Before and Again

by Barbara Delinsky

  I knew professional layering when I saw it. He hadn’t grown it longer out of neglect but design. He wanted to be someone else, just like I did.

  “You have bangs,” he said.

  “So do you.”

  “To cover the scar?”

  “Yes.” That raised the same urgent point I’d tried to make with Liam. “I’m a different person here, Edward. No one knows where I came from, because if they did a quick Google, it might lead them to Mackenzie Cooper, and if the truth of that comes out, I’ll die—I mean, literally, die. I can’t live through that again. So you and I did not know each other before—”

  “We lie?”

  “No one will ask. They won’t suspect anything unless you give it away, which you have no need to do, unless you did come to punish me. Last night, you said you hadn’t. Do you stand by that?”

  “Yes.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed him. Forgiveness was easier to discuss than to do. But I had to trust that his intention was there. “Then I beg you, do not offer information where none is needed. Brainwash yourself, Edward. Say it over and over again, like a mantra. We did not know each other before. We were never married. The story can be that we meet here through my brother Liam,” I held up a hand, “the hiring of whom, the bringing to town of whom is a whole other issue, but I can’t go there now.”

  Tearing my gaze from his, I returned to the windshield. In my current mood, the forest was a discouraging band of skeletal trees, with the occasional withered leaf clinging, even after the snows. I tried to take strength from those stubborn last leaves, but failed. My voice was as weak as the sun that struggled to filter feebly through a cold haze of clouds. “Your being here is a problem for me on so many levels I can’t begin to see my way clear.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But you won’t sell.”

  “I can’t. It isn’t just the resort.” His voice was quiet. “The package includes property all over town, even the ski slope, which needs serious snow-making equipment, but that’s nada compared to the crisis right now at the Spa. New computer security is the least of it. We’re talking major damage control, posting newsletters on travel sites, sending personal notes to clients to tell them we’re on top of things, working with travel agents to restore confidence. My group has a dozen investors. I’m the managing partner, which means I have a major responsibility for what’s happened and a major incentive to make things work. I can’t sell now. I’m in too deep.”

  I gave a short snort. “Bad time for a hacking scandal?”

  “Ya’ think?” he asked in disgust.

  I met his eyes again, couldn’t not. Yes, they were Lily’s eyes, but that fact was clouded by my own despair. “What were you thinking, Edward?”

  “Ned.”

  “Did you think I’d be happy? Did you think I was sitting here waiting for you? Did you never consider my side of this? Did it not occur to you that your coming here might be painful for me? Did it never occur to you to call me first and tell me what you were planning to do before the deal went through?”

  Those silvery eyes grew intense. “I knew you’d say no.”

  “And you didn’t respect me enough to respect my feelings?”

  His lips were as tight as the small nod he gave. “I respect you,” he said. “I’ve watched you—” He broke off.

  There was dead silence, but the guilt on his face said I hadn’t heard wrong.

  “What do you mean, watched me?”

  “Not the first couple of years, I was too upset then, but the last couple, I needed to know.”

  “Needed to know what?”

  “How you were doing.”

  I was getting an uncomfortable feeling, another little razor-sharp tear in the fabric of a life I thought I knew. “How did you watch me?”

  “Jay.”

  “Jay.” I turned away, looked blindly out my side window, put my elbow on the sill and my chin on a shaky fist.

  “He won’t say anything without breaching lawyer-client privilege. I had to know you were all right.” He stopped, but I refused to turn, was too upset to speak. His voice came from behind me. “He didn’t tell me much, just that you had friends and a job and seemed happy.”

  Against my fist, I asked, “Did you learn this before or after you decided to buy the Inn?”

  “Before. I figured maybe you were onto something, starting new and all, so when one of my partners learned about the resort package, I took over. You were my inspiration. You picked yourself up off the floor. Maybe that’s why I’m here. I need this—”

  “You need this?” I cut in, whirling back. “This is about you?”

  “It’s about us,” he said, those silver blues defiant. “About the past, Mackenzie. I can’t move on.”

  “It’s Maggie.”

  “There’s no closure.”

  “Isn’t death closure enough?”

  “No!” He boomed, then lowered his voice. “This isn’t only about Lily. Well, maybe it is. But it’s about us, too. We stopped talking. Why did we stop talking?”

  “Because I killed our child.”

  “You didn’t kill her. If the driver of the van hadn’t been going twice the speed limit—”

  “Not that fast.”

  “Yes, that fast. When everything was over—the trial, our marriage—I went back to the police. I wanted to know exactly how fast he was going.”

  “Why did it matter? I was convicted.”

  “Yeah, and that bothered me, so I asked about the guy’s speed.”

  “He was going between forty-five and fifty in a thirty-five zone.” So we were told. So my attorney argued.

  “Try seventy,” Edward said. “I stood there with the forensics team. I watched them re-calculate. The figure in the initial report was vague, but forensics are more exact, really a science now—and, sorry, but I didn’t think that a van going forty-five would have killed a child who was sitting in the equivalent of a personal tank. If the thing had burst into flames and burned her up, I could’ve bought it. But kids are loose enough to survive a roll, so it had to be his front end hitting my child at a huge speed.”

  I tucked my hands in my lap, watched them clasp each other on the slick of my parka.

  “He had a history of speeding. Someone pulled strings to cover it up. The AG didn’t want anything polluting her case.”

  My fingers were freezing, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to pull gloves from my pocket. Defeated, I said, “It doesn’t matter, Edward. I ran a STOP sign. I was responsible. I could see it in your eyes every time you looked at me.”

  “Really?” He paused, like he was trying to figure that out. “Was it really there?”

  “Does it matter? If I felt it, isn’t that the same thing?”

  He considered for a minute, then let it go, but the defiance was back. “So you shut down, refused to talk, agreed to a divorce, and left town.”

  “Whoa,” I said. I had enough to blame myself for without taking sole responsibility there, too. “You shut down, you refused to talk, you agreed to a divorce.”

  “Fine,” he conceded, moving a finger—long, lean, no more ring—back and forth over his denimed thigh. “So you came up here and became someone else. It sounds good, but what the hell does Jay Harrington know about bone-deep grief? What does he know about a woman who used to be able to bare her soul—who needed to bare her soul—to a life partner? New town, new job, new friends? How’s that working for you?”

  The Edward I’d loved had never aimed sarcasm at me—at other people maybe, but not at me.

  Defiant in the face of his, I upped my enthusiasm. “It’s working well! I like my work and I like my friends. I have a place of my own—my—own—and I have pets.”

  “But no soulmate. Not even a lover. Those two guys at One-on-Tap—”

  “They’re friends. They’re caring and kind. They watch out for me.”

  “But intimacy with them can only go so far. Is that the appeal?”

  “The appe
al is their kindness and loyalty. It’s their sensitivity. Their being gay is a bonus.”

  Going quiet, Edward gazed out at the woods. Spikes of hair on his brow, dark jaw, straight nose, lean lips—all were the same as moments before, but his profile was suddenly less stony. “I do want a wife,” he finally said.

  “Awesome. Go get one. No one’s stopping you. You’re totally free.”

  “Wrong,” he said and met my eyes with a bleakness I hadn’t seen before. “Oh, I tried, believe me, I did, and they were really cool women, smart and sexy, but no dice. Nothing worked. My personal life is stalled. I’m stuck in the past. I need to go back to the place where it went wrong.”

  “Then last night was an exercise?” I asked. “Something therapeutic?”

  Another man might have grinned a sly grin or quipped something smug. But Edward had never been a chauvinist. Of all the things I didn’t know about this new man, that hadn’t changed. But then, if he wanted to take me back to the time when things went wrong, what better way than to do what he did—to smile a sweet Edward smile, the kind I had always felt was our secret, his and mine? I hadn’t seen anything like it since before the accident. It made my heart ache.

  “I really did not plan that,” he said and looked down, actually seeming self-conscious. “I was thinking we were just going to talk, but then it was dark driving there, so I couldn’t see where I was and what I was supposed to be doing, and by the time we got inside … well, you know.” He paused and looked at me with something akin to hope. “But I wouldn’t mind a repeat. It felt good, Mackenzie. It always did.”

  “Maggie,” I corrected again, but sadly, because he was right. “So maybe that’s all there ever was? Maybe that’s why everything fell apart at the first sign of trouble, because there was nothing more than sex to hold it together? I was pregnant when we got married. If not for that, we might not have gotten married. We’d have kept on living together, and when some other crisis came up, we’d have just gone our separate ways.”

  I said it. But seriously? No. The crisis that had torn us apart was the most extreme a family could suffer, but a lesser crisis wouldn’t have ended things. We had been good together—great together—light-years better together than either of us had ever been with anyone else, including our birth families. And Edward had wanted marriage. He’d have insisted on it in time. My resistance had to do with my being younger, my friends being still single, and my parents being uber-conventional. They were sticklers for my doing things as they had, which meant legal and religious, which meant a high mass in church. But Edward was Protestant, not Catholic. They were concerned about that from the get-go, and grew more concerned the more committed he and I became. When we moved in together, they were crushed, and though they were relieved when we finally did marry, they weren’t pleased that it took place in a hotel, or that Edward’s pastor co-officiated with ours.

  I told them it was that or a Justice of the Peace.

  I did not tell them I was pregnant. When Lily was born six months later, they simply told their friends she had come early. She accommodated them by being small, but she was beautiful. They adored her from the start. They did not adore our house, which they thought was too big and showy—or our cars, which they thought were too expensive, or our friends, whom they thought too chic, or Edward’s work, which they thought was shady at best. When the accident happened, they blamed our lifestyle.

  So did I, in a way.

  “What we were,” Edward said, sounding wounded, “was far more than sex.”

  I shrugged. Fair was fair. In that retaliatory instant, I wanted to hurt him for the way his letting me go had hurt me.

  “Do you really think that’s all we had?” he asked and made a face, like I was an alien being. “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” I shot back.

  He didn’t move for an instant—didn’t speak, didn’t breathe. Finally, he blinked and shoved a hand through his hair, leaving his forehead exposed in a way that reminded me of the old Edward again. “Fuck if I know,” he muttered.

  And wasn’t there perverse satisfaction in that? Misery loved company. My life right now was as messy as the mud in the woods. No matter how often I told myself that I knew what to do, my future was as much an enigma right now as the forest. Little shoots of green were out there somewhere—I knew they were—but it would take a lot of digging to find them.

  We sat side by side—Edward, me, the future, the past—facing his mud-spattered Jeep, those naked woods, and a watery yellow sky. Finally, feeling like I was hanging on by a thread and desperate for firm ground, I said, “I have to get to the Spa.”

  He nodded but didn’t move. “Is she a good friend?”

  “Grace? Yes. Do not fire her, Edward. She’s a decent person, and she did not ask for this. She has a son. She needs the money.”

  “I’m not firing her.”

  I wasn’t thanking him. He wasn’t doing me a favor, simply taking the advice from someone who understood the situation more than he did.

  After a few beats, he asked, “Do you miss sculpting?”

  “Edward,” I warned, but still he didn’t budge. So I said, “I sculpt. Just more now with makeup than clay. I have to leave, Edward.”

  “Are you okay, y’know, with money and all?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “If you need anything—”

  “I don’t want money,” I said more sharply than I planned but, that quickly, the past was back. “Money was what got us in trouble. If we hadn’t lived such a high life, if Lily had gone to public school, if I hadn’t had to drive to a godforsaken out-of-the-way place for a playdate—”

  As abruptly as Edward had entered my car, now he opened the door and climbed out. When his feet were on the frigid drive, he leaned back in. “You think you’re the only one who can’t stop with the what-ifs? Think you have a monopoly on grief? Or regret? Or guilt? I was the one earning the money to put us in that place. I was the one who was supposed to be home to take Lily to the playdate that day, only I was too fuckin’ busy earning all that money to do it.”

  Somewhere during the outburst, his eyes had filled with tears. With a last scathing look now, he slammed the door and stomped to the Jeep.

  12

  The one thing most vivid in my mind as Edward’s Jeep tore down the hill and disappeared past the trees was the tears in his eyes. He was no actor. He could barely play gin rummy without giving away his hand. Oh, he could negotiate a business deal, but when it came to anything personal, you knew where you stood.

  That, as my mother would say, was a double-edged sword. Knowing where he stood meant I had believed what I saw after the accident. As far as I could see, the sight of me brought him so much pain that he couldn’t feel love, and without love, we had no future together.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of his tears now, but they did soften me. He had never expressed these particular feelings before, which said something about the silence that had choked us back then. It said something about the soul-searching he must have done since. Yes, I was touched—of course I was touched that he had dug into the facts of the case. I hadn’t questioned them, and not out of naïveté. They simply didn’t matter. I had been distracted; my eyes weren’t on the road; I had run a STOP sign. End of story. I wasn’t ready—would never be ready—to share the blame of that with anyone else.

  Still, Edward’s raising the issue of guilt was interesting. That he felt it, whether right or wrong, said something about sharing responsibility. It had been a long time since anyone had wanted to share responsibility for anything with me. It had been a long time since anyone had trusted me enough.

  I still didn’t want him here.

  But he was.

  I could tell him to leave until I was blue in the face. But he wasn’t leaving.

  I could threaten to leave myself. But, seriously? If you want to talk about little green buds in the forest, that was my life in Devon. I liked those buds, liked the person I was growing into her
e. I felt for the people I knew—like Alex, who loved teaching but would give anything for her own kids—like Joyce, whose husband had left her years ago and whose children didn’t often return.

  Now I felt for Edward. In our old life, he’d had friends, but I wasn’t sure he had them here yet. Liam sure as hell wouldn’t be giving him advice on what to do here.

  Considering this as I followed sanely down the road, I braked, stopped, and took out my phone. Do not use Hank Monroe, I texted. He overcharges and underdoes.

  I was halfway to the Spa when he texted back. Who then?

  I let him wait for a reply until I was parked in the employees’ lot, which was comfortably filled with the cars of Sunday staff, no press van or black Jeep in sight. Andrew Russ, I texted, and, as a little reminder that I had a life here, sent a second. Use my name. He loves me.

  * * *

  Entering the Spa, I felt absurdly better, strong enough in that moment to want to work with clay—I mean, really work in ways I hadn’t been able to do. My fingers ached to sink in, to feel its chill, tensile strength, to pound it and shape it and lose myself in creation.

  But this was Sunday. The studio was closed. Where creation was concerned, the choice was between God and Grace’s hair. Given that I was still angry at the former for allowing my child to die, the latter would have to do.

  Grace was game. “I am so done with this look,” she declared in her high voice, pulling on a cape over her scrubs, which were lilac and fitted. We were alone in the color room, as she knew we would be when she suggested this time. Freeing her arms from the cape, she dropped into a chair. She tugged an elastic from her hair and shook her head, freeing auburn curls to shimmer in a sea of chestnut waves.

  The color was gorgeous. I couldn’t believe she wanted it changed. But it wasn’t my hair, was it?

  Lighting a scented candle, I breathed it in and thought sweet, agreeable thoughts. They came with surprising ease. This, here, now, was my Devon life.

  Taking a second slow inhalation for the sheer pleasure of it, I faced the mirror from behind Grace’s chair and focused on her tension. It was in the fingers that were laced tight in her lap, in the shadow of lines on her brow and the tiny vertical ones between her brows. Her eyes, though, were the hazel I knew to be her own. Their normalcy made her hair all the more striking by contrast.