“That’s it. I had nightmares for a year after that of a man busting into the house and taking me from my father.”
“Oh, Nico,” Nora said softly. “Your parents must have known you were having nightmares, didn’t they?”
“I said I was dreaming that a monster came to get me.” He took a long breath. “My father would stay with me until I fell asleep again. He would tell me over and over again, ‘No one is going to take you away from me. No one in tout le monde.’ ” All the world.
Nora opened her mouth to apologize again, knew it would be wasted words.
“Maybe,” he said, “I think I always knew? I didn’t want to know. And now I know.”
So there it was. Nora took the first full breath she’d taken since finding out herself. She hadn’t even realized how tense the not-knowing had made her until now. And now that she knew for certain, her entire body went limp. She put her head down onto the bar and this time, Nico stroked her hair. She hoped he was doing it to mock her for doing it to him earlier. That was the only good reason he should touch her like that right now. Just in case that wasn’t the reason, Nora lifted her head, sat up, sat back.
“Do you want to know about him?” Nora asked. “You must have questions.”
“No. No questions.”
“None? Don’t you want to know if you have siblings or what he does for a living or where he lives or what he’s like?”
“Nothing. Don’t tell me anything.”
“Nico—”
“You said at the hotel you hadn’t told him about me, either. Will you tell him now?”
“I have to.”
“You don’t.”
“I was supposed to go to jail when I was fifteen. He kept me out. You can’t imagine what kind of a debt I owe him.”
“You don’t owe him me.” He pointed at himself.
“No, but I owe him the truth.” This was not a conversation they should be having while Nico was drunk.
“Let me take you home,” she said. “Please? We can talk about this tomorrow.”
“My mother is coming tomorrow. To talk to me about…all this.” He ran his hand through his hair, tried to tug on it and couldn’t. “I forgot I cut my hair.” He laughed again.
“You’re shit-faced. I mean, merde-faced. I’m taking you home, right now. My car or yours?”
“My car is a stick. And it’s not so easy to drive.”
“I can drive a stick. I can drive anything.”
He dug his hand into his jeans pocket and pulled out his keys. He held them out and she reached for them, but he closed his hand around them at the last second.
“Nico.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“What? Who? Zach?”
“Not him. Him. Kingsley Boissonneault.” He didn’t say the name so much as sneer it. Poor Nico was nowhere near the “acceptance” stage of grief.
Nora’s first instinct was to simply say no, of course she wasn’t. That was a fact. She’d never been in love with Kingsley. Lust, yes. Who wouldn’t be? But this question was loaded, dangerous.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. You won’t tell me?”
“You won’t tell me why you’re asking.”
“I told you, I don’t know why I’m asking. Maybe it’s the only reason I can think of that you would do this to me. Because you are in love with him.”
“Are you a virgin?” Nora asked.
Nico was shocked into laughing. “What? No.”
“Straight? Gay?”
“Only women, s’il vous plait.”
“So you’ve had sex with women. Sex with women can lead to pregnancy. If you had a child out there you didn’t know about…wouldn’t you want to know?”
“Of course. But—”
“If you had a friend who knew about this child of yours, and she didn’t tell you, she kept that child a secret from you for years, would you be angry at her when you found out? Would you feel betrayed? Would you ever be able to forgive her for keeping your child a secret from you? Especially if you’d saved this woman’s life?”
Nora watched as Nico momentarily sobered, as her questions stuck into him like sharp arrows. Slowly he opened his hands, gave her his keys.
“Take me home, please,” he said. “Merci.”
Chapter Nine
Nico drove an antiquated Range Rover. And it was a stick shift and it was tricky—which made driving it so much fun.
“You’re good,” Nico said from the passenger seat as she shifted gears with the ease of a seasoned race car driver.
“I’ve had a little practice,” she said. The Range Rover was so old, Nico had rigged up a CD player with wires running into the radio/tape deck. She heard the sound of a guitar, lonesome and haunting, playing softly through the speakers and although it was familiar, she couldn’t place it. “What are we listening to?”
“ ‘Coming Back to Life,’ Pink Floyd,” Nico said.
Briefly, Nora tuned into the lyrics, heard an aching male voice asking, Where were you over and over.
Maybe Nico had been thinking of Kingsley while listening to this song. Where was King when Nico was hurt? When he was helpless? Where was King when Nico was growing up? He had no idea that he even had an adult son, much less one who was suffering right now.
“It’s beautiful,” Nora said. “I wouldn’t have figured you for a Pink Floyd fan. They’re not very French. And you’re way too young. They were around before I was born.”
“Ah, had a girlfriend in California. She turned me into a fan.”
“Was she older than you?”
“A little,” he said. “When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow. Back to Paris, then to London to drop off Zach, then home to New York.”
“Have you seen the sea yet?”
“This isn’t a sight-seeing trip,” she said as she came to a fork in the road.
“Go south,” he said. “Left.”
“Home is north. Remember?
“I want you to see the sea.”
“It’s freezing out.”
“It’s worth it. Please?”
She would have said no but for the please. She heard the woundedness in his words, the vulnerability. He was a child now, again, a scared little boy sitting at the bottom of the stairs, hearing his parents fight in whispers and being afraid for a year after that some strange man was going to come and steal him away from the only father he knew, the only father he wanted.
She turned left.
Nico stared out the window as she drove. He rubbed at his eyes as if battling tears. She reached over and put her hand on his, squeezed it.
“Don’t say you’re sorry again,” he said softly. “If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have come here.”
“I’m not sorry for coming here. I’m only sorry for hurting you so much.”
“I’m not sorry,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” He turned his head, looked at her as she drove, looked at her like…like he shouldn’t be looking at her. She blamed the wine. “But I’m not sorry.”
She remembered Zach’s words about Nico hurting her to hurt King. She let go of his hand.
They said nothing else until Nico had to give her directions to the little beach. A private beach, he said, owned by a friend of his father’s. Most of the waterfront in this area was either private land or protected parkland. That’s why they had so few tourists, why Mozet was so insular and small.
As they neared the sea, which was more of a bay than the sea itself, the clouds thinned and parted. When Nora parked the car on a rocky little lot by a wooden fence, the moon was out high and clear, surrounded by a hazy winter aura.
They got out of the car and Nico led the way. The crisp night air seemed to sober him. He walked on almost-steady feet to the wooden stairway that led down the small cliff to the pebble beach below. He didn’t go all the way down, only to the first landing. Nora joined him at the rai
ling, leaning forward to study the moon on the water, their elbows resting on the top rail, nearly touching.
She heard the water lapping gently against the beach, the thrum of a not-too-far-away boat passing, the cry of a seabird who didn’t mind the cold. The moon was full and so bright that she could see the beginning of the five o’clock shadow on Nico’s cheeks.
“You’re right. This was worth the trip,” she said. The air was warmer here by the water.
“We came here in the summertime. Every Sunday. My mother’s day off from being a mother—she’d spend it in Marseille, and my father would bring me here.”
“So it was just you two, alone?”
“And some friends. My friends loved my father. Everybody loved my father.” Nico lowered his head, chin to his chest. “Ah…merde.”
Nora picked up the end of her scarf and used it, playfully, to wipe the tears from his face. “Maybe you should keep this,” she said, draping it around his neck.
“I will keep it.” He looped it twice around his neck. “Merci.”
“De rien,” she said and smiled. A heavy silence weighed the air down around them. Quickly, Nora turned away, pretended to stare out at the water again.
“I bet it’s even more beautiful here in summer.”
“It is. My father loved summer. Hated winter. He felt it too much, in his joints. And this part of winter he hated the most, when the nights are so long and the days so short. He, uh…there’s this saying. Do you know? ‘Au milieu de l’hiver, j’apprenais elfin qu’il y avast en moi un été invincible.’ ”
She’d thought his lightly-accented English was lovely. It was nothing compared to hearing him speak French.
“In the midst of winter,” she translated, “I found there was within me an invincible summer. Camus.”
“Very good,” he said.
“It’s on t-shirts and bookmarks in America.”
He smiled. “My father said that quote was about wine. He thought everything was about wine. He said wine was invented for the last days of December, because that’s when you needed summer the most. And wine was ‘summer in a bottle.’ I made a joke, uh…four or five years ago, said we should sell December Wine, wines made to be drunk only in winter. Wines that tasted like an ‘invincible summer.’ So he planted some new type of grape, a sweeter variety. He was going to call it ‘Été Invincible.’ It’s still in the barrels in the cuverie, aging. We were supposed to taste it together this week. The first of our December Wine.”
“You should drink it. Make a toast to him. And then pour a little for him, in his memory.”
“Maybe I will. I think I need it. If I have a summer inside me, it’s not the invincible kind. It’s gone.”
Nora didn’t know what to say in the presence of a grief so deep. Instead of saying anything, she took off her gloves and took his cold hand into hers and chafed it until it warmed.
“You can have some of my summer,” she said. “Until you find your own again.”
She felt his eyes on her as she warmed both of his hands in her own.
“Better?” she asked. He nodded. “Good. I’ll take you home.”
Back in his Rover, they didn’t speak. She remembered the way to the vineyard from her trip there earlier in the day. When they reached the main gates, he told her to stop there. He would walk the rest of the way.
“Are you sure? If you tell me where your house is, I can drive you to the door.”
“Better if you don’t.”
“It’s pretty cold, Nico.” She was hovering again, being protective again.
“It’s fine. It’s better if I just…I just go now.”
Nora stared at him, studied him. He said so little but every word seemed weighted down with meaning. But what was the meaning? They were both speaking English but it still seemed like he was trying to tell her something she simply couldn’t hear.
“Goodnight, then. I’ll leave your car at Le Chien Noir.”
“I won’t see you again before you leave.”
“No. You said your mother is going to be here tomorrow. I think you should talk to her before we talk again.”
He took that well, didn’t argue. He put his hand on the door latch to open it, but didn’t. “You’re going to tell him about me?”
Nora exhaled heavily. “I have to.”
“Even if I ask you not to, you will do it anyway?”
Nora sighed. She grabbed her handbag and dug out a large sealed envelope. “Will you take this? Please? You don’t have to open it now, or ever. But it’s got his address in it, some pictures. You have a sister,” Nora said. “There’s a photograph of her and her mother. My contact information is in there, too, if you have any questions, and you’re not ready to talk to him.”
“I’ll never be ready for that.”
“I will tell him your father just died, and you aren’t ready to talk or meet or anything. I can do that. But I can’t promise he won’t contact you anyway. If you only knew—”
“What?” Nico looked at her. The ‘what’ wasn’t a challenge but a real question, the first one he’d asked about Kingsley. If only he knew what?
“The second he finds out about you, he will love you with all his heart,” she said. “You will have a guardian angel who will swoop in at the first word of your first prayer to him. When you need five Euros, he’ll give you five thousand. When you need to talk to him on the phone, he’ll fly over to talk face to face. If you’re in the mood to hear a violin concerto, he’ll rent out Carnegie Hall and hire a symphony orchestra to play your favorite pieces for you. If you want a snack, he’ll serve you a feast. And if anyone ever so much as hurts a single hair on your head, he will bring down the hammer of God on them so hard your enemies will never so much as breathe in your presence again. If you had any idea… Nico, if you knew how shitty fathers could be—trust me, I know all about shitty fathers—you would realize you won the father lottery. Twice. If you knew how lucky you are to be the son of my King…you’d already be on a plane to New York. You would have been on it yesterday.” She shook her head. “I would kill to have had either of your fathers.”
Nico took a heavy breath.
“Tell him whatever you want. You will anyway.”
With that, he got out of the car and walked away. No goodbye. At least he took the envelope with him.
This time when he walked away, she didn’t see Kingsley in him. She saw only Nico and she knew she would never see Kingsley when she looked at him again.
She drove back to the hotel, thinking the whole time about Søren. She wanted to talk to him so badly, if only to hear his voice. But even if she knew where he was, knew how to reach him, she knew she wouldn’t last one minute without telling him about Nico. Instead, she simply pictured him in her mind. If he’d gone to Father Ballard, he’d be wearing his cassock. And knowing what little she knew about Father Ballard, Søren was probably on his knees right now in some medieval-looking chapel, saying a few thousand Hail Marys, a few thousand Our Fathers. He’d say them, maybe, smiling the whole time behind his prayer-clasped hands while thinking about Fionn.
His son. Søren had a son.
And so did Kingsley.
It had to mean something, didn’t it? That this was happening for all of them at once? A son for King. A son for Søren. But what about Nora?
Silly thought. Stupid thought. She didn’t want children. She had everything and everyone she needed in her life, didn’t she? Of course she did. No one was missing. Nothing was missing. She had everything.
Except she sort of wished, just a little, only a little, that Nico was still in the car with her. But only so they could talk some more, so she could convince him of what he would be missing without Kingsley in his life. No other reason.
The person she really needed to talk to was Søren. That’s why she was feeling an emptiness inside her, a space needing to be filled. Surely that was the only reason.
“I miss you, my priest.” She whispered those words to the night sky a
nd prayed God would carry her words to Søren’s heart, wherever he was.
When she got back to the hotel, it was four in the morning. In the dark, she stripped down to her underwear and got back into bed with Zach’s warm body. He stirred and pulled her to him.
“Well?” he said, only half-awake.
“He doesn’t want me to tell Kingsley about him.”
“What will you do?”
“Tell Kingsley about him.”
Zach didn’t say anything but she sensed he wanted to.
“Does that make me a terrible person?” she asked.
Zach chuckled, kissed the top of her head. “No. Of all the things that make you a terrible person, that’s not one of them.”
Playfully, or not-so-playfully, she swatted his leg.
“You’re between a rock and a hard place,” he said. “Neither choice is a good one. And whatever you do, I know you’ll do it with your heart in the right place.”
She wanted to believe him, prayed Nico would understand one day, but she wasn’t sure he would.
“I never told you this before,” Nora said. “I was pregnant once.”
He sat up in bed, and even in the dark she could see the shock in his eyes, the surprise on his face.
“It was King’s,” she said. “Søren was off getting his Ph.D. His second Ph.D.”
“What happened? I suppose I can guess.”
“It was early enough I could take the pills. So that’s what I did. It was the right thing for me, and I don’t regret it. The thing is…the thing that’s always stayed with me, is knowing how much Kingsley wanted kids. Not with me, but still... Anyway, he didn’t try to talk me into keeping it. He let me decide. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am to this day for that. It was probably one of the harder things he ever did in his life. I can’t help but think that maybe I was the one God picked to find out about Nico so I could, you know…make it up to him. Give him a son after all.”
Zach took her hand, lifted it, and kissed it. “You are an unusual woman, Nora Sutherlin.”
“You just figuring that out now?”
“I’ve had my suspicions.” He lay back down again, pulled her to him.
Winter Tales: An Original Sinners Christmas Anthology Page 7