Porcelain Keys (31 page)

The air around us suddenly grew quiet. Not even the blue jay was singing anymore. All I could hear were his words, hanging, echoing between the beats of my heart. “What?” I asked, my voice barely audible.

“Do you remember when I told you I’d been in a car accident?”

I glanced at the thin scar above his right eyebrow and felt my pulse quicken with foreboding. “Yes, I remember.”

“Well . . . I didn’t exactly tell you the whole story.”

The terror his words stirred in me robbed me of my voice. All I could do was stare at him and wait.

“A few years ago I was at a party with some friends. Richard came with Sasha. She was pregnant, about six months along, and she was upset that Richard had brought her there because she didn’t feel well. She kept asking him to take her home, but he was too busy playing rounders and beer pong. So finally she tried to take his keys to drive herself home, and they got in a huge fight—he had this old Audi he’d put a lot of work into and was really protective of it. Eventually he gave in and agreed to drive her home. It was late, so I came along.”

He pulled his hand from mine and began tugging on the fray of his scarf, twisting it between his fingers. “Richard was angry that she’d made him leave. So he kept driving up on the curb to scare her. We were both yelling at him to stop, to pull over and let Sasha drive, but he insisted he was in control and that he was just playing around.”

He gritted his teeth and tore a piece of fray from his scarf. “He was laughing, while Sasha sat there crying, and it infuriated me. So when he started veering toward the curb again, I reached up from the backseat and yanked the steering wheel in the other direction.” He dropped his hand from the scarf, gazing past me with empty eyes and a placid expression, like he was no longer with me. He was sitting in that car, reliving that fateful sliver of time.

He didn’t need to tell me what happened next, because through the window of his eyes, I saw the scene myself. I saw the crumpled metal and shattered glass on blood-stained asphalt. I kept my expression steady, which strangely took little effort. I felt as numb as he looked.

“I woke up days later in the hospital,” he finally said,
“with broken ribs and a torn spleen and stitches all over. I thought I had it bad, but then I found out that compared to Richard and Sasha, I’d come out unscathed. Richard was in the hospital for weeks with head and lung injuries. And Sasha . . .” Torment etched itself across his face, sweeping away the blanket of numbness.

“She didn’t make it,” I finished in a whisper.

He shook his head, tears welling up in his eyes.

“And the baby?”

“Emily lived long enough for everyone to fall in love with her,” he said hoarsely. “But she was too early.”

A tightness developed in my chest, and I realized I hadn’t drawn air for quite some time. I willed myself to breathe, and with each breath came a stab of pain.

“If I hadn’t yanked on the steering wheel,” Thomas added, “or if I wouldn’t have let Richard get behind the wheel in the first place . . .” He grimaced and shook his head. “I was fifteen. If I hadn’t been drinking too, I could have swiped his keys and driven her home myself. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Sasha and Emily are gone.”

What little control I had over my emotions crumbled away, and I stood and turned from him so he couldn’t see my face.

The few months I’d spent with him were laid out before me like an open field. This new revelation drove over it like a plough, scraping up the grass to reveal the hidden soil beneath. I saw my memories with him against this new backdrop. His bookshelf full of journals to sort out his grief. His walls covered in paintings to curb his restlessness. The hostility between him and his brother. That dark, tormented look that sometimes seeped into his expression. All those untold stories in his eyes, all those moments when it
seemed he was holding something back. The words,
I don
’
t feel good enough for you,
on the porch after the dance.

The plough and harrow then came over me, scraping my soul until it was raw with guilt. I must have been so selfish not to see his suffering. I thought about all the time he’d spent comforting me, helping me, and all the while he was suffering, silently carrying his own burden.

I didn’t want to cry when I was the one who should be comforting him, but even pressing a hand over my mouth couldn’t stop the first sob from erupting. Helpless to restrain the flood of tears that followed, I turned back and knelt in front of him, then putting my hands on his face, I forced him to look at me. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said fiercely through my tears. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I wanted to tell you so many times,” he said, a tear trickling down his cheek. “But every time I was about to tell you, I would look at you, at your trusting face, and I’d think of everything you’d already been through, all the things you’d already had to carry. I just couldn’t share it with you. Not because I was afraid that you’d think differently of me—though I was afraid—but because I couldn’t put that on you.”

“I wish you had put it on me,” I scolded. “I could have helped you. You were there for me when I needed you. But you didn’t let me help you. Do you have any idea how awful that makes me feel?”

His hands curled around mine and an intense flame ignited his blue eyes. “You did help me.” He pulled my hands from his face and lowered them to his lap, where he clung to them. “When we first met, that first morning I saw you in the tree house, I was in a very dark place, trying to forgive myself for what happened. Every day was
a struggle with loneliness, emptiness. But you . . . you were like this little spark of light in the blackness. You gave me something to live for—to live up to. You made me feel loved, needed, worth something, and you made me look outside myself and my own despair. It was the first time in my life that I cared about someone more than I cared about myself. All I wanted was to make you happy, to make you feel loved and protected.”

“Then . . .” I shook my head in bafflement. “Why didn’t you come back to me?”

His thumb traveled slowly over the ridges of my knuckles before he spoke again. “I wanted to. I was planning on it. But after the funeral . . .” He shook his head. “All my reason was smothered by guilt. Guilt for Sasha and my niece, compounded by my parents’ deaths. Guilt like that has a way of blinding you to everything else. You can try to escape, but it traps you, consumes every thought, every breath. Whether you’re awake or asleep, it replays your mistakes on a loop until you think you’ll go mad.

“On top of that, I had to go through all my parents’ things with Richard pacing behind me like a jackal, making biting remarks about how I’d robbed him of everything that was important to him. We got into an argument about who had hurt my parents and Sasha the most, and I just . . . snapped. I started throwing things, breaking things. Not just anything, but important things. Family pictures and awards and heirlooms. I clocked Richard in the jaw and sent him flying into a wall. Then we ended up pounding on each other until we were both bleeding. I left feeling like a despicable barbarian.”

He looked at me, his face restless. “I was coming to Colorado Springs to be with you. I was going to find an
apartment and get a job and finish high school here. But as I approached the exit, I couldn’t do it. I was a complete mess. I was so angry. At everything and everyone. I didn’t want you to see me that way. I didn’t even want you to hear me that way, so I didn’t call. I was afraid it would scare you, or that it would hurt you. So I kept driving.”

If only I’d known. I would have been out standing on the highway, waving him down with florescent flags.

“I spent that night in some place I don’t even remember. And when I woke up the next day, I still felt like I needed to sort things out and get myself together before I came back to you. So I kept driving. I drove for days, expecting my head to clear or the intensity of the pain to lessen, but it was relentless. I thought that if I could just get far enough away, I could somehow escape it. So I got on a plane for the Netherlands.

“I stayed with my friend, Stefan, and I only planned on staying a couple weeks. But he was a little too generous with me. He gave me an empty room and a bed, and I stayed holed up in that little space for weeks, sleeping or shuffling around like the living dead. To be honest, I spent a lot of time wishing you had just let me go up those stairs.”

He must have seen the distress in my face, because his eyes turned apologetic. “Not because I thought I could have saved my parents, but because dying would have been easier than dealing with the aftermath.” He ran his fingertip through the wet ash on the ground, clearing a small spot of foundation. “Some days it felt like I would never be okay. And an irrational part of me felt like if I allowed myself to be with you, my bad luck would eventually come around to hurt you. The more I thought
about it, the more I convinced myself that you deserved better than that.”

He shut his eyes tight and a silent cloak of darkness settled over him. Whether because he didn’t want to hurt me anymore, or because words were insufficient to express it, I knew he would never say just how bleak his life had become.

“I could give you a million reasons for my actions, Aria.” He opened his eyes. “But I won’t. All that really matters is that I was wrong to stay away. I was wrong to leave you hanging. But by the time I’d healed enough to figure that out, it was too late. I’d already hurt you, and I didn’t think you could ever forgive me.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but there were so many competing words that none of them could get out.

“So I settled for a different life,” he went on. “I got the fishing job with Stefan’s uncle, and to distract myself, I kept busy, working long hours at sea and doing anything and everything with Stefan on land.”

I thought about what Devin had said the day before about Amsterdam’s colorful nightlife. “What do you mean ‘anything and everything’?” I could feel the sick look on my face. “Did you spend a lot of time in Amsterdam?”

He knotted his brow as though puzzled by my question. “No—not much.” Then understanding swept over his face. “You know I’ve never been big on partying. And you have to know . . . I was never with another girl. Stefan brought girls home sometimes, but the thought of even touching another girl when I still had feelings for you . . .” He shook his head and his meaning was clear.

An involuntary sigh of relief escaped my lips. Not that it mattered, I reminded myself. Thomas wasn’t mine anymore anyway. I was with Devin now. At the thought of
Devin, it registered just how long I’d been holding Thomas’s hands. Not wanting him to misread my intentions, I withdrew my hands and slipped them into my coat pockets.

“I thought about you all the time,” Thomas said. “I can’t tell you how many times I started dialing your number, or how many times I wrote a letter only to crumple it up and throw it in the trash. But I could never find the right words to say, how to explain myself or how to encourage you to move on without hurting you more. I just hoped that you would go to Juilliard and move on with your life.” A look of regret flitted across his face. “And you did move on. You have a new life now. A better life.”

“And you have a new life too,” I said slowly. “Don’t you?”

“I guess so. But . . .” He hesitated, then pinned me with a meaningful look and said, “But I’ve spent every day for the past year wishing that I could go back to the life I left behind.”

His words jostled something inside me, something I thought I’d laid to rest. Hope. Part of me wanted to forgive him and throw myself into his arms. But another part of me—a much greater part—was still hurt and confused. I couldn’t afford to have hope. Not with him, not yet. So I stomped it back down.

“But I know that’s not possible,” he said sadly. “Funny how time is a healer . . . and a thief.”

When I didn’t say anything in return, he bent his head and studied his hands, open and empty in his lap. For the first time since his return, I noticed a pink mark on the inside of his wrist, stealing from the cuff of his coat sleeve. A burn scar. Without thinking, I reached out and touched it, as though needing to be convinced that he was healed. His small, answering smile told me that he was.

Dawn had broken over the edge of the foundation, had swept out the shadows and filled them with light. Thomas shaded his eyes against the brilliance of the rising sun, and we sat there gazing at each other, wordlessly acknowledging that the hardest part of our conversation was over.

“Thomas,” I finally said, releasing his wrist, “how did you know I would be here and not in New York?”

He hesitated. “I called Nathaniel about a week ago to find out where you were.”

“I can’t believe he didn’t tell me,” I muttered to myself. And then another question sparked in my mind. “What finally made you decide to come see me?”

Thomas tugged his coat sleeve down over his scar, and when he looked up again, instead of meeting my eyes, he focused on some point in the distance. “I think someone is looking for you.”

I whipped my head around to see Devin’s figure wandering through the frosted orchard. He paused and glanced in our direction, then resumed meandering like he knew I was here but didn’t want to interrupt.

“I better go back.” I stood and looked down at Thomas. “How long are you staying?”

“I’m flying back to Zierikzee tomorrow.”

“You’re going back to the Netherlands?”

He nodded. “For one more season.”

“One more season? What will you do after that?”

He shrugged. “My plans are kind of up in the air. I’m going to study art somewhere, I just haven’t decided where yet.”

At the thought of him being out of my life again, I felt panicked. But what could I do? I glanced at Devin again, who was waiting patiently for me in the orchard. In
a few days I would go back to New York with him, back to the life I knew and had grown to love. I turned back to Thomas. “Don’t leave without saying good-bye,” I said, the words catching in my throat.

He stared at me for a long moment before nodding slightly, and I turned to walk away.