Mel said, separating the forks from the other silverware. “Still looking for the next big deal.”
She took a cup from the dishwasher rack and rose on her toes to set it in the cupboard, though she angled the handle the wrong way. She turned the cup to its normal position and gave him an emoji-like wink. “Better?”
It was. “I blame my dad,” he blurted. “I grew up with nothing, nothing certain, everything always up in the air. I guess I’ve gone overboard to make sure things stay in place.”
She set the next cup beside the first, handle correctly oriented. “Like me?”
He placed the forks in a stack so precise you could slide paper straight through the tines. “I’m glad you told Fran the truth about us. It means things between you and me have to change. And if that means you stay here for a while longer, yeah, like you.”
Daphne rubbed the Christmas wreath on his favorite mug. It had been a gift from his mother on her last Christmas. She’d made him promise to use it instead of packing it away like all the other special mugs, even though he’d never told her that was what he did with them. She’d known him inside and out.
“That mug goes next to the coffee machine,” he said.
She kept hold of it. “Mel, the thing we have—”
His phone chimed. Daphne went on full alert, just as she had when it had gone off during dinner. He shook his head yet again, and she sagged.
“I know, I know,” she said and then recited her own mantra. “It’s been barely twenty-four hours. She’s a theatrical person. She has food and water and a phone. She can call Moshe if she’s in trouble. She’s safe.”
Mel hated to cause trouble between them, but... “You should contact Moshe tomorrow, even if he doesn’t call you first. He needs to know the truth.”
Daphne slumped onto the couch and laid her head back. “If I didn’t worry so much on this couch, I’d like it a lot more.”
He felt a twinge of anger toward Fran. Terminal cancer didn’t give anyone the right to purposely distress someone they loved.
Wanting to get her mind off her troubles, he shut the utensil drawer, grabbed the box and carried it to her.
“Here, then,” he said, sitting beside her. “Let’s see what Mom gave me.”
He placed the box on the coffee table and Mel shook and wiggled the lid, a good suction having sealed the two parts together. When the lid finally separated with a faint whoosh, Mel wished he could clamp it right back on.
Inside was an urn. A tiny one, no bigger than a jewelry box.
“Oh,” said Daphne. “Oh.”
He read the name inscribed on the urn’s copper plate: Isaac Grant. And a date in March from thirty-nine years ago. His baby brother.
Mel sat still; it was the only thing he could do. He’d seen death. His stepdad had fallen off the roof in front of him. He’d spoken his last words to Mel: “Take care of them all. Good boy.” Then Seth had scrambled down off the roof and knelt shoulder to shoulder with him. His mother had faded away on a morphine cloud from the cancer, but Seth and Connie had been there, too.
But baby Isaac—
He’d been alone wh
en his baby brother died in his arms.
Daphne sat beside him, just as motionless. “You don’t need to deal with this right now,” she said softly.
Mel managed a small shake of his head. There was no putting the lid back on this.
“I’d wondered what happened to him, if he was cremated or buried or what. I never asked. We left Cal ten days after Isaac...passed. Just outside town, I could still see the gas station behind us, Mom parked the car on the side of the road, turned to me and said, ‘We are never, never going to talk about what happened. If we don’t put it behind us, it’s always going to be in front of us.’”
“I agreed because I couldn’t think about his death any longer. But Mom—Mom had brought him with us all along.”
That stung. She’d got to keep a memento of her son, his brother, and all he’d got to keep was silent. “And because we never spoke of him, sometimes I wondered if he’d even existed.” He slid a finger over his brother’s name on the urn. “But he did.”
Beside the urn was a birth certificate in a laminated pouch. Another bit of Isaac that he hadn’t realized existed. Mel broke his long, long silence.
“He came six weeks early. The hospital was forty miles away. My mom called around the bars for Cal, but when she found him, he was too drunk to drive, and sixty miles away in the opposite direction. She called 911, but we were in the middle of a snowstorm. One of the spring ones. They come thick and heavy in the mountains, so the ambulance couldn’t even make it out of the hospital parking lot. The 911 operator patched me through to a nurse who could lead me through it.”
Daphne touched his arm. “You delivered the baby.”
“I did. The cord was wrapped around his neck. I got it off and he opened his eyes. I was the first person he ever saw. And he cried. The nurse on the phone said that was a good sign. She told me to let him cry and get him wrapped up quick. I did. I cut the cord and took care of Mom while she held Isaac.
“For a bit there it looked as if everything was going to work out.
“Then it didn’t.” In his mind, Mel slipped back to all those years ago, to that cold spring day. To the smell of blood and sweat, and the strained calmness of the nurse’s voice. To his mother’s quiet hand on her baby suddenly fluttering around Isaac’s chest. “He goes limp all of a sudden and Mom can’t get him to feed. The nurse instructs us to give him CPR. Two fingers pumping the chest. She asks if there’s any way we can drive him closer to the hospital, that she’ll try to get the ambulance to meet us there. I say there’s a gas station about seven miles away but I know the road won’t be good. Mom climbs out of bed and into the car with Isaac. Tells me to drive. The car’s an old Chevy, and I don’t think it’ll even start, but it does. I’ve only driven a few times and the road’s like wet cement but I keep driving and Mom keeps pumping. Then we hit an ice patch and I slide right into the ditch.
“I try pushing the car out, but I only work the car farther into the ditch. Mom gives Isaac to me. Tells me to run as a fast as I can. To keep pumping his chest and keep running and not to stop no matter what.”
The snow had filled his boots, pulled at his every step. “I make it to the gas station. But somewhere along the way Isaac—he doesn’t. I don’t even realize that he’s dead until the EMT arrives and doesn’t bother with CPR.”
Mel dragged his mind back to the present, to the reality of the marble box in the darkening room and to Daphne. He couldn’t remember anything beyond that. Mostly because his young mind had switched off. He imagined that the ambulance had taken his mom to the hospital, that someone had driven him home. It wasn’t his dad. He would’ve remembered that.
Nearly three years later, Seth had been born. His new dad, his real dad, had taken Mel to the hospital and he’d been allowed to hold Seth. Mel had put two fingers to Seth’s chest, but his dad had tugged them away, saying, “He’s good. He can breathe on his own.”
The healthy baby was taken from him and returned to his mom, and Mel had cried then. After three years, he’d finally cried for baby Isaac. He’d thought at the time that he’d got the grief out of his system.
He was wrong.
He lowered his head to his hands as the tears fell.
* * *
DAPHNE SHOULD’VE KNOWN he was hiding this deep sorrow. His aversion to talking about the accident, his fear of mountain driving and, most telling, his rectitude over Alexi’s pregnancy. All of it bound to this tiny urn.
What could she do for him? She’d no experience consoling anyone. She had given precious little comfort to anyone in her life. When alive, neither her parents nor her friend had needed any from her. Fran, Frederick and Moshe had functioned as an autonomous unit. Moshe’s kids with their scrapes and bruises tore past her on the way to any other adult. Even in her terminal illness, Fran hadn’t asked for care beyond providing medication and a plumped pillow.
Mel swiped at his tears. “Sorry,” he said. He straightened, and seemed about to pull himself together, when he collapsed again into sobs.
She could bring him tissues. As soon as she brought the bright-colored box, he stripped the sheets out by the handfuls. She sat, holding the box, like a human dispenser. And still the tears flowed.
Decades of tears. How often had the painful memories come back to him? If the announcement of a baby worried him, what else over the years had? Anytime he was in a car. Or seen someone in the ditch. Or had to push—
To push a car. As he had for her. He’d volunteered to push Connie’s car to give her back the joy and freedom and adventure that came with driving. He’d risked reliving his personal hell to release her from hers.
She wouldn’t let him remember alone.
She ran her hand up his back, stroked his thick hair. She touched his wet cheek. “Would you like a hug?”
He pulled her into his arms and she let him hold her, her body curled against his, his heartbeat echoing hers.
Still, she wished she could be even smaller, easier to hold. Wished she could disappear entirely and be replaced by a warm, breathing baby.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DAPHNE SNAPPED TO full consciousness early the next morning when she heard the snick of the key in the lock. Mel. How had she not heard him leave? She’d spent the night undulating along the surface of wakefulness; surely, she would’ve woken if he’d so much as opened his eyes.
A rustle of a paper bag and a scrape of a plate suggested a repeat of yesterday’s breakfast. The greasy food was welcome. Other than eating with Mel, Daphne had paired her diet to Fran’s—a plain, unscented, non-vomit-inducing one.
Daphne’s feet hit the warm carpet. What a relief to be with someone healthy. She shimmied into a skort and lightweight top from Connie’s fashion finds, and beetled to the kitchen where Mel handed her a coffee, along with an update. “The police had a few leads. One actually put her at Nordegg. That’s an hour west of Rocky Mountain House. Yesterday around noon. Just the vehicle, though. Not Fran. Unfortunately, by the time the police got there, she’d moved on.” He paused. “At least we know she can move.”
She didn’t care about Fran right now. With her fingertip, she traced a tired line beside his bloodshot eyes. “How are you, Mel?”
He winced, as if she’d touched a bruise. “Fine. Good. Thanks for asking.” He tilted his head toward the office. “You might want to check your email.”
Daphne allowed him the out. After all, she wouldn’t want Mel to dwell on, say, the car accident involving her parents. Besides, she really ought to see if Moshe had sent an email.
There were three, each increasing in bossiness and annoyance and worry.
“Email him to say that you’ll call him from this number,” Mel said. He displayed his number to her.
“Moshe’s going to kill me.”
“He won’t.”
“You don’t know Moshe.”
“I’ll be pleased to make
his acquaintance and inform him that murdering someone because his mother is an idiot is illegal and immoral.”
Moshe responded seconds after she’d sent the email with one of his own: Call now.
Daphne first took a couple of minutes to make notes at Mel’s office desk, so when Moshe barked a greeting, Daphne reeled off the facts of Fran’s absence like a good witness.
Moshe immediately put Daphne on the stand. “Yesterday morning, when you emailed me, you were aware that she was unaccounted for?”
“Unaccounted for by me and local authorities. Had she, however, been in contact with you?”
“Yes,” Moshe conceded. “We had talked on the phone. She didn’t tell me that she’d driven off or that you weren’t with her. She acted as if everything was normal, so you can hardly blame me for not contacting you yesterday.”
“I am not blaming you,” Daphne said. “I take it she’s not answering her phone this morning.”
“Why else would we be talking right now?”
Daphne fell back to her usual line of defense. Passive aggressiveness. Without a question to answer, she didn’t feel compelled to speak.
He huffed in clear aggravation. “Could you please book me a hotel?”
“There’s no need for you to come out,” Daphne said. “There’s nothing you can do that isn’t already being done.”
“I could perhaps,” he said, “get in a car and physically search for her.”
A dig about her inability to drive. Now was not the time to present evidence to the contrary. Besides, noodling around the side streets of a small town barely constituted driving.
“What about Hannah?” Daphne asked.
“What about her?”
“She needs you close by. The baby could come any day. Any minute.”
“I need to be in two places at once.”
Mel appeared at the office door and leaned against the frame.
“Moshe, please. Stay in Halifax. Your mother is a grown adult. She has medication, she has food and water and a place to sleep. If she wanted you here, she would have asked for you to come. You have to respect her wishes.”
Coming Home to You Page 14
