All Fall Down

by Megan Hart

Two blond heads poked out from under the table. Sunny gathered them into her arms, hugged them close and kissed the tops of their heads, then looked up at him with a small, nervous smile as she stood.

  “I’m sorry,” Sunny said. There was no point in denying anything. “Liesel said to cook the chicken, and I wasn’t sure how to use the oven.”

  “Where is Liesel?” Chris flapped the tea towel again, but most of the smoke was now disappearing.

  “She called and said she’d be home late, and could I start dinner.” Sunny frowned with a look at the oven. “I’m sorry, Chris,” she repeated.

  He gave her a long, strange look. “If you didn’t know how to use it, why didn’t you call her? How the he—heck do you not know how to work a freaking oven?”

  Sunny took a deep breath and coughed on the still-thick scent of smoke in the air. She’d made a mess of things, unintentionally, but she had to take responsibility for it. She hugged Happy and Peace to her again, grateful Bliss’s sobs had softened into silent, hitching tears.

  She bent to murmur into Happy’s ear, “Take Peace upstairs into the bedroom. Silent feet. Go, now.”

  When they’d gone, she faced Chris with a sense of inevitability. “I should have called her, you’re right. I was stupid and silly.”

  “You could’ve burned the house down,” Chris said unnecessarily. He tossed the tea towel into the sink and ran his hands through his hair. Everything reeked of smoke, and he went to the glass doors to take a long, deep breath. He turned back. “Look, Sunshine…”

  Chris stopped dead. Sunny had pulled a large wooden spoon from the kitchen tool caddy. She held it out to him, and Chris took it automatically. Sunny turned to the kitchen table and leaned over it. She flipped her skirt up, exposing her plain white panties. Her hands on the table squeaked as she put her palms flat on the stainless-steel surface.

  She looked at him in resignation over her shoulder, hoping he’d at least be fast.

  Chris stepped back, jaw dropping, mouth dry. “Sunny. What the hell?”

  And that was how Liesel found them.

  Chapter 20

  The first time Liesel Gottlieb looks across the room and sees Christopher Albright, she’s not looking for him. Her gaze just sort of snags on his face as she scans the crowd the way everyone does at parties. Seeing who’s who.

  The second time, though, she’s looking specifically for the blond man with the loud laugh who’s entirely focused on the short redhead in a dress a size too small. She’s all hair and heels and cleavage, and if Liesel were to get much closer, she’s sure the woman would be all perfume, too. That’s okay. Liesel’s a lot more than tits and lipstick, and predatory women like that are lots of fun to usurp.

  Liesel waits, though. This party is full of single hotties, and she’s not really that into blonds as a rule. There is something about him, though. The laugh, for one thing. It turns heads, not just hers. The redhead can’t quite keep up with him, though bless her tiny heart, she’s trying.

  Liesel circulates. She thinks of leaving. She changes her mind when she passes by the makeshift bar someone’s set up at the kitchen table and finds the blond man struggling with a couple slices of lime and a bottle of rum.

  “Mojito?” he asks hopefully.

  Liesel eyes the goods and pulls out the ingredients she needs to make up a standard mojito. She mixes the drink and hands it to him. “It would be better with crushed mint and simple syrup, but this will have to do. I hope she likes it.”

  His gaze shifts toward the living room for a second. “How do you know it’s not for me?”

  “You don’t look like a mojito drinker.” Liesel leans back against the counter. “I figure you for a whiskey sour sort of guy.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He gives her his hand to shake. “Chris.”

  “Liesel.” He has a nice handshake, firm and warm. Not clammy. “Am I right?”

  “Whiskey and soda, actually. But you were close.”

  She laughs. “I tended bar to pay for my last couple years of school.”

  The conversation moves on from there, one topic flowing into another without any break and sometimes, any sense, though neither of them seems to have trouble understanding the other. They laugh. A lot. He leans in to put a hand on the cabinets next to her head, the drink and the redhead both long forgotten. Liesel tips her head, offers her mouth without a word.

  That first kiss goes on and on.

  Liesel leaves the party with Christopher, and they kiss again under a streetlight. Again at the corner by the stop sign. Once more on her doorstep, where he leaves her without asking if he can come inside.

  She’s not surprised when he calls her the next day, or when he asks her out. She’s not even surprised how much she likes him, because meeting Christopher is like hooking up with an old friend she’s known forever. They just…mesh. They merge.

  They were married not quite two years later. Nothing fairy tale about it, no chick-flick drama, just two people who met, fell in love and kept on loving. Facing her husband from across the den, watching him drink his whiskey and soda, Liesel realized how lucky they’d been to have had so few bumps in their road. The problem was, she thought as her husband paced and drank and shut her out, they had no practice at dealing with trouble. It was easy enough to stand together when things were going well. What were they going to do now that things were a little rocky?

  Her hands were cold, and she rubbed them together. She leaned on the arm of the couch, not wanting to sit and yet unsure of how long she could keep standing. “You have to talk about this, Christopher.”

  He sipped at his drink. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “It’s not about what I want you to say. It’s about what you think or feel or need to say.”

  He gave her a look. “Really? You want me to talk about how I feel? Or do you want me talk about how you want me to feel?”

  She wanted to say he was being unfair, but something in his tone stopped her. How did she want him to feel? For that matter, how did she feel, herself?

  “This is a mistake. We were stupid to think this was the right thing to do. We don’t know anything about where she came from, except that those people were a mess. They all killed themselves, for God’s sake,” Christopher muttered, at least making the attempt to keep his voice down. “And she doesn’t seem to see a damn thing wrong with it, Liesel! Who knows how they messed with her head.”

  “So we’ll get her help!”

  Christopher tossed back the last of his drink and set the glass on the bookcase with a thud. He paced, hands on his hips, not looking at her. “She almost burned the house down. Did you think about that? How she doesn’t even know how to work an oven? We’re not talking about getting her a little help, Liesel, we’re talking about training her from the ground up.”

  “She’s not a dog!”

  “No, and you can’t adopt her just like one.”

  Liesel sighed. “So what do you want to do?”

  “We could get them set up somewhere. There are places they can go—”

  “Like what? Foster care? Women’s shelter?”

  “She’s a grown woman. We could help her with money. She could apply for help from the state.”

  Liesel frowned. “You want to send your daughter and grandchildren away to live on welfare?”

  “She wanted me to…spank her.” Christopher’s voice was thick with disgust.

  She crossed the room to him, meaning to make this all go away. Make it better somehow. This was her husband in front of her, not some stranger, after all. Yet when she got there to take his hand, it felt different. She kissed the knuckles anyway. “I know.”

  “It was sick.”

  “I’m not arguing with you about that. But…she didn’t thin
k it was sick. I mean, it must’ve been something they did there. Where she grew up. I told you I saw scars. And I’m not saying it was right, not at all,” Liesel added hastily. “I’m just saying that before we make judgments, before we just write her off, don’t you think we should at least try to find out more about how she was raised? What they believed? Don’t you feel some sort of obligation to her, Christopher?”

  The speech rattled out of her in a long string of words she wasn’t even sure made sense, but it felt as if the faster she talked and the more she said, the likelier it would be that something clicked with him. She couldn’t even have said why it was so important to her, exactly.

  “This isn’t about me,” Christopher said in a low voice. He backed away from her and rubbed his sweating glass against his forehead. Typical. She was freezing; he was overheated. “And you know it.”

  Liesel sat up straight, jaw clenching. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Her husband gave her a long, long look. “They won’t be yours. Those kids.”

  As if she was trying to…what? Steal them? Like some freaky, crazy person who snuck into a hospital and tried to walk off with someone else’s newborn? Just hearing him say the words were as bad as if he’d slapped her, and her head rocked back just like he had.

  The look on his face was worse.

  “How could you…” was all she managed to say out loud before her throat closed up and her teeth bit off the reply. She tried again. “Her mother sent her here.”

  “Is that what you want to talk about? My first wife?” Christopher paused, then kept on without waiting for her to answer. “What do you want me to tell you, Liesel? She was a crazy bitch who cheated on me, lied to me and raised my daughter as someone else’s. She never once bothered to make me a part of Sunny’s life. And then when shit went down, Trish sent her to me, and I’m supposed to just…what? Forget all that? Forget about her?”

  “No. Not forget. You’re supposed to deal with this, Christopher. She’s your child, and she’s here now, with us. And we have to find some way to make this work, for the sake of those little ones, if nothing else.”

  He faced her. “If you had one of your own, would you feel the same way?”

  Liesel gaped. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “If you had your own.” She’d never seen him look so hard. It turned her stomach, and she had to look away, but he kept talking. “If I’d let you have a baby—”

  “Let me?” Liesel’s throat closed, the words forced and hoarse. “When have I ever needed you to let me do anything?”

  But he kept on, not listening to her, or at the very least not hearing. Not wanting to hear. “If you had a kid of your own, would you be so jazzed about having them here in this house? If it was a question of your child’s safety over that of some other woman’s children…”

  She turned, considering clapping her hands over her ears so she wouldn’t have to listen. His words followed, poked and prodded. Christopher had a caustic sense of humor that could bite when he was angry. Occasionally he could be insensitive, the way Liesel figured all men could be. He could be inattentive. She’d never, ever, thought of him as cruel. Liesel had never looked across the room at Christopher’s face and thought that she might gladly punch him in the junk. Or that she’d simply turn on her heel and walk away without a look back. She’d never imagined she could be angry enough to leave him. Her stomach ached from how easy imagining it became. She wondered if she’d ever be able to forget it. She thought probably she never would.

  His words cut at her, not because he was being cruel, though he was. But because inside her, not even in a place that was very deep and not at all a secret, Liesel knew he was right.

  “Well,” she said finally, when it became clear he wasn’t going to say any more, “I don’t. Do I? Have my own. And I probably never will. Maybe this is the closest I’ll ever get.”

  A long beat of silence cut her to the bone, until at last he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Sorry because if they’d had their own it would have been so self-righteously easy to put Sunny and her children aside? Sorry because he understood for the first time how badly she’d wanted a baby of her own? Or simply sorry because they’d tried to do the right thing and now had to deal with the punishment for their good deed?

  It didn’t matter.

  This was a man she loved, who loved her, and even if they’d never had to get through anything difficult in the past, they were going to get through this now. When Christopher put his arms around her, his chin on top of her head, Liesel pressed herself close to him, the beat of his heart familiar and steady under her cheek. Somehow, they would get through this.

  Chapter 21

  Sunny had messed up again. Burning the dinner had been bad enough, but then when she’d tried to make amends she’d made everything so much worse. It had seemed simple enough to give Christopher the spoon. He was, after all, her father.

  Sunny couldn’t forget the look on his face. He’d been revolted. Liesel, coming through the door, had actually shouted at him and grabbed the spoon from his hand before Sunny could tell her it hadn’t been his idea, but hers. Liesel had backed away from Christopher with a look of disgust identical to his, but within a few seconds of his hurried explanation that look had turned on Sunny herself.

  It had been awful.

  In the corridor of the morgue, her mother’s father had looked right past her as though she didn’t exist. That had been better than seeing the faces of the people who were supposed to be her family—her blood family, staring at her as though she were some kind of monster.

  She’d tried to explain that because of the mistakes she’d made, and the mess, it was Christopher’s job to discipline her. His duty, in fact. The wooden spoon was as close to a switch as she could find on short notice.

  Liesel had actually tossed the spoon in the trash and turned to Sunny with her arms crossed across her stomach and hands cupping her elbows. Holding herself, against exactly what Sunny didn’t know, but it had shown on her stepmother’s expression as sickness. Then Liesel had suggested in a voice that was more like a command that Sunny go upstairs with the children and wait until they called her back down.

  She’d expected them to make her leave. She hadn’t had any idea about where she might go, but she’d been prepared. Terrified, but ready. Instead, they’d offered her another chance.

  Now she couldn’t sleep. Bliss had been sleeping without waking in the night more regularly over the past week than she had since she’d been born. Peace and Happy were clean, warm, well-fed and dressed. They had toys to play with, and even as Sunny’s conscience poked at her for letting them have such worldly things, such wasteful things, there was no denying that it had made all this so easy. There were no late-night drills, no punishments. Nothing to fear. Everything that had been her life, gone and replaced with what anyone could see was better.

  Still, this bed, this room, this house were all too big. Too confusing. She tossed in the warm blankets until her new nightgown tangled around her ankles and she had to kick off the covers and get out of bed.

  In Sanctuary, roaming the halls at night could get you into trouble. There were few enough nights, anyway, that they weren’t woken for some reason or another. A rainbow drill. A room inspection. When she’d moved from her mother’s room into the dorm, it had been common for John Second or one of his friends to come during the night and pick out a girl or two for special “inspections.”

  It had never stopped Sunny from slipping out into the shadows and creeping to the kitchen for snacks she didn’t even want to eat. It was never hunger that drove her. Just the idea that she could get away with it.

  She wasn’t hungry now, and she knew that even if she was, neither Liesel nor Christopher would deny her something to eat, no matter the hour. Still, s
he crept from her room on soft feet, easing down the thickly carpeted hallway with her breath captured tight in her lungs. She took each stair slowly, testing with her toes first to make sure none creaked to give her away.

  She searched the pantry first, fingertips brushing over the boxes and packages of food. So much of it, and all contaminated with additives and chemicals and things so bad for your vessel they made cancer. In the cupboards, too. Bottles, cans, jars. She pressed a cool glass jar to her cheek to feel the smoothness, but settled it back on the shelf.

  A noise froze her in place, hands full of proof she was not the good girl she was supposed to be. Another noise, something like a snore. Sunny carefully replaced everything she’d taken out and shut the cabinet and pantry doors quietly before going down the hall toward the den.

  She’d turned the kitchen light on and in the glimmer of it tiptoed just to the doorway, filling the hall but doing no more than peeking inside the den. She shrank back at the sight of Christopher in the chair in front of the television, but it was too late. He’d seen her.

  “Come here.” His voice was thick, low.

  Her feet moved, one step and another, even though she wanted to go the other way. When she was close enough to him, his hand took her by the wrist, fingers curling tight. He pulled her onto his lap.

  Sunny went quiet. Not just silent with her voice, no sound, no protest, nothing to say, but quiet in her head. He would touch her now. Run his hands up and down her body and find the soft and hidden places. Sunny sat loosely, nowhere near calm but letting her muscles be tricked into the pretense of relaxation. It was always better that way, to let herself be limp and placid like a rag doll. Like her body belonged to someone else.

  He buried his face in her hair, which she’d taken out of the braid she normally wore. His fingers tangled in it. She could hear the low rasp of his breath and feel the shift of his shoulders as he leaned into her. She thought he might be…crying?

  Now she put her arm around him, one hand rubbing his back, the other on top of his head. Her fingers sank into the thickness of his hair. She didn’t know this man who was supposed to be her father…but she knew how to comfort someone.