Season of Gifts (Neighborly Affection #8)

55. Alice

Chapter fifty-five

Alice

S o often at the beginning, Alice had imagined what a vulnerable Henry would look like. What he would act like. Now she knew, and she’d missed every warning sign. But Jay, with all his intuition and empathy? He would realign their husband emotionally. She only needed to listen and analyze the context Henry’s mother could give her. With those insights, they could move forward.

Mother folded her hands across her stomach and rubbed her knuckles. “I considered reaching out to you earlier, but I thought I could coax Henry to open up on his own.” Head bowed, she exhaled slowly through her nose. “He refuses to hear me.” Raising her chin, Mother revealed vivid and bottomless eyes. “I worry for him.”

They shared that in common.

Alice struggled to stifle a shiver. The room was warm—the whole house was warm, probably Henry’s doing to keep his mother comfortable—but fear grew its own chills. “I can see how tired he is. How not himself he is.”

“Yes.” Keen eyes so like Henry’s assessed her. Worry lines flickered in and out around them, a tiny tell for the calculus going on behind. “I don’t mean to interfere with your marriage. I suppose I might have tried speaking to young Jay, but I sense you are made of sterner stuff. And, of course, I didn’t know what Henry might have already told you.”

Alice might have quibbled with whose spirit could withstand the most pain. Jay had been through the wringer far more than she had, and he’d come out with an open heart and an optimism she could never match. Dread soured in her stomach. Another fairy tale about love proved false would crack the door to the caustic cynic lurking in the back of her mind. “It’s starting to feel like a lack of knowledge is going around these days.”

“Contagious and spreading.” With delicate shoulders, Mother heaved a sigh beyond her weight class. “But let’s see what we can do to quarantine and treat, shall we?”

Alice folded her fingers around the cuffs of her sweater and tucked her fists at her sides. This bedroom was enormous, even larger than Henry’s, and the two of them were tiny figures huddled in a circle of light that illuminated less than half of it. Anything could be waiting beyond that border. “I don’t know where to begin.”

“I do.” Mother gently raised Alice’s hand and uncurled her fingers, clasping them between her own. “What do you know of the year Henry turned seven?”

A strangely specific opener. Nothing, except—he’d woven a bedtime story about that summer for her and Jay all those months ago.

“You spent the summer at the shore, teaching him to paint.” How magical Henry’s childhood had seemed, that an entire summer vacationing by the ocean was normal for him. How empathetic he’d been, to care about not disturbing the wonderful treasures he found. The thoughtful man she loved had grown from that boy. “And how to capture beautiful things without hurting them.”

Mother gripped her hand with unexpected strength. “He’s told you, then? Why we were there?”

“I thought…” Had he said, or had she assumed? An engineer knew better than to assume. “That’s not how you usually spent your summers?”

“Ah.”

The single syllable crashed through every assumption, splintering Alice’s framework down to the foundation, leaving her crouching in the wreckage with her arms wrapped around her head. Funny how the tornado drills from elementary school stayed with her. If she could squeeze into a tight ball and bury her face in her knees, nothing bad would happen.

Stretching across herself, Mother lifted her water glass from the nightstand and took a long sip. Her other hand stayed clenched around Alice’s. “That summer was an anomaly never to be repeated. The cottage was a place to recover, like stepping outside the flow of time.”

The back of Alice’s throat dried with the sour tang of certainty. “You were sick.”

No wonder Henry had left for Maine without even considering taking them along. He just needed to go, to see for himself that his mom was okay.

“I had been. The previous Christmas—” Shaking her head, Mother sipped again and set the glass aside. “A few days earlier—” She breathed through her mouth, loud and ragged. “Thirty-three years ago tomorrow, as it happens.”

Henry had said once that he went home for Christmas every year because it was a difficult season for his mom. Asking then would have been too personal, too much like prying. Alice added her other hand to their hold, pressing her fingers to the pulse in Mother’s wrist. She wouldn’t know, not like Henry would, what a too-fast flutter felt like. Making his mom upset wouldn’t fix anything, but it sure as hell could create more problems. “We don’t have to talk about—”

“I gave birth to the last of my children.”

But Henry only had an older—

A flash freeze took hold. The lightest tap, and she might have cracked into a thousand pieces. Henry had had another sibling. One who’d almost certainly died young. One he never talked about. “I’m so sorry.”

Mother sucked in a deeper breath, this one steadier, though tears slipped down her cheeks. “She was the only one Henry was old enough to remember. Two living boys, and four dead little girls, that’s what my body wrought.”

Seven years old—no, six. Henry’s birthday wasn’t until March. Six. He’d have been expecting to be a big brother. Had he been excited? Unsettled about not being the baby of the family anymore? Had he gotten to meet his sister? To hold her?

“I knew she’d be the last.” Mother dabbed at her eyes with her knuckles. “They had to take everything when they took her.”

Four lost daughters. No words could heal that loss. Alice inched closer and folded her arms around Mother’s shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Mother’s quiet sniff carried a hint of amusement as she nestled into Alice’s hold. “Women know instinctively the wound that men take years to comprehend.”

Henry would understand. But he might’ve come by that understanding along a hard road.

When Alice had been six, Ollie had been three. Being impatient with her was a given. She’d attach herself to Alice the minute Alice got home from school. She’d chatter nonstop. When Alice got up for a snack, Ollie scribbled with her crayons on Alice’s worksheets. The crying and shouting, the stomping off in fury, the screeching for help— Mooo-ommm, she’s doing it again! —it could all have never existed.

Not having her little sister. A yawning chasm teetered beneath her. Henry might be standing at that edge again now, revisiting the past. Imagining a different life. A sibling couldn’t be boxed up and forgotten, packed away in some dusty corner of the mind.

Regardless of when she talked to Henry about her own confrontation with family history, she would tell Ollie in the morning. Her sister shouldn’t have to wait.

“Thank you, darling.” Mother patted Alice’s back and lifted her head from Alice’s shoulder. The hug slipped away, replaced by two pairs of clasped hands between them. “I spent weeks in this bedroom recovering from the surgery.” Mother flashed her teeth, more grimace than smile. “But the emotional wound didn’t heal. It scarred over and festered like an abscess.”

“That must have been incredibly difficult, to be in mourning and in pain and still trying to be there for Henry and his brother.” Henry knew how to lance pain like that. He’d helped her realize how much the past influenced her behavior now—and how she could change that. He’d encouraged Jay to get into therapy. He’d taken the classes in college to be an art therapist but never become one.

Because he’d been accumulating knowledge to heal his own pain. Once he’d gained his peace, he’d been determined to give it to others. And he’d found a joy in dominance, in taking charge of everyone else’s needs, of their pain and pleasure. But with his mom’s illness, the past had collided with the future. He’d tried to take on too much by himself. At least Jay would be helping him sleep tonight.

In a nightgown, with her hair down, Mother shrank into a form less imposing than her daytime self. Less confident, with regret etched in her face. “I wish I could say I handled the situation better.”

Watching his mom’s recovery would have left a mark on Henry, too. Even if he’d been too young to be a health aide then, he would have seen things. “Did you have help? A therapist?”

A genuine laugh bolted out before Mother tucked her lips tight. She smoothed Alice’s hair, her fingers neat and precise. “I forget how young you are. This was the eighties; a lost child wasn’t the sort of thing one talked about then. We had two boys, and my husband was content with that. To him, closing the door was…” Her gaze drifted across the room; Alice glanced over her shoulder, but the dresser was no more than an outline in the darkness. A shadow on top might be a portrait. “If not simple or easy, then at least logical. Efficient. Acceptable.”

The brutal logic stung like a frosty morning hitting her lungs. Things had been that way with Dad, too. That first year, Mom had reminded them almost every day not to talk about what went on at home. Not to gossip at school, like injury and illness were something shameful to be hidden. “It’s strange, the things we get used to.”

“I couldn’t.” The heaviness in Mother’s eyes matched Henry’s when he’d greeted them last night. “Couldn’t reconcile myself to it, even when I had Henry’s sweet company.” She chafed her hands, twisting them around each other. “I grew bitter inside, thinking only of what I lacked, of the little girl who wasn’t at my breast, of the three before her lost before their due dates even arrived. She was—” A quiet hitch stopped her; she blinked rapidly, shaking her head. “She was so perfect, Alice. Not a thing looked wrong with her, but she never took a breath.”

Substitutes couldn’t replace what her mother-in-law had lost. But Mother’s welcoming embrace—not just Alice and Jay but Ollie and Nat, too—that had to be part of healing. They needed a mom in the way she ached to be needed. “It’s not fair. I’m sorry that time together was stolen from you.”

Stolen from Henry, too. Losing a sibling must’ve amped up his fears of losing his mom. Panic came with tunnel vision, crawling forward on hands and knees in the dark, missing every other possibility because the mind clung to one strategy even when it wasn’t working.

Mother nodded softly, absentmindedly. “Henry turned seven at the beginning of March. We’d thrown a party for his first-grade class. He seemed so…” She idly stroked the quilt, her gaze fixed and distant. “So grown up. His brother had been about that age when he started pulling away, outgrew needing his mother. And Henry and my father were close; I knew Father would look after him, shape him into the man he would become.”

The icy chill had never left. It pulsed in waves with her heartbeat. Tingled in the tips of her fingers. Henry had lost more than a sister. “You felt like you didn’t have a purpose.”

“No one needed me, or so I thought.” A wry smile accompanied Mother’s gentle scoff. She met Alice’s eyes for an instant, no more. “I’d hoarded the pain pills from the surgery.”

Orange-tinted bottles with their press-and-twist caps. Always on the side table, always within reach of Dad’s hand.

“I expected Lina would come back from running errands. I didn’t know she meant to pick Henry up from school first. I didn’t know he would come running into the house looking for me.”

“You tried…” The words refused to come. Henry. Seven years old. Maybe carrying the backpack with his initials that Jay had placed in their new bedroom. Running to tell his mother something amazing he’d learned in class. “And he saw you.”

Mother’s slow nod landed with a sick thud in Alice’s gut.

“Lina told me afterward how they’d found me. Lying on the floor beside my chair in the conservatory. Henry shouting 911 as she ran for the phone.” The tears flowed, but Mother’s voice remained crisp and clear, a self-indictment loaded with decades of regret. “How he draped his tiny jacket around me and clung to me. Begged me not to leave, not to go and find the lost babies without him.”

They’d been standing in the kitchen, and he’d known. He’d looked at Jay, and so calmly, so gently, he’d asked if Jay had been the one to find Mrs. Eickhoff. Because Henry knew that face. He knew those slumped shoulders, those distant eyes, the immense fear of so much loss. The more favorable outcome had been his mother.