The Love We Keep

by Toni Blake

  “Lie down with me,” he said again. “I want to tell you. I want to tell you...the worst thing that ever happened to me. And the worst thing I ever did.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ZACK WATCHED THE woman he’d fallen in love with pad slowly back across the room toward him. She didn’t look happy, though. A lot closer to sad. And as she climbed back onto the fold-out sofa, that big sweater draping around her, she said, “I’m sorry. I know you’ve got plenty on your plate without me forcing you to revisit the past.” Then she knelt next to him, brow knitting. “It’s just that...”

  He didn’t make her go on. Because maybe it was time to finally stop running. From people. From memories. From truth. “I get it, Suz. I do.” He sighed. “I mean, kind of, anyway. Because if the situation was reversed, I’d be okay with letting it go—but I’m a guy. And historically speaking, I don’t seem to understand women too well once you get past the flirtation and the sex. So if you need to know my deep, dark secrets to be happy, then you need to know them.” He ended with a short nod. He wasn’t really any more ready to tell her than he’d been two minutes ago, but he had to man up and do this.

  She looked almost contrite, and maybe wary, as she whispered, “Thank you.” Perhaps suddenly as afraid to hear it as he was to say it.

  “At least after this,” he told her, “maybe you’ll understand why I’m...the way I am.”

  “Surly? Contentious? Hard to get close to?”

  When he shot her a look, she cast a teasing smile, clearly trying to lighten the moment. And he attempted a grin in return, but it was hard to muster right now. “Getting better at the last one, though—right?” he managed. “Being easier to get close to. I’m trying anyway.”

  “I know,” she answered softly.

  He took a deep breath, aware that if he had two good legs to walk on, he’d probably get up and leave right now. That’s how programmed he was to run away from the bad stuff. But not being able to walk changed more than just your ability to get around. He had to stay here physically—so that meant staying emotionally, too. Like it or not.

  “Okay,” he said, “here goes.” He still had no idea where to begin, but he’d just start spitting it out. Just get through it, and as long as Suzanne doesn’t think you’re scum of the earth afterward, maybe you can go back to fun, easy times with her. “When I was six, my mom had Emily Ann.”

  “I already have a question,” Suzanne said. “What about your dad? I know your mom was Dahlia’s sister, but I’ve never heard anything about your dad.”

  He nodded. “That’s because he wasn’t around. My mother got pregnant by a sailor who worked on a freighter stuck wintering in Saginaw Bay. She gave me his last name but he never knew I existed.”

  Her soft gasp filled the air, and he quieted her before she could start in with questions about that. “And yeah, I’m aware he’s probably still out there somewhere, and no, I’ve never looked for him, and no, I don’t plan to. Life led where it led—I have no interest in surprising some old man forty-three years later. It’s all water under the bridge.”

  He could see her wanting to protest badly, so badly that he met her gaze, lifted one shushing finger to her lips, and told her, “That’s an argument we can have another day, Suzie Q. I can only take so much prying into my life at one time, okay?”

  Again, she appeared contrite. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry—go on.”

  He blew out a sigh, thinking. Remembering. Feeling. Maybe he should have let her rant and rave about his mystery dad—an easier subject for him. “Emily’s father was a mechanic in Saginaw, who cleared out and moved away when he found out Mom was pregnant. Mom was...” He stopped, shook his head. “She wasn’t a good mother, didn’t know how to be. Some women get pregnant accidentally and rise to the occasion—and some don’t. Mostly her kids were burdens to her.” He didn’t look at Suzanne as he spoke—his eyes fell absently on his feet.

  “My grandmother—her mom, Dahlia’s mom—was the same way. There just wasn’t much love to go around. I think there was mostly...disappointment, lives that had turned out drab and gray.” He raised his eyes to Suzanne then, with a revelation. “That’s how I remember my whole childhood, drab and gray. I know the sun had to shine there sometimes—I just don’t remember it. I remember overcast skies and trees with bare winter limbs and houses with peeling paint and muddy yards. Except—” he raised one finger in the air “—I remember this one day when the skies were blue, bright blue—a day when Dahlia was there and even though it was winter, the sun was out, and she took me to a park and we played hide-and-go-seek.” He smiled at the pleasant recollection he’d nearly forgotten.

  “That sounds nice,” Suzanne said next to him, her voice gentle, kind.

  And it reminded him that he’d gotten off topic—and he had to get back to it if he was ever gonna get through it. “Anyway, Emily cried a lot. Looking back, maybe there was something wrong with her—maybe she should have been taken to the doctor. Or...maybe she just didn’t get enough attention, you know? But no matter how you slice it, she cried a lot. And when I think of her, that’s mostly what I think about, the sound of her crying.” He stopped, heart pounding. “Until she didn’t anymore. Until it stopped. I think of that, too.”

  Okay, you’re in it now. You’re there. And he was there, back in that room, that shadowy room where everything changed. Just tell the damn story. Tell it so you can be done with it, forever. He tried to swallow back the lump in his throat, focused on the mound his feet made in the covers. And said, “One day when I was eight, I walked in the door after school and heard Emily crying, same as usual, and my mother screaming bloody murder, telling her to shut up.” Will you shut up? Will you just shut up? Just shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

  “She just kept screaming it over and over—flipping out. And I didn’t want to cross her path while she was freaking out or else she’d unleash on me, too. So I just stood there, right inside the door, holding my backpack, staying quiet, not knowing what to do.

  “And then...Emily finally shut up.” The memory stole his breath. Don’t let yourself feel it—just tell her. “But it was all at once—one minute she’s crying and the next she’s quiet. And so is Mom. Everything’s quiet. Still as a church. And so I tiptoed toward Mom’s bedroom—that’s where the baby slept in one of those little baby beds, a bassinet? She was too big for it by then, but it’s where she slept. And I stopped in the doorway. And I could see Mom bending over her, but I can’t see Emily. Instead I see a pillow—a throw pillow from Mom’s bed. And I see Mom pressing it down, holding it down. And she’s smothering her.”

  Tears rolled down his cheeks now, but he ignored them. He knew Suzanne was crying, too—he could hear it: a whimper, ragged breathing—but he ignored that, too, lost now in a long-ago moment that still felt like yesterday. “And I just stood there. I just stood there watching her do it. I didn’t move a muscle. And then I hid. I backed away, quiet as I could, and I ran outside. I remember running up and down the streets in our neighborhood, just crying.” He stopped, thinking back. “No one ever even stopped me to ask what was wrong. It was cold out—but there were kids coming home from school, people out checking their mail.” He gave his head a slight shake. “I guess a crying kid just wasn’t a big deal in our neighborhood.

  “I don’t know how long I stayed gone. Twenty minutes? An hour? I remember wishing I could call my grandma, but she’d died the year before. And Dahlia lived in Phoenix, so it wasn’t like she could come running. And it didn’t matter anyway. No one could fix it.

  “And when I went back, I remember concentrating so hard on acting normal—afraid she’d kill me, too, if she knew I’d seen. But by the time I got there, cops and an ambulance had come. Mom had called them, and I walked in to hear her crying, saying she’d just found the baby not breathing. That simple. Everybody believed it was a natural death.

  “And Mom...” He stopped, sighed. �
��She loved us in her way. So her tears were real enough, you know? She was sorry she’d killed the baby. She just wasn’t sorry enough to tell the truth about it.” He stopped, chest tight with the barrage of memories. “And so it turned into just one more little tragedy in a poor neighborhood. One more funeral with a tiny casket—that Dahlia paid for because Mom couldn’t.”

  “Did...did you ever tell her you knew?”

  For the first time, he allowed his gaze to flit from his feet to Suzanne. She was wiping away tears, her cheeks wet with them.

  “When I left. When I was sixteen. I wrote her a note. Didn’t even sign it. Just wrote, I know what you did to Emily. Figured that said everything. Why I was leaving. Why I couldn’t stand to be around her. Why she shouldn’t bother trying to find me—not that she would.”

  “Are you...ever in touch with her now?” Suzanne asked cautiously.

  He gave his head a brisk shake. “Hell no. I never spoke to her again. Dahlia lost touch with her, too, after I left home. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive and I don’t care.”

  He almost couldn’t believe he’d gotten it all out. The thing he’d never been able to tell Meg. The big secret of his life that he’d never escaped no matter how long he spent running from it. A fresh wave of shame washed over him. “So now you know,” he told Suzanne.

  She nodded, her lips pressed tight together, looking tense—as tense as he felt. This was why he didn’t like laying his shit on other people. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s...worse than I could have imagined, and I’m sorry you had to live through it and I’m sorry I made you go back there in your head. But I appreciate you trusting me enough to tell me.”

  He nodded, one ugly question left in his mind. He could only look at her from beneath shaded eyelids to ask, “You ever gonna be able to see me the same way, Suzie Q?”

  He sensed the tilt of her pretty head more than saw it. “What do you mean? It wasn’t your fault.”

  At this, he raised his gaze to her fully—his surprise overriding the fact that it was hard to face her right now. “Partly it was.” The words came out sounding strangled. “I just stood there.”

  “Oh, Zack,” she said, reaching out to take his hand. “Please don’t tell me you blame yourself in any way for what happened to your sister. You were a little boy. A little boy.”

  He just looked at her—and again confessed his ugly truth. “But I knew what she was doing. And I didn’t stop her.” Shame pressed down on him.

  “You were in shock. I’m sure you couldn’t even move or speak. Shock can...paralyze you, Zack.” The word hung in the air like a strange coincidence and he could see she regretted it. “For lack of a better way of saying it,” she went on quietly. “But it can freeze you up inside. Nothing about this is your fault.”

  Still, Zack gave his head a short shake. It wasn’t that easy. “My whole life I’ve wished I’d just said, ‘Stop,’ or yanked my mother away. I’ve wished my sister could have lived.”

  Now Suzanne’s hands cupped his face and she peered intently into his eyes, her voice vehement. “I wish that for you, too—that she’d lived. But it’s not your fault she didn’t. I promise. You have to let go of thinking that. It wasn’t your responsibility—and you never should have seen something so awful. No child should. No person should.”

  He closed his fists around her wrists, pulled her hands down—he didn’t deserve to be comforted. And maybe the point wasn’t who was right; maybe it was... “Suz, do you get how I am now? Why I’m happier on a boat, with no people around? Why I couldn’t commit to Meg?” Helping her understand what made him tick had seemed like the one purpose this might serve.

  So it deflated him further to hear her say, “Actually, no. What does one thing have to do with the other?”

  He blew out a tired breath, frustrated that he hadn’t made things clear. “A man is supposed to take care of the people he loves. And I...” He stopped, shook his head. “I can’t be depended on to do that. I never would have dreamed I’d let somebody hurt my baby sister right in front of me. But I didn’t stop it. I didn’t do a damn thing but run away. And that’s always made me think I’m just not...” He was so damn spent, and out of words.

  “Worthy? Of love?” she asked. That wasn’t what he’d been shooting for, but he couldn’t deny it hit home a little. “You are, Zack. I promise you are. Everyone is.”

  Everyone? Was his mother worthy of love? He kept that inside, though. Because he couldn’t think straight anymore. And he wanted to collapse in a heap. He didn’t want to be there any longer—he wanted to be here, with the woman he cared for, the woman who had a knack for making things better. Okay, she hadn’t made this better—no one could—but he wanted to move on with looking forward, not back. “Can we stop talking about this, Suzanne?” Their eyes connected, locked. I kept my end of the bargain. Now let me off this ride.

  “Okay,” she said softly.

  “So...you still want me around?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  And he mustered at least the hint of a grin. “Guess that’s lucky for me. Under the circumstances.” He motioned to his bad leg.

  She smiled at his joke, then leaned in to kiss him.

  It nearly killed him when she pulled back, though, getting up out of bed. “Where ya going, Suzie Q?”

  She motioned to the kitchen table. “Still a mess to clean up. You worked too hard on this lasagna to let the leftovers sit out and go to waste.”

  “Good point,” he agreed. He didn’t care about the food, but talking about anything else made him feel like he could breathe again.

  And every other word exchanged before she came back to bed was a lighter one—the buds on the flower stems were growing, big snowstorm predicted for tomorrow, where had the wine cork gone?—and breathing got easier and easier. But he held her very tight as they slept.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, WIND HOWLED and snow drifted. Inside, Suzanne felt like she’d been hit with a ton of bricks. She went about her business as normal—making breakfast, checking the forecast, discussing the blizzard-like conditions with Zack, and being grateful they had plenty of food in the house. The weather had been relatively calm lately, and it had spoiled her, making her think spring was just around the corner. In reality, it wasn’t.

  She dialed Dahlia, planning to put her on speaker, but they reached her voice mail instead. “Call us back when you can,” Suzanne said into the phone, then glanced at Zack with a sigh. “Clearly romping around the beach today.”

  He spared another glance toward the window. “Can’t blame her. I’d like to be romping around the beach today.”

  “Maybe soon,” Suzanne suggested.

  He lowered his chin in doubt. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re doing so well that—who knows—maybe you’ll be up and romping before long. Maybe we could take a trip to celebrate.” Though she picked her way through the unplanned words delicately, since—no matter what he’d said—she didn’t feel their relationship could be fully counted on or considered stable.

  Because of what he’d told her last night. She simply...hadn’t seen it coming. Never mind it being a big enough secret that he’d never told anyone, and that it had clearly pained him deeply to talk about. For Suzanne, it had become simply...a mystery—Zack’s secret past. To have him tell her was supposed to feel like a grand victory, a major accomplishment. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost sight of the fact that it was probably something dreadful. Maybe she’d expected it to be something he’d blown out of proportion. But no, the weight of it still hung around them, and she almost wished she didn’t know.

  Because now a picture lodged itself in her head—Zack as an innocent child, dragged into horror, unloved, and suffering a guilt that wasn’t his. And it made her love him more.

  And he was suddenly promising he’d stay with her, but now that she�
�d met his inner demons, she wasn’t sure they would ever release him for good.

  “Ready for PT,” he announced from the sofa bed.

  Back to the more optimistic Zack. Good. And the fact that he’d begun bearing weight on his right leg was phenomenal. And surely a much better place for both their heads than where she’d forced him to go last night.

  Soon she stood watching him take careful, measured steps on his crutches, putting weight on the right leg. Not all his weight, and painful groans he couldn’t squelch snuck out with each step—but he kept taking them.

  When she’d counted seventeen, he said, “That’s it, all I got.”

  She beamed at him. “You did great. Up five from yesterday.”

  He looked happily surprised. “Yeah? Damn, I’m good.”

  She laughed, then told him, “Head back to the bed and we’ll start your exercises.”

  “Can I ask you a question, Suz?” he said a minute later as they began his hip rotations.

  “Sure.”

  “Did you and the doctor ever want babies?”

  It caught her off guard. And took her aback. “Yes,” she said, suspecting it came out sad.

  “Why didn’t you have any?”

  She glanced down at him. “I couldn’t.” Left it at that.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  But she shrugged. “Water under the bridge. Though...” She sighed. “Sometimes I think about how different my life would be with a child. I’d have done everything differently after Cal died. I wouldn’t have moved someplace so isolated. Maybe I even would have headed south instead of north, to be near Cal’s parents in Orlando. But...”

  “But what?”

  She met his gaze again. “Questions like that are pointless—because if you have to ask one, you have to ask others. What if Cal hadn’t died? What if I’d accepted the first nursing job I was offered instead of waiting to interview at Cal’s practice? What if I’d been raised with a mother, or a more loving family?” She kept her eyes on his, knowing, of course, the big what-ifs of his own life.