Never

by Lulu Pratt

  “I’ll stay a couple of nights,” I say. “My parents wanted to have a big dinner before I head back, though.”

  “That’s fine, I understand,” Nathan says. “Maybe this way the two of you can work out a provisional schedule for Riley, too.”

  I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Lara has been avoiding me even more than usual in the week we’ve both been in town. But unless we’re going to throw out the will and she’s going to leave me alone with Riley, we’re going to have to do something.

  Chapter Three

  Lara

  As soon as Ethan and Riley leave, Dad corners me, right outside of the lawyer’s office building.

  “Lara, you can’t be okay with this,” he says.

  “What do you mean?” I’m still trying to work my mind around the fact that Alexis wants me to somehow co-parent with the man who I hate most in the world.

  “You can’t be okay with sharing custody of Riley with Ethan,” Dad says.

  “That’s what Alexis wanted,” I point out.

  “But he killed her,” Dad says.

  “He didn’t kill her. They were in a car accident. It could have just as easily been Ethan who died, or Riley, or all of them,” I counter.

  “He was driving,” Dad insists.

  “It’s beyond the point now,” I tell him.

  “It’s entirely the point,” Dad says.

  I shake my head. “It’s not the point, the point is that Alexis wanted both of us to raise Riley,” I say.

  “But he shouldn’t be involved, not after he caused the accident that killed her. You should take the matter up with the courts,” Dad says.

  I shake my head. “Dad, this isn’t something I’m going to go to court over.”

  “Why not? You love Riley, and in spite of the way that you cut her out of your life, I know you loved Alexis. You should be taking care of your niece. You should be raising her.”

  “First of all, I don’t even know how I’m going to manage joint custody with Ethan. Second of all, that isn’t what Alexis wants. She put it in her will that Ethan and I will share the responsibility of raising Riley,” I say. My heart’s still pounding in my chest from the news that Alexis wanted me to act as her daughter’s mother, even if Ethan goes on to marry someone else.

  I have a permanent place in my niece’s life, according to my sister’s will.

  “It’s not fair,” Dad says.

  I sigh. “It’s not about whether or not it’s fair,” I point out.

  “He broke your heart, and then broke our family apart, and then…” Dad shakes his head.

  I know he’s hurting, it hasn’t even been a full year since Mom died, and now he’s lost Alexis too.

  “Let me and Ethan at least try to work this out first,” I tell him.

  “You don’t want to have anything to do with him. You didn’t even want to have anything to do with your sister after…” Dad counters.

  I want to just leave him right where he stands, but I care about my father. I know he’s in pain. Even though I’ve kept Alexis out of my life for a couple of years already, even I’m in pain. I’ve spent more time than I would have thought possible over the past week trying to decide whether I was being an idiot all along, whether I’d been partly to blame for Alexis not being in my life anymore. If I was the one being a stubborn fool or if I was in the right to cut her out when she started dating Ethan.

  “Dad, you said you wanted us both to stay at the house for the next few days, until we need to head back home,” I say.

  “I want Riley staying with us,” Dad says. “I want the family together.”

  “I know,” I say.

  I sigh and all I can think of is the fact that it’s going to be an endless few days with Ethan and me under the same roof. Why did I agree to that?

  “But just think about what I said,” Dad tells me.

  “I’m not even going to consider it,” I say. If the courts are going to side with anyone, it will be Ethan. He’s Riley’s father, he’s not abusive or neglectful, he’s a recent widower. There’s no reason for a court to decide to give Riley to me, even if I wanted full custody of her, which I don’t think would be the best idea.

  I get my keys out of my purse and get into my car before Dad can come up with something else to say to me about why I should have full custody of Riley.

  It’s more than I can take, right after finding out that my estranged sister wanted me to be a mother to her daughter. I can barely even make it real to me that my sister is dead, much less that I’m going to be Riley’s new mother. I’m going to have to deal with Ethan for the rest of my life.

  By the time I arrive at the hotel I’ve been staying at, I’m already having second thoughts about checking out early and spending time under the same roof as my ex-boyfriend. “This is a nightmare,” I mutter to myself, even as I’m repacking my suitcase and getting everything together to check out.

  The front desk knows that I’m in town for only a short period of time, so nobody makes much of a fuss about me checking out early. In less than twenty minutes from the time that I left the lawyer’s office, I’m heading back out to my car with my suitcase.

  I’ve been avoiding being alone with Ethan for years now, ever since I came back from getting my degree to discover that he was with my sister. There was a part of me that said that I was being unrealistic, that I was overreacting. After all, Ethan and I had broken up in my senior year of high school, when I’d confronted him about having no direction in life.

  I sigh as I head in the direction of the place that I least want to be in the entire world. Ethan will probably already be there with Riley, and I’ll have to talk to him, deal with him every day, for hours, until I have to go back to my apartment in the city, and back to my normal life. In spite of how much I’ve resented him, right along with Alexis, I can’t deny that he’s a good and loving father. The only conversations he and I had face to face in the last couple of months were about Riley.

  There’s nothing that I need to be thinking about at the moment except for how we’re going to manage to both raise Riley when we have to remain separated. I push any thought about what we’d been like before things went so badly between us out of my mind and focus on the fact that I’ll have several days with my niece. That, at least, will be one good thing to come out of this horrible trash heap of a week.

  Chapter Four

  Ethan

  Things are already a little tense when Lara gets to the house, and I’m almost ready to make an excuse and leave. But with Alexis gone, and everything going on, I know I have to stay. I have to get through it.

  Riley’s down for a nap, and Nathan is in the kitchen reheating some of the food that people brought for the family. The numbness that has become second nature pushes down any emotional reactions I might have. In spite of myself I end up almost staring at Lara as she takes off her shoes. I just freeze there thinking what if it was Alexis instead of Lara untying her shoe.

  Alexis and Lara were always as different as they could possibly be. Lara was always the serious one, while Alexis was the fun, popular one. Where my wife had been blonde with green eyes and a small frame, Lara has dark brown hair and gray-blue eyes.

  “Hey,” I say, feeling awkward.

  “Riley’s down for a nap?” Lara almost sounds disappointed, and I can’t really blame her.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you staying in Alexis’ room, or the guest room?” Lara crosses her arms over her chest and looks around the living room, like she’s trying to find the best way to escape.

  “Riley’s napping in Alexis’ room, but I think… it’s probably for the best for us to actually stay in the guest room,” I say. I put my daughter down to sleep in Alexis’ old bed, and just being in the room had been almost too much to take. Seeing all the reminders of her had been enough to drive me out of there as soon as Riley was asleep.

  “Too many memories?” Lara gives me a look as she steps over to the couch, and there’s
a lot in it — anger, worry.

  “Something like that,” I say, watching her sit down. I take a chair, not quite on the other side of the living room, but close enough.

  “So, I guess we should talk a bit about… you know… how we’re going to do this,” Lara says.

  “Do this?” I’m so distracted by so many thoughts of what has happened in the last week that I can’t even figure out what she means.

  “Raise Riley together,” Lara says.

  “Oh, oh, right,” I say, nodding.

  “Because… I mean, it’s not like we live in the same town anymore,” Lara points out.

  “That’s true,” I agree.

  “So, we need to figure out how we’re both going to get time with her, and make this work.” Lara sighs.

  “How are you feeling about what Alexis wanted?”

  That’s a big question that’s been on my mind since the reading of the will. When Alexis and I had made the provision to have Lara in our daughter’s life if Alexis were to die, it didn’t seem that complicated. We’d made the change back after last Christmas, when Alexis was sure that we’d have plenty of time to talk to Lara about it, and when she had new hope that maybe, somehow, Riley could bring the family back together.

  “I don’t know,” Lara says. She scrubs at her face and shakes her head.

  “You don’t want to be in Riley’s life?” I ask. That thought had occurred to me more than once, too little, too late, but I’m terrified of it now. How am I even going to begin to take care of Riley on my own?

  “I do, I do,” Lara says. “I love her, and she needs a mother. It also means that she is connected to her maternal family. I feel honored to have been asked… it’s just a bit of a shock,” she sighs.

  “I know. We were hoping to talk to you about this this weekend. But, what is it then?” I ask.

  Lara pulls her hands away from her face and gives me a brittle little smile. “I don’t want to deal with you,” she says.

  I stare at her for a moment. I know I should have been expecting this. After all, there’s a reason that Lara pushed Alexis and me out of her life. And I have to admit that I could somewhat see the point in it. I should have been expecting it, even if she was the one who’d broken up with me. But to me, at least, it feels like her excuse to be bitter at both Alexis and me got old a long time ago.

  “I get that, I guess,” I say. What else can I say?

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I haven’t since…” Lara presses her lips together and closes her eyes.

  “I know,” I say quietly.

  “But this has to be about Riley,” Lara says. She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly.

  The atmosphere in the room is heavy and I can hear Nathan banging a few pots together. I have to somehow make this work for Riley.

  “What is your work schedule like?” I ask.

  “I’ll need to get together with my bosses, but some of the people at the office work from home two or three days a week, and with what I do it’s not hard to get approval, as long as I turn in my work on time,” Lara says.

  “You know… I don’t even know what you do,” I say. I realize that I have no real idea even what Lara does, since she cut Alexis and me out of her life completely, I know next to nothing about her.

  Lara shrugs. “I do website design, and some graphic design,” she says.

  “Still lost,” I tell her with a little awkward grin. Lara rolls her eyes and smiles a little, but she’s beginning to relax, at least a little bit.

  “Anyway, the important thing is that I can figure out a few days a week where I can have Riley. That way maybe you won’t have to keep her in daycare or whatever,” she says.

  “Alexis and I didn’t want to put Riley in daycare for a while. We feel… felt she was too young. We wanted her to be raised at home for a while. Your sister loved being a mom. Becoming a mom and having Riley around made her so happy.”

  I look out the window for a few moments. I am aware that the woman in the room with me probably hates me more than any other person alive.

  Chapter Five

  Lara

  I don’t know how much more of this I can deal with. I want to get out of the living room, I want to leave the house altogether, actually, but I know I have to be mature and handle the situation. I have to do what’s right.

  “I can see if I can move my schedule around too,” Ethan says in a quiet voice, and I nod. At least, I think, we’re both trying to accommodate this incredible mess that Alexis’ death has made in our lives.

  “I guess we can figure out a way to do things. Me taking a couple of days a week off, you having her maybe one day during the workweek and on weekends, something like that,” I say.

  Dad comes into the living room and if I didn’t know better I would never have suspected that only about an hour before he’d been begging me to take the issue to family court and sue for full custody of my niece. He’s smiling as much as he’s capable of, telling us that he reheated some of the lasagna and the big, honey-glazed ham that the Jeffersons dropped off, along with the Giuseppes’ casserole, that there’s plenty to eat.

  “It’ll be good to all be together another couple of days,” Dad says, sitting down with a beer he brought with him from the kitchen. More than anything I’d like to grab a glass or two of wine. I’m definitely feeling the strain of having to actually interact with Ethan, but I know I need to keep my mind sharp, even if it makes everything more painful.

  We start talking about the next few days. I have to get through this, for Riley and for myself. I volunteer to help Ethan come up with child care options back in the town that he and Alexis moved to, and Dad suggests that he or Ethan’s parents can take Riley a couple of days during the week, if neither Ethan or I can cover things. I go along with it, but I feel like there’s some kind of risk in Dad having too much time watching Riley by himself. He has only been on his own for a few months and I am sure the death of Mom aged him.

  After a while though, I just want to get a hot bath and forget about everything that’s happened in the past week. One thing I missed about my parents’ house in the time I was estranged was the bathtub my parents had had installed in the bathroom that Alexis and I shared growing up. It was huge, deep and wide, big enough, I used to imagine, for two people to enjoy it at the same time.

  “I’m going to head up and take a bath, I think,” I say, getting up from the couch. I take my plate and Dad’s plate into the kitchen and rinse them off. I’m sure that by the time I get back downstairs, after my bath, Dad will have done his part of the old-fashioned kitchen chores, putting the leftovers away, and I’ll have the actual dishes to do. Fortunately, when Mom started getting sick, he had a dishwasher installed, so at least it won’t be that much trouble.

  I carry my suitcase upstairs to my old room and look around. The few times I’ve been back in town, I’ve stayed in hotels. The idea of having to be under the same roof as my sister for any period of time longer than a few hours was just absolutely intolerable to me.

  I grab a towel out of the linen closet and start to the bathroom, but I can’t help stopping just outside my sister’s room, listening intently for any sign that Riley might be awake. Almost against my will, even as I’m standing there, I find myself thinking about all the things that came up between Alexis and me that led to me cutting her out completely.

  We’d been so close when we were growing up. According to my mom, Alexis had been so happy to have a little sister, so overjoyed to meet me, and then she’d been a good playmate as soon as I was able to walk. Apparently my first word was “Lex,” my baby nickname for her.

  By the time we were both in school, we were different enough that there was never a real competition between us. I was the one teachers always considered serious and studious, and Alexis was the one who made friends wherever she went, who did well enough in class to hold a 3.0 average but was never really interested in doing better.

  I should have known there
would be an issue when Ethan and I were dating in high school. I still don’t know, to this day, why I was so attracted to him right from the start. In freshman year, he tried out for a play I was working on with the theater club as a joke, and then just kind of stuck around. While I helped the upperclassmen designing and building sets, he would bother the hell out of me, teasing me relentlessly. He should have been the last guy I ever chose to date. He skipped classes regularly, he’d been suspended from school more than once in freshman year alone.

  But I had to admit he was fun. And when one of the upperclassmen in theater club tried to take credit for something I’d come up with, Ethan stuck up for me, proving to the teacher-sponsor that it had been my idea. So, when he’d asked me out to the homecoming dance, I’d said yes.

  And when Alexis had met him the night of the dance, she’d flirted with him. At the time I just rolled my eyes and Ethan was polite to her. I never thought that I needed to keep an eye on either of them. If I remember correctly, the following week Alexis started hanging out with another boy, so she was just a born flirt.

  I shake my head and step away from Alexis’ room, forcing myself to go to the bathroom, to take the bath I promised myself. Ethan never ever did anything to show that he was even remotely interested in Alexis while we dated all through high school. He practically ignored her. That was part of why it had come as such a shock that he’d hooked up with her years later.

  I head into the bathroom, trying to push any thought of Ethan out of my mind. Seeing him again, without my sister at his side, had thrown me into a tailspin. I need to get my bearings. He’s actually looking really good, some quiet little voice in my head points out, but even thinking about him that way turns my stomach. How can I think the guy who broke my heart is looking good? Especially when he’s in mourning for my sister? It’s wrong, I’m obviously just under too much stress, reacting to the news that my sister wanted me to take care of her daughter if she died.

  I turn on the water and close the door and start taking off my clothes, intent on putting Ethan, as well as the situation with raising Riley together, out of my mind for at least an hour.