Marriage in Jeopardy
Anna Adams
Every marriage has its problemsOn the surface, Josh and Lydia Quincy have it all–a nice house, a baby on the way, work they both love. But one tragic act reveals cracks in their marriage that can't stay hidden.While Lydia mends physically from an attack that ends her dream of family, neither she nor Josh is sure their marriage will recover. Hoping they can still make things work, the two go to Josh's hometown. A place where even more ghosts exist for Josh.A husband and wife–physically together, but emotionally so very far apart. Can they find a way back to each other?
He reached for her hand, but she couldn’t stand his touch
“Don’t. I only want to feel my baby.” Lydia laid her hand on her stomach, aching to feel the sensation of their unborn son, lazily twisting inside her. “I miss him.”
Josh’s expression went blank again. He folded his hands, white-knuckled, in his lap.
She could end it now, put a stop to the loneliness and fear. Once they’d married, he’d considered their relationship complete, nothing more to worry about. He’d turned his attention to his priorities—his clients. Feeling left out and unneeded, more hurt than she’d ever admitted, she’d tried arguing, explaining, and finally she’d found poor comfort in her own work. But the baby had made them try again.
She had two choices. Tear him to shreds or try to save their marriage. Could hurting him ever be revenge enough?
Dear Reader,
My favorite romances are about couples struggling with life—the everyday challenges that follow that first happily ever after. It can be small things--not knowing your mate prefers potatoes when you love rice, needing the comfort of a thin sliver of night-light when he can sleep only in total darkness and complete silence. Or it could be, as with Lydia and Josh Quincy, separate views of life that simply refuse to meld.
Josh and Lydia coast along in their marriage, ignoring ever-increasing differences, until a tragedy forces them to reevaluate everything about themselves—what they want, where they want to live, if they can be together. Even in the best of marriages, these questions arise, and I’m always curious about how we answer them. Josh and Lydia made me wonder how I’d answer them myself.
I hope you’ll enjoy this story, which remains with me still. I’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to e-mail me at anna@annaadams.net.
Best wishes,
Anna
Marriage in Jeopardy
Anna Adams
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Sarah—with all my love and my deepest hopes that
all you desire and dream of will come to you. You are the
essence of joy. You shine with hope. You make me glad.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
LYDIA QUINCY OPENED her eyes. Memory rushed at her with the menace of an oncoming tornado. She remembered walking out of the elevator at the courthouse construction site. A woman had come around a stack of bricks. She’d never forget that woman’s mouth, stretched in a grin of pure malice. Lydia’s muscles clenched as she tried to duck again. That woman had swung a piece of rebar straight into Lydia’s stomach.
The moment replayed like a loop of film.
She tried to breathe.
Staring around the unfamiliar room, she saw blank tan walls and mountains of hoses, wires, tubing. A machine that screamed with blinking numbers. A shapeless beige curtain and hard plastic rails on her bed.
One more breath brought nausea so strong she had to escape. She struggled to sit, but an IV stung her arm. Oxygen tubing pulled her head back.
“Lydia?” Evelyn, her mother-in-law, spoke to her in a sleepy voice. How could she be here? She lived four hours away. “Lie down, honey.” Evelyn leapt to her feet, sending a metal chair screeching across the tile floor.
Lydia slumped against a flat pillow and it crackled beneath her head. She pushed both hands down to her stomach, but bone deep, she already knew what had happened.
The physical pain was nothing, compared to her grief. She drew her knees high, clamping her hands to her belly. She felt only emptiness. Not life. Emptiness.
“My baby.” She let her hands sink to her sides. “My baby,” she cried in anguish more animal than human.
Evelyn grabbed her arm. Tears washed her glasses and spilled over her lined cheeks.
“I’m sorry.” She peered toward the door, as if she hoped someone would show up and save her.
“Where’s Josh?” Lydia half expected he’d stayed at work.
Evelyn had been reaching for the call button at Lydia’s side, but drew back. “He wanted to be the one to tell you, but I can explain—”
“I know. Don’t say it out loud.” The second someone did, her pregnancy would be truly over. All that hope, so futile now… She couldn’t stop loving her son just because she’d never have him.
“Lydia, honey…”
She pushed at her mother-in-law’s thin shoulders. “No, no, no.”
“Shh,” Evelyn whispered, putting her arms around Lydia anyway. “Shh.”
Lydia sobbed. “I want my baby.” He’d died, but somehow she hadn’t. “Why am I alive?”
Evelyn moved away, grimacing. “I know how you feel, but you can’t—you have to live.”
A nurse hurried into the room and nudged Evelyn away. “Mrs. Quincy, I’m glad you’re awake.” The woman checked the machine’s readouts and threaded the IV tubes through her fingers. “Mrs. Quincy?” she repeated as if she needed Lydia to answer.
“I’m all right.” Lydia nodded at the nurse, but reached for her mother-in-law. Her hand fell through air to the sheets. “Is Josh in court? How did you get here first, Evelyn, when his office is only a few blocks away?”
“Your husband?” the nurse asked. “He’s here. He passed our station a few minutes ago.”
“He left?” Typical, but still it hurt. Things had begun to get better during the twenty-two weeks of her pregnancy, but before then, they’d spent much of their five-year marriage pulling in opposite directions, unable to speak, unable to explain why they couldn’t. Once they’d learned the baby was coming, they’d both wanted him so much they’d pretended nothing was wrong.
“Josh has been here whenever they let us in,” Evelyn defended her son. “But you know how he is. Impatience and anger go hand in hand, and add worrying about you—he needed a walk.”
Lydia knew Josh better than his mother did. While she could hardly hear above the pain screaming in her own head, Josh had no doubt taken refuge in calls to his office. That was Josh. If he couldn’t fix his private life, he turned to maintaining his reputation as the best public defender in Hartford, Connecticut.
“I—” She wanted to be angry. God knew, she’d had practice, but she needed her husband. He’d lost their baby, too.
“What?” Evelyn asked. “What can I do for you?”
“Do?” No one could erase the instant or the memory. Sun glinting off a green truck’s hood had blinded her as she’d walked around the bricks. One of those bricks had grazed her arm. She turned her elbow, trying to see the scrape, to see anything except that woman.
Her unborn son had probably died the moment the rebar hit. She covered her mouth.
“Try not to think about what happened. Let me call Josh.”
“Don’t go.” She didn’t trust herself to think on her own yet.
Evelyn squeezed her hand but turned to the nurse. “My daughter-in-law’s lips are cracking. Can you get her something?” Her voice rasped as if she’d been yelling.
“How long have you been here?” Lydia had assumed this was the same day, but her mother-in-law looked tired and worn.
“I’ll bring you both something to drink.” The nurse gave the machines a last look as she backed toward the door. “Mrs. Quincy, you’re in good shape. Your doctor will be in to see you—well, I can’t say for sure when—but you don’t need to worry.”
Not worry? She had to be nuts.
“What happened after she hit me, Evelyn?”
Josh’s mother splayed her fingers into short red curls that were flat on one side from her long stint in the chair. “I’ll tell you what we know.” Weariness veined her eyes. She stole a glance at her watch. “Unless you want me to find Josh,” she said again.
This woman who never cried on the principle that tears were weakness had cried a lot. Lydia brushed a teardrop off her own cheek.
“He’s not here. Explain what happened to my baby. I remember being at the courthouse.” An architect, she’d been hired to help restore it to eighteenth-century splendor. She’d visited that day only to discuss a change with the contractor. “I was leaving.” At a new wave of sorrow, she pressed her palms to her stomach again. “How long have I been here?” How many days had she been alive instead of her son, who’d never had a chance to live?
“Three days.” Evelyn wiped her face with the hem of her cotton shirt. “You’ve been awake now and then.”
“I don’t remember.” But bursts of pain and light and that damn machine bleating ran through her mind. “Who was she?”
“Vivian Durance. I lost her husband’s case.” Josh’s voice, thick with sorrow, made Lydia and Evelyn look toward the doorway. He stood, frozen.
His words didn’t register. She drank him in, desperate, because he was the only one who could really understand. Tall and aloof-looking—as always, when he felt most emotional—he stared at her, guilt in his brown-black eyes. Tight dark curls stood on end as if he’d yanked at his hair to punish himself.
“I’ll wait outside,” Evelyn said, and she passed Josh without looking at him.
He stepped aside to avoid his mother’s touch.
After the door closed, he crossed to the bed, unsure of his welcome. Lydia held out her arms. With a sigh, his eyes beginning to redden, he caught her, his arms rough. She flinched.
“I’m sorry.” He eased up a little, but when he buried his face in her shoulder, his breathing was jagged. “I’m sorry.”
His remorse forced the truth to sink in. “Vivian Durance is married to one of your clients?”
She’d been afraid of this, a low-grade fear, like a fever she’d never managed to get over. About two weeks after their wedding, the first threat from an unsatisfied client had arrived in the form of red paint thrown across their town house’s door. The client’s father had also slipped a red-stained note through the letter box. “If my son goes to prison, you die,” it read, and it was written with so much rage, the words almost ripped the paper.
Josh had repainted the door, chucked the note away and reassured her that all attorneys, even public defenders, occasionally received threats. Two years later another client had met him on the courthouse steps. Everyone who’d seen the man on the stand knew his own testimony had sealed a guilty verdict. Nevertheless, the man had blamed Josh, screaming until the cops had dragged him away.
Three more years had passed, but Lydia had never again felt entirely safe.
“Did you know she was coming after us? What did she say to you?” Lydia tried not to blame him, but the words begged to be said.
“Nothing.” He leaned back. “She screamed at the court in general.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He shook his head, but his eyes were blank. He was hiding something.
Furiously, she bit down on the words, but she couldn’t help herself. “Third time’s the charm, I guess. Someone finally got to us.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said, his calm dignified—and infuriating. “That you’d blame me.”
“Our baby didn’t have to die.”
“I am sorry.” His lips barely moved. She’d loved his mouth, full, moist, capable of giving her pleasure that was almost pain. That was the physical part of their marriage. Nothing else about living together had come easy. “I’m not hiding anything,” he said. “The truth was bad enough.”
She stared, unable to speak. He was in shock, too, which exaggerated his guilt. It couldn’t be all his fault.
“I lost Carter Durance’s capital case. After the police caught her, Vivian said she felt someone I loved needed to die, too.” Josh stated the facts without defending himself. “I tried everything I could think of to save the man, but he wasn’t crazy or innocent enough.”
Lydia pushed her fists into her eyes. His flat tone hurt most of all.
“Lydia?” He’d said her name a million times, but never before had it sounded like begging.
“I have nothing more to give.” This Vivian had taken everything. “Why do you have to defend guilty people?”
Pain rippled across his face. “You know why. Almost everyone I defend grew up the way I did. I made better choices, but do you know how many times I see myself and my parents in my clients?”
She didn’t answer. He hadn’t mentioned his sister. Clara was the one he couldn’t stop trying to save. She’d drowned in the family’s filthy swimming pool while his parents had lain unconscious, too drunk to know they were alive, much less that their daughter had died.
Josh couldn’t forgive his parents or himself, though he’d been at school when it had happened. Now he was compelled to rescue all the poor, defenseless Claras.
“You aren’t like them,” she said. “You’ll never drink the way your parents did. You can stop serving penance.” She wrapped her arms around her waist. “I deserved better and so did our baby.”
“Wait.” He tried to cradle her chin, but she turned her head, and he flinched as if she’d hit him. “Some of my clients are innocent. Even the guilty ones have rights, but I’d have dumped Carter Durance if I’d known this might happen.” Emotion flooded his voice. “I’d never risk our child.”
Her own anguish, reflected in his broken tone, confused her.
He reached for her hand this time, but she couldn’t stand his touch. “Don’t. I only want to feel my baby.” She laid her hand on her stomach, aching to feel the sensation of their unborn son, lazily twisting inside her. “I miss him.”
Josh’s expression went blank again. He folded his hands, white-knuckled, in his lap.
She could end it now, put a stop to the loneliness and fear. Once they’d married, he’d considered their relationship complete, nothing more to worry about. He’d turned his attention to his priorities—his clients. Feeling left out and unneeded, more hurt than she’d ever admitted, she’d tried arguing, explaining, and finally, she’d found poor comfort in her own work. But the baby had made them both try.
“I’m sorry.”
She had two choices. Tear him to shreds or try to save their marriage. Could hurting him ever be revenge enough? And how could she ignore his grief, as harrowing as her own?
“I couldn’t save him, either,” she said, choosing marriage. “Moms are supposed to protect their babies.”
He flexed his hands. “I’d give anything to have him safe and you unhurt.”
His bleakness affected her. Maybe her feelings for Josh had never been sane. Too intense, too much passion at first. Neither of them had fully considered what came after “I do.”
“We can’t bring him back, but we don’t have to keep hurting each other. I know I made mistakes, too.” She couldn’t look at him.
“We can stop making them.”
She might not be ready to give up on her marriage, but total forgiveness didn’t come easily. She couldn’t forget how hard she’d tried to make him care about his home life as much as he cared about work. “What do we have now?” She wiped her cheeks.
Josh held her against him. “You have me.” The strain in his corded arms reminded her of more tender moments when she’d loved him so much she could hardly breathe. “He was my baby, too.” No attempt to explain—no defense, just desolation. His whisper, rich with sorrow, pulled her back to him.
A WEEK AFTER Lydia had awakened, Josh stopped at his wife’s door, feeling as if today was their final connection with their son. She’d lost the baby the day of the attack, and they’d dealt with her D&C and with the police questioning her about her few memories. When they left the hospital, everything about her pregnancy would be over.
He pressed his fist to Lydia’s door, glancing at the busy nurses, the visitors striding up and down the beige-tiled hall. Their lives went on.
And he wanted to hit someone.
“Who’s out there?”
Lydia sounded scared. He shoved the door open. Of course she’d be afraid one of the Durances would come back to finish the job.
“Hi.” He plastered on a smile and held out a cellophane-wrapped bunch of wildflowers he’d picked up in the lobby.
After staring at them as if she didn’t understand, she popped the top off her oversize drinking cup. “Thanks. Want to put them in water?”
“You don’t plan to be thirsty again?”
She shrugged, her distant gaze telling him she was submerged in her own grief. He unwrapped the flowers and pushed the stems into the cup.
“I like them,” she said.
He brushed his lips across her temple and took the cup to the bathroom to add more water. When he set it back on the table, the scrape of plastic across laminate seemed to awaken her.
“Do me a favor?” She turned her breakfast tray toward him.
“Anything,” he said, putting desperation before common sense.
She pointed to the bland scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. A piece of toast with one bite out of it lay across the plate’s pale green lip. “Finish this. They won’t let me go if I’m not eating, and I can’t force it down.”
She touched her stomach, but quickly dragged her hand away. They both looked anywhere except at each other. Funny the things that reminded you.
“You need nourishment.” Man, he sounded like a granny. He glanced toward the door. “I can’t do something that’s bad for you.”
“If I have to fly through that window, I’m getting out of here today, but I’m too tired for the argument.” She nudged the tray again. “Is it because of your oatmeal thing?”
His “oatmeal thing” was a hatred for the stuff. “It’s my wanting-you-to-be-well thing.”
Her sharp glance suggested he didn’t have the right, but she glossed over the moment. “Eat this stuff for me, and I’ll devour anything else later.”
He dug into the congealed paste—oatmeal—and washed each bite down with cold eggs, stopping only to gag. When Lydia smiled, even oatmeal was worth it.
“What’s it like at home, Josh?”
Empty. Grim.
He looked for something to drink. How much damage could those flowers do to a cup of water? A coffee cup sat empty on the table just beyond her tray.
“What do you mean?” If he told her the truth, would she refuse to come home? A hug and the grief they’d shared the other day hadn’t put them on stable ground.
“Knowing it’s just you and me from now on.”
“I should have taken the nursery apart.” Neither of them needed reminders of how they’d painted and decorated and argued over the right way to assemble the changing table and bed.
“No,” she said. “I want to be the one who puts his things away.”
She blamed him so much she seemed to think he had no rights where his own child was concerned. “We’ll do it together.” He choked down another bite of oatmeal. She didn’t answer. In her eyes, he saw all the unanswered questions between them. “Unless you don’t want us to do anything together.”
She lowered her head.
“No?” he asked. The oatmeal almost came back up.
She shook her hair out of her eyes. “If not for the baby, we’d have split up months ago. I need to be sure you want to go on, too.”
He’d felt this kind of shock three times—when Clara had died, when the hospital had called him about Lydia and now. “You would have left me?”
Her mouth twisted with bitterness that seemed totally out of character for Lydia. “We’d have left each other,” she said. “Who cares who would have packed first?”
She must be out of her— “Are you crazy? I married you for better or worse. I’m not leaving you.”
“Why?” With no makeup and no pretense, she looked naked. “You don’t love me anymore.”
“Not love you? Have we been sharing the same bed?”
“I’m not talking about sex,” she said—loudly enough to make him glance toward the door.
“You’re the one who changed. You can’t—” How could he put his humiliation into words? “Can’t stand to let me hold you. Can’t let me touch you. Can’t let me kiss you.”
“I can’t stand the silence,” she said. “It was bad enough before, but all I want now is the baby.”
He didn’t pretend he’d been happy with their relationship, either. “It was getting better,” he said. “I thought we seemed closer again.”
“You mean we spoke once or twice at night if you got home before I went to bed, or if I called you from my office? We shared a chaste kiss before the lights went out and sex on the weekend if you found time away from the law library.”
How many times had she rolled away from him? “You didn’t want—”
“Yeah—right.” Her sarcasm left him cold. “And I just couldn’t tear myself away from work, either.”
“I thought you were excited about your projects.” Not always, he realized now. He’d wondered….
She stared at him, a hard, emotionless woman he’d never met and couldn’t hope to know. “Are you that insensitive?”
“I must be. Are you saying you want a divorce?”
She pulled her knees all the way to her chest, grimacing. Hunched over, she looked defeated. “I thought I could go on the other day, when I woke up, but now, I don’t know.”
He wanted to grab her so she couldn’t push him away. “I don’t even like going home now,” he said. She shot him another accusing glance, as if, like her, he missed only the baby. He shook his head. “I miss you, Lydia. I want you back.”
A frown lined her forehead.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were that unhappy?”
She linked her fingers at her ankles. “You stopped caring. I tried to tell you, but you never heard. Your job makes you happy, and I don’t.”
She’d left him room to fight. “I like my job, but you’re my wife. Just talk to me when you’re worried about something as crazy as my not caring.”
“Why should I have to tell you? A woman shouldn’t have to ask her husband—I shouldn’t have had to beg you to notice me.”
Defensive—and upset—he apparently didn’t know how to fight after all. “What do you need?”
She stretched out her legs and smoothed the sheet across her breasts. “I was serious about the third time being the charm. Three threats in five years shouldn’t seem so frightening, but that woman killed our family. I won’t ever forget.”
“You want me to quit?”
“Would you?”
“I don’t think I can.” He’d had one goal since college—to make people who’d grown up the way he had see that they could choose something cleaner, safer. He worked like hell to keep them out of jail and show them they didn’t have to repeat their parents’ mistakes. They didn’t have to give their children dangerous lives. They could keep their families out of the system that had let him down. He cared about those people who were as faceless and nameless as he’d been when his parents had gone to prison for neglecting his sister.
“Lydia, I can’t stop. What would I do?”
Tears filled her eyes. She fingered them away. “I’m afraid that if you can’t change, I will. I’ve thought about this all night. We’re about to go home, and I’m not sure there’s a reason to go together.”
“Nothing like this will happen again. It was an aberration.”
“It won’t ever happen to me again.”
CHAPTER TWO
“MR. QUINCY, if you’ll bring your car to the front entrance, we’ll take Lydia down.” Patty, Lydia’s nurse, took her bag of belongings and passed it, along with the cup of flowers, to Josh. “We’ll meet you at the doors.”
Josh looked at Lydia, longing in his eyes. They’d finished a wary morning. He’d gathered her things, talked about dinner tonight, assumed they were going home together.
“Are you all right?” he asked, but she knew he was asking if she’d rather call a cab.
She hesitated. She couldn’t turn back again. This time, it was give up or give in. “I’m fine.”
After he turned the corner, Patty put on her reading glasses and peered through several sheets of paper. “Let me see.” She ran her index finger down the print. “Watch for a rise in temperature and extra sensitivity in your abdominal region that might indicate internal bleeding. No sexual relations for six weeks.”
“No—” She’d almost said “no problem,” but stopped just in time to avoid flinging her dirty laundry at Patty’s feet.
“These are the numbers for the nurse’s desk and for Dr. Sprague. Call if you have any questions.” Patty took off her specs. “I’m working Monday, Wednesday and Friday from eight until eight.”
Unexpectedly warmed by an almost-stranger’s concern, Lydia smiled.
“I’d like to hear how you’re getting along.”
“I’ll call.”
“Okay.” Patty looked up as an orderly pushed a squeaking wheelchair into the room. “Shall we?”
Lydia sat and folded her hands to hide their shaking. The town house hadn’t felt like home since she’d first begun to think about leaving Josh, but if she was starting over she had to go home.
The trip in the small blue-gray elevator went too quickly. As the doors opened, a cool gust of air blew in. Lydia breathed deep. The orderly pushed her past a long row of wide windows and delivered her to the sidewalk as Josh pulled up in their car.
“Thanks,” Lydia said to the man behind her, though she avoided his helping hands as she stood.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Best of luck.” He nodded to Josh and went back inside.
“Are you in pain?” Josh opened the passenger’s door.
She shook her head and let her hair blow across her face. She assumed his tenderness, as he eased her into the seat, was for the baby they weren’t taking home. He pulled her seat belt out, but she fastened it herself. “Thanks,” she said.
“I’ll take it easy.”
The bumps in the road didn’t matter. Neither did the stab of pain in her belly when Josh had to slam on the brakes for a VW bug whose driver sped through a red light.
“Damn it!” His ferocity had nothing to do with the bug’s driver.
“Can we stop?” She risked her first look at him since they’d left. “I don’t want to go home. I thought I could do it, but…”
He was clenching his jaw so hard she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear his teeth shatter. He glanced into the rearview mirror and then checked over his shoulder and pulled to the curb. “Where do you want me to take you?”
She glanced into the backseat. She didn’t even have a sweater. “Nowhere’s practical.”
“Then come home and think about what you’re doing.”
“I was trying to, but it doesn’t feel like home.”
He nodded, a brief jab of his chin in the air. She didn’t blame him.
“I’m not trying to hurt you on purpose. I just don’t know how to pretend anymore.”
“And you can’t make up your mind?”
She looked out at the passing traffic, at the sun that seemed too bright for a day like this, and at a couple strolling by with their young daughter holding their hands.
“I’m panicking.” She wiped sweat from beneath her bangs. “But I want to be with you. I mean that.”
“Trust me.”
“If it were that easy, we wouldn’t be talking about this at all.” She folded her hands in her lap and glanced over her shoulder. “Let’s go. I’m all right. I won’t do this again.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t promise that.”
She searched his face for sarcasm but found only compassion. It made a huge difference because fear was driving her, and he had a right to be angry. A chip fell out of her massive store of resentment.
Still, she clung to the sides of her seat when he parked in front of the town house. “I’m glad none of the neighbors are out.”
He nodded and pulled the keys from the ignition. “They mean well, but I don’t know what to say when they tell me they’re sorry.”
They both got out of the car. Lydia planted her fists in the small of her back and stared at the wreath on their door, the open drapes she hadn’t been home to close. The baby’s nursery was on the second floor. She walked up the sidewalk as fast as her aching body would let her to avoid looking at that window.
EVELYN STARED at the white phone that hung on her white kitchen wall.
“I should call him.”
“He won’t feel better if you do.”
She jumped. “Bart, I didn’t know you were home.” Turning, she crossed the kitchen to take her husband’s coat and hang it on one of the pegs in the mudroom.
He took off his boots and stared at them. “I forgot to change when I got off the boat.”
“Put them in the bench. If we can’t stand the smell of our own lobster and fish and ocean water by now…” She didn’t know how to end that sentence. “It doesn’t matter. You really think Josh wouldn’t want me to call? Isn’t this different?”
“To us. Not to him.”
“We were supposed to have a grandchild.” A grandchild that might have brought Josh back to them.
Bart pulled her close and kissed her forehead. Usually that made her feel better. “For all we know, it’s brought back memories of Clara and he hates us more than ever.”
“You can’t blame him.” She wiped her mouth. Eighteen years since she’d had her last drink, but the thirst could still bring her to her knees. She stepped away from Bart and went to the sink, grateful for dirty lunch dishes. She started running the water and slid her hands beneath its warmth.
“If you want to call him that badly, maybe you should.” Bart gripped her upper arms for a minute and then let go. “I just hate that you have to prepare yourself to be hurt.”
“He might understand. He’s lost a child, too.” She thought of Clara. Rather, a memory of Clara stole into her mind. Her baby, in pink shorts that bagged almost to her knees, brown hair blowing across her eyes and a spade almost as tall as she was for digging in the sand.
Evelyn clenched her eyes shut and willed that wisp of memory to leave. She didn’t deserve to remember the good times, and the worst day was just a nightmare feeling she could call to mind. She’d been so drunk she only knew what had happened after her daughter had died.
“Josh didn’t lose his child the way we did.” Bart started toward the hallway. “I’ll wash up. You do what you have to, Evelyn.”
“Bart—”
He stopped. She wrapped her wet arms around him, finding his sea scents comfortingly familiar. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m tired of him pushing us away. But how can we complain? He raised himself. He was more father and mother to Clara than we were.”
“Not just because of you.” He looked backward in time. “The catches were so sparse. I was afraid I couldn’t feed you all. I’ve asked myself the same question since the day Clara… Why didn’t I work harder, instead of drinking harder?”
“And why couldn’t I want to be a mom?” Evelyn made herself say the words, each one like hammering a nail in her own coffin. Josh had been a total surprise to her and Bart. She’d wanted to be a teacher, but pregnant at nineteen, she’d dropped out of college. As a mom, she was a total misfit, never feeling the instincts that came naturally to other women.
She’d thought something was wrong with her colicky son, but no matter how many times she’d dragged Josh to the doctor, they just kept telling her he was fine—healthy—and she’d get used to motherhood. She’d tried some of Bart’s vodka one night, just after she’d put her baby to bed. The vodka had eased her pain.
Finally, it had numbed her.
She pulled Bart even closer. “I might have been better with their baby.”
“It wouldn’t matter. You think Josh would have let us see him?”
“He’s not cruel. He’s sad. We have to stick it out—if only because Josh feels as guilty about Clara as we do.” It was only after the state had put her and Bart in jail for eighteen months for negligence that she’d learned not to give up trying to be a good mother.
“He has no reason to feel guilty.”
“If he could believe that, maybe he’d learn to forgive us and be our son again. And I wonder if something’s wrong between him and Lydia. Even when they’re together, they— I feel distance between them.”
“What are you talking about, Evelyn?” He let her go and turned off the water just before it reached the top of the sink.
“If you disagreed with me, you’d say so. You’ve been worried, too.” She dunked the dishes into the sink, taking comfort from the clash of glass and stoneware. “It’s time we stopped just waiting for things to get better,” she said. “I’m going to ask them to come up here.”
Bart took the first plate she handed him. Even filthy from working on the boat, he started drying. It was habit. She washed. He dried. People with addictive, alcoholic personalities found strength in habits.
“Lydia might come. Josh won’t.” He set the plate down and then stared at his dirty jeans. “I’m stinking up the place. Let me shower and I’ll help you.”
“I’m fine. Go ahead.” She set a plate in the other half of the sink, her mind on her spiel to Josh. How could she convince him to come home and get over his sadness?
So aware of her thoughts after thirty-three years together, Bart stopped and said, “Listen to me, Evelyn.” His anxiety came through.
“He may turn me down, but how do you think Lydia feels in that house, with the nursery down the hall? Josh will come if he thinks it’ll help her.”
“Lydia loves us, but her loyalty belongs to him. She won’t come up here, knowing Josh can’t stand to be in this house.”
Evelyn turned. She put her hands on her hips, not caring when a marshmallow cloud of dishwashing suds dropped to the floor. “You forget—you can slide along, think you’re doing all right—but when you lose a child, nothing is ever the same. Lydia loves Josh, but she’ll be hating that room.”
They had a room of their own, hardly opened in the past eighteen years, still filled with Clara’s things. If she could have cut that room out of her house, she would have dropped it over the cliffs on the headland. And yet—it was all she had left of her daughter.
“You’d use Lydia?” Bart didn’t like that.
She struggled with a surge of guilt. “Use her, yes.” She couldn’t pretend to be better than she was. “But I love her as if she were ours. She needs a mother and father as much as Josh does, and I want my son back. This family has lost enough, and I’m through waiting for him to come home.”
“You worry me, Evelyn.”
“We’ve tried to give him time to make up his mind.” She went back to the sink. “We’ve done enough penance. He’ll either cut us off or we’ll convince him at last that he can depend on us.”
“I don’t want him to cut us off,” Bart said.
“This half life of having him come around once or twice a year is good enough for you?”
“It’s what we have.” Bart opened the fridge. He studied the bottles of water and juice and then slammed the door shut. “It’s what we made.”
She started washing again. Bart, loving her, even after what they’d done, had saved her life. Was she about to risk losing him, too? “We can make something better.”
WRAPPED IN A pale yellow chenille blanket, Lydia stared at the evening paper, oblivious to the words. Josh came into the family room and set a cup of coffee beside her.
“Thanks.” She’d craved it. He’d brewed it.
He tucked the blanket around her feet. She tried not to move away from his hands.
Somehow, he knew. He looked at her with the knowledge of her instinctive rejection in his eyes. “Should you go to bed?” he asked.
“I don’t know. They just told me to call if I felt bad.” She hunched her shoulders and cupped her mug in both hands. The coffee should have been too hot, but it warmed her against a cold that came from deep inside.
“If you’re staying down here, I’ll start a fire.”
She glanced toward the fireplace. Gray ash and small black chunks crowded the hearth. The familiar scent of apple and wood smoke usually comforted her. “Okay, but then sit for a while. You don’t have to do anything else for me.”
Surprise made him look at her. “You want to talk?”
“I’d just like knowing you’re near.” She had to believe he wasn’t thinking up ways to get back to the office.
Nodding, he began to scoop the ashes into an old-fashioned coal scuttle they’d found in a shop in his hometown in Maine. No polished copper affair, this was a dusty, dented black metal working scuttle. Like their marriage, it had taken a beating. “Something’s on your mind,” he said.
She glanced at the phone, resting beside a stack of her library books on a table beneath the bay window. “I promised your mother I’d call when we got home.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it.
She’d seen his parents through his eyes at first. Alcoholics, who’d thrown his childhood down the neck of a vodka bottle. But he’d never given them credit for cleaning up after Clara’s death.
“They love us,” she said. “Both of us.” He didn’t seem to need his parents’ love.
“I don’t want to talk to them.”
“Okay. Josh?”
He stopped, midway across the room. A vein stood out on his forearm as his knuckles whitened around the bucket’s handle.
“Sometimes I wonder what I’d have to do to make you as angry with me.”
“As angry?”
“As you are with your parents.”
“Are you looking for an argument?”
“No.” But she was tired of trying to keep the peace. “I don’t know.”
“I get that you don’t want to be here.”
She couldn’t control a shiver as she thought of the nursery and their bedroom. She hadn’t forced herself to climb the stairs yet. Too many memories waited up there. “Listen.” She willed him to understand how the nothingness pressed in on her. “Don’t you hear the silence? I know you mean well, but all the fires and blankets and warm drinks in the world won’t help. I’m afraid to say anything because I’m hurt. And I’m afraid your mind is at the office.”
“What do you want?” Long and lean and unreachable, he went to the door. “I’m trying. I don’t want to lose you, but I can’t quit my job and sell this house today.” He glanced at the ceiling. “I feel that room, too, but this is our home. I want to learn to live with the empty nursery and your anger and my—” He paused, shaking his head. “My fear,” he said. “That you’re going to leave me because it’s my fault our baby died.”
“Let’s do something,” Lydia said. “Let’s get out of here, spend some time somewhere else, just the two of us.”
“And then come back to the problems you say we’ve ignored for years?”
The phone rang. A frown crossed his face. He picked up the receiver and scanned the caller ID. Then he crossed the room and handed it to her. “I don’t want to talk to them,” he said.
His parents. She clicked the talk button as Josh took the bucket out. “Evelyn?”
“How are you? Is Josh all right?”
“I’m fine. He’s quiet.”
“How quiet? You have to make him talk.”
Or he’d retreat from her as he had from Evelyn and Bart? “We’re settling back in.”
“Come up here instead.”
Lydia knew she should say no. Josh couldn’t talk to his mother and father. He’d refuse to see them. “I’m tired. Staying here might be—”
“Come tomorrow, then. You don’t want to be in that house right now. Let me pamper you and make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Let me have a daughter for a week or two.”
Her voice broke on the final plea. Lydia’s tears, never far away, thickened in her throat. “I want to, but you know how things are, Evelyn.”
“Josh will come if you do. Don’t give him a choice for once.”
Lydia laughed, as convincingly as she was able. “You wouldn’t take advantage of me to soften Josh?”
“I guess I would.” Evelyn was always truthful. “But I only left the hospital because I knew he didn’t want me there. I’ve worried about you. Come let me look after you.”
“Josh is taking great care of me.” Lydia jumped to his defense.
“I’m saying Josh may not tuck you in, or make sure you have nice clean sheets warm from the dryer.”
“I’m not taking to my bed.” But such loving concern tempted her.
“And Josh won’t bring you lobster fresh out of the trap. Bart will bring enough for both of you. Come, Lydia. And bring our son. Families should be together when they’re hurting.”
Lydia licked her lips. It was not a perfect answer, but she couldn’t stand this house. She dreaded sleeping in her own bed, seeing the baby clothes stacked on the end of her dresser, the copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting on her nightstand. “I can’t do that to Josh.”
“Ask him.”
“It’s not right.” And if she asked and he said no, she’d resent him for not seeing how much she needed to be away.
“I understand, but when do you think our family should try to love each other?”
Lydia splayed her fingers across her belly. All her hopes had died, and raising them was proving difficult. “I’m sorry, Evelyn. I can’t answer you.”
JOSH EMPTIED the ashes into the garbage can behind the door to their walkout basement. He gathered a couple logs from the pile beside the fence. But then he couldn’t make himself go inside. As long as he stayed out here, he had an excuse to avoid talking to his parents.
Ridiculous. Childish.
He didn’t care. His guilt over losing his unborn son hurt enough, but it had also opened the lid on his guilt about Clara. He should have found a way to keep her safe when he couldn’t be home. It hadn’t been normal for a high school freshman to take all responsibility for his five-year-old sister, but he hadn’t had a choice.
He turned his attention to the dead plants in the small yard. He put down the logs. Halloween was in two days, and the cool weather was upon them. Usually, he and Lydia had cleared out her summer garden by now, but purple and blue flowers had spread as far as the gray-brown plants the frost had already killed.
“Josh?”
He turned, a couple of withered begonias in his grasp. She stood in the doorway, her hands braced on the frame.
“You should stay away from those stairs. They’re too narrow and you’re not steady on your feet.”
“I’m all right.” She’d never accepted help or advice with enthusiasm. “What are you doing?”
“Yard work.” He yanked another brown, crumbling shrub out of the ground.
“You can come in now. Your mother hung up.”
“Did she ask you to go to Maine?”
Lydia widened her eyes. “How did you know?”
“Know my mother?”
Lydia let that question lie. “She asked us both, but I told her you wouldn’t want to.”
Another plant gave up its grip on the ground. “You were right.”
“So we stay here.”
“Where you don’t want to be.”
She started to turn away, but hesitated, distraction on her face. She loved his parents. If not for him, she’d have jumped at the chance to visit Maine.
He reached blindly for a shrub, breathing in as he got a handful of sharp holly leaves.
Lydia went to him and opened his palm. “Are you all right?”
Not with her scent wafting off the top of her head as she peered at the drops of blood on his hand.
“What were you thinking?” She blotted his palm with the hem of her sweatshirt. Grateful for her tenderness, he didn’t have the strength to stop her.
“I’m realizing my parents will come between us some day.”
She froze. “Come inside and let’s clean that with something sterile.”
“They will, won’t they, Lydia? You’d rather be with my mother than with me right now. And my father’s always ready to ply you with lobster.”
“I was an only child. My parents are dead. Your mother and father have showered me with all the love you won’t let them give you.”
“Because of what they did to Clara.”
“And what you think you did?” The moment the words left her mouth, she stepped back.
He paused. “How long have you been thinking that?”
“Forever. I never had the courage to suggest you’re wasting your life and your parents’ love because you’re afraid you caused Clara’s death.” She wrapped her arms around her waist. Her sweatshirt billowed beneath them. Her unhappiness was easy to feel. “You did everything you could for Clara and your parents have paid their dues—in prison and in trying to win you back. Why throw away the kind of affection you wanted for yourself and your sister?”
“Because it’s too late.” He turned her, concentrating on keeping his hands light on her shoulders. “And I have no right if Clara can’t feel it, too.”
“That’s nuts, Josh.”
He urged her through the doorway, picked up the logs and shut the cold behind them. “I know. I can’t help it.”
TWO TRUCE-FILLED DAYS brought them to Halloween. Josh finished decorating the yard about noon and then found Lydia, dusting the little breakable things in her mother’s china cabinet. They’d hardly ever used the formal dining room. It must have felt safe to her, free of memories.
“What’s up?” He eased a plate out of her hands. “Did the doctor have cleaning in mind when they told you to take it easy?”
“I can’t sit still any more than you can.”
Understanding, he handed the plate back. “I’d better pick up some candy. You want anything from the grocery store?”
“I already bought some.” She shot an uneasy glance at the ceiling. “It’s in the nursery.”
Which neither of them had entered since she’d come home. “Okay.” If not for Lydia as a witness, he’d leave the candy in those bags and buy new. “I’ll get it.”
She braced herself, a heroine facing execution in one of those old movies she liked so much. “I’ll come with you.”
“I appreciate the offer, but I’ll do it. One of us has to tackle that room, and I can’t face another shrine.”
She nodded, empathy in her eyes. “I finally understand why no one goes in Clara’s room.”
Josh climbed the stairs. He was starting to hate his own home. He stood in front of the door he’d closed that first night when the town house had bounced emptiness from every wall.
Treat it like a Band-Aid. Yank it off. He grabbed the doorknob and walked inside. Like a man gasping his last breath, he went to the changing table. Two shopping bags, each filled with diapers and two huge sacks of candy, sat on the plastic surface that smelled new. Unused. They wouldn’t even have memories of their child.
Josh snatched at the candy and turned. Only to face the crib. Where his son would have slept in a few more months. Where his child would never sleep now.
He stumbled. The candy slipped from his fingers, a bag at a time. He reached the crib on his knees.
He could barely see through his tears. He clutched the rails and pressed his face between two of them, crying so loudly the neighbors could hear him.
Lydia could hear him. He had to shut up.
“Josh.” She was at his back, dropping to her knees with her arms around him.
He yanked her close, and for once, she didn’t pull away. Choking into her hair, he fought for control.
“We can’t do this,” she said. “I’ve been hiding from everything that mattered to me here, and I can’t stand seeing you like this. Let’s go.”
Telling himself to be a man, Josh climbed to his feet and helped Lydia up. Pressing his arm to his eyes, he leaned down for the bags he’d dropped and then followed Lydia.
“I won’t go to my parents’,” he said. “Forget it.”
Stopping in the hall, she nodded. She closed the door, and he swore the pressure on his chest eased.
“I’m going,” Lydia said, robbing him of the ability to breathe at all. “You can come. I want you to come, but I’m going.”
CHAPTER THREE
“WHAT MAKES my mother and father our answer?” Josh pulled Lydia to face him as she tried to walk away. From such a large man, his insistence should have been intimidating, but she shared his grief and understood his reluctance.
“They’re family. We need them, whether you know it or not. I don’t care about the past anymore. I want a future.”
“With me?”
His taunting barely touched her. “You don’t seem to believe me, but yes. Are you coming?”
“Clara’s all over that place.”
And maybe he was, too—a bereft teenage version of Josh that wouldn’t loosen his grip on the grown man. “It might be time to face her and yourself.”
“You’re a psychologist all of a sudden?”
She shrugged. “Is this house any easier to be in?”
His face turned ruddy, as if he were ashamed of the tears that had turned her back into a fighter. “I haven’t stayed in that house for longer than a weekend since I left for college.” And he’d left the second he was able to.
She stood, still and silent. He had to decide. She’d made her decision, but she couldn’t force Josh to try again.
He turned. She let him reach the stairs before she spoke, and she spoke over the feeling she was strangling.
“Wait.”
He stopped without looking back. “What?”
“Maybe I’m not being fair, but I do wish you’d come.”
With his back to her, he tensed his shoulders. More eloquent than words, resentment carried him downstairs.
Lydia grabbed at the wall. Suddenly exhausted, she limped to their bedroom. They’d already perfected the silent sharing of a bed, each clinging to one side. She kicked off her shoes, lay down and pulled the quilt Evelyn had given her on her last birthday up to her shoulders.
SITTING AT the family room desk, Josh tried to concentrate on paying the bills that had piled up while Lydia was in the hospital. He ruined four checks and five envelopes.
Memories, never far from his mind, rushed at him, claws outstretched. His parents had been unconscious when he’d come home from his first day of high school. Revolted at the sight of his mother and father sprawled on matching sofas, he’d expected the worst—with no idea how bad it would be. He’d searched the house for Clara.
He’d found her dollhouse, abandoned, her lunch, half eaten. He’d found her body, floating in the filthy swimming pool in their back yard. He couldn’t save her. He barely remembered the paramedics dragging him away from Clara after his mother had finally awakened to his screams and dialed 911.
Though he couldn’t stop loving his parents, he’d also hated them since that day. Nothing—not a visit, not brainwashing—could change the facts.
But his hard feelings couldn’t help Lydia. If she needed comfort—and for some ungodly reason, his parents were love enough for her, how could he refuse to go?
Swearing inside his head, he climbed the stairs. He’d expected to find Lydia reading. Instead, she was burrowed inside a quilt his mom had made for her. The vulnerability of her slight body sealed his fate.
He eased the door shut and started packing the car. He turned their Halloween candy over to the neighbors, asking them to hand it out, and he packed his clothes. Then, he called his parents.
His father answered. “Josh, is something wrong?”
“Lydia’s fine. She mentioned that Mom asked us to come up for a few weeks?”
“Yeah.” His dad sounded stunned. Too stunned to make it easier on Josh.
“Well, do you mind if we take her up on that?”
“No, son. Come. Yes, Evelyn, he wants to come up.”
His mother’s voice came through the phone. “You’re coming? I’m so happy. When?”
“Lydia’s been napping. I’m going to wake her up so I can pack some of her things. We should be there by dinner.”
“Tonight?” He might have offered her the recipe for turning lead into gold. “We’ll be ready. I need to make the bed in your old room. We’ll have lobster. Bart, run down to the market and get some corn. Even if it’s not fresh, it’s Lydia’s favorite. I think I’ll make homemade peach ice cream.”
“Okay, Mom. Thanks. I’ll call when we’re almost there.”
“Don’t bother. Just come and we’ll see you when you get here. Josh, I’m so pleased.”
“Thanks for the invite.” His parents were already talking to each other when he hung up. He put his bag in the back of the car and spread a sheet on the backseat, hoping he could persuade Lydia to rest on the drive up, rather than sitting for four hours.
Finally, he eased to her side of the bed and rubbed her shoulder. She opened her eyes and focused on him. “Hi.”
“Want to go to my mom and dad’s?”
She sat up, a hint of light in her eyes at last. “Are you coming?”
As if she’d given him a choice, but he was doing this because she needed it, and he wasn’t about to let himself resent her. “Yes.”
“When do you want to leave?”
“We just have to pack your things. Tell me what you want and I’ll put everything in a bag for you.”
“What about Halloween?” She rubbed her face. “I feel as if I’m still asleep.”
“I asked Mrs. Dover to hand out our candy.” A retired teacher, she had a way with children.
“Good.” Lydia grinned. “I’d hate to find our door soaped when we get back.”
Hell, he was just relieved she could think of returning. “What do you need?”
She shoved the quilt down to her knees and crawled out, grimacing as the movement hurt her. “I’ll pack for myself.”
He got out of her way and dragged her bag from the back of the closet to the end of the bed.
“We should call your mom,” she said, grabbing her things.
“I did.”
Lydia stood over her suitcase, clothing spilling over her arms. “Evelyn must have fainted.”
“She was happy.” He’d dreamed of a real family until he was sixteen and they’d come home and brought him back to Kline, Maine, with them. He’d been grateful to escape the foster home where he’d milked cows and felt bitter for nearly two years, but he hadn’t expected family life back in Kline. He’d never been able to believe in it or his parents.
“What changed your mind, Josh?”
Still mired in the past, he didn’t understand.
She read the question in his eyes. “About going to Maine.”
“You needed to see Mom and Dad.”
Puzzled, she dropped her clothes and then tried to bunch them into a tidy pile. With a few deft moves, she folded all the pieces that had seeped over the edge of the suitcase. “Thanks.”
“Sure.”
Before either of them could ruin the moment, he fished out their coats and carried them to the car. When he realized she might try carrying her suitcase down the stairs, he hurtled back inside.
Lydia was putting on his favorite sweater. Soft, green, touchable, a shade that deepened her eyes so that he could barely make himself look away from them. Her head popped out of the V-neck. She looked embarrassed to be caught dressing—by her own husband—and confused about his abrupt return.
“What’s up?”
He shook his head, swallowing an accusation that she was treating him like a stranger. “You ready?”
“As soon as I add toiletries.” She tossed toothpaste and various other items into her bag, then she brushed her hair into place with her fingers and grabbed her purse off the dresser. “Ready.”
He scooped the quilt off the bed. Downstairs, he turned off the lights and then outside, he opened the back passenger door. Lydia hung back. “What?”
He held up the quilt. “I thought you could rest. It’s a long drive.”
“I’ll climb in the back if I get tired.”
“Come on, Lydia. Let me have my way. You’ve been a little more active each day, which I assume means the rest is helping you.” Physically, at least. He couldn’t say the silence in their house spelled recovery for either of them.
“I’m all right.” She touched his arm, willingly. His chest tightened. “I’m better.”
He opened the front door and helped her inside. As soon as he started the engine, she punched in her favorite radio station. Some guy sang about memories of love. Josh glanced at Lydia. Her smile startled him because it came from inside.
He smiled, too, but he had to look away from her. Making her happy felt too good.
THE NEEDLE on the gas gauge was dropping toward a quarter tank as he took the exit for Kline, Maine—named for Reverend Levi Kline, a sixteenth-century hellfire-and-brimstone minister whose influence still obscured most kindness in Josh’s hometown.
He drove down a long ramp between tall pines and far-off hardwoods, almost bare of fall leaves. He always felt more like a stranger than a prodigal son. No one in town had mentioned his parents’ way with a bottle, but disapproval had followed him down every street.
He’d escaped Kline’s small-town, fish-eye interest the morning after he’d graduated from high school. People described New Englanders as stand-offish. Not if you’d grown up among them in a family that provoked notice for all the wrong reasons.
He’d buried himself on the large city campus of Boston College and continued to remain unnoticed through law school. One thing a lobsterman’s son could count on in those days of dwindling catches had been plenty of financial aid.
During law school, a Commonwealth Supreme Court judge had selected him as his clerk. Afterward, he’d turned down six-figure starting salaries to keep his unspoken promises. Success often made him forget he was the town drunks’ son who wasn’t supposed to amount to anything.
Lydia beamed with appreciation at the quaint bandstand on the square and the Victorian houses that lined the west side. “Think of the history the people who’ve lived in those homes have seen. A woman from Colorado can’t even believe places like this are real.”
Her excitement annoyed him—like always. “I’ve got plenty of history—and it’s real enough.”
“Didn’t you know good times here, too?”
“You want the truth? I’m good at my job. People come to me for advice. I get offers—big offers that would mean a lot more to us than a town house.” He felt her gaze on him. Her hard gaze. “What?”
“I don’t care about offers. I’m beginning to hate your job. What about us? You can’t measure success by our marriage.”
“Maybe I don’t write you sonnets everyday, but I thought we were safe and settled.”
“That makes a girl’s heart beat faster.” She’d learned a thing or two about sarcasm. “We began growing apart the day you decided I could wait for your free time. Marriage takes effort, too.”
Starting to feel harried, he slapped the turn signal to indicate a right.
“Go ahead,” she said. “You were saying you’re successful.”
“Some people think so. I did.” Like her, he dropped the argument neither of them was going to win. “But every time I drive down these streets, I’m eighteen again, trying to escape. Look how my parents’ neighbors still stare.” He nodded at an elderly woman who was already too busy storing up gossip to recognize bitterness in his smile he shot her way. “I hid my family secrets. I let my mother and father make Clara’s life a living hell because I had this gut feeling no one else was ever supposed to know what went on behind our doors.”
“But didn’t you have good times?” Apparently, she had to insist. She pointed ahead of them. “Look at that Founder’s Day banner. That means a fair.”
“That happened over a month ago.”
“Don’t they celebrate with a fair? With games and cotton candy?”
“And food for the ducks,” he said, remembering the feel of his sister’s hand in his. A memory too poignant to face for long. “See that pond on the library side of the square?”
Lydia nodded.
“There’s a little cove where those tall reeds grow that has just enough room for two kids. Clara always said it was our spot for feeding the ducks—and they’d swim over the second we started down the hill toward them. I used to take bread for them when I came home.”
“Not since I’ve known you.”
“I couldn’t without explaining.” The truth fought to stay hidden still. “The bad stuff is hard enough to talk about. The good times…” A grown man didn’t talk about his breaking heart.
He almost missed the turn by the brick schoolhouse where he and Clara had attended kindergarten. He never passed the ancient church where they’d buried her without anguish that was like a band across his chest.
“We should bring flowers,” Lydia said.
Small, square and brown, climbing with ivy, but nowhere near as impressive as the brick edifice erected by new money in the “good” part of Kline, the church felt like ground where Clara would always be waiting. She hadn’t been old enough to understand death. Neither had he, but he’d learned in one swift, hard lesson.
Clearing his throat, he turned toward the coast road. “Maybe.”
The ocean’s salty scent greeted them. His father’s family had been lobstermen since—who knew when? Ironically, since Josh and Clara had lived in such poverty, Bart Quincy owned a plot of the richest land in Kline.
Back in the old days, overgrown sea grass had separated the white house from the narrow road. The oversized Cape Cod had looked a little drunk itself, a square, peaked box, in peeling paint gone gray with neglect.
Now a clean picket fence separated Quincy land from folks hiking toward the ocean. Fir trees, holly bushes and a neat lawn bordered the driveway.
“If only you and Clara had known a decent home, maybe you wouldn’t be so wedged in the past.”
He’d never worried much about himself. It kind of warmed him that Lydia did. “And yet, you don’t get that it was my parents’ fault?”
“They aren’t the same people now.”
Always the same answer—and true, but never good enough. They were headed to what amounted to a homecoming for Lydia and his parents. He’d already started holding his tongue.
He looked at his wife’s delicate profile, her large eyes, fringed by long lashes that could feel so soft against his skin, her nose a little large. He’d almost lost her. If coming here comforted her, he’d try to make the best of it and of his parents, too.
Josh opened his fingers on the steering wheel and then tightened them again to follow a slight curve. Usually too aware of consequences to act on impulse, he’d given in to his need to make Lydia happy. Coming home might have been an unforgiving mistake. He’d be stunned if he ended this so-called visit on speaking terms with his wife or his mother and father.
As he parked in a square of loose gravel, his mom slid through the mudroom door beside the kitchen.
He forced himself to smile. Surprise tilted her mouth. She waved. “Even I can tell she’s really glad to see me,” he said.
“What’d you think?” Lydia sounded mystified. As if love made everything right. Wouldn’t their marriage have been as shiny and new-feeling as the day they’d taken their vows if love was all it took? “Is your father home, too?”
“I don’t see the truck, but he might have parked in the barn.” His parents had converted it to a garage after the last of his grandfather’s cows had passed to their bovine reward. “Stay there. I’ll help you out.”
“Normally, I’d argue, but I feel a little dizzy.”
He climbed out and opened her door, searching her face. “Is that normal? Should we call that nurse?”
“I’m just tired.” Lydia wrapped her arm around his waist. “The drive felt longer than I expected.”
“I can carry you.”
She blushed, watching his mother. “No, you can’t, but if you don’t mind we’ll go slowly.”
“You made it,” Evelyn said. “I was starting to worry.”
Josh stared at his mother and at the house. To the right, the ground dipped, just barely, where they’d filled in the pool.
Lydia glanced at him. “Are we late, Evelyn?”
“I was impatient. I’ll get the door.” She opened it while they climbed the wooden steps. “You look dreadful, Lydia. I’m glad to have you, but I hope the trip wasn’t too strenuous.”
“I couldn’t wait.” Lydia hugged his mom. “Where’s Bart?”
“Right here.” He came around the old pine cupboard and hugged her tight. His smile over her shoulder reached Josh. “I was building a fire in the family room.”
“Lydia’s headed straight to bed,” Evelyn said in a take-no-prisoners tone. “We won’t be ready to eat for a while. You have time for a nap.” Evelyn tapped her husband’s chest. “Get the bags while Josh takes Lydia up.”
“Sounds good.”
“Thanks for having us,” Lydia said. “Josh will come right back to help you, Bart.” She tugged his arm. “You should thank them, too.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled. Josh guided Lydia through the dining room into the small hall that separated the unused “company” living room and the family room from the rest of the house.
“It’s too late for you to mediate,” Josh said. “Have you noticed how small this place is?”
“I should have considered you’d feel like the walls were trying to squeeze you.”
“Don’t worry.” They started up the staircase. “Whatever happens between my parents and me will come in its own time. I didn’t do this for them.”
“You don’t know you’re allowed to love them and be loyal to Clara’s memory, too.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“If I could have my mother and father back for even a minute, I’d find the right words to tell them what they mean to me. Think of what you’d say to Clara.”
I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
“If you’re not careful, you could find too late that you do still care for Evelyn and Bart.” No wonder she ate up his parents’ uncontrollable need to smother her with love. She stopped, so suddenly she seemed to rock. “The stairs are moving.”
“I’m right behind you.” Her hair brushed his chin. He wanted to bury his face in the pale strands and tell her to shut up about his mother and father. “Our family, Lydia—the one you and I will have—that matters to me most.”
She swallowed. Sick or nervous? He couldn’t be sure, but she battled on. “Evelyn and Bart are part of me because I can count on them.”
“Can’t you understand I tried to believe in them again and again? I gave up when Clara died.” At the landing, he moved around her to open his old bedroom door. “Why is this so important to you?”
“Wait.” She held on to the newel post. “I never thought of those times—when you believed in them and they let you down. You were just a child.” Her troubled gaze looked into his past.
“Stop, Lydia. I don’t want you picturing me as a helpless little boy. I don’t need pity.”
“I’ve been thinking… You turned your back on me because you learned how to hold a grudge against your parents. You know how to withhold love.”
“It’s completely different. They let my sister die—and she depended on me.”
“I let your son die—and I was his only protection.”
“How can you say that?”
She didn’t answer with words. Her eyes were red and full of tears.
“Don’t be crazy.” He pulled her close. She stiffened, but he held on. “I’m the one who should have seen what was happening. I’m as blind as my parents ever were. Twice now, someone I’ve loved has died because I wasn’t careful enough.”
“No.” She put her hands on his upper arms, but this time, when she pushed herself away, it was so she could look him in the eye. “You did everything for Clara, and I may be angry because Vivian Durance was your client’s wife, but you couldn’t know what she’d do unless she told you.” She looked at him with a plea for reassurance.
“Of course she didn’t tell me. She ranted and the bailiffs dragged her out of court. She didn’t even threaten me, much less you. I swear I didn’t know.”
“You don’t have to swear.” She braced her hands in the small of her back, sagging against the doorjamb. “I’m exhausted.”
She’d let him off the hook, but if they let it go, were they following the same habit that had nearly sunk their marriage? “Come on. A few more steps and you’re in bed.”
Usually, he had to force himself inside this room. Not this afternoon.
Over the years, he’d taken down most of the old posters. No more scantily clad women seducing from the walls. No cars he’d never own on a public defender’s salary. He’d had a thing for Dali when he was a teenager who’d believed human beings could create their own reality. Those posters remained, still in their cheap frames.
“Your mom changed the bedding.”
Gone was the thin spread that had barely covered his grandparents’ old double bed. His mother had replaced it with an ivory comforter, posh and inviting enough to make Lydia test its thickness.
“Want to change clothes?” he asked.
“Yes, please. These jeans are killing me.”
As if on cue, his father showed up, holding their bags. Josh took them. “Thanks, Dad.” He set Lydia’s on the bed and unzipped the clothing compartment. “What can I take out?”
“I’ll get it in a sec.” She grinned at his dad. “Thanks, Bart. How’s the fishing?”
“Good enough.” He hugged her again. Josh watched, bemused. That sort of spontaneity rarely happened here. “I’m pleased you came, and you know Evelyn and I are both so sorry about the baby.”
Lydia faltered. “Me, too, Bart. I’ve been so swallowed in grief I almost forgot he was your grandson, too.” She turned, hiding her face. “Excuse me.” She whipped the flap open on her bag and yanked out a pair of flannel pajama pants and a matching blue tank top. Without looking back, she left to change in the bathroom across the hall.
Josh stared at his father. Over Bart’s shoulder, Clara’s room was closed tight, decades of accusations and grief stuffed inside.
“I’m glad you found time to come, son.”
“I want to be with Lydia.” His father flinched and Josh looked away from Clara’s room. “We’re grateful you and Mom offered her—us—time up here.”
“Come down when you’re ready.” Bart started to leave but looked back. “Concentrate on Lydia. Don’t either of you worry about us this visit.”
Josh exhaled, seeing stars in front of his eyes. Maybe Lydia was right. He had to do something about this thing with his parents.
He moved his bag to the chair at his childhood desk, which was rammed against the wall beneath the sloping eave. He was hanging Lydia’s things in the closet when she came back. “Where’s your father?”
“Downstairs.” Josh pulled back the comforter and sheet. “In you go.” As she crawled past him, he stroked her back. She jumped, but kept moving, unconsciously choosing her usual side of the bed.
“What did you say to him?”
“You don’t have to be suspicious. We didn’t argue.”
“Nice effort.” She eased onto her back. “Wake me if your parents want to put dinner off because I’m sleeping.” She rolled on to her side and pulled the sheet up.
“They won’t mind if you sleep.” He tucked the comforter around her. No task was too small.
“They’re doing enough, getting us out of that house. I don’t want to put them to extra trouble.” She sighed, so weary her skin and lips looked almost bloodless. “Is this worse for you?” she asked.
“No.” Seeing the baby’s things had made him hurt for Lydia and himself and for the child they’d never have a chance to know. He’d never feel comfortable in Kline, but time had applied a sturdy bandage to the wounds he’d suffered there. “Being here is better than being in the town house.”
CHAPTER FOUR
EVELYN WAS CHOPPING tomatoes for a salad when a scream rode up her spine. She dropped the knife. Her hand, jerking, shoved the tomatoes across the counter. She flew down the hall and up the narrow stairs.
At the door to Josh’s room, she paused. Lydia might want privacy. Hell, no. She’d screamed. No one would ever find Evelyn negligent again.
“Lydia?” Tapping twice, she opened the door at the same time. “Are you awake, honey?”
“Come in.”
Already in, Evelyn stopped dead. Covered in sweat that curled her blond hair, Lydia turned from the closet beside Josh’s desk, her hand sliding off the doorknob to tremble at her thigh. Her pale face and shadowed eyes made Evelyn desperate to do something. Anything.
“How bad do I look?” Lydia asked.
“Well.” Evelyn didn’t want to frighten her. “I hope you’re feeling some better. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I thought I’d lost my clothes.” She opened the closet and pulled out a clean T-shirt, her face flushing as if she’d made up an excuse. “Josh must have put them away.”
“You didn’t scream over a shirt.”
Lydia froze. “I screamed? You heard me?”
“Yes.” Trying to laugh, Evelyn pushed Lydia’s moist hair away from her face. “That’s the way screaming works. Do you have a fever?”
“Don’t suggest that in front of Josh.” Lydia’s quick smile apologized for her terseness. “He’ll worry.”
Evelyn sank against the bed, pushing her hands down her own faded jeans. “What a relief. Bart and I wondered if something was wrong between you.”
Lydia stared too hard at her shirt. “We’re both sad.”
“I mean I’ve been worried before. Josh has a compulsion to save the world. It’s my fault, of course, and his father’s, so I shouldn’t say anything, but where does that leave you?”
Lydia shook out her shirt, her expression an order to butt out. “I need to change.”
The old Evelyn would have backed down. The new Evelyn wasn’t so different after all. “Go in the bathroom and wash your face, too. I’ll make the bed. You’re sure about the fever?”
Lydia started toward the door, but stopped. “Look,” she said. “Josh hasn’t done anything. I fell asleep, and every time I fall asleep, I dream I haven’t lost the baby. Then comes a moment when I know I have.”
The lump in Evelyn’s throat refused to go down. “None of this is your fault, and Josh won’t hate you for it.” She grabbed the comforter and fluffed it hard enough to almost remove the batting.
Lydia tossed her shirt on the bed and pulled Evelyn close. “Josh doesn’t know what to do with his feelings and neither do I. I’m starting to think it’s an everyday, take-stock-of-where-you-stand process.” Her hand was tender on the top of Evelyn’s head.
“Josh loves you. Don’t forget that.”
“He loves you, too, but he lets his relationships slide, and I kept waiting around for our marriage to get better. I’m not content to coast anymore.”
“You and I are in the same place, and Josh is about to find himself at a disadvantage.” Evelyn piled the comforter on the desk chair. “I wanted you here because I love you and I needed to take care of you, but I have an ulterior motive. I’ve missed my son. I’m going to find a way to make him believe in us again.”
Lydia looked askance, which gave Evelyn her first doubt. “What?”
“I’m not sure Josh is easy to force.”
“He’s here.”
“Because we were both desperate to get away.”
“Then you’ll remain desperate. I’m not above scheming to get my son back in my life.”
“What does Bart think?” Lydia asked it with pity in her voice, as if she were hoping Bart could make Evelyn come to her senses. Dread tried to rush in, but Evelyn turned it back.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. Now, I’ll make this bed. You freshen up and come sit with me if you feel able while I start supper.”
They sidestepped each other. Evelyn raced around the bed plumping and straightening. Fear of losing a son would light a fire under any woman.
Lydia shut the bathroom door, and a moment later, the water began to run. Evelyn finished the bed and then turned to Josh’s open bag. Jeans and sweaters, neatly stacked, just begged to be put away.
Except that her son would consider her intrusive if she took care of his personal things. She set the bag on a shelf halfway down the closet wall and closed the door. Then she tidied the room, ending by picking up a copy of Tom Sawyer from the desk. Bart’s father had given him that book. She pressed it to her face, taking solace in the musty smell of the rough, old-fashioned cloth binding.
“Where’s Josh?”
Evelyn jumped, but then quickly stashed the book on the shelf above the desk. “He had phone calls. Last I saw him, he was strolling the headland with his cell phone glued to his ear.”
“Working. What a bolt from the blue.” Lydia grasped the door to hold herself up.
“Are you all right?” As concerned about Lydia’s indignation as her lack of balance, Evelyn took her arm. “Let me help you down the stairs.”
“I’m fine. Really—and I shouldn’t have said anything.”
They headed downstairs. Over the front door, a small fanlight let in sunshine, mottled by hundred-year-old glass. How many times had she felt as if she was searching for her own future when she’d tried to see through that glass?
Evelyn couldn’t bear to look at Lydia. “He’s not out there making appointments in the city.” She finally realized her son had always taken another tack to solve his problems. Business had come before family but not anymore. “I’d bet he’s canceling everything that would take him back to that office. He’ll be here until you’re ready to go back.”
“That could be forever, Evelyn.”
“CANCEL THAT CONFERENCE, Brenda, and make sure we get continuances on the rest of my cases.” Josh cupped his hand over his free ear as late autumn wind kicked through the sea grass, rustling it in loud whispers. A storm was coming in on clouds that seemed to have blown up in the blue-gray sky.
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