Steven actually chuckled. “Because that means you don’t have to worry about me warping reality any more, is that it?”
“Well…”
“Don’t worry, son. My days of using any magic more ambitious than protective charms are behind me.”
Tanner grinned with relief. “And is Joy—”
“She’s in back, feeding Rose.”
He hesitated only for a second. The two of them were smiling at each other in a way that told him he’d just be intruding if he lingered, and he didn’t want to spend another moment away from Joy. “It’ll be great if we can all catch up later, but if you don’t mind…”
Anna laughed and tousled his hair. “Don’t keep her waiting. Scoot!”
He was happy to obey. He sprinted back to Joy’s bedroom—to their bedroom, he realized. What he found when he reached it halted him on the threshold.
Joy was sitting in the bentwood rocker giving Rose her bottle, singing softly to her as they rocked. Rose clutched a strand of Joy’s hair in one tiny fist and gazed up at her mother with big, thoughtful eyes. The sight was so sweet that he stood drinking it in for long seconds. They were really here. Really alive.
Then Joy looked up and saw him, and her face came alight with gladness and love.
“Tan,” she said softly. “We’re home.”
Chapter 27
“…and so,” Josiah Cavanaugh concluded, “you may decide whether you want to remember the past as you now know it, or forget.”
Maddie and William were standing in the hallway outside her dorm room, looking rather dazedly at the half-solid man in the frock coat. He had removed his top hat, evidently out of some deeply ingrained gentlemanly reflex to go hatless indoors even when he and his hat were equally insubstantial.
William collected himself first. “If we choose to forget, what will we remember instead?”
“Will we forget we love each other?” Maddie demanded, before Cavanaugh could answer. She was still pulling herself together. Seconds ago, or what felt like seconds ago, she had been in Alterna-Mo’s living room, facing the horrifying realization that William was dead of a brain aneurysm. But now he was alive and standing here with her—along with a benign ghost who was telling them that their history had changed. Again. Talk about emotional roller-coasters.
“Your feelings for each other will remain intact,” the ghost assured them. He looked younger without his hat on, thought Maddie, younger than in his statue. His hair was parted tidily in the center and combed down smooth on each side. “You will simply have arrived at your current relationship by different means.”
“So we didn’t…” Maddie ventured. “And I didn’t…”
“Precisely.” Cavanaugh, old-fashioned gentleman that he was, wasn’t able to meet her eyes.
“I think I need to remember that, though,” she said slowly, unwillingly. “As shitty a memory as it is”—Cavanaugh gave her a reproving look—“sorry. As, uh, unpleasant a memory as it is that I hurt William like that, I think I need to have it. It was only after I wrecked things between us that I figured out how much he meant to me. I don’t want to not remember that. And I don’t want to risk hurting him or anyone else like that again.”
“Well, presumably you won’t be, uh, hurting anyone else from now on,” William pointed out, and she stuck her tongue out at him.
“I don’t mean that exactly. I just need to remember it because it taught me a lot.” God, what a lame thing to say. “I mean—”
“I think we get it.” William was smiling at her now, looking so adorable that she wanted to lunge at him and kiss him breathless, but that would probably have shocked Cavanaugh into the ghostly equivalent of a heart attack. “It’s important because of the consequences it had. For both of us. I want to remember it too—and what a jerk I was afterward. So I won’t forget how lucky I am to get another chance.” He reached out his hand for Maddie, and she took it, knowing she probably looked like an idiot because suddenly she couldn’t stop grinning.
“Very well,” said Cavanaugh, with a paternal look. “I’ll leave the memory of your first timeline with you. Just so you know, it’s nearly midnight on this past New Year’s Eve. It seemed a tidy place to launch you back into the corrected reality. There’s no performance tonight because the solstice concert occurred without incident, so the two of you may decide how you wish to ring in the new year.”
“Wait,” said William suddenly. “Does that mean Sheila’s still alive?”
“Yes, very much alive.”
Maddie’s euphoria took an abrupt dip. Was this going to become some kind of horrible love triangle? “William—” she began.
“No, it’s okay, Maddie. I don’t want to go back to her.” He thought for a second. “Actually, I guess I never was with her at all, this go-round. So there’s nothing to go back to, anyway.”
“And she never tried to summon Amdusias?” Maddie asked.
“No need to worry,” said Cavanaugh briskly. “Without having attached her dreams and career plans to Melisande, then seeing them frustrated, Sheila never had the idea of bringing Amdusias in. It’s really quite fascinating. Even with the same dance injury, the same drastic shift in her expectations for the future, without having had that one wild hope raised in her heart of some powerful figure swooping in to raise her to greatness, it won’t cross her mind to seek supernatural help.”
William frowned. “But that doesn’t rule out other shortcuts. She may still do something she’ll regret—or that someone else will. Maddie, I wonder if we—”
“I’m way ahead of you,” she said. “We’ll make friends with her. Show her that being ambitious doesn’t have to mean going over to the dark side.”
William got the idea. “Stage an intervention, kind of.”
“Yeah, a harpy intervention.” Though harpy was not the word she would have used if proper Josiah Cavanaugh had been absent. She sighed. “I never thought I’d have to be friends with Sheila. But there are worse things, I suppose.” And the beaming look of gratitude that William was giving her was a pretty good reward. Who knew—maybe Sheila had the raw material for a decent person under all that self-interest. After all, she’d liked William. That much could be said for her.
“What about Eric?” she wondered suddenly. “Did he still sign up with Amdusias?”
“I am happy to say that Amdusias and his human factotum Reed never breached the boundaries of the school at all.” He seemed perfectly willing to explain it all—something about Dr. Fellowes not sabotaging campus security, and Dr. Sumner not leaving town—but Maddie realized abruptly that she was about to crash.
William must have noticed, because he interrupted their rescuer… but politely, because he was William.
“Mr. Cavanaugh,” he said, “we really appreciate everything you’ve done for us. But the thing is, we’re still stuck in the human plane, and everything that’s happened has kind of wiped us out.”
“Of course,” said their benefactor instantly. “You’ve both had a shock. I’ll bid you farewell, then. Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir.”
As they watched, Cavanaugh gently faded from sight where he stood. In just a handful of seconds the two of them stood alone, looking at each other in the dim overhead light of the hallway. It was hard to believe he’d been there at all. “I guess now we wait for the new memories to catch up with us,” Maddie said. “I wonder how long it’ll take?”
William looked at her and frowned as if puzzled. “I’m sorry,” he said tentatively, “do I know you?” But he couldn’t keep a straight face, and cracked up when she walloped him on the shoulder.
“Ow!” he gasped through his laughter.
“William Russell, you are a horrible, mean, sadistic fiend. Want to stay the night?” He opened his mouth to answer, and she said quickly, “I know, we should take it slow. No funny business, I promise. I just… I just want to know that you’ll be near me when I wake up.” A new memory told her that she was roommates with Becca now,
and that Becca had gone home to Tennessee for the winter break. “You can take Becca’s bed,” she said.
“Sure,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you either.”
His smile made her heart somersault beneath her ribs. It was going to be difficult to be honorable and not fling herself on him. But he was worth the wait.
It was hours later when she opened her eyes to the pale blank light of January. The first thing she saw was Becca’s bed—empty. A flicker of anxiety tightened her chest. She had gone to sleep talking to him, holding his hand across the space between the two beds, warmed by his presence and the certainty that he’d be with her when she woke. And now he was gone. Doubt chilled her. What if the history rollup had changed things after all?
Then she heard the tickety-tick of a computer keyboard, and when she looked around she was flooded with relief to see William sitting at her desk, typing away. His back was to her, and he must not have even noticed that she was awake.
Slipping noiselessly off the bed, she crept up behind him to read over his shoulder from the computer monitor:
You’ve known this girl for months and years
You know her every mood by heart
So find the courage, face your fears,
Ask if she’ll make a brand new start
Afraid to tell her how you feel
You’ve let her think you’re just a friend
Your dreams of her can be made real
Just ask her and your doubts will end
You want her heart
You won’t take less
Never to part
If she says yes
You pray and hope
You try to guess…
That was where the typing stopped. Maddie slid her arms around William’s neck and, ignoring his start of surprise, murmured in his ear: “Don’t be a dope—she will say yes.”
Then she squeaked as he turned to grab her and pull her around to sit on his lap. “Well, good morning to you too,” he said, and then he was kissing her.
Now, that was the way to start the new year.
Eventually she thought to ask, “Why are you rewriting ‘She Says Yes’?”
“It’s needed doing for a while now. It came from a place that… well, a place I’m not in anymore.” His glasses were a little fogged up now, but she could see that his hazel eyes were pensive, a little sad. “It doesn’t say much for me, but I don’t think I could have been so hateful if I hadn’t loved you so much.”
“And now?”
He stroked a lock of hair back behind her ear. “Now I think I love you even more—and I want the song to be worthy of you.”
For a second she thought she might actually cry, and she was so ashamed of this wimpulse that she kissed him to hide how much he had moved her.
One kiss led to another, and soon William’s glasses were completely fogged over. Maddie removed them, drew out the handkerchief she knew would be tucked into the chest pocket of his shirt, and set about wiping the lenses clean. “I guess I’d better ease off, take a cold shower or something,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, you know. Taking things slow.”
“Going slow doesn’t mean standing still.”
Startled, she found that he was looking at her in a way that, for William, was positively lewd. “…Oh,” she said.
“You’re blushing.”
“I am not.”
“Yes you are.” He grinned. “It’s adorable. I can’t believe I actually made Maddie Rosenbaum blush!”
“Shut up,” she said, embarrassed.
“Make me.”
That was more like it. She smiled and set his glasses aside. “You got it,” she said.
* * *
Joy and Tanner didn’t sleep until late into the night. They lay on Joy’s bed with their heads close together and Rose nestled between them, gurgling and cooing as if she understood and shared in their hard-won happiness. Maybe she did. She was a pretty amazing baby.
They were still drinking in the sight of each other, whispering and laughing together as their new past took shape in their minds and their story reassembled itself. “I can’t believe…” “Do you remember…?”
They had met at Ash Grove, before Tan could drop out. One day at lunch when Joy walked into the dining hall Tanner was in his usual station near the door, but that day the song he was playing caught her attention, and she stopped.
“That’s ‘Summoned By a Rose,’ isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he’d said, surprised. “I didn’t think it was that well known.”
“My mom wrote it.”
“Get out.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“Your mother is Anna Merridew?” he asked skeptically.
“That’s her professional name. Her married name is Sumner. Would you like to meet her?”
“Hell, yeah!”
“Cool. Come to supper tonight then.”
“I was so nervous,” she remembered now. “I’d been looking for an excuse to talk to you.”
“Why did you need an excuse?”
She searched back in her mind. “You were a little intimidating to me,” she recalled. “Loner bad boy that you were. With the notorious parents.” Her happiness ebbed a little. “There was no celebrity supermodel to take you away from them.”
He reached for her hand and placed a kiss in the palm. “You and Anna and Steven became my family—just as much as Bobby and Donna.” His eyes—his beautiful grey eyes, wonderfully restored to him—widened as more new memories surfaced. “You stood by me when I decided to go to court and get a separation from my parents,” he marveled. “I’d never have had the courage to go through it without you. You still rescued me, Joy. And you persuaded me to apply for a scholarship so I could stay at Ash Grove without their money, and you even tutored me to help me keep my grades up.” He gazed at her with pride and wonder. “My superwoman.”
“And then there was Rose…” Clear in her mind was the day that she and Tanner stood hand in hand in front of her parents, nervous but giddy with excitement.
Joy had started: “We have something important to tell you.”
“We’re pregnant,” Tan blurted.
“And we’re in love,” Joy added. To Tanner she said under her breath, “Maybe we should have opened with that.” Then, to her parents again: “And we’re going to get married.”
“If it’s all right with you, sir,” Tan added quickly. “And ma’am. We’ll need your permission, since Joy’s not eighteen yet.”
Her mother, not surprisingly, adjusted faster than her father. She had clasped her hands in delight and was gazing at them with shining eyes. But her father—
“Did you mean for this to happen?” he said ominously to Tanner.
“No, sir. We used, uh, precautions.”
“The best precaution would have been not touching my daughter.”
Tanner looked at Joy adoringly. “Not possible, sir,” he said.
“Steven, it’s done now,” said Anna. “And really, isn’t it best to go ahead and get started being a grandfather? You got a late start on fatherhood, and you want to be able to see your grandchildren graduate, don’t you?”
“Grandchildren, plural?” he demanded. “Do you know something I don’t?”
She smiled at him as she hopped up from the couch to hug her daughter and future son-in-law. “Just thinking ahead, hon,” she said.
Joy and Tanner were married in the tiny Smithville chapel, with Bobby and Donna as witnesses. Maddie and Tasha threw her a baby shower. And when Rose was born, Joy and Tanner named her after the song that had brought about their first conversation.
Rose had finally fallen asleep, and Tanner picked her up and carried her to the crib. Joy watched him with her, the care with which he held her, the protective way he drew her blanket over her and leaned down to kiss her forehead. When he straightened and saw Joy watching him, he raised his eyebrows at her in a question.
She
had never, she thought, appreciated his eyebrows as much as she did now.
“What are you remembering now?” he asked her, a smile starting as if he already knew he’d like her answer.
“How you never gave up,” she said. “No matter how many times we lost each other, you didn’t stop trying to get me and Rose back.” As he lay back down beside her she drew him close, so that they lay heartbeat to heartbeat. “Thank you.”
“That’s what we do,” he said, stroking a knuckle along her cheek. “You taught me that. No matter what happens, we never stop fighting for each other.”
“I taught you that?”
“You sure did, my warrior woman.”
She loved the way she could feel his words in her breastbone, as if his heart were talking directly to hers. She snuggled even closer. “So whose turn is it now to save the other one’s life?”
He touched the tip of her nose with a fingertip. Then with his lips. “Tag,” he said softly. “You’re it.”
She laughed and kissed him, and then for a long time there was no talking. When at last they slept, they dreamed that they lay in each other’s arms on a bed of red rose petals under a sky full of stars.
* * *
The bell over the door jangled as the young man entered the diner. Clarence, scraping down the grill, was glad of an excuse to leave his work; he wasn’t as young as he used to be, and his back was complaining. He wiped his callused hands on his apron as the new arrival slid onto a stool at the counter.
The customer was looking around the place assessingly, and for a second Clarence felt defensive: he knew the kid’s eyes were taking in the cracked linoleum, the patched vinyl seats of the stools. It wasn’t easy keeping the place up these days. But when Clarence offered a brief “Help you?” he got such a friendly smile in response that his huffiness died as quickly as it had started.
Among the Shadows (The Ash Grove Chronicles) Page 32
