by Nicole Baart
The Moment Between
NICOLE BAART
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Praise for The Moment Between
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Conversation with the Author
Discussion Questions
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For Aaron
Praise for The Moment Between
“The Moment Between is a heart-wrenching story, beautifully rendered by an exciting new author who shows the courage it takes to step out of the moment of ‘what was’ and ‘is’ and grasp hold of ‘what can be’ through the hope and promise God offers. This is a novel that should not be missed.”—Francine Rivers, best-selling author of Redeeming Love
“Nicole Baart’s The Moment Between is an exquisite look at the angst- and love-filled relationship between sisters. Baart skillfully paints this picture with the tenderness and empathy of a master artist, creating a work that will not soon be forgotten. This book is a treasure that should not be missed.”—Angela Hunt, best-selling author of The Face
“Haunting and evocative, The Moment Between is a stunning literary work. Nicole Baart captures beauty and madness alike in the finely wrought net of her immaculate prose, weaving a tale of the ties that bind as only a master storyteller can.”—Tosca Lee, author of Demon: A Memoir
“The Moment Between is a stark, agonizingly beautiful treatise on family, human frailty, and suffocating regret. With breathtaking prose, an everywoman heroine, and a twisting journey, Nicole Baart unfolds hope in the darkest circumstances.”—Mary DeMuth, author of Daisy Chain
“Beautiful, complex, and rich. The great mystery at the heart of The Moment Between is not what happened but why. Nicole Baart gracefully peels back the layers to examine sibling love, brokenness, and healing that comes through redemption.”—Travis Thrasher, author of Ghostwriter
“A story about the emotional communion of two sisters that is as rich and complex as fine red wine. Nicole Baart’s story of a tragedy and one woman’s yearning for atonement, for answers, and for peace is both gritty and lyrical.”—Lisa McKay, author of My Hands Came Away Red
Copyright © 2009 by Nicole Baart. All rights reserved.
Published by BMLA Digital
Cover Design by Jordan Edens Photography + Design
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance,
Despair!
†
Emily Dickinson
“I Cannot Live with You”
I had been hungry
all the years;
My noon had come,
to dine;
I, trembling,
drew the table near,
And touched the curious wine.
†
Emily Dickinson
“Hunger”
She left the world the same way that she had entered it: swathed in robes of scarlet so red and angry and portentous as to be mistaken for black.
The latter crimson swaddling was the result of a ruptured placenta, a condition which separated mother from daughter for hours while the doctors worked to stanch the flow and which nearly left the seven-pound infant motherless from the moment she took her very first wailing breath. The former was a dirty, ruby-colored wash that spread like a morbid inkblot a few inches up the concave line of her taut stomach and dragged the edges of her white T-shirt into the shallow pool of water where I found her. She was anchored in a bathtub so small she had to bend her long legs. Beneath the water, the bottom of her jeans and her perfect, manicured feet were indistinct and suffused with carnelian.
I tried not to look at her, not to notice the droop of her pale, waxy arm or her skin like rice paper dotted with fine, translucent hairs. She was so white against all that blood. So white and small and sad that the thought fled through my mind that she was floating in wine, an attempt at salvation instead of blood. Maybe someone—the thought made my heart seize agonizingly with hope—had touched her lips with Eucharist wine. Maybe she was too sick for the host, but someone had still taken pity on her and offered viaticum with a vintage so sacred it drowned her in forgiveness. I could almost imagine dipping a fine-stemmed glass beneath the surface and lifting the heady merlot to my lips. A toast to a grand entrance now bookended by an even grander exit.
Instead, I vomited into the toilet beside her upturned wrist.
Later, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I sat beside her and watched her face. I was waiting, maybe for a flicker, the smallest breath of movement across her carved features, but I knew she was long gone. She had tried to close her eyes at the end, and her lashes almost rested against smooth, unlined cheeks the exact color of gulf sand. There were no tracks of tears streaking her perfect skin, and her lips were even slightly parted in the semblance of a half smile, a secret crescent moon of understanding, as if she knew something I didn’t.
I wanted to shake her. Why? What do you know? Or, more importantly, how could you?
But I didn’t shake her; I couldn’t. She was my waking nightmare, lying there with the razor positioned perfectly on the edge of the white porcelain tub and two bloody fingerprints beside it as if she had touched the pads of her fingers there on purpose. A signature of sorts. The dips and whorls an admission, her own posthumous confession to the crime she had committed.
There was something in me that hated her for what she had done. But beneath that and rising, swelling upward and outward in a dark, smoky thunderhead of impenetrable clouds was grief. Consuming, enveloping, absolute grief.
When I began to scream, it echoed through the glass-tiled bathroom like thunder.
I
Abigail Bennett was the definition of unexpected. She was one year on the wrong side of the knife blade that was thirty, but if she turned up at your restaurant and ordered a glass of wine, even high-heeled and clad in a black sheath, you’d card her every time. Petite and narow-waisted, with a pixie flip of hair the exact color of coffee beans, Abigail could easily pass for sixteen in a pair of ripped jeans and an Abercrombie T-shirt.
Not that she liked looking younger than her age. In fact, most of the time Abigail hated the constant reminders that no matter what she did or where she went, she would not be taken seriously. This explained the harsh line of bobby pins that held her wayward hair out of her face as if the severity of it could add years. It also explained the almost-dowdy clothes, the earth-toned makeup, and the hard, thin line of a mouth that could have been very beautiful.
Once people got past the fact that she wasn’t a teenager, Abigail looked very much like the ideal kindergarten teacher. Her stature and dress were the opposite of intimid
ating, yet there was a spark in her dark eyes as if from time to time a match was struck behind the velvety chocolate of her corneas. These eyes could freeze hell over with a well-timed look, a piercing arrow of unmistakable meaning. But there was also the hint of tenderness in Abigail that translated into quiet strength when paired with the sharp edges that were inevitably unveiled before anyone had a chance to form a false opinion of her. But then again, maybe it was all a facade. She didn’t let people get close enough to find out.
In reality, Abigail was not a kindergarten teacher, nor could she remember a phase in her life when she ever wanted to be one. She was an accountant. Numbers were stable, unchanging, and best of all, incapable of being mysterious or of forcing people to act and think and feel in ways that they would not normally act and think and feel. Numbers were predictable; people were not. And because Abigail trusted the reliability of her chosen field, she was good at her job, meticulous and capable of holding the smallest detail in her mind for as long as it was useful.
During tax season Abigail worked more hours than anyone else at her firm, and that was saying a lot. It was why she was made a partner after only five years with the company and why she occupied one of two corner offices, the one with a view of the swampy man-made pond that graced the complex of professional stucco buildings on Key Point Drive. Johnson, McNally & Bennett was a Rosa Beach institution, and though Blake Johnson and Colton McNally could claim most of the honor behind their prestigious position in the community, Abigail knew she filled an important and indispensable role. Southern Florida had its share of widows and divorcées, and for some not-so-surprising reasons they preferred to have a woman handle their money. Abigail was happy to oblige. It kept her busy and the firm in business.
Keeping busy was what Abigail did best. When she wasn’t working, which averaged sixty hours a week, she was either running or reheating days-old Chinese takeout in a dented wok. Both activities were little more than a personal experiment; they were representative of the only two things in Abigail’s life that she really, deep down hoped to accomplish someday: run a marathon and learn to cook.
The marathon was a goal that she had already partly achieved. On the day of her twenty-ninth birthday, she ran a half marathon in Miami. Abigail could have easily completed it, and in fact, the finish line was in sight only two blocks ahead when she realized it was enough to know that she could do it. Crossing the finish line would have meant that she ran for someone else, that she ran for the glory, the recognition.
So Abigail had slowed down a little and then a bit more until someone thrust a cup of water in her hand and yelled, “You’re almost there!” She smiled her thanks, sipped the water, and folded herself into the crowd while all eyes were watching the other runners throw their arms into the air for the last few triumphant yards.
The cooking, on the other hand, was little more than a pipe dream. Abigail’s greatest accomplishment was adding a diced chicken breast and some soy sauce to leftover chicken chow mein. It was too salty. But propped on her counter in an antique, wrought-iron bookstand was a Williams-Sonoma cookbook with full-color photographs and extensive instructions on how to cook homemade delicacies like potato gnocchi with wild mushroom sauce and baked clams with pine nuts and basil. Every morning, while she waited for the last few drops of coffee to drip into her Gevalia carafe, Abigail would thumb through the glossy pages of the cookbook and imagine what it would be like to make a wine reduction sauce as the sound of laughter filled her apartment. Someday, she told herself.
And though there were many somedays in Abigail’s life, she tried not to let the particulars of her existence get her down too much. It didn’t matter that she didn’t have a boyfriend. It didn’t matter that every day plodded on with the same pitfalls and small successes. It didn’t matter that her apartment was quiet but for the hum of her empty stainless steel refrigerator. It was the life that Abigail had chosen, and she was a grim optimist, resigned to the path she was on—she was getting exactly what she had always wanted. So what if it was tilted heavily toward work, personal discipline, solitude? So what if it left little room for the things other people craved? So what if her cupboards were as bare of exotic ingredients as her apartment was bare of cheerful company?
But sometimes, alone in her apartment with the shades drawn tight, Abigail would stand in front of the full-length mirror on the back of her bathroom door and relax enough to admire what she saw. Tousling her wet hair and practicing a self-conscious smile that showed her teeth—her impossibly white, perfectly straight teeth that were a genetic legacy instead of the result of extensive dental work—
Abigail could almost pretend that she was ten years younger and that the world was unfurling itself before her.
For those moments in the steam and warmth, dark ringlets of hair curling around her temples as if she were some Grecian empress, Abigail wished much more for herself than what she had. She wished that she could rewind the clock and find Abby, the girl she used to be, perched on the cusp of her life instead of entrenched in the middle of it with no apparent way out.
Every once in a while, she could gather the courage to admit that it would be a very different life if she had it to do all over again.
†
When Abigail first came to Johnson & McNally, she had a chance at a different life.
It was no secret around the office that Colton McNally had a thing for the new accountant. He was twelve years older than Abigail and divorced, and that seemed somehow estimable according to Abigail’s less-than-high expectations. It wasn’t that she would settle for just anyone, but she also didn’t enter into much of anything with a long list of prerequisites.
In truth, Abigail found Colton very attractive. She thought his salt-and-pepper hair was distinguished—even though she suspected it came from the hands of a very talented colorist as he wasn’t quite forty—and she liked the way his tailored suits fell across the straight line of his shoulders. Best of all, he was nothing like the immature, self-absorbed boys Abigail had dated in college. They had nearly turned her off of men altogether. So when Colton turned his attention toward her, Abigail let him flirt. For a while, she even stopped wearing the stern bobby pins so that her dark curls framed her rather nicely arched forehead.
And yet Abigail wasn’t naive. She knew that her employer loved her because of the photo. It would have been too much to ask for Colton to love her, or at least think he did, because of herself. But while she probably should have been reticent of attention resulting from such a faint and improbable notion, Abigail accepted—almost expected—the source of Colton’s desire.
The photograph in question hung neatly squared and centered on a fabric-covered board adorning the west wall in the reception room. It was a concession to the more traditional bulletin board, replete with employee photographs that were intended to look candid but often looked overposed.
Abigail knew of the board, she even shot glances at it whenever she could to detect updates and changes, but she was not aware upon settling into her position that tradition dictated a spot for her photo front and center ASAP.
It was her third day of work, and Abigail was immersed in balancing infinitesimal details, worlds away from the air-conditioned office she inhabited when Colton startled her with a quiet “Ahem.”
Her head was bowed, and her forearms rested on endless pages that sprouted like an unruly crop of paper weeds across her generous desk. Abigail blinked and raised her eyes, just her eyes, in time to be blinded by the flash of Colton’s expensive Canon. He laughed and snapped a few more pictures for which she cleared off her desk, sat up straight, and smiled, thin-lipped and toothy and even coy, trying them all in the hopes that one would be right.
But the next day, Abigail was surprised to see that the photo gracing the quasi bulletin board was the first of the batch. She knew she was looking at herself because seeing the small, hunched form over the crowded desk was a sort of déjà vu—she had been there before. If not for that, Abigail w
ould have never believed that the woman staring back at her was her own reflection. The woman in the photograph had luminous—there was simply no other word for them—luminous black eyes of the starry-sky variety: endless and opalescent and dark like a time before the genesis. Like the event horizon of identical black holes—no way out, but no matter, for who would ever want to leave? Beneath the twin universes of those eyes, her lips were slightly parted, pink and full and evocative of bruised raspberries. Her skin glowed faintly (fluorescent light reflecting off all that white paper?), and her shadowy curls were framing and soft. The woman was lovely.
But what unnerved Abigail the most was that Colton had caught her at a moment between. A rare, uncovered moment between expressions: a moment of evaporation before the advent of her surprise became the dutiful smile that spread across her face in the split second after the shutter snapped. This woman was a living mystery.
Abigail wished she knew her.
†
One day, a few months after she started at the firm, Abigail went into Colton’s office to ask him a question about the tax return of a dual citizen living out of country. It was a legitimate question, but Blake’s office was closer than Colton’s, and her admirer acknowledged that fact the second Abigail rapped her knuckles on the doorframe. She realized almost too late that her presence would be read as an invitation, and sure enough, a smile unfolded across Colton’s face like a flag pulled taut in a billowing wind.
“Come in, Abigail! Why don’t you close the door behind you? There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
Abigail did as she was told and crossed the plush, carpeted floor of Colton’s office with her heart stuck fast in her throat.
“But first—” Colton set aside what he had been working on—”what can I do for you?”
Passing him the papers, Abigail lowered herself to balance on the arm of one of the leather chairs facing the wide, black walnut desk. But Colton raised an eyebrow at her, motioned that she should cross behind the desk to stand beside him.
