Shopping for a CEO's Fiancee (27 page)

I was the freak.

My skin itches, the bright sun pouring down on me, my body uncovered, a short-sleeved polo, shorts, and sneakers all I chose to wear. Vince is right: I take greater risks every day just driving to work.

But living a life hidden in darkness and cold was never about logical risk assessment and playing the odds.

I almost invited Amanda to join me here, today. Almost.

As I walk, I hear the rumble of car engines behind me, a flurry of activity, then shouts and screams of kids unbound. Music from an ice cream truck jingles in the background, blending with the muted cacophony of childhood fun. That day, thirteen years ago, when I was a forward on my team and taking a break between games to go for a hike with Dec and Mom, I remember Dec asking if we could grab an ice cream bar.

And I said, “Coach doesn’t want us loading our stomachs with junk.”

Those were some of the last words my mother ever heard from me.

What if I’d said yes? What if we’d gone to the parking lot instead and had Mom chide us for eating too much sugar, had Dec buy us each two chocolate-coated bars, had shoveled them in like the growing teens we were? What if I’d paused and what if, what if, what if?

Thirteen years of
what ifs
.

Except none of those comes even close to the
what if
Declan carries inside him.

It’s the question I can’t ask him.

It’s the question he asks himself every day.

As I reach the split in the path, another
what if
assaults me, the Y in the road a dimension splicer, my dead mother down one path, my living mother down the other. We picked the right-hand path out of sheer randomness, a decision that meant nothing in the moment, yet everything three minutes later.

When Amanda jumped in the water to rescue the animals at Dec and Shannon’s wedding, she made one of those instinctual decisions, the kind that makes sense at the time.

Everything makes sense at the time.

Until it doesn’t.

Fresh air assaults my lungs, the scent of freshly-mowed grass nauseating. It takes me back thirteen years ago, my legs shorter, tighter, body all elbows and knees, getting used to my newfound height. It was the very end of sophomore year and I just got my driver’s license. Mom let me drive. Declan mocked me endlessly from the backseat, calling me “Grandma” at every intersection.

But I drove, proudly.

I’m here as an exercise in futility, an attempt to inoculate myself against memories of evil in quarter-ounce doses. The dose makes the poison, right? That’s the saying.

What if Mom had only been stung once?

What if I’d been stung before and we’d known about my allergy?

What if. That’s what I want on my grave.

What if.

I don’t want to put Amanda through a life of
what if
. Our fight that day, two months ago, at the wedding fittings wasn’t about fear. Not the kind of fear everyone thinks.

It was about love.

The kind of love so strong you’ll push it aside for the sake of preserving the other.

A chipmunk chatters at me as it leaps over a cluster of rocks, pausing to stand on hind legs and stare. Deeming me too inconsequential for more of its precious time, it skitters off into the woods, the rustling of leaves my only way to track it. Concentrating on minutiae like that is easier than thinking about the fact that I tried. I tried to push Amanda away, and I tried to save her from all the what ifs that come in the baggage I carry with me.

The god-damned ocean liner I pull through life via a yoke around my neck.

But I failed to account for an important variable.

Turns out, she loves me enough to push back. To stay. To accept the
what ifs
as part of the equation that says if—and only if—love can be so profound that a mother would sacrifice herself for her son, then maybe he should find someone to love that much.

To pass on the legacy.

To live out my mother’s greatest wish.

That I live.

“What am I supposed to do, Mom?” I say, as if she can hear me. As if she’s here, right now, with that intense look of listening that you only got out of her when you changed the timbre of your voice to cut through the busyness of being James McCormick’s wife. Mom did that. Stopped everything for us when we needed her most.

Nothing else was more important.

This is the part where I stop at that damned spot by the bridge and exorcise my demons. Talk to Mom and tell her how great Amanda is and how I wish she were alive to know her. That’s all a given. I don’t do that.

Instead, I pick up a handful of rocks and start throwing them, one by one, in rhythm to slow, deep breaths.

This is where I should have died.

This is where I didn’t die.

And this is where a single wasp could kill me.

“Fuck wasps,” I whisper, using Vince’s mantra. “Fuck wasps.” I bend down and pull out the hem of my shirt, turning it into a holding place for more rocks, mindless and stupid, just a guy gathering rocks to throw in the water.

And then I throw.

Each stretch of my arm takes about ten seconds, and as I calculate the value of my time spent collecting and throwing rocks, I say, Vince’s mantra over and over.

Vince is right.

It’s surprisingly cathartic.

Until a little voice behind me chimes in and echoes me.

“Fuck wasps. Auntie Shannon, what does ‘fuck wasps’ mean?”

I whip around, dropping the end of my shirt, the rocks spilling down my shins, the
plunk plunk plunk
of a hundred stones the backdrop for a wholly unexpected sight.

Shannon and her nephews, Jeffrey and Tyler.

“Why do you want to fuck wasps?” Jeffrey asks.

“Jeffrey!” Shannon scolds him. “Don’t say that word.”

“What word? ‘Wasps’? What’s wrong with the word ‘wasps’?”

“Jeffrey,” she says in a low voice of warning.

Tyler peers up at me, shielding his eyes from the blazing sun. “How do you fuck a wasp?”

“Very carefully,” Jeffrey whispers, laughing at his own joke.

Tyler doesn’t get it.

He damn well shouldn’t. The kid’s what—seven? Eight?

“You say that word again and no ice cream,” Shannon threatens.

Jeffrey’s smart. He shuts up instantly.

“
Andrew?
’ Shannon asks, her tone changing. “What are you doing here?”

“Reliving old times.”

She frowns, then beneath her furrowed brow, her eyes fly open. Taking in the bridge, the water, the soccer fields far off in the distance, she morphs, the realization of where we are sinking in layer by layer.

“Here?” she gasps, then shakes her head very slowly. “I guess I always knew, but didn’t think about it when I brought the boys here.” 

I shrug. My ability to speak is rapidly fading.

“Is Amanda with you?”

I shake my head.

“We’re here because of Tyler’s soccer game.” The soft melody of an ice cream truck grows louder in the distance. 

I look down. The kid’s wearing shin guards and tall soccer socks, with a sports team shirt for a team sponsored by a local plumbing company. Team colors are the same as mine from thirteen years ago, green and white.

My stomach feels like it’s been mowed.

By a flamethrower.

I reach in my back pocket and pull out my wallet, peeling off a twenty. “Here,” I say, handing it to Jeffrey. “You and Tyler go get yourselves some ice cream.”

He takes the bill but waits, giving Shannon a look of deference that I would find admirable if I weren’t half out of my mind right now.

“Can we?”

Her smile is shaky, body language tight and on guard. She can tell I’m upset and she’s frantically trying to read the situation. Meanwhile, every inch of my skin is on fire and I’m trapped in tenth grade.

“Sure. Just stay close to Tyler.”

The boys run off with hoots and shouts of “thanks!”

“What is wrong?” Shannon’s on me in under a second, her face twisted with fear. Small, breathy gasps come out of her. Fresh-faced, no make-up, and with her hair in a messy ponytail, she looks ten years younger, especially in a softball shirt and yoga pants.

“Are you following me?” I joke, only to say something that will override the sound of a hurricane between my ears.

“Andrew.” Compassion radiates off her, the fear dissolving like a swarm of emotion broken by some force no one has yet discovered. “What’s going on? Did you and Amanda have a fight?”

“Hah. No. The opposite.”

“The opposite?”

Two opposing forces square off inside my chest while my mind plays the role of whirling dervish, complete with turban and nausea, but minus the poverty. Declan’s groused about the whole “talk about your feelings” bullshit that Shannon and her family engage in.

Maybe there’s something to it.

“She doesn’t believe me,” I confess. Someone is using a jackhammer in my solar plexus.

“Believe you?”

“That I want to marry her.”

Shannon cranes her neck forward in disbelief. “You do?”

“I want to marry her. Really marry her. Propose and the whole bit.” I kick the haphazard pile of rocks at my feet off the edge of the bridge.

“Why haven’t you?”

“Because I lost the ring in Walden Pond,” I mutter under my breath. 

“Come again?”

“Because she really doesn’t believe me.”

“It’s a lot of believe.”

“I know.”

She gives me a sad smile. “Congratulations.”

“That is the weakest version of congratulations I have ever experienced.”

“Not for realizing you love Amanda and want to be her husband, Andrew. Congratulations for sitting outside with me and joining the human race.”

“The vampire thing got old.”

She studies me. “Why?”

“Even immortality has its limits.”

She punches my shoulder. “C’mon.”

I look around, my head tipped up to take in the bright blue sky. Some flying insect buzzes by, high near the leaves of the big oak trees at the edge of the path, and I freeze.

“Because thirteen years is long enough for me to torture myself. It’s time to live the life my mother saved.” I look at her, catching her eyes, and she’s blurry. She needs to work on that. How can the edges of her body become so diffuse? “The life Declan saved. Mom paid the ultimate price—with her life. But he paid the biggest price of all of us.”

Her hand is warm and smooth as she covers the back of mine. “You
all
paid the biggest price. No one’s suffering is more or less than anyone else.”

“Dec had to choose, though. I was out cold. Mom gave him an impossible choice.”

“No. She didn’t.”

“Right. I know. Mom made him pick me.” I huff. “But he didn’t have to, and Dad eviscerated him for it.”

“James can be a hard man.”

“There’s more to it, Shannon.”

She quickens, eyes darting to the field where the boys went. “More?”

“Do you know why Terry stepped down from Anterdec?”

She blinks hard. “No.”

“But you know something.”

“Only Declan’s comment that Terry and James had a standoff after your mom died, and he and James didn’t speak for over a year.”

I swallow, as if the bile can ever go down. “That’s about all I know, too. My dad is at the center of so much anger. So many secrets. When Mom died, she took all the glue that held us together with her and we just turned into a pile of loose, splintered sticks.”

“Your mother raised good sons. Good men.”

“So did my father.” Defending Dad is reflexive. I’ve done it for years without thinking, because Terry faded out and Dec and Dad have such a contentious relationship. At some point, I named myself peacekeeper.

No one asked me to do that.

“Yes,” she says softly. “He did.” She bends down and picks up a handful of rocks, tossing them one by one into the water, staring at the ripples. “When did life become so complex? I thought once I was an adult, it would all be easier.”

“Really?” It dawns on me that I’ve never been alone with Shannon. We’ve worked together and been at family events together, but a conversation like this is new.

“You know how when you’re a little kid, you think that life is one big series of rules you don’t know exist? And you come across them whenever you’re trying to do something really exciting and neat?”

“No. We always knew the rules in advance.”

“How did you learn to take risks? Break the rules sometimes?”

“In school. Work. But not in life. And after the wasp sting, risk was unacceptable. Another rule of Dad’s.”

“Is that why it’s been so easy for you to be outside again?”

“What do you mean?” If this is easy, I’d hate to see hard. 

“Once you realized you were living out a rule you didn’t make for yourself, you could drop it.”

A slim, green leaf flutters onto the surface of the water, right at the edge near the bank, and floats on one of the ripples caused by the rocks Shannon tosses into the stream. It catches in an eddy, twirling in a circle over and over until the current is so fast in that little whirlpool that it becomes a solid green circle, all the edges blurred into something new.

“You’re saying I’ve been living life as a vampire not because I’m afraid to die, but because I’m afraid I’ll disappoint my dad.”

She just shrugs and tosses another rock in the water.

It lands right on the leaf, which breaks free from the eddy and wanders downstream, swept away by forces bigger than it can fathom.

“Disappoint him by being the victim of some random wasp, a one in a billion chance, but one with dire consequences.” And the consequences aren’t death. Look at Declan. Look at what he’s had to bear because of that randomness.

And Terry.

And me.

“See? Complex.” She gives me a sad smile, her eyes open and searching.

I see why Declan loves her so much.

“Why doesn’t Amanda believe me?”

“I think she does.”

“Then, when I told her I knew she was the only one for me—when I said I wished we had turned out to be married in Las Vegas—and she dismissed the idea...why?”

“Have you asked her to marry you?”