Marrying Ember

by Andrea Randall

  Ember nodded and wiped her face dry as she turned her back. “I’m going to freshen up in the restroom.” She spoke softly without turning around.

  As I walked back to the RV, I watched Willow exit with her parents and move to the other RV. I hadn’t seen Raven or Ashby yet, but I was about to since I needed to get our things from inside the vehicle.

  Not knowing the protocol for such a thing, I rapped my knuckles against the side of the open door. “It’s just Bo … I’m … coming to get our stuff.”

  I walked the rest of the way and found Raven and Ashby sitting silently at the table that just this morning held the laughter of me and my friends.

  “Of course, Bo. Come on in.” Raven tried a smile, but it barely spread across her entire mouth before disappearing.

  I pulled our backpacks down from the overhead cabinet, and stuffed them with our phones and iPod’s and other things we’d strewn around as we’d made ourselves comfortable for what was to be a long drive. Asbhy and Raven remained silent.

  “So …” I started, feeling more awkward around Ember’s parents than I ever had. Especially since I wasn’t sure if I was looking at both of Ember’s parents. “Ash, can you just … give me the names of the next few venues so I can program the addresses in my phone?”

  Ashby stood, his thick greying hair sticking up as though he’d raked his hand through it one too many times. “Of course.”

  He moved to the front of the vehicle, and I followed, glancing back over my shoulder in time to see Raven rest her head against the window with her eyes closed.

  “Here you go, son.” Ashby handed me a sheet with the list of our tour dates, venues, and times.

  It was then that he met my eyes. Water worn and tired, a flicker of Ember passed through them that had me more confused than ever. I wanted answers, but wanted them from Ember.

  “Thanks. We’ll see you in San Francisco. Drive safely.” I turned on my heels, not knowing what else to say or do.

  “Bo?” Ashby called after me.

  I turned back around to find the broken smile of a kind man. “Take care of her okay?”

  I nodded. “Always.”

  Regan was waiting, leaning against the RV as I planted my feet on the ground.

  “Is everything … you’re not leaving the tour are you?”

  “God, no. Thankfully. At least, that’s not the plan right now. We’re driving.” I nodded to the far end of the parking lot where I watched Ember climb into the driver’s seat of the rental car that must have shown up while I was inside.

  “I … so … Ember’s my friend, and so are you, but I’m thinking you two should drive alone for a while? Right?” His eyebrows twisted as he struggled to find the words.

  I chuckled. “That’d be great, man. Trust me, I want you with us as much as I’m sure Ember does, but I still don’t know what the hell happened there. We’ll see you in San Fran tonight.”

  Regan nodded, then gave my shoulder a firm slap. “Godspeed, bro.”

  “Thanks.” I gave him a slap in return and walked to the car, placing our belongings in the trunk.

  I walked to the driver’s side door and knocked on the window. Ember rolled it down but didn’t look at me.

  “Do you want me to drive, so you can … relax?” I’d never been so tongue tied in my life as I was during this situation.

  Ember kept looking forward and shook her head. “I need to focus on something else for a while. Let me drive for a few hours.”

  I walked to the passenger side without a fight, got in, and allowed five full minutes of deafening silence as we navigated toward the highway before I spoke.

  “Ember.”

  “Not right now, Bo. Not … right now.” I watched her cheeks turn crimson as she widened her eyes—her only defense against impending tears.

  I ground my back teeth together, impatience and anxiety brewing. Her constant assertion that she could handle things herself was starting to wear on me. All I wanted to do was take care of her. Why was she so resistant?

  “We need to talk about what just happened, Ember.” My voice was firm but caring as I tried to pry open the gates around her heart.

  “You were in the RV with my parents.” She shrugged as though that was the answer.

  I turned and faced her. “I didn’t talk to them about this.”

  “Why not? They didn’t try to cover their asses?” She bit her lip as her tone turned angry.

  I reached across the car and set my hand on her leg. She moved it as though she didn’t want me to touch her, but I was unfazed. “I’m not in love with them. I wanted to have this conversation with you.”

  “If I talk about it, I’m going to cry. I hate crying.” Her eyes pinched at the edges as early tears seeped out. She was the only person I knew who spent as much time apologizing while she was crying as she did getting to the heart of why she was crying.

  “Take the next exit.” I nodded to the sign that promised good coffee in less than a mile.

  “No.”

  I erased all gentleness from my voice as I battled her stubbornness. “Ember, take the next exit.”

  She looked at me, most likely checking to see if my face matched my words. When she realized they did, she moved to the right lane and took the exit.

  “There’s a Starbucks right up there. I know you want one as badly as I do, since the band refuses to let us stop there.” I was granted a half smile as Ember negotiated the left hand turn to the church of the mermaid goddess.

  Honestly, I wouldn’t have cared if it was Starbucks or a gas station, but The Six drank tea and sunshine, leaving little time to stop for the caffeine the rest of us needed. Badly.

  “I’ll do the drive through, then we can park over there.” Ember pointed to the largely vacant lot on the other side of the tiny coffee hut.

  I let out a sigh of relief. She was willing to stop the car and drink some coffee. She needed to tell me what happened in that damn RV, and I wasn’t letting us back on the highway until I got some answers.

  “Yeah,” Ember called into the speaker. “I’ll have a venti, half-caff, soy, Pike misto with one pump vanilla.”

  I had to stifle a chuckle. She chanted her order as if it were a daily prayer.

  “You want your usual?” She asked me over her shoulder.

  “Please.”

  “And also a venti bold with cream and a shot of boring.” She grinned as the barista laughed over the intercom.

  Sarcasm was a good sign on Ember’s emotional barometer. Even if it was fleeting. Once we retrieved our drinks and paid, she pulled into a parking space and shut the car off after rolling down the windows. I left my coffee in the cup holder, knowing it would be too hot for me to drink for the next several minutes, but I watched Ember take her lid off and close her eyes as she took a deep breath, inhaling the rich aroma of the drink.

  After her first sip, she put the lid back on and set the coffee in the holder next to mine. She closed her eyes once more and rested her head against the headrest.

  “Well,” she sniffed as she let tears roll down her face, “Willow and I really are half sisters.”

  “Shit,” I puffed out my cheeks as I exhaled and grabbed her hand. I knew this information, given Solstice had said it several hours ago, but hearing it from Ember made it more real. “Who …” I didn’t know how to ask which man had fathered two daughters.

  “My dad.” Her voice went up several octaves as tears choked her tone. “Ashby … he … um.” Ember leaned forward and pressed her head into the steering wheel.

  I unbuckled my seatbelt and leaned over as far as I could, wrapping as much of my body around her as possible, trying to shield her from the internal onslaught of emotions.

  She coughed and sniffed as raw tears flooded the inside of our tiny rental car. “He’s Willow’s biological dad, too.”

  “I knew it,” Ember continued as she leaned into my chest but kept her hands on the steering wheel. “I just fucking knew it the second Willow said some
thing to me.”

  I rested my chin on the top of her head, which was hot from the force of her crying. “Is that why you didn’t want to talk to them about it? Your parents, I mean.”

  I felt her nod beneath my chin. “I knew she had to be right. Why would she make that up?”

  “Well … she’s not exactly on high moral ground.”

  Ember sniffed. “I know. But coming on to you was out of character for her. I knew she was acting out.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “I guess.”

  Finally, Ember sat up, wiped under her eyes, and looked at me. Her eyes weren’t as empty as they’d been when she left the RV earlier, but they weren’t filled with anything pretty, either. Rage, torment, and a splash of something unidentified. Something I didn’t want to try to name.

  Ember dug her fingers through her hair and left them resting against her head. “This whole time I was afraid to ask my parents because I didn’t want to lose my dad. I knew we didn’t share a mom, that much was obvious. So, one of us grew up with the wrong dad. Over the last few months I’ve looked through all the oldest pictures I could find. I dug through my parents albums, and never once were either Willow or I seen with anyone but our parents in family pictures.”

  “So what—” I don’t know what I started to ask,but Ember cut me off.

  “I was so focused on the fear of losing my dad, it never once fucking occurred to me to envision how I’d feel if it was the other way. If he was also … her dad.”

  I took a sip of my coffee, wishing I’d had something stronger. “Did your mom know? Did … anyone know but your dad? Did he even know?”

  “I don’t know how any of us could be surprised, really. For fuck’s sake they’re all free love …” Ember looked down for a second before turning her gaze out the window.

  “Was anyone surprised?” I was trying to get details in an order that made sense to me.

  “The summer and fall before we were both conceived, they’d just ended a several year run at the top of their charts. They were preparing to take a break then head to the studio for what was slated to be their best album yet. They partied hard, apparently.” It seemed as though Ember’s tears dried suddenly, and the anger was ready to take center stage.

  “November, I’m so sorry. I want to take this away from you, I do.” I pulled one of her hands out of her hair and kissed her knuckles, settling our hands on her lap.

  “Marry me, then.”

  “What?” I tilted my head to the side as my ears started to burn.

  Ember looked at me with a straight face. “I just told you that my parents never married. That they were part of a culture where that wasn’t a requirement. Apparently fidelity wasn’t a requirement either, the way it is when people legally marry. I want you to marry me, Bo. I want to be your wife.”

  “I’m not going to cheat on you, Ember. If you think—”

  “This isn’t about you!” She slammed her fist on the steering wheel.

  “It should be!” I shouted back, startled by her shift in demeanor. “It should be about us, Ember, and not you running from your fears or me running from mine. I swear to you, November. I will never, not for a second, break your heart. I’ve promised you that a million times, and I’ll do it a million more. But, what I won’t do is marry you because you’re scared.” She opened her mouth to speak, but I continued, lowering my voice. “When I ask you to marry me, I want you to say yes because you feel like any other answer would be horrifically wrong. I want you to say yes because that’s the only rational thing to say. I want you to say yes because you want a life with me. An eternity. I don’t want you to say yes because you’re scared I’ll hurt you if you don’t.”

  I let go of her hand, grabbed my coffee, and opened my door.

  “Where are you going?” she snapped.

  “Air,” I snapped back, slamming the door.

  As soon as her door opened, a sinking feeling grew in the pit of my stomach. I never raised my voice to her, and in the span of a few days I’d done it twice. Once because I was afraid, and once because she was. What kind of a husband would that make me?

  Ember crossed to my side of the car and held out the keys.

  “What’s this for?” I asked, barely a grunt coming from my mouth.

  “You’re driving.” She released the keys from her fingers, and I caught them before they tumbled to the ground.

  “Fine.” I stepped away from the car and got in the driver’s side, sliding the seat all the way back and adjusting the mirror as Ember climbed in and buckled her seatbelt.

  As I started the car, Ember reached for her cellphone and began texting. That was her signal to me that we were done talking. I wasn’t even sure what the hell had just happened between us, but I knew the couple of hours we had left to go till San Francisco were going to be the longest I’d had in a long time.

  ***

  We arrived at Bay Park three hours before our scheduled show. It was enough time to set up the stage, rehearse, and pray like hell we’d be able to pull it off. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure there was enough time for that prayer.

  Ember and I arrived only a few minutes before The Six caravan did, allowing us to pull our bags from the back of the car and walk to the “shed” that looked like a medium-sized cabin, which sat behind the stage.

  When Ember saw the RVs pull in, she walked dutifully to the lead one, which held most of our equipment. And the Shaw family. I watched from a distance as she worked silently to pull mic stands and speakers from below the vehicle and move them to the side of the stage. After a minute, or so, Regan spotted me and jogged over to the shed.

  “How was the ride? Is she okay? I texted both of you and no one answered.” He fiddled with his hands as he spoke.

  “I ended up driving, so I wasn’t looking at my phone. She was texting, but if it wasn’t to you it must have been to Monica, or someone.” I started walking to the second RV, which held the instruments, and he followed.

  “So … what’d she say?” He asked, sounding nervous.

  I shrugged. “You were driving with Ash and Raven, did they say anything?”

  Regan shook his head. “Silence has never been so loud, dude.”

  “Tell me about it. All I know is that they’re half sisters and,” I lowered my voice to a whisper, “Ashby is their biological dad.”

  “Daaaamn. Is she okay? Ember.”

  “No. We kind of had a fight during the beginning of the drive. She wasn’t really telling me anything that made sense, then she freaked out like I was going to cheat on her, or something. We’ll talk about it more later, okay?” I nodded behind Regan, where I saw the rest of the band approaching. Including Willow.

  While the band shifted awkwardly around each other, I made eye contact with Ashby, silently begging him for guidance in this situation. He seemed to understand, and nodded toward the shed, asking me to follow him. Ember had her head down as she worked to unravel cord and do sound checks, so she didn’t seem to notice my departure.

  I shut the door to the shed behind me while Ashby paced the floor for a moment. Finally, he sat in a chair against the wall, motioning for me to take the one next to him.

  “How is she?” He spoke with the same heartbreaking vulnerability Ember did. The similarities between the two made this even harder somehow.

  I sighed as I sat, rubbing my forehead with my sweaty palm. “Jesus, Ash … not good. Can you tell me what the hell happened?”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “It came out in pieces. You’re Willow’s biological father. You and Raven aren’t married. Apparently those two go together equal Ember’s assertion that we have to get married immediately.” I looked to Ashby, who frowned as he sat back.

  “We just weren’t careful, Bo. It’s not like we were swingers, in the traditional sense, but the four of us—me and Raven, and Solstice and Michael—had a very open relationship for years. Years. This conversation could just as easily be happening the other way, with Michael at th
e helm.”

  I scoffed. It was meant to be silent. It wasn’t, and I could tell it hurt Ashby’s feelings.

  “You can’t judge us, Bo. It was a lifestyle we all chose. We never meant for anyone to get hurt.”

  I stood, pacing the short length of the room with my hands in my back pockets. “Someone did get hurt, though. Two someones, and it was none of the four of you who made that original decision, Ash. Those girls didn’t get to decide this. Now Ember is in full panic mode, and I don’t know how to help her. She’s pulling away, though I’m sure me losing my temper didn’t help. Why didn’t you guys tell them when they were growing up? Did all four of you know?”

  Ashby nodded. “We all knew, but not until the girls were two. That’s when Michael found out he couldn’t have children. He and Solstice had been trying for a sibling for Willow, and it wasn’t working. They went to a doctor, and …”

  “So Willow could be anyone’s child, then?” I stopped and turned on my heels to face him again.

  He shook his head. “It was just the four of us, no one else. We were monogamous in our group … if that makes sense.” He looked up at me with the shame of a two and a half decade-old decision scrolling over his face.

  “None of this makes sense. Why didn’t you tell them?”

  Ashby sighed and stood. “By the time we found out, we’d all bonded in our families. I didn’t feel closer to Willow just by learning she was biologically mine. And, Michael didn’t feel any distance from her. We accepted the results of our actions and agreed to just … keep our families the way they were. It would have been too confusing otherwise. We did what we thought was right, I—”

  I cut him off as he started to ramble through his guilt. “I really don’t mean to judge, Ashby. I’m just trying to understand how I can help Ember. How’s Willow, anyway?”

  “Same. Though it seems that she was resolved this would be the outcome, so it didn’t come down on her as hard as it came down on Ember. I’m scared I lost my little girl, Bo. I’ve spent twenty-eight years falling in love with her, and the way she looked at me today … it was like she was staring at a stranger.” Ashby put his hand over his mouth as a sob escaped.