To Have and to Hold (16 page)

He was gone when she woke up, and she knew. She lay there and stared at the sun chinking through the blinds and she ached all over from her exertions yesterday, and that deep pain felt like a harbinger.

He could be downstairs making her breakfast. He could be preparing a tray to bring up to her. He would show up in the doorway and say, “Look what I made for you!” and he would set it across her lap. Thank her for being there for him when he’d been hurting in the middle of the night. Apologize for having yelled at her. Tell her she’d done it, she’d fixed it, just like she’d said she would.

Only she knew he wasn’t, and he wouldn’t.

After a while, she got out of bed and took a long, hot shower. She dressed in jeans and a dark gray fitted T-shirt, and she went out into the kitchen and made herself a bowl of granola. She checked on the girls, who were rollerblading in the street outside the house.

She crossed into the backyard, walked through the woods on what had become almost a well-trodden path, and found him just where she’d known he’d be. Up the tree. He’d just drilled a hole inside a larger hole.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready to sink a TAB,” he said.

She wanted to see it. She wanted to watch as the tree house took shape, as he anchored it, as he built it. She wanted to design it and make it hers. Theirs.

She wanted to stay.

Part of her had probably always known she didn’t want to go. Part of her had always known that L.A. was a poor consolation prize for what she and Phoebe couldn’t have.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

It was disconcerting, talking up at him, but she knew she had no choice. She knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t, face her right now.

He touched the edge of the hole he’d drilled, testing. Not looking down at her. But she knew that he knew she was there. His whole body radiated awareness and tension.

She could walk away, but she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t lay everything on the line, despite the fact that she knew it wouldn’t change the way he felt. Or didn’t feel.

“I don’t have to go, Hunter. I could call Stefan and tell him to offer the job to someone else. I could say I changed my mind. That I—”

She was going to lose her nerve if she didn’t just spit it out.

“—That I love you. And I don’t need any other reason to stay.”

She took a deep breath.

He’d stopped moving. He rested in his harness, his body an L, his legs slightly bent against the tree trunk. And then slowly he lowered himself, walking down the solid column of the tree’s strength, until his feet were on the ground again. His eyes drilled into her.

“You think you don’t.” His voice was low. Angry. “You think you don’t, now, but you will. I know you want me to ask you to stay. But if I do that, a week, a month, a year from now, you’ll be looking at me with big Bambi eyes, asking what you can do to make things okay.”

She shook her head, tears filling her eyes. “That’s not true, Hunter.”

“You’ll end up hating me for not giving you what you need.”

“No. No.”

“And I’ll hate you for wanting more than I can give.”

It was surprising how much that hurt. Like something splintering in her chest. The last few days, the blooming tenderness between them, the joy, the ferocious need—that he could have been with her through all of that and still
doubt
.

She got angry then. Fast, like the anger had been waiting right beneath the surface, boiling there, brewing under her patience with the two-steps-forward-and-one-back, the forbidden connections in the dark, the slow dance in the light.

“Don’t fucking tell me that, Hunter. Don’t tell me you
can’t
do it. Don’t tell me what you can and can’t give. I’ve seen you. I know you. And you fell in love with me. So if you’re not feeling it now, it’s not because you can’t.”

She took a deep breath.

“It’s because you
won’t
.”

She was breathless and furious.

“You loved me, Hunter. I know you did.”

He turned away, gazed up for a moment at the thick TABs protruding from the tree. Like strange robotic branches grafted on, half organic, half man-made.

“Maybe I did.”

When he looked at her again, it was almost blankly, absently, the way he’d looked at her those first couple of days, as if she were vaguely familiar but he couldn’t quite place her.

“But I won’t let you give up your life waiting for it to happen again.”

There was such an awful finality in his voice. She felt like the wind had been knocked out of her.

But the sound, the one like air going out of someone who’d been punched in the stomach, wasn’t her.

They both turned.

Clara was standing at the edge of the clearing. Stock-still, eyes wide.

Hunter started toward her. “Clara!”

But she was already running away.

Trina found Clara up in the old tree house, facedown on the bed.

She sat beside her almost-daughter and stroked her hair, until Clara said in a soft, tear-choked voice, “If he loved you, would you stay?”

Oh,
God
.

For a moment, it felt so complicated. The job, the possibility of Phoebe getting to know her biological father…

Hunter.

Clara.

It seemed important, no matter how much it might hurt both of them, for her to tell the truth, so she took a deep breath and said, “Yes. But he doesn’t. He can’t, right now.”

“You said he won’t. You said he’s choosing not to.”

She had. And she believed it. But she also knew it was more complex than that.

“Sometimes—sometimes for grown-ups, things don’t feel exactly like choices. It’s like everything that’s happened to you before adds up to something—inevitable.”

“I hate him,” Clara said. “I hate him for making you leave.”

Trina’s throat felt so tight she could barely speak, and all that mattered to her in that moment was trying to make this okay for Clara. And for Hunter. So the two of them could begin the process of rebuilding their family.

It hurt, so much, but it was what needed to happen now.

“He’s not making me leave. I know what you heard, and what it must have sounded like, but grown-ups are complicated. Even though it sounded like a fight, we both know I need to leave. He can’t just magically love me. Love isn’t like a switch you can turn on and off.”

Though God knew, she wished it were. So she could stop wanting what she couldn’t have. She’d worked so hard to forget Stefan, to get away from the experience of wishing for what wouldn’t happen, only to find herself right back where she’d started.

“I wish he’d never gotten amnesia,” Clara said.

Her voice had softened a little, some of the tension easing from her skinny little body, and Trina took her first full breath in what felt like hours. “Me, too,” she said. “But maybe it wouldn’t have worked out anyway. He was gone a long time. People change a lot in a year. They see things and do things that change what they want out of life. You know—” she told Clara. “You know this has
nothing
to do with you, right? You know I—”

There was no way she was getting through this without tears, so she gave up right then. “You know I love you so much. You know I don’t want to leave you. You know I would stay if I felt like I could. You know I will always be available if you need me. You can call, you can email, and if you really need me, you can ask me, and I’ll come.”

“If something bad happened, and I needed, like, a substitute mom, you’d come?”

“Absolutely.”

Clara sat up and threw her arms around Trina and the two of them sat there, legs bunched under them on the bed, clinging to each other and crying, until neither of them had any tears left.

“I won’t tell Phoebe,” Clara said suddenly.

“You won’t tell her what?”

“What I heard you and Daddy say. She’d be sad, too. We both thought—we both thought you were changing your mind. That things were going back to the way they used to be.”

“Oh,” Trina said, suddenly getting it. That she and Hunter hadn’t been fooling anyone,
before
. That the girls had known full well just how serious their parents had been. That they’d built their own castle of expectations, their own fantasies for the future. And they’d had them built up and torn down more than once, just as she had.

Why hadn’t she seen that?

Because she’d been too busy riding her own roller coaster.

“We weren’t careful,” she said. “We weren’t as careful as we should have been. We should have been more discreet.”

But part of her suspected that they’d simply underestimated the intuitive powers of two twelve-year-old girls.

Part of her wanted to ask Clara not to tell Phoebe what she’d overheard. Not to spread the pain any farther. But the other part of her knew that wouldn’t be fair. That Clara needed to be able to talk about what had happened, to share her suffering with the only other person who might have a chance of understanding it.

“You can tell her, sweetheart. And I’ll talk to her, too, okay? So she knows—it’s all going to be okay.”

Although she wasn’t sure exactly how she would convince Phoebe of that fact, when she hardly believed it herself.

“I know you’re angry.”

That was the understatement of the year.

“Phoebe, please.”

But you couldn’t make a stubborn twelve-year-old talk.

They’d left early in the morning for the airport, even though their flight to L.A. wasn’t scheduled to leave till late afternoon. She just couldn’t take any more of Hunter’s attempts at normalcy.

So just after breakfast, she’d let the shuttle driver hoist their suitcases onboard, then slid in beside Phoebe. They were the only two passengers and they’d sat way in the back so they had a little privacy. Not that it mattered, because an angry twelve-year-old girl was like a black hole, sucking all conversation and emotion in.

“I tried, Phoebe.”

Trina supposed she was overdue. She’d read the books; she knew the children of split households often went through long periods of blaming the remaining parent for the absence of the distant one. She’d been lucky, and Phoebe had never gotten angry at her in that way. She hadn’t really gotten angry at Stefan, either. She’d just…accepted the situation. So maybe it was time for a little anger.

Trina certainly was angry. Angry at Hunter, because it was easier, and cleaner, than feeling anything else. She would not—could not—feel anything else. But she could be angry at him for shutting her out. Last night—she’d cooked the chili she’d promised Clara, and cornbread, and brownies—he’d treated both her and Phoebe the way he had when they’d first met. As if they were valued guests—the relatives of an important co-worker or friend, perhaps.

She had always known that in hoping for him to love her again, she’d been on the most tenuous, uncertain ground. Since the promise he’d made before his deployment, he’d never again asked her to have faith in him, to believe that things would turn out well, or to risk her heart for him. She’d given him all her love and trust because it had been the only thing she knew how to do. Because the alternative—to give up on him—had felt unthinkable.

So she didn’t blame him for
her
pain.

But she
was
furious with him for hurting Phoebe and Clara.

Phoebe and Clara’s matching sad, gray faces had broken Trina’s heart. Maybe her heart was already most of the way broken, but there had been little fragments still held together. The girls’ grief had shattered what was left.

But most of all, Trina was angry at herself. Because she’d foreseen all this, and she’d still allowed herself the destructive fantasy that somehow it would work out. She’d let herself believe that the joy she’d felt with Hunter, the joy she’d felt with the girls in the months that Hunter had been gone, was something permanent that belonged to her. When she knew, perfectly well, men left.
Family
was her and Phoebe.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.

He’d given her a preview of this grief the day he’d come home, and
still
she’d let herself be drawn back into the heat and temptation of him. Like a seventeen-year-old girl whose hormones were in control.

Like Hunter, who had followed his dick into the thorny tangle of his marriage with Dee.

She touched Phoebe’s shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry, baby.”

Finally, her daughter turned to look at her, her face streaked with tears. Phoebe’s eyes searched hers, looking for…Trina wasn’t sure. But whatever she saw, Phoebe’s face softened, the anger slipping away. “It’s not your fault, Mom.”

It was that, more than anything, that finally loosed Trina’s tears, and the two of them cried in the backseat of that grimy shuttle, arms around each other, mourning what was lost and grateful for what they still had.

After that, they talked about L.A. About how it was different from what Phoebe had known before, how the height and bustle of it, and even the palm-tree-sunniness of it, would feel foreign at first, but that eventually it would feel more comfortable, like a worn-in sweatshirt.

The first of the airport signs came into view, and Trina touched Phoebe’s shoulder and pointed. The official beginning of the journey.

Or that’s what it was supposed to be.

Departures.

And that, right there, was the truth of it. It should feel like a new beginning, but even with Phoebe’s hand tucked snugly into hers, squeezing reassuringly, it felt like the end.

He’d hugged them goodbye at the curb.

He’d kept it as brief and distant as possible, trying not to catch the layers of Trina’s scent—floral shampoo, sharp Ivory soap, lavender deodorant, the smell of her skin, her secret sweet-salty center. Releasing her before the press of her body could penetrate his numbness.

Trying not to crave the bear hugs he’d gotten into the habit of with Phoebe at some point in the last week, but just giving her a kindly uncle’s careful squeeze.

She was not his daughter. She was Stefan Spencer’s daughter, and if Stefan Spencer had never done anything particularly heroic, neither had he pretended to have more to give than he did.

He knew it was wrong, putting them in a shuttle and sending them away, but he hadn’t been able to stand the thought of riding in the car with them.

His head hurt.

He kept seeing Dee’s eyes over and over again, reminding him of what he’d taken away from her.

Trina’s eyes held some of that, too. The accusation.

She hadn’t asked him to drive them to the airport, and he hadn’t offered.

Like last night. She hadn’t come to his room, and when the dark hours stretched without her, he hadn’t gone to her, either. It wasn’t pride. It was what was best for her.

The shuttle pulled away from the curb in front of his house and he was left with Clara, who was sobbing.

He put his arms around her because that was what he knew he should do, but it was like he was touching her through layers of thick cotton wool. Her grief couldn’t reach him, so all he could do was pat her and murmur things that were true but not felt.

Clara was murmuring something indistinct into his shirt, over and over. He tilted his head to listen.

“You should have made them stay.”

But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t that he should have made them stay. It was that he never should have led them on in the first place. He was angry at himself—or rather, he was angry at that other guy, that pre-deployment Hunter—for making them—Trina, Phoebe,
and
Clara—believe there was some kind of happily-ever-after in their future.

“They don’t belong here, baby. They were just staying here while I was gone, but now that I’m back, they have to get on with their lives. Trina has a special job that’s perfect for her. Phoebe needs to know her father.”

“You’re her father.”

His heart gave a funny, misguided hiccup of hope, as if somehow Clara’s saying it might make it true, but then he thought of the look on Trina’s face after he’d said he didn’t want her to wait around for him to love her again. Closed. Finished. And that was what he’d wanted. To get her to see that hanging around hoping for him to give her what she wanted would end badly, sooner or later. Better sooner than later.

“No, baby, I’m not her father. She has a father. Stefan Spencer.”

Clara’s face turned pink and her eyes got big.

She’d always gotten angry exactly that way, ever since she was a baby.

“Then you’re not
my
father, either.”

She punctuated her words with a stamp of her foot and stormed into the house.

He knew he should go after her. He should set her straight. He should say,
I am your father, and I love you so much
.

But maybe he hadn’t loved her enough. He had left her so many times. Duty first, he’d thought. But maybe that was all wrong. Maybe that was his biggest mistake.

He didn’t know how long he stood there in front of the house, not moving. His heart pounding, breath coming so hard he could hear it rasping in his throat. Darkness sinking over him, over the room in the building thousands of miles away, the impenetrable black behind the ragged concrete, and then those
eyes
. Grief and guilt bound tight around his chest.

When he came back to himself and went inside, Clara’s room had been ransacked, and Clara herself was nowhere to be found.

He searched the house from top to bottom as carefully as he could, holding panic at arm’s length. He searched first in the hiding places she’d favored as a little girl, but when that didn’t pan out, he opened cabinets and crawl spaces, then planted himself facedown on the floor to peer under beds where dust hadn’t been disturbed for years. In the master bedroom closet, he thrust his hand through the small collection of Dee’s clothes he had saved for Clara and swept it across the shelf behind, even though logic told him she couldn’t possibly be hiding there.

His grasping fingertips brushed an object, and something clicked in his mind. Not memory. Recognition. He knew the shape, size, and feel of it.

His mind rejected the possibility even as he clutched it, drew it out of the tangle of musty clothes, and shoved it into his jeans pocket as if he were pushing it back down through layers of memory.

There wasn’t time to think about what it might mean. There was only Clara and figuring out where she’d gone.

Leaving the empty house behind, he raced into the yard. Climbed into Clara’s tree house. No sign of her. Climbed down again. Harnessed himself to the new tree. It occurred to him, clipping in at intervals to peer through the branches, that he no longer cared about building the tree house. That from almost the beginning he had been building it for Trina, to see what she would put inside it, to see how she would stamp it as hers. To feel like they were building something together, their creations intertwined until afterward you could hardly say what was her and what was him.

The thought choked him, and he thought maybe he’d scrap the project, tear out the TABs and brackets and frame he’d built. It would take as long to dismantle it as it had taken to build it, but it would be something to do, something to occupy himself with.

He tromped around the woods, looking for her. Came back and threw open the door of the toolshed, though he knew as he did that it was a futile gesture. Clara hadn’t set foot in that toolshed in years, terrified of its dark corners. He didn’t bother making a study of the little room, where—she had correctly observed—there were spiders aplenty, and snakes, too.

No, she was gone.

And the thing he was most ashamed of was that he was jealous of her, as he was jealous of Trina and Phoebe, because all of them could run away from him and what was inside his head.

“Hunter?”

The three men had materialized on their bicycles like some kind of low-key Hells Angels. Nate dismounted first and reached him.

“What are you doing here?”

“We’re on our way back. From the trip.” Nate shot a look at the contents of his overloaded bike. The three men were scruffily bearded and definitely the worse for wear.

“Thought we’d maybe snag some yard space and a shower if you guys were feeling generous.”

What did
generous
have to do with
numb
?

He couldn’t figure it out. It was like a math problem his brain was too tired to solve. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. When he finally spoke, the words that came out had nothing to do with Nate’s question.

“I can’t find Clara.”