Carly's Gift (7 page)

“What about your mother?” It was a stupid question, one he immediately regretted asking. Carly's mother had stood in her husband's shadow throughout their entire marriage. She would have been as helpless after his death as a hummingbird with a broken wing.

“She had her own problems.”

“Who
did
you tell?”

“No one.”

Having no other vent for his frustration, she became his target. “You just went on like it had never happened? How could you let the son of a bitch get away with what he did to you?”

“I didn't want anyone to know.”

“Not even me?” he asked, an unreasoning hurt at being excluded coming over him.

“I was going to tell you. It was the reason I came to see you that weekend. But you were so caught up in whether or not you were going to make the rent that month, and the story you'd had rejected by
The New Yorker,
and the test you'd taken the day before and . . .” She didn't finish.

“And the political science paper I had to turn in the next day,” he said, the argument they'd had that Sunday afternoon playing in his mind with agonizing clarity. He'd been worn out from working two back-to-back shifts and so damned wrapped up in his own problems that he'd had little energy left over for her. Beyond putting his arms around her and letting her cry on his shoulder, he'd done nothing to help her through her father's death.

He felt compelled to stay and listen to her, if for no other reason than to do penance for not having figured out for himself why she'd done what she had. And he felt like running, knowing if he stayed, he would never stop looking at his life as it was now and thinking of the way it should have been.

“Two months later, I learned I was pregnant. . . .” She put a scarlet leaf in her hand and closed her fingers around it. When the whole had become a dozen parts, she slowly opened her hand and let the wind take the pieces. They all disappeared save one, which stubbornly clung to her palm.

“I didn't tell anyone. At first I was too ashamed, later when I discovered I was pregnant, I didn't want anyone trying to tell me what I should do. Besides, talking about it wasn't going to make what had happened go away.”

“I found the name of a doctor in Illinois who did abortions, and I made an appointment. The morning I was getting ready to leave, Ethan came over and found me crying. He kept at me until I told him where I was going and what I was planning to do.”

She brushed the last fragment of leaf from her hand then hugged herself and began to rock slowly back and forth. “Ethan was incredible,” she said, her voice taking on a softness it had lacked before. “He was exactly what I needed at the time—someone who didn't ask questions or make judgments or try to reason with me.”

“Someone who had time for you.”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“What happened?” David asked, fighting a surge of jealousy.

“I was on the table with my legs up in stirrups.” She shrugged. “But you know what they say, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. I couldn't go through with it.”

Even after all this time, it hurt that she hadn't tried harder to get through to him. He should have been the one she confided in, not Ethan. “I understand why you left New York without saying anything, but how could you have given up on me so easily? Why didn't you give me another chance when you found out you were pregnant?”

At last she looked up at him. “What would you have done?”

“You know what I would have done.”

“Precisely. And the more I thought about it, the more determined I became not to let you. I don't expect you to understand this, at times it's even hard for me to remember why I felt so desperate and alone back then, but when I decided to have the baby, I truly believed the life I had planned for myself was over. All I could see in my future was a struggle to find enough money to take care of myself and a baby. Art school became a cruel joke.”

The wind caught a pile of leaves and scattered them across the clearing. “I decided I would do anything to make sure your dream didn't die along with mine,” she said. “And that's exactly what I did.” For an unguarded moment, there was a look on her face that gave him a glimpse of the terrible price she'd paid for her sacrifice.

“On the way home, I told Ethan that I'd decided to go away to have the baby. I made him promise he wouldn't tell anyone where or why I'd gone—most especially you.”

David felt sick to his stomach. Ethan had been in love with Carly for years, but she'd been too blind to see it. He must have been beside himself to find he was finally at the right place at the right time. “And he came up with the perfect solution,” he said.

“At first I refused. I told him it didn't matter how much sense marrying him made, it wasn't fair. He said he knew how I felt about you, but that it didn't matter.” Her voice became so soft he had to strain to hear her. “Then he told me he didn't care whose baby I was carrying, that my child would be his child and that he would raise it with all the love he had stored inside to give me.” The deciding factor had been when she'd realized marrying Ethan was the one sure way to keep David from abandoning his own future.

“From what I've seen, he's fallen a little short on his promise,” he said, surprising even himself with how angry he sounded. A bizarre, protective instinct had surfaced in David. It was almost as if Ethan's assumption that David was Andrea's father had given him the proprietary right to behave as if it were true.

“Don't judge him by what you saw at the house. Ethan loves Andrea, but most of the time he's too afraid of her to let it show. He's been hurt so much by me, and Andrea is so much like me, that he instinctively protects himself.”

As if to lessen his vulnerability, Ethan had insisted they have another child as soon as possible after Andrea was born. Shawn arrived fourteen months later; Eric eleven months after that. When, less than a year later, Ethan started pushing for yet another child, she realized that he was trying to tie her to him with children. He'd convinced himself that as long as she knew he would never relinquish custody of their children, she would never leave.

Already exhausted with taking care of the three she had, Carly had renewed her efforts to bolster Ethan's confidence in other ways. There were brief shining moments when she'd almost succeeded, but then Ethan would remember how she had once lit up when she looked at David or the secret smiles the two of them had once shared or how everyone else became an outsider when she and David were together. Ethan couldn't get over the feeling that he was still standing on the outside. What he failed to realize was that she was standing out there too and that it was a compelling, significant thing for them to have in common.

David shook his head sadly. “I can't stop thinking how different all of our lives would be if you had just come to me first.”

“There was a time when that kind of thinking almost drove me crazy. Especially when the older I got, the harder it became for me to understand why I'd done what I had. But then the older Andrea got, the more I saw and understood the girl I'd been back then. None of us is ever as intense or as selfish or as self-sacrificing as we are when we're young. Through all the tears I shed over losing you, I never felt more noble.”

“Hypothetically speaking, of course—if you had it to do all over again?”

“Oh, David, that's such an unfair question. If I chose you, I would lose Shawn and Eric.”

He went to her, hunkered down, and took her hand in his. In a day of lightning-bolt revelations, he'd just been struck by another. For all these years, he'd believed it was the lover he'd so desperately missed in Carly, now he knew it had been the friend. “I'm sorry I wasn't here for you when you needed me.”

She curled her fingers around his. “I need you now.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go on letting Ethan think you're Andrea's father.”

“That doesn't make sense. Not the way Ethan feels about me.”

“It's the only way to keep him from trying to find out who Andrea's real father is.”

“Is? You mean he's still around?”

“I'm not going to play semantics with you.”

“Goddamn it, Carly,” he said, fighting to keep his anger in check. “You've had sixteen years to make some kind of peace with what happened. I've had less than ten minutes.”

“I know it's asking a lot, and if there were any other way, I wouldn't involve you.” When he didn't answer right away, she rushed on. “Is it Victoria? Are you worried about what she'll think?”

“Victoria doesn't care what I did before I met her.” He could have added that she didn't care all that much what he did with his life since, either, but the intricacies of his marriage weren't something he wanted to share with Carly.

“If you think about it, the only thing that's changed is your knowing.”

He'd come there that day to put an end to what they'd once had. What she was asking would tie them together, if only mentally, for the rest of their lives. It was on the tip of his tongue to say no, but the word wouldn't come out. “All right.”

She squeezed his hand. “Are you sure you know what you're doing?”

Her reaction was so like the Carly he remembered, he couldn't help but smile. “I know that asking me was the last thing in the world you wanted to do.”

“I can't have Ethan trying to find out who Andrea's real father is.”

“Would that really be so bad?”

“Too many people would be hurt.”

“I can't believe you still want to protect him, not after all this time.”

“Not
him,
Andrea. The truth would destroy her.”

“You may be underestimating your daughter. She didn't strike me as fragile as you seem to think she is.”

She stared at their intertwined hands. “You're going to have to trust me on this one, David.”

“Meaning I couldn't and shouldn't have trusted you before?”

“It's imperative you understand how important this is,” she said, ignoring his jab.

“I believe you.”

She pulled her hand from his. “Goddamn it, David. Don't give me lip service on this. It's too important.”

When she made a move to get up, he grabbed her arms and held her. “You don't get it, do you?”

“This isn't a game,” she said, anger in her voice.

“The reason I'm willing to go along with what you want and tell Ethan that Andrea is mine is that I would give everything I have if it were true.”

She caught her breath. “Why would you say something like that?”

“Because it's the truth,” he said simply. “God knows I've tried to stop loving you, but nothing I do seems to work. If Andrea really were my daughter, I would have a piece of you no one could take away.”

She didn't want to hear this. Whatever stability and comfort she'd found with Ethan would be lost knowing David still loved her. “You're living in the past. I'm not the girl you once knew.”

“Oh? How are you different? Have you stopped crying in sad movies? Do you hate bread pudding now? Maybe you've stopped snoring?”

“Those are all superficial—”

“All right—do you still reach a climax faster when you're on top and in control?”

She jerked back as if he'd hit her. “You bastard. You have no right.”

“What? To remember? When it's all I have?”

Her anger was as transitory as snow in August. “So much has happened, how can you still love me?”

He reached up to touch the side of her face. “I guess it's because I never stopped loving you, not even when I was hating you. Every woman I've known I compared to you. I married Victoria because she was nothing like you.”

“This is wrong. We shouldn't be doing this.” She closed her eyes against the rush of longing that swept through her. “It's not why I came here today.”

“Do you ever think about me?”

Carly slowly leaned forward and pressed her cheek to his shoulder. He put his arms around her. “There are times I miss you so much I can hardly—never mind. You were more than my best friend and my lover. Somehow, when we were growing up, I think you actually became a part of me. When I lost you, it was like losing a part of myself.”

He closed his eyes. “The day I received a copy of my first book, all I could think about was showing it to you.”

“I wish I could have been there.”

“What would you have done?” he asked, pressing the side of his face into her hair, breathing in the just-washed fragrance.

She smiled. “I would have done something preposterous, like filling the bathtub with Dom Perignon and making you sit there with me while you read every golden word aloud. Then later we would have toasted your success with wine in Lalique goblets and thrown them in the fireplace.

They were engaged in a dangerous dance. David could feel all that he had worked so hard to become slipping away from him. “And then?”

Carly stiffened and tried to pull away from him. It was as if the realization of what they were doing had hit them both at the same moment. “We've got to stop this. It isn't fair to Ethan or Victoria.”

“Or us,” he said, reluctantly letting her go.

She nervously combed her hands through her wind-tossed hair. “When you see Ethan, tell him that you didn't want Andrea sixteen years ago, and that you don't want her now. It's important to convince him that being her father means nothing to you.”

“My God, that's what's been eating him? He's been waiting all this time for me to show up to take his daughter away?” David felt a sudden, overwhelming sadness for his old friend. The bond that tied him and Carly together had broadened to include Ethan.

“And there was no way I could reassure him by telling him the truth.”