Carly's Gift (2 page)

“Let it go, David,” she begged him.

“I wish to hell I could,” he admitted with a sigh. He stared at her for what seemed an interminable time as if searching for something more to say. Finally, wordlessly, he turned to leave.

Carly watched him walk away. Instead of setting him free all those years ago, she'd imprisoned him in the same tangled web of lies that she'd spun around herself. She'd made a hundred promises to David and then sent him a letter that broke every one. Now she had a chance to set things right.

“David?” she called, ignoring the terrible risk she was taking to settle her debt. He stopped and looked back at her over his shoulder. The wind caught his hair, brushing it across his forehead, giving her a glimpse of the twenty-two-year-old boy she'd once loved and believed as necessary to her existence as the air she breathed.

“Yes?”

“Don't go.” For the first time in years she would do something unplanned and uncalculated. Something for herself.

“What's the point, Carly?” He retraced his steps.

She hesitated. “Why did you come, David?”

With an abrupt, angry movement, he grabbed her, his fingers digging into her arms. “To rid myself of you. I don't want to think about you anymore.” He brought his face menacingly close to hers. “I don't want to remember what it felt like to love you. I don't want to care that you could throw away everything we had.” With a look of disgust, he released her and took a step backward. “God—I swore I wouldn't let this happen.”

“There's so much you don't know,” she said. And so much she couldn't explain. “I was young and scared, and I really believed I was doing what was best for everyone.”

“Are you telling me you regret marrying Ethan?”

“I don't let myself think about things like that.”

“What were you afraid of, Carly? Me? Did you think I would go off the deep end if you told me you'd been sleeping with Ethan while I was in New York and that you were pregnant with his child? Or did you think I'd tell you to get lost, so you figured you'd grab Ethan while you could?” He swept the hair off his forehead with his left hand, his wedding ring gleaming in the morning sun.

Carly stiffened her spine, bringing herself up to her full five feet six inches. “I can't give you the answers you want, David, but if you give us a chance, we can be friends.” He started to say something and she put her hand up to stop him. “Friends are infinitely easier to forget than lovers.” When he didn't immediately answer, she went on. “Isn't that why you said you came here today, to find a way to forget me?”

“It's a little hard to think of you as a friend after all the years of hating you.”

He could have hit her and it would have hurt less. “Come inside. I'll fix some coffee and we can talk.” She stepped out of the doorway. “Or do you drink tea now?” Somewhere in the back of her mind a warning sounded. Gathering details of the life he had now would only add color to the canvas of her memories.

“I'll have coffee,” he said, stepping inside the foyer. “Americans don't know how to make a proper cup of tea.” A self-conscious grin played at the corner of his mouth. “I didn't mean that the way it sounded, it's simply a fact.”

She'd always dreamed of going to England, or France, or China, longing to see for herself how other people lived. “Do you like living in London?” It was a dumb question. If he didn't like where he was living, why would he be there?

“Yes.”

“I read somewhere that your wife is English.” She knew precisely where she'd read about Victoria Montgomery, in an upscale magazine called
European Life.
The article had been about the movers and shakers of London society and had included a photograph and several paragraphs on the bestselling author David Montgomery and his stunning wife, the former Victoria Digby, daughter of Lord and Lady Something-or-other.

“Is this what you had in mind, Carly, a cup of coffee and some idle chitchat? If it is, I'm not interested.”

She sighed. “This isn't going to work if you don't bend a little, David.”

After several seconds he took off his coat and handed it to her. “My agent tells me there are times I can be a real stiff-necked son of a bitch,” he said in lieu of an apology.

Carly held the coat on her arm while she reached for a hanger. The coat was soft and obviously expensive and, for an unguarded moment, she thought about slipping her arms into the sleeves and letting David's lingering warmth envelop her. When she was in high school, she'd lived in David's varsity jacket and could still remember the incredible feeling of intimacy that had come over her when she'd be sitting in the middle of class and her own body heat would release a trace of his cologne.

Forcefully shoving the memory to the back of her mind, she hung his coat next to hers and closed the closet door. “We don't have much time,” she said. “I never know when one of the kids will decide to come home for lunch, instead of eating at the cafeteria.”

“That wouldn't bother me.”

“They can't see you here,” she answered, a little too quickly.

His eyes narrowed. “What are you afraid of, Carly?”

For once she could hide behind the truth. “I'm not afraid of anything. It's simply that when Ethan found out you were coming back, he asked me not to see you. I'd just as soon he didn't know you were here.”

“That doesn't make sense,” David said slowly, more to himself than to her. “He won. Why would he . . .” His head snapped up. “Well, I'll be damned. Could it be you don't like lying in the bed you made for yourself?”

“You always did use words as weapons, David.”

But never against her. At least not until today. “It's an occupational hazard.”

Carly pointed toward the back of the house. “Why don't we have our coffee in the kitchen?”

David nodded and motioned for her to lead the way. As they passed through the living room, he quickly scanned the pictures hanging there. Unless she'd stopped painting watercolors and her style had changed dramatically, and for the worse, none of the paintings were Carly's.

She turned to say something and caught him looking at a picture of a girl standing next to a tree. “Ethan collects turn-of-the-century artists,” she explained.

He gave her a questioning look. “Since when?” The Ethan he remembered had taste that ran to shopping-mall art.

“He started a few years after we were married.”

“I don't see anything of yours in here.”

“I got tired of looking at them.”

Something wasn't right. And then it hit him. “You're not painting anymore, are you?”

“I grew bored after a while. It's difficult to maintain enthusiasm for something that's third-rate.”

What was it about artists and critics? Of the hundreds of glowing reviews that had been written about his books, it was the half-dozen bad ones he remembered word for word. “And just who was the genius who told you your work was third-rate?”

She turned her back to him and continued into the kitchen. “Me,” she said, reaching into a cupboard for the coffee.

“I know what passes for art these days. I've seen too many paintings—hell, I own too many of them. I remember your work, Carly. You were never third-rate.”

“It's past history,” she said. “I hardly remember what it felt like to hold a brush in my hand.” With a forced brightness, she added, “At least one of us made it.”

Battling a streak of vindictiveness, he considered telling her how close he'd come to not “making” it, how after receiving her letter he'd dropped out of school and lived on the road, spending the next two years hitchhiking his way through South America and then hopping a freighter to Europe. The ship was ancient and painfully slow and only the cook spoke enough English to put more than a halting sentence together. Boredom had prompted him to borrow paper and start writing again—a cliché-ridden spy novel about Nazis who'd hidden in Argentina after World War II. The hours he spent working on the manuscript were the best he'd had since leaving school. After two years of trying everything from tequila to whores, he'd stumbled on the one way to escape her memory, if only for a few hours.

He crossed the kitchen and leaned his hip against the tile counter. She was thinner, almost fragile looking, a word he would never have used to describe her back then. From the time they were first allowed to cross the streets by themselves, she'd refused to be left behind in anything he and Ethan did, whether it was cross-country skiing or climbing trees. He liked that she'd finally let her hair grow and that she wore it loose; what he didn't like was that he could still remember the sweetness of its smell, and how it felt against his bare chest after they'd made love.

“I've read all of your books,” she said, again turning the subject from herself to him. “They're wonderful.” Softly, she added, “I'm so proud of you, David. You've done everything you wanted.” She paused. “Everything you ever dreamed.”

“Ironic, isn't it? I had the dream because of you and then succeeded in spite of you.”

She flinched but never lost a beat, going on as if the jab had been a loving stroke. “Remember how you used to say your books would never hit the bestseller lists because really good books never did?”

There was no place to hide from her. She knew all his secrets, every pompous thought he'd had back then. “Well, at least I was right about that.”

She whipped around to face him. “You can't be serious. Your books are as literate as they are exciting. Especially the last four. I couldn't put them down when I was reading them and then I couldn't get them out of my mind after I finished.”

A sickening thought occurred to him. It was like old times, each of them bolstering and defending the other. Only it wasn't old times; it was now and it was warped. Still, he couldn't stop himself from saying, “And your paintings were wonderful.”

“Even if I had the desire, I wouldn't have the energy or time. This house, three kids, a husband, and a dog are about as much as I can handle.” As if on cue, the dog stood, made a circle and lay back down in its basket.

“I can't believe what I'm hearing.”

She stopped filling the coffeepot long enough to give him a sardonic smile. “Surprised?”

“Not at all. I knew you would have kids someday—” A caustic laugh punctuated his remark. “Of course at the time I thought they would be mine.” Defensively, to cover his exposed feelings, he added, “What does surprise me is that you would use them as an excuse for giving up painting.”

She glared at him. “You always did try to put words in my mouth.”

“What really happened, Carly?”

“What are you trying to do to me, David? What do you hope to accomplish by pointing out how successful you are and what a failure you think I am?”

“When we were growing up”—he struggled for the words to express what until then had only been feelings—“our ambitions were so caught up together that at times I lost track of where yours ended and mine began. I've imagined you a lot of ways since then, but never once did I imagine you not painting.”

She went back to making the coffee. “Can we talk about something else?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Tell me about England.” A deep hunger to know what she'd missed seeing for herself, came through in her voice.

“On the surface, it's a lot like we used to think it would be—the double-decker buses, the tea shops, the museums.”

“And below the surface?” she asked eagerly.

He knew what she wanted, to live the experience through his eyes the way she had when he'd gone to New York without her. “What took me by surprise was the sense of history—the feeling of mortality, and the utter insignificance that I felt the first time I stood in the middle of Westminster Abbey. I went on a day when there was a blizzard outside and I almost had the place to myself.”

He searched for the words that would make what he'd seen come alive for her. “It was incredible, Carly. There I was standing in the Poets Corner, surrounded by memorials to Chaucer and Jonson and Browning.” He chuckled. “Talk about a humbling experience. I went home and threw out everything I'd written since moving to England.”

“Has it changed—your feelings, I mean? Have you gotten used to living there?”

“You mean, have I lost my sense of wonder?”

“Yes.”

He thought back to how he'd felt the first time he'd seen Trafalgar Square and the River Thames and how he felt when he passed them now. “I guess I have,” he said with regret.

“I suppose it was bound to happen.” She reached into the cupboard and took down two mugs.

He didn't say anything then. The silence grew until it became awkward and she looked up at him. Her eyes were dark brown pools of sadness and fear that contradicted the seemingly casual turn in their conversation.

“Why did you turn your back on me, Carly?” he asked, unable to stop himself. “And why Ethan? What did he give you that I didn't? Was it because I wanted to postpone our getting married again?”

Carly looked away, sheltering herself from the hurt she saw on his face. Now, even knowing how much it meant to David to hear what she would tell him, she found herself stumbling over the words. “I was lonely. Ethan was here when I needed him. He loved me. I fell in love with him. I never meant for it to happen—it just did.” Allowing herself a crumb of truth, she added, “I know it doesn't mean much for me to tell you this now, but not one day has gone by that I haven't regretted the way I hurt you.”

He walked over to the window and stared outside, taking in but paying no attention to the shimmering red and gold leaves still clinging to trees no longer willing to nurture them. “I threw away all of your letters but that last one. Every once in a while when I was feeling particularly lonely or lost, I would reread what you had written and it would shore me up with enough anger to see me through until the next time. But then that stopped working after a while when the memories of how it really was between us started to creep in and thread their way through what you'd written. Once I even went so far as to make airline reservations to come over and confront you and demand that you tell me the truth.”