Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (30 page)

Mrs. Lynch didn’t say what Destiny’s mother felt when she visited home, went to her family in Pittsburgh.

He had thought he needed to be selfless to make the love between himself and Jessica worth the mad leap they’d made of it. That their love was bigger than the both of them, and to be worthy of it, he had to sacrifice himself to it.

What he needed to know was what would happen when he was sitting on some wet rock on the shoreline of his youth and he called the phone in his pocket.

He pulled out his own phone and pushed the number he’d fortuitously labeled
In Case of Emergency
.

* * *

“Did you get the city taxes statement I sent you last month? I thought I’d refiled that, but
I must have missed it.”

Hefin carefully unrolled his bundle of cutlery. “I did, thank you. Not to worry.”

“Good.” Jessica looked at him, propping her chin in her hand, her large brown eyes so deceptively soft-looking until she really
looked
at you and you suffered from a sudden sensation of utter transparency and nakedness. Naked transparency. Both see-through and unclothed, like a medical model.

Jessica was a very good attorney.

Thank Christ, the server arrived just then, and before Hefin could order, Jessica smiled at her and said, “He’ll have black tea, four sugars and cream. I’ll have your mango smoothie.”

“Jesus, Jessica.” But he wasn’t actually mad. That kind of thing, her idea of teasing or a joke, had made him mad when they were together, but it just
didn’t
anymore.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t do that, I know. I can’t resist, it seems.”

She’d cut her hair. It had always been long, a mass of glossy, shoulder-length braids, but now it was short to her scalp, styled in dozens of tiny twists. Her eyes looked even more enormous in contrast. She was thinner, too, her suit cut close to her body, her heels high.

She looked like youth had been polished away from her and what was left was bright and complex for its utter simplicity—like good furniture or an effective advertising campaign.

He mentally smacked himself for being uncharitable. What he had told her when she walked to his table was that she looked beautiful, which was true.

But she also looked untouchable, which wasn’t actually new since their divorce. What was new is that he couldn’t find where that bothered him.

“I saw your picture in the paper.” She still had her chin propped on her hand, but her dimples were showing, the beginning of a smile.

“Oh right. I should look that issue up to send to Mum, she’d get a kick out of that.”

“I’ll send you my copy. She would like that. I didn’t realize you carved, like your dad does. I mean, I knew you had learned but thought it had been a hobby when you were a kid.”

“It was a hobby, mostly. I guess I just learned my hobby a little more thoroughly than some.”

She laughed. “I guess. You always knew how to keep things close to the chest, Hefin.”

He looked at her. “Not all things.”

“No,” she said, softly. “Not all. I was a very well loved woman.”

He traced a pattern in the tablecloth with his fork. “Were you, do you think?”

“What do you mean?” She sat back and crossed her arms over her lap. “Why’d you ask me to lunch, Hefin? It’s been a while. More than a year since we’ve done this—when you bought me out of my share of the condo.”

“I’m going back to Wales. Not for a visit, but to go … home.”

She didn’t say anything right away, just continued to look at him. Their server came and laid their drink service on the table and they rushed through orders for their meal.

“Why now?” she finally asked.

“Do you ever feel like it was a mistake?” he asked in return, “Getting married after knowing each other for such a short time, and on your holiday, besides, my following you here. Any of it, really. I know I made mistakes, especially at the end when I stopped talking to you and resented everything so much, but I don’t know, Jess, it’s just that I’m going back, and I need to figure things out, and it was all so,
civilized
.”

He looked at her and was surprised that she was pushing away tears with the heels of her hands. “I never thought we were a mistake. I loved you. So much. You were the only thing I ever did that was off plan. You know how I like to plan.”

He pulled some napkins loose from the caddy on the table and handed them to her. Pushed her smoothie closer.

She laughed. Closed her eyes. Blew her nose in the napkins. “You know, I’m in a serious relationship right now.”

“Yeah?” Not even a tug on any part of his heart.

“Yeah. I love him, I really do. He’s really good for me, and we’re great together. He makes me think about myself, just myself, without all the plans.”

“That’s great, Jess. I’m really happy for you.” He was. He could see how her face got soft when she talked about this love.

“I’m happy for me, too. But can I tell you something?”

“Of course.”

“This guy, this wonderful man, he takes care of my soul, my heart. But I’ll admit
to you that there are nights when I come home, late, and all I want is a Hefin to make me tea and rub my feet and do you remember how, when it was cold, you would put a blanket in the dryer to make it hot and tuck me in?”

“I do.”

“I loved that.”

“I loved doing that for you.”

“I know you did.” She leaned forward, her eyes going all X-ray vision again.

“What did you love that I did for you?”

He looked at her smoothie. At the lipstick around the straw.

“This man that I love? He makes me selfish. He makes me want to take things from him. Things like his time, and his attention. I make him selfish. He wants things from me. It makes me feel wonderful that he wants things from me, that he wants my attention on him all the time. It’s like he feels bigger and stronger just because I give him the time of day.”

“You needed me to be selfish?”

He looked up, and now she was looking away. “Yeah. I think I did. When we were in Wales, when I was on my holiday, do you remember that first day you ran into me at the beach?”

He couldn’t help his grin. He just couldn’t. Perfect days were perfect days, even in perspective. “Yeah, of course.”

“You ‘faffed around’ for a minute, as you call it, but it was just cute. Then you grabbed my hand and dragged me up to the village. Told me that you would make sure I had a good holiday. We barely made it to my room. I’d never done anything like that before. Or since, actually. The way you just
took
me—it made it easy to take you home, to take you here and make a home with you. I expected you to keep taking. To take of me. To grab life like you grabbed my hand. But instead, you just kept giving and giving, until you didn’t have anything left but your resentment of me. And when someone keeps giving, like you did, it just feels wrong to take from them all the time. I didn’t feel good taking what I really needed from you. I felt like I didn’t have anything you believed was worth taking, either. Like there was nothing inside me that you really
wanted
.”

He looked at her because she had touched his hand. She was handing him a stack of napkins. He tried to make sense of it, then realized he was crying. Great, hot tears over his face, over his neck, into the collar of his shirt.

Jesus
.

“We’re quite the mess,” he said. He scrubbed his face with a napkin. “Why didn’t we—”

“Why are you asking? I feel like you’re asking me for my blessing for something we did years ago.”

Suddenly, he just wanted Destiny. He wanted her right next to him, her bony elbow in his side.

When he fussed after Destiny, it didn’t feel selfless. It felt like a moment’s respite from the fucking blind and dumb relentlessness of life.

He couldn’t fix her, he couldn’t fix anything, but he could fix a cup of tea. He could rub her neck. He could make sure she was well fed and well loved. He could take a moment he had no idea what to do with and make it pleasurable.

He could take what he needed from her, as well. When she was softened from his stupid tea and biscuits, even if nothing was perfect, he could kiss her and let his guard down and not understand everything that was happening and touch her and take comfort in her body even if he wasn’t certain, yet, what he needed comforting for.

“What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t gone with you? If we’d waited, took some time.”

“I didn’t want the man who would have waited or taken some time, Hefin. I married you as soon as our feet hit the soil in Ohio because after a week in bed you brought me around to meet your parents and proposed.”

Their food came then, and they tucked in without any more conversation.

“I’ll miss you,” she said after a while. “I’ll always miss you, especially on cold nights. I don’t regret it, I really don’t. I hope that your moving back doesn’t mean that you do.”

He realized he might have thought just that, just two weeks ago. That he was going home to lay his regrets on a familiar doorstop. “No,” he said, meaning it. “I’m glad you took me home. If only to know I’m not so stupid I won’t follow a beautiful woman wherever she takes me.”

Jessica laughed. It made her look like the Jessica he’d grabbed for himself on the beach, unpolished and perfect.

He’d miss Jessica, too. The one sitting here with him, right now, actually.

She’d been his wife, he’d been her husband, and they didn’t regret it. Their marriage was over, but the good things were still inside it, and what was not good in it had helped her find the love she needed.

The good and bad things might help him, yet.

“You’ll tell me how it works out with your new bloke?”

She laughed again. “If you’ll tell me how it works out with the reason you called me.”

He looked right at her X-ray eyes and let her see. It was easy enough to return her smile.

“You’re boring.”

“You stink. Let the patient care assistant help you with a bath.” Des shifted in the hot vinyl-upholstered recliner to try to find a way to balance the laptop she had borrowed from Sam so that she could type without her wrists hurting.

“You’re supposed to be entertaining me.”

“I have to work, Sarah.”

“Work is boring.”

Des closed her eyes. “Do you remember when I used to follow you and Lacey to that lot where the broken merry-go-round was?”

“You were such a pest.”

“Lacey never thought so.” She looked at Sarah, wedged on her bed with an abductor pillow with the Styrofoam take-out containers from the food Des had brought scattered all over her chest and the blankets.

“No. Lacey dumped me for you, it’s true.”

Des grinned. “Yeah, she did.”

“It’s kinda gross when you think about it.” Sarah used her remote to try to get the head of the bed adjusted higher, forgetting that the nurses programmed it so she wouldn’t bend her hips past a certain angle and she was already at max. She threw the remote on her bedside table. “That lot was filled with trash. The merry-go-round was just the top part, and had been thrown there because it was trash. Our big hideout was a trash pile.”

“But it was a magical trash pile.”

“Yeah it was. I kissed my first boy there, remember?”

“Of course I do. Lacey and I paid you five dollars apiece to watch from behind that mulberry tree.”

“It was not a good kiss.”

“It didn’t look like it was. Not that I knew a lot about that kind of thing, but I knew I didn’t want a boy to do that thing Harry Pietrawicz did to your neck with his
tongue. Ever.”

Sarah laughed so hard she grabbed her hip. “Oh my God! Do you remember after that Lacey started calling him ‘Hairy Petridish?’ I was so pissed.”

“You pretended that you had liked that neck thing
for years
just to lord your sophistication over us.”

“Maybe I would have relaxed and enjoyed it if you assholes weren’t hiding behind a tree watching me.”

“No. No one likes what he was doing. Even people who like being watched don’t like what he was doing.”

Sarah wrinkled her nose and laughed again. “You’re totally right.”

Des curled her feet up under her butt. “Do you miss Mom? I mean, I know you do, but do you miss her all the time? Like when you’re going through stuff like this?”

Sarah tipped her head back and looked at the ceiling. “Yeah.”

“I wish I remembered her better.”

“Do you know I got my first period three days after she died?” Sarah pulled the blanket up over her shoulders and the take-out containers rained to the floor.

“Oh,
Sarah
.”

“At the wake. I went to that bathroom at the church that’s by the choir-practice room, the one that’s super tiny and only has a sink and a toilet but a full-size radiator so it’s superhot and always stinks. No one uses it, and I wanted to be alone and cry. I thought I had to pee, but when I pulled down my panties there was, like, blood and stuff all over them. At first, I didn’t get it and I thought I had cut my leg high up or something. Then I remembered what it must be.” Sarah’s voice got thicker, softer.

“I kind of panicked, you probably don’t remember but Dad made me wear a dress and I only had one and had grown since the last time I wore it. It was one of those that were like an extralong polo shirt. It was light blue, and too fucking short, and now I was bleeding all over my panties, and that bathroom didn’t have anything to help me. There was something like twelve squares of teepee on the roll.”

Des laughed, but only because there wasn’t anything to say to a disaster so epic. She wished she had a time machine, and she’d go back to that moment with the biggest box of Kotex ever made. And underpants. And a pair of those jeans with the loops and
pockets all over them that Sarah loved so much back then. “What’d you do?”

“I sat on the toilet and sobbed. I wasn’t even thinking anything specific. It was like throwing up—my body just took over and it sobbed.”

“God.”

“Eventually, I heard a knock on the door. It was Dad, and he said, ‘Sarah, you okay in there, honey?’ And suddenly, I was
so happy
because Dad was there and he could go get Mom.”