Wishing on Willows: A Novel (34 page)

She kissed the crown of Caleb’s head, pressing her lips against his flyaway cowlick. It was hard to believe, but almost four years ago one of those little ones had been him. Time moved at such an odd, disorienting speed—stalling in place, then lurching forward in spurts and stammers. Back when
the pain of losing Micah had been fresh and sharp, she’d prayed for time to hurry. To drag her away. But somewhere along the line, as time pulled her further and further from the life she’d dreamed, her prayers had changed.

Had it really been four and a half years since Micah’s death? Was her baby boy really going to start preschool in the fall?

A nurse walked around the corner. When she saw Caleb, she bent over her knees and tucked her clasped hands between her thighs. “This handsome fellow looks familiar. Weren’t you peeking in the window a little bit ago?”

Caleb smiled his shy smile, the one that poked at his lips but didn’t come out all the way.

“Looks like somebody’s ready to be a big brother.” She winked at Robin. “He was just here with his daddy looking at the babies.”

His daddy?

The woman ruffled Caleb’s hair and disappeared around the corner.

Robin’s confusion lifted and she took a step after the nurse to clear up the misunderstanding, but a picture flashed in her mind and held her in place. An image of Caleb on Ian’s shoulders, looking into the nursery at a baby swaddled in pink, with Ian’s eyes and Robin’s dark hair. Ian pointed at the tiny bundle, a gold ring circling the finger on his left hand. Robin jerked, as if the picture had eight legs and scurried up her arm.

She pushed the image away and convinced herself it came because she’d seen Ian holding Caleb a few minutes ago and these babies did funny things to her heart. That’s all it was. She touched Caleb’s shoulder. “Do you want to go say good-bye to Uncle Evan and Aunt Bethy before we go?”

He gave an enthusiastic nod. “Is Leesey all better now?”

“The doctors are giving her medicine.”

She led him past the nurses’ station, down the long corridor, and turned into room forty, where Evan wrapped his strong arm around Bethany’s waist as she bent over the crib and stroked Elyse’s cherub face. Evan rested his chin on Bethany’s shoulder and whispered something into her ear. She turned her face toward his, and he kissed the worried crease between her
eyebrows. A soft, tender kiss while Elyse slept below them. A three-part family wrapped in a posture of intimacy. Robin’s chest squeezed. Evan and Bethany were a complete family, while Robin scrambled to fill the missing hole in her own. No husband. No Daddy tiger.

Exhausted from its day of terror, the puppy slept in Robin’s arms. Her four-legged, furry excuse. Caleb wouldn’t be happy when he woke up, but what else was she supposed to do? She couldn’t keep it. And for whatever reason, she had to see Ian. She had to know why he left the hospital in such a hurry. As soon as Amanda got home and Caleb was asleep, she got in her car and drove to Bernie’s, where apparently the front door was left unlocked after hours.

Robin glanced at her watch and pressed her ear to Ian’s door. It was silent inside, but light flickered from the thin strip of space between the door and the floor, as if he had the television on mute. She stepped back, reconsidering. This was stupid. Showing up on Ian’s doorstep so late at night. She clutched the sleeping puppy to her chest and turned toward the staircase. If she left now, nobody would have to know about her strange visit. But a handle clicked and the door groaned open behind her.

She glanced over her shoulder.

Ian stood in the doorway, his carefully pressed shirt now rumpled and untucked. A tuft of hair stuck up from the back of his head, as if he’d been lying on his pillow for too long, and a shadow lined his jaw, hinting at the thick beard that could grow should he ever allow it. His eyes were big, wide, and somehow lost. She’d never seen him so completely disheveled or so completely attractive.

“I wanted to bring back—”

He held his finger up to his lips. “Bernie’s a really light sleeper,” he whispered. He nodded toward his room and walked inside. A nonverbal invitation. Trapped between his door and the stairs, Robin stood very still, the
safe and the uncertain going to battle. Half of her itched to follow him, the other grasped for an escape. She took a deep breath and scratched the itch.

The room was small, barely big enough to hold an armoire, a full-sized bed, and a desk. No nightstand. Not even an extra chair. She deposited the puppy on the mattress and Ian clicked the door softly behind her. “It’s not the Marriott, but it works.”

She stayed where she was, standing at the foot of the bed. If she stepped any closer, he’d hear the pathetic sound of her hammering heart.

“Did she put you in the smallest room?” she asked.

“She claims it’s the biggest.” The puppy turned in a circle, then curled into a ball. Ian brought his hand to the back of his head and smoothed down his hair, but it sprung back as soon as he took his palm away. “Sorry it didn’t work out.”

“To be fair, you did warn me.”

He smiled. The effort stopped short of crinkling his eyes, reminding her why she came. She couldn’t get the look he’d given her at the hospital out of her head. And now he wore the same one.

He scratched the dog’s scruff. “I could have picked him up tomorrow.”

“I’m not sure either of us would have survived.”

He laughed an empty laugh.

“What will you do with him?” she asked.

“The breeder seemed like a nice lady. I’m sure she’ll let me take him back.”

“That’s good.” She watched him pet the dog’s ears, thumbing her naked ring finger. “Hey, Ian?”

“Hmm?”

“I wanted to thank you again. For looking after Caleb.” She stared down at the fuzzy carpet. “I also wanted to apologize.”

“For?”

“You don’t like hospitals very much, do you?”

“Was it that obvious?”

Robin bent her ankles out, so that her weight rested on the outside edges of her unlaced tennis shoes. “Is it because of your mom?”

Ian looked up from the floor. “How do you know about my mom?”

“Amanda’s my roommate and she’s not exactly the type to keep things to herself.” When Robin told Amanda about Ian’s odd reaction at the hospital, Amanda suggested it might have something to do with his mother’s cancer. The news rocked Robin to her core. She had no idea his mother was sick. Then she felt selfish for not knowing. Ian had gone out of his way to ask about her mother and all this time, Robin hadn’t inquired once about Ian’s family.

He walked to the opened window, the thin drapes lifting from the breeze. Robin stepped closer, until the night settled over the tops of her shoes. As if sensing her nearness, he turned and looked at her with eyes so lost she felt a little lost herself.

“She’s not doing well?”

“No.”

“I’m really sorry.”

He shrugged. “It’s not your fault.”

“I know, but I’m still sorry.”

“I’m determined to take your café and you come here to express your sympathy about my mom.” He shook his head, like he couldn’t make sense of her apology. “You’re a hard woman to figure out.”

“Not that hard.”

He touched the drape. “She had cancer when I was in high school. But my dad got her the best treatment and it went into remission for a long time.”

“Do you have any siblings?” After her own mother died, she’d longed for a sister or a brother, somebody to share her grief, somebody to help her understand it, somebody who could shape her sorrow into words. Bethany grieved, but it wasn’t the same. “Maybe talking to one of them would help.”

He let go of the drape and sat in the cove of the window. “I have a younger sister.”

She took a step closer.

“Bailey got married last month.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. “To this wealthy trust-fund guy from Brown. I wasn’t sure about him at first, but he’s pretty solid. Right now she’s finishing her honeymoon
in Europe.” He wrapped his hand around the back of his neck. “Even though she’s married, she still seems like a kid, you know? I don’t want her to worry about this.”

It was peculiar. Listening as Ian unveiled this piece of himself. Envisioning his human side. Not as a businessman trying to buy out her café, but as an older brother and a son. Hearing Ian talk about his family made him so … real. Her fingers twitched. What would it feel like to place them on his shoulder? She tucked her hand deeper into her pocket, keeping it safe from temptation.

“My mother isn’t the reason I was acting weird at the hospital.”

“It wasn’t?” She took another step closer, her insides wobbling.

“Tomorrow’s Father’s Day.”

“Yeah.”

He looked up from the ground. “I was supposed to be a dad.”

Robin tripped over the hollow sound of Ian’s voice. He was supposed to be a dad? When? How? She replayed the statement several times, trying to figure out what it meant.

“Did Amanda also tell you I’m divorced?”

She tried to put his words together, but they kept slipping from her grasp. Ian was divorced. Which meant … Robin thought about the scare she had with Caleb. She’d come so close to miscarrying her son. It had been absolutely terrifying. Had Ian and his ex-wife lost a baby?

He set his elbows on his knees and massaged his palms. “Two years ago, my wife got pregnant. When she told me, I was thrilled. I always wanted to be a dad, you know? And I thought it might fix whatever was wrong in our marriage. But she kept telling me she wasn’t ready to be a mom.”

Robin’s heart stilled. Ian’s wife didn’t miscarry.

“But I thought they were just words. I thought she’d get over it. I never suspected …” He stopped his palm massaging and dug finger paths through his hair. “She didn’t want to tell anyone about the pregnancy until the second trimester. Not even our parents. So we kept it a secret. And one day, on my way home from work, I bought this silly little stuffed rabbit at the gas station, thinking it might cheer her up. When I got home, the baby was gone.”

Pain drew her closer. It was as if God had flipped over the fabric of his life and showed her the underside, where everything was twisted and reversed. A father without a child. A child without a father. She sat beside him.

“I should have seen it coming.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” She’d spent too much energy thinking the same thing. That maybe if she’d called Micah at work that day, she would have noticed something funny in his speech or tone. Maybe he would have complained about a headache and she would have insisted he go to the hospital. It didn’t take long to drown in the maybes.

“My father wouldn’t have let it happen.”

“Ian …” But what was there to say? What words could she possibly offer? That nobody—including his father—had that much power? That his child was in heaven? That they lived in a fallen world and things like this happened? Those things, no matter how true, had offered her little comfort back then, and would offer him no comfort now.

“The kid would be close to a year and a half. And today, all I could think was that we’d probably have a puppy by now. I always had a dog growing up.”

She reached out and touched his knee.

He looked down at his leg—at the place where her palm touched his jeans—and took her hand, like he did earlier in her kitchen, only this time she didn’t pull away. Her breathing turned shallow, uneven. He turned toward her, so close she could see specks of honey floating in the brown of his eyes. “What happened to your ring, Robin?”

“I threw it in the middle of the pond.” Her heart thudded in the hollow of her clavicle. She wanted to cover it up, but she didn’t want to take her hand away from his.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” Nothing made sense anymore. She only knew that in this moment, sitting in the nook of Bernie’s window, she understood Ian. Or at least a part of him.

“But it was your mother’s.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Really.”

He traced her knuckles with his thumb and goose bumps danced up her skin. She started to pull her hand away, but he circled her wrist and turned up her palm and rubbed his thumb over the frantic tapping of her pulse. And before she could think, before she could reconsider, she kissed him.

Attraction and fear and longing burst and pinged and pecked at her heart. She was kissing a man. He was kissing her back, and her pulse was pounding. He drew her closer and she let herself be drawn. But then he stopped. And her senses flailed.

A light tapping broke through her confusion. Robin jumped up and pressed her hand against her lips, her cheeks flooding with heat. What was she doing, kissing a man she was supposed to be fighting? What was she doing kissing a man at all? She hurried to the door and flung it open. Bernie stood on the other side with rollers in her hair, nightgown stopping short of her bony ankles, a scrawny black cat clutched under her arm.

Robin brushed past the old woman and took the stairs two at a time. When she got to the bottom, she heard Bernie’s voice. “I thought I heard the television.”

Early-morning dew pressed into the balls of Robin’s feet. The lid to the mailbox creaked as she pulled out the lump of mail she’d neglected over the past two days. She frowned. People weren’t supposed to deal with mail on Sundays, but then again, people didn’t usually wait until Sunday to check it. With her coffee in one hand and the mail in the other, she padded across the walkway and sat down on the front stoop.

The quiet calmness of a June morning surrounded her. The sun hid in the east, a pink ball hovering over the horizon. Cool humidity hinted at the impending heat. She set her elbows on her knees and buried her face in her hands.

Lord, give me peace
.

She’d repeated the same prayer over and over last night, like counting sheep, until sleep came sometime past midnight. Six hours later, she awoke with the same prayer on her lips. But peace eluded her. Fear kept her thoughts hyped up on adrenaline. They refused to rest, and so, too, did Ian’s face, the story of his mother, the child that was taken away from him.

The memory of that kiss …

Robin rubbed sleep from her eyes and stared at the ground between her toes. Several times last night, she’d considered flinging off the covers and going into Amanda’s room. Waking her up and telling her everything. But once she told Amanda, there’d be no going back, no retreating to safety.