Reason Is You (9781101576151) (18 page)

Something flickered in his eyes, but he blinked it away. “What was different?”

I shrugged. “Just—I don’t know. I had on a yellow halter dress, which I have never owned, but I think I need to go find one now.” I laughed. “Oh, there was a swing.” I felt the heat again. “It all started on a swing.”

His expression locked in place, and he only blinked once before he licked his lips and sat back a few inches. “A swing.”

“Yeah. That’s a new one. One of those big flat plank things with heavy rope from a big tree. I don’t know, that one’s kinda vague.” And it started with Jason. But I wasn’t going there.

He nodded, and something in his face changed. Like it got far away.

“But if I had to pick something,” I continued. “It was—I’ve—never been kissed like that.”

He met my eyes then, heat for heat. “You should be. Every day.”

I swallowed hard at the fire in his eyes. It wasn’t just physical. He was fighting something.

“Alex, last night—”

“You need to be careful,” he said, his voice low.

“What? Why?”

“This thing with Nazi boy.”

I blew out a breath. “Really? You’re gonna kill this mood with that?”

“I’m just telling you, the guy’s got issues. And he lives on a boat.”

I laughed at that. “Yeah, I know.”

“It’s not solid. It’s not stable. It can float away.”

“And if it does, I’ll wave from the dock. I don’t care where my boss lives.”

“Please,” he said. “We both know that’s becoming more complicated.”

I sat up in bed and crossed my legs, since the sensual part of the evening was clearly over. “And how do
we
both know this?”

He paused for a moment. “I was on the porch when you got home.”

I narrowed my eyes. “No, you weren’t. Riley and Grady were there. She would have seen you. I would have felt you.”

“Okay, I wasn’t on the porch, but I did see you after they went down to the dock.”

I felt like I was in trouble, and it grated on me. “Okay. But, Alex, nothing happened.” I twisted a piece of hair. “God, this is so warped.”

“What?”

“I feel like I’m—cheating on you or something.”

He blinked and backed up a bit. “Why?”

“Because I just had sex with you,” I said, bringing a grin back to his face. “And we’re talking about me being interested in another guy.”

With the air lightened up a little, he shook his head. “I don’t mean that.”

“I know but I can’t help it,” I said. “You’ve been like—my man. For my whole life. At least in my head you were.”

He locked in on me again, and I was unable to look away. “I know.” He paused again without blinking. I hated it when he did that. “And I know it’s time for you to find that in someone real.”

“You are real,” I said, the sound of the words fading off.

He held the rose against my shoulder and trailed it down my arm and back. “Who can touch you with more than this.”

I felt a knot in my chest that burned.

“I’m sorry I asked too many questions last night.”

Alex looked at the flower in his hand, and appeared to get lost in it as I watched him.

“It was called the Sarah Alyssa.”

My brain backpedaled, spun, cartwheeled, tried desperately to align that sentence with something I knew to make sense.

“What—was called—”

“The boat.”

“The—oh, the boat you built at your dad’s shop?” I asked, and he nodded. “You named it after your wife?”

“And my little girl.”

His voice all but disappeared on that sentence, and it broke my heart. I suddenly wanted him to keep it private.

“It was a gorgeous afternoon, and we wanted to take the boat out for a celebration.” His voice took on a haunted tone, almost as
if it were someone else talking. “It was finished, Sarah had gotten a raise, and Alyssa had straight As on her report card.”

I smiled. I could picture them as a family, celebrating the basic successes like Riley and I did.

“We dressed up a little. A lot, by Key West standards.” He tugged on his jacket for emphasis. “Alyssa made it a big deal. She was so enamored with her name painted on the side, she thought we needed to make it a formal occasion.”

“Hence, the black clothes.”

“Yes.” His expression went dark, and I knew the bad part was coming. “We were having a good time and I lost track of how far out we were. The sky got dark and the storm was on us before I could even register it. Looked like the claws of hell.”

I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see his pain. I hated to see him like that. He stopped for a bit, tracing a pattern on a quilt with the rose stem.

“I lived my whole life on that coast. Knew the tides, the wave patterns, how to read a storm. I knew better than to lose track of captaining my own boat. I can even see now how that storm was telegraphed in thirty different ways.”

“You were enjoying time with your family.”

“And it got them killed,” he said flatly. He spread his left hand and touched his ring finger. “They depended on me, and I let them down.”

Tears sprang to my eyes as I visualized the little girl.

“We were broadsided by a rogue wave and rolled.”

“Oh God.”

Alex got up and went to the window. “I heard Sarah scream Alyssa’s name once, and then she disappeared. I got to Alyssa and tried to hold her and look for Sarah, too—but she was panicked, and it was everything I could do just to keep her above the waves.”

“Could she swim?”

He looked out into the yard and nodded, but saw a different scene, I was sure. “We lived on the coast; she could swim before she could walk, but it was fifteen-foot waves. There’s no swimming in that. She kept saying, ‘Don’t let me go, Daddy. Don’t let me go.’”

His voice started to break up. “I told her, ‘I’ve got you, baby. I’ll never let go.’ I held her up for almost two hours in brutal waves and sideways rain, waiting. I prayed. I begged someone to come. My legs went numb. I rolled on my back to float and laid her on top of me. Nothing stayed. It was too rough.”

I felt frozen in bed, wishing so badly I could go to him. Hold his hand. Give him a hug.

“She finally gave out and started to sink and I yelled at her to keep kicking, but she couldn’t. She was done. I dove under her to push her back, but—”

He broke. So did I. I’d never seen Alex cry. He grabbed the wall like he wanted to snap it.

“I held her up over my head like that till everything just went quiet. No more wind. No more fighting. No one came. Not even God. My wife was twenty-nine. Alyssa was eight. And beautiful. And trusted me—”

He walked around the corner of the room and disappeared.

“Alex, wait.”

But there was no one there.

W
HAT
do you say to that? I sat there in bed still wrapped around my pillow, almost wishing I hadn’t asked. But I marveled at the selfish, tunnel-visioned person I had clearly been to have never asked before.

I couldn’t comprehend losing a child like that. Especially fighting so hard for it and then losing. I also couldn’t stand to see Alex like that. A broken man. He was always the pillar of strength, with the killer smile and kick-ass attitude. This was the Alex he hid from me. The one with the cross to bear.

Oh, man, it ripped my heart out. I got up, wishing Riley was home so I could hug her. I felt like I needed to do something productive to offset feeling like a complete ass, so I decided to go downstairs and clean something. The living room, I noticed, was pretty good. Bathroom was good—much cleaner than mine. The kitchen still had food crumbs and dirty dishes left from earlier, so that was the winner.

Some people find it therapeutic to hand wash dishes. The warm
soapy water and the transition from dirty to clean—all that. I’m not one of those people. I feel strongly that dishwashers should experience that magic and provide us with the mystery.

When we first landed back at Dad’s, I was happy to dive into that sink out of sheer gratitude. Over the weeks since, I found reality and reintroduced his dishwasher to the world. I was loading up this marvel of technology when he walked in with Bo, who made a beeline for my crotch before I diverted him with a spatula.

“What’s up?” Dad asked, pulling out a chair with a scrape.

“Nothing. Just antsy today, I guess.”

“What for?” He laid out his newspaper across the table like he’d done my whole life.

“I don’t know,” I said, cramming a meatloaf pan between two plates. “Thinking of things I know I should do, versus—running off to Disney World.”

He chuckled. “You used to want to adopt Pluto. Said he got a raw deal since Goofy could talk.”

That made me grin. “Yeah, I guess even the happiest place on earth has its issues.”

“Guess so.”

“Oh hey, Riley had an album the other day that I’ve never seen before. An old yellow one with black and whites of you and Mom.”

Dad peered down his glasses at the paper. “Yeah.”

“Have you seen it lately? I wanted to look at it.”

“Hmm. No, don’t think so.”

I went back to loading. “Riley said she put it in my room, but it wasn’t there. Oh, and neither is my picture of me and Mom.”

He frowned and looked at me over the top of his glasses. “What?”

“The picture of Mom holding me—it wasn’t in my box.”

“Oh,” he said quickly. “I took that a while back to have copies made.” He winked and went back to his paper. “Kinda wanted one myself.”

“So, where’s mine?”

“I guess I forgot to put it back. Maybe I stuck it in that other album instead.”

I laughed and put a hand on my hip. “Which would be where?”

He looked up again like one waiting for the inquisition to be over. “I don’t know, sweetheart. But I’ll look around, okay?”

“Okay.”

I went back to the dishwasher, thinking that was an odd conversation. Odd enough, that after he left for a drive into Restin, I went on a mission. I looked through every cabinet and shelf in the living room. I went to his room but just stood in the middle and scanned, unable to bring myself to invade his privacy. The picture of my mom and me was in a frame on a bookshelf, and it pulled me closer.

I felt the familiar pang of loss and distance mixed together that I always felt. As if I were looking at someone else’s photos. And it struck me for the first time how much she looked like Riley. Same mischievous smile.

There was only one other place to look, and that was the attic, which seemed a highly extreme thing to do for a photo album. Still, something was driving me to find it. I pulled down the hide-away stairs and peered up into the darkness, sure that I was crazy.

I looked down at Bo next to me, who gazed from me to the stairway and swung his tail like a baseball bat.

“You gonna come with me?”

His eyebrows did a little Groucho Marx thing, and his tail got a little less enthusiastic as the oppressive attic heat poured down.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

I trudged up the stairs as they creaked and wiggled under my weight and grabbed the flashlight my dad kept on a hook at the
top. Just in case. Daylight poured in from a dusty window, but it didn’t make it to the corners.

“Whew, it’s hot up here, Bo,” I called down.

But it wasn’t just hot. It was crackly. Like if I rubbed my hands together, I’d ignite a spark. It made my skin itch. And it was an odd sensation in contrast with the mugginess everywhere else.

I scanned the room, turning in a circle with my beam as it landed on boxes and plastic tubs and black plastic garbage bags labeled in tape and Magic Marker. My Big Wheel was there, as well as a pogo stick and a crib that had slept my dad, me, and Riley. Lead paint and all. There was a big box of wooden crafts that I’d started and never finished. My old rock collection, including the polisher that was all the rage when it came out but in reality only held up through one batch. My grandfather’s old wooden rocking chair with two different-sized rockers that always listed to one side.

And a big treasure chest. I laughed when I saw it because for one it looked like something you
would
find in an attic in the movies. And second, my dad and I made it together for a school project about pirates. Except him being him, it wasn’t made out of cardboard and glue. We made an actual treasure chest of treated wood and heavy-duty hardware that he had to put on rollers so I could bring it into the building, and it will probably outlive Riley’s great-great-grandchildren.

Inside, I knew there was old “stuff,” so I headed that way and pulled up a stool that I had painted eyes all over when I was six. I unlocked the fake padlocks and lifted. Right on top. There it sat. I stared at it for a minute, at first startled, then confused, then annoyed. I picked it up and turned the first couple of pages as a wave of dizziness hit me. I closed my eyes and shook my head, thinking that was happening way too often. I blinked and focused.

“You have no idea where it is, huh?” I said out loud. “Can’t imagine how it got locked up here.”

There were some pictures I’d seen before, which now I knew had just been pulled from their little corner-piece holders, because they were all in their places. Others were new to me.

Snapshots of my mom, young, maybe even Riley’s age, acting goofy and looking full of life. At the beach in pedal pushers and an oversized button-down shirt, throwing sand at whoever took the picture. She and my dad, smooching upside down from tire swings over by the old dock. I recognized the cove. Even Jiminy, young and unwrinkled, holding a bottle of Falstaff up for the camera as he and my dad perched on an old car and grinned the carefree expression of kids with no worries. My dad, whom I’d never known to be skinny and beardless, looked to be about eighteen.

The heat settled on me, making my clothes and hair wilt and stick, but I hardly noticed it. Everything was captioned, and my hands shook as I read the handwriting. All the times I wanted something new of her. And here it was. Funny little quirky comments that were so her style.

Then interspersed with other pictures of them in action were some odd ones of seemingly nothing. A tree. My favorite old dock in its better days. A porch. An old car. But it wasn’t the pictures that made my skin crawl. It was the captions. I read them again and again.