I wondered what he meant by that and how much he knew. I decided not to pursue the point. The world was probably safer that way.
As I lay on the blanket, the sun broke through a patch of clouds and I closed my eyes and let it warm me. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d felt this relaxed. For as long as I could remember, my life whirled around me. Now it was time to slow things down.
I felt a presence above me and opened my eyes to see Melissa. She knelt down and kissed me softly and slowly.
“Is the album done?” I said.
“As done as it’s going to be. I could work on it forever, you know, but I think this latest mix is as right as I can get it.”
When we’d started dating, Melissa was halfway finished with her new album. After our lunch, she flew back to Aspen to work on it and then I flew out to see her for a remarkable weekend that confirmed everything I ever believed about the two of us. When she returned to work after that, she told me that she couldn’t look at her new music the same way, that it didn’t have the passion she now demanded from it. It didn’t say who she was any longer. So she set about rebuilding it, making it more personal. The record company, who knew Melissa’s star was on the rise, got very nervous when they found that she’d scrapped her sessions, but changed their minds when they heard some of the revised material. Still, it had taken her until this morning to get it just the way she wanted it.
“Congratulations,” I said. “Does this mean we can honeymoon in peace?”
“We can honeymoon anywhere you want. We can honeymoon right on this blanket if you’d like.”
“Don’t tempt me. You know I have no will power.”
“None?” she said, kissing me again.
“Really very little. If you’re at all worried about paparazzi, you’ll immediately start talking about your mother.”
She laughed and sat up. The sun glinted in her eyes, though the sun was a poor substitute for their radiance. “So what did you bring me for lunch?”
I reached into the cooler pack and pulled out the sesame noodles I’d gotten for the two of us. “Chinese restaurants are much more expensive here than they are in D.C., and no one delivers. Are you sure we made the right decision?”
Melissa turned to glance off at the mountains and an eagle soaring in the clouds. “I’m pretty sure we made the right decision.”
On Saturday, more than a hundred people (and certainly more than a few uninvited photographers) would gather on this mountainside to watch Melissa and me share our vows. I never imagined myself to be the kind of guy who would get married on a mountain. If the last year had taught me anything, though, it was that the unimaginable is always possible – and maybe even preferable. The Colonel, who was nearly as persnickety and set in his ways in this life as he had been in our other – even from the Argent retirement home in North Carolina – thought the entire thing was absurd and tried to prevail upon me to convince Melissa to do something more traditional. I asked him to tell me the last time someone had convinced Melissa to do something other than what her heart told her. “Trained her too well,” he said morosely. Regardless, it was going to be a beautiful ceremony, complete with music provided by a world-class flautist and violinist.
When we finished our meal, Melissa leaned back against me. We had last-minute plans to orchestrate and travel itineraries to juggle, but all could be delayed for at least a few minutes.
“I had no idea what I was missing until you came around,” she said. “Do you know how scary it seems to me that I could have gone through my whole life not knowing what was possible?”
I kissed the top of her head. “I think we always would have found each other.”
“How? I mean I can still barely believe that it happened.”
“We would have. I just know it.”
Melissa turned to look at me and then shook her head. “Every now and then I still don’t totally get you.”
“You have plenty of time to figure me out.”
She hugged my arm and then sat up. “I have something for you,” she said as she reached into her shoulder bag. She pulled out the pocket watch I once wore proudly for such a short period.
“My mother gave this to me when I was sixteen.” She held it up, letting it spin slow circles on its chain. “It was my grandfather’s. I just got it back from the engraver. Give me your hand.”
She lowered the watch into my palm, the chain sprawling across my outstretched fingers. I flipped it over and read the inscription: KEN + MELISSA FOREVER. I leaned over and kissed her.
“We are forever, right?” Melissa said.
“Absolutely forever. There is nothing that could ever take me away from you,” I said with more certainty than I’d said anything in my life.
About the Author
I grew up in the New York area and I’ve lived there my entire life. I worked in retail and taught high school English before I got my first book contract. I have gotten several additional book contracts since then, which is fortunate because I didn’t have the patience to work in retail and, while I quite enjoyed teaching, my approach was a bit too unconventional for most school systems. One school administrator told me that, “there are more important things than being a dynamic teacher.” Since I couldn’t name any of those things (at least in the context of school), I figured I didn’t have a long-term future in the profession. Hence, I became a writer, where I believe people appreciate a certain level of dynamism.
My first several book deals were for nonfiction books. Though I started with nonfiction, I have always loved fiction and I have always wanted to write it. I’ve always had a particular affection for love stories. In fact, the very first book-length thing I ever wrote, when I was thirteen, was a love story. Mind you, it was the kind of love story that a thirteen-year-old boy would write, but it was a love story nonetheless. I have a deep passion for writing about relationships – family relationships, working relationships, friendships, and, of course, romantic relationships – and I can only truly explore this by writing fiction. My novels have given me a way to voice the millions of things running through my head.
My wife and kids are the center of my life. My wife is the inspiration for all of my love stories and my children enthrall me, challenge me, and keep me moving. One of the primary reasons I wrote my first novel, When You Went Away was that I wanted to write about being a father. Aside from my family, I have a few other burning passions. I’m a pop culture junkie with an especially strong interest in music, I love fine food (as well as any restaurant shaped like a hot dog), and I read far too many sports blogs for my own good.
“Michael Baron” is a pseudonym. This isn’t because I’m in the Witness Protection Program, or anything of that sort. I’m writing these novels “undercover” because they’re not entirely compatible with the nonfiction books I write and I didn’t want to confuse readers. We’re all different people sometimes, right? I just decided to give my alter ego another name.
I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at [email protected].
More from the Author
When You Went Away
Only a few months ago, Gerry Rubato had everything he thought he needed from life. He was passionately in love with his college sweetheart after nearly twenty years of marriage, he had a bright, independent-minded daughter, and he had the surprising addition of a new child on the way. Then everything changed with stunning rapidity. With little explanation, his daughter ran away with her older boyfriend. Then, only a month after giving birth to their son, his wife died suddenly.
Now, Gerry needs to be everything to his infant child while he contends with two losses he can barely comprehend. And when a woman walks into his life as a friend and their relationship verges on something more, Gerry must redefine all that he knows about himself, about love, about loyalty, and about his dreams.
From the author
When You Went Away was my first novel after several works of nonfiction, and it was both a joy and a bit of a nightmare to write like this for the first time. I knew I wanted to write about being a father and I knew I wanted to write a love story, and the novel grew organically out of that. I’d heard novelists talk about falling in love with their characters, but I didn’t truly understand what they meant until I wrote When You Went Away. These characters still pop up in my head regularly, especially Gerry and little Reese, who manages to upstage all the other characters in every scene in which he appears.
Here’s an excerpt:
I dreamt of us in springtime. Maureen and I walked hand in hand through Washington Square Park, an acoustic guitarist playing an Indigo Girls song on one side, a guy throwing a Frisbee to his dog on the other. As we walked, Maureen’s sleeveless arm rested against mine, giving me one more reason to be thankful for the dawning of this new season. A teenaged girl and boy ran past laughing carelessly, transforming as we watched them into Tanya at age five, and Eric, her best friend at the time. The park became our backyard. I chuckled as they rumbled by and Maureen leaned into me. She kissed me on the cheek and tittered into my ear, causing the fine hairs on my neck to rise.
Then she pushed me on the shoulder, calling out, “You’re it!” and running away laughing like the little girl I always wished I could have known. I chased them both (Eric had disappeared), sweeping Tanya up and carrying her, squealing delightedly and wriggling, under my arm while I sought Maureen, who somehow ducked out of sight. While I looked in one direction, she jumped on my back from the other, causing the three of us to tumble to the ground, Tanya leaping free to pounce on both of us. We wrestled together for a few moments, kissing, tickling, until we lay in the grass, a tangle of arms and legs, gazing up at the impossibly blue sky. I could stay here like this, I thought. I could very easily stay right here and never want for anything.
A musical tinkling came from somewhere in the near distance, and Tanya gathered her feet under her faster than any little kid should be able to. “Ice cream truck,” she said with a joy that was singularly hers, sprinting to the front of the house, knowing that the man in the truck had already slowed in anticipation of her approach and that Maureen and I would soon be behind her with the money necessary for an ice pop or a Dove Bar or whatever else she might want.
Maureen kissed me again at that point, softly this time, warmly, enveloping me with her spring smell. “Do you think the ice cream man will put this one on her tab?” she said, understanding how completely I wanted to remain here and kiss her like this indefinitely.
And then Tanya sat next to us again, her feet tucked under her nine-year-old bottom. “Do the two of you always have to kiss?” she said, pretending to be repulsed but at the same time bearing just enough of a glint in her eye to let us know that this was at least moderately okay with her.
“Yes, always,” I said and I kissed Maureen again to underscore the point.
She frowned at me, but her mother reached out to grab her and she tumbled toward us, kissing Maureen’s hair and settling into her embrace. I rested my head against the two of them, not knowing where one ended and the other began and not caring in the least. And in the languor of this late March day, with the afternoon sun making the air feel warmer than it actually was, I fell asleep on a bed infinitely more important to me than my own life.
The first thing I noticed when I came awake was early morning birds chirping, the sound slipping through the slim opening I left in the window the night before. Then the smell of the daffodils that Maureen planted in ridiculous quantities all around the perimeter of the house. It really was spring. I hadn’t dreamed that. And for just a second – that instant between dreaming and being awake when almost anything still seems possible – I believed that everything else about my dream was true as well. My wife was next to me. My daughter, five or nine or seventeen, was two doors down the hall, about to protest that it was too early to go to school.
But the moment receded. And again, Maureen was gone forever, gone from this earth with a suddenness I promised I would never understand. And again, Tanya disappeared from my life, not knowing that her mother wouldn’t be here for her if she ever chose to return. I felt each loss as if it just happened, realizing that the one thing I might have in unlimited quantity was sorrow.
In the past few months, there had been so many dreams. So many moments when they were right here where I could touch them and let them know that they were the absolute essence of my life. Where I could lay my forehead against Maureen’s and we could allow our eyes to have hours of conversation for us. Where I could stop time before I floundered with Tanya and give her something of me without taking away any of her. Where I could have said to them, “I’ll gladly accept the worst possible moments with either of you over any moment without you.”
I wanted to hold onto this dream, but I couldn’t any more than I could hold on to the dozens of others I had before. All I could hold onto was the increasing depth of understanding of everything I had lost. Like the insistent repetition of the chorus at the end of an epic song, with every new visit from Maureen and Tanya in my dreams, I came to feel what I had with them just a little bit more – and by extension feel what I could no longer ever have again.
Neither the birds nor the daffodils or any of the other harbingers of the season I loved most could elevate me. Spring was nearly here. And the thought that I would live it without Maureen and Tanya was heartbreaking.
I closed my eyes. Let me dream again. Let me visit with them for just a little longer. It never happened before and it didn’t happen now. Sleep didn’t come easily for me these days and it wouldn’t possibly come this way. No matter how much I wanted it.
Reese made his first morning sounds. He never cried right away when he got up. For the first couple of minutes of every day, it was as though the world was just so fascinating to him, so absolutely new to his eyes, that his rediscovery of it took precedence over his hunger. Then the crying would come. Crying that always reminded me, perhaps would always remind me, of the sound of his crying the night I came home to find Maureen.
I didn’t want him to have to cry today. And so before his empty stomach imposed its will upon him, I went to his room, picked him up, and held him to my chest. After a moment, we walked toward the kitchen. Past the framed painting of a hobbyhorse, posted outside Reese’s door, that Maureen found at the last antique store we visited together. Past Tanya’s empty room. Down the staircase lined with photographs of my wife and daughter and even a couple of the new baby.
As we got downstairs, Reese started to fuss a little. We were probably a minute from full-blown bawling. I heated the bottle quickly, using the microwave though I knew that wasn’t the best thing to do, rubbing his back, and humming to him in the time this took. I tested the temperature on my arm and brought him into the family room. Almost immediately, he sucked contentedly.
While he drank, I lost myself in the image of the antique quilt on the opposite wall. Maureen and I bought it a month before we were married. It was an extravagant expense at the time, but she wanted it so much. “It will hang prominently in every home we ever have,” she said. And it did. From the drafty walk-up in Coram to the needy starter three-bedroom in St. James to this, our family home for the past twelve years in Port Jefferson. “This quilt is you and me, Gerry. Woven from separate parts and joined together forever.”
Reese stopped sucking and I glanced down at him. He looked at me with fascination in his eyes, maybe even a bit of confusion, and his hand reached up toward my face. I bent toward him, kissing his hand and rubbing my cheek against it. It was only then that I realized I was crying. I let Reese’s hand stray over my face, drawing the line of tears down toward my chin. He had no idea what I was going through, just as he had no idea how much his touch meant to me.
I pulled the baby closer and adjusted the bottle. He began to suck again, secure in
the simplicity and wonder of his world.
A new season was coming. A new day was beginning. I held fast to the only thing that made it possible for me to face either.
Crossing the Bridge
Hugh Penders has been stuck in neutral for nearly a decade since his brother Chase died in a car accident. He carries with him two secrets that he has never been able to share with anyone: that he believes he might have been able to prevent the accident, and that he was deeply in love with Chase’s girlfriend, Iris.
When Hugh’s father suffers a debilitating heart attack, Hugh must return to the New England home he’s been running away from for the past ten years. One day, he encounters Iris – who has long since moved away – on the street. They begin a friendship and Hugh believes he’s falling in love with Iris all over again.
But the ghost of Chase haunts both of them. And when each reveals a truth the other never knew, their lives, their vision of Chase, and their chances for a future together will change forever.
From the author:
Crossing the Bridge is a novel that leapt into my head all in one piece. I had the idea of writing about two brothers in love with the same woman with the added complication that one of the brothers had died tragically ten years earlier. It added all kinds of nuance to the present-day story and gave me a great opportunity to write about both family relationships and the weight of desire. Chase is probably the darkest protagonist I’ve created, but I hope you’ll find that he’s worth getting to know.
Here’s an excerpt:
Russet Avenue is designed for foot traffic and browsers. There’s parallel parking on the street and a couple of municipal lots around back. Among other things, there’s an inn, a craft shop, a print gallery, a few restaurants, a jewelry designer, and a chocolatier for the tourists, and a bank, a drug store, and my father’s store for the locals. I’m not sure which category of consumer I fit into at this point, though I certainly hadn’t returned to Amber for its quaint New England flavor. As the morning turned into afternoon, I spent a lot of time watching pedestrians out the window from behind the counter. I remembered quiet afternoons such as this when I felt shackled to the store and believed that every other teenager in Amber had something more interesting going on.
Anything Page 23