The Pages We Forget (20 page)

“One day you and I will get married and we'll have a family,” he promised her one morning as they waited for the sun to rise over Bacon Street.

“If our first child's a boy, we will name him Keith Adams Jr.,” she whispered in his ear.

“No. Not that. Let's name him something else, like Trevor,” Keith responded. “Trevor was my best friend's name before we moved here. Keith isn't a good name. I never liked it.”

“And what if she's a girl?” she asked.

“Camille,” he answered.

“Why Camille?”

“Because it sounds as beautiful as she's going to be,” he responded and kissed her softly. “Especially if she looks anything like her mother.”

June never forgot that morning. And when their eyes finally met, she knew that he had not forgotten the promise he made. “You said Keith wasn't a good name,” June reminded him. “So I named him Trevor like you wanted me to.”

“But is he really my son?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“He's not my father,” Trevor yelled and jumped down from the steps. “My dad's coming to get me,” he cried and backed down the walkway. “You're not my dad.”

Keith saw himself in Trevor. Every backwards step Trevor made toward the gate made him remember the morning he backed away from his own mother as she pleaded with him to stay. Like Trevor, he had been forced to face a truth he wasn't ready to live with.

He recalled hearing his mother yell for her husband, who was still asleep in their upstairs bedroom. “Reverend!” She turned to him and begged, “Please, Keith. Please come back inside and tell me what's wrong.”

“I can't, Ma. I have to go,” he cried and backed out of the yard carrying an overpacked suitcase in one hand and a backpack in the other. “Tell Dad good-bye for me and tell him I love him.”

“No! Keith, please! Please tell me what I did wrong.”

“Ma, you didn't do anything wrong.” He tried to assure her as best he could. “I couldn't have asked for better parents.”

“Then how can you just leave us? How can you walk away without telling us why you're leaving or where you're going?”

“Ma, I have to go now while I still can.” He closed the gate behind him. “I love you.”

“No!” Mrs. Adams screamed and charged through the gate. “I won't let you go!” She grabbed the suitcase and tried to pull it and him back into the yard. “You are not going! You're not leaving us!”

“Lucy? Keith?” Reverend Adams ran out of the house in his pajamas. “What's going on out here?”

Reverend Adams was the one person Keith didn't want to see. There was no way he could face his father. Not now. Not ever again. So he pulled away from his mother and ran.

“Keith, come back here! Keith!” His dad called for him, but he
kept running until he vanished in the early morning fog that covered Bacon Street.

“No!” his mother's heart-wrenching scream followed him across distance and time.

Now, Keith stood and watched as his son ignored June's cries and ran away.

“Let me talk to him,” Keith suggested to June, who had already taken off behind Trevor.

“No,” she responded. “This is all my fault, so I have to straighten it out.”

“Junie,” he called.

She stopped in her tracks.

“Please, Junie.”

She had not heard him speak her name since that night at Mildred's Bed and Breakfast more than ten years ago.

“Let me at least try.”

She nodded for him to go ahead.

Trevor was in the car with the door locked. “You're not my daddy,” Trevor yelled as Keith walked up to the car. “I just said that so you would talk to her.”

“I know I'm not your daddy.”

“Then leave me alone!” Trevor crawled over to the driver's seat. The keys were still in the ignition switch.

“Trevor, I just want to talk to you,” Keith said.

Trevor started the car.

“Trevor!” June screamed. “Stop him, Keith! Stop him!”

Before Keith could move, Trevor shifted the gear into “Drive” and the car crashed into the picket fence.

“Open the door, Trevor,” June demanded. But he didn't. Instead, he sat motionless, staring blankly ahead, gripping the steering wheel with both hands.

“Don't worry about the fence,” Keith told him. “We just want you to open the door.”

“Not until my dad gets here.” Trevor turned and stared angrily at June. “You said I should always tell the truth. How come you're not?”

“I am telling the truth.” June gazed into Trevor's tear-filled eyes. “I wouldn't lie about something like this.”

“Well, you did,” he replied. “You said Dad was my father. Now you're saying Keith is.”

“Trevor, I think you should open the door and let your mother explain,” Keith said.

“She won't tell the truth. She never tells the truth.”

“I've never lied to you about anything other than this, and there was a reason I did what I did.”

“You lied about your cramps and you made me lie.”

June didn't know how to respond. She had asked him to lie about the day he walked into her room and saw her on the floor.

“Trevor, this isn't entirely your mother's fault,” Keith admitted. “If you're going to be mad with someone, then that someone should be me.”

June couldn't believe her ears. She knew there was nothing Keith could tell Trevor to make him believe what they were saying about his father. But this guilt-ridden plea to Trevor was exactly what she'd been waiting to hear him say. It was her life that he destroyed when he eased out of the room that morning.

“I didn't leave her with any choice, except for the one she made,” Keith explained to Trevor. “I'm the one you should blame.”

“If you're my dad, why did you leave us?”

June anxiously awaited his answer to the question that had dogged her since that morning.

“You didn't love us?” Trevor asked.

“I did love you,” Keith revealed. “I loved you more than I've ever loved anyone.”

June knew Keith wasn't talking about Trevor. He couldn't have been. This was his first time seeing Trevor, so he had to be talking about loving her. He said he loved her more than he'd ever loved anyone. She convinced herself that that was what he meant to say. He didn't say why he left, but at least now, she knew it wasn't because he didn't love her.

“Please unlock the door,” June implored.

“I want to go home,” Trevor cried. He paused before unlocking the door. As soon as he pressed the unlock button, June snatched the door open and pulled him into her arms. “Please,” he appealed to his mother. “I want to see Dad.”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “We'll go home tomorrow.” If not for Trevor, June could have spent the rest of her life there with Keith. But her son needed her to help him put his life back together, and he came first. “Tomorrow we'll go home to Dad.”

Keith had said more about his leaving than he had said since the day he left Hampton Springs. However, after inviting them inside, he immediately retreated back into the safety of his solitary world. Once again, he felt uneasy in her presence. The sound of her voice unnerved him. Her stolen glances left him feeling naked. But the worst thing was being able to sense her pain. That scared him.

“Can I get either of you anything to eat or drink?” he asked and stepped away from the room's only lamp. He hoped that the pockets of darkness created by the room's high ceiling and inadequate lighting could hide him from her.

“I'm fine,” June answered. “What about you, Trevor?”

He didn't respond and only stared out of the window. It was
nearing nine o'clock, but Trevor still hadn't given up on his dad. He still expected him to show up and take him and his mother home. He wasn't afraid of facing Alex anymore. He wasn't going to ask his dad if his mother was telling the truth. In his heart, Alex was still going to be his dad, so he decided it was best to forget everything his mother had told him.

“He's okay,” June said.

Trevor didn't seem to notice the uneasiness between his mother and Keith. He found solace in the dismal night sky, as he peered out the four-paned windows. Even after everything that had happened during the day, June was still having a hard time believing she was sitting in Keith's living room. She strained to catch a glimpse of him as he stood in the corner. She surveyed the room, but there was little to see because the lamp was covered by a gray-painted shade that was too large. Even in the darkness, June could tell that this old board and batten house, with its weather-worn exterior and bare walls, was much like its owner: An empty shell of what it once was.

“So, how have you been?” June asked Keith in a barely audible whisper. Keith didn't respond, which made June squirm in her seat. She didn't know what else to say. All those things she thought, wrote and even dreamed of saying when she saw him, somehow seemed inadequate. She wished that it was brighter inside the room so she could see his eyes. If she looked into his eyes, she would know what she could or could not say. They would tell her exactly what he was feeling.

“I didn't mean to drop in on you like this, but I really needed to see you,” she told him, waiting for his reaction. Crickets chirping, owls hooting and the shrill baying of coyotes weren't enough to drown out the silence that filled the room. “I know you didn't want
to see me, but I had no choice. I needed to talk to you.” She waited for him to say something. Anything. But he didn't. “Can I be upfront with you?”

“No,” he quickly answered.

“Keith, don't you think it's time we talked? I mean, it's been ten years. I don't know what I did to make you hate me so much, but don't you think it's time we at least talk about it?”

He ran away from home and the people he loved to keep from having to answer questions like the ones she was asking. He couldn't answer them then, so why should she expect him to be able to answer them now? Surely, he would have confessed and told her why he could no longer live with himself after that night if it was that easy. He ran and he kept running until he found a place that would allow him to start over and forget that chapter of his life.

“Keith,” she said, “I need you to—”

Keith was out the front door before June finished her statement. He'd heard all he cared to hear. He wanted to stay and listen, to be strong for Trevor, whose eyes watched attentively as he hurried past him, but after ten years of denying nearly everything about his life with her, he didn't want to remember those forgotten pages.

“Why?” he questioned the heavens. He lost his faith the day he ran away. “Why won't you leave me alone?” He gave up praying and the special conversations he thought he had with God that day. “I did what I had to do. Didn't I?” The answers he sought never came.

By the time Keith built up enough courage to go back inside, Trevor was asleep on the sofa. June tried to get him to sleep in one of the bedrooms, but he insisted on sleeping in the living room so he could hear when Alex came. Keith closed the door behind him and tiptoed across the wooden floor so he wouldn't
wake Trevor. He stared at Trevor, who was curled up under the crochet blanket Mrs. Adams made for him last Christmas. “My son,” he told himself. And then he heard her singing.

“Suddenly,” June's voice wafted from the shower. “I don't know what I feel. I'm feeling so alive, your love has got to be real.”

He was drawn down the dimly lit hallway toward the bathroom.

“Can you promise me,” she crooned over the pitter-patter of the shower, “that you will always be, right here, beside me? Is forever…what our future reveals? This time, boy, love has got to be real.”

He remembered losing himself in her melodies.

“I'd given up on love. I was watching out for me. Until you came back, and set my heart free.”

He missed her even more now.

“Now I don't understand all these emotions I feel,” she sang. “But I'm feeling so alive, love has got to be real.”

He was entranced. Which was probably why he didn't hear her turn off the shower or notice the widening shaft of light when she pushed the door open. He was more startled than June was when she stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her.

“I'm sorry,” he said and turned his head to keep from looking at her. “I didn't mean to scare you.”

“Actually, it's my fault,” she countered. “I should have asked you if it was okay to use the shower.”

“Go right ahead,” he said and stole a glimpse of her. “I mean, it's all right.”

June didn't try to hide her staring. This was the first time since she arrived that she'd been able to look at him up close, so she took her time and meticulously examined him. His caramel complexion had been bronzed by the Florida sun which, with his straight
black hair, made him look like he was of Indian descent. His mustache was more tapered and his hair was cut shorter than it used to be. But other than that he looked like he did the last time she saw him.

Keith knew she was staring at him. He wanted to walk away, but he felt paralyzed.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “Just feels a little unusual having someone else in the house.”

“Well, we'll be leaving tomorrow,” she stated, moving to one side of the narrow hallway so she could get past him.

“I didn't mean it like that.”

“I know.”

As Keith slid past June, he mumbled, “That was a nice song you were singing.”

“Thank you. It's from my new album.”

“I heard.” She stood close to him, so close he could feel the warmth of her body. “I heard you had a new album. Actually, a few photographers and reporters came here wanting to talk to me because they said my picture was on the cover.”