From This Day On

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Instinct learned from a lifetime had Amy wanting to snatch her arm back and retreat. She saw Jakob sneering, heard him say, Running away? And hugged her mother tighter.

  Michelle lifted an astonished, distraught face, then leaned against her. After a moment, her arms crept around Amy, too, and they sat there holding each other close. Her mother’s tears wet the T-shirt Amy slept in.

  No moment like that was going to last long. Mom collected herself and her pride, straightened until her back was very straight and looked ahead. In profile, that blotchy, puffy, wet face was almost that of a stranger.

  “I apologize. That wasn’t like me.”

  What was she supposed to say? Good? Nothing seemed like a better choice.

  “Thank you,” her mother whispered.

  “Everyone cries.” Oh, sure, state the obvious.

  “I have not for a very long time.” Michelle sighed. “I need to blow my nose.”

  Amy heard herself giggle. “Yeah, you do.”

  Astonishingly, her mother laughed again. “Oh, lord. I’m glad Ken can’t see me.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if he could.” Crying on Jakob, it occurred to her, had been better than crying alone.

  She didn’t always do better alone. Maybe, she thought, it’s just less scary to be alone. Safer. I am an island. Except she wasn’t.

  Her mother stood in stages, as if her joints hurt. She disappeared to the half bath under the stairs. Amy heard the toilet flush, water running, and sat waiting until Mom reappeared.

  Her face was ravaged, but after a moment Amy realized that wasn’t why she was so nearly unrecognizable. There was something else. Not the recovered dignity, but some emotion or inner alteration that seemed to soften her features.

  “I’ve decided I’m going to confront him.” She said it quietly, calmly, with resolution. “I understand the trial has ended.”

  Amy nodded. The arsonist had been convicted. Steven Hardy had emerged triumphant, and with his photo once more in the Oregonian.

  “It might be possible to catch him in his office. Or perhaps I can make an appointment using an alias.”

  “Unless he’s followed you.” Seeing her mother blanch, Amy regretted what she’d said. “Not literally. Online. Knowing you’re out there must scare him, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Perhaps initially, but after this many years? I doubt it.”

  “Why don’t I make the appointment. He wouldn’t have any reason to recognize my name.”

  “Unless, as you said, he knows that I married a man named Nilsson.”

  “Okay, I’ll use a pseudonym.” She almost felt her own spine straightening. “I want to go with you, Mom.”

  “I was hoping you would,” her mother said, completely astonishing her.

  * * *

  JAKOB WANTED TO be angry as well as devastated, to convince himself she wouldn’t give him a chance, that she was the one with a problem. Two things stopped him.

  The first was something his father said. Not in their last conversation, but years ago. Jakob couldn’t even remember the context.

  “You can lie to other people, but not to yourself.” The moment had been totally serious. Jakob still saw the expression on Dad’s face. “Somebody accuses you of something, go home, cool off, and accept responsibility for the part that’s yours. No more. No less.”

  The second thing that hit him was a passing thought of his own, one of the pissed ones. All I wanted to do was help her heal....

  He hadn’t gotten any further than that. Instead he’d thought, Shit. He’d said he wasn’t trying to fix her. But fix and heal, they could be synonymous, couldn’t they?

  Struggling for complete honesty with himself wasn’t easy. He thought he’d faced everything when he had admitted first to himself and then to Amy how he felt about her when he’d been a teenage boy and what he’d done about it. But what else was hiding under there?

  Yeah, he asked himself that night, lying in bed, light from the window that looked out on the Willamette River filtering through the blinds, what about her insistence that her looks were completely ordinary and he was the one with the skewed perspective? Poor self-esteem on her part, purely eye of the beholder on his...or something else going on?

  It was true that he had mostly dated tall, athletic, classically beautiful blondes. Not exclusively—a few brunettes had crept in, though never a redhead. Freckles he’d steered clear of. Otherwise—blondes. He couldn’t deny it. More uncomfortable yet was the realization that those women had more closely resembled Amy’s mother as a young woman than they did Amy. Not the athletic part, of course, but she was the classic, elegant blonde, and a good four inches taller than her daughter.

  Because she was emotionally inaccessible to him, had she set up some kind of challenge in his psyche? He was a man who thrived on challenges, who looked for them.

  Maybe.

  In the back of his mind, he’d always suspected what he was doing was seeking out women who didn’t look like Amy. Every time he’d seen even the faintest resemblance in a woman he met, he’d made sure she saw the “not interested” signals. No way in hell was he going to deal with the idea that he was in bed with a woman subbing for his maybe sister. That was creepy. So he went for completely, safely different.

  Either/or, he thought. Could be both.

  None of that answered a more basic question. What was it about Amy that had made him as a teenager lust so desperately for her? So, okay, he’d always had the voice in his head that said, You know she’s not your sister. Which, coupled with the fact that she arrived one day with breasts when she’d been flat as a board the last time he saw her, pretty well guaranteed that he did look.

  So...would I have been looking no matter what, as long as she was reasonably pretty?

  He couldn’t imagine. Boys with stepsisters probably did have occasional, sexual thoughts about them. This was different. He had craved her, and it wasn’t only sexual. It was...he still didn’t know. The sadness and hope in her big brown eyes. The fire and the vulnerability. Her determination to hide her hurt.

  And now I’m pissed off when she’s still doing the same thing?

  He groaned and hammered his pillow into a new shape. Sleep wasn’t a lot closer.

  The next day, he had to work hard to hide his general state of testiness from his staff. He made an excuse to avoid lunching with a couple of people he liked, and had his P.A. send out for lunch. When it came, he swiveled his chair away from his desk, propped his heels on a windowsill. Looking at the not-so-fabulous view, he took in a row of now leafless trees and the parking lot beyond, and slowly unwrapped the chipotle chicken sandwich.

  This dragging sense of grief was making him the next thing to useless here in the office. No matter who he was talking to, what he was thinking about or studying, a significant portion of his attention was focused on his phone, which had remained stubbornly silent. Even friends weren’t calling.

  Ring, he would will it, which only went to show he had no superpowers at all.

  Call her? Not yet.

  The sandwich should have been spicy; he hardly tasted it. He kept thinking back.

  Why Amy?

  As he ate, mechanically and with no real appetite, he found himself recalling his earliest memories, many of which involved her. He’d been so intensely curious. Some of that was jealousy, of course. Why was his daddy cooing and cuddling her all the time?

  But it wasn’t only that. He’d plain been fascinated. Dad had sometimes let him hold her—supervised, of course—but Michelle seemed to see his interest as a threat. Either that, or she couldn’t be bothered indulging the little boy he was.

  Something else came to him when he remembered those years. Maybe because Dad worked such long hours, Jakob had been lonely. Once he understood he had a sister,
once she smiled at him with open delight, those intriguing colored eyes sparkling, he had wanted to be her brother. Maybe to bond with another person.

  Michelle had kept it from happening. Possibly with malice aforethought, although probably not. Most likely he’d only been an inconvenience, something she had to accept to acquire a father for the baby she had already carried.

  But her keeping him at a distance like that had increased his fascination with his little sister while leaving him unsatisfied. Then came the divorce, the visits he’d both resented and wanted, the puzzlement because Amy wasn’t like him. Even then he’d thought of her as somehow magical.

  Staring out at yet another rainy day—this was Portland, after all—Jakob felt as if puzzle pieces were slotting into place. It all made sense.

  The complex, baffling feelings he’d had for the girl who might or might not be his half sister made sense. He heard again her accusation: You wouldn’t have reacted the same if we didn’t have the past hovering.

  Honesty compelled him to admit that she was right. A lot of what he felt for her had roots in their shared childhoods. Should he be bothered by that?

  No. Asking him to pretend she was a new girlfriend, a woman he had no history with, was ridiculous. He’d loved and hated the little girl who threatened his place with his daddy, loved and hated the teenage girl who awakened such frightening feelings in him—and he loved the woman she’d become.

  He did feel guilty. She was right again. He’d been letting that ride him.

  The feeling that stole over him was familiar, but it took him a minute to identify it. Sometimes he’d find himself in an alpine meadow, or tucked out of the wind in a rock chimney with a thousand-foot drop below to an impossibly blue lake, the air so clear and pure, his vision sharpened, and this same feeling would grab him by the throat.

  It was complete and utter peace, letting go of frustration and day-to-day striving, accepting a perfect place, a perfect moment with joy.

  He was okay with the past. He didn’t care how he’d come to love Amy. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t bothered by the fact that he’d wanted her when he shouldn’t have. And he couldn’t imagine why he had thought he had to heal her. He loved everything about her that made her complicated and vulnerable.

  Always had. Always would.

  He wadded his lunch wrappings in a ball and deposited it in the trash container beneath his desk. He looked at his phone, black and silent, and willed it to ring.

  He’d give her a couple more days, then call her. He couldn’t believe she wouldn’t listen.

  * * *

  AMY WAS SURPRISED at how easy it was to make an appointment to see Deputy District Attorney Steven Hardy. She’d decided to take a chance and use her own name. Unless he really had been keeping an eye on her mother online or via a P.I., there was no reason he’d recognize it. If he did...well, she’d try again, and use subterfuge the next time.

  Her credentials were evidently sufficient. A couple hours after her initial phone call, his gatekeeper called her back to offer her an appointment two days later.

  Mom nodded at the news, expression cool and serene, but her eyes looking oddly blind for a moment. “Thank you,” she said.

  She had a book about roses open on the table before her. When Amy’s phone rang, Mom had been about to show her pictures that theoretically demonstrated the proper techniques for pruning roses. They went on with their lesson as if nothing had happened. After studying the pictures, Amy accompanied her mother into the garden despite the drizzle, and Mom told her where she’d make cuts. Both were wet when they went back inside.

  “I’m sure Mr. Cherpeski would be glad to do the pruning if you’d prefer,” her mother was saying.

  Amy shook herself like a wet dog, earning a reproving look from her mother.

  “And waste the lesson? Don’t be silly. How much damage can I do?”

  Mom’s frown dissolved into an unexpected laugh. “Quite a lot, but there’s only one way to learn. I suppose at worst, it’s like a bad haircut. Your hair grows back.”

  Amy grinned at her, astonished to be laughing with her mother, of all people. “Good deal.” She headed for the coffeemaker. Mom agreed that she, too, could use something hot.

  Not until they sat down did Amy nerve herself to raise a subject that was part of what had kept her awake the past two nights.

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  Mom’s expression was pleasantly inquiring.

  “It’s about Jakob.”

  Pleasantly inquiring became guarded. “He doesn’t seem to be around.”

  “No, we had a...well, a fight, I guess. I think some of what he said is true, which means I have to eat my pride, which is taking me a while.”

  Her mother understood pride. She nodded.

  “The thing is...I’d like to ask him to come with us. To our meeting with Steven Hardy.”

  Instead of reacting with indignation or even surprise, Michelle considered her. “Why?”

  “Before you came home, I was trying to go off by myself to investigate who the guy is. That’s always been my way, you know? I’d have probably holed up in the house, quit eating—” Again. “Jakob wouldn’t let me. He said we were in this thing together. That if we need answers, we’d find them together.”

  He’d said one other thing, too. Don’t try to get rid of me, because I guarantee you’ll fail. She had succeeded in getting rid of him, and that gave her a hollow feeling inside.

  “I think both of us could use his support,” she said finally.

  Michelle turned her head and gazed out the window for what had to be a minute or two. Long enough, Amy chickened out enough to hasten into speech again.

  “If you’d rather not, I understand, though. I’ll respect whatever you want.”

  Her mother met Amy’s eyes, and hers had that look again, as if she wasn’t really seeing. “If you’d like to ask him, I have no objection. Perhaps we’ve both been too determined to do everything by ourselves.”

  Amy had expected a no. A little dazed, she thought, The times they were a-changin’.

  Oh, wow. Now all she had to do was call Jakob and hope he wasn’t mad at her enough to say, Yeah, you know what? You’re on your own.

  Only, she found she had this rather startling faith that he would never do anything like that to her. That, in fact, she really, truly could trust him.

  Once, she would have called herself naive, an idiot for thinking any such thing.

  Mom wasn’t the only person who seemed to be changing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JAKOB THOUGHT ABOUT going out. Maybe just to a bar, maybe see if any friends wanted to meet up. Another evening of pretending he was interested in a television show or book held no appeal.

  Trouble was, getting shit-faced while being surrounded by sweaty bodies and loud voices didn’t strike him as an improvement. And he couldn’t think of anyone he actually wanted to hang out with.

  He poured himself a bourbon and water, turned on the TV, watched for five minutes, turned it back off. Finally he put on a coat and went out on the balcony, where he could smell the wet air and watch for stars or glimpses of the half moon when clouds shredded.

  His phone sat on the small table next to him.

  Man, he was a sad case.

  He was sagging low in the chair and a second drink was starting to take the edge off when the phone actually rang. He grunted, reaching for it. What were the odds it was Amy calling?

  He blinked, staring at her name. Removing his feet from the railing, he sat upright, hesitated, then answered.

  “Amy?”

  “Jakob. Hi.” Her voice was really soft, even timid.

  Some acid words surfaced, but he held them back. “What’s up?”

  “I made an appoint
ment with Steven Hardy. Mom wants to confront him and I said I’d go. We figured he’d recognize her name, so...”

  “Probably, although it’s been a lot of years.”

  “Would you ever forget?”

  “Depends whether he shocked himself and it was a defining event in his life. I’m guessing some guys who commit date rape and get away with it become repeat offenders.”

  The silence hummed.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re right,” she said. “I didn’t think.”

  Neither of them said anything else for a minute.

  “I wanted to let you know. And, well, ask whether you’d come with us.”

  Jakob had to rerun what she’d said before he was convinced he’d heard right. She wanted him with her.

  Hallelujah.

  “I can’t believe you called.”

  “Why?” She sounded defensive.

  “Because before I had to coerce you to let me in.” He rubbed his forehead. “Because of the way we left off. The last thing you said was that you’d rather do things alone.”

  In the ensuing silence, Jakob realized how much he would give to be able to see her face, to have any clues at all to what she was thinking.

  “I was wrong,” she said, in a small, husky voice.

  He was desperate to ask how much she’d been wrong about, but no way would he jeopardize this small opening she’d given him.

  “You were,” he agreed, but...gently. Agreeing, that’s all. “You and your mom want to go to lunch first?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t imagine either of us will be hungry or feel like, I don’t know, socializing.”

  With him, a mere acquaintance? But that was him being sensitive. Chances were, she hadn’t meant it that way.

  Was it possible she was straining to interpret his pauses, too?

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “All right, I’ll pick you up at one-thirty.”

  “We could meet you there.”

  “Neither of you should be driving.”

  “Oh. Okay,” she said softly. “Thank you, Jakob.”