Lacy
“Lacy! Oh my God!”
I bolted upright in the bed, shielding my eyes while they adjusted to the sudden shock of bright sunlight. Still groggy and disoriented from the most restless sleep of my life, it took a moment to realize I was in Nick’s bed, in his old room next door to Kevin’s at their house in Claryville.
“Jesus, I can’t believe you’re here!” Jolting instantly wide-awake at the sound of Kevin’s voice, I brought my hands down from my eyes just as he closed the door. Nearly tackling me with his warm embrace, he plied kisses all over my forehead and cheeks, while I sat too stunned to stop him at first. “Thank God, you’re home. It was so late when I got in last night that mom was already in bed. I didn’t know you were here until just now when I went down for breakfast and she told me.”
It was morning! Over Kevin’s shoulder, I glanced around Nick’s room. I remembered feeling so emotionally drained and physically exhausted after visiting my father that it had been difficult to hold my eyes open after Rhonda’s hearty dinner leftovers. I had agreed when Rhonda insisted I come up to take a nap, but never meant to sleep the whole night through!
The shrill ringing of the phone on Nick’s bed table startled me. Kevin quickly answered it. “Hello? Oh, hey Chris, how’re you doin’?”
I instantly went on guard. I wanted to tell Kevin about my engagement to Nick myself. I didn’t want him suspicious of why Chris would be calling here looking for me. Nick would be home in a few hours. Chris was no doubt calling to find out if I was ready for him to come pick me up so we could go meet Nick at the airport together as planned.
“No, my dad is next door at the Dalton house. What do you need?”
I should have been relieved to discover Chris wasn’t calling for me—and, therefore, wouldn’t give me away—but learning that he wanted to speak to Andy instead somehow added to my worry exponentially. I sat up straighter, leaning closer, hoping Kevin would say something to indicate what Chris was saying. Instead, he dictated to Chris the phone number I had once called my own, said a crisp, obligatory good-bye, and then hung up.
My second wave of morning sickness suddenly swept over me, and I couldn’t control it this time. I hurtled past Kevin and darted into the bathroom next door with only seconds to spare. As my stomach emptied, I tried thinking of a way to explain the episode without giving my condition away to Kevin before I had a chance to tell Nick first.
I had been anxiously waiting for our trip to Los Angeles, so I could pick a romantic moonlight stroll on the beach as the perfect time to tell him. Now, though, learning about my father had changed things. My happiness over starting a family with the man I loved was now a bittersweet joy.
I had been robbed of a life with my mother. Now, I had been deprived of what little time my father had left before joining her. I could have been by his side, helping care for him and lovingly nursing him through his losing battle against death. I could have cherished his last few months by building memories to live on the way I hadn’t been able to do with momma. If only he—and Nick—hadn’t denied me the opportunity. How could I not begrudge them both?
Yet, as angry as I was with Nick, he was my breath and soul. I would indeed forgive him, for to give up being with him wasn’t an option for my heart.
Fifteen minutes later, once I had a chance to finger-brush my teeth and run Kevin’s comb through my hair, I felt well enough to join him back in the bedroom.
“You okay?” he asked, coming to pull me into his arms without permission. And honestly, I still felt so emotionally drained and wobbly on my feet that I welcomed the support his arms provided.
“Yes. Nerves I guess. Coming home to find everything like this… I’m still a little in shock, I think.”
Easing out of Kevin’s embrace, I tried to give him a reassuring smile, though my watering eyes couldn’t have been very compelling.
“Oh, Lacy,” he crooned, filling the space I had just created between us by reaching up to wipe the tears from my cheeks. “You didn’t know about your dad, did you?” he surmised.
Unable to speak for my typhoon of emotions running amuck, I shook my head.
“You never called him?”
Wiping my cheeks, incessantly awash with the tangible manifestation of my despair, I shook my head again. Taking my chin in his fingers, Kevin forced me to look up and face him. “You never called anyone from home?” Instead of waiting for me to answer, he wistfully added, “But me. You called me.”
Looking touched by what I knew he interpreted as indisputable proof of my unwavering love for him, he smiled with as much joy as was appropriate under the circumstances, and it suddenly dawned on me that he had just mistaken my arrival as coming home to be with him.
Not wanting him to make any more presumptions, I quickly tried to set him straight. “Kevin,” I said, pulling away, this time stepping out of his reach and smoothing out my dress with guilty, shaking hands. “I have to tell you something. A lot has happened since I left and-”
I couldn’t do it. He watched and waited for me to finish, so unsuspecting and oblivious to the pain I could cause. Just as I never expected he would ever hurt me, he would never dream me capable of hurting him. I couldn’t do it. Not yet anyway.
“We have a lot of catching up to do, Kevin, but right now I need to go over and check on daddy.”
I was halfway around him on my way to the door when he grabbed my hand. “Hey, give me a sec to get dressed and I’ll come with you.”
“No,” I said, trying to appear casual when inside I was screaming the words. When he looked stricken that I wouldn’t want him to join me, I smiled to put him at ease. “I’m sure daddy’s tired and won’t be able to visit long, but I really want to see him alone. We’ll talk over breakfast when I get back.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Once in my own house, with the front door slamming behind me, I hurried toward my father’s shrine. I was almost to the bedroom door when Andy appeared in the archway separating the living room from the kitchen. A quiet calm in his red-rimmed eyes, a vacant detachment in his entire expression, gave me pause, and I stopped short to stare back at him.
“What? Is daddy…”
My throat constricted at the mere thought, and I cast a woeful glance toward my father’s deathroom door, expecting the worst.
“Jerry is still hanging on. It’s Nick.”
Sighing with relief, I took a few steps towards daddy’s room before his words finally registered, and I stopped again.
“What?”
“I was just about to call and have Rhonda send you over. Sit down, bird.”
“No,” I said, offended by his ominous tone.
Instead of insisting I sit down, he came to take my hands in his own large, fatherly ones. “He’s dead.”
My eyes widened, stunned by his blunt delivery, then narrowed in confusion. “Who? My dad?” Hadn’t he just said that my dad was okay?
“No, honey. Nick.”
It took a moment to recover from the alarm of what I knew must be a foul misunderstanding. Andy took advantage of my shock to elaborate. “Chris got a call from the highway patrol out in California. I just got off the phone from talking with them myself.”
Shaking my head in denial of his claim, he went on in spite of my refusal to believe.
“Apparently, a semi jack-knifed on the expressway and came across the median. The southbound lane was backed up with morning rush-hour traffic, so the cab Nick was riding in was trapped. The driver couldn’t move to avoid being hit…”
Andy broke off to let out a sob, pulling me close to bury his face in my hair. I instantly pulled free, though, and took his hands, smiling up at him with relief.
“It wasn’t him, Andy. His flight left at five o’clock this morning. He’s on the plane on his way home right now!” A giggle of joy escaped as I snaked my arms around his waist. “God, you had me scared half to death!”
“No, bird,” he said firmly, gripping my shoulders and hunching
over to make himself eye-level to me. His eyes were red and puffy, evidence that he had succumbed to his own private grief before I arrived and had pulled himself together enough to talk with me now. The fact that he had accepted such cataclysmic news unsettled me. “He wasn’t on his way home, honey.”
“Yes, he was!” I insisted. “In fact, his flight should land in just a few hours. Why don’t you drive me home so I can be there when he lands? I was going to call Chris, but you can take me instead, and once we get to the airport you can see for yourself that there’s been a terrible mistake. Besides, it’ll be quicker if you take me, so I won’t have to wait for Chris to drive all the way over from-”
“Come sit down, bird.”
Knowing in my heart that there was a mistake, I didn’t argue when Andy took my elbow and led me to the kitchen table. He lowered himself into the chair beside me and wiped away a few straggling, rebellious tears from his cheeks. A cold wave of terror swept through my heart.
“He wasn’t planning to come home. He found the letter from Noah Mason inviting you and your friends to New York. When he realized you were planning to pass up the opportunity, he couldn’t abide it. You were supposed to be home today, waiting for him. I was supposed to call you later this evening to explain why he didn’t come home, why he was leaving you. He was afraid if he called you himself that he wouldn’t be strong enough to resist when you tried to convince him to come back.”
Andy gave me a moment to process his words, which barely penetrated my shock. I shook my head, still denying his claim, though my conviction was waning with every tear that slipped from Andy’s eyes. He broke down in sobs and clutched my fingers, lowering his forehead to our clasped hands on the table. “He loved you, bird. God, he loved you. But he didn’t want you giving everything up for him, so he was willing to give you up instead. Only now…”
I stared down at the thinning strands of dark hair atop Andy’s head, paralyzed by mind-numbing shock.
He was wrong. Nick was on a plane on his way home. It was impossible for him to have been in a cab on the expressway at the same time when he was supposed to be on a flight home to me. Impossible.
I stood so suddenly that my chair skidded out from under me. “I have to get home. You’ll see, Andy. You take me home. Take me to the airport to pick him up and you’ll see—whoever you spoke to out in California was wrong.”
He looked up with dismay, sniffling back another sob. “Honey, they found his identification in his wallet.” When he saw my hardened jaw and cold glare, he took a different approach. “Don’t do this, bird, please. I need you to be strong the way you were when your mother died. I still have to tell Rhonda and Kevin, and—what are you doing?”
I held the phone and glanced back at him while I dialed. “I’m calling Chris to come pick me up. If you won’t take me to the airport to meet Nick, he will.”
“Lacy…”
I continued waiting for Chris to answer my call. Andy sighed. “Hang up, bird. He’s not home. He’s already on his way. He was just about to leave to come get you when he called me. He’ll be here within the hour.”
Feeling the cold, uncontrollable, tooth-jarring tremors taking over, and not wanting Andy to see such evidence of my dimming hope, I marched to the back door. “I’m going to walk down to meet him at the end of the driveway. I don’t want Rhonda or Kevin to see him picking me up.” With shaky resolve, I looked back over my shoulder before walking away. “You’re wrong, Andy. You’ll see.”
Lacy
Chris and I had waited at the airport for hours. Long after the last person came through the debarking tunnel and the airline staff closed the door to confirm that no other passengers would follow. Once he convinced me to go home, I sat on the sofa holding onto the last vestige of hope that Nick would walk through the front door at any moment. Or the phone would ring, and it would be him calling to let me know he had missed his flight, or that there was a delay with the airline. So sure I was that such a call would indeed come, I had cradled the phone in my lap, waiting.
“Lacy.”
My eyes fluttered open to find Chris sitting beside me with a comforting hand on my shoulder.
“You should go to bed,” he said, trying to pry the phone out of my grasp. I jerked it away from him at the same moment I noticed that sunlight no longer showed through the living room window. Dusk was setting in. A glance at the clock indicated that Chris had allowed me to doze for several hours.
His eyes held the sheen of pity, mixed with the red, swollen evidence of recent tears. If anyone would miss Nick as much as me, it would be his best friend. Realizing that I had just thought of Nick as gone brought fresh tears to my eyes. If Nick wasn’t home by now, Chris and Andy were right: He wasn’t coming home.
He was gone.
Chris must’ve seen the moment my hope died, for he brought my head to his shoulder. “Why, Chris? Why was he going to leave me?” I asked through my sobs.
“God, Lacy, if you don’t believe anything else, you have to know that he didn’t want to leave you. He loved you so much, Lacy. It broke his heart to know you were planning to give up everything like that. He didn’t want you to do it. He couldn’t stand the thought. As much as he loved you and wanted to be with you, the guilt over what you were doing and what it would cost you was eating him up. Not being able to tell you about your dad—that was killing him too. He thought you would hate him once you found out.”
“But it was such a waste,” I cried. “I can’t leave daddy like this. Not now. I’m still staying here anyway so he did it for nothing, Chris! For nothing!”
“I loved him too, Lacy. He was like a brother to me for most of my life. This may sound horrible, but in a lot of ways, I loved him more than I love my own brother. I know how you feel, and we’ll both get through this. But if you don’t go to New York, he stayed out there for nothing. This tragedy happened for nothing. Nick being gone will only be a waste if you make it one.”
Suddenly the phone rang in my lap, startling us both. Glancing up at Chris, my hope flared. He must have recognized that light in my expression, for he shook his head ominously.
“It’s him,” I said with conviction, grabbing Chris’s hand in excitement.
The phone rang again. He gave my fingers a warning squeeze, his frown as piteous as his tone. “Lacy…”
I pulled my hand free to answer the call, but his reflexes were quicker.
“Hello,” he answered, sounding as frantic as I felt, betraying his own hope. A second later, he closed his eyes and let out a blusterous sigh. “Yeah, Andy, she’s holding up okay,” he lied, though he cast a glance my way as though wishing that merely speaking the words would miraculously make them true. After another short pause, he said, “Yeah, okay. Bye.”
Once he ended the call, Chris let out another ragged sigh and gazed back at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Andy’s leaving early in the morning to fly out to California to bring home the…”
His words faded when he saw me recoil.
The body. To bring home the body. Nick’s beautiful, perfect body, no doubt marred and grotesque from the accident. The funeral most likely wouldn’t be an open-casket one. Would there even be an opportunity to view the… the body, to tell Nick my heartfelt goodbye in private? Or would I have to put on a strong front and swallow my grief so no one would suspect the depths of my suffering? If only I could see him one last time, see his body, perhaps I would be able to reconcile myself to the fact that all of this was real.
“You gonna be able to handle sleeping in that bedroom?” Chris asked, pulling me back from the dark hole I wanted to climb into inside myself. “I’ll sleep on the couch if you want to take my room until you leave.”
Not missing his assumption that I would indeed be leaving, my mind spun with panic. The thought of sleeping in that bed alone with the memory of Nick to haunt my every waking and sleeping thought was too agonizing to bear. Yet, the need to feel near him, to lay on the same sheets we had made love on only two nigh
t ago, where his lingering scent could envelop me and make him real and alive again for my desperate imagination, was a torturous agony I welcomed.
Was this the way my father felt when my mother died? How easily I could envision locking myself in that bedroom surrounded by everything “Nick” to keep him with me in some morbid, masochistic fantasyland. My father’s insanity suddenly didn’t seem so insane anymore.
Willingly prepared to condemn myself to the same fate, I rose from the sofa and bid Chris goodnight. “I’ll be okay.”
Lacy
After packing up all my belongings from the house in Asheville, Chris and I headed out early enough the next morning to arrive in Claryville before anyone in the Martin house might be awake to catch him with me. Once I had my things transferred from his car without detection, we took a moment to sit on my front porch swing and say what would likely be an indefinite farewell.
When I kept nervously glancing at the Martin house, he said, “You sure about this? You know you can stay at the house for a few more days until time to go.”
“I’m sure. But if I change my mind, I’ll call Alex and he can drive me over. I need to talk to him and Susan and Dorian anyway. I hadn’t planned on going to New York before, so I didn’t tell them about Mr. Mason’s invitation. But now that things have changed, I should let them know so they can decide if they want to come with me or not.”
He rolled his eyes as though I were foolish to entertain the possibility that my friends wouldn’t jump at the opportunity.
“Hey, Lacy?”
“Yeah.”
He took my hand and gave my fingers a meaningful squeeze. “Things will be awkward and busy with the funeral and all. In case I don’t get another chance to talk to you alone like this, I just want you to know that I meant it last night when I said I loved Nick like a brother. Because of him, you and I are friends by default now. It would be a dishonor to his memory if I didn’t say this: If you ever need anything, even if it’s only wanting to talk about him, or cry over him, or just feel close to him by hanging out with someone who loved him as much as you do, I’m always here.”
Breaking Lacy (Nick & Lacy Book 1) Page 26