He pushed her an arm’s length away from him, his fingers digging into her arms. “How can you even think about walking away?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”
“Well, it’s news to me!”
“Really, Andrew? Can you honestly say you’re happy? You come home angry more days than not. How can you want to live this way?”
He thrust her away and paced in a tight little circle. Then he rounded on her and shouted, “I give you everything! You don’t have to lift a goddamn finger! What do you want?”
Her fear of him vanished. Now that she’d made up her mind, the power he’d held over her diminished. There was nothing left to lose. “I don’t have the most important thing in a marriage. I don’t have your trust.”
“And whose fault is that?” he asked accusingly.
“Apparently you think it’s mine—which is why this is never going to work.”
He took a swing at the door as he stormed out of the room. It slammed against the wall, the doorknob knocking a hole in the drywall before it bounced back and half closed.
She waited several minutes before she went after him. As she left the nursery, she felt a pang of regret. She’d never sit in here and rock her baby.
Andrew was in the kitchen. His hands were braced on the casing of one of the windows that looked onto the swimming pool. But he wasn’t looking out the window; his head was bowed between his shoulders.
She stopped just inside the kitchen and waited. The baby seemed to be upset by the argument; tumbling and twisting inside her, sticking little feet and elbows painfully under ribs and into kidneys. She couldn’t help but question her conviction, this was her child’s future—she couldn’t afford to make the wrong decision.
At that moment, when her resolve was most vulnerable, Andrew turned to her. Tears tracked down his cheeks. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”
When she opened her mouth to speak, he held up a hand to silence her.
“Just don’t do it today,” he said. “Don’t leave like this. Sleep on it—that’s all I ask.”
She hesitated. What harm could waiting until tomorrow morning do? It would give Andrew a little while to come to terms. No matter what happened between them, they would always be linked by their child. She had to do what was best for the baby; had to keep the lines of communication open. It wasn’t too much to concede.
“All right. But I won’t change my mind. We need some time apart—to think about what we really want.”
“I know what I want. You and I are meant to be together forever.” There was a chilling finality in his tone.
The last thing Glory remembered of that night was Andrew moving into the guest room and her going to bed alone.
Chapter Eighteen
AFTER LEAVING THE cemetery, Glory drove out Laurel Creek Road for the first time since her return to Dawson. The road was narrow and curvy, as were most roads in the area. It dead-ended not too far beyond where her house once stood. She slowed as she neared her old driveway. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach. I have to do this, she told herself. What she’d remembered so far was horrible, but was there something else? Had she done something even more horrible in her desperation to be free of Andrew?
Those notes . . . had there been truth in them? She couldn’t believe it of herself, and yet if there was nothing ugly lurking there, why couldn’t she remember? She had almost everything back—except those last hours.
A heavy chain was strung across the driveway entrance between two metal posts. A NO TRESPASSING sign was suspended in the middle. Weeds had sprung up between the bricks in the drive. What once had been meticulously maintained was now abandoned.
She pulled off the edge of the road and parked. After shutting off the engine, she clung to the steering wheel. She couldn’t seem to pry her hands loose and get out of the car. Eric had suggested she shouldn’t be alone when her memory returned fully—did he suspect she’d had something to do with the fire, too?
Maybe she should leave this for another day, perhaps bring Granny with her.
No, she wouldn’t drag Granny into this. It wasn’t a burden to be shared; it was Glory’s past, her choices, her actions.
She got out of the car before she could chicken out. The yard was so overgrown that she decided to step over the chain instead of fighting her way through the weeds.
Once over the chain, she approached the site where the house had once stood. There was nothing but a rough patch of ground where the basement had been filled in. The swimming pool gaped drily beyond that. The carriage house remained untouched by tragedy, but not by time. The paint was mildewed, tiny trees sprouted in the clogged gutters, and vines had begun to snake up the walls. The weather vane on the cupola sat tilted as if swatted askew by a giant hand.
Her heart raced and felt as if it sat at the base of her throat. Slowly, she began to walk around the old footprint of the house. Memories rushed over her—garden parties and birthdays, holiday dinners and lazy Sunday mornings—not the ones she was seeking. She came full circle and stood where the steps to her front porch had once been.
Her knees trembled and suddenly felt weak. A buzzing started in her ears and she became light-headed. She crumpled where she stood, sitting hard on the ground.
Drawing on her newly recovered memory of the last evening in her house, she sat very still, waiting for the picture to complete itself. A fierce ache centered in her chest, but she refused to cry. Over and over again she relived those last hours.
Andrew had been surprisingly considerate that evening. It had been his idea that he take the spare bedroom. He’d spoken to her gently, telling her how much she meant to him and how important it was to him for them to stay together. She recounted every minute, yet she could not remember getting out of bed.
She remembered she’d turned in early, physically exhausted by emotional stress. She’d fought not to be swayed by Andrew’s surprisingly nonvolatile temperament throughout the evening. His behavior had been increasingly irrational. More than once, she’d feared that erratic behavior would explode into violence. There was no way she could bring her baby into such a household.
But, she’d thought, Andrew came from a powerful family. Power was hard to fight in a small town, especially when the powerful want certain things kept in the dark. Outwardly, Andrew could be very charming and persuasive. Beneath that veneer was a man obsessed. What might he truly be capable of? It wasn’t beyond comprehension that he would convince everyone she was the unstable one; she might lose custody of her child.
Her troubled thoughts had kept her awake for hours, but, sometime after midnight, she’d fallen asleep. The next thing she recalled was opening her eyes and seeing Eric’s smoke-stained face in the rain.
Sitting there before the ghost of her home, Glory closed her eyes. Eric said she’d been near the back door—so clearly she’d gotten up at some point.
Stop trying so hard. Relax. Let go. Breathe.
Beginning at the top of her head, she went through the exercise of relaxing each muscle, moving down her body until she reached her toes. She kept her mind free of thought, drifting on a sensation of near weightlessness.
A hand fell on her shoulder.
With a scream, she jerked away and shot to her feet, turning quickly.
Eric stood with his hands before him and an apologetic look in his eyes. “It’s okay. It’s me.”
Adrenaline buzzed through her veins, and her knees felt rubbery. “Why in the hell did you sneak up on me?” Hand on her chest, she dragged in a breath.
“I didn’t. I called your name twice. I was beginning to worry that you weren’t conscious.”
Now that she’d had a moment to gather herself, she asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I was driving by and saw your car.”
She tilted her head in doubt. What purpose would Eric possibly have to be here in the middle of the day?
He sighed roughly and ran a hand through his
hair. “All right. I’d seen your car at the cemetery earlier and thought you might come out here. It’s so isolated, I didn’t want you to be alone.”
Crossing her arms over her chest, she said, “What if I want to be alone?”
He glanced at the place where her house used to stand, then toward the carriage house. “Sorry. I didn’t think . . . I just want to help you, Glory.”
“I know.” She made herself put words to her most unsettling suspicion about his interest in her. “But you can’t save me. It’s not your job to fix me. I know you feel it’s your duty to keep everyone safe—”
“Is that what you think? That I’m feeling somehow responsible for you—you’re an obligation? You think I made love to you just to make you feel better? Jesus, Glory! I thought we knew each other better than that.”
“Do we?” She searched his face. “I’ve seen something in your eyes when we talk about my remembering the fire. You’re hiding something from me.”
In the second of hesitation that followed, Glory saw it again.
He said, “You’ve asked me more than once about that night, and I’ve always answered you.”
“Yes. Yes, you have. But I’m sensing there’s something more.”
Eric held her gaze for a long moment, as if he wanted to make sure she understood the depth of his sincerity. “I care about you. I don’t want to see you hurt. I have a feeling you suffered enough at Andrew’s hands.”
She was startled by the boldness of his statement. “What makes you say that?”
“I knew Andrew better than most people think. He required unquestioning loyalty and had some pretty serious control issues in high school—I saw things that told me he hadn’t changed.”
“What kinds of things?”
“I saw the way he was with you . . . dominating, suspicious of your every move.”
She was stunned to realize Eric had even been aware of her relationship with her husband. “How could you know that?”
“Because I looked in his eyes the day you and I were talking in the drugstore after Scott was born. Because he was still the same as when we were younger. Andrew required total, 100 percent devotion—and no one dismissed him without repercussions.”
A shiver of confirmation slithered down her spine. Andrew had said he wouldn’t let her go—and in her deepest heart she had understood there would be no way out. With a dry mouth, she asked, “What do you mean, ‘repercussions’?”
“Things seemed to happen to people who slighted him . . . or left him.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Listen, I’ve got no business saying all of this to you—”
“It’s too damn late now! Tell me!”
He looked around, then said, “We need someplace to sit down. Let’s go sit in the car.”
“All right.” She followed him with a mixed sense of dread and validation; she didn’t want to believe she’d been married to a bad person. And yet . . . For years she’d been convinced she had been doing something to make such trouble in their marriage. Everyone—their friends, his business associates, the whole damn community—had such high regard for Andrew.
It was nearly four o’clock, but still warm even in the shade where the Explorer was parked. Eric put all of the windows down, then got out and opened the rear hatch, returning with two bottles of water.
“Here.” He handed one to her and opened the other himself. “It was hot this afternoon, and you’re starting to look a little dehydrated.”
There he was, trying to save her again. Still, she took the water without comment. He was right; she’d dumped most of her body’s moisture into her tears at the cemetery. After taking a drink, she said, “You think Andrew was a monster?” She couldn’t believe such words had left her lips.
He huffed. “That’s not what I said at all. Andrew had his good points. He just had one serious . . . character flaw in my opinion.
“We were friends in high school.”
“I remember,” Glory said, not wanting to feel like she didn’t know anything at all about the man she’d married. Eric and Andrew had been several years ahead of her, but everyone knew them—every girl who’d passed through puberty dreamed of dating them. “But you two seemed, I don’t know, strained over the past years.”
Eric nodded. “Andrew needed to be in control of every relationship—romantic and otherwise. It wasn’t hard for him to do because everyone looked up to him, everyone wanted to be his friend.”
“So what happened to make you see?”
“There were a lot of little things. None alone would mean much, but over the years, when you put them all together . . . well, it became pretty clear to me.”
“Such as?”
He looked uncomfortable, as if he didn’t want to go into detail. He rested his elbow on the car door and rubbed the back of his neck. “Such as, everything had to be Andrew’s idea . . . socially. If someone else brought something up, Andrew managed to change things around enough that he could claim it was his idea. He was actually so good at it that no one seemed to notice or care.”
“You said there were things about his romantic relationships . . .”
Eric shifted uncomfortably. There were things that he’d rather not reveal to anyone, least of all Glory.
He said, “More of the same; he had to be in control. Sometimes when he dated a girl, I got the feeling that she didn’t actually want to be with him. At first I thought they stayed because he was the most popular guy in school, but sometimes it seemed like something . . . I don’t know . . . darker was going on.”
Glory made a little sound in the back of her throat that told him she knew exactly what he was talking about.
He went on, “And sometimes he was . . . paranoid. There really wasn’t a better way to describe it. He’d get an idea in his head that a girl was cheating, or that some guy was gunning for his position as team captain in football or basketball, and nothing, I mean nothing, would convince him otherwise.”
Eric wanted Glory to know he understood her difficulties in her marital relationship. He didn’t want to tell her the worst, the most damning of his suspicions. If he told her about Emily MacRady, he’d have to admit his own contribution to Andrew’s being able to get away with a very dangerous act of revenge.
Glory was quiet for a long while. When she spoke, her voice was so soft that he had to strain to hear. “There were days when I thought I was crazy. Everyone thought Andrew was perfect, that we had the perfect marriage. I thought there had to be something wrong with me—I wasn’t trying hard enough, you know?”
“That was another thing Andrew was good at, making other people think problems were their fault.” He wanted to reach out and touch her, to tell her Andrew was a bastard, and she was just one of his silent victims. But that wasn’t what she needed. She needed time to think.
He was about to suggest he follow her to Tula’s to make sure she got home safely, when she said, in a voice so distant he wasn’t sure if she was talking to herself or speaking to him, “I was going to leave him.” She continued to stare out the windshield. “I’d told him the day of the fire.”
Eric’s gut turned over. That was not what he wanted to hear. It opened up a whole realm of nasty possibilities—possibilities he should have dealt with eighteen months ago.
Glory had declined Eric’s offer to drive her home. He’d been a true friend this afternoon, something she valued as much as his intimacy as a lover. He’d instinctively known that while she needed the comfort of his nearness, she also needed to deal with her thoughts and feelings privately.
Bits and pieces of the past had filtered into her consciousness all afternoon. Now she’d pieced together most of what happened the day of the fire. Even her time in the hospital afterward was becoming clearer.
After Eric put her in her own car and kissed her cheek good-bye, she knew there was one more stop that she had to make before going back to the hollow.
Several minutes later, she pulled up in the c
ircular drive at the elder Harrisons’ spacious home. Ovella wouldn’t welcome an unannounced visit—especially since they had planned a specific time on Sunday. But it wasn’t Ovella she needed to see.
While Ovella had had severe reservations about Andrew’s marriage to Glory, Walt had been the polar opposite. He’d welcomed her as a daughter; in fact, he willingly filled in for the father she’d lost as a young child—he even walked her down the aisle.
It wasn’t quite five o’clock, and Walt’s car wasn’t in the drive. Glory got out of the car with a prayer that Walt’s car was in the garage and he was home.
She owed him. That had become especially clear this afternoon as she’d remembered that he had been the first person to show up at the hospital emergency room. It had been Walt who had held her hand and grieved with her when the doctor told her that the baby had no heartbeat. Even after Granny had arrived, he’d stayed. Even after he’d heard his own child was dead, he’d stayed. He’d stayed with Glory until the grandchild he’d been so anxious to have was delivered, stillborn.
And Glory had never thanked him. She couldn’t let another day go by without telling him what it meant to her—and apologize for being so weak that she hadn’t recalled his extraordinary strength and kindness until now.
At the thick oak front door her stomach flipped. It had been a long time since she’d stood on this threshold. She squared her shoulders and rang the bell.
When Ovella opened the door and looked Glory up and down with surprised concern, she realized what a mess she must be. She hadn’t even taken a look in the rearview mirror before she came here.
“I’m sorry to barge in like this . . . I . . . I was hoping Walt was home.”
Ovella, ever the consummate hostess, recovered quickly from her surprise. “He isn’t home yet, but should be soon.” She stepped back and opened the door wider. “Please, come in.”
Ovella guided her into the living room. Glory was somewhat disappointed they hadn’t gone to the back of the house, to the comfortable kitchen and family room. The message was clear; she was a guest in this house, not family.
On Blue Falls Pond Page 24
