The First Time at Firelight Falls

by Julie Anne Long

  She pressed the half-dressed Ken doll into Jasper’s hand. Jasper gave a start.

  “Whoa! This dude has quite a package.”

  “Don’t be scared! It’s easy to make him modest. Here are his favorite pants.” Annelise handed him a pair of brown pants. “They’re brown because he works for UPS, like Jeffrey who comes into my mom’s store and hangs out longer than he should.”

  Jasper clutched the Ken doll and darted a look at Eden that was reminiscent of a guy tied to a post in a basement that was rapidly filling with water.

  Eden was conscious that she’d been standing back like Jane Goodall observing the interactions of primates. And part of that was to make a possibly unworthy-of-her point: children are dazzling, and children are effort, and sometimes children are boring. But they’re always worth it.

  Just exactly what Gabe had said.

  “Annelise, why don’t you show Jasper your guitar. I’m not sure he’s in the mood to play Barbies. You probably got your own musical talent from him.”

  “Okay!” Annelise said brightly. “This is my guitar.” She retrieved her three-quarter kid-sized guitar from its stand.

  He cradled it respectfully in his long hands, with a reverence that Annelise clearly relished and that Eden appreciated.

  “Wow, she’s really pretty,” he told her.

  “My guitar is a girl?” Annelise breathed. “How do you know?”

  “I can just tell. I know a lot about girls.”

  He shot a mischievous look in Eden’s direction. Which she didn’t reward with anything like a smile. He didn’t need the encouragement.

  “I write all my songs on this guitar,” Annelise pronounced as grandly as if she were Adele. “I wrote ‘Invisible Dad’ on this guitar. I know Glory Greenleaf. She’s super great. She taught me to play C and G and then she went away to be famous. Play A minor now, okay?”

  Jasper obligingly strummed an A minor chord, and then, thrillingly, sang.

  “Annelise . . . oh Annelise . . .

  The wind in the trees whispers sweet Annelise . . .

  The trees

  say to the bees

  have you seen Annelise?

  She’s as pretty as the spring

  And she’ll make you want to sing

  . . . Annelise . . .”

  Eden and Annelise listened, motionless, utterly enchanted.

  That was Jasper’s power. He could whip out a silly song just like that and sing it with enormous soul and have a stadium eating out of his hand.

  He smiled at Annelise, pleased with himself, charmed by, and probably relieved by, Annelise’s rapt silence and glowing eyes.

  “Maybe something about breeze next,” she suggested shyly. “Or grilled cheese. And maybe you could really whisper one of the sentences.”

  “Those are all excellent suggestions. I’ll work on it. Did you name her?” He gestured with the guitar.

  “Guitars have names?” Annelise was fascinated.

  “Oh, yeah. For example, the two guitars I play the most are named Arrow and, um, Veronica.”

  “How come those names?”

  He hesitated again.

  Eden was pretty sure there was some prurient reason for both of them.

  “They just seemed to fit,” he said diplomatically, apparently catching on how easy it was to get lost in a conversational labyrinth with a ten-year-old, where one question never led out of it; it just led to another and another and another.

  “Maybe you should name a guitar Annelise.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  “It would be so cool if you could sing at my school,” Annelise said with great wistfulness.

  “Why, does Principal Caldera sing?” he asked, with startling, almost comical bitterness. “I could totally sing at your school.”

  Eden shot him a warning look.

  “Oh, could you?” Annelise clasped her hands again. “We’re having a raffle and everything to raise money for a new baseball field. Mom is donating flowers. But Caitlynn Pennington’s mom is donating a whole fancy dinner and a getaway at a hotel in Black Oak.”

  “Not in Black Oak!” Jasper gasped.

  Annelise nodded dismally.

  “I can do better than that. I can give you a signed guitar to raffle.”

  Annelise froze.

  Then she sucked in a dramatic, long breath. “Seriously?” she said in that squeaky register only ten-year-olds seemed able to achieve.

  Jasper didn’t even flinch. His hearing probably wasn’t what it used to be, anyway, from proximity to all those Marshall Stacks.

  “NO. WAY.” Annelise gripped his wrist and gazed earnestly into his face like she’d just had a religious conversion.

  “WAY.”

  They froze that way in a moment of communion.

  Annelise was clearly thunderstruck by her luck.

  “It’s in two whole weeks. On a Friday night! We’re going to have a table and Mom is doing the flowers and it’s going to be so much fun! You can maybe even sit with us!”

  “Maybe so,” he said, rather noncommittally, and with an eye dart that made Eden’s radar ping with alarm.

  “Mom, did you hear?”

  “I heard,” Eden said rather grimly.

  Then a ding on his phone made Jasper spring up. He’d probably set a timer.

  “Well, lovely girl, I’ve loved spending time with you, but I have to get going. Can I have a hug?”

  He knelt again. Annelise hugged him goodbye with something a little closer to her usual abandon.

  This time, Eden couldn’t see his expression.

  He stood up so fast his bracelets jingled frantically. “We’ll talk again soon, okay? Fist bump, daughter of mine?”

  Annelise put out her fist to be bumped.

  They smiled at each other.

  And then Jasper didn’t quite bolt for the door, but he sure got there in a hurry.

  “Honey, why don’t you play A minor while I talk to Jasper?” Eden said to Annelise, and followed Jasper.

  He paused there. “Thanks, Eden,” he said. “For . . . all of this.”

  His eyes were glazed. She could have sworn he’d even aged ever so slightly.

  “You did great for a first go-round. You look a little shell-shocked, though.”

  “Yeah?” he said distractedly. “Wow, she’s just . . . it’s just . . . wow.”

  He pushed his hands through his hair.

  “Yep,” Eden agreed cautiously.

  “Is it always like that? Um, dizzying? And dazzling?” he added hurriedly.

  “No.”

  Something like a smile began to curve his mouth.

  “Not when she’s sleeping,” she added.

  The smile dropped off.

  She was tempted to laugh, but she took pity. “She is a little keyed up. Naturally. She’s sharing things about herself and kind of showing off, too. Kids have insane amounts of energy.”

  He took this in with silence. And then he smiled a sort of wistful smile. “She’s . . . amazing.”

  “She is.” She already knew this, but she couldn’t help but feel gratified that Jasper recognized it, too.

  Though the word amazing had quite a number of facets and dimension, the way he said it.

  “Can I hug you goodbye?” he said, almost diffidently.

  She eyed him skeptically. “As long as your hands stay far, far away from my ass.”

  “Deal.”

  She hesitated, and then thought, oh, what the hell. He was family.

  He smelled like patchouli and was pleasantly lean. But the way he clung for a desperate moment made her think that he’d asked for the hug because he’d needed reassurance and not a grope, which made her feel about a thousand years old and like his mother, which wasn’t sexy in the least.

  He left her with the scent of his patchouli and doubt adhering to her.

  She supposed they were only at the beginning of this. They would just have to feel their way through. Maybe set up regular visits via Skype w
ith Annelise, if that’s what they both wanted.

  She stared at the closed door, and thought of what Gabe had said about a smooth, white wall with fire behind it, and her emotions ricocheted between fury and ferocious yearning and settled into something like stillness and numbness because that was the only safe place for them.

  She felt a nudge at her calf. It was Peace and Love, winding through her legs.

  She knelt to give him a thorough petting.

  And then she went still. What was it that Annelise had said? That Peace and Love scratched when he got scared?

  And that was it. That was the thing she’d been trying to sort from the snarl and pain and anger in his office.

  Maybe Gabe was scared.

  “Boy, late night, huh? You gonna be much longer, Mr. Caldera?”

  Carl the janitor was paused in the doorway, hands folded over the handle of his mop, which he’d soundlessly glided down the hall. If Carl was in the hall, it must be about eight o’clock. He had the nightly cleanup routine down to a soothing, ammonia-scented ballet.

  “Yeah, I just have to finish up paperwork.”

  Carl gave a shudder at the word paperwork. He wouldn’t want Gabe’s job for the world.

  At five o’clock, Gabe had been reviewing and signing various invoices for the big Fund-raising Raffle about a week away. He’d fully expected to be home by six.

  But then he’d come to the one for Eden’s Garden, and stopped.

  He hadn’t done much but sit in the semidark and think ever since.

  “You okay?” Carl added. “Boy, you sure look like you could use some sleep.”

  Gabe snorted. “Hey. This isn’t the most flattering lighting.”

  Carl grinned and moseyed off, whistling what sounded like, for Christ’s sake, “Lily Anne” by Blue Room. The universe was a bastard, sometimes.

  Gabe blew out a long breath. He reached for his baseball. Hefted it once, twice.

  He realized what he was doing and swore and put it back again immediately.

  Goddammit.

  Just because she was right about that didn’t mean she was right about everything.

  He sighed, surrendered, picked up the ball and tossed it thoughtfully.

  He realized what he’d been trying to do here in the semidark of his office: listen. Because the sort of odd ringing, wired numbness that usually followed a disaster—an earthquake, an explosion, a crash, a shattering breakup, for instance—was ebbing from his body. He still felt like shit, but various realizations were beginning to sift down like ash.

  And he knew from experience the quality of the silence that followed a disaster was a hint as to what, if anything, remained.

  He knew exactly what it felt like to lose someone or something. In his experience, when a person was gone, boy, they sure felt gone. Greta at the New Age Store downtown might beg to differ, but even though all of the things one said in the wake of a loss—that someone will live on in your heart and memories, and so forth—were technically true, the absence was still resounding. Gone was gone. As though a lovely song that had been playing all your life had been . . . slapped off.

  The way Eden had slapped that Jasper Townes’s song off the radio.

  So he listened.

  She was here. Eden was. In that chair across from him, where she’d toppled into his arms for the first time. In the way his skin hummed when he so much as brushed up against the memory of how it felt to touch her; his fingers curled hard when he recalled her fingers clinging to his shoulders as he plunged into her when they made love on that sofa.

  And she was in the doorway, too, her pale face as they shredded each other’s hearts, each of them wielding pride as a battering ram.

  Ironic to discover that deep down inside there was a little bit left of that cocky fucker who thought he had control over anything. He was darkly amused by this. He’d had a damned plan, for God’s sake! What could possibly go wrong? Literally the last thing he’d ever imagined, that’s what had gone wrong. Jasper Townes waltzing into town to claim paternity was, in its way, pretty damn funny. Surreal funny, like those dreams you had after eating Pasquale’s pizza too late at night.

  Joke was on him, though.

  Townes would be meeting Annelise tonight. The restless, territorial, subterranean misery of knowing another man—a man like Jasper Townes—was in Eden’s apartment right now was part of the reason Gabe was sitting in the dark.

  But he knew instinctively that wasn’t the only reason he was still sitting here.

  And that’s when he admitted to himself that he was sort of keeping vigil. The same way you would if you were waiting for a loved one to get home on a stormy night or out of surgery. Maybe not as dire. As if you were waiting to hear an award announced. As if somehow his vigilance could keep Eden and Annelise safe, make that meeting go well, make it everything Annelise hoped it would be, help Eden feel peaceful about it.

  What had Eden said about Gabe waiting outside the burning building? That they’d be fine if he was the one waiting out there. That’s what she thought. He believed it himself.

  Ah, but she “couldn’t deal with him right now.”

  She had pushed him away, hard.

  He gave a short laugh. Then sighed.

  Fuck it.

  He signed the invoice and turned off his desk lamp.

  Carl was right: he needed to sleep.

  But that was the other reason he was hanging out here.

  He wasn’t looking forward to his empty house. And somehow his big yellow house felt even emptier than before.

  Chapter 18

  “Well, what do you think of today, Annelise? What do you think of Jasper?”

  They’d gotten Annelise into her pajamas, and Eden was perched on her bed.

  “He’s really cool.” Her face was still alight with a sort of wondering abstraction, but her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes had a sort of hectic brightness she got when she was exhausted but still hopped up on emotion in a night-after-the-day-at-an-amusement-park kind of way.

  And that wondering abstracted expression reminded Eden of the time Annelise had wanted a Sunshine Sandy doll for Christmas and had gotten a Patty Peaches doll instead because Sunshine Sandy was sold out.

  And as it turned out, Annelise ended up loving Patty Peaches.

  But not right away.

  “I’m going to keep this forever!” She held out the tortoiseshell guitar pick that said, “Jasper Townes” on it. They were probably chucked by handfuls into audiences at his shows. At least it wasn’t a koala. “I’m going to take it with me everywhere!”

  “It’s lovely,” Eden agreed. “So are you glad to know who your dad is?”

  Leesy nodded. “It’s like . . .” She sighed theatrically. “The suspense was killing me. But I thought he would feel more like . . .”

  She glanced up guiltily.

  “More like . . .” Eden prompted gently.

  “More like . . . mine.” And she folded her hands over her heart. “You know, like, the way you’re mine, and Grandma and Grandpa are mine. Like I thought I’d feel him right here right away. Because he’s my dad.”

  Eden was speechless.

  And it was darling and hilarious and gratifying and deeply painful and beautiful that her daughter was probably, right now, trying to be delicate with her mom’s feelings.

  “Well, right now you’re getting to know each other. Maybe someday he’ll feel like yours. How does he feel to you right now?”

  “Mmm . . . well, he’s funny and nice. He doesn’t really feel like a dad, though, if that’s okay. He’s maybe too thin? Dads are usually a little thicker and wider, seems like. And he smells like Greta’s store, kind of. Is it okay if I don’t think he feels like a dad dad?”

  That smell would be the patchouli he dabbed on. Greta at the New Age Store sold every imaginable oil and incense.

  “Sure. I think being a father and being a dad are a little bit different. Being a father is a result of biology—you know what that mean
s, right? It takes a lady and a man to make a baby.” Annelise scrunched her nose here and waved her arms as if her mom had just farted by way of discouraging her from expounding on that. “And being a dad is something you kind of become as a result of being there every day and being involved in everything you do, and taking care of you the way a mom does.”

  “Like carrying you on shoulders at picnics and fixing stuff and coaching your soccer team and stuff like that?”

  “Yeah, stuff like that. And making sure you’re safe and happy and eat your vegetables and clean your room and learn how to build stuff and teaching you to drive when the time comes . . .”

  She stopped when guilt swooped in: she’d had a great dad, who was part of nearly everything she was and said and did, the same as her mom was. She’d known the luxury of waking up with Glenn’s comforting, gruff, hilarious presence in the house every day.

  And here she was expounding on the idea of a great father to a kid who had . . . Jasper Townes. More an exotic pet than a dad.

  She was desperate to ask Annelise: Do you feel safe here with me? Do you feel loved enough? Are you conscious of missing something in your life, like Jasper said he was? Was it like a house with a drafty window or a gap where your baby tooth fell out, and now everything is whole again, now that the mystery is solved?

  Questions she of course couldn’t ask a ten-year-old.

  She was going to have to keep doing the best she could and take it with a heaping dose of faith, the way she’d taken everything so far.

  “So . . . like Grandpa is a dad?”

  “Right. Your grandpa is a great, great dad for me and a great granddad to you.”

  “And some people are naturally kind of dads even if they don’t have kids, like Principal Caldera?”

  Damn.

  That was as painful and shocking as stepping on a Lego in bare feet in the dead of night.

  She couldn’t speak for a full two seconds.

  “Maybe so,” she said breathlessly. Her voice hoarse.