Echoes of Family

by Barbara Claypole White

  “I’m making omelets for breakfast,” she said without cheer. All cheer edited out.

  “Lovely,” he said, and grabbed a crumpled Church Times that looked thoroughly read. He turned as if to disappear into his study.

  “No, sit!” she snapped, and he froze. “I mean . . . Take a load off.” She pulled out a chair and smiled a muted smile. Nothing manic here, Gabriel.

  He did as ordered. It was not a good feeling, the knowledge that she could yell, “Roll over and die for England,” and he would. When she was younger, she had abused that power shamelessly. Now it might be the only way to get him to listen.

  “Sleep well?”

  “The usual,” he said.

  “So that’s a no?”

  “Correct.” He opened the paper, even though he wasn’t wearing his reading glasses.

  She dropped a dollop of margarine into the skillet.

  “Listen, I know that invading your bedroom like Goldilocks was a monumental screwup. And I’m truly sorry.” She kept her back to him. When he didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder.

  “The woman on the phone”—she’d already forgotten her name—“was talking about the baby, and I had some horrible flashback. The grief came roaring in and knocked me for six.”

  He screwed up his eyes to squint at the newsprint. “It was a long time ago, Marianne.”

  The margarine sizzled. She tossed in the onions and peppers, stirred and watched, stirred and watched. Thought about the physical pain that came only from a burn; the emotional pain that came only from losing a child. She turned with the wooden spoon in her hand. His look was almost a dare: Go on, hit me.

  “Please don’t tell me I was a kid and it was for the best. I’ve heard that far too often.”

  Slowly, he closed up the paper and put it aside. Then, stretching across the table, he claimed everything she’d left out for him: the coffee mug, the french press, and the small pitcher of milk. Milk in a china jug was a habit picked up from his mother. Funny the details she could remember, ridiculous the life-altering facts she could not.

  She turned back to the skillet. “And another thing—you can’t keep avoiding me.” Her voice was a sea of flatness, a whole friggin’ ocean without waves. Emotions could be such traitors, and for once she would be their master. She imagined a halo of light moving down her body, bringing calm. A slight pressure rang in her ears; her bottom teeth tapped gently against her top teeth; the muscles in her right arm tightened as she stirred.

  “I’m not avoiding you, Marianne. It’s been intensely disruptive having you and Darius to stay. I’m merely trying to get my life back on track. I appreciate Bill Collins offering to talk with the bishop on my behalf, but eyes are still on me and how I perform my job.”

  “Lucky for you that I’m leaving on Monday morning, then. By the way, Monday’s also Jade’s thirtieth birthday, in case you want to send a card back with me. Save the postage.”

  “If you give me your flight details, I’ll ask one of the parishioners to give you a lift to the airport. I’m sure Ian would do it. He likes odd jobs.”

  “I’ve become an odd job?”

  He didn’t answer; she kept stirring. The kitchen filled with the smell of fried onions, and in her jeans pocket the ring box nudged her left leg.

  “What I’m about to say comes from a place of good intentions.” How did you ask someone if he still loved you without sounding like a raving narcissist? But the question needed to be asked, because he needed to be free of her, and on some level, she needed to be free of him.

  “Then you should keep it to yourself. You know what they say about good intentions.”

  Out in the hall the grandfather clock struck the hour, as the church clock had done on the day she’d stumbled out of his past and into his church. They were always competing against time.

  She turned and opened her mouth. “How about we just enjoy breakfast together?”

  He glanced up as if waiting for the but to drop. She half expected it, too. That was not the question she’d intended to ask.

  “What do you have planned for the day?” she said.

  “Endless meetings after my morning prayer.” He reached for his coffee.

  “Of course. And I appreciate you letting me stay this extra week.” She moved back to the counter by the oven and cracked six eggs into a glass bowl. A three-egg omelet, Gabriel. That’s how serious I am. “I’m in a much better place than when I arrived, even though everything that pulled me back here is still tugging at me, still forcing me to question what happened thirty years ago.” Was that subtle enough?

  “It’s quite simple, Marianne. Two brothers, who didn’t understand each other, fell for the same girl. The outcome was tragedy.”

  The phone rang; they both ignored it.

  “I’m sure Simon treated you like a queen, but from my perspective, he was a tormentor. Would that have changed if he’d lived? Undoubtedly. Jade said something when she was here that reminded me Simon and I were close when we were little, a stage I’m sure we would have returned to after the horror of the teen years. But denied the chance to rebond, our relationship is frozen in brotherly rivalry.”

  “What if you could change that?” She cranked the pepper mill. “What if I knew something about the accident that might help you?”

  “If you’re going to ask me to relive the events of that night, my answer is no.”

  “Understood.” Even professional soldiers knew when to retreat, and withdrawal wasn’t surrender. She was merely regrouping to consider strategies, armed with the understanding that a battle of wills lay ahead. Gabriel could be extraordinarily pliable, but once he’d dug in his heels, there was no U-turn.

  Wasn’t that the real reason she’d strayed to Simon? Gabriel blocked her from his bed with no hope of changing his mind. But whatever his game plan back then, right now he needed to believe he’d been victorious.

  “I’ll try to stay out of your way as much as possible in the next few days,” she said. “I’d also like to help out more. Can I cook supper tonight?”

  He smiled, and she saw a flash of the old Gabriel. “You’re asking for my opinion, not telling me what you’re doing and expecting me to fall into line? That’s twice now.”

  “You mean there’s hope for me?”

  “Thank you. Supper tonight would be much appreciated.”

  His words, oddly formal, sliced like a paper cut.

  FIFTY-THREE

  MARIANNE

  A bat swooped low under the wooden pergola covered in the rambling rector rose that had all but strangled a clematis. Legs hugged to her chest, Marianne rocked back and forth. The chair—old, graying—wobbled and squeaked. Probably a hand-me-down like everything else Gabriel owned. Forty-seven and he’d never outgrown the younger-brother mentality.

  If she stopped moving she could easily morph into the one-eyed feral cat that strayed into her yard to piss and hiss. One mean little bastard. And if she couldn’t stay calm, all would be lost. Gabriel handled chaos well, but he never engaged with it. And she needed one thing from him: engagement. She glanced sideways at the small velvet box on the table next to her. Okay, poor choice of words.

  Dammit. This was like waiting in the departure lounge for a delayed flight and listening to stupid announcements spread to con restless passengers into believing they’d soon be on their way. Delays had always “ticked her off something rotten,” to quote Mrs. Tandy. Where the hell was Gabriel?

  Dinner was not destined to be a cordon bleu affair—lasagna, garlic bread, and salad—but she hadn’t gone to all that trouble so Gabriel could bail on her. She could eat the salad, dump the garlic bread, and freeze the lasagna in individual portions. Easy meals for one when he was living alone and she was back with her family. She stopped moving and tugged his cashmere sweater down low to cover as much of her body as she could.

  “Oh, Gabriel,” she said into the night. “We messed it all up so badly.”

  The concrete birdbath that appeare
d to be his pride and joy loomed out of the darkness. He scrubbed it every Sunday night with an old scrubbing brush he kept in the garden shed, often muttering about pigeon shit. A little routine she’d clocked because it reminded her of cleaning out the hummingbird feeders. They lived an ocean apart, had never known each other as adults, and yet they shared a Sunday night domestic ritual.

  A car honked on the A428; the front door opened and closed; she sat up straight.

  “I’m in the garden,” she called out, and waited. She would not rush him, she would breathe in the nighttime floral scent she couldn’t identify and repeat an endless refrain in her head: I am calm.

  When he appeared, he was holding a heavy glass tumbler with way more than one shot of whisky. The smell hit her nostrils like nectar. I am calm.

  He shrugged off his black jacket, tossed it onto the table, and seemed to collapse into the rickety chair next to her. That was not his first drink of the evening.

  “I should’ve called,” he said.

  She looked at the whisky. An odd choice for Gabriel.

  “I’m sorry, but I needed a drink. I’ll get rid of it fast.”

  “Don’t worry about it. People drink around me all the time. Except for the musicians in AA. What’s going on?”

  “A family in one of the barn conversions,” he said. “They lost a child.”

  “Oh no.” Marianne flattened her hand over her heart. Another dead baby. When did it end? “What happened?”

  “Drowned in a swimming pool full of children and in front of two lifeguards.” Gabriel took a slug of whisky. “It doesn’t matter how many funeral services you’ve conducted, how many burials, you never make peace with the death of a child.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  In the house next door, Phyllis turned on the television too loudly. Stars twinkled above them like tiny diamonds.

  Gabriel’s phone buzzed in his jacket pocket, and as he tried to find it, something fell from the table onto the concrete patio. When she looked up, he was holding the ring box.

  “Where did you find this?” he said, his voice sharp.

  “Inside the drawer of the old nursing chair, and no”—she sighed, her mind stuck on the image of a kid floating facedown—“I wasn’t snooping. I moved the chair and it rattled.”

  Gabriel stood, put the box back on the table, and turned toward the open patio doors.

  “Wait! You’re not walking away.” She shot up. “We’re still talking.”

  “No, Marianne. We’re done. We were done a long time ago.”

  Snatching up the ring box, she followed. In the kitchen he grabbed a bottle of whisky off the table and filled his now-empty glass. Drunk Gabriel was foreign territory—like being lost on a county road at night surrounded by black forest, in the fog, with a broken headlight and no GPS. Frightening for most people, thrilling for her. She never could resist the lure of the unknown.

  “I think I’ll skip supper,” he said.

  “No, you won’t. We’re both eating. I’m trying to make better decisions about my health, and you’re a grumpy bastard when you’re hungry.”

  “I am not.” He scowled.

  Gabriel behaving badly. They were definitely off the map, which gave her the upper hand. Off the map she could do with bells on. Plus, he was drunk, she was sober. Finally being an alcoholic on the wagon was working in her favor.

  Holding her breath, she grabbed the bottle from the table, screwed the cap on and, carrying it at arm’s length, put it in the pantry and slammed the door. Then she scrubbed her hands with the vegetable scrubbing brush by the sink. When they were beet red and smelled of nothing but his lavender pump soap, her breathing returned to normal.

  Gabriel stared out the kitchen window while she made a dressing and tossed the salad. Then he turned abruptly and said, “Here, let me.” He attempted to set the table and dropped the forks. Neither of them commented.

  She gave him a large serving of lukewarm lasagna and decided to forgo the garlic bread. “All I’m asking right now is that you eat, Gabriel. If you have a hangover tomorrow, news will travel faster than the Titanic sank.”

  “She took three hours to sink,” he said.

  “How the hell do know that?”

  “How the hell do you not?” He pulled out a chair and slumped onto it. With hooded eyes, he squinted up at her; the wrinkles that curved down around his mouth—his first signs of age—were more pronounced than they had been when she’d arrived. His skin was almost gray. He closed his eyes and spoke through a drawn-out sigh. “I’m sorry, Marianne. The crash, it was my fault.”

  A thousand questions thudded in her brain: What, when, why? But Dr. White, the grand inquisitor, had taught her the art of interrogation restraint. Warm up your patient before going in for the kill.

  “How much have you had to drink?” she said.

  “Not enough.” He pushed his plate away; she pushed it back. Then she filled him a glass of water.

  “Trust me, as someone who used to drink two bottles of cheap wine every night, you’ll feel better with food and water in you. Did you eat lunch today?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I had a meeting about the organ fund-raiser.” He scooped a forkful of lasagna into his mouth, swallowed, ate more. “This is good, Marianne. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Hot enough?”

  “Yes.”

  They were talking without saying anything.

  Gabriel wiped his mouth on his napkin and sat back. “Zachary, the little boy who died, was with his big brother. Victor was meant to be watching over him. That’s going to haunt him for the rest of his life.”

  “Encourage his family to get counseling. You must, Gabriel, you must.”

  “His mother doesn’t believe in therapy.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I would be dead without therapy. Convince her she’s wrong. A kid shouldn’t have to shoulder that kind of guilt without professional help.”

  His fork clattered to his plate. “Don’t you think I know that better than anyone?”

  “Gabriel—” She opened the ring box and put it on the table. “It’s time to talk. I’m going to tell you what I remember about the crash, and you’re going to do the same. We’re going to deal with this, together, once and for all. And then you’re going to tell me why you never gave me that ring.”

  “Are you joking, after the evening I’ve had?”

  “No. I’ve never been more serious.” She walked to the door, closed it, and turned with her arms crossed. “You’re not leaving this room until we’ve bashed this out.”

  “Really? You don’t think I could pick you up and move you aside?”

  “You could, but I have two factors working in my favor. One, you’re drunk, and two, you would never manhandle a woman. I know you, Gabriel. I know everything about you, except what matters—how you feel about me, about us, about all of it.”

  He picked up the whisky glass, emptied it in one gulp, then went back to the pantry, took out the bottle, poured a respectable shot, downed it, and refilled his glass.

  Go for it, Gabriel. If he needed to do this drunk, she’d let him.

  “You want to know why I bought that ring? It was going to be your seventeenth-birthday present. I was going to ask you to marry me.” His voice had turned slurry. “And while I was planning our future, you were sleeping with my brother. Who announced, in the car, that you were carrying his child. And I responded by informing him that I wished he were dead. And then he was.”

  “What else?” she said.

  “Marianne, what’s the point? The past is over. We’ve both moved on.”

  “No. We haven’t. For all your ministering and good works, there’s something dark eating away at you. Something you’re not showing me. Something I doubt you’ve shown anyone.”

  “I see your time in the mental hospital has made you philosophical.” He threw himself back down on his chair.

  “For three decades we’ve carried around this guilt, and we can’t both
be responsible. Together we can pool our memories. Make sense of it all.”

  “And I can only repeat, why?”

  “Gabriel, that night has haunted me for thirty years. Why did you tell me to turn off the music?”

  “That’s what’s been bothering you for three decades? Fine,” he said. “I’ll play along. When we kissed at the party, I thought you were letting me back in. I thought whatever had forced us apart was over. But what followed were the worst twenty minutes of my life. Why the hell do you think I asked you to turn off the music? You thought what—I’d be happy for you? It wasn’t enough that I had to find out from him that you two were sleeping together, you had to be irresponsible enough to get pregnant?”

  She flinched.

  “The noise and anger in the car were palpable. I couldn’t think. You were bouncing off the walls in the front seat, singing your heart out; the music was blaring; Simon was clearly drunk—God only knows why the two of us got in the car with him—and then he made that snide comment about whether you were happy because you’d been snogging me, and I can still remember his face when he looked up in the rearview mirror to see my reaction. That’s how I knew you two were sleeping together. And then I started yelling at both of you.” He wrapped his hands around his glass. “I called you a whore. Then Simon was yelling that he loved you and you were having a baby together, and I had no right to talk to you that way. You don’t remember any of this?”

  “Simon never told me he loved me.”

  “He screamed it that night.” Gabriel took a sip of whisky. “What do you remember?”

  “You asking me to kill the music, and I’ve always assumed I distracted Simon as I fiddled with the radio.”

  “No, you didn’t turn off the music. Simon did. He leaned down to see what he was doing and lost control of the car. He missed the curve and we went straight into that tree. It took a year for the inquest to make a ruling, and by then you were gone. The lack of skid marks had suggested suicide, but—”

  “Oh my God.” She slid down the door and sat on the cold tile. “You didn’t let everyone believe he’d committed suicide?”

  “Of course not. But in the aftermath of the accident there were a lot of questions, and neither of us gave satisfactory answers. You didn’t make sense when the police interviewed you, and given all that followed, they decided you were an unreliable witness. And I kept quiet about the fight in the car because I’d assumed the crash would go down as an alcohol-related accident. Bad enough I was the jilted one—did I have to share all the details?” In the lane a dog barked. “After I came clean, the crash was ruled an accident. My mother was too tangled up in her own guilt to blame me, but Dad kept clear of me for years. Why do you think I went to Sandhurst? I was trying to make amends.”