Accidental Happiness (23 page)

“Well, I break my own rules once in a while. It’s not a crime.” Her mouth was set. She looked off to the side.

Lane opened her eyes again and stood up, shook her head at both of us. “I’m going to take some more medicine, then lie down in my room. Just don’t break any furniture.” She shuffled off, left us to our stalemate.

“I can reschedule with the preacher,” Reese said.

Angel stood beside her mother. I forced myself to remember that she was just a little girl, a child who had been dragged from town to town by a mother who couldn’t tell fact from fiction to begin with. It wasn’t the kid’s fault, but she’d perfected her mother’s look of smug indifference.

Still, part of me remembered the soft child who sat beside me at the cemetery. The delighted face when she completed her puzzle. In spite of myself, I felt a thaw go through me when I looked at the stone-set expression of her mouth, her eyes. It surprised me, the compassion I couldn’t shake. How could I feel charity toward a child who offered nothing back, when I’d only mustered tolerance, at best, for a sister who openly begged for approval?

“I need to talk with you, Reese.” I could sort out my feelings about Angel later. I’d put off the real issue of the day for too long. “Let’s at least sit down.”

This was Derek’s cue. He came back into the room, all easy smiles.

“Hey, Angel,” he said. “How ’bout some ice cream? We can see if the dolphins are feeding on the mud bank across from the marina.”

Angel smiled and stood up, but before she took a step, Reese intervened.

“Where are you going?” She sounded near panic. Where the hell had that come from?

“Just to the Ship’s Store.” Derek’s face was a question. “Then we’ll hang out near the gazebo at the dock. You’ll see us out the window.”

“I’m sorry,” Reese said. “I’ve been a little on edge today. I’d rather she stay close, that’s all.”

Reese didn’t know Derek all that well. Her concern wasn’t unreasonable when I thought about it. But how the hell could I talk with her if Angel stayed directly underfoot?

“I tell you what,” Derek said. “Lane has some Rocky Road in the freezer and she gets Nickelodeon. How ’bout we stay right here and watch TV?”

Angel glanced over at Reese, saw her mother offer a slight nod.

“Okay,” she said, going with Derek into the kitchen.

Reese looked at me. She looked as if she knew what was coming, and maybe she did.

“Can we sit out front on the porch?” I asked.

“It’s hotter than hell out there,” she said.

“I don’t mind staying in here,” I said, “but I don’t know if you want Angel to listen in. To tell you the truth, I don’t care. I’m not the one keeping secrets.”

She stood up, walked toward the kitchen.

“Let me get a cold soda and I’ll meet you out there.” She looked so tired. But I had to get it over with, for everyone’s sake.

“Do you want anything?” she called from the kitchen.

“Diet Sundrop if there’s one in there.”

“Got it,” Reese answered.

I went out onto the porch and waited.

Reese walked out with the two soda cans in one hand. Her dark, curly hair looked damp, as if she’d splashed herself with water, then smoothed it back.

“Angel told you,” she said before she’d even sat down.

I was sitting on the green porch glider. I’d watched Lane spray-paint it the week before. The chipped and dingy white of the metal had become lovely again in an instant. Reese sat opposite me in a matching chair. She handed the soda over, waited for me to respond.

“How long had she known him?” I asked.

“I told him about her just after the holidays. He drove to Richmond to meet her sometime in January. She saw him twice after that.”

I’d gone to see my parents in January. A weekend visit that was a concession for having missed Christmas with them—again. Ben and I had started a tradition with Maxine. I told myself it had been that way because Maxine was alone. Truth was, I wanted to be with Maxine more than my own mother. So I’d gone off to my parents’ house and he’d gone off to meet Angel. I wondered about the other times he’d been with her. Where was I?

I’d been thinking that confronting Reese would be the hard part, the axis of all the conflict. Turns out, I was wrong. All of the questions that had to follow seemed more difficult.

“Why didn’t you say something before?” The question came out hard, an accusation. But it wasn’t Reese I was accusing. Even I knew that.

“Everything happened so fast. I had no idea that Ben was gone when I got here, much less what he’d said to you. I felt like I should get the lay of the land, let you get used to the two of us before I filled you in on everything else. I thought he’d left you, Gina. That seemed like a logical explanation for you to be sleeping on a boat, for God’s sake. And I know that there was—” She stopped, and I think my heart stopped too. “—tension between you,” she finished.

The television sounded absurd inside the house. The manic orchestration of Looney Tunes provided the sound track for our conversation. I could feel my heart again, beating fast and unsure.

“Then why didn’t he tell me?” Sweat formed at my hairline. Tears threatened to spill. The dampness came from all around. Even the inlet that met the edge of Lane’s yard steamed the air with a salty haze. “Did you tell him not to say anything to me?” I hoped this was true. I wanted to blame Reese more than I wanted to breathe.

“No. Benjamin made his own decisions about what to say.”

She must have seen the pain her words caused, because she leaned toward me, rested her elbows on her knees. The timbre of her voice changed, softened as she spoke again.

“I know that he intended for you to know, Gina. We didn’t have this secret pact or anything. But he thought he had time. I mean, who would have known he didn’t have time?”

“Were you sleeping with him?” It sounded ridiculous as I asked it. I knew Ben better than that. But more than the child, more than anything, it was the question I wanted to hear her answer. The question that affirmed or negated my marriage.

Her face didn’t register anything. No surprise, no confirmation. Her expression stayed passive, a formal portrait in living flesh.

“Did you?” I asked again.

“No.” Her answer hung there. The small word I’d wanted to hear, but hardly believed.

“Then why did he lie?”

“What makes you think he lied, Gina?” She pulled her cigarettes out of the deep pocket of her skirt. Reached in again for matches. “Think about it.” She lit up a menthol; the deep smell of tobacco covered the distance between us, brought her words closer than I wanted. My emotions gathered, began to have substance again. I wouldn’t be the victim in this one. She wouldn’t have that from me.

“He kept it from me,” I said. “I know in your book that’s not being dishonest, but we don’t exactly agree on that one.”

She reached over, let ashes drop in the hedges just over the porch rail. I thought maybe that was it, all she planned to offer me by way of explanation. I needed to keep her talking. I had to hear more so I could put my memory of Ben back together, keep it intact.

“Did you lie to him?” I asked. “Tell him that Angel was his? Did you skip the stories about your complicated sleeping arrangements at the time she was conceived?”

If I’d been closer to her, she might have struck me. Her mouth formed a rigid line of anger. Good. Let her get angry. Let her lose enough control to tell me the fucking truth for a change. “What did you tell him, Reese?”

“I told him the truth.” With the cigarette loose between her fingers, she reached for her soda. But her hand shook as she picked it up from the wooden floor of the porch. The cold sweat off the can left a stain on the gray-painted planks. “I never lied to Ben—or to anyone, for that matter—about Angel.”

“You think keeping her away from him for seven years wasn’t lying?” I felt suddenly strong, and I wanted to cause injury. The pain could be someone else’s for a change. “I don’t know what that is if it’s not a lie.”

“I never spoke words to Benjamin that weren’t true. Everything I said to him was right.”

“I don’t know, Reese. It’s pretty fuzzy. The distinction between technically lying and simply withholding the truth. What else did you finally decide to open up about?”

She turned her head to look at me. “I told him that I still loved him.” Not a twitch or a blink.

It stopped me, her admission. But then, she intended for it to. I took a breath and made myself move forward. “So that makes you a good citizen? After all those years?”

“I know that I kept things from him for a long time.” She put down the drink. “But regardless of how you feel about it, lies by omission are a different animal. I won’t apologize for anything I thought was necessary to give my daughter the life she needed.”

“Okay. Well, just for fun, why don’t you fill in the parts you left out? All the
omitted
scenes in your little drama.”

The wind shifted her smoke into my nose. The cigarette bugged me all of a sudden. Everything about her bugged me. As if hearing my thoughts, she put her cigarette out on the top of her soda can, slipped the butt in the opening; I heard the sizzle as it hit the remains of her drink.

“I don’t owe you any apologies for what I did to Ben,” she said. “I loved him. He understood that.”

She was right. It had always confused the hell out of me, but he did seem to understand her. And she loved him. I believed her on that one. But that didn’t explain why she’d left him. Or why she’d come back with Angel in tow. But her love for him made perfect sense to me. The thought of it made me sick.

“What did he say when you told him about Angel? When you told him how you felt?”

I waited. From inside the house, Road Runner . . . the Coyote . . . Their endless chase continued. The frantic sounds brought Reese’s silence into hard focus.

“Tell me.”

She looked out across the inlet and I could see the line of her jaw, the edges of her profile, but not her eyes. I tried to figure out what she was focusing on, but there was nothing in that direction but still water and boats. She continued to look away as she spoke.

“He said that he was married to you. That he had a life with you. He wasn’t interested in
playing family
—your words, not his—with me. He told me that you were the partner he needed.”

A charter fishing boat motored by. The noise made us stop, wait for the sound to fade, and I took just a second to acknowledge the relief I felt at what she’d said.

“Then why didn’t he tell me?” I started in again. I couldn’t dwell on the small bit of ground I’d gained. I hadn’t heard any real answers in all of her talk. “What kept him from talking with me about you? About Angel?”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Gina!” She leaned back, dropped her head, and let out a dramatic breath. “He tried to tell you, for God’s sake. Are you so fucking stupid that you don’t see it?” She’d lost patience, was acting as if I’d missed something obvious. The hot air pushed close against my skin as I stared at her, unable to look away.

“He tried to tell you,” she said again, as if repeating it would make it clear to me.

“A conversation about a child that might have been his kid? I don’t think so. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d remember having a talk like that with my husband.”

“Children,” she said, still trying to make her point. “He talked to you about children. What do you think he was getting at? Are you just plain simple or don’t you want to know the truth?”

“You’re offering
me
lessons on the truth?”

“There. You’re changing the subject again. You don’t want to hear it, do you? He talked with you about kids. Recently. Over and over, as a matter of fact, and you just couldn’t listen. But he tried. God knows he tried.”

Children? All those questions. All those arguments over some baby that didn’t exist, would never exist. “He was talking about a baby,” I said. “Having a baby. What does that—”

“Oh, stop!” She cut me off. “Just think for a second.” Each syllable unfolded with a slow, deliberate cadence as spaces formed between the words. “He was talking about Angel.”

Everything stopped. The boats. The birds. Even the television noises had gone away. In the still air, I could only hear blood rushing inside my own head. Angel. Benjamin’s desperation, the urgent petitions. For Angel, a child he’d already claimed. All that was left was for me to accept her.

“Gina?” she asked. “Did you hear what I said?” I nodded, but all I could hear was Benjamin talking to me on the couch, in our bed, in the car. Children. I had to rethink the idea of children. His voice took on a pleading quality that I’d never heard before. The subject had dominated the months before his death. I didn’t understand. For his sake, he said, I had to consider it.

For the first time, I did understand, but it was too late. In his world, in the new world that had come to him, I
had
to listen. I had to change my mind. Because if I didn’t, it would have meant a choice. A choice that he couldn’t make.

“He wanted to work out an arrangement,” she said. “Shared custody. He just needed some sign that you were softening, and he was going to open up the idea to you.”

That made sense, but at the same time, didn’t. Some part of her story rested off-kilter.

“Why would he do that without proof that she was his?” I tried to find some way around it, some way to make her a liar. For an instant I tried to think like Benjamin, to
be
Benjamin. Wouldn’t he want to know for sure before he ripped our life apart? “Why would he go through all that without knowing for sure? It doesn’t make any sense. You must have let him think—”

“I told him the truth,” Reese said again. She stood up, her bare feet planted in a solid stance as if to bolster her point. “I told him I didn’t know. In fact, I told him I didn’t want to know.”

“Then why . . .” I began, but somehow got lost in my own question.

“Maybe . . .” Reese came and sat in the glider, but with a solid distance between us. “Maybe he thought it was his only chance at being a father. Any kind of father.”

“What do you mean?” But even as I asked, the logic of what she said began to connect the pieces of my last months with Ben.