Gwynneth Ever After

by Linda Poitevin

  Gwyn stuck her finger into the brown murk and grimaced. “Ice.”

  “Ah.” A long few seconds passed, then Sandy cleared her throat. “Sweetie, you can’t sit in Perth for the rest of your life.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you all right to drive home tonight? You can always camp out in a hotel until morning.”

  “No. I’m fine. Really. I’m just – ” She trailed off, having no idea how to finish. How to describe her current state.

  Sandy’s tone became brisk, her advice practical. “Well, your kids are hoping you’ll tuck them in, so why don’t you buy yourself a fresh coffee to go? I’ll let them watch a movie until you get here and then help you get them to bed.”

  She nodded, then remembered Sandy couldn’t see her. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

  “Good. And, Gwyn,” Sandy’s voice turned fierce, “you’ll be okay, you know.”

  Gwyn closed her cell phone. Brushing away a tear, she wished she could share her friend’s certainty.

  ***

  Gareth stared at the willowy young woman who had risen from the couch at his entrance. Dark eyes, identical to the ones he saw in his own mirror every day, stared back at him, uncertain, questioning, shining with a mix of the same thousand emotions that milled within him. A tremulous smile curved a mouth indisputably inherited from Catherine. Nervous hands tugged the folds of a blanket closer around slender shoulders; one reached up to tuck a strand of long, dark hair behind an ear.

  He swallowed, encountered a lump, cleared his throat.

  “Hey,” he said. The first word he’d spoken to his daughter’s face since she was two years old.

  “Hey,” she replied, and, without warning, burst into tears.

  A half-box of tissues later, they sat facing each other on the couch while Amy sniffled her way through the last of her watery explanation. “So anyway, they were already here when I landed. The paparazzi, I mean. I didn’t know what to do – they kept yelling questions at me, and their cameras were flashing, and – ”

  Gareth plucked the soggy tissue from her fingers and handed her a fresh one. “You did the right thing,” he assured her, despite knowing from a brief conversation with Sean that, in hysterics, she had assailed an unsuspecting airport security officer and nearly gotten herself arrested before things had been straightened out. Minor details.

  She giggled through her tears. “Hardly,” she said. “But thank you for saying so.”

  She blew her nose, added the tissue to the growing pile on Sean’s coffee table, and sat back to regard him ruefully. “I guess I really blew it, huh? And after Mom asking you to keep the secret – ”

  Gareth shook his head. “It’s nothing we can’t handle,” he said. “In a day or so, I’ll have my agent arrange an interview with someone, give enough details to get the sharks off our backs, and it will all be over.”

  Amy looked unconvinced. “It’s really that easy?”

  He smiled. “No. But if we can hang tight for a few days, some other personality is bound to do something that will take the spotlight off us.” He gave Amy’s hand, resting in her lap, a gentle squeeze. “A month from now they’ll have forgotten all about you.”

  She grimaced. “I’m not sure Mom’s nerves will hold up that long.”

  Neither was Gareth. “Speaking of your mother, does she know where you are?”

  “I called her when I got here. She wanted to come and get me, but Sean managed to talk her out of it.” Her dark eyes sparked with the faint mischief Gareth had encountered once before, in their only phone conversation. “Thank God.”

  He mentally echoed the sentiment, but said, “I should call her too.”

  Amy put a hand on his arm. “Don’t. Not tonight. She’s put you through enough. Let me handle this tomorrow, when she picks me up.”

  He didn’t know how to respond. Or what to think.

  His daughter smiled. “Mom means well, but she’s a little…controlling. You may have noticed.”

  A snort escaped him before he could catch it back. Amy laughed.

  “I thought so. Anyway, remember when I told you I knew more than Mom thought I did? Well, I’ve known about you since I was fifteen. I went to Lance and he told me everything, on the condition that I not speak to Mom about it, or try to contact you until I turned eighteen. He even told me about all the rules she’d imposed on you for our first meeting.”

  Amy looked a little teary again, and Gareth reached for another tissue.

  “That’s why I went to Wales to find you,” she continued, her voice wobbling as she accepted the tissue and dabbed at her eyes with it. “I wanted it to be just me and you, and instead I got an airhead travel companion and a dozen paparazzi.”

  Gareth hastened to head off another full-blown meltdown. “How did you first find out? About me, I mean.”

  “Apart from the suspicions I’d had my entire life because Mom developed a migraine every time I asked who I resembled in the family? You sent me a birthday gift that year. A pair of Celtic-cross earrings.”

  The only gift that hadn’t been returned to him. He’d spent an entire year thinking that Catherine had finally begun to soften, only to have the sixteenth birthday present come back as if the fifteenth had never happened. He’d thought then that it had just gone astray. He’d never dreamed –

  “Speaking of birthdays,” he said, “I have something for you. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He went to his room and returned with the suitcase that had stood unopened in the corner since his arrival. He set it on the coffee table and smiled faintly at the question in Amy’s eyes. “Open it.”

  Then he watched while his daughter caught up on a lifetime of missed birthday gifts and lost opportunities. Watched, passed tissues as needed, and, in a separate part of himself, counted the minutes ticking by as he waited for word from Gwyn.

  Chapter 37

  Tucking the duvet around Katie’s shoulders, Gwyn leaned over to kiss her forehead. Her daughter, already more than half-asleep, smiled without opening her eyes.

  “I love you, Mommy,” she whispered.

  “I love you, too, sweetie,” Gwyn returned softly. She brushed a lock of hair back from the still baby-smooth cheek. “Sleep well.”

  She tiptoed from the room, turning off the desk lamp on her way, and pulled the door shut behind her. As was her routine, she paused outside Nicholas and Maggie’s door and listened for a moment to their breathing, deep and even in their sleep.

  A stab of guilt twisted inside her. All three had insisted on waiting up until she’d arrived home at nearly midnight, hours past their normal bedtime. They would be so tired tomorrow…

  All because of a cold, congealed cup of coffee that she might as well have foregone, for all the good it had done her.

  She started toward the stairs. The stop in Perth had been a complete waste of time, giving her neither the benefit of a caffeine boost nor the ability, as she’d hoped, to come to terms with any of what had transpired at the cottage. She’d left the coffee shop and driven the entire way home in exactly the same fog in which she’d operated since hearing Sandy’s words over the phone: “Gwyn, sweetie, I’m watching the evening news and – well, I just wondered – I thought you’d want to know – unless maybe you already do, but I figured you’d have at least mentioned it – Gwyn, did Gareth ever tell you that he had a daughter?”

  A silhouette loomed at the foot of the stairs, interrupting the mental replay of her fateful conversation with her friend. Her heart gave a momentary leap. For an instant her treacherous mind placed Gareth on the bottom landing, waiting for her as he’d done before. Then her new reality took over, slicing through any lingering haze with a ruthlessness that quite literally took away her breath. Her knees buckled.

  Not Gareth. Sandy. Sandy waiting to comfort her with empty words, because Gareth –

  Because Gareth –

  She sat down on the top step with a thump, arms crossed over her knees and face against
them.

  Because Gareth had lied to her. He had systematically torn down every wall she’d erected to protect herself and her family – worn down every objection, countered every argument, taken over her judgment, her heart, her soul…

  …and she had let him.

  “Gwyn? Sweetie?” Sandy’s soft voice broke through her pain. “I made some tea – come and sit.”

  Gwyn raised her head from her lap. “How could he?” she asked.

  Sandy shrugged, helplessness in her blue gaze. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “He told me he loved me.”

  “Oh, Gwyn.”

  “He said we could work everything out. He said –” She gulped against the knife in her throat. “He said – God, Sand, I should’ve known better.” Scowling, she dashed away an escaped tear. “I did know better, but I didn’t want to listen to myself.”

  “Honey, you can’t possibly blame yourself!”

  Gwyn smiled at that. Her voice wry, she pointed out, “I let him in, remember? I have no one to blame for that but myself.”

  Sandy’s face tightened into lines of disagreement, but she shrugged, keeping her arguments to herself. “We can debate that another time,” she said. “Right now, how about that tea?”

  Gwyn nodded, happy to change the subject. “Please. But I have to call Gareth first – he wanted to know when I got home.”

  “Do you want me to do it?”

  Gwyn shook her head. No matter how tempting the offer, she wouldn’t put it past her very loyal friend to add a few choice words to any conversation with Gareth. “Thanks, but I can manage. Really.”

  “Then I’ll pour the tea.”

  ***

  Gareth held up the teapot and looked askance at his daughter, who shook her dark head.

  “Thanks, but I think my back teeth might start floating if I drink any more.” Amy tilted her head to one side, her arms wrapped around a large, brown plush teddy bear – her fourth-year birthday present - and studied him from her place at one end of the couch. “So? I have to ask. Am I what you expected?”

  He set the pot back on the glass-topped coffee table. “No. And yes. I really wasn’t sure what to expect, I suppose. I’d seen your photos, of course.” He paused. In deference to Catherine, he hadn’t yet confessed his private investigator to Amy. After a moment, he continued. “So you were what I’d expected in that way, but I think you’re more grown up than I’d imagined.”

  “Having missed so many years must have been hard for you.”

  “I have to ask you something, too.” He stared down at his hands. “Are you really as forgiving as you sound? I dropped out of your life when you were still a baby – ”

  Amy reached over to cover his hand with hers. “Lance was a good dad,” she said. “He still is. And from what he told me, you would have been too, if you’d been given a chance.”

  “Exactly how much do you know?” he asked, regarding his daughter narrowly.

  “Like I told you before, more than Mom thinks. A lot more. I know you changed your mind, and that you tried to get Mom to change hers.”

  Thank God.

  “I’ve never regretted anything so much in all my life.”

  “Lance told me.”

  He made a mental note to buy Lance a case of the best Scotch he could get his hands on. “So you’re really okay with everything then.”

  “I really am.” Amy’s eyes danced. “Of course, if you’d asked me when I was fifteen it might have been a different story, but I’ve grown up a lot since then.”

  The phone on the table beside Gareth rang, cutting off his reply. He withdrew his hand from beneath Amy’s, twisting in his seat, and then paused as he heard Sean’s deep voice answer in the kitchen. His hand hovered above the receiver. He listened to his cousin’s murmured responses, then to the distinct click that ended the call.

  Only when Sean appeared in the kitchen doorway did he let his hand drift back to his side.

  “Gwyn?”

  Sean nodded, his gaze flicking towards Amy. “She said to tell you she’s home.”

  “But she didn’t want to talk to me.”

  His cousin shook his head. “No.”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  Amy ahemmed discreetly. “I take it this Gwyn is someone special?”

  “Very.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  It was late, Gareth thought. He should probably insist that Amy get to bed, but given the time-altering effects of a trans-Atlantic flight, she most likely wouldn’t sleep just yet anyway. And given his own royally screwed-up life, neither would he.

  He poured himself another cup of tea and sat back on the sofa. “Her name is Gwynneth,” he said. “With two n’s.”

  Chapter 38

  “May I have some more milk, please?” Maggie inquired, holding out her glass to Gwyn.

  Gwyn gritted her teeth at the little girl’s careful formality, typical of the way all her children had treated her since this morning. Reaching across the lunch table, she took the glass from her daughter. She’d strived since waking to maintain a note of normalcy in the household, but seemed instead to have made the atmosphere ever more brittle with her efforts. She forced a smile.

  “That was very polite, Maggie, thank you.”

  Maggie’s solemn expression didn’t change. “You’re welcome.”

  Gwyn sighed and picked up the nearby milk carton. Her eyes drifted to the bold-faced kitchen clock. Only twelve-fifteen. Could this day possibly drag by any slower? She tipped the carton toward Maggie’s glass.

  A sudden shrill from the telephone jolted through the oppressive silence, causing her to jump and send a stream of milk across the table.

  “Damn it!”

  Three pairs of startled, accusing eyes stared at her. Maggie’s bottom lip quivered. The phone rang again and she bit back a second, choicer phrase.

  Katie pushed back from the table and retrieved the dishcloth from the kitchen sink. She set it beside Gwyn’s plate.

  The phone warbled a third time.

  “Should I - ?” Katie asked, her gaze locking onto the intrusive instrument.

  “No!” Gwyn drew a deep breath and attempted to soften her response. “Thank you, sweetie, but we’re having lunch and the machine will take a message.”

  No one pointed out that the machine had been taking messages all morning. Fifteen of them, to be exact. As if on cue, a loud click interrupted the telephone’s fourth ring. They sat, waiting for their greeting to end, and for the voice they’d come to expect to follow.

  “…message after the tone and we’ll be happy to return your call.”

  Beep.

  “Damn it, Gwyn, you can’t avoid me forever,” Gareth’s deep tones growled through the kitchen. “We have to talk. We need to talk.”

  The raw frustration in his voice sliced deep into Gwyn’s belly. Clamping her teeth over her lower lip, she coiled her fingers around the chair’s seat, battling the desire to spring up and grab for the receiver.

  Not while the kids are up. She’d made that decision at some point during her sleepless night and, unlike all her other resolutions where Gareth was concerned, was determined to stick to this one.

  “Gwyn, please,” Gareth’s voice dropped lower, roughened. “I know you’re hurt, and I know I’ve messed up, but I really can explain if you’ll just give me a chance.” A small silence ended with a sigh. “Fine, have it your way for now. But just so we’re clear on this, I hope you understand that I’m going to keep trying until you talk to me. And that I meant what I told you yesterday. All of it.”

  Silence fell over the kitchen once again, broken by a second loud click from the answering machine.

  “Mommy?”

  Gwyn pried her fingernails out of the wooden chair seat beneath her. She picked up the dishcloth and set it in the middle of the milk puddle. “Yes, Nicky?”

  “Did you and Gareth have a fight?”

  If only it had been that simple.

  “Ki
nd of, I suppose.”

  “Madame Lucie says that when friends fight they should talk about it.”

  Gwyn made herself smile and keep her present opinion to herself regarding the kindergarten teacher’s playground peace tactics.

  “Are you and Gareth still friends?” Nicholas methodically stabbed his fork into the macaroni in his bowl.

  “I won’t settle for being friends…”

  Gwyn inhaled a shaky breath. She looked at each of her children in turn, seeing their uncertainty, feeling their confusion. It would be so easy to spout platitudes, she thought, so easy to give them the reassurance they wanted. But she wouldn’t lie to them. Not on top of everything else.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Katie stared at her plate, saying nothing. Nicholas nodded solemnly. Maggie sniffled.

  In a devastating moment of clarity, she saw the full impact of her actions on her children. The parallels to Jack she’d sworn would never happen.

  Despite all her declarations to the contrary – her empty, meaningless assertions – she had put her own desires above the welfare of her kids. Taken a calculated risk that had placed three innocents in the direct path of the same kind of hurt their father had once inflicted on them. Gambled, and lost.

  Knowing that this could happen.

  She shoved back her chair and stumbled to the counter. Fighting back a wave of nausea, she dropped the milk-sodden cloth into the sink, then turned on the tap and splashed cold water over her face and the back of her neck. The nausea slowly receded.

  The knife in her heart remained.

  She straightened up from the sink and reached for a dry tea towel. Turning, she stared at the sad little group at the table. Lord, how had she ever messed up their lives so thoroughly? And how did she even begin to make it better?

  The elusive specter of “normal” hovered before her once more.

  “Come on, guys,” she said, adopting a brittle note of cheer, “let’s finish lunch and then find a game to play, all right? Who’s up for Hungry Hippos?”

  No one answered.

  Nicholas looked up at her with a fierce scowl. “Mommy?”

  “What, Nicky?”