“From us?”
“Her grandparents,” Laura amended, and then she grew fierce. “And yes—me. I loved Jenny but I had no claim on her. I was terrified of losing her.”
“Did we seem like such monsters to you?”
“You seemed like a normal family. And I simply could not picture Jenny with you. Why would your wife accept her? Another woman’s child. And your daughter, Olivia—I had no idea if giving her a sister would be a good thing or not. Either way, I would be playing God with a little girl’s life, and I wasn’t willing to do that.”
That little girl didn’t exist anymore, Jenny thought as a decision firmed in her mind. She was a grown woman now, and she was through being ruled by secrets and fear.
After dinner, Jenny drove home and automatically turned down Maple Street before she realized her house was no longer there. She was supposed to go back to the vast, too-comfortable-to-be-good-for-her bed at Rourke’s house. But now that she was so close, something compelled her, even at this hour, to drive past the place.
The tires of the car crackled over the salted roadway, and she parked at the curb rather than turning into the driveway, now covered in deep drifts of snow. The empty spot where the house had been looked incongruous. There was a pair of tall maples in the front yard. In the fall, when Jenny was little, her grandfather used to rake the leaves into a pile so high, she could jump into it and disappear. Now the trees looked out of place, bare skeletons randomly standing in the middle of nowhere. She could see clear through to the backyard. A demolition company had followed in the wake of the salvage workers, leveling the place to rubble. Freshly cleared, it had resembled a war zone of black, scorched earth.
But it had snowed the previous night and most of the day, and thick drifts had virtually erased all traces of a house that had stood on the site for seventy-five years. Now all she could see was a lumpy expanse of white, cordoned off by safety tape. In the light of the street lamp, she could make out every contour. A set of rabbit tracks bisected the area where, she guessed, the living room had been, where her grandmother used to sit in the evenings and talk with Jenny.
Before her stroke, Gram had been a great talker. She loved to discuss things in endless detail, and loved to answer questions. This made them a good match, because Jenny had always been full of questions.
“What was it like when you were a little girl in Poland?” she would ask.
That was one of Gram’s favorites. Her eyes would soften and shift focus as she went away somewhere, to a far-off place. Then she would tell Jenny about the old days in a village called Brzeźny, surrounded by wheat fields and sycamore woods, the air filled with birdsong, the rush of a fast-moving river and the sound of tolling bells.
When she was sixteen, Helenka’s father put her in charge of driving the wagon loaded with wheat or corn to the miller for grinding. There, she met the miller’s son, a young ox of a man who was strong enough to operate the mill single-handedly, and who had eyes the color of a robin’s egg and a laugh so loud and merry that people who heard it tended to stop what they were doing and smile.
And of course, she fell in love with him. What else could she do? He was the strongest, kindest man in the village, and he told her she was brighter than the sun.
To Jenny, it sounded like an idyllic fairy tale. But she knew that unlike a fairy tale, there was no happily-ever-after for the newlyweds. Just two weeks after they married, the Germans initiated their September Campaign and invaded Poland. Soldiers overran the village, burning homes and shops, murdering or conscripting able-bodied men and boys, terrorizing women and children. When Jenny grew old enough to research the massacre of Brzeźny, she realized her grandmother had protected her from the ugliest of details.
The only reason Helenka and Leopold had escaped the carnage was that they had been sent that day to the district capital to register their marriage. When they returned, the village was in chaos, and their families gone—murdered or fled.
“The next day,” Gram would tell Jenny, “we started to walk.” It took several tellings and much questioning before Jenny learned that they had walked away from their village with only the clothes on their backs, a sack of withered apples and a few supplies, including the coffer of rye starter Gram’s mother had given her on her wedding day.
The Germans attacked the Poles in the west and the Russians in the east. For the people of Poland, every river and roadway became a battleground, and not one square inch was safe for the people who lived there, tilled the soil, raised their children and buried their dead. About six million Poles died in World War II. Jenny’s grandparents were lucky to escape with their lives.
“Where did you walk?” she used to ask.
“To the Baltic Sea.”
When Jenny was little, she thought it was like walking to the corner store to buy a quart of milk. Later she learned that her grandparents, who were little more than children themselves and had never before left their tiny rural district, traveled hundreds of miles on foot and, once they reached the port of Gdansk, paid for their passage by the labor of their backs.
Sometimes, Jenny would think about the people Gram had never seen again—her parents, six brothers and sisters, everyone she’d ever known. “You must miss them so much,” Jenny would say.
“That is true,” Gram told her. “But they are here.” She pressed her hand gently to her chest. “They are here in my heart, forever.”
Leaning against the idling car, Jenny closed her eyes and pressed her fists to her chest, praying that Gram was right, that you could never really lose someone, so long as you held their memory in your heart and tended to it, nurturing it with love.
She let out a long, unsteady breath, opened her eyes and blinked at the cold night. It wasn
’t working. There was nothing in her heart. She felt hollow, with unreasoning panic ricocheting back and forth inside her.
A car rounded the corner and washed the area in white light. Across the way, a curtain stirred in the window of Mrs. Samuelson’s house. As the visitor drew closer, Jenny recognized Rourke McKnight. He pulled over to the curb and got out of his car and walked toward her.
Jenny’s heart skipped a beat.
He was still dressed for work, his long overcoat billowing out behind him as he came closer.
She shivered and stuffed her hands into her pockets. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey, yourself.” He looked around the empty lot. “Everything all right?”
“Sure,” she said, knowing that the real question was, What are you doing here? “I, um, I drove here by mistake. You know, driving home on autopilot.” She offered an ironic smile. “It takes some adjustment, this homeless business.” She couldn’t bear to look at his expression—a mixture of compassion and kindness—so she leaned back and studied the spot where the second-story bedroom window used to be.
“Do you know,” she asked, “that when I was a kid I used to climb out the window and onto that branch?” She pointed at the maple tree. “I never once got caught.”
“What were you doing, sneaking out?”
She tried to figure out the source of the sharp note in his voice. “Depends,” she said. “It was usually to meet my friends down by the river and hang out. Sometimes we went to the drive-in movie at Coxsackie. I wouldn’t say we were juvenile delinquents or anything. I really tried to stay out of trouble for my grandparents’ sake.”
“I wish all kids tried to do that,” Rourke said. “It would make my job a hell of a lot easier.”
“I always felt sorry for my grandparents, because of my mother,” Jenny explained. With each breath she took, the panic in her chest was subsiding. “She broke their hearts. There was always a sadness in them—my grandfather, especially. When the doctors told him he wasn’t going to make it, he said maybe she would come back for his funeral.” Jenny stabbed the toe of her boot into the snow. She’d always felt she should somehow atone for her mother’s abandonment. “Since my mom would never come back to see them, I promised I would never leave them.” At a very young age, Jenny came to realize that her job was to keep her grandparents’ sadness away, and she had played that role for years. It felt strange, not having to do it anymore.
He was quiet for a few minutes. She did the self-check the doctor suggested. Moments ago, she’d been an eight out of ten. Now she’d subsided to a six, perhaps even a five or four, a huge relief. Maybe it was that half a pill she’d taken. Or maybe she was finally moving past this phase.
“There were several boxes of reports about my mother’s disappearance,” she said. “They were lost in the fire.”
“The department has everything archived,” Rourke assured her. “If you want, I can check and see what they’ve got in the records.”
“Thanks. I’ve been thinking about her more than I usually do, these past few days.” A sprinkle of snow flurries started. “It’s funny, but some part of me thought she might come back after my grandmother died.”
“Why is that funny?”
“Poor choice of words. Strange is more like it. It was strange for me to think of that. I mean, if she didn’t come back when her father got sick and died, and she didn’t come back after her mother had a stroke and we filed for bankruptcy…if those things didn’t bring her back, then it was silly to think Gram’s death would.”
He didn’t say anything, and she was glad. Because one conclusion was that her mother had never come back because she was dead. Jenny refused to think that. If Mariska had died, they would have heard.
“What’s ironic,” she said, “is that Philip showed up, out of nowhere, practically. Just when I think I’m completely alone in the world, this whole other group of relatives shows up.”
“You don’t ever have to be alone,” he said.
His words and the tone of his voice startled her. “Rourke?” she asked softly.
He seemed to catch himself, and then the Officer Friendly mask dropped back in place.
“What I mean is, you’re part of this town,” he explained. “Everybody here loves you. Your best friend is the mayor.”
“You’re right. I’m incredibly lucky.” She took in a long, slow breath that chilled her lungs.
“There’s very little I’d call good about what happened,” she said. “Finding myself homeless, with my family gone, is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
“You don’t have any enemies,” he pointed out.
“Unless they find out someone torched my house.”
“No one torched your house.”
“Well, one good thing came of this. Being homeless has opened up a world of possibilities for me.”
“Meaning?”
“I can start over with a clean slate, anywhere I want.” She watched his face but couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “That’s why leaving here is going to be so hard.”
He didn’t move or make a sound. In fact, it was so quiet that she could hear snowflakes landing on the fabric of her parka. She waited, breath held, anticipating his next question.
It never came. He simply stood there, stone-faced.
Maybe he hadn’t heard. “I said, I’m leaving Avalon.”
“I heard you.”
“And you don’t have anything to say about that?”
“Nope.”
“Rourke—”
“It’s your life. Your decision. I don’t get a say in it.”
Tell me you want me to stay, she thought. Just say the word, and I won’t go. Then she felt pathetic. If he did tell her that, would she stay? “Say something.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“I want to hear what you think of my plan.”
“Does it matter what I think?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you matter to me,” she blurted out. Then, in horror, she backpedaled. “It’s just that you’ve been so generous. Too generous. I feel bad about the way I’ve inconvenienced you.
I’ve imposed on you for too long. I can’t just move into your life, Rourke.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s wrong. We’ve each got our own lives to live, and we can’t keep cramping each other’s style.”
“So now I’m cramping your style.”
“No. My God, you are frustrating to talk to.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’ve decided to go to New York,” she said. The impact of the decision reverberated through her. This was the first time she’d said it aloud. “I’m going to be staying in Olivia’s old apartment. Philip Bellamy suggested it. He wants me to get to know him better, meet his sisters and spend some time with his parents—my grandparents—and…I don’t know. Once all my business is settled here, I’m going to take him up on it. Laura will handle the bakery and I’ll finally have a chance to get serious about my writing.”
She felt oddly breathless when she finished telling him the plan. Talking about it felt strange. This was going to happen. She was actually going to leave the place where she’d been born and raised, where she had lived her whole life. Unless Rourke gave her a reason to stay.
And why on earth would he do that? “I’m taking advantage of the freedom the fire has given me.”
“Sounds to me like you’re running away.” He opened her car door. “I’ll meet you back at my place,” he said.
Feeling unsettled, she got behind the wheel.
“See you later,” he added, leaning slightly into the car. “Seat belt,” he reminded her, then slammed the door shut.
Thirteen
S
o far at Avalon High School, Daisy had made two actual friends, and she hadn’t even had to lie to get them to like her. Of course, she’d held back certain information. She wasn’t sure whether or not that was considered lying. No, she decided. It wasn’t. However, she was keeping a few cards close to the vest. For the time being, anyway.
She was good at keeping secrets. Like when her parents started sleeping in separate rooms a year before the divorce, she hadn’t told anyone, not even her little brother. Or when Logan O’Donnell said he didn’t want anybody to know they were having sex, she’d totally kept it to herself, even though Logan was considered the hottest boy in the school.
Of course, hottest never meant the smartest, as she had soon found out. Just because a boy was sexy didn’t mean he knew how to practice safe sex.
Although, now that she looked back from her current perspective, she could clearly see that the truly stupid one in the relationship had been her. Even though it was dark, even though she’d wanted to do it so bad she nearly came out of her skin, she should have taken two seconds to check and make sure Logan actually knew how to put on a condom.