by Marci Bolden
He had taken great pride in tending to his garden. Now, Carol paid someone to maintain the plants. Even without his touch, the flowers flourished. They grew. Carol hadn’t. Somehow, she’d found the strength to move on after Katie’s death, but Tobias’s passing had stunted her. She hadn’t taken a single step forward. Everything was the same. Her life was the same. Only emptier.
Maybe she simply didn’t have the same resolve to survive she’d had twenty-four years ago. Maybe the constant sense of loss had finally won. First Katie. Then the children she and Tobias were never able to have. And then Tobias.
So much loss. So much misery to carry.
Heavy footfalls on the stairs drew her attention. Forcing herself to turn toward John, she cleared the emotional clog from her throat. “There’s wine if you want.”
He kept his red-rimmed eyes downcast. “I, uh, I’ve been sober nine years now.”
She was surprised he’d finally admitted he had a drinking problem. He’d always denied he was a functioning alcoholic. He blamed his need to drink on the stress of being a cop. He blamed everything on the stress of being a cop.
“I’ve had a bit too much,” she said, setting her glass aside. “Let me call you a cab.”
“Caroline, I—”
She turned, anger causing her to clench her teeth so tightly her jaw ached. “I don’t want to hear how sorry you are. I don’t want to hear your stupid excuses or your bullshit justifications. I want you to leave, and I don’t ever want to see you again.”
“You won’t. But I’m taking her with me.”
Gripping her wine glass, she swayed at the impact of his statement. Feeling as if he had kicked the world from beneath her, stunned and off-balance, she narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me?”
He lowered his focus, and hers followed. He had Katie’s urn cradled in his left hand. Carol started to fully comprehend what was happening.
Lifting her steely gaze to his, her voice quivered as she asked, “Are you trying to steal my daughter’s ashes?”
John brought the container to his chest, embracing it as he had Katie when she was a baby sleeping with her little head on his shoulder. “You’ve had her for twenty-four years. It’s my turn.”
Bile rose and burned her esophagus. “Your turn?”
John licked his lips. “Do you remember how we were going on vacation that summer? Our first real family vacation. We were going to take a road trip across the country. Katie was excited to see all the places we’d read about in her books. She couldn’t wait to see Mount Rushmore and the ocean. Yellowstone. She had such a long list of things, there was no way we could see them all in one trip. Remember?”
Carol didn’t want to remember the promises they weren’t able to fulfill to their little girl, but she was slammed by a memory of Katie curled in her lap as they looked through one of the many science and nature books John’s parents had bought to nurture Katie’s curiosity. Carol shook the memory loose before it could overcome her.
His bloodshot eyes filled, and a sad smile touched his lips. “We thought we had time, didn’t we?”
“We should have had time,” she squeezed out through her teeth. “We would have if it weren’t for you.”
“I know,” he said in resignation. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t relive it. The way you screamed when you found her—”
“Stop!” Closing her eyes, she turned her face away. That moment snuck up on her far too often without her being reminded. For twenty-four years, the scene had spontaneously popped into her thoughts and knocked her to her knees without warning. The most ordinary thing could bring her to a screeching halt as her heart sank and her stomach knotted. She’d be going about her life, and then a voice in the back of her mind would whisper, “Katie’s dead.”
As if she could forget.
Facing him again, she embraced her anger to keep the sorrow at bay. He’d taken Katie from her. He’d robbed her of the life she was meant to have—the only child she’d ever had. Now he wanted to take the only thing she had left—Katie’s ashes?
Hell no.
“Put her down and leave,” Carol said, her voice cold and unwavering.
“I’m taking her,” he said. “I’m going to show her all the things I didn’t get to before she died.”
“Before you killed her.”
He didn’t respond to her accusation. She wasn’t sure how she’d expected him to react, but he took the verbal hit without denial or his usual excuses.
“Give her to me.” Closing the distance between them, she held her hand out. “John. Give her to me.”
“So she can sit on a table? Hidden away like a secret you don’t want anyone to know.”
“Excuse me?”
“When’s the last time you were in that room? When’s the last time you sat with her? Talked to her? The dust on her urn…”
“I don’t need to sit in that room to talk to Katie. I talk to my daughter every single day. A layer of dust doesn’t give you the right to take her away from me.”
Straightening his back, he rose to his full height. “She’s my daughter, too. I’m going to take her to all the places she wanted to see.”
“Go to those places. See whatever you need to. Katie stays here.”
He cradled the urn in silent defiance.
A bitter laugh erupted from her. “Oh my God, John. Are you really going to make me call the police and turn you in for stealing my child’s remains?”
“She was my child, too. I want my time with her.”
Clenching her fists, she silently counted to five, willing herself to remain calm. “Despite you showing up unannounced, I let you come to my home. I let you stay as long as you wanted. I’ve been more than reasonable.”
“More than reasonable?” It was his turn to laugh, a sound that was rife with resentment and anger. “If you had ever been reasonable, I wouldn’t have had to hunt you down like a fugitive on the run, Carol. You disappeared with my daughter’s urn in the middle of the night.”
The cork on her fury popped. Years of bottled-up rage erupted as she closed the gap between them. Jabbing her index finger into his chest, shoving hard enough that he hunched back in response, she screamed, “You’re the reason she’s in an urn, John!” She poked him again. Harder. “You did this! You! If you’d ever been any kind of father, she’d still be alive.”
Hurt found his eyes and softened his glower. Good. She wanted to hurt him. To break him. Make him feel all the pain he’d caused her for too damned long. She removed her finger from his chest only to point at the glass-and-metal table next to him. “Put the urn down, or so help me God, you’ll be in one too.”
“Caroline—”
“Don’t call me that.”
Lowering his gaze, he gave a measured exhale. “I didn’t come here to cause you more pain. I thought, somehow, you would have found a way to forgive me by now. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I upset you, and I’m sorry I hurt you. But I am taking her.” He turned for the door.
She hurried around him, blocking his way. “Put her down, John.”
“No. I need to do this. I need to say goodbye to her. The way we planned.”
The way they had planned was to stop at all the places Katie had wanted to see—mountains, monuments, oceans—and leave a piece of her behind. They’d sprinkle her ashes across the country little by little, letting go bit by bit as they went. Each stop was intended to be another chance to ease the pain of their loss. Except Carol couldn’t let her go. She couldn’t follow through. She couldn’t spend one more moment with the man she blamed for the death of her child.
So she’d left and taken Katie with her.
She’d be damned now if she’d let John take her away. Grabbing his arm as he stepped around her, she jerked him to a stop. “I said no.”
He yanked away from her grip and kept moving, but she wasn’t the pushover he remembered. She wasn’t the docile girl he’d married. She wasn’t the naive young mother who had convinced herself he’d
never let anything bad happen to their little girl. She was strong now. She was a childless mother with nothing to lose but the last bit of her daughter that remained.
Pressing her palms into his back, she pushed with all her might, knocking him off balance. John took several stumbling steps before turning to face her, mouth open and eyes widened with obvious consternation. She took advantage of his confusion and grabbed for Katie. He pulled the urn from her reach. Lurching again, she wrapped her palms around the cold metal jar.
He gripped one of her wrists and tried to pull her hand away. His eyes were full of sorrow, but that didn’t soften her hatred for him. Not the slightest. Instead, his show of sympathy enraged her. How dare he look at her with such pity as he tried to take Katie from her again?
Balling her fist, Carol pulled her arm back and crashed her knuckles into his nose. She expected him to take several steps back, to cover his face, probably even to curse at her.
She didn’t expect his eyes to roll back as he collapsed into an unmoving lump at her feet.
Her stomach dropped to meet him as panic rolled through her. She loomed over him, not certain what to do. “John?” she called hesitantly. She nudged him with the almond-shaped tip of her black pump. “John?” She kneeled down and pressed her fingertips to his neck. Once she was confident he wasn’t dead, she eased Katie from his limp hand and hugged the urn to her chest.
What an idiot. Trying to steal Katie’s ashes?
Carol started for the stairs but changed her mind and crossed the living room to Tobias’s office. He had taken over the downstairs office years ago. The window looked right into their neighbor’s backyard with an oversized playground and in-ground pool where the kids loved to run and jump. Even with the blinds closed, their screams filtered into the room in a childish crescendo, clawing at her heart in a way only Tobias seemed to understand.
The safe behind his solid oak desk had plenty of room to keep Katie out of John’s reach. She tapped a few numbers into the keypad and opened the fireproof door before setting Katie’s urn inside. The etching was a bit worn on one side from years of running her fingers over the letters, making some of them difficult to read, but she had the words memorized.
Kathryn Elizabeth Bowman
Born June 5, 1989
Died June 22, 1995
Once her daughter was secure from being…ash-napped…Carol returned to the living room and stood over her ex-husband. She could call the police. She was well within her right to defend herself and her daughter. Pressing charges against him didn’t appeal to her. All she wanted was for him to be gone. Now that he couldn’t take Katie, she expected he’d storm away as he tended to do when he’d lost a fight.
She was wrapping an icepack from the freezer in a towel when John moaned. She crossed the room and stood over him until he came around.
He blinked at her several times, as if getting his bearings. “Hell of a right hook you got there, kid.” Putting his hand to his nose, he gingerly moved the cartilage from one side to the other.
“Broken?”
“No.”
Squatting down, she rested her forearms on her knees as he struggled to sit. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you, and I certainly didn’t mean to knock you out.”
He searched around him for a few moments, patted the plush gray-and-white diamond-patterned area rug, and then sighed when he confirmed she’d taken the urn.
“I told you, you aren’t taking her away from me.”
“Message received. Where’d you learn to hit like that?”
She held the icepack out to him. “Houston’s a big city. Tobias wanted to make sure I could take care of myself.”
“He was a boxer?”
“No. Maybe I could be,” she said with a smile. Gripping his elbow, she helped him stand and cross the room, where she eased him onto a barstool. She offered the icepack again. “Do you want this?”
“No. I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll call you a cab, then.” She tossed the icepack on the counter.
“Caroline—” he called as she reached for her briefcase.
“Carol.” Meeting his gaze, she stared him down to get her point across. “My name is Carol. I have been Carol for twenty-four years. Caroline…” Tears stabbed at the back of her eyes. “Caroline died with Katie, John. I’m Carol now.”
“I didn’t come here to—”
“Steal her remains?”
“To fight.” His tone was firm but tired, like he’d spent such a long time preparing for this conversation that he was too exhausted to actually have it. “I don’t want to fight with you. I wanted to make peace. With her. With you. With myself. It’s been a long time.” He put his hand to his chest and patted the wrinkled white button-down covering his heart. “I need some peace.”
She knew that feeling all too well, but he wouldn’t find absolution here. Not from her. She had tried to let go of the past, of the hurt, of the blame, but seeing him brought all that old hurt to the surface. She’d never let any of it go; she’d simply stuffed all those feelings and her former name into an urn with her daughter’s remains.
“When I got here,” he said, “I couldn’t leave without her.”
“You are leaving without her.”
He nodded. “Before I go, you’re going to hear me out.”
The anger that had started to ease spiked again. “John.”
Florets of red bloomed across his cheeks as he stared her down. That blush used to be a warning to her to back down. He was losing his well-maintained grip on his temper. This time, she dug her heels in and braced herself for the battle ahead. He jabbed his finger onto the white-and-gray granite countertop, much as she’d done to his chest when accusing him of killing their child. “You owe me five minutes. You owe us five minutes.”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“We were parents. Her parents.” A sheen filled his eyes.
A less angry woman might have softened, but Carol added another layer of ice to her heart, making sure he couldn’t pierce her armor. John leaned back and clasped his hands, pushing his breath out between his lips in an apparent attempt at calming himself. He never would have done that two and a half decades ago. Carol had always been the one who caved. She had been the one who accepted losing the fight just to stop the emotional bloodbath.
“Let me say this while I can,” he said. “Then I’ll leave and, I swear, you’ll never have to see me again.”
Carol sank onto a barstool at the other end of the long slab of granite. She gripped the edge, as if she could somehow absorb some of its unwavering strength. “I’m not rehashing that day. I will not relive a moment of her death to appease you.”
His mouth dipped into a frown, but he nodded and took a moment before speaking. “I can still hear her laugh, you know? Sometimes I come home at night, and I swear I hear her call from her bedroom. ‘Daddy, come kiss me guh-night.’ Remember how she said guh-night?”
Flashes of the rundown ranch she’d left behind filled her mind. “You still live in our house?”
“I thought about selling it a million times,” he said after a stretched silence, “but I never could bring myself to do it.”
“It’s hard to let go,” she said, thinking of her own struggles.
“I…I had a rough patch after you left. Between losing you and Katie, I had a hard time working. They put me on paid leave, but…I guess it’s no big surprise that I drank my check instead of paying bills.” He didn’t meet her gaze. He was clearly ashamed of the failure he was confessing. “The bank threatened to take the house, but Mom and Dad helped me until I could pull my head out of my ass. Which, as you might recall, was no small feat for me. They paid the mortgage off because they didn’t want to lose Katie’s home any more than I did.”
The small two-bedroom starter home had been ragged when they had moved in. Over the six years she’d lived there, she had painted the walls and scrubbed the l
inoleum clean, but the aged house never sparkled like the house she shared with Tobias.
The day she and John walked through the small space with a real estate agent, John had jumped at the chance to buy the house. Carol had a rock in the bottom of her stomach. The house needed work, but they couldn’t afford a nicer neighborhood on their paltry budget. He had a long list of projects he could do to fix up the house. She’d known then he wouldn’t follow through. He rarely did. She couldn’t really imagine how broken-down it must be after all these years. John hadn’t been much on maintenance back then. His father did more than he should have for his grown son and daughter-in-law. She wondered who’d taken over after Mark died, since she doubted John had changed that much.
“I don’t blame you for leaving,” John said, bringing her back to their conversation. “I don’t blame you for hating me. I don’t blame you for never looking back. I wasn’t strong enough to walk away from the past. I tried. I did. The memories always pulled me back. I loved you. I wasn’t good to you. I see that now. It is my fault that Katie’s gone. I need you to understand how incredibly sorry I am.”
Her emotions knotted in her throat, making it a challenge to squeeze the words out. “Sorry can’t change anything, John. I wish it could, but my little girl is dead.”
“I know,” he said so softly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it. “And I take full responsibility for that. I do. It took some time to break the habit of making excuses for myself, but now that I have, I know it’s my fault Katie’s gone.” He choked out the last words and sniffed. “All I can do now is ask for forgiveness.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t forgive you. I wish I could. I’ve tried. I can’t.”
After a moment, he nodded. “That’s okay. I don’t deserve your forgiveness. Doesn’t hurt to ask, though, right?” He offered a weak smile as he stood, but he didn’t head for the door. He moved around the stools separating them, stopping directly in front of Carol. He looked her over, this time without the judgment in his eyes. This time he took her in as if trying to memorize her. “I’m very happy that you had a good life. Despite me.” Leaning down, he kissed her head. “Guh-night, Mommy,” he said as Katie had done many times before Carol had left to work the third shift at the hospital. “We love you.”