He couldn’t, wouldn’t do that. Frankie deserved a life, and the least he could do was let her have one, even though in doing so, his life felt over.
His old life was over; a new life with Hannah had begun. She needed him. He couldn’t leave her. Not like this. He couldn’t do the same thing to the woman he loved now as he’d done to the woman he would love forever.
The apartment door opened and Hannah stepped in.
Charley shoved the documents into his duffle, then kicked it behind the couch. ‘You’re home early.’
Her gaze was unfocused. ‘Is it?’
Charley glanced at the clock. 6:00 p.m. She wasn’t the only one unfocused today. He’d spent over four hours staring at papers, as if by doing so he could make the ink on them disappear.
‘I made an appointment for you with someone recommended by a friend of mine.’
‘Great.’ She drifted into the kitchen.
She didn’t ask who, what, why? His friend could be an axe murderer, who was friends only with other axe murderers.
‘Dr Benvolio. He’s a grief psychiatrist.’
Hannah didn’t answer. Instead she stared at the last can of ginger ale. Then she opened it and drained it in several long gulps.
‘Huh.’ She tossed the empty can into the trash. ‘Didn’t help.’
‘Are you nauseous?’
‘Nope.’ She sat on the couch.
‘Then how could ginger ale help?’
‘I thought maybe it would fill this …’ She rubbed her stomach with one hand, then set her other palm against her sternum and rubbed that too.
‘Hole?’
Her gaze flicked to his. ‘How’d you know?’
‘Losing a twin is losing part of yourself,’ he repeated.
‘Yes!’ The adoration that had faded from her eyes recently, replaced by sorrow and bewilderment, rushed back.
Charley hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it. The pain that lived in that matching hole in the center of his chest eased just a little.
‘You’re lost, adrift, alone,’ he said. ‘Half not a whole.’
He didn’t mention that sometimes it felt as if that missing chunk had been yanked out by the hand of a giant, then stomped on a bit.
‘I’m the eternal maiden aunt. Though now I’ll never be an aunt. I’ll never again be one of two that together are one. I don’t feel him any more.’ Despair flickered in her pale blue eyes. ‘I always felt him inside. There, even when he wasn’t. I knew things about him when we weren’t together – what he was doing, feeling, sometimes what he was eating. I was born a twosome. How do I stop needing to be a twosome?’
‘You don’t,’ he said.
‘Don’t what?’
Her attention was hard to keep these days. He needed to cut to the chase. Quickly before he lost that attention and his nerve.
‘You can be a twosome.’ He took her hands. ‘With me.’
She still looked confused.
Charley went down on one knee. It wasn’t easy. His knees were not what they used to be. ‘Marry me, Hannah.’
Though it was probably too soon for both of them to make such a decision, it was the perfect solution. Hannah needed to be part of a whole. Charley needed to anchor himself to this new life. Otherwise he’d keep drifting toward the old one.
Anticipation lit her eyes. She seemed almost like the Hannah she’d been before Heath died. Could he become, again, the man he’d been before Lisa had?
Doubtful. But he could try.
‘Is this what you want, Charley?’
He wanted so many things, the foremost of which was a time machine. But as that wasn’t going to happen, he’d have to settle for moving on.
With her.
Hannah
London. July 26, 1994
Hannah awoke, groggy. Had the earth moved?
Outside her hotel, sirens wailed, but that was nothing new in London. They had seemed to be wailing since they’d arrived yesterday.
Hannah glanced at the clock. 12:12. Was that a.m. or p.m.? Since it was light outside, she voted for p.m. How could she still be asleep?
Then she did the math. She could still be asleep because it was six a.m. in DC. Maybe it was seven a.m. She wasn’t good at math.
‘Charley?’
He didn’t answer. His side of the bed was cold; his camera bag was gone. That math she could do. Charley wasn’t here.
He was a lot more used to jet lag than she was. He adjusted to time differences without any real adjustment at all. At least it didn’t seem to bother him that she took a lot longer to get her shit together than he did.
He probably liked it. That meant that he could go out and do whatever while she slept their first day away. Hannah did her best, always, to make sure that Charley liked everything about their life together. Yet she still worried every day that he might go back to Frankie.
She told no one of this fear. Not her father – as if. Not her mother – dear God. She might have told Heath, if Heath had still been here to tell. She definitely hadn’t told Charley.
The only thing worse than fearing Charley might leave her for his first wife, was him knowing that she feared he might leave her for his first wife.
Whenever Charley invited her to travel with him, she jumped at the chance. Sure, he only did so a few times a year – and that was OK because she had You to deal with.
She wasn’t sure why Charley asked her to go along. Maybe he thought she was lonely in the too-large apartment that they’d moved into last year. But really, she spent so much time with people at work, and she worked a lot, that when she came home, she was happy for the silence.
Frankie had never traveled with Charley. Hannah didn’t know if his inviting her was good or bad. Mostly she didn’t ask questions like that because she didn’t want to hear an answer she didn’t want to hear. Probably not a healthy habit to have but it worked for them.
Hannah slid out of bed and searched for a coffee pot. None to be had. Neither was a note from her husband.
After the first time he’d left town and not told her that he had and she’d flipped out calling everyone he knew – almost – he’d never done it again. She’d felt like an idiot when it turned out he’d been in Barcelona for the Olympics. She probably should have known that, but shouldn’t he also – probably – have mentioned it?
His voice when he’d called her after Ray called him – after Hannah had called Ray, crying …
Hannah wrapped her arms around herself. She never wanted to hear that chill, slightly annoyed tone again. So far, she hadn’t.
They’d worked it out. He no longer flew off without telling her; she no longer flipped out if she woke and he wasn’t right there.
She wasn’t going to flip out now. This was London. It had stood through world wars and Roman invasions. The English were famous for their stoicism and fortitude. She admired that. She kind of thought Charley would admire it too. He loved it when people ‘dealt with their shit’ quietly, coolly, firmly without whining about any of it. The less he heard about trouble, the better Charley liked it.
Well, she wouldn’t trouble him with her need for coffee and a donut. She’d just handle that herself. If she was going to be stoic, coffee was a necessity.
They were here so Charley could get a photo of Tony Blair, the newly elected Labour Party leader, but he had also been asked to get a shot of the Israeli embassy, perhaps to accompany a story on the peace talks between Jordan and Israel going on right now back in DC. For some reason, Ray wanted photos of Israeli embassies around the world. She found it ironic that the big story was taking place a few blocks from their new apartment, yet here they were across the ocean.
The sirens continued to wail outside. They seemed to be wailing a lot longer and louder than usual. Had something happened?
Then she remembered the weird shimmy that had woken her. She’d thought it was just jet lag, but maybe not.
Hannah flicked on the television.
‘A car bomb
has exploded in front of the Israeli embassy.’ The on-air reporter appeared harried and a little scared. The glass windows in the shops just visible to his left lay all over the pavement. ‘The blast has been heard up to a mile away. So far we have no report on the number of injuries or deaths.’
He touched his ear, tilted his head. Behind him, people trailed out of the embassy, dazed and confused.
‘I’m hearing now that the injured are being taken to Charing Cross Hospital. More on that as I have it.’
Hannah reached for the phone. Her hand was shaking. She just knew Charley had been at that bombing, if not before it happened then immediately after.
‘Right place, right time Charley,’ she muttered. ‘Goddamn it.’
She dialed his mobile phone. It went directly to voicemail, something it did so often she wondered why he even had the thing.
‘Charley,’ she said after the tone, proud of how calm her voice sounded. Had she even put a British twist on his name? Her back was straight, her upper lip very stiff. ‘Please call me when you get this.’
Hannah waited as long as she could manage for a call back before she got dressed, wrote a note, then went in search of coffee near the Israeli embassy.
She smelled spent ordinance long before she reached the police line. She tried to talk her way closer. The bobbies didn’t even blink in response; they certainly didn’t bother to answer her request even with a no.
She caught a cab to Charing Cross Hospital. The place was busier than the blast sight. The number of press was atrocious. She spoke to a few of them. None had seen Charley. In direct opposition to any press she might have spoken to in the US, none of them had even heard of Charley Blackwell.
She bought a scone. Charley had said scones in the UK were much better than in the US. They still couldn’t beat a donut.
Hannah returned to the hotel. What was she going to do now? Was it too soon to visit the US embassy? Probably. She still had to fight not to hail another cab and do just that.
She unlocked her door and went inside. It took her thirty seconds to realize the shower was on. Charley’s camera bag was on the bed. His clothes were strewn everywhere.
She picked up his shirt. There were tiny brown pinpricks all over it.
The garment floated to the floor and whispered across her feet. She sat abruptly on the bed. He’d been so close to the blast that residue had burned his shirt.
Hannah put her head between her legs and tried to breathe.
The shower went off.
Her head went up. She didn’t pass out, so she stood, retrieved his shirt and trousers then tossed them into the trash.
By the time Charley walked out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, using another to scrub at his hair, her hands had stopped shaking.
‘Hey!’ He gave her a kiss. Apparently he hadn’t been worried at finding her gone. ‘Did you have fun?’
‘Fun,’ she repeated stupidly.
‘The concierge said you’d gone in search of coffee.’ He winked. ‘And a donut. How’d that go for you?’
She’d told the concierge that? She didn’t remember even meeting the man. Explained why Charley wasn’t worried. Although had he ever been worried about her? Would he ever be?
Another set of questions she was not going to ask.
‘Found the coffee.’ Didn’t find you.
‘Well, that’s the important thing, right?’ He tossed the towel over a chair and rooted through his suitcase for new clothes.
So that’s the way they were playing it. Pretending nothing had happened.
No, thank you.
‘How was the embassy bombing?’ Hannah’s voice was very QE2. She was so damn proud.
Charley froze with his hand on a fresh, unburned shirt. ‘I … uh …’
‘Yes?’ Hannah prompted. That time she thought she sounded like Margaret Thatcher, unless she sounded like Julia Child.
Hannah cleared her throat.
Charley turned and she lifted one eyebrow. She’d been practising that since Heath had died and she’d finally perfected it. She understood why he’d liked the expression so much. It got results.
Charley shrugged into his shirt. ‘As embassy bombings go, not the worst. Then again, what bombing could be anything but bad?’
‘You have a point.’
Next question. What was the right one? Definitely not: How close were you? She knew that answer. Close enough.
How about: Did anyone die?
She wasn’t certain she could get those words out without choking, maybe crying. She didn’t cry in front of Charley. She cried in the shower. That was the way they both liked it. Besides, she could find out how many had died on the evening news for the next several days to several weeks – over and over and over again.
When they’d first married, he would come home and he would never say a word about where he’d been. She’d ask, he’d say a little, then next time a little more. The stories he’d shared had been whitewashed – that had been easy enough to see just by watching the news. But as time passed and she hadn’t fainted like a seventeenth-century maiden, the accounts had become more in depth, more honest, more real. She’d had her panic attacks later, alone, and eventually she hadn’t had them at all.
Charley finished dressing, cleared his throat, flicked her a sidelong glance. ‘Something else you need to ask?’
The way he held himself so tense revealed he expected her to lose it. She was not going to be that woman; she would never be that wife. She would be the type of cool, collected female he admired, no matter that sometimes, inside, she was anything but. If she wanted to keep Charley, she would have to become That Hannah, both inside and out.
‘You wanna help me find a donut?’ she asked.
His smile was worth every agony; his kiss pure bliss, but it always was. Hannah would do anything for that kiss. She already had.
‘Not yet,’ he said, and pulled her on to the bed.
Later, much later, when the room had gone hazy with twilight and donuts were nothing but a memory, he told her about that morning while he played with the strands of her hair that splayed across his chest.
‘A woman drove up in a gray Audi. Middle-aged. Middle Eastern. A security guard and a police officer approached her and then …’ He used both hands to indicate boom.
How close were you? was again on the tip of Hannah’s tongue. She bit her tongue and snuggled closer to his side.
He rewarded her by kissing her head and hugging her even tighter. ‘I wound up on my ass. By the time I got to them, there were half a dozen others there already. I don’t think they’re dead. At least they weren’t then.’
‘I’m sure we can find out if you want …’ She indicated the TV.
‘No.’ He kissed her head again. ‘Right now I just want you.’
Her chest hurt. She loved him so much. ‘Did you get the picture you went there for?’
‘Yeah. Probably the last photograph of the embassy in one piece.’
Typical. Charley always got the last picture, if he wasn’t getting the first picture.
‘You need to get that film to Ray?’
‘Already did. No reason to leave bed again today.’
They didn’t.
The next morning when she woke, he handed her coffee.
‘How long have you been up?’
Charley shrugged. ‘A while. I walked over by the embassy. It’s a mess.’
She sipped her coffee, said nothing. She hated it that he could leave the room and come back and she’d never even known it. She slept like the dead when she slept with Charley. What would she do when they had kids?
Would they have kids? That was a question she’d intended to ask, and she’d intended to ask it on this trip. But how?
‘London’s going to be shut down,’ he began.
‘They do not shut London down.’
‘Right. But the places we planned to see are going to be tough. Kensington Palace had some damage. All the big tourist site
s have doubled their security.’
‘Good.’ Hannah took another sip of coffee. ‘I don’t mind lines.’
Charley grimaced. Charley didn’t do lines.
‘We should probably …’
She waited for him to say ‘go home’, or at least say she should.
‘Go to Paris.’
‘Really?’ She loved Paris, never thought she’d get there with him since Paris wasn’t exactly a rip-roaring photojournalist’s dream.
‘I want to see it the way you do. You can show me around.’
‘Really?’
He laughed and sat on the bed, touched her face, rubbed his thumb along her cheekbone the way he always did, the way that she loved. ‘You gotta stop saying “really”.’
‘Really?’ she whispered.
He didn’t answer, just stared into her eyes for so long she started to wonder what, or maybe who, he was seeing. Would she ever stop wondering that?
‘It means a lot to me that I can tell you everything.’
‘Why couldn’t you tell me everything?’
‘I don’t want to upset you, but you’re stronger than that. You’re not …’
He broke off, stood. She knew he was thinking of Frankie.
What had Frankie done when he’d come home with burned shirts? Stories of bombs and bodies? More questions she would never ask.
They went to Paris and it was glorious. She showed him everything she loved. The café with the best coffee. The bakeries with the beignets and the croissants. Oh, my God, the croissants. She never even thought about donuts.
They were shameless tourists – the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, the catacombs, the Seine. Charley didn’t bother with his camera and he didn’t seem to miss it.
‘You sure?’ she asked when he left it behind in the hotel yet again.
‘No one in the world needs another picture of the Eiffel Tower.’
She wasn’t sure the world didn’t need a picture of the Eiffel Tower taken by Charley Blackwell, but she let it go. Hannah let a lot of things go.
But there was one thing she couldn’t, one thing she wouldn’t. On their last night in Paris, she brought it up during their dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel George V, her father’s favorite restaurant. If there was one thing her father knew besides investments, it was dinner in Paris.
Just Once Page 34
