The Ranch She Left Behind (26 page)

More Lydia, like a parrot mimicking the sounds it heard. When he had pleaded with Lydia to accept that they’d married too young, she’d countered with exactly those arguments.

“God, Max,” she’d said caustically. “That’s such a cop-out. You were twenty-four. Bill Gates founded Microsoft at
twenty.
”

Or Steve Jobs started Apple. Or Orson Welles directed
Citizen Kane.
It was always some example that proved twenty-four wasn’t so very young. He sometimes wondered whether she looked up examples on the internet, so she’d have new ones to toss at him. As if this were a debate she could win on merits. For someone who professed herself emotional, as opposed to the frigid automaton she’d married, she certainly had been clueless about whether you could debate someone into loving you.

It had been horrible, having the same pointless arguments over and over. They never made progress, because she wouldn’t ever agree there was a problem. Not even when she confessed her affairs. She’d felt so justified, as if his emotional inaccessibility after the Mexico ordeal had left her no choice.

Maybe it hadn’t.

“Being grown-up isn’t simply a matter of age,” he explained to Ellen now, trying to set his resentment aside. Maybe he could succeed with his daughter, where he’d failed with his wife. “I wasn’t very mature for twenty-four.”

In fact, he’d been a raging, overconfident jerk. Just out of grad school, cocky, holding the world carelessly by a string, poised to rise like a meteor above his farm-boy roots.

Bewitched by Lydia’s pretty face, bedroom eyes and incredible body. Unaccustomed, in those years, to denying himself anything.

And so sure, so stupidly certain that he was marked for greatness. He had honestly believed that the little matter of a missing condom wouldn’t be a problem.

Fate intended him to be a famous architect. A star. No way one quickie was going to derail plans like those. He knew other methods. He’d been careful.
Ha!

“So what does that mean?” Ellen jutted her chin out. “You like…outgrew her? When you finally got mature, you didn’t want to be married anymore?”

Ellen scowled, but her voice had a suspicious tremor, and she plucked compulsively at her book. “You didn’t want to be a
father
anymore, either?”

“No!” Instinctively, he reached out, as if to hug away the very thought. But she flinched, backing up against the headboard. She picked up her sketchbook and pressed it to her collarbone like a shield.

He let his hands fall.

“No,” he repeated calmly, though his heart pounded hard against his rib cage. “I never, ever didn’t want to be a father. Having you was the best thing that ever happened to me. And to your mom. We didn’t agree on very many things, but we always agreed on that.”

She narrowed her eyes. “That’s not what
she
said.”

Oh, Lydia.
For a minute, he felt helpless, defeated by the unretractable words of a dead woman.

Lydia, you short-sighted fool.

Deep in his heart, he’d always feared this. He hadn’t been able to imagine what else could account for Ellen’s intense antagonism. Sure, he could have been a better father, but he hadn’t exactly been a demon, either. Yeah, he was gone a lot. But lots of fathers were. Lots of mothers were, too, for that matter. Families did what they had to do.

But he’d always assured himself that Lydia wouldn’t poison his daughter against him. She wouldn’t fill Ellen’s heart with ugly lies when they were alone—not while he was in Mexico, praying just to stay alive. Praying to get home to his little girl.

He took a deep breath, appalled to realize that it shook. “What did Mom say?”

“She said you wished you could just walk out, but you couldn’t, because of me. She said you wished I hadn’t ever been born.”

Dear God.
It was all he could do not to release his anger in some kind of physical movement, or verbal outburst. If Lydia had been here, he had no idea what he’d say to her.

But she wasn’t here. And that was, of course, the whole point.

Lydia had died without warning, without time to set anything right—without time to tell Ellen the truth. Surely, if Lydia had known she would have to leave Ellen motherless, with only Max’s love to sustain her, she would have retracted her lies.

“Listen to me, Ellen. It’s important that you hear this. I’ve loved you from the first moment I set eyes on you, and every moment since. Whether I was here or away. Whether you wanted me to or not. I have always, always loved you. And your mother never doubted that for an instant.”

“Are you calling her a liar?”

“I’m saying she was wrong to tell you that. She knew it wasn’t true.”

“That means liar.” Ellen’s hostile eyes glistened. “Why would she have lied to me?”

“Because she was angry with me. Because in a very irrational way, it made her feel better to say bad things about me, and to make you mad at me, too.”

The frown was back. But so was a hint of uncertainty. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?” He searched for an eleven-year-old’s corollary. “Haven’t you ever done anything like that? What if…what if Stephanie hurt your feelings? What if she wouldn’t let you in her group? You might say bad things about her behind her back, just because you felt so crummy. You might even be glad if you could make other people dislike her.”

Ellen pursed her lips, but she wouldn’t look at him. “No, I wouldn’t.”

He let the denial fall on silence. He could tell that, with some small part of her heart, she knew what he said was true.

When he spoke again, he didn’t return to that. He could feel Ellen closing off, and he knew he didn’t have much time to make his point.

“Look. Your mom isn’t here to explain, or to admit why she said what she said. But I am here, and the only thing I need you to hear is this. I love you.”

Ellen bent her head to her chest and shut her eyes.

“I love you,” he repeated. “And your mother loved you, too. We had a lot of problems. We weren’t really good for each other, and our marriage wasn’t very happy. But that wasn’t your fault. You were the best thing our marriage ever created. Not one single bit of the trouble was your fault.”

Ellen’s eyes opened, but they remained focused on the sketchbook, and her chin dug deeper into her collarbone. She mumbled something inarticulate.

“I couldn’t hear that,” he said mildly. “What did you say?”

“I said I
know.
”

In spite of her tone, hope rose in his chest. If she could see that she wasn’t to blame, maybe she could let go of the anger. Not today, maybe, but someday. If she could even entertain the idea that her mother might, just might, have been wrong…

He waited, hoping for more. “You know?”

“Yeah.” Finally, she raised her gaze to his. Her mouth was set. Her blue eyes, the spitting image of her mother, glittered with hot tears.

“Of course I know it wasn’t my fault,” she repeated, her voice cold, a disturbing contrast to those scalded eyes. “How could it be? It was
yours.
”

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
HAT
S
ATURDAY
NIGHT
, the night of the Bell River sleepover, was stormy. The rain was a torrential, tree-thrashing battle to the death in the heavens, ripping the sky open every few seconds with swords of lightning.

It had been raining when Max fell asleep on the sofa of his duplex, which felt oddly empty with Ellen gone.

When he woke up, he was in the basement.

And he was screaming.

Recovery from the dream always followed the same pattern. The first thing he had to do was sit up, because he felt as if his lungs were collapsing. When he was upright, the pressure slowly eased, and he knew he wouldn’t suffocate.

Over the next several seconds, sometimes minutes, he identified where he really was. He pinpointed whatever sound had triggered the dream—a car backfiring, a television shoot-out, something heavy dropped in the next room. In this case, thunder.

Gradually, his head cleared, and his heart slowed.

And, eventually, life went on.

But tonight he couldn’t get his heart to settle down, no matter what he did. It was like being in a car with no brakes, racing downhill. He stood. He turned on every light in the house. He walked around the duplex. He drank a glass of water. He checked his phone, to be sure Ellen hadn’t called, to assure himself that, though she wasn’t in the house with him for the first time in a year, and she’d left on bad terms, she really was all right.

But nothing helped. He couldn’t slow his heart. He couldn’t get the smell of oil out of his nose. He couldn’t get enough air…there simply wasn’t enough air in the entire world….

He didn’t know whether he would have a heart attack or go mad, but he knew he couldn’t stand it another minute.

He grabbed a T-shirt, dragged it over his head and down his damp chest and went out the front door. The rain pummeled him, and a bolt of lightning streaked jaggedly across the black sky. But he didn’t give a damn. He quickly loped down the steps to the small plot of front yard, crossed over, his bare feet sinking into the sodden grass and his hair dripping into his eyes, and climbed up to Penny’s porch.

The rain, driven sideways by a crazed wind, still beat against his back angrily. He knocked on her door, belatedly trying to read his watch. Was it too late to bother anyone?

But he couldn’t read the glowing blue numbers. It could have said 7:31, or 2:27, or 4:59. It was as indistinguishable as if the rain had been made of acid and the display had melted away.

It didn’t matter anyhow. He needed her. He knocked again. He would have prayed for her to answer, but he didn’t pray anymore. Not since Mexico.

It probably was only seconds before he heard her turning the knob and opening the door, but it felt like hours. He put his hands on the doorframe, just so that he wouldn’t put them on the door itself, and push his way in like the wounded animal he was right now.

Her face was a pale oval in the wet light. “Max?”

“May I come in?” He’d chosen those words carefully, in the hours…seconds…he’d stood here waiting. He didn’t want to sound as crazed as he felt. “Penny. Please.” Water sluiced off his lips when he formed words. “May I come in?”

“Are you all right?” She didn’t answer him with a yes or a no. She just flung the door open and gathered him into her arms, apparently not caring that he tracked mud and grass and puddles of rain into her pristine and lovely living room.

The rain raged behind him, slanting in, but she shut the door. Instantly, the noise in his ears diminished. The room smelled of violets and clean sheets. The smell of dusty gas and oil began to clear out of his nostrils.

“Come,” she said. Keeping her arm around his back, she led him into her bedroom.

“Take those wet things off.” She turned toward the bathroom, which was lit by a pinprick of honey light—a night-light, a candle, a flicker of warmth and hope. Light was good.

He’d flicked on every fixture in his house, and it hadn’t helped. But here, one tiny night-light was enough to poke the first hole in the darkness inside him.

He heard the sound of a cabinet door shutting, and suddenly she was back, silhouetted against the dimly lit rectangle. She held a stack of towels.

“Take those off, Max,” she said again, softly. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. She was too beautiful, and he was too weak. He could feel his body responding to her, in spite of the fact that his heart still raced, and his head still spun. He hardly knew who he was, or where he was. He could hardly even see her in the darkness, but he knew he wanted her.

“It’s okay,” she said. She came closer and smiled, a small gleam against the watery darkness. “We just have to get you warm and dry.”

When he didn’t move, she came closer still. His heart went crazy.

She tugged at his shirt, pulling it halfway up his chest. When he felt its dull prodding at the underside of his arms, he lifted them, like a child, and let her tug the soaked cotton over his head.

She handed him one of the towels. He put it to his face, then ran it hard over his hair. At the same time, she took another, shook it open and scrubbed his chest, his shoulders, his neck. Whenever she moved across his heart, he registered her touch as if it were made of fire.

He grabbed her hand and stilled it there, right over the thudding. He pressed it hard against his skin, pushing the soft terry like a tourniquet, as if maybe it could close off the flood of blood that coursed through his veins, forcing his heart to keep this frantic pace.

“You need to get those pants off.” She held out the last towel. “Do you want to go into the bathroom and maybe just put the towel on instead? I don’t think I have any clothes that would fit, but—”

“Penny.” He kept her hand against his heart. She must be able to feel how it raced, how it couldn’t possibly go on like this forever. “You know what I want.”

“No, I don’t. I can’t tell. You seem…” She tilted her face toward his, her eyes searching. “Something is very wrong, Max. I can see that you’re hurting, but I don’t know what you need. Do you need a lover? Or do you just need a friend?”

“I…” He closed his eyes and let rain drop from his hair, over his brows, through his lashes and onto his cheeks. “I want both. For once in my life, I…”

He looked down at her. “Is that too much to ask—just one night with a woman who is both a lover
and
a friend?”

She held her breath for a moment. Then she let the final towel drop and lifted her hand to his cheek. She skimmed her fingertips across his cheekbone, fading back toward his ear. She cupped his cold, hard jaw in the soft warmth of her palm.

“No,” she said. “It’s not too much to ask.”

She took the towel he’d used to dry his face, and let it fall on top of the other one. Then she took her hand away from his heart and put her fingers under the waistband of his pants, pulling the rain-soaked fabric away from his hip bone gently.

She did the same with the other hand, sliding warm fingertips in and slowly stretching the waist until she could slip the sweatpants down, letting the cotton find its way over the contours of his body without discomfort.