Scattered Ashes (30 page)

“Still bitter, I see.”  Setting his mug on the table, Michael turned his full attention to her.

“It’s not bitterness.  It’s anger, Michael, and I have a right, considering how things went.”  She took another sip even though the coffee was way too hot to drink.  She needed something to keep her trembling fingers busy, and right now holding a coffee mug was about the best she was going to get.

“Yeah, well, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”  Leaning back, Michael stretched out his long legs and took a deep breath.  Nicole marveled at how he could seem to relax no matter where he was or what he was doing.  It was truly amazing, and she wished just once she the power to unsettle him as deeply as he’d unsettled her on more than one occasion.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said, looking at her mug instead of her ex.

“Kelsey and I are getting married.”

It was a good thing Nicole was sitting down because the air seemed to suddenly slip from her lungs, and her whole body went weak.   Grateful for that one small miracle, she closed her eyes and tried not to let her emotions go haywire.  It was the "m" word, the one she never expected to hear from Michael.  He wasn’t exactly the marrying sort, and she rather figured that while he might live with "her," he would never completely entangle his life with another human being's.  Marriage wasn’t in his best interest.

Now she knew the truth.  Marriage with her hadn’t been in his best interest.

“Damn it, say something, Nicole,” Michael growled, leaning toward her.  His hand slid over the top of hers.

"Gee, did you get her pregnant?"

Michael looked away.  "Yes, she's pregnant, not that it matters."

She looked down and tried not to feel the rage building inside.  She pulled away.  “Congratulations, Michael.  Is that what you want to hear?”  Glaring, she stood and walked over to the window in the kitchen, wishing she were anywhere but in this room, where it felt like the walls were crumbling around her.  It was hard to breathe, and she couldn’t bear the pain.

Finally, something dawned on her.  It made no sense for Michael to come all the way over here, something he never did, and make this announcement--not unless there was something he wanted.  She slowly turned and folded her arms across her abdomen.  “Okay, Michael.  Out with it.  I’m tired of waiting for the other shoe to hit the floor.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”  He took another sip of coffee.

“Really?  I’m the last person you’d ordinarily talk to about ‘her,’ for obvious reasons."  She waved at the table.  "Yet here you are, telling me about all your future plans, including a wedding, I presume.  Why is that?”

She waited for him to answer, but he just calmly sipped his coffee, seemingly oblivious to the tension between them.  He had to feel it.  He had to.  She couldn’t be the only one almost drowning in this painful sea.

“All right,” he finally conceded, his eyes meeting Nicole’s. “There is something I need you to do.”

Every muscle in her body tensed, and she forced herself to walk back to the table and sit across from him.  “So make this easy and get it over with.  What do you want?”

“I need you to talk to the kids.”  He took another sip of coffee, and it took a moment for Nicole to digest what he’d said because his tone was pleasantly formal, as though she were one of his clients or something.

“About what?”

“Kelsey.”

At the sound of her name, Nicole burst out laughing.  He had to be joking.  Didn’t he?  One look at his face revealed that he was serious.  “You can’t really expect me to do this, Michael.  I’m your ex-wife, and you left me for her.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t be civil when it is required.”  Another sip of the coffee.  Right about now, Nicole wanted to throw her mug at him and watch the coffee splash all over him.  He’d deserved it. Then again, scalding him would hardly improve the current ability of his brain cells to fire adequately.

“Civilly?  You want to talk about being civil?”  Nicole heard her voice rising, but she couldn’t seem to control it.  Michael had that effect on her.  “If you wanted things to be civil between us, you never would have slept with her in the first place.”  Now she was screaming, and that immediately got a reaction from Michael.  He hated when anything shattered his appearance, and if screaming did nothing else, it did that entirely too well.

“Take it easy, Nicole.”  He stepped toward her, and she knew he was going to try to calm her down.  It was his freaking lawyer voice, and she didn’t want to be calm, not in her own house.

“Don’t patronize me!” she shouted, her hands settling on her hips, challenging him to touch her.

“Do you really want the neighbors to hear our business?”

“I don’t care what they hear!” she yelled.  “I’d much prefer the truth to image, Michael, and those kids are never going to love your mistress even if you marry her.  They're smart enough to know the truth.”

Michael started to say something else when he saw movement in the corner of his eye, forcing him to turn to see Michelle and Nick standing there. Michelle wore her robe over a nightgown, and right at that moment, she appeared the spitting image of Nicole, her arms folded across her abdomen.

Nick leaned against the doorway, wearing a navy t-shirt and grey knit shorts.  His hair stood on end.  Both of them blinked at their parents.  That’s, of course, when Nicole felt tears burn her eyes because what she saw in their faces was her own vulnerability—the realization that all the mysteries of their parents’ divorce had been revealed.  Nicole felt deficient and useless.

She closed her eyes and tried to summon the calm, but it refused to come, refused to answer with her heart pounding so furiously it was all she could hear.  So at last she turned to Michael and said, “Well, there they are.  Perhaps you might explain to them why they should be so enamored of their stepmom to-be.”  She shook her head.  “This is a low blow, even for you, Michael.”

She turned slowly and cast her eyes at the floor as she passed close to her children.  Nick sensed the pain and fear radiating through his mother and tried to grab her arm so he could find some measure to calm her, but Nicole ducked away from his touch and kept walking, heading to the bedroom.

“What does she mean, Dad?” Nick asked, staring after his mother, an unpleasant frown on his face.

“It’s nothing,” Michael said. 

Nick stepped closer.  “Yeah--that’s why she was upset.  Try again.”

Michael took a deep breath and looked out the window.  “Well, Kelsey and I are getting married, and I—”

“Thought Mom would just say all the right things to us,” Michelle finished for him, shaking her head.  “Well, she doesn’t have to, Dad.  I don’t like Kelsey.  I’ve never liked Kelsey, and that’s that.”  She turned and headed back to her bedroom.

“That makes two of us,” Nick said before his father could say anything.  “I know you left Mom for her, and Kelsey is nothing like Mom, so I guess the two of you deserve each other.  Just leave the rest of us out of your demented happily ever after.  I think you can see yourself out.”

He also walked away and spotted Michelle standing at their mother’s closed door, where she lightly knocked.  “Mom? You okay?”

“I’ll be out in a little while, Michelle,” Nicole said, her voice muted by the door.  But even that couldn’t hide the way the tears had thickened her voice.

Michelle frowned and started to say something, but her brother caught her arm.  “I know you want to help, but right now she probably needs space.”

“Dad is such a jerk,” she seethed and whirled to go to her own room, leaving Nick standing there, shaking his head.

“Yeah, he is,” Nick finally agreed.

* * *

As much as Nicole wanted to say she hadn’t been hurt by Michael’s news, she knew better.  In all the years since she and Michael had split, she had gotten used to the hole in her heart her ex-husband had left.  He made no sense to her, and she’d finally realized the best she could hope for from him was a long and wonderful life with his two children.  Michelle and Nick were the best parts of both of them, anyhow.

She’d waited until Michelle and Nick had gone on various errands before she finally slipped out of her bedroom.  Walking into the kitchen, she marveled at how normal things seemed, not fractured the way Michael had left them.

The bastard.

Unable to stay in the same room which had not only been the place Michael had finally admitted his affair but also the place where he’d finally told her he was getting remarried, Nicole headed into the living room, where she walked around like a stranger in her own house.  She touched the framed pictures on the fireplace mantel and scanned the bookshelves as though she really didn’t know what was there, and it was only when she ran across the few scrapbooks she kept that Nicole knew she ought to turn a blind eye to the past.  Nothing good lay there except the life she had led with her children.  Still, the scrapbooks had the same allure as Pandora’s box had, and they would probably have the same effect if she weren't careful.

She was beyond careful these days, she realized as she picked up the middle scrapbook.  Wrong move, she realized, as she flipped it open and saw a large photo taken at her wedding.  The breath caught in her throat, and no matter how hard she tried to look away, she found her eyes drawn to Michael’s face.  He wasn’t looking at the camera.  No, he was peering at the Nicole who had ceased to exist beyond these pictures--the smiling, happy Nicole who'd believed that love always worked out and that there was nothing else worth fighting for, the Nicole who'd learned firsthand that sometimes love was a casualty of life no matter how hard you tried to keep it alive, and that there was always one person who loved the other more.  She had been that person, and she had paid dearly for it.

A sad smile crept across her face as she wished she had known how to keep that Michael with her, the one who'd promised he would never hurt her.  How could he have slipped so far away?  Tears burned her eyes, and she closed the album.  It took three tries to get it back into its spot because her vision was so blurred.  A sob cut through her, and she knew better than to keep playing this game, but something wouldn’t let her cut her losses and quit. 

She reached for a different scrapbook, determined to find memories that wouldn’t sting so badly.  Her trembling hands flipped open the book, and she came face-to-face with another, different blast from the past, no less breathtaking but for very different reasons.  She saw a small picture that had been taken of Jordan  and at the end of the PE trip when they’d met.  The instructor had taken different shots of students.  Jordan had been sitting cross-legged on the bridge, in the exact same spot where she’d been right before she’d fallen off and she was right beside him.

Once again, she found herself asking why things hadn’t worked out between the two of them.  If things had even been slightly fair, they  would've because he would never have broken her heart like this.  Never.  Somehow she knew that much. Staring into his dark eyes and at his inviting smile, she found herself lost and broken.

A wave of pain rushed over her, and she started crying.  It wasn’t just about Jordan or Michael.  It was about all the things Nicole had believed in which had crumbled into a million pieces and now lay at her feet.  It was about losing her father and about her kids growing up and about all the fears she could never contain or shake.  She’d never felt so alone and so
diminished
in her entire life.

Sobs ripped through her, and she couldn’t stop crying.  She couldn’t even move, and the only thing she could see was Jordan.  Tears rolled down her face and spattered the slick sheet protecting her memories, and they just kept coming in wave after wave of pain and emptiness.  The only sound she could hear was her heartbeat thumping throughout her body.

In that instant, she wasn’t expecting to feel arms around her, and she started to pull away until she realized it was Nick.  He’d come back, and he held her tightly to let her spend her grief.  Nick, the son of Michael—a man who afforded her no compassion and no regrets, a man who had loved her easily and then, just as easily stopped.