All the Pretty Poses

by M. Leighton

  “By the time we got to the hospital, they couldn’t stop it. She was too tiny to make it, too weak to breathe on her own. She died two days after she was born.” Kennedy bursts into sobs so deep, they sound like they’re coming from somewhere in her soul rather than her physical body. “Your dad came to visit me. He told me that it would ruin your life to know about her, that if I loved you I would never tell a soul. So I didn’t. I never told anyone. Because I loved you.”

  Over Kennedy’s head, I glare at my father. I’ve never felt more hatred for another human being in my entire life. It burns in me like a hellish fire.

  “How could you?” I growl.

  “I did what I had to do for you, son. For your future. You wouldn’t be where you are today if you’d stayed with her. She was tarnished goods.”

  Tarnished goods?

  Ice. My heart pumps one sudden burst of icy cold blood through my veins before it bursts into flames. An inferno traveling through my body.

  “What did you say?”

  “You think I didn’t keep an eye on you? You think I didn’t know what you were doing? And who you were doing it with? I knew all about her. Her perverted father, too. I saw the way he looked at her, touched her when he thought no one was around. He couldn’t stay away from her. That’s how he found out about you. He was following her and saw you two in the woods. He was filth. I would never let something like that touch you, touch our family.”

  I see red.

  I release Kennedy and I lunge at my father, grabbing him by the throat and throwing him against the wall, intent on choking the despicable life out of him, intent on watching existence drain right out of him. “You knew? You knew what he was doing to her and you did nothing? You did nothing?”

  My father makes a sputtering sound, his face turning bright red, fading into a dusky purple the longer I cut off his air supply.

  “You make me sick! You are every bit as much a monster as he was!” I shake him, slamming him harder up against the wall as he claws at my hand, trying to loosen my grip. “I hate you! I hate that I share your blood!” I squeeze harder.

  “Reese! Reese no!” Kennedy cries, pulling at my arm. “Let him go! He’s not worth it.”

  I hear her words, but I don’t care. To me, taking his life is worth it. It’s a service. I’m doing the world a favor by ending him.

  “Reese, if you hurt him, we won’t have a future. It’ll ruin your life. Please don’t hurt him. Please don’t let him take anything else from me.”

  The pain in her voice penetrates the haze of my fury. I see the consciousness dwindling from my father’s eyes and I know how close I am to killing him.

  But I think of Kennedy.

  Always Kennedy.

  I release him and back away.

  My father slides bonelessly to the floor, gasping for air and holding his beet-red throat.

  “I swear to all that’s holy, if you ever, ever come near her again, I’ll kill you. I’ll drop you where you stand and bury your body where no one will ever find it.” He neither moves nor speaks. “Do you hear me?” I shout, bending to scream into his ear.

  My father raises hate-filled eyes to glare into mine. We stare at one another for a few seconds and I see the instant that my sincerity sinks in. A wary light flickers in his cold eyes and I know that he realizes that I’m as serious as I’ve ever been about anything. I just pray that he’s smart enough not to test me. Because he will lose. He will lose everything if he crosses me. I’d give my life for her, even if it means taking someone else’s.

  Finally, he nods.

  “Now get out,” I say, dragging him to his feet and throwing him toward the door. “Get out!”

  I watch him open the door and stagger through it. It takes all my self-control not to kick his ass onto the walkway and make him bleed, but Kennedy asked me not to hurt him. So I won’t. Instead, I shut the door, shut the door on my father and that part of my life.

  I turn to gather Kennedy into my arms and I let her cry. My chest feels heavy. Crushed, like I’ve suffered a great trauma to it. I hurt for her, for all the things she’s suffered, for all the time we’ve lost and for the baby that I never even got to see.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO- Kennedy

  I never considered how much it might hurt me to have to tell Reese about Mary Elizabeth. Or how much it might hurt him to hear it. The look on his face when he finally turned to me after coming to blows with his horrible father was agonizing to see. However, it was just another reminder that, deep down, Reese is nothing like that man. Henslow Spencer might’ve steered Reese in one direction or another, but not even his evil manipulation could kill the wonderful soul that Reese was born with. It just delayed its appearance by a few years. In a way, that almost makes it sweeter. It certainly makes me thankful that I’m still around to see it. I wouldn’t have missed this Reese for the world.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE- Reese

  Waking with Kennedy in my arms is the only solid, real thing that I feel when I open my eyes. I’ve always known that my father was a bastard, but I guess I never knew just how much of a bastard.

  I feel overwhelmed by wrongs that need to be righted, by mistakes that need to be rectified, by apologies that need to be made. But how? How can I go back and fix things that happened so long ago?

  Kennedy stirs against me. She’s my first priority. Making things right with her. Making things right for her.

  I turn onto my side, pulling her into the curve of my body and pressing my lips to one bare shoulder. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning,” comes her hoarse reply. I can hear her smile, though. Gone are the tears. I just need to make sure they stay gone. After today…

  “Can we talk?” I ask.

  I feel her stiffen. “Of course.”

  “I know this might be hard for you, but I need to work all this out. Will you tell me about the baby?”

  I feel as much as hear her sigh. “Oh, Reese, she was beautiful. For the hours that she lived, she was the sweetest baby in the world. She had your hair, dark and a little wavy. A head full of it from the moment she was born. Her little hands and feet were the most precious thing I’ve ever seen. And the way she fit in my arms when I got to hold her…even for those few minutes…”

  I can feel her anguish. It’s different than mine, but I feel it nonetheless.

  “Where is she buried?”

  “At Bellano,” she sniffs. “Near the cottage. Hidden”

  “Malcolm never knew?”

  “I never told anyone. I can’t be sure who Hank told. Malcolm found out about her somehow. He might’ve known where she was buried.”

  I hesitate to ask this of her, but I’ll need her help if the grave is that hard to find. “Would you mind if we go visit her?”

  She turns in my arms to look up into my face, her pale green eyes glassy with unshed tears. “No, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

  The way she presses her lips to mine, like she’d rather kiss me than to take her very last breath, tells me that this will mean as much to her as it will to me.

  It’s when we get to the old groundskeeper’s cottage that I begin to wonder if I might’ve been mistaken.

  Kennedy gets quieter the closer we get to the place where she spent such difficult years. When I pull to a stop in the gravel drive that approaches the house from the rear, I hear her take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Does it still hurt you to see this place?”

  She worries her lip as she thinks. “No, it doesn’t hurt. I just think of how much Hank changed after Hillary died, how he went from a loving husband and a good foster dad to a man who would want to put his hands on a child. It turns my stomach.”

  I reach for her hand. “I’m so sorry that I never looked deep enough to see what you were going through.” It makes my guts twist into knots just thinking of what he did to her, even more so when I think that he cost her the life of her baby, of our baby.

  She laces her fingers through mine. “You weren’t s
upposed to see. I didn’t want you to see. Although I desperately wanted someone to save me, I loved you too much to let you carry that responsibility. That’s why I hid it so well.”

  “But I would’ve done things differently. I would’ve—”

  She leans over to put her finger across my lips, shushing me. “I know you would’ve. I didn’t want you to stay because you had to or because I needed you to. I wanted you to stay because you wanted to.”

  “I did, you know. I wanted to stay. I was just so weak. My father knew all the right things to say to get me to go along with him. I just… I hate that I’ve let him go this far. I hate that I didn’t put a stop to this long, long ago.”

  “But you’re doing it now. Not all is lost, Reese. There is still so much life out there for you.”

  I bring her hand to my lips and turn it over, kissing the palm. “For us,” I clarify.

  She smiles. “For us,” she agrees before she reaches for her door handle. “Come on. Let’s go meet your daughter.”

  Kennedy leads me around the house and into the woods to the left. We walk along a barely-there path until it just stops, just disappears into the dense undergrowth. She strikes out to the left again, weaving through the trees and stepping over a hollow log until she comes to a little patch of yarrow that completely covers the ground. She doesn’t have to tell me that we’ve arrived. The spot rests in sunshine and I can see the arrangement of rocks on the ground. They’re shaped like angel wings.

  Slowly, I walk to where the wings meet and I kneel. Instinctively, I know I’m directly over the final resting place of the daughter that I’ll never get to see this side of heaven.

  I feel Kennedy as she drops to her knees beside me. I feel the pitter pat of her tears as they coat the back of our joined hands with warm salt water. I feel them on my left hand, too. Only those aren’t Kennedy’s tears. They’re mine.

  We stay like that for a long time, spending quiet time with our daughter, neither of us saying a word. It’s when we’re finally making our way back to the car that I find myself unable to hold back another thought.

  “Do you ever think about having more children?”

  From the corner of my eye, I see Kennedy look at me, but I keep my gaze trained forward. I don’t want to influence her answer one way or the other.

  “Of course. But you don’t, do you?” she asks, a tinge of sadness in her voice.

  “I didn’t used to. I’ve never wanted to have a baby with anyone else. But with you it’s different. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped thinking somewhere in the back of my mind that maybe one day we’d be together.” I stop, taking Kennedy’s other hand and tugging her toward me so that I can put my arms around her. “When I got the vasectomy, I talked to the doctor about the possibility of having it reversed someday. How would you feel about that? Would you want to have another baby with me, Kennedy?”

  “Oh, Reese,” she says, tucking her head against my chest, but not before I see tears fill her eyes again. I feel a pang of guilt that I seem to make her cry so often.

  “Don’t cry, baby. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  I hear her sniff several times before she looks back up at me. “These aren’t sad tears. These are my ‘happy as hell’ tears. There’s a difference.”

  I smile at that. “Well, in that case…”

  I bend my head to kiss her. Fire sparks between us quickly. With all the skeletons out of the way, it seems that we are closer. And the closer we are, the hotter that flames burn.

  “I love you,” she says when I finally release her. “Thank you for loving me even though I’m not rich and I didn’t finish high school and I—”

  “Wait, what?” I interrupt. “You didn’t finish high school? How did you—”

  “I got my GED. When Hank took me out of school, I got too far behind to catch up, and after the baby died, I guess he saw me as soiled goods. He didn’t try to touch me anymore, but he wasn’t the least bit afraid of hitting me or kicking me if he felt like I needed it. So after he died, the first thing I did was go get my GED. That’s where I met Gena Lamareau. She was the teacher, but she also owned a little dance studio in town. Once she found out that I wanted to dance, she started letting me come by and participate in her lessons for free. Those were my first steps toward leaving my past behind and becoming someone that I wanted to be, to have something that no one could take away from me.”

  As I stare into her eyes, eyes that seek no pity, I know for a fact that one of the first things I’ll do when I move in to Bellano, just a few hundred yards away, is to burn down the groundskeeper’s cottage. Right after I give our daughter the kind of grave site she deserves.

  For Kennedy’s sake, I push back my anger in favor of something more constructive. I raise my hands to stroke her cheeks, soft as silk and twice as fine. “You are the strongest, most beautiful creature I’ve ever known. Every day you amaze me in some new way.”

  She shrugs, but her cheeks pinken with my compliment. “Life either crushes us or polishes us. I’m just glad that we both held up under the pressure, that we made it to here. To now. I wouldn’t trade a million happy childhoods for ending up here with you. I have regrets and heartaches just like everybody else, but I can’t let them define me. I choose to leave them in the past where they belong and only bring along the good things that matter. Like you. Our summer. The baby we made. Those are the only things worth saving.”

  “And you. You were worth saving. Then. Now. Forever.”

  I love the sound of that when I’m talking to Kennedy—forever.

  It’s time to focus on that, to put the deeds of my father and the ways that he influenced us behind me forever. Some things are unforgiveable. There’s no point in wasting any more of my life trying to find a redeeming quality in my dad. It’s time to move on, move on to the kind of life that I want for myself. One with Kennedy. With Kennedy and our happiness and our children.

  And one without Henslow Spencer.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR- Kennedy

  I watch the familiar landscape whiz by. Reese is taking me to Bellano for the arrival of the furniture he ordered. He asked me to help him pick it out, and I know he wants me to live there with him, but today he seems particularly excited to make the short trip.

  The furniture truck is already there when we arrive. Tanny is bundled in a thick sweater to keep her warm against the cold winter air that’s gushing through the wide-open front doors as the movers haul in heavy bed frames and sturdy dressers.

  I give her a hug and a kiss as I pass. Reese does the same. As always, Tanny strokes his cheek and smiles into his eyes. “My two favorite people,” she says, turning her twinkling blue eyes to me.

  “Is it ready?” he asks.

  Her smile is angelic and happier than I think I’ve ever seen it. “It is.”

  “Is what ready?” I ask.

  They look at each other and smile, but neither answers me. Reese simply takes my hand and says, “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  We walk down the hall, discussing the new additions of art and rugs and knick knacks here and there. Reese didn’t want to get rid of his uncle’s things, so much as rearrange them or add to them. We both love all the antiques and history-rich pieces in the house. We both grew up seeing them and feeling like this was our “true” home, so neither of us wanted to change much.

  It’s when we get to the room that has always been Tanny’s that Reese stops just outside the door.

  “I ordered a few extra things for this room,” he says, his lips hinting at a smile.

  “For Tanny’s room?”

  “Errr, not really. Tanny is taking one of the big suites in the other wing.”

  “Then what’s going in here?” I ask.

  “Why don’t you go see for yourself?” I see satisfied mischief in his eyes and it makes my stomach twitter in anticipation.

  I push open the door and I can’t stop the gasp that bubbles up in my throat any more than I can stop the wash of tears that fills
my eyes.

  Before me, Tanny’s room is nowhere to be found. This room looks like it’s ready for the arrival of a baby. The walls are painted a cheery yellow and the floors have been re-stained to look like warm honey. There are fluffy white rugs scattered about and a white crib sits at the bay window, flanked by two brand-new, padded rocking chairs.

  “It’s a nursery,” I whisper, my heart fluttering in my chest. “Oh, Reese,” I exclaim, turning into his always-waiting, open arms. He curls them around me, tucking me warmly and safely against his wide chest. “Just when I think I can’t be any happier…”

  “You might as well expect things like this. As long as I’m alive, I’ll always want to make you happier.”

  “The only thing that could make this more perfect would be having some family here to share it with. I hate that Malcolm couldn’t see this.”

  “I do, too. He would’ve approved one hundred percent. But at least we still have Tanny.”

  I turn shining eyes up to his. “I bet she was giddy with excitement, wasn’t she?”

  Reese grins. “Yeah, she was pretty damn happy.”

  “Why don’t you go get her?”

  I walk around the room, ooo-ing and ahh-ing over all the tiny details until Reese returns with Tanny. She stands in the doorway with shining eyes and looks around what used to be her room.

  “Think you’ll mind having a little one around here, Tanny?”

  “I can’t think of one single thing I’d love more.”

  “I was just telling Reese that everything is perfect. Just perfect. And we get to share it with you.”

  Tanny covers her trembling lips with one hand as she struggles to compose herself. After a few moments, she pulls something from behind her back. It’s a wooden box, about the size of a shoe box, covered with beautiful carvings.