by Sarra Cannon
“And Emmaline?”
“Officially? Her murder was ‘racially motivated.’” He tore his gaze away and looked up at the starlit sky. “You know, I hate the term ‘Reconstruction.’ It doesn’t tell you anything about what the end of the war, what those years after so much pain and hatred and death, was really like.
He took a shallow breath.
“I came back changed, like I told you. And I met this young woman, who was just—“ He stopped, shaking his head. “I should explain that Emmaline was Black, and she’d come from up north after Emancipation to look for her daughter, who’d been kidnapped and sold, as a child, into slavery.”
He sighed, and the furrow in his brow deepened as he cast himself back into his memories. Hallie felt him receding, drawing inward toward his past. When he spoke, it was low and slow, with a kind of eloquence that had no place on the lips of a twenty-first century man.
“Her search had led her to Abingford,” he continued, “and I met Emmaline because she’d come to Christine for help—Christine who, as you know, wanted to help former slaves, especially women and children, start new lives. Christine was tough-as-nails, but she cared about, she had a soft spot, for women like Emmaline. And she had a soft spot for people like me, soldiers who had suffered in the war. I was nearly destitute, which is why I was living with her at the time.”
“I had just come back from the front and hated everything about Abingford, from the humid heat to the smell of the place, like dead livestock and ash… And—I don’t know—Emmaline was everything Abingford wasn’t… and everything I wasn’t. Beautiful, strong, compassionate, determined. She was sad, but I could make her laugh. When I was with her, I saw a future for myself. I would help her find her little girl. We would journey north as a family, and I’d become both father and husband: someone who would protect and love the two of them for as long as I could.
“I wasn’t entirely stupid. I knew race mattered, whether I liked it or not. We kept our relationship a secret from the town, whose hatred of newly freed blacks was more vile than you can imagine. And I worried about all the ways I was compromising her… I wondered if I was taking advantage. We fought about it, often… but I could never walk away.
“I continued to refuse the Guardians’ demands. I wanted to live my own life with Emmaline, not spend an eternity bending to their will. But it was Emmaline who paid the price. When word got out about us—thanks to the same man who attacked me today—the townspeople waited until I was out of town, then broke into her cabin and murdered her.”
Matthew paused, rubbing his hand over his tight mouth. Then he turned to face Hallie, whose stomach churned with the violence and injustice of his story. .
“When I came home that night, I found her.” His voice cracked. “Stripped, beaten, bloody. All because I’d been naive enough to think we could be together… I put her at risk and then left her exposed. I didn’t watch over her, like I was supposed to. Because I was selfish and fell in love, somewhere a little girl grew up without her mother.”
He clenched and unclenched his fists, restless with anguish.
“So you can see, maybe, why I’m taking this so seriously. Why I want to get as far away from Abingford as possible—and why I don’t want you involved. This is anything but convenient for me, Hallie. I don’t want you now and then, I want you always… but I’m not going to let them hurt you ag—" He broke off, eyes blazing. “I’m not going to let them hurt you like they hurt her.”
“You’re scared,” she murmured. “Understandably. But history doesn’t have to repeat itself.”
He sighed. “I don’t mean to be patronizing… but I have seen so much more of life than you can possibly imagine, Hallie.” He touched her cheek with his thumb, sliding his fingers into her hair. “I see it in your eyes—you have hope that I lost a long time ago. Despite everything you’ve been through, you’re still here with me. You’re still searching for your family. You’ve been hurt over and over, you’ve seen people get hurt, and you still choose this.”
His hand curled in her hair, holding her in place as he traced her lips and neck with his other hand, his fingers rubbing the column of her throat as she swallowed the emotion solidifying there.
“I love that about you. But I don’t understand it. I’ll fight to the death for you, but I’m not like you. You have a future… and all I have is a past that’s going to catch up with me, and soon.”
Hallie shook her head, pulling out of his gentle hold. The lights from the pool cast undulating shadows over his face, the glint from the water catching his blue eyes—warm, boyish eyes that didn’t match up with the heartbreaking things he’d said.
It wasn’t true. He was good and strong and brave and resolute. Like a towering oak, worn by the years but still vital, still flourishing. He had a future with her. And damned if she wouldn’t make him see that.
She took her feet out of the water and shook off the droplets of water, then shifted and crawled behind Matthew. He watched her, bemused. Then she spread her legs and aligned her chest to his back, wrapping her arms around his waist and her thighs around his hips, and pressing her cheek between his shoulder blades.
He always held her… but this time, she wanted to do the holding.
As she hugged him, he caught her arms against his chest, kissed the back of her hands, and held her there tightly. The deep breath she took smelled of his soap and chlorine.
“You’re not so hopeless,” she whispered. “Not as much as you think.”
In this position, she could feel the tension gripping him, lacing the powerful muscles in his arms and shoulders and back. He shivered when she pressed a tender, lingering kiss to the base of his neck, as if she could draw out that tension, wash away the pain that lingered in his body. She extracted her hands from his grasp and let them roam his chest, his sides, caressing the firm swell of his pectorals, his shoulders, the sloping valley of his spine. He shuddered.
“I’m sorry for what I said.”
“I know.”
“Why aren’t you afraid?” he asked, after another moment had passed. “To be with me?”
“I think I am,” she confessed, stroking over the muscles of his lower back. “But I’m just so, so sick of running, Matthew. I don’t want to run from you, too.”
Chapter 22
They were near her hometown; Hallie could tell from the way the air had changed, gone from woodsy to salty, the thickness of inland air morphing into the kind of ocean breeze that always cleared her lungs.
Matthew was driving; the Westie had been given a clean bill of health, and he had ushered her onto the road as quickly as possible, which Hallie appreciated, begrudgingly. If it had been up to her, she would have dallied in that small town as long as possible, to delay this meeting.
But finally, they were there. She recognized the neighborhood: her old elementary school; the little grocery store across the street where as a girl she used to ride in the shopping carts; the rows and rows of perfect houses, with their clipped lawns and smooth inclined driveways. The neighborhood was quiet for midday. Sleepy. Serene.
“Turn left here,” she said. The words stuck in her throat. He turned left. And there it was, just sitting there, with a well-trimmed flower-bed and a lawn gnome squatting out front: her childhood home. She pointed, and Matthew maneuvered the Westie to a halt in front of the mailbox.
“This doesn’t look right,” she said, inspecting the front of the house. Something was off—her father would never have kept a lawn gnome. Or flowers. Or that cutesy stained glass thing she saw hanging in the bay windows. There was one way to find out, though, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“I don’t know what to say to him,” she said, her heart rate quickening. The pancakes were making a comeback, were lodged somewhere in her throat. Now that the moment was here, trepidation was rapidly shifting into blind panic. She needed to run—to push Matthew aside, kick the Westie in gear, and peel off into the sun. What was she thinking, trying to
resurrect these ghosts of her past?
“You’ll know when you see him,” Matthew reassured her. “Just say the truth—just say what you can.” He unbuckled his seatbelt. “Do you want me to go with you? Or would you rather go alone?”
She shook her head, taking long, calming breaths that were still too shallow, and unbuckling her own seatbelt. “Alone.”
But when she traipsed up the front lawn and rang the doorbell, the house was quiet. She peered through the window on the front door—and found darkness, but for the dim outlines of old furnishings that she recognized, even now, with a jolt. She sighed, then turned around.
“No one’s home,” she called to Matthew. But just as he opened his mouth to respond, a sleek red sedan rounded the corner. The gravel crunched as it pulled into the driveway—a sound that, for all the years that had passed, still made her stomach clench and twist. She stood rooted, her legs resolutely ignoring the signals firing from her brain, telling her to run.
Her father’s worn but polished leather shoes touched the pavement first, and her eyes followed them up his pleated grey slacks, the slightly wrinkled dress shirt, the cuffs pushed up to his elbows and his tie tangling loosely around his neck. She recognized the tan of his forearms beneath, the shock of dark arm hair she used to tug at, as a little girl—
He pulled a briefcase out after him, then straightened up and froze when he saw her standing on the sidewalk. She blinked. He was smaller than she remembered. Stooped and tired, his glossy dark hair greying at the temples, his once radiant, tanned skin loosened with age, even where it covered his muscles. Lines scored his eyelids, his mouth, his brooding brow. He was the same tall, dark, solid man she remembered, loved, and feared, whose arms she’d used as monkey bars, whose hands had smoothed band-aids on her knees but also, later, seized her by her hair and twisted… And at the same time, he was just another tired, middle-aged, menial office worker—his once commanding, dashing good looks receding with his hairline, fading like an old photograph.
“Hallie?” He shut the car door and was on the sidewalk in two strides. “Mi hija?” he murmured, his dark, bright eyes—so like her own—searched her face. The small Spanish endearment made her throat tighten.
“Hi, Dad.” Her hands trembled, so she shoved them in the pockets of her jeans. “I just—um. Need to ask you something. Can we go inside?”
He glanced down the sloping lawn to the Westie, where Matthew was leaning against the door, arms crossed. Her father nodded in greeting, but Matthew didn’t reciprocate.
“Of course,” he replied. He gestured toward the front door. “Please, follow me.”
He fumbled with the lock before it came unlatched. And as the door swung open, the scent of her childhood home—a mixture of lemon-polished wood and vanilla—hit her so hard she gasped. He stepped inside, and she hovered on the threshold, the panicky tightness in her chest threatening to take over.
He set his briefcase down in the foyer. The clunk echoed in the empty house.
“Please,” he said again, turning to where she lingered in the doorway, “come in.”
She followed him inside, into the sitting room, where everything was neat. Pristine. Sparkling. The place looked like a model home, complete with a little bowl of potpourri on the coffee table. From the spot she took on the high-backed ivory armchair, she could peer into the kitchen and further into the breakfast area, which was bathed in sunlight from the rear bay windows. In all of her dreams and nightmares she never remembered the house being quite so serene, so lovely, so clean and fragrant. He must have a hell of a housekeeper.
“Hallie, mi reina, you look so grown up.” He sat opposite her, on the matching plush loveseat. The sudden warmth in his voice set her on edge.
“It’s been nearly ten years, so I’d hope so.”
He winced.
“And please don’t call me that.”
“Call you…?”
“That nickname.” My queen. It was a term of adoration, of adulation. One whose disingenuousness made her toes curl in revulsion.
A dark flush tinted his ears, and she knew she’d nettled him. That he was kicking himself. That in this dance they were doing, he’d made the first misstep, shown the first sign of weakness, not her. Which meant she had the upper ground, the high hand, the—whatever the hell it was.
“What brings you here?” he asked. Without missing a beat, she reached into her bag and pulled out Louisa’s letter, then handed it to him.
She was silent as he opened and read it quickly, then wordlessly refolded it and handed it back to her. As if she’d just handed him some immaterial legal document, or some spreadsheet with P&L figures, or maybe a note with her lunch order written on it.
“You’re here because Louisa sent you, then?” he said briskly.
She stifled the frustrated noise in her throat and shook her head. “I’m here because I’m looking for her. Has she contacted you with another address?”
He was quiet for a moment, assessing her, and she felt her insides pressurize.
“Hallie, there really are other things we could discuss.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“Well, for example—”
“For example, why you got rid of me like a bag of garbage?”
Her words lanced him; he winced. But it didn’t matter. Her heart was shattered, its pieces churning with anger, shredding the insides of her chest. She wanted to make him pay, to shame him the way he’d shamed her.
“There are two sides to every story,” he replied softly. “You know yours… but you haven’t heard mine.”
“I don’t need to. I was there. I don’t need to hear how you spun it in your head, or how you rationalized it.”
“It wasn’t spin, Hallie… and yes, I think you do.”
“Well, here’s what I remember. Mom and Maggie died, and you said it was my fault. You drank and drank and drank. You were all I had left and from the day they died, you hated me… everything about me. Does that sound right?”
The ceiling fan whirred, rustling her hair against her cheek, wafting the spicy scent of his cologne toward her.
“I never hated you,” he said, a hard edge to his voice that raised the hairs on her neck. “I was grieving, and I was wrong. You’re so like your mother.” He shook his head. “Look in the mirror—you’ll see her, and Maggie, too. You and your sister shared so many mannerisms. You had the same eyes, the same dark hair, with those streaks of red. After the accident I saw so much of your mother in you, and I saw the girl Maggie would have become. That was excruciating.”
Hallie caught her own reflection in the glass of the mahogany curio cabinet and looked away quickly.
“So it was my fault that I looked like Mom, and Maggie looked like me?”
She wasn’t going to cry. But the hurt of decades of apologizing for who she was, for what she wanted, for even existing, licked fire into her throat and burned like ash on her tongue.
“No. My fault,” he said rubbing his hands over his face. “I could have helped your mother more. I could have driven you to school that day. We fought about it, do you remember? She left flustered and sleep-deprived. And then you two were bickering. I could have stepped in, but I had work, a big client.” He looked over at his briefcase. “That’s what I chose, and we all paid the price.”
Something stirred in the back of her mind, like an itch she couldn’t quite reach. She shook her head.
“You blamed yourself,” Hallie said, the sarcasm like hot oil in her mouth, “and that’s why you treated me like crap?”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense, sweetheart, but at the time—”
“At the time, I was a child. I was a little girl. I had no one, nothing, except a drunk for a father and the constant fear that I’d screw up and fail somehow. Like killing my mother and sister weren’t bad enough, and it was only a matter of time before I did worse.”
“Hallie! Don’t say things like that.”
“Why not? You said them to me all th
e time.”
He stood up abruptly, making her jump and scoot backwards on the chair cushion. Wordlessly, he stalked into the kitchen. She heard the familiar thuds of the cabinets, then the clink of ice in a glass, and every muscle in her body tightened. When he returned, it was empty-handed, which meant that whatever he’d poured himself, he didn’t want her to see.
“How did Louisa find you?” she pressed. “I never told her where we were from. Your name’s common enough.”
“I don’t know. She sent me adoption papers about a year after I left you, which I refused to sign.”
Hallie sucked in a breath, her chest so tight that it ached.
“Adoption papers?”
“She wanted to be your legal guardian, but I wasn’t prepared to make that choice.”
She stood up so fast the armchair skidded on the hardwood floor.
“You weren’t prepared—you made that choice the moment you left me on that beach!”
He was quiet, his jaw clenched, and she her hands trembled as she ran them through her hair.
“So let me get this straight,” she said, her voice threatening to crack. “Not only did you decide that you didn’t want to be my dad, you also decided that no one else could be my mom?”
“It wasn’t like that. I thought that if I could recover from the grief and the drinking, I could be a good father to you again—“
Hallie let out an hysterical laugh. Now she was trembling, shaking all over, but she couldn’t stop. Not while he stood there in his pressed suit, in the clean suburban house she used to call home, and confessed that the reason she’d been abandoned was that he’d just wanted a break from being her father.
“You don’t get a choice, Dad,” she said, “you don’t get to pick and choose when you get to be a parent. God, what is wrong with you?”
“I was mixed up, I had to stop drinking in order to get my head on straight—”
“And did you? Did you get sober? Clean? Let’s see…” She marched into the kitchen where a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler with ice sat sweating on the counter. “Oh, right, I guess that’s the special kind of whiskey they give recovering alcoholics.”
