Moore Than Forever (21 page)

Pulling her close up against him, he whispered, “I love you, Baby Girl,” and kissed the top of her head before falling into a deep afternoon slumber.

Berto, Marit and Lily were seated at a round table in the center of the Lodge’s thatched roof restaurant when Schooner and Mia arrived.

“Did you see the elephants today?” Lily’s plan was to see them tomorrow.

Mia nodded, “Plan on falling in love. Each one has a story and it’s heart wrenching,” and then in a quiet tone, “much like the children at the orphanage.”

A look passed between Lily and her father.

“There will always be time for this after college, Liliana.” Berto was giving his daughter the “this is not negotiable” face.

Rolling her eyes at him made Schooner laugh.

“Lily, if I had a dollar for every time my kids gave me that exact same look, well, I’d be a much richer man.” Taking a sip of his robust South African Cabernet Sauvignon, “I definitely need to introduce you to my daughter, like you, she’s also in New England, up at Brown.”

“Yeah, that’s not too far at all from New Haven.” Although Lily had just completed her freshman year at Yale with excellent grades, the thought of going back was becoming less appealing by the day.

“I think you two would like each other. You were both brought up in Orange County, yet are the antithesis of Orange County women,” Schooner’s pride when talking of Holly was very evident.

As the waiter delivered plates of smoked salmon ceviche resting in lemon, ginger and sweet chili, the conversation turned to the plans for the rehabilitation center.

“Don’t you think I could make more of an impact here than back in New Haven, Dad?” Lily relentlessly continued to press her case.

“Lily, this is not the time or the place,” Marit was clearly becoming annoyed with her tenacious daughter. Her steely-eyed look silenced Lily into a petulant silence.

Berto and Marit Castillo made a striking, if not odd, looking couple. Dutch-born Marit towered six inches over her husband, her Nordic beauty an instant head-turner for both men and women. Liliana was an interesting combination of the two, with a long silky sheath of medium-brown hair cascading down her back and a creamy complexion that tanned instead of burned. Her light brown eyes, flecked with gold, flashed with the intensity of her very serious personality. Lily Castillo was not a fun, care-free teen and that was made even more evident by the fervor in which she embraced the emotional and physical intensity of the trip.

Mia remained conspicuously quiet throughout the meal with Schooner working double time to hold up the conversation for the two of them. Under the table, he reached for her hand to give it a squeeze. Her lack of response kicked up his alarms a notch further.

“You up for dessert,” he asked softly, his face clearly conveying concern.

With a half-smile, she nodded and they stayed through the rest of the meal. After dessert, with kisses to each cheek, they bid the Castillos goodnight, with plans to meet early for breakfast and travel together back to the facility for the ground-breaking ceremony and press conference.

Under a black sky dotted with an impossible amount of twinkling stars that weren’t obscured by ambient city light, they silently walked hand-in-hand back to their chalet. Letting go of Mia’s hand, Schooner slung his arm over her shoulder, pulling her tightly into him.

“I’m worried about you, Baby Girl.”

Without looking up at him, she uttered four words that chilled the blood in his veins, “We need to talk.”

Schooner’s alarms were now blaring. His gut told him, “This is not going to be good.” And his gut was rarely wrong.

Chapter Thirty-eight

Entering the chalet, Schooner went to the mini-bar and pulled out a bottle of GlenLivet. Holding it up, he silently asked Mia if she wanted a drink. She nodded yes and his anxiety ratcheted up yet another notch. He was dying. He just needed to know what was going on, so that he could fix it. Because whatever it was, he would fix it. Of that, he was sure. That is what he did best.

Handing her the glass of scotch, he put his forefinger and thumb on her chin and tipped her head up. “Talk to me, Baby Girl.” The look in her eyes was something he could not discern and his throat closed a little more.

Mia nodded and walked over to the bed. Getting onto it, she sat in the middle cross-legged. Following, Schooner got on the bed, sitting up with his back against the pillows, facing Mia. He placed the bottle of GlenLivet on the night table next to him. They sat there for a few moments in uneasy silence.

After a long draw on her scotch, “I don’t even know where to begin this, but there is a lot I need to tell you.”

The thought that immediately flashed through Schooner’s mind was that maybe after the orphanage the last few days, there was a baby in her past that she’d given up for adoption. Maybe that is what she wanted to share.

Mia let out a deep breath, “There’s so much I’ve wanted to tell you for so long, but I just didn’t know how and the timing was never quite right. And maybe part of me was afraid. I haven’t really talked to you much about our years apart.”

“No, you haven’t. And you don’t need to, Mia.”

“I do, Schooner. I really, really do. And it needs to happen tonight.”

He thought her last statement to be odd.
Why tonight? What was going on that this conversation had to happen tonight?

“You know why I left and you know what kind of shape I was in when I left. I came home and my parents pulled some strings to get me into a good college upstate New York. I was able to get into a really coveted writing program because a student had dropped out, a slot had become available and my writing samples were strong enough. The instructor was George Roy, which was kind of a big deal, and looking forward to that program got me through that first summer. It was an anchor that I could hold onto, the thing that made me want to keep my head above water.”

Feeling her pain was easy. He had spent his whole summer, right here in the country where they both now sat, trying to hold onto something, anything, to keep from feeling like he was going to drown. As she spoke, the excruciating desperation of that time in their lives grabbed onto his heart, wringing it harshly.

“When I got to school, I found out that Professor Roy had suffered a massive heart attack over the summer and had been replaced for the entire school year by his protegé, an MFA out of Cornell who was writing screenplays and TV scripts. A few weeks into the semester, he singled out me and Rob. You know, my friend Rob Ryan.”

Schooner nodded. Although he had not yet met Rob, they had spoken over the phone on several occasions and he knew how close Mia still was to both him and his wife, Joni.

“Rob and I worked together, independently from the rest of the class and met with the professor two evenings a week. The guy was young, he was only twenty-seven, and good looking and was sleeping with a couple of the seniors in the class.”

“That’s not very professional,” Schooner chimed in, his eyes narrowing.

Mia laughed and shrugged her shoulders, “It was the 80’s. Life before sexual harassment,” she took another sip of her scotch. “Anyway I became pretty friendly with him, but it was nothing at first. Just kind of a harmless flirtation, until the end of the school year, when it became something more.”

“Mia, you were a minor,” there was alarm in Schooner’s tone.

“No, we waited until my eighteenth birthday before anything happened.”

Stomach knotting, Schooner remembered her eighteenth birthday vividly, and how despondent he was that night, sailing alone, thinking that was the night he was supposed to get engaged. That was the night it was supposed to happen. And now years and years later, just hearing this, he wanted to be sick. Shocked at how much this was already affecting him, he refilled his glass and took a healthy swig.

“Go on,” he urged.

“Well, Tom, his name was Tom, and I ended up staying together for seven years.”

“Seven years?” Not expecting any of this, the thought that Mia had been in a relationship for that length of time, meant it was a real relationship, and he was becoming uncomfortable with the jealous feelings it was evoking.
Had this guy come back?

Nodding, “Yeah, seven years. And it worked because both of us were really limited in what we could give to one another emotionally. We got along great, enjoyed each other’s company, had a fun time together, but Schooner, never once in seven years did I tell him that I loved him. And he never said it to me, either.”

Taking a breath, he was pleased with her last statement.
Why am I so jealous
, he wondered,
this was ancient history and she didn’t love him
. But he also knew, that sometime before this conversation was over, the other shoe would drop.

“So, what happened?” he could hear how tight with stress his voice was and wondered if she picked up on it.

As if reading his thoughts, she reached out and took his left hand. Smiling, “You’re going to love this.”

“Well I don’t know about that.”

Insisting, “No, trust me, you will love this. I had left a client file on the dining room table that I needed for a meeting, so I went home to grab it and have some lunch. When I got into the apartment, I thought he had left the TV on in the bedroom, so I went to turn it off.”

Schooner’s mouth opened, “It wasn’t the TV, was it.”

Shaking her head, “Nope. He was fucking one of his students in our bed.”

“And you walked in?”

Mia was smiling, the memory not at all painful, “I did and quite the scene ensued. I threw the girl’s clothes and shoes out the window, which was on the sixteenth floor, and pushed her out of my apartment wearing a bed sheet.”

Letting out a laugh, “Only you.”

“I know. So me, right?” she released his hand.

“Well, what about him?” Schooner wanted this guy gone.

“I threw his ass out, too,” she was proud of the memory.

“Good girl,” equally as proud of her. “Did you ever hear from him again?”

“Not for a long time,” Mia swirled the amber liquid in her glass, “and then I got a call from him on December 31st, 1999. It was a surprise call, but it was a nice call. A lot of time had passed and I’m guessing he was just a little melancholy,” Mia smiled at Schooner, “and probably all of his students were home for the holidays and he had no one to fuck.”

“Where does he teach?”

“He’s at NYU.”

Schooner was shocked. This guy was downtown, not all that far from where they were living. “And you’ve never run into him?”

“Surprisingly no. Which is pretty amazing,” she took a deep breath, as if gearing up for something. “Well, after it ended with him, I went a little wild for awhile. My behavior became more than a little destructive and risky. Rob had been bugging me since sophomore year to get into therapy and work with a professional to deal with what happened freshman year and I just kept thinking it wasn’t an issue and I could handle it. But it was an issue and I couldn’t handle it. Right after I was raped, I had you there and you were so protective and I was so happy that you really loved me, that I could just push it away from reality. Just lock it away. I think by the time I left at the end of freshman year, I had somehow convinced myself that it never really happened. I just wrapped all my self-worth into my relationships with men, and after Tom, when I wasn’t in a relationship, everything I’d locked away started to bubble up. I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t feel anything and I wanted to feel. And the more out of control I got, the more I thought, let me just go a little farther, a little closer to the edge, and I’ll feel something, I will. But I never did. And I kept getting closer and closer to that edge. And I didn’t care. I didn’t love me. I knew Tom never loved me and I just didn’t feel like I was lovable. I was the girl that got used and raped and thrown away and cheated on and left. That’s who I was, that’s how I saw myself. And I guess that is who I had become.”

Schooner could not breathe. Mia Silver was probably the strongest, most resilient, self-sufficient woman he had ever known and hearing her verbalize the struggle, knowing that he had added to it - whether it was his fault or not - was shredding his heart.
How could this amazing woman think she was anything but wonderful?