by Julie Cohen
The driver’s side opened and a man stepped out. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and he was Nick’s dad.
Nick didn’t have to think about it, or catalogue features to recognise him. It wasn’t the instantaneous connection he’d wondered about, either. He just knew this man was his dad as he knew that a car was a car and the sun was the sun. His dad was tall and had brown hair with some grey in it, and he reached back into the truck and pulled out a plastic carrier bag.
‘That’s him,’ Zoe said beside him. He hadn’t heard her come up but he’d known she was there anyway, in the same way that he knew who this man was.
‘Yeah.’
‘Good. I’m glad you found him. That makes this easier.’ Zoe kissed his cheek, and then stepped back. ‘Good luck, Nick. It was nice knowing you.’
She turned and walked away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT MADE SO little sense that Nick stood there for a moment as his brain stuttered. Only the sight of Zoe walking quickly away from him brought him back to life.
From his father’s driveway, he heard the truck door shut. He ran after Zoe and grabbed her shoulder, turning her around to face him.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I said good luck and it was nice knowing you. Go talk to your father, Nick, it’s what you want to do.’
‘And what are you doing?’
‘I’m going back to New York.’
He stared at her. Her jaw was set and her body was tense. Disbelief was making him numb, but already that numbness was fraying, giving way to something else.
‘You’re going back to New York and that’s all you have to say to me? Good luck? It was nice to know me?’
She pressed her lips together. ‘You’re right. I should have also said goodbye, and if you’re ever in NewYork again, give me a call.’
She tried to turn away from him again, but he didn’t let her. ‘Why?’ he asked, his voice hoarse.
‘I told you my reasons last night, remember? I’ve got a life in New York, and I like that life, and I’m going back to it.’
‘Zoe, that’s bull and you know it is.’
‘Well, it’s my bull.’ She stuck her chin out still more.
Everything he had said to her last night, everything they had shared. It had made no difference. He had had the chance to stop her from going, and he’d failed.
He held on to her shoulders tight, as if that would make up for what he hadn’t been able to do.
‘And nothing we did together made any difference at all? Not even last night? That meant nothing to you?’
She jerked her shoulders under his hands. ‘Nick, let me go.’
‘Answer me, Zoe.’
‘Nick, if you don’t let me go, I can force you to do it, and that’s not going to be fun for either of us.’
She had that ‘don’t-mess’ edge in her voice. Nick took his hands off her.
‘Thank you.’ She turned around and started walking off again.
He most definitely wasn’t numb now. Anger flared in him, and he ran past her and stood in front of her, his hands on his hips, his legs spread wide, blocking her way.
‘You’re lying,’ he said.
‘You can believe what you want, Nick, but I’m going home. Let me by.’
‘I know what this is really about. It’s you. You’re doing the same thing you always do, pushing people away, pushing me away, because you’re scared to trust anybody or open up.’
She shrugged. She was meeting his eyes now, but he couldn’t see any emotion there. Her blankness made him even madder.
‘You’re running away,’ he said fiercely. ‘You said you wanted to make other people’s lives better but you can’t even take a risk for yourself. You think you’re tough, Zoe, but you’re not. Strong people don’t run away. Only cowards.’
This time, there was some emotion. Her eyes narrowed and her face got harder.
‘Congratulations, Nick,’ she said. ‘You finally got it. I’m a screw-up. Now goodbye.’
She stepped off the path, into the undergrowth, trying to walk around him.
‘You don’t care about anything except for your own safe life,’ Nick threw at her, beyond furious, not thinking about what he was saying. ‘You don’t care what your great-aunt wanted for you or how your parents feel about you or about taking any responsibility. You don’t even care that I love you.’
Zoe stopped dead still and Nick realised what he had said at the same time he saw all the blood drain from her face.
He put his hand to his forehead and felt how his own skin was hot.
He loved her. He’d meant it.
‘No,’ she said, and her lips were nearly as white as her cheeks. ‘You’re right. I don’t care.’
He couldn’t say anything else. Her words were a sucker punch in the gut. He stared at her and she looked back at him with that maddening, impenetrable defiance.
Faintly, from the end of the path, he heard a car door slam and the sound of his father’s truck starting up again.
‘Go see your father,’ Zoe said. ‘He’s the person you’re really looking for.’
She kicked through a wad of leaves that stood in her way and walked past him and away. Again.
Finally and for ever.
Nick turned and ran back towards the noise of the truck. His blood pounded in his head. His father, he could get through to. His father had abandoned his family. His father was wrong and his father, unlike Zoe, owed him love because his father had created him.
Zoe had only changed him.
He burst into the clearing and ran towards the truck, words warring in his head, the words he’d thought about saying to his father for years.
A real man doesn’t walk out on his family. A real man wouldn’t let his wife and children scrape for money and live on their own. A real man takes care of the people he’s committed to. He loves them and protects them no matter what.
I called her a coward.
Nick stopped running, because all of his energy seemed to have suddenly drained away. He stood on the driveway, pulled forward, pulled back, as unable to move by himself as a rooted oak.
The truck had been backing up but it braked. Nick heard the ignition switch off. The door opened and his father stepped down from the cab.
‘Hi, Nicky,’ said Eric Giroux.
Nick hadn’t heard the pet name since he’d been a boy. He watched his father walking towards him and saw a faint limp, a weather-beaten face, more signs of time.
None of his rehearsed words came to him. His anger seemed to be lying in pieces at his feet, leaving him hollow.
‘Nick,’ he said finally. ‘I’m called Nick now, Dad.’
‘Oh. Yeah.’ Eric stopped in front of Nick. He started to put out his hand, and then seemingly thought better of it and dropped it. Nick didn’t make a move to touch him. A hug was too intimate, a handshake too distant for this man who had held him as a baby and taught him to fish and disappeared.
Eric was a little shorter than Nick and more wiry. He nodded quickly once, his eyes casting around, and Nick could see how awkward he felt.
‘I stopped at your house,’ Eric said. ‘Your sister says you were out looking for me.’
‘I went to New York,’ Nick said, and the pain that shot through him was almost unbelievable because he’d found Zoe in New York. He closed his eyes and said the first thing to distract him from the hurt. ‘Why’d you write to me, Dad?’
‘Well, I got talking to the lady I work for yonder,’ Eric began, and Nick opened his eyes.
‘Xenia Drake?’
‘Ayuh. I been working for her for years, and we got talking. She asked me if I had kids and she has a way, you know, of drawing you out. I told her about you and Kitty and she said she had this niece who was special, and she got to talking about her will and it made me think, you know.’ He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans, an action that made him seem smaller. ‘I never saw you for so many years but I heard about what you bee
n doing, a ranger here on the island, and I’m real proud. Real proud.’
For a second he met Nick’s eyes, and then he shifted his gaze back to the trees behind him. Nick felt as if he’d been given a gift he hadn’t expected and didn’t know what to do with.
‘So I wrote a letter and asked Miss Drake to mail it for me somewhere. I didn’t want to mail it from Southwest Harbour, because I didn’t want you to feel you had to, you know, come visit if you didn’t want to.’
‘Xenia told you about Zoe and that made you decide to write to me,’ Nick said, and Eric nodded.
Zoe and his father, each leading him towards the other without even knowing it. And now Zoe was driving away. Down Seal Cove Road, back onto Route 3, onto the mainland and towards the south.
And now he had his father. Except this man wasn’t the man he’d wanted all these years. He was a familiar stranger, someone Nick couldn’t even be angry with.
Zoe was everything he wanted even though he’d never known it, and the last words he’d said to her had been in anger. He’d even told her he loved her in anger.
He remembered the darkness of the bedroom last night, how she’d asked him if he’d ever been in love. At the time he’d taken it at face value, as a question about his past, not thinking about why she’d asked.
He hadn’t known yet that she was the answer. He’d thought she was going to stay.
‘Why’d you leave?’ he burst out, and, though that was the question he’d been waiting so long to ask, he didn’t want the answer from this man in front of him. But Eric Giroux was the only person he had to ask, any more.
Eric’s work boots shuffled in the dirt. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just left, I guess. It was easier alone. And then it was too late to go back.’
Nick looked at his father, really looked at him. Not to see how he’d changed from sixteen years ago, not to look for resemblances or memories. Just to see who he was: a middle-aged man, strong in body, uncomfortable with words, who had made a decision, maybe a mistake, half a lifetime ago and had been alone ever since.
Nick’s feet and mind came unstuck and the hollowness inside him filled with urgency. She was going. She might be gone already.
‘I’m in love with a woman,’ Nick said, ‘and I’ve got to go find her.’
He was starting to run for the path even before he registered Eric’s, ‘Oh, ayuh.’
But the voice stopped him. There was something defeated in his father, something, in all his thoughts about him, Nick had never imagined would be there.
Nick ran back to his father, and put his hand on his shoulder. The gesture of companionship, a man to another man.
‘I’ll be back,’ Nick told him, and then he was sprinting.
She couldn’t open the garage door.
It wasn’t heavy. She’d opened it earlier this morning. But her arms wouldn’t work and her breath wouldn’t come and she could barely see anything because any minute now she was going to erupt into big girly tears.
Dear God, she thought. He loves me.
Even last night when she’d been caught up in her for ever fantasies, she hadn’t thought that she’d be able to believe it. Not that he really could love her. But the way he’d said it, angrily as part of his accusations. Everything else had been the truth and so she knew that this was the truth, too.
He loved her and she loved him and she’d known it even while she’d walked away from him. Because she was too scared to stay.
And now she was too scared to leave.
‘Damn,’ she said, and dropped the keys to the four-by-four on the ground.
Her tears started to fall as soon as she was back on the path towards Eric Giroux’s house. She ran ahead, letting them fall without wiping them from her eyes.
She recognised Nick running towards her from the way he moved and from the way she felt. Zoe didn’t pause in her running or her crying. She went straight into his arms and buried her face in his shirt and breathed him in deep, through sobs.
He held her tight. ‘I thought you’d be gone,’ he said into her hair.
‘I couldn’t,’ she said, and then lifted her head so she could look him in the eyes. Her face was smeared with tears and her nose and eyes were probably red and swollen and she did not care.
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t go because I love you and I’ve loved you since the minute I first saw you.’
‘Zoe.’ He squeezed her so tight she could barely breathe, and kissed her hair, her forehead, in between words. ‘I’m sorry I said those things to you. I didn’t mean them. I was angry and hurt. You’re not a coward. You’re the strongest, most wonderful woman I know.’
‘I am a coward.’
He stopped kissing her and looked her in the face. Her nose was running, but she didn’t want to take her hands off him so she sniffed before she spoke.
‘If I were strong, I would have gone. I’ll lose myself if I stay with you, Nick. That’s why I was leaving. I’ll rely on you and I’ll live in your world and I’ll never be independent again. I’ve been fighting against it ever since I met you.’
She sniffed again. ‘But I can’t fight any more. It hurts too much.’ She pressed her head back against his chest and listened to his heartbeat and the air pumping in and out of his lungs. His arms around her felt like something she’d been waiting her whole life for. They were something she’d been waiting her whole life for.
‘Zoe,’ he said again, and he raised her chin with one of his hands. ‘This isn’t my world. It’s ours. Remember last night, you and me and the stars?’
‘Don’t forget the raccoons.’
‘I was running back here to you and if you’d been gone, I was going to get in my truck and drive after you all the way to New York and set up my tent outside your door if I had to and wait for you to talk to me. I’ll go to your world if you want, Zoe. It doesn’t matter to me. You’re the important thing.’
‘But you hate New York.’
‘And you love Maine. But I don’t care, if you want to be stubborn I can be stubborn, too. I’ll wait you out, Zoe Drake. Because I want to rely on you just as much as you want to rely on me, and if you can’t see that you really are an idiot.’
He wiped the tears from her eyes with his gentle hand. It was a protective gesture, but it didn’t make her feel weak. It made her feel loved. She remembered curling around him at night, stroking his hair.
‘I’ll even do step aerobics,’ he said, and at that she couldn’t help a smile.
‘We are going to drive each other crazy,’ she said.
‘But making up is going to be great.’
He kissed her and she kissed him back and in the solid reality of his embrace she began to see how they could be equals in passion, equals in love, equals in everything. Together.
‘I love you, Zoe,’ he said when they parted.
‘I love you, Nick.’
‘Please stay.’
She nodded. ‘I’ll try it.’
They shared a smile and Zoe could not remember ever feeling so happy in her life.
‘Let’s live in Xenia’s house,’ she said.
His extra squeeze and kiss let her know that he liked the idea. ‘My father will be our neighbour.’
She furrowed her brow. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Nick. I wanted to be there when you met him.’
‘I wanted you to be there, too. But you will.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He’s all right.’ Nick threaded his fingers with hers. ‘Come on. Let’s go meet him.’
ISBN: 978-1-4268-1313-9
HIS FOR THE TAKING
First North American Publication 2008.
Copyright © 2007 by Julie Cohen.
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rbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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