Before and Again

by Barbara Delinsky

  “So what did you tell them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You didn’t fight the rumors?”

  “What was the point?”

  “Uh, killing them?” he asked, but I was shaking my head before his mouth closed.

  “Rumors take on a life of their own. Besides, my lawyer told me to ignore them.” I snorted softly. “Lot of good that did.”

  “I hate it when you’re cynical.”

  “So do I. It’s ugly and mean-spirited and lowering myself to their level—”

  “I get it,” he broke in, squeezing my hand.

  But I wasn’t sure he did. “I’ve lived through this, Kevin. Seeing reporters and hearing gossip and knowing, just knowing where it can lead.”

  “Jimmy says the station is quiet.”

  “Uh-huh. This is the lull when lawyers are plotting strategy. Jay Harrington amasses pro-Chris legal arguments, while prosecutors amass anti-Chris ones, but we won’t see any of that. What we will see isn’t about legal issues. It’s about headlines. It’s about entertainment. It’s about sensationalism.”

  “And memory,” Kevin said, returning the subject to me. “Confront them, honey.”

  Well, there was that underlying theme again. It was easy to ignore my therapist, who had her head in psych texts. It was harder to ignore Kevin, who had a keen feel for real life.

  That sent my frustration through the roof. “How?”

  “Start with him.”

  9

  Kevin didn’t know the half. He didn’t know that passion had been like lightning between Edward and me. Or that since the divorce I hadn’t missed it—had barely thought about it—until now. Or that by the time Friday ended with a fourth—or was it a fifth or a sixth sighting of Edward Cooper, now calling himself Ned, I was upset enough to confront the man.

  I did it that night in my dream. I yelled at him, yelled and screamed, threw the kind of tantrum I had never thrown in my life. I wanted to scare him off, but don’t know if I did. The dream woke me too soon.

  And still, when I left work Saturday evening, I might have avoided him if the parking lot hadn’t been surreally dark and rainy, or if the first person approaching me as I dodged puddles hadn’t worn a plastic poncho visibly shielding camera equipment. When Edward came from nowhere with his ball cap dripping, warded off the man and shepherded me to my truck, I was so grateful that when he said, “My place or yours?” I was lost.

  “Yours,” I whispered.

  “Lock your door.”

  I did. Wipers going double-time front and rear, I backed around with care lest the photographer be lurking behind, and waited only until the Jeep Wrangler had done the same before following it out of the lot.

  Lost was putting it mildly. I was insane to be doing this. But I was exhausted after a day of back-to-back appointments, and worn down after a week of fighting the past. I didn’t know what I was looking for, didn’t know what I wanted, didn’t even know whether the simmering inside me was from anger or desire, only that it was there.

  My wipers beat at the rain, muting the thud of my heart as we headed north on the Blue before crossing back over the river onto a lesser-used road. His taillights were my guide. When he put on his blinker, I did the same. Our headlights showed a brief sprawl of farmer’s porch, shingled siding and mullioned glass, but all went dark when I pulled in behind him at the side door and shut down the truck.

  I had a moment then, literally sixty seconds in which I might have changed my mind. I had been so prudent, so prudent since the accident. My life was about self-control. It was about discipline. Yes, it was about self-deprivation, and my therapist had tried to change that, to no avail. Self-deprivation felt better to me than self-indulgence.

  So this was out of character. I felt a flicker of hope that acting now would kill the need, but if that gave me a lofty motive, it was quickly gone. The past was knocking as insistently as Edward’s knuckle on my window, and my body ruled.

  He held my gloved hand as we ran through the rain and, once inside, he quickly had me backed against the door. Our mouths fused. His kiss was forceful; so was mine. I was furious to be here doing this, but I truly hadn’t had a choice.

  Clothes were in the way. He pushed my hood aside to dig his fingers into the knot of hair at my nape, and, with better traction, kissed me again. Between my wet down jacket and his sodden wool one, though, skin was too distant to feel. And I did want to feel. That was all I wanted to do—not think, just feel.

  We pulled at clothing, hands tangling at buttons, zippers, and snaps. I’m not sure we were completely undressed when he entered me, but it didn’t matter. I gave a sharp cry. Oh, my body was ready, but it had been nearly five years without this, and the stretching, followed by his incredible fullness was a shock.

  He paused only for a rough, “You okay?”

  I didn’t answer, just grabbed the facial hair I hadn’t known and pulled his mouth back to mine. I was hungry. I was angry. Too much lately was beyond my control, but here, now, I was taking what I wanted. He might be larger and anatomically able to lift me against the wood with each thrust, but I was the one managing hands and mouths.

  I came too quickly, still wanting more as he pinned my body to the door to allow for his own throbbing release. He was barely done when he bodily lifted me and half-walked, half-ran down a hallway, past dark rooms I couldn’t identify to one that had a bed. In the next instant, with sheets against my back, he came down on top and was inside again.

  The joining was easier this time but no less startling. I had forgotten what it felt like to be totally possessed, and we both were that, in every sense of the word. I couldn’t touch or taste enough. We fought each other, rolling and shifting, and all the while he pounded into me with a fury I shared.

  My release this time was no less fierce. I cried out again, a sound that erupted from some primal place deep inside. His own cry was more guttural but totally familiar. We had always been vocal, Edward and I.

  Awareness of what we had just done must have hit him at the same time it hit me, because we fell apart. I assumed his breathing was as heavy as mine, though both were muted by the drum of the rain. Staring at the ceiling, I saw nothing. I turned my head on the pillow. He was looking up, too, but, feeling my gaze, turned to meet it in the dark.

  For a few seconds I was bewildered, wondering where I was and how I had come to be here. This was no dream. But it was unreal. I was wide awake and, with each passing second, aware of the fact that the eyes that held mine belonged to my ex-husband, and that little had changed, on this score at least. Despite the hell that had torn us apart, the attraction remained.

  That fact infuriated me, but still, yet again, I avoided confrontation. Thinking only that coming here had been a mistake, I rolled away and stumbled up.

  “Don’t leave,” he said, half-rising.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” I murmured and searched the dark floor for what few of my clothes might be there. Seeing none, I grabbed at the sheet that was bunched at the foot of the bed and held it to my breasts. Leave, my gut cried. Don’t talk. But I was too curious not to ask what I most needed to know.

  “Why did you come here?”

  He reached for the lamp.

  “Don’t.”

  He withdrew his hand.

  “Why, Edward?” I asked again.

  He was on an elbow, in a limbo between sitting and lying. “I needed a change.”

  I struggled to process that and remain calm. There were many ways he would know where I lived, not the least being through our divorce lawyer. “But why would you want to be anywhere near me?”

  “Owning the Inn was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  “Edward,” I said, impatient. “You’re a venture capitalist. You don’t own things. You raise money for people who do own things.”

  “I quit my job. This is what I do now.”

  “Inn keeping?” It defied belief. “Everyone here said it was a group.”

&nbs
p; “It is. I’m the managing partner. So I’ll be living here.”

  “In my town? Why, Edward? There are inns all over the country!”

  “Not like this one.”

  “I. Live. Here.”

  “I know that.”

  “And still you came? To punish me? Torture me?”

  “No.”

  I wanted to throw the kind of tantrum I had in my dreams, but it would have demanded an energy I just didn’t have. Instead, levelly, I said, “This isn’t fair, Edward. I was here first. You need to leave.” I backed away when he reached for my hand and, dropping the sheet, left the room.

  My GPS tragedy notwithstanding, I had a good sense of direction. Returning to the kitchen, I fished through the clothes strewn about in the dark. No bra? No problem. No panties? No problem. I pulled on my sweater and was stepping into jeans when Edward appeared. He wore boxer shorts, which I saw because he did turn on the light. It wasn’t a big light, just a small one over the stove, but it removed the last vestige of illusion. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t here, much less that Edward and I hadn’t just had sex.

  Frantic that the past was crowding in here too, I turned on him. “I don’t want you around. This is my home. I have a good job and good friends. I’ve invested four years of my life building something different from what was before.”

  “I know—”

  “Want to know why?” I asked, and suddenly my voice was shaking, suddenly my whole existence was shaking. “Because I had to. I had no other choice if I wanted to survive, because you all pushed me away. My mother disowned me, my brother distanced himself, my friends rejected me, my father died on me, and you divorced me.”

  “I know—”

  “Mom blamed me for my father’s death, my brother blamed me for her grief, my friends blamed me for making them look bad, car makers blamed me for being a reckless driver, you blamed me for killing your daughter.”

  “It was an accident—”

  “And that makes a difference?” Even barefoot, he was taller than me by a head, but I was past the point of being silenced. “She’s gone,” I shouted. “I can’t bring her back.” My voice cracked. “I nearly killed myself, Edward. Do you know that? I had pills. The doctor prescribed them after the accident to help me sleep, but I didn’t want to sleep. I couldn’t let go of the image of Lily lying upside down in that car, still strapped in her seat but crushed on the wrong side and bleeding and covered with glass, because if I let it go, I’d be letting myself off the hook. So I saved up the pills.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t.” I pressed a hand to my chest, working harder to breathe but unable to stop. “We were living in the same house totally apart, and you were wrapped in your own grief, but a mother’s is worse, Edward.” I gulped for air. “I carried her, I nursed her, I fed her and read to her and let her make perfectly horrible things out of clay, every one of which was beautiful, because she’d made it with her own little hands. Then it ended.” I pressed harder on my chest, desperate to say it all. “Her bedroom went untouched, her Cheerios went uneaten, her clothes went unworn, the stuffed animals she loved went unloved, and it was all my fault. I held those pills in my hands more nights than I can count. I went so far as to pour myself a huge glass of water so that I’d have enough to wash them all down.” That quickly, I was caught back in the horror of it.

  He looked shaken. “Why didn’t you?”

  Coming from another man, it might have been an accusation, even a dare. But Edward had never been cruel. He simply wanted to know.

  I spotted my coat on the floor, picked it up, and held it to my chest. It was my life jacket, a piece of the present that would keep me afloat. As I held it, I forced in one breath, then another. The tightness in my chest eased just enough. “I asked myself that a dozen times—ten dozen times. When you lose the most precious thing in your life, how do you go on?” Again, consciously, I inhaled. “But how do you not? I lost everything, Edward, not just my daughter but my marriage, my family, my home, my career. I was all alone and searching, searching for something good about myself, and the only thing I could come up with was courage. Killing myself would have been cowardly. It would have been taking the easy way out. I couldn’t let myself do that.” Defeated, I inched my arms into my coat. “But I couldn’t stay where we lived. I couldn’t wake up each day to the wreck of my life, so maybe I was a coward after all.”

  “No.”

  I raised my chin with remnants of pride. “When I first moved here, I used to cry myself to sleep, the loneliness was so devastating, and when tears didn’t work, it was rocks in my chest. But I made it through, and now I can’t go back. You can. You have a life in Massachusetts. You have colleagues and friends. You have a big, beautiful house.”

  Eyes glassy, he half-shouted, “Do you seriously think I wanted to stay there, just me and all those memories?” His tone leveled. “I sold the house. I bought the Inn.”

  “If you bought it, you can sell it,” I replied. “Buying and selling is what you do best.”

  He started to say something but stopped. And suddenly there it was—a look in his eyes identical to the one Lily wore when she didn’t know what to do. I had seen it the morning Lily died, when she hadn’t known which dress to wear for her playdate, and the day before that, when she couldn’t find her magic ring and couldn’t possibly go to school without it. I had seen that look the spring before, when she joined a soccer class and found herself with twenty other kids and thirty soccer balls going every which way. I couldn’t count the number of times I had seen it and adored that she looked like Edward. Her hair was blond to his sable, her legs lean to his muscled. But they both had silvery-blue eyes, and the looks that came from those eyes were the same. It had been that way from the moment of her birth, had surely been so even in utero—

  I felt a sudden chill. My eyes fell to the wide-planked floor. One image and a quick calculation later, I breathed again. I wasn’t on birth control, but if ever I had a safe time of the month, this was it. Had it not been, I’d have gone to the drug store first thing tomorrow. I would not—could not have a child—not again.

  Edward knew what I was thinking. Used to be, all I had to do was conjure up fro-yo and he was on his way to the ice-cream shop. Our minds had always run in the same direction, and they did now. He stared at me for a painful moment before breaking away and reaching for his jeans. “It’s pouring. I’ll drive you home.”

  I felt a sharp stab of fear. “No! My house is mine!” I blurted. “You can’t go near it!” I grasped at the rational. “If you drive me home, my truck will be here and I need it to get to work. My work is important, it’s what I do now, I like it, and they like me.” Just then, I couldn’t have said what day of the week it was, much less whether I had bookings the next day. I only knew that I needed to get back to a life I could control.

  But he continued to dress, reaching now for the pool of flannel that was his shirt.

  “Edward!” I shouted. “Listen to me. I don’t know why you’ve come, I don’t care why you’ve come, but I can’t live with you here. You have to leave.”

  His arms were in the shirt, but it hung open. “I can’t leave,” he said.

  “If you won’t, I will.”

  * * *

  I mean it, I fumed silently as I drove. I could leave. Between Edward’s arrival and Chris Emory’s mess, Devon wasn’t the refuge it had been such a short time ago. I could definitely leave, could leave in a heartbeat.

  When I saw the glow of headlights in my rearview mirror, I was angry enough to pull to the side of the road. I was out of the truck when the Jeep came alongside and was leaning toward the side window as it lowered.

  “Go home,” I told him.

  “It’s dark. You didn’t know who it was. What if I’d been a rapist?”

  “This is Vermont, Edward. We don’t have rapists around here, and even if we did, no rapist would be out in this rain. I knew it would be either you or the police.
Give me credit for that.”

  “Get in. We need to talk.”

  “Isn’t it a little late for that?” I cried sharply, but added a saner, “I’m fine. I can take care of myself. Please go home.”

  I didn’t wait for an answer, just climbed back in the truck, drove along the shoulder of the road until I was clear of the Jeep, and returned to the pavement. I was relieved when his headlights shrank with distance and, once I rounded the curve, were gone.

  * * *

  I mean it, I vowed more than once during the fifteen-minute drive, and thought it again when I turned onto Pepin Hill Road and started up. If I had reinvented myself once, I could do it again. My tires spun in the slick mud, then caught, spun again a few seconds later, then caught. If I found work here, I could find work elsewhere. If I made friends here, I could make them somewhere new. When my wheels spun and caught again, I thought, If I can handle this road, I can handle any road.

  But I liked my road. I liked the way the string of a stone wall sang of early settlers, the way fallen trees lay in the woods and became homes for squirrels, fishers, and foxes. I liked the weave of the road as it climbed around rocks and gullies. I knew every one of these curves, which was a good thing tonight, since the rain had given way to fog, and visibility was nil.

  But the cabin had lights. They were on timers so that my pets wouldn’t be alone when I couldn’t get back until dark. Muted now by the fog, the swath of those lights was dispersed at first but grew focused as I neared. They were welcoming. They were mine.

  And there was another thing—my cabin. It had character and charm. Sure, I could find another home with character and charm. But why did I have to do that? I had come here first. I had a right to stay.

  Edward was the one who should leave. He had known I was here but had come anyway. He had never been cruel, but how else to explain it? Did he have a sick need to punish me more by making me see Lily’s face wherever I turned? If so, then the pain would be compounded knowing that in killing our daughter, I had turned a loving man into a shell.