Wedding Ring (8 page)

“The porch light would attract every moth in Shenandoah County. And Mom and Gram have already gone to bed.”

“Country hours, huh?”

“There’s not too much to do at night. Gram refuses to get a satellite dish, so TV reception depends on the wind and the will of the gods. She does have a pretty substantial library, though. Particularly if you like elementary textbooks.”

“Textbooks?”

“I think she disagrees with the school board’s decision to bring local classrooms into the twenty-first century. She’s been visiting their Dumpsters.”

Even in the faint light of moon and stars, Tessa thought Mack looked tired. He was still every bit as appealing as he had been at their first meeting. His hair hadn’t thinned, and the new lines in his face added maturity. Most of the time he wore glasses now, wire-rimmed and unobtrusive, which only served to make his face a shade more scholarly.

“How many Dumpsters has she visited?” He hiked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the horse trailer, as if he had guessed what it was for.

“I’m thinking she knows the whereabouts of every promising pile of trash for at least twenty-five miles.”

“That doesn’t sound good, Tessa.”

She resisted the urge to cross her arms. “She’s doing better than I expected. So far she hasn’t hauled anything back inside. She’d never say so, but I think she’s grateful we’re here.”

“And your mother?”

She gave the slightest of shrugs. “She’s running her social life in Richmond from the telephone, but I’ve got to hand it to her. In between phone calls, she works hard.”

Mack crossed
his
arms and leaned against the porch post. “And the third member of the household?”

“Tired, hot, out of sorts a lot of the time. But glad to see we’re getting things accomplished.” She wondered if he would leave now that the duty questions were over, but he made no move to.

“The sun went down before I got to the prettiest part of the drive. How are things looking down the valley?”

Even though they were in the northern third of the Shenandoah Valley, they were “down the valley,” because the Shenandoah River flowed north. The geography and history of the area had always fascinated Mack.

“The drought’s done a lot of damage,” Tessa said. “The river’s down. You can hardly see it from the hill anymore. The pond’s lost a third of its water, at least. If we don’t start getting some rain, I’m afraid it’s going to go dry.”

He whistled softly. “I’ve never seen it that low.” He hesitated. “Want to take a look at it with me?”

“Now?”

“Why not? I need to stretch my legs before I drive back.”

“You could stay the night and go back in the morning if you’d rather,” she offered belatedly. Mack’s staying hadn’t occurred to her before, a measure of how far apart they’d grown.

“No, I’m swamped with work, and I have an early breakfast meeting.”

She realized she hadn’t asked him one question about himself. “Is work going okay? I know you had a big trial coming up.”

“Not for a while. But James had his first day in court this week.”

James, the same James Bates who had cost them both their jobs in Richmond, was now a first-year associate at Mack’s law firm in D.C. After Mack lost his lawsuit against the school administration, Tessa’s father had found the young man a place in a small private school. James’s record had been good enough that he’d gotten a scholarship to Virginia Commonwealth University right there in Richmond. By the time he graduated, his grades were good enough to get the needed financial aid to make it through law school at UVA.

Now James was proving to be a welcome addition to Mack’s small firm.

“I was thinking about him earlier,” Tessa confessed. “How did he do?”

“He lost his bid to have the charges against the client dismissed, but he scored a few points while he was at it. He did okay.”

“I bet he did.”

Mack pulled away from the post. “How about that walk?”

She remembered the last time they had been to the pond together and was about to make an excuse when he added, “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about, Tessa, and I don’t want to do it here.”

She couldn’t very well refuse. He started down the steps, and she followed.

Out from under the shelter of the porch, she could just see the palest outline of a waning crescent moon in the clear dark sky overhead. Without clouds to hide them or city lights to outshine them, the stars were spectacular.

Mack waited until she was beside him before he set out on the well-worn path. A light breeze stirred, and the scent of something blooming—trumpet lilies along the driveway, perhaps—tinged the air. He didn’t take her arm, but he stayed close, as if he was afraid she might stumble in the darkness.

“I remember the last time we were out at the pond together, too,” he said, as if she had spoken her concerns out loud. “Kayley is everywhere here. The hill where we flew her kite the summer before she died, the old barn where she found that stray and her litter of kittens, the field where Biscuit scared up the covey of quail.”

“Ruffled grouse.” Biscuit, their old English sheepdog, had been nearly as surprised as everyone else when the grouse family had taken to the sky. Job completed, Biscuit had fallen to her rump and scratched behind her ear in celebration. Mack had said it was the equivalent of a gunfighter blowing the smoke from his six-gun.

“You’re coping all right?” He kept his tone light, but she knew the question wasn’t light at all.

“I see her everywhere at home, too,” she said.

“But you’re more used to that. And at home you’ve managed to remove a lot of the memories.”

She heard censure, although she wasn’t really sure it was there. They had quarreled in the past about the way she had systematically cleared Kayley’s presence from their house. Now the decor in their home of six years was clean and spare, minimalist to the bone, and there were few traces of their only child.

Even Biscuit, who had grown from puppyhood as Kayley grew from toddlerhood, had gone to live elsewhere.

“I’m too busy to give it much thought,” Tessa lied. “And Mom tiptoes around Kayley’s death. Gram never mentions it at all.”

“It’s on their minds.”

“Is that what you wanted to talk about? How to bring everything out in the open so we can all have a good cry together?” There were enough sharp edges in the question to shred them both. She blew out a long breath. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” He didn’t sound as if he thought so.

“I am. You didn’t deserve that.”

“The subject makes you uncomfortable.”

“But not you?”

“I’m more used to talking about it.”

She knew exactly what he was thinking. Because
he
had made use of a support group that she had rejected.

“It hasn’t brought her back, has it?” she asked. “Talking about her hasn’t brought her back.”

“It’s not supposed to.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather spend my time making sure this never happens to another set of parents.”

“And that hasn’t brought her back, either, and won’t.”

“Maybe not, but at least I’ll know there’s a child graduating from high school or making his first home run or singing a solo in his church choir because the organization I work with got another drunk driver off the streets.”

“MADD is a good organization, Tessa. You know I support everything you do for them.”

“I don’t know why we’re arguing again,” she said. But she did know. Neither of them had yet coped with their guilt and grief. Mack knocked himself out to live up to every promise he made, and she? Well, she put one foot in front of the other and hoped that someday, if she traveled far enough away from the past, she would find something approaching peace.

“Do you remember the day you told me you were pregnant?” he asked. “We were off on a walk, right about here.”

That was just one of the memories she had hoped to avoid. That walk had been at Christmastime, a year after their wedding, and they had paid a duty visit to Toms Brook along with Tessa’s parents. After the ritual exchange of presents, she and Mack had excused themselves, and on this path, on their way to view the frozen pond, she had told him she would deliver their first child the following summer.

The news had been welcome to both of them. From the moment they began to discuss marriage, Tessa and Mack had agreed they wanted children, and after a year of marital bliss, the decision to bring a child into their marriage had been an easy one. They were happy, healthy and stable. There had been no reason to wait, and Mack had been ecstatic at the announcement.

“It was probably the happiest moment of my life, up to that point,” he said. “Except for the day I married you.”

She wanted to ask him how happy he would have been if he had known the eventual outcome. But that was a conversation she would never be ready for, because her own answer was unclear. Had Kayley’s life been worth the tragedy of Kayley’s death? She really didn’t know.

“I loved everything about the next nine months,” he went on, when she didn’t answer.

“That’s because you weren’t pregnant,” she said. But in reality, the pregnancy had been easy. Tessa had gotten pregnant the first month she abandoned birth control, and as the months progressed, they had snuggled together at home, curtailing their social life to nest together. They made long lists of names, discussed how best to divide up the work, splurged on a plush rocker and mission oak nursery furniture.

He gave a short laugh, as if he was trying to keep the conversation casual, just warm happy memories shared between two normal people whose entire lives hadn’t been torn apart and discarded.

“I was particularly glad I wasn’t the one who had to go into labor,” he said.

“You might as well have been. You were right there, letting me squeeze your hand. I nearly ripped it off.”

“She was such a wonderful baby,” he said. “So interested in the world that she hardly slept. Do you remember? Of course, we didn’t care, because we loved having her awake.”

Tessa’s heart was breaking. She didn’t know why she was letting him do this. “Mack…”

“The good memories still belong to us, Tessa. Nobody can destroy them, not unless we allow it. I can still see you nursing her. I would get up and get her from the crib, and you would be waiting for us, sitting propped up against the pillows, your hair loose over your shoulders. I don’t want to forget the way you looked, the way I felt.”

They had been so enthralled, they had known immediately that they wanted another child, but they had been jealous of their time with their daughter, and they had decided to wait, to enjoy both childhoods to their fullest.

She wondered now if that had been a mistake. How different would the aftermath of Kayley’s death have been if they’d had another child to care for, too? Would they have been able to retreat so far from each other? To indulge their grief so separately? To spend so much time apart?

And yet, how could she have looked in the face of another child, Kayley’s brother or sister, and not been destroyed anew each day? How would she have coped with the possibility of another loss? How could she have survived it?

“I go over and over our time with her,” Mack said. “All the decisions we made. Do you do that, too?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“I’m so glad you took that first year off with her, that you had that time together. But once you went back to work and Letty came to take care of her, she still did fine. She was so happy every day, so well adjusted.”

Tessa had arranged her teaching schedule so that she had no late afternoon activities. They thought through every decision, every summer vacation, every holiday and holiday gift. All that had been part of the joy of being parents.

And then, when Kayley was five, the world had fallen apart.

With the story of Kayley’s brief life hovering there, un-concluded, Tessa was forced to think about the rest of it as they made the remainder of the walk in silence.

Kayley, with two years of preschool behind her, had been more than excited about kindergarten. She was a bright, verbal child who made friends easily and could read most of her storybooks by herself. Her memory was extraordinary, and she seemed happiest when she was learning. Kindergarten in a “real” school was a dream about to come true for the little girl.

When the first day of kindergarten dawned, Kayley dressed herself in the clothes she and Tessa had carefully picked out the night before. Since it was Tessa’s first day of the regular school year, as well, Mack was going to walk their daughter to the elementary school not far from their house. They had turned down a neighbor who had offered to pick up Kayley and bring her along with her own daughter. Mack had wanted to do the first-day honors himself.

But from the moment they came down to breakfast that morning, things began to go wrong. Tessa tore the skirt she’d donned, catching a pocket on the handle of a cupboard. She ran back upstairs to change, and when she came downstairs, Mack was pacing the floor.

There was an emergency with one of his cases, and he was needed in D.C. as quickly as possible at an arraignment. Could Tessa take Kayley to school instead?