It Comes In Waves (21 page)

Shep said, “Claire, would you mind giving us some privacy?”

“She's not going anywhere,” Ivy said. “Pepper has as much right being here as anyone, and I want her here. Which is more than I can say for the two of you right now. Excuse me.”

Then Ivy walked through their tense semicircle to the upstairs door, threw it open, and slammed it behind her, the sound of her bare feet smacking the treads to the apartment.

Shep closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Luke stormed out from behind the counter. “I'm outta here.”

“Baby, we'll be right down,” said Jill.

“Don't bother, I'll walk home,” he muttered, reaching the door and giving it a hard shove. “See ya, Miss Claire.”

Jill moved to follow him, but Shep touched her arm to stop her. “Let him cool off.” He turned to Claire and said low, “Claire, look; we appreciate what you think you're doing here, but Ivy has no business keeping this shop one more day.”

“It's what she wants,” Claire said.

Shep looked at Jill. “That's news to us.”

“Well, she didn't hesitate when I suggested it.”

“So it
was
your idea,” Shep said.

Jill turned for the door, her features strained with worry. “I'm going to catch up with Luke. I don't want him going off angry about this.”

Claire watched Jill rush out, reminded of her own recent attempt to stop her child from leaving in a rage, the helplessness she'd felt, the regret. She followed, sure she would see Jill endure the same. But from the height of the porch, Claire could see Jill reach Luke at the end of the street. He stopped, appearing to listen. Envy swelled, shifting quickly to bitterness. It was hard not to resent the simple fact that Jill
had
lied to her child, whereas she, Claire, had been accused of it and was suffering her child's anger unfairly.

Shep came out too, yanking the door shut behind him. “Is this because you're still mad at Jill?” he demanded. “Is that why you're doing this?”

Claire turned to face him. “This has nothing to do with Jill. This is about Ivy. This is about taking care of her.”

“Christ, Claire—what do you think we've been doing for the last ten years?”

“I think she's not ready to let this place go.”

“How would you know? You've been back in her life for all of forty-eight hours.”

“That's not fair.” Claire could feel the bubble of tears climbing her throat. “I know her, Shep. I know her just as well as you do.”

He rubbed his face with his palms, as if to wipe away his frustration, but when he looked back at her, the flush of exasperation remained. “I thought we made it clear at dinner that this decision was something Jill and I had been working toward for a long time, that it was best for everyone.”

“Including Ivy?”

He squinted, as if it hurt to look at her. “Do you have any idea how hard this has been for us?” he demanded. “How good it felt to know we could finally move on from this place? Then you show up, out of the blue, and stir all this up again. Did it ever occur to you that this isn't just about what's best for Ivy?”

“Then what about Luke?” Claire said.

“Don't bring Luke into this.”

“Why not?” said Claire. “Doesn't he have a say?”

“I just can't believe that you'd come back here and make this kind of trouble for us.”

Claire's heart raced so fast that she nearly stumbled over her words. “And I can't believe after everything Jill did, you—”

She stopped herself, trapping the rest of the accusation safely behind her teeth, but Shep wouldn't let her off the hook. He stared at her, waiting.

“Go on and say it,” he ordered, low. “You can't believe I took her back. That's what you wanted to say, isn't it?”

Claire straightened, too angry now to pretend otherwise. “You just scooped everything back up like nothing had changed. You're living in the Glasshouse, for God's sake! After the way she treated you, the way she lied to
both
of us, you just take her back like it's no big deal, like none of it mattered.”

“I don't have to justify my decision to you, Claire. I made the choice I made. You made yours just the same. And I think if you'd had the chance, if Foster had begged you to come back, you'd have done the same damn thing I did and you know it. And I'm sorry if you're angry about that, or jealous, or what—but it doesn't give you the right to come back here and upend all of our lives.”

Shoving his hands deep into his pockets, Shep turned for the steps and took them to the gravel, headed for the van.

Claire followed him down. “This has nothing to do with me, Shep. I'm here to do what's best for Ivy.”

Shep didn't respond, just gave her a cool look as he yanked open the driver's door and climbed inside.

When he'd sent the van lurching into the road, Claire stood frozen, too numb with hurt to move.

She looked around, feeling small and out of place. Lost.

She needed a compass.

C
laire wasn't sure Gus would be home. She wasn't sure he'd be happy to see her; she wasn't sure of
anything
, but still she steered her bike up his driveway without slowing, deciding she'd take her chances. If he wasn't alone, she'd flee, unnoticed. But, God, she hoped he was.

She heard the wail of blues guitar coming from the back of the house. When she rounded the deck and saw him leaned over a flipped board, she stopped before he spotted her and watched him for a moment as he waxed, relishing too much the sight of him stroking the rails to disturb him, the peaceful set of his mouth, the intense focus in his eyes.

She wished she could trade places with that board.

“Going for a ride?”

Gus looked up, startled for a moment until he located her.

Please don't make me go,
Claire thought, a girlish panic and need sloshing around in her stomach, making her dizzy. She couldn't take another rejection today.

He set down his wax and reached over to turn down the music.

She made her way to him.

He wiped his palms on his thighs. “She lives.”

“Barely,” Claire admitted with a weak smile.

When she reached him where he waited at the edge of the deck, his gaze was searching, wary. “For future reference, I hate notes. You want to sneak out in the middle of the night, wake me up and tell me, okay?”

She nodded. “Duly noted.”

He touched the swollen skin above her eyes. “I don't think you got enough sleep.”

She smiled wearily. “But I'm not tired.”

He dragged his thumb down her cheek and smiled back. “Yeah. Me neither.”

•   •   •

S
he'd forgotten what it was to make love in daylight. The decadence, the feeling of doing something forbidden, like skipping class or getting drunk at lunch. She rolled drowsily onto her stomach and surveyed Gus Gallagher's cluttered bedroom in the watery glow of late afternoon. Beyond the door, out of sight, she could hear him in the kitchen, whistling as he cooked, dishes clinking, water flowing.

She'd craved pasta; he'd obliged with boxed mac and cheese.

Exhaustion tugged at her, the smoothness of his sheets tempting her to slide deeper into his bed and drift off to sleep. She closed her eyes, the cotton cool and smelling faintly of salt and damp skin. She'd arrived as tight as a knot; now she felt like a piece of taffy that had been warmed and pulled. How quickly the mind could shift from despair to pleasure. Just a few hours earlier, she'd been swamped with such sadness, such regret.

It wasn't that she hadn't cried for Foster before that morning in the storage room. Learning of his death ten years earlier, Claire had wilted against her kitchen counter in Colorado and wept a different kind of tears. Two thousand miles away from Folly, the words on the paper had belonged to someone else, a life too distant to hurt the way loss should hurt. But there in the shop, the anguish had arrived at last, in whole, the intersection of grief and reality, and she'd stood in the center of it and let it pummel her. Until she'd come back to Folly, until she'd stood inside the shop without him, Foster could never really be gone.

But he was.

Gus returned, lay down next to her, and slid the bowl of mac and cheese between them.

She smiled sleepily. “Why do I feel like I just called in sick to work and any minute now my boss is going to find out that I lied?”

“Because great sex always makes people feel guilty.” He speared a stack of macaroni and fed them to her.

She grinned as she chewed. “You too?”

He snorted. “Hell, no. I need all my guilt for those mornings I leave without remembering to refill Margot's water bowl, or when I forget her heartworm pill. I can't be wasting prime guilt like that on great sex.”

Claire laughed. “I'm sure Margot appreciates that.”

“Yeah, well. She'd appreciate fresh water more.”

They shared the rest of the mac and cheese, shiny and gooey and electric orange, until the bowl was emptied and Gus lowered it to the floor. Margot trotted over and lapped it clean.

Claire dropped her cheek onto her folded arms. “You must need to get to the store,” she whispered.

“Later.” He rolled her onto her back, lifted her hands above her head, and came over her.

She searched his eyes. “They don't want me here.”

He frowned down at her. “Who?”

“Ivy's family. My old friends. They're angry that I encouraged Ivy not to sell the shop. They think I'm interfering.” She reached up and wove her fingers through his hair. “I'm not.”

“Then what does it matter what they think?” He drew down the sheet, baring her breasts to the breeze, and dropped a kiss on each one. She closed her eyes, trying to lose herself and all worry in the sensation of his mouth on her body, the roughness of his beard as it swept a circle over each tip.

He was right. This time, it didn't matter. It couldn't, she thought.

Then she stopped thinking entirely and sank like a stone.

B
efore the affair, Jill had been a terrible liar. Sure, she'd dabbled in the age-old tradition of the kind white lie, the ability to reshape hard fact into something soft and pleasant, but pure deceit, the kind that broke friendships or crushed hearts, was something else entirely, something deplorable, something ugly.

Until she and Foster had made love for the first time, and a talent for falseness had arrived overnight. Lies over the smallest things—lost keys, leftover coffee—had danced out of her mouth with the grace of a heron in flight.

Then came the day she and Foster agreed to tell Shep and Claire the truth of their love. And suddenly honesty terrified her. Worse, she wasn't even sure she knew how to tell the truth anymore. When they'd stepped into the kitchen where Claire and Shep were setting out the pizzas they'd picked up for dinner, Foster asked Claire to walk the beach with him. Just a quick walk before they ate, he promised. They'd put the pizzas in the oven so they wouldn't get cold. The look of excitement, of unquestioned anticipation, in Claire's eyes had squeezed Jill's heart so hard she struggled to breathe.

When they'd gone and Jill turned to Shep, his eyes darkened with dread. She'd had everything planned, imagined she knew him well enough to know exactly what he would say. But his expression undid her. The words she'd practiced, the gentle phrasing she'd composed, abandoned her. She blurted everything out in one frantic breath, dropped her head into her hands, and began to weep.

She was the girl who spared spiders in the bathroom, the girl who set out water bowls in the heat of summer for neighborhood dogs. She was the girl who gave up her place in line, who donated canned goods and blankets, who potted marigolds and asters for monarch butterflies. She wasn't supposed to hurt someone this way.

She wasn't that girl.

And then she was.

Shep sat stiff and straight, rubbing his palms up and down the tops of his thighs. “He's telling Claire now, isn't he?”

She lowered her hands. “Yes.”

Shep kept his gaze fixed on the table, his brown eyes always liquid soft, like melting chocolate, burned hot on a pile of junk mail that had been forwarded from her old apartment. It struck Jill sharply—she and Shep had only just moved into this house together. They had barely had time to start receiving mail.

“How long has this been going on?” he demanded.

“It doesn't matter,” she whispered.

“It matters to me.” The anger in his voice seemed to shake the legs of her chair. She looked up. “How long?” he asked again.

How did she answer that? Did she say that night she and Foster shared the dinner she'd cooked for him, Shep, or did she say the first time she and Foster lay in the bed he had shared with Claire for nearly six years? Either answer would have been true.

“I'm pregnant.”

Whatever air remained in the room vanished. She watched Shep take in the impossible news, waiting for the blow to come, wishing for him to deliver something so vicious she could be absolved. But he just kept staring at her, until she saw the glisten of tears.

He shook his head, slowly, almost imperceptibly.

“Say something, Shep,” she pleaded.

“Like what?” he demanded. “Do I have a choice? Can I say, no, you can't leave me for him? Can I say that?”

When she didn't answer, he got up and left the house, letting the screen door smack the jamb so hard the pots on the stove trembled. Jill rose and turned off the oven, then sat in the silence for a long time afterward, her eyes fixed on that same pile of junk mail, waiting for someone to return, but the house remained empty and finally she walked numbly back out into the night—which seemed crisper and colder than it had when she'd walked in, as if the seasons had shifted while she'd sat.

Two hours later, Foster found her on the back porch.

His lip was cracked; he'd let Shep hit him.

“It's done,” Foster said as she cleaned the blood from his jaw, as if the hurt they caused was that easy to move on from, that simple, the contents of a dustpan brushed into the trash, the trash knotted and put to the curb.

•   •   •

L
ies and secrets were everywhere; Jill understood that now. Everything boxed or slid into a drawer was a secret, a signal of danger. If something couldn't live out in the open, on a shelf or a countertop, then it was to be feared. When she came into the living room and saw the two strange boxes on the couch, she stopped. The front door flew open; Luke stepped inside, carrying a stack of photo albums. Jill watched him lower the pile to the couch, settling it beside the boxes. What had remained from their morning's work. Pieces of his father.

She sniffed back tears, refusing to let her emotions derail her. She wanted to speak to him while Shep was gone. Her pleading that morning had been only marginally successful; Luke had agreed to ride home with them, but he'd refused to temper his glare. All day he'd stayed outdoors, missing lunch, missing dinner. Now he was back.

“Luke, baby . . .” She stepped into his path as he moved for the door. “We need to talk about today.”

“Yeah, we do.” He nodded firmly, his fierce expression strange to her, the look of an adult, not a young man. “I think I've changed my mind too. About the fall. About school.”

“What about school?” she asked carefully.

“I'm not going,” he said matter-of-factly. “I want to help Grams reopen the shop and run it.”

Panic skidded down her arms. Jill held herself to keep from shaking.

“Luke, baby, listen to me. I know this morning was hard—but your grandma can't just start over. She hasn't thought this through.”

“What's to think through?” Luke demanded. “You weren't there today, Ma. You should have seen Grams going through Dad's old stuff. Her whole face lit up! I can't remember the last time I saw her so happy. You don't understand what that was like.”

Had her son forgotten the day she, Jill, had sorted through her
own
room of ghosts? She knew how emotional it was to revisit so much, how it made you feel hopeful, how it made you feel invincible—and how neither feeling remained the minute those same boxes were emptied out or stored away again.

“I'm sure it did,” she said gently, “but one afternoon doesn't make—”

“It wasn't just today,” Luke said. “Claire and I even talked about it when I went to see her at the hotel.”

Jill blinked. “You went to see Claire? When?”

“Two nights ago.”

“You said you were with Amy.” She stared at him, trying to wrap her head around the simple fact: her son had lied to her.

“What was I supposed to do? You and Shep made it clear you didn't want to see her again while she was here, and I had stuff I wanted to ask her, stuff I wanted to know.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“What difference does it make?
Stuff.
”

Jill looked away, torn. Her son was right to want to know as much as he could about his father, so why did she feel such outrage that he'd gone to Claire—and what had Claire told him?

It didn't matter now. She'd been right to worry from the beginning. That nagging dread she'd harbored—it was this. This moment. This panic. The fear that Claire's return would spark the past in Ivy that no one else could and cloud her thoughts with memories of the old days. Even worse, Claire had pulled Luke into their fantasy, confusing him.

“There's no way you're skipping college to help your grandmother run a failed surf shop, Luke. We won't allow it.” It was an absurd thing to say—he was almost eighteen. She would have no control of his choices. Did she even at this moment?

He leveled a look of determination at her that answered her question.

“I'm doing what I want, Ma. Maybe Dad didn't want the shop, but I do.” He swept up his sweatshirt from the couch and moved for the door.

Jill followed him outside. A sliver of moon softened the blackness, but the sea wind was sharp. “Where are you going?” she called.

“To the shop,” Luke said, lugging his bike down the steps.

“But it's late. It's dark.” Her voice was shaky, panicked. Her heart thundered behind her ribs.

“Grams said I could stay there anytime I wanted, and I think tonight I want to.”

“Luke, wait!”

But in the next instant he was on his bike, a blur under the streetlight, and gone.