The icy eyes didn’t deem her worth a glance. The fluid steps didn’t hesitate on their way out the door. Aubrey surged forward, and her fingers snagged Lee’s black leather jacket.
Lee’s arm swung a dislodging blur of a circle, with such force that Aubrey’s thumb nearly jammed backward.
Aubrey rubbed her thumb. “Are you going to call him?”
“My actions don’t concern you.”
“His actions concern me, and they concern my son.”
“Because you’re imposing on his life. Marcus is not your responsibility. You don’t know him.” Lee resumed her path to the door.
A pang for him passed through Aubrey’s stomach. Lee might shove her aside, but she stepped in front of the door anyway. “I don’t care how you feel about him; he’s in love with you. And something’s wrong. He needs help. He needs you.”
Aubrey might as well have been wallpaper. Lee stepped around her and walked out the door.
40
The day was a parched blur. Nothing registered except the weird things. The streaky path of melting snow that dribbled from the roof of his truck down his windshield at the first red light. The knothole in a client’s wood floor, nearly black at the center and framed by two half-ovals that met at the ends, a double-lidded eye that never blinked. The way every shade of gray, from clouds to concrete, was either lighter or darker, more blue or less, than Lee’s eyes.
He worked. He shut the headache out as much as possible. He gulped coffee, and coffee, and coffee. How had he ever thought this rush could be enough? He tried to listen to his clients’ conversations and tried not to hear them. He finished work and returned to Elm and Travis Court, last night’s empty houses. Today, one sported a yard of yellow tape, and the other held a family that wouldn’t listen. They pleaded with him not to come back. He drove home.
Day one. Almost nine years had collapsed under one night of weakness. He could see them lined up behind him, every day he’d said no, every day God had helped him say no. Every day Lee had stayed with him through the shaking and the needing and the wanting. All those days now huddled inside as a giant pile of rubble, dust still rising.
Driving might help. The old house, the Constabulary tracker house—he could park and walk for miles out there. He could get lost in trees and snow. He could hunker down inside the deteriorating structure and disappear. Maybe he’d come out when he was stronger. When he could drive past a grocery store again without clinging to the steering wheel.
Running might help. The impact would jar his back, but he could handle that. His legs could pump out the mulch of his insides until he was hollow.
Woodworking might help. He’d bury himself and the thirst in his workshop, in sandpaper and hobby knife.
Marcus pulled into the garage and parked the truck. He didn’t remember turning into his neighborhood or lowering his head to the steering wheel. He kneaded his forehead against it. That didn’t feel so bad.
Somewhere inside an instinct still fought to call Lee. His thumb rested on speed-dial one, not the first time today, but he didn’t press it.
She didn’t have to come over. She didn’t have to choose a movie or belittle his ice cream sundae. She didn’t have to occupy space nearby or even say a word, if she would hold her phone to her ear while he held his.
Why had she never told him about the baby?
She’d told him everything that day at the park, their park, sitting beside him on the wrought iron bench, fingers knotted in her lap, meeting his eyes for a few seconds at a time, then staring at her hands. She’d said he deserved to understand why she’d really said no, and then she just … said it.
“When I was eighteen, I was raped.”
She recounted specifics as if they had happened to somebody else. Attacked in a parking garage while leaving work. Her first job after retail, receptionist in a big medical building. The assailant had hit her. Might have done worse but was startled by someone coming off the elevator. Marcus could hardly listen to those details, and then she’d offered a final fact she meant to chase him away for good.
“As a result, I’m physically unable to have children.”
He’d gone home and stood on his back deck for an hour, trying to stop picturing the crime, the details she hadn’t said. When he couldn’t, he’d split his knuckles against the porch beam, and the pain sharpened his thoughts to a single point: that monster’s knuckles might have looked like this after he hit Lee.
He’d vowed two things while he tried to stop the bleeding. Someday, he would marry this girl. And he would never break the trust she’d offered him.
He hadn’t known her trust had held back.
Marcus blinked away the past and closed his phone.
Praying might help.
No.
If God wanted to hear from him, He should do something. He should roll time back like an old reel-to-reel and paralyze the monsters before they could touch her. He should part this day like a sea and reach down to Lee and set her baby into her arms.
Marcus lifted his head. God said nothing. Marcus slid the key from the ignition and headed inside.
41
When Marcus returned home a little after 8:00 that evening, Aubrey migrated from the living room couch to the kitchen. He dropped his keys, kicked off his shoes, and ran a hand over his dog’s head as if this day were no different than yesterday. He had to know her eyes were tracking his movements as he started the coffeemaker, but he said nothing.
“How’re you doing?” she said.
He turned partway for a look that ended after about half a second. Without the glaze and the anger, his eyes were his own again, but the embers behind them didn’t glow anymore. He froze with the fridge door only half open. He eased it the rest of the way, like the discoverer of some ancient treasure that had existed only in mythology, until now.
“She came by on the way to work this morning,” Aubrey said.
Marcus reached into the fridge for one of the bowls, then yanked open the deli drawer instead. He threw some lunch meat and buns onto the counter and pawed around the door for condiments.
“You did call her at some point, didn’t you?”
He gathered his supplies—mustard, a paper plate, and a white bun about as nutritious as the plate. A handful of iceberg lettuce from a bag, and layers of thick, dark-edged roast beef. This looked more appetizing to him than Lee’s food?
“About last night,” she said.
He squeezed four straight lines of mustard onto the bun.
“I feel like we should talk about it.”
Roast beef piled higher and higher on the mustard tracks. “Nothing to say.”
Aubrey rose and stood beside him. He mounded lettuce onto the meat, then squashed the second half of the bun onto the entire heap. He stood over his sandwich without saying a word or taking a bite.
“Marcus, I’m not judging you. I’m not judging what you did.”
After a moment, his eyes flashed to hers.
“And I wanted you to know that.”
“I’m an alcoholic,” he said.
“You told me.”
“I know. I remember. But—” He shook his head.
“But what?”
He didn’t need to say a word, not with self-hatred shuttering the fire that belonged in his eyes.
“Listen, Marcus. That whole once-an-alcoholic-always-an-alcoholic thing—I don’t buy into that nonsense.”
“You should,” he said quietly.
“You’re recovered. Last night doesn’t change that, and recovered means you’re not one, not anymore.”
He abandoned his sandwich to pace, fists tight. “It doesn’t go away.”
“I’m sure it doesn’t, completely.”
He replaced the carafe and sipped the coffee black, then gulped it. In a minute, he drained his mug and set it on t
he counter. His hand rested there as if too heavy to pick back up.
“Aubrey, I’m …” His voice fell. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I didn’t used to be this … weak.”
Father God, please put the words in my mouth. “You’re not.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Marcus. Almost nine years is not weak.”
His hands rose to cup his face, and the whisper oozed through his fingers. “One day.”
She crossed the kitchen. This might be a bad idea, but she curled her hands around his, tugged them down, cradled their broadness. “Tomorrow will be the second day.”
His face crumpled. When her arms wrapped him up, his circled in return. His shoulders heaved with one dry, silent sob. Her certainty hardened—why he hadn’t taken the hurt to the woman he loved, what had to be the weapon that had ripped these holes in the first place. Why Lee had stocked his refrigerator, why he’d made a cold sandwich and ignored a homemade casserole. She tipped her head back against his shoulder and whispered up to him.
“It was really bad, wasn’t it? The fight with Lee.”
His head turned toward the far wall, away from her.
“Talking might help.”
He shook his head. Did he know how tightly he was holding her? Did he know his irregular breathing was revealing his struggle for control? She rubbed a steady rhythm into his arm, up, down, up, down. His body curved over hers.
Step away.
Her hand moved from his arm to his back. He needed this. A minute to pull himself together.
Marcus shuddered, then sighed. His arms tightened around her. A dormant ache rose in her body.
Stop now.
She pushed his chest, gently. “Marcus.”
His arms plummeted to his sides. He stepped back twice. Aubrey stood in the center of the kitchen, his warmth torn off her like a stolen coat.
“Aubrey.” His voice rasped.
“That’s right. Not Lee.”
He closed his eyes and turned away, but not before the shame flooded his face. Aubrey circled to make him face her. More guilt was the last thing he needed. She shoved away the ache for herself. It was an embrace, nothing more, especially not to him. She and Marcus would never belong to each other, and she’d never considered otherwise, not for one heartbeat, until she’d spent a few of them in his arms. But these last few moments weren’t reality.
“Look at me,” she said.
His gaze flickered up to hers, then dropped to the floor.
“You love her. I knew that before, and I know it now. I don’t get why, to be perfectly frank—”
That garnered eye contact. He opened his mouth, but she waved him to silence.
“I don’t need to get it. The point is, we’re okay.”
He nodded slowly. He stared at the rug.
Aubrey rubbed her cold arm. The man needed to talk this out. “What’s the worst thing right now, Marcus? Is it falling out with Lee, or what the falling out made you do?”
“It didn’t.”
Aubrey waited, but he stood wordless, motionless. “What didn’t what?”
“Nothing made me drink. Except me.”
Technically true, but hauling a rock of guilt around would only crush him, and his transgression was so … small. Really, it was.
“Aubrey, the things you make excuses for—they’re the things you don’t quit.”
Truth flashed in his words. She’d nursed excuses of her own with headlong diligence, excuses to cling to a darkness she’d recognized and wanted anyway—the salted velvet of Brett’s skin, the two of them tangled like vigorous vines, the hungry kindling. And afterward, telling herself that she loved him too much to deny him, that she had to anchor his loyalty, that she’d marry him soon and the old sin would evaporate as soon as the action was no longer sinful.
Marcus studied her.
“It’s just that there are worse things than drinking,” she said. Illicit sex was probably on the same level, but other things … weren’t.
He paced again, this time as if a burden weighed him down.
“It might not feel like that to you, especially right now, but it’s true. What you did was forgivable.”
“Not really.” He took another, firm step, and another, crossing the rug in front of her, but his strides had lost their mission.
“Yes. Really. And whatever happened to your mom—”
He froze midstride. His eyes darted to hers, stunned at her knowledge, then dimming with recollection.
Yes, Marcus, you said too much last night. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”
“I talked to the paramedics. After, when I was—sober.” His mouth tightened, and he blinked through a wince. “It was. My fault.”
“There’s no way to know that for sure.”
“Don’t.”
“Marcus, I’m sure they told you, she might have died no matter what you or anybody else—”
“Don’t.”
Really, what was she trying to do? He’d believed for years that he’d killed his mother. She couldn’t persuade him otherwise.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Marcus’s gaze didn’t rise from the rug.
“All I’m trying to say is that, even if you could have saved her, it’s still forgivable. Everything’s forgivable, almost.”
Maybe the quaver in her voice made him look up from his feet.
“And I’d know, because I did the thing … that isn’t.”
Some desperate throb inside wanted to tell him. Maybe her confession would even the ground between them again. Maybe a glimpse at her sin would help reduce the weight of his. Maybe she simply had to heave out the poison of guilt that sickened her more every day.
“They’re not talking about it on the news. I guess because it would make their system look bad, but I … I’ve been through it. Re-education. It’s been less than a year.”
He surged one step toward her, and a flame of alertness licked his eyes back to life. “Did they hurt you?”
“It doesn’t matter what they did, what matters is that I told them there were multiple ways to God, that—Marcus, I said whatever they told me to say.”
“You didn’t believe it.”
“I didn’t know what I believed. I didn’t know why God was letting this happen, if He’d save me from them or if He’d let them—”
“What did they do?”
The hard chair she’d sat in for days, the ache in her back, the zircon blue eyes that bored into her, and the scream, that woman’s scream. Not as if someone were hurting her, but as if someone were hurting every person she loved in the world, all at the same time.
“Aubrey?”
“Nothing, they didn’t do anything. But they said …”
“What?” Marcus barked at her like Indy sensing intruders.
Her hand pressed her stomach, high where Elliott’s fluttering heels had hammered some strength into her, but not enough. “Before he was born. They threatened my baby,” she whispered.
His fists clenched at his sides. She had to back away from his anger, even though it burned on her behalf. She tried not to say more, but the words pushed themselves out into the heated air.
“I saw a woman there,” she whispered. “I don’t know what they did to her but her mind was broken. She didn’t see anyone or anything. They kept her locked up and sometimes she would scream and I don’t know if they did that to her or not but I couldn’t take it. I’m not like Karlyn.”
Marcus shifted into her sight.
She was crying. For some reason. “But don’t you see, none of that really matters. If only I’d had more faith, but Janelle’s right. I’m Judas.”
Marcus came closer, and Aubrey tried to shove away the tears that blurred him. His warm hands cupped her shoul
ders. “Janelle said that?”
Aubrey clamped her lips together and sidestepped away from his grip, but he didn’t release her.
“She’s wrong,” he said.
Aubrey shook her head. “I did betray Jesus, I said—”
“You said you didn’t know Him. Right?”
Her face hid behind the curtain of her hair. Sobs squeezed her chest. I’m sorry, Jesus.
“Aubrey. It wasn’t Judas that said he didn’t know Jesus. It was Peter.”
Peter. The story inched into her heart. He’d denied Jesus three times, and Jesus still let him be His disciple, even let him participate in the beginning of the church.
“Read it,” Marcus said, hands still firm on her shoulders, holding her up. “And forget what anybody else says. Just look at what Jesus says to Peter.”
“Okay,” she whispered.
He stepped back. “Good.”
Aubrey swiped at her cheeks. “What about you?”
“There’s nothing to say. About me.”
He believed in forgiveness for everybody except himself? God, please show him how stupid that is. Aubrey clearly couldn’t.
“And Lee?” she said, because the other topic was up to God now.
“I’ve got to call her.”
“I’ll feed Elliott in your room, give you some privacy.”
“No. I can’t yet. I don’t have … words. Yet.”
“Okay.” Had he wrought the damage between them, or had Lee? Or had they both yelled things yesterday that shamed them today?
He crossed to a drawer, tugged out a plastic baggie, and shoved his sandwich inside. At the refrigerator, he traded it for a casserole dish. He ran his thumb over an edge of foil, then turned on the oven.
42
“You don’t need a new floor,” Marcus said for the fifth time.
“I don’t know what you expect me to do, young man. I’m not going to put up with this moldy old stuff anymore.”
His hand latched onto his neck. “It’s not moldy.”
“No other word for it, all those ugly black spaces in between the squares. They used to be white, you know.”
Seek and Hide: A Novel (Haven Seekers) Page 25