The Duet (29 page)

I was just about to demand an explanation, when the doorbell rang. Miranda’s smile froze on her face when she saw that I’d been staring at the twilight zone scene unfolding in the kitchen. But she recovered instantly, raising an eyebrow at my incredulous expression. I tugged on my blouse – a vintage peasant-style from the sixties in a deep purple color. I’d paired it with a wool, plaid mini kilt and gray tights. I hadn’t been nervous all day, for some reason, but now that Jay was here, I felt my palms go sweaty.

I lifted my chin as I swiped past Miranda; a gesture to let her know she had some explaining to do later.

I took a deep breath before opening the door, and I’m glad I did because seeing Jay standing there, clean shaven, wearing a pair of khakis and a white, button-down shirt, holding a huge bouquet of the most vibrant sunflowers I’d ever seen; well, it knocked that breath right out of me.

“These are for Sydney,” he said, handing me the flowers. I pretended to smell them, but I was really inhaling the scent of Jay; familiar and comforting, Old Spice and spearmint.

“Jay!” Sydney came tearing down the stairs, so fast I was sure she’d do a nose dive and land at our feet.

“Hey, pumpkin,” he said, kneeling down to let her hug him. My heart melted.

Sydney backed up a step and grinned widely. “I’m too young to drink wine,” she said, “but you go ahead.”

Jay threw his head back and laughed. “That’s not for you, but thank you.”

“Your… Jay brought these for you, baby.” I held out the flowers and Sydney’s face lit up. She snatched them out of my hands and ran into the kitchen to put them in water.

Jay stood up, the smile from watching Sydney still on his face. But his eyes had something else churning inside them. I thought I knew what it was, but I was afraid to be wrong. He handed me the bottle of wine. I tore my eyes from his and glanced down at the label.

“Nice,” I muttered. “Come on in. Dinner’s ready.”

Supper was pleasant – if not a little off kilter. I was the one who clammed up, and Jay and Miranda seemed to carry the conversation; in between Sydney’s constant monologues, of course. I had spent countless Sundays across the table from Jay at the O’Donnell’s house, but I can’t remember him uttering more than just a sentence or two during any of those meals. He seemed different, at ease. I liked it, but there was a pang of sadness that came along as well. I tucked it away and tried to enjoy my family, forgetting how broken it was just for a moment.

We were all sitting around, enjoying the afterglow of a fine meal over coffee, when it happened.

Jay and Sydney were enmeshed in a serious game of tic-tac-toe. Miranda, Uncle Fred and I all watched with amused expressions. I, in particular, was lost in my own fantasy of how normal this all seemed. I loved watching the two of them together. They were completely in sync, even had a few of the same facial expressions and hand gestures without realizing it.

Sydney had won every game, but then Jay snuck up on her and finally won one. He grinned proudly while she studied the board to try to figure out where she’d gone wrong. Then she looked right at him with a very serious look and said, “You’re my daddy, aren’t you?”

I never saw it coming. And clearly no one else at the table had either, judging by the absolute silence that followed. No one spoke and no one moved. Sydney sat patiently waiting for an answer, but Jay was frozen in his seat.

“How come I never met you before now?” she asked. Her voice was filled more with wonder than with sadness, but I knew how her mind worked, and it wouldn’t take her too long to feel the weight of - what she would calculate as - abandonment.

There was no way I could let Jay try to explain. “Sydney,” I said, my voice stronger than I felt. “Jay didn’t know about you until just a few weeks ago. If he had…”

“Why didn’t he know about me?”

I swallowed hard. This would be the worst of it. Once we got through this conversation, we could all move forward. “Because I didn’t tell him.”

She stared at me for the longest time. I could see the betrayal written all over her face, and it killed me. For so long all I had thought about was protecting myself, and how having Jay in my life would hurt me. Could I have been any more selfish? Then when Jay came back, I worried about how I had done him a royal injustice by keeping my silence. I never once really took my own daughter’s feelings into consideration. I convinced myself that she was young yet – that it wouldn’t really affect her until she was older, and started wondering about who her father was. But look at what I’d done. I’d robbed her of knowing him, and I’d broken her heart by shattering the illusion that she could trust me.

No one spoke. Miranda cleared her throat and stood up. She reached for Sydney’s hand, but Sydney snatched it away, continuing to stare at me. “Baby, I’m sorry,” I whispered, my voice catching.

Sydney spun around on her heel and ran out of the room. A moment later, we heard the front door slam and all four of us were on our feet and out the door after her.

It was dark out – there aren’t any streetlights in front of our house – so I heard the screeching tires before my eyes could focus on anything. I am sure that my heart stopped for a moment, but my body didn’t hesitate. I was running toward the street, only it felt more like I was running across a vast expanse, and that I would never reach my destination even though it was in my sights. I heard voices, shouting, crying, but they were all jumbled together. I could see the car – I think it was blue – and the silhouette of a woman walking around the front. Then I saw my daughter’s little legs, one foot bare, and one still clad in the SpongeBob slipper, and I stopped hearing or seeing anything else.

She wasn’t moving.

I dropped down beside her, afraid to touch her in case she was really hurt and I made it worse by moving her. I felt someone grip my arm tightly. I think it was Jay. He was saying something to me, but all I could hear was the pounding of my heart in my ears.

“Sydney?” I cried through my foggy mess of a brain.

I prayed then. I prayed so hard. I begged, I pleaded, I made deals, promises, anything at all to keep my worst fears from being true. I rocked back and forth, my hands resting gently on Sydney’s side. This was all my fault. If I had done things differently, if I had been stronger, a better person, a better mother; none of this would have happened. And now I couldn’t go back and change any of it.

I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them up, willing my beautiful girl to come back to me, picturing it in my mind. And then I saw her eyelids flutter, and her body squirm under my hands. She sat up without much effort and I stared in awe.

“I saw her trip and fall, so I stopped to see if she was okay.” I looked over at the woman who was speaking. There must’ve been something frightening in my expression, because horror filled her face. “Oh my God. Did you think I hit her? Oh, I’m so sorry! Oh, you must be absolutely traumatized right now. How terrible…” The woman rambled on and on, but I ignored her and helped Sydney stand up. When I touched her arm, she screamed.

“Ow, Mama! My arm hurts!” She cradled it gingerly and I noticed that it wasn’t quite bent the right way. I swallowed back the nausea, determined not to let her see me faint on top of all the other excitement of the night. Jay must’ve noticed because he touched me lightly on the shoulder and moved past me to scoop Sydney up in his arms. I got in the backseat of his rental car and he laid Sydney in beside me. We made it to the emergency room in record time.

49

It was three in the morning by the time we got Sydney home and tucked into bed. She had broken her arm cleanly, so they set it and put her in a hard cast, which she already had full of signatures by the time we left the hospital. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

Uncle Fred had taken Miranda home hours earlier, once we found out Sydney was okay, so the house was quiet. I pulled Sydney’s bedroom door shut and Jay followed me out to the back porch.

I stood at the railing, looking at the moon’s reflection off the shimmering ocean way off in the distance. It was cold, near freezing, but I didn’t really feel it. I felt almost feverish instead; the events of the night and the nearness of Jay seemed to be heating me from the inside out.

Jay leaned against the rail, his back to the ocean, only a few feet away. He was either waiting for me to say something or he was carefully contemplating his own words. That was the thing about Jay, he never blurted anything out without analyzing it to death first.

The stillness was mesmerizing. There was something so intimate about being awake when everyone else was deep into their dreams.

“I should go. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” Jay didn’t move from his spot. He didn’t look like he wanted to go anywhere.

“I thought I had a thousand good reasons why I didn’t tell you about Sydney,” I said into the darkness. I felt his body turn toward mine; still too far to touch, but close enough to make me shiver. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was really only one reason, and I’m not even sure it was a good one.” I turned to face him. “You hurt me, Jay, and I just needed to protect my heart.”

He took a step closer, his arm flinched at his side as if he had been about to touch me, but changed his mind. “I’m sorry you felt like you needed to protect yourself from me,” he said softly. “I’m sorry about a lot of things, Izzy. But what I’m most sorry about, is that I never said what I should have said a long, long time ago. And that’s that I love you. I’m pretty sure I loved you since that day you narrowed your eyes at me across the table at Cooper’s house when you were twelve. It’s always been you, Izzy. No one else but you. And it just kills me that all I had to do was tell you that, and all of this could have been avoided.”

I don’t know why I froze up. All I had to do was reach for him and we could end this stand off and be where we both wanted. But this moment, his confession, it seemed too big to act in the obvious way. I needed to let his words really sink in, down to the depths of my heart, into places that I had sealed off a long time ago. And that wasn’t going to happen right away. So I just stood there, blinking up at him, my breathing shallow, but my heart rate slow and steady.

He reached for my hand and brought it up to his lips, kissing my palm. Then he turned and walked back through the house. I looked back out over the water. The sky was clear, and the moon seemed brighter than usual. I stood there a while longer, until my teeth began to chatter and my nose was numb. I went into Sydney’s room and crawled into bed beside her, careful not to jostle her injured arm.  My brain finally shut down just as the sky began to lighten, and I fell into a dreamless sleep.

50

Jay finished up his last appointment at the rehab center and packed up the last of his things before taking one last look around and flipping off the light. He would grab something quick to eat, then head over to the rec center where he coached basketball three nights a week.

It had taken Jay the better part of a year to come out of his funk after Cooper died and Izzy left. But once he did, he put everything he had into helping kids with drug and alcohol problems. Even at his own personal lowest point, he was focused on this mission. With the money he had made from his duet with Izzy, plus a steady amount of appearances at small clubs - thanks to good old Chad - Jay had put himself through college. And now, after thousands of hours of interning and volunteering, and his own grueling personal therapy, he was a licensed counselor.

For someone who spent his life shutting himself off from everyone by withdrawing into his cocoon of silence, it was not a natural leap that he now made his living talking. But as long as he wasn’t the one exposing all his own feelings out loud, it came surprisingly easy to him. He had helped dozens of kids in real, measureable ways, and intended to multiply that number in the future. Nothing was more important to him than steering these kids away from the bad decisions that would ultimately lead them down a road to nowhere.

And what he’d recently figured out, was that he could do that same work on either coast.

He was sorry to leave the kids he was currently working with; especially the ones that had been making the most progress. It was a powerful thing to watch the transformation from angry, defiant teen to intelligent, self-assured young adult.  But he had been working at the center for two years as a licensed counselor, and before that he’d volunteered there. He knew the staff well, and his kids were in good hands.

His basketball league would be harder to let go of. The league was made up mostly of kids who had completed rehab and were committed to staying clean and sober. There were also a handful of kids from around the neighborhood who Jay had personally recruited. They either wanted to help out, or just needed something to keep them out of trouble.

He got to the rec center early. His two longest standing players were there waiting for him. He’d asked them to meet him.

“Hey guys,” Jay said as he walked over and shook each of their hands.

“Jay, what’s up?” said Micah, the taller and more outgoing of the two. Cody just nodded, eyeing Jay warily. Cody had accomplished a lot in the last couple weeks while Jay had been away, but he hadn’t had an easy time of it, and he was still a little mad at Jay for leaving in the first place. He was still staying at the rehab, but had outside privileges a couple times a week. Jay raised a brow at him, and for once, Cody didn’t look away.