What's Left Behind

by Lorrie Thomson

  That made them more alike than she cared to admit.

  “We used to say, if we had a son, we would’ve liked him to have been like Luke.” Lisa’s gaze went soft, as though she could see Luke in her mind’s eye, too.

  “You and Ronnie used to say that?”

  “He was such a part of this place. He had such great energy—”

  “Yes.”

  “Such a way of making everyone feel special.”

  Abby’s mouth trembled, and she brushed away a tear.

  “I’ll never forget how Luke brought flowers up to the room for me last summer,” Lisa said.

  “He did?”

  “I mentioned I liked lupine, just mentioned it. And that night, I found a bunch outside the door to our room.”

  “He never told me.” Abby imagined Luke taking the pruners to his favorite flowers, the impulse to please overriding his aversion to cutting. She imagined Luke knocking on Lisa and Ronnie’s door, ducking around the corner, and then waiting to hear her appreciative squeal. The image warmed her cold places. The image made her want to run to her room and sob into her pillow until her chest ached. She took a slow, deep breath to clear her head. “Thank you for sharing that story with me.”

  Lisa gave Abby a long stare. “You were lucky to have had a son like that,” Lisa said, and then left the kitchen, the word lucky trailing behind her.

  Lucky wasn’t a word Abby had associated with herself in quite a while.

  All over the evening news were stories of overwhelming luck. Just last week, a three-year-old boy fell from his bedroom window and came to a soft landing in a thick patch of overgrown shrubbery, bruised but otherwise unharmed. A six-year-old girl pushed through a window screen, ten stories above a city sidewalk, and a bus driver with unusually fast reflexes and strength happened to be walking by and caught the child in his arms.

  Where was luck when Luke had fallen?

  Tessa slipped into the kitchen, gaze wary, but chin held high.

  Abby’s heart skipped a beat, a palpitation connecting her to the grandchild this stranger carried.

  Abby supposed she’d been lucky to have become pregnant at eighteen, if you considered that many couples battled years of infertility and never conceived. She’d been lucky to carry her son to term, to have instinctively known she never would have survived terminating her pregnancy. She never would have survived cutting him out of her life after he was born either. To that end, she was lucky to have had Lily Beth’s support.

  “Close the kitchen door,” Abby said for the third time in her life. The first time was when, years ago, she’d had to fire a chambermaid for stealing a Rolex from a guest room.The second time was when, months ago, she’d called Hannah into the kitchen, told her to take the rest of the week off, and then thrown up in the sink.

  “Sit down.”

  “You’re mad at me.”

  “Not exactly.” Abby pulled out a chair and sat down next to Tessa. She shook her head. “When I was pregnant with Luke, my mother told me to hold my head high, not to be ashamed.”

  “I’m not ashamed—” Tessa said.

  “Let me finish.” Abby held a hand up. “That doesn’t mean I volunteered information.”

  Abby also hadn’t needed to explain her pregnancy, because she’d lived in one place her entire life. And like it or not, everyone had known her business.

  “I want you to understand I’m not going to pressure you to decide what you want to do with the baby,” Abby said. “It’s a big decision, probably the biggest you’ll ever make. I don’t want you to ever look back on this time with regret. If you decide to keep the baby, I will support you. If you decide to give the baby to someone in your family, I will support you.”

  And if Tessa decided to give Abby’s grandchild to a stranger, she wouldn’t lie down and take it. She would drag her into court. She would fight her on it.

  She didn’t tell her that.

  Tessa started toward Abby, and for the second time, Abby raised a hand for her to halt. “But, what I will not do. What I refuse to do,” she said, and she pressed a fist to her chest, “is audition for the role of mother to Luke’s child. I have proven myself, over and over. I have done the work.”

  Tessa’s big brown eyes filled with tears, but they did not fall. Her whole body trembled with the effort. “I’m wicked sorry, Abby. Please, Abby. Don’t make me leave. I have no place to go, no one I can talk to. I’ve got nothing left.”

  Really, Tessa? From where Abby sat, gazing at the swell of Tessa’s belly, she had everything.

  Everything that Abby wanted.

  Why would Tessa jump to that conclusion? “I’m not asking you to leave,” Abby said. That was the last thing she wanted. Abby wiped the tears from Tessa’s cheeks with her thumbs, the way she had on the day of Luke’s memorial service. “You can stay as long as you want.”

  “For real?” Tessa’s voice caught on the hiccup of a laugh-cry, and tears spilled down her cheeks.

  Abby hugged Tessa close, pressing the girl’s wet cheek to hers. That made Tessa cry harder, like a little girl lost.

  Abby’s heart skipped a beat, a palpitation connecting her to the stranger who carried her grandchild.

  Don’t play me.

  If luck was what happened when opportunity knocked on your door and found you prepared, then Abby would welcome luck with open arms, even if she had to do so through gritted teeth. Even if luck came in the form of a girl with the face of a child, the body of a woman, and the ability to toy with her heart.

  CHAPTER 7

  Rob barely recognized the house he’d once called home.

  His truck made a sharp turn and the tires ground into the pea-stone driveway, kicking up dust in the dry summer heat. He’d taken Bella’s dog run down months ago, sent over a couple of guys to aerate and seed the lawn. Maria still hadn’t gotten around to listing the house, part of their divorce settlement. But per a realtor friend’s suggestion, Rob had instructed his summer hire to unhinge the fire-engine red front door and paint it a “warm and welcoming” yellow. Last day off, he’d trimmed the arborvitae himself until the bubble had centered on the level. The property looked tidy, well-maintained, and organized.

  Unlike his life.

  Sweat cooled the back of his neck, a sticky concoction of summer heat, hard work, and mad-as-hell. He tugged at the cotton fabric beneath his arms, stepped from his truck, and brushed the gray dirt from his knees, evidence of the soil he’d been kneeling in before Maria’s call. He flexed his fingers because he’d promised Maria he’d come over to talk with Grace and have a discussion with the boy his ex-wife had found in bed with their daughter, and Rob liked to talk with his hands.

  Maria met him at the door in a crisp white blouse and black shorts, her hair slicked back in a ponytail. If it hadn’t been for the crease between her eyes, the way she was gnawing at her bottom lip, he would’ve thought he’d imagined their phone call.

  “Tyler took off,” Maria said before Rob could fit through the door, and the boy’s name once again forced the image of Maria finding his daughter and her just-a-friend beneath the sheets of Grace’s bed. Rob shook it off, and more pleasant Tyler images settled. The scrawny kid used to come over every Sunday night for dinner, gobble down Maria’s mashed potatoes, marvel at the fact they ate together as a family. He and Grace liked to play on the swing set in the yard, hang upside down from the monkey bar until their faces turned red. They played ultimate Frisbee, Tyler against Bella and Grace. The game always ended in a tie. Everybody won.

  Long time ago.

  The unnatural chill of air-conditioning raised the hairs on the back of Rob’s arms. He’d forgotten how much he disliked the closed windows. And shades drawn to keep out the heat darkened the home’s interior, a stark contrast to the place he was supposed to be in less than two hours. “Coward,” Rob said. “I wasn’t going to hurt him. Much.”

  Maria gave him a tight little smile.

  All the way over from the Hendersons’ place, he
couldn’t stop thinking about Abby’s unexpected guest, Tessa, not much older than Grace, and a few months away from having a baby. What would he do if his Grace got pregnant? What would he want her to do?

  All he knew was that he didn’t want Grace to ever be in that position. He never wanted her to have to choose between the life she’d intended and the one coming her way. That thought had him racing from Phippsburg to Bath, praying his way through yellow lights, red lights clipping the cab of his truck.

  “Where’s our baby girl?” Rob asked, but the joke misfired, tightening his chest.

  Maria blinked back tears and her voice came out weighted and water-logged. “Upstairs in her bedroom. Locked the door,” Maria said, “after she slammed it on me.”

  That didn’t sound like Grace. His girl was level-headed and, unlike her mother, not prone to melodrama. She’d never gone through a boy-crazy phase, found most boys ridiculous and immature, a sentiment Rob wholeheartedly agreed with. As far as he knew, until Tyler, his girl hadn’t slept with any boys.

  And if Maria’s manicure appointment hadn’t been cancelled, they wouldn’t have known Grace was sleeping with Tyler either.

  “What did you say to her?” he asked, remembering Maria’s urgent call, her hard-to-comprehend rambling that slipped into the Italian of her childhood, ranting about their daughter behaving like a puttana. A whore. Had Maria said that to Grace?

  Maria was like an old-fashioned pressure cooker, slow to anger, and then she blew.

  “Nice girls do not have sex before marriage,” Maria had told him. But Rob and Maria had. Did she regret that, too?

  Maria met his stare, and her gaze narrowed to a point. “This isn’t my fault,” she said. “I did everything right. I was always home after school for her, always had dinner waiting on the table.” Dinner that Rob had missed those last years of their marriage, more times than he cared to admit. Maria never missed an opportunity to throw that one in his face.

  Maybe he hadn’t done everything right, but neither had she.

  “Tell her she shouldn’t have slept with Tyler,” Maria said. “If he cared for her, he would’ve waited. He wouldn’t have pushed.”

  As Rob recalled, back in college, Maria had resisted his pushing, for about five minutes.

  Rob stopped at the bottom of the stairway, hand on the newel cap, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You asked me to come here and talk to her. Now, let me.”

  Maria started after him.

  “Alone,” he said, and left her at the bottom of the stairs, staring up.

  He glanced at Grace’s sports team photos. His pretty tomboy wore Morse High School blue and white, her dark hair pulled back, her expression sports-serious. Then his gaze caught on the portrait of Grace and Tyler taken at the prom, as if he’d never seen it before. Grace’s long hair hung in loose waves around her shoulders, and she aimed a high-voltage smile at the photographer. Excited about the dance or moony for her date? Tyler’s arm wrapped around Grace’s back. Muscle had replaced scrawniness. Confidence now overrode little-kid awkwardness. When had the neighbor boy become a man? When had Grace’s just-a-friend turned into something more?

  Rob knocked on Grace’s door. “It’s Dad,” he said, and Grace opened the door to let him in. Windows were open wide; a fan moved sheer white curtains. Even on this shirts-stick-to-your ribs muggy day, his daughter couldn’t tolerate artificial anything, just like her dad.

  “Hey, Gracie girl,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  “She’s taking a hissy fit,” Grace said, borrowing an expression of Rob’s. “That’s how it’s going.”

  To Rob’s relief, Grace was fully dressed, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a tight-fitting green T-shirt. The blue-and-green polka dot spread she’d had since middle school covered Grace’s bed, and a row of throw pillows leaned against her headboard. That didn’t stop Rob from imagining rumpled sheets beneath the spread, Grace on top of the sheets and Tyler on top of his daughter. That didn’t stop Rob from imagining picking up Tyler by the shoulders and throwing him against the wall. A line of perspiration ran down the center of his back, and he flexed his fingers.

  “How was your mother supposed to act?” he said. “How do you think it would’ve gone down if I’d found Tyler in your room? Or any boy, for that matter?” Grace took a step back from Rob’s rarely used harsh tone.

  Pink splotches bloomed on Grace’s cheeks. Her gaze lowered to her arms, folded over her chest. “Not so well.”

  “Not so well,” he repeated. The edge to his voice cut both ways, tensing his jaw.

  Grace shifted her weight from foot to foot. Her bottom lip jutted out, as though she might cry.

  That’s what happened when he let Maria rile him, when Rob let his ex-wife’s wild emotions replace his common sense and reason. Shaming words—Maria’s—and an angry tone—Rob’s—would only drive their daughter away. Shaming words and anger would do nothing to keep her safe.

  Rob turned his head from side to side, worked out a kink in his neck. “Oh, no, you don’t.” He sat down on Grace’s bed and patted the seat beside him.

  As if she were still a little girl, Grace slid beneath his arm and fit her face into the crook of his neck. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head, the way he had when she’d been small. But instead of sharp angles and hard bones, a woman’s curves pressed against him, and he shifted away from them. Instead of fly-away hair, smelling of No More Tears shampoo and strawberry detangling spray, a mix of vanilla and flora hit his nose. And, when Grace raised her head from his shoulder, instead of the mortified gaze of a repentant child, a woman’s wide eyes met his and her long eyelashes refused to blink.

  “So . . . old buddy Tyler’s your boyfriend now?” Rob said.

  Grace shrugged. “Guess so.”

  “Since when?”

  “We never, you know, decided to go out. It just sort of evolved.” She flexed her hands to reveal open palms.

  “At the prom?” Rob asked.

  Grace laughed, shook her head. “Way before that.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t have to. Kind of thought it was obvious,” Grace said. Rob started to shake his head and then paused. What had he missed?

  Last winter, Tyler had asked Grace to troubleshoot a problem with his car, even though his uncle owned a garage in Phippsburg. A few times, Rob had swung by for an impromptu visit after work and found Grace and Tyler in the living room, books and schoolwork spread out across the coffee table, the two of them sitting on the couch, tight as a secret.

  Grace tucked her hair behind one ear, revealing a diamond stud and a pearl. Since when did Grace have two holes?

  What had he missed? What hadn’t he missed?

  He’d come here intending to lambaste Tyler and Grace with his words. To threaten Tyler with bodily harm.

  Truth was, they were both eighteen years old, the same age Rob and Maria had been when they’d started dating. Ducks-in-a-row Grace had had her life planned out since she was ten. Study biology in undergrad school and then apply to veterinary school. Overachiever Tyler had his sights set on law school. Kid was mature, for a boy his age.

  Truth was, Tyler could still hurt her, in so many ways.

  “What’s going to happen in a few weeks, when you go away to different schools? Not great timing to start a relationship, kiddo.”

  “Cell phones, instant messaging, Skype,” Grace rattled off. “It’s a brave new world.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Grace turned toward the window, and a corner of her bottom lip tucked into her mouth, a trace of her mother.

  Had to admit, Grace might favor him in temperament and athletic ability, but she was Maria’s daughter, too, prone to spikes of emotion. When Rob first moved out, Grace had refused to talk to Maria for a week. And after Maria took their wedding photo off the wall, Grace dug it out of the closet and set it on her bureau. If Maria wante
d to talk to her, she’d make her come into her room, where the photo of what she’d denied Grace could bear witness. Making herself stare at that photo day after day, night after night, must’ve hurt Grace worse.

  “We’re not going to see anyone else for the first semester,” Grace said. “And when we come home for Thanksgiving, we’ll reevaluate.”

  For Rob, first semester at school had been a free-for-all. He’d never been a big partier, but that hadn’t stopped him from propping a beer in his hand while he’d scoped out the cutest girls at the dorm parties. That hadn’t stopped him from bedding more than his share of freshman girls, until he’d met Grace’s mother. Until she’d somehow made him care.

  “Devil’s advocate,” Rob said, a term he’d used when Grace had been knee-deep in college acceptance letters and weighing each school’s pros and cons. “What if Tyler wants to see other girls? You’d be okay with that?”

  “He won’t—”

  “Oh, Gracie girl, your dad’s here to tell you, guys are different. It’s not the same for them. It’s not all emotional.”

  “It?” Grace said, and she tilted her head. Her eyes widened—Are you serious?—but her grin said she forgave her dad’s discomfort.

  “Okay. Sex isn’t the same for boys.” As he recalled, he’d also had more than his share of girls, who, come Monday mornings and the return of reality, wanted more from him. He wasn’t proud of it, but he’d broken plenty of girls’ hearts, too. “Guys don’t have the same concerns, honey. Guys can’t get pregnant.”

  “Daddy!” Grace pressed both hands over her mouth, a move Rob suspected was more about embarrassment than slapstick.

  “Don’t you dare tell me you and Tyler hadn’t thought of that.” When Maria had called Rob, that’s all he could think of. “You are being careful, aren’t you?”