Season of Gifts (Neighborly Affection #8)

41. Alice

Chapter forty-one

Alice

W ind gusts rattled the rental car. The cold crept in even with the heater on full blast, snaking down into Alice’s coat. Body shaking, she poured all her concentration into her arms, down into her fingers on the steering wheel.

Back to Sioux Falls was a straight shot down the highway. Simple. So easy she’d tested Ollie on this stretch in the pickup, and when they’d hit the city, she’d almost said let’s keep going .

But that’s what she did, right? That was her. Alice who ran away from her hurt and pain and anger. Alice who took what she could and got out and never looked back.

She shouldn’t have looked back today.

If she’d trusted her gut in the first place, she never would have returned to that house. This heavy block of ice in her chest was her punishment for trying, and it was so much fucking worse than leaving for college. Things had been better then. Dad was grouchy, hair-trigger, sure, but not so belligerent. And she’d been able to make a difference for Ollie, preparing her for everything she could think of, getting her to focus on the stuff that would give her a way out, too.

She’d done nothing today but make things worse for Mom. Maybe if she went back, visited the diner instead, offered— let’s keep going. No, that was stupid. Mom would reject Alice’s help like she always did. A gal could only offer so many times before she kept her hands to herself so they wouldn’t get bitten off.

The mile markers whipped past in the dark, gleaming in the headlights. Clouds had smothered the stars above her, the world a gray vault above black highway and snowy white fields. A coffin. A burial for the last of her childhood, with her silly shoebox of ornaments riding shotgun with her into the afterlife.

The shaking infected her arms. Her vision blurred, turned oncoming headlights into sprawling supernovas.

She supported Ollie in anything she wanted to do—but not Mom. Could she have made a difference for Mom in the last ten years if she hadn’t been so angry? Mom was never going to leave Dad, and she would never force him out of his self-pity and resentment. Mom would keep being there, day in and day out, putting his needs first, sidelining her daughters, sidelining Jay—

Oh fuck.

Sobs shuddered through her like she might break apart. She yanked her foot off the gas and eased onto the brake. Explaining to Wade why she’d gotten ticketed for reckless driving, twenty-five over the speed limit with snot dripping off her chin, would not be the greatest end to the evening. The shoulder widened ahead in the headlights, a spot where the plow trucks had carved out a sweeping emergency pull-off.

She drifted to a stop and threw the car in Park, folded her arms around her aching middle, and howled.

Was there a limit to the number of things she could fuck up at once? She’d tried to cut all of these pieces out of herself at eighteen, to leave the emotional push-pull behind, and they kept following her. Forget her own needs—she’d insulated Henry from Jay’s needs this month the same way she’d handled Ollie’s so Mom could focus on Dad. She hadn’t asked Henry what he’d actually wanted, and she’d wholesale ignored Jay’s perspective because she was so damn certain of her own. She’d forgotten the most basic fucking rules: always be honest, and check in with your partners.

One month in, and she was making her marriage as dysfunctional as her parents’. If she was angry at Henry for choosing his mother over her and Jay, even if her anger was irrational and unhelpful, she should say something. They should have a conversation about what compromises they could make. Like Jay had wanted to do from the start. He’d gotten so good at sharing how he was feeling, and she shut him down again and again, assuming she knew what Henry wanted and needed because she’d been down this road before. Maybe she should be the one in therapy.

Christ, maybe Jay was furious with her, too. She’d chosen work over her husbands. Sure, saying no would’ve tanked her career and maybe cost her the job, but had she talked to them about that? Nope, not her. Not I-handle-shit-myself Alice. Medical crisis in the family and she was suddenly thirteen again, patching things together with breakfast cereal and a fake allowance.

She peeled her forehead from the steering wheel. Tears had pasted her hair to her cheeks. She reached for calm, for Henry’s breathing technique. Hitching sobs interrupted her flow.

Her phone sat in the cradle, the GPS confused by her unwillingness to slip back onto the highway or confirm a traffic slowdown.

Henry would want her to call him. Regardless of whether he was busy getting dinner for his mom right now. Hearing his voice would be enough, even if she had to wait until later tonight for a longer talk. If she could just be angry, and also apologize, and tell him she’d gone off and acted on this maybe-not-so-brilliant idea. If she could feel connected again, cracking up this glacier in her chest would stop hurting so much.

The phone rang before she could reach for it.

No way had Henry felt her distress and given in to an urgent need to call her. But it was sure nice to think—

Jay’s profile picture filled her screen.

She swiped at her eyes. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Washed her face with her coat sleeve like a toddler. Shoved sodden hair behind her ears. Popping on the overhead light, she checked her face in the mirror.

Still a complete shitshow. Like five seconds of primping would erase tear tracks and red eyes and a puffy nose and a trembling chin that couldn’t decide if her mouth was done making awful sounds yet.

But unless it was urgent, Jay would have texted. He needed her.

“Hey, sweetheart, what’s up?” She’d enabled audio only, although his video replaced his static image on her screen. Her voice sounded thick in her ears, but only a little garbled. “Everything okay?”

“I can’t see you.” Fuck, his voice was as thick and wobbly as hers. The video flipped between dim cave and washed-out light show, making his face hard to read. “You sound different. Can you put on your camera?”

“The signal’s weak out here.” She resisted the urge to sniffle. Tissues in the glove box, maybe? She leaned across the seat. “I don’t know if it’ll go through. What’s going on? Are you okay?”

The hitch in his breath splintered what was left of her ribs. “Please don’t lie to me.”

“Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She switched the settings, and the video stabilized. Their red eyes and heavy faces might as well have been twins. Turning her head, she used the tissues she’d discovered. Not like she needed to hide nose-blowing sounds from him now. “I really do have a weak signal. I’m on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.”

Thirty minutes from town hardly counted as nowhere, but it might be as far as cell towers were concerned.

“Did you get a flat?” The camera pulled closer to Jay, as if he’d hugged her to him, his eyes wide and fixed on her. “Are you out of gas? Do you need help?”

If she lied to him now, her marriage was over. That was the choice. Not because it would be a big lie—a polite lie, just a little one, so he would think she was frustrated and crying over something easily fixed and he wouldn’t worry. But their relationship depended on trust. Jay’s trust had been broken over and over again, by so many people in his life. Those polite fictions, they became the thin surface lives people led. And eventually they believed the lie, like they could ignore the massive blizzards and raging infernos going on underneath.

“No, the car’s fine.” She lifted the phone in her hands and rested against the seat. If only the stiff headrest were her pillow at home, where she could wrap Jay in her arms and revel in the heat of his body. Talk to him breath for breath, noses and foreheads touching. Tomorrow. She could have that tomorrow, if she just got through the rest of today first. “It’s me. I’m broken.”

He sucked in a breath. “Is it—did the fix not work? You’re not—you won’t be home—”

“Oh God, sweetheart, no, no.” Fuck, she’d scared him, and she didn’t even know what had upset him enough to call. “The fix is great, and I will be home tomorrow if I have to fucking walk there.”

He snorted, but his face relaxed. “Long walk. I’ll come meet you halfway.”

She could leave things there. Ask him what had gone wrong for him today. But that would still be a lie of sorts. “I, uh…” She clamped her lips together. If anyone would understand, Jay would. “I went to visit my parents, and it didn’t go well.”

His jaw dropped, and he took a long blink. Sweet dark eyes drew together as he tugged his lip with his teeth. “Kinda like my brilliant trip home?”

A tractor-trailer sailed past, rattling in the wind, rocking the little sedan.

“Yeah, about like that.” She had almost no memory of leaving his family’s farm. She’d been standing in the gravel watching Jay disappear, and then she’d been in the car practically trying to claw through Henry to go back for him. “I didn’t exactly get kicked out this time, but I didn’t not get kicked out.”

No daughter of mine.

She tipped her face up and blinked furiously to drive away the sting.

Jay dipped his head. “Have you told Henry?”

“Not yet.” Squeezing her eyes shut turned headlights from the other direction into floating orbs in the darkness. She stared through the afterimages speckling Jay’s face. “I didn’t tell him I was going, either. I wasn’t sure if I would even get out of the car. And I thought…”

Now probably wasn’t the moment for a dissertation on all the baggage she’d heaped into their marriage. But she’d already proven her judgment was for shit. And fuck, she would have to talk to Ollie before her sister called home to chat with Mom and found out by accident. She’d been so certain that confronting Dad would be empowering. Freeing. Maybe part of it was. But it also felt exhausting, like trying to pull up a runaway horse before he stepped in a gopher hole and threw her.

“That you were doing the right thing?” Jay held no judgment in him; his earnest desire to understand, to help her or make this easier for her, bled right through his eyes and her screen.

Nausea rolled in her stomach. She’d been trying to do the “right” thing for two weeks, and she’d pretty much succeeded in hurting all of the people she loved. “I told myself I was protecting you from having to deal with my stress while you both have so much of your own. But that never seems to work out, does it? Kinda just makes things worse.”

“Well, and then you beat yourself up about making the choice to do the thing, because if you’d talked about it first, maybe you’d’ve been ready for the worst.” He slouched down—was that brick behind him? The fireplace. He resettled the phone, maybe propping his elbows on his knees. The angle made him smaller, younger. “But if you’d talked about it first, maybe you wouldn’t have done it. And you felt like you had to do it. Like if you didn’t do it, you wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

He might’ve just meant visiting the farm in the fall. But he didn’t. She couldn’t even pretend to believe he did. “That’s how—” Her voice shook. She’d hurt him. Hadn’t meant to, but she had. “That’s how you feel about going to Maine, right? Every time Henry and I say no, not yet, it’s like you’re suffocating.”

He turned away from the phone. The glow from the Christmas tree illuminated the side of his face, the shifting of his jaw, the drying tear tracks. “I couldn’t do today’s card. So I, so I opened tomorrow’s. Before dinner. I thought that would make it better.”

If he’d asked Henry’s permission, he wouldn’t be falling apart. Which meant he’d gotten so desperate for their company, for a new directive from his dominants, that he’d chosen to break Henry’s rules for the game. She asked the question knowing the answer. “Did it help?”

His head swung in a slow arc. “We were supposed to be together. Here.” He slapped the bricks behind him and flinched. “In front of the fire, you and me and Henry. Like he promised.”

Their first time with the fire’s cozy glow. Bare skin and tongues like flame. Six months they’d been waiting for that moment together.

“I’m sure we’ll…” She couldn’t promise him that. She wasn’t sure of a damn thing. She barely knew what tomorrow would look like, let alone next week or the week after that. Everything depended on Henry and what his mother needed. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

“It’s really lonely here without you.”

He gazed into the phone, looking up at her, shaggy hair framing his face, his eyes impossibly dark.

A flash of memory sprinted past, his bitchy sisters still complaining decades later about what a nuisance their baby brother had been. How it took forever for him to stop crying when they shut him in his room.

He had, though. He’d learned to stop because no one was coming.

She and Henry had shut him up in the house and told him to hold the fort. Just for a few days, like that made a difference. That Jay could even admit to being lonely spoke volumes about how much he’d absorbed in therapy. This separation had been awful for him. For two weeks he’d been trying to tell them, in ways big and small, that he needed to be at Henry’s side. And they’d pushed his pleas aside, not recognizing them for what they were.

“I’m trying, but…” Shrugging his shoulders practically to his ears, he breathed out hard. “I’m just not there yet. I’m not on-my-own Jay yet, and it’s like frustrating and embarrassing and—”

“Human.” If she could only find the right words to fix one fucked-up relationship today, let it be this one. “I thought I was always on-my-own Alice, and I was fucking fantastic at it, but that’s not right either. You know, Ollie told me something right before the wedding about strong bonds.” She didn’t need to teach a whole lesson on chemistry. Taking refuge in science wouldn’t get her closer to Jay. “I think sometimes you and I, we’re at these opposite poles of neediness and independence. And we don’t fix anything if we just swap positions. We have to let go and allow the magnetism at the center to pull us in. And our center needs all three of us together to stay spinning in the right orbit.”

That was it, the only truth that mattered. Being together was always the answer for them. She’d wrapped herself in teen-Alice armor and stopped thinking critically about what actually worked for them. Henry had been wearing a Keep Out sign since he’d gotten the call, pulling the same shit Jay had done at his parents’ house, and she hadn’t even asked why. She’d taken his busy-with-medical-stuff distraction at face value because that’s the way Mom had been. But Henry wasn’t anything like her mother. If he’d been thinking straight, if she’d been thinking straight, Jay would have driven him up the very first night. Been by his side through everything.

Jay rocked side to side, the image swaying with him. “Are you okay? You look angry.”

“Not at you.” She could fix all of this tomorrow with a little arranging. “I’ll be home in less than twenty-four hours. And then we’re fucking going to Maine. We’re not waiting any longer.”

The sudden shift in his body would break her. Tension slid off him. He scrambled up a bit, maybe in waiting pose; the phone grew too tight on his face to tell. But his wide eyes, his upturned mouth: hope lifted him with angelic grace. “Really?”

“Absolutely.”

Whether Henry wanted them there or not.