The Foster Family, page 32
“Why are you being so nice?” I sniffled, and he handed me a tissue. “I was an idiot to let this happen. Maybe I don’t deserve nice.”
“Honey, I work in a field where people die all the time. I get attached to them, and then the heart doesn’t work, or the cancer gets them, or some other stupid thing, like a fucking cold, and when they don’t die, when they go on to bigger and better things, like lovers and babies, it makes me believe the world isn’t complete shit. So I take care of the ones who live, because that’s what I do.”
I nodded at him. What was I supposed to say to that?
“We’ll be in touch,” he said.
“Thanks.”
His smile was pretty brilliant, and I couldn’t help smiling back.
“And thanks for taking care of David. He’s really lucky.”
“Yes, he is, isn’t he just?”
He made me laugh as I hopped down and headed for the door, and for that, I had to concede, he was damn good at his job.
“All set?” David asked as I emerged.
“Yeah. They’ll call with the results. And I have to come back in three weeks, three months and six months, as long as the tests are negative. If not….”
“Come on,” David said, patting my back and guiding me toward the door. “One thing at a time.”
The three days waiting for those results brought me back to the afternoon I worked my sexual frustration out in Malcolm’s yard, which felt like a lifetime ago. I was too exhausted to do anything but eat and sleep in the evenings. No energy to think was a good thing. The results, when they came, gave me a glimmering of hope that maybe Andrew hadn’t lied about the condoms. We celebrated with barbecue and ice cream, and I finally told them about Charlie’s opening and broke the news that I wanted to go.
“Will you stay there?” Nash asked.
“I guess it will depend. If they’re happy to see me, then yeah. I’ll give it a try. If not, then no. I’ll just get my stuff and come home. I’ll find work here or go back to school or something.”
“Whatever you decide, Kerry, you know we support you.”
“Even if I stay with them?” I asked him. “Even knowing what that means about me?” I studied his expression. Searched for the line, waited for him to draw it.
“If they’re good to you and you’re happy,” Nash said, though I could see the worry in his eyes as he said it, “then that is what matters. And you have this Lissa person. She sounds reliable.”
I grinned. “She’s awesome. You’ll love her and Marcus both.”
“You’re a grown man,” Nash finally conceded. “Doesn’t make me less your father, does it?”
“God, no.” I hugged him this time, and realized, as I did, that we’d both been firmly on the same side all along. That he didn’t have to understand my lifestyle to love me or care what happened to me, and all he’d ever wanted was to know that I understood that.
Chapter 23
SO, YEAH. I crashed Charlie’s party. I had no idea if he wanted me there, but I walked in with Lissa on my arm and Marcus at my back and took the chance. I actually had time to look around at his work before I saw him. Lissa said we’d come early so I could see the art in case things with Charlie went badly.
This wasn’t what I had looked at in his old photo albums. That stuff had been beautiful. Vibrant and exciting to look at, but this, what I saw on the soft-gray walls of that gallery in groups of five or six at a time or off in small alcoves immersed in the colors of Charlie’s work, or, occasionally, hanging, one piece alone on a broad, otherwise empty wall, was something else.
The natural world was still his focus, but gone were the tamed, controlled gardens of his backyard. And it wasn’t anything so cliché as the wild sand, sea, and stone beach at the foot of their cliff either.
I recognized the uneven stone steps up to their yard from the beach in the first picture I looked at and the glimmer of the golf course clubhouse in the next shot, off in the distance, looking like fairy lights and dreams except for the rubble of uprooted trees and dying vegetation that had been ripped out and discarded to make room for a new green. That ugly pile appeared in sharp, detailed focus in the foreground of the picture and made the rest look fake and unreal by comparison.
There were pictures of their own property in one room. Not the neat flower beds and exotic imports, either, but of the wild end. He’d taken pictures of the whole thing in gray-and-white, nebulous and indistinct, and of bits of it, close-up and finely focused on a single juniper berry or ash leaf, or a last, fuzzy dandelion gamely clinging to its puff of seeds as the stalk bent in the breeze.
That one, titled Not Quite Ready Yet made me smile, because I totally identified with that hardy little flower, clinging to the seeds of its new life until they were ready to take root and grow.
One image caught my breath. It was just black earth, his grandfather’s old snips stuck point-first into it, and white shards of ceramic littered around. A single, tiny purple-and-blue forget-me-not was the only point of color. It was so simple a composition that the title Chaos wouldn’t make any sense at all to anyone but the three of us.
“Isn’t it weird,” Lissa asked from my side, “how the ones that don’t seem to make any sense in your head are the ones that hit you hardest in the gut?”
I nodded. This one made perfect sense to me, as did the one next to it. That was an image of that same juniper bush he’d been hacking away at that day. It had gaping holes in it where he’d lopped off fine, living branches, and it was left an awkward, windswept, but somehow utterly beautiful shape. It should have been ugly, and to someone expecting the fanned-out, clean silhouette of a normal juniper bush, I supposed it would be ugly.
But to me, it was beautiful, and aptly titled My Beauty.
Between them was a very small, very detailed photo of their gazebo. The outdoor shower was on, easy to see against the white sky because the water droplets glimmered in the sun, and the deck was darker where the water fell and splashed. It had no title at all.
By far, it was the most powerful piece, and it was difficult to tell why. Certainly, it was a pretty picture, and a stranger seeing that on the wall would think it was a beautifully executed photo of a stunning view, a peaceful spot capturing an old-fashioned, idyllic moment in time.
“That one’s pretty, isn’t it?” Lissa asked. “I think it’s my favorite.”
I agreed with her and stepped back, realizing, as I looked around the room as a whole, that Charlie had told a story. Our story. His, mine, and Malcolm’s, in pictures the rest of the world could never really understand. And that last, haunting triptych was us, in all our lonely, broken glory, only not a soul would ever see that truth but us.
“I should….” I looked around. The place was crowded full of people I didn’t know. Strangers who’d come to see Charlie’s work and judge it.
“Liss, I should….”
“What?” she asked, looping her hand through my elbow. “Go? You think you should go without saying hello?”
I brought the small champagne flute I was holding to my lips and sipped. The liquid was tasteless on my tongue, and my hand shook as I drank. My heart wibbled pathetically. Go before they saw I’d come? I looked around again, past the milling people to the pictures. To Charlie’s heart, nailed to the wall, displayed so all these strangers could pass judgment on him.
“I should find him.” I downed the last of the champagne, like that small sip would be enough to fortify me, and loosed myself from her grip.
When I brought the glass down, he was there, across the room, Malcolm at his side, and they watched me.
I held my breath. In that instant, I was back at a dance, looking across the dance floor, waiting for Andrew to acknowledge my existence. Some part of me expected them to turn and face the young woman trying to get Charlie’s attention, but he ignored her and took Malcolm’s hand, plowing through the crowd in his haste to come to me.
Again, I expected something. Him to ask what I was doing there. Demand to know how I had the nerve to show up.
He picked me up in a soul-crushing bear hug, feet right off the floor, without saying a word. No breathy You came! or choked hello, or I missed you. Just the hug, as intense and silent as the hug good-bye at the airport had been. Like he was picking that one up where he’d been forced to drop it before and had no intention of stopping any time soon.
I felt Malcolm’s big hand at the small of my back after a moment and his hot breath near our ears. “It’s almost time for your opening speech, babe,” he whispered. “You’ll have to put him down.”
“Make me,” Charlie mumbled against my neck.
“Charlie.” There was a new, sterner note in Malcolm’s voice, but none of the kindness was hindered by that. “Let him go.”
Charlie did, after a heartbeat, set me back on my feet. “Only because Mal insisted,” he said to me as he brushed hair off my forehead and grasped my hand in his. It was as though he was afraid I’d run off or disappear if he lost contact, even for an instant.
Mal didn’t say anything to me, but he did stand on my other side and place an arm over my shoulder.
When Charlie went off to stand behind a podium and publicly thank the gallery owners for sponsoring him and the people for coming, Malcolm leaned close, and his breath brushed my ear again. “We’ll have to stand around and be polite for hours. You should have come near the end when we might have been able to escape to an office somewhere and greet you properly.”
Charlie had finished his speech and was ushering someone over. Malcolm’s hand dropped from my shoulder and brushed over my ass as he swung his arm around to shake hands with the person Charlie was introducing him to.
“This is Malcolm.” He smiled wide. “My other half.” Malcolm shook the graying man’s hand and smiled, an echo of the polite smile Charlie wore.
“And Kerry,” Charlie went on, much to my shocked surprise. “My inspiration.”
The man held out his hand to me, and after a heartbeat and a discreet tap on my ass from Malcolm, I shook it. “Hi,” I said dumbly.
The man gave me a polite smile. His grip was hard and his clear blue eyes sharp. “So you’re the one who brought our Charlie out of retirement. Well done, boy. Well done. He’s done a fine job, and we’re proud to host his first show.”
The gallery owner? Charlie had introduced me to the gallery owner? I glanced at Charlie, but he was busy blushing and glaring at his shoes. “I… think he does beautiful work,” I said lamely.
The man agreed, made more polite small talk for a few moments, allowing Charlie to pull himself together, then he took Charlie by the elbow and lead him away. I heard him tell Charlie he wanted to introduce him to some buyers.
“He’s selling these?” I asked, staring around the room.
“That is how you make money in this business, Kerry,” Malcolm said dryly.
“But this is….” I waved a hand at the pictures.
“It’s what?” Malcolm asked, turning to face me. “What, exactly, do you think it is? It’s a bunch of very nice photographs.”
I shook my head mutely. Surely he could see what I saw. Charlie’s sweat and blood and tears disguised as mere pretty photographs.
“That’s what I thought,” Malcolm said softly, and there was no mistaking the disappointment in his voice.
“This is Charlie’s night,” I whispered fiercely at him. “We’re here for him.”
“And where will you be tomorrow, Kerry?” he asked. He wasn’t looking at me but staring toward the three photos that I’d found so fascinating.
That was my opening. I glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. His hands were in his trouser pockets, and his gaze was fixed straight ahead.
I squared my shoulders and clasped my own hands behind me, so maybe he’d not notice how badly they shook. I looked straight ahead too, at that lopsided, damaged bush. It had been maimed by Charlie’s hack-and-slash attack but had been powerful enough, determined enough, to survive the assault. It had bent itself around the wounded parts, protecting tender new shoots from the ravaging, salty winds, and one day, new growth would appear, like scar tissue, over the old wounds. Because trees that eked out a living out in the open like that, exposed and vulnerable, found ways to survive the odds.
I turned to look at Malcolm and found he was watching me. I looked him in the eye and licked away the dryness making my lips stiff. “Wherever you deem it appropriate I should be,” I said at last. It was the best I knew how to do, and I dropped my gaze, because I couldn’t keep looking into his eyes and risk seeing them turn cold against me.
His palm under my chin was warm and smooth, strong as he lifted my face. His gaze was the same. “It’s Charlie’s night,” he said back to me. “If he wants you—”
“Do you?” I blurted.
His brows flashed up and his eyes got a bit wider. “Pardon?”
“Do you? Want me?”
“I thought you were here for Charlie.”
I pulled my chin free of his grip and took a step back. “It has to be both of you or it can’t be either,” I told him. “None of us are built any other way.” I looked at the photos again, at the tree, stocky and strong, partially protecting the shower and gazebo from the cool ocean breezes, and the water dripping down through the gazebo floorboards to the soil, at all the tiny details that made the three pictures one. All the tiny interwoven bits of lives that made three people into one heart. I looked back to Malcolm and drew in a breath and thought I would hold it, but Malcolm leaned close and kissed me, hard and possessive, knocking the breath from my lungs and thought from my head and leaving only room for him.
The rest of the show went off without a hitch and mostly in a daze for me, as Malcolm effectively relieved Lissa from chaperone duties by never letting go of my hand the entire night. I thought that him being as openly with Charlie as he was, that little demonstration of possessiveness over me should have raised eyebrows, but if it did, it never happened in my presence, and I was grateful for however that was possible.
There was no talk of my going back to Lissa’s that night, and she said a quiet good-bye to me while Malcolm looked on, long before the show was actually over.
“You sure?” I asked her.
She smiled and nodded. “If you are.”
I was. “Thank you for this, babe,” I told her.
Her crooked expression and small shrug were very sisterly as she turned to go. “You owe me one.”
God. I owed her a whopper.
WE DID eventually make it back to the house, all a little bit tipsy from maybe one last, unneeded glass of champagne, and I made myself at home quickly, stripping off the suit jacket David had loaned me for the occasion. I had short sleeves underneath, and Malcolm immediately noticed the small round plaster sticking precariously to sweaty skin on the inside of my elbow.
He looked at it, at me, and his brows thundered down.
I covered the telltale evidence with my other hand, but Charlie was there to pry my fingers loose and demand I tell them what it was and why.
And of course I had to. I would have preferred a nice, safely ensconced night in my bed in the little room they’d given me and a deep cup of creamy-sweet coffee in the morning to tell them this, but since the genie had been let out, there was no point trying to stuff it back in.
So, I told them. I told them the first test and the three-week one had both been negative, there were no signs of any other STDs, including gonorrhea, and I reluctantly had to place some hope in the idea that Andrew had been telling the truth about the condoms. That made him human in a way that made it harder to accept the rest of how he’d treated me.
I pulled a return plane ticket out of the breast pocket of the jacket I’d removed and let them know I was going back to Seattle in three months, for my next appointment, and they accepted that news as well.
“You aren’t going to say anything?” I asked.
“Three months seems like a decent amount of time to try this out,” Malcolm said.
I wasn’t sure I had the nerve to ask what we were trying, exactly, so I just nodded.
“Was there something specific you wanted to hear?” Charlie asked.
I wanted to know I was welcome. Wanted. That I had been missed. That at least for the duration of this trial period, if that was what this was, this would be my home.
“How’s working for Lissa?” I asked him instead.
They looked at each other over my head and Malcolm sighed.
“Really?” he asked.
What was I supposed to say or do? How was I supposed to get from this awkward space between the couch and the coffee table, between them, to my room? How was I supposed to walk over there, like I’d never left, and risk opening the door to find they’d changed it back to what it had been before I’d dropped my pile of crap into their lives?
How was I supposed to watch them go, hand in hand, to their own room, and know my place was that limited? What the hell had I thought was going to happen? Maybe whatever was going to happen, I had to be the one to make a start.
I turned to face Malcolm and held out the hand he had clasped so tightly, so possessively, all night. “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed.
To my relief, he reached across the back of the couch and took hold of me. “Come to bed and sleep off the champagne,” he said. He jerked his head at Charlie, indicating my room as I stumbled around the end of the couch to join him. “Go get him a pillow.”
Charlie grinned and obeyed without comment.
“And sleep shorts,” I called, but Charlie only chuckled and Malcolm took my chin in his hand and turned my head so I was focused on him.
“You won’t need those.”
I blinked at him. God, I had to admit his hand on me like that felt more like coming home than walking into the house had, by a long shot. But the thought of lying naked beside him and Charlie made me nervous. I was so hyperaware of the needle prick in my arm, of the memory of Andrew’s pale, defeated expression. “I’m drunk,” I stated.
