The Sins That Bind Us

by Geneva Lee

  “I think there’s more to your story than that.” But he doesn’t push me for more information. Instead he turns the volume on the stereo up. “What does Faith Kane listen to?”

  I shrug as the final catchy notes of Taylor Swift’s latest song fades away followed by a darker, more soulful tune. I don’t know the artist’s name, but I know the song. Maybe I don’t want to know it because the words she sings are my own. Without thinking I begin to sing along with her, forgetting for a moment that I’m in the car with Jude.

  “I lost myself the day that I met you.

  Now I’m not sure where I’m heading to.

  And you’ll break my heart like the time before;

  Until I don’t believe in true love no more.

  I’m in pieces…pieces…”

  Jude’s hand on my shoulder reminds me that I’m not alone, and I startle.

  “It’s up here,” he says softly, pointing to a driveway.

  “Sorry.” I slam on the brakes so I don’t miss the turn.

  “No reason to be sorry. I liked listening to you sing, even if you got some of the words wrong.”

  “I got the words wrong? I love that song. What are you an expert?” I’m starting to remember why I’d given him the nickname Mr. Arrogant in the first place. As soon as the car is in park, I turn to glare at him. “What did I get wrong?”

  He shrugs, but he can’t keep that cocky grin off his face. “I think she’s singing I lost my way.”

  “Remind me to Google it later.” Apparently he has a knack for ruining things, and I’d almost found myself liking him. It’s too bad he’s so goddamn full of himself. Who the fuck corrects someone’s singing?

  “You want to come in?” he asks as he opens the car door.

  I want to say no but instead I unbuckle my seat belt. Way to stick to your guns, girl. Well, if he can be a know-it-all asshole so can I. “You know this isn’t exactly walking distance,” I inform him as I get out and slam the door behind me.

  “Three miles? I thought you grew up in the city.”

  My next rebuke dies on my lips when I finally look at his house. If there had been any doubt that he and I are from vastly different worlds, this settles it. It isn’t the older homes I love, but it still steals my breath away. The house had been built into the side of the bluff, curving along the rocky terrain so that it captured a full view of the sea from every angle. I’m still ogling it when Jude takes my hand and pulls me forward. I go because I’m too flabbergasted to pull away and because part of me wants to know what it feels like to walk into a place like this. It’s so far outside my reality that even my broke-ass imagination can’t picture what’s inside. I barely pay attention when he drops my hand to key in the garage code. As the door ratchets open, my eyes land on a motorcycle.

  Figures.

  Jude catches me staring at it and shrugs. “There was a time in my life when I thought I needed that.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s mostly for show.” He nods to the spot next to it. “That’s my true love.”

  It’s a canary yellow Jeep and far from what I pictured him driving. Something about his attitude the first time we met suggested sports cars—the ones with two seats and no room for baggage.

  “Max would love that.” I flinch when I realize I’ve brought my kid into this again. It’s bad enough that they met at the store. Max is my whole world, but there are parts of me that I protect him from. Jude exists in those dark areas that he doesn’t need to know about.

  “I’ll take him for a ride.”

  I don’t speak. What is it about Jude Mercer that leaves me tongue-tied?

  “I should be going,” I finally force out. “I need to get Max by four.”

  Jude holds up his phone. “Looks like you have twenty minutes to kill.”

  Unlike me, he has an answer for everything it seems.

  I wander behind him as he leads me into the main house and my mouth falls open. If the outside had been impressive, there are no words for the inside. Naked, wood beams line the ceiling, matching the slick, hardwood floor. The furniture is minimal—modern square lines and a few carefully selected pieces all facing the floor to ceiling windows that look out over the bay. Today the water looks calm but the waves are there—tiny tremors that slice knifelike through the glassy surface and are gone as quickly as they appear.

  My heart jumps as his hand clamps down on my shoulder and for a second my own carefully poised surface shatters like the water.

  “Can I get you some water? I might have soda, but that’s questionable.” There’s a smile in his voice and between that and his hand still resting on me heat begins to spread through me. It’s a warm and welcome sensation like coming home and I haven’t felt it for a long time. I turn away from him and everything he’s offering me and catch sight of an easel across the room. On it a half-finished canvas reflects the subtle tide outside the window.

  “It’s beautiful,” I whisper. I’ve seen the water every day for four years and today I see it for the first time. He’s captured the hint of movement in a clash of blues and greens. “I didn’t know you were an artist.”

  It’s a stupid thing to say because I don’t know anything about him. Not really. Except that he’s patient and he doesn’t actually ride a motorcycle and he has no sense of when it’s going to rain and that he’s so much more than he gives away. To me he is as unfinished as the painting awaiting his return and I want to pick up the brush and fill him in until I can see all of him.

  “I think you’re looking at it with mom eyes.” He chuckles as he turns to study the canvas.

  “Mom eyes?” I repeat. “What the hell are those?”

  “Oh, you know. Remember when you were a kid and your mom put every picture you brought home from school on the fridge?” He glances toward me and the grin slides off his face.

  “My grandmother raised me. My sister was the artistic one, so…”

  A muscle in his jaw clenches and relaxes as if my life story upsets him more than it does me. “I bet you do it for Max.”

  “You have me there,” I surrender. I do it for Max all the time, so why am I thinking about my mom and the life I lost so long ago? “I think the ocean makes me think of the past and not the present.”

  “How so?” he asks in a gentle voice that makes me long to explain it to him, even though I’m not certain that I can.

  I focus on the expanse of bluish gray that stretches before me seemingly without end. “The ocean is so vast–fathomless—just like a person. I could know you for years and you would never see all the moments that made me the woman I am today. The ones that are forming me into who I’ll be tomorrow or five years from now. No one can ever truly know another person. We’re all mysteries just like the sea.”

  “Do you really believe that?” A harsh current undercuts his words. “Your sister? Grandmother? No one knows you? Not even Max’s father?”

  “Definitely not him.” My laughter is hollow as I consider that. “They might have known me once but they’ve been gone too long to know me now.”

  “And Max?” he asks gruffly.

  “He only knows the best parts of me, I hope.” It hurts to say it to someone who comprehends what I mean. I haven’t had to profess my shortcomings to Jude. He’s known them since the moment we met and judging from how his eyes close briefly, he understands all too well.

  When Jude opens his eyes he doesn’t turn them to me, rather he stares outward, looking beyond the waves into his own past. “It’s nearly four.”

  I don’t need another reminder that I belong somewhere else and to no one at all.

  Chapter 5

  I get Max situated with his iPad in the corner of my office before I dare to look at the stack of invoices waiting on my desk. The end of the month always brings all the accounts payable and nothing is worse than when it coincides with group day. It hardly seems fair that the post office can’t deliver before three in the afternoon. As it was I’d sat around all morning looki
ng for something to do and now I had too much–and even more weighing on my mind.

  “I’ve decided to quit cooking.” Amie appears with her usual flair for the dramatic. Dropping onto a corner of the desk, she tugs off her bandana and sticks it into her paisley chef’s jacket. “Don’t you want to know my back-up plan?”

  By my count she’s had about a dozen back-up plans in the time I’ve known her. She still cooks on the line everyday.

  “Sure.” I sift through the envelopes beginning to mentally filter them by priority.

  “I’m going to host a cooking show.”

  “Food Network?” I ask off-hand.

  “Travel Channel or maybe PBS to start.” She starts to unbraid her hair as she continues. “I suppose if Food Network offered the right amount…”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” I bet Jude never has to decide which bills get paid at the end of the month. Meanwhile I get to gamble on whether or not our vegetable guy likes us enough to keep delivering if we’re late. It’s one of life’s more annoying phenomenons: how few of us exist in the middle. There’s the have-plenty’s and the have-not’s and a football field in between.

  “You aren’t listening to a word that I’m saying.” Amie’s accusation breaks through my bitter inner-diatribe.

  “I was actually.” I repeat back her thoughts on Food Network. Maybe I’m wrong. There is something in the middle. It’s where the dreamers exist, people like Amie. No one has ever told her she can’t achieve exactly what she wants and that’s why she has a restaurant at thirty. It’s why she’ll probably land her own TV show. Some people just know how to make things happen. They aren’t weighed down by the fear the rest of us carry.

  “You’re using that mom voodoo¸” she says and her words strike too familiar of a chord.

  I suck in a breath and shake my head vehemently. “No such thing.”

  “Well, you’re obviously listening but thinking about something else entirely.” Her eyes narrow and I want to remind her that she’s the one with the creepy knack of getting into people’s heads. “Or someone. Maybe a hot, tattooed bad boy with a heart of gold.”

  I refrain from screaming and shoot her a thin-lipped smile. “It’s the end of the month. Bills and nursing homes are the only thing on my mind.”

  “Oh shit!” Her attitude instantly shifts and she pats my arm softly. “Do you need anything? I can take this over if you want to head out.”

  “No.” What I need right now is to work and focus and forget whatever weirdness going on between me and he-who-must-not-be-named. “I got this. I’m heading out to see her tomorrow. It’s supposed to be gross out anyway. I might as well spend Saturday in the car.”

  It’s not as if we have real weekends off, but I know she tries to give me as much time as possible with Max on Saturday and Sunday. But even I have been too distracted this week to plan for my monthly trip to see Nana. I’ve never told Amie that I dread it, because I don’t have to. Who would enjoy visiting someone who doesn’t remember who you are?

  “I’ve got the weekend,” she says this as if it’s no big deal that she constantly sacrifices her life for the sake of mine.

  “I can come in on Sunday.”

  “No way.” She waves off my offer and jumps to her feet. “I need you here on Monday because I have a hot date.”

  This is the kind of news that I can distract her with so that we can finally change topics. “Do tell.”

  “Who am I kidding?” Amie presses the back of her hand to her forehead and dislodges the sweaty curls sticking there. She looks exactly like a character in a Tennessee Williams’ play. Like I said, she’s got the dramatic flair down. “It’s with the chiropractor.”

  “I thought that ship sailed. Forcibly if I recall.”

  She sighs and draws her shoulders up like she doesn’t understand either. “So did I. Either I’m not as forcible as I like to think or the boring doctor has bigger balls than I thought.”

  We both immediately check to make certain Max isn’t watching us, but he’s still glued to an alphabet game.

  “Maybe I should say no and force you to work on Monday,” I tease.

  “I swear I’m not lowering my expectations. I’m just worried that when a good man finally comes along I’ll be too rusty.” She sticks her arms out straight in front of her and croaks: “Oil can. Oil can.”

  My eyes widen and I shrink back into my chair.

  “What? I was being the Tin Man!”

  I sit back up with a grin. “I know. I was just trying to decide if I should record that for your future dating site profiles.”

  “Now you’re definitely working on Monday.” Amie pauses in the doorway. “Just think how many eligible suitors I’ll have when I have my own cooking show.”

  “Or how many creeps,” I correct her.

  She wags a finger at me. “Do you mind? Cinderella wore glass slippers and they didn’t break. I need some fairy tale-level optimism here.”

  I promise her that I still believe in true love because it’s a nice thing to say, and because part of me does. I love her and my son. I’m truly fond of a couple of our regulars. But romance and happily ever afters? That’s why they’re called stories.

  There are a million reasons that I moved my grandmother to a nursing facility in a town nearly an hour away, but most of them are lies. The fact is that I want an excuse not to spend every Sunday feeling like a ghost. I check the mirror every few minutes and find Max staring out the window taking in the Douglas firs that rise as majestically as the Olympic Mountains in the distance. The weather forecaster missed the mark because the sky is bright and the air crisp. One of the few days we’ll have like it until summer roars defiantly into the Northwest. By the time we reach Nana, Max squirms with energy as I release him from the captivity of his car seat.

  I have to remind him twice to hold my hand in the parking lot as we climb the steps to the front door. Miss Maggie, who’s been here since the day Grace and I dropped Nana off, smiles widely when she spots us. Today she’s wearing a shockingly pink pair of scrubs and lipstick to match that pops against her mocha skin.

  “Hello sweetness!” she cries out and Max runs to give her a hug. I can’t help inflating a bit at the joyful greeting or Max’s response. “She’s going to be so happy to see you.”

  “It’s a good day then?” I try to contain my hope.

  She raises an eyebrow over her turquoise reading glasses. “It’s always a good day when you’re breathing, sugar.”

  And that’s why I try not to get my hopes up. I don’t have an eternal font of positivity to draw from. I want to see the world in rainbow hues but I’ve learned to only expect grays. Max, on the other hand, gets a hero’s welcome. It’s why he loves to come here. The whole community works with a local preschool to keep up the residents’ spirits. They’re used to having kids around and they enjoy Max as much as he enjoys them. He doles out high fives and hugs like he’s an official sponsor of each.

  “They just eat him up,” Maggie says with a giggle. “That child is a light.”

  I bite my lip and watch how each person reacts to him. By the time he comes to a worn old chair in the corner, he’s left every one in the place glowing. But he turns to face us, his own smile falling from his face. He signs to me.

  “I don’t know where Frankie is,” I respond, waiting for Maggie to fill me in.

  “Frankie’s out for the day.” But there’s a significance to her tone that’s meant for me.

  It’s happened before, but now Max is getting old enough to remember. That’s the inevitability of life. He can come in here for a few hours once a month and breathe vitality into every soul he touches but he can’t stop them from dying. For now, he’s appeased by her response, but I’m going to have to talk to him about it later. Next month he’ll ask again and I promised myself I’d never tell him unnecessary lies.

  I wave for him to head down the hall with me before he can ask more questions. I don’t want him to stare at his great-grandmother like she m
ight disappear any moment.

  Nana’s sitting by the window when we reach her room. Her fine white hair has been combed into a tight bun exactly like the one she wore every day of my youth. It amazes me that she remembers how to do this. She can dress herself and make her bed and read a book. Her body keeps moving forward each morning out of habit. There’s none of the responsibility that urges the rest of us out of bed and yet she’s here—dressed and waiting for no one and nothing.

  That used to make me feel guilty. I would drive up every weekend as long as I could scrape together the gas money. When Max was born I would bring him and she would sing him the lullabies she never forgot while she rocked in her chair. I wanted to be the someone she waited for—I wanted to be her reason for getting dressed. Then one weekend I left some diapers in her room. At the time they were a precious commodity and I couldn’t afford to leave them. When I unbuckled Max and wrapped him up and dragged us both inside, I found her sitting by the window still waiting. In five minutes’ time she’d forgotten I had been there. That was how quickly we slipped from her. After that I came less because it hurt too much to be erased each time.

  Max doesn’t mind that she forgets him. Today he runs and drops to her feet, taking her paper-thin hand in his. She pats him on the head and asks his name. He doesn’t need to read her lips to know this part of the monthly ritual.

  “It’s Max, Nana,” I call over. She looks at me with a frown and squints. “Grace?”

  A lump forms in my throat but I force myself to shake my head and smile. “It’s Faith and I brought Max to visit.”

  “Oh yes. Max.” She’s gotten very good at sounding like she’s following.

  We sit and I tell her about work and how Max is doing with his lip reading. I tell her that insurance still refuses to pay for the cochlear implants and that I’ve saved a little more toward them. Max draws pictures of the ocean for her. Not the still bay she can see from her window but the choppy, wild water near where we live. He writes her a letter that I do my best to decipher. We give her glimpses of our lives while I silently pray that any one of them will stick. My parents died a long time ago but it wasn’t until she got sick that I felt like an orphan.