Rosethorn (38 page)

She got up abruptly and was rewarded with her head spinning violently. She felt around for the window frame, dropping the beer bottle in her haste. She heard it bounce off the platform then crash to the ground below after a few moments, shattered.

"Wait," he said as he got up, his hand on her arm again.

"Don't-" She wrenched her arm away as she clung to the wall. "Feel so free to touch me." She stepped back into the attic. "Thank you for the beer. I'll show myself out."

"Why did you return, then? Just tell me that."

She stopped but didn't turn around. "To see if it was real, any of it." She made for the stairs.

"She said it wouldn’t bring you back."

"What?"

"Miss Haviland. When I asked - begged - to buy this house from her. She knew all along about us, that this was our place. And she said that it wouldn’t bring you back. 'It'll drive you crazy.' she said. And you know what, she was right. In every room, when I least expect it, there you are, rising out of the water."

He had come off the ledge and was now standing right behind her, a mere breath away, and still she didn't move.

"Walking to me, telling me that-"

“Don’t." A faint protest for she was flushed, dizzy, intoxicated with how close he was, his breath against her neck, the whole of the universe straining against the bit of air between them.

All he would have to do was touch her once more and it would all be undone.
             

She turned around, the words locked and rusty in her throat so that she could barely pry them out. "I had an abortion, Andrew."

Recoiling from her as if she had thrown him knives. "What?"

"Three days after graduation. You were away. Senior trip to Mexico. At least that's what your mom told me."

The last useless phone call to his house she remembered, made on the way to the clinic after she had Allison pull over to the gas station phone booth, then standing there with the phone in her hand long after his mother had hung up, trying to keep from retching out the medicine she had taken on an empty stomach.

He now doubled over, as if she had just punched him in the gut, "Why didn't--"

"I tell you?" She was surprised at that moment to realize that there were no more words like knives she wanted to throw at him. She shook her head, drained.

"I did try," she said, more gently than she would have thought possible. "All the calls you didn’t answer. All the letters you sent back to me, unopened. But in the end,” she sighed, “It wouldn't have mattered. Whether you knew or not. I would have done the same thing either way."

Recovering fast from his shock, Andrew straightened, his whole body rigid.

"Right. You certainly didn't care about me, why would you let something as insignificant as a baby ever stop you from doing what you wanted?"

The moonlight now weakly shining through the open window partly revealed his face to her, handsome, unlined, yet embedded with long years she did not witness, a stranger's features with no trace of the boy she had known.

She saw, too, the true visage of their shared past, a brief time that was, when viewed from this side of the stained glass prism, inconsequential.

He approached her, one-half in menacing shadow. "Been everywhere by now, haven't you, done everything you said you'd do, and soon you'll be living in Paris with your French boyfriend. I am impressed,” He sneered. “But tell me one thing, was it all worth it? You couldn't wait to drop all the things that were going to hold you down, could you? Me, a baby, we meant so little to you. Why did you even come back, Sera? There's nothing here that could possibly have any hold on you."

Sober now, she met his hostile eyes fully.

It was time to let go.

Without a word she turned her back to him and let drop what she had fished from her pocket, a now meaningless token to which she had blindly chained herself all these years. The necklace and bullet clattered dully on the wood floor behind her.

Emptied, her heart stopped briefly, then continued beating. She would be fine.

One more step, then another after that, all the way to another continent if she had to, away from the sheer precipice, but rapid footsteps followed her, an urgent hand on hers pulling her back, as if it was always meant to happen like this, and she was falling once more in his arms, relinquishing all defenses as she succumbed to his kiss, as ravenous and clumsy as the first time, impatient for his hands to find her underneath her clothes, and groaning when he finally did for it was unbearable, what his touch brought.

The moonlight was on him, recalling a distant and imagined hour, uncovering at long last the boy she loved in this man's body. There was nothing more painful or more rapturous than falling like this, at that moment when he came beating back into her heart.

Chapter 24

Surely she had done this before, carefully closing the sliding glass door behind her and tiptoeing up the stairs, leaving the lights off so that her grandmother wouldn’t wake up, avoiding the creaky floorboard on the hallway, then stopping, amazed, as she caught her reflection on the large mirror on the wall, sixteen again, her face radiant because she had just come from Andrew’s arms.

“What are you doing?” she asked the girl in the mirror.

Sixteen again and making a mad dash to get dressed as she realized how many hours they had lost in each other’s flesh. As before, or perhaps more bittersweet this time around, reluctantly parting for the night.

“When?” he had asked as he held her hips captive with his hands, fingers dangerously playing with her.

“I have to get dressed, Andrew,” she had moaned, half-heartedly trying to pull her jeans up, but giving up as they tumbled back to his bed.

“Stay."

“You know I can’t. I’ll have enough to answer to as it is. The café closed hours ago." Laughing as she tried to push him from her in an empty gesture of resistance.

“God, why is to so hard to let you go?" Had she ever felt like this back then?

He finally let her get dressed, and kissing, buttoning, then unbuttoning, he walked her to her car. She had been fastened to him in a way she would have ridiculed in others, she blushed to recall now, then had driven away from him, disheveled and almost unrecognizable to herself.

She was grateful that her grandmother, surprisingly, had been asleep, and so did not see the girl reflected in the mirror, with those eyes that betrayed everything.

Back in her old room again, she ignored her blinking cell phone, did not check her e-mail, and instead looked out to the window to search the dark sky. Trees blocked the horizon so she couldn’t see what Andrew had pointed out to her before she left, that the rest of the missing planets had indeed appeared as he said they would.

She wanted to see them again as proof of the past few hours, as if his scent on her and this feeling of falling with only air above and air below weren’t enough. As before, nothing mattered except that he was falling with her.

After the urgency of being found and during their slow exploration of each other, they had spoken as if they were the only two people in the world, with the whole universe rearranging itself to suit them, time
suspended as the past came crashing to the present.

Planets had paraded humbly before them on this night; anything was possible, even forgiveness.

“I thought that you were testing me, again. How far could you go, how much you could hurt me and I’d take it, all to prove how much I loved you.”

Sera had smothered her protest. She would grant him the exorcism she had sought for herself.

“I was impatient and simple. I just wanted to be with you. But you had other plans..." Here he had fallen silent and although she wanted to fill the chasm, Sera remained quiet.

“My parents had been having problems. I heard them talking one night about separating. They’d been married for 27 years and I thought they were happy. I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sera had exclaimed, even as lightning perception struck her. Completely immersed in her own anger and pain, would she have listened if he had told her, not when she harbored her own secrets from him?

“I guess because I didn’t want to face it. I thought if I could hang on to you, to us.”

“You thought I would be the one constant thing. So when I told you about Columbia---”

“I felt like there was nothing I could count on, not you, not my parents." He had turned to her. “But you have to believe,” his voice hoarse, eyes pleading, “that if I had only known--nothing on earth...”

“I know,” she had replied as clarity washed over her. “I know.”

“I failed you. I failed us, but I didn’t realize it for a long time. I was too angry. I quit State that fall and never went back. When my parents ended up getting a divorce, I just checked out. I took the Mustang, what little money I had and drove up Oregon and Washington, camping or sleeping in my car, working odd jobs here and there. I was aimless. It took me three months to make my peace with the world, to realize what an ass I’d been. But I thought it was too late by then, for us. I was young and still cocky enough to think that there would be other chances to find what we had.”

“How many chances did you have?” she tried to ask casually as she rested her chin on his chest.

“Do you really want to know?”

“That many, huh?” She got off him and drew the sheets up to her chin. “And your engagement?” she asked tentatively.

He sighed. “She was...everything I needed."

Her heart twisted at this, jealous and pained to hear him talk of another woman with such feeling.

“I was happy with her and we would have had a great life. We were engaged for a year, then two years and still we hadn’t set a date. She said I always found some excuse, wait until we find the perfect house or let me finish one more flip. It was entirely by chance, at least that’s what I told myself then, that I came by this house. I hadn’t been by since the day it ended between us." He shook his head as if in bewilderment.

“I wasn’t prepared for ... what it brought up. I made an offer and it was mine three days after, just like that, without telling her. She was hurt, not because she knew what it meant to me—she didn’t know anything about its history. I brought her here, and as we walked around, I just knew. She and I would never live in this house together." He rubbed his stubbled chin thoughtfully, a man’s gesture.

“Why did you buy the house?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out for months,” he laughed. “Why did you come back?”

She took his hands and bent over them. They were rough and red with calluses and scars, which she slowly traced with her fingers. “You never used to have these,” she murmured as she kissed each palm lightly. They used to smell of grass and earth back then, now they smelled faintly metallic.

“I looked you up in the web one time. I saw all the articles you had written, all the places you’d traveled. I felt like I did when we were kids, wondering who you were." One hand reached for the bullet necklace, back around her neck. “It was like I never knew you.”

Her hand closed over his. “So many people have asked about this. Always curious about the story behind it.”

“And what would you tell them?”

“Nothing. A good friend of mine, Elise, said it was better to preserve the mystery—‘Just leave them with a Mona Lisa smile,’ she said, ‘And let them invent a fantastic story on their own.’”  Sera laughed.

“She’s always telling me provocative advice like that, my self-appointed fairy godmother. She’s the first friend I ever made in New York, actually. She kind of adopted me, fed me, showed me how to dress, how to do my hair, so many things. But most of all, she helped me to stop being sad all the time. No one can be sad around Elise.”

“She probably wouldn’t think much of me then.”

“Oh, no!" Sera sat up, excited. “I’d love for you two to meet. You should see her palazzo in Umbria and the clothes she wears—she dresses like a movie star, diamonds while she gardens and rubies when--”

“What does she think of your French boyfriend
?” He said quietly, arms crossed. “You haven’t said much about him. Or about yourself, actually. I’ve practically laid out my whole life and yet I still know so little about you.”

She shook her head, then lay back down, her ear to his heart. She could hear its even beating, feel his chest rising and falling with every breath.

“I met him the day you saved my life," She began. “And he’s not French, but an American ex-patriat living in Paris. We were on a boat in Slovenia, heading over to an island in the middle of Lake Bled. The oarsman was inexperienced, I found out later, and it was windy that day. One strong gust after another until the boat tipped over.”

“I suppose if I had been swimming all my life I would have reacted quickly. Instead, I panicked. I had
never been a very strong swimmer. I remember how icy the water was. I remember sinking further and further down until it was dark all around me. I had swallowed water and felt so heavy. It only took seconds to sink that far. But then out of the darkness I heard your voice--you were shouting, screaming at me to kick as hard as I could. And so I did. You never let up on me until I reached the surface. Chase was the one who stayed with me until another boat picked us up. He held me until I was warm and now comforts me whenever I wake up from nightmares about that day."