Birthright

by Judith Arnold

  “I should be leaving, too,” he said.

  “No.” The word came out so automatically she knew it was the truth. She didn’t want him to leave yet. She’d failed him by asking him about his mother, and she had to make things right before he disappeared, or whatever kind of friendship they had would be ruined. “I want to show you something,” she said.

  He eyed her warily. It occurred to her that he might be desperate to leave, that without Charlie there, he didn’t want to be with her. But stronger than her attraction to him was a need to count him as a friend. Aaron was the only person she knew in Riverbend who might understand what she’d done. He’d done bad things, too, and he had redeemed himself. When she looked at him, she saw the chance for her own redemption.

  So he couldn’t leave, not until she was sure things were okay between them.

  She started toward the stairs. His mouth tightened and his gaze hardened, but he fell into step behind her. Like a condemned man marching to his doom, he climbed the long stairway without saying a word.

  What did he think would happen to him on the second floor? she wondered. Was he aware of her attraction to him? Did he fear she was going to drag him into her bedroom and have her way with him? She barely had the courage for what she was about to show him. She certainly didn’t have the courage for anything more.

  She didn’t bother with the hallway lights, since early-summer sunlight spilled through the open windows of the rooms flanking the hall. Not looking behind her—for fear that Aaron might have stopped following her—she headed down the hall to the bedroom at the end that she’d converted into a studio. It was the brightest bedroom in the house, a corner room with windows on two walls. Once she entered, she stepped out of the way of the door and turned to him.

  He followed her in and stared. The room’s only furnishings were a few lamps, an easel, a long work-table and a comfortable stool. Along one wall she’d propped her newly stretched canvases. One canvas stood on the easel, with a faint charcoal sketch across its taut white surface. The table held her new acrylic paints, neatly sorted, a few old plates for mixing colors, jars, brushes, palette knives and a can of solvent.

  Aaron gazed around the room. “This is your studio,” he said, stating the obvious.

  “I’ve put the watercolors away. I’m going to start working in acrylics,” she told him.

  He surveyed the tubes of paint.

  “Acrylics have texture and vivid colors, like oils,” she explained. “It’s a much stronger medium.” She smiled. “Riskier.”

  He crossed to the easel and studied the sketch. From the few vague lines she’d drawn, he probably couldn’t tell that the painting was going to be a cornfield. By the time she was done with it, it might not look like a cornfield, either. In her conception, the cornstalks would be slashes of green and brown and black, the sky burning down to night, the horizon as flat as Riverbend’s own. It would be impressionistic, almost abstract. Only by standing back and taking in the entire context would a viewer recognize that it was a cornfield.

  “It’s not a still life,” she told him.

  “Good.” He assessed the tentative sketch. “What is it?”

  “You’ll have to wait until I paint it.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t smile, didn’t look pleased. The studio, which was flooded with natural light through most of the day, was fading into dimness as the sun angled toward the opposite side of the house. Lily could have turned on the floor lamp near the easel, offering strong artificial light, but she didn’t. She liked the play of shadows across Aaron’s face, the way they emphasized the sharp lines of his nose and chin, the intensity of his brow.

  He scrutinized the blank canvases along the walls, the tubes of paint on the table and the canvas on the easel. Then he turned to her. “I’m glad you’re painting with these acrylics,” he said. “But I had no right to say what I did that day. I don’t know squat about art.”

  “You said what I needed to hear.”

  “I was out of line.”

  “Sometimes it’s good to be out of line.” A year ago, or ten or fifteen, she would never have believed such a thing. But she’d crossed the line herself, and Aaron’s willingness to cross it was one of the things she admired most about him.

  “So, this painting—” he waved toward the easel “—is going to be out of line?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t painted it yet.” She let him look around for a minute more, then moved toward the door. As they went back down the hall to the stairs, he seemed much more relaxed.

  “How about some of that ice cream?” she asked as they reached the first-floor hall. “Or would you like another beer?”

  “A beer sounds good,” he said.

  She smiled inwardly. He was going to stay long enough to drink another beer. Even without Charlie to buffer them, he was willing to stay.

  They entered the kitchen, and she pulled a bottle out of the refrigerator for him. She refilled her glass with iced tea and led him out onto the back porch. The air had cooled a good ten degrees since midday, and the sky was glazed with pink light. She settled into one of the wicker chairs, and Aaron took the other.

  “I’m sorry if I jumped to the wrong conclusions earlier,” she said.

  He quirked his eyebrows questioningly, but said nothing.

  “About your mother,” she clarified.

  “Oh.” He shrugged. “Forget it.”

  “It’s just…” She sipped her tea. “I came home for myself, for my own selfish reasons. You came home for your mother.”

  He remained silent.

  “I’m sure it was a big adjustment for you to come home. You must have had a life somewhere else, a job.”

  He shrugged again. “It was a good job, but not as good as what I’ve got at Riverbend High.”

  “Coaching the old team. And you’re a guidance counselor, too, right?”

  “I work with high-risk kids,” he said. “I was doing that in Indianapolis before I came back here. I was working at a youth center, coaching basketball and trying to keep kids out of trouble.” He cracked a smile. “I was the hick there, the token white guy from the sticks. It was kind of fun. I think I opened some eyes during my time there.”

  “I’m sure you did.” She tried to picture him as the “token white guy” among a group of inner-city kids. Surely his adolescence had been just as tough as theirs, his resilience and survival instincts just as strong as theirs. “Did you like the city?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He sipped some beer, then propped the bottle on his knee and gazed out into her backyard. “Yeah. I liked it. It wasn’t Riverbend.” His quick grin stole the bitterness from his words.

  “You probably had an exciting social life in the city,” she said, then bit her lip at her tactlessness.

  He gave her a sidelong glance. “I was pretty serious with a woman there,” he admitted. “But when I decided to move here, she refused to come. She didn’t want to leave the city.”

  “And you came, anyway?” That surprised Lily.

  “You broke up a relationship to take care of your mother?”

  He shook his head. “I came back to make sure my mother was taken care of. But it was Coach Drummer who got me to stay. Not my mother. I did it for the coach.”

  “You wanted to run the high-school team that badly?”

  “Drummer is a good man,” Aaron said, his voice hushed but fervent. “He saved my life. I’d take a bullet for that guy. Fortunately he didn’t want me to take a bullet. He only wanted me to take over the high-school team. I didn’t have to think twice about it.”

  The sun dropped below the trees, stealing most of the light. Crickets launched into their sweet summer chorus, and fireflies glittered along the hedges bordering her property. She remembered how much she used to love summer nights in Riverbend when she was a child, how soothing the air could be, how tranquil the breeze. She hadn’t needed anyone like Coach Drummer to persuade her to move back home. She belonged here, despite the
fact that she was no longer the person she’d been when she left.

  “I’m glad Coach Drummer convinced you to stay.” She was glad for herself as much as for him. Her fantasies about him notwithstanding, she was thrilled to have someone nearby with whom she could feel this comfortable, someone with whom she could sit on her back porch, talking and sipping a cool evening drink. “If it weren’t for you, Aaron, I’d still be hiding from the world.”

  “You’ve got no reason to hide,” he argued, his tone gentle. “You told me your deep dark secret, and it’s nothing, Lily. It’s a zero.”

  “You don’t know all my secrets,” she warned.

  He shifted in his seat so he could look at her. Even in the fading light she felt the power of his gaze. She felt his presence, his strength, the sheer masculinity of him. His hands seemed too big for the bottle they held. His hair seemed too long, his chin too sharp, his smile too tender for a man who’d known so little tenderness in his life.

  No matter how much trouble he’d seen in his youth, he’d never done anything as bad as what she’d done. Lily Bennett Holden, the good girl, the perfect young lady, was far more evil than Aaron could ever imagine.

  “Your husband was a drunk. You told me,” he reminded her. “It’s not a crime to admit you aren’t exactly sorry he died.”

  “I killed him,” she said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FOR A LONG MINUTE all Aaron heard was the crickets. And Lily’s voice, reverberating inside his skull: I killed him.

  She’d killed her drunken lout of a husband? Good for her.

  That was a terrible thought, one that shook him up a little. He and Lily shared genes, after all. And while he’d never murdered anyone, he’d been in trouble more than a few times. Maybe the genes they’d both inherited from good old Dr. Bennett were evil ones.

  “You didn’t really kill him,” he said. No matter how evil her genetic makeup was, in his heart, deep inside where it counted, he knew she wasn’t capable of murder.

  “I did,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “Really.”

  He wondered if she was going to cry the way she had at his house a few nights ago. He wondered if she had invited him to her house tonight not to celebrate the holiday or test her entertaining skills but to unburden herself. For some reason she seemed to view him as her confessor. She could have talked about this with Reverend Kendall, or some other minister in town. But she’d chosen him.

  “All right. You killed your husband,” he echoed, measuring the words to see if they felt true.

  She nodded, her eyes downcast, her fingers fidgeting with her glass.

  “Do the Boston police know about this?”

  “He didn’t die in Boston,” she said, her voice still wavering, still raw. “He died in Cohasset—it’s a shoreline town south of Boston. But no, the police didn’t know it was my fault. No one knows.”

  “You’ve just told me.” He was surprised at how calm he felt, and then not so surprised. This wasn’t real. Lily couldn’t kill anyone.

  “You’re it. The only one who knows.” She sighed and lifted her eyes to him. They were glassy with tears. “Do you hate me?”

  “Actually,” he admitted, “I don’t believe you.”

  “He was drunk,” she said, her words sounding choked. “I knew he was drunk that night, drunker than usual. He came into the bedroom and I kicked him out. I couldn’t…” She issued a shaky sigh. “I couldn’t let him touch me. Not when he was like that. I told him to get the hell away from me.”

  Understandable. Aaron nodded.

  “I heard him go downstairs. I thought maybe he was going to watch some TV or take a walk to clear his head or…I didn’t know. To tell you the truth, I didn’t care. All I cared about was that he wasn’t going to get in bed with me when he was drunk.” Another sigh escaped her. “By the time I realized he was in the garage, it was too late to stop him. I heard him gun the engine of his car. He was bombed, stinking drunk, and I heard him drive away. If I hadn’t kicked him out of bed, he wouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel that night.”

  Aaron could see where she’d feel some responsibility for what had happened—but it wasn’t her fault. She’d been within her rights to refuse to sleep with him when he was stewed. “You didn’t know he was going to get behind the wheel. He did the drinking and he did the driving, Lily.”

  “What if he’d hit someone? What if, instead of slamming into a tree, he’d slammed into another car? Or run someone over? Given his condition, a bartender would have been legally required to take his keys away.” She sounded too weary to cry, too sad. Too lost. “I could have stopped him, Aaron. I could have gotten his keys and hidden them. And I didn’t.”

  Aaron took another sip of beer. He didn’t swallow it right away but held it on his tongue, felt the bubbles pop, absorbed the bitter flavor. He absorbed her words, as well, and conceded that there was something in what she was saying.

  He wasn’t an amateur, when it came either to taking responsibility for one’s own choices or to helping a troubled soul work out a personal crisis. He had a degree in psychology and a master’s in counseling. He knew this stuff.

  “When someone drinks the way your husband drank,” he said carefully, hoping he wasn’t coming across like a pompous know-it-all, “he’s got a self-destructive streak. Okay? Alcoholism is a disease, but drinking is a behavior. Do you know the difference?”

  She eyed him quizzically. Obviously she hadn’t been expecting an expert lecture, but she seemed receptive.

  “Alcoholism has to do with brain and body chemistry. Lots of alcoholics never drink, and they function well. Lots of people who aren’t alcoholics drink too much and don’t function well. I don’t know if your husband was technically an alcoholic or not. But he drank too much. That was the behavior he chose.”

  She listened intently, leaning toward him, her eyes glowing with a light that looked a lot like hope. Did she think he would absolve her? At least make it possible for her to forgive herself? He would do his damnedest.

  “Your husband was miserable and depressed,” he continued, “and he engaged in self-destructive behavior. I know an awful lot about self-destructive behavior, Lily. I tried my hand at it as a kid.”

  “You never—”

  “I did,” he assured her. “But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about your husband.”

  “I thought he drank as a way to hurt me.”

  Aaron suppressed a reflexive surge of anger. Who would ever do anything to hurt Lily? She was such a good person. “There’s no question his drinking hurt you, but if all he wanted was to hurt you, he would have found a way to do it that wouldn’t damage himself so much. Your being hurt by his drinking was only a by-product. He was out to destroy himself.”

  “Do you think so?”

  Aaron nodded. “And his decision to drive into a tree—”

  “It wasn’t a decision. He was too drunk to decide anything like that. It was an accident.”

  He gave her a long hard look.

  A transparent look, given how easily she read his thoughts. “You think it wasn’t an accident?”

  “I think he was hell-bent on self-destruction. I think if he was all alone and drove into a tree…No, it wasn’t an accident. He had other options. He made a choice.”

  She contemplated his words. Her head was slightly ducked, her hair pale and lustrous in the dwindling light, her knees pressed together primly, her eyes closed. If he could convince her to stop blaming herself for her husband’s self-annihilation, he would feel as if moving back to Riverbend had been worthwhile. Even more than living up to Drummer’s expectations, salvaging Lily’s life would validate his return.

  He wasn’t sure how he’d gone from despising her to wanting to be her savior. Well, he’d never actually despised her, except in the most irrational way. He’d despised her for being Julian Bennett’s daughter, not for anything she’d done. But he would no more blame her for her father’s decisions—and they wer
e every bit as deliberate as her husband’s had been—than he would blame her for having blond hair and delicate lips.

  She stirred, emerging from her meditation. Her eyes fluttered open and she smiled, the saddest smile he’d ever seen. “We were really in love when we started out,” she told him.

  “I figured.” At her quizzical look, he explained, “You wouldn’t have cared so much if there hadn’t been something good there. You would have left him.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” She let out a breath. “He was so smart. So generous. And he used to tell me he loved me because I was sweeter than any woman he’d ever met before.”

  “He got that much right.”

  Her smile grew slightly, tinged with amazement.

  “Why are you so kind to me, Aaron?” she asked.

  “Kind?” He snorted.

  “Is it because I gave your program money?”

  He almost dropped his beer. “No,” he said, wondering if she could hear the irritation in his voice.

  “I’m not for sale.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant…” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Let’s not count the ways I’ve offended you tonight. It’s a miracle you’re still sitting here.”

  “You haven’t offended me.”

  “All that stuff I implied about your relationship with your mother—I had no right to assume anything. I always come up with the best possible interpretation of things. I heard you came to Riverbend to take care of your mother, and I assumed you did it out of love.”

  “Maybe I did,” he muttered. “Who knows?”

  “You love your mother?” she asked.

  “Damn it, yeah.” It was his turn to sigh, his turn to let her peel away a layer of him. “She pisses the hell out of me, but she’s the only family I’ve got.”

  “I’ll bet she’s proud of you.”