A Sinclair Homecoming (The Sinclairs of Alaska) (16 page)

“No, Mama,” he disagreed. “We’ve all got stuff on our plates. Nobody gets a pass. Not even Dad.” If it was time for everyone to start dealing with the past, Zed Sinclair didn’t get to sit it out. This shit had gone on long enough.

And if he had to drag the man out of his cell with his bare hands, he would do it. Wade stepped forward and pressed a kiss on his mother’s forehead. “I have some errands to run. Do me a favor, bite down on that sharp tongue of yours before you say something you can’t take back. I will be here tomorrow to help you get settled into Miranda’s house. Promise me you’ll be nice,” he said.

She nodded reluctantly, and he took that as an important step. Now he just needed to find a way to get his father out of that jail cell.

He met his siblings in the hallway, away from Jennelle’s doorway. Miranda was biting her fingernail, a habit she hadn’t quite lost from childhood, and Trace paced in small steps. Both stopped when he said, “Okay, she’s calmed down a bit. She’ll be nice. I think.”

“How’d you manage that?” Miranda asked, spitting out a tiny sliver of nail. “Did you perform an exorcism?”

Trace barked a short laugh, but when Wade didn’t share their laugh, he sighed and said, “Okay, so moving day tomorrow. She say anything else?”

“She said plenty. Nothing new. Listen, let’s all try to remember that this is a pretty big transition, okay? Don’t take the bait even if she throws it at you. Sometimes she can’t help what comes out of her mouth.”

“You’re asking us to be the bigger person?” Miranda asked wryly. “I’ve spent my adult life being the bigger person with Mom. It’s getting old.”

“Well, seeing as she’s going to be your roommate, you might want to keep the status quo.”

“Good Lord, heaven help me. Maybe we should put her in a home.” Wade shot her a dark look and she shrugged. “I’m kidding. Sort of.”

“In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can get Dad out of jail by Friday.”

“Why?” Trace asked. “It’s not like he’s going to be much help.”

“Because I think it’ll help Mom deal with the cleanup. She feels alone. Her husband abandoned her to that house. If we can see that, she can, too.”

Miranda nodded, flushing with shame. “You’re right. It’s hard to remember when they were different. Always laughing, hugging and kissing...they’re like different people now. They probably haven’t had sex in years.”

“Blech,” Trace said, his face wrinkling in disgust. “Thank you for that lovely visual. I could’ve gone my whole life not thinking about my parents’ sex life.”

“Hey, a healthy sex life is integral to a healthy marriage,” Miranda quipped, and Trace made a gagging sound.

Wade bit back a grin, recognizing that Miranda was deliberately trying to gross out her brothers. Miranda had always been a bit of a troublemaker, and he’d loved that about her. Somewhere along the way, they’d all lost a bit of themselves and it was high time they reclaimed it. “Wish me luck,” he said, turning to leave. “And remember...be nice.”

“I’ll kill her with kindness,” Miranda promised with false sweetness. “And if that doesn’t work, a good, old-fashioned pillow over the face will.”

Wade laughed and kept walking. He knew she was kidding. At least he hoped she was.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“W
HY
THE
SUDDEN
need to spring clean? It’s not even spring yet,” Remy said, idly picking through the clothes hanging in the large walk-in closet of Morgan’s bedroom. “And am I on the clock? If not I’ve got better things to do with my time unless you’re going to share what’s going on in that cuckoo brain of yours.”

Morgan exhaled a short breath and shot Remy a look that said
keep working
but said, “Yes, you’re on the clock.”

“Mmm-hmm. So what are we doing here, looking through David’s dusty drawers? You should’ve unloaded these ancient threads three years ago.”

Yes, she should’ve. But when it had come time to throw it all out, she’d hesitated. If she were truly grieving, would she be in such a hurry to get rid of his things? She hadn’t wanted to seem anything but the grieving widow and thus, the clothes had remained as David had left them—perfectly organized by color and type—as if he were going to walk through the door at any minute. “Do you see anything you like?” she asked her cousin as he eyed a particularly fine Calvin Klein suit. “You’re about the same size, right? You can have whatever you want.”

“Are you kidding? Don’t tease me when Calvin Klein is on the line.” He pulled the dark navy suit and made a sound no man should make when talking about clothes. “This is exquisite and so classic. Your David had impeccable taste. Are you sure he wasn’t gay?”

“He was pretty straight,” Morgan said. “And homophobic.”

“Ohh, honey, that’s a dead giveaway that he was hungering for something he would not allow himself to have.”

Morgan suppressed a shudder. It was hard enough to remember David period, much less try to imagine him with another man. “Well, guess it doesn’t matter now. Help yourself to whatever you like. Everything else is going to Goodwill.”

Remy chortled like Tim Gunn at a runway show and began picking through the suits, exclaiming here and there at his good fortune. “Not that I’m not tickled pink but I have to ask...what’s happening with you, sugar pie?”

“Nothing. Just time to let go.”

“It was time to let go of that man the minute his body cooled. He was a dirty, rotten SOB—with impossibly gorgeous tastes in clothing—and you’re better off without him. But why now?”

She didn’t know. Something felt different inside her. Maybe it was breaking the seal on her self-imposed celibacy post-David that had made the change. Maybe it was spending time with a man who was an overall good person and not just surface deep. Everyone thought David was a good man but that was because no one actually knew him. Except Morgan.

“David had wanted to start trying for a baby,” she said, pausing at the dresser. “Can you imagine?”

“It was a blessing in disguise that you lost that baby,” Remy said, pursing his lips at the sad memory. “And an even bigger blessing that you didn’t get knocked up again afterward. Can you imagine, indeed. That man...you should’ve pressed charges when you had the chance.”

“And who would’ve believed me? David was a pillar of the community. Beloved, even. I doubt anyone would’ve taken a police report even if I’d tried to report the abuse. I would’ve gotten a stern talking to, to try and work things out, and then David would’ve punished me even more for embarrassing him.” She shook her head at the idea. “No, there was no out for me except the way it’d happened.”

Remy shot her a warning look. “That’s a terrible burden to carry around, sister. Someday those shoulders are gonna bow from the weight. Are you at least coming out of your fake mourning?”

“It’s not fake. Not exactly. I am a grieving widow.” Grieving the loss of her ideals, hopes and dreams, at the very least. “I wonder how things would’ve been different if I hadn’t met David but someone else, instead.”

“You’re in a philosophical mood today. Fate is a funny thing.”

“Sometimes I wonder how I ever fell for David’s charm in the first place. Perhaps I’m just jaded now because I feel I’m not even the same person in my memories.”

“You were a young, idealistic girl and you were taken in by the idea of marrying a rich, successful man who appeared to dote on you. How were you supposed to know he was going to turn out to be a sadistic bastard?”

She shrugged. “I’m a therapist. I should’ve seen some kind of sign.”

“Would you have paid attention? We see what we want to see. I never told you this but in college, while I was out discovering my true self, I thought I’d fallen head over heels in love with the first man I’d slept with. I put up with a lot of bullshit from him and it included abuse.”

“Remy...you were in an abusive relationship?” She gaped, shocked that her flamboyant, outspoken cousin had found himself in an abusive situation such as herself. “What happened?”

“The first time? I told myself we were both emotional and things just got out of hand, and the reason he hit me was because he was scared of the idea of losing me. I thought his freakout was a testament to my worth. I mean, why not? No one had ever cared that much about me to raise a fuss if I wasn’t around. It felt good to be so madly desired for once. But it got harder and harder to stick to that thinking after he kept beating the shit out of me.”

Morgan stared, stunned by Remy’s revelation. “How did you get out?”

Remy smiled. “I may be a flaming queen but I was raised by a hard-living fisherman. One night he came at me—pissed off because I’d dared to make a joke about his hair—and I realized that SOB didn’t love me, and he sure as hell didn’t deserve me. And then I laid him out. After that, I collected my things and walked away. Best damn thing I ever did. Just as it was the best damn thing
you
ever did by getting away from David.”

Tears burned behind Morgan’s eyes, so incredibly thankful for her wild, outlandish cousin who kept her secrets and felt safe enough to share a doozy of his own. If only she’d had Remy’s courage and had walked out on David before that night. “Why couldn’t I have inherited some of that bravery?” she whispered, mostly to herself, but Remy caught it and scowled as he tossed the suit in his hand to the pile growing on the bed.

“Don’t do that,” he warned, shaking his head. “You are braver than you know. Braver than you give yourself credit for, and you need to stop beating yourself over something that was an accident.”

“Is it an accident if you wanted it to happen?” she dared to ask, lifting her gaze to Remy. “So many times I wished David dead...what if I made it happen somehow?”

“Listen to me...he slipped and fell down the stairs. That’s all anybody ever needs to know. Now wipe that look off your face and hold your head up. You’re acting like the judge, jury and executioner are coming to dinner. He was a rotten man and he deserved what he got. Who cares if you wished it a thousand times? I wish to win the lottery every damn day but it hasn’t happened yet. Our thoughts don’t manifest into reality and I don’t care what the self-help gurus say. David’s death was a
happy
accident. Leave it at that.”

A happy accident. She wished she could embrace that perspective. Maybe if she could lose the crushing guilt that she carried every day, she could actually move on.

But move on to what? She looked to Remy. “Have you ever considered moving away from Homer?”

He shrugged in answer and made a silent exclamation of joy at a wool coat he found. “Honey, home is where you make it. I can live anywhere I choose.” He cast her a pointed look. “And that goes for you, too. I’ve long thought that maybe it’s time for you to move away and start fresh someplace else.”

She waved away that idea. Move away? Where would she go? Her home was here. “This is where I belong. I have no interest in moving away. Besides, I’ve built my practice here. I wouldn’t want to start over someplace else.”

“Why not? Sounds fun to me. You’re in a rut, girl. You need something—or someone—to shake you loose.”

Morgan couldn’t help the private smile at Remy’s comment because it conjured all manner of delightful memories spent shaking things up with Wade. What would it be like to say goodbye to everything she’d ever known and start fresh? Somewhere where David’s ghost didn’t dog her every step? Where no one knew she’d ever been married to the horrid man? That would be fantastic.

And impossible.

She was firmly entrenched in her life here. She had to take the good with the bad. That was being a grown-up.

“Sometimes being a grown-up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” she murmured. Without missing a beat Remy snapped his fingers and nodded.

“Amen to that.”

Morgan smiled and pushed away thoughts that bordered on dangerous. Her life was here. And that’s where it would stay.

CHAPTER TWENTY

W
ADE
WALKED
INTO
the jail with one purpose—to convince his father to let them bail him out and come help them with Jennelle. He had no idea how he was going to do that, seeing as his father had already been given many opportunities to get out of jail. But Wade hadn’t come all the way to Alaska, disrupting his own life and career, for his dad to hide out in jail.

As before when Wade visited, Zed was led into the receiving room and for as long as Wade lived he would never fail to wince at the memory of his father in shackles. There are just some things you can never imagine are going to happen and this was high up on that list. Wade waited for his father to sit before he started talking. “I’ve come to get you to see reason,” he started, determined to make his dad see what a mistake he was making. “This business of you hiding in a jail cell while everyone else cleans up our family’s mess is unacceptable. Talk to me, Dad. What’s going on with you?”

* * *

Z
ED
LOOKED
AS
if he’d aged ten years in the time that he’d been incarcerated, and it hurt Wade in a deeply private place to see his dad so diminished but he needed to focus. “I need to try to understand what’s going on because right now I’m at a loss. Help me to understand,” Wade pleaded with his father, feeling much like a young kid again, trying desperately to understand why the man who had once been his hero had regressed to a sad, pathetic mortal.

Zed glanced away, shame in his gaze. “You think I don’t want to be there for your mom? Of course I want to be there. But I’m not what she needs right now. She has you kids, and you guys can help her through this. I’ll just get in the way.”

“She doesn’t need us, she needs
you.
She’s falling apart. You guys have been together since you were teenagers, and you can reach her in a way that we never could. We need you, Dad. Don’t abandon us now.”

“Come on, Wade. You’re not babies anymore. You’re grown adults. I don’t need to hold your hands any longer.”

“We’re not asking you to hold our hands. We’re asking you to help us pull Mama out of a really bad situation that you helped put her in.” Wade couldn’t help the rise in his voice as his temper got the best of him. “What you’re doing is
hiding,
not helping. Don’t try to tell yourself anything different. You can sit in this jail cell and pretend that you’re doing everyone a favor but the truth of it is, you’re being a coward. I’m sorry but there’s just no pretty way to say it. Take responsibility and help us to help this family. Do you think that it doesn’t hurt to see Mama pushing away every single person who loves her because she’s swimming in grief? Grief that you won’t help heal?”

“What am I supposed to do about it, boy?” Zed’s cheeks colored as he leaned forward, his eyes flashing with a hint of his former spirit. “I’m no therapist! Don’t you think I have my own issues? Am I in any shape to be helping anyone else with their pain? If you can’t see that I would make it worse, then you’re blind.”

Wade clenched his fist. “No, you’re wrong. You locked yourself in that shed and you buried yourself in drugs to escape your shame for letting down this family. I get it but you can come back from that. You don’t have to wallow in self-pity forever. If you don’t watch out, your wife will be dead before you come to your senses. She almost died in that house as it is.
Do you hear me?
She almost died! And where were you? Sitting here in this jail cell. How is that helping your wife? How can you continue to let down your family? The man I knew, the man who raised me, he wouldn’t have stood for this bullshit. Do you hear me?
Bullshit!
”

Wade had never spoken to his father in that way but he couldn’t help it. What was going on wasn’t right and Zed had taught him to stand up for what was right, and sometimes that meant going against the stream.

Whether Zed was rattled by Wade’s impassioned speech, it didn’t show. The man was a rock and a stubborn mule to boot. “Have you said your piece?”

“Would it matter? Does anything I have to say matter to you anymore?” he retorted bitterly.

“I’ve done a lot of wrong and I sure as hell have no authority to throw stones, but you have a helluva lot of nerve coming in here and pointing fingers when you walked away from the family eight years ago. You skipped off when we all needed the family to rally, so don’t sit there and point your fingers and raise your voice as if you are innocent in any wrongdoing. You hide behind your excuse that you had a job to go to—but what you did was run away. Don’t try to sell it to me any other way.”

Wade opened his mouth to protest but what could he say? His father was right. He’d run as quick and as fast as he could. How could he stay after what had happened with Simone? After he had failed to find her? How could he look his father in the eye and not see failure staring back at him every single time?

“I shouldn’t have left the way I did,” Wade admitted quietly. “I didn’t know what else to do. If I’d stayed in this town I would’ve lost my mind. So I left. Is that what you want me to say? Well, there you have it. My confession. Yes, I bailed. I bailed on my family because I couldn’t handle the thought of confronting Simone’s ghost around every corner. I failed to find her. I was her big brother. I was supposed to protect her. But I failed. I couldn’t live with myself if I’d stayed.” Wade leaned back in his chair and covered his face with his hands. Pain, sharp and unrelenting, sliced across to his heart as he suffered the echo of his guilt and suffering but it was a wound that needed lancing. It’d taken eight years for him to admit that he shouldn’t have bailed and a weight fell from his shoulders that he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying.

“You didn’t fail,” his father said roughly. “Bad things happen and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Simone got caught up in something terrible and we might never know why. Don’t bear that burden, son.”

Wade scrubbed his face and ground the moisture from his eyes. “You don’t blame me?”

“Why would I? No more than I would blame Trace or Miranda. It was just Simone’s time and that’s the part that we have to get right with.”

“I can’t get right with it, Dad. I just can’t.”

“I know, I know. Getting right with it...that’s the struggle. Every day. Why did such a sweet girl get cut down so young, so brutally? The questions kept me awake at night. While your mother fought nightmares, I fought insomnia.”

God, Wade knew insomnia well. Seems he’d inherited that particular trait from his father. Whereas Wade used work to occupy his brain, his father had resorted to marijuana. What a slippery slope it is managing emotional pain.

“At first, the dope helped me sleep. And then it turned into something more, something I needed to function but then I wasn’t really functioning. I was just existing. And I didn’t have the strength to hold your mom up because I didn’t have the strength to hold myself up. I turned down Rhett’s and Trace’s offers to pay my bail because I knew I needed to be here. I needed this time to get my head on straight—to let the smoke clear from my brain. And for the first time in a long time I have clarity. But with that clarity comes the realization that I don’t deserve to ride in on a white pony to save the day.” Wade stared in shocked silence at Zed. He couldn’t fathom his father’s position but he could plainly see Zed’s pain. “I’m a burden to your mother—just one more thing for her to worry about at the end of the day. And I never imagined I would be that. But I am. I’m trying to give your mother time without adding to her burden, don’t you see that?”

“But you’re not doing that, Dad. She’s drowning without you. You’re standing on the shore and watching her go under water saying ‘I can’t save her. I can’t save her’ but you can. She needs you, more than any time in her life. She’s turning into a bitter, angry woman.” Wade took a deep breath. “And she’s killing Miranda—your other daughter. Mom’s squelching Miranda’s spirit and stomping on all the love that a mother is supposed to have for her children. It’s as if she can’t help herself and all sorts of mean things come popping out of her mouth at Miranda’s expense. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.”

“She’s always been harder on Miranda,” Zed agreed in a soft, aggrieved tone. “I don’t know why.”

“It’s gotten worse. Please, Dad...please come home.”

A torturously long moment stretched between them, and for a second Wade was hopeful that his father might finally agree, but Zed gave a slow, definitive shake of his head and Wade’s hope plummeted. “I can’t. I’m not ready. I wish that I were, son. I really do.”

“Tomorrow they’re doing the cleaning on the house. She’s going to need you more than ever. We need you. We’re all going to be there. You know it’s going to be difficult for her to have people going in and out of the house looking at all of her embarrassing mess. But if this cleaning doesn’t work, they’re going to condemn the house permanently and Mom will have nowhere to go. Do you understand? This is bigger than your pride. This is your wife’s home. The place where she raised her children. The place you built! It has to mean more than your pride. It has to mean more than your shame for failing her. I need you to rise above all of that and be the man you once were. The man I remember. The man I miss.”

In all of his life Wade could remember his father crying on three occasions. The first time was when they’d lost his favorite hunting dog, Butch, to a bear mauling. The second time was when Trace broke his leg skiing and had to be airlifted to Anchorage in order to save his life. And the third was the morning that they found Simone. But as Wade watched, a tear snaked down Zed’s cheek, and Wade knew his father wasn’t going to budge. Wade was looking at a broken man—a man whose soul had been crushed by circumstance with no hope of survival—and it was all he could do not to cry himself.

There was nothing more he could say. The situation was out of his hands. His father had made up his mind that they were better off without him, and Wade didn’t know what to say or do to change it. His dad had already admitted he had demons to slay, and he thought the best place to battle them was behind bars.

Wade let out a heavy sigh and pushed away from the table. “I came here to change your mind. When I set out and walked into this place, I swore I wasn’t leaving without you. But I can’t really force you to do what’s right. You think that your family doesn’t need you and you think that your wife is better off with you in here. All I can say is you are wrong. There was a time when I thought of you as the wisest of all men. And I know it’s unrealistic for fathers to remain their sons’ heroes for the rest of their lives but I never thought that you would stop being my hero. But today, you did.”

Wade stood on stiff legs and walked away. There was a wealth of pain crashing over his heart, crying out for his father but he had to accept that his father had made his choice. He would have to do his best to be the stand-in head of the household for his family. If his father were thinking clearly that’s what he would’ve wanted.