Read One Week In December Online
Authors: Holly Chamberlin
One Week In December (18 page)
“That's not a promise you can keep.”
“Maybe not,” she conceded after a moment. “But the fact remains that I have a lot more to offer Rain than you and Naomi.”
“Like what, money? Things? Designer clothes and whatever else it is those spoiled Hollywood kids can't seem to live without?”
Really, Becca thought. He makes himself out to be a pillar of self-sacrifice and moral rectitude. Like he didn't have a flat-screen television? “Yes, David,” she said, “money. And things. Things like vacations in Europe and the best colleges and . . .”
David laughed that bark of a laugh. “Oh, I get it now! You want to buy your daughter's love! What makes you so sure she won't throw the money in your face? What makes you so sure she won't hate you for giving her up and for lying to her all these years?”
“What makes you so sure she won't hate you and Naomi for lying to her?”
David couldn't answer. The truth was that nothing made him feel sure that Rain wouldn't hate him and Naomi and the whole Rowan clan for what they'd done sixteen years earlier.
“This conversation is going nowhere,” he said. His tone was clipped. “When you can talk calmly and dispassionately about your daughter's welfare, let me know. Until then . . .”
As soon as David had left the room, Becca sank onto her brother and sister-in-law's bed, head in her hands. She felt suddenly and utterly deflated. Nothing was going as she'd hoped. Everything, everything was going horribly wrong.
31
Later that afternoon, David lay on the bed in the Lupine Room. He was fully dressed and his shoes were on. He knew that he shouldn't put his shoes on the clean bedspread; Naomi was always telling him that, just like his mother had told him until he'd left home for college. But he always seemed to forget their admonishments until it was too late and the damage had already been done.
The house was quiet, except for an occasional thump from the attic. Of course it was Olivia, on her never-ending, obsessive expedition into the past. Well, David thought, good luck to her. For himself, he could do without the past. In fact, there were great big chunks of the past he wished he could forget or, better yet, erase.
Like the adoption. Not that he wanted Rain to go away; he adored the girl and couldn't imagine a life without her. It was just . . . Just the way in which she had come into the life of the family that was bothersome.
There was something else that was bothersome. David was beginning to suspect that his protectiveness involved more than a little self-interest. He didn't want the girl he thought of as his daughter to think badly of him, to lose respect for him. He didn't want her to stop loving him and if she learned the truth of her birth now, in Becca's abrupt way, there seemed a pretty good chance that she would stop loving the man she'd always considered her father. There seemed a pretty good chance that she might even hate him. And David didn't believe he could handle that. He was strong, even tough, but that was one thing he was dead sure would knock him down for good. He needed to be seen as a good man, an honest person, and the idea of being shown for who he seemed after all to be, a deceiver though one with the best of intentions, was abhorent to him.
David kicked his legs against the mattress, aware that it was a childish way to show frustration. But yes, damn it, he did harbor feelings of guilt about his own role in the secret that had so largely defined the life of the family. Not terrible, debilitating guilt, but guilt all the same. Not that he was going to admit to those feelings publicly, not while Becca was on her insane campaign to destroy his life. David winced. He meant, on her insane campaign to destroy the life of his daughter.
There was a knock on the door. Before David could speak, it opened and Naomi slipped into the room.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he replied.
“Am I interrupting?”
“Of course not.”
Naomi stretched out next to her husband on the bed and kissed his cheek. “I'm sorry I yelled at you, David,” she said.
“I'm sorry I was such a bully. That's what Becca called me, anyway.”
“You were just concerned about me. I know that.”
“Yeah. I'm pretty concerned about us all, right now. I feel so powerless, like I'm a victim. Like we're all victims.” David gave a wry laugh. “You know, if this were a movie or a novel, we'd all plot to silence Becca once and for all.”
“David!”
“What?” he said, his eyes wide in a look of feigned innocence. “It's true. Here's this person threatening to destroy our family by revealing a long-kept secret. She won't listen to reason. She refuses to change her mind. And we're all sitting here trembling, waiting for her to strike. If we were fictional characters and not decent human beings, we'd join forces like we did sixteen years ago andâmake something happen.”
“But we're not fictional characters,” Naomi pointed out. “So stop entertaining such crazy notions.”
David turned his head to look at his wife, the person he loved more than anyone else in the world. “You're my best friend, you know,” he said. “Whom else could I talk to so honestly?”
“No one.”
“Come to think about it, you're my only friend.”
Naomi lightly slapped his arm. “Oh, come on, David. Don't sound so self-pitying. What about Johnny, at work?”
“Sure, he's a good guy to go bowling with. But . . . I wouldn't call him a friend. It's not like we talk about anything but work.”
“And bowling.”
“Yeah,” he conceded, “and bowling. I don't know, Naomi. I guess I've never been very good at keeping friends. Do you realize I don't keep in touch with one buddy from high school or college? Not one.”
“What about your father? Wouldn't you call him a friend?”
David thought about that. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “Dad became my friend over time. When I was growing up, he was only my father. That was good. I didn't need another buddy to hang out with. I needed a parent to guide me, to teach me right from wrong. But now . . . Yeah, it looks like you and Dad are my best friends. Now that Grandpa is gone.”
“You're a pretty lucky guy, you know.”
David lifted Naomi's hand and kissed it. Yeah, he was pretty lucky. He got to spend every day of his life with the woman he adored. “I do know, Naomi,” he said.
“So no more talk about rubbing out your sister.”
“I didn't say we'd have to kill her,” he argued. “We could, I don't know, inject her with a drug that would erase her memory and then pack her off to start a new life inâin the Siberian arctic.”
“You know how Becca hates the cold weather.”
“Maybe she wouldn't be able to remember that she hates it.”
“David.”
“All right,” he said, with exaggerated reluctance. “No more fantasies of Becca disappearing from our lives.”
“Good.” Naomi kissed her husband's cheek again and got up from the bed.
“But maybe she could just go away for a little while, like a couple of months.”
Naomi turned back to her husband, her hand on the doorknob. “You always have to have the last word, don't you?”
David grinned. “Yes.”
32
Rain was sitting cross-legged on the living room couch, flipping through yet another of the seemingly endless supply of glossy fashion magazines she'd brought with her. Becca, coming into the room from the direction of the kitchen, opened her mouth to say hello, or maybe to comment on the magazineâand suddenly found that she couldn't speak.
Because for the very first time in sixteen years, Becca had caught a glimpse of Rain's father in the girl on the couch. The recognition had been fleeting but all too real. The tilt of her daughter's head as she readâit had been nothing more than that, but that was everything.
Becca felt as if she had been issued an emotional slap so brutal it had sent her flying to the hardwood floor of the living room, where she lay prone, unable to summon the energy to rise.
It was crazy, she knew, but over the years she had almost come to believe that Rain was the product of her body alone, just another version of her own self, uncontaminated by the genetic contributions of anyone else.
But she was not. Rain was unique. She could not be incorporated or consumed or even claimed. She was not a copy, not a clone. And she was not entirely a Rowan.
Becca walked to the closest chair and sank into it.
“What's wrong, Aunt Becca?” Rain said, finally looking up. “You look like you just saw a ghost. Hey, you know what? I don't think I've ever actually used that expression before.”
With supreme effort, Becca managed to reply. “Everything's fine,” she lied. “I justâI just remembered something I'd forgotten. Something I was supposed to have remembered.”
“Getting old, huh?” Rain teased. “Having a senior moment? Don't worry. I'll come visit you in the nursing home.”
Becca smiled weakly in response. Rain went back to her reading and Becca watched her. And as she watched she wondered what exactly she had given Rain in terms of genetics, biology. Her lanky build certainly. The Rowan eyes. An interest in fashion maybe, if such a thing could be passed along via DNA. Her high spirits? Maybe. But Rain's father also had been full of high spirits. . . . Was there nothing else?
Not for the first time, Becca wondered how much more Rain would be like her, her biological mother, if they had lived together from the start, if Becca's presence had served as a primary example of being and conduct, and not Naomi's. And would Rain's being more like Becca be a good thing or a bad thing or something in between? It was impossible to say, and almost as impossible to imagine.
“Hey, Grandpa.”
Becca jumped. She hadn't heard her father come into the living room. Abruptly, she got up from her chair.
“Hi, Rain,” he said. “Becca.”
Rain unfolded her legs and got up from the couch. “Well, I'm out of here,” she said. “I promised to let Lily hear this new CD I got last week.”
“She's growing into a lovely young woman,” Steve said when she had left the room.
“Yes.”
The silence that followed this brief exchange was awkward but not hostile. Becca waited.
Finally, her father spoke. “I'd like us to talk. Please.”
It was a moment before Becca could reply. “I can't, Dad,” she said, her voice unexpectedly wavering. “Not now.”
Steve nodded. “All right. I can't force you to talk to me. I wouldn't force you even if I could.”
“I'm sorry,” she said, though she wasn't quite sure what she was sorry about. At that moment it could have been nothing, or everything.
Becca stood perfectly still until her father had disappeared upstairs. Then, she escaped into the denâand that was how it felt, like an escapeâand shut the door behind her. Her breath was coming rapidly now and she wondered if she was having a panic or an anxiety attack. She'd never had either sort of experience; she'd never allowed herself to feel enough of an emotion that might upset her so.
Becca sank onto the couch and concentrated on getting her breathing under control. But it was not so easy. The fact was that she was as scared now of a confrontation with her father as she had been eager for it only a few days earlier. Her confusion troubled her. What had happened to her steely resolve?
And her father's latest request coming hard upon the heels of Becca having seen evidence of Rain's biological father in her daughter . . . well, it had thrown her.
She felt very unhappy about having made Naomi cry, and so often. Until this week she'd never made anyone cry, not that she knew of. And really, Naomi had always been so generous with Becca, offering her access to Rain and, though she didn't strictly have to, even asking for Becca's opinion on certain matters of Rain's upbringing.
And then there was the latest argument with David. There had been moments when she had felt unable to control the words coming out of her mouth. There had been moments when those wordsâher own wordsâhad befuddled her. It was almost as if she was losing hold of her original desire, her primary goal, and fighting blindly, for the sake of the fight alone.
Something concrete and clear and without passion. Something she could fix or solve without emotion. That's what Becca badly needed right then. That's what would bring everything back into hard, clear focus.
So she checked her e-mail. There were no messages from anyone at the office, or from clients. She checked her phone. There was one message, from her dentist's receptionist, confirming an appointment for a cleaning on January 2. For a moment she considered calling Mary, her assistantâshe had Mary's home numberâjust to be sure she wasn't needed, but she abandoned the notion. Mary didn't need her few days off interrupted by her boss. Becca had never considered it before, but now she wondered what Mary and the other staff thought about her. She knew she was a fair leader; she knew she had never been and would never be an abusive boss. There could be no, or very few, complaints there. But did her staff, her colleagues, find her to be . . . odd? One of those slightly strange single women who didn't seem to be quiteâcompleteâas a person? Did they think of her as a character, rather than as a woman, a human being?
Becca slumped back onto the old leather couch. She felt vaguely disappointed that there was no crisis to be solved or critical decision to be made. She wondered: Of what did her life really consist?
Becca searched for a word that could describe what she was experiencing right then. It came after a few moments. She feltâdesperate. She felt as if she could jump out of her skin and through the window. She felt as if she might start screaming and not stop for a very long time. She had never felt this way before, so unmoored, so untethered, and it scared her. Maybe, she thought miserably, Olivia wasn't the only Rowan woman with a serious emotional problem. Working out at the gym and eating right was all well and good, but the body wasn't of much use if the mind and the heart were ailing.
Beccca lay back on the couch. Take deep breaths, she told herself. Just take deep, slow breaths. And you might want to call your doctor when you get back to Boston.
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