The Moment Between

by Nicole Baart

  They had flirted before, secret half smiles conveyed across crowded rooms and careful conversations littered with possibilities. And it seemed that the unmistakable chemistry between Colton and Abigail was a favorite topic around the water cooler, boasting far more people in favor of a match than against it. It was impossible for Abigail not to get caught up in it a little. But she also couldn’t help being cautious, and suddenly, with the door closed and Colton looking far more handsome than she remembered from only the day before, she knew that he was a man who wouldn’t play games for long.

  Colton waved her over again and Abigail moved slowly, explaining about the nonresident and his recent payout from a life insurance death benefit. She had just gotten to the part where he intended to give enough of it away to slip below the line of taxable income when Colton grabbed her wrist and, in one smooth movement, pulled her forward until her face was inches from his. He studied her, still smiling, then kissed her full on the mouth as if he had been intending to do so for a long time.

  It wasn’t that Abigail didn’t want to kiss him back. Actually quite the opposite. It wasn’t even that she was stunned by the inappropriateness of such a gesture. Instead, it was a Tic Tac that ruined everything, a burning little grain of peppermint that she inhaled when Colton’s lips touched hers.

  She drew back, pulling out of Colton’s embrace and coughing violently until tears collected at the corners of her eyes. Abigail struggled for a moment, choking mutely as she watched Colton bolt out of his chair and grab her upper arms. When the breath mint was dislodged from her throat and she could feel it hot and peppery on her tongue, she knew it was a very small thing that would be significant in ways that might cause her years of lament.

  “I’m sorry,” Abigail murmured, utterly mortified for one of the first times she could remember. “I . . .” She couldn’t continue.

  Colton stared at her, concern and disbelief gathering foglike across his forehead. At first, Abigail thought he might fold her into his arms, that the almost-pitiable comedy of what had just happened would become the sort of story they laughed about months down the road when they told people the tale of how they came together. But then Colton laughed, rubbing his hands up and down her arms. The

  moment shattered and fell away, disappearing in a shimmer of doubt that made Abigail wonder if she had merely dreamed it.

  “As long as you’re okay,” he boomed. And then he sat back down and pretended nothing had happened. He never mentioned it again and neither did she.

  Eighteen months later, Colton married Marguerite, the receptionist who was hired at the same time as Abigail. Marguerite was a few years younger than Abigail, but she looked much older due to a succession of bad dye jobs and what appeared to be a lifetime of sun damage spotting her skin. Colton seemed happy; from what little Abigail could discern of her boss’s marriage, he genuinely longed for companionship and Marguerite’s horselike laugh didn’t turn him off so much that he considered her a poor match.

  Although it was against her nature, shortly after the happy couple’s beach wedding, Abigail went through a brief stage where she fixated on what might have been. The entire office had once been invited to Colton’s sprawling house only a block off the ocean, and Abigail could almost picture herself the mistress of his columned colonial. What sort of a woman would she be if she were Mrs. McNally? What would she look like offering guests a second martini and lounging in some bright sari that she had bought on their honeymoon?

  It was a nice scenario, but Abigail wasn’t one to waste too much energy on regret, and she abandoned such nonsense the same way she set aside every other impossible dream: she placed it firmly out of her mind. A few years later when Blake and Colton approached her about being a partner, she was even able to congratulate herself that her business card would read Johnson, McNally & Bennett instead of Johnson, McNally & McNally. She convinced herself that it was much more satisfying this way.

  For his part, after their less than romantic encounter in his office, Colton was nothing but a gentleman to Abigail. He treated her with the same respect, the same quiet yet somehow condescending pride of a father figure. Abigail was reduced from a possible lover to the discarded role of a dependable daughter. It was a character she was rather good at playing.

  †

  Lou Bennett was a father when he could have been a grandfather.

  He met Melody Van Bemmel at Chevy’s Café a week after he turned forty-five. It was nearly a blizzard outside, and she blew into the warm restaurant off-balance and trembling as if she were a leaf driven by the vicious wind. When the door slammed behind her, Melody gasped, stomped her booted feet, and flung the hood of her parka back. She smiled shyly, looking around as if her entrance had been staged, as if she were taking her place beneath the spotlight and now that she was front and center she had forgotten her lines.

  Everyone in the café glanced up at her for the blink of an eye and then turned back to their coffees and specials of the day without a second thought. Everyone except Lou. He had fallen in love the moment Melody raised her hands to turn back her hood. They were little hands swimming in a pair of men’s work gloves that were so big on her fingers they nearly slid off. Lou imagined they were his gloves. He wished they were.

  And just as quickly as he longed for her, Lou hated himself for it. She was a child. Her eyes were too clear, her skin too bright for her to even look twice at a man whose own skin was as deeply lined as those etchings he had seen on display in the American National Bank. But when she caught his eye, when her lips pulled up slightly just for him, Lou knew there was nothing that could be done about it. He was hers, even if she never acknowledged his existence. Even if he loved her in secret until the day he died.

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to. Melody came to Lou in the most natural, ordinary way: she brushed against the edge of his life and found herself inexorably pulled in. He didn’t even know he was drowning until he felt himself reach for her and cling for dear life.

  They were married less than a year later, and though Melody was not as young as Lou had imagined, when she walked down the aisle in a confection of white, a little shiver crept up Lou’s spine because she did not look twenty-five. Twenty years, he thought in the second before the preacher asked him if he would have her and hold her until “death do you part.”

  Lou said, “I do” without hesitation, but somewhere in the back of his mind he faltered. There was a nagging suspicion, an accusatory guilt that made him wonder if he had made her the happiest woman alive like she claimed or if he had involuntarily ruined her life.

  It took Melody almost six years to get pregnant, though they tried to make a baby on their wedding night. She saw doctors and gynecologists and fertility specialists, but no one could tell her why her womb would not swell with a child. For a while, Lou entertained the possibility of joining her at one of her appointments, but those sorts of things made him unbearably uncomfortable. He avoided the conversation he knew Melody wanted to have the same way that he avoided the drawer where she kept her neat pile of lace-trimmed underwear.

  When Lou was fifty-one, Melody’s cheeks took on a greenish hue in the early morning, and the waist that he so loved to encompass in his enormous hands began to expand. She wouldn’t admit it at first—maybe she was scared to hope—but Lou knew almost immediately. Something about Melody had changed, the scent of her skin or the complexity of the air around her when she entered a room. Maybe both. Either way, Lou was relieved. It wasn’t him, it had never been him, and now she would be happy. They would be a family.

  Lou didn’t think much about the baby until the doctor handed him a tiny, tightly wrapped bundle with a pink cap sliding down over her lashless eyes. They were two little commas, those eyes, a break amidst all the words that comprised his many years of life,

  though certainly not a beginning or even an end. Lou stared at her and realized that he had planned on having a son.

  “Abigail Rose,” Melody called weakly from the bed
. She smiled at him with all the energy she could muster, and her eyes were dancing with tears. “Rose for my mother and Abigail because it’s the most beautiful name I’ve ever heard. I think we’ll call her Abby.”

  What was there to say? It was a fine name, and Lou hadn’t wasted a single thought on another. “Pretty,” he said finally and brushed his lips tentatively across the soft forehead because it seemed like the right thing to do.

  I didn’t know what to do with her.

  She was cold, her skin was so cold, and she seemed dirty to me. I wanted to wash her hair and make her lips look pink again instead of the sickly gray that taunted me for not getting here sooner. For not paying attention. For not being everything she needed me to be.

  When I got over the initial shock, when I had cried so hard I had emptied myself of every fighting, aching thing inside, I moved her arm half a degree and sat on the edge of the bathtub so I could be near her. There was nothing to be afraid of. This body beside me was only an empty shell; she was gone, and yet I wanted to be close enough to study every detail. I wanted to imprint her on each scribbled page of my memory so that when they took her away, I could remember how her collarbones rose in mirrored harmony and almost met in the shadow of her long neck.

  My skin was tight from crying, and I could taste the salt from my tears when I licked my lips. There was blood, too, and it was insulting somehow that I could feel the metallic tang of life on my tongue when hers was spilled beneath me. Then I felt a jolt of shock at the blood in my mouth. How did it get there? Had I bled with her? Had I inadvertently touched where she lay broken and partaken in some unholy communion?

  I raised my palms and studied their whiteness, then put them to my face and knew: the edges of my mouth were cracked from forming the scream that tried to clear a way for my heart to leave my body. It would have climbed up through my throat and escaped—it wanted to; I could feel it thrashing around, dying for an exit, a way to escape this pain—but it was held fast by each vein that anchored it to my fingers, my toes, the rest of my numb body. The blood in my mouth was my own.

  It took me what felt like hours to reach for her. And when I did, her fingers were firm and limp like molded plastic as I wrapped my hands around them. I fought back my revulsion and reminded myself of who she was. Rubbing her lifeless hand between my own warm ones, I willed her to squeeze me back even as I knew she never would. A longing stabbed through me and was gone: I want to be where you are. But that was impossible.

  I would have to live in this new reality.

  I didn’t know what to do without her.

  II

  Abigail left everything when she went to find Tyler.

  At first she convinced herself that she could forget about him. She told herself that this consuming, breathing thing inside her would slowly fold and fade and crumble away so that she could live again. But instead of eventually cooling into ash and ember, the flame that had been lit for the elusive Tyler only fanned into something burning and fierce. In the end, Abigail didn’t really even have a choice. She went because she had to.

  It happened almost unexpectedly, the leaving, and when Abigail turned off the final light in her apartment and drank in one last, long look as the sunset laid an offering of orange flowers across her honeyed laminate floors, she felt like she was saying good-bye for good. And then the cat—the tabby stray she had adopted and forgotten to name—brushed against her legs, and she realized that she almost left it to die behind locked doors.

  “Pretty girl,” she murmured absently, picking it up and pressing her face into the ginger fuzz. “You can’t come with me.”

  Abigail carried the cat outside under one arm and pulled her sleek suitcase on wheels with the other. One item would find its way into the trunk of her midnight blue Passat. The other she could hardly bring herself to think about. Maybe the nice men working for the Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t notice a cat hiding in her calfskin attaché.

  It was difficult to balance the cat as Abigail descended the two flights of stairs and slid a shiny silver key into her mailbox for the last time in weeks. Maybe months? She had put a hold on her mail, but Abigail knew there was a small accumulation of post that she had been ignoring for several days.

  They had told her that she could expect the parcel in eight to ten weeks. For exactly two and a half months, every time she slipped her hand inside the tall, metal cavern that contained nothing more threatening than paper and envelopes, Abigail’s heart wrenched and she had to force herself to stand still.

  This time, as she was leaving, Abigail hardly gave the package a second thought. And there it was. Her fingers stalled for a moment on the manila envelope, then withdrew so quickly it seemed there was poison on the heavy-grain paper that stung her skin.

  “Not now,” Abigail whispered.

  The cat mewed in reply.

  “Shhh,” she murmured. The deliberate hushing could have been meant for the cat. It could have been meant for Abigail.

  She stood there staring at the mailbox for what seemed like hours. Finally Abigail thrust her hand back in the cool mail slot and grabbed everything without looking at it. Jiggling the attaché on her shoulder, she unzipped it with her arm bent corkscrew-like and jammed the papers inside. She stuffed the manila envelope down deep, sliding it between a slim folder and a bunch of maps she had printed off that resided in the niche usually reserved for her laptop. Slamming her mailbox closed, Abigail strode out of the building, trying with each purposeful step to fight the slick veneer of nausea that the envelope had spilled down her throat.

  “Going away?” The unexpected voice seemed disembodied.

  When Abigail turned, she saw the neighbor girl perched on one of the benches in the shade of the pergola crowning the entrance to Gulf Wind Estates. She was twelve or thirteen years old, and Abigail could never remember her name. Sierra or Sienna. Maybe Savannah. Something Southern and airy like a slow exhalation.

  “Yes,” Abigail said, trying to coax a smile onto her face. This was a welcome distraction. “I forgot to find a kennel for . . . ,” she fumbled, shrugging to lift the plump cat a bit higher.

  The girl’s eyes widened. Her legs were crossed beneath her but she lowered them now, putting her hands on her knees as if she was waiting for Abigail to say something else.

  “Do you know . . . ?” Abigail started and then drifted off because she didn’t know what else to say.

  “How long are you going to be gone?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  The girl had long, blonde hair like a cascade of sun-drenched water, and sitting as she was in the fading evening light, Abigail thought her very striking. Abigail’s breath caught in her throat for a second and she swallowed with difficulty, suddenly eager to escape the strange conversation with her anonymous neighbor. But then the girl swept her hair over her shoulder and secured it in a ponytail with an elastic band she had looped around her wrist. Any resemblance to the ghost that haunted Abigail’s dreams immediately disappeared.

  “I’ll take care of your cat,” the girl said without preamble. She didn’t put out her arms for the tabby, though it looked like she wanted to, like she was stopping herself from doing so.

  Abigail didn’t feel quite right about it, but what choice did she have? She knew she should ask the girl if it would be okay with her parents, or better yet she should ask the parents herself, but it seemed too complicated an endeavor. Instead of opening her mouth to form a single question, Abigail nodded slowly and took a step toward the girl.

  The young lady stood and reached for the cat, smiling as she accepted the ball of fluff and tucked it into her thin arms. “What’s her name?”

  “Whatever you want it to be,” Abigail answered. Her reply echoed in her own ears like a tacky pickup line. She tried to soften it a bit. “I just called her Cat.”

  “We can do better than that, can’t we?” the girl whispered, burying her nose in the scruff of furry neck.

  Abigail wav
ered for a minute before walking away. It was easy—almost too easy—to leave. The cat was a charade of connection, an artificial reason to stay that resolved itself without any effort on her part. Abigail had already said her good-byes. There were no complicated loose ends to tie up. There was nothing to worry about. There was no one for her to miss when she was gone. Or anyone to miss her. Everything she was leaving behind was as unnamed as the girl and her cat. Meaningless. Vague.

  Taking a deep breath, Abigail sliced through whatever slim bonds had tried to hold her back. She felt like she was emerging from the hazy aftermath of a storm.

  As the sun set, it jettisoned thick shafts of brilliant light, bright and furious in their daily closing rite, across the earth below. It was so piercingly splendid in the moment before the horizon swallowed the scarlet sun whole that it was almost as if it was all—the cat, the sunset, the impending absence—an act of intention. All of it seemed purposed to break through the soft, gray mists that clung like cobwebs to Abigail.

  It illuminated with startling intensity the only thing she sought: Tyler.

  †

  Leaving Florida to chase after Tyler was something Abigail never planned on doing. But obsession is rarely premeditated, and by the time she admitted that her life could not go on as long as Tyler only existed nebulous and uncertain in the shadowy corners of her mind, he was already gone.

  Abigail had tracked him down to a modern apartment building that was only blocks away from the beach. In fact, it was so close to the ocean that as she walked the tree-lined street to Tyler’s Tuscan-style apartment complex, she caught glimpses of white-capped waves frothing the surface of the blue herringbone gulf water. There was a slight breeze chasing itself around the corners of the rambling houses in the upscale neighborhood, and it would lift Abigail’s cropped hair off her neck and cool her skin. She stifled a shiver, knowing that the soft wind on land was a mighty force to be reckoned with over the waters she could see in the distance.