Just Fall (30 page)

Lucien knows he needs to talk to his nephew. He also knows Gabrielle is not likely to support this initiative. He enlists Agathe.

“Agathe, I need to ask Thomas questions.”

“No! He is exhausted, the poor little thing! Traumatized.”

“But, my darling, if he can help find the other boys…”

Lucien looks into his wife’s beautiful green eyes and for the first time in months lets down the barriers he had so carefully constructed between them. He allows her to see his pain, his anxiety, his sense of purpose, and his fear.

She takes his hands in hers and nods.

When Lucien emerges from Thomas’s bedroom a half hour later, he is filled with determination. He knows what he must do next.

“What’s your first best memory?”

It was a rainy Saturday morning a week before their wedding. Rob and Ellie braved the downpour to run out to the little place on the corner for coffee and bagels, then tumbled back into bed. Now they lay, limbs entangled, sleepy despite the coffee, savoring the idea that they could do anything they liked for the rest of the day, or better yet, do nothing at all.

“My first best memory?” Rob repeated. The question, posed by Ellie, troubled him. Rob didn’t dwell on memories. There weren’t that many that were good, for one thing, and keeping himself firmly in the here and now was a big part of how he managed to live with himself. This sharing, the parsing of intimacies and memories and histories, these sheer onion layers of exposure and trust and deeper exposure that Ellie insisted on, these were all new to him. He relished it. It terrified him. How often hope and fear are one and the same.

Even as all this ran through his head at lightning speed, he said, “You go first.”

“Okay. My first best memory is of me and my sister.”

“I didn’t even know you had a sister.”

“She died when I was seventeen. Leukemia.”

“How old was she?”

“Twenty. Diagnosed at fifteen.”

“Jesus.”

“It changed everything. It was like there was one life before Mary Ann got sick and another after. But when I want to remember her, I always think about this memory. It’s the very first one I have, and I’d rather remember her this way than think about her weak and dying.”

“So what’s the memory?”

“I was about three or four, I guess, so she was six or seven. It was raining out…kind of like today. It felt like it had been raining forever. Mary Ann at least got to go to school, but I had been cooped up in the house and I was going stir-crazy. Mary Ann had just gotten home, and even in the short walk from the school bus stop on the corner she had gotten soaking wet, so Mom took her into our bedroom to get her changed. She had sat me at the kitchen table with a coloring book and a strict command to stay put—but I was sick of sitting still. I was fidgety and restless. Then I saw it. This china plate my mother had. It had been her grandmother’s. It had a rooster painted on it and the words ‘My love will stop when this rooster crows.’ We were never allowed to touch it. She kept it on a little shelf in the kitchen filled with other mementos, a model of the Eiffel Tower my parents had gotten on their honeymoon, a pair of candlesticks from a family trip to Williamsburg. Anyway, I loved that plate. I decided to climb up on a chair and take it down, just to hold it, to look at it. You can guess what happened. I stretched, the chair tipped; the plate fell to the floor and smashed into pieces. Mary Ann came into the room. She saw the broken plate and then my face. I remember being so afraid of what I had done. And ashamed. I thought Mary Ann would yell at me, or go running for my mother. But instead, she told my mother she had broken the plate. I’m still not quite sure why she did—she lied for me.”

“That’s a funny thing to remember so strongly.”

“I knew in that moment that Mary Ann would always have my back. That in the ‘us and them’ of kids and parents, she was my ‘us.’ ”

Rob realized he couldn’t remember a time when he felt he had an “us” in his life. Not before Ellie. “It must have been awful for you when she died.”

“This may sound terrible, but in some ways it was a relief too, you know? She had been sick for so long, and her illness just vacuumed up everything in its path. I’ve never told anyone that before. About hating what her illness did to me, to our family.”

“You can tell me anything.” He kissed her and she felt that it was almost true.

Rob hears the car before he sees it. Rattling and wheezing into the driveway, the tires spitting up crushed shells. He hears Ellie whisper a question, confused by the sound. Rob doesn’t answer. He strides swiftly into the hallway, scooping up the blood-spattered copper pipe as he goes. Its weight and heft feel reassuring in his hand. Ellie trails after him. He glances at her. Her eyes are wide with apprehension.

Rob accidentally kicks a piece of broken tile and it clatters and skips, unnaturally loud.

An old junker, barely held together by rust and spit, shudders to a stop in front of the mansion. A man exits.

Square-jawed and solid, he plants himself in the driveway. He assesses the ruined majesty of Maison Marianne.

Rob exhales. “I knew he would come.”

Rob drops the bloody pipe and runs outside. Ellie doesn’t move. The two men hug, but Ellie lingers in the doorway. Rob turns to her. “Matt, this is my wife, Ellie.”

Rob is jubilant that Matt has come. It is evident in the lift in his voice, the light in his eyes. Matt’s presence lightens Ellie too, or at least provides a welcome distraction from the thorny facts of Rob and their relationship built on lies. And death.

Matt shares his interactions with Lucien Broussard. How he got the detective to take him to Lou’s hotel and how while there he’d found the brochure with Ellie’s scrawled message. He compliments Ellie on her cleverness in hiding the note in the parrot cage.

After he had parted ways with Broussard, it hadn’t taken Matt long to figure out that “Maison Mary Ann” was actually Maison Marianne. The lore of the house was well known to the locals and it had taken Matt only one round of rum punch at a funky thatch-roofed bar to hear the whole story from an old boozehound. A hundred in cash and another round had convinced the old boozer to lend Matt his ancient rust bucket of a car.

Matt’s made arrangements, he tells them. He’s going to get them off the island. They must get going.

“What about Quinn?” Ellie asks. “He’s still alive. We can’t just leave him here.”

Matt’s fingers stroke the scars surrounding his own mutilated mouth. “Let the bastard rot.”

A short while later, the junker abandoned just outside town, Matt leads the way through the crowds thronging the streets of Soufrière. Ellie trails behind him. Rob takes up the rear. Rob feels anonymous here. He wants to stay that way.

He keeps his eyes on Ellie’s back, the glossy brown hair of a stranger, the swaying hips of his lover, his bride, his wife.

Panic rises in his gut. He is this close to freedom from Quinn and a life with Ellie, but this desire suddenly feels like a crushing burden. Ellie has proven she would risk her own life for him, kill for him. What if he can’t escape the life he has lived? What if he will always be the man he is?

Rob is terrified of failing Ellie, terrified of failing himself.

Matt takes an abrupt turn into an alley. He leads them through a lime-green door, the paint blistered, the door sagging on its hinges. Canned goods jam the shelves. Crates of fresh produce are haphazardly piled. A fat tabby cat stretches in a patch of sun. A restaurant storeroom. There is a tantalizing scent from the adjacent kitchen: aromatic spices, piping hot oil.

A man emerges from the steam of the kitchen. Shiny, freshly shaven head. Pierced eyebrow. Calloused hands. Rob steps protectively in front of Ellie.

But Matt greets the stranger warmly and the bald man replies in kind.

Could it be? Rob’s eyes search the man’s face. He had had a full thatch of hair back in Cleveland, a leaner look. But that voice. Unmistakable.

“P.J.?” Rob asks tentatively.

The bald man claps Rob on the back. “I live here, man, have for years. But then I hear from Matt? I mean, I thought he was dead. I flew back for the fucking funeral!” P.J. points his finger at Matt. “A zombie, back from the dead. And then to hear you were here? But I’m not asking any questions,” P.J. continues in a tone that slams that particular door shut. “I don’t want to know. I just know you need off the island. I’ve arranged to borrow a friend’s fishing boat.”

“So let’s go.” It is the first time Ellie speaks.

Matt shakes his head. “We can’t quite yet. I need to put together some cash. And the police are all over the harbor. We need to wait until nightfall.”

These three people have all always come through for Rob. An unfamiliar emotion presses against his chest. Suddenly he recognizes it.

It is a rising tremor of hope.

The rain was still streaming down the window, blurring the world outside.

“Okay. Your turn. Your first best memory. Come on,” she coaxed, “it can’t be that hard.”

Ellie’s head nestled on Rob’s shoulder. She traced a pattern on his bare chest with her fingertips.

“Oh, all right. Here goes. I was waiting in a restaurant. It was an ordinary night after an ordinary day. I was waiting for someone I didn’t know, and ambivalent about being there at all.”

“Wait a minute. Back up. How old were you?”

“Sshh. This is my memory, stop interrupting.”

“Yes, sir!” Playfully, she gave his nipple a tweak.

“Ouch! A woman came into the restaurant. She had long blond hair and a green coat.”

Ellie picked her head off his chest and looked at him.

“Me?”

Rob continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “The hostess led her to my table. This woman was gorgeous, sure, but I wasn’t really looking to meet someone. It was too complicated. There wasn’t room in my life…”

“Tell me!”

He kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, her lips.

“What happened to you, baby?” she pressed softly. She was marrying this man; she had to know. “What happened in your life that hurt you so much?”

He gathered her tighter in his arms. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we look forward. I don’t want to look back. Falling in love with you is my first best memory.”

They made love. They were tender. They were kind. They felt safe. They could dissolve into each other. They just might.