by J. L. White
Rayce hollers and puts his hands up and I glance at Lizzy in just enough time to see the determined and infuriated expression on her face before the blast of water is coming right at me. Now we’re both throwing our hands up and desperately looking for cover and saying, “Hey Lizzy!”
“Shut up both of you!” she yells, but I barely hear her because she’s not letting up with the water. We both scramble to crouch behind the work station, safe for the moment. The water stops.
“I’m so sick of your petty bickering and constant sniping and—” Rayce and I stay crouched low, looking at each other wide-eyed and wondering if our sister’s lost her mind, “and your stupid childish behavior,” she finishes. She doesn’t sound done, though. She sounds raging mad.
Rayce’s suit is soaked and water’s dripping from his hair and into his face. I’m not much better off. We both wipe the water out of our eyes and look at each other as if to say, Which one of us is going out there?
I shake my head. Not me, dude.
“Uh, Lizzy?” he says tentatively, raising his head just a bit to peek over the top of the counter at her. His eyes widen and he ducks back down. A spray of water goes over his head.
I’d laugh if I weren’t so stunned.
“Don’t Lizzy me! You’ve been a royal fucking pain in the ass for months and I am over it. And as for you,” she says, and even though I can’t see her I know she means me and I cringe. “You just can’t resist feeding into it, can you? Can you?”
Neither one of us say a word. Nope, not us. We’re just two grown men in suits, looking at each other in astonishment, and crouching behind steel tables in sheer terror of their sister and her water hose.
“I’m so sick of it. I’m so—” her voice breaks “so—”
A sob breaks loose and the mood of the room changes instantly. The weight of our sister’s heartbreaking sob drapes over us. The silence is thick, and neither one of us moves. I don’t think either one of us are breathing.
“It was bad enough losing Mom and Dad,” she says firmly, anger and tears still trembling in her voice. “I don’t need to lose you, too.”
Ouch. Rayce and I look at each other, more openly than we have in months.
A reverberating clang tells us she’s thrown the nozzle back into the sink, but we still don’t move. We aren’t looking at each other with shock or fear anymore. The only thing I see on Rayce’s face is exactly the one thing I feel: regret.
“I want my brothers back!” With that, she storms past us, her heels clicking furiously on the tile, and slams the kitchen door behind her.
We both hold our breath in the silence that follows. We’re frozen for a second. Then he pinches his eyes closed and I exhale heavily. We slowly sink the rest of the way to the floor, our backs against the table and our knees drawn up.
His arms are resting on his bent knees. “Shit,” Rayce says quietly.
I run my hand through my wet hair. “Yeah.”
“Well, that was fun.” But there’s not a hint of malice in his voice. In fact, he sounds like my brother again, and it makes my heart hurt. I’ve really missed him.
I look at him. He looks like he’s hurting too, but like he doesn’t want to be hurting. Like he’s trying to stomp it all back in. God, with my anger sprayed clean out of me, it’s easier for me to see what Whitney was trying to tell me. I think my brother really might be suffering. I wish I’d been willing to see it sooner. I wish I’d been there for him, instead of pushing his buttons all the time.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Oh,” he says, sighing again and rubbing his forehead. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I’m not mad at you. I’m really not. It’s just—” he says. “It’s just been a lot, you know? Trying to keep it all going.”
“I know.” I think maybe, as the oldest, Rayce has felt even more keenly than Lizzy and I have the weight of protecting Mom and Dad’s legacy. But… as I really look at him now, I don’t think that’s what’s making his face look so weary and drawn. I think back over the past several months, and what his behavior’s been like.
Now I feel even more sure of what’s going on with him. God, it’s so obvious. Now that I see it, I don’t know how I was missing it. “It’s okay to miss them,” I say.
He blinks, almost like I struck him. But otherwise, his expression is unchanged and he’s still looking straight ahead. “Don’t get all Dr. Phil on me.” His voice is tight, I don’t think from anger, but from suppressed sorrow. He’s been all locked up, and it’s killing him.
“It is,” I say.
“I mean it, Connor.”
“It’s eating you alive.”
He looks at me suddenly, his eyes sharp and miserable. “I’ll tell you what’s eating me alive. Mom called me that day. At exactly 3:04 p.m. she called and I didn’t answer because I was in a meeting.”
Now it’s my turn to feel like I’ve been punched. God, she called from the boat.
“I didn’t call back until almost five. Because I had the meeting and emails to respond to and a stupid, fucking coffee to get from—”
“Rayce—”
“She called me and I wasn’t there.” Then his anger breaks and his face twists into agony. And I can’t move. I’m held fast by the wrenching look on his face. I’ve never seen him look so raw. “What if she was calling for help? What if I could’ve got to them?”
I exhale slowly. Is this what it’s been? “Shit, Rayce,” I say quietly. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He laughs humorlessly, leaning his head back against the table and closing his eyes. “You don’t know that,” he says dully.
“Well,” I say firmly, “you don’t know that it was but you’re over there blaming yourself? God, I really wish Dad was here to knock some sense into you.”
Before the whole Lizzy-spraying-us-with-water thing, a comment like that would’ve pissed him the hell off. But he doesn’t get mad. Instead he does something I haven’t seen him do since we were kids. He drops his head onto his arms and starts to cry. It’s silent at first, the only sign the trembling of his shoulders. Then I hear it, and it intensifies, like a great dam has been let loose. And it rips right through me.
Ultimately, I’m glad he said something, and I’m glad he’s finally letting this out because I think he’s really needed to, but god, it’s killing me to watch. I put my arm on his back, my palm cupping the back of his head. I keep it there, trying to offer my big brother some small measure of comfort. He doesn’t move. He just grips my hand and hangs on while he weeps and weeps.
Eventually he stops, and we start talking. For an hour we talk, moving from the floor to sitting on the tables eating chocolate, and it’s much more like the way we used to be between us. We talk a lot about Mom and Dad, and old memories, and what life looks like now without them. We even end things with a hug that lingers awhile.
We agree to make things up to Lizzy right away, and are surprised to find her still in her office instead of at home. She’s sitting behind her desk, and watches us warily as we approach her. We each have one hand behind our backs.
I carefully bring my hand out and put a square of dark chocolate in front of her. “I brought you a piece of chocolate.”
Her wary expression is unchanged as she frowns at the little square, molded with a fleur de lis on top.
Rayce puts his offering in front of her, an oversized pecan turtle that’s one of her favorites. “And I brought you a bigger piece of chocolate.”
Her expression breaks then and she kind of laughs, looking up at us. We’re both smiling.
“We’re sorry,” I say.
She looks at Rayce, hopeful.
“I’m really sorry,” he says, in a tone of voice that gets me right in the chest. There’s still so much raw tenderness about him. Now that he’s cracked open, it may take a while to close him back up again.
His apology must have hit Lizzy in the heart too because she immediately gets up and comes around to give him a hug, starting to cry.
> “Don’t cry,” he says, holding her. “I’ll be better, I promise.” She keeps crying and he just holds her tighter. “God, I’m sorry.”
“You just had to one-up me in the apology department, didn’t you?”
He smiles at me and Lizzy laughs, pulling back. “I do want my brothers back,” she says again sternly, wiping her tears away. She said brothers, but she’s only looking at him.
“We’ll be here,” he says. “We promise.”
She looks at me to confirm and I wink at her.
She leans back against her desk and takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says. Looking calmer now, she looks us both over, taking in the big wet spots all over our clothes. “I would apologize for spraying you, but it was pretty gratifying, actually.”
“Don’t get too comfortable with that,” Rayce says, grinning. “You get one free pass. Anything beyond that is open for paybacks.”
Chapter 25
Connor
I told Whitney all about it and she was pretty happy, both because I made things official and because Rayce and I seem to have turned a corner. I’m happy too. But something is wrong. And I can’t figure out what.
Worrying is definitely the cause of my insomnia this time. I slept for something like two hours, then woke up in the middle of the night and haven’t been able to get back to sleep.
Why do I still feel so off? I’ve made my decision, and I do think I want to stay. But something is wrong. Something deep inside me feels all riled up. In a panic almost.
It’s bad enough that I get dressed and go for a walk, unable to be still. There’s normally something soothing about being out in the world when it’s this dark and quiet. But my mind won’t be still. It’s all over the place.
Way back when I told my family I wanted to leave the business and go travel the world, it was Mom who was the first to endorse my decision. I was on my old sailboat, stocking the pantry and still feeling raw from the emotional conversation we’d all had at my parents’ house about it. She found me there, helped me pack in my supplies, and talked at first about other stuff. Normal stuff.
When we were done, and I was feeling calmer, that’s when she decided to talk for real. We were sitting out on the deck, looking out at the sea. My boat was ready to go, but still moored to the dock.
“You have a lot of your dad in you,” she said.
I shrugged. While my siblings weren’t exactly keen on the idea of me leaving, they weren’t mad about it like he was. They didn’t tell me I was making a big mistake, like he did.
“He’ll come around,” Mom said reassuringly. “I think your dad just forgets what it’s like.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was pretty restless when he was younger, too.”
“But he didn’t do anything like this.”
“No. He didn’t. But nearly every weekend was about him getting his adrenaline fix. I think once he has a chance to recover from the bomb you just dropped on all of us, the adventurer in him is going to win out and he’ll respect you for what you’re doing.” I was too upset at the time to believe her, but she’d been right. He eventually accepted my decision and later did, in fact, tell me he respected me for it.
“As for me,” Mom continued, “I think this is what you need to do for now.”
“For now?” I said, still feeling defensive. “Like getting it out of my system?”
“I don’t know. You’ve always been your own person, son. I don’t know if this is something you’ll ever get out of your system. It’s always been in you, even when you were little. But… then again… at some point in your life, you may decide you want more.”
More? More what? What could be better than seeing the world and meeting all the people in it? What could be better than chasing that horizon and turning the next corner? As reassuring as my mom was trying to be, her comment only seemed to reinforce my notion that no one in my family really understood how I felt about this. “I can’t image anything more,” I said.
“Which is why you need to go.”
Now, walking the streets of Swan Pointe in the black hour before pre-dawn, letting my feet take me wherever they want to go, a brisk wind pushing me on, I think back on that conversation with my mom. The fog I’ve been feeling for months gradually starts to clear. Things are coming into focus.
I’m able to back up and see the last several years from a distance: my frustrating time in college, breaking away from my family and the life they wanted for me, finally putting my wandering self in the driver’s seat, my failed attempt to change for Evie, and my perpetual itch that I could never quite seem to scratch. Even upgrading from a small sailboat to a trawler once I could afford it, because sailing the coasts wasn’t enough. I had to be able to cross oceans.
And now Whitney.
And the fact that I’ve been here nine months now.
Aside from the occasional visits, it’s only been family tragedy that’s drawn me back for any length of time: Corrine’s cancer and my parents’ death.
I look at it all from a distance, and things become more and more clear, little by little.
At that moment, I realize just where my feet have taken me. I’m turning off the street and crossing the parking lot that’s next to the marina. The sea wind is rushing up to greet me, like an old friend. I could say I came here accidentally, I suppose. But the thing is, here in Swan Pointe, I know what’s around all these corners. I realize now there must have been a part of me that knew exactly where I was going.
For months I’ve been wanting to say that I will stay. I’ve been wanting to make my family the promise I knew they wanted to hear. But I refused. Because I wanted to be sure. I didn’t want to make a promise if I was going to just turn right around and break it.
It was Evie all over again, except worse, because it was my family and they were already wounded. Who in the hell wants to be the asshole to put a knife in the wound?
Not me.
I wanted to stay.
I also wanted to leave.
Both in equal measure.
Then Whitney came along. I didn’t want to walk away from her, and now I’ve made all these promises all over the place.
And now, at the worst possible moment in time, as I stand here at the docks in the middle of the night with the wind whipping around me, every voice in my head falls to silence as I gain the clarity I’ve been wanting this entire time.
Now I know why I didn’t want to tell them I’m staying, even after I decided I would. I know why I’m not happy about Whitney’s promotion. I even know exactly what’s brought me here in the middle of the night.
For the first time in months, I know precisely what I want.
Now that I know, I do what I always do. I act. I head down the dock toward my boat and start to untie the stern line.
Minutes later, I’m gone.
Chapter 26
Whitney
A fierce storm has been pounding San Francisco mercilessly all morning, but even the dark skies and rain gusts buffeting my window aren’t enough to dampen my mood. Connor told his family yesterday. He finally made a decision for real and he’s staying. He’s really staying.
I’ve made a decision too. I don’t want to do the long-distance thing anymore. I should’ve been upfront with Connor about how I’m feeling. If it doesn’t feel like too big of a step for him right now, I’d really rather try to find work in Swan Pointe rather than take a promotion here. I don’t expect him to make the “ultimate promise”, as he puts it, but I’m willing to take chances if he is.
I’ll call and talk to him about it after work tonight.
Meanwhile, I’m knee-deep in one of our influxes of paperwork as a new group of refugee orphans enter our program. The reason we have this new group is, as always, gut wrenching.
As much as I’ve loved working with these kids, I do think I need to find something less hands-on. Talking to Connor about things helped me feel better about the possibility of that, and as I’ve considered wha
t it would be like to have a job like Manager of Resettlement, it’s made me realize there are other things I can do that will fit my personality better. Things in Swan Pointe, maybe.
So, all in all, that rain can pound on my window all it wants. I’m in love with Connor and at peace with myself.
What could be better?
Our receptionist sticks her head in my office with a strange look on her face. “Whitney, there’s someone here to see you. A Connor Rivers?”
“Connor Rivers?” I glance at my office phone, expecting to see a red light indicating he’s actually waiting on the line for me, even though she said he’s here and not on the phone. “He’s here?” I ask.
She nods. “In the lobby. He’s dripping wet.”
I pop out of my chair and follow her back to the lobby. I see him by the front doors, standing like he’s too restless to sit, and he is indeed soaking wet. I head straight for him as the receptionist goes back to her desk.
He sees me and breaks out into a smile. I smile too. “What are you doing here?”
He gives me a kiss—we forego what would be a very wet hug—but as we pull back and I get a good look at him, it only adds to my confusion because I’ve never seen this expression on his face before. There’s an intensity and anxiety there I can’t read.
“Are you okay?”
He glances at the receptionist. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
And in that one moment, Connor did what the storm had failed to do all day. “Sure.” I lead him to the small conference room with a terrible sinking feeling in my gut.
We go in and I shut the door. There’s an oblong table in the middle, surrounded by eight straight-back chairs. One wall is all windows with what’s normally a nice eighteen-story view of the bay. Right now it’s hidden by the dark rain.
Connor doesn’t sit. He takes to pacing a bit, looking at the table, and at me, and out the window, and back at me again. I take in his drenched appearance and ask, “How did you get here?”