“Hungry?” Jason asks. A crystal vase holds a small bouquet of silk flowers and a candle’s flame flickers low inside a red glass globe between them.
“Starved.”
He asks for a carafe of wine and after their meals are ordered, fills each of their goblets.
“Welcome back,” Maris says as she cups her glass in front of her. He had put on his suit jacket before coming into the restaurant, attempted to straighten back his disheveled hair and his face shows a shadow of whiskers. What she sees now, behind the evidence of the difficult day, are glimpses of the old Jason.
“Welcome back?”
“To life, Jason.” She reaches for his hand and holds tight.
He touches his glass to hers in a silent toast. “Every now and then it all comes to me in a flashback. Like that night on the boardwalk with Kyle. I needed you to know, Maris, in case it happens again. Hysterical amnesia is funny that way.”
“I’m glad you told me.”
“Paige is the only one who knows I was driving the bike.”
“You never told your parents?”
He shakes his head. “The first week in the hospital, I was in rough shape. The whole business with my leg, and well, it was bad. The doctors didn’t know how I survived the crash. So by the time I was coherent, the police reports had been filed. Somehow they got it that Neil was driving. Whether they misunderstood me in their questioning when I was pretty much out of it, or if a witness said something, I don’t know. But I didn’t have the strength to even move, never mind go through it all again. So I let it be.”
“Except with your sister.”
“With Paige,” he says, nodding. “The details of that day came back slowly. Little things, like Neil pointing to the side mirror, I didn’t remember for years. But I knew that I was driving as soon as I woke up. So one night, Paige stayed late at the hospital watching some television show in my room. Never mind that I lay there with no leg and partial memory, she knew something else was eating me up. And it seriously was. So I told her.” He pauses and sips his wine.
Maris knows that even in his pause, in this small silence, a part of his story is being told to her. There’s an aloneness to it, and that’s the place he’d been in until he told his sister.
“She never blamed me. You know my sister. Once I told her, she did everything she could to help me get my shit together. The phone calls and letters and home cooked meals never stopped. Never. Through the physical therapy, head therapy, medical therapy, she didn’t give up on me.”
“You’re close.”
“Very.”
“You weren’t involved with anyone who could help you? No girlfriend?”
He sits back and sets his hands flat on the table. “Maureen. One look at my missing leg, physical therapy schedule and mostly at my loss of income and she split.”
Maris considers a life rich, his in architecture, walks on the beach, family, the past. “And no one since, in all these years?”
“No one steady. Not until today.”
She tips her glass to his. “And what about the car that hit you, was it a kid? Joyriding?”
He hesitates, as though still not believing it. “It was an older man. Late sixties. He had a heart attack at the wheel with his foot on the gas. I doubt he even knew what hit him. Or what he hit, either.”
“Did he survive?”
“He did. He pulled through.” He lifts his glass, sips the wine. “So what was it all for? That was God’s plan? To just pluck Neil off the earth that day?”
“I don’t know,” Maris says under her breath, picturing the day’s sad carnage. “How did you survive, afterward?”
The waitress places a basket of warm bread and a plate of foil-wrapped butter tabs on their table.
“It’s been a long trip, let me tell you,” he answers. “Fueled by a dose of liquor and medication along the way.”
“Your way of losing yourself?”
“To put it mildly.”
“Sometimes I think that’s why I eventually moved to Chicago,” she says. “To lose myself. You had your medications of choice. Mine was the big city. Chicago felt like a really good tranquilizer.”
“How so?” He leans forward, taking both her hands in his.
Maris thinks back on her whirlwind city life. “It’s simple, actually. Between my hectic career, Scott and the crazy social calendar we kept, I had no time to look over my shoulder. Chicago kept me very busy, and that was the drug, leaving no time for questions. An aunt in Europe? A missing sister? Family secrets? I was cushioned from it there.”
“You’re not going back?” Jason asks, his eyes never leaving hers. “I saw the email on your porch today.”
“Scott wants me to fly back next weekend. To talk about things. He doesn’t think it’s over between us.”
“Is it?”
Maris watches the man seated with her, his dark brown eyes glancing at her in a way Scott’s never would. “Maybe it was never over between us,” she says, “whatever we started all those years ago out on Foley’s deck that night. Remember?”
“Remember?” For the first time all summer, she sees a spark in his eyes. “You’ll have to refresh my memory.” A slow grin spreads across his face.
“Huh. You wish,” she says, grinning right back.
Jason unfolds the red and white checked cloth from the breadbasket and butters a slice of warm Italian bread. He speaks so softly, she almost misses his words. “I never forgot that kiss. Through it all, I never forgot you, sweetheart.” He hands her a buttered slice of bread.
Maris doesn’t realize just how hungry she is until she feels the warm, doughy bread in her mouth. “Mmh. Heaven.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
She follows his gaze around the restaurant, seeing the golden light of late day slant into the dim room, seeing the tables and flowers and red candles. Paintings of piazzas and olive orchards hang on the walls. The aroma of fresh tomato sauce fills the air and the taste of wine lingers in her mouth. Her eyes stop when they meet his.
“Because I’m in heaven,” he says. “Sitting right here with you.”
For the first time in years, pregnancy tests sit on her bathroom counter. Eva bought two, knowing that whatever the outcome, she won’t trust its results and will try again. She looks at her reflection and sweeps a stray eyelash from her cheek, expecting a change in her appearance other than the layered haircut. Expecting that sense of familiarity to come to her, that spark of recognition now that her hair is shorter and off her face. She looks into her reflected eyes, searching for someone else, for her mother to talk her through this. To smile for her and be happy, whether it is yes or no. She picks up the package and reads the bold print for the second time. White – Not Pregnant. Pink – Pregnant. After a few minutes, she checks again and sees that she is not in the pink.
What surprises her is the feeling. She’d thought she’d be relieved. She’d thought her life and family had passed the baby stage. And yet, it is hard setting down the test and turning away, glancing in the mirror and not seeing a smile. The white result shifts everything. It shifts her focus. It shifts her mood. White means instead.
Instead the house is still. And quiet.
Instead of calling Matt at work with good news, her voice is sad. She wonders if he hears it through the relief she forces over her words. “At least now we can move ahead. Taylor will be in high school before we know it.”
Instead of looking for Taylor’s old baby things in the attic, Eva climbs the ladder to empty the contents of the old trunk so Matt and Kyle can move it downstairs and repaint it a sand color. She’ll stencil starfish on it and use it in her office for extra storage.
She pauses at a carton of Christmas decorations and lifts the cover to see glass ornaments and window candles and velvet bows. For the past week, her thoughts have moved along the timeline of a pregnancy. When Taylor begins eighth grade in September, she’d be two months along. When her latest sale closes, she’d be three months
. The baby’s movements would start to be detected. Looking at the Christmas ornaments now, everything has changed. She will not be five months pregnant in December. Baby items will not be collecting in the extra bedroom.
Knowing there will never be another baby in their home makes her think back fondly to when Taylor was a baby. Opening the trunk, there are candlesticks inside, and Taylor’s Communion Dress wrapped in tissue, a shoebox of loose photographs, tablecloths and doilies. Memories, memories, all of them, to be taped up in a cardboard box now as she empties the trunk. In a way, she’s missing, too, the new baby memories that’ll never come to be.
When the trunk is empty, Eva presses the lid closed until the old latch clicks inside. Crouching in front of it, her hand runs across the surface. The finish feels dry and cracked and it will need to be carefully stripped. She wants to see the back surface, and pulls one end of the trunk away from the wall. Sunshine comes through the attic window and catches on a sliver of gold thread snagged on the back hinge. The space around her swims with dust particles floating in the afternoon sunlight, like some sort of dream. The thread is twisted and so she carefully unwinds it and lifts a dusty, faded blue velvet pouch. It looks like it has hung there for years, long forgotten.
Eva sits on the closed trunk and leans into the sunlight shining in through the attic window. She gently slips her fingers through the golden threads and opens the velvet fabric. In a moment filled with wonder, she tips the bag sideways, catching in her other hand its glimmering contents.
A beautiful etched star hangs on a braided gold chain, which doesn’t make any sense. It looks like the exact same necklace that Maris wears, the only one of its kind, designed purely for her. Eva’s finger lightly traces the gold star, a thought playing games with her heart. The circumstances of her adoption, according to Theresa, though very sad, are filled with love.
Maris also lived very sad young years. She suffered a terrible loss when her mother died. Could they have possibly suffered the same tragedy? Is that why Maris is a part of her life, under the guise of being a summer friend? A thought comes, but no. No. It can’t be. No way. Someone would have told them. Could their two lives have started in the same home, with the same mother? She closes her fingers tight around the necklace, unwilling to look on the back of the star yet. Various thoughts float like stardust, coming together brilliantly.
If there are two identical star necklaces, custom-made and tailored with significance to a lost mother, then there must be two daughters. Two nieces with an aunt in Italy. Two separated nieces with inscribed stars.
She moves her touch around to the back of the pendant and feels it on her fingertip, the engraving in the gold.
Everything in her life suddenly comes together in that one, clear instant. She knows.
Sitting alone beneath the rafters, she knows. She knows as she looks down at the star, as she closes her eyes, as she folds her hand around the pendant, the chain hanging loose. She knows when she holds it to her heart.
Sitting in that attic with dust and joy and regrets and happiness all around her in the memories, she turns the pendant over and reads the delicate script inscribed there.
Evangeline.
Time suddenly moves differently, faster than just an hour ago when life stretched long before her with emptiness. She rushes downstairs to her dresser, rummaging over the top of it, through her jewelry box, searching for the telephone number where Theresa and Ned are vacationing this week. She yanks open drawers. Her hand skims for the slip of paper with the Martha’s Vineyard number on it, because no surprise, the little cottage they’re staying at has no cell service. For the life of her, she cannot remember where she put it. Not in the kitchen, on the top of the refrigerator, beneath fridge magnets, in the cabinet, in the junk drawer, in her handbag on the counter.
“Damn it,” she finally says as she sits at the kitchen table. Between the wallpapering and painting and thinking she was pregnant and searching adoption registries, the telephone number is just gone.
So she grabs her phone and quickly dials Maris’ cell, impatiently waiting for her to answer. “Come on, come on,” she says, pacing the kitchen, disconnecting and dialing again. “Answer the damn phone.” She leaves a quick message on her voicemail, then disconnects and tries again. “Maris, call me.” She takes a long breath, wanting to say everything, and unable to say anything. “We really need to talk, it’s important. Call,” she says before slamming down her phone.
When she hangs up, she looks at her gold star necklace. She, too, has an aunt, far across the Atlantic. Someone who must think of her, from time to time. And the thought leaves her feeling so purely connected to Maris and Elsa, the three women linked together through the years with a simple braided chain, that she puts on her sandals and heads off, half-running, to Maris’ cottage. She has to see her, to tell her, to hug her.
After waiting endlessly on Maris’ doorstep, she returns home. Matt finds her later sitting in their kitchen on the window seat, her knees pulled up in front of her as she watches out the window, hoping to see Jason’s SUV drive by further down the street. Maris has to be with him.
“I knew you were upset about the baby,” Matt says when he sits beside her and sets a bouquet on the table. He wears his uniform, his polished boots, his firearm still, in his rush to get home. “You’re shaking,” he says, wiping away her tears. “You’ll feel better in a few days.”
“It’s not the baby.” She takes off the pendant and holds it out to his hand, watching his gaze move from it up to her face. “It’s true,” she says. “And no one ever told me.” The flowers lay on the table in front of them, the summer day grows warm outside the window, the scent of the sea reaches in.
Jason had forgotten that he could feel happiness in the wind brushing his face, in the damp sea mist settling on the night, in the darkness itself. At the water’s edge, Madison bounds ahead of them, occasionally barking into the sea breeze.
“Sometimes it feels like I’ve never left here,” Maris says as she brushes back strands of hair.
“What do you mean?” Jason asks.
“It feels like I’ve always been here and Chicago and the past twelve years were only a dream somehow.”
“There’s a reason for dreams, Maris. We work things out in them.” A cool ocean breeze skims across the water. “Cold?” he asks. His suit jacket hangs draped over her shoulders and he lifts it higher, closing it around her arms while pulling her near.
“A little. Do you want to go back?”
“In a minute. There’s something I have to do first.”
“What’s that?” Maris asks, looking up at him.
His fingers touch her hair, brushing wisps from her cheek. Standing at the edge of the sea, night and water are as black as one, broken only by a swath of pale moonlight falling from the sky, by the rhythm of the waves breaking close by. In that darkness, he kisses her and his world becomes just and only that, for one long moment as the waves continue to reach up on the beach. When he stops, his hand traces every curve of her face. “I couldn’t love you and not tell you about that day.”
Her fingers touch his lips. “I love you, too,” she whispers.
“Come on,” he says, and they turn back toward the road with his arm around her, holding her close. Madison lopes past them holding a stick of driftwood in her mouth, her tail swinging with happiness. They walk slowly behind the dog, lingering with the night. Time is finally, finally sweet.
Beneath his bedroom window, with the rhythm of the breaking waves carrying to them, Jason’s hand stops hers from reaching for the bedside lamp. Moonlight allays the darkness instead, looking almost liquid, Maris thinks. The edges of the room are softly blurred by it, much like her sketches blur beneath fresh watercolor paints, the water dissipating clarity. And that blend of pale light from above, along with the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, makes the night itself watercolored. Sea colored, she thinks, with the evening’s breeze bringing the sense of the sea close. Sometimes l
ife is all about that, about how the waves continue to reach the shore no matter where we are. Bent over a sketch pad in a city studio, with denim samples strewn about. Or lying twisted on a hot summer pavement, it doesn’t matter. The waves come. Once you’ve heard them, and walked beside them, they are always there.
Maris touches upon his scars, her fingers softly slipping along them. His breath catches at her first trace of his face and she stays there, close, her eyes searching his as she moves her hand along his neck to the gnarled skin of his back where his body met the road. Her touch comes in those waves, gentle but endless, down his side to his leg, tracing the scarred web along his thigh ever so slowly before reaching back to find the ridge above his jawline. Time is fluid, the night is fluid, life is fluid, and at the sea, one heals.
Maris knows this day has been like a silver cap on one of those sea waves, changing the direction and force of his life, bringing him gently to shore. She heals him then, completely, moving on top of him and leaving tender kisses along his jaw. His hands move over her back and up through her hair, touching her neck until he turns and cradles her beneath him. She whispers words that he stops with his kisses, so she brings the affection to her hands that stroke his arms, cling to his back, not letting him slip back into that sea of darkness.
What she is most glad for, more than anything else, is this. Summer, for him, will have this moment in it, too. She wants that for Jason, wants him to remember it drifting in through the open window, the starry sky above, the sea breeze moving the white curtains, bringing a hint of the sea itself. His hands frame her face. “Maris,” he says quietly, searching her eyes. She senses, somehow, that this is how he has to love her, his eyes have to see the moment, hear the night. Sight and sound, sight and sound, keep him present.
When she answers softly, “I love you,” it is the way his mouth tastes the soft of her throat before moving to her face and kissing her cheek, her eyes. It is the way his hands frame her shoulders close that tells her he hears the sound of her words. She presses her lips against his ear, letting him feel even her breath as she says his name, hoping he feels the possibility of life again, shimmering like a summer sea.
Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans Page 24