by Shirley Jump
He parked, bought his ticket, then boarded the gangplank and headed up the stairs to his favorite vantage point at the bow. None of the couple dozen chairs set on the front deck were filled. It was still early yet, the first trip of the day for the ferry, and that meant Zach pretty much had the boat to himself. Just the way he liked it. Quiet, peaceful, with a tranquil sea that seemed to stretch on forever. He stepped over the coiled ropes and slipped into place behind the stem.
“That always was your favorite view.”
Zach’s heart skipped a beat. He turned around, sure he’d find out he was hearing things, that the sweet voice he’d heard wasn’t hers. But no, there was Jillian, standing on the bow a few feet away. Her hair was up in one of those clip things, while the light wind played with a few loose strands. She had on dark shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt with tiny buttons running down the front. There was a day when he would have undone those buttons, one after another, slow and easy, exposing her delicious skin like a present he’d been dying to unwrap. But not today, and maybe not ever again. She’d made that clear last night.
He’d been an idiot and come on too strong, too fast. It wasn’t like they could pick up where they’d left off. Even a fool knew that. The problem? Every time he saw Jillian, all he wanted was to go right back to her being in his arms, hearing her laugh, seeing her smile. Skip this rocky road and find the smooth path they’d once had.
Even with sunglasses covering her beautiful eyes, she looked incredible, and that made him ache a little. “Hey, Jillian,” he said.
Yeah, just play it cool. Like he wasn’t stunned to see her here and even more stunned that she was talking to him after last night.
“Are you going over to visit your parents?” she asked.
“Yeah. Couple times a month, like it or not.” He grinned, as if that was a joke, but Jillian knew his parents and knew how much he dreaded the visits.
“Maybe the visit will go well,” she said. “Please tell them I said hello.”
“I will.” His mother adored Jillian. His father had never said anything much one way or another. But those family dinners with Jillian by his side had been ten times more enjoyable than this one would be. He wished she was going with him. Wished she would slip into place beside him, so he could wrap his arms around her and let the wind buffet their joined bodies as the ferry made its way across the water. He nodded toward the mainland in the distance. “What are you doing on the ferry?”
“I…I had someplace to go.”
He shouldn’t be disappointed that she wouldn’t tell him what she was doing, but he was. There used to be a day when Jillian told him everything, but those days were gone. He realized he knew very little about what she was doing nowadays, except for the fact that she was dating some guy who took her to fancy restaurants.
Jillian stood there, her hands clenched at her sides, in that awkward silence of people who didn’t have much to say to each other anymore. “I didn’t come up here for small talk,” she said. “I wanted to tell you that what you did last night wasn’t cool, Zach.”
He took two steps closer to her. “I know, Jill. I’m sorry. I—”
The captain blew the horn, a long, loud sound that cut off all conversation. By the time the horn silenced, Jillian had turned away and was heading toward the stairs.
Zach caught up with her and grabbed her arm. Touching her sent an immediate electric jolt through him, just like the first time they’d held hands. God, he wanted her. Missed her.
Jillian turned, her mouth open.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, before she could protest.
She stepped back, forcing him to let go of her. “We can’t keep doing this. We aren’t together, Zach, and every time…”
“Every time, what?” he asked when she didn’t finish.
“Every time you touch me, it makes it more difficult.” Her voice broke a little on the last word.
“I’m sorry,” he said a third time. Was he, really? Because she’d just about come out and said that when he touched her, she was still impacted. That had to be a good thing, right? “You’re right. I’ve been an idiot. I…I just don’t know what to do.”
How did he begin to tell her how lost he was without her? How he couldn’t seem to find the right path for anything, even his music? It was as if losing her had cut him in half, and he was forever looking for the other parts.
Did she feel the same? Or was she completely over him? Already focused on the fancy bottles of wine and expensive dinners. Or was there hope in her reaction to his touch?
“Jillian, I miss you,” he said. “I…I can’t seem to figure out how to do anything without you around.”
She shook her head, her eyes downcast. “Move on, Zach. Just move on.” Her voice cracked a little more on the last two syllables, and that opened a cavern into the despair he’d been feeling. Maybe she was hurting, too. Maybe there was still a window to get back to them.
He stepped forward and cupped her jaw, a tender, light touch, though he wanted to do so much more. He wanted to hold her again, to kiss her, to have her against him so close and tight, he could inhale the scent of her shampoo. “I don’t want to move on, not without you, Jillian.”
“It’s too late. It’s over.”
“What, are you marrying someone else already?” He meant the words as a joke, but when she looked away, his heart broke a little. “You like this other guy?”
“I don’t know. I…” She sighed. “I want something more, Zach.”
“More than what we had?”
She stepped away and crossed to the railing. The breeze tickled under her shirt, lifted the hem, brushed her hair back. He leaned on his elbows beside her and watched the white caps of water rushing past the bow as the ferry sliced through the bay. “I want someone who can’t wait to see me,” she said softly. “Who would drop everything at a moment’s notice just to spend an hour with me. Someone who is on the same forward path as I am. Someone who shares his life with me. The big stuff, the little stuff. The silly stuff.”
“I was that guy, Jillian.”
“No, you used to be that guy. Then you stopped.” She let out a breath. A seagull flew by, dipping low to scan the water for fish. “Maybe it’s as simple as you fell out of love.”
Had he? If that was so, then why did he still want to hold and kiss Jillian? Why did his breath still catch every time he saw her? Why did his every thought revolve around her? Was that just leftovers from being together so long, or a fear of being alone, or was he still in love? His answer, he realized, didn’t matter, not without knowing Jillian’s. He could be in love all he wanted, but if she didn’t feel the same, he could never get her back.
He took in a deep breath, then finally asked the question he had been avoiding all these months. “You said last night that I can’t force you to love me again. So…did you? Fall out of love with me?”
She turned back to him, her eyes still unreadable behind the dark sunglasses. “Yes, Zach, I did.”
Even watching the words form on her lips, then hearing them catch on the wind, didn’t make them sink into his brain. How could that be? After all the time they were together? “Come on, Jillian. We were together for eight years. You can’t just shut that off.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s off or on, Zach. We are not a good match. Maybe we never were. I want a future and you just want status quo.”
“What if I want a future now?”
She turned back to the railing, her shoulders hunched. “You’re just saying that because I dumped you. People always want the thing they’ve lost.”
“That’s not true.”
“Really?” Jillian turned to face him. “You want a future now? Because as far as I can tell, it’s more of the same old thing. You’re still barely making enough to pay the rent, still driving a car you can’t afford, and still not making plans that go further than tomorrow. Not to mention the last year, when you stopped talking to me about what was going on in your life. I
felt like…like some place you stopped at in between gigs.”
That stung. It was almost as if she was channeling his father. “I thought you supported my music. I’m a hundred percent behind you, Zach, was what you used to say. Was that all a lie?”
“You know I support you. I would love to see you make it big. But you shut me out, Zach. You did your thing and…I was second place.”
“Shut you out?”
“You used to share what you were writing with me. Tell me when you had a good practice or a bad one—”
“I told you those things.”
She scoffed. “Yeah, but almost as an afterthought. It wasn’t like before, where we would sit on my floor and listen to the new Green Day album and dissect it. We could talk for hours about music, and sometimes did. Then you just…stopped. I wasn’t part of your world.”
“Because you resented my world,” he said. “It was distracting me and keeping me from making smart decisions.”
“It wasn’t the music, Zach. It was you.” She shook her head. “I don’t know if you got scared the more serious we got, or if you didn’t want to marry me deep down inside, but you just…withdrew. And I felt like I was in this relationship alone.”
“I always wanted to marry you, Jillian.”
“Oh yeah? Well, your actions didn’t say that.” She laced her fingers together and rested her arms on the chrome railing. “When I said we should start saving for a wedding and a bigger place to live, what did you do?”
“Said yeah, I agree.”
“Said it. Didn’t do it. You bought that Mustang.” She let out a gust. “You bought a car you didn’t need to drive around an island that’s like five miles square. Instead of saving for the future you kept telling me you wanted.”
“I needed a car, Jillian.” Okay, even to his ears, that sounded like a lame excuse. Yeah, he needed a car, and a ten-year-old Toyota sedan would have gotten him from Point A to Point B as easily as the Mustang did.
“And when I said we should put some money aside for a honeymoon, you bought a new guitar”—she put up a finger before he could protest—“and an amp, and a new mic.”
“Are you telling me I should sell everything to prove to you that I’m serious?”
“No. I’m saying you should have shown me you were serious when you had the chance.” She opened her mouth as if she was going to say more. Instead she shook her head, turned on her heel and went inside. A second later, she had gone down into the belly of the boat, leaving him on the bow. He debated following her, but in the end, let her go. By the time the boat docked, Jillian was gone, caught in the crowds on the pier.
# # #
“I have a surprise for you.” His mother smiled. It wasn’t the kind of smile that said there was a new bike waiting in the garage. Or the kind of smile that said she’d baked his favorite chocolate cake. It was the kind of smile that said, This isn’t a surprise you are going to like but please, please try to.
“What is it?” Zach asked. Even as he said the words, he hoped for the chocolate cake option.
“Come on out to the back deck and see.” His mother put a hand under his elbow and led him down the hall and into the kitchen.
Through the window, Zach saw the top of someone’s head. Dark hair shaved almost short enough to see his skull. A tendril of smoke curled into the air beside him.
Only one person Zach knew looked like that and smoked. Keith.
His mother leaned in. “Your brother is home,” she said in a happy whisper.
Zach would have turned around and left, but Mom had a hand on his elbow and was already opening the back door, and then Keith was getting to his feet and putting out his arms.
Keith was out of prison and home again. Zach had known this day was coming but had ignored it, as if pretending this wasn’t happening would put off the inevitable. But no, his brother was here—out for good, unless he screwed up again.
“Hey, good to see you, bro.” Keith drew Zach into a hug before Zach had decided if he even wanted an embrace. Their mother put a hand on her boys’ backs.
“It’s so good to see our family together again. Isn’t it, Carl?”
From his seat at the patio table, their father nodded. Apparently the occasion was big enough that Dad had left work early. Great. “About time,” Carl said.
“Dad got me a job interview with Larry’s construction crew. It’s practically a done deal, you know, because you and I did all that reno work in the summers,” Keith said. “Maybe you should work with me. Like old times.”
“None of this is like old times.” Zach shook his head. “We can’t just pick up like nothing happened.”
“Zachary, your brother has just gotten home from a very long absence. Let’s—”
“He wasn’t on vacation, Mom. He was in prison.” Zach cursed and shook his head again. All of them, sitting here, acting like this was an ordinary dinner. “How the hell do you expect me to react? Do you think I can just go back to old times, like nothing ever happened? Like my brother didn’t do a whole lot of shitty things that put him there in the first place?”
“Do not use that language in front of your mother,” his father said. Like Zach was the one who needed to be straightened out, not Keith, the former inmate. It had always been that way. Zach was the one in trouble, while Keith was the one who was making all the right choices. “Now, sit down and have some cake.”
Zach noticed a small square cake on the table. Scrawled across the fluffy white frosting was “Welcome Home” in big blue letters. Like this was no big deal, like Keith had just been on safari in Africa or something. Not serving six years for beating up and robbing an old man outside a grocery store in Plymouth. “I gotta go,” Zach said.
“Your mother went to a great deal of work and your brother deserves to have this celebration,” his father said. “Don’t you dare leave already.”
“Why, Dad?” Zach said. Suddenly, the entire situation seemed to explode in his head. All of them acted like Keith was the next best thing to the Pope, and he was just supposed to get on board? “Because I’d disappoint you again if I left? Because you really care whether I’m here or not, or because you want to make sure Keith has a good little party, regardless of how I feel about this? I can’t just sit here and act like everything is the same. Because it’s not. And it hasn’t been for a long time.”
Carl scowled. “I’m not doing anything of the sort. Though it would be good if you quit acting all high and mighty and sat down for some damned cake.”
Zach didn’t point out the hypocrisy of his father’s cursing. He knew better. “I have to practice tonight anyway. The band has this audition with a producer from—”
“For God’s sake, Zach,” his father said, with that little tone of disgust, “today isn’t about you. It’s about your brother.”
His mother rushed in, with a soothing hand, waving it between her husband and son as if that would cool an argument that had been going on for decades. “Carl, we can celebrate both—”
Keith just sat back down, watching the fireworks from his corner of the table. Zach had had enough. He’d tried—and God only knew why he kept trying—to get his father to notice he had a second son, that the world didn’t revolve around Keith. Keith, who could do no wrong in their father’s eyes. Keith, who was getting a party for serving a prison term, while Zach was the one being reprimanded, like he was six years old again. Why had Zach thought coming here tonight was a good idea?
“I’m leaving,” he said again, then turned on his heel and headed back the way he’d come in. He had just started down the front steps when he heard the door open behind him.
“Wait up,” Keith said.
Zach considered not stopping, but he’d cabbed it here and there wasn’t much means of escape in a neighborhood this small. “I don’t want to talk.”
“Fine. Then listen.” Keith came around in front of him. His brother was taller, leaner now, and the short hair made his eyes seem bigger and darker. “I know
I fucked up a lot. But I paid my price—”
“Did you? For what you did to Jillian?”
A moment passed, where those words just hung in the air between them, stark and cold. The truth they never talked about. Keith let out a long breath. “I swear to God, I didn’t even know it was her that night. I never would have hurt her.”
It was the same thing Keith had told Zach years ago when he realized his brother had been the one to attack Jillian. When he had come home from consoling her and seen her backpack stuffed into the trash and a crisp twenty-dollar bill sitting on Keith’s dresser. The day that Zach realized the big brother he had idolized really was the jerk everyone had told him he was. But Zach, stubborn and young and scared to lose the one friend he had in a family that had never understood him, hadn’t said a word.
Because Keith had been the one who saw the truth—that their father preferred one son over the other. When Zach was little, Keith had always gone the extra mile to include his brother, to shore up his confidence when it flagged because their father had disparaged his music. More than once, Keith had told their dad to lay off on Zach. He’d been Zach’s hero for so long, that when it came to making a no-win choice, Zach had simply…done nothing.
Zach wasn’t sure who he was more angry at—Keith or himself. “But you did hurt her, Keith. I never told her it was you because I wanted to protect you. You’re my big brother. The one person I always looked up to. Or you used to be. Now you’re just some convicted felon I used to know.”
The words had hurt. Zach could see it in the hunch in Keith’s shoulders, the way he took a half step back. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not the one you need to apologize to.” Zach shook his head. “All these years, I’ve protected you. I never told her what you did. Never told her I knew it was you.”
“And that was about protecting me? Or protecting you?”
It was a question Zach didn’t want to answer. Had he kept the truth from her because he was afraid Jillian would blame him, by extension, and he would lose her? “I wasn’t the one who robbed Jillian that night.”
