So when the movie ends and the credits roll, I gently loosen my limbs from around her and sit back a little. I feel sticky where our skin has been pressed together, and the cool night air is like a balm to it as we get a few inches between us.
“You okay?” I ask quietly.
She looks at me there in the dark, and her eyes actually meet mine for the first time in so long that it takes me aback. It startles me, and I have to force myself not to show it. For so long, her gaze has avoided mine. For so long, she has pushed me away. But right now, in this moment, I feel connected to her again.
“I’m okay,” she says. She looks down at Miles “He slept through the whole movie.”
“I’ve learned this week that when he’s out, he’s really out.” I grab his foot and give it a jiggle. He doesn’t move. “He’s a good sleeper.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard him cry,” she says.
“He makes a fuss if he’s hungry, if he has a dirty diaper, or if he’s tired, but aside from that he’s a pretty easygoing baby.”
“I think it’s weird that he never cries.” She lets out a loose giggle. “It’s like Lynda and Aaron made some kind of kid with superpowers or something.”
“Lynda might have been capable of such a feat, but I assure you that I am just a normal man,” Aaron says from beside me as he squats down. “Still asleep, huh?” He looks at Bess and stares at her. Her face is normal. Her eyes aren’t swollen from her crying, nor does she have any evidence of her emotional upheaval on her face. The only thing different about her is the fact that she’s holding a child in her arms, a baby. She’s not pushing it away or thwarting its need for care. She’s engaged. She’s honestly somewhat enthralled.
“He slept through the whole movie,” Bess tells Aaron.
“Do you want me to take him now?”
Bess startles. “Oh, yeah,” she says, a tiny bit flustered. “Sure. Here.” She thrusts him toward Aaron.
“Thanks for watching him. I got to spend some time with Sam, so that was nice.” He settles Miles in his arms like he’s transferred a sleeping baby a million times, which I’m pretty sure he has.
“Sam. Oh, yeah. Right. Sam,” Bess says, like she’s still a little muddled. She scrubs her nose with the palm of her hand. “Did the girls enjoy the movie?”
“Very much.” He stares at Bess like he’s waiting for her to announce a revelation. But he’s smart enough not to goad her into it. “Well, I guess I had better get the girls to bed.” He stands up and instructs his girls to gather all their belongings and pick up any trash they left behind, and Mr. Jacobson loads them into his red golf cart to take them to the cabin. Then they’re gone.
I look up and see that Jake and Katie are walking toward the big house and they have all their children in tow. Suddenly, it’s just me and Bess left, and we’re still sitting on the blanket in the middle of the open field. Instead of getting up, Bess lies back on the blanket and stares up at the stars. She says nothing.
“Want some company?” I ask her.
“Sure,” she says hesitantly, like she’s not sure how to answer my question.
I lie down next to her and stare up at the stars. I point toward a constellation. “Jake told the kids that one is called piggly-wiggly.”
She giggles softly. “It does kind of look like a pig.” She turns her face toward me. “I’m sorry I got upset tonight.” Her voice is low and quiet.
I try to smile and reassure her, but it’s dark so I don’t think she even notices. “It’s fine, Bess. No harm done.” I reach over and pat her forearm with my fingertips. She doesn’t jerk away, and I am somewhat mollified by that.
“I wiped snot all over your sleeve.”
“My shirt’s washable.”
She lies quietly and stares up at the stars again. “Do you remember the night we watched that same movie, in this same spot, back when we were almost twenty?” Her voice is barely more than a whisper.
“Vaguely. Why do you ask?”
“I was pregnant for the first time.”
I reach out and take her hand in mine. She doesn’t reciprocate the squeeze, but she doesn’t pull back or slap me either, so I take that as a win. “Now I remember.”
“I was scared to death.” She snorts out a self-deprecating laugh.
“So was I, Bess. So was I.”
She turns to face me. “You didn’t seem like it. You seemed like you had accepted it so readily.”
“I don’t think I had accepted it, exactly. I remember I was terrified of what was going to come next. But I knew I wanted to be with you. That part was never in question.”
“Did you want to be a father?” she asks.
I lie still and absorb the question. My answer will be wrong no matter what it is. I can feel that before I even open my mouth. “If I could have chosen it right that moment…I think I would have wanted to wait to be a father,” I say slowly, trying to make the words come out the way I want them to. “Looking back, I should have taken more precautions. I should have taken more care. But I didn’t, and we got pregnant. We didn’t plan it, but then there it was. It was our reality. So, I got myself ready, in my head.”
“I have a confession. I was relieved when they told me that the baby wasn’t viable, that there was no heartbeat and that there never would be one. And I…I still hate myself for that.” She turns her gaze back toward the stars. “I didn’t want it, and so I was relieved when it was gone. And you? Were you relieved too?”
“Yes, Bess. I was relieved too,” I admit. I hate it, I hate admitting it, but I was. We were so young. We were both just starting college. We were both working part time and going to school full time, and we were doing it in different states. We saw one another sporadically, and we’d filled up our time with late-night phone calls when we could stay awake long enough to make the call.
When she’d told me she was pregnant, I’d made plans to transfer to a college closer to her so we could live in the same place. I’d moved. I’d changed colleges, and we’d gotten a place together. Her parents didn’t like it, but we didn’t let them deter us. We got our apartment together and we became a family. We got married a year later.
“That baby might have been an adventure,” she says quietly. “Do you think I willed it away? By not wanting it enough?”
“Sweetheart, I don’t think you have that kind of power. No one does. Bad things happen. And they happen to good people.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. So quiet. Then: “Were we good people?”
I turn to face her. “How can you ask that? We were just kids.” I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “We were kids playing at being adults, doing adult things. But we weren’t adults. Not really. We still had a lot of shit to figure out.” I pluck a blade of grass and start to play with it in my fingers. “I still feel like I have a lot of shit to figure out, most days.”
Silence falls over us, but it’s peaceful. It’s not frantic or raw, like the time we normally spend together. I don’t feel like I’m being punched in the gut over and over. There’s a stillness in the air.
“You haven’t signed the divorce papers yet,” she says finally.
I wince, closing my eyes. “No, I haven’t.”
“Why haven’t you signed them?” Her voice is soft and cool, like the flip side of a pillow, all of a sudden.
My shoulders lift in something close to a shrug. “I’m not ready.” I’m not ready to give up on us.
“Do you have any idea when you might be ready?”
I sigh. “No, Bess, I don’t.” This conversation has evolved into the same kind of conversation we always have. Next, she’ll start giving me one-word answers. She’ll avoid my gaze. She’ll close herself off. I can already feel it. I roll to my knees and stand up. “Are you ready to go back to the cabin?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “I’m going to lie here for a few minutes. You go ahead.”
“I can wait with you.” I don’t want to leave her.
“I’d like a few minutes alone, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay, Bess,” I reply. My usual reply when things turn this way.
I huff out a breath, straighten my spine, because it’s the only thing I know how to do. I collect our trash and carry it with me, retreating back the way we came. I leave her there alone in that field, both of us wondering why I won’t give her what she wants and sign the damn divorce papers already.
24
Bess
I hear the golf cart as it comes back up the hill. I don’t get up, though, until I hear Mr. Jacobson cut the engine. I lift my head, and I see him closing the case on the old movie projector, and he picks it up to set it on the back of the golf cart.
“Do you need a hand?” I ask. I roll to my side so I can get up.
“I got it,” he says.
“Are you just loading up the stuff that’s left?”
“No, I just came back for the projector. We can get the chairs in the morning, when we can see,” he says. He pats the seat next to him. “Have a seat.”
I pick up my blanket and fold it up in my arms. “I should probably get back,” I say and jerk my thumb toward my cabin.
He pats the seat again. “It wasn’t a request,” he says calmly. He pulls a toothpick from his shirt pocket and pops it into his mouth. When I was a little girl I used to think that shirt pocket was magical, that there was a never-ending supply of toothpicks in there.
I gingerly sit down next to him, and the only sounds I hear are the crickets and the bullfrogs and his heavy breathing. I cross my arms over my wadded-up blanket, unsure of what to do now.
“I’ve always loved this time of night,” he says. “It’s not dead quiet, and it’s not busy either.” He leans over so he can look beyond the roof of the cart. “I can see the stars. And the moon is bright enough that you don’t really need a flashlight, once your eyes adjust.” He sits quietly, and then he asks, “Did you enjoy the movie?”
“Very much,” I reply. “I’ve seen it at least a hundred times, but for some reason it still feels new every time I watch it.”
“Funny how your appreciation for things changes as you get older.”
I sit and wait, because I have a feeling there’s a reason for this little chat. I just don’t know what it is. I want to flee, because the quiet night combined with the quiet man, who is usually larger than life, are disconcerting in the extreme. Feeling awkward, I hesitantly say, “I should probably get back to Eli.”
He chuckles. “You don’t want to get back to Eli,” he says. “You’ve spent the whole week coming up with ways to get away from Eli.” He shakes his finger at me. “Don’t pretend like I’m wrong.”
I pick at a string on my blanket. “Things are a little strained between us right now.”
“Marriage is hard,” he says, talking around that ever-present toothpick.
I laugh without humor. “Yes, it is.” I turn to look at him. “Why doesn’t anyone tell you how hard it’s going to be? They paint a picture of tranquility and happiness, but it doesn’t always turn out like that.”
“It doesn’t ever just turn out like that,” he says. “You have to make it like that.”
“My parents were very happily married.”
“I remember.”
“And when Eli and I first got married, I wanted that. In my head, I wanted what my parents had. But when we got married, marriage wasn’t like that at all. It was hard, and it’s still hard. So, either I’m doing it wrong…” I let out a hushed chuckle. “…or somebody lied to me about what it’s supposed to be like.”
“You say you wanted a marriage like your parents had?” He stares into the darkness and doesn’t even glance in my direction. “And you were around twenty when you got married, right?”
“Right. But–” He hushes me with a finger. I bite my lips closed.
“You wanted the marriage your parents showed you when you were twenty.” He waits for me to answer.
“Right. And I never got that.”
He laughs. “So, you thought you were supposed to get that right away.” He snaps his fingers. “Like, okay, I’m married now, so I get that.” He gestures at nothing, as though the idea of my parents’ marriage is some object in front of us. His head falls back as he laughs again and my neck bristles more than a little. “What you didn’t see was that they had twenty years of work put into what you wanted. You didn’t see they’d already been through the same struggles you are going through. They’d done the fighting and the making up. They’d done the child-raising and the changing jobs. They’d probably changed houses and bought cars. They’d been broke and they’d had money. They’d struggled in their own ways. They had their own problems. They just worked through them and kept going.” He reaches over and flicks the end of my nose with his finger. I press my fingertips against it and sit back a little. “You can’t get what they had the minute you say ‘I do.’ You have to work for that. For them, it took twenty years to achieve that marriage you so desperately wanted to emulate on day one.”
I’ve never thought of it like that. I just remember being viciously disappointed when my marriage wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I’m still disappointed that my marriage isn’t what I want it to be. “Well, I’m twenty years into it now and it’s still shit.” I cross my arms and stare into the darkness.
“It is what you put into it.”
His words hit me like a fist. “I have tried—” But my voice breaks. I take a deep breath. “I tried so hard for so long.”
“Mm-hmm,” he hums.
“I did. I worked at it. It just didn’t work out.”
“Mm-hmm,” he hums again.
“And now I think I’m ready to be done with it.”
“Done with the marriage?”
“Yes. Done with the marriage.”
“You spend a lot of energy hating Eli.”
Yes. Yes I do. “And it’s fucking exhausting,” I admit. “Pardon my French,” I add at the last minute, because my mama raised me to be a lady.
“You’re feeding the wrong wolf,” he says cryptically.
“What?”
He says it again, this time more slowly. “You’re feeding the wrong wolf.”
I scoff. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
He shrugs. “Don’t know.” He sits quietly for a moment. “Do you remember when you were a little girl and we used to have those traveling missionaries come in on Sundays to do crafts and Bible studies with you kids? They would show up and you all would get so excited. They would sing with you and you’d make stupid shit to hang on the refrigerator. You remember that?”
“Yes.” Some of my fondest memories were of those Sunday mornings.
“Well, we had one about thirty years ago that I can still remember. She had Native American ancestry but she had become a Christian when she was a child. Anyway, I was in a shit mood that day. Hell, maybe even all that year. I can be a rat bastard when I want to.”
I snort out a laugh and I don’t contradict him.
“Ain’t funny,” he says. But he chuckles too. “Anyway, that lady changed my life.” He gives the steering wheel a couple of taps and falls silent.
I wait for a long beat. Nothing. “How did she change your life?” I feel obligated to ask.
He lays his hands on his chest and pretends to be surprised. “Well, I’m so glad you ask.” He sobers. “She said something that resonated with me. Her culture had taught her that there are two wolves that live in each of us. There’s one for love and one for hate.”
“Two wolves?”
“Yes. One for love, one for hate. Pay attention.”
I’m so confused. “I’m guessing we need both of them?”
He makes an impatient gesture. “That’s not the point. The point is which one is dominant that day.”
I’m even more confused. “I don’t understand.”
“Out of those two wolves, one shows up more than the other.”
“Well…who picks which on
e?” I ask.
“We do.”
“How do we do that?”
He sits quietly and picks at his teeth for a moment, and then he turns to look me dead in the eyes. “The one that’s prominent is the one you feed that day.”
I try to absorb what he’s just said. Have I been feeding my own hatred?
“You have to feed love to keep it growing. It’s like a garden. You have to weed it and tend it and care for it. You can’t just let it sit there. It won’t show up where it isn’t wanted.” He rocks his head from side to side. “Now I can’t speak for you, but for me, back then, I’d been feeding the hatred inside me and the hatred was what showed up.”
“Hence the rat bastard?”
He shakes his head. “No, that’s just my nature.” He chuckles. “But hatred, that’s not truly in anybody’s nature unless you’re feeding the wrong wolf.”
“Well, damn,” I say. I look at him. “Would it offend you if I told you I hate you a little bit right now?”
“If I thought you were serious, it would.” He pats my hand with his. It’s rough with calluses from years of hard work, but it’s soft right where I need it to be, deep within me. With that pat, he shows me that everything is going to be all right. “Now get off my cart and go home.” He gives my shoulder a playful shove.
“You could at least give me a ride,” I say as I get off the cart.
“Your feet ain’t broke,” he says. He starts up his cart and leaves me standing there in the open field. And what I can’t figure out is whether or not he’s helped.
I walk back to the cabin slowly, carrying the blanket over my arm. When I get back, I open the door quietly in case Eli’s already asleep, but the light is on in the bedroom so I head in that direction. I find Eli sitting on the side of the bed in his boxers and a t-shirt. Eli always did sleep in his boxers and a t-shirt. His hair is damp from where he must have just gotten out of the shower. “I need to brush my teeth,” I announce as I walk through the room to the bathroom.
Feels like Home (Lake Fisher Book 2) Page 12
