To Have and to Hold: A Returning Home Novel

by Serena Bell

  “Absolutely.”

  Clara sat up and threw her arms around Trina and the two of them sat there, legs bunched under them on the bed, clinging to each other and crying, until neither of them had any tears left.

  “I won’t tell Phoebe,” Clara said suddenly.

  “You won’t tell her what?”

  “What I heard you and Daddy say. She’d be sad, too. We both thought—we both thought you were changing your mind. That things were going back to the way they used to be.”

  “Oh,” Trina said, suddenly getting it. That she and Hunter hadn’t been fooling anyone, before. That the girls had known full well just how serious their parents had been. That they’d built their own castle of expectations, their own fantasies for the future. And they’d had them built up and torn down more than once, just as she had.

  Why hadn’t she seen that?

  Because she’d been too busy riding her own roller coaster.

  “We weren’t careful,” she said. “We weren’t as careful as we should have been. We should have been more discreet.”

  But part of her suspected that they’d simply underestimated the intuitive powers of two twelve-year-old girls.

  Part of her wanted to ask Clara not to tell Phoebe what she’d overheard. Not to spread the pain any farther. But the other part of her knew that wouldn’t be fair. That Clara needed to be able to talk about what had happened, to share her suffering with the only other person who might have a chance of understanding it.

  “You can tell her, sweetheart. And I’ll talk to her, too, okay? So she knows—it’s all going to be okay.”

  Although she wasn’t sure exactly how she would convince Phoebe of that fact, when she hardly believed it herself.

  Chapter 24

  “I know you’re angry.”

  That was the understatement of the year.

  “Phoebe, please.”

  But you couldn’t make a stubborn twelve-year-old talk.

  They’d left early in the morning for the airport, even though their flight to L.A. wasn’t scheduled to leave till late afternoon. She just couldn’t take any more of Hunter’s attempts at normalcy.

  So just after breakfast, she’d let the shuttle driver hoist their suitcases onboard, then slid in beside Phoebe. They were the only two passengers and they’d sat way in the back so they had a little privacy. Not that it mattered, because an angry twelve-year-old girl was like a black hole, sucking all conversation and emotion in.

  “I tried, Phoebe.”

  Trina supposed she was overdue. She’d read the books; she knew the children of split households often went through long periods of blaming the remaining parent for the absence of the distant one. She’d been lucky, and Phoebe had never gotten angry at her in that way. She hadn’t really gotten angry at Stefan, either. She’d just…accepted the situation. So maybe it was time for a little anger.

  Trina certainly was angry. Angry at Hunter, because it was easier, and cleaner, than feeling anything else. She would not—could not—feel anything else. But she could be angry at him for shutting her out. Last night—she’d cooked the chili she’d promised Clara, and cornbread, and brownies—he’d treated both her and Phoebe the way he had when they’d first met. As if they were valued guests—the relatives of an important co-worker or friend, perhaps.

  She had always known that in hoping for him to love her again, she’d been on the most tenuous, uncertain ground. Since the promise he’d made before his deployment, he’d never again asked her to have faith in him, to believe that things would turn out well, or to risk her heart for him. She’d given him all her love and trust because it had been the only thing she knew how to do. Because the alternative—to give up on him—had felt unthinkable.

  So she didn’t blame him for her pain.

  But she was furious with him for hurting Phoebe and Clara.

  Phoebe and Clara’s matching sad, gray faces had broken Trina’s heart. Maybe her heart was already most of the way broken, but there had been little fragments still held together. The girls’ grief had shattered what was left.

  But most of all, Trina was angry at herself. Because she’d foreseen all this, and she’d still allowed herself the destructive fantasy that somehow it would work out. She’d let herself believe that the joy she’d felt with Hunter, the joy she’d felt with the girls in the months that Hunter had been gone, was something permanent that belonged to her. When she knew, perfectly well, men left. Family was her and Phoebe.

  The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.

  He’d given her a preview of this grief the day he’d come home, and still she’d let herself be drawn back into the heat and temptation of him. Like a seventeen-year-old girl whose hormones were in control.

  Like Hunter, who had followed his dick into the thorny tangle of his marriage with Dee.

  She touched Phoebe’s shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry, baby.”

  Finally, her daughter turned to look at her, her face streaked with tears. Phoebe’s eyes searched hers, looking for…Trina wasn’t sure. But whatever she saw, Phoebe’s face softened, the anger slipping away. “It’s not your fault, Mom.”

  It was that, more than anything, that finally loosed Trina’s tears, and the two of them cried in the backseat of that grimy shuttle, arms around each other, mourning what was lost and grateful for what they still had.

  After that, they talked about L.A. About how it was different from what Phoebe had known before, how the height and bustle of it, and even the palm-tree-sunniness of it, would feel foreign at first, but that eventually it would feel more comfortable, like a worn-in sweatshirt.

  The first of the airport signs came into view, and Trina touched Phoebe’s shoulder and pointed. The official beginning of the journey.

  Or that’s what it was supposed to be.

  Departures.

  And that, right there, was the truth of it. It should feel like a new beginning, but even with Phoebe’s hand tucked snugly into hers, squeezing reassuringly, it felt like the end.

  Chapter 25

  He’d hugged them goodbye at the curb.

  He’d kept it as brief and distant as possible, trying not to catch the layers of Trina’s scent—floral shampoo, sharp Ivory soap, lavender deodorant, the smell of her skin, her secret sweet-salty center. Releasing her before the press of her body could penetrate his numbness.

  Trying not to crave the bear hugs he’d gotten into the habit of with Phoebe at some point in the last week, but just giving her a kindly uncle’s careful squeeze.

  She was not his daughter. She was Stefan Spencer’s daughter, and if Stefan Spencer had never done anything particularly heroic, neither had he pretended to have more to give than he did.

  He knew it was wrong, putting them in a shuttle and sending them away, but he hadn’t been able to stand the thought of riding in the car with them.

  His head hurt.

  He kept seeing Dee’s eyes over and over again, reminding him of what he’d taken away from her.

  Trina’s eyes held some of that, too. The accusation.

  She hadn’t asked him to drive them to the airport, and he hadn’t offered.

  Like last night. She hadn’t come to his room, and when the dark hours stretched without her, he hadn’t gone to her, either. It wasn’t pride. It was what was best for her.

  The shuttle pulled away from the curb in front of his house and he was left with Clara, who was sobbing.

  He put his arms around her because that was what he knew he should do, but it was like he was touching her through layers of thick cotton wool. Her grief couldn’t reach him, so all he could do was pat her and murmur things that were true but not felt.

  Clara was murmuring something indistinct into his shirt, over and over. He tilted his head to listen.

  “You should have made them stay.”

  But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t that he should have made them stay. It was that he never should have led them on i
n the first place. He was angry at himself—or rather, he was angry at that other guy, that pre-deployment Hunter—for making them—Trina, Phoebe, and Clara—believe there was some kind of happily-ever-after in their future.

  “They don’t belong here, baby. They were just staying here while I was gone, but now that I’m back, they have to get on with their lives. Trina has a special job that’s perfect for her. Phoebe needs to know her father.”

  “You’re her father.”

  His heart gave a funny, misguided hiccup of hope, as if somehow Clara’s saying it might make it true, but then he thought of the look on Trina’s face after he’d said he didn’t want her to wait around for him to love her again. Closed. Finished. And that was what he’d wanted. To get her to see that hanging around hoping for him to give her what she wanted would end badly, sooner or later. Better sooner than later.

  “No, baby, I’m not her father. She has a father. Stefan Spencer.”

  Clara’s face turned pink and her eyes got big.

  She’d always gotten angry exactly that way, ever since she was a baby.

  “Then you’re not my father, either.”

  She punctuated her words with a stamp of her foot and stormed into the house.

  He knew he should go after her. He should set her straight. He should say, I am your father, and I love you so much.

  But maybe he hadn’t loved her enough. He had left her so many times. Duty first, he’d thought. But maybe that was all wrong. Maybe that was his biggest mistake.

  He didn’t know how long he stood there in front of the house, not moving. His heart pounding, breath coming so hard he could hear it rasping in his throat. Darkness sinking over him, over the room in the building thousands of miles away, the impenetrable black behind the ragged concrete, and then those eyes. Grief and guilt bound tight around his chest.

  When he came back to himself and went inside, Clara’s room had been ransacked, and Clara herself was nowhere to be found.

  He searched the house from top to bottom as carefully as he could, holding panic at arm’s length. He searched first in the hiding places she’d favored as a little girl, but when that didn’t pan out, he opened cabinets and crawl spaces, then planted himself facedown on the floor to peer under beds where dust hadn’t been disturbed for years. In the master bedroom closet, he thrust his hand through the small collection of Dee’s clothes he had saved for Clara and swept it across the shelf behind, even though logic told him she couldn’t possibly be hiding there.

  His grasping fingertips brushed an object, and something clicked in his mind. Not memory. Recognition. He knew the shape, size, and feel of it.

  His mind rejected the possibility even as he clutched it, drew it out of the tangle of musty clothes, and shoved it into his jeans pocket as if he were pushing it back down through layers of memory.

  There wasn’t time to think about what it might mean. There was only Clara and figuring out where she’d gone.

  Leaving the empty house behind, he raced into the yard. Climbed into Clara’s tree house. No sign of her. Climbed down again. Harnessed himself to the new tree. It occurred to him, clipping in at intervals to peer through the branches, that he no longer cared about building the tree house. That from almost the beginning he had been building it for Trina, to see what she would put inside it, to see how she would stamp it as hers. To feel like they were building something together, their creations intertwined until afterward you could hardly say what was her and what was him.

  The thought choked him, and he thought maybe he’d scrap the project, tear out the TABs and brackets and frame he’d built. It would take as long to dismantle it as it had taken to build it, but it would be something to do, something to occupy himself with.

  He tromped around the woods, looking for her. Came back and threw open the door of the toolshed, though he knew as he did that it was a futile gesture. Clara hadn’t set foot in that toolshed in years, terrified of its dark corners. He didn’t bother making a study of the little room, where—she had correctly observed—there were spiders aplenty, and snakes, too.

  No, she was gone.

  And the thing he was most ashamed of was that he was jealous of her, as he was jealous of Trina and Phoebe, because all of them could run away from him and what was inside his head.

  “Hunter?”

  The three men had materialized on their bicycles like some kind of low-key Hells Angels. Nate dismounted first and reached him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We’re on our way back. From the trip.” Nate shot a look at the contents of his overloaded bike. The three men were scruffily bearded and definitely the worse for wear.

  “Thought we’d maybe snag some yard space and a shower if you guys were feeling generous.”

  What did generous have to do with numb?

  He couldn’t figure it out. It was like a math problem his brain was too tired to solve. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. When he finally spoke, the words that came out had nothing to do with Nate’s question.

  “I can’t find Clara.”

  Chapter 26

  While Nate, Griff, and Jake combed the neighborhood in a grid system they’d laid out, Hunter started in on a more systematic search of the house and yard. Jake had instructed him not to reject any possible hiding spot, no matter how implausible. “Kids can make themselves a lot smaller than you think.”

  They were here, all of them, helping him. They’d shown up, really more like guardian angels than Hells Angels. No blame, no questions, just arms slung here and there across his shoulders, and Jake, a guy he barely knew, giving him that steady-eyed reassuring look, like Dude, I know you’re freaking out and I would be, too, but it’s gonna be okay.

  It just felt so far from okay.

  He finished the house and started in on the woods again, combing as thoroughly as he could, trying to see the maze of it as a grid like the one they’d laid out over the neighborhood. He peeked into every corner of the tree house, under the daybed, in all the cabinets, even the ones he knew were too small to hide a preteen girl.

  He came out of the woods into the sunlight of the backyard and stood there, letting the sun’s brilliance blaze into his eyes, as if it might illuminate his next move.

  He was listening with half his self for a call from inside, or the sound of Jake or Nate or Griff hailing him from the neighborhood, or, best of all, the music of Clara’s voice sifting through the ordinary forest sounds. But all he heard was trees moving in the breeze and the tree house creaking just slightly on its perch. The distant highway and a lawn being mowed. Children playing, but not his child.

  If something had happened to her, he would never forgive himself. Trina, who loved Clara with a mother’s love, would never forgive him.

  Except he knew that wasn’t true. Trina had held him blameless for the woman in the darkness. For Dee’s death.

  That blanched, shocked face, the accusation—

  With a tremendous effort he pulled himself back from that black hole.

  Those things weren’t in your control. That woman’s death. Dee’s death. How much you love some—

  She’d been about to tell him, You can’t control how much you love someone, when he’d cut her off. Furious. He’d been furious.

  He wanted—

  He wanted to believe her.

  His chest ached, something rising and looming just behind the veil of numbness.

  He couldn’t.

  He pushed it down again and the veil held.

  Find Clara.

  There was just the toolshed left.

  He blinked against the power of the sun and strode toward the shack. Threw the door open. In that transition from absolute blinding sun to pure black, the world vanished and he could see less than nothing, so the first thing he knew was the sniffles, the small, helpless sounds in the dark, and then, like something rising to the surface of memory, a face in the dark, pale, frightened. Eyes. For a moment he grappled with it
and crossed over between worlds, the impulse to tear at the concrete between them almost overwhelming, his fingernails burning, dust rasping his lungs, because she needed his help and he would have done anything, anything, to protect her.

  “Daddy!” said the white face with the big eyes, and it was, suddenly, Clara.

  Clara, crying, her arms thrown around him.

  “God, Clara! You scared me so bad.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  The words were all murky wet with tears, and she was sobbing against his chest.

  And the numbness parted like a curtain and he felt the weight of the guilt he’d carried, the spiky outlines of fear that had lurked in all the dark corners of his mind, and he was—

  He was crying, too. For the woman in the dream, in the wrecked building. For himself, lost in his own mind, and for Trina, for what she’d lost. For all of them. Because there were just so many damn ways it was possible to be in the dark, alone.

  But most of all, for Dee, because he never had. Because he’d buried her deeper than lost memory, rather than feel what he was feeling now.

  He clung to Clara and her sobs drowned out the quiet sounds of his grief and his tears got lost amids hers, and he comforted them both by stroking her hair and whispering “shhhh” into her ear, the way he had when she was a colicky infant.

  It worked. On her, and on him. The grief, unleashed, dissipated. Felt manageable again. And she subsided to hiccups and sighs against him. Between the tortured little breaths, she informed him:

  “Phoebe and I thought if I were missing you’d have to call Trina to help look for me and then they wouldn’t go, and if they didn’t go then Trina’s job would be gone and they would have come back for good.”

  He heard the sharp intake of breath behind him, but he didn’t lift his head from his daughter’s hair, fragrant and soft.

  “That was—foolish. And brave.”

  “She’s the best,” Clara said on a sob. “She makes everything fun.”

  Hunter squeezed his daughter tighter, and he thought of Lakeshore and the raft, the sparkle of sun on water and mischief in Trina’s eyes, the torment of her body slipping past his as they kidded and teased. Thought of the spit and how it felt to walk out on the most precarious, narrow bit of land with her hand in his, as close to the sea as you could get without a boat, and yet thoroughly anchored. Of building the tree house with her, and how she could make a box into a room, a hidey-hole into a hideaway, a space into a stage. A house into a home.