He shrugged.
“Say something,” she pleaded.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Whatever you want. Whatever you want to say, say.”
“I’m glad we saw her. I am. That’s the truth. But it has to stop here.” He looked away. “To bring in all that pain again makes no sense at all and surely you don’t want to either.”
“What if it’s not pain?”
“Of course it is.” He removed his arm from her shoulder and slid to the other end of the bench.
“I don’t get it.” She was thrown off-balance, as if he’d slid to the other end of the world, an adult teeter-totter.
“Don’t you think I wanted to be with you? Days I wanted to go to Arizona and talk some sense into you?” A haze of summer heat and anger settled between them, palpable. “Shit, even after I was married I wanted to do that. It never seemed to end.”
“How was I ever supposed to know that’s how you felt? You only wrote that one letter. That one yearly letter.” Kate’s voice shook.
“I can’t always do exactly what I want to do. None of us can. If I’d done every single thing I wanted over the past thirteen years, I can’t imagine how many people, including myself, I would’ve destroyed. This is not about what I did or didn’t want to do; it’s about what I had to do. Don’t you even get that? You act like I didn’t want to write to you or see you.”
Kate dropped her face into her hands. “Then why didn’t you?”
“There was always something, Katie. Always. A real something. And then it did end. I did finally stop wanting it all.”
“Why not now?”
He stood then and looked down at her. “You have a boyfriend who has an engagement ring in his bedside drawer.”
She looked up at him. “I know that.”
“Just because Luna found us—” he seemed to stumble. “Look, Katie—Kate—that was then and this is now. We can’t dig into the past and fix it. It’s already happened. Done.”
“But our daughter isn’t in the past anymore. Our daughter. Luna.” Kate stood now, facing him with her voice strong. “This is not a small thing. She found us and this changes everything. She’s here.”
“She’s always been here. We just now saw her again, but she’s always been here.”
“With us, I mean. She’s here with us.”
“No.” He waved his hand toward the street. “She’s still with her family. Her mom and dad.”
Kate sat, and she looked up at him through the tears that made him appear murky and wavy, a dream almost.
“You can’t always make things come out the way you want them to come out.” He took a breath and then spoke on exhale. “This was a perfect day and I just don’t want to ruin it with anything we’d do or say now. I think we should just go. Just leave this the wonderful way it is.” He looked away. “I heard what you said when Rowan came to get you, about ending one chapter and starting another. And that’s exactly what we both need to do.”
The ground was slipping, moving away as if she could for the first time feel the roundness of the earth. “I understand,” Kate said.
“I’m not sure you do. I’ve never told my son. My ex-wife. My family.” Jack ticked each name off on his fingers. “If I focus on all of this—on you, on her—it takes away from living my life right now. She has a great life. Let’s leave her be.”
“It’s not like that. You can’t pretend her life doesn’t exist so you don’t have to upset yours.”
“You never told Rowan,” he said. “So let’s not forget that. You might not ever have told him if he hadn’t shown up at my house.”
Regret rolled around inside Kate’s belly, trapped under her ribs. “You’re right. I hadn’t told him, but I was trying to find a way. I wasn’t taking that engagement ring until I found a way to tell him.”
He avoided her gaze, staring off as if she weren’t pleading with him. “I don’t know how to fix this for us.” His voice was as distant as the years between them.
“I’m not asking you to fix it.”
“I think it’s best if we give ourselves some time to think about this. Let it be…”
“Okay,” Kate said. She touched the side of his face, a last gentle gesture, and then walked away. She wanted and needed him to call out to her, to call her back, but he didn’t, and she continued to walk until she reached her car.
Once, a day, a time, and a place had existed when Kate had believed that nothing could separate them—not anger, not un-forgiveness, not other loves, nothing at all.
twenty-three
BIRMINGHAM, SOUTH CAROLINA
2010
Emily sat in the back seat trying to read her parents’ every move and glance. Were they mad? Sad? Glad?
“Say something,” Emily finally asked.
Elena turned in her seat. “That was a nice lunch, didn’t you think?”
“Of course I did. Why did you run off?”
“Can’t you for one second imagine that was hard for me?”
“Of course, Mom. Mr. Jack thought he hurt your feelings with the ‘aunt’ comment. I could tell. He didn’t mean it though.”
“That wasn’t it. I was upset because my heart breaks every time I hear you doubt yourself, every time I hear you talk about how you’re not good enough or smart enough or pretty enough. I don’t know what I’ve ever done to make you believe that. You’re amazing and you can do anything you want.”
“What are you talking about?” Emily scooted up in the seat, straining the seatbelt across her chest.
“When you said you’d never be as good at writing as Tara. Why do you say things like that? I didn’t raise you that way, Emily. I’ve always told you how…”
“What you tell me and what I feel aren’t the same thing, Mom. Not the same thing at all. And it makes me crazy when you tell me how great I am over and over and over. Of course you’re supposed to believe I’m the most wonderful of all wonderfuls, but guess what?” Emily took in a long breath and hollered, “I’m not!” Her words echoed inside the tiny rental car.
“Yes, you are.”
“Damn GPS,” Larry said. “It keeps taking us in circles.” He stopped at a red light and turned in his seat. “Okay, that’s enough. You’re both emotionally fraught and tired. Please.”
“God, Dad, why do you have to be so freaking logical? Can’t you just let us freak out?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Nope. No freaking out.”
Elena attempted not to laugh, but the sound bubbled up and she turned in her seat to face the windshield, pulling down the visor to check her face. “I look a wreck.”
“No, you don’t.” Larry reached across and took her hand. “All is well.”
The GPS’s robotic voice announced, “Stay left and keep in the right-hand lane.”
The three of them burst into laughter. “How do I stay left and keep in the right-hand lane?” Larry said as they drove past the restaurant for the fourth time.
Only Emily saw them on the bench: Mr. Jack and Miss Katie. Her head was on his shoulder and his face was lifted to the sun.
“Just turn left anywhere and see where it leads us,” Elena said.
Emily settled back into her seat and ran through the list of questions that still remained, but not one of them was as important as this answer: Yes, they’d loved each other when they’d made her. She’d been made of love instead of the other options she’d imagined in her worst moments.
It was important, she thought, to know where you started. It seemed to her that where you started just might have something to do with where you ended. And love was a good place for a start and a finish.
twenty-four
BLUFFTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
2010
Days passed until September leeched summer from the ground and Kate felt herself becoming as cold as the arriving autumn. The months moved forward toward the holidays, time marked by the falling of leaves, the marsh grasses turning from brighte
st green to sage. Even the slant of light resting on the leaves marked time, becoming weary and faded. Kate worked the boutique, watching the crowds increase. She and Rowan were still together and she waited, patiently, for her heart to join her mind.
Emily sent funny e-mails and photos as Kate measured every answer, word, and note as carefully as an exact recipe and made sure to copy Elena. Kate longed to see Emily again, but she waited. The old ache, like an old bruise that wouldn’t heal, returned when Jack disappeared as he had during the years between his letters—silent and gone.
Then Thanksgiving arrived with its companion of a record-breaking cold spell, frosting the live oak leaves into silver-flocked exclamation points. The heat had gone out in the middle of the night and Mimsy Clothing was as cold as the refrigerator; Kate’s loft felt encased in rime. Kate and Rowan stood at the window of the boutique, waiting on the technician from Bluffton Heating and Air. They were bundled up in coats and scarves.
“Damn how did it get to be Thanksgiving?” Rowan asked.
“Thanks for staying in town,” Kate said and burrowed closer to him. “I’m so glad you’ll be here for dinner. I’m not sure I could take it without you. Tara with her perfect husband and the kids, Molly getting drunk on champagne because she thinks champagne doesn’t really count as alcohol, Dad asking again and again about Luna. This should be a great, great night.”
Rowan laughed, “Everything works out in good time.”
“And an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” Kate said.
“Can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. It’s all a lie,” Kate said, laughing and leaning into Rowan’s shoulder, staring out the window at the potted mums outside the front door. They drooped under the weight of winter, now dead. “We need to throw those away,” Kate said, pointing outside the window. “Winter killed them.”
He pulled her closer as if the cold would do the same to them. Finally, the technician banged on the front door announcing that this would be double-price for working on Thanksgiving.
“Of course it is,” Kate said.
She walked to the back of the store and checked e-mails while Rowan took the technician to the heating units.
* * *
Dear Kate,
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. This is a hard note to write, but I need to ask that you please not e-mail Emily for a little while. I know you love her, and I know you have no ill intentions, but we are seeing a sadness and belligerence in her that we’ve never seen before. Every time she is angry (as all teenagers can be), she announces that she is running away to live with you or Jack. She’s even asked a few of her friends to call her Luna. So, I’m asking that you give us some space to be what we’ve always been—her parents.
With Warm Wishes,
Elena Jackson.
* * *
“Warm Wishes?” Kate spoke out loud, her voice echoing in the room.
“What?” Rowan called from the side room.
“Elena sends me this e-mail that could break any heart in any world and then ends it with ‘warm wishes.’ Seriously?”
Rowan came to Kate’s side and read the e-mail. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.” Kate scooted away from the table and from her emotions, wanting to soothe Rowan as much as herself. “I’d do the same thing. I probably wouldn’t even have let her meet me. I could’ve been a serial killer. A crazy, insane person living in a cult in New Mexico. But she did let me meet her, and that has to be enough for now.”
“Let’s go to your loft and skip your parents’ dinner. We’ll drink all the champagne you have.”
Kate smiled at Rowan, sensing an eagerness to be alone, to mend, and then make their own holiday. “That is the most brilliant idea I’ve ever heard,” she said.
* * *
Kate awoke with her leg wound around Rowan’s, her head on his chest. She smiled before she opened her eyes. Maybe she’d come out on the other side of a long-gone fantasy. Maybe now her desire and her touch could be in the same place, the same bed.
Rowan wiggled his arm out from under her head, moving silently.
“I’m awake,” she said, opening her eyes.
“Stay in bed. I’ll go get us some coffee and donuts.”
“Boston cream?” she asked, turning over to wiggle further into the pillows.
“Anything you want,” he said.
“I want.”
He kissed her before he left and she again closed her eyes, content to sleep, but across the room, her cell phone rang. She climbed out of bed and stumbled to her dresser to answer. It was Jack’s voice that brought her to full awake, a jolt more potent than coffee.
She sat upright then, finding her way into day and time: the day after Thanksgiving. Six in the morning. “Hey,” she said.
“Emily ran away. She’s on a Greyhound bus on the way to Birmingham. Her parents are freaking out.”
“Oh, no.” The room wavered; she closed her eyes to focus. “Okay, I’m coming.”
“Wait. Not here though. We looked up the bus she took and it’s a twenty-five-hour drive with a stop in Richmond, Virginia, and then again in Atlanta. She should hit Atlanta in about five hours. Her parents are flying there, and Greyhound knows she’s on the bus. The driver is watching out for her. So meet me in Atlanta—we can get there before her parents.”
“Yes.” Jack’s words erased the night and intimacy with Rowan as if it had never happened, a blurred dream. “Elena must be freaking out.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Why did she do this?” Kate cupped the phone between her shoulder and ear, fully awake and in the bathroom. She turned on the sink water to brush her teeth.
“They wouldn’t let her go to a party or something parental, and she snuck out in the middle of the night and left a note saying she took the Greyhound to Birmingham. They didn’t know until late morning because they thought she was sleeping in, and they hadn’t checked her room.”
“This is terrible.” Kate spoke through the toothpaste froth filling her mouth.
“What?”
She pulled the phone away from her mouth and spit. “Sorry, I was brushing my teeth. I’m coming now.”
“I’ll meet you in Atlanta,” Jack said, and he was gone.
Kate dressed without once thinking about what she wore or how she looked. The only image imprinted on her mind was the picture of Emily on a bus, scared, and alone. Kate wrote a note. It was cowardly, but all she knew to do to leave quickly.
* * *
Rowan,
Emily ran away and I’m intercepting her bus in Atlanta. I’ll call you.
xo
Katie
* * *
Quick decisions—her leaving without a phone call and signing the name Katie—were the only two things Rowan mentioned when he called her in the car, and the only two things he would remember about that day after Thanksgiving.
twenty-five
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
2010
Emily Jackson felt nauseous, sick, and mostly scared. The bus smelled like too many people who hadn’t taken enough baths. This had all seemed like such a perfect idea when she was so mad that her stomach hurt. She’d asked to go to Chaz’s party and her parents had done the most embarrassing of all embarrassing things: they’d called to see if his parents were going to be home for the party, which of course they weren’t and which of course busted Chaz.
Now she wouldn’t be able to show her face at school, and she’d never be invited anywhere for the rest of her life. And all of that had seemed the worst of all possible worlds until about eight hours into the bus trip when she was tired, hungry, and shaking.
It had been easy enough planning the trip; she’d done it in her head a hundred times since meeting Mr. Jack in Birmingham.
At Sailor’s house, she’d gone on the Internet and found the Greyhound schedule from New York to Birmingham. She took the MasterCard from her Mo
m’s wallet and instantly she had a ticket. Done. That easy.
She wrote a note and left it on top of her pillow. She’d signed it in capital letters: LUNA and then drawn a tiny crescent moon under the name.
The thought of her mom reading the note made Emily’s hot tears start again; her eyes ached. The note would hurt her mom’s feelings, but Emily had been so mad, and signing “Luna” had seemed smart and funny. Changing her name was something she and Chaz had talked about doing for weeks. They’d even practiced with him calling her Luna to see if she liked it, and she did.
It was all a brilliant plan until she tried to sleep and the creepy man, who smelled like the bottom of the trashcan behind her garage, sat next to her and showed her his snake tattoo. Until she needed food and even the ten dollars she took from her Mom’s purse wasn’t enough. Until she called Mr. Jack’s cell phone ten times and he didn’t answer. All she’d imagined as wonderful turned into awful.
It had been such a great image: walking off the bus in Birmingham and having Mr. Jack standing there, taking her home. And then Miss Katie would come visit and tell stories about working in the desert. Then Mom and Dad would be sorry and let her do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted and not ruin her life.
Emily leaned against the oily window where someone else had left a smear of something white, sniffling into the pillow she’d been smart enough to bring. She curled her legs up underneath her bottom and wished, in the most desperate way she knew how, that the tattooed man sitting next to her would go away. She imagined the snake coming alive, writhing its way into her seat. Then she heard her name and she turned her face only slightly.
“Are you Emily?”
She nodded into her pillow, wiping at her eyes. The bus driver’s eyes were blue and crinkled around the edges like a shirt before it was ironed. “Your mom and dad are pretty worried about you. I want you to come up to the front seat and sit behind me until we get to Atlanta.”
Emily nodded again, her voice hiding somewhere behind her tears. She grabbed her pillow and Hello Kitty duffel bag and followed the driver to the front seat. He placed a reserved sign in the seat next to her and smiled down. “I’ll watch out for you until we get to Atlanta. Your family will meet you there.”
And Then I Found You Page 17
