After the Rain

by Karen White

  After locking the front door, she shoved the key under the doormat and walked out the front gate to the sidewalk. She didn’t dare look back at the beautiful white house with the wind chime hanging from the front porch, and the picket fence wrapping around the yard like arms in an embrace. She itched to take a picture of it, to store it away for later, when the horror of this night had faded. But she couldn’t. It had been the only place she’d ever called home, and having a one-dimensional record of it would only make it less real.

  She headed toward Cassie’s house, the album tucked under her arm, listening as her feet beat a lonely echo on the deserted streets.

  Suzanne was surprised when she reached the house and Cassie was sitting in the porch swing, bundled inside a thick afghan.

  Suzanne paused on the bottom step. “What are you doing?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing. It’s four o’clock in the morning. Only nursing mothers are supposed to be up at this hour.”

  “I was going to leave this on the porch, but since you’re here . . .” She walked up the steps and handed Cassie the album. “It’s done. You can give it to Maddie. Now or on her graduation day—I don’t suppose it matters.”

  Cassie stopped the swing and took the album. “Why don’t you stick around and give it to her yourself?”

  Suzanne snorted, not completely hiding the sob in the back of her throat. “She doesn’t want to see me. Not that I can’t blame her. What I did was unforgivable.”

  Cassie was quiet for a moment, looking up at Suzanne. “No. Maybe what we did was unforgivable. We accepted you too easily. We didn’t give any consideration as to who you were or where you were from.”

  “What—so you would have stayed away from me?”

  Cassie shook her head. “No. So we would have realized how fragile you really are. We would have taken better care of you.”

  Tears ran down Suzanne’s cheeks, and she gave them an angry wipe. “Don’t try to be nice to me now, Cassie Parker. I don’t deserve it. I’ve really messed things up, and there’s no going back.”

  Cassie surprised Suzanne by throwing her head back and laughing. “You remind me of me three years ago. Next you’re going to tell me that you’re leaving for good.”

  Hurt, Suzanne stared back at Cassie, feeling the freezing air numb her nose as she breathed in heavily. “I am. There’s no way I can stay now—not after what I did to Maddie. And there’s the matter of my picture on the cover of Lifetime. Anthony will take the first flight down, and I’ll be facing a jail sentence. I’m leaving tonight.”

  Sobering, Cassie stood. “Don’t make another mistake to try and fix the first one. You’ll regret it the rest of your life. I know I do. I got hurt really bad once. Instead of staying to face it, I ran away and didn’t come back for fifteen years. And when I came back, my sister was dying. I had lost all that time with her, and I could never get it back. Don’t make the same mistake I did, Suzanne.”

  Suzanne turned away. “It’s not the same. This is where you belonged. I don’t. I’ve never belonged anywhere, and it’s too late to start now.” She began to walk down the steps. “You don’t have to tell Maddie who did the album if you don’t want to.”

  Cassie moved toward her. “Don’t go, Suzanne. What about Joe?”

  Suzanne stared out into the interminable night, the darkness swallowing everything. “He’ll win the election and get on with his life. He’ll find somebody else.”

  “No, he won’t. He loves you.”

  Suzanne paused. When she spoke, she had a catch in her voice. “Not after tonight. Not after seeing Maddie . . .”

  “Then you don’t know him. You might love him, but you certainly don’t know him.”

  “I know him enough to know that it would kill him to lose the election to Stinky and let Walton down. Having a girlfriend who betrayed his daughter and faces time in a jail cell will not induce people to vote for him. He’ll probably be relieved to see me leave.” She tried not to think of the warmth of his arms, the fullness of his heart, and the way he loved the people in his life without holding back.

  “But where will you go?”

  Suzanne shrugged without turning around. “I’ll catch the bus I came in on and just stay on it as long as I can. I’ve done it before.”

  “Will you at least call me if you need anything?”

  “Probably not.” She began walking down the front path toward the avenue of oaks.

  Cassie called out to her, “This isn’t good-bye, so I’m not going to say it.”

  Suzanne kept walking. “Good-bye, Cassie.” And she continued walking, staring at the stars that were forever beyond her reach, until the thick darkness blocked Cassie and the big white house from her sight.

  CHAPTER 23

  Maddie splashed cold water over her face again, then stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. It didn’t help. Her eyes were still puffy and red from crying. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered anymore. She remembered how hopeless she had felt after her mother died, and how she thought nothing could ever hurt that much again. She’d been wrong. At least her mother’s dying hadn’t been intentional.

  She heard the front door shut downstairs in the empty house, and her aunt Cassie calling up to her, “Maddie? Are you here?”

  Slowly Maddie pulled open the bathroom door and peered over the banister at her aunt in the foyer below. “I’m here. I’m skipping school, but my dad knows about it.”

  Aunt Cassie wore a sympathetic look on her face, and Maddie relaxed a bit with relief. After last night, she could have sworn that her aunt was siding with Suzanne. She loved her aunt Cassie and would have hated not speaking to her for the rest of her life.

  Maddie came down the stairs one at a time, and when she reached the bottom, her aunt gave her a warm, one-armed hug. It was then that she realized that Cassie was carrying something under her other arm.

  “What’s that?”

  “Come on into the living room and I’ll show you.”

  She followed her aunt into the pale yellow room that was only used for company and special occasions—and Aunt Cassie knew that. A tickle of uneasiness brushed the back of Maddie’s neck as she walked into the living room.

  They sat down on a cream love seat, and her aunt placed a large scrapbook album on Maddie’s lap. Maddie noticed with a start that her own name was embossed across the front.

  “I know this is a little early to be giving it to you, but I figured you needed to see it now. It’s supposed to be a graduation present.”

  Maddie stared uneasily at the pale blue linen cover, remembering the conversation she’d overheard at Bitsy’s salon between Darlene Narpone and Suzanne about a surprise for her. Maddie’s preoccupation with the photography contest had made her forget all about it until now. Something thick and heavy settled into the bottom of her stomach. “Who’s it from?”

  “Your mother. And Suzanne. It was a labor of love. From both of them.”

  Maddie tried to shove the album off her lap, but Aunt Cassie grabbed it and pushed it back. “We’re going to look at it now together. You need to see it.”

  “I don’t want to. I don’t want to have anything to do with that woman. I’ll look at the parts my mom did, but not anything else.”

  “But all the pages are intertwined; there’s really no place to distinguish where your mother’s work stopped and Suzanne’s started. You’ll just have to look at it and see the whole picture.”

  “I’m not going to do it.”

  Cassie put her hand on Maddie’s arm. “Yes, you are. I know you’re angry at Suzanne. She made a terrible mistake—she knows that. But she did it out of love. If her ex-fiancé saw her picture on that magazine, he’d come after her. His name is Anthony deSalvo, and he’s not a very nice man. She didn’t do anything wrong, but he could make her go to jail. And she didn’t want to leave you. Can you understand that’s why she did it?”

  Maddie shook her head, not wanting to listen. “I don’t care. She
lied to me. She betrayed me. I don’t ever want to see her or hear her name again.”

  Cassie sighed heavily, as if searching for patience that Maddie knew was in short supply with her aunt. “Look, I want you to do this as a favor for me. Just look at the album. How you feel afterward is completely up to you.”

  Maddie stared down at the album, feeling nothing but revulsion. She picked it up, ready to hand it back to her aunt, when something slipped out from the back cover. Cassie leaned over and picked it off the floor, and Maddie saw it was an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph.

  Cassie held it in front of her so both of them could study it closely. It was a picture of a rainstorm in the desert, the gray sheets of rain thundering down on the cracked floor of sand, the stiff earth rolling on and on, with no beginning and no end. But the rain poured down, filling and softening the cracks of the hard ground. And there, as if accidentally caught on film, was the form of a woman sitting on a large boulder, her back to the camera. Her arms were open, her face turned toward the angry sky, her eyes closed against the unforgiving beat of the rain.

  It was stunning in its beauty and reminded Maddie of some of the photographs she’d seen at the Gertrude Hardt exhibit at the High.

  She turned to her aunt. “Where did this come from?”

  Cassie creased her brow. “I don’t know. I wonder if Suzanne forgot it was here.” She placed the old photograph on the coffee table. “I’m going to leave this here for now, and we’ll worry about it later. Right now we need to look at the album.”

  Maddie glanced at her aunt, at her determined expression and the hard set of her mouth. Her aunt’s stubbornness was something mules envied, and she knew she’d better give in now, because it would happen eventually. Besides, she wanted to see what her mother had done. She’d just pretend she’d done the entire album.

  Maddie slowly opened the album and saw her mother’s handwriting. A tight ball formed in her chest, and she felt her aunt’s arm around her shoulders.

  “This will be hard at first, but you’ll be glad you saw it when you’re done.”

  Maddie nodded, knowing she couldn’t speak, and began turning the pages, soon forgetting her anger and her heavy heart. Each page showed her a chapter of her life, the life of a child who was loved and cherished. She looked at her baby pictures, at the photos of her with her mother and father and then with each of her baby siblings, and her heart cried out for the years that were gone, while at the same time it sang for the joy those years had given her.

  Then she came to the more recent pages: the pictures Suzanne had taken of her at football games, at her sister’s party, and in the photography lab with Suzanne. She looked at the pictures of the two of them together taken with the timer set on the camera, their heads held close as they examined proof sheets.

  These, too, were photos of a daughter and friend, a girl who was still greatly loved by the people who filled her life. She recognized Suzanne’s fine handwriting documenting the events and people in the photographs, along with Maddie’s accomplishments and thoughts. Thoughts Maddie had never voiced to anyone, but that Suzanne seemed to know anyway.

  The pages showed her the years and the people that had made her into the person she’d become. The bad times along with the good had shaped her, and the two people who had made this album had shown her this. They also showed her where her foundation was, how indestructible it was, and how she would always have a soft place to fall.

  She knew now why her aunt had made her look at the album. It wasn’t to make her anger and hurt go away. It was to help her see beyond it to the woman who loved her like a mother, a woman who knew her as well as the people who had known her since birth, and loved her anyway.

  She looked up at her aunt, unsure.

  Cassie’s voice was gentle, but her words were not. “Be a more mature person than I was, Maddie. Don’t let resentment and anger cloud your love for Suzanne. What you two had was special, and you’ll never get it back if you let her go. Never.” There were tears in her eyes, and Maddie knew she was thinking of the fifteen years of wounded pride that had separated her from her sister. Fifteen years that could never be brought back.

  Maddie leaned forward and took the black-and-white photograph off the coffee table. “This must have been a favorite of Suzanne’s. It’s like a picture of her, isn’t it? She’s sitting all alone out in this desert, and the rain’s practically drowning her. She sits there and takes it because there’s nobody there to protect her.”

  Cassie took the photograph from her hands and put it back on the table. “I think you’re right. But I also think that’s more how she feels about herself than how things really are now. I think it’s time that we showed her.”

  Tears stung Maddie’s eyes, and she looked down at the album. “She has a lot of explaining to do. And a lot of begging for forgiveness, too.”

  Her aunt’s voice held a note of relief. “She knows that. But you have to make the first step.”

  Maddie looked at her in surprise. “I’m not the one who screwed up.”

  Cassie stood. “No. But you’re the one with the support system. Suzanne thinks she’s alone.”

  Maddie swallowed. “Where’s Suzanne now?”

  “She’s gone. She left last night.”

  Maddie stood, feeling a tide of rising panic. “Will she be coming back?”

  “I don’t think she’s planning to.”

  Maddie dropped the album on the coffee table. “We can’t just let her leave like that. Do you think we can make her come back?”

  Cassie shrugged. “It’ll be tough, but if we can find her, I’m sure we can find a way to bring her back.” Her aunt watched her shrewdly.

  Maddie threw her hands over her face. “I’ve really screwed up, haven’t I?”

  Cassie brushed Maddie’s hair off her forehead. “Nothing that can’t be fixed if you set your mind to it. I have great faith that you’ll figure something out.”

  “What if I can’t? Daddy will be miserable without her. We’ll all be miserable without her.”

  “You’ll find a way. You are your mother’s daughter, you know.”

  Maddie smiled for the first time. “Yeah. I know. I just need to think.”

  “You do that. Just make sure it’s nothing illegal. And run it by me first.”

  “Okay. I can do that. Anything else?”

  “Yes. Let me know if I can help. If we put our heads together, we can do anything.”

  Maddie hugged her aunt tightly, so glad to have her in her life. “Thanks, Aunt Cassie.”

  Her aunt nodded, her eyes suspiciously moist. “Right now I need to go find your father. Is he at school?”

  “Yeah. He’s trying to pretend that nothing’s changed.”

  “I’ll see if I can catch him there. But if you see your dad first, tell him I need to talk to him as soon as possible. He needs to know about Suzanne and Anthony deSalvo. Mr. deSalvo will probably be visiting Walton as soon as that issue of Lifetime hits newsstands next week. It’ll probably get ugly, and I know Stinky Harden will want to get involved, so he’ll need to be prepared.”

  With a quick kiss on Maddie’s forehead, Aunt Cassie left. Maddie sat on the sofa for a long time, looking at the album and thinking. When her gaze fell on a picture of the Walton High football team, the idea hit her and she smiled. Then she ran upstairs for a notebook and her cell phone. She had at least a week’s worth of planning to do, and she couldn’t waste any of it. It was time to save Suzanne from Anthony deSalvo, save the town from Stinky Harden, and have a little fun doing it at the same time.

  With a determined grin, she raced back down the stairs, not bothering to lock the door that banged shut behind her.

  Joe sat in his office at City Hall, feeling as if he were having an out-of-body experience. In the week since Suzanne had gone, that same sensation had enveloped him more than once. It was different from the way he had felt when Harriet died, but the sense of desolation and grief was the same. But this time it
was all his fault. He’d made the mistake of trusting someone, of letting someone in. And then she had left him.

  He tried to focus on the paperwork in front of him, along with the press releases on another annexation hearing in Mapleton that he’d just had faxed over from Hal Newcomb at the Sentinel. Stinky Harden was on the move, as if he’d just found a new weapon in his arsenal, and he was aiming it right at Walton. Stinky had something up his sleeve, and damned if Joe wasn’t going to find out what it was.

  As if conjured by the devil, Stinky strolled into the office, not bothering to knock. Rolled up in his hands was a magazine. He tossed it on top of Joe’s desk, and Suzanne’s face unfurled.

  “Hey, there, Mayor. Look what hit the stands this week.”

  Joe didn’t bother looking down. “I’ve seen it. Congratulations to Charlie. Must feel real good to win by cheating.”

  Stinky spread his hands in the air, as if offering them for an inspection of cleanliness. “Hey, he won fair and square. Ain’t nobody can tell me he didn’t take the picture. He’s got the negative.”

  “I’m still working on it. But you can rest assured that I’m going to have a little talk with the folks over at Lifetime.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that, Mayor. If you’re thinking you’re going to get something out of Suzanne, think again. If the lady’s as smart as I think she is, I’d say she’s left town for good.”

  Joe leaned back in his chair, feeling that he should have taken two more aspirins than the four he’d taken earlier. “What are you getting at?”

  “Well, a real city slicker just drove into town in a rental car from the airport. Says he’s looking for a Suzanne Lewis. Something about her being a thief. I believe he’s gone to go talk to Sheriff Adams.” Stinky pulled a toothpick out of his shirt pocket and stuck it between his teeth. “Sounds like she’s my campaign dream. I already got my boys working on my next campaign button. ‘I don’t date cons.’”