All the Pretty Poses (25 page)

I see red.

I release Kennedy and I lunge at my father,
grabbing him by the throat and throwing him against the wall,
intent on choking the despicable life out of him, intent on
watching existence drain right out of him. “You knew? You
knew
what he was doing to her and you did nothing? You did
nothing?”

My father makes a sputtering sound, his face
turning bright red, fading into a dusky purple the longer I cut off
his air supply.

“You make me sick! You are every bit as much
a monster as he was!” I shake him, slamming him harder up against
the wall as he claws at my hand, trying to loosen my grip. “I hate
you! I hate that I share your blood!” I squeeze harder.

“Reese! Reese no!” Kennedy cries, pulling at
my arm. “Let him go! He’s not worth it.”

I hear her words, but I don’t care. To me,
taking his life is worth it. It’s a service. I’m doing the world a
favor by ending him.

“Reese, if you hurt him, we won’t have a
future. It’ll ruin your life. Please don’t hurt him. Please don’t
let him take anything else from me.”

The pain in her voice penetrates the haze of
my fury. I see the consciousness dwindling from my father’s eyes
and I know how close I am to killing him.

But I think of Kennedy.

Always Kennedy.

I release him and back away.

My father slides bonelessly to the floor,
gasping for air and holding his beet-red throat.

“I swear to all that’s holy, if you ever,
ever
come near her again, I’ll kill you. I’ll drop you where
you stand and bury your body where no one will ever find it.” He
neither moves nor speaks. “Do you hear me?” I shout, bending to
scream into his ear.

My father raises hate-filled eyes to glare
into mine. We stare at one another for a few seconds and I see the
instant that my sincerity sinks in. A wary light flickers in his
cold eyes and I know that he realizes that I’m as serious as I’ve
ever been about anything. I just pray that he’s smart enough not to
test me. Because he will lose. He will lose everything if he
crosses me. I’d give my life for her, even if it means taking
someone else’s.

Finally, he nods.

“Now get out,” I say, dragging him to his
feet and throwing him toward the door. “Get out!”

I watch him open the door and stagger through
it. It takes all my self-control not to kick his ass onto the
walkway and make him bleed, but Kennedy asked me not to hurt him.
So I won’t. Instead, I shut the door, shut the door on my father
and that part of my life.

I turn to gather Kennedy into my arms and I
let her cry. My chest feels heavy. Crushed, like I’ve suffered a
great trauma to it. I hurt for her, for all the things she’s
suffered, for all the time we’ve lost and for the baby that I never
even got to see.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO- Kennedy

I never considered how much it might hurt me
to have to tell Reese about Mary Elizabeth. Or how much it might
hurt him to hear it. The look on his face when he finally turned to
me after coming to blows with his horrible father was agonizing to
see. However, it was just another reminder that, deep down, Reese
is nothing like that man. Henslow Spencer might’ve steered Reese in
one direction or another, but not even his evil manipulation could
kill the wonderful soul that Reese was born with. It just delayed
its appearance by a few years. In a way, that almost makes it
sweeter. It certainly makes me thankful that I’m still around to
see it. I wouldn’t have missed
this
Reese for the world.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE- Reese

Waking with Kennedy in my arms is the only
solid, real thing that I feel when I open my eyes. I’ve always
known that my father was a bastard, but I guess I never knew just
how much
of a bastard.

I feel overwhelmed by wrongs that need to be
righted, by mistakes that need to be rectified, by apologies that
need to be made. But how? How can I go back and fix things that
happened so long ago?

Kennedy stirs against me. She’s my first
priority. Making things right with her. Making things right
for
her.

I turn onto my side, pulling her into the
curve of my body and pressing my lips to one bare shoulder. “Good
morning.”

“Good morning,” comes her hoarse reply. I can
hear her smile, though. Gone are the tears. I just need to make
sure they stay gone. After today…

“Can we talk?” I ask.

I feel her stiffen. “Of course.”

“I know this might be hard for you, but I
need to work all this out. Will you tell me about the baby?”

I feel as much as hear her sigh. “Oh, Reese,
she was beautiful. For the hours that she lived, she was the
sweetest baby in the world. She had your hair, dark and a little
wavy. A head full of it from the moment she was born. Her little
hands and feet were the most precious thing I’ve ever seen. And the
way she fit in my arms when I got to hold her…even for those few
minutes…”

I can feel her anguish. It’s different than
mine, but I feel it nonetheless.

“Where is she buried?”

“At Bellano,” she sniffs. “Near the cottage.
Hidden”

“Malcolm never knew?”

“
I
never told anyone. I can’t be sure
who Hank told. Malcolm found out about her somehow. He might’ve
known where she was buried.”

I hesitate to ask this of her, but I’ll need
her help if the grave is that hard to find. “Would you mind if we
go visit her?”

She turns in my arms to look up into my face,
her pale green eyes glassy with unshed tears. “No, I wouldn’t mind
at all.”

The way she presses her lips to mine, like
she’d rather kiss me than to take her very last breath, tells me
that this will mean as much to her as it will to me.

It’s when we get to the old groundskeeper’s
cottage that I begin to wonder if I might’ve been mistaken.

Kennedy gets quieter the closer we get to the
place where she spent such difficult years. When I pull to a stop
in the gravel drive that approaches the house from the rear, I hear
her take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Does it still hurt you to see this
place?”

She worries her lip as she thinks. “No, it
doesn’t hurt. I just think of how much Hank changed after Hillary
died, how he went from a loving husband and a good foster dad to a
man who would want to put his hands on a child. It turns my
stomach.”

I reach for her hand. “I’m so sorry that I
never looked deep enough to see what you were going through.” It
makes my guts twist into knots just thinking of what he did to her,
even more so when I think that he cost her the life of her baby, of
our
baby.

She laces her fingers through mine. “You
weren’t supposed to see. I didn’t want you to see. Although I
desperately wanted someone to save me, I loved you too much to let
you carry that responsibility. That’s why I hid it so well.”

“But I would’ve done things differently. I
would’ve—”

She leans over to put her finger across my
lips, shushing me. “I know you would’ve. I didn’t want you to stay
because you had to or because I needed you to. I wanted you to stay
because you
wanted
to.”

“I did, you know. I wanted to stay. I was
just so weak. My father knew all the right things to say to get me
to go along with him. I just… I hate that I’ve let him go this far.
I hate that I didn’t put a stop to this long, long ago.”

“But you’re doing it now. Not all is lost,
Reese. There is still so much life out there for you.”

I bring her hand to my lips and turn it over,
kissing the palm. “For us,” I clarify.

She smiles. “For us,” she agrees before she
reaches for her door handle. “Come on. Let’s go meet your
daughter.”

Kennedy leads me around the house and into
the woods to the left. We walk along a barely-there path until it
just stops, just disappears into the dense undergrowth. She strikes
out to the left again, weaving through the trees and stepping over
a hollow log until she comes to a little patch of yarrow that
completely covers the ground. She doesn’t have to tell me that
we’ve arrived. The spot rests in sunshine and I can see the
arrangement of rocks on the ground. They’re shaped like angel
wings.

Slowly, I walk to where the wings meet and I
kneel. Instinctively, I know I’m directly over the final resting
place of the daughter that I’ll never get to see this side of
heaven.

I feel Kennedy as she drops to her knees
beside me. I feel the pitter pat of her tears as they coat the back
of our joined hands with warm salt water. I feel them on my left
hand, too. Only those aren’t Kennedy’s tears. They’re mine.

We stay like that for a long time, spending
quiet time with our daughter, neither of us saying a word. It’s
when we’re finally making our way back to the car that I find
myself unable to hold back another thought.

“Do you ever think about having more
children?”

From the corner of my eye, I see Kennedy look
at me, but I keep my gaze trained forward. I don’t want to
influence her answer one way or the other.

“Of course. But you don’t, do you?” she asks,
a tinge of sadness in her voice.

“I didn’t used to. I’ve never wanted to have
a baby with anyone else. But with you it’s different. I don’t think
I’ve ever stopped thinking somewhere in the back of my mind that
maybe one day we’d be together.” I stop, taking Kennedy’s other
hand and tugging her toward me so that I can put my arms around
her. “When I got the vasectomy, I talked to the doctor about the
possibility of having it reversed someday. How would you feel about
that? Would you want to have another baby with me, Kennedy?”

“Oh, Reese,” she says, tucking her head
against my chest, but not before I see tears fill her eyes again. I
feel a pang of guilt that I seem to make her cry so often.

“Don’t cry, baby. I didn’t mean to upset
you.”

I hear her sniff several times before she
looks back up at me. “These aren’t sad tears. These are my ‘happy
as hell’ tears. There’s a difference.”

I smile at that. “Well, in that case…”

I bend my head to kiss her. Fire sparks
between us quickly. With all the skeletons out of the way, it seems
that we are closer. And the closer we are, the hotter that flames
burn.

“I love you,” she says when I finally release
her. “Thank you for loving me even though I’m not rich and I didn’t
finish high school and I—”

“Wait, what?” I interrupt. “You didn’t finish
high school? How did you—”

“I got my GED. When Hank took me out of
school, I got too far behind to catch up, and after the baby died,
I guess he saw me as soiled goods. He didn’t try to touch me
anymore, but he wasn’t the least bit afraid of hitting me or
kicking me if he felt like I needed it. So after he died, the first
thing I did was go get my GED. That’s where I met Gena Lamareau.
She was the teacher, but she also owned a little dance studio in
town. Once she found out that I wanted to dance, she started
letting me come by and participate in her lessons for free. Those
were my first steps toward leaving my past behind and becoming
someone that I wanted to be, to have something that no one could
take away from me.”

As I stare into her eyes, eyes that seek no
pity, I know for a fact that one of the first things I’ll do when I
move in to Bellano, just a few hundred yards away, is to burn down
the groundskeeper’s cottage. Right after I give our daughter the
kind of grave site she deserves.

For Kennedy’s sake, I push back my anger in
favor of something more constructive. I raise my hands to stroke
her cheeks, soft as silk and twice as fine. “You are the strongest,
most beautiful creature I’ve ever known. Every day you amaze me in
some new way.”

She shrugs, but her cheeks pinken with my
compliment. “Life either crushes us or polishes us. I’m just glad
that we both held up under the pressure, that we made it to here.
To now. I wouldn’t trade a million happy childhoods for ending up
here with you. I have regrets and heartaches just like everybody
else, but I can’t let them define me. I choose to leave them in the
past where they belong and only bring along the good things that
matter. Like you. Our summer. The baby we made. Those are the only
things worth saving.”

“And you. You were worth saving. Then. Now.
Forever.”

I love the sound of that when I’m talking to
Kennedy—
forever.

It’s time to focus on that, to put the deeds
of my father and the ways that he influenced us behind me forever.
Some things are unforgiveable. There’s no point in wasting any more
of my life trying to find a redeeming quality in my dad. It’s time
to move on, move on to the kind of life that I want for myself. One
with
Kennedy. With Kennedy and our happiness and our
children.

And one
without
Henslow Spencer.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR- Kennedy

I watch the familiar landscape whiz by. Reese
is taking me to Bellano for the arrival of the furniture he
ordered. He asked me to help him pick it out, and I know he wants
me to live there with him, but today he seems particularly excited
to make the short trip.

The furniture truck is already there when we
arrive. Tanny is bundled in a thick sweater to keep her warm
against the cold winter air that’s gushing through the wide-open
front doors as the movers haul in heavy bed frames and sturdy
dressers.

I give her a hug and a kiss as I pass. Reese
does the same. As always, Tanny strokes his cheek and smiles into
his eyes. “My two favorite people,” she says, turning her twinkling
blue eyes to me.

“Is it ready?” he asks.

Her smile is angelic and happier than I think
I’ve ever seen it. “It is.”