The Words Between Us, page 27
“No you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.” His eyes search mine for a moment, and his expression turns sad. “Why did you leave?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“You didn’t read my note.”
“I read it. I read it a thousand times. But it never made any more sense than the first time I read it.”
He looks so sincere that a little pit begins to form in my stomach. “The reporter? At my door? The very day after I freaked out on you and your dad about your mom?”
Two deep thought lines appear between his eyes. “I had nothing to do with any reporter. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t mad at you, but I never told anyone who you were.”
The pit is getting deeper. “Then how would she know?”
“I don’t know. When your grandma died, couldn’t there have been some record of you as Robin Windsor? Maybe your grandma said something about it to a nurse.”
I cross my arms, tucking my cold hands beneath them. My mind races for some other explanation.
“Anyway, you were wrong,” he says. “About my mom.”
I swallow hard. “I was?”
“Yeah. Dad and I were having an argument about . . . something, I don’t know. We were always arguing then. You got in my head with that theory of yours. I went through all of the books you returned. The pattern was there, just like you said. I accused him of lying about it, and he stormed off and came back a minute later with the death certificate and the thesis she was working on for these graduate classes she’d been taking—some extension or correspondence program. Her thesis was on mad women characters in classic literature. That’s why she had all those things underlined.”
All the breath leaves my body. A master’s thesis? Notes for a paper? It was as simple as that?
“That doesn’t mean she wasn’t having a tough time,” he goes on. “I mean, there’s probably a reason someone would gravitate toward that topic, and Dad told me she was under a lot of pressure and he wasn’t always very understanding of it. He blamed himself for the aneurysm for a while. That was part of why he was trying to erase all trace of her—just trying to stop thinking about how he’d killed his wife. Then a doctor finally got it through his head that it had nothing to do with him. It runs in families, tends to happen to women more than men, she had high blood pressure, stuff like that.”
The pit in my stomach is a chasm. I feel lightheaded. “And I come along and twist the knife a little more. I—I am so, so sorry. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.”
Peter shrugs. “It can’t be changed now.”
“Does he still live around here? Your dad?”
“He moved to Arizona not long after I graduated college.”
I look at my feet. “It was really none of my business.”
Peter puts his hands in his pockets. “You were fourteen. Well, fifteen, I guess.”
“Old enough to know everything and nothing.” I pause, wondering if I should tell him about my parents, about the letter I failed to find. “How did you know where I was?”
“I’ve known for years. Sarah told me she ran into you when you first moved back.”
I let out a long breath. “You married her.”
He rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah, I did. That was a mistake.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’?”
“Was she pregnant or something? You didn’t love her.”
“No. The girl I loved skipped town and left everything I’d ever touched on my doorstep. Sarah was there for me. For a while anyway.”
I swallow down all of the questions I want to ask him, all of the things I could never bring myself to ask Sarah because it would have meant talking about Peter when all I’d wanted to do for so long was forget him. Instead, I focus on the present.
“If you’ve known where I was all this time, why wait so long? Why send the books now?”
“I’d been watching the news. I knew the execution was coming. I thought maybe you’d need a nice distraction from it.”
“Oh. And now? Why are you here now?”
He closes some of the distance between us. “Robin, I think about you all the time. I thought I could forget you if I got married. When that didn’t work, I thought maybe I could forget you by going to war. But you were still there in my mind every day. And when I came home to divorce papers sitting on the counter, all I could think about was finding you.”
My heart rate quickens. When I had been hiding in the north woods, Peter had been searching for me? The girl who’d taken every one of his manifold kindnesses and shoved them back in his face?
“I didn’t know where to start,” he continues. “I got a job where I could travel. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I thought maybe I’d run into you somewhere or at least come across some sort of sign you’d been somewhere—something so that I could at least be sure you existed, that you weren’t some figment of my imagination. But everywhere I went, I could tell right away you weren’t there.”
He takes another step toward me and reaches out to grasp my arms.
“The night Sarah saw you in the bookstore she called me in Wyoming. I was halfway to Michigan the next day when I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to see me, so I turned back.”
“I wish you’d come.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
He furrows his brow, but his eyes never break contact with mine. “Is that how you feel now?”
I shake my head, afraid to speak for the knot forming in my throat. He pulls me into his broad chest and wraps his arms around me. In that embrace, the years of pain and anger melt into tears.
“Oh, Peter, I’m sorry. I was so hurt. I assumed it was you.”
He cups my face in his hands. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But all this time wasted—I feel so stupid. It just seemed like there was no one else who ever knew about me or my grandma or . . . Oh.”
“What?”
“It was Billy.”
39
Now
I fill Peter in on all my discoveries—the money in the Doll House, the truth about how my parents were and weren’t actually involved in the crimes that took them from me, Billy’s strange visit in July, the letter that had probably been thrown into a garbage bag as the old church ladies cleaned out my grandmother’s trailer. When I say it all out loud, my life sounds far more exciting than it actually is. Never once does Peter look like he doesn’t believe me.
Finally I run out of news about all the things I cannot change and focus on the one thing I can.
“Why not send the books all at once?”
“I thought about it. Briefly. I know how overwhelming that can be.”
He smiles when he says it, but I can tell my rash and childish actions still sting.
“I thought maybe it would be easier if you had some time to get used to the idea of me again,” he says. “Anyway, it took a lot of time to copy all the poems into them.”
“What about all the different postmarks? How can you travel that much?”
“I work for the Department of the Interior. I’ve been doing an intensive tour of the National Park System this year to assess staff needs and management of the resources. Before I left DC, I filled up the back of my Explorer with everything and started working my way through. It’s been a fun little puzzle to match the poems up to the books and copy them in. Took a little guesswork at times. Your handwriting was terrible.”
“It still is.”
The side of his mouth quirks. “Good.”
“Why the big gap between Moby-Dick and Romeo and Juliet? I was waiting. I was hoping when they all came, you’d follow.” Yes, I can admit it now.
“That was always the plan. But Sarah told me about the art contest thing and how busy you were. And she told me about that Ryan guy. I thought you had enough going on. I didn’t want to be one more thing when I showed up. I wanted to be the only thing.”
I look directly into his sky-blue eyes. “You are.”
Peter places a hand on the back of my neck and pulls me into a kiss worthy of Shakespeare, worthy of poetry. Everything fades. Billy, the lost letter, Sarah, my failure. For just a moment, none of it matters. I feel nothing but his arms, his lips, this singular perfection.
“I can’t believe you kept all of those poems,” I say when it ends.
“I did more than that,” he says. “I probably should have asked, but I figured you’d say no. So I went ahead and submitted the entire collection to a contest.”
I take a step back. “You what?”
“Don’t be mad. I wanted to do something nice for you that I figured you probably wouldn’t do yourself. I wanted you to be able to see your name—your real name—associated with something positive.”
The old familiar feeling of being deceived and exposed creeps across my skin.
“Peter, you had no right to do that.”
“No? Those poems were mine, right? I gave you the books and you gave me the poems.”
“You know that’s not how writing works. Those were my intellectual property.”
He takes my hand in his. “It’s done. And what’s more, you won.”
“What?”
“Ten thousand dollars. And all the poems are being collected into a book that’s going to be published next year. It’s another reason I had to get ahold of you now. You’ll have to start working with the publishing company and signing contracts and stuff.”
I pull my hand away. “Wait, is that why you came back? Because I had to sign contracts?”
“No, it’s not. It’s not why I came back, it’s why I came back now. Don’t twist this into something it’s not. I thought you’d be happy.”
How could I know what I felt anymore? Everything’s so tangled up, so complicated. Why did I pick up that phone? I could be halfway to Ohio right now.
“So, your store has been struggling,” he goes on, “but now you’ve got some more money to keep it afloat.”
The store. It really could all work out, just as everyone kept insisting it would.
I shut my eyes. “No. There’s no store. Not anymore. It’s done.”
“But I thought—”
“I’m leaving, Peter. I’m leaving town. When you called, I was on my way out the door for good.”
“You sold the store?”
“Not yet.”
“Then there’s still time.”
“No, there really isn’t. It’s over. That chapter . . . it’s done. I’m moving back to Amherst.”
His eyes search mine for the barest moment. “Come with me instead.”
My breath hitches. “What?”
“I’m heading north to visit Pictured Rocks and then flying to Isle Royale. I’m spending the winter there to help with a study of how the latest wolves relocated to the island are doing. Come with me. I’m sure they’d have room for you up there. It would just be a few months. Just to see if there’s something here worth saving.”
North is not my direction this time. East is. East to see my mother again. East to Amherst to prove to myself that my house is still alive. East to the Atlantic.
Peter is still looking at me, eyes pleading, waiting for an answer. “It’s just a season, Robin. Amherst will be there in the spring. But this chance won’t be. And if things work out . . . well, it’s only an hour flight from DC to Massachusetts.”
“Peter, I—”
My cell phone rings in my pocket. I check the number. Sarah. I press ignore. But her name on the display has knocked loose an idea.
40
Now
We have to make two stops before we leave,” I say as we transfer the contents of my still-running car to Peter’s Explorer, starting with the books.
“It’s a good thing I pack light,” he says. “You’re really going to leave the car here?”
“I’m bringing it to Dawt Pi—the car and The Professor. He always liked her better anyway.”
Maybe she could teach him some Chin words before her family came. They would come. I would make sure of it. Half of the money Peter had told me I’d won for my poems would go to her. Five hundred would go to Ryan for the Science Olympiad team. The rest I’d save for myself, a little nest egg for the future.
“I never thought I’d see this creepy thing again.” Peter is holding my mother’s old doll by the neck. He tucks it back in the bag and shuts the liftgate of the Explorer, accidentally severing the head from its body. It bounces twice and rolls to a stop near my feet.
I let out an involuntary gasp.
“Shoot, Robin, I’m sorry,” Peter says, opening the liftgate again.
I pick up the head and examine the stubby neck for damage. Except for a chip and a bit of extra dirt it seems to have survived.
“I’m sure it can be reattached,” I say.
“What’s this?” Peter pulls a short stack of folded paper from the body’s stuffing and hands it to me.
I open one up. It’s a letter. The salutation, Lindy, Darling; the closing, Yours Always, Billy. I frantically open and scan the rest of them. They are all from Billy. And surely one of them is the letter that will save my father’s life. All this time it had been hiding behind those unseeing eyes. Every time I had spoken to my mother’s doll, she’d actually had something she wanted to say back.
I rush back to my car, dig through my purse. The lawyer’s card had arrived just a few days after I visited my father in Terre Haute. I fumble with my phone, drop the card. Peter picks it up.
“A lawyer? What’s going on? What are those?”
I snatch the card from Peter’s hand and punch in Joel Staub’s number. It rings once, twice.
“Mr. Staub? This is Robin Windsor. I think I may have the letter you’re looking for.”
I tear down Centerpointe Road, past the stately homes of nineteenth-century lumber barons. I had once thought of Sussex and River City as nothing towns full of boring houses and farm fields. I’d been wrong. I just hadn’t ventured far enough from home to know what I’d been missing. But I don’t see the houses now as I speed through yellow lights.
Incredibly, Peter manages to keep up. He pulls into a parking spot right next to me outside Dawt Pi’s salon downtown and rolls down his window. “Should I wait here?”
I give him a nod. The bell dings as I rush in.
“Robin!” Dawt Pi comes around the desk. “I’m so happy to see you. Do you need a haircut?”
Actually, I do. The reason I’ve let my hair grow so long is the same reason I have never purchased lattes or cappuccinos at a coffee shop—because I dread being stuck in a chair or at a counter while a stranger asks me personal questions.
“Probably, but that’s not why I’m here. I want to give you something. A few things, actually. But first, do you have a scanner here?”
She leads me through an invisible but pungent cloud of hair product chemicals to an office in the back of the salon. I scan the letters one by one, then email the lot of them to the address on Joel Staub’s card. When it’s all done, Dawt Pi grips my hand and I realize with a pang how much I will miss her quiet support, her fierce determination, her faith.
“Now, about the other things. I’m leaving town for a while, and I want you to watch The Professor for me.”
She furrows her brow. “How long will you be gone?”
“I’m going up north for the winter. I won’t need the car there. I may be back for it in the spring. We’ll see. But for now, you can use it.”
I hold out the car key and give it a little shake. Dawt Pi makes no move to take it, so I grab her hand and press it into her palm.
“What about the store?”
“I’ll see to that. Don’t worry. I have to run now. Peter’s waiting for me.”
“Peter? Book Peter?”
I smile. “Yeah.”
She rushes to the front window. I feel my phone buzz. The text is from Joel Staub.
Scans received. Will keep you updated.
“Can you bring The Professor inside here?” I say. “He’s in the car and it’s too cold to leave him there. You can get all of his things from the store later. Sarah can help you move the big cage out.” I hand her another ring of keys. “Give the store keys and the key to my apartment to her.”
Dawt Pi slips into her coat and follows me onto the sidewalk. She crushes me in a hug. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I say, tears welling up in my eyes. “You have my number. I doubt there’s reliable cell service where I’m going now. But I promise I will get ahold of you somehow and let you know how I’m doing.”
“Okay.”
She retrieves her avian charge from the car as I get into the passenger seat of Peter’s Explorer and roll down the window. Dawt Pi hoists the cage up to my level.
“Goodbye, you cantankerous old curmudgeon,” I whisper. “I’ll miss you.”
The Professor lets out a little gurgling noise. I wave to Dawt Pi as she takes him into the salon and roll up my window.
“One more stop.”
“This is your store?”
“Funny, huh? It was for sale again when I moved back to town.”
Then I remember that Peter has a different coincidence on his mind. This is where Sarah met Mark—and conceived Caleb. For a moment my grand scheme doesn’t seem so grand anymore. Sarah must have bad memories of this spot as well. But she’d never really avoided the place, and she seemed to be upset that I was even thinking of leaving it. The plan could still work. I retrieve the deed to the building from the lockbox and lead Peter around to the back alley. I pull the spare key from its hiding spot in the crumbly mortar between two bricks.
“I see your grandmother taught you well,” Peter says.
I give him a knowing smile.
Inside I pull out a clean sheet of paper. I’ll figure out the particulars of switching ownership at some point, but for now I just need to write a letter.
Dear Sarah,
Thank you for your friendship these past seven years. A friendship I’m sure I didn’t deserve. You forced your way into my life—and I’m glad you did. You’ve given me more joy than I think you realize, certainly more than I ever allowed to show. Now I want to give something to you. I know you were thinking of using your ArtPrize money as a down payment on a studio space. But I think you should save it for something else. Maybe supplies. Because you already have a studio space.
