Another Summer (2 page)

Cheryl laughed harder than the comment deserved. She needed a drink, something to hold in her hands beside her purse to keep them busy, something to put to her mouth to bridge awkward silences, something to bolster her flagging courage. “And she says such nice things about you.”

“Yeah, I’ll just bet she does.”

Cheryl’s gaze settled on a man standing at the bar with his back to her. He was the right height, weight, and hair color but was wearing a plaid jacket she knew Andrew would never wear. She should have questioned knowing this: seventeen years was a long time. People changed. Knowing Andrew as she had, having him so integrated into her mind and heart that thoughts of him still intruded into the most ordinary moments of her day-to-day life, was a burden she had come there to shed.

Slowly, she began to sense a change in the air around her. It was as if it had grown heavy, sending gentle, insistent ripples charged with electricity against her skin. Unbelievably, she was still intune to Andrew’s presence, could still feel him before seeing him, was still drawn to him without a word being spoken. The feeling was so compelling, so powerful, so deeply familiar that she knew she’d been right about seeing him again. It was the only way to find a way to forget him.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” Andrew said softly.

In a room echoing with talking and laughter and raised voices, Cheryl heard the whispered words as if he had shouted them.

She turned.

He was no longer the boy she’d held frozen in the recesses of her mind, but a man she had not accurately imagined. His lean body and confident posture, the premature wrinkles on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes, the threads of gray in jet-black hair were all expected. What she hadn’t foreseen, what nearly stole her composure, was the pain and loneliness she saw in his eyes and in the unguarded way he looked at her.

“I almost didn’t,” she said.

Moving to Cheryl’s side to turn what had become a one-on-one into a triangle, Lynn said, “Twenty years seems to be a magical number. The reunion planner who helped us said we could expect a lot of people who’d never attended.”

Andrew studied Lynn. “Lynn Littrell? Didn’t we have chemistry together?”

She nodded, a smile showing she was pleased that he’d remembered.

“You married Max Sawyer.”

“Eighteen years this October. And five kids,” she added. “Have you seen him yet?”

“Only for a second. He was looking for you.”

“Really?” She glanced around the room. “I wonder why.” Obviously torn between going and staying, she said, “I guess I’d better find out what he wants.”

When Lynn was gone, Cheryl said, “Max wasn’t looking for her.”

Andrew gave her a questioning look. “What makes you think he wasn’t?”

“Because I know you.” The simple truth was an acknowledgment that cut through the years. For a time after Andrew left her she’d managed to convince herself that love wasn’t singular, that the belief two people were destined for each other and no one else was poetic fantasy.

When she married Jerry and still dreamed of Andrew, she’d dismissed those dreams with the reasoning that a first love was never forgotten. Then, after the divorce, when she was alone again and found herself looking for Andrew in every man she dated, she accepted that he would always be a part of her. Acceptance gave an illusion of peace…. until the invitation arrived. She knew then that she would never have any real peace until what had once been between her and Andrew was resolved.

“I heard you were divorced,” he said.

“I heard you never married,” she countered.

He looked at her, his gaze a connection. “A long time ago I made a mistake. I’ve had to live with the consequences.”

“Am I supposed to know what that means?”

“Are you saying you don’t?”

“How could I possibly know what consequences you’ve lived with?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “But then, I didn’t come here to listen to how hard your life has been.”

“What did you come for?”

“An apology. Better yet, an explanation–one that I can believe this time.”

“You deserve more than me telling you how sorry I am,” he said with heart-stopping humility. “And I don’t know how to explain something I no longer understand myself.”

“Why did
you
come here tonight?” She fought to maintain her emotional footing, to remember the pain he’d so easily inflicted on her, to remind herself that if she let him, he would have the power to hurt her that way again.

“I wanted to see you.”

“Just me?”

“Just you.”

In the background she heard someone announce that dinner was being served. Panic set in at the thought of spending the next hour making small talk between bites of salad and prime rib. Cheryl glanced at the double doors leading to the dining room. “Do you want to stay?”

He shook his head. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Where?”

“I don’t care. Anywhere we can be alone to talk.”

She didn’t know anyplace. She’d only been back to Santa Cruz twice since her parents moved sixteen years ago. So much had changed since the earthquake, she hardly recognized what had once been favorite haunts. “The Last Wave?”

“Closed down a couple of years ago.”

“Wilson’s?”

“Never reopened after the earthquake.”

“You choose.”

“What about my place?”

“You live here?”

“Twenty minutes away.”

Her immediate thought was to say no. But then she questioned her reasoning. Why not his place? “I’ll follow you.”

She turned toward the door. He put his hand in the small of her back. The casual, intimate gesture stole her breath. She stopped and stepped away from him.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m not going with you for anything but conversation.”

“It’s me, Cheryl,” he said softly. “I know why you’re going with me. And no matter how much I wish it were different, I know what to expect.”

If so, he was a step ahead of her.

  C
HERYL LEANED AGAINST THE RAILING
that surrounded the small, flagstone deck at the back of Andrew’s house and tasted the Chardonnay he had poured for her. She stared at the ocean from the vantage point of being on top of a fifteen-foot cliff, took a deep breath, and let a sense of homecoming fill her mind. She knew this beach; it was one she and Andrew had come to when they wanted to escape the crowds at Santa Cruz. Every memory they’d created here was a good one. Nothing painful had happened that she could summon to use as a shield if she felt herself slipping too close to forgetting the years between then and now.

The beach beckoned. She could almost feel the warm grains of sand between her toes. She knew exactly how the water would feel as it hit her legs,how free she would feel if she dove into a wave and released herself to its power. From the day her father had moved the family from the mountains of Idaho to the beaches of Santa Cruz and she saw the ocean for the first time, she knew she’d found her spiritual home.

Andrew came to stand beside her. “I can see it still holds you the way it used to.” He put his hand on the railing next to hers, close but not touching, and turned to face her.

She both loved and hated that he knew her so well. “How long have you lived here?” More than that, she wanted to know why he lived there. Why this house on this beach?

“Twelve years, off and on. When my grandfather died I wound up with a great deal of money that no one knew he had.”

“Your grandfather was still alive all the time you were in foster care?”

“He and my mother were estranged. Or at least that’s the way the lawyer put it. Seems he didn’t know I existed until the detective I hired to find my mother showed up on his doorstep.”

Andrew had refused even to consider the possibility of looking for his mother when Cheryl had suggested it. What could have happened to make him change his mind? “Did you find her?”

“There was nothing to find. She died of a drug overdose when I was two.”

“What about your father?”

“He could have been any one of a dozen men she hung around with at the time, or a stranger passing through with drugs and willing to trade for sex.”

She winced at the flat retelling of something that must have devastated him at the time. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t what I’d hoped to find, but I’ve learned to live with it.”

“Did you get a chance to know your grandfather?” She told herself that she was asking as an old friend, nothing more, that she was interested more out of politeness than caring.

Andrew let out a short, harsh laugh. “He didn’t want anything to do with me. At least not while he was alive. I guess it satisfied some hidden sense of family to leave his money to me when he died. But then it was either me or the local men’s club if I decided I didn’t want it.”

“Are you happy?” This came from curiosity and a raw need to believe he hadn’t walked away unscathed.

“I have my moments.” He turned to look at her. “What about you?”

“Most of the time.” The truth would make her too vulnerable.

They slipped into an awkward silence. Cheryl turned her attention to a man racing a small boy across the sand. They were headed toward the stairs that led to the path beside Andrew’s house. Laughing and out of breath when they reachedthe landing, they paused for one last look at the ocean.

“I don’t wanna go yet,” the boy said, tugging on the man’s hand, trying to lead him back to the water.

“Mom’s waiting for us.”

“She won’t care,” the boy coaxed. “She likes us to have fun. She told me so.”

“How’s this for fun?” He reached down and lifted the boy, swinging him around and up to sit on his shoulders.

Not trusting herself to look at Andrew, Cheryl watched the man climb the stairs, the boy hanging on to his ears as he twisted to have one last look at the ocean. “I always imagined you with children,” she said.

“And I thought for sure that you would have a houseful of your own by now. You and Jerry must have been happy in the beginning. Why didn’t you–” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the railing, staring at the palate of oranges, pinks, and reds coloring the horizon. “Forget that. What happened between you and Jerry is none of my business.”

Jerry had told her up front that children were a part of the package. He insisted he wanted them even more than she did. Only later did she discover he wanted them for completely different reasons. Along with producing an heir, he saw the media attention and photo opportunities that having children would bring. She saw an end to herloneliness. As disheartened as she was when all their physical and medical efforts to conceive failed, she was glad the end of the marriage was uncomplicated and she could walk away without ties.

“I do have kids in a way,” she said. “They don’t go home with me, but I get to see them almost every day.”

“You’re a teacher?”

“A social worker with a private agency. We’re funded by endowments and a trust.”

The man stopped at the top of the stairs and turned to face the ocean. “Say good-bye,” he told the boy.

“We’ll be back,” he said instead, leaning over and pressing his cheek to the side of the man’s face.

“I know how he feels,” Cheryl said, anger rising in her like bubbles in a pot of boiling water.

Andrew looked at her. “I’m sorry.”

She avoided his gaze. “For what?”

“Everything.”

“That covers a lot of territory.” She wasn’t going to make it easy for him. She’d waited too long for an apology, needing one even though it would change nothing. “Are you saying you’re sorry I dropped out of school for two years before I went back to get my degree, that I married someone I didn’t love because I wanted to prove to myself I’d gotten over you, or that I’ve wasted half my life wanting something I can’t have. Just what is it you’re sorry for, Andrew.”

“That I was such a coward.”

At last she looked at him. “Oh, is that what happened?”

“I’m not the man I was then.”

“Too bad, I really liked that man. Actually, I loved him. With one small exception, of course.”

The anger didn’t bother him. The pain did. How easily he’d convinced himself the wounds he’d inflicted would heal and that she would be whole again and happy without him. “Do you ever wonder–”

She turned on him. “Don’t you dare ask me that. What I wonder, what I think about, what I feel are none of your business anymore.”

“Then I’ll tell you how it is with me.” He ached to touch her. Just holding her hand would be enough. It seemed impossible that he had once taken the hundreds of small, day-to-day moments they’d shared for granted.

“There isn’t a day I don’t think about you. There are times I’ll see a woman walking alone on the beach and let myself believe it’s you. Some days someone will knock on the door, and for the seconds it takes to answer I tell myself you’re the one waiting for me.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“I can’t say. I’m not sure when it started.”

“I know exactly how long it’s been with me.” She stared at the liquid in her glass, brought it to her lips, and finished the wine in two long swallows. “What happened that finally made you realize you’d made a mistake?”

“One day I took a hard look at myself and all the other men I knew chasing the endless summer and realized we’d bought into something that doesn’t exist.”

Her eyes flashed an antagonistic challenge. “I was hoping for something better.”

“I had to grow up to understand what I had lost. By then it was too late.”

“Lost? You didn’t lose me, Andrew, you discarded me.”

He flinched. None of the arguments he’d used to justify abandoning her made sense anymore. In hindsight he understood the fear that had consumed him the day he was told he had cancer. He remembered the growing, desperate need to grab hold of whatever time was left to him. Most of all he remembered the shame that came with the prospect of losing his manhood. Facing testicular cancer hit him harder than anything else ever had, stealing his youth and with it the belief that he was invincible.

He’d reacted the way he had reacted to every crisis he’d faced before he met Cheryl, pulling into himself and closing out those who would have helped him. He battled the cancer and chemotherapy and radiation alone, dropping out of college, coming up with excuses at the last minute not to meet Cheryl for holidays and birthdays, lying toher about difficult classes and intractable professors. He came through the experience so completely focused on himself all he could think about was his determination to savor every moment left to him, to experience everything life had to offer, to refuse ever again to settle, or compromise, or bargain.

Cheryl turned back to the man and boy and watched them until they went inside a house at the end of the block. “If you realized you’d made a mistake all those years ago, why did you wait until now to look for me?”

“You were married. Happily, I thought.”

She nodded. “For a while we actually managed to convince ourselves that we were the perfect couple portrayed by the media.” She paused as if struggling with what she would say next. “But a marriage gets a little crowded when another person becomes involved,” she said finally.

“Jerry was unfaithful?”

She held up her empty glass as if to ward off the question. Andrew reached behind him for the bottle of wine. As he poured, he said, “I know you. There’s no way you would ever–”

“You
knew
me, Andrew,” she reminded him. “The breakup was my fault.”

The revelation stunned him. “There was another man? What happened? Why aren’t you with him now?”

She stood motionless, her gaze fixed on the horizon. “I am.”

“I don’t understand.” And then it hit him. “Me? I’m the other man?”

Instead of answering, she took another long, deep swallow of wine.

Andrew reached for her glass. “Talk to me.”

She pushed his hand away, looked at him, sighed, and then handed him the glass. “Liquid courage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s never worked before, I don’t know what made me think it would work now.”

A childhood spent in foster homes where he’d been on display like merchandise for childless couples had taught him that dreams were for others, for those who had the right looks, the right smile, the right words. Those who were left behind, the kids like him, learned to play the cards that were dealt them.

Still, he couldn’t stop the swell of hope that filled his chest. A lump in his throat, he took a chance. “I never stopped loving you,” he admitted. “You have been the standard I used to judge every other woman I met.”

Her smile was tinged in a bitter sadness. “I’ve dreamed of this moment. So many times I’ve lost count. It’s always the same. You tell me you love me and take me in your arms and all the hurt and confusion simply disappear.”

“It can be like that.”

“No, it can’t. It’s not why I came, Andrew. I don’t want to start over. I want to put you behind me. I want to forget I even knew you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t you see? We can’t go back. We can’t even start over. You can’t have a relationship without trust, Andrew. Or do you have a magic wand you can wave that will bring that back the way you think you can bring back everything else?”

He didn’t have an answer, at least not one good enough. “What would it take for you to trust me again?”

She considered the question. “I’m not sure that’s possible. Even if I were willing to take a chance.”

“Time?” he prompted.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s yours. As much as you want.”

“What if it took years?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Seems to me I’ve heard that before.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and brought her around to look at him. “I let you go once, there’s no way I’m going to do it again. At least not without a fight.”

She started to say something. He put his finger to her lips to stop her. “Do you still love me? Even a little?”

“It doesn’t make sense for me to love you, and I don’t do things that don’t make sense anymore.”

“I don’t care whether it makes sense or not–do you love me?”

For long seconds she looked into his eyes, trying to decide whether it was the man she loved or the memory. “I’ll give you this much–there’s something unfinished between us.”

He nodded. “That’s enough–for now.”

It wasn’t enough for her. “So where do you see us going from here?”

“If it were truly up to me, I would have you move in with me tomorrow.”

“Just like that?” she snapped. “What about my job? My friends? My life in Oakland?”

He gave her a slow grin. “Like I said, if it were
truly
up to me.”

She was at a place she’d imagined, but never truly believed she would be. Andrew loved her and wanted her. Wasn’t this the answer to her dreams? Or was it a reminder that she had to be careful what she wished for?

He could break her heart again as easily as he had broken it before. She wasn’t the tower of strength, the battle-scarred worldly veteran she wanted to believe she was, that she wanted him to believe she was. “I don’t know….”

“Where we go from here is wherever we feel comfortable going.” He stepped back and hunkered down to look her directly in the eyes. “Right now, a walk on the beach would be nice.”

It was exactly what she needed–time. He knew her as well as he’d ever known her, and it scared her as much as it connected her to him.

“Of course, unless you have a suitcase in the car or are willing to wear something of mine, you probably don’t agree.”

She’d spent an entire week’s salary on the midnight blue designer dress she was wearing. The narrow strapped high heels had set her back another two hundred. Sand would ruin one, salt water the other. “My suitcase is at the motel.” He looked the same size he’d been in college, and his shirts had swallowed her then. “What did you have in mind to lend me?”

“Shorts and a T-shirt?” He looked at her waist. “And a pair of suspenders?”

A
LONE IN ANDREW’S BEDROOM, THE PROM
ised clothes on his bed, Cheryl questioned what she was doing. Doubts assailed her. She could feel her defenses slipping. How long would it take to recover if he walked out on her again? Would she ever recover? If not for her mother and father and their persistent efforts to get her on her feet again the first time, she wasn’t sure where she would be now.