by Amy Pine
“I know,” Alissa said, stopping in front of her daughter. Then it seemed everything her mother had wanted to say to her for months poured out all at once. “I shouldn’t have hidden it from you, but I’d literally found out hours before you got home, and then it wasn’t just you coming home. It was you and Ethan, and we were planning a wedding, and I didn’t know where things stood with me and your dad, and I didn’t want to ruin or upstage what’s supposed to be your special time. And Ethan? He barely knew. He overheard me and your dad in the kitchen last night, and I begged him to wait—to let me tell you. So please don’t hold it against him. As for me, I know all of these are shitty excuses for lying to you, but Gabi, sweetheart, you have to believe me when I say it’s not for any reason other than me being scared. I’m scared of how this is going to change my life. Scared that your dad will take off again. Scared that if he stays you might resent this baby for having the childhood we couldn’t give you.” Alissa gasped and covered her mouth, like she’d just realized something herself.
“What is it?” Gabi asked, still trying to process everything else her mom just said.
Tears welled in Alissa’s eyes, but she sniffled, trying to keep them at bay. “I know why I did it!” she said to Gabi’s aunt Becca first, then turned her gaze back to her daughter. “All those other fears, they’re true. But it’s the last one that scares me the most. What if your dad and I worked things out and raised this baby together the way I wish we’d been able to do with you? Would you—hate us?”
Gabi’s cheeks grew hot and her eyes stung. Miriam was right. It didn’t matter that her parents were a whole generation ahead of them. They still had no clue what they were doing. And maybe just like Gabi was learning that she only knew her parents as parents, her mom only really knew her as a daughter. But they were both so much more than that.
“Mom,” Gabi said, incredulous. “You and Dad have loved me no matter what for twenty-two years. We might not be anyone’s first idea of family, but it’s the only family I’ve ever known. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. And hate you guys? How can you even think that’s possible?”
Her mom gave a meager shrug. “We messed up big-time.”
Gabi nodded. “And it hurt and made me angry, but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand. Will you tell me about you and Dad? And I don’t mean the whole making-the-baby situation, by the way. Like, never ever tell me about that. But tell me your story—the whole story—this time?”
Alissa nodded. “I would really, really love that.” She laughed but also swiped away a tear. “Can I hug you?” she asked. “Because it’s killing me not to hug my daughter.”
Gabi threw her arms around her mom’s neck and squeezed. Alissa squeezed her right back, her round, firm belly like a volleyball to Gabi’s gut.
“You are so pregnant!” Gabi said with a laugh.
“I know!” her mom replied, still holding her daughter tight. “So. Freaking. Pregnant.” She stepped back, one hand still on Gabi’s shoulder and her eyes fixed on her daughter’s. “I love you so much, sweetheart.”
“I love you too, Mom,” Gabi said. “And I’m pretty sure babysitters get something like twenty bucks an hour these days. I’m just sayin’.”
Becca sighed. “It’s true. Even more when you have twins.”
“Oooh!” Miriam said, bouncing on her toes. “I’m down for a lucrative side gig!”
Gabi laughed, as did the other three women as they made their way into the exhibit. Together.
* * *
It was at the singing trees—tall, narrow, evergreen-looking trees that sang, their LED lights moving in time with the chorus—that Gabi learned about the early years of her parents’ teenage marriage.
“There was no reason we both had to put our dreams on hold,” her mom said. “I wasn’t emotionally ready to leave you, and your dad? He loved you so much, but it didn’t make sense for us to both put school off. It wasn’t easy for him to leave. I want you to know that.”
In the dangling ribbons of light, Alissa told Gabi about her father’s internship in Costa Rica, the place where his wanderlust officially kicked in.
“I kept telling myself he’d resent me if I asked him to stay, so I never did,” her mom admitted. “I realize now that he maybe never knew how much I’d have wanted that if it was what he wanted too.”
“Did he ever tell you how much he cared about you?” Gabi asked.
Her mom laughed and shook her head. “We were so young, sweetie. We loved you and each other and we thought that was enough to keep us together. But we were too naive to understand the work you have to put into a relationship to make it last. Falling in love? That part is easy. Staying in love? There’s no manual for that.”
* * *
“Holy wow!” Miriam cried later in the tour, spinning to face Gabi and her mom and pointing over her shoulder to what the website called the Cathedral of Light—a hundred-foot-long arch of white lights.
Miriam unapologetically pulled a selfie stick out of her coat pocket and grabbed Becca’s hand. “Come on!” she said. “We need to social media the shit out of this.”
Becca shrugged and let Miriam lead her at a much-increased pace toward the tunnel of lights.
Gabi gasped and stopped short.
“What is it?” Alissa asked.
Despite her winter coat, the hat and the gloves, she suddenly felt naked and exposed. “I was so nervous about tonight—about seeing you and Ethan and Dad—that I didn’t grab a camera. Do you know how shots of this would have looked like in my portfolio? How did I let this happen?”
Alissa pulled off her glove and pressed her palm to her daughter’s cheek.
“First of all, your dad works here. I’m sure you can come back,” she said. “And second…Maybe tonight we’re just supposed to be in the moment. You don’t always have to be working.”
“You mean like you baking from scratch for every family event—including your own daughter’s wedding—when that’s all you do from sunup to sundown on a daily basis? And oh my goodness, I’m just realizing you baked all those sample cakes on a broken ankle while you were pregnant. And you’re telling me to stop and smell the roses?”
Her mom raised her brows. “Touché.” But she was right. Without her camera tonight, Gabi couldn’t hide behind it or make excuses not to tell Ethan everything. Tonight wasn’t about the perfect shot. It was about her and getting ready for the adventure that would be the rest of their lives.
Gabi hooked her arm through her mom’s. “Are you going to share whatever’s in that travel mug of yours or what?” she asked.
Alissa handed the mug over. “Sorry to disappoint, but it’s just plain old cocoa. Your aunt has the party-time cocoa.”
Gabi let loose a dramatic groan. “Fine,” she lamented. “I’ll take a sip of your boring non-alcoholic cocoa, but I don’t have to like it.”
Her mom grinned. “You will, though. It’s homemade. My special recipe.”
* * *
When they finally made it to the stunning finale—the field of light that danced to holiday music—that was when T.J. appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Ladies,” he simply said. “I’ve been instructed to ask you to please sit on this bench while we wait for the rest of the patrons to make their way out of the garden.”
He gestured toward a nearby bench that was barely big enough to fit the four of them, but they did as he asked, eager for whatever came next. They huddled on the bench as patrons lingered at the end of the tour for what felt like another hour or two but was likely no more than thirty minutes.
“It’s balmy at least, right?” Becca said. “It could be snowing.”
“Becca!” the other three women cried in unison.
“Don’t summon it,” Alissa said. “I don’t even know where my shovel is.”
Becca laughed. “It’s not like I said Beetlejuice three times.”
“Oooh,” Miriam said. “Classic movie. I think I’m going to have to watch that t
his weekend.”
“Okay, now that you mentioned it not being that cold, I’m getting cold,” Gabi added.
For several minutes after that, the four women playfully squabbled over whether it was truly chilly outside or if the mere mention of it being so only made them think they were chilly. They debated the process by which to invoke the Chicago weather gods and if Becca had cursed them into an early winter. But the true curse came when Gabi’s mother said, “Oh no. I have to pee.”
Because now all four of them had to pee.
“Where’s T.J.?” Gabi said. “T.J.? Can we run inside to—” But before she could finish, the field of lights that had illuminated the area where they’d been sitting went dark. Then she realized all the patrons were gone as well. It was just the four of them. On a bench. In the pitch-black night.
“Oh,” Miriam said. “So we’re in a horror movie now. Maybe we should call Beetlejuice. You know…to make sure it’s comedy-horror instead of we’re-all-gonna-die horror.”
“No one’s going to die,” Becca said. “Although if it is a horror movie, I’ll be the first to go since I’m a doctor and likely the only one who can help with mortal wounds.”
Upbeat guitar strumming sounded from a nearby speaker, and all four women went silent. Then, from the outskirts of what was the field of lights, a spotlight turned on. Whoever was holding it aimed it up at one of the surrounding trees where Gabi’s dad stood between two thick branches, hanging on with only one hand as he began singing along with the Proclaimers.
“Oh my God!” Becca whisper-shouted. “He’s serenading you with ‘Five Hundred Miles’! Super romantic but also I will never forgive him for this earworm.”
Alissa’s cheeks burned. “It was our first date—or what was supposed to be our first date. I got sick and had to cancel, but he showed up at my house with matzo ball soup and the Benny and Joon DVD, and I think I fell in love with him that night.”
“Mom,” Gabi said. “That’s, like, the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. You never told me that! Also…Where’s Ethan?”
The next verse started, and the spotlight shifted to a different tree, one where Ethan seemed to be clinging for dear life while he also shouted lyrics about working hard and growing old with her.
“He’s afraid of heights!” she shouted, then sprang up from the bench, trying to find her footing in the dark as she made her way toward the trees.
The two men continued their karaoke duet, Gabi’s father deftly climbing down from the tree as he did while Ethan seemed frozen in place. Gabi knew her dad was on his way to her mom, hopefully on their way to getting right what they’d been unable to figure out for so many years. But Ethan…Shit, Ethan. What the hell was he doing?
“T.J.!” Gabi yelled when she stumbled past where he crouched on the ground, pointing the spotlight. “Do not take that light off him, okay?”
Gabi had climbed the trees in her grandparents’ yard all her life. It was the reason her dad built her the tree house. She could climb this one. In the dark. She breathed a sigh of relief when she made it to the tree’s base and saw the rope ladder.
“I’m coming up!” she called, and she thought she saw Ethan nod.
She gave her gloves a good yank at the cuffs to make sure they were on tight, and then she climbed. It took less than a minute to reach him where he was perched with an arm wrapped firmly around the tree’s narrow trunk.
“What were you thinking?” she asked him, a nervous laugh escaping her lips.
Ethan’s eyes dipped toward the ground, which looked like a sea of black other than the spotlight blaring up at them.
Ethan forced a smile. “That I needed to do something big—like risk-my-life big—to help get your parents back together? I thought it would be romantic after how everything went down last night—especially me finding out about the baby before you did. But I’m realizing now that I might have used poor judgment on this whole grand-gesture thing.”
Gabi pressed her gloved palm to his cheek. “Yeah, especially since I forgave you last night after Miriam told me the position my mom put you in—which she totally owned up to, by the way.”
Ethan let out a shaky breath. “Information that would have been useful before I climbed a tree in the dead of night.”
She laughed. “I love you,” she said, realizing that those three words that had scared her for so many years didn’t seem so scary anymore. “But I’m the one who should be pulling out all the stops to win you back. I haven’t been completely honest with you, Ethan.”
He gripped the tree tighter. “I’m already fearing for my life, Gabs, so if you’re about to break up with me, this would be a really shitty time.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “God, no! You’re never getting rid of me. But—I don’t want to be a portrait photographer. I don’t just mean at the mall, either. When I asked you about traveling again like we did in Europe, I didn’t mean for a honeymoon. I mean—for work.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, and Gabi’s heart sank. Was she going to lose him—while standing on the branches of a tree?
“Gabi…I love you and promise to support whatever it is you want to do, but I really feel like this is a conversation we need to have on solid ground. Like, the ground beneath this tree.”
This time she snorted. “Right. Okay. But in order to do that, we need to climb back down that ladder.”
“Or we could grow old right here?” he said. “It’s a great view.”
Gabi leaned in close and pressed her lips to his cheek. “But if we get out of this tree, we can go home and do all sorts of things we might not be able to do anymore when we’re old.”
His knuckles might have been white the whole way down, but Ethan made it out of the tree. The second their feet hit the ground, T.J. shifted the spotlight.
“Want to see your parents making out?” he asked.
Gabi ignored him and wrapped her arms around Ethan’s neck. She’d let her parents have their moment. But also—no—she didn’t want to see. She had the man who would walk five hundred miles for her, and there was nothing more important than that.
“I’m sorry I ran out last night,” she said. “I’m not going to be that girl anymore.”
Ethan dipped his head and pressed his forehead to hers. “You can be whoever you want to be, Gabi Bloom, as long as you take me along for the ride.”
“But what if the ride is too far and too long for you to be away?”
“Then I’ll wait for you to walk five hundred miles to my door.” He kissed the top of her head. “Do you know why my parents had such a hard time warming up to the idea of us getting married?”
“You mean other than me almost killing your dad the day I met him?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“You know about my injury, but I didn’t tell you how bad things got after the surgery. I mean, my knee heeled, eventually. But I was pretty messed up. Ireland was supposed to be an exchange program where I trained with Galway’s team, and instead it was my final farewell to this dream I’d had since I was a kid.”
A tear leaked out of the corner of his eye. She’d never seen him cry before, and her heart broke for him. She cupped his cheek and brushed away the tear. “I’m so sorry, Ethan.” But she didn’t know what else to say.
“They were worried about me, especially when I decided not to come home after the semester ended. I banked my future—my happiness—on this life I’d created for myself through years of practice and training and then lost it all in matter of minutes. So I ran away from the loss. I think they were afraid that I was doing the same with you.” He cradled her head in his hands. “But here’s what I learned after meeting this amazing girl and falling in love with her. I had this dream since I was six years old, and could wallow about what I lost, or I could acknowledge that I got further with that dream than most people do in a lifetime. So I’m going with option number two—and my new dream.”
“Your new dream?”
He
nodded. “You.”
And then he kissed her, and Gabi knew that no matter what—no matter how many miles there might ever be between them—they’d never truly be apart.
Chapter Thirty
Alissa spun her daughter to face her and pressed a feather-light kiss on her cheek, careful not to mess with Gabi’s makeup. “Happy wedding day, Peanut. You’re absolutely stunning.”
“Thanks, Mom. Happy birthday, by the way.”
Alissa smiled, then rested her palms over the navy chiffon skirt of her dress. “Thanks.” Then she cupped her breasts, adjusting her strapless bra beneath the deep V of the off-the-shoulder lace bodice. “Also, what was I thinking going with a dress that requires a strapless bra? These things are huge. My apologies in advance if everyone’s looking at my girls instead of the beautiful bride.”
“Mom!” Gabi cried, but they were both laughing. When the laughter subsided, Gabi’s expression grew serious. “I’m happy things are good with you and Dad, but you know that no matter what happens between you two, you can tell me and I’ll be okay, right?”
Alissa nodded, remembering the night at the botanic garden.
“I got your message,” Matthew had said after hopping down from the tree. “At least, I think it was you. I get lots of calls from pregnant women professing their love to me, so if it really was you, I’m going to need to hear it in person.”
The Alissa before that night would have deflected with humor. But after twenty years of not letting him know how she really felt, she hadn’t felt like it was a laughing matter anymore. So she’d taken his hand, placed it on her swollen belly, and told him.
“I love you, Matthew Bloom. And I want you to stay. With me. For good.”
He moved in that night.
“I know, sweetheart. But at the risk of putting it out there into the universe, I’ll tell you right now what I want the most—right after your happiness and this baby being born healthy and without any complications—is to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop and just enjoy the fact that I get a second chance with the love of my life.” She blinked back tears. “Shoot. I can’t remember if I put on the right mascara, and if this isn’t waterproof…”