Carly's Gift (40 page)

A chill swept through Carly as she saw how much the effort at conversation tired Andrea. “Eric misses having you around. So does Shawn.”

“I miss them, too.” She was quiet for several seconds, as she slowly twisted the cord from the headphones around her finger. “I've been meaning to ask you something.”

“Why don't you save it for later? You look like you could use some rest.”

Andrea ignored her. “Do you remember the night you told me it wasn't biology that made someone a father, it was the time they put in on the job?”

“I seem to recall saying something like that.” She doubted she would ever forget that night.

“How much time do you think it takes?”

“What are you really asking me, Andrea?”

“Is David my real father yet?”

A lump formed in Carly's throat. It was only a matter of time before Andrea learned the truth—days, weeks, maybe a month or two at the outside. “Yes,” she said softly. “In every way that matters.” She laid her hand on the bed and hooked her little finger with Andrea's. “In the only way that counts.”

Andrea closed her eyes and was quiet so long Carly thought she'd gone to sleep.

“I've been listening to the music Jeffery downloaded for me. I've fallen in love with Beethoven's 9th. Do you know it?”

“Yes. I play it all the time when I'm alone. Ethan doesn't—” This was not the time or place to complain about Ethan. “Never mind. It isn't important.”

A smile reached Andrea's eyes. “Ethan's taste in music is pretty narrow.”

Ethan
? When had Andrea stopped calling him Dad? Before she could say anything, Andrea went on.

“I want you to have my iPod so you can hear the music I've grown to love and know something about me I never had a chance to tell you or share with you.”

An icy hand traveled up Carly's spine. “By then I'll be so old—”

Andrea turned pleading eyes to her mother. “We can't do this anymore,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper. “We have to stop pretending. Don't make me die without being able to say good-bye.”

“You're not going to die,” Carly insisted, an irrational fear that saying the words aloud would make them happen. “I won't listen to you talk that way.”

“I'm so sick, Mom. And I'm so tired. I don't feel like fighting anymore.”

“You can't give up, Andrea. Think of all the things you have to live for.” Jesus, she had to come up with something better than that. Andrea was too young to comprehend loss of her future. How could she be expected to understand what she would be missing—the maturing love between her and Jeffery, the indescribable joy that would come from holding her own child, from watching that child grow?

“I've been thinking about all the places I'm never going to see and the things I'll never do,” she said, as if reading Carly's mind.

She searched her mind for the magic words that would resurrect Andrea's will to live. “Then I don't understand how you could be willing to let go.”

“I'm not
letting
go. It's not my fault. It's just something that's happening to me.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean that the way it sounded.”

“I want to talk to you, Mom.”

It was so little to ask. “The greatest sorrow I can imagine is losing you,” Carly said simply.

“I've been so lucky. I've already been more places and seen more things than most people do in a lifetime.” She turned her head to look at Carly, the movement slow and exhausting. “And the people I love and who love me—I've had the best, Mom. I can't be too angry that it isn't going to go on forever.”

Sometimes when Carly was in the kitchen doing one of the mindless things that confined her there every day, she would think of the recipes she would one day share with Andrea, the traditions, and the little discoveries. They were the inconsequential threads that bound the fabric of mother and daughter. “I'm afraid I'm not so unselfish,” Carly said, tears burning her throat. “Or tolerant. My heart will scream to the heavens every day of my life if I lose you.”

“I don't want you to be mad that I died,” Andrea said. “I want you to be happy that I lived.”

“They go hand in hand.”

“Not if you live for me when I'm gone.”

Carly was choking on her tears. But she would not cry. She could give Andrea so little. “I don't understand what you mean.”

“I feel like I finally understand why you didn't go to David to tell him you were pregnant. My dreams will die because I do. But you let your dreams die so David could have his. I didn't know what it was to love someone that much until I met Jeffery. It makes me so sad to think how empty you must feel inside.”

“You filled that emptiness, Andrea.”

“What will you do when I'm gone?”

“I don't know,” Carly answered truthfully.

“That's why I want you to live for me. I want you to paint again. I want you to dream again. Let me give you back something for everything you've given me.” A trickle of blood escaped the corner of Andrea's mouth.

Carly reached in the cabinet for a sterile gauze pad and handed it to Andrea. “Would you please rest now?”

Andrea nodded, too tired to argue.

“I'll stay until Jeffery comes back and then I'm going to take my suitcase to the flat and look for David.”

“I love you, Mom.”

From somewhere, Carly found a smile. “I love you, too,” she said. Before she moved her chair away from the bed, she gently returned the earbuds to Andrea's ears. “Sleep tight,” she whispered.

“And don't let the bedbugs bite,” Andrea murmured, completing the age-old childhood ritual.

Thirty-six

The streetlight cast
long shadows across the living room of Carly's flat. David moved past the window to the sideboard to pour himself a drink. After several seconds, he turned, glass in hand, and looked at Carly. “I used to put myself to sleep at night trying to figure out who had raped you and why you were so intent on protecting him. Not once did it occur to me that it might have been your father.”

“Why should it have?” Carly said, sinking into the chair beside the window. She was exhausted to the point of numbness, her mind on the verge of shutting down out of self-protection.

“Because it was so goddamn obvious. It was all there. I was just too blind to see it.” He finished his drink in one long swallow and put the glass back on the silver tray. “Your father's death, Barbara's cool reception of my condolences that day I saw her in the grocery store, that strange day at the mill when you questioned me about my feelings for Andrea.” He folded his arms and hunched forward, as if in pain. “I should have known.”

“It wouldn't have made any difference,” Carly told him.

“You needed me and I wasn't there for you.”

“Because I pushed you away.”

“And I let you.” He came across the room and knelt beside her, laying his arms along the outsides of her legs, his head in her lap. “I'm sorry.”

“I can't help thinking about all those years I thought I was buying protection for Andrea and Wally and my mother with my silence. And now, in one afternoon, everything I've done became pointless.”

“Meaning you think you shouldn't have gone to your grandmother's?”

“It was such a terrible risk. And look at the consequences. I've irrevocably damaged—if not actually destroyed—the lives of the people who trusted me.” Her hands closed around the strands of hair between her fingers. “Not to mention what this will do to Andrea when she finds out.”

David lifted his head to look at her. “She's stronger than you think,” he said.

“She'll never feel the same about herself. How could she?”

“In time she'll understand that she's the same person she's always been. Not even something this ugly could change who she is inside.”

“How do you think Jeffery will react?”

David thought a minute. “The way I would have if I had known. He loves her. Nothing is going to change that. His entire life is planned around her.”

A pain sliced through Carly's chest. “Did you know she believes she's going to die?”

David sat back on his haunches. “When did she tell you that?”

“This afternoon.”

“Did something happen I don't know about? Have you talked to Reardon about this?”

“She's worn out, David. Her will to fight is gone.”

Some of the panic left his eyes. “That's to be expected,” he reasoned. “She'll feel different once they pull her off this course of treatment and she starts to get her strength back.”

“God, I hope you're right. She really scared me this afternoon. So much so, I tried to call my mom to tell her to pack everyone up and get over here on the next flight out. Thank God I'd had time to settle down before I finally reached her.”

“What did you say to Andrea?”

“I tried arguing, but she begged me not to, so I just let her talk.”

“You should have—”

“Don't, David,” she said gently, putting her hand on his arm. “I can't bear to hear any more about the things I should and shouldn't have done in my life. Andrea was desperate for someone to listen to her. I couldn't refuse.”

David turned away. The streetlight fell across his face. She saw tears trailing down his cheek. “I don't know what I'd do if I lost her,” he said.

“Loving Jeffery has helped Andrea understand why I let you go instead of telling you I was pregnant.” Carly put her hand to her throat, trying to ease the tightness caused from holding back tears. “She's ready to die, David. And there's nothing I can do to make her live.”

He got up and moved away. “I don't want to hear that,” he said roughly.

She went to him. “Don't close her off. She needs to talk to all of us about what's happening.”

“How can you be so goddamned calm about this?” he yelled, his face distorted with pain.

His question brought her up short. “Because I don't believe it,” she admitted. “My mind knows Andrea could die, but my heart refuses to accept that possibility.”

The phone rang. David answered. “What is it?” he snapped. “Jeffery—I'm sorry, Carly and I were—” He paused to listen. “How high?” And then, “We'll be right there.”

“What is it?” Carly asked.

“Andrea's fever spiked,” he said.

For the length of a heartbeat, Carly thought about running away and finding a hole she could crawl into where nothing, where no one could find her to tell her things she didn't want to hear.

But then her heart beat again and she gathered her purse and coat and was on her way to the hospital.

Thirty-seven

It was raining
the day they buried Andrea.

David looked skyward and thought it was as if even the heavens mourned her loss.

The service had been held in London to facilitate the number of people who'd called and asked to pay last respects. The interment was near Hawthorne on a hillside beside an abandoned church. Andrea had chosen the ancient cemetery herself because of the tombstone of a young girl she and Jeffery had found one day when they were out riding. Now the two shared more than birth dates; they had both died at seventeen, three hundred years apart.

The minister had left more than a half hour earlier. The gravedigger stood discreetly down the hill waiting and still. David, Carly, Victoria, and Jeffery remained, the umbrellas they had brought with them by their sides unopened. Silent tears had not stopped flowing from Victoria since early that morning. David felt a special sorrow for her because she had been so slow to recognize how deeply she would feel Andrea's loss.

Jeffery was inconsolable at the finality of Andrea's leaving, an alien thing for someone so young to try to understand. He couldn't imagine the next day without her, let alone a lifetime. His life, who he was, had been irrevocably changed. The loss, the sorrow, would set him apart from his friends. There would be no more carefree youth for him.