Marrying Daisy Bellamy (4 page)

Although bursting with the news, he couldn't find anyone to tell. He tried to explain it in rapid-fire street Spanish to his neighbor, Rojelio, but Rojelio was late for work and couldn't hang out with him. After that, Julian ran all the way to the library on Central Ave., barely sensing the pavement beneath his feet. He didn't have a home computer, and he had to get his reply in right away.

The author John Steinbeck referred to winter in California as the bleak season, and Julian totally got that. It was the doldrums of the year. Chino, a highway town east of L.A., was hemmed in by smog to the west and mountain inversions to the east, often trapping the sharp, ripe smell of the stockyards, which tainted every breath he took. He tended to hole up in the library, doing homework, reading…and dreaming. The summer he'd spent at Willow Lake felt like a distant dream, misty and surreal. It was another world, like the world inside a book.

To make sure the other kids didn't torture him at his high school, Julian had to pretend he didn't like books. Among his friends, being good at reading and school made you uncool in the extreme, so he kept his appetite for stories to himself. To him, books were friends and teachers. They kept him from getting lonely, and he learned all kinds of stuff from them. Like what a half orphan was. Reading a novel by Charles Dickens, Julian learned that a half orphan was a kid who had lost one parent. This was something he could relate to. Having lost his dad, Julian now belonged to the ranks of kids with single moms.

His mom had never planned on being a mom. She'd told him so herself and, in a moment of over-sharing, explained that he'd been conceived at an aerospace engineering conference in Niagara Falls, the result of a one-night stand. His father had been the keynote speaker at the event. His mother had been an exotic dancer performing at the nightclub of the conference hotel.

Nine months later, Julian had appeared. His mother had willingly surrendered him to his dad. The two of them had been pretty happy together until his dad died. Julian's high school years had been spent with his mom, who seemed to have no idea what to do with him.

He didn't have a cell phone. He was, like, one of the last humanoids on the planet who didn't have one. That was how broke he and his mom were. She was out of work again, and he had an after-school job at a car dealership, rotating tires and changing oil. Sometimes guys gave him tips, never the rich guys with the hot cars, but the workers with their Chevys and pickups. His mom had a mobile phone, which she claimed she needed in case she got called for an acting job, but the last thing they could handle was one more bill. Their
phone service at the house was so basic, they didn't even have voice mail.

At the library, he could surf the web and access his free email. He quickly found the ROTC site and used the special log-in provided in his welcome packet, feeling as though he'd gained membership to a secret club. Then he quickly checked his email. That was how he kept in touch with Daisy. They weren't the best at corresponding, and there was nothing from her today. He had school and work; she'd recently moved from New York City to the small town of Avalon to live with her dad. She said her family situation was weird, what with her parents splitting up. He felt bad for her, but couldn't offer much advice. His folks had never been together, and in a way, maybe that was better, since there was no breakup to adjust to.

Email only went so far, though. He wanted to call her with his news. And to thank her for reminding him college wasn't out of his reach. Her suggestion, made last summer, had taken root in Julian. There was a way to have the kind of life he'd only dreamed about. In a casual, almost tossed-off remark, she had handed him a golden key.

The apartment he shared with his mother was in a depressing faux-adobe structure surrounded by weedy landscaping and a parking lot of broken asphalt. He let himself in; his mom wasn't around. When she was out of work, she tended to spend most of her time on the bus to the city, going to networking meetings.

Julian paced back and forth in front of the phone. He finally got up the nerve to call Daisy. He wanted to hear her voice and tell her in person about the letter. The call was going to add to a cost he already couldn't afford, but he didn't care.

She picked up right away; she always did when he
called her on her cell phone because nobody else called her from this area code. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey, yourself. Is this a good time?” he asked, thinking about the three-hour time difference. In the background of the call, he could hear music.

“It's fine.” She hesitated, and he recognized the song—“Season of Loving” by the Zombies. He hated that song.

“Everything all right?” It was weird, he hadn't seen her since last summer, but her
It's fine
struck him as all wrong. “What's up?” he asked.

She killed the music. “Olivia asked me to be in her wedding.”

“That's cool, right?” Julian was going to be in the wed ding, too, because his brother was the groom. He'd never attended a wedding before, but he couldn't wait because it was going to take place in August at Camp Kioga. Suddenly it occurred to him to check his ROTC schedule to make sure he was free that day.

“It's not so cool,” Daisy said, her voice kind of thin-sounding. “Listen, Julian, I've been trying to figure out how to tell you something. God, it's hard.”

His mind raced. Was she sick? Sick of him? Did she want him to quit calling, make himself scarce? Did she have a boyfriend, for Chrissake?

“Then tell me.”

“I don't want you to hate me.”

“I could never hate you. I don't hate anybody.” Not even the drunk driver who had hit his dad. Julian had seen the guy in a courtroom. The guy had been crying so hard he couldn't stand up. Julian hadn't felt hatred. Just an incredible, hollow sense of nothingness. “Seriously, Daze,” he said. “You can tell me anything.”

“I hate myself,” she said, her voice low now, trembling.

The phone wasn't cordless, so his pacing was confined to a small area in front of a window. He looked out at the colorless February day. Down in the parking lot, Rojelio's wife was bringing in groceries, bag after bag of them. Normally, Julian would run down and give her a hand. She had a bunch of kids—he could never get an accurate count—who ate like a swarm of locusts. All she did was work, buy groceries and fix food.

“Daisy, go ahead and tell me what's going on.”

“I screwed up. I screwed up big-time.” Her voice sounded fragile, the words like shards of glass, even though he didn't know what she was talking about. Whatever it was, he wanted to be there, wished he could put his arms around her, inhale the scent of her hair and tell her everything was going to be all right.

His mind scrolled through the possibilities. Had she started smoking again? Was she failing in school? He waited. She knew he was there. He didn't need to prompt her anymore.

“Julian,” she said at last, a catch in her voice. “I'm going to have a baby. It's due in the summer.”

The words were so unexpected, he couldn't think of a single thing to say. He kept staring at Rojelio's wife, now on her second trip with the grocery bags. Daisy Bellamy? Having a baby?

At Julian's school, pregnant girls were pretty common, but
Daisy?
She was supposed to have, like, this privileged life where nothing bad ever happened. She was supposed to be his girlfriend. It was true, they'd parted ways in the summer having made no promises, but it was an unspoken assumption between them.

Or so he'd thought.

“Julian? Are you there?”

“Yeah.” He felt as if he'd been punched in the gut.

“I feel really stupid,” she said, crying now, sounding scared. “And it can't be undone. The guy…he's somebody from my school in New York. We weren't even, like, together or anything. We got drunk one weekend, and…oh, Julian…”

He had no idea what to say. This was not the conversation he'd imagined when he'd picked up the phone. “I guess…wow, I hope you're going to be all right.”

“I pretty much changed everything for myself. I told my parents, and they're, like, in shock and everything, but they keep telling me it'll all work out.”

“It will.” He had no idea if it would or not.

“Julian, I'm so sorry.”

“You don't need to apologize.”

“I feel terrible.”

So did he. “Look, it is what it is.”

“I wouldn't blame you if you never wanted to see me again.”

“I want to see you.”

She breathed a sigh into the phone. “I still want to see you, too.”

“I guess we will at the wedding.”

“Right. So…enough about me.” She gave a weak laugh. “How are things with you?”

It didn't feel right to share his news with her now. All the energy had been sucked out of him. He couldn't stop thinking about the fact that she was pregnant…and what she'd done in order to get that way.

“Everything's fine,” he said.

“Good. Julian?”

“What?”

“I miss you.”

“Yeah,” he said, though he didn't know what he missed. “Me, too.”

“H
ey, buddy,” said Daisy, perching on the edge of Charlie's sandbox. “Guess what?”

Her son smiled up at her, green eyes twinkling in a way that never failed to catch her heart. “What?”

“You're going to have a sleepover with your dad.”

“Okay.”

“Does that sound like fun?”

“Yep.” He went back to the trench he was digging in the sand.

The afternoon light filtered through the new leaves, glinting in his fiery red hair. “Silly question,” she said, pushing a toy truck along one of the roads he had paved. “You and your dad always have fun together, right?”

“Yep.” He filled a dump truck with sand. The backyard sandbox was elaborate, a gift from his O'Donnell grandparents for his third birthday. Charlie loved it. His grandpa O'Donnell claimed this was because shipping and transport—the O'Donnell family business—was in his blood, same as his red hair and green eyes.

He looked so much like Logan that Daisy sometimes wondered what part of her their son carried in
him. Looking at Charlie felt like peering through a strange lens that took her back across time, to Logan as a child. Before she knew it, Charlie would be starting kindergarten; he'd be the same age Logan had been when Daisy had first met him. That was freaky to contemplate.

Logan's mother, Marian, loved showing Daisy pictures of Logan at Charlie's age. “It's uncanny,” she would say. “They could be twins. Logan was always such a happy child,” Mrs. O'Donnell often added.

A happy child who had nearly ruined his life by the age of eighteen. Daisy suspected Logan had grown up under enormous pressure from his parents. He was the only boy of four kids, and his family was very traditional. Much had been expected of him. He was supposed to excel at academics and sports in school, and he had done so. He and Daisy had attended the same rigorous Manhattan prep school, where she'd watched him swagger through the halls with a twinkle in his eye. He came from a privileged background, and he'd been groomed to carry on the tradition—an Ivy League college, or at the very least, Boston College, his dad's alma mater, followed by a position in the family's international shipping firm.

Daisy looped her arms around her knees and watched Charlie, who was lost in a world of play. Why did parents saddle their kids with expectations, instead of letting the kid become whoever he wanted to be? Didn't they know it made kids want to do the opposite?

It was a sports injury that precipitated Logan's descent into drug addiction. A soccer championship was on the line, and Logan had suffered a knee injury. He discovered if he swallowed enough painkillers, he could keep playing.

Hide your pain and keep on playing. It was the O'Donnell family way.

Daisy pushed her son's toy truck over a plastic bridge and silently vowed never to pressure him about anything. Ever. She wondered if her own parents had made that same vow about her. Didn't every generation promise to be better parents than their own parents had been? How come it never worked out that way?

“Good, it's all settled, then,” she said to Charlie. “A sleepover with your dad.”

“Because you're working?” Charlie asked, scooping out a hole with a yellow plastic shovel.

That was the only reason she ever left him. To work. This time was different.

She paused her truck at the end of the bridge and took a breath. “This is not for work. I'm going to see Julian.”

Charlie didn't stop digging and he didn't look up. “Daddy-boy,” he said quietly.

“Okay?” she asked.

No response.

“Julian's got something important to do called a commissioning ceremony.” It was the moment Julian would actually be given his officer's commission, and she couldn't imagine missing it. “It's a really big deal to be an officer in the air force,” she added, wondering how much of this Charlie was absorbing. She stuck a plastic gas station by the side of the sandbox road and pushed her truck into the bay to fuel up. “They're going to tell every body where he has to go for his job. He could be sent anywhere in the world, from Tierra del Fuego to the North Pole.”

“Where Santa lives,” Charlie said, his face lighting up.

“You never know.”

She shook off a wave of melancholy, thinking about how hard it was going to be, seeing him go off somewhere to start his life as an officer. She was determined not to show her sadness. This weekend was about celebrating Julian's incredible achievement, not about lamenting the chance they'd never had.

“Tell you what,” she said to Charlie. “Let's go grab some lunch and you can pick out three toys to take to your dad's.”

“Four toys,” he said, always pushing for more.

She was pretty sure he didn't know what four was, but that wasn't the point. You didn't bargain with a little kid. “Three,” she said. “And they have to fit in your Clifford bag.”

 

Charlie was sound asleep in his car seat when Daisy drove up to Logan's place. She spotted him up on the roof of the house he'd bought last fall, pounding at something. The house was old and graceful, from the 1920s, on a tree-lined street prized for its vintage architecture and quiet ambiance. The neighborhood was a haven for the upwardly mobile, close to schools and the country club. It didn't appeal to Daisy in particular—her taste ran to funky lakeside cottages—but Logan had embraced home ownership with his usual tenacity.

Like all older homes, the house had issues. He insisted on doing many of the renovations himself, even though he could probably afford any contractor he wanted. It was as if he had something to prove. Born to a wealthy family, he'd never had to do home repairs. With his new place, he embraced the challenge. It was a steep-roofed two-story house surrounded by overgrown rhododendrons and hydrangea bushes, with a big hickory tree in the front. He must have heard her drive up because he paused in his work and lifted his arm to wave.

He lost his balance and wheeled his arms, and his feet came out from under him. Gathering speed, he skidded down the steep slope of the roof. It was like something out of a nightmare. Daisy opened her mouth in a voiceless scream and clamped both hands over her mouth. A part of her understood that this would be a really bad time for Charlie to awaken—in time to see his daddy fall to his death.

Logan grabbed for a purchase, hooking onto the eaves. The old metal tore away. He tumbled to the edge and dropped like a sack of mail, crashing down on an old rhododendron bush.

Daisy leapt out of the car and rushed over to him. He lay by the broken bush, motionless. His eyes were closed, his face chalk-white.

A sense of unreality fell over her.
No
. These things didn't happen. They weren't supposed to happen. He looked dead. He
was
dead. Just like that.

She couldn't catch her breath. She sank to her knees beside him. “Logan,
no,
” she said. “Please.”

A terrible sound came from him as he sucked in a breath. “Please…what?” His eyes fluttered open, and he groaned.

She cried harder, from joy now. “Are you all right? I thought you were dead.”

“Hey,
I
thought I was dead. Completely knocked the wind out of me.”

“Should I call 911?”

He pushed himself up, plucked a rhody branch from his hair. “Sorry to disappoint you, but the emergency is over.” He moved his head from side to side. “No broken neck. Extremities all intact.”

A thin, livid scrape slashed across his cheek, and his hand was bleeding.

“Are you sure you're okay?”

“Okay enough, I swear.” He wiped his hand on his shirt.

“You shouldn't have been up on the roof all by yourself. Couldn't you have called someone?”

“Now you're sounding like my mother.”

“Sorry.”

He offered a lopsided grin. “Maybe the fall knocked the silver spoon from my mouth. Here, give me a hand.”

She pulled him to his feet and looked into his eyes, making sure the pupils matched. “Did you hit your head?”

“Nope. Fell on my ass.” He laid his arm around her shoulders. He smelled of sweat and broken greenery. “I should lean on you, though. You know, just in case. Where's my boy?”

“Asleep in the car.”

“I got plans for us this weekend,” said Logan. “My soccer team's got a big match.”

She cast another worried look at him. “You might be really hurt.”

He stepped away from her, spread his arms wide. “Look, I'm fine, okay? I took a spill—”

“From a two-story roof.”

“And lived to tell the tale,” he said. “Quit worrying. Charlie and I'll be fine. Perfectly fine.”

“What were you doing up there, anyway?”

“Fixing some loose shingles. A regular home handyman.”

“Do me a favor. No ladders, no roof repairs while you're in charge of Charlie.”

He raised his right hand. “Scout's honor.” He unbuckled Charlie's seat and pulled it out. Charlie stirred but didn't wake up, so Logan carried the whole rig into the
house. Daisy followed with the Clifford bag and Charlie's weekender.

“I could call Sonnet,” she suggested. Her stepsister was Charlie's favorite babysitter. After finishing her studies and internships in Germany, Sonnet was back in Avalon for a few months. In the fall, she would start work at the U.N.

“Or either of my parents could help out—”

“Enough, okay? I didn't get hurt. I'm perfectly capable of taking care of my own kid.” He spoke quietly, but his voice had an edge. Because of his past as an addict and drunk, people tended to tiptoe around him or assume he was inadequate. Just the suggestion of help brought out his defensiveness.

“I know you're capable. But you just fell off a roof. You're not Superman.”

He grabbed a Nehi soda from the fridge. “Sure, I am.” He offered her a sip.

She shook her head. “All right. Instead of getting another sitter, I could cancel.” Thus proving once again how easily life interfered with her and Julian.

“Nope,” he said quickly. “No way.”

This startled her. Logan knew she was going to the commissioning ceremony, and he couldn't stand Julian. In Logan's mind, Julian was the one thing that stood between them, preventing them from having a deeper relationship. Which was so wrong, but that was a different conversation. Still, she didn't get why Logan seemed to want her to go to Ithaca.

He must have read her mind. “You need to see him get his commission. Maybe it'll be, I don't know, closure for you.”

“Closure?” She hated the sound of that word.

“You need to see that the air force is his life.” Logan spoke kindly. “You'll never be first with him. Maybe
after this weekend, after he gets sent to Timbuktu, that'll finally be clear to you.”

It irked her that Logan assumed that was the way things would play out. He spoke as if he had some kind of crystal ball.

“Great, now you're my relationship analyst.” God, how did I get here? she wondered. Sometimes she looked around her life and asked herself that. How was it that she was getting relationship advice from the father of her child, a guy who had come into her life through an act of bad judgment, and stayed through sheer determination.

“Logan—”

“I want you to know, I'm here. I'm not going anywhere, not to Timbuktu or the Pentagon or North Dakota or Cape Town. Here, Daisy. You know what you mean to me.”

She did know. If she ever needed a reminder that this was true, all she had to do was remember what had happened the Christmas before last. The day had started out innocently enough. She and Charlie had been invited to spend the holiday with the O'Donnells, which meant taking the train with Logan from Avalon downstate to the city. She remembered feeling so torn that day, knowing Charlie deserved equal time with his paternal grandparents, yet realizing it would mean spending the holiday away from her own family. For Charlie's sake, she'd put on a brave face, packed her bag and met Logan at the station.

At the last minute, Julian had come to town to surprise her. His train had arrived shortly before hers was scheduled to leave. He'd come bounding over to her platform with his usual exuberance, which deflated visibly the moment he'd spotted Logan. She hadn't known they would both be there. It was never comfortable having the two of them in the same vicinity.

Predictably, and to her complete mortification, it had all gone wrong in a flurry of angry words and accusations. Like a couple of rutting animals, Julian and Logan had gotten into a fistfight right there on the train platform. A
fistfight
. Between two men who both claimed they cared about her—Logan, the passionate family man she'd known all her life and the father of her child, and Julian, the guy she hadn't been able to get out of her heart since they'd first met.

In the midst of the altercation, things had flown from pockets, littering the platform—change, a Swiss Army knife, keys…and a small velveteen jewel box. It had hit the pavement, popping open to reveal the unmistakable glint of a diamond ring. She'd been so shocked, she could barely think, but she'd blurted out, “Oh. You dropped something.”

And God help her, she couldn't be certain who had brought the ring.

Most women dreamed of a romantic marriage proposal offered on bended knee with soft music playing in the background. In Daisy's case it had been a nightmare enacted in public before a crowd of people. A far cry from a tender moment to remember and savor with misty-eyed fondness, it had been one of those occasions that had left her wishing the ground would open up and swallow her whole.

Instead of a sweet recitation of love and devotion, the occasion had started with a fight. What happened next still made her cringe. A babble of spectators. Strangers pressing in, drawn by the drama. There had been a moment, a split-second leap of hope, when she imagined the ring had popped out of Julian's pocket. But no. Marriage was discouraged for ROTC candidates.