The Returning (16 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-THREE

Rebekah told herself
everything was all right now that she was out of the cottage and seated on a park bench beside the mini-donut concession stand. Yes, she was in deep trouble with her parents, but she’d had a good reason for what she’d done, and he was seated there beside her, his arm draped casually around her shoulder. David. This, right here, was the center of her universe. As long as she was with David, everything was all right.

She laid her still throbbing head on his shoulder and smiled wanly as she felt his hold on her tighten. The pain was more of a dull ache now, instead of the pounding sledgehammer that had awakened her this morning.

The minute she’d opened her eyes, she knew she’d been caught. She was lying on her side, facing the window. The screen was lowered. She’d never been able to lower the screen. When she was sober, yes, but not when she stumbled in drunk. She’d always awaken the next morning and find the window wide open with nothing between her and the flies buzzing over the trash cans outside. But now the screen was closed, and there was only one explanation: someone else had closed it.

She was almost afraid to move, wondering what was waiting for her beyond the bedroom door. She heard movement out in the kitchen, the voices of her mother and father. She thought briefly of escape, of climbing back out the window and leaving for good. She might have done it if the hammering in her brain wasn’t keeping her nailed to the bed.

She didn’t remember anything about getting home. She didn’t remember much about the night at all. Her mind carried pieces and fragments but nothing that fit together to make a whole. She remembered a bottle in her hand, the first warmth of alcohol flowing through her veins. She recalled the flickering of flashlights, whispered voices, music coming from somewhere. She had an image of Jim falling over a gravestone, falling flat on his face, and Lena laughing. And too, there was David beside her, the hard ground beneath her, a whole slew of stars overhead.

A few other kids were there too, she remembered, kids Lena knew from the movie theater where she worked. Rebekah thought she might have seen them rolling joints, but she wasn’t sure now. The rest was a blank screen with no reception, not even snow, and as she gazed at it she sensed a certain fear gnawing at her stomach. She didn’t know what she had done in the lost hours.

By the time her mother had come into the room and stood by the bed, Rebekah had already resolved to stop drinking so much. The last thing she needed was the look on her mother’s face, her eyes so grieved Rebekah might have been lying in her coffin, stiff with embalming fluid instead of simply sick with 80 proof. Then her dad had appeared and stood beside her mother. As he looked down at her, she sensed she was seeing his face through the end of Phoebe’s kaleidoscope, at an ever-changing scene of grief, anger, hurt, puzzlement. Couldn’t he settle on just one negative emotion and leave it at that? She couldn’t deal with so much at once.

Her father said, “
You probably don’t feel very good right now
.”

“
Yeah, you would know, wouldn’t you?
” she said. At least she thought she spoke. She wasn’t sure the words actually came out. She was so dry she could hardly peel her tongue off the roof of her mouth.

An hour later she was sitting across from her parents at the kitchen table, sipping hot tea. When Billy happened in looking for something to eat, he was told he’d have to wait for lunch and that for now he should go outside and take Phoebe with him.

Billy, wide-eyed, asked, “
Is Beka in trouble?
” Without waiting for an answer, he looked at her in alarm. “
Beka, what’d you do?
”

Nothing you’ll ever do
, she thought.
Perfect child. Mama’s golden boy
.

After Billy left, Rebekah sat quietly nursing her tea while her mother threw out anguished questions and her father lectured her on the evils of alcohol. He made sure he was holding her attention when he warned, “
Beka, keep it up and you’re going to ruin your life
.”

And Rebekah had stared him right back in the eye and said, “
Not much chance of that. You’ve already ruined it for me
.”

This time she got the words out, and if she and her dad had been dueling with swords, that would have been a slice right to the heart. She could see it in his eyes, on his whole frozen face.

She had felt triumphant then, but only a short time later the memory of that moment made her feel pained, as though somehow the sword had been turned back on her.

And now she was going to have to tell David. She drew in a deep breath to steel herself. “Hey, David?”

“Yeah?”

She lifted her head and looked at him. “Listen, my parents found out. They heard me come in last night.”

He swore quietly, narrowed his eyes. “So what’s the fallout?”

“I’m grounded. Two weeks.”

“Yeah? And what’s that mean?”

“No phone calls—”

“What? You were just on your cell phone with Lena.”

“Yeah, I can have the phone when I’m at work—in case of emergencies, they say. But once I’m home I have to hand it over.”

“Oh yeah? So what else?”

“No e-mail, no seeing friends, no seeing you.”

He laughed. “Yeah, right.” He kissed her, laughed again.

“A little hard to keep us apart when we work at the same place. Idiots.”

Rebekah stiffened, suddenly defensive. But she decided to brush off David’s remark. Let him say what he wanted, as long as he didn’t break up with her.

“Listen, I’ll be more careful next time,” she promised. “I won’t get caught again.”

He shrugged, looked disinterested. “Like it matters,” he said.

She wanted to ask him what he meant, but she was afraid of the answer. When she was with him, she wanted everything to matter.

He asked, “Do they know you were with me last night?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t tell them who I was with, though they could guess about Lena. I didn’t tell them they were right, though. I just said I was with a group of kids I’d met at the park.”

“Okay, so they don’t know I was there, but they still don’t want me to see you.”

“It’s just part of the punishment. They don’t have anything against you.”

David seemed to think about that for a minute. Then he said, “So when do you think we can have a repeat of last night?”

Rebekah chewed the inside of her lip. “Soon.”

“Man, it was great.”

“Yeah.” She wished she could remember.

“Listen,” David said, “we’d better move it. The boss’ll have my head if I’m late again.”

“All right.” She sighed.

“Meet me at the pavilion for lunch, okay?”

“Yeah.”

He kissed her, smiled, wandered off. Everything at home was a mess, but at least she had David.

Rebekah took a deep breath. She couldn’t afford to be weak, not unless she wanted someone like Jessica Faulkner to come between them. Rebekah’s hold on David was threadlike, and she knew it. There were plenty of other pretty girls around to tempt him, plenty of reasons he might wander off for good without a backward glance. She needed to tighten her grip, and she would—even if it meant doing everything in her power to keep him.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FOUR

Andrea snapped open
a fresh sheet and watched it settle gently over her bed. She smoothed the wrinkles and tucked in the corners. She had always loved the feel of cool clean linen beneath her hands, had always loved to crawl between crisp sheets at night, even if she was alone.

Which, she realized at once, was exactly what she was, in spite of the wedding band she wore.

She stood up straighter, shut her eyes.
Never mind
, she thought. She hated self-pity. She wouldn’t indulge in it.

Still, it would be nice if someone knew who she was, what she wanted, what she needed.

“
Listen, honey
,” Selene had told her, “
you don’t want to go through your whole life without loving someone
.”

But that wasn’t the problem. Andrea did love someone. What she wanted was to be loved
by
someone.

Wearily she tried to put the thought aside, to set her mind on the task at hand. It was good to stay busy, doing what needed to be done. Satisfied that the sheets were smooth and tight, she tucked her pillow into a clean case, plumped it, and laid it at the head of the bed, then draped the white summer spread over the sheets.

She turned to John’s bed and paused when she heard Phoebe’s timid voice downstairs. “I’m going to play on the porch.”

The girl was talking to her father, who was no doubt lounging in the overstuffed chair and reading the newspaper from Rochester, the
Democrat and Chronicle
. “Okay, Phoeb,” John said. “What have you got there? Chinese checkers? Want me to play with you?”

Andrea could well imagine the look of fear in the child’s eyes. Two weeks with her father home and Phoebe still regarded him as an intruder. She’d given him a Father’s Day card over the weekend only because Billy had insisted they make one together.

Andrea listened hard but couldn’t quite hear Phoebe’s response to John’s question. She knew what it was, though, when she heard John say, “Well, it’s a little hard to play Chinese checkers by yourself, isn’t it?”

The screen door opened, slammed shut.

Andrea stepped to the window and looked out over the lake. She shouldn’t be so surprised. She had known all along that she might be disappointed, that John’s coming home might not be that second chance she wanted, that it might in fact spell only disaster.

Things fall apart
, she remembered,
the centre cannot hold
. The snatch of poetry bubbled up from somewhere, from long-ago school days. She didn’t know the name of the poem or who wrote it. She only knew the line, and that it was true.

She saw bits and pieces of her life breaking off, floating away. . . .

Rebekah, angry and alienated, and worse, flirting with alcohol just like her father. She might be lost completely, drifting off right under their noses if they weren’t careful to reel her in.

Billy, her son, joy of her heart. He’d be eighteen on June thirtieth, less than two weeks away. Legally, he’d be an adult. And in spite of his disability, he was growing more and more independent. Andrea often wished she could have stopped time long ago, kept him a child, the vulnerable one who needed her.

Phoebe, the baby. How quickly she was growing up! She’d be starting first grade in the fall. Then all of Andrea’s children would be in school. Some women looked forward to that. Not Andrea. She wanted to gather each of them to herself and keep them forever under her wing, where she could protect them. Which was, of course, the opposite of what a mother was meant to do.

And then there was John. What a strange and tenuous relationship they had. Somewhere along the way they had stopped pretending to be lovers and had settled into this routine of tolerable coexistence. It was hardly the stuff of a woman’s dreams.

She wondered what would become of her. Well, no, she didn’t have to wonder. She knew. Her children would grow up and move out—even Billy, who talked about having his own apartment someday. She would have to let them go. And then, she supposed, not even John would stay. Why should he? Unless something changed, it didn’t seem likely that he would stay even until then. The most probable scenario was that she would end up alone, with only occasional visits from children and grandchildren. And that was all.

It didn’t seem near enough, couldn’t possibly be the sum of an entire lifetime, but no matter how she worked the equation, it all added up to the same impossibly small measure.

“Dear God,” she whispered. Only after a moment did she realize the words were a prayer. What she had meant as a statement of disapproval, or at best a sigh of resignation, sounded for all the world like a plea. And she was surprised, because she was not one to pray, though she supposed there was a God out there somewhere.

She turned back to John’s bed and stripped it of its rumpled sheets. Just as she reached for the clean linen, she heard Phoebe let off a wail on the porch. Andrea sighed, recognizing it as an angry cry. That child was always frustrated over something. The screen door banged again, and John’s voice floated up from the porch.

“What’s the matter, Phoeb?”

“My marble!”

“What happened?”

“Down there!”

“You mean it rolled through the slats?”

“Down that hole!”

How many times had Andrea told Phoebe not to take her Chinese checkers out to the porch? “
You’ll lose the marbles if you do
,” she’d warned. The old floorboards had too many crevices that could swallow up a marble in seconds.