Now, so long after, was too late to respond.
~oOo~
Three days before Thanksgiving, Theo stared at his Mac, his head a disorienting muddle of gloom and glory. The holidays were upon him, Thanksgiving was looming, and he was alone. The French did not celebrate Thanksgiving; it was just a Thursday here. Jordan was spending the day with friends, and Eli and Rosa were leaving Brooklyn on Wednesday to spend the Thanksgiving weekend in Quiet Cove. Eli seemed to be worming his way into the midst of Carmen’s family, and it burned Theo to know that he would always be in just enough contact with her to miss her.
That was the gloom. The glory was that he was finished. He had a manuscript.
He read over the page he’d just written. The Foreword:
I sit here in Paris on a crisp day just before Thanksgiving. My task upon arriving in the city months ago was to write a story about the beginning of my life with Maggie. I’ve already written about its end, in my first memoir, Orchids in Autumn. On this late-autumn afternoon, I’ve just finished writing what I was meant to write here, in the beautiful city in which Maggie and I honeymooned many years ago.
I have finished writing what I was meant to write, not what I was supposed to write.
What Maggie and I had was not a fairy-tale romance. We were two young people who fell in love in the usual way and had a marriage that was loving and successful in the usual way. We were good and loving partners, good and loving parents, in the usual ways. Our story is not remarkable. The most interesting thing about our life together was its end.
So what follows is not the story of the beginning of my life with Maggie.
It is the story of the beginning of my life without her.
He needed to set the manuscript aside for a couple of days and read it over again, and then again, before he sent it to his editor. But one thing he could say for heartbreak—it was the thing that made him write best and hardest.
Now the question was whether his editor, and Hunter Anders, would be satisfied with the book he’d written.
He poured himself a drink. Nothing he could do about that. He’d written what he’d needed to write. The only thing he could write. Literally.
~oOo~
Theo went out for his (almost) daily run in the evening on the day before Thanksgiving, a little later than usual. Despite the drinking, he was trying to stay at least a little bit healthy. If nothing else, running made his brain work in a straight line. It was good for writing and general problem-solving alike. Most runs, his sweat smelled of booze and he came back thinking there was a fifty-fifty shot he’d keel over dead, but he was getting in at least three a week. That he could run gave him some justification for his contention that he was still scrabbling at the slippery slope and had not yet fallen on his ass.
Justification, rationalization…tomayto, tomahto.
He did about eight kilometers—he’d started thinking in the metric system months ago—and was wet and exhausted when he got back into the apartment. Before he could get to the kitchen for his chilled bottle of water, his phone started rattling on the table by his Mac.
He checked the screen and saw he had four texts from Eli:
Dad—you there?
Need to talk ASAP.
Checking again—you there?
Get on Skype soon as you get this. I’m up and waiting. Don’t even text.
He was too sweaty to sit on Hunter’s upholstery, so he took his Mac to the kitchen and sat there, grabbing his water before he opened the screen.
True to his word, Eli was there waiting when Theo got on Skype. “Hey, son. Are you okay?”
Eli goggled at him. “Dad—are you? You look like hell.”
He laughed. “Just came in from a run. I’m fine. Finished the book yesterday. First draft, anyway.”
“That’s awesome! But Dad…I…you’re sitting, right? You look like you’re in the kitchen. Are you sitting?”
Theo tried to decide if he was about to get bad news or good. Eli looked a bit wide-eyed and tense, but not enough to determine whether it was excitement or stress making him so. “I’m sitting, E. What’s wrong?”
Eli took a breath. “You know I came to Quiet Cove with Rosa for Thanksgiving, right?”
Of course he did, and Eli knew he knew. He was stalling. “Eli. Out with it.”
“We’re here at her brother’s house. Staying here. Everybody came over tonight for dinner and games. It’s a thing they do a lot. Everybody’s here, Dad.”
Now he knew that this was about Carmen. That was what Eli was saying without saying. “I know. I expected it. It’s fine. Don’t feel like you’re disloyal or something stupid like that. It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not fine. And it’s not that.” In the background, Theo heard Rosa’s voice, and Eli turned away from the camera.
Eli, God. Just say it. You want me to tell him, I will. I’m going to get my ass kicked anyway.
No, Rhody, I got it. Just…okay. He turned back to the screen.
“Dad, can you get here? I think you need to get here. Maybe now.”
Something was wrong with Carmen. “Christ, Eli. What the hell is wrong? Is Carmen sick? Hurt? What?”
Eli swallowed hard, and Theo’s heart, which had only just returned to its normal rhythm after his run, picked back up to full speed. “She’s pregnant, Dad.”
His ears heard, but his head rejected. “What?”
“She’s about five months now.”
Carmen was pregnant.
Five months pregnant.
She’d gotten pregnant five months ago.
In the summer.
Carmen was pregnant with his child.
Theo’s heart thumped hard, stopped, and then resumed its speedy beat.
And then the camera shifted and Rosa filled his screen, looking surprisingly blonde but otherwise adorably familiar. “She said not to tell you, that she was figuring out how to do it in her own way, but forget about it. She’s halfway gone. I get it if you don’t want to come, but you need to know. You needed to know a long time ago, I.M.O. What do you want to do?”
Anger. Joy. Sorrow. Shock. Love. Hate. Fear. He felt it all. “I’m coming. Soon as I can get there.”
“You want us to say anything?”
“I don’t care. Up to you.”
Rosa grinned, and Theo, whose head was a cacophony of incomprehensible thoughts, had a moment’s pause. That grin was positively viperous. “I’m not gonna say, then.”
“Fair enough.” He closed the Mac and started packing.
~ 15 ~
Seeing Eli and Rosa for the first time in a couple of months had been exactly as awkward and unpleasant as Carmen had anticipated it would be. She wasn’t showing hugely yet, and she’d dressed to try to camouflage her belly, but she’d known that her time of dodging reality was coming to an end.
Shockingly, her family had kept her secret from Rosa, too. Carmen attributed that to the way that Rosa, since she’d gone to college four years ago, had sort of faded to the back of the family. Whether that circumstance had evolved by Rosa’s influence or the family’s, Carmen wasn’t sure. Probably a little bit of both. In any case, in this case, it had worked in her favor, and she’d gotten until the end of November to ignore key facets of her reality.
It was not her usual approach to be such a pussy, but what was happening to her was so enormous and life-altering that she hadn’t been able to make any clear decisions. The baby was due in April. She couldn’t afford another summer away from work—though her staff had done a great job covering everything while she was away, and she’d been apprised regularly of all their progress, some clients had not been thrilled to know that the woman they’d contracted with was barely even reachable while the work happened. She’d need to be able to get in front of clients in the coming season.
Worrying about that, trying to wrap her mind around the possibility that she’d have to find a new home, and simply confronting the truth that she was going to be a mother—that was all her mi
nd could face. The little bit remaining was a raw sore from the continuing hurt of missing Theo and knowing she’d fucked up irredeemably.
There was nothing left for the thought that she’d have to face him and tell him that not only had she fucked them up, but they were now connected forever. So she’d set that thought aside and decided to wait until she had no other choice but to deal with it. She’d expected Thanksgiving to be that time, and she’d arrived at the house girded for the discussion. But then Eli and Rosa hadn’t noticed, and she thought she’d have some more time.
Everyone had converged at the house. The men were in the cellar watching the big television, and the women were in the kitchen, wearing aprons, baking pies and doing whatever prep they could the day before Thanksgiving. Eli had tried to join them in the kitchen, but Adele had swatted him with a tea towel and told him to go be with the men. He’d made a show of being run off, and everyone had laughed. Rosa had been in a great mood, and the vibe in the kitchen was merry.
And then the baby moved. Carmen had been feeling movements, little tickling flutters, for a week or so, maybe two. With the first of those flutters—she’d read online that they were called ‘quickening’—the truth of her life had hit her hard. She’d had a strange couple of days, swinging back and forth between panic and joy. Panic because now, for certain and forever, the path of want was closed to her. Now, she would never be able to think of herself first. But joy because those flutters made the baby real. There was a little person growing in her belly, making himself or herself known. Carmen had wanted a family. She’d once fantasized about meeting a handsome man in Europe and both of them wandering around the world with kids strapped to their backs.
Her family would look a little different, and it had happened in a way she hadn’t expected—except the part about meeting a handsome man in Europe—but at least it was one thing in her life she’d wanted, one thing she would have. A child.
When that child moved in the kitchen on Caravel Road on the day before Thanksgiving, he or she had not fluttered. He or she had kicked. Carmen, surprised and pleased, had, unthinking, laughed, dropping the wooden spoon in her hand to the floor with a clatter and clutching her belly.
Rosa, in the midst of a description of one of her neighbors in Brooklyn, froze and went silent. And then she’d emphatically recovered her voice. “I knew it! I knew it. Oh my GAWD, I knew it! You’ve never gotten chubby in your whole life until now. You’re knocked up!”
She ran over to Carmen and put her hands on her belly. “Oh. My. Gawd! Is it Theo’s? It’s Theo’s. Right? Does he know?” She looked around the kitchen. “Did everybody know but me?”
Carmen jerked herself away from her sister’s touch. “Rosa, I swear to God, shut up.”
“No! No way!” She looked around the room. “Everybody knew but me, didn’t they?” Now she was pouting and angry, and Carmen wanted to slap her. So like Rosa to turn this around and make it about her.
The big kitchen had been bustling with activity; now it was silent. Sabina stepped forward. “It wasn’t about you, Rosa. Carmen has needed time to decide how to tell the fath—Theo.”
Rosa’s eyes widened with dawning comprehension. “You don’t want Eli to know. This is all a big conspiracy to keep Theo from knowing he’s going to be a father…again.”
“No, Rosa. I’m not trying to keep it from him. I wanted to tell him. Dammit. You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand.” She untied the apron and pulled it over her head. “Bitch alert, Carm. This is the worst thing you’ve ever done! You totally suck!” She was shouting.
She started to leave the room, and Carmen knew exactly where she was going. She grabbed her arm. “Rosie, wait. I will tell him. I will. I need to figure out how to do it. Please. Rosa, please.”
“Tell who what? Rhody, you okay?” And there Eli was, in the hallway between the kitchen and the cellar door. Carmen saw Joey standing just behind him, his eyes eager, and then Carlo pulled Joey away and only Eli stood there, big and blond.
Fuck.
Rosa’s head swiveled to Eli. When she turned back to Carmen, there was malice in her eyes. “Carmen’s pregnant. It’s your dad’s.”
Carmen faced Eli and saw confusion turn to shock. “You are?”
She nodded.
“How far?”
“About five months. Eli—I’m going to tell him. I am. I promise. I need to do it my way. Please. I know I’m asking a lot, but please don’t say anything. Please.”
Eli said nothing, and the whole kitchen stayed quiet while Theo’s son and Carmen stared at each other.
Then, he made a movement that was either a nod of concession or a bow of farewell, and he spun on his heel and walked down the hall. Rosa yanked her arm free of Carmen’s grip and followed him.
Carmen had no idea what to think or expect now. But reality had moved in to stay.
~oOo~
Carmen kept herself out of the way for a while, wanting to leave but sure that her leaving in the middle of all this would only stoke the family fire hotter. So she fussed in the kitchen, and just found things to do that kept her away from Eli for about half an hour. Then she took Elsa for a quick walk.
When she came in through the back gate, the mingled sounds of laughter and her family’s typical loud voices flavored the air in the back yard. Carmen felt unready to face them, especially since they seemed to have moved on past her scandal, and going back in would only remind them. She liked it better out here, alone in the fall night, the air crisp and strongly aromatic from the smoke of wood fires burning in fireplaces all around.
Though she adored summer sports and had grown up spending virtually all of every summer in a wetsuit or just a bikini, Carmen’s favorite season was autumn. She loved everything about it: the smells, the colors—nowhere on earth was as beautiful as New England in the fall—the way the beach got so peaceful after the summer people had closed up their summer places, the suddenly lazy pace of the town, the way that she knew almost every single person she saw anywhere in town because they were all residents, and the voting population of the Cove was quite small. Even though autumn was seen as a time of ending, of dying, Carmen had always felt a crisp kind of life in the air. Autumn was the time for resting and preparing to revive. Animals packed their dens and settled in. Plants put their energies into their roots and hung on.
Most saw spring as the season of hope, but Carmen thought they got that wrong. Hope wasn’t necessary when things were turning green. Hope was for the season when the green faded. Autumn was hope.
While she was sitting on the patio in her coat, watching Elsa roll around in a pile of leaves, Sabina came outside, pulling her sweater tightly around her and sitting down in a chair near Carmen.
“I think hiding in the yard is not a very good plan, Carmen. Frostbite will happen.”
With a wry shake of her head, Carmen laughed. “I know. I’m being a pussy. Everything’s just so out of control right now.”
“You are brave and strong, Carmen. You will find your way.”
“I would like to have your faith in me. I love you, Sabina.” The baby moved again, and she put her hand on her belly.
“And I love you. He is moving again?”
“Or she, yeah. It’s been more like kicks today.”
“May I?” Sabina nodded at her belly.
“Sure. I don’t know if you’ll be able to feel yet, but sure.”
Sabina came over and sat on the settee next to Carmen. She hesitated, looking a little nervous, and then laid her hands on Carmen’s belly, spreading her fingers. Carmen lifted one of her hands and moved to the spot she’d felt the kicking.
For a few minutes, they sat just like that, not speaking, Sabina’s attention so acute it was like she was trying to hear the baby as well as feel it. But it didn’t matter whether the kicks were strong enough yet to be felt; the baby was quiet. Eventually, Sabina sighed and sat back.
“Sorry.” Carmen felt vaguely and irrationally guilty.
Sabina’s smile was sweet and loving. “Not to be sorry. I hope you’ll let me do that another time, though. I would like to feel the baby kick someday.” She blinked, and Carmen realized that Sabina was nearly overcome with emotion.
“How are things with Anna and your baby?” The baby they were set to adopt was due on New Year’s Day.
Rooted (The Pagano Family Book 3) Page 19
