Connor felt her come up behind him, her touch on his shoulder hesitant.
“Connor, I’m sorry if I sounded ... picky. I didn’t mean it that way. I just didn’t want the vase to get broken. I’m probably so used to warning Toby to be careful that it was automatic.”
He smiled sardonically, not at all cheered by her explanation. “Right. I understand. You have a great place here, Gaby, with lots of valuable, irreplaceable things. You have a right to expect guests in your home to be careful. Now, go get whatever it is you want to bring with you. Like you said, we’ve already wasted enough time today.”
Still looking troubled and apologetic, she disappeared up the stairs, leaving him alone with the discontinued-style vase and the handmade Oriental rugs and the collection of porcelain figurines that he seemed to recall had been in the Flanders family since... he didn’t remember exactly. The invention of porcelain, probably.
Squinting, he hunkered down for a closer look at the assemblage of gently rounded, softly colored birds and flowers and strangely elongated people...all of them probably irreplaceable, too. Yep, he thought, straightening and glancing around, just about the only thing around here that wasn’t irreplaceable was him. If he checked into it, he’d bet he’d find that even the mouse sprinkler in the shed was probably some sort of limited, commemorative edition.
Restless, he paced across the living room to the double glasspaneled doors that opened into the dining room. There, too, everything was in perfect order, a lace cloth arranged on the gleaming dark wood table, silver candlesticks all in a row.
Funny, he mused, trailing his finger along the edge of a silver tray that held a crystal decanter and some glasses, he must have been in this house hundreds of times before, on holidays and for parties and just to hang out and watch a game with Joel on the TV in the den, but he’d never noticed how... settled it was here. How filled it was with permanence and details, how structured and heavily weighted a life lived within these solid walls must be.
He’d never really thought about what Joel did when they weren’t together, when he wasn’t playing poker with the guys or watching a game. Now he did. He thought about him entertaining his boss in this dining room and using the tools out in the shed and living the life that came with a house like this... with a woman like Gabrielle. And he was in awe of the friend he had loved and lost.
He wandered out of the dining room and into the kitchen, stopping to look at the finger paintings hanging on the refrigerator, some signed Toby and some Mommy. He smiled, only slightly less intimidated by the mother-son projects as he was by the porcelain figurines in the other room. On the calendar hanging nearby were pencil notations for dentist appointments and swimming lessons and birthday parties. He read a few and turned away. If he were to wander into the bathroom, he wondered, would there be things there, too, to make him feel like an interloper?
Hitching his hands in his jeans pockets, he stood by the window and stared out at the relatively open space of the backyard. He couldn’t shake the feeling that had followed him from room to room, growing steadily stronger. It was hard to put into words. It was almost as if the walls of the house were closing in on him. No, he thought, that wasn’t it. It was more as if, as spacious as it was, the house was too small for him, as if there was no room for him within its solid walls. He felt trapped, caged.
It wasn’t the first time he’d felt that way. Once, a while after his mother died, right after the locked-trunk-in-the-attic incident, to be precise, his father had gotten the bright idea that he was too young to be left alone with his brothers after school. He had arranged for an aunt, a distant relative of his who lived across town and whom Connor had never even met, to pick him up at school each day and look after him until his father could get him on the way home from work.
Aunt Grace, he was instructed to call her. She lived in a house a lot like this, settled, filled with things he was too reckless and clumsy to be trusted around. One day he tripped over a little footrest she had near her chair. He could still see it, covered in red velvet and with ugly, spindly legs that curved out at the top. One of those spindly legs snapped off when he caught his foot on it. Before he could say he was sorry, almost before he’d regained his balance, Aunt Grace slapped him across the face and called him a buffoon. A great, lumbering buffoon, he recalled, his lips narrowed and curved dangerously as he also remembered how much the slap had stung and how the pale red imprint of her hand had still been on his cheek when he went to school the next day.
After it happened, he had run out of her house and kept running all the way home. Later, when his father stormed into his room and demanded to know what had happened, he’d told him that he would rather let his brothers lock him in the trunk in the attic and forget about him all over again than have to stay with that aunt who wasn’t even his aunt, and that he was never going back to that place where he didn’t belong ever again. And he never had.
He exhaled roughly, wishing Gaby would hurry up. It was hot in there, and while he knew the temperature had nothing to do with how out of place he felt, it did provide him with an excuse to holler up for her to get moving.
Almost immediately she came rushing down the stairs, her face flushed, wisps of shiny dark hair slipping from the braid at the back of her head, the braid he’d watched her arrange as he’d lain in bed that morning. He had to admit, the memory of that moment, along with the smile she now flashed at him coming down the stairs, went a long way toward wiping out the uneasiness he’d felt since walking in there.
She was carrying an oversize tote bag, denim blue with pink roses scattered across it, along with an armload of children’s books.
“For Toby,” she explained. “I don’t like him out in the sun during the middle of the day, and these will help me persuade him to stay put in the shade for a while. And I want to bring some snacks I know he’ll like. Some Fun Fruits and animal crackers. Maybe I’ll even steal the box of sugar-coated cereal from my mother’s,” she said, talking more to herself than him as she headed for the kitchen.
Before she was through, she had filled two shopping bags with more things to bring back to the cabin.
“That should do it,” she told him.
Connor surveyed the pile by the back door. “I’m beginning to see why you drive a station wagon.”
“Stop grumbling. You’ve never had to pack for a five-year-old.”
“No,” he admitted, feeling the words like a lance near his heart. “I never have, at that. If you’re ready to go, there is one last thing I’d like to do before we leave.”
“What’s that?”
“I’d like to take a look at those boxes of Joel’s things you said you packed away in the basement.”
Her face lost most of its color. “But why?”
“You mentioned that you saved the personal papers from his office.”
She nodded, still looking stricken. “It was mostly correspondence and his old date books. There were also some notes for a book on household economics that he wanted to write, and a few notebooks he had hanging around. Do you think there might be something there to shed some light on what happened?”
“I don’t know. But it’s worth a try. I do think that Joel knew exactly what was going on, he just didn’t know how vicious it was going to get. As painful as it will be for you to look through his things, Gaby, it’s as close as we’re going to come to hearing what Joel has to say, and I don’t think we should pass it up.”
“No,” she said, the delicate muscles in her throat flexing as she swallowed and lifted her chin resolutely. “I don’t, either.” She reached to open the door to the basement and flipped on the light over the stairs. “Come on. I’ll show you where I put them.”
The boxes were on shelves in the storage area behind Joel’s workshop. They were unlabeled and shoved all the way to the back, behind more boxes filled with clothes and toys that Toby had already outgrown in the time since she’d packed Joel’s things away.
“I should ha
ve done a better job,” she confessed. “I could have at least labeled the boxes. I usually do, but I just wanted to get it done. Out of sight, out of mind,” she added as she slit the packing tape and opened the first box Connor lifted down. It was filled with pictures, some in albums, some loose, some still in the frames that had once been scattered throughout the house. “Only it never quite worked out that way.”
He watched as she sifted through the uppermost pictures in the box, stopping to press the back of her hand to her eyes at one point. Connor resisted the urge to gather her in his arms. It wasn’t his place to intrude. Gaby knew he was there if she needed him.
She pulled from the box a picture of Joel that Connor remembered well. It was taken when they were still in high school. In it Joel was wearing his old red-and-white high school basketball uniform and spinning a basketball on the tip of his finger, a trick he could do and Connor couldn’t, and that Joel never tired of demonstrating.
Gaby stared at the picture for a long time, as if it held some sort of secret she wanted to uncover. Connor didn’t rush her. Finally she placed it carefully back on top of the others in the box and turned to him.
“I don’t think there are any papers in here,” she told him. “Why don’t we try another box?”
They located the box containing the things from his office on the third try. She readily agreed with Connor’s suggestion that they bring it back to the cabin, where they would have more time to look the contents over thoroughly. She appeared relieved to put the task off for a while longer, and Connor regretted having to make her do it at all. It must have shown on his face, because she stopped him as he hoisted the heavy box and turned toward the stairs, placing her hand gently on his arm and going up on her toes to kiss him on the mouth.
“I’m glad I did this,” she said. “And I’m glad you were here with me when I did. It feels right.” Smiling, she held up the picture of Joel in his uniform. She must have removed it from the box of pictures, along with the handful of others she was holding, when he was busy restacking the other boxes. “I think it’s time Toby had some pictures of his father around. He has this collage of his favorite sports stars in his room, and there’s the perfect place for this picture of Joel right at the top.”
“I think that’s a great idea.” He grinned as he started walking. “So Toby’s a sports fan already, huh?”
“What can I say? It’s in the genes.”
“Really? I never knew you were a sports fan,” he teased, intentionally misunderstanding.
“Very funny.”
“Seriously who do you like in the Pazienza fight next week? All right, all right, don’t hit, I’ll stop. And don’t push,” he added, pausing on the stairs. “I can’t see where I’m going.”
“Then let me take the lead.”
“Never. Men lead, women follow.”
“Oh, really? As I recall, that’s not what you said this morning, in bed, when you wanted me to—”
“That was different,” he interrupted.
“Says who?”
“Me. It’s a guy thing that you wouldn’t understand.”
They kept the banter up as they loaded the box of papers, along with all the things Gaby was bringing with them, into the back of her car. By the time they pulled out of the garage, the harmony that had miraculously developed between them during the past few days had been pretty much restored and Connor had almost forgotten the uneasiness he’d felt inside her house.
Almost, but not entirely. A small piece of that uneasiness remained embedded in him, like a splinter that slips beneath the skin, hidden from sight and only hurting if you move the wrong way, until it inevitably festers, without warning, forcing you to pay attention.
The drive to Gaby’s mother’s house took about fifteen minutes. Gaby had called ahead and explained that she would be coming for Toby, warning her mother not to mention it to anyone, especially not to Adam. She’d assured Connor that it was best to call ahead so that Toby would be ready and that her mother could be trusted not to let anything slip.
When they arrived, Toby was waiting in the window. He came tearing through the front door and across the porch and landed in Gaby’s arms the instant she was out of the car. She bent down and gathered him close as Connor stood apart from them, watching.
Joel’s son, he thought, taking note of the little boy’s familiar sandy hair and intense brown eyes. Joel’s son. The realization was like something much stronger than he was, gripping his heart and squeezing. It was impossible to stand there—watching Gaby laughing and hoisting Toby in the air, pretending that he had grown bigger in just the short time she’d been gone—without thinking about Joel and that he should be the one witnessing that moment, sharing in it.
Countless times after the explosion, Connor’s thoughts had turned to moments exactly like this one, dwelling on all the moments Joel was going to miss out on, all the summer days and birthdays and graduations. And inside of him there would rise up a burning resentment that steadily, inevitably was edged out by guilt and by the belief that when you cut right through to the bone, it was his fault that Joel had to miss out on all of it, his fault that Joel was dead.
This time was different. This time it was the guilt that was edged out and overwhelmed by other feelings. Watching Toby laugh at something Gaby had whispered in his ear, Connor felt only sadness for the little boy’s loss, and the same steely, single-minded determination to exact vengeance on his father’s behalf that had brought Connor home in the first place.
They moved inside, where Gaby dealt gracefully with the introductions, referring to Connor as an old friend.
“What’s wrong with your hand?” Toby asked him matter-of-factly.
Connor held up the hand, freshly bandaged by Gaby that morning, and briefly explained how he’d injured it, but not who had stitched him up or how.
Gaby’s mother was a pretty, silver-haired lady whom Connor remembered from get-togethers they had both attended at Gaby’s house in the past. He could tell she remembered him, too, and not entirely favorably, judging from the wary look she wore as Gaby briefly explained what was going on.
With Toby present it was necessary to skim over most of the details of her disappearance from the church and the renewed investigation into Joel’s death. It was obvious to Connor that the boy was happy to have his mother back with him and was looking forward to spending time at the lake. It was just as obvious that Gaby didn’t want to alarm him. Finally she sent him to fetch his things from the bedroom and took the opportunity to hurriedly fill in some of the missing pieces.
“Oh, my,” her mother said when Gaby had finished, pressing her fingers to her throat. “If what you say about Adam is true, he could be dangerous. Maybe we should call the authorities.”
Gaby touched her hand reassuringly. “Mom, Connor is the authorities ... at least he was. And they’re already working on it.”
“But he’s not with the force any longer,” her mother argued, giving Gaby a warning look that-wasn’t lost on Connor. “So why would they ask him to look after you and Toby?”
“They didn’t, ma’am,” Connor replied before Gaby could. “I asked them to let me handle this end of it. I figured I knew Gabrielle and I knew Adam and, to be honest, I trust myself to do the job more than I trust anyone else. I won’t let anything happen to your daughter or your grandson. I promise you.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” the older woman replied, looking him right in the eye, leaving him no doubt how Gaby came by her stubbornness.
Connor offered her his hand. “Deal,” he said, and they shook on it.
When Toby returned with his overnight bag and another bag full of toys, Connor enlisted his help in loading them into the car. Gaby kissed her mother goodbye and held the door to the back seat open for Toby to climb in.
“Seat belt,” she said, shutting the door after him, and Connor noticed that as she slid into her own seat in front she turned to make sure he had heeded the reminder to fasten it.<
br />
The whole procedure was done smoothly and efficiently, as if she had done it hundreds of times before. Which, of course, she had, Connor realized, seeing her at that instant not simply as the woman he had fallen in love with, but as a living, breathing, integral part of something much bigger than anything the two of them alone might share. She wasn’t simply his lover and never would be, but someone’s mother and someone’s daughter, a sister, a friend and probably a lot of other things he wasn’t even aware of.
She had a whole other life he knew nothing about, and thinking about that other life made that sliver of feeling he’d carried away from her house shift inside him, sliding in a little deeper.
He thought about that other life of hers most of the way back to the cabin, with Toby chattering to his mother about all the great things he and his nana had done while she was gone. He thought about where he might fit into that life of Gaby’s, amid all the swimming lessons and gardening tools and irreplaceable possessions. He thought about it and he realized that the uneasy feeling he’d had back at her house, the feeling he’d at first thought was fear of being trapped by everything the house symbolized, wasn’t really fear of being trapped at all. He could see now that it was something much worse.
What he was really afraid of was failing, of trying to find a place for himself in her life only to discover there wasn’t one, or worse, that one existed but he didn’t have what it took to fill it. He wasn’t like Joel. He never had been. And he was afraid of letting Gaby down all over again.
How did that old saying go? he thought as he drove on into the deepening afternoon. “Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.” That wasn’t it exactly, but it would do. Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. The problem with all those old sayings was that they never went far enough.
Better to have tried and failed—even if it might mean screwing up other people’s lives and hurting a woman who, God knew, had already been hurt more than enough—than never to have tried at all. That version came a hell of a lot closer to the truth, and he wasn’t buying it, not for a minute.
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