The Way Back

by Stephanie Doyle

  “No. I don’t.”

  Only Gabby didn’t hear him. “I wanted to love you. I wanted to so badly. I knew you weren’t the person they’d portrayed in the media. I knew you were good and kind and heroic. Not just for the cameras, but every damn day. I had to prove it.”

  “Gabby. I told you, you were going to have to find a way to forgive me. I told you.” His face was tight and his eyes were imploring her to do or say something, but she didn’t know what.

  “But there is nothing to forgive. Don’t you see? You were innocent. So everything is okay now.”

  He swallowed and she could see a shimmering in his eyes that, if he were a normal man, might be a prelude to tears. But Jamie had nothing to cry over. She had liberated him and by doing so she cleared the path to love him. They should be celebrating. Not fighting.

  Because this, whatever it was, felt a lot like fighting.

  He reached out and took her hands in his, simply holding them and squeezing them for a time while he seemed to search for the right words.

  “I thought I wouldn’t tell you. I thought maybe it was part of being ready for you. Letting the past go and not hurting you or pushing you away intentionally. But I can’t do that. I can’t be someone I’m not.”

  “I don’t understand. Jamie, you don’t have to be anything besides who you are. You’re this amazing wonderful man and I love you.” So why did she want to cry right now? Why did she feel her breath coming faster than it had when they were jogging? Why was he looking at her as though he was about to break her heart?

  “But would you forgive me? If it had been true? If I had cheated?”

  “I— I don’t know. I don’t have to, so what’s the point?”

  “The point is eight years ago in Florida I found my wife in bed with another woman. I was shocked and startled and mad as hell. Mad, because it explained a lot about our sex life. Mad, because of what I thought she made me become. I was twenty-two when we married. That first year, when things became clear it wasn’t going to be…easy…between us, I got restless. Bored and resentful, too. Everything else you might imagine a hotshot, hotheaded egocentric pilot might become. I started cheating on Paula not fourteen months after we were married. Fourteen months. I met a woman in Germany. She was a scientist from Russia working on a program with other American scientists… .”

  Gabby felt her knees give out. He was still holding her hands but she was now kneeling on the beach feeling the tiny stones dig in through her spandex not really sure how she got there. She pulled her hands free and sat back on her calves.

  “Zhanna,” she breathed.

  Jamie sat in the sand next to her. Not touching her. Not looking at her. “I didn’t know. Elia returned to Russia and I never knew. Zhanna showed up here two years ago and told me she was my daughter and her mother was dead and I was to take care of her.” He laughed at the memory. “Just like that. She explained how she was a grown woman at twenty, and would have her own place and her own job, but ultimately I was responsible for her well-being.”

  Gabby thought about the young woman’s face. Her beautiful chiseled face. “She has your jaw line.”

  “She does. And my stubbornness.”

  The weight on her chest was crushing. This was the truth. The whole truth. “You are a cheater.”

  “I told you I was,” he said calmly. “I never lied about it. I told Paula, too. She knew there were others and wanted to pretend there weren’t. Elia was one of many. I wasn’t out whoring with a different woman every night, but there were affairs. I needed Paula to know. I felt like it was okay and my conscience was clean if I told her. All I did was hurt her.

  “Because the kicker is she loved me in her own way. She was funny and sweet. She always represented herself well at any event we attended. She was a great cook and baker. Every holiday she would stuff me with fudge, cake and cookies. And gifts. Anniversary, birthday, Christmas, it didn’t matter. Paula always knew the perfect gift for me. Some off the cuff thing I might have said months prior and she would remember it and spin it into something wonderful. She was a good person. And she wanted to be a mother so badly. But I could tell she just dreaded it…and so I couldn’t with her. Not even to give her the one thing she wanted.”

  Gabby felt tears running down her face. She wanted him to stop talking. She wanted him to take the words back, but he wouldn’t.

  “You called me a hero? Isn’t that what you said about me? That I was good and kind and heroic? I was scum. I was pissed my wife didn’t want me in bed and I did the most selfish thing I could do because of it.”

  “She could have told you,” Gabby said trying to defend him, but in her heart she couldn’t. The same way she hadn’t taken pity on Paula when she’d tried to explain. The same logic was true for Jamie. His actions were wrong and there was no defense for them.

  “She didn’t know. She was so sheltered as a kid. It didn’t occur to her to know how she should feel when I kissed her or touched her. She thought there was something wrong with her. She went through therapy and took pills and—”

  “I know. She told me.”

  “She tried so damn hard,” he said, shaking his head. “And every couple of months I would go away for a weekend and come home and say…sorry. I needed it. I would ask her if she wanted a divorce. After every time. I wanted her to know she could walk whenever she chose. She would never agree.”

  “You did this…for years.” Gabby counted the exact number. They had been married nearly fifteen years. Fifteen years of him cheating on a wife who didn’t understand she was gay. It was so awful, for two people who liked each other to cause each other so much pain. “What if she hadn’t met Cheryl? What if she never figured it out?”

  “The deal was we would divorce after her parents died. The truth is my affairs ended a couple of years before she met Cheryl. I couldn’t stomach it anymore. I couldn’t live with who I had become. I felt dirty all the time. Finally, I said, screw it. The sex wasn’t worth how awful it made me feel. We became this oddly platonic, friendly couple. She was mostly happy and I was sexually frustrated, but it felt better than the alternative.”

  “And Cheryl?”

  “Cheryl was an interior decorator. She came to our house to renovate the place. She was attractive. Beautiful and free. So different than Paula’s classic chic style. Naturally, I wanted her. For the first time in years I actually worked up enough anger over my lack of sex—because that’s how I justified everything to myself, like I was the victim—to make a move on her.”

  “Let me guess. You got shot down.” Gabby could actually work out a smile.

  “I did. Paula started acting funny, though. Like a girl for the first time since I had known her. She’d laugh and giggle and touch Cheryl’s hand. She never touched anybody voluntarily. What made me follow her that day, I will never know. Because if you asked me before it all went down if I thought my wife was gay, the answer would have been a big hell no. Paula was such a prude, the idea of sex outside of her preconceived notions of normal, seemed crazy to me. Still, I had this gut feeling something was off. I followed her and I watched Cheryl open the door and I waited outside. I waited a good long time because I thought— I thought…finally Paula is getting some. I wanted her to have that. I wanted her to know how good it could feel. How freaking crazy is that?”

  “Why didn’t you drive away?”

  “The anger came back. I remember what it felt like with those other women. Dirty, tawdry. How shitty I always felt after. The whole damn time, Paula was gay and didn’t realize it. I told myself if she’d only known before we married, I never would have become what I did. I wanted to blame her for it.”

  “You had a choice.”

  He looked at her then, the first time since he started spilling his deepest life secrets. “I did. I get that now. I could have gone to therapy with her. I could have tried harder. We know now it wouldn’t have worked, but I didn’t know then. Those years of celibacy because I couldn’t stand cheating anymore wer
en’t any more horrible than the years when I was cheating and feeling like crap about it. I could have been a better man for her. It took years of being alone here on this island to figure it out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  Gabby couldn’t say exactly. She only knew she felt this deep hole in the pit of her chest and thought it must be what it felt like for him, too. For that she was sorry.

  “Does she know about Zhanna?”

  “No,” he said tightly. “Zhanna didn’t want anyone to know. It was her secret, she said. Not mine. I’m going to have to tell her I told you. She’ll be pissed.”

  Gabby nodded. They had run for almost three miles but strangely sitting on the beach talking had been infinitely more exhausting. Slowly, she rose without taking the hand he offered. She couldn’t.

  “What does this all mean, Gabby? Where do we go from here?”

  Gabby closed her eyes. “I don’t know. I can’t think right now. I think— I know I need some space. Maybe I’ll grab my suitcase and head to Susan’s.”

  “You’re leaving,” he said flatly.

  “I have to.”

  “You said you wouldn’t.”

  It was a cheap trick. To hold her words against her when he knew she didn’t have the whole story. She looked at him and he closed his eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said weakly.

  Slowly they walked to Jamie’s house. Gabby stood outside by the car while he went inside to grab her suitcase. She didn’t trust herself to be in the house with him. She didn’t want him to say anything that might make her feel better or worse.

  She thought about the call she was going to make to her mother. And how it would have to wait.

  He emerged with her bag and lifted it into the trunk. She opened the driver side door but he held it so she couldn’t escape.

  “I’m a better man today than I was then. I know it might be hard to believe. But I didn’t just excuse myself, you know. I could have said, hey, my wife was gay and I was entitled. I didn’t. I owned every last piece of lousy behavior. But then eventually I forgave myself for it. I had to or it would have eaten me up inside. I’m ready for you, Gabby. I really am.”

  Tears blurred her vision. He was ready. But she didn’t know if she was. She got in the car and tried to close the door, but he still wouldn’t let it go. She wanted to close him out. She wanted to isolate herself because she wasn’t sure if she could hear one more thing, process one more feeling.

  “You’re going to have to forgive me. You’re going to have to.”

  Yes. She was. Only she didn’t know if she could.

  He released the door and she closed it. She looked at him in the rearview mirror for as long as she could until he was gone.

  Then she pulled the car over to the side of the road. She was shaking and knew she would need it to stop before it would be safe to drive.

  Only the shaking wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop it. She thought she might shake forever.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JAMIE KNOCKED ON Zhanna’s door and for a moment hoped she wasn’t home. He wasn’t positive he was ready to face her anger after having gone through what he went through with Gabby this morning.

  He thought about her date with Tom last night and for a second it occurred to him she might very well still be on her date with Tom. The thought made his stomach turn until he reminded himself she was a grown woman and could sleep with whomever she chose.

  Besides, it wasn’t like he had ever thought about her in terms of his little girl or that he’d ever bounced her on his knee. A man who raised a baby girl to a woman, it made sense why he’d be so distrustful of other men. He didn’t want to see the person he’d invested so much of himself into get hurt.

  But Jamie had met Zhanna for the first time when she was twenty and the need to not see her hurt, especially when she came to him so wounded and grieving from her mother’s death, kicked in immediately.

  Maybe it was some built in genetic male instinct that made him want to kill anyone who slept with his daughter.

  Glancing around the parking area of the restaurant, he spotted some customer’s car and Zhanna’s. No Toyotas.

  For now Tom was safe.

  “I’m coming. Are you bringing me another kitten? I think Mary would like a sibling—” The door opened on a smiling Zhanna whose face changed when she saw who it was.

  “Expecting Tom, I guess?”

  “He said he would come by this morning for breakfast.”

  Jamie glanced at his watch. “It’s after noon.”

  “We had a late night and he told me to sleep in. Who are you, the sleep police? What brings you here anyway and why do you have such a sad face.”

  “I need to tell you something. Something that probably isn’t going to make you happy.”

  “Now I have a sad face.” She opened the door and went to sit on the couch, curling her bare feet under her legs. When he saw her like this with her hair a little disheveled and her feet bare he thought this is how she might have looked as a girl.

  He thought of all the time he missed with her.

  At first when she showed up at his door he was stunned, then disbelieving, then seriously angry. Had he known there had been a child, his child, somewhere out there in the world, he never would have let her exist without him. Nothing, not Paula, or her parents or his reputation would have stopped him from finding Zhanna.

  Elia had betrayed him in the worst possible way.

  He wanted to rail against the woman who had been his lover for a brief time, but Zhanna wouldn’t have a bad word said against her beloved mother. As Zhanna explained it, Elia’s thinking was simple. When she told Zhanna about her father, she also justified her decision to keep him out of their lives.

  She lived in Russia and Jamie lived in the U.S. Even overlooking what an illegitimate child would have done to his career as well as his marriage, the reality of trying to raise Zhanna together would have been impractical.

  As a scientist, Elia had first and foremost been practical.

  Nothing had come easy with Zhanna at first. Just because she chose to find him, didn’t mean they had immediately become close. It took time for them to form a relationship. He wanted her to live with him, but she demanded her independence. He wanted to help her financially, but she would take none of his money.

  In the end, it probably was for the best. They were able to meet as adults and as equals. He came to love her not because she was his child, but because she was smart and funny and fiercely loyal.

  Now he had to let her down and it hurt more than he realized. He used to think of their relationship in terms of friendship. It was easier that way. He could see now there was so much more. She was his daughter.

  His daughter. A truly incredible gift.

  “What is this bad news?” Zhanna patted the cushion beside her and he sat with his hands clasped together. Like he couldn’t look at Gabby when he’d told her the truth about his life, he found the same to be true with Zhanna. It struck him as cowardly, so he forced himself to face her.

  “I told someone about you.”

  Her eyes opened wide, then narrowed. “Gabby,” she guessed. “She is back?”

  He nodded. “She came back last night. This morning I had to explain everything. My life, my past and it included you and your mother.”

  “Hmm.”

  He wasn’t sure what to make of the noncommittal sound, but she wasn’t shouting or throwing him out, which he took as a plus.

  “I know you didn’t want anyone to know. I promised to keep your secret. Today I broke that promise. While I’m sorry for breaking it, especially if it hurts you, I can’t tell you I wouldn’t do it again. She needed to know. She is— She was…important to me.”

  “Was important? Why was if she came back?”

  “She found out what really happened between my ex-wife and Cheryl. She thought it exonerated me. I needed to let her know the truth.”

  �
��Does she know how you have punished yourself in isolation for so many years trying to make what you did right? Does she know how you took me in without blinking and did everything I asked of you? Does she know the actions of an angry young man don’t define who you have become? She knows these things, yes?”

  Jamie patted his daughter’s knee. Fiercely loyal didn’t begin to describe her.

  “I don’t know if she knows those things. I think she does. I hope she does. She didn’t leave all the way. She left me, but she didn’t leave the island. She’s staying at Susan’s. I think it might be a good sign.”

  “I think if she doesn’t accept what you have to offer, then she is a fool.”

  He leaned in and kissed her cheek. “Thank you.”

  “Hey, Zhanna, I brought muffins for breakfast—” Tom had opened the door without knocking. A sign, Jamie concluded, which meant these two were suddenly very comfortable entering each other’s homes unannounced.

  His daughter was dating this man. While it didn’t appear he’d stayed over last night, most likely those circumstances would change in the near future. The genetic instinct kicked in again and he had to hold himself in check not to charge at the man. Instead he kept his place on the couch and his hand on his daughter’s knee.

  Tom’s eyes fell to Jamie’s hand and his face flushed. “Jamie.”

  “Tom.”

  They were eyeing each other up cautiously as men do when the possibility of violence exists.

  “What are you doing here?” Tom asked.

  “I could ask the same of you.”

  “I’m bringing my girlfriend coffee and muffins on her day off.”

  Zhanna beamed. “Did you hear? He called me his girlfriend. It is such an American word. I like it very much.”

  “Well, we were having a private conversation. Maybe you could come back later.” Jamie said the words intentionally, knowing the reaction they would have on Tom. He wasn’t sure why he was pushing the man’s buttons. It could be he was looking for a fight. The idea of working out his frustrations with his fists seemed like a brilliant one. If it also served to let Tom know he better not think of hurting Zhanna, then all the better.