by Opal Carew
But this time, it was my fault. I didn’t know how I’d ever be able to live with that.
“Oh, Lucien. Please don’t cry,” she said as she came to me. She reached up and grabbed my face into her smooth hands. I winced as her touch brought me back, but I let her wipe the thin red tears away. “I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t apologize. Just tell me there’s something I can do to change your mind. I’ll make any promise. I’ll accept any condition.”
A long time passed before she dropped her hands and her gaze. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
I cut my eyes away and nodded. Struggling to keep my voice even, I asked, “May I say good-bye to Ollie before I leave?”
“She’s sleeping…” She knotted her hands in front of her.
“I won’t wake her, Sam, I promise. I can’t bear the thought of not saying good-bye.”
The internal debate played out on her face, then she turned and walked silently up the steps. I followed Samantha into Ollie’s room, lit by a pink castle-shaped lamp that cast a low, warm tint. I knelt down on the floor next to her bed. Ollie was curled on her side and faced out into the room, toward me.
Il mio piccolo angelo. My little angel. She was the angel, not me.
Samantha was right. She deserved protecting no matter the costs. While I thought she’d be equally safe around me, I couldn’t deny where Samantha’s priorities were or that she thought she was doing the right thing. Even if her decision was tantamount to my destruction, my love for Ollie made me accept it.
I spoke quietly, keeping my promise to Samantha not to disturb her daughter. “I love you, precious Ollie. The way you accepted me, the way you looked at me—I’ll never forget your kindness or your love. I hope you’ll always be able to remember how much I loved and adored you. You listen to your mom. She loves you very much, and she only wants what’s best for you. The two of you will have long wonderful lives together. And though we won’t see each other again”—I paused, swallowing down the nauseating blend of Samantha’s emotions and my own turmoil—”know I’ll always be thinking about you, wondering what great things you’re accomplishing.” I took a deep breath, trying to steady my voice. “Dream sweet dreams, Ollie. Forever.”
I leaned over and barely brushed a kiss on her hair. I inhaled deeply and tried to commit her innocent scent to memory. After a long moment, I stood up, and a tear-streaked Samantha and I walked out together. I pulled the door shut and rested my hand against it.
“Lucien? Is that you?”
Without thinking of Samantha, I pushed the door back open. Ollie flew off the end of the bed into my arms as the words spilled out of her.
“P-please don’t leave me, Lucien. I love you. I’m s-sorry. I’ll be better. I’m sorry I went t-to your house without asking. Mommy’s always t-telling me. If I hadn’t g-gone, I would’ve never run into him. Please,” she wailed.
“Ollie, no, no.” I sat down on the bed with her straddling my lap. “You can never think any of this is your fault. Do you hear me? You did absolutely nothing wrong.” I hugged her into me and imprinted the feel of her in my arms into my brain. “I love you, Ollie. So much. I’m so proud of you. You have so many exciting things ahead of you in your life. Know I’ll always love you and always be thinking of you.”
“Lucien!” The tears streamed down her face now. Her arm muffled sobs as she used her pajama sleeve to wipe her face and nose.
The combination of their suffering was becoming incapacitating. My head and chest throbbed. “There, there, now. It’s okay. Come, crawl back in bed. You’re going to be fine. Just fine.” My eyes burned from the tears threatening to flood into them.
She curled into her pillow. “Can you play for me, Lucien? I don’t think I can go to sleep.”
“I’m sorry, Ollie. I can’t play right now, but I can sing to you.” She nodded, her breath still coming in uneven heaves. My voice wavered through a lullaby I knew she liked.
“I love you, Lucien. You’re still my angel,” she whimpered as her eyelids drooped.
“Sleep now, baby. Dream good dreams.”
When her eyelids fell for good, I flew out of the room. Samantha gasped. Her surprise tingled in my stomach as she followed downstairs, alarmed. I leaned against a wall bent over with my hands on my knees, trying to breathe through the chaos of emotions. I willed myself under control and rose to face her.
Her face was pale, drawn. An LED in the kitchen read 10:59 p.m. Eight hours fifty-four minutes until my life is over. An awkward moment passed.
Finally, I walked over to the trash bag of items I’d retrieved from my house earlier. My mind started to work in a more mechanical way. I knelt and pulled out Ollie’s stack of DVDs and placed them on the coffee table. Then I found her brown bear. I held it up to my face, feeling its softness and inhaling its scent. Gritting my teeth, I set it on top of the pile of movies. Next, I pulled Ollie’s violin case out from underneath the bag and slid it on the rug underneath the coffee table. I held my hand on the case a beat longer than necessary.
The rest of the bag was mine. I looked around. The others had already taken my music stand and violin with them earlier. I rose, emptiness a heavy weight within my very blood. Samantha approached me, slowly at first. Then she caught me off guard by throwing herself against me. We stumbled back into the front door as her lips found mine, pleading, urgent. I wrapped my arms around her and surrendered to the kiss. I tasted the salt from the tears she’d cried as I ran kisses across her cheeks and jaw to her ear and neck. We panted and moaned into one another.
It was pleasure and pain. Light and dark. Life and death.
“I love you, Lucien. I’m sorry. I love you.” She looked up at me from underneath wet eyelashes.
“Never apologize. You gave me more than I could’ve ever hoped for. I love you, Samantha. I always will.” I lingered a kiss against her forehead.
It’s time. I looked into her eyes. She met mine, but the acrid smell of fear and panic flooded from her. She looked away gasping. “No!”
“Samantha—”
“I don’t want to forget! Please don’t make me!”
I scrubbed a rough palm over my face. Selfishly, I didn’t want her to forget either. And charming them hadn’t always worked anyway. I decided this was one infraction Magena could forgive. She knew charming wasn’t fail-safe.
I nodded. “I told you I’d never force you to do anything.” Then I reached down, picked up the black bag, and stepped out the door. I pulled it closed behind me and a thump and a brush told me Samantha had slid down against it.
My connection with both of them ached as I strained to break it. I swayed and gripped the railing.
When I regained my bearings, I looked up. “Meet on the street,” I growled to William and Jed, still in the truck. Expressions filled with emotions I didn’t want to analyze, they nodded.
I staggered around the side of the house and pounded a path back and forth while Samantha’s hitching sobs echoed through the living room wall. The sound ate at me, and I threw the bag into the night with a grunt.
My knuckles grazed something. I reached out, needing to destroy. In a frenzy, I ripped out the row of boxwoods at the side of her house and hurled them.
It wasn’t enough. I turned, almost behind her house now, and saw the large oak. A particular set of memories unhinged me: all those summer days I’d spent teaching Ollie to climb that tree.
I stalked up to the thick trunk and slammed my head into it. Blood trickled down my forehead as I reared back and with a roar planted my right fist into it over and over. The physical injuries didn’t distract me from the emotional distress—mine or hers.
I had to get away. The others were all waiting on the street for me. The brine of their sympathy made it all worse.
“Let’s go.” I didn’t wait for a response. I wrenched the door open and slammed my body into the Maserati and punched the accelerator. Tearing down the block and squealing around the corner, I careened in the direction of the
interstate, the rear of the car fishtailing.
My body screamed against the separation, tearing me apart as surely as if I’d been drawn and quartered. I cranked the volume control up to its maximum setting. Some rock band screeched out unintelligible lyrics against a background of explosive percussion and screaming guitars. It suited me just fine.
My head was the last place I wanted to be.
In an effort to escape the agony, I succumbed to a light trance and allowed only enough mental capacity to remain in control of the vehicle. I forced everything else out.
There was just me. Alone. The road. The midnight sky.
***
Something nagged at me.
Despite my growing distance, torment and horror choked and suffocated me. The emotions’ physical impact intensified and ripped me free of the trance.
That’s when I understood it. Fear. Pain. Regret. Panic. Longing.
This was the cocktail of Samantha’s and Ollie’s emotions I’d felt earlier. My Blood Connections with them were stronger than my need for self-preservation.
The strangest thing was my family’s feelings seemed to be reflected in what I was picking up. I looked in my rearview mirror. They weren’t behind me. But then I’d torn out of Frederick Street with little expectation they’d be able to keep up.
A block before the on-ramp to the interstate, my cell phone rang. The noise enraged me. It took everything in my power not to crumble the phone into a pile of metallic dust. I rolled my eyes at Catherine’s number on my caller ID.
“What?” I spat into the phone.
The voice that responded took me off guard. “Come back.” Samantha. “We need you. P-please?”
I remained in a stupor of grief and rage and self-loathing. The only thing I could think to ask was why she was calling from Catherine’s cell phone.
She ignored me. “Just come back, Lucien. Please.”
I pulled a U-turn across four lanes of traffic, sending a beat-up sedan into a tailspin. In six minutes’ time, I returned to Frederick Street, filled with equal parts dread and hope.
Unattended vehicles were parked haphazardly as if my family had returned unexpectedly. Everyone stood in the snowy field near Samantha’s townhouse. I couldn’t fathom the situation.
I raced across the field, but slowed as I approached them, still confused. In the center of the group, Samantha sat on the cold ground with Ollie on her lap. She rocked Ollie while whispering soft motherly reassurances in a panicked voice. Henrietta knelt next to them, delicately skimming her hands over Ollie’s arm and shoulder.
“What—”
Samantha looked up, her face full of the same grief and despair I tasted. “She fell.”
“What?”
Catherine placed her hand on my arm and pointed. My eyes followed her finger to the open window to Ollie’s room where the pink light of the castle lamp still illuminated the inside.
“She fell…out of her window?” Samantha nodded, clutching Ollie to her harder and rocking her. “Hen?”
She evaluated Ollie’s arm as she spoke. “Catherine felt her when it happened. She apparently landed on a surface tree root. She broke her arm and shoulder. It’s taking me longer to heal her because her body is still weak from the earlier attack.”
I knelt down, stunned. “Ollie?”
“I put her to sleep,” Henrietta responded. “It was bad.”
Samantha moaned at Henrietta’s words. “I said I wouldn’t go with you, to protect her,” she gasped as she tried to hold back tears, “and then…I didn’t.”
“Sam, you can’t blame yourself for this,” I said, still dazed.
She shook her head. Her emotions were a gut- twisting frenzy of guilt and grief and sadness. “I’m making this huge sacrifice, on both our parts, but if I can’t keep her safe, if she won’t let me, then what’s the point?”
“Sam—”
“Lucien, please, please, forgive me,” she rasped, her voice a raw scrape as tears finally leaked from her swollen eyes.
Griffin stepped back so I could crawl in next to Samantha. I wrapped my arm around her shoulder, and she sank into me, Ollie’s body falling slightly so she was between us, some of her weight on my thigh.
“There is nothing to forgive, dolcezza.”
Samantha choked back a sob as she pressed her face into my neck. “Help me. Please?”
The taste and sound of her anguish pulled at the center of my chest. “With what, sweetheart?”
“With Ollie. Please? Help me keep her safe. I can’t lose her. I can never lose her.”
I didn’t know how to respond to her. I couldn’t stay. But I didn’t dare hope she was asking to join me in leaving the city. “Sam—”
“Will you ask me again?” She pulled free of my arm so she could look up into my eyes.
“Ask you what?”
“Ask me. Please?”
Hope felt like the most dangerous emotion I’d ever known. But there was only one real question I’d put to her in recent hours. I swallowed thickly, then blew out a breath. “Will you come with me, Samantha?” My voice was a strained whisper. “Will you come with me to New York?”
She clenched her eyes shut and nodded against my shoulder. A wave of relief rolled through me so forcefully I sucked in a breath. “If you’ll still have me, have us, then, yes,” she whispered in a voice distorted by emotion.
I stopped breathing for a moment, half convinced I was still sitting in the Maserati on the way to New York and my grief had conjured up this hope-against-hope conversation.
“Lucien?” Henrietta interrupted. “We need to get Ollie someplace warm.”
Samantha and I stared at one another for a beat longer, then we separated as Henrietta lifted an unconscious Ollie into her arms for the second time in twenty-four hours.
“Your face,” Samantha said as she reached her hand toward my forehead.
I grabbed her hand before she could touch the blood crusted down the side of my face from my earlier encounter with the tree. Pressing a kiss against her knuckles, I murmured, “It’s nothing.”
She bit her lip as she continued to look up at my wound. When she finally looked away, down at the hand she was holding, she gasped at my healed but bloodied knuckles. A warm wave of compassion erupted from her. She tugged my hand to her mouth and kissed the back of it.
We returned to Samantha’s house. I felt queasy passing through her living room, remembering the wrenching good-bye scene that had played out there less than an hour before and still echoed in the air.
We got Ollie settled in her bed, and Henrietta stayed with her, continuing to work her hands over Ollie’s injuries. I walked to the window and pulled it down, but first noticed Ollie had pushed the screen out in her effort to flee the house. A wave of guilt swamped me for not registering her desperation sooner.
Griffin stood with Henrietta, a pointed look on his face. The clock read nearly 12:30, which only left us a little over seven hours until the sun rose. I guided Samantha into her bedroom and closed the door.
Tugging at my hair, I gazed at her, then walked up to her and grasped her hands. “Sam, you are welcome, of course. I want you. God, how I want you. But I don’t want you to feel you have to be with me if that’s not what you want. I can set you up somewhere safe, set you up with a whole new life. And we can watch over you, protect the both of you. But please, don’t make the choice to come with me out of fear. If you come with me, I want you to be with me because you want to.”
Samantha simply could not make her decision out of desperation. If she did, she would always regret it, always second-guess it, and I would feel every nuance of those emotions. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if Samantha felt cornered or pressured into this.
Samantha thought for a long while, staring down at her feet and shivering from the cold and her adrenaline. “Lucien, I love you. We love you. I won’t deny I’m scared. And confused. And still overwhelmed by…everything.” She heaved a breath. “But the main factor i
n my decision was Ollie’s safety. I didn’t want to risk it, to risk exposing her to unnecessary dangers. And then, not ten minutes after you left, she started screaming for you and then there was this thumping. I rushed upstairs and found her chair in front of her window and the broken screen. She was hanging from the tree limb whispering ‘Don’t leave’ over and over, but she couldn’t hold on. When she slipped, I thought I would pass out. Oh, God, the sound of…”
She choked on a sob and shook her head.
“She was crumpled on the ground, not moving. And I was so sure…”
I pulled her in for a hug, but she pushed back.
“No, no, please let me say this.” She took a deep breath. “I ran outside praying for her to be okay. My first thought after that was for you to be here, for your family to be here. And then I knew. I thought about the truck. And the stairs. And the fall from the window. And I realized there’s danger everywhere. If you hadn’t been here from the beginning, Ollie might very well have died when that truck hit her. I realized there are no guarantees—there’s only living life today. But there are no guarantees.”
We looked at each other for a long while. I finally managed, in a whisper, “Sam, please think this through carefully. I couldn’t bear it if you changed your mind. It would break me completely.”
“I won’t. I promise. I’m only sorry I didn’t come to these realizations sooner.”
I froze and used every means at my disposal to evaluate her. She was sincere. But I was still concerned about her reasoning.
She cupped her hands around my face. Her fingers worried for a moment over the faint mark of the forehead wound. She searched my eyes for a long moment. Forever came and went while I waited for her to speak.
Finally, she smiled. A warmth so healing rushed through me I had to close my eyes at the goodness of it. “All that I am, Lucien, all that I have…it’s yours. And it feels like it always has been.”
My eyes flew open. I sucked in a breath. That was all I’d needed to hear. I pulled her into my arms and pressed kisses onto her hair and face, then leaned back so I could look into her eyes.