by Amy Garvey
“I wanted to bring it up the night I called Michael the first time,” she admitted. Her eyes had a faraway look, their dark depths trained on a spot across the bustling dining room. “When he told me about you and Emma. I wanted to beg him to come up the next day and bring Emma with him so they could both be tested. But Drew made me promise I wouldn’t, at least not then, not when he didn’t even know Michael or Emma. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. I was about ready to start jumping people on the street just to ask about their bone marrow.”
I couldn’t help it—I smiled at that.
“You know, Drew is a man now, even if he is still a young one,” Sophia went on. She’d picked up her soda and was staring thoughtfully at the straw. “He’ll always be my baby, same way Emma will always be yours, but that doesn’t mean they don’t eventually grow up, you know? And Drew has been very vocal from the start about the way he wanted to handle this. He’s stubborn, my kid.” She laughed a little as she lifted her gaze to mine. “It doesn’t mean he’s not angry about this, or that he hasn’t done his share of ranting and throwing things at the wall, but he’s always been in charge of this. His life, his death. That’s what he said. He knows what he wants, always has.”
He sounded more like Michael every minute, and for a moment I felt tears threatening. Drew deserved to know his dad. And he definitely deserved a chance to a life lived outside a hospital’s walls.
“Don’t get me wrong, either,” Sophia added before I could say anything. “If you and Michael hadn’t come to me about what Emma wanted to do, I would have asked, believe me, Drew’s rules be damned. He’s all I have, and he has everything on earth ahead of him.”
Afraid to speak right away, I simply nodded. There were all kinds of choices to make in the course of a life, and it was beginning to seem to me that the most important ones were completely unexpected.
I couldn’t let this chance to raise one more question slip by, though. I took a sip of my iced tea and finally raised my face to hers. “Can I ask why you didn’t tell Michael about Drew back when you found out you were pregnant?”
She shook her head with a curious laugh. “Tess, I told you that the day I called you. Michael and I…those months were wonderful. He’s caring and kind and smart and unbelievably sexy, but I couldn’t compete. He was with me, yeah, but he never stopped talking about you.” She reached across the table and laid her hand over mine. “And I didn’t want to be with a man who was so completely in love with another woman. That was my choice, Tess. It wasn’t easy on Drew, which was selfish of me, but it was certainly a hell of a lot easier on my heart.”
I had never known relief could be so palpable. I hadn’t realized that a few small, stubborn doubts had lingered in my imagination and in my heart.
And I had never even considered that I could be grateful to this woman who had given my husband a son.
CHAPTER TWENTY
September
“AND NOW YOU MAY KISS the bride.”
The minister, a kindly older man Nell had met at the hospital, offered the words with a smile, and Jack and Nell leaned into each other gratefully, hands clasped, for their first kiss as husband and wife.
It went on a bit longer than anyone anticipated, and finally my brother Will, the youngest of us, began to clap. Matt followed with a hoot of joy, and Nell and Jack parted, flushed and grinning, to start down the aisle.
I had crept away from the makeshift altar, set up on the wide side porch of the Willowdale Farm house, when they exchanged rings. The shot of the kiss was from a distance, but I knew Nell would want more pictures of her and Jack as they came down the aisle arm in arm. To my surprise, she stopped when she reached where I stood behind the last row of seats. She didn’t plan to, I could tell—she sort of jerked to a halt at the last moment, the creamy satin of her skirt rustling. Jack was startled, but his grin widened as Nell leaned over and kissed my cheek. She was full to the brim with joy—it was bubbling over, and she was eager to share.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Happy tears made her eyes sparkle in the late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the screens. “Thank you for giving me the courage to wait for the real thing.”
And then she was gone, disappearing through the French doors into the side parlor of the old house with Jack. In another moment I heard them laughing with relief and celebration.
“She thanked me,” I told Michael as we waited for cocktails at the bar a few minutes later, when he asked why Nell had paused. “She actually said I was the reason she ‘waited for the real thing.’” Puzzled, I looked up at him, and he shook his head before he took his martini from the bartender.
“You don’t think you deserve it?” he murmured, and put his arm around me. He was gorgeous in his dark suit, his hair newly cut and the faint scent of his aftershave a spicy warmth. “You don’t think we do?”
A few months ago, it would have been a loaded question. Today, with my sister’s wedding reception before us on a bright early-fall afternoon, I offered up a sheepish shrug in reply. He was right, as usual.
Some of Nell’s happiness bubbled through me then, deliciously light. It was almost unbelievable to me that we were standing here, the summer behind us, and with it all of the pain and confusion that had begun with a simple phone call on a Tuesday evening in May.
The whole south side of the farmhouse had been opened into one large room, with the pocket doors between what had been the original dining room and parlor tucked away. And since I had last seen Willowdale Farm in May, the owners had completely refurbished the place. The wide-plank floors gleamed, fresh creamy paint adorned the woodwork and the reception room had been simply decorated with white ribbon, white tea roses, glossy green garlands and candles.
Across the room, silhouetted by the floor-to-ceiling window, Emma stood with Drew, and Sophia was nearby talking to one of Jack’s friends. I didn’t remember his name, but he was a research chemist with an incredibly dry sense of humor. He was also surprisingly sexy—suddenly, I understood the allure of a shaved head, especially paired with a rakish goatee and a tiny hoop earring. He looked a bit like a pirate—and he also looked as if he liked Sophia, and her simple, curvy midnight-blue sheath, very much.
My whole family was under one roof, my parents, my siblings, their children, my daughter—and even my husband’s son. I’d invited them back in August, with Nell’s blessing, surprising Michael into speechlessness.
Well, momentary speechlessness, anyway. Michael was never without words for long.
“You don’t have to do that, you know,” he’d said. I’d told him that I’d called Sophia while we were grocery shopping on a Saturday afternoon, of all things, and he’d stopped dead beside the neatly arranged rows of spaghetti sauce and tomato paste. “It’s Nell’s wedding, and she might not want…”
I waved a box of linguine at him with airy confidence. “I already asked her, and she’s fine with it. They’re family, too, Michael. And it’s something for Drew to look forward to, a reason for him to come and stay, see our home. Hell, he needs to meet Walter, if nothing else.”
Michael laughed, but when we turned into the frozen-foods section, he pushed me against the cold front of a door and kissed me until I blushed.
Even just six weeks ago, that Drew would even be able to come wasn’t a sure thing. Turned out that bone marrow transplantation was as big a deal as transplanting any organ, and he was in the hospital for almost three weeks until the new cells engrafted properly. He was at risk for bleeding and all kinds of infection, which meant keeping him in isolation, and today he was only three months post-transplant, almost to the day. He was thin and still pale, and he’d lost a lot of his hair during the pretransplant chemo and radiation, but he was so alive, grateful, excited, interested, watching everything and everyone as if he’d be quizzed on it later.
“I told you he knows what he wants,” Sophia said on the phone when she called to say they would drive down for the wedding. Her tone was rich with rueful pride. “He foug
ht with the doctors, and then fought some more. But the truth is, he’s doing better than anyone could have believed.”
Emma, apparently, had believed it all along—and she’d taken an eventual visit from Drew as a given. She’d nattered at me to start cleaning up the guest room the day they’d discharged her from the hospital, and she hadn’t let up until I handed her the reins of the project and told her to give it a shot. She’d taken a job at a summer day camp run by the YWCA, but most afternoons when she got home, she retreated upstairs with plastic storage bins, dust rags and paint samples. By the time Michael and I informed her that Drew and Sophia would be coming for Nell’s wedding, she’d painted the room a soft spring green, made new curtains and throw pillows for the bed, and nudged me into buying a new comforter set that reminded me of sea glass, with stripes of clear green and blue and sand.
Not that she’d become all work and no play, of course. Whenever she wasn’t working at the camp or working on the guest room, she was with Jesse—whenever he wasn’t working at the supermarket. Their schedules didn’t leave them a lot of time to be together, which I of course didn’t mind, but by August I had to admit that they were really pretty devoted to each other. At least twice they’d spent the evening with Michael and me watching a DVD, which made me blink.
“See,” Michael said on one of those occasions, as Emma followed Jesse out onto the dark front porch to say good-night. “Maybe all teenage couples aren’t all hands and out-of-control hormones.”
Of course, at that moment, the kids put their arms around each other to kiss good-night. I had to tug Michael away from the window when it was clear that neither Emma nor Jesse was afraid to use tongue.
Still, the summer had been a good one. Lucy and I had talked, finally, and spent a weekend together at the Maryland shore, drinking far too many margaritas and soaking up the sun. Michael had begun writing a new novel, and was constantly scribbling notes to himself on bits of napkins or the back of my grocery lists. And what had looked like a storm, especially where Emma was concerned, had blown through quickly. It had stripped away a bit of Emma’s childhood, yes, but it had revealed a glimpse of the young woman she was becoming—a woman I would be proud to know.
A young woman who hadn’t yet forgotten, I reminded myself as I watched her across the room, what childhood was for. She’d kicked off her shoes and was sliding across the floor with her grandfather in her stocking feet, her face flushed pink and her giggle a perfect echo of her five-year-old self.
I put my arm around Michael’s waist and took a sip of my wine as the deejay queued up “Moondance.” Nell and Jack had decided not to be formally announced—“Everyone just saw us say our vows ten minutes ago!” Nell had protested—but I knew this was their song. The crowd parted as Jack gathered Nell against him and she laid her head on his shoulder as they started to move.
“You might want to get a picture of this,” Michael murmured in my ear, and I sputtered wine.
Crap. Being the maid of honor and the photographer at the same time wasn’t easy, especially when my mind was so busy traveling back over the weeks needed to get here. Michael took my glass as I fetched my camera from a nearby table, and managed to get half a dozen perfect shots of the newlyweds dancing.
When I looked away from them, I found Drew holding out his hand to Emma, and I wriggled past other dancing couples to get a few shots of them, too.
I had dozens now—the photos I’d taken that day in the hospital waiting room, plus many more I’d shot in the weeks as we drove back and forth. There were more frames of Drew and Michael, too, and shots of Drew, Michael and Sophia—all kinds of permutations of the new family that we had become since May.
But they weren’t the photos I planned to submit to Alicia for the gallery opening. I’d shot others over the summer, a series of the local families I’d thought about all those weeks ago, and another series of more whimsical shots—a collection of mismatched forks on a table at a flea market, laundry hanging on a line, pairs of shoes lined up beside a door.
The photos of us were too new, and too important, somehow. It wasn’t that I didn’t want anyone to know how our family had changed, more that I wanted to keep it safe and make a choice to respect all the people in it.
Love, I’d figured out, was never only about two people. I put my camera down and pulled Michael out to the dance floor, and put my arms around him just as the deejay put on a new song. The people around you were swept along in love’s wake, and the bigger your love was, the more people it seemed to touch.
Michael and I had changed the world, just a little, by choosing to love each other. And that was a big responsibility, but it was also a gift—to ourselves and to the people we cared about. I’d learned that much, anyway.
And I knew, as Michael turned me on the floor with the candlelight flickering and the music a soft pulse in the background, his arms a familiar anchor around me, that it wasn’t a gift I would ever take for granted again.
“What are you thinking about?” he murmured, his lips warm against my cheek.
“Nothing.” I lifted my face to his and kissed him. “Everything. Love. Choices. Weddings. Pictures. I’d love to have a picture of us, just like this, to look at from time to time. Problem is, who would take it?”
He steered me out of the room and into the center hallway, then out onto the porch where the ceremony had been held. A few college kids in white shirts and black bow ties were stacking the chairs, but Michael ignored them as we swayed to the faint music.
“You don’t need a picture of this,” he said, and left a trail of light kisses along my cheekbone. “I’ll dance with you anywhere you want, anytime.”
“I’m counting on it,” I whispered.
We couldn’t quite hear the music anymore, and the porch was beginning to get chilly, but it didn’t matter. We kept dancing.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-2696-2
PICTURES OF US
Copyright © 2009 by Amy Garvey.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
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