Donovan's Child (14 page)

How could she have let this happen?

He was so not the man she'd imagined herself falling
for. She'd always known that the man for her would be openhearted. And trusting. Someone kind and not cruel. Someone who would tell her all his secrets, someone who could love her without holding his deepest heart away from her.

Someone as different from the man beside her as day was from night.

And then, in a torn voice, he said, “I had…a child, Abilene. A little boy who died. His name was Elias.”

A
bilene sat very still in her chair, her hand held in his.

He was ready, at last—ready to tell her about Elias. It hardly seemed possible, that this precious moment had finally come.

She forgot all about that other man, her ideal man. The one who loved her unconditionally, the one who never spoke harshly, who was always understanding.

Right now, there was only Donovan. He filled up her heart, banished her doubts.

It meant so much, proved so much. About how far they had come, with each other,
toward
each other.

Donovan said, “Elias was four when his mother, Julie, died.”

She let out a low cry. “Oh, Donovan. His mom died, too?”

He gazed at her steadily. “That's right.”

She asked, softly, “You were married then, you and… Julie?”

He shook his head. “We were together, for a while. But it didn't last long.”

It seemed important, then, to tell him what she already knew. “That day I went to lunch with Luisa…?”

He made a knowing sound. “She told you about Elias.” At her nod, he added, “I was afraid she might.”

“Don't get the wrong idea. It wasn't a gossip session, I promise you. Luisa respects your privacy and your feelings.”

“I know she does.”

“She mentioned Elias, but only because she assumed that I already knew about him. When she found out I didn't, she wouldn't say much more. She said I should ask you.”

“But you didn't.” Donovan spoke gently, a simple statement of fact.

Abilene admitted, “I've been waiting, for you to tell me yourself, when you were ready. It seemed somehow wrong, for me to be the one to bring it up.”

He almost smiled. “You rarely hesitate to say what's on your mind.”

“True. And I did want to ask you about him, about Elias. About what he was like, and yes, how you lost him. But somehow, it never felt like the right time. I didn't want to ambush you with something like that. And I knew it had to be a really rough subject for you.”

“Yeah.” His eyes were more gray than blue right then, a ghostly gray. And his face, too, seemed worn. Haggard. “It is a rough subject.”

“Luisa did say there used to be pictures of Elias, in the music room and the front room.”

“I had all his pictures moved to my own rooms,
months ago, when I got back from the first series of surgeries after the fall. So no one would ask me about him—which was seriously faulty reasoning, if you think about it.” His voice took on a derisive edge. He was mocking himself.

She understood. “Who was around to ask you?”

“Exactly. By then, I allowed no one inside this house but Ben and Anton and Olga. And I'd already told them in no uncertain terms that they were never again to mention Elias. And they didn't. It was part of their job description, not to push me, never to challenge me, not to mention my son. I had everything under control, I thought.” The shadows in his eyes lightened a little as he gazed at her, and a hint of a smile came and went. “And then you came along….”

She squeezed his hand. “Tell me about Julie. Tell me…the rest.”

“Julie…” His almost-smile appeared again, like the edge of the sun from behind a dark cloud. “She was a good woman. Straight ahead, you know? Honest. After it was over between us, when she found out she was pregnant, she told me right away. I asked her to marry me. She said no, that we didn't love each other that way and marriage between us wouldn't last. But she did want the baby. I had money by then. And Julie was an artist, a struggling one. She was barely getting by. So I agreed to pay enough child support that she wouldn't have to work and she could be a full-time mom.”

“That was good of you.”

He chuckled. “No. It was convenient for me. And it worked for Julie, too. She was devoted to Elias and happy to be able to be with him, to raise him without the constant pressure of having to make ends meet. Everybody won—Elias, Julie. And me. I had no interest in being a
real dad. Not until Julie died out of nowhere, of a stroke, of all things. She had no family. What could I do?”

“You took your son to live with you.”

“I didn't see a choice in the matter, and that's the hard truth.”

“So it was a big change for you.”

“I dreaded it, to be honest, having a kid around. I worked all over the world. And when I wasn't working, there were mountains I wanted to climb. If Julie's parents had still been alive, I would have turned Elias over to them in a heartbeat. Or to my mother. But as you know, she was gone, too.”

Abilene searched his face. “You're being way too hard on yourself, you know that?”

“No. I'm just telling you the way it was. The way
I
was. That first year, after we lost Julie, that was rough. Elias suffered, missing his mom. But he was a sunny-natured guy at heart. A miracle of a kid, really. From the first, clutching that beat-up Elmo doll he carried everywhere with him, he was following me around. He was looking up at me with those trusting eyes, asking me questions.” Donovan smiled, but his own eyes were suspiciously moist. He shook his head. “Elias never stopped with the questions. And as the months went by, I found I was only too happy to come up with the answers he needed, only too happy to be a real dad. He was so curious. And as he got over the loss of his mom, he didn't have to carry his stuffed Elmo around everywhere. He became…fearless. I loved that about him. I took him with me, when I was working. I hired a tutor. And a nanny, to go with us. We lived in San Francisco and Austin. And then in Lake Tahoe….” Donovan drew in a slow, shaky breath.

Abilene waited. She sensed the worst was coming.

And it was. “That was where it happened, in Lake
Tahoe.” Donovan let go of her fingers then. He sank back into his wheelchair and gripped the wheels in either hand. “I had rented a vacation cabin there. The driveway was impossibly steep—and remember how I mentioned that Elias was fearless?”

“I remember.”

“Six years old, and he loved nothing so much as to ride his Big Wheel down the steepest hill he could find—the driveway. And then he graduated to his first two-wheeler. That really freaked the nanny out, but I watched him and he was a natural athlete, lightning reflexes, great balance. I told her to back off, that Elias knew what he was doing, that he had sense as well as good reflexes—plus, she always made him wear his helmet. He would be fine. At first, she thought I was crazy. But then, after she watched him go flying down that hill a few times, she agreed with me. He was having a ball and he was perfectly safe.”

A chill ran along the surface of her skin. “But he wasn't?”

Donovan shut his eyes, tight, as if he saw the worst all over again, and only wanted to block out the memory, erase it from his sight. “Elias rode that new two-wheeler down the driveway countless times without a scratch. And then there was the last time. The bike hit a rock—or so the medical examiner determined later. It was one of those freak things, out of nowhere. Must have caught him off-guard. Elias fell. He never wanted to wear his helmet. That time, apparently, he had it on to appease the nanny, but left the clasp undone. The helmet flew off. He hit his head. I found him at the bottom of the driveway. Just lying there. His eyes were open. He was gone, I knew it. But he seemed to be staring up at the pines, at the blue sky overhead….”

“Oh, Donovan.” The words were useless, but she couldn't help it. She said them anyway. “I'm so sorry….”

After a moment, he looked at her. His face was so pale, suddenly. Pale as a man lying in his own coffin. As if he was the one who had died.

And maybe, in essence, he had.

“I didn't protect him,” Donovan said. “He died because I loved his fearlessness. I ate it up, that he was such a bold little guy, that nothing got him down. I…didn't watch out for him.”

She ached to argue, to insist that you can't possibly watch a child every moment of every day, that terrible things can happen, with no one to blame. But she had no doubt he'd heard all that before. And if Elias had been her child, such consolations, however true, wouldn't help in the least.

A father needed to protect his children. And if he failed at that, for whatever reason, nothing anyone could say would make the guilt and pain go away.

“The children's center?” she asked in a whisper.

He swallowed. Hard. “Yeah. The idea for the center was a lot about Elias. My son was gone, but I hoped that maybe, if I could help someone else's child to have a better start in life, it would mean something, somehow. It would make up, at least a little, for the life Elias was never going to have.”

“Oh, Donovan, yes. It's a good thing, what you're doing, an important thing. The center
will
mean a lot to children who need it.” The words were totally inadequate, but she offered them anyway, in a vain attempt to draw him back to her, to the world of the living.

“I thought I was over it.” His voice was no more than a rough husk of sound. “I thought I had made my peace with Elias's death. For a year or so, I grieved. And then
I told myself I needed to let it go—let
him
go—to get on with my life.”

“But you weren't over it. Not really.”

He shook his head. “It all came back, after the accident, like some dangerous animal I had locked in a room and told myself I was safe, protected from. That animal got out. During those three days alone in that ice cave, that animal came after me. At first, I fought it. I told myself I could make it, I was going to be okay. But that, the fighting, the holding on, it didn't last long. Then I was wondering if I was going to die, and then I was
certain
that I would. I was making a kind of peace with death, an agreement. Death and I came to an understanding. We both knew it was time for me to go.” He stared off into the far corner of the long room, past the shadowed open door down at the other end. And he was lost to her at that moment, lost to the world, gone from his own life.

She reached for him, touched his face. His skin felt cool, bloodless. “Donovan.” She urged him to turn to her. “Look at me. Please…”

He did turn his face her way. But his eyes were empty. He said, “I thought about Elias a lot during those three days. I thought of the life he would never have, of the complete wrongness of that. By the end, before they found me, I was talking to him, to Elias. It seemed I could see his face. I could hear his voice, calling me, asking questions, asking where I was, why I had left him alone. And I started thinking it was good, right, that I should die and be with him. I knew I was
ready
to die. I wanted it. To die.”

He seemed a million miles away from her then, back on that mountain, in unbearable pain, with only his lost son for company.

She feared for him, truly. And she hated herself a little.
For pushing him so hard, for challenging him, constantly, to open up to her, to face his demons.

What did she know, really, about all he had suffered, about how he might have managed to deal with the worst kind of loss a parent can ever know?

What right did she have, to rip away his protections, to drag him back to the world again? She could see a deeper truth now, one her own youth and optimism had blinded her to. She could see at last, that in his isolation and silence, he had found a kind of peace.

But then she had come and stolen his peace away, all the while telling herself it was for his own good.

His own good.

What did she know about what was good for him?

Desperation seized her. She found herself pleading with him. “But Donovan—Donovan, please. You didn't die. You made it back.”

He only went on staring at her through those blank eyes. “Not really. My body was rescued, I went on breathing. But for all intents and purposes, I was dead….”

It was too much. He seemed so far away now, gone somewhere inside his own mind, into a cold and lifeless place where she would never be able to reach him. She couldn't bear it.

She clambered up out of her seat and reached for him, wrapping both arms around his broad shoulders, from the side, bending across his wheelchair. It was awkward, trying to hold him like that. And it wasn't enough, either. She couldn't hold him tight enough.

So she eased one foot up and over him, sliding it between his white-knuckled grip on the wheel and the crook of his elbow. He only sat there, still as a living statue, as she squirmed to get her other leg into the space between his arm and his torso.

Finally, she managed it. She straddled him as she had the night before—only then, it had been for their mutual pleasure.

Now, it was for comfort. Comfort for him.

And for herself, too.

It was the only way she had left to try and reach him, to make him come back to her from whatever dark place he had gone.

She wrapped her arms around him and she buried her head against his neck. She held on tight, so very tight….

At first, it was no good. She was holding on all by herself. And that was unbearable, that he just sat there, unmoving, like the dead man he'd claimed he already was.

She held on tighter, she pressed her lips to the cool flesh of his neck, she whispered his name, over and over again.

And slowly, so slowly, his arms relaxed their steely grip on the wheels. He lowered his head a little, enough that she felt the soft kiss of his breath, stirring her hair.

He said, so softly she almost didn't hear the word, “Abilene…” And then those powerful arms came around her. He was holding her as tightly as she held on to him.

And she was whispering, frantically, “It's not true—you know it's not. You're here, with me. You're okay and you have to go on now. You have to learn to go on….”

He pressed his lips to her temple, a fervent caress. And then he was cradling her face between his two hands, urging her to lift her head, to look at him.