She wanted to put her arms around him, tell him that he had succeeded, become the man he wanted to see in the mirror – but somehow he divined her intention, and he put up a warning hand.
“Something else about that time, Laura. I’d been an agnostic for years. I got fed up with my mother’s piety in my teens. I’d see her with her rosary and her novenas, going to confession every Saturday afternoon, and it all seemed like so much claptrap to me, it seemed absurd that someone as good as she was had to worry all the time about her salvation. I remember one time I lectured you about how you couldn’t prove that God was even there, and you just blinked at me, because you were like her, you never lacked faith. Well—” he gave a short laugh— “God might have gone on vacation, but when I needed help, He came back fast enough. That’s when I learned what true charity was – that gift of mercy, wiping the slate clean, no matter what you’ve done, it’s not irretrievable. You’re not irretrievable. And I found out – it took a while – if you truly believe that God has forgiven you, you’d better learn to forgive yourself.”
Laura stared at him. “You went to church this morning,” she whispered.
He gave her a smile. “I went to Eucharist. I go every week. I never miss.”
Her hand went to her mouth. She couldn’t stop staring at him.
“I guess years of listening to Mom worry about my going to hell rubbed off. I started going to church with my father, and I joined a men’s study group – that’s where I met Tom – and I found—” He paused. “Truth. Answers. Peace. All the things that a rationalist can find once you lay down pride at the foot of the cross. All the things that came so naturally to you and Mom. It took the worst moral failure of my life for me to get past my empiricism.”
That boy, so sure of himself and his intellect. It must have indeed come as a shock to him, this crisis of self and identity and faith. He had never doubted himself before.
“One day – I looked in the mirror, and I had a sense of integrity back. I felt better – I’d flunked the big test in life, but I’d pulled myself back together, and I was,” he sounded ironic, “pretty damn proud of myself. And Diana was sliding badly, she was drinking heavily, and we were so alienated from each other, I wasn’t even interested in helping her. I just wanted her out of my life. I didn’t want any reminders of what had happened. She tried once to patch things up, and I rejected her out of hand. I was back on my moral high horse, because at least I’d faced my demons, but she hadn’t undergone the spiritual transformation I had. I told myself I’d forgiven her, but I felt justified in never trusting her again. I wasn’t about to wipe the slate clean for her.”
She wanted to tell him that he hadn’t flunked the test, that the real test was how he had dealt with failure – but he wasn’t finished.
“Sorry, I know I am going on too long, but you need to know this. You have a decision to make after I finish, so you need to hear it all. About three years later, Diana and I had one last huge blowup – an appalling scene, you cannot believe, I don’t think either of us ever behaved so badly in our lives – and I threw her out. I was full of righteousness at that point; she’d strayed off the straight and narrow, while I had remained faithful, and I didn’t consider that she deserved any of the forgiveness I’d claimed for myself – anyway, we separated, and I filed for legal custody of Julie.”
Was he going to tell her about the custody fight? Tell her the truth about Julie?
“Then Francie came back,” and she stiffened in shock. “I know you know, Laura, you said as much the night you came back. She called me from Ash Marine, and I went running out there to tell her as gently as possible to stay the hell out of my life. I had left her behind, it was time for her to move on and forget me – oh, I had a whole speech to give her. I was on my high horse about her too. This time, I was going to do the honest and decent thing. And I saw her, and – well, suffice it to say within minutes we were going at each other.”
She couldn’t breathe. Tight bands had wrapped around her lungs.
“I hadn’t been with a woman in three years. I was starved for physical love – I have no idea if you know what that feels like, Lucy says women have the same hungers men do, they just don’t dwell on them as much. That may be true, I don’t know. I was in my mid twenties, and in seven years of marriage, I’d had one good year with my wife and six years of near-total abstinence. I have a normal sexual appetite. I touched Francie, and it was like going up in flames.” He heard his own words and winced. “Not the best way to put it. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. She couldn’t speak. He still thought he’d seen Francie on the island.
“It’s hard to know what metaphors I can use with you, although,” he showed a gleam of humor, “I noticed you teased me about skyscrapers last night, and it didn’t seem to bother you. You’ll have to tell me if I say something that upsets you.”
She forced out, “Don’t worry about that.”
He resumed his story. “So we were together, and then afterwards it turned – never mind, suffice it to say that the row I had with her cast the time in the park with Diana in the shade. I lost my temper, and Francie lost hers, and we behaved unforgivably towards each other.”
He wasn’t going to tell her. She wasn’t to know that he had goaded Francie with the threat of losing her child. She wasn’t to know that Francie, in retaliation, had picked up a gun and shot him.
“That’s the last time I ever saw her. But – it didn’t take long for all the guilt and self-loathing to descend again. I’d fallen off my pedestal again, and this time I had hurt a young woman that I cared about deeply. It wasn’t like hurting Diana, who gave just as good as she got. Francie was so much more vulnerable, and I had been cruel beyond belief to her. I had driven her flat crazy. So now I had to look in the mirror and square that in myself.”
She felt sick. She’d spent so many years trying not to remember Ash Marine – there be dragons – that she had never thought beyond the physical damage she had inflicted. She had never thought that he might struggle with guilt about the way he had behaved towards her – because she had never realized that he might feel guilty over Francie. She had loved Richard Ashmore, and she hadn’t known him at all.
“How long did it take that time to come back?” she asked.
He smiled at her; he knew she understood what he had been trying to tell her. “Not as long this time – a year or so. I had a lot to keep myself busy. I was a single father, I’d gotten my license as a registered architect so I got assigned more challenging projects, I started working on the Folly – and I kept going to church. I learned to accept myself as a flawed individual who was going to fall, and I learned to repent and ask for forgiveness and start anew.” He stopped. “At some point,” he said, “you know you’re going to make it.”
She watched him with wet eyes as he came back and sat down opposite her.
“That’s it for Francie,” he said. “I never saw her again. But I had finally learned one thing, and it’s that I am a fool when it comes to women. I had made three monumental mistakes, and I had screwed up any hope I had of a normal life. And, honestly, that’s all I ever wanted. I never wanted to sow my wild oats, sampling women like a buffet; I didn’t consider that part of being a man. I wanted to be like my father. By the time I was twenty-six, that was all gone.”
“Oh, Richard.” She looked away, blinking away tears. “You should have had what you wanted.”
“Instead,” said Richard, and his voice had started to strain from talking, “I knew that I was going to be by myself until Julie was old enough that Diana couldn’t take her. I’m sure,” he cocked an eyebrow at her, “you’ve heard Lucy’s theories about why we never divorced, and it’s true that I didn’t want to risk another down-and-dirty custody fight. So you can see my dilemma – how to build a decent life as Julie’s father and balance that with my own needs. I needed to matter in a woman’s life, and have her matter in mine, and when you have to tell a woman up front that you are
not getting a divorce, that is not easy. Most women aren’t interested.”
She said hoarsely, “But some were.”
He nodded. “Three, after Diana left. Two were shorter relationships – very nice women, both of them were getting over bad marriages, and I made a pleasant stopgap. I treated them well, and they treated me well. I made it crystal clear from the beginning that there was no hope of anything else, and everything ended gracefully and with no recriminations on either side.”
He paused. “The third – well, Jennifer was a different story. I met her when Julie was ten. It lasted three years, and that was the only time that I seriously considered divorce. She wanted me to, Lord knows we talked the subject to death. I put all my usual restrictions on her – she was part of my private life, and that meant no meeting Julie or my parents, no coming to the house, no socializing near home. She lived in Richmond then, and we saw each other there most weekends. After a year or so, she was chafing at that. She wanted to be an official part of my life. She wanted us to get married and have children and be a family, and I don’t blame her for that.” He ruminated. “By year two, we were in trouble. I had to weigh my genuine affection for Jennifer against the need to keep Julie safe, and the problem was – that’s all it was, genuine affection. It simply wasn’t enough to outweigh the risk to my daughter.”
He lifted his hands briefly. “So we limped along for another year, and she grew increasingly impatient, and I grew increasingly tired of being on the defensive, and we enjoyed being together less and less. Then came the ultimatum, and I told her no. She went off with a girlfriend on a cruise, and when she came back, she told me it was over. She’d met someone else. She married him two months later.”
“Oh, Richard.” Her natural compassion bubbled up. No matter how glad she was that Jennifer was out of his life, she ached for him. “I am so glad she was there for you.”
He leaned back against the rough wall, and now his gaze was level upon her.
“Your turn, Laura. You have a decision to make. I’ve told you everything, I’ve told you things I planned to take to my grave with me – this is who I am now. Francie is part of my life, she is part of who I was and who I’ve become. I failed with her, she was a terrible mistake, but – strange to say, she ended up making me a better man. I cannot go back and undo the past, so – Laura—” And his voice was straight and uncompromising, and she could not look away from him.
“Yes?” Her voice was shaking.
“You have to decide if you can live with that. You have to decide if you can accept me for who and what I am, even though that includes Francie. You have to decide if you can forgive me for her.”
His gaze bored in on her.
“I am not going to put up with your jealousy. I can’t deal with you still mourning that she was there that night and you weren’t. If you are going to let Francie eat at you, then let’s call it quits right now and go our separate ways.” In her horror, she saw a muscle pull at his mouth. He said quietly, “I can’t deal with another scene like today. It’s up to you.”
She sat there rigid, unable to move, her heart beating painfully within her. He was watching her carefully, intensely, waiting for her answer; he was no longer the man whose eyes had glowed at the sight of her the night before. She had come up against a wall.
She had wrecked it all because she, not he, was still stuck in the past.
She had thought she would destroy the world for him, and instead, she had destroyed the promise that lay between them. It might not have been love – he might never have fallen in love with her – but, she thought numbly, he had seen in her his last best hope for the life he’d wanted and been denied.
She didn’t have to ask if he had ever told Jennifer about Francie. She knew he had remained silent. He had kept Francie between himself and God.
But, in one morning, he had laid himself right out for her. This man who kept his inner self private and isolated had trusted her enough to let her in.
And she was going to destroy it all because she still had Francie’s voice in her head.
“Well,” he said briskly, “I guess that’s that.” He started to rise. “Are you ready to go?”
Laura found her voice, shaking, rough. “Sit down, Richard, don’t – you – dare – move.”
He stilled and watched her warily.
She rose and crossed the pavilion, and sank to her knees before him. She took his hand, tightly clenched on the arm of the chair, she coaxed his fingers open so that they touched palm to palm, and she kissed his fingertips. The floor was brutal against her knees, every muscle was going to ache later, and she didn’t care. That didn’t matter.
She made herself meet his eyes, and maybe he saw the desperation in her face. She felt like a swimmer drowning, with no strength left, turning to try to make it to shore.
“I’m still seventeen inside,” she said. “I know that’s stupid, I know I’ve gone beyond that. But still – I feel like that girl. I know it’s a cliché, but that girl was always on the outside, looking in, pressing her nose against the bakery window, and honestly – I still feel like that.”
She looked down, and drew in a long painful breath.
“That’s how I felt about you and Francie. I was outside looking in at you both. For fourteen years, I’ve been that girl. I’ve been the loser. That’s how I always saw myself. The loser. I think – sometimes I think that I made up Cat Courtney because she was a winner like Francie, she had all Francie’s passion and fire, and at least when I was Cat, I could be that girl with you.”
She caught the bare shake of his head. “No,” he said. “I never saw Cat in Francie, not once.”
“You should have,” her voice was high-pitched and frightened. “You made love with Cat the last two nights. I faked it, Richard, I was a fraud. You thought you were with me – and you wanted to be, didn’t you, you said so – and instead,” her voice caught in a sob, “that was Cat – I was failing again, and Cat wouldn’t fail, she never fails, she wins, and I – I just stepped right out of myself and she took over.”
“So that’s it.” She heard an element of interest in his voice, but she couldn’t see him. Her eyes were awash with unspilled tears.
“And you know why?” she demanded. “It’s because I’m still seventeen! I’m still trying to get your attention from when I was seventeen! I’m still trying to win that boy you used to be. And that’s so stupid, I’m so stupid, I’m a grown woman, and I don’t even like boys anymore. That girl and that boy – and Francie – they don’t matter, they no longer exist.”
She looked at him, and now she felt no fear. She was rolling the dice, and maybe she was going to lose everything. Maybe he was going to walk away from her, and this time he would not come back. She trusted herself. She had never done anything so right in her life.
“I’m a woman now. I’m not a girl,” she said clearly, “and I don’t want that boy. He is not enough for me anymore. I want – I want you, Richard, I want the man you are now, nicks on his soul, banged-up heart, and all. I want the man who can admit he was dead wrong. I want the man who’s failed and fallen and screwed up, who knows how to pick up again and go on living, because he can forgive me if I fail and fall and screw up. And if Francie helped make you that way, well, then,” her voice shook with tears, “I guess I am in her debt.”
She scrambled to her feet and looked down at him. “Back there at the house,” she said, “I saw those silly girls making up to you, and I saw myself trying to get your attention all over again and failing, and I saw Francie again, winning. I was irritated with the others talking to you, and that was selfish, I know, but the girls – they got to me. They got to that girl who’s still inside me. So I did just what you said I did, I flattened them, and it wasn’t a fair fight.”
“Not even close. They were outclassed, and you let everyone know it.”
“And if Francie had been there, hanging all over you,” Laura said, “you know what?” She stared down at him, her brea
th rising and falling hard. “I would have flattened her too.”
He looked at her silently for a long moment, and then he rose, and his arms went around her very gently. “Francie,” he said, “wouldn’t have known what hit her.”
She breathed a sigh of relief, tension spilling from her, and her arms went around his waist, but her voice was fierce. “You’re mine,” she said. “Don’t you forget it, Richard Ashmore. Diana may have been dumb enough to blow it with you, and Jennifer settled for second best, and Francie gave up without a fight, but I won’t. I am serving notice on you and any woman who looks at you and thinks, ‘Hmmm, I’d like that’ – I will sweep her out of the way, I will fight for you, I will not let you go, I will not lose.”
He framed her face in his hands, his long fingers warm against her temples, and he kissed her then, and this was not the lover’s kiss of the night before. His kiss did not seduce, did not explore. He kissed her, fellow survivor of a life-and-death battle, he kissed her, banged-up heart to banged-up heart, and she kissed him right back.
When they parted, they stared at each other for a long time. Her face was heated, she could feel it, and her heart beat so hard so that she was sure he could hear it. Underneath his tan, she saw a flush on his cheekbones, and he was breathing as hard as she was.
She saw in him the same recognition she felt, that they had breached a point of no return. There was no going back now.
“My God – you have the heart of a warrior,” and his eyes were alight. “If we had a door—”
“I don’t mind,” said Laura immediately, before her nerve started to fade. “No one’s around.”
“Three people came by a while ago and left when they saw us in here. Besides, that’s a hard floor, and you bruise too easily.” He leaned against the wall, and pulled her close against him. “Come here, my lady. We need to cool down. I can’t go out in public right now.”
She laughed up at him, giddy with relief. “And standing like this is going to help?”
“No, but it doesn’t hurt either.” He looked down at her. “How, Laura, how did you ever hide this from us – this lioness?”
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 55
