Forever Promised (43 page)

“That sounds….”

“Small,” Benny said, looking at the crowded living room. “It was small. It was before Andrew and Shane and Jeff, before you and Collin and Kimmy and Lucas. It was small.”

They both looked at the people sitting and talking, eating the buffet Crick and Jeff had set out on the counter, playing with Parry Angel, and making sure that she never, not once, had cause to miss her shadow, Lila, who had been there from the time she was eighteen months old. Drew was there most often, and Parry had no trouble wrapping her arms around his waist and hugging him like the father he so obviously was.

“I was missing Jon and Amy,” he confessed, looking at his plate. The meatloaf had disappeared. Shane would be pleased. “Now, I see that it’s as though Deacon surrounded himself with people so he could let people go if he needed to.” He turned to her. “Does it not seem that way to you?”

Benny laughed a little, as though she knew something she couldn’t articulate. “It’s why I decided to have the baby,” she confided quietly. “So we’d never really leave.”

Mikhail opened his mouth, caught by the simple beauty of that, by the simple sacrifice. His eyes burned again, and he felt wretched, utterly wretched.

At that moment the phone rang, and he jerked, breathing hard, which he’d been doing since Sweetie disappeared.

“It’s Jon,” Benny said unnecessarily. Crick had picked up the phone at the wall, and his whoop of excitement bounced off the walls. For a moment Mikhail saw Crick—who was about Mikhail’s own age—as a young man with more enthusiasm and passion than good sense, and his heart stuttered. He looked sideways at Benny, and for the first time since that wretched girl had pounded up the stairs like a poisoned cow, he saw the resemblance between Missy and her sister.

Finally, he had a moment of compassion for someone so angry she would
say
hideous things,
do
hideous things, because the bile in her belly was so corrosive that she would slaughter villages just to spite the world.

“What?” Benny asked, looking at him.

He shook his head. “Would you….” He sighed. “Never mind. I am still not feeling that charitable.”

“Wow. That was cryptic.” Benny shrugged, short hair flying carelessly, and the illusion of Missy was dispelled. Mikhail shook his head and wondered bitterly when Benny had grown older than him.

Shane caught his eye from the kitchen then, and Mikhail took a deep breath, body filling with oxygen. In three steps, Shane had crossed the room and was reaching to take his plate.

“Thank you,” Mikhail said quietly.

Shane only smiled a little. “You ate!”

“I guilted him out about the meatloaf,” Benny said cheerfully. “He’s little. If he skips a couple of meals, we’ll see right through him.”

“It was very good meatloaf,” Mikhail said with dignity. “How are Jon and Amy?”

Shane looked over at where Crick was on the phone, talking extra loud and gesticulating wildly with his least-coordinated hand. “I am thinking they’re doing pretty good,” Shane said, laughing. “Jon called us this morning, remember?”

Mikhail looked at him blankly.

“You were outside feeding the dogs—I don’t think you registered I was on the phone when you came in.”

Oh yes. Mikhail had been feeding the big hairy beasts and picking up after them. It was his Christmas present to Shane, who usually got up early to do that chore. He remembered that now—he’d done it every Christmas they’d shared together, except the one he spent on the ship with his mother.

“I was distracted,
lubime
,” he murmured, because
Chert
, that was obvious, was it not? “So… is there anything new?”

Shane chuckled. “Amy said that Jon put on twenty pounds in the first month. She’s started kicking him out of bed early so he can hit the gym at the law offices. She also said that Lila misses dance lessons with you and that Jon-Jon’s first word was ‘dammit’. Apparently the folks in DC did not think it was as funny as she did.”

Benny laughed. “I
know.
Did she tell you about the time Jon forgot and parked the car in the driveway instead of the garage?
Three
people came to make sure their garage door opener hadn’t busted. And
then
they asked her if she was getting a divorce, because her husband seemed to have left all his clothes in the car!”

Shane was laughing openly now. “I heard that one—and then….” Shane’s smile died a little and his mouth twitched. “When she told the group of women what she and Jon did for a living.”

Benny caught his mood, and Mikhail did too. “What happened?”

“Well, Lila wasn’t invited back to playgroup, for one thing,” Shane said quietly, and Benny growled and rolled her eyes.

“What did Amy do?” she asked, and Shane blinked.

“What do you mean, what did she do?”

“Well, it’s
Amy.
She doesn’t take that sort of thing lying down.” Benny nodded. “She’ll get some sort of revenge. You’ll see. Nobody fucks with Amy’s kids. She’ll be pissed.”

“Why did she not tell
you
this story?” Mikhail asked, and Shane’s next breath sounded strangled.

“You heard her, Mickey—Benny’s demanding action, and maybe Amy feels like sitting this one out!”

Mikhail thought about them, about Jon and the wonderful things he had said at their wedding, and about Amy, who let her handsome, lazy husband get away with nothing.

“She will do something,” he decided. “That one, she is a fighter.”

Shane nodded. “I think you’re probably right. But you two, don’t give her any grief about it. She’ll get her feet under her in a little while, okay?”

Shane stood up and squeezed Mikhail’s knee before taking his plate to the sink. Mikhail turned in time to see Benny sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes.

“What in the
hell
!”

“I love him,” Benny said matter-of-factly, “but even
you
have to admit he comes off like your favorite teacher sometimes.”

Mikhail was watching Shane’s bottom, which filled out his good jeans. “I have to admit no such thing,” he said seriously. “I did not ever want to be nailed to the wall by
any
teacher, favorite or otherwise.”

Benny cackled with glee, and Parry ran up to her mother to see why the happiness.

“She was laughing because I was being silly, bunny girl,” Mikhail said. Parry’s curly hair was up in two ponytails for Christmas, one with a green tinsel-spangled ribbon and the other spangled red. She was wearing an old-style plaid dress, with a white lace bib and a tie in the back, and a white lace cardigan, and white Mary Jane shoes. Every Norman Rockwell fantasy Mikhail had ever had about Christmas in America was dressed like this little girl sitting on his lap, and yet Mikhail knew that the little girl’s happy childhood had not come easily. Every adult in the room, including Kimmy and Lucas, who had come latest to the party, had participated in her growing up.

“You have not told me about your favorite present today, Angel,” Mikhail said soberly. “Why am I the only one who has not seen it?”

Parry’s face fell. “Drew made me put it out on the porch. He said it could be dangerous to Mommy if she got up to pee.”

Mikhail masked a smile. He’d seen her riding the thing around the living room and into walls and into people. He thought—not for the first time—that Benny had chosen very well when she’d picked Drew to be Parry’s father. His own mother had never found a man worthy, and he had to admit, after the time spent with Shane’s children, Missy not least among them, that better no father at all than the wrong one.

“That is probably
exactly
why he had you put it outside,” he told her, setting his mouth in serious lines. He looked sideways and saw that Benny was flashing through the TV menu, and when she stopped, she grinned at Parry with a combination of delight and relief.

“Look, Angel—they’re playing
Tangled
on Disney. You want to sit here with me and Uncle Mickey and watch it?” Benny patted the space next to her. Reflexively, Mikhail tightened his grip around Parry’s shoulders.

“She can stay on me.” He wanted that very badly.

Benny nodded and leaned back against him while he angled his body so Parry could lay her head on his shoulder and settle in to watch. The noise from the kitchen leveled off to a quiet rumble, and Mikhail thought that maybe Jon and Amy were about to wrap up their call.

“Oh, hey—Mikhail!” Benny whispered, right when he was settling in.

“Wha—” Suddenly the hand not steadying Parry was dragged down and thrust flat against the front of Benny’s black yoga pants. He felt the heat of her body, and then, unexpectedly, a flickering little
thwap
of pressure against his palm.

An honest smile stretched his cheeks. “It is kicking?” he asked, and it was a brand-new thing, a glowing, wonderful thing, and none of the sadness that had suffused him could taint it.

“Yeah,” Benny whispered, and he closed his eyes, everything concentrating on that flicker against his palm. “Deacon already felt it, but Crick hasn’t. I think Deacon teared up, but don’t tell anyone.”

“That… that is
amazing
,” Mikhail said.

Benny hmmed in her throat—and then just left his hand there, on her stomach, until his arm cramped and he had to drag it away.

He needed this, he thought, his chest sore. All of the things that Benny and Parry were to him, he needed this. Shane had given him pots and music and those had been nice, but they weren’t his real gifts. His real gifts were that moment at the car, lost and found in Shane’s arms while he remembered the taste of grief, and this right here: joy and family pressing against him until the grief faded and he could breathe again.

Benny
:
When Blood Tells

O
NCE
she had permission to get off the couch and resume her regular scheduled life, Benny remembered that she
loved
being pregnant.

She did.

She’d thought, at twenty-two, that she was exaggerating the memory that she’d carried at fifteen, and through all of the bullshit of the first trimester—the nausea, the boobie-geddon, the
wildly
massive mood swings, the revulsion to
any
foods but popcorn, steak, and strawberries—it had all come flooding back to her.

When you were pregnant, you woke up
every
morning with the certainty that something wonderful was around the corner.

It didn’t matter how shitty life was in reality, there was that
promise
of something wonderful that could come. When she was fifteen, she hadn’t recognized it at first. Part of that was that she started out living on the street, in fear that her father would find out that she was pregnant. It didn’t seem rational, didn’t seem sane, that she would wake up and think about that burgeoning, alien thing in her stomach and be happy about it. She hadn’t
done
anything to put it there. She’d woken up after a party sore and achy, and in two weeks she’d been thrown down the pregnancy hole.

But that didn’t stop the feeling of
something wonderful
that had followed—especially
after Deacon had gotten her off the streets, away from her parents, and she’d discovered what living with someone who gave a crap was actually like.

She hadn’t expected that anticipation this time. That
something wonderful
wasn’t
meant for her—why would she feel that excitement about it? It was a burden, something to be borne but not enjoyed. Right?

She didn’t trust that feeling—not this time. This time, there would be pain, the terrible roller-coaster plunge and horror of labor, and there would be… nothing. A sore body, breasts that needed to be emptied, blood that would need to be sloughed off, and… and then what?

Her, and Drew, and Parry. Her tiny, sprouting family, and nothing else.

There would be
no
something wonderful
after this—at least that’s what she told herself. The singing thing inside her didn’t seem to believe that, and she had difficulty telling it to fuck off.

But on days like this one, her first week back to school, she was having no trouble at all telling
someone
to fuck off, and that was the truth.

“What do you mean, I can’t get in the class?” she asked her evaluator. “I signed up, I registered on time, I was
on the roll sheet.
I need these four classes to graduate—how is it this one isn’t available?”

The evaluator was a middle-aged woman with short graying hair, thick black-framed glasses, and the sort of rabbity expression of someone who was accustomed to wanting to run away because of her own incompetence. (That last was purely a guess on Benny’s part, but she’d put honest-to-God money on it being a damned good guess.)

“I’m sorry, Miss Coats, but someone with a higher priority bumped you out of the class—”

“There’s a higher priority than graduating senior?”

The woman cringed. “I don’t understand why the computer did it either. You can go wait for people to drop out—you’re not far down on the list, but you know there are no guarantees!”