The Moment Between Page 3

  The water frightened her a little, and though the ocean was one of the primary reasons Abigail had left Newcastle, Minnesota, her prairie blood had never quite warmed to the fathomless depths that surrounded her on three sides.

  When she first moved to Rosa Beach, Abigail had a recurring nightmare that included a tsunami wiping Florida off the map. In her dream, she was standing in a parking lot with bags of groceries slung over her arms. Suddenly the sky went dark, and she looked up to see the wave—an impenetrable fortress of black water—swell and spread as if it would consume the heavens before crushing the earth.

  All at once people screamed and ran for their lives, but Abigail was frozen by the immensity of the water and traumatized by the fact that it could stand there, upright, as if it lived and had risen out of the sea to stalk her. She dropped her groceries and strangely felt a surge of worry that the crusty baguette she had just purchased would get soggy. And then it began to sprinkle, the top curl of the churning wave dripping and crying in anticipation of crashing, and Abigail felt the full weight of the knowledge that she was about to drown.

  The horror was so absolute, the fear so real and consuming that Abigail would inevitably wake up. She would be gasping and damp, sure that she was dying in the second before she realized that the paved parking lot beneath her was really her stiff-mattressed bed and that the drops on her skin were sweat and not seawater.

  The nightmare eventually began to taper off, haunting Abigail less and less frequently until it was nothing more than the memory of a feeling, a sour aftertaste that lingered in her soul and could not quite be identified. But something about Florida forever felt changed to Abigail. It was as if the state was a floating, unstable peninsula. She stumbled at times, sure she felt the movement.

  Approaching Tyler’s apartment, desperate to see him yet afraid of that very thing, Abigail was actually forced to stop and steady herself against the trunk of a tree. She fitted her fingers against the bark and swayed once, an unwilling dance partner. But Abigail was a grown woman and this feebleness was nonsense. She forced it out of her mind and angled her steps away from the distant patch of sea.

  As it turned out, Abigail need not have expended such agony—Tyler didn’t live there anymore. His roommate, an attractive young man who was adjusting a neat, cranberry-colored, raw silk tie, informed Abigail that Tyler had moved out several weeks earlier.

  “And I don’t think he’s coming back,” the man offered, trying out a charming smile on Abigail to see how she would respond to his subtle flirtation.

  Shock must have rippled visibly across her face because the man smoothed his pin-striped charcoal shirt with an irritated flick of his wrist and said, “Lover? What, he didn’t leave you his number?”

  In accordance with the sarcastic note in his voice, Abigail half expected him to add a caustic “boohoo” or some other less-than-sincere condolence. And though she didn’t want to beg, though she didn’t want to give this man the satisfaction of knowing that she sought Tyler with a steadily growing passion, she asked quietly, “Do you know where he is?”

  The man sighed hard through his nose and put his hands on his hips. “You know, you’re not the first girl to come looking for him.”

  “I don’t care,” Abigail said evenly.

  “You can do a lot better than him, pretty thing like you.”

  “It’s not . . .” But Abigail couldn’t finish. She didn’t know how to explain it all. “I just really need to talk to him.”

  “I don’t have a phone number, sorry.”

  “An address?” she pressed.

  He smiled wryly and gave in. “I’m supposed to send some of his stuff to him. What do you think? Tyler and I are a pretty close fit, wouldn’t you say?” He held out his arms and admired his own outfit. “I guarantee you, I look way better in it than he ever did.”

  Abigail gave him a stiff nod.

  Rolling his eyes, he moved to shut the door in her face. “Stay here. I’ll see if I can find that stupid address. You can have it and I’ll pretend I lost it.”

  Waiting for Tyler’s ex-roommate to return was a taste of eternity for Abigail. If he didn’t have what she was looking for, she didn’t know what she’d do. She was hardly a detective, and the only things she had that even assured her that Tyler was real and not some creation of her overactive imagination were his name and a photograph with his striking face in profile.

  Some of the panic that Abigail had left behind at the foot of the tree only steps from his front door began to creep up the sidewalk to claim her. If he didn’t have the address, if it was lost or he was lying or he refused to give it to her, what next? All her days up until this point had led to this one place in her life, and Abigail could not see another future no matter how hard she tried.

  But then the door swung open and the man thrust a rumpled receipt at her. “For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t waste another second on him if I were you.”

  “Thank you,” Abigail muttered thinly.

  “I’d say good luck, but I wouldn’t mean it.” He shut the door for a second time, and Abigail heard a dead bolt slide home.

  Numb and suppressing a shudder that would quickly become a tremor throughout her entire body, Abigail looked down at the address scrawled in slightly smeared blue ink.

  Gia’s Bakery and European Deli

  5467 Crescent Drive

  Surrey, British Columbia V4S 2H2

  Canada

  Canada? She hadn’t expected that.

  †

  Nothing in Lou’s life was quite how he expected it would be.

  Sure that he was destined to be single forever, Melody had been an apparition that slowly took shape in his reality. She was all mist and magic in the beginning, but she solidified a little every day, reversing the normal pattern of life and becoming more real, more present and vivid and possible as the years progressed. What had once seemed impossible was now a beautiful, breathing actuality.

  When they were newly married, Lou woke up every morning half-expecting his wife to have dissolved as his dreams slunk away in the fading night. But there she was, day after day and week after week, until one morning he woke up and knew that she would be there. Lou wasn’t dreaming it. He was living it.

  Then Abby came. She was quiet and contemplative for a child, but she was still a child, and suddenly the unexpected bliss of six unimaginable years was interrupted by nighttime feedings and the impulsive needs of a newborn. Lou didn’t resent his daughter, not exactly, but she arrived at a time in his life when most of his friends were empty nesters or even grandparents who could coddle the children in their lives for small bits of time before returning them to their mothers. For Lou, it was as if God rewound the clock but forgot to rewind Lou. In the split second after the doctor announced, “It’s a girl,” Lou was transformed into an old husband playing the role of a young one. And a new father on top of it all.

  So he quit the farm.

  Just like that. He harvested the corn and soybeans for the last time while Melody nursed and cooed over her precious infant, and then he called the only Realtor he knew and listed the farm.

  “What have you done?” Melody cried when she learned that the farm was for sale. And she was crying—huge, shining tears that Lou wiped away with his calloused thumbs.

  “It’s for the best,” he said. Though what he meant was, I have to do something.

  How could life go on as it always had when the truth was that it would forever be changed? The farm was an emblem to the way it had been and could never be again. It was a living photo album of sorts, for Lou couldn’t look at the sagging fence around the pasture without seeing Melody standing on the bottom rung, hands on her hips as she balanced and her hair stroked wild by the wind. He couldn’t see the freshly painted barn without watching his wife, remarkable and forever preserved in his mind’s eye, color the splintering wood with her own carefully wielded brush. She was everywhere he looked, and he wanted it to remain that way. He didn’t know if
there was room for Abby in his dream of Melody.

  So Lou tried to invent a new dream. It had to change—all of it—and he knew that one truth as certainly as he knew that the sun would continue to rise in the east.

  “We’re moving to town. I’m getting a steady job. We’re going to church.” He ticked off each imperative, calculating and measuring out the ingredients that, if left to simmer, would create the perfect life. Lou figured he could love Abby if he could only make room for her, if he set aside all that had been and focused hard on all that could be.

  The farm sold quickly but only because Lou was willing to take less than what it was worth. By the time the final papers were signed and initialed, Melody had warmed up a bit to the idea of moving and had picked out an appealing little two-story only a block from the public library. The siding was lemon yellow, and the former owners had painted the shutters a blinding lime green. Melody chirped that it was “cheerful and fun,” though when Lou looked at the house, it gave him such an impression of citrus that he actually had to fight a pucker.

  Finding a job proved more difficult than finding a house, and when Lou and Melody moved in he still hadn’t secured employment. He scoured the local paper for applicable want ads and circled them with a red pen purchased solely for this purpose. But either the job felt beneath him or he felt beneath the job, and Lou couldn’t bring himself to drop off a résumé. Not that he had a résumé.

  For the first time in his life, Lou felt the beginning twinges of something that threatened to suck him under: a depression with claws. Of course, he had been depressed before. But this felt like depression with a capital D. Just when it became alarming, when Lou could feel regret and bitterness glower menacingly on the horizon, Melody saved him for a second time.

  “I got us a new phone number,” she said one night over supper.

  Abby was just learning to eat solid food, and pureed peas were lining her mouth like a foul, furry lipstick. Lou found it hard to focus on his wife, but he tore his eyes away from his daughter and tried. “We don’t need a new number. We can transfer our old one to this house.”

  “This one is better.” Melody smiled. “655-4357.”

  Lou shrugged.

  “Do you know what 4357 spells?”

  He shook his head.

  “Help.”

  “Help?

  “655-HELP. It’s the phone number for your new business. Temporary, of course, until you work something else out.” Now that the confession was over with, Melody seemed afraid of Lou’s reaction and explained what she had in mind. “I was thinking about you today, and all that you can do and all that you are, and I decided that you are a jack-of-all-trades.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”

  “But it is. You’re a jack-of-all-trades and a master of them all, too. You can do everything from hang drywall to repair small engines—” Melody cast around, fumbling to encompass everything—”to fix the kitchen sink! Honey, you’re the whole package, plus the kitchen sink.” She reached across the table and took his hand, temporarily turning her back on the little girl who was taking up more and more of her attention—the little girl who was taking attention away from Lou.

  Though Melody made him weak even sitting there without makeup to brighten her face and her hair in a sagging ponytail, Lou felt a stab of irritation at her self-satisfied smile. But she was trying and she loved him—he had to remind himself of that daily, sometimes hourly. He filled his mouth with another forkful of mashed potatoes before he could say something he regretted.

  “Don’t you see?” Melody asked. “You can run your own fix-it business. You can do everything, whatever people need you to do. Whenever they need help with something, they can just call you. We’ll charge six dollars an hour.”

  “Six dollars?” Lou almost choked on his food. “That’s almost double minimum wage.”

  “People will pay it.” She shrugged. “I was thinking of calling the business Mr. Honey Do or something like that, but now I kind of like the idea of incorporating the kitchen sink. . . .”

  “I will not be Mr. Honey Do.”

  Melody laughed. “No, I suppose not. That sounds silly, doesn’t it?”

  “Ridiculous.”

  And though Lou initially hated the idea, though he was certain that people would continue to call their plumber instead of him when they had a leaky faucet, a year after they took their first ad out in the local paper, he had a truck with Handy Lou painted on the side. There was a custom-built storage unit in the bed of the truck with panels and compartments for his tools and equipment. It was fire engine red with bold yellow lettering. It was recognizable wherever he went. Lou both loathed it and loved it in equal measure.

  The Bennetts took the truck to church on Sundays when Abby was old enough to find the color and size of her daddy’s vehicle to be something akin to a clown car or an amusement park ride. When Abby was four and they took her to the county fair, she wouldn’t go near the pastel-painted merry-go-round. Something about the prancing horses, the tinny music, or the blinking lights

  offended her. And yet at every opportunity she scrambled to sit high in the cab of her daddy’s obnoxious truck. Lou didn’t get it.

  In fact, there were a lot of things Lou didn’t get. Five years after he made the decision to change everything, his life was exactly what he had intended it to be. The Bennetts had a well-kept little home smack-dab in the center of town. He had steady work. And they all attended St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Melody, true to her name, sang soprano in the choir. Abby tottered off happily to Sunday school every week. Lou even knew the priest by name and considered him as close to a friend as he had ever had—they talked from time to time about things more consequential than sports or the weather.

  All the ingredients were there. Lou should have been happy, ecstatic even, with a life that he had never dared to hope for himself, let alone expect. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. Some mysterious, gaping hole that he hadn’t even realized existed sank deep and empty in his heart. It may have gone unnoticed forever but for the fullness of his present life. What manner of greed was this? The cavernous depth of his need was only felt when everything else in his life was exactly as it should be.

  It wasn’t until he stood in the delivery room a second time that Lou found himself hoping against all hope that Melody had given him a son. Maybe this was the ache that gnawed at his soul when he stared at the ceiling instead of sleeping every night. Maybe this child would complete whatever inside him was lacking and broken.

  Lou didn’t realize that Hailey was what he wanted until her baby hand curled around his own massive index finger for the very first time.

  She was what he had been missing all along.

  I thought about pulling the plug on the drain.

  It was an old-fashioned knobby plug with a slim, beaded chain. I knew this because I had noticed it before, not because I could see the plug now, slick with diluted blood and hidden beneath the murky water.

  Remembering such a peculiar, insignificant detail stunned me, but for some reason, I could see everything with the same stark clarity. It was as if all my senses, even my memory, had been set to a higher frequency. Suddenly each detail—the hum of electricity in the lightbulb, the earthy-sick scent that hung weakly in the air, the occasional drip from the end of the corroded faucet—was backlit and brilliant, impossible to ignore. I was momentarily thankful, because in this new dynamic, knowing everything stopped me from having to feel everything.

  I wanted to, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull the plug in the bathtub. All that water—crimson and consecrated by her willful transgression—prevented me. And yet that didn’t stop me from realizing that I was all she had; I was the only person who could prepare her for her dismal wake.

  I knew that I should be calling someone. But who was I supposed to call? the police? the coroner? the ambulance? Dialing 911 seemed out of the question. This was not an emergency. Nothing could save
her now.

  But it didn’t matter just yet. I wasn’t ready to call anyone. There were things she would have wanted me to do.

  I found a clean washcloth in the cabinet beneath the sink. It matched the narrow row of blue glass tiles surrounding her bathtub, but it bore neat, round scars from a few drops of spilled bleach. It seemed important to find a spotless cloth, but when I rifled through the half-dozen others neatly stacked beneath the curving s-pipe, I couldn’t find one. They were all marked.

  Choosing the least disfigured rag, I turned on the sink and held the blue cloth beneath the ice-cold stream. Because the world had sharp edges, I had to do more than just stand there. I counted the seconds it took for the water to warm up. “Thirty-nine,” I whispered when I could turn off the tap and pinch out the hot, sopping rag. It had to be warm, even though I knew she wouldn’t feel it.

  Hesitation gripped me when I was back at the edge of the tub. Why? What could I possibly accomplish by doing this? But there was a smudge of mascara at the corner of her right eye, and I couldn’t stop myself from tenderly wiping it away. The soft pile of cotton loops erased the powder of her makeup in an uneven little circle at the height of her cheekbone. I thought it was beautiful, that exposed skin, and I turned the cloth to rub the clean side over the rest of her cheek.

  I returned to the sink three times, rinsing the cloth in steaming water until her makeup ran in dull rivulets of color against the porcelain bowl. When it was done, she looked faded somehow. But she also looked clean; her skin was unmarked, almost fresh, as if she were newly born instead of newly gone.

  III

  It was almost midnight when Abigail landed at Sea-Tac Airport.

  The terminal was dim and quiet, nearly devoid of passengers. Most of the gate counters were closed, and there were only the occasional harried fliers leaning against overstuffed bags with eyes half-closed and a look of fatigue shadowing their faces. It was hollow feeling and desolate, as if the world had expired while they flew thirty thousand feet above the earth.