And Then I Found You (24 page)

“What is it?” Kate asked, softly, prodding.

“Do you want me now? Would you take me if I asked?” Emily asked, her voice muffled.

Jack jumped from the booth, moving to Emily and sidling up next to her to wrap his
arms around her. “I wanted you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. Ever.
I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything in my life. But take you now, Emily?
You’re not ours to take. You know that, don’t you?”

Emily looked up and nodded. Her face was mottled, dirty with a combination of Jack’s
coat, bus grime, and tears mixing into a muddy wetness that covered her cheeks and
ran down her chin. “Did you always love me?”

“Yes,” Jack answered. “Always yes.”

“But I’m a terrible secret, aren’t I?”

“No!” Kate measured her words as carefully as if the combination of letters were the
keys to the secret of the universe, and to Emily they were. “We’ve been here. All
along we’ve been here loving you.”

Emily looked up at Jack as if to verify the truth. He nodded, unable to speak.

Yes, Kate thought, this was the pain he’d wanted to avoid. Yes, this was what he’d
meant when he’d told Kate to let it all go. He couldn’t bear to feel any of this again.

A real smile, the kind that reached all the way to her green eyes, came over Emily’s
face. “Yes, I guess a call would have been the better thing.”

Jack stood up and for a breath-stopping moment, Kate thought he was leaving, that
yes, this was all too, too much for him. Then he held out his hand. “I want to show
you something.”

“Okay,” Emily wiped at her face.

“Stay here. I need to get my laptop out of the truck.”

“You carry your laptop around?”

“I was headed into work when I got the call. So hold on.”

“Do you know what he’s doing?” Emily asked.

Kate looked over her shoulder, watching Jack walk away. “Nope. But whatever it is,
I’m sure it’s good. He’s always full of good.”

They grinned at one another—Emily and Kate—a conspiracy of almost identical smiles.

Jack returned and scooted next to Emily and patted the corner of the bench. “Here,
Katie.” Then he gently placed his laptop on the table and opened it to the slight
whir of a booting computer. He clicked a few times until a photo emerged on the screen.
Large and vivid there was her name:
LUNA
in zinc letters, the
A
covered in a shaft of light.

“Oohh,” Emily said, an involuntary child’s voice of awe. “What is that?”

“Your name,” Jack said.

“Well, I know that. But where?”

Jack clicked on another photo and the same image emerged, but pulled backward to show
the entire front of the studio on a brick-lined street in Birmingham. “It’s an art
studio in Birmingham. It’s mine actually. A small studio for emerging artists.”

Emily stared at Jack like a child who was being read a fairy tale, wanting to believe
its truth. Then she looked at Kate, who nodded. “Yes, it’s true.”

“It’s true? You named something after me?”

Jack smiled and pushed her hair back from her face. “Yes.”

Emily smiled at the photo, ran her finger along the screen. “I want to go there someday.”

“Of course, as long as your parents are okay with it.” And with that his phone dinged.
He looked down “Speaking of … your parents are almost here.”

Emily nodded.

They consumed the remaining minutes as if they were a huge buffet containing all the
food they’d ever wanted. Kate and Jack listened to Emily chatter about Sailor and
Chaz; about hating reading, but loving stories; about her brothers being the most
annoying creatures on earth; and about how she wanted to go home and sleep for days.

Elena and Larry burst through the door, worry covering their faces like a mask, Emily
jumped up and buried herself into the folds of their coats, disappearing almost altogether.

“Parents.” Kate looked toward the three of them.

Elena came to sit in the booth. “I am so sorry to put you two through this. She’s
never done anything like it. I was scared almost crazy.”

“Don’t say sorry,” Kate said. “We love her. It’s okay.”

“I know you’ll understand if we just leave now. Larry got us a hotel room and I think
we all just need a good shower and some sleep.”

“Absolutely.” Jack stood.

The good-bye hugs were quick and efficient, and then the Jackson family was gone,
daughter and parents together, leaving Jack and Kate alone.

“Is it terrible that I wish her parents hadn’t shown up so quickly?” Kate asked.

“No, it’s not terrible,” Jack said. “I wish the same thing. But…”

Kate held her hand up. “I know there’s a but. There’s always a ‘but.’ You don’t need
to say it, Jack.”

“You’re mad.”

“No,” Kate said. “Just sad.”

They paid the bill as the waitress took the empty coffee cups and hot chocolate mug.
“I have to get back to Caleb. I threw him at Mimi Ann and she has to work.”

“She lives with you now?”

“No, I took him to her apartment. But I need to go get him.” He paused. “How was your
Thanksgiving? I didn’t even ask.”

“It was good. I just drank a little bit too much champagne.” She paused. “And yours?”

“Fine,” he said and then stood and held out his hand for her to join him.

She shook her head. “No. I’m going to stay here for a little bit. It’s a long drive
for me, so maybe I need some more coffee.”

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

“I’m sure I will be.” Then in one last hope-drenched request, she asked him. “Can’t
you stay for a little while?”

“I can’t.” He closed his eyes and when he opened them, he seemed gone. “I just can’t.
Caleb and all.”

She nodded without speaking. Words no longer changed anything at all.

twenty-six

BLUFFTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

2010

Rowan’s dark house was ominous instead of comforting, and in bed Kate pulled the blanket
up to her neck. December had settled into South Carolina and into Kate’s bones. The
opposite side of the bed was empty and it was two-thirty in the morning. Where the
hell was Rowan? She’d called his cell phone ten times and it had gone to voice mail.
He hadn’t said anything about staying out after their argument that night. He’d left
to “walk it off.”

Kate had tried to focus on her life with the store and her friends and Rowan; with
her family and her loft and the success of Mimsy. She’d avoided talk about Emily and
Jack, but that night she’d spilled her hurt to Rowan, telling him that Emily was calling
Jack and she hadn’t even known they talked.

“Why should he tell you he talked to her?” Rowan had asked, and then for the third
time filled his glass with straight whiskey.

Kate had thought the answer obvious and only stared.

“Tell me something, Kate who used to be Katie. What did I do yesterday?”

“You worked on the Cavanaugh landscape plan and obsessed about tree size for the side
yard.” Kate answered. “Why?”

He looked away and then back. “I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“It seems like all you talk about lately is Luna and Jack. Jack and Luna.”

Her heart fell sideways. “No.”

“Seriously. It does.”

“That’s so not fair,” Kate said, squeezing her napkin under the table, winding it
through her fingers. “I just saw her in Birmingham three days ago.”

“Three days and how many hours, Kate?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You are obsessed with all of it.”

“Why are you being so mean? This is about Emily. She’s not some cute kid I met on
a trip, or my second cousin.” She hollered and everything seemed to bounce off the
house walls, a rubber ball of words.

“I know she’s your daughter. Don’t you think I know that part of the story by now?”
He stood and looked down at Kate. “This is falling apart.”

“What is?”

“This conversation is falling apart. I am going to take a long walk and I’ll be back.”

That had been hours before.

“Oh, Rowan, where are you?” She rolled over and spoke to his empty side of the bed.
She thought about taking a sleeping pill to ignore the panic, but then what if there
really was something wrong and the police came knocking at the door and she was out
of it? What if Rowan was in the Emergency room, mangled from a car accident, and she
blissfully slept?

Waiting for Rowan, she again had the same terrible feeling—the exact helpless, hopeless
feeling she’d had during that trip to Charleston with Norah so many years before.

On a girl’s getaway before Norah got married, they’d sat at a poolside hotel bar in
Charleston, South Carolina, on the first day of spring. Norah had understood what
that day was to Kate, and together they sipped mint-infused vodka drinks made by the
hotel bartender with the Elvis hairdo. The pool was on top of a lavish hotel overlooking
the spired city. The Holy City, the tour guide had told them, for all the churches.

When Norah fell asleep on the pool chair before the sun had set, Kate found herself
at the bar drinking alone and discussing the intricate theory that Elvis was still
alive and well, hiding somewhere to live a quiet life. Eventually she wandered out
of the hotel to walk through the circuitous streets of Charleston. The Ashley River
moved at the city’s side, a faithful companion, snakelike and sultry. Kate stood at
its banks, aware of the slow buzz of vodka sliding its way through her body just like
that river.

She walked on, turning into blind alleys and backstreets until she stood in front
of a lavish Gothic cathedral so highly wrought that Kate’s eyes didn’t know where
to rest. She pushed open the double wood doors and walked into the dark, quiet sanctuary,
an otherworldly hush made of ancient whispers. Wandering in the rear of the church,
she found herself face to face with an oil painting of the Madonna and child. A scholar,
she thought, a woman better than herself, would have wanted to know the history of
this grand church, the painter of this masterpiece, the origin of this edifice. But
Kate merely wanted to kneel before this painting of the perfect mother: the kind of
mother Kate couldn’t be to her own daughter, the kind of mother for whom statues were
crafted and paintings were formed and religions were founded.

Kneeling on a worn velvet bench, Kate didn’t close her eyes when she prayed. She spoke
directly to the painting. “You’re a real mother and I’m asking you to watch over my
daughter. I have no right, but I’m asking anyway. Please watch over my daughter, Luna,
born on this day four years ago. I won’t ask anything else, just that.” Kate then
closed her eyes. “Just that.”

She stayed there on her knees long enough for them to hurt, long enough for the sunlight
to move from one side of the stained glass Ascension to the other, long enough to
cry and then stop. When she did stand, it was to light a candle and repeat her only
plea, “Just that.”

The March air in Charleston was cluttered with the competing forces of air and water.
Kate sat on the front steps of the church and realized she had no idea which turns
she’d taken to get where she was—in her life, at the church. Water won the battle
over air and rain began to fall, nestling in Kate’s hair, working its way through
her clothes to skin.

The man who found her, the Italian man with the broken English, the tailored suit,
and the umbrella, was charming and witty. He sat next to her on the church steps and
tilted his umbrella to shield her from the rain. “I saw you today at the hotel pool,”
he said.

Kate turned, her head dizzy. “Oh, yes. That was the beginning of the end,” she said,
attempting to smile.

“What end?” he asked, and the word end sounded like “eend,” which made Kate laugh
too loudly.

“This end, right here. Where I’m lost and half-drunk and … wet.”

“Aha,” he said and then held out his slim hand. “I’m Nico.”

“I’m Kate,” she said, leaning back against the step and scooting closer, under the
dome of his umbrella.

“Kate.” He seemed to taste her name. “Are you lost?”

“In more ways than you can possibly imagine.”

“Well, I don’t believe in coincidence, so we meet again. Maybe I can help you be not
lost.”

“Be not lost.” Kate laughed again. “Well, can you get us back to that hotel?”

“These are things I can do.”

“Show me?” she asked.

Nico walked her through the maze of streets and alleys, and Kate willingly followed,
feeling safe and shaky. She needed, God how she needed, to outrun the fear that the
way she felt would be the way she would always feel—Lost and Lonesome, a permanent
penance.

Damp, they arrived at the hotel where they sat at the restaurant bar. Nico ordered
her a sandwich and a beer, telling her that the “heaviness would save her lightness.”
She laughed at his mixed-up words. He told her stories of Italy and how he’d come
to Charleston to open a restaurant. A stranger who spoke her language in broken ways,
he made her feel oddly safe, like another girl completely.

Satiated with food, they left the bar, and in the elevator their mouths came together
in warm kisses. Then they were falling into his room; his hands found skin, running
along her spine with deep pressure until he reached the hollow of her lower back and
she gave into the sensations so opposite of what she’d been feeling. She tasted his
skin, moist with rain. In dull amusement, she wondered how he could so neatly fold
his suit over the chair while she was so carelessly ripping off her own clothes. When
they did come together, she couldn’t blame him for pressuring or pushing, as she was
the one who begged, “Now. Please.”

Kate actually believed, for the moments it was true, that giving her body to this
kind Italian stranger would end the agony of wonder and loss. And it did, until it
was over and she found herself again full of aching shame and the knowledge that she’d—once
again—tried to fix something with someone. While he slept, she crept out and returned
to Norah, spilling her pain to her best friend and then reaching for Jack’s yearly
letter.