Crossing Oceans (13 page)

He scrunched his nose against Isabella’s, making her giggle and me cringe. “I don’t think so. We’re good. Aren’t we, princess?”

She looked at him adoringly and nodded. “I’m not a baby, Mom.”

What happened to
Mommy
? “The law says that she needs a booster.”

He set her down and smoothed his khaki pants. “Well, I guess I need it then.”

“It’s for her safety.”

His nostrils flared. “Did I say it wasn’t?”

It took everything I had not to respond to his defensiveness. He arranged her booster in the middle of the backseat and strapped her in. As I watched the two of them pull away, it felt as though David were driving off with my very heart in the backseat of his car.

I lifted my arm to wave good-bye to my daughter, but she was looking ahead, not behind her. It was a healthy response to life that would serve her well in the coming months. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. What happened to the days when she would allow no one but me to hold her? when she would scream bloody murder when I left her with the sitter to go to work?

I looked down and noticed Cocoa lying on the ground. I bent and picked him up. I started to call for Isabella, but David’s car had already turned out of sight. I brushed dirt off the bear’s nose. “I’ll bet she’ll be missing you before the hour’s up.” His blank eyes stared back, looking as unconvinced as I felt. Hugging him to my chest, I inhaled her scent, which lingered on his fake fur.

I carried the bear back to the house and noticed a small blob of gray lying on the bottom porch step. As I got closer, I saw a pointy nose and whiskers attached to it. Shivers ran across my shoulders, making them shimmy. A dead mouse. Our biannual gift from Sweet Pea. He meowed at me from the sidewalk.

“Thanks for the carcass,” I told him. “You know, you sure have a funny way of showing affection.”

The cat took off toward the lake, and I went inside.

* * *

The phone rang only once before someone picked it up. Mama Peg yelled from the kitchen, “Jenny!”

Isabella.
I jumped up, letting the journal I’d been writing in fall to the floor. Something was wrong. I knew it. I never should have left her with him.

Before I could reach the phone, Mama Peg pulled the receiver from her ear and hung up. “That was David. He’s bringing Bella home.”

I checked my watch. It was only two. “What happened?” I stared hard, trying to read her body language.

She hesitated. “He didn’t say, but I could hear her crying.”

Adrenaline rushed through me. “Whimpering or wailing?”

“She sounded pretty upset.”

“Upset or frantic?”

My grandmother’s eyes answered me before she had even opened her mouth. “Inconsolable.”

My stomach dropped as a million possibilities sped through my mind, each one more horrible than the last. “Well, is she hurt? Did he say what made her—”

“He said that she’s okay, just shook up. She’s on her way home.”

From the front of the refrigerator, I snatched the scrap of paper with David’s number on it. I picked up the phone and dialed as fast as my fingers would fly. Lindsey answered.

“Put my daughter on.”

“Jenny? They’re on their way.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. We took her to the pool—”

My heart stopped. “You did what?”

“David wanted to teach her to swim.”

“No,” I pleaded as if it hadn’t already happened.

“He just tossed her in the shallow end. She could have stood up but she panicked.”

My eyes refused to blink away the tears blurring them. She must have been terrified. My baby. My poor baby. “Is she okay?”

“It’s really not as bad as it sounds. He pulled her right out.”

Lindsey’s calmness fueled my anger. “She almost drowned two weeks ago.”

Silence met me.

I began to tremble. “She almost died!”

I heard only her ragged breath.

“He had to know that she was scared.”

Lindsey’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He wanted her to learn how to swim.”

“She already knows how to swim. Didn’t she tell him?”

Mama Peg laid her hand on my shoulder. “Sweetheart, you’re yelling.”

I shook her off.

“We didn’t know, Jenny. I’m so sorry. We didn’t know,” Lindsey said through sniffles.

I wanted to reach into the phone and grab her by the neck. “You knew that she didn’t want to go in, right? I know she told you.”

“When you fall off a bike, you need to—”

Red flashed before my eyes and I heard nothing except the rapid pounding of my pulse. “I haven’t even been able to give her a bath since it happened, you idiot. You—”

Mama Peg lifted the phone from my quaking hand. While I shook with fury, she spoke into the receiver. “Lindsey, I know whatever happened wasn’t on purpose. Jenny’s just upset.”

I snatched the phone from her, growled into it, and slammed it down.

Minutes felt like hours as I waited for David to bring my daughter back. My mind played out all kinds of gut-wrenching scenarios. Isabella clinging to the father she trusted so readily as he pried her little fingers off his shoulder, her pleading with him to stop . . .

Thinking of my daughter being terrified knocked the wind out of me, and I clutched my stomach. What kind of people would force a child to do something that petrified her? Not anyone that needed to be parents. What kind of future would she have with them? That behavior was inexcusable. Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable.

I threw open the screen door and hurried to the front lawn to wait for them. It had been two weeks since it last rained, and the grass showed it. It crunched under my feet as I paced, trying to spend my anger before they arrived. The more I marched, though, the more upset I became. I couldn’t believe he had done what he’d done. I kept picturing my little girl, flailing and frantic, until I felt as though I were the one drowning.

Would she suffer lifelong trust issues now? She would definitely be scarred.
I’ve spent her whole life trying to protect her, and he undoes it all in one afternoon. Falling off a bike? What a ridiculously stupid analogy.

Before David’s car had come to a complete stop, the back door opened. Isabella jumped out and ran for me. David called for her, but she didn’t slow. She threw herself into my arms, nearly toppling me. I held her as tightly as I could, but it wasn’t nearly tight enough. I wanted to somehow again merge her with me, as we had once been, and protect her from the world.

David got out of the car and stood before me. “Is she always so over-the-top?”

All the blood in my body shot to my head the instant I looked at him. My temples pounded and my eyes felt like they had been replaced with laser beams set on annihilating him. “She almost drowned two weeks ago, you moron.”

“She said something about that.”

“And you threw her in anyway?”

“She just needed a little confidence. The same thing happened to me at that age and—”

“Shut up,” I snapped.

He reached out to touch Isabella, but she buried her face in my chest. For the first time, David actually looked hurt instead of prideful. Good.

He leaned against his car. “How did you know what happened?”

“Lindsey.” I kissed the tears off Isabella’s lashes before it dawned on me. “Why was she there?”

“What?” he said.

I rested my chin on Isabella’s curls. “Why was she there? You promised me that it would only be you.”

“She’s my wife, and I didn’t promise.”

I shook my head at him in complete disgust. “I used to be able to trust your word.”

When I turned to leave, he grabbed my arm. I glared at him until he let go.

“I never once lied to you,” he said. “Lindsey came because Isabella begged her to. Ask her if you don’t believe me.” He stared at Isabella’s back with a sad expression. “I didn’t mean to scare her.”

Isabella wiggled to get down. I set her on the ground, and without turning to say good-bye to her father, she ran inside.

“I would never hurt her on purpose, Jenny.”

Isabella disappeared into the house. The door slammed shut and David winced.

I pressed my fingers to my forehead, trying to force my racing thoughts into words that made sense. I looked up. “This isn’t going to work, David.” I headed for the porch.

He called after me, “Don’t do this, Genevieve.”

I turned. “You did this, not me. You’re trying to treat her the same way that you treated me. We both deserved better.”

His expression changed him into a man that I no longer recognized. “She’s my daughter and she
will
be part of my life. Don’t fight me, Lucas. You won’t win.”

Without answering, I turned back around and headed inside, leaving him alone with his threat.

Chapter Sixteen

The smell of sweat and cedar passed under my nose right before something touched my arm. I opened my eyes, surprised to see Craig squatting next to my bed.

His hazel eyes crinkled at me. “You should see your hair.”

I shielded my mouth, hoping that my breath didn’t smell as bad as it tasted. “That good, huh?”

“Let’s just say you probably wouldn’t win the Miss North Carolina title.”

“I don’t think I stood that great a chance even on my best day.” I sat up the rest of the way, glanced at the alarm clock, and groaned. It was nearly dinnertime. My one-hour nap had somehow turned into three and still I could have easily slept a few more. “Why are you here?”

He sat, sinking one side of the mattress. The intensity of his gaze sent an unexpected thrill through me, and I found myself smiling at the ridiculousness of it. How in the world had I managed to develop a crush in the midst of dying? Only me.

“Wow,” he said.

“Wow, what?”

“Even with your Medusa hair, you still manage to look beautiful.”

I crossed my arms and looked him over in return. He wore a John Deere T-shirt, shorts, and grass-streaked tube socks that peeked up through crusty work boots. I started to say something smart about the way he was dressed but stopped myself. The truth was that he looked exactly the way a man should.

He winked. “Even looking as raggedy as you do, I’d share a mattress with you any day.”

I felt myself flush. “That’s enough.”

He covered his mouth and fake-coughed the word
prude
.

“I’ll take that as a compliment. The last time I laid down my prudity, I ended up with Isabella.”

“That’s not a word,” he said.

“Isabella?”

“No,
prudity
.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Oh, come on . . .
prudity
?”

“It is so,” I said, trying to sound certain.

“You wanna bet?”

I combed my fingers through my tangled hair. “First, you compromise my reputation by being in my bedroom unchaperoned, and now you want me to gamble?”

He bent over to pick a pillow off the floor. I found myself at eye level with his bottom. It was a fine butt, small and round, which I had no business admiring. Heat rose in my cheeks. I looked away as he straightened.

“Listen, Mother Teresa, I’m not trying to take advantage of you or cause your backslide.” His smile faded. “I’m not David, Genevieve.”

My hands clutched the blanket. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I actually care about you.”

My heart grew heavy. “He cared once too.”

Craig opened his mouth as if to argue, then closed it again.

After a moment of silence, I gestured to his feet. “How in the world did you get past Mama Peg in those filthy things?”

He looked down at his boots and then at me. “Crud, I forgot why I even came up here.”

“Which was?”

“I’m supposed to let you know that Ted’s down there waiting to talk to you.”

I knew only one Ted, and the thought of him in my house gave me the same Alice-in-Wonderland feeling I got the first time I ran into one of my teachers at the grocery store. “
Uncle
 Ted?”

“He ain’t my uncle, but yeah, that’s the one.”

“What does he want?”

“My guess is it has something to do with his nephew’s daughter.”

I sighed. Apparently David and Lindsey weren’t going to be the only Prestons I was going to have to contend with. I didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me until then that Isabella wasn’t just inheriting David, Lindsey, and Dr. Preston . . . but Ted, his wife, and the rest of the Preston clan. I flopped back on my pillow and yanked the blanket over my head.

Craig tore it off.

A gust of air hit my legs. “Go away.”

He grabbed my ankles and pulled my feet to the floor.

I batted his hands away from me. “Okay, already. I’m up.”

Eyeing my upright position, he nodded smugly and sauntered out. Perspiration had soaked the back of his shirt in the shape of an upside-down heart. He started to close the door behind him but paused and peered back at me. “I wouldn’t take too long if I were you. Your father’s down there reading him the riot act about his brother.”

My stomach cramped at the thought of what could be going on downstairs between these modern-day Montagues and Capulets. After changing into a clean lace-rimmed T-shirt, pulling my hair into a ponytail, and speed-gargling some Scope, I hurried down to intervene before blood could be shed.

As I made my way to the landing, Isabella’s laughter fluttered in from the yard, and I wondered if Ted was entertaining her. The thought neither warmed nor disturbed me. He was the type who would offer a kid a sucker, then expect a quarter, but at least he didn’t have a god complex like his brother.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw him sitting on the couch, looking as out of place in my living room as a vulture in a bluebird nest. He wore white work pants with a Ted’s Café silk-screened shirt tucked into them. His bald head gleamed more than usual, making me wonder if he had shined it up special for the visit.

My father stood, arms crossed, leaning against the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

Ted’s gaze fell on me. He jumped up. “Jenny, long time no see.”

I gave him my best what-pray-tell-are-you-talking-about look. “I just saw you two weeks ago.”