Crossing Oceans (6 page)

“David?” a woman called meekly from the back door. This was not the Lindsey I’d imagined with wavy blonde locks and an hourglass figure. This Lindsey wore her shiny black hair in a blunt cut that would have looked more at home in Manhattan. Her fawn eyes jetted between David and me as she approached.

Her long khaki shorts ended where knobby knees began. In an evening dress, her pasty skin might have appeared luminous, but in naked daylight it just looked like she needed a tan.

By anyone’s standards, I was more attractive, but that thought brought no satisfaction. What it did bring was painful curiosity. What virtue did she possess that made her lovable when I was not?

David seemed to quickly compose himself as he stood, leaving the chains on the hammock jingling. “Lindsey, this is Genevieve Lucas. Jenny, this is my wife.”

She turned in my direction, studying me. After a moment, recognition washed over her, punctuated by an exclamation. “Your prom date!”

When my eyes met David’s, he looked back to his wife. “That’s right, sweetie.”

Sweetie
was a name he’d often called me, but for her it dripped with honey. She held out her hand.

I gave it a weak shake. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“You should see the scrapbook I made David with his high school memories. I gave it to him for his birthday. Your prom picture’s in it.” Her gaze traveled over my body so quickly, if I’d blinked, I’d have missed it. “You looked so pretty in that green dress. So pretty, I almost—” she made air quotes—“
accidentally
lost the photo.”

David shifted from one leg to another. Red mottled his cheeks and neck. “What brings you here, Genevieve?”

Taking in a deep breath, I motioned to the glass-and-iron table on the brick patio. “Can we all sit?”

“Is this about your mother again?” He crossed his arms. “Your dad really needs to move on.”

The cockiness that made his father so loathed in my household shone from David’s eyes like candles I wanted to blow out in the worst way. I felt my nostrils flare. “Would you be able to move on if you thought someone’s negligence caused
your
wife’s death?”

Lindsey fingered a button on her blouse, rubbing it absently as a child might do to the satin edge of a blanket. “What’s she talking about, David?”

He glared at me as he spoke to her. “My father supposedly—”

“Not
supposedly
,” I interjected.

“According to Genevieve’s dad, my father misdiagnosed her mother. He wasn’t even her doctor.” He said it as though the accusation were as insignificant as a fly he could just wave away.

That infuriated me as I stood among green grass and hummingbirds feeding from beautiful flowers. What did he know of losing the person he loved most in the world? What did he know of misery? He whose heart had never been broken. He whose parents both still breathed. He who would most likely live to a ripe old age. “He should have insisted she get checked out.”

David opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. I turned to Lindsey, trying my best to keep my hands unclenched and my volume down. But like every other time in my life when I felt slighted, a switch had been flipped and I was powerless to control what came out of my mouth. “Your father-in-law told my mother her fatigue and headaches were due to anemia. Without running a single test, he gave her prescriptions for ibuprofen and iron pills, which she took faithfully. Six weeks after that, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Three months after that, she died.”

Lindsey looked pleadingly to David.

He was more focused on debating me than offering her the refuge or explanation she sought. “Jenny, what do you want? Like I’ve said a hundred times, what’s done is done.”

“All my father ever wanted was an apology.”

“Right. What he wants is for us to raise her from the dead.”

I slapped his face and felt the sting on my hand. Shocked at my behavior, I clutched my hand to my chest to keep it from lashing out again against my will.

Lindsey stepped back, looking lost and unsure. David grabbed my other wrist. “You come to my house, accuse my father, then attack me?”

I pulled from him and rubbed the spot he’d held. Hot streams of shame trickled down my cheeks. “David, I’m sorry.”

His expression didn’t soften. “I’m tired of all the grief your family’s caused mine. I thought when we broke up, we could spend the rest of our lives avoiding each other. It’s a big world. You’d think you’d be able to stay on your side.”

I wiped the tears from my face. “I’d love nothing more than—”

“So do it,” he hissed. “Go. I didn’t ask you to come here. I’m married, Jenny. Married. It’s time for both you and your father to move on.”

I laughed bitterly. “Do you really think I’m not over you? I was over you the second I slammed the car door that night. You Prestons really think you’re something.”

“I want you to leave. You’re upsetting my wife.”

Lindsey looked embarrassed at her mention.

A tiny butterfly landed on the hammock David had been lying on, and finally I remembered Isabella.

This wasn’t about me or David or Lindsey or my mother or our fathers. It was about her. This idiot was her daddy. I needed to do damage control. For her sake.

“Listen, David, Lindsey, I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to hit you or to accuse your family. I came here to—”

“Save it.” David rubbed the red mark I’d left on his cheek.

“Fine,” I spat back. “You’re not good enough for her anyway.”

He whipped around and snatched the coffee cup and paper off the ground, then marched toward the house.

Lindsey stared at me, uncertain. “For who?”

“Never mind,” I said. Let his father tell him. Let no one tell him. I couldn’t care less. The last thing in the world I wanted after finding that David had turned into his dad was for him to be part of the upbringing of my precious daughter. Better for her to be raised by my father, half-present, than this pompous jerk.

Chapter Seven

Naked Barbie dolls lay strewn across the coffee table beside a heap of miniature clothing. Isabella was nowhere in sight. I listened for her but heard only the distant hum of the ancient refrigerator. No laughter or pattering of feet. Curiously, the house was silent.

My father’s Buick sat in the driveway and Mama Peg almost never left the house these days because of shortness of breath, which made me wonder if they’d taken to napping in the mornings.

If my mother were still alive, I would be seeking her sympathetic ear to lament that David’s words had ripped open the wound that had never quite healed. That I again felt his rejection every bit as raw as the night he told me he didn’t love me. But I’d long since learned to live without the comfort of my parents. I used to talk to God, but He’d never seemed as far away as He had in the weeks following my diagnosis.

Isabella was the only one who could give me what I needed at that moment—love, acceptance, and as many sweet hugs as it took to smother my pain. Nothing in the world brought me more comfort than to feel her warm breath against me, her soft cheek against mine, and to hear the only words in the world I could trust without question: “I love you, Mommy.”

My sandals clacked against the hardwood floor as I walked farther inside and called for her. Mama Peg’s bodiless voice shushed me from the kitchen. Following the raspy sound, I found her sitting at the table, a Bible and notebook set open before her. The breakfast plates had been washed and put away. The scent of lemon dish soap still hung in the air.

Looking up at me, she laid her pen on the table. “She’s taking a nap.”

“She stopped taking naps two years ago.”

“I think this morning upset her.”

I grimaced. As I considered how the morning’s altercation between my father and me must have sounded to my little girl, I felt shame for the second time in an hour. I wanted to ignore the voice in my head chiding me, but regret is not an emotion that whispers. “You think I should check on her?”

She shook her head, making the oxygen tubing jiggle from her ears. “Just did. Snoring away.”

“She sounds just like Dad when she sleeps.”

“He used to drive me crazy when he slept between his father and me.”

I slid a chair from the table, making a scraping sound against the floor. Mama Peg frowned at the scuff mark I’d left behind.

With my foot, I rubbed it away and sat across from her. “You let him sleep with you? You gave me such a hard time about that.”

“Jack refused to sleep on his own until he was six. Why do you think I tried to warn you?”

I grinned. “Is that why he’s an only child?”

She tugged on the hem of her blouse to straighten it. “You laugh, but it’s true. And see? So is she.”

“That’s not why she is. I thought if I ever did it again, I’d do it right.”

Her thin lips curled downward at the mention of what would never be.

I pulled a ragged edge of paper off the notebook and rolled it between my fingers. “I hate that she’ll never have any sisters or brothers.”

“Builds self-sufficiency,” she said. “Besides, you don’t know she’ll be an only child. David might give her a sibling.”

I worked the paper between my fingers, bunching it into a tiny ball, not daring to meet my grandmother’s gaze.

“Did you find him?” she finally asked.

I nodded slowly.

“And?”

I laid the paper ball I’d made on the table and ripped off another corner of paper. I worked this scrap, too, into a ball and placed it beside the first one.

She took a long, deep breath. “By the look on your face, I’m guessing it went over about as well as a turd in a punch bowl.”

I wanted to cry but figured I’d let my pity party go on long enough. It was time to put my daughter first. Her future depended on the decisions I would make. The actions I would take.

“You guessed right. He’s a total jerk,” I whispered.

“Runs in the family,” she said matter-of-factly. “Hard to believe that sweet angel has Preston blood running through her veins.”

I ripped off another corner, not answering. I balled it up and added it to the pile I’d begun.

I was reaching to tear off another piece when a warm, shaky hand grabbed mine. “So did you tell him about Bella before his father did?”

I looked up into my grandmother’s foggy eyes. “He still doesn’t know.”

She scrunched her face, giving her the appearance of a fleshy prune. “What? Why the dickens not?”

“He was so abusive. I couldn’t tell him.”

“Abusive? or angry?”

I shrugged. “How do I know he won’t be that way with her?”

“How do you know he will? It’s not your job to control the results, only to relay the message. He has a right to know he’s a father.”

“He hates me.”

She squeezed my hand. “It doesn’t matter if he hates you, hates Jack, or hates me. He’s her father.
Her father
, Jenny. If he loves
her
, then that’s all that matters.”

“His father will tell him,” I mumbled. “I’m sure he probably has already.”

“He should have heard it from you.”

I slid my hand from under hers and wrapped my arms around myself, feeling suddenly cold. “He should’ve let me speak. Besides, I don’t want my daughter being raised in that family.”

“That’s not your decision.”

Not my decision? Having metastatic melanoma was not my decision. The headaches, fatigue, palpitations, and mood swings I’d been suffering from were not my decision. David’s breaking up with me was not my decision. My mother’s dying was not my decision. Mama Peg’s emphysema was not my decision. My father’s coldness toward me was not my decision. But this? This was one of the few things that
was
my decision. “She’s my daughter. While I still have breath in my body, I have a say.”

I looked down at the pile of tiny paper balls I had made, then closed my eyes.
It’s time,
I told myself. After months of worrying about what would be best for my daughter, all choices but one had vanished. I now knew what Isabella’s future would be and it was time to meet fate halfway.

I stood and swept the mess I’d made into my palm.

“Where are you going?” Mama Peg asked.

“To tell Dad.”

“Tell him what?”

I walked to the sink and emptied the scraps into the garbage disposal, then turned around. “What do you think?”

She went into a coughing fit. I grabbed a glass from the dish rack, filled it with tap water, set it before her, then set out to find my father. As I neared the stairwell, I started to call his name but remembered Isabella sleeping.

Standing before my father’s closed bedroom door, I clenched my fist and gave a light tap. Not surprisingly, no reply followed. Of course he wouldn’t be in his room. All he did in there was dress and sleep. Most of his time was spent in his office teaching himself the banjo or in the basement studio painting, or rather, trying to. The truth was, he was even less talented in the visual arts than he was at music.

I made my way back down the stairs and found Mama Peg waiting for me. Her skin appeared ashen and her breathing resonated louder than usual. “You can’t tell him today,” she managed around coughs. Cyan outlined her lips.

“You don’t look well,” I said.

“You’re perceptive.”

“I mean more not well than usual.”

The slamming of a car door in the driveway turned both of our heads toward the window. I walked over and drew back the curtain, revealing a blue pickup in the driveway with
Allen Landscaping
stenciled in white letters on the door.

“Who is it?” Mama Peg asked.

“Craig.”

She frowned. “What’s he doing home already?”

He leaned against the truck with a cell phone to his ear.

I shrugged, let the curtain drop, and turned around. “You think Dad’s in the basement?”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I can’t tell him. Why not?”

She grabbed the stairway post to steady herself. “To everything, there is a season.”

I let out an exasperated breath. “First you get on my case for not telling him; now you’re telling me
not
to tell him?”