A Broken Kind of Beautiful (29 page)

“So you asked me?” Ivy flung her hand against her chest. “There are a million models out there. Any one of them could have sufficed.”

“I didn’t want any of them. I wanted you.”

“I’m not your daughter.”

Marilyn’s shoulders deflated. “I know.”

“So what is this, then? Am I a pity project for you—Marilyn the Martyr? Because if that’s what this is, I don’t want your pity.”

Marilyn’s face drained of color. “You’ve never been a project.”

“He visited the children several times … She talked about him like he was some kind of hero … He visited the children several times …”
Ivy looked down at her hands: her father’s pinkies, her mother’s palms. How could Marilyn even stand to look at her? “All those years he would come to us—to her—and you let him back into your bed.”

Davis stepped forward. “Ivy, that’s enough—”

Marilyn held up her hand, shushing his protest.

The steam of emotions pushed against Ivy’s throat—an accumulation of suppressed hurt and hatred. “He might not have loved me, but it sure didn’t seem like he loved you much either.”

“Ivy.”

“Davis, please go.” Marilyn’s voice cracked.

He stood in place, unmoving. Until Marilyn said his name again and his retreating footsteps echoed in the cavernous room.

“Why did you take him back?”

“He apologized.”

“And that made everything better?”

“No, of course not.” Marilyn pressed her fingers against her lips and looked out the sliding glass door that led to the courtyard. “I didn’t want to forgive him. You have no idea how much I didn’t want to, but every time I packed my bags, I felt God telling me to stay, even if I couldn’t always love him.”

“He slept with another woman. He cheated on you.”

“He was sorry.”

“Yeah.” Ivy swallowed the tremor in her voice. “He was sorry about me.”

Marilyn shook her head. “That’s not what I meant.”

“But it’s true.”

They were words Marilyn couldn’t negate, no matter how much it looked as though they tortured her. James not only didn’t love Ivy; her very existence inconvenienced him.

“He visited the children several times … She talked about him like he was some kind of hero … He visited the children several times …”

Ivy’s eyes blurred. She pressed her lips together, gathering Connie’s words to her chest, wrapping them around her wounds like dirty bandages. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Sweetheart, there is nothing wrong with you.”

“Then how could he love those kids when he never looked at me for more than a second?”

“What kids?”

“The kids at the hospital.”

“Oh, Ivy …”

She turned from Marilyn’s sympathy. She didn’t want it.

Marilyn touched her shoulder.

Ivy wrapped her arms around her waist and pulled away. And then Marilyn’s touch was gone, and Ivy felt so alone—with her grief, with her thoughts, with the truth.

Her father wasn’t a villain. Because villains didn’t write checks to good
causes. Villains didn’t spend time with sick kids in hospitals. Ivy had no idea what to do with this new information. She had no idea what to do with him. Knowing he loved her mother and Marilyn was bad enough, but knowing he visited the mayor’s daughter? Knowing he spent time with kids who were no more than strangers? It made his rejection so much less about him and so much more about her.

“Visiting those children was nothing more than an act of penance at the end of a dying man’s life. He was driven by guilt, not love. And a desire to be needed.”

I needed him
.

The words hung like stagnant air in her lungs. She couldn’t speak them. She couldn’t give them a voice.

“Ivy, if you found out James loved you, would that make a difference? Would it fix whatever’s broken?”

Ivy turned around.

“If we could bring your father back from the dead and you could ask him these questions, would you find whatever it is you’re looking for?”

Silence followed the question. It was much, much too heavy.

Marilyn reached for Ivy’s arm, but Ivy shivered and withdrew.

“He was a man. A flawed, broken, selfish man who didn’t know what he had even when you were right under his nose. He failed me and he failed you. Neither of us will get what we’re looking for from him.” With pinched eyes, Marilyn turned around and walked away.

Ivy stared at the empty counter. Marilyn was right. All the answers in the world. They wouldn’t be enough. They’d be too little, too late.

Davis rocked on the front porch swing, swatting mosquitoes as waterlogged clouds rolled across the horizon and Ivy’s sharp accusations rolled through his mind. A tropical storm hit the North Carolina coast last week, and another was scheduled to reach land somewhere along Georgia in a few days.
He wrapped his fingers around the wooden armrest and let the creak of the springs and the croaking of bullfrogs sing him a Lowcountry lullaby. A breeze thick with humidity rustled the Spanish moss hanging from the ancient oak towering at the edge of Marilyn’s lawn.

For the past couple of years, James had siphoned a generous portion of his money into the building and maintenance of the children’s wing at the county hospital, but Davis had no idea the man visited the place. It didn’t seem like something James would do, but then Davis never really knew him that well. Sure, they attended the same family functions and on occasion ate family dinners together, but that did not lend itself to really knowing a person. Besides the obvious—good looks, corporate success, and Grandfather’s favor—he never understood what Aunt Marilyn saw in the guy.

Now Ivy was inside, taking out whatever anger she felt toward James on Marilyn. His aunt didn’t deserve to play the scapegoat. But Ivy sure didn’t deserve to get landed with a father like James. Davis closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the rocker, conjuring an image of her ashen face on the drive from the marina. The white patches along her knuckles as she pressed her fingers on to the window ledge.

The front door opened, followed by the shutting of the storm door. The cushion beside him sank and the swing squeaked. A cold hand patted his knee. He opened one eye and spotted Marilyn’s familiar wedding band.

“That girl’s in a world of hurt,” she said.

He crossed his ankles. “What about you?”

“I’ll be fine.” But even as she said it, tears gathered in her eyes.

They swung in silence, questions building in Davis’s mind as Marilyn stared down the long drive, out into the empty street. The heat had swept the neighbors off their porches and inside to cooler air. Or maybe they were all at the oyster roast. “Marilyn?”

“Yes?”

“Why did you invite Ivy down here?”

She didn’t answer at first. In fact, she waited so long Davis wondered if
she would answer at all. But then, “The minute I first laid eyes on Ivy was the minute God taught me I didn’t have to bear a child to have a child.”

“What do you mean?”

Her brow furrowed. “For reasons I’ll never know, I fell in love with a daughter that belonged to another woman. I know it doesn’t make any sense. It drives your grandfather crazy, and a lot of the time, I have no idea what God is up to, but …” She held up her hands, palms facing the sky, and let out a long sigh. Like finishing her thought was too tiring. Or maybe too confusing. “I wish James would have had more time. I wish I could have gotten Ivy here before he died. I wish he would have reached out and tried to contact her in New York.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“His past. Her rejection. A million and one other things, I’m sure. I think he thought he’d lost the right to reconcile with Ivy a long time ago, so he didn’t try. I sure wish he would have.” Marilyn batted her hand as if to shoo it all away. “You know what your Grandma Eleanor would say.”

“ ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’ ”

She caught a stray tear on her knuckle. “I should have thought up this whole wedding dress campaign while James was still alive and gotten Ivy down here whether he thought he deserved it or not.”

“From what I know of Ivy, I don’t think she would have come.”

Marilyn set her hand against her chest. “I don’t know, Davis. I can’t explain it. With him gone, I want her here. It feels right.”

His skin prickled. He couldn’t explain it either, but Marilyn’s words resonated. It did feel right. “Aunt Marilyn?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think she’ll be okay?”

She patted his knee again. “I hope so. But right now, it sure doesn’t feel like it.”

Ivy set her hand on top of Marilyn’s box and stared into the heavy, ornate mirror. Her perfect reflection mocked her.

Who was she?

Closing her eyes, she tossed around descriptors inside the darkness.
Model. Beautiful. Alluring. Desirable
. But they all fell victim to gravity, falling to the ground like a handful of rocks. She sank to the floor, wrapped her arms around her legs, and tried to picture the James she thought she knew visiting sick children at the hospital.

“What do I do with you now?”

Was it possible to be a lousy father but a decent man? Did being a decent man matter—did it balance the scales—when you were the daughter? She hugged her knees tighter, trying to block the memories, but they slithered closer, wrapping around her mind and squeezing until she was no longer sitting on the floor of her temporary apartment but crouched in the bedroom of her childhood condominium, knobby knees pressing into her mattress, horns blaring from the Chicago street outside her window, a crisp, autumn breeze whapping at her blinds.

Mom shouted in the hallway.
“I might as well kill myself and get it over with!”

Ivy catapulted across the room and stuck her face to the crack between the door and wall, her little-girl heart punching bruises against her chest. Mom wouldn’t kill herself. She couldn’t. Mom was all Ivy had in the world. Nobody loved her better or even at all. She wanted to sprint into the hallway and beg James to pay attention to her mother. To kiss her. To love her. To do whatever he needed to do to take those words away.

Instead, he grabbed Mom’s wrist.
“Keep your voice down, Renee. Do you want your daughter to hear you?”

“Your daughter! Do you hear yourself? She’s yours too, James. She’s ours. We made her together, yet you act like she doesn’t exist. Doesn’t she mean anything to you? Don’t I mean anything to you?”
Mom wrenched her hand away from him and stumbled out of sight.

There was a loud crash, like glass smashing into teeny tiny pieces.

Ivy flung open the door and flew out into the hallway. Mom didn’t have many rules. One of them, however, was staying in her bedroom anytime James came to visit. But Ivy couldn’t obey that rule. Not now. She rounded the corner and found them squaring off, Mom with a knife clutched to her chest. The sharpened blade made Ivy’s breath come too quick.

“Don’t be stupid, Renee. Put the knife down.”

“Cutting out my heart isn’t stupid. Not when you’ve already done it!”

Ivy clamped her hands over her ears. She hated when her mother got this way. Whenever she drank from the bottles in the locked cupboard, she turned into a different person. And whenever her father stayed away for long stretches of time, her mother took to drinking from those bottles. The last time he’d come had been the beginning of Ivy’s summer break, which meant Mom had been taking drinks from the cupboard a lot lately.

James stepped closer—a slow, hesitant step.
“You’re drunk, Renee. You’re not thinking straight.”

“You used to love me. You used to want me. You used to burn with passion for me. I want to know what changed. Do you love Marilyn more than me?”

“She’s my wife.”

Ivy pressed her hands tighter against her ears. She wanted to rewind. Make him take it back. Make him promise he didn’t mean it. Couldn’t he see that if he would simply promise his love everything would be better?

Her mother let out a frantic laugh. Ivy closed her eyes, counted backward from ten. Her school guidance counselor had come to her third-grade classroom the week before and had told Ivy and her classmates that counting backward from ten helped most things. She reached seven when a door slammed. James stood in front of her. It was the closest he’d ever been.