Between Here and the Horizon (28 page)

‘It’s enough time to fall for someone.
Hard
. And then what? I go back to California, without the children, without a job, and with a broken heart?” I shook my head. “No, Sully. This doesn’t end well.”

“You don’t know how it ends,” he retorted. “And I can guarantee you, you won’t have fallen for me by the time you leave this place. I won’t let it happen. I can protect you from it.”

“How?”

He closed the gap between us again, moving slowly. “By letting you get to know me. By showing you my true colors.” He gently tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, staring at my earlobe like he wanted to feast on it. “And I’ll crank up my asshole super powers to the fiendish setting. That ought to do the trick.”

I looked up at him defiantly, searching his face. Did he believe his snarky comebacks and his sharp-edged tongue would be enough to hold back the tides of something that already felt unstoppable, like the wave of a tsunami rushing in to shore? I studied his face for a long time, willing myself not to lean into his hand and close my eyes. Sully gave nothing away. His face was blank, his eyes mirrors, only reflecting myself back to me in their dark depths, betraying nothing of him at all. His lips were pressed tightly shut—that was the only thing that gave him away. He was holding his breath.
 

Pushing away from the wall, I stooped down and grabbed my purse from the floor, then hurried past him before he could stop me. “I’m sorry, Sully. I have to go.”

“Lang?”

I didn’t turn back.
 

“Ronan and I fought all the time,” he rushed out. “We raged, and we gouged, and we kicked the living shit out of each other, but through it all we always still loved each other. After what he did with Magda, though…there was no coming back from that. It changed me. I’ll admit I’m not the man I used to be. But you make me feel…
fuck
.” He stopped, growling under his breath. “You make me feel like I might be able to find that man again, the man I was, before Magda and before Afghanistan, and it scares the shit out of me. I don’t even know if I want to be him again. So…don’t walk away for good. I get it if you have to walk away for now. But make sure you come back, okay? This isn’t done yet and you know it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Snow Angels

Three days. Then a week. Then two.
 

December arrived, and with it snow. Wet, slushy snow that didn’t stick for long and made the roads a nightmare to drive on. Everything felt gray and dismal, especially my mood. Rose commented on my downcast spirit a few times, then gave up trying to figure out what was wrong with me. It was when Amie asked why I was so sad all the time, and was I going to go away like her daddy and her mommy had, that I realized enough was enough. I wasn’t alone anymore. I had two little people to consider, and moping around, feeling sorry for myself because I’d been stupid enough to develop a serious attraction to a man who was essentially poisonous, was only going to make them anxious and unhappy.
 

So I cheered the fuck up.
 

Connor got a part in the school nativity play. He had two lines, so it didn’t matter that he’d joined the cast at short notice. He rocked the part of Shepherd No. 2, and both Rose and I cried a little when he took a bow at the end of the performance, grinning from ear to ear. I’d never seen him smile. Not like that. Not like he was a normal, trouble-free seven-year-old, playing with his friends, looking forward to Christmas.
 

Another week.

Jerry, the boatman, decided to sail back to the mainland early and didn’t tell anyone he wouldn’t be coming back until the day after Christmas, so the inhabitants of The Causeway were scrambling through the few small grocery stores that remained open on the island, trying to find last minute presents for each other along with ingredients for their holiday dinners.
 

Then, Christmas morning. I woke to hear Amie running up and down the hallway outside my room, squealing at the top of her lungs, followed by her brother, who was also yelling and laughing. They burst into my room, giggling like maniacs, half dressed, hair all over the place, both wearing toothy grins and extra cheeky dimples.
 

Hurtling themselves at my bed, they jumped up on top of me and proceeded to flail and bounce around, hollering at the top of their lungs. “Snow! Snow! Snow!” Amie dropped to her knees, landing right on top of me. “Get up, Feelya. There’s so much snow outside. We need to go play in it.”

Sure enough, when I allowed them to drag me, groggy and in sore need of caffeine, to the window, the entire view out of the glass was pure white for as far as the eye could see. There must have been a huge storm in the night, and we’d all slept through it.
 

“Can we?” Connor said, looking hopeful. “We’re not even hungry. We don’t need breakfast.”

“I don’t know about skipping breakfast,” I said, yawning. “But we can definitely go outside and build a snowman first. How about that?”

They screamed in response. Outside, the world felt fresh and new. It felt like it was holding its breath. Like it was keeping a secret. The huge lawn to the front of the house was a pristine white blanket. Connor and Amie, in pink and green rubber boots, charged at it like wild animals, racing each other, running in circles, pushing each other over, making snow angels on their backs. They dragged me down with them, and I created the most lopsided, shapeless snow angel, which made them both laugh. The three of us lay on our backs in the snow, panting, trying to catch our breath, staring up at the sky, and Connor reached out and took my hand. I’d never forget it. The small, usually unremarkable gesture that had me so close to tears. I squeezed his hand and he pulled away, but he smiled at me as he raced off, whooping and shouting so loud that his voice echoed way off in the distance.
 

When the cold set in and the glory of charging around in the snow was no longer enough to distract the children from the lure of the presents waiting for them under the Christmas tree, we headed back to the house. On the doorstep, sitting there, stacked one on top of the other, were three presents all wrapped in matching brown paper.
 

“Look!” Amie ran up the steps and picked up the first present, shaking it in her mittened hand. “Santa brought us extras presents!” She held it up to show me.
 

“That one’s got an O on it.” Connor took the present—long and narrow—from her, studying the small gift card that was taped to the top of it. “It doesn’t say anything else. I think it’s for you.” He handed the gift to me, and then picked up the one underneath. “This one has a A on it. And this one has a C.” Picking up the largest, bulkiest present from the floor, Connor gave it to his sister, who had to hold it with two hands.
 

“Whoa! It’s heavy! Where did they come from?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart. I think Santa maybe
did
just forget to drop these off in the night, so he left them here where he knew we would find them.” The presents weren’t there when we came outside earlier, I was sure of it. I spun around, scanning the sprawling lawn and the sweeping driveway that stretched on and on for at least a mile back to the main road, and there, in the distance, I saw him—a tall figure dressed in black, so far off he was barely more than a half a centimeter tall, walking away from the house. Black pants. Black jacket. A black hat, or maybe just very, very dark hair. Plumes of smoke rose up on the figure’s breath, clouding overhead as he grew smaller and smaller, until I couldn’t make him out anymore.
 

“Who was that?” Connor asked.
 

“I don’t know, buddy. I haven’t got a clue. Come on. How about we head inside and have some oatmeal? I think I’m starting to freeze.” I
did
know who the mystery figure was, though. It was all too obvious. Sully must have walked right past us playing around on the lawn when he dropped off the presents. He must have slipped by, less than fifty feet away, and none of us had seen him. I slid the small present into my jacket pocket, ushering the children inside, and I couldn’t help but ask myself why. Why would he bother sneaking onto the property to bring the children a present? To bring
me
a present. After all he’d said, it made no sense that he would go to such extreme lengths, walking so far in the cold, so early in the morning. Why hadn’t he just driven his truck?

I didn’t get to spend too long analyzing the man’s behavior. Breakfast had to be made, and then the children spent two solid hours ripping open their gifts and playing with their toys. Thankfully I’d had the foresight to order everything for them online weeks earlier, so Jerry’s vanishing act hadn’t affected me in any way.
 

Connor and Amie, without meaning to, ended up opening Sully’s presents last.
 

For Connor, a beautiful, small telescope, made of brass and maple wood. As soon as he opened the box and took out the complex looking article inside, I knew Sully had made it. You couldn’t buy that kind of craftsmanship anymore. Everything was machine made, but Connor’s telescope was unique, the wood hand-turned and sanded, the workings smooth and breathtaking. Connor held it reverently, eyes round and amazed. “It’s awesome,” he said breathlessly. “So much better than my binoculars. I’ll be able to see the stars with this.”

“You sure will, buddy.”

“Best present ever. I can’t wait for it to go dark so I can try it out.”

Amie’s gift was just as impressive. At first it looked like a box full of random, sanded and varnished pieces of wood. All three of us stood over the open packaging, eyeing the contents with frowns of confusion on our faces until Amie yelped.
 

“I know what it is! I know! I know!” She dropped down to the floor and began pulling out the pieces and laying them out in front of her, at which point it dawned on me, too: they were bones. Dinosaur bones. Sully had hand carved her a simplified, to-scale skeleton of what turned out to be (after many hours of playing where-the-heck-does-this-piece-go?) a Velociraptor.
 

Amie was uncontainable.

Rose showed up in the afternoon, and together we made Christmas dinner. We exchanged gifts—I’d bought her a new Coach purse online. She’d bought me a beautiful cashmere scarf all the way from Scotland—and once we were done with the food and the gifts, and the children were crashed out face first on the sofa, she turned to me and said, “Off you go, then.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t play coy with me, girl. I may have pretended I didn’t know what was going on before, but I’ve witnessed my fair share of Fletcher-infatuated women to recognize one when I see one now. So go. And tell him Merry Christmas from me, okay? I nailed a sock full of coal to his front door this morning. I’m sure he saw the funny side.”
 

I sat there, debating whether I should stay and argue with her, denying any knowledge of this Fletcher-infatuation she was referring to, or whether I should just gracefully accept defeat and come clean. In the end, there was only one thing for it.
 

“I’m really sorry,” I told her, groaning. “It wasn’t meant to happen. He’s just…he’s so
infuriating
. He gets to you, and then he gets to you some more. Before you know it, he’s all you can think about, and you find yourself wishing you’d never laid eyes on him in the first place, but it’s too late, and—”

“And he’s the one.”

“The most inappropriate, unorthodox, unreliable one there ever was.”

Rose gave me a pitying look. “Don’t we all just know it? Funny how the knowing doesn’t change anything, isn’t it?”

I hung my head, feeling pretty sorry for myself. “It’s the worst.”

******

I hadn’t opened Sully’s gift. I sat in the car outside the lighthouse, too afraid to get out of the car and go inside, knowing that he must have heard me pull up. I held the small present he’d left for me in my hands, turning it over and over, worrying the corners of the paper under my shaking hands. I was scared. What if it was something and nothing? A pair of socks? A gift certificate to a bookstore? The box was the wrong size and shape to be either of those things, but the thought was still there. What if it was a throw away gift that meant nothing? Was that worse than him giving me something that meant too much? Jewelry? Something personal and handmade like he’d given to the children? Either way, I was screwed.
 

The passenger door to the car opened all of a sudden, scaring the crap out of me. I’d been staring so intently down at the gift that I hadn’t noticed Sully leave the lighthouse and make his way over to the car. His cheeks were flushed red from the cold, and his wavy hair was swept back out of his face. Still the handsomest man I’d ever seen.
 

He climbed up into the car and made himself comfortable in the passenger seat. Not looking at me, he slammed the door closed and then stared straight ahead out of the windshield. Neither of us said anything at first. And then, “Aren’t you going to open it?”
 

“I’ve been thinking about it,” I admitted. “The children loved their gifts. Thank you.”

Sully shrugged, blowing onto his hands. “No big deal.” He was trying to pretend that it wasn’t, but both he and I knew how much effort he’d put into those gifts. How long they would have taken him to make—hours and hours. Both gifts were labors of love. It really was a big deal. “It smells like Christmas threw up in here,” Sully observed.
 

It really did. I’d set aside a plate of food for him when we’d dished up dinner without really thinking about it. A flask of mulled wine leaked cinnamon and spice smells into the car, which mingled with the scent of turkey, stuffing and gravy to produce an undeniably festive oratory assault.
 

“If you don’t want the food I can always take it home with me.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been waiting for you for hours. I’m starving.”

“How did you know I was coming?”

Sully glanced sideways at me, mouth open in a smile. “There’s this part in The Sound of Music, where Maria’s trying to deny her true feelings for the stuffy old Von Trapp bastard. He’s fallen down some stairs or some shit, and everyone thinks she won’t go to him, that she’ll let him figure out his shit for himself or whatever because he’s been a grade A cunt to her, but then at the end of the film, just as the Nazis are about to cart old Von Trapp off to Auschwitz, Maria shows up with a machine gun and rescues his ass. Well, she
tries
to rescue him and gets herself captured in the process, so he actually has to save her in the end, but it all works out.”