The Family You Choose (34 page)

She curled herself up into a little ball on
the beach. It was cold. She couldn’t move. She didn’t care. Maybe
she would just die there. It didn’t matter to her if she couldn’t
be with him.

She heard footsteps on the beach. She knew
who it was. She didn’t care. "Miranda," Alex said, kneeling next to
her. "Come with me, you’re going to freeze."

"I don’t care." She sobbed harder than she
had so far. She felt sick again and dry heaved. "Go away. Go away.
I wish you’d left me here when I was a little girl."

"Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.
I never meant for any of this to happen, I swear to you." He put
his arms around her, but now it meant nothing.

Miranda woke up the next day in a strange but
pretty white bedroom. She looked around, trying to figure out where
she was before she remembered the beach and Alex. She rubbed her
eyes. Alex had taken her to a bed and breakfast after much
pleading. Miranda had been too tired to say no. She looked at the
side table. There was a scone and some juice and tea. She sipped
the juice, but she couldn’t touch anything else.

There was a knock on the door. She knew who
it was. "Come in," she sighed.

Alex came to sit on her bed. She was wearing
the shirt he’d had on last night. He was in his sweater. "How are
you feeling this morning?" he said quietly. "I had them bring up
some food for you, in case you wanted anything."

"You can be so goddamned thoughtful
sometimes, can’t you?"

"I try sometimes."

She threw off the covers and went into the
bathroom. She came out a few minutes later in her own clothes and
threw Alex’s shirt at him. "Thank you so much for everything,
particularly for yesterday. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m leaving.
Have a nice life."

"Wait," he said, and put his hand in front of
her. She stopped but didn’t look at him. "I’d like to take you
somewhere."

"And what Alex wants, Alex gets. Sorry, not
this time."

"I want to take you to your house. I want to
take you to the house you and your mother lived in."

She didn’t have any more tears to cry after
last night. "Is it really my house?"

"It is really your house," Alex said quietly.
"Yours to have, any time you want it. Let me show it to you,
please."

"Fine." She walked downstairs and waited
while Alex changed and paid the bill. Without looking at him, she
got into his car. She didn’t say a word as he drove a short
distance to a little house.

The shape of the house from the outside was
as she remembered it, but the inside was dark. Alex opened the door
into a small living room. The house was surprisingly dust-free. "I
have someone come in every week," Alex said, as if reading her
thoughts. "It’s good to have someone watch a house this close to
the sea, particularly in the winter."

"How thoughtful." She sat on the couch her
grandmother had sat in. A pretty view of the sea was behind her.
She didn’t care. She stared now at a faded picture of her mother
and herself as a baby. Tatiana was smiling and cuddling her
giggling dark-haired little daughter. Miranda smiled involuntarily.
That feeling that her mother had loved her had never left her,
despite everything; even this.

"It’s a beautiful picture," Alex said,
carefully sitting in the chair next to her. The chair she’d seen
him in the first time she’d met him. "It was here the day I came to
pick you up."

"Why did you leave it here?" It might have
been nice to have had all these years.

"I suppose I thought that this would make
this house your home, even if you weren’t here."

"In case you needed to send me here," she
said without looking at him.

"No," he said softly. "I didn’t have any
plans to send you away."

"How generous."

Alex sighed. "I’m so sorry. I never meant for
things to become what they did. I never worried—not once—that you
and Michael—"

"That Michael would get to me first?" she
said, looking at him for the first time.

"I didn’t think he’d ever get to you at
all."

"Had you told me the truth, he might never
have."

Alex came to sit next to her. "Do you want me
to tell you the truth now?"

"The truth," Miranda scoffed. "What
difference does it make? How does telling me a sequence of events
change what happened? How does telling me history make anything go
away?" She closed her eyes and saw his face, his eyes. She heard
his voice. She refused to think his name, because then she might
lose her mind. "Don’t tell me anything else if you can’t make all
this go away."

"I think you deserve to know."

"I don’t care."

"I should have told you. I knew that. I
didn’t because I was so ashamed. You have no idea what I’m
responsible for. Everyone else knows what I’m capable of. They’re
all afraid of me, or they despise me; or both, but never you. From
the first day you saw me, I was your hero. I’ve tried, believe it
or not, to live up that. But of course I couldn’t, so when that
failed, I tried to hide my sins."

"Lucy. Joanna Hazlett. Stephen. My mother.
All your sins? More I don’t know about, I’m sure. All of it." She
looked up at the ceiling, but even that was too painful. She buried
her face in her hands. "What difference does it make now?"

He was silent for a moment. "I want you to
know...maybe it was a mistake that you came into my life. At least,
the way you came in. But I’ve never regretted it, and it’s given me
faith that maybe there is something better in the world. You’re
proof of that."

"I wasn’t a mistake," Miranda said softly. "I
had a father and a mother, and they both loved me. I had a picture
in your house of the two of them. They were married. They were in
love. They found the letter my mother had written telling him about
me when he died. He’d opened it. He knew about me. I know that. And
my mother loved me. I don’t know what she had with you, I don’t
know why she was in that car with Stephen, but she loved me. And
there is nothing anyone can say that will make me feel like I was a
mistake."

Alex nodded. "Everyone wanted you. If your
father hadn’t been killed, things would have been different. There
were accidents and tragedies—" Miranda grabbed her stomach "—but
believe it or not, I’ve done everything I could to make sure you
didn’t suffer one."

She was losing her mind again. She felt like
her heart wasn’t in her body anymore. She knew where it was.

"Why did my mother die? I guess I want to
know that."

"Because I was a jealous bastard. Because I
was cold and ruthless even then, but I wasn’t very smart."

She knew he was crying at this point. She
wasn’t sure if she should feel sad or gratified. "Why?"

"Your mother was the most beautiful woman I
had ever seen. I don’t think it’s hard to see that. I met her with
Stephen. Stephen wasn’t happy. Stephen hadn’t been happy for a very
long time. It wasn’t Annabelle’s fault. It was in him. I thought I
helped. But maybe I did more harm than I thought.

"When I saw your mother with Stephen, I
assumed she was his mistress. Maybe I hoped it because Stephen
looked happy. And I knew how messy it might get, but maybe it was
for the best. Except that from the moment I saw her, I wanted her
too. And I pursued her. You see, that’s what I do. I go after what
I want. I have to. I’ve always been around people who got what they
wanted so often that they forgot how to want. I didn’t. I never had
the luxury. I get what I want, most of the time, but I have to work
for it." He paused. "And I worked to get her. More so because she
could tell what I was and that fascinated me. She knew she was a
thing at first, and she didn’t like it. I had to admit that I
wanted her beyond just having her." He looked out at the sea. "And
then I wanted her worse than I wanted anything else." He wiped a
tear. "I was going to marry her. She told me it was over with
Stephen, and I was going to tell the world she was mine. But then I
saw her with Stephen, and I lost control. I hit him, my best
friend. And she looked at me like she had no idea who I was, and
she told me to go to Hell.

"I was crazy with jealousy. I was sick with
it. She wouldn’t take my calls, and I was convinced, absolutely
sure, that she was with him. I’d lost her to him. I don’t lose
things. So I did the worst thing I could. I told Michael’s mother
they were having an affair. She didn’t believe me. She didn’t
believe me because she knew her husband better than I did. But I
convinced her."

Silence. Miranda couldn’t believe any of this
was real because in reality, she should be with Michael right now,
but she wasn’t. "And then what?"

"It took a little while, but I figured it
out, or so I thought. Jim and Richard told me. The two of them came
to Stephen’s house. Annabelle wouldn’t listen to anything. Why
should she? Your mother got into her car, and she was very upset, I
imagine, and Stephen got in to make sure that she wasn’t going to
hurt herself." Miranda heard a small heave. "But of course, she
did."

Now she could look at him. She blinked,
shaking her head. "And then she was gone. And then he was gone. So
how...how did you figure it out, if everyone who knew was
gone?"

"Jim called me to tell me about the accident.
I ran over. Annabelle was crazed with grief. I’d never seen her
like that. She hit me on the face and chest. And I let her. And she
kept screaming that I’d killed them both. I wasn’t going to say
anything, because that was close enough, wasn’t it?

"She almost caused a scene at the funeral.
Jim and Lucy—Lucy—took her and Michael in so they could watch her.
But they didn’t do a good enough job. The doctors gave her some
tranquilizers, but they didn’t watch her. She took the whole
bottle.

"Jim was a wreck. Lucy—well, you know Lucy.
They all—we all—thought it was best that Michael stay with me. I
was his godfather. Stephen made me his son’s godfather." He shook
his head. "Michael had never been very fond of me. I can’t blame
him. And after everything that happened—I didn’t think there was
anything I could do except allow him to have Richard whenever he
wanted. Anything he wanted. Fix anything he broke."

Miranda imagined how much Michael must have
hated Alex that week. She remembered how much Michael had glared at
Alex, and had hated all of them, of course. She wished she could be
the child she was and throw her arms around Michael and tell him
how sorry she was. But she couldn’t think about being so close to
him at any point in time. "Why didn’t I just stay here?" she
whispered painfully. "And then I’d never have met him."

Alex absently traced the line of the couch.
"It was a month after your mother died. I got a call. I’d spoken to
her once before." Alex closed his eyes briefly before he continued.
"She told me she was Tatiana’s grandmother, and she told me she
needed to talk to me. I didn’t think I could turn her down under
the circumstances.

"I’d never been here before. It’s so
beautiful, isn’t it? It was exactly the kind of place your mother
would have come from. So beautiful..." Alex stood up and turned. He
was crying but she didn’t care.

"I need to know. Why did I come to you?"

~~~

The cottage Alex walked into was the most
charming place he had ever seen. It was light and bright. It was
white inside, with touches of pink and red. He smiled in spite of
himself, because it was so much like Tatiana.

As was the older woman, so much like Tatiana.
She must have been in her late sixties, but she had the same eyes.
He could tell that her hair had once been blonde like Tatiana’s.
But her eyes didn’t have the same sparkle Tatiana’s had.

"I’m Helen Hamilton, Mr. Sheldon. Thank you
for coming," she said as she walked him into the small living
room.

"I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Hamilton. If
there is anything I can do, please let me know." Alex sat in the
chair for all of two seconds before he saw the picture on the wall.
It was the picture with Tatiana, maybe a few years younger, holding
a little girl. The hair and eyes were different, but the little
girl had the same face.

He stood up. "Oh God, oh God." Her secrets.
Oh, they were very different from his. "I had no idea." He turned
to Helen. "I’m so sorry," and it was the first time in years that
he meant it.

He shrank from her gaze. "Please sit down,"
she said gently.

"Where is she?"

"In her room," Helen answered. "I’ll be happy
to introduce you after we’ve talked." Alex didn’t say anything.
"I’m afraid my granddaughter wasn’t entirely honest with you. I
hope you can forgive her. But," she said, looking at her lap, "I
know that it was a mistake she intended to remedy." She looked back
up. "She’d want you to know now."

Alex nodded mutely to the unspoken question.
Helen turned her head in the direction of that window. "Do you see
that beach out there, Mr. Sheldon? It’s one of the prettiest sites
in the state, I think. Not too well known, maybe that’s part of our
charm. But of course, we’ve never been entirely a secret."

"I used to be a teacher. Nothing too grand, I
was just an eighth-grade English teacher. I’d wanted to be a
professor when I was younger, but I got married to a wonderful man
and we had a beautiful daughter. Her name was Eve. And she was
worth giving up a dream for. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice. My
husband and I had a wonderful life with her."

"She was fifteen." Helen looked even further
out into the horizon, not at the beach but past it. "She grew more
beautiful with each passing day. She had my eyes and hair. I must
say, when I was younger, people told me they were my best features.
But they looked much better on her. My husband was very
handsome—she took after him as well." She closed her eyes, and
smiled. "She was going to be a junior in high school after that
summer. She wanted to make a little extra money, so her father and
I said she could have a job that year. It’s a little livelier here
in the summer, more visitors, more summer jobs. Her father and I
thought she might work at the lemonade stand, or maybe even at one
of the restaurants. But no, she ran home to us on her first day and
told us that one of the families that were visiting needed a nanny
for their son. He was about eight at the time—easy enough for a
bright fifteen year-old to control." She turned to Alex, her green
eyes suddenly flashing. "And would you believe, Mr. Sheldon, that
that was the very first time I’d heard your name?"