According to Mark

by Jackie Barbosa

  Withdrawing my hand, I closed my eyes. This was my fault. From start to finish. I’d been sending mixed signals from the beginning, and tonight, I’d sent the worst mixed signal of all. In the quest for a past I could live with, I’d given her a reason to believe there might be a future. I was a first-class shit.

  But that didn’t change the facts.

  “I’m sorry, Allison. I shouldn’t have brought you here tonight. I shouldn’t have taken you upstairs that first night at The Rack. And when I told you I couldn’t be with you again that night, I should have stayed away. You deserve real, but I can’t give it to you.”

  “Because of Clint.” It was a statement of fact, not a question. A resigned, bitter statement of fact.

  “Yes, because of Clint. Jesus, Allison, I killed him. Your husband. My best friend. I don’t know how you can forget that.”

  “You didn’t kill him, Mark. A brain tumor did.” She let out a sigh tinged with both exasperation and sadness. “You have to stop blaming yourself. I never have, and Clint wouldn’t have blamed you, either. You were doing what he wanted. Giving him a chance. But I’ve said all that before. I don’t know what else I can say now to make you let it go.”

  My gut pinched. I wanted to believe that. But in the deepest, darkest corner of my soul, I couldn’t be sure it was true.

  I took an unsteady breath, knowing I was going to have to say the words I’d never really allowed myself to think. To admit the whole truth of what I feared I’d done.

  “How would you feel if I told you I knew when I took Clint’s case that the surgery never had a chance of helping him? If there was never any hope, and I agreed to operate because I wanted something he had so badly, I was willing to kill him for it?”

  She paled visibly, her eyes widening with shock as the significance of my confession sank in. “You didn’t. You couldn’t.”

  “I wish I was as sure of that as you are. But I’m not. Because no matter how many times I go through it in my head, no matter how many times I review my reasons for agreeing to operate, I’m never sure that somewhere in the back of my mind, I wasn’t thinking that if only Clint were out of the way, you would be free. And you could be mine.” I pressed my palm over my eyes, fighting against the tears that prickled behind them. Never in my life had I felt so raw or exposed.

  To my astonishment, the next thing I felt was Allison’s arms wrapped tight around my shoulders. She was embracing me. Comforting me.

  What the hell? I’d all but admitted I might have planned to murder her husband, and she was hugging me? I felt wetness on my cheek and dimly realized it was her tears, mingling with the ones I hadn’t been able to suppress after all.

  “I never realized,” she whispered. “I always thought my crush on you was strictly one way. You never gave me a hint…all those years.”

  “Would it have made a difference? Would you have divorced him for me?”

  “God, no.” She pulled away and swiped at her tears with her thumbs. “I loved Clint. That didn’t stop me from fantasizing about you, but I’d never have left him. Especially not after he got sick.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because I couldn’t have been with you then, either. Before or after he got sick.”

  She nodded. “But you said you aren’t sure if you knew the surgery would kill him. That has to mean you could have just been doing what you should have done—trying to help a friend who had run out of hope.”

  “I could have been. But I won’t ever know. And I can’t live with that on my conscience. These past weeks, I’ve been fooling myself into thinking what we were doing together was okay because it was just sex, just scening.” I reached up and cradled her damp cheek in the palm of my hand. “But it’s never been just anything, has it?”

  She shook her head. “Not for me.”

  “Me, either. Which is why I have to end this now, tonight. Before I rip myself in pieces. If I have to choose between being with you and being able to look at myself in the mirror, I have to choose the latter.”

  “I understand.” Her smile was watery. “I just wish you’d chosen some other way to break it to me. I really thought…hoped—”

  I brushed an errant tear away with my thumb. “I know. It was selfish and wrong. I shouldn’t have done it. But, God, Allison, I needed this one night. One night when neither of us was holding anything back. One night when I wasn’t trying to protect myself—or you—from feeling too much and getting in too deep.”

  She swallowed a hiccupy sob. “You’re a real bastard, you know that, Mark Finley?”

  “Yeah, I do. All the more reason you should find someone else. And this time, I am letting you go to find someone else. I won’t pop up in The Rack to keep you from trying. I won’t show up on your doorstep in the middle of the night. Eventually, you’ll fall in love with someone who deserves you. Because I sure as hell don’t.”

  “Too bad I’m already in love with you.”

  “You’ll get over it. Especially now that you know exactly how big a bastard I am.”

  She reached down and caressed my cheek with the back of her knuckles. “I knew you were a bastard the first time I met you. I fell in love with you, anyway. What makes you think I’m going to stop now?”

  “Maybe you won’t stop,” I admitted, “but I know you’re capable of loving someone else. You loved Clint. You love me. I’m pretty sure there’s room in your heart for someone else.”

  But there’d never be room in my heart for anyone but Allison. After all, there never had been. It had always been her. And it always would be.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I was true to my word. I stopped going to The Rack, allowing my membership to lapse when it came up for renewal about a month after my break-up with Allison. When I ran into Greg Hernandez at a charity function a few weeks after that, I told him I’d lost interest in the scene and was moving on. That much, at least, was true.

  Unlike Matthew, who had fallen apart spectacularly every time he and Casey had broken up—and yes, it had happened more than once before they’d finally gotten married—I gave my brothers no reason to disbelieve my casual explanation that my relationship with Allison had run its course. I neither moped openly nor drank heavily. In fact, I gave up drinking whiskey altogether. John raised his eyebrow when I changed my standing order at O’Malley’s from Glenlivit to a dry martini, but he didn’t press me for a reason.

  I threw myself into my work, taking on more cases, extending my office hours, accepting more on-call nights. Without the distractions of the club to keep me entertained in my off hours, I turned to rigorous exercise. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that I wanted to do the Iron Man Triathlon in Hawaii and took to running ten miles, swimming five, and biking twenty-five every day. I’d always been in good physical shape, but it was still a brutal schedule. The pain felt like fair punishment for my crimes, however, and the exhaustion all the activity produced was the only thing that made it possible for me to sleep.

  Months and many washings later, my sheets and pillows still bore her scent. Or maybe that was just my imagination. Whichever one it was, most morning when I woke, I reached for her, convinced by my treacherous senses that she must be there beside me.

  But aside from the torments I couldn’t avoid in private, I did a pretty decent job of keeping my shit together.

  That is, until I came home one Sunday afternoon in mid-August from a particularly grueling bike ride—I’d done thirty-five miles instead of my usual twenty-five—to find my mother in my kitchen. She stood at the stove, her back to me, and I realized she was putting a kettle of water on to boil.

  I set my helmet on the granite-topped counter that separated the kitchen from the breakfast nook overlooking the back garden.

  “Mom, what are you doing here?”

  She turned around. “There you are.” A fond, motherly smile stretched across her face. “Bettina let me in before she left for the day,” she continued, as if that answered my question.

  Bettina was
my housekeeper, a solid, responsible woman in her late fifties with a nurse’s eyes for cleanliness and a chef’s touch in the kitchen. There was almost always something delicious and reheatable waiting for me in the fridge on the days she came to clean. I was going to have to have a discussion with her about letting people into my house just because they claimed to be related to me, however. Although, in the case of my mother, I probably had to give Bettina the benefit of the doubt. Mom could be very persuasive and rarely took no for an answer. Besides, it would have been difficult to deny the family resemblance. Matthew and I may have gotten our father’s sharp blue eyes, but we’d gotten our mother’s general looks, not to mention her tenacious personality.

  “That tells me you didn’t break and enter,” I observed drily. “But it still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.” As I spoke, I rounded the corner of the counter to give her a quick peck on the cheek. I didn’t want to give her the impression I wasn’t happy to see her.

  “Oh, well, George and I have decided to get married in October. It’s terribly short notice, so every nice venue is either too expensive or already booked, so I was thinking—”

  “Wait, what? Did you say you and George are getting married?

  Mom had been dating George Aubusson for a couple of years now, but this was the first time she’d ever used his name and the concept of marriage in the same sentence, so I was taken aback. It wasn’t that the idea of her getting married bothered me. It was just that the announcement came so completely out of the blue.

  “Yes, dear,” she said, holding out her hand to display a diamond solitaire that was definitely not the one my dad had given her. Although I didn’t have an eye for jewelry, even I could tell this rock was a carat or two bigger than the one she’d worn for years after my father’s death. “George asked me last week, and I said yes.”

  “Last week? Do my brothers know?”

  “John does.” That figured. John was always the first to know everything when it came to Mom. “I haven’t had a chance to tell Luke or Matthew yet.”

  “Well, congratulations,” I said, meaning it. George was a very nice man, and he clearly wasn’t marrying my mother for her money if he could afford a rock that big. Not that she was rolling in dough, anyway. “But this is kind of a strange way to break the news to me, don’t you think?”

  She reached into an overhead cabinet, pulled out a glass, and started to pour ice and water into it from the dispenser in the fridge. “As I was saying when you interrupted—” She handed me the glass. The mild rebuke did not escape my notice. “—we want to have the ceremony in October, but every nice venue in town is already either booked or far too expensive. It occurred to me that your garden might be the perfect place for the ceremony and reception, but I had to come and look again to be sure it’s the right size.”

  “Why would you want to have it here?” I asked after I took a several chugs of water. “Matthew’s yard is much larger.”

  “Which is exactly the problem. It’s too large. We just want a small, intimate ceremony. Nothing fancy or extravagant. Just a few dozen guests and a pretty setting. It’s not as though I’m a virgin bride, after all.”

  “Mom!” I choked on my water and started to cough violently.

  She laughed and gave me a solid whack between the shoulder blades even though I was sure she knew it wouldn’t do a bit of good. It was a mother’s reflex. She couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t mean to remind you I’m a human being.”

  “That okay,” I wheezed. “I’m a doctor. I’m not supposed to be shocked by these things.”

  “In any event,” she said, when I was breathing normally again, “I think your yard is the perfect size, and it’s certainly got the right ambience. Graceful and…well…not to put too fine a point on it, mature. So, what do you think? Can we have the wedding here?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I’m planning to sell the place.”

  I hadn’t been planning any such thing—at least not consciously—but no sooner had the words escaped my mouth than I realized that was exactly what I wanted to do.

  Mom gave me one of those looks of horror that only a mother can truly pull off. “Why on earth would you do such a thing? This house is a treasure, and in this market, you’ll never get what you put into it.”

  “I can afford to lose a few dollars here and there. And don’t you think it’s a little extravagant? This house, all three thousand square feet of it, for just me? I don’t even go into half of the rooms. Bettina sees them more than I do.”

  “But you won’t be living here alone forever. One of these days, you’ll find the right woman, get married, and have kids. This is a beautiful home to raise a family in, Mark.”

  Ouch. Way to hit below the belt, Mom.

  All the emotions I’d been suppressing since that last night with Allison came rushing back in a flood—guilt, regret, loss and, most of all, longing. She was the real reason I had to get out of this house. In my subconscious, this had always been her house—our house. But that could never be.

  “I’ve already found the right woman, Mom. Unfortunately, marrying her isn’t an option.”

  My mother gave me an arch look. “Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for a married woman?”

  I shook my head. “Or, at least, she’s not married now.”

  “I hope you aren’t going to tell me you had an affair with her and broke up her marriage.”

  “No, no, nothing like that.” Well, all right, it was kind of like that. On a scale of moral wrongs, what I’d done was infinitely worse. “Mom, it’s Allison Hoffman.”

  Her brow furrowed for a second as she tried to place the name, then smoothed. “Clint Hoffman’s wife?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that is tricky, I suppose, but I don’t see why—”

  “I killed Clint, Mom. That’s why.”

  “But, honey, he had a terminal brain tumor. You told me yourself that, even if the surgery had been successful, it wouldn’t have been a cure. You’ve lost patients before. Unless it’s that Allison blames you?”

  “She doesn’t. But I’m not making myself clear. The problem isn’t that Clint died during an operation that we all knew might fail. It’s that I think it’s possible I encouraged him to have that surgery, even when I knew it would probably be lethal, because I wanted Allison. Why do you think I never got serious with any of the women I dated before?”

  “I assumed it was because you were sowing your wild oats. And I figured, given your personality, that you had more oats than average.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at that. There was no doubt that I’d been the “challenging” child. Always in and out of scrapes, always instigating trouble. My facility for lying may have kept us from getting punished as often as we might have been, but I had a feeling our mother had known a lot more about our escapades—my escapades—than she let on.

  “Well, that wasn’t it. I kept trying to find a woman like Allison, but there is no other woman like her, and I’ve realized it’s pointless to keep looking.”

  The kettle whistled. My mother took it off the burner and busied herself getting out two tea bags and mugs. I was still in my riding gear, sweaty and uncomfortable. Did she really think I was going to sit and drink tea with her?

  “Tell me something, Mark,” she said, her back to me as she poured steaming water into the mugs. “Does she love you?”

  I knew you were a bastard the first time I met you. I fell in love with you, anyway.

  As declarations of love went, it hadn’t been the most romantic, but she’d definitely said it.

  “Yes,” I answered. But that was months ago. She could already have found someone else. Even though the thought made my chest ache, I hoped she had.

  “Smart girl,” my mother murmured. “If she were anyone but Clint’s widow, would you ask her to marry you?”

  I didn’t even need to think to answer that question. “In a heartbeat.”

  “Thought so.” She looked me up and
down with those appraising eyes that seemed to see right through me, before turning back the counter and busying herself by dipping the teabags in and out of the mugs. “Do you remember when you were about eight or nine and I had to move Matthew into John’s bedroom for a while?”

  That was a non-sequitur if I’d ever heard one. “Yeah. Vaguely,” I said. “But what—?”

  “Do you remember why?”

  I dug the recesses of my memory, but nothing came to me. “No, I don’t. But I don’t see—”

  “Stop interrupting when I’m trying to be profound, dear.” She removed the tea bag from one of the mugs and handed it to me.

  I couldn’t keep myself from smiling as I juggled the hot mug from one hand to the other. That was my mother.

  “Anyway, I remember perfectly well why I had to move Matthew to John’s room. It was because he wanted to sleep with the light on while you flatly refused to.” She took a cautious sip from of her tea, obviously waiting for a reaction from me.

  “So I grew out of needing a nightlight sooner that Matt. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It isn’t the what, Mark, it’s the why.” She watched me, waiting for the memory to come back to me.

  And it did. “I hated the nightlight because of the way it cast shadows in the room. It made everything I recognized in daylight look unfamiliar and threatening.”

  “Yes, but it was something you said to me when you were trying to describe why it bothered you so. You told me you didn’t care if there were monsters in the dark, because as long as it was dark, you couldn’t see them.”

  I blinked. Now that she said it, I did remember telling her that. And feeling it. Monsters I couldn’t see didn’t scare me. It was the monsters in the light I was worried about.

  She placed a hand on my arm. “I think you need to turn off the light, Mark. You’ve got the light on, and you can’t stop looking for monsters. It’s just that these are the monsters you’re afraid are inside yourself.”