The Last Embrace (30 page)

We talk for a few more minutes before ringing off. I finish my coffee, then start back toward the house. As I near the Connally house, the swishing sound comes again and curious, I stop and turn back.

I follow the noises, rounding the corner to the back of the house next door. A tall, thin man stands upon a ladder, his back turned, moving boards. His wide shoulders and narrow hips are familiar. Charlie. My heart lifts. But of course this time, it cannot be; he is in England recuperating. With Grace. Pushing down the hurt, I take a step forward. Closer now I can see that the man's hair is a darker shade, his build thinner.

There, repairing the house, is Liam.

I take a deep breath, finding my voice. “What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?”

Liam freezes, but does not turn. “I heard this is where all of the cool kids hang out,” he replies slowly. He spins, his expression disbelieving. He jumps off the ladder and starts toward me.

“Liam!” I yelp, running forward. Surprise and then delight flood his face as I fling myself at him. He catches me in his arms, warm and tight, and I draw close to him like a dry plant to water. I rest my head on his chest and he cradles it, fingers entwined in my hair.

“It's really you.” He lifts me off my feet and spins me around.

Once I would have protested for him to stop. But now I just allow myself to melt in his arms. A moment later, he sets me down. I step back and an awkwardness crystalizes between us. He is leaner now, jawline carved in a way I hadn't quite remembered. But his eyes are unmistakably the same.

“I was looking for coffee,” I blurt abruptly, mindful that I am still wearing yesterday's clothes. Suddenly I am sixteen again and sounding stupid. “You're here. That is, I didn't know.”

“I drove back down this morning. Had to get more supplies from the city.”

“I wasn't planning to stay,” I confess. I might have picked up the boxes and gone last night. If I had, we would have missed each other completely. But something had kept me here.

“Your aunt isn't renting next door,” he observes.

“My uncle died.”

“Oh, I'm sorry.” But his voice is level, the neutral response of one who has known deep suffering and almost grown immune.

“I just came to pack up some things for my aunt.”

“Well, I've got coffee. Come on in and see what I'm doing.”

I hesitate, starting to tell him that I've already had some. Though I had gone by the Connallys' house in Philadelphia hoping someone might have returned, I find myself now not wanting to step inside, to cross the threshold of a door I had closed forever. But he looks so hopeful, I cannot refuse.

Inside the house is a wreck in a way that would have driven Mrs. Connally mad. The furniture that remains has been pushed to one side and covered with a tarp. Thick smells of paint and turpentine fill the air. “The house had really fallen to pieces with the storms and being empty.”

I am puzzled: it has been less than two years since we had summered here. Could things really have fallen to pieces so quickly? But there were cracks and damage, undetected through the years, that had been amplified during the time we were gone. Liam is trying to bring it back, restoring it and making everything just as it had been before, only fresh and new. But there are improvements, too, like the window he cut between the living and dining areas to give it a more airy, modern feel.

As he walks to the kitchen to pour coffee from his mom's old percolator, I look around, trying to grasp the scope of his undertaking. He is, quite literally, rebuilding the house from the outside in. “You're doing all of this yourself?”

He nods as he hands me a too-warm cup. “I've still got to finish most of the bedrooms and the deck. Need to get the major outside work done before the weather changes.”

“It's going to be swell,” I say, meaning it. I take a cautious sip. I had feared I might find the house unbearable, see ghosts everywhere. But the memories of Robbie playing and ducking under the table are merry ones, warming me.

“I thought...” His voice cracks. He turns away abruptly. “I've got to get this done before dark,” he apologizes, starting for the back door.

Is that my cue to leave? I can go back to the boardinghouse and load up the boxes, be gone for good in an hour. But my feet remain planted. “Let me help.” I follow him to the back door. He hesitates, relying on others still unfamiliar to him. “I'm not much with tools,” I say, “but I can paint for you.”

“Your clothes are going to get ruined.”

“I don't mind.”

“Wait here,” he instructs. I stand alone in the house I had once known so well, the walls seeming to whisper to me. A minute later he returns with one of his old T-shirts. “Put this on.” I pull it on over my clothes and the too-large fabric envelops me in his familiar scent, as it had the night I tried to talk to him on Chelsea Beach. I walk outside and pick up a brush.

We work alongside one another without speaking. There are so many things I'd like to ask him about the time since I'd last seen him and how he had come to be here. But I fear if I press, he might pull away, as he had when we were younger. The silence broken by the humming of the saw and the gulls overhead. I look over at him as he sands the wood, fingers dexterous. Watching him work I am reminded of the boy who seemed to dance on the waves, agile and carefree in that moment, unheld back by anger and fear. How had I forgotten that part of him?

His shoulders are broad, tapering to a narrow waist and long legs. I see him for the first time as a man, fully grown into himself, reminiscent and at the same time not at all like Charlie. Warmth rises, confusing me. I force my eyes back to my work. I fall into an easy rhythm painting, the repetitive up and down motion somehow soothing. The work is simple and the ache in my shoulders satisfying in a way I had not anticipated.

From around the house comes the sound of sandals slapping against pavement. I turn toward the sound, glimpsing a flash of brown hair out of the corner of my eye. My breath catches and I half expect to see Robbie, still eleven years old, carrying a bucket of sand crabs he'd caught off one of the docks in Chelsea Harbor, water sloshing over the sides and leaving dark streaks on the street. But it is an unfamiliar boy and he walks into one of the rented houses down the row, the screen door slamming behind him. My eyes burn as I remember exactly how hard this is. Blinking, I force myself to focus on the painting once more.

“Let's take a break,” Liam says a while later when the morning sun has climbed late in the sky. Gratefully, I set down my paintbrush and drop to the porch steps. He goes inside and returns with two glasses of iced tea. A fine perspiration coats his upper lip and wets the ends of his hair. We sit beside each other, not speaking, the silence growing more awkward by the second. I want to jump up and grab the paintbrush again.

“So what have you been doing these many years?” he asks.

A year and a half, I want to say. But I know that it feels like more. There are so many levels on which I could answer his question. I decide to take the simplest. “I was in Washington, then in London, working for the paper.”

I wait for him to chastise me for going to a place as dangerous as London. But he is not Charlie. “Did you go all the way back to Italy?”

I shake my head. “It wasn't possible with the fighting. But I was able to confirm what had happened to my parents.” A burning rises in my throat and I stop short of sharing the whole of the awful truth.

He does not press. “So you came home?”

“Just to help my aunt for a bit,” I reply quickly.

“My folks are down in Florida,” he offers. I start to tell him that I already know. But I am not ready to mention Charlie. “I've got a boat now, docked over at the marina.” He is speaking in all directions, trying to fill the space between us. “I'm planning to start a small business. Fishing trips and that sort of thing.”

The Liam I had known was not one to fish. “So you're going to stay down here year-round?”

“Yeah. There's nothing left for me back in the city. I'm more whole here. The seawater,” he says. “It's in my bones, you know?”

I nod, understanding. There's a part of me that still cannot breathe deeply unless the air has salt in it. “Liam Connally, settling down,” I muse, half-chiding. “A house. A business. Next thing you know you'll be getting married.”

“Who would want me? I'm so broken.” He tries to make his voice lighthearted, but a note of sad truth rings through.

“Not at all.” My heart twists as I remember the boy he was, before all of this. I want to reach out and put my arm around him, but somehow I can't. “You've started over.” The easiest thing for him to have done would have been to move far away where no one had ever heard of the Connallys or the accident at the bridge. But he had returned. The house is a second chance for Liam—a chance at redemption. “I would have imagined Jack settling down first, though,” I offer, then instantly regret it.

“My brother's a queer.”

“Liam, don't.” For a minute I take his comment as mean-spirited, the Liam of old. But his tone is neutral, non-judging.

“I don't say that to be mean,” he adds. “I say it because it is the truth. What is so wrong with the truth? He's happy actually, living with someone outside of Philadelphia.” In some ways, he is more accepting of his brother than Charlie was.

I finish my iced tea and stand to carry the glass back inside. On the low table by the door there is a notebook and pencil. I pick it up. “Is this yours?”

“Yeah.” He jumps up and takes it from me, a guarded look crossing his face. “When I was coming through it all, I started keeping a journal. I liked it, so now I'm working on a story.”

“You're writing,” I marvel. “I had no idea.”

He shrugs. “It's nothing much.” As he returns the notebook to the house, I wonder if he's writing about everything that happened, and whether I might be in it.

He returns a minute later, finishes his iced tea and sets down the glass. “I should get back to work. You don't have to help me. I know you've got to get through those boxes for your aunt.”

“I should get those finished so I can head back,” I concede reluctantly. I've enjoyed working here and I'm not ready to go.

“Well, come back over for dinner,” he said, seeming to read my mind. “I caught some fresh bass and there's plenty. We'll have a good meal before you go.” He ends on a downward note.

By dinnertime, I think, I should be packed up and on my way back to the city. But his face looks so hopeful, I cannot refuse.

* * *

The sun has sunk low in that late summer way, casting long shadows of the houses on the pavement, as I make my way, hours later, across the patch that separates the boardinghouse from the Connallys'. I've showered to rinse off the packing dust and put on a fresh cotton dress, pinning my hair back at the temple where my bangs have started to fall in my eyes again. I walk around the side of the Connally house. Liam is grilling fresh fish over the old grill in the backyard. I study him, noticing the way his hair curls at the collar, the lean silhouette of his cheekbones and jaw. Has he grown handsomer in the time we were apart, or had he been that way all along and I had just been so blinded by Charlie I had not noticed?

He carries over two plates and we sit on the porch, watching the last embers of the fire die, crackling upward into the darkness of night. A kind of awkwardness seems to hover above us. We never had easy conversations, even in the old days.

“There's wine, if you'd like some.”

“No, thanks.” I notice he does not have any for himself. That part of him, I can only hope, is gone forever. “It's quiet,” I say.

He nods in agreement. “Even after all of these years, I'm not sure I can get used to it. Growing up with three brothers was rough, though. I know it seemed like a party to you, but there was always someone faster, smarter, bigger. I just didn't know how to make my way in a place like that.” He'd run away because it had been too much, just like Robbie hiding under the stairs. “Sometimes I actually envied you, being alone.”

“I wasn't alone. I had you all.” He does not respond. “I saw Charlie,” I offer, unable to keep it to myself any longer.

Something flickers across his face, though whether it is anger or pain or something else I cannot tell. “Where?”

“Washington, and then London. He was wounded.”

“Yeah,” he says gruffly. “Mom and Dad keep me in the loop.” So the Connallys had stayed in touch with each other, but not me. I am an outsider to the family once more.

“He's okay now.”

He always is
, Liam's cursory nod seems to say. “You and Charlie were together, weren't you?” There is a catch to his voice. “Never mind, it's none of my business.”

I don't want to answer. But his eyes are probing, needing the truth. “Yes. Before it all happened—and a bit in London, too. How did you know?”

“You notice a lot from the sidelines,” he remarks wryly. “I always knew. I could tell from the day we met you. What happened?” He looks at me squarely.

“Just one bad start too many.” I struggle to keep my voice nonchalant. “Maybe some part of me knew that it wasn't right, that if I was with him I could truly never be free. Anyway, he's engaged now.”

“Grace.”

So he knows about that, too. Of course he does—she's his brother's fiancée, after all. My stomach roils as I picture Grace: blonde, winsome. Not Jewish. Everything Charlie is supposed to have. I swallow against my pain. “Charlie and I, it was impossible. It just wasn't meant to be.”