Max slowly approached her. “You told Alice you suffered from postpartum and term depression.”
She lifted her chin and found the courage to say, “I was pregnant when I left.”
Patrick staggered backward and Gabe was there to help him find a chair, urging him to take deep breaths.
“You have another son,” she told her husband. “Jonah. He’s thirty and he asked me not to tell you.”
Patrick’s thick shoulders heaved with racking sobs and she stood, desperate to be near him. But Max, her warrior son, got in her way.
“You should go back to your room,” he told her, his eyes obsidian with rage. “You’ve done enough.”
He turned then, standing side by side with his brother to protect their father—a unit. A family she had no place in.
The tears she’d controlled until now slipped down her cheeks, hot with regret, burning her.
And, as she’d done before, she left because she thought it was the right thing, because she thought they’d be better off without her.
13
The lodge was silent. Dad was in his room. Gabe and Alice were in their room. Alice had taken the news about their unknown brother hard and Gabe was trying to keep her relaxed and calm. The last time Max had seen him, Gabe looked torn, pale and scattered.
And Max couldn’t stop pacing.
He strode from the bar to the front door to the big window. He gazed out at the clearing, at cabin four with its front window aglow.
Mom.
He couldn’t even think the word without his lip curling, his eyes narrowing.
A creak on the stairs spun him around, Delia’s name on his tongue, but it was nothing. The shadows at the top of the stairs didn’t change. No fiery woman emerged, calm and knowing. The lodge just settled into its foundation.
He rubbed his forehead and tried to gather himself, tried to find some task that needed doing, some work to empty his mind. He couldn’t. He felt raw and naked.
He paced and wished Delia was here. He wanted to talk to her, feel her hand on his, listen to her say something calm and smart that would actually make him feel better. That would anchor him in this new world.
He turned to continue his circuit to the window and came face-to-face with Sheila. They stared at each other across five feet like soldiers on opposing sides.
“Are you checking out?” he asked.
She shook her head. “We’re booked in for two weeks. Iris wants to stay.”
“She can stay,” he said, “but she’s not welcome.”
Sheila tilted her head and smiled sadly. “You think she doesn’t know that?”
Guilt reared its unwanted head.
“What she’s done to us is inexcusable,” he said, trying to beat back that guilt.
“She knows that, too.” Sheila sighed and tucked her hands in the back pockets of her pants. “But I want to tell you what she won’t.”
Max wished he could kick her out, send her on her way, but he wanted to hear this. He wanted to make sense of what Iris had done, as stupid as that was. He and his brother and father had lived with a lot of blanks over the years and now was the chance to fill them. To complete some of what he’d never thought would be completed.
“Your mother arrived in Arizona a mess,” she said, and Max was arrested by the woman’s tone and her sympathetic, knowing eyes. “She was terrified, depressed. She had uncontrollable impulses to hurt herself and the baby she was pregnant with. So, I got her on some medication that helped and—” Sheila bit her lip then smiled “—what a change. What a woman she was. Bright and funny and a fighter. She was fierce in her opinions and her decisions. But with the letters from your father, that woman started disappearing. And in her place was a shadow. A fighter who didn’t fight. She had Jonah and part of her was reborn, but she was never the same.”
Max swallowed and turned to look out the window. He could practically feel his mother’s pain reaching out to him, through the glass and cold air.
“I’m glad she found you,” he said and, oddly, felt better for saying it.
“You remind me so much of her,” Sheila said. “After she got those letters from your dad, when Jonah was a baby.”
“A fighter who isn’t fighting?” he said.
It was him exactly.
He blinked up at the ceiling, trying to make sense of what he felt. Things were moving in him, giant tsunamis of emotion and a longing to not be who he was right now. Stuck waiting for the universe to push him around, trying not to care, trying not to live.
“She’s in our cabin doing the same thing you are,” Sheila said. “And you have every reason to be angry with her. To not like her, but don’t doubt for a minute that she didn’t suffer those years, too.”
There was nothing he could say, so he stayed quiet, wondering who he was, right now. This moment. He heard Sheila leave, felt the draft of cold air across his neck before the door shut and the room was silent again.
His mother was clearly choosing to fight for them, finally.
But what did he want to fight for?
He looked up the steps, to the shadows at the top and thought of Delia and Josie.
You know where to find me, she’d said, giving him every indication that these startling feelings he had for her, this connection he felt, was reciprocated.
You know where to find me.
He did. And he couldn’t wait any longer.
He took the stairs two at a time, unsure that was the right thing to do, only knowing he needed to do it.
He knocked quietly on the door, aware of the time and the young girl possibly asleep in the room. He heard sounds of the television turned low. The door opened and in the crack of the door was Delia.
Her trim body was lit by the lamplight behind her. He could see the yellow trail of the bruises around her neck just over the edge of the gray turtleneck she’d worn a few times since being here.
He wondered, idly, what she usually wore when not covering bruises. The boy in him hoped it was low cut and that someday he’d get a chance to see it.
Then he noticed that her hair was piled on her head in some haphazard hairstyle and her eyes were red-rimmed, as if she’d been crying.
“Delia?” he asked, bracing one hand on the door. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, her sparkle, her glow and light gone. “How are you? Everything okay with your mom?”
Something was not right.
“Fine,” he said, his mind already forgetting that problem and pulling toward whatever had upset Delia. “Why are you crying?”
She bit her lip. “Josie’s asleep, Max. I need to go.”
Delia tried to shut the door but he stopped it, his hand splayed flat. “What’s changed?” he murmured, confused and suddenly worried, deep in his gut. Finally, her eyes met his and the pain there mirrored his own. For a moment there was no one in the world but them. No mother, no unknown brother, no bereaved father. No one but her.
“Nothing’s changed, Max,” she whispered. “That’s the problem.”
Then the door shut in his face.
It’s late, he told himself, trying to close the yawning hole opening up in his chest. It’s been an intense day. Tomorrow we’ll be able to talk. Tomorrow everything will be okay.
The next morning, exhausted and on edge, Max stared at the cold coffeepot as if it had punched him and insulted his father.
“Is it too much to ask for one cup of coffee!” he yelled to a totally empty room, hoping someone was around who had a working relationship with the coffeemaker.
“We’re in here,” Alice called out and he quickly found her and Gabe in the dining room, sitting on the couch in front of the cold fireplace. They both wore black. Alice’s sweater stretched taut over the mound of her belly.
Everyone was so damn morose. It was a funeral in every room.
“Hey,” he said, slapping his brother on the back, before sitting in the chair beside the couch.
“How are you doing?
” Alice asked, looking wan.
Gabe looked the same, as if he’d spent a long night staring at the ceiling, just as Max had.
“All right,” Max said. “Have you talked to Dad?”
“Briefly, last night.” Gabe sighed. “He’s better.”
Alice reached over and stroked Gabe’s face and neck, a comforting partner in these grim days. Max suddenly felt more alone than he’d ever felt.
He felt the kind of alone he had wanted to feel weeks ago.
Before Delia and Josie showed up. Before Iris.
Before he had started to smile and laugh again, before he remembered what happy felt like.
“What about Iris?” Max asked, unable to say mother.
“Their car is still here,” Alice said. “So, she must be in her cabin.”
“I’m tempted to go over there and haul her out,” Gabe snarled.
“I think we should give her a chance,” Max said, surprising all of them.
“What?” Gabe asked. “Are you kidding?”
“I’m not saying we should forgive her, but—” he shrugged “—I don’t think she wanted to hurt us. I don’t think she’s a cruel person, I think she did the best she could.”
Gabe and Alice blinked at him, stunned.
“That’s my opinion,” he said, and luckily the phone rang and Gabe picked up the extension on the end of the bar.
“Riverview Inn,” he said. “Hello?” He paused. “Hello?”
Finally he hung up. “That’s the second hang-up today. But word’s gotten out in town that there is a massage therapist here. Delia’s whole day is booked. Even Daphne is coming.”
Max wanted to ask about Delia, but he wasn’t ready for their questions and sideways looks.
Why? Why her? Why now?
He didn’t have any answers. He felt something for her that he had never felt before. Something past the overwhelming need he’d had to protect Nell, and the infatuations and lust he had experienced in his twenties.
Delia had lied to him, was avoiding him, had pushed and bullied him into doing things he didn’t want to do and yet, he liked her.
Liked her, liked her.
Despite that shut door in his face, which he was sure she would explain when they saw each other. Maybe she felt as awkward as he did, as up in the air and vaguely embarrassed by this connection they felt.
She, after all, had to try and explain the situation to a little girl.
“Have you seen Delia?” Max finally asked, feeling an utterly inappropriate grin crease his face. Gabe and Alice’s faces both turned angry.
“She’s still here. For the moment,” Alice said.
“What do you mean?”
Alice reached over and grabbed his hand. “You should talk to her.”
He nearly rolled his eyes. Did everything have to be so hard?
“Why don’t you just talk to me,” he urged.
Alice and Gabe shared a quick look and Gabe shrugged, giving Alice the go-ahead to say whatever she thought she knew and Max felt again that door in his face, the strange and unwelcome certainty that that was the answer to his questions about Delia.
“She told me that she wasn’t planning on staying past January,” Alice said. “She never told any of us the truth.”
He absorbed that like a blow to the stomach. “When did she say that?”
“In the kitchen yesterday, when you guys went to talk to your father and Iris.”
A wave of numbness washed over his body as he remembered her telling him she was here for a fresh start.
It hurt. Not that she’d lied—that wasn’t surprising. He’d come to expect that. He didn’t even know her real last name, for crying out loud. What hurt, like a thousand pinpricks to his heart, was how much he’d wanted to believe her, to give her that fresh start.
He stood, suddenly needing to be outside, to find the lonely place inside of himself that didn’t ache and itch with all that he wanted. And couldn’t have.
“Max,” Gabe said, grabbing his hand as he walked past him, but Max shook it off, the touch feeling like barbed wire.
“I’m so sorry,” Gabe said. “We liked her, too.”
“Come get me when Dad comes out of his room,” Max said, and headed out the door to the peace of his clearing.
What a fool, he told himself, breathing deep of the cold air, hoping to get enough in his lungs that his chest might freeze up and he’d feel nothing.
Both of them were fools.
He remembered her eyes two nights ago, her whispered sighs on the bar, the touch of her lips against his in the clearing as she convinced him to confront his past.
She felt something for him, too.
She just wasn’t going to fight for it.
Story of my life, he thought bitterly.
Sadly, the peace of his clearing was compromised.
An eight-year-old girl, painfully like her mother, wearing a pink coat, sat cross-legged in the skeleton frame of his shed.
He allowed himself to hang his head for just a moment, before he faced her head-on, because that was the only thing to do with these women.
“Hi,” he said, bracing himself against the frame.
She waved. Back to being silent.
“You here to work?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Well, let’s get to it.”
He turned toward the locked box he kept his tools in at night. Hopefully he could keep her busy and quiet.
“That old woman’s your mom, huh?” she asked.
“Yep.” Just the word mom raked him, burned and scratched at his fragile skin. To think she’d been out there, making dinner and kissing scratches and helping this Jonah with his homework while he and Gabe had been trying to make do without her.
“Are you mad?”
“Yep.”
“I’m mad at my mom, too.”
“Why?” he asked, and winced. Talk about unlocking doors he didn’t want to open.
“Lots of reasons,” she said. “She’s a liar and she’s mean—”
“Your mom?”
“You don’t know her that well.” She sneered. “She left me, too, you know. Went to France and she was never going to come back. And my dad said she—”
“You don’t believe that,” he said, not totally surprised to see this animosity and anger. She’d been through so much, that her not being angry would be worrisome. “Your mom loves you.”
“Then why did she drag me here?”
“I think she wants you to be safe.”
“I was safe at home.”
He wondered if Delia knew this poison was at work in her little girl. If she didn’t nip it in the bud, there’d be bigger problems down the road.
But not mine, he reminded himself. Not my problem at all.
“Well, maybe you’ll be going home soon,” he said. Probably sooner than you think, he thought.
The little girl fell uncharacteristically quiet and Max turned around to see if she was still there. She was and she looked at him through older eyes. Eyes that sent chills through him.
“You like her, don’t you?” she said. “You like my mom.”
“Yep,” he answered, his ability to lie shattered.
“That sucks.”
“Yep.”
He tried to lock her out, shove away his unruly feelings, but he felt Josie’s little hand on his hip and her arm came around his stomach.
She hugged him.
Lost. Alone. Scared.
And she held on to him.
His throat and eyes burned, his heart ached, and his chest was too tight, too full.
This is not mine, he wanted to cry. I can’t have this. He put his arms on her shoulders to shift her away. As if she could sense that was his intention she held on tighter.
Then he dropped to his knees and hugged her, too.
Iris opened the door to her cabin to find Patrick on her doorstep, his hair silver in the bright winter sunlight, his cheeks red from the cold. Despite the years
and the injustices and the animosity that sparked to life between them, she felt that old jump in her heartbeat.
Her hormones let her know she wasn’t dead yet. She was foolish, but she was still a woman who’d been faithful to a ghost and a memory for a very long time, no matter how crazy that seemed.
He was a good-looking man who’d aged well.
“Iris,” he said. That was it. His squinted eyes were flinty.
“Would you like to come in, Patrick?” she asked, standing sideways to let him pass. Sheila was getting a massage so they would have the one-room cabin to themselves, but he shook his head.
“You want to walk?” he asked. “It’s not as cold and—”
And it’s easier not being in the same room as you. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. She felt the same way. As if no matter what the square footage, no matter how high the ceiling or how many windows, the room felt crowded with all their baggage.
“Let me grab my coat,” she said, pulling the brown quilted monstrosity off one of the armchairs.
“You still have that thing?” he asked.
“My pet?” she asked, using his old name for the ugly coat.
His smile was wan, reluctant, indicating there were going to be no sweet talks about the old days. Good enough, she thought, shrugging into the coat and shutting the door behind her. She barely recognized the woman in the good old days.
“There’s no real need for a winter coat where I am in Arizona,” she said as she let Patrick lead the way along the shoveled path toward the gazebo and the view of the Hudson River.
He shoved his hands in his pockets, curving his shoulders like the football player he’d been.
“We need to get a divorce,” he said, and her head snapped around, the useless romantic memories of their youth draining away. “Put an end to this farce.”
“It was your choice not to have a divorce,” she said, feeling oddly panicked, as though without that marriage her life would be somehow different, which was ludicrous, but the panic was there all the same.
“I know.” He shook his head. “I just always believed I was married to you, no matter where you were.”
“And that’s changed?” she asked.
Secrets of the Riverview Inn Page 16
