This Time for Keeps, page 11
“That’s not fair.”
“No, it wasn’t. Jesus Christ, Meg, I was your husband, but every time I so much as touched you, you cringed as if I was a pervert or something.”
She stood there, absorbed the sting of his words.
“Do you have any idea what that did to me?”
“To you?” she shot back. “I was the one trying like hell to hold myself together, when all you could think about was how long it had been since we had sex.”
“Sex.” He physically reeled, as if she’d just knifed him in the gut. “I was hurting, too, Meg. Did it ever occur to you I needed my wife?”
“And I needed time.”
Through the strobe light of the storm, he looked so very tall standing there on the front porch, rain sliding down the lines of his cheeks, his body perfectly still. The light in his eyes completely gone. “Looks like you got what you wanted then. Congratulations.”
He didn’t wait for her to say anything—she wasn’t sure what there was to say. He turned from her as if she was something ugly and broken and crossed the porch, his loafers coming down in hard splashes against the puddles. He reached the rail, yanked open the screen door, strode into the rain.
Meg stood on the porch for a long, long time, watching taillights disappear in the storm. Even then she remained, watching, unable to turn away, walk away.
Until Charlotte started to cry.
“DID HE SPEND THE NIGHT?”
Seated at the big curved booth at the back of Uncle Ralph’s, Meg reached for her water glass. The lunch crowd had thinned, leaving only one other table occupied. “Of course not.”
“I love the way you say that,” Julia said, plucking a tortilla chip from the basket in the center of the table. “Of course not. Like why would I ask such a crazy question?” With a pointed smile, she scooped the little triangle into the freshly made guacamole. “Because it’s not like you waited two days to even mention it to us or anything,” she pressed on, the way only she could. “Your husband in your kitchen…naked.”
Husband. The word made Meg shift uncomfortably against the vinyl cushion.
“He was wearing a blanket,” Lori pointed out, gnawing on a chip of her own. “Or at least that’s what Meg says.”
Meg glanced around for Ruby, who was apparently in no hurry to clear out the stragglers. “I don’t know why I even said anything.”
“Because for two days you’ve been somewhere far, far away,” Julia said. “Now we know where.”
“It was no big deal—he was just watching Charlotte for a few hours.”
“Naked,” Julia reminded.
“Seriously,” Meg said as her cell phone beeped the arrival of a text message. “Can you just forget I even mentioned that?”
God knew she was trying to forget the whole thing.
Julia, being Julia, refused to back down. “Can you?”
Sighing, Meg knew the answer to both questions. No. She couldn’t forget any more than Julia and Lori could. God knew she’d tried.
“I bet he’s still got that killer chest, too, doesn’t he?” Lori said, and with the simple question the image formed, Russell lounging in the entryway to the kitchen, his body big and hard and naked except for that little yellow…loincloth.
Quickly Meg reached for her purse, fumbling for her BlackBerry. The last thing she needed was for her friends to see her eyes—or the flush she couldn’t prevent. Because then they would know there was so much more than Meg was telling them.
They knew anyway. “Something happened, didn’t it?” Julia asked. “That’s why you’ve been holding out on us.”
“We talked.” If you could call that talking.
“Talked. About what?”
Meg closed her fingers around her phone. “Hope,” she said. “Dreams.” Sex.
Or the serious lack thereof.
I was hurting, too, Meg. Did it ever occur to you I needed my wife?
Even now, his words, the raw humiliation in his eyes, haunted her. Almost forty-eight hours had passed since she’d asked him to leave. During that time there’d been nothing. No sightings. No phone calls.
No signed divorce papers.
Frowning, she unlocked the phone and pulled up the text message from one of her editorial assistants.
Ur 1:30 is waiting.
Three minutes later, she was hurrying across the street. She’d checked her calendar that morning, but through the rush of meetings since then had forgotten about the appointment Lori had added after Meg left the afternoon before. Lori said the young man had been insistent about seeing Meg.
Kids from the community college came in all the time, eager for a job. Meg didn’t have any openings, but it never hurt to hear what they had to say.
“Hi,” Meg said, breezing into the sun-dappled outer office. She saw him sitting rigidly on the dainty camelback sofa her grandfather had placed in that exact spot half a century before.
“I’m Meg,” she said in greeting. “I understand you want to see me?”
The young man with closely cropped hair stood, his jeans faded and his white T-shirt wrinkled, but his posture ramrod straight. “Hi,” he said with an endearing awkwardness. His smile was warm, but unsure somehow. “I’m Tyler.”
Extending a hand, Meg closed the distance between them. There was something vaguely familiar about him…that smile, but she couldn’t place him. “Have we met before?”
He took her hand and shook it briefly, quickly. “No, but Ainsley—”
Meg stilled, all but her heart. It started to pound.
Tyler.
The name drifted through her, stripping away the weeks and the months, to the spring day shortly after Russell left, when she and Ainsley had walked among the willows at the edge of the creek behind Meg’s house. Ainsley had practically floated. Her eyes had glowed.
“You knew Ainsley?” Her throat locked around the words, but even before the question found voice, she remembered the picture in Ainsley’s bedroom, and knew the answer.
“Before I left for Iraq,” Tyler was saying as the memories kept piling onto one another, the first blush of love, the excitement and the tears…the nights Meg had held a sobbing Ainsley. The morning they’d both stared at the positive pregnancy test.
“I got back last month,” he said. “I tried to find her, didn’t understand why she’d quit writing.” He hesitated, his gaze distant, devastated. “I thought maybe she got tired of waiting.”
The pain in his voice stirred something deep inside her. “No,” she said, reaching for him again, taking his hands and squeezing. “She never got tired of waiting.”
“When I found her number disconnected, I thought maybe she was telling me to get lost. But I did an Internet search…” His eyes, an intelligent piercing blue, filled. “I found her obituary.”
And Meg couldn’t do it. She couldn’t just stand there in a slant of sunlight while Ainsley’s soldier fell apart in front of her. Instinct took over and she stepped toward him, put her arms around him and closed her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
She thought maybe he would just stand there, wooden, like the soldier he was. He didn’t. He sank into her more like a child than a man, his arms closing around her and holding on. Sobs shuddered through the solid strength of his body. “There was a write-up in the Gazette,” he muttered—and Meg’s throat became even tighter.
Over the years she’d written hundreds of obituaries and tributes and accident reports. But that morning she’d just sat there at her laptop, her eyes blurring, her fingers frozen. Julia had offered to take over.
Meg had refused. She’d owed her sister-in-law that final courtesy…just as she owed her so much more.
“Did she…” Tyler pulled back so that his eyes met Meg’s. “Did she suffer?”
Meg swallowed, searched for words. “No,” she lied, seeing her sister-in-law’s final moments all over again, the agony, the tortured glow of awareness. Ainsley had known she was dying. She’d known she was leaving her little girl behind.
She’d known she would never see Tyler again.
“She whispered your name,” Meg said quietly, as a fresh wash of pain twisted across Tyler’s face. “She wanted you to know that she loved you.”
His throat worked. “And the baby?”
Meg froze. Her hands remained on Tyler’s shoulders, her gaze on his face, a face so staggeringly familiar, considering she’d never seen him before. She’d always thought Charlotte the spitting image of Russell, but there was no denying that the young man standing inches from her was, in fact, Charlotte’s father. The almond shape of the eyes, the rounded bow of his top lip, the endearing little lopsided smile…
“I—I…saw her,” he said.
The quick knife of panic went deep. “You saw her?”
“Around town,” Tyler said. “I’ve been here a few days. I had to see her…I had to know.”
Somehow Meg remained standing. Somehow she held it all together, while inside everything unraveled. Tyler had been watching them. He’d seen Charlotte. He knew. He knew she was his daughter.
“I’d like to see her,” he said, stepping back from Meg and going all soldier-straight again, the boy vanishing, the man, the father, standing tall. “I think she’s mine.”
THE SPARKLY PINK BALL zoomed down the narrow Wii alley, curving just a fraction toward the end. There it slammed perfectly into the side of the middle pin, knocking all ten of them down.
“Look at you!” Russell said as a voice from the television announced, “Nice throw!”
Meg’s mother beamed. “It’s all in the wrist,” she said.
But Russell didn’t think so. This was their third game. So far he’d been pretty good at picking up spares, but strikes had eluded him. Lilah had dubbed him King of the Splits.
“Just pretend like you’re at the bowling alley,” she coached, as she’d been doing from the start. “Pretend like you’re really throwing a ball.”
Standing about five feet back from the massive plasma TV, in a room otherwise dominated by Victorian finery and heavy velvet drapes, Russell sent his mother-in-law a playful smile. “Come on, Mama Lilah.” She’d always insisted that he call her that. “You know I’ve never been very good at pretending.”
She frowned. “Sometimes you got to,” she said, reaching past one of the three huge Siamese cats for her glass of raspberry green tea. She guzzled the stuff by the gallon, had since her cancer diagnosis. “Sometimes it’s the only way to get to the other side.”
Frowning, Russell positioned his Mii character and lifted his arm, initiated his swing and stepped forward, just as he’d done countless times before, when he and Meg had killed time at the local bowling alley. The blue ball shot down the narrow alley, perfectly straight until just before the end. There it hooked sharply and knocked only the three pins farthest to the left.
“You’re not letting yourself see it,” Lilah said. As if it was as natural as breathing, she put down her tea and positioned herself in front of the TV, initiated her swing and once again knocked down every pin. “You have to trust,” she said, clearly pleased with herself. “You have to see what you want, not where you are.”
Subtlety was not Lilah Roberts’s forte.
He’d debated the wisdom of stopping by. She was Meg’s mother. They were tight. He couldn’t imagine he was too high on her list of favorite people.
But she’d answered his call on the second ring and invited him straight over. She’d opened the door before he’d had a chance to knock. And then she’d hugged him. Just hugged him.
In the end, it was as simple as that.
“Always knew you’d be back,” she’d said when she’d finally pulled away. “Always knew someday the same winds that blew you here in the first place would blow you back.”
“So what do you want, Russell Paul?” She’d always called him that. “That’s what it all comes down to.”
His own mother was sturdy and practical…she’d had to be. With a brood of nine children, there’d been no time for games—or meditation. Lilah had always been a breath of fresh air.
“Your daughter wants me gone,” he said, deliberately lining up his next shot so he didn’t have to see Lilah’s eyes—and so she didn’t see his.
She humphed. “First off, that’s not what I asked you. Secondly, though…can you blame her? Most folks don’t take a shine to walking on broken glass.”
He stared at the sweet big-screen television, still trying to absorb that it belonged to Meg’s mother. Then he swung back and killed the ball. It bounced once before barreling down the video alley, smashing into the remaining pins.
“Nice spare!” the console narrated.
Lilah remained a few steps behind and to the right of him, one hand stroking the cat perched on the arm of a deep purple camelback sofa. On the dainty end table just a few feet away sat his and Meg’s wedding picture.
“Try again,” she said. “You, Russell Paul Montgomery. What do you want?”
It was a bloody good question. Not that long ago, he’d been sure he knew. Out in the field, on assignment, doing what he did. Watching. Observing. Documenting.
Packing up, moving on.
Before then, the answer had been easy.
He’d wanted Meg. A family. The future.
“I’m due back in Afghanistan next week.”
All brisk and businesslike, Lilah lined up her next shot. “And I’ll be in Peru,” she said. “I’ve wanted to go as long as I can remember, to see Machu Picchu with my own eyes. Thought I had Ray talked into it, but the old coot’s hell-bent on never taking a breath outside of Texas.” Hesitating, she launched her shot—and once again smoked the pins.
“So now that we know our travel plans,” she said, turning to scorch him with one of her patented pecan-pie-sweet smiles, “you gonna answer my question?”
It was the damnedest thing. Lilah went straight to the meat of the matter. There was no skirting around the issue, no running or hiding. She just laid it all out there.
He’d never understood why Meg couldn’t do the same.
“Okay, apparently not,” Lilah said, sweeping a strand of silver hair from her face. Most of it was secured in a long braid down her back. Silver hoops dangled from her ears. A gorgeous turquoise pendant lay against her chest. “Let me tell you something, Russell. I was supposed to die. I still will, of course. But not yet.”
She’d kicked stage-two breast cancer. She’d endured a double mastectomy, chemo and radiation, but never once had Russell heard her feel the least bit sorry for herself.
“But you know what? Having a doctor look you in the eye and say the word cancer, going on the Internet and reading all the statistics and horror stories, meeting women in treatment, then going to their funerals…it changes you. It teaches you, brings life into this razor-sharp focus that can cut to the bone.” She hesitated, her hand fluttering down to find Simon’s back. The sleek cat with marble blue eyes had not been here the last time Russell visited Lilah. “There’s only one way to live, my nomad son-in-law, and that’s without regrets.
“Go to Afghanistan, if that’s what you want to do. Take your pictures,” she said as his cell phone started to ring. “Just make sure you know why you’re there.”
On the television screen, his Mii character waited for him to make his move, while Lilah’s character bobbed in the background.
“Best answer that,” she said. “Never know when it’s the one that matters.”
THE DRIVE ACROSS TOWN felt like an eternity. Meg pulled into her driveway, glancing in the rearview mirror to see Tyler pull in behind her—in the white truck she’d seen parked across the street off and on over the past week.
She wasn’t sure which unnerved her more—the realization that he’d been watching them, or the fact that she, a trained journalist, had been completely oblivious.
She parked and slipped out of the car, met him at the front porch. “I have a nanny,” she explained, reaching for the screen door. “A friend of my mother’s, Miss Rosemary, stays with Charlotte.”
“She’s real good with her,” Tyler said, and Meg’s unease skittered a little deeper. No, she wanted to scream. No! Go away. Stay away from my daughter!
Except Charlotte wasn’t hers.
“Yes, she is,” Meg murmured, sliding the key into the lock when the screech of tires had her glancing toward the street.
The blue sedan zipped around the corner, jerking to a quick stop in front of her house. And then the door swung open and Russell materialized, shoving the door shut as he started toward the house.
CHAPTER NINE
THE IRRATIONAL FLASH of relief almost made Meg’s legs buckle. Meg watched him cross the front yard, striding onto the porch and closing in on them as if he had every right to be there.
As if he belonged.
Two days before, he’d walked away. She’d all but shoved him. Now he came right up to them, taking his place by Meg’s side and sliding an arm around her waist in silent solidarity, urging her against him. Into him.
She didn’t resist. “Russell,” she said, hating how thin her voice sounded. How…scared. “This is—”
“I know.” The lines of his face hardened as he sized up the young man who’d knocked up his sister…then left her alone. “Lori called me.”
Tyler’s eyes flared. Clearly he knew who Russell was, too. No doubt Ainsley had told him a thing or two about the take-no-prisoners brother she worshipped.
“I understand you want to see Charlotte,” Russell said, cutting straight to the chase.
Tyler nodded, cleared his throat before speaking. “I do.”
Around her waist, Russell’s arm tightened. “My sister loved you, you know,” he said, and at the protective edge to his voice, Meg’s eyes stung all over again. He’d loved his baby sister…had been there for her even when thousands of miles had separated them.
