by Cara Bristol
Lon didn’t answer his cell, and although Dana told herself he was busy and tried not to feel disappointed, she was. Talking with Roger about Lon had given her all sorts of warm, fuzzy feelings, the conversation further cementing her relationship with Lon in her mind. As Lon’s phone rang, her fading warm fuzzies morphed into serious foreboding cold stickies, but she dismissed her anxiety as an aftereffect of the emotional stew that had brewed all afternoon.
Lon’s voice mail intercepted her call.
“Hi, Lon.” Dana swallowed and strove for a normal tone. “Why don’t you stop by tonight? I need—”A hug. To hear your voice. She needed not to burden him when he was working. “We’ll talk when I see you.” Dana flipped her cell shut. Don’t make something out of nothing, she chided herself.
Chapter Twelve
Despondency settled like an eighty-pound sack of cement on Lon’s shoulders as he trudged out of the hospital for the evening. He’d lugged it throughout his fourteen-hour ER shift. It had become part of his normal work attire ever since he’d learned Dana and Roger had gotten back together. Dana had left him three messages in four days, but he had yet to return any of them.
He couldn’t bear to hear the consoling words that weren’t: I never meant to hurt you.
Dodging her afforded him a coward’s way out, but Lon feared what he might say, worried the emotional toll of a confrontation would impair his ability to function. Expressing his churning emotions would be tantamount to shaking the bottle and releasing a very angry genie. His best recourse was to hammer in the cork and pray the genie settled down.
His strategy failed. His pain grew larger and more searing with each passing day. He should lance the abscess, face Dana, and deal with the breakup head-on. But knowing it and doing it were two different things.
Head and shoulders slumped, he lumbered across the asphalted parking area interspersed with islands of trees and shrubbery. He fished his keys from his pocket and unlocked his Hyundai from across the lot with a chirp of the attached remote. He looked up at the flash of his car’s headlights. The train that had flattened him four days ago backed up and plowed into him again. Dana’s Lexus stood alongside his compact, and parked against her car was Dana herself.
Lon raised his gaze skyward to glare at the universe. The stars smirked, shimmering with laughter over a private joke at his expense, while a gibbous moon turned a cold shoulder to his pain. He would never be able to look at the moon without remembering making love with Dana under its light.
Dana pushed off from her car and waited. As he approached on leaden feet, a hesitant smile trembled on her lips. Shadows smudged the pale skin under her eyes, which bore little of their usual sparkle, an indication of the effect her husband’s illness had had on her. No doubt their reunion had been bittersweet. For Lon, it was merely bitter.
“Hi,” she said. “I tried to call you.” The quaver in her voice further betrayed her uncertainty. Being the dumper carried its measure of discomfort. No doubt confronting him was difficult for her, but he had little sympathy.
He forced his hands into his pockets to refrain from beating the hood of his car. “I know why you’re here,” he said before she could launch into her it’s-not-you-it’s-me speech. “We had fun, a pleasant interlude.” He nearly gagged on the words. It had been so much more to him.
“A pleasant interlude?” She stared, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. He feared he’d lose his nerve, would resort to begging for another chance to prove to her they had something special. But his head told him if she didn’t realize it on her own, then nothing he could do or say would change anything. His conscience told him he had no right to hammer a wedge through a twenty-plus-year marriage.
“You have to do what’s right for you.” He focused on his car’s tires. “Both of us need to get on with our lives. What we had was good, but it wasn’t meant to last.”
He thought he heard Dana gasp in surprise that he’d beaten her to the punch, but his heartbeat drummed so loudly in his ears he couldn’t be sure.
“So this is it?” Her voice sounded as stiff as her posture, which he viewed in his peripheral vision, since he still couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
“This is it.” A lump lodged in his throat. “Be happy, Dana.” Lon threw himself into his car and peeled out of the parking lot.
Three. Two. One. In her head, Dana counted down the seconds until she burst into sobs, her eyes springing as if a geyser had erupted. Lon’s taillights blurred to a red haze through the sheen of her tears as he sped away after blowing a hole in her chest.
Over? How could it be over? How the hell could their relationship have ended when everything was going so well? She’d been so certain Lon had feelings for her. How could he do this? It wasn’t fucking possible.
But her sob-wracked body and the silence of the past few days insisted it was. In the past, they had spoken every evening, if only for a few minutes. But he hadn’t called her in four days, hadn’t returned any of her phone messages.
She’d told herself the lack of communication was nothing to be concerned about, but when days passed without even a text message, her nagging intuition insisted something was amiss, and she’d decided she needed to confront her fears head-on. If her marriage had taught her anything, it had hammered that home. Unfortunately, Roger had had his open-heart surgery today, requiring her to spend the evening at the hospital—not so much for him, but for Katie. With an inkling of Lon’s schedule, after Katie had departed for the evening, she’d waited to catch Lon at his car when he got off work.
Now she had an explanation to assign to the unease that had dogged her for days. She’d been dumped. When had Lon intended to tell her? The flash of anger his cavalier behavior ignited did little to alleviate the bone-deep pain.
She wasn’t Roger’s soul mate, and she wasn’t Lon’s either. He didn’t even want her as a part-time fuck buddy.
Realizing she was standing in a public parking lot wailing, Dana crawled into her car. She tried to fit the key in the ignition, but her hands shook so badly, she dropped the key ring, and it disappeared somewhere on the floor. Hugging the steering wheel, Dana buried her face in the crook of her arm and cried.
She sobbed until she ran the well dry and littered the floor of her Lexus with soggy tissues. As she picked them up, she located her car key and started the ignition. Her eyes and face were swollen and blotchy, and a deep indentation from the steering wheel cut into her cheek.
This is what you got when you ignored good sense. No fool like an old fool. It had been folly to date a man so young. She could blame no one but herself for her poor judgment. At the start of a demanding career, Lon didn’t have time for the commitment of a full-time relationship or even a part-time one. And why would he want to saddle himself with a woman nearly his mother’s age?
But as Dana exited the hospital parking lot, she couldn’t forget how Lon’s eyes would soften when he looked at her. Had that expression been a mere manifestation of physical desire? Dana hadn’t dated in more than twenty-five years. Were her courtship skills so rusty she would confuse horniness for affection?
Thank God she hadn’t told him she loved him. Her humiliation ran deep enough as it was.
Or maybe Lon had sensed her growing feelings, and that scared him off. He’d said in the beginning he was only interested in “now.” Somehow she’d expected “now” to last a little longer. She could only guess as to why Lon had ended their relationship, since he hadn’t been forthcoming about his reasons.
Dana drove on automatic pilot and managed to stop when the lights turned red, although twice motorists honked at her to go when the signals turned green. By the time she crept into her driveway, exhaustion had claimed her body. She eyed the Corbin house next door and dreaded the day she would bump into Lon. Dana grimaced at how she’d battled with Roger to keep her house; now she wished she lived anyplace but here.
She ached more than when her twenty-three-year marriage had died. When Roger had announced
he wanted a divorce, she’d been hurt and angered, but deep down, not surprised. In her postmortem, when she’d plumbed the depths of her marriage for answers, she’d drawn up the suspicions that Roger had been cheating for years, along with an awareness that the estrangement had begun long before the infidelity.
But she’d been oblivious to the signs with Lon. How could a relationship transform from sparkling new and perfect to a heap of nothing overnight? She couldn’t figure out what she’d missed. Why had the plane crashed when the skies were clear and all systems had appeared operational?
Dana tore her gaze from the Corbin house and focused on her white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. She forced her fingers open to release the stiffness in her joints. She would drive herself insane searching for clues in the wreckage, parsing and analyzing every nuance of the past month. And in the end, the conclusion mattered not. What was done was done.
She recalled an inspirational quotation that said the difference between success and failure was getting up one more time than you got knocked down. She would get up again. If only she had the energy to get out of the car.
Chapter Thirteen
Pain settled into numbness, permitting Dana to go through the motions of life. She went to work, put out the trash on the scheduled pickup day, paid the bills, and even occasionally remembered to eat. But as the week continued, she felt stuck on a stationary escalator while everyone else rode by and carried on with their lives as usual.
Dana no longer cried, but she found little cause to laugh or smile. She attended the requisite meetings, commented appropriately, and fulfilled a myriad of duties, but each act required she wade hip-deep through an emotional pool of sludge, every task consuming more energy than it should. She borrowed from an inner reservoir of strength to survive the day, but by nightfall, she would be overdrawn and would collapse inward on herself. Her evenings she spent staring at the television with no recollection afterward of what she’d watched. The final divorce papers that officially freed her from her marriage arrived in the mail, and she filed them in a cabinet without even looking at them.
After several days in the hospital post-op, Roger was discharged to his condo in the care of Mila, who’d quit her job to tend to him with fanatical zeal. Dana checked on him once and found Roger in cheerful spirits and Mila clucking around him like a brooding hen, a marquise diamond flashing on her ring finger. As Roger was still recuperating and not up to jewelry shopping, she surmised the one-carat wonder had been purchased before the heart attack. Their happiness contrasted so starkly to her own misery, Dana decided it would be best for her own mental health to avoid further visits and left Roger to Mila’s doting care.
Roger had mentioned that Katie came often, but Dana herself had not seen her daughter since the surgery.
About two weeks after the fateful day, Dana was curled in a living room chair, attempting to read, when she heard a knock. Her stomach lurched at the possibility that it could be Lon. Even though she chastised herself for her stupidity, she ran to the door and practically ripped it off its hinges.
Her daughter stood there.
“Katie. Hello.” Dana forced a smile and picked up the shards of her shattered heart.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” Katie asked with an oddly hopeful lilt.
“No. Come on in.” Dana stepped aside. She wondered for a moment why Katie had bothered to knock before she recalled she’d asked her daughter to announce herself before dropping by. That was when there was a chance her daughter could interrupt something.
“How are you doing?” Dana asked.
“Fine. How about you?” Katie perched on the arm of the sofa where Lon had made fierce love to her.
No, that was where they had fucked. Dana redacted her memories. “I’m fine,” she lied and averted her gaze from the couch.
“Dad seems to be doing well.”
Dana nodded. “I think so.”
Katie studied her toes. She wore a pair of flip-flops and had painted her toenails black. “Mila seems to be taking good care of him.”
“Yes, she is.”
Katie glanced at the murder mystery Dana had left open on her chair. “That’s not your usual kind of book, is it?”
“No, I thought I’d try something different.” She usually devoured romances but had no appetite for them now. She did not want to read about couples, even fictitious ones, falling in love and living happily ever after.
“I’m still at the beginning.” Dana glanced at the novel. She’d been slogging through chapter one for two weeks but didn’t blame the author for her lack of progress. Her mind had become a sieve, words and meaning streaming out as fast as she could pour them in. For as many times as she’d reread the same passages, she should have memorized it.
Katie stretched out one leg, arched her foot, and continued her study of her toes. She glanced sideways at Dana. “Are you still seeing what’s-his-face…Lon Corbin?”
The sound of his name kicked her in the gut. “No.”
Her daughter seemed to wince, and her gaze slid away. “I’m sorry.” Surprisingly, she sounded sincere. “I realize now that you and Dad… Well, it’s not going to work, is it?”
“No.” Dana shook her head.
Katie’s grimaced. “I’m such a bitch.”
Dana frowned. “Why would you say that?”
“You really liked Lon, didn’t you?”
Dana’s throat ached, and she opened her eyes wide to force back the tears that threatened to appear. “Yeah. But it wasn’t meant to be.”
“I did so many things wrong.” Katie stared at her feet. “Starting with inviting Mila over. If I hadn’t done that, none of this would have happened.”
“You can’t blame yourself.” Dana shook her head, unable to tell her daughter that if it hadn’t been Mila, it would have been someone else—had been someone else for years, in fact. She couldn’t ruin Katie’s opinion of her father. What happened in her marriage was between her and Roger. “You have friends. Bringing them over to the house is a normal, natural thing. Your father made his own choices.”
Katie sighed. “Well, it’s getting late,” she said and scooted off the sofa arm. “I’d better go.”
“Wait.” Dana halted her departure, knowing her daughter was still concerned. “Your dad is going to be okay. You know that, don’t you?”
Katie twisted her lips almost derisively and nodded. “Yeah. That much I know. Well, see ya.” And her daughter left.
About a week after speaking to Katie, Dana decided she’d wallowed long enough. She began accepting invitations to lunch with friends, went back to yoga class, and even finished her book. But the one thing she hadn’t been able to do was swim in the pool. That hurtle remained to be jumped.
Although the calendar insisted several weeks remained of summer, the days had grown shorter and the nights longer. On several occasions, Dana detected autumn’s scent on the air. School days approached, and in a flurry of slamming doors and squeals of excitement, the Corbin family departed for a final camping blowout one Friday evening.
Knowing she would never get a better opportunity, Dana donned her swimsuit and proceeded to the backyard before she lost her nerve. She clenched her jaw as she stared at the large, perfect orb in the sky. She and Lon had gone skinny-dipping, made love for the first time under a similar full moon.
Dana gritted her teeth with determination. She would wash Lon out of her system under that same moon. But when she risked a glance at the tree-house sentinel, a sharp pang sliced into her heart. There would be no blond hunks climbing down from it this time.
Dana draped her towel on a chair and eyed the glittering pool. “Fuck it,” she muttered. “May as well do it right.” She peeled off her suit and tossed it atop her towel. “Do it like you mean to.” Dana threw back her shoulders, marched to the deep end, and plunged into the pool.
Enveloped by the water’s embrace, she descended to the bottom. She relaxed and let the soothing liquid mend the ragged
tears in her psyche and return her to the surface in its own time.
When her head popped up, she treaded water and listened to the waves slap the pool walls. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine, the splash echoed.
Dana shifted and began to swim. Before the breakup, she’d swum often during the evenings and had gotten quite proficient. She discovered with a tiny surge of pleasure that her muscles remembered, and her arms and legs snapped through the water with precision.
She focused on the moment, on the smooth movement of her arms and legs, of her chest filling and emptying of air, of the insignificant splash she’d created. Dana smiled as she remembered how she used to churn the water like an outboard motor stuck in neutral. Then came the memory that Lon had been the one to teach her the freestyle stroke, and her amusement evaporated.
Time. It’s going to take time. Tonight is the first step. She ejected all thoughts of swimming lessons taught by a muscled, blond instructor from her thoughts.
Dana swam until her arms and legs grew tired and her breathing labored. Rolling onto her back, she stretched out and did what she always liked to do: float.
* * * *
Lon slouched in the webbed folding chair on his minuscule patio deck, nursing a warm beer and a busted heart, determined to get over Dana. He glowered at the jeering full moon; he refused to permit a malicious hunk of rock orbiting the earth to chase him inside to hole up in his apartment. He aimed another glare at the sky and focused on the pool in the courtyard two floors below.
It was quiet tonight, save for one couple who were doing more flirting than swimming, their sexually laced laughter rising to taunt him. He forced himself to watch the amorous duo in hopes their antics would cauterize his wound, but so far he felt only the searing burn without the healing.
Lon picked up his near-full beer and studied the label as he fantasized clocking the couple with the bottle. He wouldn’t do it, of course, but the thought satisfied him nonetheless. With a sigh, he returned the lager to the table before his baser urges got the better of him.