Everlasting (21 page)

Someone waved at Ivy—who had washed off her makeup and changed back into her own clothes before leaving Panera. Ivy gave a little beep of the horn.

“Love the car!” the woman called—it was Pat Celentano, but she didn’t recognize Tristan. Nobody here would recognize him.

“Could we drive by my house, my parents’ house?” he corrected himself.

“
Your
house,” Ivy said. “Sure.”

It was real, yet dreamlike to him, riding along the tree-lined streets over where he had biked and skateboarded. He saw landmarks he knew but had never paid much attention to: a striped awning off a side porch halfway down the block, a blossoming vine that came back each year to twine around a lamppost at the end, the white picket fence on the corner of the next block with tall spikes of flowers that always seemed to lean against it.

Ivy pulled up in front of a clapboard home with gray shutters, old shutters that had taken him and his friend Gary an entire summer to scrape and paint.

“The cherry tree. It’s gone.” Tristan had spent a lot of time under the shade of that tree.

“We had a really bad storm this spring.”

“Right. Of course. Things change,” he replied quickly, and saw Ivy biting her lip. “It’s okay,” he told her, resting his hand on hers. “I can handle this.”

Then the front door opened, and he gripped her hand hard as he watched his mother emerge. There were streaks of silver in her hair—maybe she’d had them before and he’d never noticed. She was carrying her medical bag, and he could guess where she was going: on a house call, which few pediatricians made these days.

His mother saw their car and stopped. “Ivy!” She rushed over.

Ivy glanced toward him, then got out. Tristan watched her and his mother hug.

“Look at that suntan! You look well. I heard some scary stuff from your mom.”

“Yes, but I’m fine now, just home for a few days, then back to the Cape to work.”

“Steve and I have missed you, but I’m glad you, Will, and Beth are enjoying a summer at the beach. How are they?”

Tristan saw Ivy hesitate. “Fine. Good.”

His mother leaned down and peeked in the car. It made him ache, seeing her smile at him as if he were a stranger. “Hello.”

He couldn’t move.

“This is my friend . . . Gabriel.”

“Hello, Gabriel.”

“Hi.”

“He’s a little shy until he gets to know people,” Tristan heard Ivy say. “Then you can’t shut him up,” she added, leaning down to look in the window as if she were teasing him. She straightened up again and he couldn’t see either of their faces. “Gabe works at the inn with us, lives on the Cape year round.”

“I’m glad you’re making new friends.”

Knowing his mother, Tristan could hear the quiet message in her words:
It’s okay, Ivy.

He heard his mother’s phone buzz.

“On call?” Ivy asked.

His mother’s hand reached into her pocket to retrieve the phone. He was glad he was in the car, hidden enough to stare at a hand he had held onto so tightly as a child. “Same patient,” she said. “First child—new parents always get a little nervous. I had better go. But listen, Steve will be home any minute. Stay and see him—he’d love it. I’ll let you in the house.”

Ivy leaned down, her face appearing in the driver’s side
window. Tristan shook his head quickly. He couldn’t bear to go in the house. It was too much.

“Thanks, but we’ll wait in the garden for a few minutes. I’ve always loved it there.”

Tristan’s mother gave Ivy a second hug, then she leaned down to peer in the window again. “Sorry I can’t stay. Come back, okay?”

His heart felt pressed against his ribs.

He watched her hurry off to her car and back down the driveway too fast—as always—cutting the wheel too soon as usual.

“Mailbox!” he yelled when she was still ten feet from slamming on the brakes. She gazed at him with surprise, her hazel eyes holding his for a moment, then she laughed and continued out of the driveway on a safer path.

Ivy got back in the car and sat silently, waiting for him to speak.

“I don’t think I can take anymore. Can we go on to your house?” Tristan asked.

She took his hand in hers, cradled it in both hands, then kissed it. It took her a long time to answer him. “Are you glad you saw your mom? If you could push the delete button, would you erase the last few minutes?”

“No!” he said, the passion in his voice surprising him. It was painful, but no matter what, he couldn’t part with those moments.

“Then I think we should wait for your dad. You can stay in the car and we can make it as quick as with your mom.”

“What if I—” he hesitated, feeling as vulnerable as a child. “What if I . . . break down?”

“Your dad’s work is to be with people when they break down. It’ll be all right.”

Tristan kept his hand in hers, and when a dark blue car drove up and he saw the clergy sticker, he wove his fingers through hers.

He watched as his father got out and walked toward the house, his dad’s mind elsewhere, as it always had been, not noticing Ivy’s car.

Tristan’s throat tightened. “He looks old. Not his face, but the way he walks.” Tristan didn’t want to think of his parents growing old, their bodies becoming worn.

His father turned suddenly, saw their car, then his face lit up, making him look years younger, the father Tristan remembered.

“Ivy! What a wonderful surprise!”

Ivy got out of the car and Tristan watched them meet halfway across the lawn, his father’s arms opening wide, then closing around her. She and his father talked for a few minutes, moving slowly toward the car, then his dad leaned down to look in. For a moment, Tristan was eight and saw the face of his father staring at him, under his Spider-Man bedcovers, where Tristan had buried himself due to some
kind of second-grade catastrophe. Tristan couldn’t remember the catastrophe, just his father kneeling on the floor next to his bed, his face suddenly appearing under the covers. “How are you doing, buddy?”

“Hello, Gabriel,” his father said, his voice gentle but formal. “I’m Steve Carruthers.”

“Hello.”

Ivy went through the same explanation as before about shy Gabriel from the Cape, and Tristan somehow found the strength to move his arms and legs and climb out of the car. His father reached out to shake his hand. Tristan tried to remember if he had ever shaken his father’s hand, except when he was being taught as a little boy.

“Would you like to come in?”

Tristan felt Ivy watching him. “Well, how about the garden?” she asked. “Are you growing tomatoes again?”

Tristan remembered how amused Ivy had been by his father’s garden, in which vegetables and flowers were mixed together, cucumbers hanging on a trellis next to climbing roses, squash running over petunias, tomatoes surrounded by zinnias. The garden had looked like their house, especially the living room, the first place where Ivy and Tristan had been alone together, the day she gave him her cat, Ella. He remembered how politely she had peeked around at the piles of medical journals, sports magazines, and books of prayers that left no place to sit but the floor,
not mentioning until much later that she had seen the tub of carryout chicken he had stashed behind the sofa.

Now Ivy offered to show “Gabriel” the gardens that extended around the side yard, perhaps to save Tristan from walking through the house, but he spoke up and accepted his father’s invitation to come in and get a cool drink. Ivy took his hand, twining her fingers in his as they entered the house.

It looked the same, except no sports magazines were left open on the floor. His books were still in one of the many bookcases that lined the walls, and there were pictures of him at every age, more than he remembered.

“We have a new member of the family.”

Before his father could explain, a black and white cat flew out from a pile of laundry that had been dumped on the sofa, pounced on Tristan’s sneaker, and began pulling on his shoestring.

Tristan bent down. “She looks like Ella!”

His father looked at him surprised. Tristan couldn’t believe he had blurted that out. He picked up the kitten and tried to recover from his mistake. “Doesn’t she look like your cat Ella, the one you showed me pictures of?” he asked Ivy.

“Yes, very much.” Ivy petted the young cat under her chin.

“Her name’s Lacey,” Tristan’s father said.

Tristan saw Ivy’s jaw drop. “Lacey! What a cute name! What made you think of it?”

“It’s an odd kind of story,” he said as he led them into the kitchen. “Lynne and I were having dinner on the back patio, enjoying one of the first warm spring evenings. A girl came around the corner of the house—a teenager, not a little girl—saying she had found our kitten. We explained to her that we didn’t have one. She said it was on our front porch, its paws up on the screen, crying to get in. ‘Really, it’s not ours,’ we said. Then I noticed it had a collar and tag.”

“This one?” Ivy asked. Both the collar and little metal heart were purple.

Tristan’s father nodded.

Ivy flipped it over. “Lacey,” she read aloud.

“While Lynne and I were looking at the tag, the girl ran away. She was gone in a flash, nowhere to be found, and there we were, holding a cat. We advertised, put signs up in town, and an ad in the paper. By the time it became apparent that no one was going to respond, Lacey had made herself at home here.”

Tristan held the cat away from him to study her: she was mostly black, but had one white foot, with a splash of white on her face and the tip of her tail. Did Lacey think his parents needed a companion and, finding a kitten that was a double for Ella, decide to drop by with it? Did cats have souls—could they come back?

He handed her to Ivy, who cradled little Lacey in her arms. The cat blinked her large green eyes at Ivy and purred.

“She has a big motor for such a little thing,” Tristan said.

“Oh, she’s a purr-ball, all right. We think she’s about six months old.”

Ivy rubbed her cheek against the kitten’s, and Tristan saw a tear sparkling at the end of Ivy’s lashes.

“Bring her leash with us. She enjoys the garden, but Lynne and I don’t want her wandering off.”

Ivy picked up the long leash from a hook by the door, and Tristan and his father carried their glasses of lemonade outside.

They talked for a half hour, Ivy catching up on all the news of Stonehill, Tristan drinking up the familiar smells and colors of the garden, and, most of all, the sound of his father’s voice.

When Tristan was a child, he had thought his dad had Superman’s X-ray eyes, the way he could read him and guess when Tristan had been into something he shouldn’t have. Tristan had that feeling again, every time his father’s eyes came to rest on him.

“Would you two like to stay for dinner?” his father asked. “Something simple. Pizza or Chinese. Lynne ought to be back soon.”

Ivy glanced at Tristan.
Enough
, he thought, aware suddenly of how emotionally exhausted he was. He stood up, hoping she could read his body language.

“Thanks so much. Another time,” Ivy said.

Tristan’s father put the cat inside, then walked Tristan and Ivy around the house. When Tristan reached the car, he saw his father had caught Ivy by the arm and was talking to her quietly.

Tristan waited. The tilt of his father’s head told him that he was asking Ivy questions.

“He knows, yes. Gabriel knows all of what happened,” she said, looking back at Tristan, before turning to his father again. She was nodding at whatever his father was saying, then suddenly leaned against him and started to cry. For a moment, he was an angel without a body again, unseen by Ivy and his father, an outsider, powerless to comfort either of them. He watched his father put his arms around Ivy and saw the age and sadness in his father’s face.

Then Ivy turned to Tristan, smiling through her tears, and said, “Reverend Carruthers says that there’s something about you, Gabriel. Despite how different you are from Tristan, when he looks at you, he keeps thinking of his son.”

Tristan stared at his father. What reasonable response could he make to that?
None
. He walked toward his father, put his arms around his him, and hugged him. It was almost unbearable letting go again. “Thank you,” Tristan said quietly. “Thank you.”

“SO WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF LACEY JR.?” TRISTAN
asked Ivy as she drove past the edge of town, following the two-lane road that led to her home.

Ivy laughed out loud. “Well, we know
who
is watching out for your parents, but where exactly did Lacey get the kitty? Philip has always said that Ella became an angel, and we all went along with the idea, since it seemed to help him get over her death.” Ivy told Tristan about the graphic novel Will and Beth had been collaborating on, and he smiled.

“But who knows?” Ivy added.
Who knows anything for
sure?
she thought. She’d never dreamed she’d be driving this road again with Tristan.

She turned into the driveway that led to her house, climbing the long hill through stretches of trees that opened here and there to small clearings made bright by wild-flowers. When they parked, she turned to look at Tristan, trying to read his feelings about seeing his parents again. The first thing she had learned from loving him was that, when you love deeply, pleasure and pain can be intertwined. “How are you doing?” she asked softly.

He smiled into her eyes as if knowing she needed to look into them to be convinced. “I’m good. I’m glad we went.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek, then got out of the car.

“You’re sure no one’s here?” Tristan asked, standing next to her, gazing up at Ivy’s home.

It was an imposing house, three full stories with a two-story wing on each side, massive double chimneys, and heavy black shutters. For Ivy, moving from their Norwalk apartment to this house had been difficult, the residence seeming too large and too cold, and later becoming a place of fear, thanks to Gregory. After her stepbrother’s death, Andrew had asked her mother, herself, and Philip whether they wanted to stay there or move to another house. Knowing Andrew’s attachment to a house and land that had been in the Baines family for several generations, they
decided to replace the bad memories with good ones. Ivy believed it was proof of their and Andrew’s love for one another that they’d been slowly able to do that. The only place she avoided in the house was Gregory’s old room, which was now used for storage.