The Ocean Between Us (20 page)

“That’s not going to happen.” Josh knew in his bones that she’d make it.

“I also don’t want to feel obligated to go if I’m offered an appointment.”

Josh remembered the battles he had had with his parents over college when he was her age. Maybe it was that way in most families. “Okay, you have my word.”

It felt strange to be calling Cissy from shipboard, Steve thought as he dialed the Atlanta number. Twenty-six years ago no sailor, not even an officer, had phone privileges. Now, thanks to satellite technology, he could contact anyone in the world.

Even his ex-wife.

He knew he had to make this call. From the moment he shoved his bag under his rack and set out the family pictures, he’d been overcome by a terrible, unsettled feeling that haunted him along with images of the son he didn’t know. He fingered his St. Christopher medal through three rings.

“Hello?”

“Is this Cissy King…Lamont?”

A pause. “Stephen? Oh, my stars, you sound exactly the same.” She spoke in a honeyed voice he’d never quite forgotten. He pictured her in her Atlanta tract mansion, widowed too young by a man who had given her everything, including a reason to keep Steve’s son from him.

“Joshua Lamont gave me your number.”

“Yes, he said the two of you met. Stephen—”

“Cissy, goddamn it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Lord, I’d nearly forgotten that temper,” she said.

“Oh. Excuse me for feeling put out that you had my child and never told me.”

Another pause, so long he thought the connection might have gone bad.

“Cissy?”

“I was young and completely on my own,” she confessed with disarming honesty. “Also terrified. I imagined raising a baby all alone, and I couldn’t see myself doing that. I knew I needed a full-time husband.”

It was a shame she hadn’t made that discovery before marrying him.

“You didn’t stay young and on your own forever,” he pointed out. “He’s twenty-six years old, Cissy. In all that time, it never occurred to you to pick up the phone?”

“I was afraid of you, Stephen,” she admitted. “Afraid you would try to share custody of our child.”

“Of course I would have. What’s scary about a man wanting to take responsibility for his child?”

“I had already found that in Grant and would have fought giving you any rights at all. I thought it was kinder to walk away, to make a clean break of it and let both of us start new lives.”

“It was a bad call,” he told her. “You had no right to take the decision away from me.”

“I’m sorry, Stephen. It was a terrible mistake to hide this, but Josh was such a happy child, and Grant such a good father. I can’t turn back the clock any more than you can. All we can do is go on from here, support Josh and let him find his own way.”

The whir and crash of the ship’s catapult drowned out his reply, which was probably for the best. As underhanded as she was, she didn’t deserve to be called
that.

“…when he joins the Sparhawks squadron in your air wing,” she was saying when the thunder passed.

“What?”

“He’s going to be deployed before long,” she said. “I guess I’m hoping you’ll watch out for him.”

Great. Now that he was grown and her husband was gone, Steve got a shot at the kid. “It’s my job to watch out for every man and woman under my command.”

A pause. “All right. That wasn’t fair.”

After twenty-six years, she was trying to be fair?

“And Stephen?”

“Yeah?”

“I just wanted to say…you sound good. You sound really good.”

Jesus. Was she flirting with him? Was the woman completely insane?

“Goodbye, Cissy.” He couldn’t get off the line fast enough. It was cold on the ship, but he’d broken out in a sweat. Cissy King, his first love. She had been beautiful and passionate, bringing laughter to his days and comfort to his nights. He thought their love was strong enough to sustain them through anything life had to offer, that they’d be together forever.

Cissy’s forever lasted less than six months. Everything Steve endured in basic training paled in comparison to the pain of reading her Dear John letter and seeing the divorce decree. He’d been a different man after that. More driven. Less trusting. Ruthlessly ambitious.

Grace had been an unasked-for miracle. She probably didn’t know it, but she’d saved him from turning to stone. She’d softened his edges, taught him to laugh again, to love more deeply than he’d ever thought possible.

And now he was on the verge of losing her, too. In the same way he’d been oblivious to Cissy’s discontent, he’d been blind to Grace’s. She claimed that even before Josh arrived, she’d been unhappy, and he simply hadn’t seen it. He dismissed her efforts to make some changes when he should have been discussing them with her. But instead, he chose not to notice. Why hadn’t he paid closer attention? Why hadn’t he listened better? That night she told him she thought she was fat, that she was worried about
turning forty, he’d brushed off her concern and sweet-talked her into bed. How many other times had he done that?

Grace sat at her computer and wrote her now-customary neutral e-mail about the kids to Steve. They had their troubles, but she couldn’t simply throw away the habits of a twenty-year marriage. Despite their dispute, they shared three children, a past she cherished and a problematic future. She felt obligated to keep some kind of continuity until he returned.

But what she really wanted to do was to tell him everything—about how well her business was going, about the professional association and the fitness class she’d joined, about the house she still hoped to buy.

She felt vulnerable since the impregnable fortress of her marriage had been breached. Its foundations had been eroding in unseen places. There was no ignoring the weakened state of their relationship.

She hadn’t realized that the effort of shoring up the eroded places was emptying her out. She used to believe she and Steve were equally committed to their relationship. Now she realized that from the very start, it had been lopsided. She gave a hundred percent; he held things back. And in the meantime, she’d discovered that she wanted her own success, her own growth.

Seized by nervous energy, she pushed back from the computer. She needed to do something physical. Maybe it was time to tackle the bedroom closet. Since they’d moved in last summer, she hadn’t gotten around to dragging out her winter clothes.

The prospect was disheartening. She resisted the act of integrating herself into this house. She didn’t want to be here, didn’t want this to be her closet. She didn’t belong here anymore. The Navy had been her home for years. Living on base gave her a place to belong, a place of security. Now it was a bad fit, like the old outfits in her closet.

But Grace was a realist. She was a businesswoman, she had to pay attention to the way she dressed. There were probably outfits
still packed away that she’d forgotten about. She had yet to find her favorite heather-gray sweater.

She dragged a step stool into the bedroom and gave the closest moving box a small tug. The box split open at the seams, and a flurry of papers and magazines poured down to the floor.

“Oh, we’re off to a great start,” Grace muttered under her breath. She climbed down from the stool and dropped to her knees on the floor. She spread her arms to collect the flotsam and jetsam of the past that had spilled out of the box.

At first she didn’t recognize the neatly labeled files and folders, the photographs, the colorful clippings and folded articles. Then she realized what they were: a collection of dreams. Inspired by a scrapbook workshop for officers’ wives, she had started the project. She’d never gotten around to creating the album, but over the years she had torn out pictures of hometowns, houses, neighbors who looked as though they’d known one another for years. She used to visualize herself as part of a picture like that.

She shuffled through photographs of herself and Steve and the kids. Time had faded the colors, but their essential significance still shone through. She found a shot of herself as a new bride, laughing as she held Steve’s arm. She studied the brightness in the young woman’s eyes, the strength and energy in her body. Then she looked at the soft, fatigued woman in the mirror and could not reconcile the two.

Despair bubbled up and crested, and then the phone rang. It was her business line, recently installed.

Saved by the bell. She rushed to the study and picked up. “Grace Bennett.”

“I need you, Grace. Now.”

She pretended not to feel a little thrill of heat. “What’s the matter, Mr. Cameron?”

“Ross. I keep telling you to call me Ross.”

Ross Cameron, her first and best client, occupied more and more of her time and attention lately. His frequent, unfailingly pleasant phone calls and the upbeat tone of his e-mails had
become a regular part of her day. His promptness at paying for her services had made her company viable.

Transferring him, his business and staff cross-country gave her a glimpse into his world. She caught herself daydreaming about who he was, building the image from facts she gleaned in the course of her work. He was single and successful. The people who worked for him were loyal and enthusiastic. He traveled overseas, had inherited his grandmother’s collection of Ludwig Moser glass, owned two kayaks, bought his shoes in Italy and drove a vintage red MG. He played amateur hockey and bought season tickets to the Cubs.

Now his warm voice on the phone brought her own discontent into sharp focus. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

“My CFO wants her kids to attend a Waldorf school.” He sounded tense; maybe he was pacing the room, raking his hand through his hair. “She’s making noises like she won’t be moving with the company.”

“Look, Mr. Cameron—”

“Ross.”

“Don’t worry about a thing. I have a service partner who specializes in educational consulting. She’ll find the right school. I’ll send you a list.” She wandered with the cordless phone back to the bedroom and looked at the mess on the floor. “I’ll make sure it gets done.”

“Really?”

“I promise.”

“Why does everything seem easier after I talk to you?”

She smiled and realized she was blushing. He intrigued her. And she could not deny that she felt a beat of forbidden attraction. To a man she’d never met. How sick was that?

“No idea,” she said. “If I knew how to simplify my own life, believe me, I’d do it.”

“What’s the matter with your life?”

“Aside from my twins leaving home and me turning forty?” She laughed, hoping he’d think she really was joking.

“Forty.” He gave a low whistle. “When’s your birthday?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I need to mark my calendar so I know when the world is coming to an end.”

She laughed again, but she told him the date.

“You sound frustrated.”

I’m not.
She tried to say the words, but they wouldn’t come out. Holding the phone to her cheek, she stared at her image in the mirror. She’d lost herself in the worst possible way. She’d allowed her dreams to fade away. Here, in the middle of her life, she realized that she’d been slowly disappearing. Why had she never noticed that before?

“Grace?”

“Yes?”

“What’s on your mind?”

My husband lied to me. He never told me about his first marriage.
But she didn’t say that, either. Because in the middle of the thought, it hit her. Steve wasn’t the cause of her unhappiness, and he couldn’t fix it. He just happened to break the news to her at the same time her discontent surfaced.

Ross was talking, but she scarcely heard him. The realization drummed through her. Her thoughts were focused on things she hadn’t considered in years. Shaken awake, she squared her shoulders and stared directly into the mirror. And smiled at herself.

“Ross.” Oh, it felt good to say his name. “I’m sorry to cut this short, but I have to go.”

“So soon?”

“I just thought of something I have to do.”

“This thing’s still for sale?” Katie asked, peering through the windshield at the house on Ocean View Drive. “Didn’t we look at this, like, last summer?”

“Yep.”

“It was kind of funky,” Emma said. “Ugly kitchen.”

“Remember the view, though?” Grace pulled her car up next to Marilyn Audleman’s and turned off the engine. The fitness class
had become a close-knit group, and Grace had let her friends know what she hoped to do. She’d told Steve, too, when he phoned from the
Dominion.
His response had been predictable. “Wait until I get home and we’ll talk about it some more.”

“You
were
home and we didn’t talk about it,” she’d said. “We fought about it.”

Beside her, Brian was unnaturally quiet. The girls jumped out of the back seat and went to find the real estate agent, who had already opened the house. “Okay, Bri?” Grace asked.

He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters.” Was there anything so fragile as a teenage boy? she wondered. He was taking Steve’s absence hard this time, and he refused to talk about Joshua Lamont. That, combined with the pressures of figuring out his life after high school, was making him edgy.

“I’ve got a million things to do this afternoon. How long is this going to take?”

“Not long. Come on, Brian.”

He pushed open the door with his shoulder and got out. Katie and Emma were already upstairs, probably picking out their rooms. Grace and Brian went inside together. She didn’t need to walk through the place again, though she encouraged Brian to take a look around. She’d come here many times when Marcia lived here. The house had been empty since Marcia had moved to Arizona. Grace stayed in touch with her by e-mail, and Marcia was as good as her word, keeping Grace’s Web site current. Now the house on the bluff rang with emptiness, a soulless box waiting to be filled.

Marilyn and Grace talked for a while about the offer Grace intended to make. She’d been preapproved for financing, and if Marcia was agreeable, the whole transaction could go through in a matter of weeks. Terror and excitement clamored inside her. “I can’t believe I’m going to do this,” she said.

“You want this house,” Marilyn reminded her. “You’ve wanted it forever. Let me get this written up and I’ll call you to go over it.”

“Yes. All right.” Grace felt light-headed, short of breath. She
walked straight to the windows spanning the deck and looked out at the sea, iron gray under a bruised-looking sky. She would never get tired of looking at this, winter drama and summer light, year after year. “Tonight?”