What's Left Behind (12 page)

Polite applause all around. Charlie clapped at half speed, a universal sign of grudged tolerance.

Rob came to stand beside Abby and touched her shoulder. His expression reflected the warmth of the gathering.

“Thank you for the generous introduction,” Rob told Abby, and then he cleared his throat. “For the past couple of months, in order to give me an idea of the young man whose spirit she’d like the labyrinth design to reflect, Abby has generously shared many, many stories about her son. Luke’s likes, his dislikes, his favorite things. I imagine this couldn’t have been easy for her.” Rob glanced over at Abby. “I know that it wasn’t,” he said.

“I’ve been privileged to get to know Luke Connors. A secondary benefit of learning about Luke has been getting to know Abby as well. You probably already know, she’s one strong lady. You probably don’t already know how much her strength has inspired me.”

A feeling of fullness crept from Abby’s chest and heated her cheeks. She’d had no idea.

“So . . . about labyrinths. A popular misconception is that they’re a kind of maze.” Rob shook his head. “Nope, not even close. From the outside, they may look similar.” He flicked his gaze to Abby. “But sometimes things aren’t what they seem. A maze is a game, intended to trick you. A labyrinth is a journey along a simple circuit, no trickery involved. You walk into the center, turn around, and walk out again. Easy. As you walk, you might reflect on your life, you might reflect on your son. Or maybe you clear your mind and think nothing at all. But for any labyrinth, whether indoors or out, each walk is different. Because every time you walk the labyrinth, each time you begin anew, you’re a different person. We’re all a little different today than yesterday.

“I really like outdoor labyrinths, especially here in New England, because each time that you walk the path, the changeable weather impacts your experience, too.” A far-off rumble of thunder. “Speaking of the weather,” Rob said.

Abby stepped forward. “I think Mother Nature has provided the perfect segue to an abbreviated groundbreaking. If you could all follow behind,” she said.

Abby paused before the arbor, turned to Rob.

“Your party,” he said.

“Your design,” she countered, and together, they passed beneath the arbor to where Rob had laid the red-handled, beribboned shovel on the grass.

Abby raised the shovel. “To peace. But most of all, to Luke,” she said, and plunged it into the ground. The tip barely broke the surface.

“Like some help?” Rob asked.

When Abby nodded, he placed his hands over hers and adjusted the angle of the shovel. “Ready?” Rob directed his energy through her, and they plunged the shovel into the earth, breaking ground.

A smattering of applause from the guests. Charlie tapped his foot, arms crossed, stance wide. Abby’s pulse raced, a buzzing at her solar plexus. How would she feel if their roles were reversed? She should’ve asked Charlie to help. She should’ve given him a role.

Even from half a dozen feet away, she could see the color in Charlie’s cheeks. The skies grumbled, that deep rumbling that seemed to come from the earth itself and enter your body at the soles of your feet.

The tops of the treetops shook. Abby’s hair whipped around her shoulders. And a shiver laced her arms. Twelve o’clock, straight up over the harbor, water droplets had formed a multistory anvil. Big and green and ready to roll. “Cumulonimbus,” Abby whispered. She raised her voice for the crowd, but her gaze remained focused on the sky. The ominous green-tinged monster stirred energy in her belly, and her fingers tingled. “I’d like to invite everyone to return another day for a labyrinth walk. Right now, I think it’s time we took the party inside. If everyone can please grab a dessert on your way inside and reconvene in the dining room. Many thanks!”

A few squeals from ladies. The deep, booming voices of men. Laughter grew distant as the guests made a run for the dessert table and hurried for the cover of her home. The winds picked up, rattling the branches of pines and maples, and setting leaves aflutter. A second rumble of thunder took her back to a long-ago morning of cold whistling through a drafty house, white-washed skies, and the rarity of thunder snow. The morning Luke was born.

Abby had backed up against her pink-painted headboard, knees raised, head turned to the side. A white sheet draped over her legs, but just for show. A part of her floated above her body, above the pain, aware that she should be mortified Lily Beth was reaching between her legs, checking the progress of her labor. Lily Beth’s hand emerged, but the pain remained. “Six inches! You’re almost in transition,” Lily Beth said, and Abby started to cry.

“What is it, baby? What do you want? What can I get you?” Lily Beth said, but it was useless. Even if Lily Beth called Charlie, even if he still loved her, he wouldn’t make it here in time. Instead, Abby had asked for Celeste.

A hand gripped Abby’s upper arm, and she startled.

“Shouldn’t you be headed in?” Rob said.

Abby gave herself a shake to bring herself back to the present, but the past held tight. The memory of Celeste snowshoeing a mile in the storm, and then, snowshoes still on her feet, she’d clomped into Abby’s bedroom and told her that her timing sucked the big one.

The anvil-topped cloud grew, becoming more defined, gathering strength, and blotting out the sun. The low light simulated sundown, a sunglasses tint that crisped images, simultaneously darkening and defining.

Luke had never let a little weather get in his way. Any weather was camping weather, although he liked winter camping the best. A blizzard necessitated a nature walk, a day on the slopes, a day living. And if Luke were alive, he’d be standing here, not wanting to miss a thing.

“I want to walk the labyrinth before the lines wash out,” she told Rob.

Rob’s close-cropped hair rippled in the wind. His pale blue eyes shone with both amusement and concern. “Wild woman struck down by lightning.”

She laughed because that was the kind of warning she would’ve given Luke if he’d been alive and, despite her efforts to drag him to the sidelines, he would have insisted on remaining in the epicenter of a storm.

“Wild woman, huh?” Abby said, an expression not usually associated with hard work and responsibility. An expression not associated with someone who put off living. An expression not usually associated with her.

“You coming?” Abby said, and Rob followed her into the labyrinth.

Nowhere to go and nothing to do
.

The phrase Lily Beth recited to invite a meditative state played in Abby’s head. The shade-enhanced grass appeared too green, fluorescent. Each blade stood out in stark relief, a whole world unto itself. She thought of Luke the teenager, jumping off the cliff of the Bath Tub at Hermit Island, Abby standing by as a spectator to his joy. Luke winter camping in the yard, Abby ducking into his tent to bring him a thermos of hot cocoa and chocolate-chip cookies, warm from the oven. He’d encouraged her to stay and pull up a sleeping bag, but she’d never taken him up on it. Why? What was she waiting for? For her body to grow too old to withstand the physical rigors? For her mind to grow too stodgy, too scared, too set in its ways? From the time Luke was born, he’d always been reaching for something, arms outstretched, eager to experience more. Eager to experience life.

The wind gusted, ushering a sideways burst of rain and a howling high in the treetops. She answered the wind’s fury with a girlish giggle, a grin that stretched her cheeks.

“Abby.”

Abby glanced over her shoulder at Rob’s rain-spattered face, and put a finger to her lips. Quiet in the meditation room.

Two more circuits to experience.

Rain pelted Abby’s chest, soaking her dress, enlivening her skin. She blinked up at the sky, now darkened from sea mist to hunter green. But tension grew in her belly, a holding back, as though the storm were just winding up and getting started.

Center of the labyrinth.

A deep boom of thunder rattled the earth. A crack of lightning threaded the sky. And Abby lit from within. Energy charged her, from the vibrating soles of her feet to the ache at the base of her throat. For a vertiginous moment, she thought she’d been struck.That a bolt of lightning had jolted her heart. For a vertiginous moment, she didn’t care. Nowhere to go and nothing to do, but be here now, loving every minute.

“We made it.” Rob shot Abby a rain-slicked grin. His jeans clung to his hips and followed the long line of his legs. His light-blue button-down melted across the expanse of his arms and chest.

Storm force, low-pressure madness, regression to her teen years. Abby wanted to slip a hand beneath his shirt, taste his skin, and work her way down. She wanted to taste all of him.

Rob’s bright-eyed gaze slid down her neck to the wet fabric clinging to her breasts, and then returned to her eyes.
Wow,
he mouthed, and then reached out to take her hand. “Abby—”

“What the—” Something struck her behind. Not rain, too hard for rain, more like a stick or a rock. A direct hit jostled her shoulder.

“Ouch,” Rob said, as though something had hit him, too.

“Hail!” they both yelled. Rob pulled Abby against him, chest to chest.

Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.

Luke would’ve loved this snowstorm in July.

Marble-sized hail splashed the harbor, battered the shore, and slapped their bodies. The assault stung Abby’s skin, sending shivers through her limbs, a bass-deep ache between her legs. She laid her head against Rob’s chest.

On the morning Luke was born, ice-laced snow had pinged off her bedroom windows, a
tap-tap-tapping
background track to her moans. Celeste held her hand, refusing to flinch when Abby dug her fingernails into her palm, creating a red semicircle record of contractions.

Lily Beth stood at the foot of Abby’s bed, hands on her hips. “Give me a minute alone with her,” Lily Beth told Celeste. Seconds later, Lily Beth loomed over Abby’s face, barking orders for her to sit up, quiet down, and get serious.

“It hurts!” Abby had protested.

“Of course it hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. Otherwise you wouldn’t know a baby was coming.”

Lily Beth taught Abby how to settle down. She taught her that labor pains had an anatomy, with valleys and crests and durations, same as ocean waves. If Abby rested in between the contractions and saved her energy, she could listen for the approaching wave and get on top of the pain. If she paid attention, she could work with the pain, and ultimately make the pain work for her.

Fifteen minutes later, her son had been born.

Rob yelled to be heard above the hail racket. “Let’s make a run for it!”

Stones rained from the sky, hitching Abby’s shoulders. She trailed a hand to where Rob’s hand rested at her waist, and held tight. “One more minute!”

And sometimes, when the waves wouldn’t stop coming, when no valleys offered a respite, when the intensity rendered you mute with agony, well, sometimes, pain was just something you had to get through.

Because pain was so much better than feeling nothing at all.

T
essa’s usual stress-buster wasn’t busting, and she totally blamed Abby. Instead of being able to simply lie down, revel in “If I Die Young,” and marinate in the music, she was sitting on the edge of Luke’s bed and listening, really listening, to the words. And, damn it all, they had nothing to do with Luke.

For starters, the dead kid in the song was not only a girl, but also a virgin. According to Luke, his virginity was something he’d given up at sixteen, along with wishing on chicken bones, eyelashes, and the first star in the night sky. Those dumbass lyrics had Tessa imagining Luke up in a heaven, where he took his pick from a harem of fair-haired virgins and got laid every night. After all, wasn’t heaven supposed to be whatever got you off?

In Tessa’s heaven, she’d get to relive a certain day in January when she and Luke spent every moment together, their post-holiday-break reunion celebration. They’d started out downtown at the bookstore Food for Thought, Tessa consciously avoiding her father’s bore-me-to-tears collection of philosophy essays and dragging Luke by the hand to find the romance novels. There, at least, the stories guaranteed her a happy-ever-after. They’d lunched at sun-filled Judi’s, Luke reaching across the table to feed Tessa bites of his popover, Tessa licking the apple butter from his fingers. Then they’d gone back to Luke’s dorm room and made a baby.

According to Luke, anything that felt that good was worth taking a risk.

Everyone—Dina, Jon, even her father—had told her to take grief one day at a time, as if the days without Luke didn’t stretch as far as the shifting horizon. How was she supposed to get through something that never ended? With each passing day, grief didn’t get better. It got worse.

Sometimes, here at Abby’s, Tessa half-expected Luke to walk into his bedroom with that can’t-help-but-love-him smirk on his face. Then Luke would tell her that the last five months had been a game, a practical joke gone terribly wrong.

Then Luke would need her forgiveness instead of the other way around.

A familiar tightness gripped her throat. Her hand gravitated to her thigh. She squeezed the hemline of her shorts until the top of her shoulder twinged, and the tightness in her throat spread across her chest.

Tessa imagined laying her head against Luke’s bed pillow, her body at rest, sinking into the oblivion of sleep. Instead, she lifted the egg-in-a nest drawing tablet from the dresser top, and rifled in her purse for the Baggie of art pencils Dina had sent along with her makeup and prenatal vitamins. She considered taking the picture of her and Luke from the wall. In lieu of a live model, she usually needed a photo to refer to when drawing a face. But Luke, beautiful Luke, she could sketch with her eyes closed.

Outside, Tessa squinted through the glare. The sun baked the top of her head, as though yesterday’s crazy hailstorm had never happened.

After Tessa had taken cover inside the house with all the other normal people, she’d pressed her nose to the glass of the dining room slider and watched Abby, on-schedule, house-rules Abby, go crazy. What else would explain refusing to come in from thunder and lightning, oh so frightening? What else would possess Abby to stand her ground in the center of the labyrinth site, hail pounding her like a stoning? What else would compel Abby to hang all over Rob, judges-you-in-a-glance just-like-Tessa’s-father Rob?

Abby belonged with Charlie.

Charlie had waited for Abby by the slider, bath towel in hand. Love and disappointment, two sides of the same coin, had twisted his features, reddened his eyes, but he’d stood his ground. And when he’d wrapped a towel around Abby, something electric had passed between them. Just like in a romance novel.

Tessa scanned the yard for a patch of shade.

Oh, crap.

Abby was kneeling before Luke’s stepping-stones and talking out loud to no one that Tessa could see, as if crazy hadn’t ended with the storm. She couldn’t quite make out the words, but like a good song, the emotion in Abby’s voice sent a shiver up the back of Tessa’s head.

When Tessa ducked under the shade of the nearest maple tree, a warm breeze ushered the sweet purple scent of grape soda and the green bite of seaweed, and clarified Abby’s words.

“The groundbreaking for the labyrinth went well yesterday. That is, until the storm washed away the painted lines. And did you see that storm? Did you see it, Luke?” Abby paused, as though waiting for a response.

Tears pressed at the backs of Tessa’s eyes.

She used to walk around campus, having in-her-head arguments with Luke she still couldn’t win. Being alive had seemed like an unfair advantage. Then, after she’d found out about the baby, she’d asked Luke for advice. A sign or an omen, a bird crapping on her head.

But the difference, the major difference, was that Tessa never talked to herself out loud. And even if she did, she sure as hell wouldn’t expect a response.

So why was she waiting for one now?

“Hail the size of marbles fell from the sky,” Abby said. “Just like snow in July. Piles of it! Didn’t last long, but still. You would’ve loved it. I saved a couple of prime specimens in the freezer. Remember how you used to make me keep a few snowballs every year, and then we’d take them out in July? You’d get so excited, looking forward to winter.” When Tessa turned eleven, her mother had given her an I Dream of Winter Barbie doll, a blonde in a glittery blue evening gown. Tessa hadn’t the heart to explain she’d outgrown playing with dolls by the time she’d turned ten.

What if Luke hadn’t been all that thrilled with the summer snowballs? What if he’d only acted excited to make his mother happy? What if Abby remembered everything wrong?

If the way Abby remembered Luke made her happy, did it really matter?

Abby crawled onto Luke’s stepping-stones, pressed her hands to a paver. “There’s something I have to ask you. Something I’ve been wondering for a long time. I’m sorry,” she said, and she bent her head.

Under the shade, Tessa’s face flushed hot and cold at the same time. She pulled at the sticky soft hairs at the back of her neck. Dug her fingers into the maple’s trunk until bark bit beneath her nails. A sharp intake of breath, and she did it again.

Abby wanted to talk to Luke about his baby. What else could she possibly dread? What else would make her sit still for so long that Tessa thought she must’ve changed her mind and decided to keep her question to herself?

“It’s about your fall . . .” For a breath, Abby’s words hung in the summer-humid air. Then their meaning hit Tessa, as clear as the sound of Luke’s body smacking the snow-slick ground.

Abby’s words reverberated in Tessa’s throat. Tessa lowered herself down to the grass. Her heart slammed her ribcage, hard and fast and painful, same as the day she’d raced down three flights of dorm stairs to get to Luke, the prayer
Please God
sounding in her head.

Abby swept her long hair off her neck, gathered it on top of her head with both hands, and then let it spill back onto her shoulders. “What happened?” she said, and her voice splintered. “Why were you climbing out your window?” A noise came out of Abby, a cross between a bark and a wail, and she covered her mouth. “Why, Luke? What would make you do something so stupid? What in the world was worth risking your life?”

What or who?

Tessa’s palms slid against each other, as sweat-damp as the day Luke had fallen. Her fingers slid beneath the hem of her shorts. She pressed into the flesh until her fingers fatigued. But her thigh still tingled.

Abby brushed off her bare knees, shook out her skirt, and stretched to her full height.

Tessa scrambled in the grass for the drawing tablet. She opened it to the first page and tried for a casual leaning-against-a-tree pose. Knees bent to support the tablet and pencil raised in the air, as though she were awaiting inspiration instead of Abby’s approach.

“Hello, there!” Abby said, her voice taking on that now-familiar innkeeper lilt, the assumption of happiness. “What are you up to? Been here long?” Under the too-bright sunlight, Abby’s face betrayed no traces of guilt, no hint of the meaning beneath her words. No attachment to any particular response.

“Just got here.” Tessa heard a similar tone in her own words, the faux-sincerity of a liar. She fanned herself with the drawing tablet. “I wicked needed some shade.”

“Mind if I join you?” Abby flopped down on the grass beside Tessa. She hung her head back, and her long blond hair glowed like spun silk, like the surreal soft curls of a princess in a fairy tale. “I’m questioning my decision to start wearing my hair down again,” Abby said. “I think one of those hailstones hit me a little hard in the head, maybe shook something loose.”

Tessa laughed, managed a full breath. She stretched out her legs. Maple-shade patterns played against her calves, climbed to the hem of her shorts.

Abby’s smile dropped, and her voice flattened. “What’s that from, Tessa?”

Tessa’s abdomen hardened, pressing on her bladder. “Huh? What’s what from?” She covered her thigh, in case Abby hadn’t already gotten a good look. She was an idiot, a stupid careless idiot. A fact she hadn’t intended to share with Abby.

Abby shifted onto one hip, turned her body toward Tessa. The skin around Abby’s mouth dimpled, as though she might cry. And her eyes, so much like Luke’s, made Tessa almost forget who she was. Made her think, maybe, just maybe, she could be somebody else.

No, she couldn’t tell. She couldn’t stand to see a mirror of her own disgust on Abby’s face. She couldn’t let Abby hate her as much as she hated herself.

Abby set her hand on top of Tessa’s, sending a shuddery shock to Tessa’s throat, her mouth, the center of her chest. No one had touched Tessa, not like that, since Luke had died. No one had made her want to give herself away, risk everything, and ruin her life.

“It’s okay. Let me have a look at your leg,” Abby said, as though Tessa were a little girl who’d covered up a scraped knee.

“It’s nothing,” Tessa said, which was mostly true. It was nothing that mattered. Not anymore.

Abby angled her head so her face was closer to Tessa’s, her expression an open and caring invitation. An opportunity for Tessa to lose.

“Honestly, it’s nothing!” Now, Tessa sounded like a little girl, too. That only made her fingers tremble. That only made her more disgusted. That only made her want to take off, get behind a locked door, and make her thigh stop tingling.

She wouldn’t do it. She’d promised.

Abby slid her hand from Tessa’s, and the back of Tessa’s hand went cold. “If it’s nothing,” Abby said, “you won’t mind me taking a look. Right? Not a big deal. I just want to make sure you don’t have an infection.”

Tessa’s heart raced.
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,
pulsed between her ears. She clenched her teeth, the way she used to when she was small and her mother would take her to the pediatrician for a shot. Sometimes, Tessa would drop down from the examining table and hide from the nurse beneath her mother’s chair, the smell of rubbing alcohol thick in her mouth, her bony knees raw against the floor. But they always found her. No matter how many times she’d wished herself invisible, she’d always get caught.

Tessa hung her head and her hair fell before her face, like a night-darkening shade. Was this what it felt like to be dead? In perpetual darkness and hidden from sight, but also safe, because the worst had already happened. You had nothing left to lose. Her whole body shook, a last-ditch attempt to hang on, hold on, never let go.

Abby tucked Tessa’s hair behind her ears. Sunshine flooded Tessa’s face, Abby in the center of the light. “Shh, shh,” Abby said, soothing, as if she already knew. As if it really didn’t matter. “It’s okay if you’re not ready. I can wait.”

A staccato burst of air released from Tessa’s mouth, an almost laugh. Luke had given Tessa the same speech, verbatim, when she’d told him she was still a virgin.

Tessa had always been a sucker for other people’s patience. Crouched under the plastic examining room chair, she’d grow bored of staring at her mother’s jeans-clad legs, the nurse’s green scrubs, the faces that cajoled and pleaded. Finally, they’d bribe her with red lollipops, waving the candy beneath the chair the way Abby lured Sadie with rainbow ribbons.

Luke had had his own methods of whittling away Tessa’s resolve to delay intercourse, making love to her in every other way possible, until her virginity was nothing but a technicality.

Out on the bay, the sun gleamed off the navy water, and Tessa imagined herself swimming. The cold numbing her body. Her arms straining against the tides. Then she’d crawl from the water onto a sandy beach and collapse, utterly, blissfully, spent. Then she’d feel nothing.

Tessa slipped her hand from her thigh.

This time, a burst of air came from Abby, a sober, reverent “Oh.” More than Luke had uttered in response to seeing Tessa naked for the first time. He’d treated her scars the same as the rest of her body, kissing every inch to make them all better, no questions asked.

The clang of a bell buoy punctuated Abby’s sigh. “Why, sweetheart? What made you want to injure your precious body?”

Sweetheart, precious,
terms of endearment. Not a single word of disgust was directed toward Tessa. Not a hint of anger laced Abby’s tone. Head down, Abby focused on Tessa’s thigh, as if Abby were a magical princess, willing her gaze to heal the ugly lines Tessa had carved into her flesh.

“I don’t know,” Tessa said, which wasn’t exactly true. But whenever she’d posed the same question to herself, the reasons led her down the same twisted path and made as little sense to her as when she’d first held her father’s purloined razor blade over her perfect, unmarred skin.

One glance from Tessa, and water edged Abby’s eyes.

Was Abby crying for her? That made no sense, since Tessa had gotten exactly what she’d deserved. She’d tried to erase the scars, slathered vitamin E oil over the bumpy surface. But then her thigh would glow, the oil highlighting the raised flesh instead of erasing it, the skin reddening beneath her touch. Her father was right. Some people created their own problems. And others—Tessa—made everything worse.