Distant Shores (25 page)

“We missed you,” Jamie said simply, kicking off her shoes. She pulled off her jeans and crawled into bed.

Stephanie went down the hall. When she came back, she was wearing a baggy flannel nightgown and her face was pink and shiny. She kissed Elizabeth on her way past, then crawled into bed beside her sister.

Elizabeth wasn't ready to leave yet, to face Jack. “I want to hear about your new boyfriend, Jamie.”

“That's it,” Stephanie said, giggling. “If she's going to start blabbing about jazz-man with the oh-so-cool eyes, I'm going to sleep. G'night, Mom.” She rolled onto her side.

Elizabeth sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall. “Tell me,” she said.

Jamie pushed the covers aside and slid down to the floor beside her. “How did you know Dad was the one?”

Elizabeth tilted her head back. She stared up at the white, peaked ceiling where a lonely, rarely used fan collected dust. “The first kiss pretty much cinched the deal.” She remembered how it had felt to be swept away, out of control. She would have given up everything to be with him.

In so many ways, she had.

“When your dad kissed me the first time, I cried.”

“Why?”

“I guess that's what you do when you're falling and there's no way to land safely. Love's dangerous territory.”

Jamie rested her head on Elizabeth's shoulder. “I think I'm in love with Michael. It scares me.”

“Then you're growing up, kiddo.”

“I think I'm afraid because of Grandad. I never knew that one minute you could be drinking eggnog and opening presents, and the next minute be in some horribly decorated room, picking out a box, and pretending that wood grain and brass accents matter.”

Elizabeth put an arm around Jamie and pulled her close. For a long time, she said nothing, just stroked her daughter's hair the way she used to. “Your grandad wouldn't want you to be afraid. He never was.”

“That's what I tell myself all the time. But there's a hole in me now.”

“I know, honey. But it'll get easier. I promise. You'll always miss him, but after a while, the missing will be more of an ache, not so sharp a wound.”

“He wanted me to swim in the Olympics. That's all he talked about at Christmas. And I can't even beat some girl from UVa.”

“He didn't care about the Olympics. All he cared about was you, Jaybird. He wanted you to be happy. It'd break his heart if he thought you quit swimming because of him.”

Jamie looked at her. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Always.”

“I don't really want to quit swimming. I just wanted Dad's attention. Not that I got it.”

“He's a little crazy right now. Be patient with him. It's a big deal to have a dream come true in the middle of your life.”

“I know. I just want things to be easier, I guess.”

“Life isn't supposed to be easy, Jamie. Who cares if you discover that you'll never swim the three hundred as fast as Hannah Tournilae? What matters is knowing you tried.”

“So you'd still be proud of me if I stayed on the swim team but never won a race?”

“You're fishing for compliments now.”

“What if I flunked out?”

“Are you close to flunking out?”

Jamie grinned. “Actually, no. Michael's really helped me out. I just wanted to check the parameters of your goodwill while you're all gooey.”

Quicksilver Jamie. Her moods were like the coast's weather; if you didn't like it, stick around for ten seconds. “You're a good egg, Jamie. Now, get to bed.”

Jamie gave her a kiss on the cheek, then climbed up into bed, snuggling up beside her sister. “G'night, Mom. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Elizabeth stood up and flicked off the light, then went back downstairs.

Jack had built a fire. It crackled loudly and sent spiraling, dancing gold light across the rug. He looked acutely uncomfortable, like a big man trying to negotiate his way through a tea party.

She sat down on the sofa, close but not too close.

For a long time, neither spoke. Finally she said, “I used to remind you guys endlessly about my birthday.”

“We know.” He laughed, then seemed to relax, as if he'd been afraid of what she'd say.

“I always thought you'd forget, and I was so afraid of how I'd feel if that happened. Why did I do that, Jack? Why did I assume I was so unimportant?”

He faced her. There was a sadness in his eyes that she hadn't often seen. “Because I would have forgotten. Not every year, not even most years, but at some point, it would have happened. Not because I didn't care, but because I never had to think for myself. You always did it for me. You were my backbone; you kept me standing.” He sighed. “And I took you for granted.”

Elizabeth knew he wouldn't have thought that—let alone said it—a few months ago. “I guess we're both learning a few things about ourselves lately.”

“I'm not the father I thought I was.” He looked surprised by the admission, as if he hadn't meant to voice it. “Without you, the girls and I have nothing to talk about. They think I'm an idiot.”

This was a new side to Jack, vulnerable. It changed him somehow, shifted the balance of power between them. She felt as if they were friends, talking about their kids. “They're nineteen and twenty, Jack; they think anyone who remembers Kennedy should be in a nursing home. I used to treat Anita the same way.”

“Jamie rolls her eyes at you, too?”

“Of course. Usually right before she says, ‘Hel-
lo
Mom, could you please get real?' And Stephanie gives me that wounded deer-eye blink and shuts up until she gets her way. They've been perfecting the act since sixth grade. They could take it on the road.”

“How do you handle it?”

“On a good day, I ignore them. On a bad day, I get my feelings hurt. Fortunately, there are more good days than bad.” She saw his frown and asked, “What is it, Jack?”

Minutes ticked past before he answered. “We're going to have to tell them, aren't we?”

She almost touched him then, but something held her back. Fear, maybe. If she touched him now, when her heart was swollen and tender, it might begin again, and she wasn't ready for that. This journey of hers wasn't finished yet. “Yes.”

“They'll blame me, you know.”

“I'll tell them it was my choice.”

“It won't matter.”

“They're practically grown-up, Jack. They'll understand. And we won't mention divorce, just separation.”

He smiled, but it was bleak and bitter. “We can call it anything we want. Hell, call it a vacation, but they're not stupid. I'll lose them.”

Suddenly she was afraid, too. “Maybe we won't have to tell them. Maybe they won't have noticed that anything's wrong between us.”

“Birdie,” he said, smiling sadly at her. “My dreamer.”

She wasn't quite sure why, but the way he said it made her want to cry. “We haven't made a decision about the future, Jack. We're just taking a break. That's all. There's still a chance for us,” she said fiercely.

He touched her face gently, as if she were spun from glass that he'd broken long ago. “I want to believe that.”

“Me, too.”

TWENTY-FIVE

It was late Saturday afternoon when the shit hit the fan.

Jamie was sitting cross-legged on the floor by the fire. Her small, pointed chin was jutted out in the bulldog expression Jack knew meant trouble. “Okay, you guys, spill it.”

Stephanie, in the rocking chair in the corner of the room, paled visibly.

“You want me to ask it another way?” Jamie said, her voice rising. “Steph and I aren't idiots. We know something is going on between you two.”

“Leave me out of it,” Stephanie said.

Elizabeth, who was sitting on the sofa, tucked her legs up underneath her. She didn't answer.

Obviously, she was leaving it up to Jack. That had always been their pattern. Elizabeth decided what the girls could and couldn't do, and Jack was the bad guy who laid down the law, the one who gave them a “talking to” when Elizabeth was unhappy with their grades.

“So?” Jamie demanded again.

The girls looked at Jack. They knew: All bad news came from Dad.

He gazed at his beloved daughters. Jamie's tight, ready-to-be-pissed expression was ruined by eyes that were already sad. And Stephanie never looked up from the hands coiled in her lap. She was like a buck private, hunkered down behind a building, waiting for the shrapnel to start flying.

The thought of telling them, of actually speaking the toxic words aloud, made him almost sick to his stomach. They would always remember that it was his voice that had torn their family apart.

He couldn't do it.

He was so deer-in-the-headlights frozen that he didn't notice when Elizabeth got up, walked around the sofa.

She was behind him now. She squeezed his shoulder, and there was a gentleness to her touch that hurt more than any punch.

“I know you guys sense that something is not normal with Dad and me,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly calm.

He couldn't believe she was going to do it.
Birdie.
The woman who ran from conflict and couldn't make a decision to save her life … the woman who'd stand in front of a train to spare her children's lives.

“That's an understatement,” Jamie said mulishly. “We know Dad slept on the sofa last night.”

“People who love each other have fights, Jamie.” Stephanie looked up. “That's all it is, right?”

Elizabeth's hold on Jack's shoulders tightened. It occurred to him to reach up, to lay his hand on hers, but he was paralyzed by what was unfolding. He could barely breathe. “It's a little more than a fight,” Elizabeth said evenly. “The truth is, your dad and I have separated.”

Stephanie's mouth dropped open. The color faded from her cheeks. “Oh, my
God
.”

“I know this is difficult to hear,” Elizabeth said quickly. “And we're going to have to work together to get through it, but we'll be okay. We'll always be a family, no matter what.”

“Oh, this is fucking great. We'll
always
be a family. What a crock of shit.” Jamie shot to her feet. She was breathing hard, and Jack could see that she was close to tears. “That's right up there with a guy asking to be just friends. It means he already has another girlfriend.”

Elizabeth's grip became painful. “Honey, let us explain.”

“No way. I've heard all I can take.”

“Listen to us, please. Your dad and I were so young when we got married,” Elizabeth said.

Stephanie's head shot up. “That's your reason? Because you got married too young? I thought … I mean you always … Oh, shit.” She burst into tears.

This was ripping Jack's heart out. Nothing had ever hurt this much. Nothing. Ever. “Honey …” He didn't know what to say. He glanced helplessly up at Birdie. She gazed down at him; her mouth trembled. And then her beautiful face crumpled.

Jack didn't think. He leaned sideways and pulled her into his arms. “We'll get through this,” he whispered against her wet cheek.

He had never loved her more than he did right then. She'd been stronger in this than he could have been, and now he saw the cost of that strength. She was tearing like old cloth, coming apart in his arms.

He looked at his daughters and knew he'd never forget this moment.

This
was the price for every bad choice he'd ever made. And of all his poor choices, none had been worse than not loving Birdie enough to fight for their marriage. “This is hard on all of us,” he said. His words came slowly; he was a blind man feeling his way down a dark and twisting hallway. “But we love you.” He glanced at Birdie, did his damnedest not to cry. “And we love each other. For now, that's all we know. You guys can either help us through this, or you can be angry and shut us out. You're adults. We can't control you anymore.” His voice almost broke. “But we need you now—both of us do. Maybe more than we ever have. We need to be a family.”

That took the wind out of Jamie's sail. The anger seeped out of her; without it, she crumpled to her knees, whispering something Jack couldn't hear.

Elizabeth slid to the floor beside her. “My girls,” she whispered.

Jamie and Stephanie launched themselves at her. The three of them clung together, crying.

Jack stared down at them longingly. He wanted to join them, to for once be part of that inner circle, but he couldn't move. They'd always been a trio first, a family second.

It was Jamie who looked up at him first. Jamie, his warrior princess, whose face was ravaged now by pain. “Daddy,” was all she said, reaching out.

She hadn't called him that in years.

Elizabeth reached behind her, felt around for Jack's hand. When she found it, she squeezed hard.

He slid off the sofa to his knees and took them all in his arms.

Elizabeth felt as if she'd just gone two rounds with Evander Holyfield. She sat in the porch swing, gliding back and forth. A full moon hung above the midnight-blue ocean, its light a silver beacon across the waves.

The last four hours had been the worst time of her life.

They'd all sat together, alternately weeping and shouting. Jamie had vacillated between fury and despair; Stephanie had been stubbornly silent, refusing to accept that her parents might not get back together.

Now, finally, the girls had gone to sleep.

She heard the screen door open and bang shut.

Jack stepped onto the porch. With a sigh, he slumped down onto the swing beside her. The chains groaned at his weight.

Elizabeth wrapped the woolen blanket more tightly around her shoulders. “We should have lied to them.”

“I don't know how you had the guts to tell them,” he answered. “When they started crying … shit, it was awful.”

“It's my fault,” she said. “I refused to go to New York. I wrote that letter. I had to be the one to tell them.”

“We both know better than that, Birdie. This is a thing we did together.”

It meant so much to her, those few and precious words. He'd shouldered part of her guilt. “I still love you,” she said, realizing suddenly that it was true. That it had always been true. She turned to him. “Until tonight, I'd forgotten that.”

He looked at her steadily. “For years, I asked you what was wrong. You never really answered, did you?”

“You don't know what it's like to disappear, Jack. How could you? You've always been so confident, so sure of yourself.”

“Are you kidding, Birdie? I went from all-star in the NFL to nobody. Nobody.”

“That's different. I'm talking about who you are inside. Not what your job is.”

“You never understood,” he said. “For a man, what you do is who you are. When I lost football, I lost myself.”

“You never told me that.”

“How could I? I was ashamed, and I knew what it had been like for you as a player's wife.”

He was right. She'd grown to hate his football years; the better he did in the sport, the farther he moved from the family.

So she hadn't been there for him in his time of need. Instead of his safe harbor, she'd been another port to avoid. “I'm sorry, Jack.”

“Don't say that. We've wasted too many years on that.”

“Not wasted,” she said softly. “We did okay, Jack. We buoyed each other up for twenty-four years. We built a house and home that was a safe and happy place. We created two beautiful, loving young women.” She managed a smile. “Not too bad for a couple of kids who ran off to get married in the last semester of college. There were a lot of years when I thought we had everything.”

He stood up and offered her his hand. She took it greedily, held on so tightly his strong bones shifted within her grasp. “You're something special, you know that?”

He'd never said that to her before. The simple compliment meant more to her than she'd thought possible. “You, too.”

“Well. Good night, Birdie.”

“Good night.”

She went to her bedroom alone.

Jack pulled into the airport's underground parking lot. When he turned off the rental car's engine, the silence was deafening.

Jamie and Stephanie sat in the backseat, huddled together. There had been no clamoring to sit up with Dad. Not this time.

He glanced in the rearview mirror. “We'd better get going. You don't want to miss your flight.”

“That's for sure,” Jamie said, reaching for the door handle. “We want to get the hell out of this state.”

Stephanie threw Jack a sympathetic look, then followed her sister out of the car. They didn't wait for Jack. Instead, they bolted for the terminal, walking so fast it looked as if they were fleeing a crime scene. Through the endless security checks, neither girl looked at him.

With a sigh, Jack followed them.

At the gate, they were forced to stop. Jamie finally turned to him. For a single second, their gazes met and her armor weakened. In her blue eyes, he saw a pain so raw and deep it rocked him back. She was hurting so damned much …

And he and Birdie had caused it. An ache spread through his heart, a combination of guilt and shame and regret. Regret most of all.

“Jamie,” he said, moving toward her, hands outstretched.

“You do
not
want to touch me right now,” she said loudly, stepping away from him.

He knew then the truth of a broken heart; it wasn't some poetic metaphor. It was muscle and sinew tearing away from bone. It hurt more than any blown knee ever could. “I'm sorry, Jamie.
We're
sorry.”

Jamie's face crumpled. She appeared unsteady on her feet. “Bite me.” She turned and stomped away from him. Even after she'd reached the Jetway door and stopped, she didn't look back.

“You know Jamie,” Stephanie said, “when she gets scared, she gets pissed off.”

Jack wanted to say,
I'm scared, too,
but he didn't know how to be that honest with his daughters. It was his job to be the family's strength. “I guess we're all scared.”

Stephanie was doing her best not to cry. It was a terrible thing for a father to watch. His Stephie, always so strong, looking as if she were held together by old Scotch tape. “It's like discovering one day that you're schizophrenic. Everything you've believed in is suddenly suspect. I don't know how to live in a world where our family is broken up.”

“Keep believing in all of us, Steph. Someday you'll understand. Mom and I have been together since we were your age. That's a long time. Things … pile up between people. But we're not even talking about divorce.”

Stephanie gave him a pathetically hopeful look. “We thought you were lying about that.”

“No. We're just taking a little breathing room; that's all for now.”

“Oh.”

In the background, a voice came over the loudspeaker, announced the boarding of flight 967.

Jack glanced over at Jamie. Her back was to him. Even from this distance, he could see how stiff she was.

Poor Jamie.
Always so terrified of bending. She was probably tearing apart inside, but she wouldn't show it. “Take care of your sister. She acts tough …” He couldn't go on. He remembered the day Jamie had broken her arm. All the way to the doctor's office, she'd sat stoically silent. It hadn't been until late that night, in her dark bedroom with its Big Bird nightlight that she'd finally cried. She'd curled into Jack's arms and whispered,
It hurts, Daddy.

Back then, all he'd had to do was stroke her hair and tell her a bedtime story.

“She's really pissed off at you and Mom. Did you see her at the house? She wouldn't even let Mom ride to the airport with us. I've never seen her so mad.”

“I wonder how long she can avoid talking to us.”

“Jamie? How long until the polar ice cap melts?”

“Take care of her. And of yourself. I love you, Stephie.”

Stephanie looked up at him. “Be honest with us, Daddy, okay? If it's time for us to stop hoping, tell us.”

“I promise.” He saw by the look on her face that he'd said the wrong thing. Of course. In the past, his promises hadn't meant much. It was another change he'd have to make in the future.

They called the flight again.

“Come on, Stephanie!” Jamie yelled, waving her sister over.

“Bye, Dad.” Stephanie shouldered her carry-on bag and hurried toward Jamie. They both boarded the plane without a backward glance.

Jack went to the window and stared out. A hazy reflection of his own face stared back at him. Beyond it, the plane pulled away from the Jetway. Slowly, Jack headed for his own gate.

The make-believe spring lasted until the end of March. Then the rains returned with a vengeance. Each day, Elizabeth walked to the mailbox in her Eddie Bauer raincoat and knee-high boots, with high hopes. Time and again, she returned empty-handed. Twice in the past weeks, Stephanie had written. Short, pointed letters; each one contained a burning, unanswerable question.