What's Left Behind (13 page)

Abby lifted her chin to the sky, the same cute way she’d scanned the horizon for yesterday’s storm. “When was the first time you cut yourself?”

The pulse in Tessa’s thigh jumped to life.

Tessa had been worried about this moment for years. She’d always known she’d do something careless. Slip on a bikini for the beach and fail to add swim shorts. Change in front of Dina and forget to turn to the wall. But she’d never imagined anyone asking for details. She’d never thought anyone would want to hear her story.

Pretty much the reason she’d done it in the first place.

“Um, I was thirteen, I guess.”

“Wow,” Abby said. “You were just a baby.”

“Not really,” she said, but then she considered one of her prized possessions.

When Tessa’s mother had taken off, she’d left behind the family photo albums, as if Meredith Lombardi had been trying to cast off not only her daughter and husband, but all of their memories. Whenever Tessa rifled through the albums, she’d focus on the last pictures of her mother. She’d wonder at Meredith’s seemingly genuine grin; she’d search for traces of sadness in her mother’s dark eyes. But she’d barely noticed herself at her mother’s side. Mouthful of braces, hair hanging in two sloppy French braids, and half a head shorter than her mother. At thirteen, she was always craning her neck and trying to catch her mother’s attention. Tessa had never put the two together.

Her mother had given up her baby.

“What happened?” Abby asked, jolting Tessa back to the pink-tiled bathroom Meredith had hated.

Tessa had rifled through her father’s side of the medicine cabinet, not caring if she was making a mess. Not caring if her anal father actually counted the replacement blades for the fancy shaver her mother had given him for Christmas, and found one missing. At first, she’d sort of hoped he did.

“I didn’t mean to,” Tessa said. Closer to the truth, she hadn’t meant for it to continue for so long. She hadn’t known the secret thing that was all hers, the one thing she’d thought she could control, would spiral out, until the cutting controlled her.

When Tessa tilted her head, the maple’s branches and leaves spun in a circle. Sunlight glinted into her eyes. She bent her head to her knees, wrapped her arms around her legs, held on.

Beside her, Abby secured her filmy white skirt around her knees. “Tessa, no. I meant, what happened to you before you hurt yourself? Was something going on in your life that upset you? Was someone bothering you?”

“My mother,” Tessa blurted out, and then wished she could take it back. Just reach out to the air in front of her, grab the words she’d spoken, stuff them in her mouth, and swallow them back down to her center. Keep them with the rest of the lies she told herself. The truth was, Meredith Lombardi had stopped being her mother the day she’d booked a flight across the Atlantic. So what if, nineteen years ago, she’d managed to squeeze Tessa out from between her legs? That was totally irrelevant.

Mother
was a verb, too.

Abby’s eyes bulged a tiny bit, her mouth set in a grim line. “Did she? Did your mother hurt you?”

“No. I mean, yes. I mean, she promised she wouldn’t leave. . . .” It sounded so stupid. Who cared if her mother had broken a promise? Everybody lied.

“And then,” Abby said, “she left?”

Tessa had awoken to the smell of the Belgian waffles Meredith cooked every Sunday. She didn’t cook a lot, so when she did, she made a big deal of it. Meredith cheated with Aunt Jemima mix, but she always heated real maple syrup, browned six sausages in a fry pan, and set the table with cloth napkins.

Dad had set the table and warmed the syrup. But a stack of waffles sat on a transparent-from-steam paper plate, drooping and cold, as though they’d come off the iron hours ago. And four shriveled sausages lingered in the coated fry pan, stale-smelling and sticky with congealed grease.

That day, Dad had become Professor Lombardi, a pontiff who’d stated the facts and clarified the new reality. Tessa’s mother was gone. Other than that, nothing had changed. Then Tessa had watched, transfixed, while her father choked down his breakfast and left the dirty dishes in the sink for her mother to scrub.

According to her father, Lombardis put their heads down, got their work done, and never whined.Who needed a mother when you had every advantage?

Tessa yanked up two handfuls of grass, tossed them on the ground. “Yeah, she left. She never came back. End of story.”

“If that was the end of the story, then why did you cut yourself?”

“Because,” Tessa said. “That was the only way I could tell.”

Abby’s gaze dropped onto Tessa’s scars. Several were white with age. But one stood out, pink-hued and angry and screaming for attention.

“I stopped a long time ago,” Tessa said. She knew that other girls in her grade would rush home from school, lock the bathroom door, push their jeans to their ankles, and steal a few precious minutes of self-service relief. That wasn’t her thing. Who would’ve thought, after everything that hurt, slicing through your flesh would come as the biggest relief of all? Who would’ve thought something that relieved her stress would create her greatest shame?

Until ninth-grade art class.

Who would’ve thought telling stories through sketches and painting would feel better than carving her flesh? She’d even tried her hand at sculpting reliefs, cutting stone to give the illusion of elevation. Those reliefs she didn’t have to hide.

Abby’s nostrils flared, as though sniffing out Tessa’s lie. “Are you sure about that? Because, if you’re still cutting . . . Sweetheart, it’s not good for you. I can get you help.”

“I’d never—” Nausea prickled the back of Tessa’s throat, the lining of her mouth. Her hand drifted to her belly. She knew she was losing her mind, because she was thinking of the last time that she and Luke, and Dina and Jon had played their favorite drinking game.

I never had sex in the university library.
Chug.
I never went down on my boyfriend while he was driving on Route 116.
Chug.

“I’d never hurt my baby,” Tessa said.

“I know that,” Abby said. “I know that’s not what you’d want.”

Why should Abby believe her? The evidence was as obvious as the pink welt on her thigh, a long slash above all the others that pointed straight to the day Luke died. Blood dripping down her leg and pooling in her boots, she’d hobbled down Orchard Hill to Health Services. She’d begged them not to tell.

Three weeks later, she’d returned for prenatal vitamins.

“Right after Luke died, I didn’t know I was pregnant.”

“I know, Tessa. You told me that before.”

“Right after Luke died,” Tessa repeated. “That was the last time I did it.”

Abby squinted, and then her features broadened with understanding.

“I’m not crazy,” Tessa said. But wasn’t that exactly what a crazy person would say?

“Want to know a secret?” Abby said. “After Luke died, I thought I was going crazy. I was feeling desperate. It’s hard to be the one left behind.”

“After. After I knew I was pregnant, I was freaking out. I thought I was being punished and I was going to lose the baby, too. But I never told anyone about the, you know, what I did.” Tessa waved at her thigh, wished it were that easy for her to dismiss the hideous scars, the pathetic story of her life. “I came close to telling my best friend, Dina, but I couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t want her to think I was bat shit.”

“You’re not bat shit, Tessa. It makes sense that after Luke died, you turned to something that once made you feel better. Even though that something was really, really bad for you.”

Tessa inched closer. “Promise?”

Abby held up her pinkie.

Tessa wrapped her pinkie around Abby’s, and a shiver skittered up her spine. “Did you and Luke used to pinkie swear when he was little?”

“If by
little,
you mean when he was old enough to shave. Then, yeah. Luke was a big fan of the pinkie swear.” Abby secured her arm around Tessa’s shoulder and gave her a squeeze, as though welcoming Tessa into the Luke-and-Abby pinkie swear club.

Tessa rested her head on Abby’s shoulder, inhaled her hair. Sunshine and summer sand, and something she could only describe as a deep blue sadness. She touched a fingertip to one of Abby’s shining princess curls. “Your hair’s pretty,” Tessa said, and then she started to cry.

“Sweetheart,” Abby said.

That only made Tessa cry harder.

The day she’d cut herself too deeply, she’d stripped down and made herself stand in the shower under burning hot water, gritting her teeth so that her dorm mates wouldn’t hear her cry out in pain. Then she shut off the water and leaned against the dirty shower stall, shivering, until brown dots no longer danced before her vision and she was reasonably sure she wouldn’t pass out. She slapped a gauze pad on her thigh and immediately soaked through it, but the wet cotton provided enough of a cushion so she could struggle into a pair of sweats. Through the darkness, the light from Health Services shone like a beacon, a promise of relief.

A stocky nurse with lipstick on her teeth tore the bloody pad from Tessa’s leg and exposed her shame to the sting of the air. “Well, well. What do we have here?” she’d said, widening her eyes to take in the horror show. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself, young lady.”

Now, Abby rubbed Tessa’s back, rocked slightly to a rhythm both foreign and familiar to Tessa, like hearing a song you used to know. Heat came off Tessa’s body, waves and waves of heat that prickled her skin, coated her with sweat, and lightened her even better than creating art. Her pulse relaxed, settled. Lemons and summer sand. The curve of Abby’s neck. The pressure of Abby’s hand between her shoulders.

Who would’ve thought telling Abby about the second-to-worst thing Tessa had ever done would give her so much relief?

T
he sadness of the day lingered, sticky as the homemade peppermint-candy ice cream Abby and Tessa had churned under the shade tree. Abby told Tessa the treat was for Briar Rose guests, too. That wasn’t a lie. But the chore was primarily a means to an end. Half an hour of rocking wasn’t nearly enough time to offset years of Tessa’s emotional and physical scarring.

In lieu of lunch, Abby and Tessa had gobbled ice cream, racing against the melting. Then they’d taken a long, leisurely walk into town, both of them unusually quiet. Abby sensed that Tessa had had enough sharing for one day, and they hadn’t spoken again about the cutting. But even now, Tessa’s revelation niggled Abby, like a canker your tongue couldn’t resist worrying.

Why would someone hurting you make you want to turn around and hurt yourself? After Luke’s memorial, Abby had been in that dark place, wanting to drown out her pain by drowning herself. She knew she’d never allow a friend—or a stranger, for that matter—to contemplate such selfish foolishness. Why was it so difficult to show yourself the same compassion?

Abby wanted to sit cross-legged in the middle of the floor and have herself a good cry until she’d drained herself of every emotion. Instead, she’d taken a long shower, fluffed and arranged herself into her version of a bombshell. A bombshell looking forward to her date with Rob and a little no-drama letting off steam.

That thought doubled the pressure.

Abby wore her hair down, thanks to copious quantities of summer curl-taming gel and spray. Gray eye shadow, once relegated to the back of her medicine cabinet, now graced her lids, highlighting her blue eyes. Mascara darkened her pale lashes. And she’d made sure she’d brushed the lint off the berry lipstick that lived at the bottom of her pocketbook before gliding the balm across her lips. She wore a hot-pink give-the-girls-some-attention sleeveless T-shirt and tight dark-wash jeans she’d purchased last summer.

She eyed the shoe choices. Flats were all wrong, but wear too high of a heel and you ran the risk of crossing the line from slightly sexy to seriously slutty. Considering she hadn’t had sex in two years, she didn’t want Rob to accuse her of false advertising. With that in mind, she shrugged into the white short-sleeved cardigan she’d, moments ago, slung across the arm of her bedroom’s peach club chair beside the seat’s pile of rejected T-shirts and blouses. On the dresser, her cell buzzed. Celeste smirked at her from the photo window, perpetually on the cusp of speaking her mind.

“Heels or flats,” Abby said, not bothering with a hello.

“Inch and a half. Two at most,” Celeste said.

“You think three inches is too slutty?”

“Too much for you to handle,” Celeste said. “But take off the damn cardigan.”

Abby clasped the sweater’s cotton neck, exaggerated a gasp. “I feel like you’ve known me forever.”

Abby had known Celeste long enough to be certain she was smiling through the phone. “Is that your best line?” Celeste said. “Is that what you’re going to use on Rob to seduce him on your first official date?”

“Yeah, I’m having a little trouble with that part.”

“What do you mean?”

Abby conjured the image of Hailstorm Rob, rain-soaked and sexy. When she pictured the way he’d deliberately run his gaze over her body, her T-shirt tightened against her chest and her back arched into a luxurious stretch. She wanted more. “Well . . . if this is our first date, then polite dinner conversation should lead to a polite truck conversation. Which leads to a walk to my front door and a good-night kiss. Absolutely no tongue permitted. But since we’ve kind of sort of actually been dating for over a month . . .”

“And his tongue has already familiarized itself with the inside of your mouth.”

“Right.”

“Huh,” Celeste said. “I see your dilemma.”

Sadie peeked out from under the pile of Abby’s castaway tops and jumped to the floor. The cat glanced up at Abby and then launched into a full-throated purr. She wound around Abby’s jeans leg, no doubt marking the dark-wash with several long gray hairs.
You’re mine,
she seemed to say.

If Rob didn’t work out, at least Abby still had Sadie. No matter how many men came and went, Abby could always depend on her cat to love her unconditionally. As long as Abby plied Sadie with foil balls, rainbow ribbons, and chicken-and-brown-rice kibble, no one got hurt.

“You still there?” Abby asked.

“I’m thinking! Okay, here we go. You need to seek a middle ground. More than a kiss, but less than full-out boinking.”

“Can you be more specific? I mean, there are a lot of middle ground options.”

“Hand jobs, bl—”

“Celeste! I meant, above or below the waist?” She couldn’t fault Celeste for regressing to high-school talk and not realize Abby had slid down that slippery slope all the way into middle-school rhetoric. Abby’s cheeks tightened, and a flush bloomed across her chest. She yanked off her cardigan and tossed it onto the rest of the discarded tops. Sadie dashed for the sweater, pounced atop the pile. “Never mind. I’m probably worrying for nothing. Rob’s a complete gentleman.”

“Sure, Rob’s a gentleman, emphasis on
man.
I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

“Think he’s noticed my secret weapons?” Abby said.

“Girlfriend,” Celeste said, sprinkling a dash of city attitude. “Yesterday, everybody noticed your secret weapons. But that’s not what I meant. Whenever Rob talks about you, he gets this goofy grin on his face. He’s got a thing for you, Abby.”

And she had a thing for Rob. Then why was she holding on to the bed post and rocking? She bit the flesh at the base of her thumb, thought of Tessa, and let go. She rubbed the smudge of lipstick off her thumb. “Can I ask you something?”

An oven timer dinged in the background, one of the many bells and whistles that kept Celeste’s bakery running and her shelves stocked with pastries. “You’ve got ninety seconds.”

Abby sighed.

“Eighty-five.”

Abby looked to the ceiling, exasperated with herself, not Celeste. “Do you think Rob’s seeing anyone else?”

“Nope.”

“You answered awfully fast.”

“Seven days a week, Rob comes down for coffee and muffins at seven. Unless he’s out with you, he returns twelve hours later for his decaf. No one goes into his apartment, no one ever comes out. Kind of like Willy Wonka’s factory. Oh, yeah, except for that one time he brought his daughter by. Definitely a daddy’s girl.”

“You met Rob’s daughter?”

A buzzer thrummed through the phone line, then the creak of a stainless-steel oven door opening on its hinges.

“Do me a favor and just go with it,” Celeste said, one of the phrases Abby herself used time and again over her many years of dating. So why was she getting all worked up about this one date? Why was she wondering when
she’d
get to meet Rob’s daughter?

“I liked dating Rob unofficially better. Official means I could mess up. Official means I have something to lose.” Abby usually felt better when she came clean with Celeste. This time, her stomach tensed, as though trying to regain the balance of pretending not to care.

“You’re not going to mess up.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because,” Celeste said. “Rob’s the real deal, one of the good guys. That said, if you do end up boinking Rob, tell me all about it.”

“I most certainly will not!”

“Boink or tell?” Celeste said.

“Love you,” Abby said.

“Love you more.” Celeste hung up the phone, leaving Abby with a goofy grin on her face.

Abby stepped into the one-and-a-half-inch heels, opened her closet door to check out her reflection, and frowned. She kicked off the low sandals and strapped her feet into the three-inch heels, turned from side to side. The extra inch and a half straightened her posture, lengthened her legs, and boosted her confidence.

“I’ll show Celeste how much I can handle,” Abby told Sadie. “But the cardigan stays.” Abby eased the sweater out from under Sadie’s belly and past her swiping paws. Sadie angled Abby her best look of reproach. “Lily Beth always said a girl should leave something to the imagination.”

Abby slipped her pocketbook onto her shoulder, the sweater over her arm, and opened her bedroom door to find Tessa with her fist raised to knock. “Sweetheart,” Abby said, as if she’d been calling Tessa that forever.

The only thing that felt strange to Abby was the fact it didn’t. “I was about to go hunt you down.”

Abby had been looking forward to her date all day, but she wanted to make sure Tessa was all right. Abby understood Tessa had last hurt herself during a time of extreme stress. She believed Tessa when she’d told her she wouldn’t do it again. But Abby also understood how hard it must’ve been for Tessa to share a secret, after having kept it to herself for so many years. And, frankly, the fact Tessa had chosen to share with her, of all people, humbled Abby. The sharing, the emotional responsibility, made her feel like a mother again.

Tessa glanced at Abby’s pocketbook. “You’re going out?”

A pang tightened Abby’s stomach, even though she was sure she’d told Tessa about her date. “I have plans, but I can cancel them.”

Tessa leaned against the door frame, reminding Abby how tired she’d get when she’d been expecting Luke. Not normal end-of-day fatigue. That would’ve been a pleasure. More like, scrape-self-off-chair-and-drag-to-bed-at-six exhaustion.

It was already six-thirty.

“Come in before you fall asleep standing up.” Abby moved aside, and Tessa slipped into her bedroom, where Sadie occupied the only chair. “Servant to a cat,” Abby said, and she patted her bed. “Second-best seat in the room?”

“Oh, uh. I’m kind of on my way out, too. Just came to tell you.”

“Really?” Abby said. Tessa had pulled her hair into a high ponytail, and her face glowed, freshly scrubbed, as though she’d washed up for bed. Only a skim of gloss shined her lips. She wore Bermuda-length shorts, a pink hoodie, and sparkly pastel flip-flops, her usual hang-around outfit. “Going anywhere special?”

“Spinney’s?”

Then she was dressed appropriately. “Food’s always great there. And they’ve a nice view. You may want to avoid anything fried, though. Not great for indigestion. Going with anyone special?” Abby asked, thinking Hannah the most obvious choice. She’d noticed the girls chitchatting by the dining room fireplace after Hannah was off work. And she’d seen them actively noticing Jordan, a good-looking young man in his early twenties who’d been visiting the B&B with his middle-aged parents.

“An older guy,” Tessa said, and her entire countenance brightened.

“J-Jordan?” Abby said, tripping over his name. Somewhere in her mind Abby acknowledged that one day Tessa would get over her son and find another man to care for. But not today. Certainly not while she was carrying Luke’s child.

“No! Jordan’s cute. But this guy is way older.”

Abby should call Rob, tell him Tessa needed her. Clearly the girl time they’d had this afternoon hadn’t been enough after their tree-side conversation. Tessa needed a lot more of her attention. Abby would find a suitably sweet romantic comedy, she’d pop popcorn, encourage Tessa to open up about her father.

“C’mon, Abby,” Tessa said, putting on a fake air of annoyance. “You know who he is. Guy’s old enough to be a grandfather.”

“Charlie!” Abby said, not because her brain had finally sputtered to life, but because the
older man
was standing in the doorway to her bedroom. A doorway through which, ever since Charlie’s two-years-ago expulsion, Abby hadn’t allowed anyone to trespass.

Until Tessa.

“Divider was open,” Charlie said. “Hope you don’t mind, I let myself in.”

Abby had asked Tessa to close the pocket door when coming and going from the private wing of the house. She’d forgotten how conveniently forgetful teenagers could be when it pertained to house rules that inconvenienced them.

Probably not fair, since Charlie wasn’t any good at following her rules either. Yesterday, he’d taken her dress selection as an invitation to ogle her, their shared grief as an opportunity to try and take her hand, their history as justification for throwing a towel over her and ushering her away from Rob.

To the untrained eye, it might’ve looked as though Charlie had been acting the part of the overprotective mama bear, rather than the part he’d played for years. Never more interested than when Abby wasn’t.

The crease in Charlie’s weekend khakis was fresh-pressed. His hair appeared casual and windblown, although Abby knew he bothered with hair gel to get that effect. He didn’t wear cologne, thank goodness. But, today, his aftershave carried a hint of lime, the spray scent he’d worn when they were teens.

Charlie whipped out two boxes from behind his back. He handed the smaller beribboned tan box to Tessa, the larger to Abby.

Abby untied the ribbon and flipped open the lid to reveal two dozen gourmet truffles. The type made with good dark chocolate and heavy cream, infused with vanilla, and finished with crystallized ginger. The variety she’d told Charlie she preferred when he’d, instead, presented her with that pathetic red heart-shaped box of waxy chocolates.Who the hell was dumb enough to give his pregnant girlfriend a jumbo heart when he was leaving her?

She’d shared that thought with Charlie, too.

“Better late than never?” Charlie said.

Abby looked to the ceiling, making sure no tears would fall. She didn’t need Charlie’s too-little too-late apology. But she would’ve liked to travel back in time to give the-girl-she’d-been a big hug. Better yet, she would’ve liked to expel that girl from her heart and soul. “Thank you. You’ve quite the memory.”

“Not as good as yours,” Charlie said. “My warning to you, Tessa. Never cross Abby. She holds a grudge like nobody’s business. She never forgives.”

“That’s not fair.”

Charlie pressed a hand against the door frame, as though he might step into her bedroom, and Abby blocked his path.

“Not fair,” Charlie said, “but it’s true.”

Tessa came up behind Abby and placed a hand on her shoulder, as if to comfort her. Then Tessa stood on tiptoe and kissed Charlie on the cheek, as though she were trying to placate him, too. “Thanks for the truffles,” she said. “They look awesome.”