The Accidental Family

by Rowan Coleman

  “So what happened?”

  “It was like I said, he walked in, saw me sitting there, and Wendy said, ‘Seth, this is Louis. Louis is your father,’ just like that. For a second or two he was quiet, just looking at her and then me, and then he said, ‘I don’t have a father, I have never had a father, and I don’t need one now. He’s about twenty years too late.’

  “And he walked out without a second glance. I met my son for less than ten minutes and we didn’t speak two words to each other.”

  “It does seem a pretty brutal way to break the news to him,” Sophie said. “It must have been a shock—like Bella finding me here this morning. I don’t think I’d react much differently.”

  “Wendy said it was best,” Louis said, shrugging. “She said he appreciated her being straight and open with him, and after all, she’s the one who knows him, not me.”

  “So what happened after he left?”

  “Well, Wendy had cooked, so I stayed and ate and we talked some more. Talked about the past, talked about Seth—tried to work out what to do.”

  Sophie tried not to imagine Louis and Wendy sitting across a table that was, of course, candlelit as they talked over that glorious summer of love they had spent in each other’s arms. This wasn’t about Louis and Wendy, this was about Seth, and she had to remember that or otherwise she’d drive herself mad.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Wendy thinks I should go to his college in Falmouth, try to talk to him again, but I wonder if he needs a bit of space? Like he said, he’s done without a dad for twenty years, and now I turn up and what have I got to offer him? It’s not as if he needs anyone to teach him how to ride a bike or play football in the park.” Sophie felt a pang as she thought of what Seth had told her last night before the kissing incident. Of how he’d longed for a father to do just that with him.

  “Maybe I should just let him know I’d like to meet him again,” Louis went on. “Let him know how to get in touch with me and then give him some space to get used to the idea—what do you think?”

  “I really think that would be the best thing,” Sophie said, thinking of the look on Seth’s face last night. “I really think he’d appreciate knowing that you are thinking about him.”

  Louis looked uncertain. “But then again, Wendy is his mum, she should know best. If she thinks I should really go for it, really try and make a relationship with him now, then maybe I should do that …I don’t want him to think I don’t care even if—the fact is, Sophie, I haven’t known him long enough to know if I do care about him. And if he’s angry and resentful, then whose fault is that? It’s mine. I’ve screwed up the life of a boy without ever knowing about it, and right now, right this moment, I’m finding it really hard to feel anything.”

  “You should do what you think is best,” Sophie said, expressing her thoughts before she had a chance to censor them. “Maybe Wendy’s got other reasons for wanting you to hang around so much, maybe she’s not just thinking about Seth …”

  “Like what?” Louis turned to look at her, impatience threaded in his tone.

  “Like she likes having you in her life again, like she wants a reason to keep seeing you.” Sophie was painfully aware of how irrational and foolish she sounded.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Louis said, suddenly springing out of bed and scooping up his clothes from the floor. “I don’t know why you have such a problem with Wendy. I thought you’d admire her, if anything. She’s a single mother who’s brought up her son, my son, on her own for twenty years and who just wants him to have the chance to know his father. What is your problem with that, Soph?”

  Sophie wriggled awkwardly on the bed, suddenly feeling vulnerable in her nakedness and hurt that Louis was so quick to defend his ex against the woman he was going to marry. She knew what she should say, she should say that she didn’t have a problem with Wendy, that she was just being silly, but she couldn’t ignore her instincts.

  “I just don’t trust her,” she told him despite herself.

  “Why ever not?” Louis exclaimed, pulling up his jeans. “Last night, Wendy and I agreed to think things through and then talk again in a few days. Does that sound unreasonable to you? Does that sound like she’s looking for excuses to get me to ‘hang around’?”

  “No, but …Louis, please don’t be angry with me, I’m just trying to look out for you!”

  “You know, if you stopped trying to ‘look out for me,’ then our lives would be a lot simpler right now,” Louis said.

  The two of them looked uncertainly at each other across the bed. Just then the doorbell sounded and the relief on Louis’s face was clear.

  “Girls, don’t answer the—” Louis grabbed a T-shirt and ran to the stairs, but it was already too late. Bella had opened the front door.

  “Dad,” she called up the stairs. “That woman Aunty Sophie doesn’t like is here.”

  Twelve

  Hi, Wend.” Sophie heard Louis greet his ex, all too aware that he was dressed in only his jeans, and was pulling his T-shirt on over his head as he headed down the stairs. “Hey, Bellarina, why don’t you and Izzy watch your programs on the kitchen TV for a bit?”

  “I don’t want to,” Bella replied. “I want to stay here and listen to you and find out about this strange woman.”

  “Well, this isn’t a conversation for little girls, so go and watch TV please.”

  “Yes, but you see …” Sophie could hear from the tone in Bella’s voice that she was in full negotiation mode. Normally Louis loved to engage her in her lengthy sometimes logically skewed but always entertaining debates about why she should be able to do whatever it was that he didn’t want her to do. About 50 percent of the time she’d win him over. But Louis was not in the mood today and his tone was stern.

  “Bella, do as I ask. Now.”

  There was a pause and then Sophie heard Bella in the kitchen saying very loudly to Izzy, “We’re going to watch cartoons even though they rot our brains.”

  Like Bella, Sophie was unable to resist the temptation to find out what was going on. But even though she didn’t think Louis could send her away to watch cartoons, she was also fairly sure he’d want to talk with Wendy on his own. Quietly she crept out of bed, dragging the heavy duvet around her body and creeping to the edge of the stairs where she could just see the tops of Wendy’s and Louis’s heads without giving away her own position.

  “So how is he?” Louis asked her, a reluctance in his voice, as if he didn’t want to know the answer.

  “I don’t know, that’s the problem.” Wendy sounded upset, her voice shaky and strained. Sophie hazarded leaning over the banister, hoping to catch a glimpse of the other woman’s face and try to discern if her expression matched her tone. But Wendy’s head was bowed, her hair screening her features. Sophie could see Louis’s hand on Wendy’s shoulder. Only moments ago his long fingers had been caressing her thigh.

  Sophie dropped the duvet at the top of the stairs and darted back into the bedroom, plucking her clothes off the floor where she had discarded them what now seemed like a lifetime ago. Hurriedly she slipped on her underwear, straining to hear the continuing conversation below, hurrying back to the banister in bare feet, the rest of her clothes tucked under her arm in a bid not to miss anything crucial.

  “I haven’t heard from him since he stormed off last night,” Wendy was saying. “He’s not answering his cell phone. None of his friends seems to know where he is. I thought he might have gone back to Falmouth, but no one there has heard from him. He gets …very emotional when he’s upset.” Sophie pulled on her jeans certain that the rasp of denim over her thighs could be heard in Penzance, never mind at the bottom of the stairs. “I don’t know where he is, Louis. I’m really worried about him—anything could have happened.”

  Sophie held on to the banister as she pulled on first one sock and then the other. She knew; she knew where he had been at least up until two A.M. this morning, up until the point when he had k
issed her.

  “He’ll be okay,” Louis reassured Wendy. Sophie watched as he drew her into a hug, her chest tightening as she saw his arms around another woman. “It’s not as if he’s a kid. He can look after himself.”

  “I know.” Wendy’s voice was muffled by Louis’s shoulder and Sophie knew exactly the scent that Wendy would be breathing in—a mixture of sweat and sex and the last traces of yesterday’s aftershave. “It’s just like I said, sometimes he can be a bit rash—acts before he thinks. He’s got a temper on him, he gets really angry and self-destructive. When this girl he really liked broke up with him last summer, he went out on a bender and ended up in a fight with three other men. He got four broken ribs and a dislocated knee.” Sophie heard Wendy take a ragged breath. “What if he’s in some gutter somewhere?”

  “Okay …” Louis hesitated and Sophie knew he was trying to work out exactly how worried he should be. “Have you rung the hospital? Police stations?”

  “No. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. That’s why I came here.” Sophie couldn’t see her but she just knew that at that precise moment, Wendy was looking up at Louis with tear-stained blue eyes. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be bothering you with this now, but I didn’t know who else to turn to—I hoped we could do it together?”

  Sophie’s heart sank; she was going to have to tell them that she had seen Seth, and he had been very drunk and in a brawling mood. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she had seen Seth and experienced his rash behavior with her own eyes, and even lips, then she would have thought Wendy was making the whole thing up, or at least exaggerating the situation just to get close to Louis. The hot, raw, and irrational part of herself still felt that way. But Wendy didn’t need to make up complications to get to Louis, if that was what she wanted. She had his son, and that was reason enough.

  Despite her mixed feelings toward Wendy, a mixture that consisted of one part hatred, two parts loathing, and one part irritation, she could not withhold information about a child from his mother, not even when the child was twenty years old and had recently made a pass at her. Sophie might have been new to motherhood, she might have experienced it only by proxy, but she knew how worrying about the children you loved could tear you to shreds and found she couldn’t let Wendy go through that. As she thought about how she’d feel if Bella or Izzy was lost, she was all at once overwhelmed with an unexpected empathy for Wendy, an emotional upswell that tightened her chest and made tears spring to her eyes.

  Brushing the tears away, she took a breath and descended the stairs.

  “Oh, you’re here,” Wendy said when she saw Sophie.

  “Yes—look, I couldn’t help overhearing,” Sophie said, fighting to keep her voice steady and free of emotion. “My friend Cal was down last night from London and he wanted to go clubbing, so he, Carmen, and I all caught a cab into Newquay for a bit of an early hen night, although there weren’t any hens to speak of and—”

  “And what’s that got to do with anything?” Wendy asked impatiently.

  Sophie fought hard to maintain her empathy for the world’s most annoying woman.

  “If you’ll let me finish …We went to a nightclub and I saw Seth—”

  “You saw him?” Louis asked her, his tone incredulous. “You saw Seth and you are only telling me this now?”

  “I know, I was going to tell you, but I didn’t exactly have time what with one thing and another …” Sophie hazarded a small smile. She knew that wasn’t true. She could have, should have told him about seeing Seth as soon as she had woken him up this morning. “Anyway, the point is, I saw him and he was really drunk and pretty angry, so—”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Louis challenged her, exasperated.

  “I did, but you weren’t picking up,” Sophie snapped back, incredulous that suddenly she had to defend herself.

  “You could have left a message,” Louis countered.

  “I would have, but I thought it was best to get your son out of the road before he got flattened by a taxi.” Sophie felt cornered but took a breath and pressed on, determined to deliver the information she had, even if it was a little late. “Like I said, he was really drunk, angry—a bit punchy. He tried to pick a fight with this guy, and I thought it was best to get him out of there before he got into any trouble. But he refused to go back to Wendy’s and I didn’t think I’d find a cab that would take him all the way to Falmouth or that he’d be able to remember where he lived when he got there so …so I took him back to the B and B to sober up.” Sophie rushed out the last part of the sentence in the vague hope that Louis and Wendy wouldn’t hear and she’d be able to gloss over that.

  “You did what?” Wendy asked her. “You took my son back to your B and B? What for?”

  “To sober him up, what else?” Sophie replied, the memory of that foolish kiss weakening the conviction in her voice somewhat.

  “Wait a minute.” Louis ran his fingers through his hair, which was still tousled from sleep and sex. “I need a second to get my head around all of this. You knew all of this and you didn’t tell me? I don’t get it, Sophie. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know,” Sophie lied. “I suppose I was waiting for the right time. I’m sorry, okay? I should have told you sooner, but I’m telling you now.”

  “So is he there now?” Wendy demanded. “Is he still at the B and B?”

  “Um, well, no …” Sophie felt her heart sink; not only had she withheld information from worried parents, she also now had to break the news that she had single-handedly lost Seth again. “He fell asleep on the sofa while I was making him coffee, but when I woke him up he seemed a lot better, a lot more together. He drank the coffee and we were having a bit of a chat about things when …” Play it by ear, Cal had said. He hadn’t figured on two recently reunited, not to mention angry, parents hanging on her every word. It was definitely not a good idea to mention that Seth had kissed her and that she had been slow in breaking off the kiss. On the other hand, it was an excellent idea to never ever mention the kiss and to pray hard that Seth was either too drunk to remember it or too mortified to ever want to mention it again.

  “When what?” Wendy asked.

  “When he got angry again. He stormed off just as Carmen and Cal came back from the club. I went after him, but he’d got in a cab before I could reach him, and besides, I don’t think he would have wanted to talk to me anymore.” Not with the whole attempted snog thing, Sophie thought.

  “And what time was this?” Louis had his hands on his hips the way they had been when Izzy had decided to paint his white Renault with her poster paints to cheer it up a bit.

  “Just after two,” Sophie told him reluctantly. “But at least we know he’d sobered up a bit and slept off some of what he’d drunk by then. I bet you the only reason he’s not answering his phone is because he’s sulking.”

  Louis looked as if he were about to say something that Sophie really didn’t want to hear when there was a shriek from the kitchen and the clatter of cereal bowls on the kitchen tiles.

  “Daddeeeeeeeee,” Izzy yelled in the tone that usually indicated she had sustained some minor injury that required rubbing or kissing immediately. “I’ve fallen off my stool again!”

  “She has,” Bella confirmed. “And a bowl is broken.”

  “I’m coming, poppet.” Louis looked from Wendy to Sophie, his face strained and tense. “Go into the living room. I’ll sort the girls and I’ll be back in a second.”

  Sophie glanced warily at Wendy as she led her to the living room and indicated that she should sit on the sofa where not so long ago she and Louis had been having unbridled and carefree sex.

  “Look, Wendy,” Sophie began, attempting to build some kind of bridge. “I should have said something sooner about seeing Seth, but please believe me when I tell you I was only trying to help him.”

  “Trying to interfere more like,” Wendy muttered, staring out of the window at the metallic gray day.

  “No, not at all. T
he poor boy was really shocked—I just wanted to help him.”

  “Why?” Wendy’s head snapped round and Sophie got the full benefit of her Medusa glare. “What has any of this got to do with you?”

  Sophie was no longer able to prevent the exasperation that Wendy inspired in her from slipping into her voice. “If it wasn’t for me, Louis still wouldn’t know a thing about Seth, and besides, I am marrying him. This has got everything to do with me.”

  “Oh yes, that’s right. I forgot,” Wendy said, a mirthless smile on her lips.

  “Forgot what?” Sophie asked her.

  “Louis told me all about you last night, he told me everything. How you moved in on your dead friend’s life, like a vulture. Picking off her husband, her kids—even her home. What’s your problem, Sophie? Can’t you get a life on your own? Did you really have to wait for someone to die before you could get a man?”

  “You bitch.” Sophie growled the word, the full force of her fury boiling over in her guts. “How dare you judge me. You know nothing about me. Nothing about what Carrie and I meant to each other, and you certainly have no idea what Louis and I went through together and how much we love each other and those children.”

  “I know that barely more than a year has passed since your so-called best friend died and you’re marrying her husband and taking her kids. Well, you can forget about trying to do the same thing with me. Seth is mine and Louis’s, and our son hasn’t got anything to do with you.”