“Oh, yeah, Franconia Ridge. Incredible views. Stayed at the Greenleaf hut with Grace and her mother. Long time ago.” He swung his pencil above the legal pad, batting the air. “Anyway. The labyrinth.” He gave his head a slight shake, as if to clear the memory. “Where were we? Goals for the project!” With a flick of the wrist, he tapped the paper three times with his pencil. “Give me a minute,” he said, and a shiver laced her shoulders.
Rob glanced out to the bay, the day melting into the ocean. He let out a breath, nodded, scratched pencil against paper. “Every design tells a story, conveys a theme with subtle details. What do you say, Abby?” Rob turned the legal pad in her direction so she could read the side-by-side words: Peace and Luke.
“Is this what you want?” he said.
More than anything.
She skirted his gaze, swallowed, studied the lupine. The sturdy purple cones pointing to the sky would wither by summer’s end. Day in, day out, she served breakfast to bleary-eyed guests, taking into account half-a-dozen different dietary restrictions, their random preferences. She answered the phone and made reservations with a smile in her voice. She laundered white cotton sheets, ran her hands across the smooth heated fabric, warmth missing from her own life. The two-sided longing never left her. And yet no one saw. No one saw her.
Peace and Luke.
She raised her gaze to Rob’s. He’d never looked away.
The ability to withstand life’s storms without flinching earned Rob a third check for Abby’s ideal-guy list.
Did he see that, too? “Where do we start?” she asked.
Rob patted Luke’s stepping-stone, as though inviting her to sit down, take a load off her feet, and settle in for a long stay. “This, right here, is where we begin.”
CHAPTER 4
Ever since eighth grade, Tessa Lombardi had always wanted whatever her best friend, Dina, had. Two parents who lived in the same house, slept in the same bed, and never bickered. A mother who gave a shit. A boyfriend who didn’t cheat.
For a few short months, she thought she’d finally gotten the boyfriend part right.
Now, Luke was dead, it was all her fault, and her life was over. Be careful what you wish for.
It totally pissed Tessa off that one of her mother’s favorite sayings had actually come true, like a broken clock, right twice a day.
That was one of her father’s favorite sayings.
Tessa swung her legs over the edge of the bed, planted them on the apartment-issue rug, and gazed wide-eyed through a skim of tears. The room appeared magnified, the walls canting, the dresser looming, as though she were swimming through salt water.
Since Luke had been gone, she cried every day, and not just about stuff that made sense either. The endless stream of posts on Luke’s Facebook wall did her in. Girls Luke hadn’t really known, or cared about, posted dumbass stuff like, I’m going to wicked miss you, as if Luke were spending a semester in London and would return in the fall, sporting a cockney accent and a fondness for clotted cream. All the girls who posted were pretty, if you believed their duck-face profile photos, which Tessa did not.
She knew better than anyone how you could put on a different face during the day to trick the world into thinking you were someone other than who you were and then wash it off at night. Luke had known that, too, without needing an ounce of makeup to pull off the prank.
Or maybe she wanted to believe the worst. If she believed the worst, then she wouldn’t have to remember all she’d lost.
Tessa waited until her sight cleared and then tiptoed across the bedroom. The apartment was a bargain, as long as management didn’t find out they’d crammed two beds and three people into a one-bedroom.
Morning light sneaked through the blinds of the off-campus summer rental and threw flickering leaf patterns across the blue-blanketed mass.Two figures crammed into a single bed no bigger than the twins from the dorms. Dina’s linebacker boyfriend, Jon, lay with his broad back to the room. One large hairy leg flung atop the covers and clamped around Dina.
Nestled against Jon’s arm, Dina looked like a little girl with her face awash in a golden-glow night-light, rather than a nineteen-year-old sleeping off strains of last night’s birthday beer bash. Dina’s hands clasped together beneath her chin, and she sighed, not a care in the world. If only.
In a snap-quick slip of the wrist, Dina-and-Jon and Tessa-and-Luke had become Dina-and-Jon and tagalong Tessa.
Tessa closed the bedroom door behind her. At least Dina and Jon had the decency to sleep, only sleep, when she was in the bedroom.
Since Luke had been gone, Tessa hardly slept at all.
Not due to weekends of staying up late, after-hours dance-till-dawn parties. That used to be her thing. Now, at the end of a beaten-down-tired day, she’d slide into bed early, only to find herself awake again three hours later, Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” playing over and over in her head, Luke haunting her. He’d introduced her to the band, musical taste he’d claimed was handed down from his father. Tessa and Luke had sat on his dorm bed, backs up against the painted brick wall and legs out in front of them, holding hands, at first zoning to the music and then tuning into each other.
Bags of chips gaped open along the coffee table, a dank smell tainted the air, and red plastic cups a quarter filled with beer decorated the kitchen table. Tessa’s cup sat at the table’s head, her name spelled out in black Sharpie, the beverage completely drained.
Since Luke had been gone, Tessa had lost her taste for beer.
Tessa yanked open the porch slider and stepped into the fresh air. Her hand grasped the wrought-iron railing. “Same shit, different morning,” she mumbled.
“Kiss your mother with that mouth?” Dina stood on the cement balcony, her hands jabbed on her hips. Dark-blond hair tumbled around her shoulders, as though she’d arranged it that way. Jon’s favorite football T-shirt came to the top of Dina’s knees. White letters stood out against the black background. How do you want to be remembered?
Tessa tried to glare at Dina before tears sprang to the corners of her eyes.
“Oh, God. Sorry, I’m an idiot.”
“You said it,” Tessa said, but she’d no fire behind her words. And when Dina came in for a hug, Tessa didn’t resist. She never talked about her mother with anyone but Dina, so even a momentary lapse stung. She supposed it wasn’t Dina’s fault she couldn’t relate. She didn’t have to rely upon thrice-yearly cards sent from Europe, on Christmas, Easter, and Tessa’s birthday, to pinpoint her mother’s latest location.
Last birthday, Tessa’s mother had thought she’d turned eighteen for the second year in a row.
Jon stumbled into view and tickled Dina from behind, making her jostle against Tessa.
“Quit it,” Dina said, batting a hand behind her. Tessa untangled herself from her friend so she wouldn’t have to feel Dina let go first.
“Uh, sorry,” Jon said, as if he hadn’t noticed Tessa, and lumbered into the kitchen. How could she simultaneously be both the talk of the campus and invisible?
“What are you going to do?” Dina asked, same thing she’d been asking Tessa daily.
“I have no clue,” Tessa said, and headed for the bathroom with her cell. Behind the door, she reviewed the text from her father, philosophy professor Noah Lombardi, requesting her presence for a breakfast date. The message was no small feat considering her father’s newest phone was an old-fashioned flip job where every letter required three jabs of the thumb. Tessa tapped in, ok, and hit the shower. She must’ve been desperate to resort to talking to her dad, but what choice did she have? Even she was sick of hearing herself talk to Dina. The same conversation wound in mazelike circles with no way out.
Fifty minutes later, Tessa sat across from her father at Dad’s favorite Amherst haunt, Lone Wolf. Midmorning, and the restaurant was packed with students Dad ignored, sprinkled with a few faculty members he acknowledged with a lift of his chin. The din of conversations, the clang of silverware against pla
tes, created a buffer of privacy. The server placed Dad’s regular order on the table before him, lox and latkes, his way of remembering his Jewish mother. Tessa’s order came next, challah French toast, because she was so hungry she thought she might hurl.
Tessa slathered the toast in butter and drenched it in maple syrup until the sticky liquid pooled around the stack. She shoved the first bite in her mouth, smiled through sweet relief.
Dad took his time, slicing and dicing lox and latkes, and examining Tessa in preparation for stabbing philosophical inquiry. “Present,” he said. Her father’s way of asking her to lay out her opposing arguments totally threw her off, since all she could think about was the past and the future.
“I can’t do this,” she said, and burst into tears over her French toast.
Her father became Professor Lombardi. He tilted his head and blinked at her, as if she were one of his freshmen who’d failed to grasp the basics of debate. The way he chewed his lox—steady and sure—made her want to tear the breakfast from his lips.
He took off his glasses and folded them beside his coffee mug. “Tessa, Tessa, Tessa,” he said. “It’s a little late for tears, don’t you think?” He let out a put-upon sigh. His gaze softened, as if he were about to, for once, talk to her like an adult. “Just like your mother.”
That only made her cry harder. Did he honestly think he was being helpful?
“Life is a matter of priorities and proper focus. Your mother’s artistic attitude”—Dad said, pausing to draw a set of quotes in the air—“doesn’t work in the real world. We all have to get up at a certain time, go to a job or school. And when you have a child, he or she is your main priority. I blame myself for thinking your mother was ready for motherhood at twenty-two. Some people’s temperaments aren’t suited for the job, no matter the age. Simple as that. Stop overthinking. Right now, college should be your priority.”
Tessa remembered Dad focusing his nails-on-blackboard logic at her mother in response to Mom’s last great rant about needing the richness of foreign soil to grow creativity. Tessa remembered Mom’s final summation that her father was heartless.
“Meredith, Meredith, Meredith,” Dad had said. “One can have everything, just not necessarily at the same time.”
What he’d meant was, not necessarily with a husband and a kid.
Her father had met her mother’s tirades with calculated logic, her heat with ice.
No wonder Mom had left him. But why did she have to leave Tessa? What had she done wrong?
The last time she’d seen her mother, Mom had stood in the doorway to Tessa’s bedroom, her face blotchy with spent tears. Dark eyes shining, she’d offered up her usual bedtime rhyme. “Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, see you in the morning light,” she’d chirped.
“Promise?” Tessa had said, and Mom came to sit on the edge of Tessa’s bed. She’d gathered Tessa’s hands in hers. She’d looked Tessa in the eye. She’d promised.
She’d promised.
Tessa had never again seen her mother in the light, morning or otherwise.
Dad scrubbed a fist across his close-cropped dark beard, and set down his fork. “Have you registered for fall classes yet?” he asked, as if she had a choice. She could already see him formulating his arguments, his gray gaze drifting from hers, lengthening the distance between them.
Tessa struggled to catch her breath, and then blew her nose in her napkin. “I can’t let go of Luke.” As if to prove her point, Tessa’s throat hugged his name. Her heart beat double time, her body working to resurrect the boy she loved.
Dad raised his gaze to the ceiling, a sure sign of exasperation with emotional displays, immature students, her. “Clean breaks are best. You have a chance to move on, get your degree. No need to compound the tragedy.”
Tessa shot her father a questioning look. She knew what he thought about her completing her bachelor’s degree in studio art for the express purpose of painting. If she’d no interest in an MFA and a professorship, she might as well have majored in coloring with flat-bottomed Crayolas, building with Legos, and sculpting Play-Doh.
“Take advantage of your opportunities.”
“I have an opportunity—”
“To do what? Ruin your life? You’re nineteen. I’m not going to support you forever.” His gaze bore into her, the x-ray vision of disapproval simultaneously scorning her outer appearance and assuming all of her mother’s inner faults. Flighty, impulsive, irresponsible. Tessa had heard them all before. She didn’t care to hear them again.
After Luke’s death, her father’s negative opinion of her had solidified, clay in a kiln. Why bother trying to change it? Heat flushed her hairline. It wasn’t her fault she looked like her mother. That much she knew. “Mom was right. You are heartless. I wish she’d taken me with her.” Tessa hated the way her voice sounded, thin and pinched and prepubescent, same as the first time she’d hurled the phrase.
Dad didn’t even flinch. He never did. Instead, he regarded her over the rim of his coffee, set down the mug, and tapped his napkin twice against his lips. Seeing his nostrils flare wasn’t half as thrilling as Tessa had hoped. “Leaving you with me was the only unselfish thing that woman has ever done in her life.”
So now he thought Tessa was selfish? She couldn’t untangle that inside-out logic. The din of background conversation rose; the sharp tone jumbled her insides. Not only had she inherited all her mother’s faults, but she’d also managed to sidestep her mother’s single crumb of goodness.
Tessa hadn’t been willing to forget Luke and move on with her life in February. Why should she do it now? She still loved him. That constant would never change.
When her mother had left, her standoffish father had taken a giant step backward. He’d prepared dinners, where the two of them chewed and swallowed without exchanging a word, and she’d assumed he was angry with her. He’d wished her a good night’s sleep, without the benefit of a rhyme or a hug, and she imagined her adolescent development explained Dad’s sudden shyness. A year ago, he’d congratulated her on her art scholarship. Yet, last week he’d refused to visit the Herter Gallery, where her painting hung beside her mother’s, Professor Meredith Lombardi.
Her father might act as though her mother’s leaving hadn’t touched him at all, but Tessa knew better. For once, his little act didn’t fool her. “I have three choices,” she said.
Her father swirled a bite of latke in sour cream, popped it into his mouth, and held up his index finger. He might as well have flipped her off with the middle one instead.
“Luke’s mother would understand how I feel,” Tessa said, remembering the way Abby had dried her tears at the post-memorial reception, one hand resting on Luke’s father’s arm. Luke’s parents had never married, but Abby still loved Luke’s dad. It wicked showed.
Dad shook his head, his slow side-to-side gesture meant to erase the silly misguided thoughts of silly misguided children. “Complications, Tessa. Keep things simple and straightforward.”
A laugh burst out of her. Her life had spiraled way beyond complications months ago. “Are you freaking kidding me?”
“Language.” Dad’s eyes jostled from the effort to keep them from flicking around the restaurant. Heaven forbid he looked bad in front of faculty, or worse, his students. One must maintain decorum at all times.
Screw that to hell.
Tessa pushed to standing and yanked her handbag off the chair. She made sure to use her best pronunciation and project across the crowded restaurant sharp enough to slice the heads off conversations. “Sorry, Dad. What I meant to say was, are you fucking kidding me?”
Dad’s mouth stopped mid-chew, and Tessa headed for the door, expecting her father to chase her out to the sidewalk and convince her to stay. But when she peered through the glass, her father unfolded his glasses and bent his head to study the bill.
Tessa slammed her handbag onto the passenger seat of her car. She considered going back to the apartment to pack. Last time she went out
for the morning and returned early, she’d found Jon’s baseball cap hanging on the bedroom door. The murmurs and moans from beyond the door would’ve explained the not-so-subtle symbol, if she hadn’t already known. Dina and Jon were going at it. That had only made Tessa miss Luke more.
She’d never again feel Luke move inside her.
Tessa tapped Recently Found on her GPS and scrolled back until Briar Rose B&B showed on the screen. She pressed Go, and hit the gas.
She thought of the last time she’d seen Luke’s mother, the way Abby had gazed straight into Tessa’s eyes without any preconceived notions about her flaws or failings. She remembered running to Dina. But in her peripheral vision, she’d noticed Abby starting after her. She imagined Abby embracing her, giving her one of those cheek-to-cheek hugs, the kind that reverberated deep in your bones.The kind that told you that you were special and loved and too precious to leave.
Something shifted inside Tessa, unleashing a hot flood of tears down the sides of her face. She dug into the box of tissues she kept on the passenger seat, came up empty, and flung the box onto the stupid floor.
Since Luke had been gone, Tessa really missed her mother.
In the short span of four weeks, Rob Campbell had figured out how to drive Abby crazy.
He’d taken her to North Creek Farm in Phippsburg to introduce her to his favorite beach rose, a showy strawberry-blond blossom he called Agnes, and Abby could’ve sworn he was trying to make her jealous.
He brought her to test-drive three different coastal labyrinths. An all-brick patio bordered by formal statuary. A casual sea rope path that meandered through a grove of oak trees. And a grass trail, lined with privet shrubs and unabashedly feminine pink paving stones that shimmered with ocean-reflected sunlight.
Instead of uncovering her particular brand of mind-quieting peace and authentic style, Abby studied the wide expanse of muscles in the sweet valley between Rob’s shoulders. She ogled the just-right-uplifted shape of his buttocks, and imagined the round feel of his flesh in either hand. And on post-field-trip nights, she discovered a near-forgotten knot of tension between her legs that scared away sleep.
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