A Forever Family

by Jamie Sobrato

  There had been no escape.

  And the longer he lived here, the more this cabin became a prison of his own making, until lately, the sight of another person was enough to send him cringing into bed, his eyes shut tight, hoping they would go away. Hoping the whole goddamn world would just go away.

  And now…This.

  Emmy.

  Emmy divorced.

  Why did the universe continue to torture him in such cruel and unusual ways?

  Aidan locked the bathroom door, flicked on the light, and stared at his haggard, unshaven face in the mirror. A week’s growth of beard had given him the requisite mountain-man look, and a jagged scar across the left side of his forehead gave him what a few women had kindly called “character.”

  But all he could see was the haunted wretch he’d become.

  He should shave.

  No, that would be too obvious, like he was trying to impress Emmy. And he definitely didn’t want to impress her. No freaking way.

  Brush his hair then? Wash it?

  No. He had had it cut eight or nine months ago, and it had grown shaggy, hanging to his collar, if he’d ever bothered to wear a shirt with a collar, rather than the faded black T-shirt that had become part of his new recluse uniform.

  A recluse—one thing he’d never imagined himself becoming. He’d once been fully engaged with the world around him. Before his time in Sudan, he’d lived and breathed for human interactions.

  His hands were shaking. They did that often at odd times. Usually when he had to talk to people.

  And Emmy wasn’t just any people. She’d haunted him in her own way for all the years since he’d last seen her. He’d almost not come here, because of the memory of her, because of the summer they’d spent here in college, making love beneath the redwoods and in the cool water of Promise Lake.

  That impulse, he saw now, had been a wise one. But her father had been so insistent, and Aidan had needed a place to escape where no one would think to look for him. He’d tried living in the city, tried going about his life as if nothing had changed. But it had all felt like such a huge lie, he couldn’t stand it.

  Everything had changed. Nothing inside him was the same. He’d had his insides ripped out by what he’d seen, and what had formed inside him after was a new landscape full of horrors and nightmares. He sometimes felt like a child again, like a little boy hiding his head under the covers here in this isolated cabin, trying to pretend the bogeymen under the bed and in the closets weren’t really there, hoping they’d leave him alone until morning light chased them away.

  Unfortunately, hiding out had a disadvantage. It gave him time to remember all the real horrors. One boy’s face in particular. A child, maybe Max’s age, standing on the side of a dirt road, a dead, decapitated man at his feet. His father?

  Aidan never had a chance to ask as his vehicle rolled past. The boy’s eyes were hard, so full of hurt that there was no more room for pain, and his face was permanently seared into Aidan’s memory like so many others. They appeared to him at odd times, as he was trying to fall asleep, or as he poured milk into his coffee, and their appearances never stopped feeling like a kick in the gut.

  The horrors aside, this cabin had been a suitable hideout from the world for the past six months. People rarely even ventured down the private gravel road that led here, barring the occasional lost tourist.

  But Emmy.

  Here.

  Now.

  Divorced.

  And with a son.

  It seemed too cruel to be true. A whole new kind of horror to face.

  Any sane person would have turned tail and run out of a healthy sense of self-preservation, but it wasn’t like Aidan could really apply the term sane to himself anymore. Lately, even stepping out the back door onto the deck seized him with an anxiety attack. No way could he consider relocating now.

  Okay, so he couldn’t hide out in the damn bathroom forever. He had to go back out into the rooms with windows and risk spotting Emmy—or the kid—out there in the yard.

  This was almost too much to consider.

  But it was the lesser evil than hiding out like a coward and having to look at himself in the mirror. He had to get out of this rock-bottom rut and do something different from what he’d been doing. He wanted to get better, not worse.

  Hands still shaking, he turned the lock on the door knob, then eased the door open. To the left, the bedroom, from which he could see out to the guest cottage. Or to the right, the living room, which overlooked where their car was parked, the car they were probably unloading now.

  Through an open window came a boy’s voice calling, “Mommy, look! A red-tailed hawk!”

  He froze. His stomach pitched, and he bolted back into the bathroom and lost his lunch in the toilet.

  Crouched there on the tile floor a few minutes later, he wiped away the cold sweat on his forehead and said a silent prayer that some miracle might deliver him from this hell.

  Then he rinsed his mouth out, turned back to the door, and tried again. This time, he made it all the way into the living room before the sight of Emmy’s station wagon as he was drawing the curtains shut became too much to bear, and he had to rush to the bathroom again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There is no one face of war. There are many faces. As children playing soldier, we play with guns, we play at killing. Then there is reality, which I saw up close in Darfur. I saw that the people who suffer in war are someone’s mother, someone’s child, someone’s husband, someone’s brother.

  From Through a Soldier’s Eyes

  by Aidan Caldwell

  “THIS IS absurd.”

  Emmy caught herself clutching the phone as if it was a life preserver and she was on a sinking ship. She loosened her grip. On the other end of the line, her mother was making apologetic noises about how she’d forgotten to check with Robert about the cabin before telling Emmy it was empty.

  “It’ll be good to have a man around there. Maybe you two will pick up where you—”

  “Mother! Don’t say it.”

  “Well, you were quite the thing—”

  “Don’t. Say. It.”

  “I don’t know why you have to be so dramatic.” Anna Hawthorne had spent her life carefully not being too dramatic about anything. She was east-coast proper, she liked to say, which Emmy knew was code for “well-bred in a way these Californians I foolishly married into are not.”

  It was a tribute to Anna’s cheery sense of martyrdom that she had not packed up and gone back to Boston after her own divorce. That, and she couldn’t bear to be so far from her children and grandchildren.

  “I’m not here to find a husband,” Emmy said, leaving out the part about not ever intending to marry again.

  Ever, ever, ever.

  The pain of going through divorce—especially with a small child—was too staggering, the havoc wreaked on their lives too devastating, to go through it again. And the only way to avoid divorce, as far as Emmy could tell, was to avoid marriage.

  “In my day, a single woman was happy to find a handsome, eligible man in her life.”

  “I just got divorced two years ago. Divorced? Remember that? You went through it once upon a time.”

  Except, unlike Emmy, Anna had remarried as soon as another man had come along. She hadn’t gotten permanently jaded about romance by the loss of her marriage the way Emmy had. At times though, Emmy wasn’t sure if the failure of imagination was on her side or her mother’s. Something about Anna’s eternal optimism made Emmy feel a little like a grouch and a failure.

  “Yes, dear. And I’m sorry. I know you’re still carrying around a lot of pain. I was just hoping you could look for the roses instead of the thorns for once.”

  Emmy bit her tongue. Anna didn’t understand her oldest daughter, the most headstrong and driven of all her children, and she never had been able to relate to her the way she could to the younger two.

  “I have to go, Mom. Please ask Robert to call Aidan and tell
him he’ll have to vacate the cabin by next week.”

  After she hung up the phone and placed it on the little dinette table that occupied one corner of the tiny guest cottage, Emmy stared out the window at the cabin. Okay, so she was a coward.

  She couldn’t bear to talk to her father since discovering that her own husband was just as much an adulterer as her dad had been. The sound of his voice felt like a betrayal to her now, and accepting him again as a part of her life felt like saying that being a cheater was okay. Her mother might have gotten over his adultery and moved on, but Emmy hadn’t.

  Not for a second.

  She was a coward, but she also saw the wisdom of being kind to herself. She was too emotionally drained to deal with something as complicated as those old wounds right now.

  Not only would she not call her own father, but she wouldn’t walk across the lawn and discuss the matter with Aidan again like an adult. Not after that last encounter, which had left her filled with that odd grief of unknown origin.

  But unfortunately, coward was one word no one would ever apply to Max. She watched, her mouth dry, as he crossed the yard and knocked on the back door of the cabin. When no one answered, he simply knocked harder. And after that when no one answered, he tried the doorknob.

  Emmy hopped up in horror, reacting in slow motion, and called out his name. “Max! Leave that door alone!”

  But he couldn’t hear her, and apparently the door was unlocked, because as she hurried to their own door calling out for him to stop, he walked right into the cabin.

  AIDAN ONLY realized as he watched the back door open that he’d neglected to lock it. He sat on the bed, willing his hands to stop shaking, as the boy came in and stood in the dusty afternoon light.

  “Hi,” the kid said.

  Aidan didn’t answer. He wanted to tell the little carbon copy of Emmy to get the hell out, but even in his current state he had enough decency not to say that to a child.

  “I’m Max,” the kid said.

  Aidan said nothing as the kid stared, unblinking, at him.

  “Are you a pirate?”

  He’d been called worse things. But still he couldn’t produce any words. And the boy was starting to look a little unnerved by the silence.

  “You look like a pirate.”

  “Yeah?” Aidan managed to croak.

  “This is my grandma’s cabin. Do you know her?”

  “Yep.”

  The boy closed the door, just as his mother was calling his name from outside. And smiling mischievously, he locked it behind himself. Aidan still could not manage to loosen his throat for long enough to tell the kid to get out.

  Max crossed the room and got down on his hands and knees in front of the desk. Then he squeezed past the chair and wedged himself beneath the desk. “Shh,” he said. “Don’t tell my mom I’m under here. I’m a stowaway.”

  A stowaway? Were kids that little supposed to use words that big? He thought of his own giggling nephews, whom he hadn’t seen in months. One of them, Andrew, was about the same size as this kid. Aidan loved those boys fiercely, but he couldn’t bring himself to see his family—especially not his nephews—in his current state. He was ashamed of how pathetic he’d become, and there was no way to reconcile his inability to leave the house with the kids’ hero worship of him.

  Now he only wanted to curl up and pretend the rest of the world wasn’t still out there, vulnerable to all that pain and hurt he could never stop from happening.

  The boy was peering out at him now. “How come you don’t talk much?” he asked.

  His face was so innocent, so untouched by the hard truths of life.

  Aidan turned away from him. Emmy was knocking on the door, and he knew he would have to answer.

  “Max!” she called through the door. “Aidan? Could you please open up? My son is in there.”

  He dragged himself from the bed and across the room. He unlocked the door and jerked it open. Silently, he pointed to the desk, then turned and left the room without saying a word. He was well aware that he was behaving like a freak, which was exactly why he didn’t want people around.

  Hands shaking again and a headache beginning to pound at his temples, he slumped on the sofa in the living room and hoped like hell his unwelcome guests would vacate the house without bothering him. But it was a futile hope, because a moment later, the sound of footsteps came down the hallway.

  “I’m sorry,” Emmy said from the doorway. “Max is used to being able to come and go at will around here. I’ll make sure he knows not to come in uninvited again.”

  Aidan forced his gaze toward her. She was more beautiful than she used to be. The smooth-skinned perfection of youth had given way to something more interesting. She had laugh lines, more prominent cheekbones and a certain knowing quality in her eyes. Her dark-brown hair, that she’d always worn in a thick, glossy braid during college, was a little shorter now, hanging only to the middle of her back, parted on the side and tucked behind her ear.

  The sight of her had never failed to stop his heart short and catch his breath in his throat. She’d been his first love. His only true love. Once upon a time, he’d thought they’d be together forever.

  But over the years, the love had turned to bitterness, and then to acceptance that she was only a painful chapter of his past.

  Until now.

  “Are you okay?” she asked when he didn’t answer.

  He made his head move up and down in something resembling a nod.

  But she was still standing there, staring at him.

  “Could we at least be civil to each other while we’re stuck like this?”

  “I need to be left alone,” he finally said. “I’m writing a book.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I mean, that’s great. I’m sorry we’re bothering you.”

  And with that, she turned and left. He cursed himself for letting his gaze sweep over her retreating form, the slim torso in a stretchy white tank top and the lush curve of her hips and ass in a pair of faded jeans. He’d gone too long without a woman, and his dick instantly went hard, betraying all his neuroses. He’d always been crazy about Emmy’s body. He still could recall the details of her flesh as if it were his own.

  He wondered how age and motherhood had changed the parts of her he couldn’t see, then he cursed himself for the torturous thought.

  Aidan stared at the empty hallway where she had been, listening as she cajoled her son out the back door and shut it behind them. When they were gone, he shot up and checked each door to make sure they were locked. Then, to be safe, he checked all the windows too, shutting and locking the ones he’d had open for the breeze.

  By the time he finished, his erection was mercifully gone, but he knew if he let his thoughts stray for long, he’d be tortured all over again.

  Memories of Emmy had tormented him less and less over the years, but having her here reminded him of the future he’d lost, the different paths they’d taken.

  How the hell was he supposed to work?

  Okay, so it was absurd how little his day consisted of anymore. Him, alone at his computer, working on a manuscript that had already gone on two hundred pages too long, with no end in sight. Why had he thought it would be a good idea to write a memoir of his time in Darfur?

  Okay, the hefty advance his agent had gotten him had been a big step towards persuading him to do it. But he’d actually believed putting it all on paper would be therapeutic. So far, it had only edged him further and further away from sanity. But the book was his excuse for every eccentricity now. It was his official reason for not going anywhere, or talking to anyone, for having groceries delivered and rarely even answering his e-mail. He didn’t answer the phone normally, either, so when it rang just as he was sitting down at the computer, he let the answering machine pick up.

  “Say there, Aidan my boy,” came a baritone voice he recognized instantly as Robert Van Amsted’s. Emmy’s father, who’d treated him like his own son since they’d first met so many years ago.
He’d made it clear he always wished Emmy had had enough sense to marry Aidan instead of “that wishy-washy fool” she had married.

  “I hear there’s been a mix-up with the accommodations there, but don’t worry about it. Just want you to know you’re still welcome to stay there as long as you want. Don’t let that girl of mine bully you out of the place.”

  That girl…Aidan was no stranger to the rift between Emmy and her father. They were two headstrong people who never should have been cursed with being in the same family. Emmy had never forgiven her father for being a womanizer during his marriage to her mother, and Robert had never forgiven Emmy for being so far out of his control.

  The machine clicked off, and Aidan reached over and pressed Delete. While his hand was still near the curtain, on a whim he pushed it to the side just enough to see out, and he caught sight of Emmy bending over to examine something her son was studying on the ground, her beautiful ass right there for Aidan to admire.

  Damn it. There his fool body went again.

  WHEN HE was sure his mother was sleeping, Max crept out of his sleeping bag on the couch and went to the window. He wasn’t afraid of the dark like some other kids.

  He liked to pretend he was a cat creeping around in the darkness, hunting for prey. Well, except he didn’t like to hunt. He just liked to explore. He wished he could go outside and explore in the dark like a cat, but he knew his mom would be way too mad if he did that.

  So he watched from the window, hoping he would get to see some nighttime animal out there, maybe a possum or an owl, or even a coyote if he got real lucky. He knew all about nocturnal animals from a book he’d gotten at the library called Creatures of the Night.

  But all he could see outside were trees and stars and the almost-full moon. He looked across the yard at the cabin where the pirate was staying.

  His mom hadn’t given him any good reason for there being a pirate in his grandma’s cabin. She’d laughed when he asked about the intruder and said that he wasn’t a pirate at all, just a regular man.

  But Max didn’t think his mom would know a pirate when she saw one, and she didn’t really understand that when he called the man a pirate, it didn’t actually matter if he had a peg leg or a ship of his own. It was more interesting to imagine things than to go around believing stuff that really happened.