A Morning Like This (35 page)

The first thing she thought to reach for was David. But his side of the bed was empty, the way it had been empty for so many
nights before. The pillow lay cold and unspoiled, the sheets unsullied, as creased and flawless as they’d been when she’d
climbed in alone hours ago.

Unable to fall back asleep, she turned back the covers and padded to the window.

Out in the driveway, moonlight fell like finely powdered dust over the Suburban and the roof planes of the garage. A glitter-streak
of pale white spilled through the tree limbs and lay like lace doilies on the grass. At the edge of the yard, the buck-railing
and the little wooden sign that read: “The Treasures, 3475 Peaks View Drive,” bulged with the shape of the logs, catching
the illumination, a pencil drawing of shadow and light along the fence.

Abby squinted her eyes shut, then opened them again. She saw what she thought she’d seen in the shadows, a gentle, sad discovery.
Two people stood together in the darkness of their driveway. Her husband, David. And Susan Roche.

Susan’s jacket was draped over a lower rung of the fence. Abby could see the zipper, its ties and snaps etched in the meager
starlight. She could just make out Susan’s blonde hair, light enough to show blue in the midnight radiance.

The view of them together in the dark, as they must have stood so many years before, two figures tempting fate. Abby put her
fingers to the bridge of her nose and pinched out the sight of them. When she pulled her hand away, they were still in the
driveway, Susan’s face upturned.

Abby watched as Susan reached toward him in the darkness and gripped his forearm.

Abby felt as empty as the mountains. This was
her
house,
her
territory,
her
child,
her
husband. Of course, there would be some explanation. Probably just papers to be signed or plans to be made, something a mother
and father needed to do together for their child.

Probably just…

Probably just…

With all the uncertainty Abby might have felt at that moment, all the broken questions she might have asked, all the accusations
she might have flung—What more do I have to do? Why do we keep returning to this? If you wanted to talk to her before she
left, why couldn’t you do it in the house?—were not what sat foremost in her mind.

Foremost in her mind, a memory. Two figures standing in a driveway in the dark, at a different house, thirty-five years ago.

“Mom? Why were you and Dad in the driveway in the middle of the night?”

“What?”

“You were doing something out there. I saw you.”

“The question is, why were you looking out the window at four in the morning, Abigail? You should have been asleep.”

“I couldn’t. I had a dream.”

“What were you dreaming, sweet? Was it something that scared you?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I heard you and Dad yelling at each other again. I didn’t like it. It scared me.”

“Maybe you weren’t dreaming, Abigail. Maybe that yelling really did happen.”

Now, Abby dressed soundlessly, tugging on a pair of jeans and a turtleneck, closing the bedroom door with two hands against
the jamb so it wouldn’t click and awaken Sam. She carried her shoes to the front door.

“He wouldn’t leave us, would he, Mom? Yesterday I saw him packing his socks.”

“Yesterday? You saw him packing things yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“He must have planned this all week long.”

“Planned what?”

A thin, pursed line on her mother’s lips. “Leaving. Yes, he’s gone. Now you know. He doesn’t want to live with us anymore.”

“Why?”

The dishrag, going round and round in circles on the counter. “Who’s to say?”

Abby opened the front door with a squeak of hinges.

David saw her first, and turned. He gripped Susan’s shoulder as if he wanted to protect her from this. “Abby—”

“What are you doing out here, David? What are you doing with
her?”

Susan’s forehead shone full and sallow in the unearthly light. She stepped away from David, even though he tried to hold her
there. “We were talking—”

“Don’t explain,” David said to Susan. “We don’t have anything to hide from Abby.”

“We were talking about Sam’s birth certificate,” Susan said in their defense anyway. “I never put his name there. I wanted
to find out if he wanted me to change that.”

Abby said, her voice uncommonly steady, “She was touching you. What am I supposed to think?”

“Aren’t we past this?” David asked. “Past the point of what you’re supposed to think?”
We
are
past it. That’s what Nelson’s tried to show me
.

“I should go.” Susan glanced from Abby to David, then back to Abby again. “I’m sorry.”

“No, we aren’t past this,” Abby said. “That’s something you owe me, David. We’ll never pass the point where I won’t be thinking.”

Susan retrieved her jacket off the fence. “It’s late. I’ll see you both in the morning.”

“We’ll never be past the point where we’re both here in spite of ourselves.”

Susan’s car had been parked behind the trees in the street. She left them and drove away, not turning the headlights on until
she’d driven past the neighbor’s yard. They both watched her go, the low beams two pinpoints in the darkness, sweeping through
the bottom limbs of the trees. Then, only starlight again, but David didn’t move toward the house. The heavy stare of his
eyes through the darkness showed that he resented her, that he’d hardened himself against her for interrupting them. The moment
Abby saw his reaction,
she
resented
him
.

She asked, “You’re out in the middle of the night, in the driveway, with a woman who used to be your mistress. How did you
expect me to respond?”

“I didn’t want her in the house again. You don’t know what it does to me, seeing the two of you together. You should have
trusted me, Abby.”

“I’m trying to trust you. But I can’t just… pull it out of a hat. You have to earn it.”

“I’ve been trying to earn it for eight years, Abby.”

“For yourself, maybe. Not for me.”

“I have an entire lifetime of my little girl to catch up on. I don’t know how else I’m supposed to do this.”

She didn’t turn to him. She hugged herself instead, tears coursing down her cheeks, while she saw a ghostly moonlight reflection
of his face from behind her in the Suburban window.

“Ab.” He reached for her, but she drew back. “You’re a lot better than I am, Abby. Do you know that?”

“Don’t say that.”

“You think I don’t know what I’ve put you through? Or that I don’t care?”

“David, you broke something between us. I’m just trying to get by.”

In confusion and sorrow, Abby saw a little girl’s face suddenly peer through the front window, a hand drawing back the curtain,
solemnly watching their exchange from behind a sidelong wash of light. Her breath caught.
Samantha
. A girl’s face in the window that, once-upon-a-time, had been Abby’s face.

“I can’t do this,” she said. “I just need to get away. So many people depending on you.”

“Abby.” Just as he took one step toward his wife, Samantha backed away from the window, disappearing into the vast, empty
darkness of their house. In the moonlight, Abby watched his face go grim. “What did she see?” he asked. “What did she see?
Did she see us fighting?”

It’s endless
, Abby thought.
Look what I’ve done
.

“You go in there,” she said to David. “You go in to her and tell her it doesn’t matter what she saw. That it wasn’t what it
looked like.”

With one sad, solemn look, David went into the house, leaving Abby broken, clenching her fists at her sides, unclenching them,
the chasm of helpless guilt growing broad inside of her.

The Treasure’s house had many hiding places large enough to conceal a small girl and her sleeping bag. David checked the kitchen
cabinet beside the massive sack of Brewster’s dog food. He checked beneath the dining-room table where the chairs made a forest
of wooden legs. In the family room, he checked behind the sofa and beneath the black Mendenhall grand piano where Braden used
to play.

It wasn’t until David heard a choked sob from the rear of the mudroom and followed the sound that he found the humped figure
leaning against the wall, hidden behind the wicker basket where Braden kept his staggering collection of baseball mitts.

“Sam.”

She sat folded like a fishhook inside the sleeping bag, with her hair hanging in clumps across her face. Beside her, the hot-water
heater clicked on and seemed to sob with her. She stared at a baseball in the basket with a timer in it, a radar ball that
gave a speed readout to indicate how fast it had been thrown. “She doesn’t want me, does she?”

“No, Sam,” he said. “It’s
me
she doesn’t want.”

Sam’s guileless face shone with her willingness to take the blame. “But, if I hadn’t come…”

“I’m the one. I’ve made her hurt like this. It’s my fault.” He was being forced to face his own pride like layers of an onion
being peeled away. How much of his apologizing had been acting, doing what he’d needed so he could get his own way with Abby?

At that moment, he heard the Suburban roaring to life.

“Dad, where’s she going?”

“I don’t know.” How bittersweet, the first time Sam had actually called him the name he’d longed to hear for a week.
Dad
. He scooped his daughter, sleeping bag and all, into his arms. “We’ll stop her. She ought not to be driving when she’s this
upset.”

It took David precious seconds to punch the button and open the garage door. More precious seconds to load up, get seatbelts
on, and fumble for the keys. He could see Abby’s headlights turning out onto the highway by the time he backed out of the
driveway.

Come on, Abby. Don’t endanger yourself. It doesn’t matter what happens between us.

By the time he turned onto the highway, she had disappeared around the broad curve, the cutaway bank above the South Park
elk feed grounds. He pressed the accelerator to the floor, but by the time he had passed the feed grounds, she had disappeared
completely across the Snake River Bridge, behind a stand of cottonwood trees that rose like plumes into the sky.

David checked the speedometer. Seventy already.

“How fast is she going?” Sam asked.

“Too fast.”

It’s my pride that’s done this. It’s been so easy to take offense at her offense. I’ve even been proud that I haven’t been
proud
.

His speedometer had inched up past seventy-five on this winding two-lane highway and still he couldn’t see her. When he crossed
the bridge, the road became a straightaway and he caught a glimpse of her a good half mile ahead.
Abby, slow down. Slow down
. It was the time of night when the animals could be out—elk, deer, moose, even coyotes. In the direction they were headed,
an entire herd of big-horned sheep grazed on a hill just above Highway 89. Just as he thought it, he saw her brake lights
come on. He saw her swerve. He’d made her promise once that she’d never swerve on that road. And there she was. He’d seen
her.

If he sped up to eighty, he could catch up. Wild-eyed, Samantha clutched the door handle on the passenger side. As David pressed
the accelerator to the floor, the panic started somewhere deep inside his own chest, smothering him.

If she gets away now, I’m never going to see her again
.

The panic edged even higher. Where would she go?

What would she do, on this road?

If she gets away now
, he thought, panicking,
I’ll lose her forever
.

The gentle nudging came inside of him, the quiet, surprising wisdom he had come to rely on during these past weeks.

Beloved, let her go.

The thought came with such clarity, David knew God whispered in his heart.
But if she gets away now, Father
…

Slow down. Let her get away.

The hum began in his ears, the pounding in his chest. How could he do this? What would he say to Abby, if she ever asked him
why?

You will never do this again, chasing after her this way.

But, Father
…

Release her to Me. You are not the one responsible to keep her happy, David. You mustn’t let Abby’s pain control you anymore.

With sorrowful resignation, he eased his foot off the accelerator, and his breathing slowed. Okay. Okay. So, I let her go.

David steered the Suburban onto the shoulder and cut the engine.