A Forever Family

by Jamie Sobrato

  From Through a Soldier’s Eyes

  by Aidan Caldwell

  EMMY HAD maybe fifteen minutes of peace and quiet before Max would get bored watching the construction work and come in to bug her again about going swimming. Capable as he was of entertaining himself, she knew he missed having other kids to interact with more and more as the quiet days beside the lake ticked by. And much as she looked forward to him going to day camp so she could have more work time, she also knew she’d have a hard time letting him go away all day. She had a tendency to cling to him a bit too much lately.

  She hurried to pack a beach bag with towels, sun block and other necessities, then set it by the door.

  Now, where had she put her swimsuit?

  She found it hanging in the bathroom, barely damp from their swim the day before.

  Emmy could feel the presence of the chest no matter what she was doing. As she undressed, she tried to ignore it. She found herself casting apprehensive glances at it every so often—when she was working, or cleaning up, or making the bed or getting dressed.

  She’d been afraid to open it up again since bringing it into the cottage. She hadn’t wanted to start reading the journal, rekindling old feelings best laid to rest, or even remembering the things she and Aidan had written to each other. Back when they were together, she’d considered his frivolous romanticism a sweet but silly trait to be endured, and she’d indulged it by going along with it most of the time.

  But now that she’d experienced the world away from Aidan, she understood just how rare he was in that regard. How rare it was to find a man comfortable enough with his softer emotions to express his love for her in such an open and honest way. She didn’t want to get sucked back into feelings that were inappropriate in her current life.

  She was no longer the selfish coed who’d fallen for Aidan. She was a grown woman who couldn’t afford the energy or emotional fallout that could come along with getting involved in the sort of intense relationship Aidan couldn’t help but have. She had to consider her own needs, and Max’s, and how it took all she had just to keep him cared for and get her work done every day. Where was there room for any man, let alone one so much bigger than life as Aidan?

  There wasn’t any room. Nor did she even have the energy to try to fit him in.

  And it wasn’t only the journal she and Aidan had shared that kept her away from the chest. She’d even been afraid to take a closer look at the other contents. That someone had deliberately gathered then buried their treasures suggested those items contained secrets and revelations that Emmy wasn’t prepared to face at the moment. She knew she’d need to do it sooner or later, but with all the stressors in her life right now, she’d simply set the chest aside to deal with another day.

  Max, for his part, was thrilled with the discovery of the chest. It fueled his imagination, and he’d spent the rest of the day after finding it furiously working on his treasure-hunting guide.

  Which was, essentially, a bunch of childish drawings and incomprehensible maps of the forest and lake, along with his very rudimentary efforts at writing. As a reader, he was extremely gifted, but he still had the fine motor skills of a six-year-old, and the handwriting to match. Also, while his reading comprehension vocabulary was high, that didn’t always translate into his being able to spell words accurately as he wrote.

  “Follow the trail to the big sequoia tree by the water” became, “Falo the trayl to the big sakoya tree by the water,” and so forth. It might not have been all that easy to read, but for a kid his age, it was still pretty impressive.

  In only a day’s time, he’d completed most of his text and drawings and had moved on to adding color to the pictures.

  Undressed now, Emmy caught a glimpse of herself in the long mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Since having Max she’d rarely spent time gazing at herself in mirrors, inspecting the landscape of her body for flaws the way she had in her pre-kid days.

  And since the divorce, she’d nearly stopped thinking of herself as a sexual being. So she was surprised to see this side-angle view of herself, looking like a real, live, flesh-and-blood woman who should and did have sexual needs.

  She trailed a hand gently up her stomach, causing goose flesh to dot her skin, and felt her insides go liquid at the sensation of it.

  It had been too long since she’d been touched—really touched—by a man. The massage her mother had bought her last month didn’t count, since that guy was being paid to touch her.

  The afternoon light pouring through the window cast a soft, yellow light on her skin that flattered her coloring and made her look like a painting she’d seen somewhere. A portrait of a normal woman, no other-worldly beauty, just a woman like her, who was still, in her naked imperfection, beautiful.

  She thought of Aidan in the cabin next door, and the way he’d kissed her that first day, the way she’d kissed him back so eagerly, and the way her body had ached just as it did now. She thought of how they’d made love years ago, so often in a frenzy of never getting enough. They were not the most skilled lovers in the world back then, but they’d made up for it with enthusiasm.

  No sooner had her thoughts strayed to sex than from outside the cottage Max called, “Mommy! Hurry up, I want to go!”

  Emmy sighed at his timing, grabbed her swimsuit and dashed for the bathroom. Before she closed the bathroom door, she called out to Max, “I’ll be out in just a minute.”

  She resigned herself to sexual frustration yet again, as she put on the swimsuit, a baby-blue one-piece tankstyle suit that had seemed lovely and refined on the store rack, but now that she looked at herself in the mirror in it, she saw it for the matronly mommy suit it was.

  She wanted a bikini, something skimpy and bohemian, maybe with some little wooden beads and ties at the hips. She wanted to wear it proudly, unafraid of revealing her body’s grown-up curves, to splash in the lake with her son looking like her own woman, not just like someone else’s mom.

  She resolved to go into town in the morning and find such a suit, as she left the cottage and met up with Max on the stone path toward the lake.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love being a mother. She did. But in the days before her divorce she’d seen how she’d sacrificed herself and how she might lose herself completely—to her work, to her child, to her husband or to any of the big demands life made on her. That realization, coupled with Steven’s infidelity and their crumbling relationship, led to her vow to live more authentically. And while she still had a way to go, she was being more true to herself. The bikini was one more step.

  As they walked, Max talked nonstop about another map he’d thought to add to his treasure-hunting book, and Emmy, though she wanted to be good and pay attention, found her mind wandering.

  Her body was still tense with sexual frustration. And she found herself aware of the way she was moving, of the way her body bounced and felt heavy in certain places. She felt as if she were awakening from a deep sleep, and her primary awareness upon waking was of herself as a sexual being.

  She had needs, and she’d been ignoring them for too long.

  A few men had tried to flirt with her since she’d come to town. There was Jerry Lawson, the town mayor, whom she’d bumped into in the coffee house a few days ago. She’d studiously ignored his efforts to charm her.

  Could she be attracted to Jerry? Even for a night?

  He was a nice enough guy, she supposed, but he had a certain smarmy quality that turned her off. No, Jerry definitely wasn’t going to do it for her.

  They arrived at the lake’s edge, and as Emmy spread out a towel on the sand, Max splashed right into the water, squealing at the cold but not letting it stop him for a second.

  Why did adults so often lose the ability to do that, to dive right in and bear the shock of entry to enjoy a good thing?

  She watched him as she sat on the towel and began slathering on sunscreen. She’d already put some on Max before he’d gone out to play for the day, but in spite
of diligent applications, his skin was turning bronze from being outside every day. He had her complexion, but with a touch of his father’s, too—so that he was less susceptible to burning than she was.

  Max, already becoming a confident swimmer, dove down under the water and came up with a rock. He hauled it to the shore and sat hunched over it, probably examining it for gold flecks. He frequently asked when they’d get to go panning for gold in the gold country—ever since one of his friends in San Francisco had told him about a similar trip his family had done.

  Emmy wondered where Max got his interest in finding treasure. It certainly hadn’t come from her. Maybe it was one of those natural kid things, or maybe it was because he’d watched Pirates of the Caribbean at his grandfather’s house a few months ago. But some part of her worried that maybe it was an unhealthy interest. Maybe he was responding to the instability in his life by wanting to find some quick-fix solution, such as a treasure chest full of riches.

  Okay, she was probably being way too neurotic there.

  Still, she made a mental note to find a child therapist in the area and get Max an appointment, just to be sure he had a safe place to talk about any post-divorce anxiety he might be having.

  His father hadn’t called Max since leaving on the trip to Tibet, but Max asked about him perhaps once a day. And he frequently looked up Tibet on his world map, sometimes staring at the country for fifteen minutes or more, tracing his fingers around its zig-zaggy border and trying to pronounce the names of its towns and counties.

  The sight of him staring at the map as if he might find his father there never failed to break her heart a little bit more.

  “Mommy,” he might say, “what is Aba?”

  And Emmy would bring him to her computer to search for the city on the Internet with him so they could read about it and look at pictures.

  Now that they had a reliable Internet connection via Aidan’s unsecured wireless network, she’d been resisting showing Max Google Earth, because she so often needed her computer free for work, and she was afraid he’d become obsessed with looking up his father on the interactive maps. But, she realized, he would love it so much, she was cheating him by not letting him use the site. So she resolved that she would show him tonight.

  “Hey, little man, whatcha got there?” she heard a voice call out from the north end of the beach, where a path from the road gave the public access to this secluded part of the lakeshore—or at least it gave access to the few people who knew about the path.

  She looked and saw a man she didn’t recognize, tall and good-looking, strolling toward them. He had shoulder-length wavy blond hair and an athletic build of the type that usually came from working and playing outdoors rather than any deliberate effort to get buff. He was bare-chested and tan, with a pair of navy swim trunks hanging low on his narrow hips.

  Emmy found herself sucking in her stomach and feeling conscious of how frumpy and conservative she probably looked in her mom-style swimsuit.

  Then she rolled her eyes at herself and made a mental note not to be such an idiot.

  The man smiled and nodded at her. He wasn’t quite as good-looking as Aidan, but he was certainly easy on the eyes. When he knelt next to Max and appeared interested in Max’s rock, Emmy gave herself a mental slap on the head for even holding Aidan up as a measure of anything.

  “It’s a piece of granite,” Max offered to the man.

  “Nice. You’ll find a lot of that around here, you know. What’s your name?”

  “Max.”

  “I’m Devan. Nice to meet you, Max.”

  He held out his hand for the boy to shake, but Max only looked at it warily.

  “Right on, little man. Good idea not to trust weirdos like me.”

  Max tossed the rock aside, no longer interested in it, and ran to the water without saying another word. He’d never been all that interested in socializing with grown-ups, in spite of his intelligence…or maybe because of it.

  “Hi,” Devan said to Emmy now. “You guys here visiting?”

  “Actually no,” Emmy said. “We’ve just moved here permanently.”

  “Excellent. If you need any information about the area—”

  “I spent my summers here growing up,” Emmy said, ridiculously wanting to set herself apart from the once-in-a-while tourists. Being a summer resident wasn’t much better in the eyes of the locals, but it did have a bit of added cache.

  Why did she even care? For all she knew, this guy was a tourist himself. Except, well, he had the slightly grungy, hippied-out look of a true local. And she vaguely recognized him now that she had a close-up view, though she wasn’t sure from where.

  He sat on the sand next to her and gazed out at the lake.

  “What’s your family name? Maybe I know some of your folks.”

  “Van Amsted.”

  “Oh, whoa, really? Like Drew Van Amsted?”

  “He’s my little brother.”

  Devan smiled then. “Yeah, I remember you guys. I used to play soccer with Drew in the summers over at Sequoia Park.”

  “You look vaguely familiar. Maybe I saw you guys together sometime.”

  He grinned. “I’m sure I’d remember if I’d seen a girl as gorgeous as you around.”

  Emmy was not so naive that she could mistake a sentence referring to her as both a girl and gorgeous as anything but a blatant come-on.

  But this guy Devan…if he’d been hanging out with Drew, he was definitely younger than her. And judging by the lack of lines on his face, she imagined quite a bit younger. Surely he wasn’t looking at her as a sexual prospect. She hadn’t been mistaken for under thirty, since…well, since she’d been under thirty.

  She ignored his compliment. “I’m probably six or eight years older than you. That’s why you don’t remember me.”

  “Get out of here. What’re you? Like twenty-five, twenty-six?”

  Emmy laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m thirty-five.”

  As soon as the words exited her mouth, she wondered if she should have kept the fact to herself. Would he totally lose interest now?

  She didn’t know anything about this guy, but she didn’t want to shut down this fun little flirtation before it had even gotten started.

  Aidan invaded her thoughts again. He was probably sitting in his cabin, glaring at his computer right now. And he had good reason to glare, given the trauma he’d been through. She wondered if Devan had ever done anything that required risking his life for the greater good.

  “Well, you do the age of thirty-five proud, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  She caught his gaze dropping to her chest, and she found herself happy to be stared at there for once. She glanced down and saw that her nipples were hard beneath her swimsuit, and the suit itself was light enough in color that the dark skin of her nipples actually showed through faintly. Yet another flaw in this suit that she’d failed to notice at the store.

  Oh well, she supposed there were worse things he could be seeing right now.

  “So where’d you and your husband move from?”

  He was definitely interested. Even after hearing her age, and getting a full-on inspection of her in her granny suit. Doubtful he’d go fishing with the “your husband” phrase otherwise.

  Amazing.

  “Actually it’s just me and my son. I’m divorced from his father.”

  “He’s a cute kid,” Devan added. “I’ve got a five-year-old girl myself. I’m not with her mother anymore, but I’ve got custody of her half the time. Maybe we could get them together for a play date sometime.”

  Oh, the old playdate-that’s-actually-a-grown-up-date maneuver. Smooth.

  She felt a tiny bit awkward hanging out with a man—a potential love interest, even?—with Max present, too. She’d never done that before. The last time she’d spent a day with Max and another man, it had been his father, and the thought created a dull, momentary ache in her belly.

  She would not let those thoughts ruin thi
s perfectly lovely day. Instead, she forced her mind back to the present and Devan’s offer.

  “Sure, that would be great. Max doesn’t know any kids his age here yet. What’s your daughter’s name?”

  “Zoe. I’m actually picking her up tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll have her for the weekend, if you guys are going to be around.”

  “We will be,” Emmy said, trying her best to sound casual. “Maybe we’ll bump into you at the festival tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for you.”

  It struck Emmy as odd that the times she’d been in the presence of both Max and Aidan, she didn’t feel the same sense of tense awkwardness she felt now, with Devan. Being with Aidan felt like slipping back into a favorite pair of jeans—he just fit.

  No.

  He didn’t, and it was stupid of her to think that way. He was more like an old destructive habit—smoking, or drinking—that she’d done to excess in the past and now had to be diligent against if she wanted to take care of herself.

  Because with him, she’d been out of control, impulsive, too passionate, too consumed by his energy—none of the things she could afford to be as a mother. She had to think of Max first now. Always. And he needed a stable, calm, responsible mother. She couldn’t afford to lose herself to a man any more than she could to motherhood, or to any of the other roles she played in life.

  Just as there was a delicate balance between being a good mother and holding onto her sense of self separate from motherhood, there was the same balance necessary between having a love relationship and becoming engulfed by the flames of it. Aidan had already proven once that he could engulf her.

  Right now, she had a perfectly nice guy sitting next to her, and the last thing she should have been doing was comparing him to Aidan.

  “If you come to this beach again, we live in the house on the other side right back there,” Emmy said, pointing through the trees at the cottage.