Comeback (21 page)

There were all sorts of paths through the pond area, lined with trees of every variety. The koi in the ponds were still swimming, oblivious to the cold. We walked to the center of a bridge that looked out over the pond and stopped there for a bit. I breathed deep, letting the crisp, damp air swarm my nostrils and clear my head. Rock, greenery, and man-made structures came together in perfect harmony here, as though this was exactly how the universe intended for it to be. Jessica leaned over, resting her arms on the railing of the bridge. We both had on raincoats, so the water gathered on the wood wasn’t an issue. Resting on the railing seemed like a good idea, so I mimicked her. She was watching the koi slithering around underneath us; I was watching her, or rather her reflection in the surface of the pond.

As long as I’d known her, I had been aware that she had a huge capacity to care for other people who often made loving them difficult. No matter how many times the addicts who worked with Light the Lamp fucked up, she always did anything she could to help them out. At first, when she’d been helping me deal with all the problems that came with Emma’s arrival in Portland, I’d thought it was just because it was her job to do so. Now I knew better. She helped because it was simply what she did. It all boiled down to who she was as a person. But after last night, I realized I had previously underestimated her ability to care. Her heart had been broken time and again—by people much like me—yet she didn’t let that deter her from getting close to more people who may very well hurt her again. All the pain became fuel for her to try to make a difference. She should be steering herself clear of me, but instead she’d turned her life upside down to try to help me.

I didn’t know if I was worth that kind of sacrifice, but I’d be damned if I didn’t do everything in my power to make myself worthy of it. I just wasn’t entirely sure how to go about doing that.

“Do you ever think maybe you had to go through all the crap in your life so you’d recognize something good when you found it?” she asked me out of the blue. “No,
recognize
isn’t quite what I’m thinking. Maybe I mean
appreciate
.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever really thought of it that way,” I said. “There might be something to it, though. I mean, if you had dessert after every meal every day of your life, then would you really appreciate the perfection of a piece of good chocolate? Maybe not the way someone who’d never had dessert before would appreciate it.”

Our reflections in the water changed as cloud cover rolled over us again. Maybe we should have brought the umbrella after all. A couple of the koi came up near the surface, causing our images to ripple even more. Those ripples couldn’t hide the smile that came over her lips, though, or the way that smile seemed to brighten up everything around us. Including me.

“That’s a pretty deep analysis.”

“Hey, now. Don’t forget we’re talking about deep things,” I replied. “Chocolate is a big deal, not something to be taken lightly.”

She laughed. “So it is.”

“You weren’t asking me about chocolate, though,” I said, sobering. “I think I know the crap you were talking about, in both of our lives.”

“I think that’s pretty clear after last night.”

“So the only real question I have is what you were thinking of as being the
something good
you mentioned…”

She fell as quiet as the garden itself. Thinking. Was it that she didn’t know how to answer me, or was it more that she was weighing just how honest she wanted to be with her answer? There were times when we were together that I believed she would never tell me anything less than the full, unbridled truth. Then there were other moments when I was sure she was holding back—perhaps to spare me heartache, or maybe sometimes because she didn’t think I could handle the full truth. I wished she could see me as someone she didn’t have to worry about, but I wasn’t sure that would ever be a realistic possibility. Not now that I knew as much about her past, about the people she’d loved, as she’d revealed last night.

She wanted to help me. That wasn’t in doubt. But would she ever be able to see me as just a man, not a man who was also an Addict with a capital
A
? I wasn’t so sure.

“Never mind,” I said after a protracted silence when she still hadn’t replied. “It’s not important.”

“Don’t say that,” she said.

“Don’t say what?”

“Don’t tell me it’s not important. Not when it is. It’s one thing to make self-deprecating jokes when the cameras are on. It’s something else entirely to tell me that something you asked isn’t important when it’s just the two of us.”

I dragged a hand down my face in frustration, although I wasn’t entirely sure what the source of my frustration was. Her? Myself? I couldn’t put my finger on it, but neither of those options seemed right. “I just didn’t want to make you feel as if you needed to answer if you didn’t think you could answer me honestly,” I finally said.

“I never said I couldn’t give you an honest answer. I was just thinking—something you do plenty of, yourself, you know.”

“I know.” Maybe I did too much of it. Emma always told me I spent too much time in my own head. “I just thought if it was taking you so long to come up with the answer, it was something you didn’t think I could handle.”

“You can handle a lot more than you give yourself credit for.”

“I could say the same about you,” I said.

We were still leaning over the railing, staring out over the pond. She took my hand, palm to palm, linking our fingers together. “I didn’t worry if you could handle what I was going to tell you. I was trying to decide if I could handle it.”

“It being…what, exactly?”

“That the
something good
I found is you.”

“Oh…”

Well, then. I hadn’t been expecting that.

“Do you want to walk? Let’s walk,” she said, not waiting for my answer.

We finished crossing the bridge, and she took the path leading toward the teahouse. She didn’t say anything for a little while, and I kept quiet, waiting for her to elaborate on why that was such a difficult thing for her to accept.

“After Steve, I told myself I was done,” she said after we passed an older couple strolling leisurely in the other direction. “I couldn’t love another addict. It hurt too much. That didn’t mean I couldn’t
help
them, though. Or at least that was what I told myself. I was sure that I could do my work and keep my distance. It was a point of pride for me, being able to maintain a professional relationship with all the addicts I worked with through Light the Lamp.”

We reached a part of the path consisting of stone steps that weren’t wide enough for us to remain side by side, so I went ahead of her, holding on to her hand behind my back so I could steady her in case she lost her footing on the damp stones.

When we got to the tearoom, the rain was just starting up again. We ducked under the cover that the structure afforded, taking a seat on a wooden bench where we could look out at the beauty of the nature surrounding us. She shivered, so I put my arm around her shoulders and tugged her to my side.

“Then you came along,” she said. She inched closer, snuggling up next to me. “And all the things I told myself, all the promises I made myself, went out the window. I didn’t want to get close to you, but I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want to care about you any more than I care about all of the people I work with, but you wouldn’t let that happen.”

“I do have a way about me,” I said, waggling my eyebrows. “People love me. They can’t help it.”

“You’re making a joke about it, but it’s the truth. People can’t help it. Not once they get to know you. I can’t help it.”

“And now you’re scared you’re going to end up hurt again,” I said.

“No. Well, yes. There’s a part of me that’s scared of that. But not because you’re an addict.”

“Then why?”

“Because I think I’ve figured out that it isn’t loving addicts that hurts so much. It’s just love. Love hurts, but that isn’t a good enough reason not to love. The truth is, it hurts even more not to love.”

I was pretty sure that she was telling me in some sort of roundabout way that she loved me. She hadn’t said it in so many words, and I wasn’t really sure what I’d do if she
did
put it out there plainly. I didn’t have enough brainpower left right now to figure out what I felt for her. I knew it was strong. I knew it was important. But there were too many other things fighting for space in my head right now. It was too soon. We hadn’t even had Emma’s memorial service yet. It had only been two days since we’d said good-bye to her, since I’d become the sole guardian of those three kids.

Because of all that, I was glad that she
hadn’t
said those three words. Not yet. I wanted to be able to give them to her, too, and right now I just couldn’t do that.

There was one thing I could give her, though. “Jessica?” I ventured, the pitter-patter of the rain surrounding us matching the beat of my heart.

“Yeah?”

“You’re something pretty good for me, too. I’m glad I’m able to recognize that, to see it for what it is. To really appreciate you.”

She dropped her head to my shoulder, leaning in toward me with her arm around my waist. The rain picked up, but it didn’t matter. We stayed as we were, listening to it fall upon the roof of the tearoom and watching it turn everything around us into a magical water world.

After a while, it still hadn’t let up. Jessica looked up at me, grinning. “Should we make a run for it?”

I raised a brow. “Depends. Are you afraid of a little water?”

“What did you have in mind?” she asked, her voice wary.

“Well, we could run back to the car and only get a little wet, depending on how fast we run…”

“Or?”

“Or we could keep exploring and say screw the rain.”

The day was still young. We had plenty of time before Soupy and Rachel would be bringing the kids back. I was in no rush, and we’d only seen a couple of the gardens.

The idea of taking her home afterward, helping dry her off and then warming her up in my bed had crossed my mind, too, but it wasn’t the primary reason I liked the thought of staying at the gardens despite the rain. I just liked being here with her. It certainly wasn’t a deterrent, though.

She got up and moved to the open doorway before looking back at me. I still didn’t know what option she intended to choose; she hadn’t given any indication.

I crossed over and joined her. “Well?”

She put her arm through mine and smiled. “Screw the rain.”

WE WERE BOTH
drenched—dripping, really—when we pulled up the driveway at Nicky’s house. The rain hadn’t let up all afternoon, and it had worked its way underneath our outerwear, but that hadn’t mattered to either of us, at least as long as we’d still been out in it and moving around. We’d spent hours at the gardens, taking our time strolling through the different sections and enjoying each other’s company. At one point, we’d stopped at the rock garden—the same place we’d sat and talked a few months ago—and repeated that performance.

Now that I’d made it clear to him, not to mention to myself, that I wasn’t able to keep my heart closed to him, the entire barrier I’d built for myself seemed to have just been smashed. The pieces of it lay crumbled beneath our feet before washing away with the rain, and now I felt as vulnerable as I had when I was a little girl coming to terms with the fact that my father wasn’t exactly a safe person in my life.

Whether he knew it or not, Nicky now held my heart in his hands. He had the power to squeeze the life out of it, and there was nothing I could do to stop that from happening. I’d given him that power. I’d handed it to him. I had to remind myself of that because if anything did happen, if Nicky started taking pills again and crushed me, I would have no one to blame but myself. There were other things he could do with my heart in his hands, though. He could nurture it and help me grow my capacity for love and compassion. I simply had no way of knowing or controlling which direction things would go.

On our way back to the house, we’d grabbed sandwiches from a Subway drive-through, eating in the car with the heater turned up as high as it would go to thaw out our fingers and toes. It didn’t help much, and now that we weren’t moving around any longer, the cold and wet really had a chance to seep in and go bone-deep, but at least the sandwiches helped to stave off our hunger. Now we were home again and could deal with getting warm and dry.