The Color of a Memory (The Color of Heaven Series) (20 page)

I felt David’s hand on the small of my back, guiding me as we walked the length of the narrow carpeted hall.

“Here it is,” David said. “Are you ready?”

I nodded and he knocked on the door.

It swung open immediately, and there stood Carla, as if she had been listening for our footsteps all the way from the elevator.

She was strikingly beautiful with a tall, slim figure, clear skin, full lips, big brown eyes, and wavy honey-colored hair. I found myself staring at her in a foggy haze of disbelief.

Had this woman made love to my husband? Did she flirt with him and lure him away from his family? Did she not see the wedding ring? Was he even wearing it at their first meeting?

Anger welled up inside me, but I pushed it back down.

“Hi,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Carla. You must be Audrey.”

Then the most extraordinary thing happened. Her daughter—who looked to be about two years old—came barreling through to greet us with a smile.

“And this is Kaleigh,” Carla said.

As soon as I saw the child, I knew that she belonged to Alex. She had the same dark features and charismatic eyes. The realization knocked me off balance emotionally, and I was confused by my feelings.

Part of me wanted to scoop the child up into my arms and hug her tight.

Another part of me wanted to shake the daylights out of Alex. If only I could.

Carla swept her daughter close, up against her leg. Her smile was radiant and I was briefly mesmerized. This reaction was immediately followed by bitter, sour-tasting jealousy.

“This is my friend David,” I said, gesturing toward him.

“Oh yes.” Carla shook his hand as well. “Alex spoke highly of you. He showed me pictures and told me about your work, and how you were friends since high school.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” David said, and I suddenly found myself wishing I hadn’t brought him after all, because I half expected Carla to flirt with him, too.

She stepped aside to make room for us to enter. “Come on in.”

The layout of the place was standard for a high-rise apartment. The entry hall was narrow. There was a small kitchen to the left which opened to a modest-sized carpeted living room beyond.

David and I followed Carla and Kaleigh into the living room where she had a vegetable tray set out on the coffee table with a bowl of dip.

“Can I get you anything to drink?” she asked. “I have juice, pop and coffee. Or would you like a beer, David?”

“Nothing for me, thanks,” I replied because I had no appetite.

David, however, said he’d love a glass of water.

While Carla went to fill it at the sink in the kitchen, he and I sat down on the sofa and exchanged glances. He gave my hand a squeeze.

Carla returned and set his water on the coffee table. “There you go.” Then she met my gaze as she took a seat in a facing chair. “I can’t believe I’m finally meeting you. I’ve wanted to talk to you for so long. It was hard not to contact you over the past two years, but I always forced myself to resist. I didn’t want to break my promise to Alex, but maybe he would have wanted me to…. I’m still not sure, but the fact that you found me makes me wonder if he
did
want that. Who knows?”

I swallowed over my disbelief.
Was this really happening?

Little Kaleigh climbed up onto the sofa beside me and smiled. “You have pretty glasses,” she said.

I smiled in return. “Thank you.”

“She has a thing for the type of glasses you’re wearing,” Carla explained. “I don’t know why. Maybe she saw something on TV.”

Kaleigh continued to smile at me, and I was overcome by a perplexing mixture of emotions. She was an adorable little girl, and her eyes… They had the same spark as Alex’s. It was the same spark that had made me fall in love with him.

Which made me feel hurt and betrayed.

Shifting uneasily in my seat, I tried to focus on all the questions I wanted to ask. “So how did you meet Alex?”

Carla stared at me for a moment, as if confused. “Well…I can’t really remember the first time, I was too young…but in a way, I guess I’ve known him all my life.”

I didn’t know how to take that. Had they gone to kindergarten together or something?

She inclined her head at me. “You do know who I am, right?”

To her, I probably looked like a deer caught in the glare of car headlights as I shook my head, because I really knew nothing about this woman other than the fact that she worked as a waitress and had borne my husband’s child.

Carla sat back in her chair and spoke bluntly, without hesitation. “I’m Alex’s half-sister,” she said. “We only found each other again the week before he died. Who did you
think
I was?”

The room spun in circles as I struggled to comprehend what she’d just told me.

Thank God David was sitting beside me, because I couldn’t seem to make my mouth work.

Chapter Forty-nine

“You’re Alex’s
sister
?” David replied.

Carla nodded. “Half-sister. Oh, God, this is awkward. I’m not sure what’s going on here. I thought you knew that.”

David and I looked at each other. “We had no idea,” he said. “Audrey found Kaleigh’s ultrasound photo in Alex’s car, and she assumed…” He stopped at that.

Carla’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh my. Did you think I was having an affair with him? No, that’s not it at all. Oh, Audrey…”

I covered my mouth with a hand. “I’m so sorry. I feel like an idiot.”

She stared at me. “What made you think that?”

How could I ever explain? How could I tell her that I had lost faith in my husband, and that as soon as the first opportunity arose to confirm my early doubts about him…it was enough to convince me he was a cheater?

I felt ashamed, yet I understood why I wanted to believe this. Perhaps I needed a place to project my anger over losing him. Maybe a part of me felt it would be easier to believe he’d betrayed me—and to hate him—than to accept that I had lost such a perfect, wonderful man.

“Everything pointed to that,” I told her, because it was true. The evidence had been compelling. “Just before he died he became withdrawn and I sensed something was off, and then when I found the picture in the car… Do you remember what you wrote on the back of it?”

Carla shook her head.

“You wrote: ‘I hope she has your good looks.’ And you drew a heart by your initial. Then we found an email from you that made it seem like he was going to leave us for you. It never occurred to me that it could be something else.” I looked down at Kaleigh who was now playing behind a pink-and-white dollhouse under the window. “So she’s Alex’s niece?”

“That’s right,” Carla replied. “Half-niece.”

Quietly I whispered, “Can I ask who her father is?”

Carla also spoke in hushed tones. “That’s not a good story. He’s someone I dated briefly a while back. I was in love with him, but he walked out on me when he found out I was pregnant. He left town—quite some time ago—and I haven’t heard a word from him since. I was pregnant out to here when I reconnected with Alex.” She gestured with her arms, as if she were holding a basketball in front of her tummy.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Alex never mentioned a sister other than Sarah.”

“That’s because he didn’t remember me,” she explained, “nor did I remember him—and this is the part he wanted to keep secret, because he wanted to protect his mom. She never knew her husband was seeing someone else. So there
was
an affair going on. It just wasn’t Alex, and it was many, many years ago.”

I cupped my forehead in a hand. “I can’t believe it.”

I was both relieved and saddened to learn that it was Jean’s husband who had been unfaithful. Alex had told me many times how deeply his mother loved his father and how long it had taken her to overcome the grief of losing him.

“Alex and I were born about a year apart,” Carla explained, “and our father used to spend time with us together on Saturdays when we were both really young. That’s how I found Alex two years ago. I kept having these vague, foggy memories of riding in an antique car and going to the race track with a boy I believed was my brother. My mom died in a car crash when I was five and I was sent to live with my aunt in Pennsylvania. That’s when our father died, sometime after that, which is why I lost all contact with Alex. I was too young to investigate anything, and my aunt just swept everything under the rug, so to speak. So I just kind of buried it and went on about my life until recently, when I got pregnant. That’s when I started having the dreams about that old car, driving around in the back seat and eating ice cream. I couldn’t get the memories out of my head, so I went online looking for vintage cars and found a picture of one that looked exactly like what I remembered. It had a red pinstriped interior and a crystal knob on the gear shift at the steering wheel. I went into every chat room I could find and asked if anyone remembered going to the race track as a kid in an old Buick Street Rod.”

“And Alex replied,” I said.

Carla nodded. “He was just as confused as I was about those memories, because the way he remembered it, he thought he had gone to the track with his sister Sarah, but then he realized that she would have just been a baby then. He said he never really questioned it. He just thought his memory of it was hazy.”

I recalled the day Alex and I sat in the Buick in his garage and he told me about those fond memories of his father taking him and his sister to the race track. I realized I hadn’t done the math either, because he’d told me his father died when he was seven, yet Sarah would have been only about six months old. I remember Alex telling me how he and his sister would run to the creek to catch frogs.

“I don’t understand why he wanted to keep this a secret,” I said to Carla. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

This was perhaps the most hurtful thing.
Did he not trust me? Did he feel it would reflect badly on him if I learned that his father had been unfaithful?

Carla rested her temple on a finger. “He was shocked to learn about his father’s affair, and he told me he needed time to figure out how to tell you and his mom. Actually, he was reluctant to
ever
tell his mother about it because he didn’t want to spoil her perfect memory of him.”

As I listened to all of this, my heart broke at the thought that Alex died without resolving this situation.

“Oh, Alex,” I whispered, bowing my head with regret for all my suspicions and feelings of anger over the past few weeks.
How could I not have known? How could I not have trusted him to be the good husband and father he was—right up until the day he died?
He had never cheated. He didn’t deserve my censure.

Maybe that’s why he always had his back turned to me in my dreams. It was
me
who couldn’t see him for the true and honorable man that he was.

David touched my shoulder. “Now you know,” he softly said.

Needing to be held, I turned into his loving embrace.

Chapter Fifty

“Now the burning question is this…” I said to David as we drove home from Boston that evening. “Do I, or do I not, tell Jean?”

David turned off the radio. “That’s a tough one. I’ve known Jean since I was in high school and there was always a sense that she never got over losing Alex’s dad. Their house was like a shrine with family pictures everywhere. I swear we all thought he was some sort of saint. But I remember Alex saying once that he wished his mom could move on, but it was like…a part of her had died, too.”

“It certainly took her a long time to find someone,” I replied. “I’m just glad she’s happy now.”

“Me, too. Garry’s a good guy.” David’s eyes met mine and I saw a hint of melancholy in them. “What about
you
, Audrey? Now that you know Alex wasn’t unfaithful, will you go on mourning, like Jean did?”

I gazed out the window at the passing landscape and thought about the relief—and love—I’d felt in Carla’s apartment when I learned that Alex hadn’t been unfaithful to me, and that he’d struggled with the decision to tell me about his father’s infidelity because he was ashamed of it.

How easy it would be to idolize and cling to the memory of that integrity…

I looked at David, whose gaze was fixed on the road ahead of us. Then I touched his arm and asked, “Do you remember when you showed me the email from Carla, and I said it felt like Alex died all over again?”

David nodded.

“I honestly did feel that way,” I continued, “and it brought everything back—the terrible heartache. Then today, when Carla told us she was his half-sister, I was ashamed of myself for doubting him, and all the love I felt for him came flooding back. It was as if he’d risen from the dead.”

David took his eyes off the road for a few seconds to study my expression.

“But all that joy came from my
memory
of him,” I explained. “I’m so glad now that it’s not tarnished, that he really was the best husband and father in the world, and I can talk about him to Wendy without trying to hide any bitterness. I know now that I was right to trust my instincts and marry him, and that I can do that again… I can take a leap of faith—because the greatest joy I ever had was with Alex. I want to love like that again.”