She looked down at the linked pinkies. “Even if I don’t fall in love with you?”
“Even then. And we’ll just have to be best friends forever,” I promised, meaning it for the first time. “We’re family, you and me. By marriage once before but, more importantly, by the blood we combined into those two amazing kids of ours. And when they grow up and don’t want to hang out with us anymore, we’ll be bound by our past, our friendship, and our new promise.” I made a point of shaking the pinkies. “No matter what. And if I ever forget that, may my pinkie fall off and get eaten by a shark.”
She laughed, wiping tears away that I hadn’t seen until now. Then, as I was about to tell her to pack some stuff and move it into the spare room, she broke away from the promise and threw her arms around my neck. I leaned right into the hug, not holding my wife this time but the sweet girl I met in February this year. She needed to be held more than I’d needed to hold her back then. I thought I was in the dark after losing her, but the shadow I’d cast on her life lately was far darker and a lot colder.
She held me like she’d never been hugged before, and I hugged her back as deeply as I was sorry for all that I had done to her.
“David?” she said, her small voice muffled in my shoulder.
“Yeah.” I pulled back, thinking I was squeezing her too tight.
“Can you help me with something?”
“Sure. Anything.”
She grinned, looking so much like a child that I felt even worse for the way I’d treated her lately, and even worse about what we did in the closet.
Then she took my hand and stood up. “Come up to my room.”
41
Ara
The sun was almost up before we were ready. I’d been sitting on my bed waiting for him to talk, but he just stood by the packing box with his arms folded, looking down into it.
“You’re not ready to face this yet,” he decided.
“I am,” I assured him, standing up to join him. “I want to know what these meant to me in the past.”
He reached down into the box and picked up a small ziplock bag of jewelry, jiggling it in his open palm as he poked a finger in there to pick something out—a pretty silver bangle with a glossy pearl-colored stone set into the center.
“Wedding.” He cleared his throat, suffering a quiet moment of agony. “I gave this to y… to her the night before our wedding.”
I took the bangle and tried it on, surprised that it fit, even though that was silly, since I hadn’t changed in size or shape. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you give it to me?”
“It was my mother’s.”
My eyes widened. “So this must be really old?”
He nodded. “My father gave it to her on their wedding day.”
“Wow.” I slipped it off and handed it back to him, as though I was a kid playing in her mother’s things but didn’t actually own them.
He took it, placing it back in the bag among the rest of my jewelry, which he then laid aside, so I figured none of it really mattered that much. I wanted to ask if I’d had an engagement ring—maybe one that matched the wedding band I still wore on my right hand despite how much he’d hurt me lately—but I was afraid that would lead into a conversation about his wedding band and the reason he no longer wore it at all. When we first met, the ring had been on his left hand, but after that first day it went to his right, like mine, and eventually to his pinkie. Now, it was gone completely, leaving behind only a tan line where it once sat for twenty years.
“This was in the stuff that was sent back here before you… when you left Mike at the altar.” He lifted a shoebox covered in cat stickers and took off the lid. “If you’d gone through this box, you’d have known who he was.”
I let out a small breathy laugh. “That would have changed the course of things.” I looked at a photo of Mike and me as little kids, and it amazed me to see us that way—best buddies, so happy, so free. “I might have thought I was in love with him.”
David rolled his eyes playfully. “And we’d go through the Mike-Ara saga again.”
“Saga?”
“I left a few things out when we last talked about this,” he said, and handed me another picture, this one of Mike in a tuxedo and me in a blue dress. “When we first met, I tried to force you to choose between him and me, and it made you compare us both, I guess, so you could figure out which one you should be with for the rest of your life. It was silly of me to do that to you after we just met, especially after you’d suffered so much loss at the time.”
“You mean my mom?”
“Not just her.” He put the box down and turned his shoulders to me, bringing his finger slowly up to point at a baby in a picture, sitting between Mike and me. “When your mom died, so did your little brother.”
I held the picture with both hands, really looking at the face of the little boy. He had dark hair, like Harry, and a sweet little smile, and just from the way he looked up at me in the photo, I could tell he loved me and that I’d loved him. “How did they die?”
“Falcon hasn’t told you?”
I shook my head. “He tried to, but I asked him not to.”
David paused a moment, exhaling before he spoke. “You were all in a car accident when you were seventeen human years old.”
My eyes watered, blotting out the picture.
“You were so young to go through such tragedy—losing your mom that day, and H… and your brother. And to make matters worse, your dad lived in the States and couldn’t get to you for more than forty-eight hours.”
“Was I hurt?”
“You had scars.” He ran his hand across his chin. “Which would have been worse if you weren’t Lilithian.”
“I was immortal then?” I showed the picture.
“No. You were born Lilithian, and though the change to immortality didn’t happen until we met, your body was stronger than an average human. If not for that, you’d have died with your family.”
My heart hurt so deeply inside that I wanted to cry for them, but then I wanted to cry for not remembering them. “What was his name—my brother?”
David hesitated. “Harry.”
“Harry?” I looked at him, and when he nodded, I realized a few things. “I had a dream once—that I lost a baby. Is this why?”
“Maybe.” A look of deep and eternal pain crossed his face then. “But it might also be because Elora was born under very tragic circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“A man that wanted to take over the monarchy tried to abort her.”
“What?”
“She was premature—very premature—and you gave birth to her alone.” His voice broke. “You thought she was dead for the first few minutes of her life.”
My hands were shaking. In five minutes, he’d just shared so much tragedy with me that I wanted to hug my past self and tell her I was sorry, that she was okay now and that I’d never let anything like that happen to her again. And then I understood David’s need to hold her ten times greater than I thought I had before. “How ’bout Harry? Our Harry? Was he born under better conditions?”
David nodded, smiling. “It was a fun water-breaking scenario outside the supermarket, and you went into labor forty minutes later, nearly had him in the car on the way to the hospital.”
I laughed.
“When he was born”—he shook his head, taking me in with new eyes and then casting them away to hold that look on the faces of the past—“you were so overjoyed that you let him cry for about five minutes, just because you’d never heard anything so beautiful in all your life.”
I laughed again, imagining it all.
“And I was so proud of you. I didn’t see Elora come into the world, but I knew, after seeing Harry squeeze out of that tiny little body of yours, that there was no going back for me. I’d been alive over a hundred years at that point and thought I’d seen everything there was to see, but I had never seen anyt
hing more amazing than my son being born into this world.”
My arms went tight with frosty bumps. I felt a connection to David then that I hadn’t felt before, as if we shared something special, even though I didn’t remember it.
I put the picture of my little brother aside and leaned into the box to choose something else. This was actually fun—getting to know my past—but I knew it was something that I’d needed to do with David. I did promise Elora she could help, but no one knew my past like he did. And that made me feel closer to him in ways.
“What’s this?” I drew out a navy-blue knitted sweater.
“That”—he laughed, taking it—“was my uncle’s.”
“Your uncle’s?”
“Yeah. After he died, we all went through a very lengthy period of grief—one I’m not sure really ever ended.”
“We must have really loved him.”
“We did. And I often found you in his room just sitting with his stuff.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “You were close. He was a good friend to you when you entered the immortal world—when I wasn’t there for you.”
“Why weren’t you there for me?”
“In the beginning, I… I treated you like a child, I guess. And I shut you out thinking I was protecting you. But he saw you as the strong, capable woman I wouldn’t notice, and he treated you that way. Supported and loved you where I failed.”
“Loved me?”
“Not in that way,” he assured me. “And when he died, even though you knew he was finally at peace, you couldn’t make your heart believe he was gone, and neither could I. You took this sweater when I locked up his room and told you it was time to move on—wore it for about three months and then, as I knew you would, you slowly started to move on from it.”
“And what about you? Were you as cut-up?”
“More.” He laughed, holding the sweater to his chest. “That’s why I locked his room up. I made it seem like it was for your benefit, but it was for mine. We were stuck in the past, Ara, and neither of us could see the future for what it was. We had a daughter and a new life to live, and my uncle was at peace. He wouldn’t be there to give us advice or guide us when we felt lost, but we didn’t really need him to either, and it took closing his room off to realize that.”
I nodded, reaching over to take the sweater. I pressed my nose to it and drew a deep breath, my heart skipping as a face appeared in my memory. He looked a lot like David, but with an air of wisdom about him, as if he carried centuries of knowledge in the absence of lines on his face. “Was he old?”
“Very.” He nodded once.
“Arthur,” I said, looking at David. “Was his name Arthur?”
David twitched a little, growing taller. “Yes.”
I smiled, putting the sweater aside. “His spirit still comes here sometimes.”
“How can you know that?” He grabbed my wrist as I went to get something else from the box. I had to stop then and think: how did I know that?
“I… I’ve seen him, I think.” I looked over to the foot of my bed. “He has a woman with him, and a baby.”
“You see him?” He leaned right forward, his eyes so wide the green looked like tiny marbles in the whites.
“I thought I was dreaming, but it… but it wasn’t quite like a dream,” I explained.
“Did you talk to him?”
I shook my head. “He just looked at me and I looked at him.”
“And then what?”
“He left.” I shrugged. “I think maybe he just wanted me to know he was there.”
David leaned back, letting go of my arm.
“So you don’t see him?” I asked.
“I can’t see ghosts.”
“Why not? Can’t most people?”
He laughed. “No.”
“Oh.” My eyes flicked sideways. “After Elora said she saw ghosts, I started to realize that some of the people I’d been seeing around weren’t actually solid, and I just figured it was normal—that pretty much everyone saw that. Like Brett with the fire.”
“The fire?”
I nodded. “He can light fires with his hands—”
“You could too.”
“I know. Now. But before that, I just thought everyone could—but me.”
David grinned. “The innocent, or is it ignorant mind of a child.”
“Shut up.” I slapped his arm playfully.
“It’s nice though,” he said after a few seconds.
“What is?”
“That he’s checking in on you—Arthur.”
I looked at the foot of my bed again. “I just wish I’d known what he was—who he was—when I saw him.”
“Maybe there’ll be a next time.”
“Maybe.” I leaned back a bit and folded my arms as the sun peeked over the ledge of my window, lighting up David’s brown hair and making it look golden red. He was so much older now than he looked in the pictures of our past. His hair was lighter, his stubble thicker, his shoulders wider, and he was even taller than my body thought it remembered. Even in those stupid bed shorts and boots, I wanted to press myself alongside his body and wrap my arms around his ribs, hold onto him tightly for a bit. But when he looked at me, it wasn’t with the love he once did. He looked at me; no, he saw me as a different person now, and the love I once thought was for me had, in fact, been for Ara. He didn’t have love for me yet, and I was okay with that. For now. I wanted the look to come back to his eyes, but I wanted it to be for me.
“What’s up?” he said, noting my distance.
“I’m hungry.”
He laughed, cupping my waist to turn me toward the door. “Then we better feed you before the ogre comes out.”
“The ogre?”
“It lives in your belly.” He reached over and rubbed it. “Gets tempestuous when you don’t feed it.”
My hands quickly covered the emptiness there as if to stop the beast from ripping out of me. “Why didn’t Brett tell me about that? Is it dangerous?” I looked at his stomach. “Do you have one?”
He laughed, stopping short when he realized I was serious. “Ara, there’s not really an ogre in there.”
“Then why did you say that?” I dropped my hands.
David just laughed again and led me into the hallway. “I’ll explain over breakfast.”
* * *
David was right. There was more good in him than bad. And there had been more good moments in our lives together than there had been tragic, which made me wonder why Brett always said my life had been horrible before I died and why he told me I was a flake with no real friends. Thinking back on the way Elora and Eric argued with him the day she killed me, I wished I’d paid more attention to what they were saying. It felt like layers of pillows had been lifted off my head recently and I was noticing more now—piecing my life together by the glue of random bits of information—learning exactly where I once stood.
Best of all, though, after spending the last night with David—the David that had let go of his wife long enough to see me—my entire world felt different. I could see new pathways being created where once only darkness lay. I could even see myself being with David long-term. Especially when he’d make a coffee, no matter what kind of coffee we had in the house, and then he’d sit down with a knowing grin on his face and wait for me to taste it.
“How do you do it!” My lips spread from ear to ear, still wet with coffee. I put the cup down and shook my head. “It’s like magic.”
He shrugged one shoulder shyly. “Maybe it is.”
“Do you really think so?” I said. “I mean, could you have witch blood in you?”
“No.” He laughed. “But it could be something to do with my vampire side—like how I retained some of my strength. Maybe the magic I always put into food was something supernatural.”
“Maybe,” I said thoughtfully, sipping the coffee again. And then I was convinced. No matter how many times I made a cup of coffee with Brett’s disgusting
“Nes-crappé”, I could not get it to taste drinkable. David had worked a miracle here. A supernatural miracle.
I stopped thinking then and brought my attention back to the kitchen—to David’s soft smile resting comfortably on my face. “What?” I said.
He pressed his lips into a line, his eyes still smiling, and shook his head. “I guess I’m just beginning to realize how much fun this actually is.”
“What is?”
“Getting to know you.”
My cup clunked loudly on the wood table top as I put it down. “I wish it had been like this from the start. I always liked you,” I confessed, “always thought you were fun to be around, but I knew there was this other side to you that was hiding away under something…” Under what? “Maybe something…”
“Tragic?” he offered.
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. And without that there… like, when you’re just being you…” I didn’t want to finish that sentence. Things were still new, and they felt very fragile. If I confessed to really liking this version of him and then it went away again, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. But I think he knew anyway. I think he understood how I felt without me needing to say it, because he nodded, casting his eyes downward as a smile crept in and warmed his entire face. It was easy to see why she married him when he was like this.
“So?” he said, reaching across to place his hand firmly over mine. “What should we do today?”
“I wanna finish going through that box.” I looked up then with a rush of guilt. “Oh my God! Harry! Who’s gonna get him ready for school if we’re here!”
“Mike will,” he assured me with a very casual nod.
“But it’s not his job—”
“Of course it is.” He chuckled softly. “We’re family, Ar. We all take care of each other—it’s been that way forever.”
“So he’ll just… what? Wake up, see you’re not there and just get Harry ready?”
He nodded, smiling.
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