by Sarah Hegger
Quietly Donna let him in. She poured him a stiff measure of whiskey and gave it to him, before digging in the linen closet for a couple of the boys’ old things she had yet to part with. She put on the kettle and watched him as she went about making tea.
She had mothered three boys and she knew her men. Richard would talk when he was ready. Like she didn’t know the problem already. Her oldest son had just hit the wall he’d been racing toward for most of his adult life.
“Ma?”
“Yes?”
“Why do you have to make all these changes in your life?”
Donna put her tea bag into the cup before answering. “Because I am still a young woman, Richard. I need to do those things I have always wanted to do, before it is too late. I loved your father, I’ve told you this before, but I spent a lot of my time making sure he was happy and letting my needs slide.”
“I don’t like it,” he stated in such a pig-headed, definitive, Richard fashion, she had to snort with laughter. He’d done that since he was old enough to shake his little towhead and assert his will.
“I know you don’t, mon fils, but it’s not the changes I am making that are bothering you. You don’t like change. Change frightens you.”
“That’s not true,” he protested, and helped himself to another gentleman’s measure. He did not drink, this boy of hers, and he was fit as well. He would be three sheets to the wind if he kept this up.
Donna had never seen Richard drunk. Once, when he was thirteen and he’d had one or two beers too many, but Des had dealt with that. Josh, she’d put to bed a time or two, Thomas a couple more than that, but Richard, never.
He hated to lose control and being drunk would do that to him. It might be an interesting experience. He worked his way through the second drink. The kettle whistled and she poured hot water over her tea bag.
He looked up at her suddenly and frowned. “It’s true,” he stated.
Donna stirred her tea and waited.
“You know, if you weren’t my mother, I would be applauding what you’re doing,” he said, and gave a mirthless little laugh. “In fact, the other day a woman came to see me. She’s going through a divorce and I’m giving her some help with depression. I told her to find something that makes her happy and do it. Something that makes only her happy.”
“It was good advice.” She smiled at him and blew on her tea.
“But I hate it when you do it.” He waved his hand at her. “I love your new hair and I hate it. I think your new clothes look great, but I want you to put the old ones on.” He went for the whiskey bottle again.
A sandwich might help soak a bit of that up and she got to work, cutting thick slices of bread. Donna added cheese and sliced pickles to his bread. She opened a bag of potato chips and tipped half of them onto the plate next to the sandwich. The rest she kept for herself.
“Ashley came to see me today.” He took a bite of the sandwich.
It wasn’t exactly a surprise to Donna. She’d heard the story of Lucy leaving Richard’s house from at least three different people.
“She wants me to sign the divorce papers,” he mumbled.
“So sign them,” Donna said, and shrugged. “You both deserve to be happy and hanging on to a dead marriage is not going to do that.”
He took a bite, chewed, and swallowed.
Donna imagined his mind doing the same thing. Methodical, careful, and considered, that was her oldest son.
“I know that I am not”—he waved his hand a bit sloppily—“all in love and starry eyed about Ashley, but I married her, Ma, and that has to count for something.”
“It does, Richard.” Donna brought her tea and the rest of the chips to the table and sat opposite him. “It means a lot, but it has to mean a lot to both of you. Marriage is tough, Richard. It’s not for the faint-hearted and it’s not what you think it’s going to be when you get married, all swept up in the romance and hopeful. It takes two people to really, really want to make it work.”
“And Ashley?”
“She doesn’t want it enough. And Richard?” Here Donna had to go gently and she crunched a chip before she stepped on hallowed ground. “I think she is right.”
He drew in a sharp breath, but the whiskey must have softened him because he didn’t cut up rough at her.
“I think you both deserve more than that warmed-up friendship you called a marriage.”
“Ma,” he said, looking thunderous.
“You hardly spent any time together, Richard. You had different interests from the start.” Donna didn’t want to even speculate what their sex life had been like, but she had never seen Richard look at Ashley with one tenth of the heat he gave Lucy. Which brought Donna around to the real reason Richard was tying one on in her kitchen. “You going to talk about her?”
He tipped another measure, this one a bit smaller, into his glass. “Nope.” He shook his head mulishly. “I can’t talk about her. You would think I would have been done talking about her years ago.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I am done with Lucy.”
“You are?”
He frowned and shook his head vigorously. “I saw her with that man from Seattle tonight.”
At last, the truth started to leak out and Donna waited. “He loves her, Ma. He really, really loves her and it’s killing him that she doesn’t love him back.”
“You spoke to him?”
Richard shook his head. “I saw them, through the window. It was all over his face.”
“Ah.” Donna pushed the chips away, her appetite gone. “What does Lucy say?”
“She says she doesn’t love him. She broke up with him because she can’t love him the way he wants her to.” He laced his fingers together around the glass, but didn’t drink.
“It is not the same situation as you and Lucy.”
“I know that,” he said, and snapped back the whiskey. “I know that, but it still scares me.”
“And why is that, mon fils?”
He frowned down at his hands. “Because he was me. I saw myself on his face.”
“You saw yourself nine years ago, Richard.” Donna gently cupped his fingers between her palms. “You are not that man and Lucy is not that girl.”
He made a soft noise in the back of his throat. “Ma?”
“Yes, Richard.” It amused her how quickly the alcohol hit him.
“I don’t think I’m done with Lucy.”
“Neither do I.” Donna took a deep breath. “Neither does Josh. He could see how you looked at her that night she came to dinner.”
Richard made a rude noise and refilled his glass. “I wanted to punch Josh when he came on to her.”
“He wasn’t coming on to her.” Donna gave a weary sigh and moved the whiskey out of his reach. “Josh is a flirt. He flirts with all women. It’s his thing.”
“What is with that?” Richard demanded with a scowl.
“It’s his way of hiding how sweet and sensitive he really is. He had the misfortune to be born with the soul of a stargazer behind the face of a player. People never see how quickly he can be hurt or how much he wants to be loved. All they see is what is on the outside.”
Richard reared back in his seat and looked at her, as if he were seeing her for the first time. “Whew! That’s a bit deep, Ma.”
Donna hid her smile behind her teacup.
“What about Thomas?”
“Thomas?” Donna smiled. “Thomas is my adventurer. There is always going to be another mountain for Thomas. He grew up in the shadow of first Des and then you and Josh. Between the three of you, there is nothing that you don’t excel at. Thomas is the youngest and he is always scrambling to keep up. He always will.”
“Hmph.” He gave her that look again. The one that said he was not sure she wasn’t an alien plant after they’d abducted his real mother. “And me?”
Donna laughed out loud. “You fear the thing that you desire the most. You hate that you want it so badly. You are scared you
will get it and terrified you won’t.”
“Ah, come on,” he protested with a frown. “That’s a bit vague.”
“You want clear?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
He paused for a telling moment. “No.”
“Tell me when you are. Or better yet”—Donna poured the next shot for him—“figure it out for yourself. Before it’s too late.”
“Ma!” They both jumped as the back door thudded open. “Have you seen, Rich … there you are.” Josh blew into the room, not looking like his normal, laid-back self. “I’ve been looking for you. There is something you should see.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Lucy quit. Her phone vibrated in her hand. Twelve missed calls. The screen lit up again with another call. It was Mads and Lucy stared at it and waited for it to go to voice mail. Through the wall the soft sound of Lynne’s weeping came from the room next door. Lucy wished she could cry, but the tears were stuck somewhere in the middle of her.
The image on the computer screen burned into the back of her brain. It felt almost surreal. This was the sort of thing that happened to famous people. The e-mail, with the link, had dropped into her inbox about half an hour ago. It was one of those automatic notification e-mails, with no way to reply and no way to respond. She laughed softly. What would she say anyway? It was a little pointless to start protesting her innocence, not when the truth was there in black and white for anyone with a browser to see.
They were not bad pictures, considering how drunk Jason had been when he took them. It was not his finest work, but they were perfectly in focus and identifiable. There were only three pictures in the link. Lucy had no idea how many more there were, but she did have a vague recollection of Jason shooting spool after spool that night.
Lynne didn’t own a computer, but a friend had been kind enough to rush right over with her laptop. Lucy stared at it now. She lay sprawled across an unmade bed, her eyes vacant, dark smears of old makeup beneath them. In the pictures, she looked wasted; wasted and grubby and completely naked. The e-mail had a long list of recipients. Just about everyone she knew. Richard was on that list. She’d noticed that much before she’d got stuck on the site with the pictures.
God. She’d been so stupid to even think there might be some kind of happily ever after out there for Lucy Flint.
She pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes. Exhaustion dragged at her neck muscles until it hurt to move her head. Her cell rang again. Elliot. She let it go to voice mail. It rang again and she glanced down. Another number lit up the screen and this one she didn’t recognize at all. She let that one go the way of all the others. They would give up eventually.
Lucy stood up. She felt older than the wood floors that creaked beneath her feet. Carefully she closed the laptop. The pictures made her feel vaguely queasy.
“Lucy?” Lynne’s voice rose querulously from the room beside hers.
Lucy walked straight into the bathroom and closed the door.
Her mother’s footsteps crossed the floor toward the bathroom.
She stared at her face in the mirror, pale, tired with her mouth set in a grim line. It was the same face as the one in the pictures. Only she’d still had her short hair then. She touched the ends of her hair. Maybe she could cut it again.
“Lucy?” The handle rattled as Lynne tried to open the door.
Lucy kept staring at the face in the mirror. She had a few more lines on her face now, but all in all, not many. She probably looked better today than she had in those shots. Then, she had been partying hard and it was etched into the face in the photographs. Not that anyone would be looking at her face.
“What are we going to do, Lucy?” Lynne wailed from the other side of the door.
“I’m going out,” Lucy said. She hadn’t realized that was what she was going to do until the words came out of her mouth. And when they did, she knew that was exactly what she was going to do. She left her phone in the bedroom. She had nothing more to say.
She walked past her mother in silence. The weight of Lynne’s reproachful stare pressed into her shoulders as she descended the stairs. “Why did you do it, Lu Lu?”
Lucy snorted beneath her breath. Why had she done anything back then? She did it because it felt like a good idea at the time. She was a bad girl and she wanted the world to know it.
“Where are you going?” Lynne came halfway down the stairs toward her.
She shrugged and hauled on her coat. Lucy had no idea where she was going, just out.
“Shit.” Lucy hauled the frigid air into her lungs. It went down with claws all the way. It was so cold her eyes teared up immediately and then froze.
Lynne stood in the doorway, babbling about something, but Lucy tuned her out. It didn’t matter anyway.
She felt dead inside. There had been a brief moment, when she first followed the link, when she had felt shock and then rage. Then, it had all gone numb and she preferred it this way.
It was better this way, because nothing changed in the end. She had made all these huge life-changing decisions and done the demon confronting, but what for? What she had ended up with wasn’t peace or serenity. What she ended up with was nothing. Or worse, a dirty, smutty visual reminder of a girl you had once been. You couldn’t leave the past behind. You didn’t get to walk away from that girl.
It didn’t matter what she did.
Brooke was right. Lucy wanted to scoff at the idea of Brooke being right about anything, but there it was.
She would always be the girl in the pictures. It didn’t matter what she did on the surface, down deep there was that girl and she could never outrun her or leave her behind. She would always be Lucy the drunk, Lucy the slut, dirty, grubby Lucy looking wasted and out of it. The soul-searching, the tears, the desperation, and the shame had all come to this. It didn’t matter how much she grew or tried to change. Here in Willow Park everything was exactly the same. She was still the wild, out-of-control party girl who couldn’t be trusted and wasn’t worth shit. Hot breath formed icicles on the inside of her scarf.
She quickened her pace. The cold seeped through the toes of her cheap boots. She would need somewhere to get out of the cold.
Fucking pointless, all of it.
She’d sent Mads the link just after she’d received it. Mads had been trying to reach her ever since. Mads would only talk and talk and Lucy didn’t want to hear it. She’d said all of those things to herself and they were nothing more than platitudes.
All the times she had clung perilously to her sobriety, fighting sometimes between one heartbeat and the next not to melt into the sweet, numbing oblivion of alcohol. And for what? For this? To stare into the face of Brooke’s bitter rage? To go round and round in circles with her mother and her father? To face the sharp, searing regret that was Richard? And to come right back to where it all began—crazy Lu Lu, up to her old shit again.
Lucy stopped and breathed—first in and slowly out. She forced the hopelessness to recede slightly and she looked around her slowly, taking it all in.
Lucy had no idea how long she sat at the bar and watched the barman pour drinks for the people around her. She had been walking for so long, her feet had gone numb and she had ducked into the nearest place that offered relief from the bitter cold. Seeing where she found herself had almost made her laugh. She was like a homing pigeon.
The bar had changed, more trendy and upmarket now and none of the old faces were around. God, she’d run riot in this place. Been asked to leave more times than allowed to stay.
The barman looked at her again, silently asking what she wanted. She shook her head and he turned away again.
A body slid into place on the stool beside her.
She kept her eyes on the rows of bottles along the mirrored shelves. So many different ways to lose herself and drink away the pain. Her old friends JohnnieWalker and Smirnoff winked at her.
The man beside her smelled great, familiar.
Out of
the corner of her eye, she saw him raise a hand for the barman.
The newcomer turned on his stool.
She could feel his eyes on her face. Lucy glanced at him.
Josh Hunter looked back at her. His hair was tousled from the wind and his cheeks reddened by the cold. He nodded a greeting. He turned again when the barman returned.
The barman put two glasses of whiskey on the counter in front of them.
Lucy looked at the whiskey and looked at Josh.
Josh shrugged. “Your choice, Lucy.”
The familiar peaty scent of the liquor taunted her nose. It gleamed amber in the light from the bar. In that glass lay the path to sweet oblivion. All she had to do was reach over and take it.
Beside her, Josh raised his glass and downed it in one shot.
Lucy stared at her glass. Her hand twitched beside it, but she didn’t touch it. “You’ve seen the pictures?”
“Yup.” He motioned to the barman again. “And, in case you’re wondering, so has Richard.”
She still felt like ice inside, but a small shard broke away with a sharp jab to her chest. The glass beckoned to her. Take me, it whispered. Drink me, and it will all go away in one sweet rush of alcohol through your system.
“What are you going to do, Lucy?” Josh sipped his second whiskey. He jerked his head in the direction of her untouched glass. “I’ll stay here and get drunk with you, if you like. I’ll even carry you home when you’re done, without trying to get into your pants.”
“They’re everywhere,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and strained.
“Yup,” Josh said, nodding. “I have managed to get the domain taken down and we can get them barred, but that won’t stop all the downloads that have already happened. Or the hundred horny men who will e-mail them to their friends.”
“At what point are you going to start helping?” The glass in front of her seemed to swell in size, the heavenly smell grew stronger.
“I have already helped you.” Josh grabbed her hand from the bar and held it between his. “I’ve done what I can, Lucy, but you know what the Internet is. Once something is out there, it’s out there and we can mitigate the damage going forward, but there is no stopping this.”
