by Karen Booth
“Eamon!” The cold was snapping at my ears like an angry dog. Why hadn’t I worn a hat? “Eamon! Please stop!” I was half-running now, dodging suspicious lumps in the snow, bracing myself on trees, my hand-knit mittens catching on the bark and doing nothing to keep out the cold.
Just then I saw a shadow move between the trees ahead. He was probably a good quarter mile ahead of me, but his legs were ridiculously long. No wonder he'd gained so much time on me.
“Eamon!” I yelled again. Snow started to fall—tiny, wispy flakes floating to Earth.
“Go back to the house!” Eamon's voice echoed between the trees, but knowing how mad he was only kept me going. Plus, I had to stop him before he got too far. Another half mile or so and he'd be through the woods and out to the road. The road where my mother hit a patch of ice and the car spun out, hitting a tree and killing her instantly.
I couldn't let Eamon get that far. I couldn't let him go. I couldn't let him get away from me. The desperation hung heavy in my chest, while every shade of gray and blue and white in the snowflakes was a reminder of that day with my mom. Every shadow in the trees was bringing back the hours Amy and I spent in the back seat, waiting for someone to rescue us.
I felt sick to my stomach, and desperately wanted to stop, but did Eamon have any survival skills at all? He was a rock star, for God's sake. Up ahead, I saw a dark blip of a shadow that had to be him, winding between the trees. I ran faster. I had to get to him. He was my salvation. I knew that now. My steps became desperate lurches. My foot hooked on a branch under the snow. I landed with a thud, my knee squarely meeting a rock. Pain sizzled up my thigh. I rolled to my back for a second then forced myself to my feet, running even faster. “Eamon! Please stop! I'm begging you!”
Like magic, he did what I asked. In profile, I saw him place his hands on his hips and look skyward. I kept going. I was gasping when I got to him.
“You never should've come after me.” He turned and looked down at my leg. “What happened?”
Sure enough, I had a gash in my favorite jeans. “I fell.” I reached down and touched my knee with my mitten. The blood soaked right through it.
“You’re bleeding.” He crouched down, his hands on my thighs. His presence was so powerful it made me want to weep. How could I be so desperate to hold on to someone while feeling so destined to push him away?
“You're right. I am terrified of marriage. I haven't told you everything about me. My parents. My family.” He looked up at me with his penetrating gray eyes and I had to start. I had to let it go. I had to unravel everything with five little words. “It was all my fault.”
Something about finally saying it was so overwhelming that I had to sit. I didn’t bother thinking about it. I sank to the ground. Right on my butt. The cold shot straight through me like an arrow. The melting snow soaked my pants. My knee throbbed, but I ignored it. I needed the strength for the words that were now spilling from my lips…
“I told my dad that my mom had been cheating on him. I told him that she made us spend time with her boyfriend, like she was trying to pretend he was our father. Dad was crushed when I told him, but he said everything would be okay, but I was sick and had a fever, and I don’t know. I think he was just telling me what I wanted to hear. He confronted her the next morning. Amy was at school, but I was at home. As soon as Dad left for work, Mom let me have it. She barged into my room and started screaming about how I didn't understand. She and Gordon were in love. I was so sick, half delirious from my fever. She told me that I had ruined everything. I had destroyed our family and things would never be the same.”
As the words rolled from my mouth, I could see the cold swirling around me. Blue. Black. Silver. The colors came at me like I’d climbed inside a dark kaleidoscope, and the images from the day were whizzing by me so fast I couldn’t keep up. This was like that day in the car. It felt so real, like it was right in front of me. Like I could reach out and touch Amy. Like I could touch my mom. If only for a second.
I sensed that Eamon was still by my side, but I had to keep talking. I came out here to tell him everything. “She started packing our suitcases. She said she was taking me and Amy to live with him. I yelled no and tried to run away, but she slapped me and told me to obey her. When I screamed that he wasn't even our family, she told me that I didn't understand. She made me pack my bag. She made me get in the car, in my pajamas, so we could get Amy at school. She made me go inside the building and stand there while my classmates walked past, staring at my tear-stained, fever-filled face. I listened to her lie to the school secretary about where we were going. I couldn’t say a thing. I was so terrified of what she would do. As soon as we had Amy, Mom practically dragged us through the parking lot. In the car, the screaming started again. If I had just kept my mouth shut, everything would've been fine. She kept saying it over and over again.”
I could see every frame of it in my head—my mother gaining speed, the dark stands of trees lining the road, flying past us too fast, sending choppy flashes of light into the car. I could feel the rumble of the tires over chunky ice and snow. I could hear her screaming at both of us, her voice raw and savage. Fury and rage. Amy cried. She sobbed, gasping for air. Stop it, Mommy. Stop it.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. Amy was so upset. I started yelling back at my mom, telling her she had to stop and take us home. Dad would come looking for us. He would know where we went. I was so desperate. I remember hearing that in my voice. I couldn't get her to listen. She just kept saying no. Over and over again.”
No. No. No.
“I was wrong. She was right. Amy screamed.”
Do something, Katherine. Do something.
“So I did. I said the worst thing ever. I asked her the worst question a ten-year-old kid could ever ask her mom. I shrieked it at the top of my lungs. Why are you such a fucking bitch? Why are you such a whore?”
Something wrapped itself around me. Eamon? I couldn’t see him. In my head, the movie kept playing. It rolled on. It didn’t care to stop.
“She turned around. She was so mad. So mad. And then the car skated across ice. Impossibly fast. It slammed into a tree. It ricocheted and slid backward. Down an embankment. My mother was still staring at me when the car stopped. Her neck had snapped. She was staring right at me. Bright blue eyes. Golden hair. Crimson blood leaking from her lips. The same face I see when I brush my teeth or put on my makeup. The same face I can never escape. I thought Amy was dead, too. She was unconscious. All I could do was pray that she would live. It was too late for my mom.”
Sitting in the snow was only a fraction of what it had been like in the back seat of that car. I was there for hours, crying, whimpering, and wondering if anyone would ever find us or if this was the fate we were destined for. Or even worse, the fate I had set in motion. I didn’t know what to think. So much of what I loved was gone. And it felt like the cold was coming for everything that was left.
“Katherine. Katherine. Stop for a minute. Listen to me.”
I heard Eamon's voice, but it was like I was drowning or someone had their hands over my ears. If I hadn’t had his accent to guide me, I wouldn't have known it was him. My breaths shuddered out of my throat, and I gulped it back in, but I was desperate for air. More air. The trees, the snow and ground were tilting and pitching and coming at me. The cold clawed my lungs. It seeped into my legs and pulled on my body like an angry sea.
Something else was pulling on me, tugging me away, but I couldn't see where it was. I was nearly blind, everything around me a million shades of black and shadows now. But then there was heat on my cheek. Then my forehead. And finally my back. I keeled into it. I clung to it. I had to have more.
“Katherine. Talk to me, darling.”
The way his words hit my ears, it felt like my head popped up out of the ocean. Eamon was the warmth. He was the one saving me from the snow and cold. He was saving me from myself. “I’m sorry. I'm so sorry.” Tears had nearly frozen my eyes shut. “That's why I am
the way I am. And I didn't tell you because I thought it would mean I wasn't Sunny Girl. I'm not some happy-go-lucky person. I don't know that I can give you what Amy and Luke have. I'm terrified I'm going to mess it up.”
“Shh. Shh. Take a deep breath. You need to calm down. You were a kid, Katherine. You can't blame yourself for what happened. And I don't want what Amy and Luke have. I want what we have.”
“I ruined everyone's lives that day. I ended my mother's. If I hadn't said anything, this wouldn't have happened.”
He pulled me tighter against him. He was not about to let me go. He wasn't about to let the cold take me. “Things happen. Accidents happen. You did what you thought was right. It was a tragic event, but you can't blame yourself. You just can’t.”
A blip of clarity dropped into my head, an instant where the tears stopped. “Why?” I muttered. “Why can't I blame myself? And don't say it's because I was a kid. It’s somebody’s fault. I knew that what I was doing was serious. Amy and I talked about it for weeks and weeks. But me and my fucked up sense of right and wrong just couldn't let it go. I couldn't let her drag us to his house anymore. I couldn't let her invite him over and pretend like everything was normal. It was so not normal.” I sobbed again and curled into him.
“It wasn't normal. And it wasn't right. You did the right thing. It just didn't turn out the way you thought it would.”
I was shaking again, even with the steadying force of Eamon's arms around me. “I was such a dumb kid. I thought she and Dad would stay together and work everything out. There was no way that was going to happen.”
Eamon blew out an exasperated breath. “Katherine, let me just tell you one more time. You can't judge yourself by what happened when you were ten. It's not fair. No one should be measured by their actions at that age. It's craziness.”
“Fiona could be measured by her actions at this age. She'd do great. She's so perfect.”
Eamon laughed, which had a profound effect on me. It began to lift me out of the bizarre fog I'd talked myself into. “She does seem pretty bloody perfect, doesn't she? I worry that means we're really in for it when she becomes a teenager.”
“She can’t see my heart. She told me that today.”
“What?”
“My heart. She said she can see everybody's heart, but she couldn't see mine. Do you think that means I'm a bad person?”
Eamon shook his head. “Come on. It's freezing out here. Let's got back to the house and talk about this.” He picked himself up off the ground and helped me to standing.
“Oh, man. My knee. I really fucked it up.”
“All the more reason to get back.” He put my arm around his shoulders and we started walking. The sun had set. All you could see were tiny glowing squares ahead, the windows of our house and the neighbors’.
“You didn't answer my question about Fiona seeing my heart.” We trudged along the narrow path, through the snow that was more compact now. I held on to Eamon with everything I had. I didn't want to let him go.
“It's a game she plays. I told her when she was little that she could see people's hearts because she was always a good judge of people.”
“She told me the story about the gardener.”
“Exactly. It doesn't mean she can really see them.”
“But she's still a good judge of character. Was that her way of telling me I'm a bad person?”
Eamon came to a stop and turned to me, pulling me into a firm embrace. “I don't know why she told you that, but I can tell you that she adores you. She's drawn to you. She wants to play with you and talk to you as much as she possibly can. She doesn't feel that way about bad people.”
I sucked in a deep breath. The icy air that had punished my lungs earlier was cleansing now. I'd told Eamon the gruesome tale and unlike every other person who’d heard it before him, he reined me in after it was said and done. He didn’t push me away. He held me closer.
“Thank you. Thank you for listening to me and putting up with my erratic behavior. I'm so sorry about this afternoon. It's not that I don't want to get married to you. I love you. I really, really do. And I don't want you to go anywhere. I'm just not ready. That's all. And I can't get engaged here, anyway. I don't want that moment to be tainted by old memories. Now you know why. Exactly why.”
He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Do you feel better now? Now that you've told me everything?”
I reared my head back and peered into his eyes, now only barely visible in the pitch dark. Luckily, we could see the house and its gleaming gold windows. “I feel so much better. A million times better.”
“Good. I'm glad. You know you can tell me anything, darling. You can't make me fall out of love with you because of something that happened in the past. It's all just part of you and I love you. You can't scare me.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Good. Because there's one more thing I didn't tell you.”
“We'll freeze to death out here if it's another story like the one you just told me.”
I took his hand again and resumed our hike, with me leading the way. I still knew every subtle turn in this path. It was carved into my memory, just like the thing I was about to say. “It's not an actual story. It's the one detail I didn't tell you.”
We stopped when we cleared the woods and stood at the back of my dad's property. The warm glow from the house was brighter now. Eamon was so unbelievably handsome in the light. “Why did you leave something out?”
“Because it's something Amy doesn't know, something my dad doesn't know, either.”
“Can you tell me?”
I looked to the house again. I could see my dad in the kitchen with Fiona. My heart ached for the words that were about to come out of my mouth, but I knew I had to let them out. Then we could go back inside and be a family again. “The man my mom had an affair with? I'm pretty sure he's Amy's real dad.”
Chapter Nineteen
Despite the canon of terrible memories contained in my childhood home, it felt so good to step across the threshold after being in the woods with Eamon for so long. Waves of laughter filtered out onto the porch. Dad, Julia, Amy, Luke, and Fiona were playing charades in the living room in front of a roaring fire. This was what coming home had once felt like, a lifetime ago.
Amy sprang up from the sofa when she spotted us. “We were about to send out a search party. Everything okay?” She grimaced when she saw my current state up close. I didn’t need to look in a mirror to know that I looked like hell.
“Everything's good. I just need to go upstairs and change. I fell and banged up my knee.”
“Oh, shit,” Amy said. “The First Aid kit should be in Dad's room. I'll get it.”
She scampered off and Eamon helped me with my coat, then let me lean on him as I hobbled inside. We waited for Amy at the bottom of the stairs and resumed our previous conversation, without words, just disbelieving looks from him and my agreement.
Holy shit.
I know.
If it hadn’t been so cold outside, we could have stayed out there for hours debating the bomb I’d dropped about Amy.
She emerged from Dad’s room. “Do you need help?”
“I think I can handle it.” Eamon took the kit from her and tucked it under his arm.
“Come down when you're done,” Amy said, bubbly as a can of shaken soda. “Fiona is hilarious at charades. You should've seen her act out Gone with the Wind. I nearly died laughing.”
A smile crossed Eamon's face. “We will. We won’t be long.” A step at a time, he helped me up the stairs and into my bedroom. “We need to get you out of those pants.”
“I’m usually way more excited to hear you say that.” I peeled off my jeans, wincing when the ragged edges of the torn fabric stuck to my knee. I settled on the edge of the bed and grabbed a throw blanket to drape across my still-frozen thighs.
“You can't tell her. You know that, right?” Eamon carefully dabbed at my skin with antiseptic on
a gauze pad.
I let loose a heavy sigh. “I know I can’t tell her. I don't even know if it's true. My mom was so furious that morning and I was so scared. I’m not even sure I remember it right.” Except that there was something in my gut telling me that I had perfect recall of that day. My brain could screw up plenty, but not this. “She was throwing our clothes into suitcases and telling me that all three of us were going to live with him. I was panicked. It was the last thing I saw coming. I tried to argue my way out of it by saying that we couldn’t live with him because her boyfriend wasn't part of our family. She snapped at me and said she was pretty sure he was part of Amy’s.”
“My God, Katherine. She made a holy show of herself that day, didn’t she?” He shook his head in dismay and squeezed some antibiotic cream onto my knee. “I think she was just angry. No good comes out of saying anything after all this time. You were right to keep the secret.”
Funny how he could so simply answer a question I’d asked myself for more than twenty years. “You think so?”
“I would’ve done the same thing.”
My heart, visible or not, felt so much lighter. “I don’t want to look back anymore. I don’t even want to think about it anymore.”
“Then don’t. You’ve unburdened yourself. Let it go.”
“I feel better after telling you everything.”
“Ya do?” The sweetest look came over his face as he peeled off the backing of a bandage.
“I do. So much better. I think I just needed to get it all of my chest.”
He placed a gentle kiss on my leg right above my knee and helped me pour myself into a pair of yoga pants. “I love you, Katherine. Please don't ever feel like you can't tell me something. Our relationship needs to be an open book for it to work.”
“I know. You're right. Thank you for understanding.” It felt a little bit like my heart might explode. If I'd known I would feel this way after coming clean, I would've done it much sooner.
