Season of Gifts (Neighborly Affection #8)

60. Henry

Chapter sixty

Henry

B right sunlight streamed through the curtains. For the first time in uncounted days, Henry had missed the sunrise. To his right, peaceful, even breathing softly sang the merits of slumber. To his left, the faint scratch of pencils came through the portable monitor.

Nothing had happened to Mother in the night; she was sketching, possibly amused by his lateness. Almost certainly relieved not to have found him dozing in the bedside chair.

His heart maintained its slow, steady beat. His body lay easy. Having Alice and Jay beside him, knowing what weighed upon him, made a profound difference. He knew that, when he was thinking clearly. Hadn’t he often held Jay to chase away nightmares?

He tipped the blanket back and slid from the bed. Thrusting his arms toward the ceiling, he stretched his back and neck. The omnipresent headache had left him. Relief made him giddy as he slipped into the bathroom for the morning necessities, carrying the monitor with him.

The night’s talk had laid bare their stresses and how concealment had compounded those stresses. Alice and Jay would never have agreed to him operating alone had they known his mother’s history. He told them of all he should have shared at the start, until fatigue demanded they set revelations aside.

Experience with therapy had given him a false impression of himself as a new man. In some ways, he was. Certainly he’d gained self-knowledge and grounding exercises that had served him well. But logic and rationalization were a linguistic trick that had fooled him into believing that the silence of the emotions grasping at him, goading him, was equivalent to their eradication. True healing would be re-integrating the wounded child into his psyche.

A lilting hum came through the portable. Mother was pleased with her sketching, it seemed. Or perhaps with a message from a friend. He ought to have immediately recognized the value of such an outlet, not attempted to shut it down. He owed her any number of apologies. Perhaps he might do that now, before breakfast.

With his toothbrush replaced in the holder and his mouth minty fresh, he stepped back into the bedroom. Alice slept on her side, waves of hair cradling her face, one hand curled beside her on the pillow. Beyond her, Jay lay on his stomach, his face turned to the far side of the bed. The sheets formed a heap at Alice’s back, bundling her in the warmth their husband had rejected.

Henry had been a silent ghost yesterday morning, in for a change of clothes and out again without waking them. A natural state at home; most mornings he woke first and left them to rise as they would. But this was not home, and these were not normal circumstances.

He circled slowly, his feet soundless on the rug. Jay’s back lay bare, exposed, as beautiful as the day he’d stood for his portrait. Black shorts clung at the waistband, wedged near his hips, and draped the powerful muscles of his ass and thighs. Approval stirred, appreciation of Jay’s beauty, and more—a vague flicker of desire, like a live coal banked in the embers of a fire he’d thought cold.

Today began on a canvas not scraped clean but brimming with the colors of the truths they carried with them. He would avoid the mistakes of yesterday. And when he inevitably slipped, his spouses would be there to prevent a stumble from becoming the well he drowned in.

Jay rested with both arms around his pillow, hugging it beneath his head. A shock of black hair lay across one eye. Henry’s hand hovered in the air, shading Jay from the light streaming in through the windows.

Jay’s eyes swept open. “My turn for the shower?”

“If you like.” Henry gave in to temptation, brushing the hair back, luxuriating in the heat of Jay’s skin. His boy burned hot, a furnace of energy and life. “I thought to check on Mother before starting breakfast. Perhaps you’d care to wake Alice. We have an Advent card to open.”

“Her day. She’s evens.” Jay yawned deeply, his shoulders and back tensing and releasing. “I’ll wake her.”

“Thank you, my boy.” His kiss landed high on Jay’s cheek. The things one took for granted. Such a simple touch could elevate his mood, and he’d foolishly denied himself the comfort despite Jay’s fervent desire to help. Never again. “I’ll see you both soon.”

Carrying the portable with him, he straightened his pajamas. No mismatched buttons this morning. He walked the hall at a far more sedate pace than he had last night. His gentle rap on Mother’s door brought a soft “Enter” that echoed through the monitor.

The bed stood empty, the covers folded back. In the sunny seat by the window, Mother faced the garden below, her sketchbook on her lap and the monitor base on the low table in front of her. She’d dressed for the day and brushed her hair into submission. His coddling, though well-meaning, had been unwarranted. The process may have taken her more time, but the importance of agency could not be overstated. The light in her eyes spoke wonders.

A gesture would convey far more than words. He tossed the portable handset onto the bed. Mother tilted her head with interest. He hefted the chair at the bedside and returned it to face its mate by the window.

Standing beside the empty chair, he breathed deeply and resettled his shoulders. Shedding concealment—emotional and physical—was an honesty he owed her. He patted the seatback. “May I?”

She laid the sketchbook aside. Melting ice hung like diamonds from the bare branches of trees. “Given that you didn’t spend the night in it, I’m inclined to allow it.” Her broad smile gentled the tease as she waved him down. “From your attire, I take it you finally had a decent night’s sleep?”

A transformative one, in fact.

“Following a long talk with Alice and Jay, in which I made numerous apologies, yes.” Hands folded, he sat forward in the seat, a penitent at prayer. “I owe you my apologies as well, Mother.”

She narrowed her eyes, the surrounding wrinkles softening a stern glare into a careful assessment. “I will accept them, for your sake. But, darling, I make no such accounting. This experience…” With a slow, deliberate breath and a hand touching her heart, she indicated the cause of so much strain. “I believe it has emotionally taxed you as it has physically taxed me. I do hope the frustration will ebb for us both the more openly we discuss it.” A grimace twisted her mouth, and she gazed into the garden. “That’s not what your father would have said, but discussing emotions never did sit easy with him.”

“You may have mastered understatement.” He joined her laugh, though hers lacked the bitter undertone his carried. “I am…” Painful to say the words, to acknowledge the failure of the silent promise he’d made at seven. “I’m afraid I am more like him than I thought, and I am sorry for that. I’ve done no better than he did.”

“No better?” She extended her arm, and he swiftly rose and rounded the table to accept the hand she offered. She gripped him tightly, her hand pale and small but pulsing with life. “What is it you think you have done?”

What hadn’t he done? An ache settled under his ribs, and he closed his eyes to follow the thread. So often of late he’d pushed warnings aside when he ought to have examined them.

“I remember,” he murmured, slowly returning his gaze to the present. “I remember how angry Father was, how…” The word teetered at the edge of his tongue before he pushed it forward. “Ashamed.” Questions forbidden, truth forbidden, emotions most certainly forbidden. “He lied and obstructed and forced secrets upon you without considering what you needed.”

Henry would never grow up to be that man; he’d sworn vows in the mirror. Never would he ignore or miss or refuse to listen, refuse to see. If wishing could make it so, if vigilance and control could make it so—but when his actions had mattered most, he had failed again.

He swept his thumb across Mother’s knuckles, careful to glide over the delicate skin. Aging thinned bodies even when minds grew more resilient. “And now I have overprotected you and forced restrictions and my presence upon you without asking what you needed. I was…” His confession came haltingly, snagging in his throat, the truth jagged and uncomfortable. “I was afraid of failing you like he did, missing the signs.”

Bringing his childish fears to Father had resulted in nothing, no action that would have arrested Mother’s despair. The shadow of the past haunted him with specters no longer present.

“But in trying to keep you safe, I smothered your spirit as much as he ever did.” If she’d been mourning in the last two weeks, it had been for the freedoms and independence he had put out of reach. He might well have precipitated the events he intended to prevent. “I’m truly sorry, Mother. I wish I had handled all of this differently. You deserved better from me now, just as you deserved better from him then.”

Mouth pressed in a tight line, Mother shoved her artwork aside. He startled back. The tray of pencils tumbled over the edge of the table and upended on the floor, scattering. When he would have stooped to reassemble them, she tugged him forward and tapped a finger on the table in front of her. “Sit.”

He sat.

She clasped both of his hands in hers, atop his knees. The low table brought their eyes level. Pain echoed in hers, tiny flickers at the corners, a faint sheen covering the fresh spring green of her irises.

“Is that how you see it?” Her voice had shifted into the warm, coaxing tones of his childhood, the welcoming comfort of fetch me a book, darling, and I’ll read to you. “All those years ago. His failure? Your failure?”

She’d wanted to leave this life three days after his seventh birthday. Two and a half months after the arrival of his stillborn sister, the one he’d never met. “I went to Father. I told him you were sad. He insisted I shouldn’t worry about it, that you were fine.”

He spat the word with venom. Fine was the first falsehood he’d felt in his bones, the unconscionable lie. The lie he’d been presenting to Alice and Jay for weeks. Like his younger self, they had struggled to find a way to peer beneath. He’d repeated the pattern Father had set. He would have to do better in the aftermath.

Mother bowed her head, nodding. “You were such a self-possessed little boy that it was easy to overlook how young you were. Children see and interpret differently from adults.”

His younger self crept forward, listening with a wary tension. Therapy in his twenties had crawled through his memories and quieted the turbulent emotions. Of hers, he knew nothing. The silence had blanketed them all, layer upon layer, year upon year. “You see it differently?”

“Your father wasn’t missing the signs, Henry. I suspect he was trying to divert your attention in that brusque way of his, the way he learned from his father.”

That grandfather he had no recollection of; the man had died before Henry turned two. Heartbreak from the loss of his wife the year before, the story went.

“What happened wasn’t your father’s fault, and it wasn’t your fault, either.” Mother clenched his hands so tightly they hurt, her eyes fierce and bright as a hawk’s. “I made choices, Henry. Poor ones, fueled by loneliness and despair, by rioting hormones and mental confusion. Persistent thoughts I imagined would never end. When your father grew concerned, I took pains to conceal more and more of the turmoil, until I landed upon the only escape I could envision.” Clicking her tongue softly, she cupped his cheek and swiped her thumb beneath his eye. “Those bad emotional habits you may have gotten from me, darling.”

“You were grieving. He ought to have…” Thirty-three years, and he still had no answers.

“So was he.” A vibration fluttered in her sigh. She stroked his shoulder and slid her hand down his arm, staring as if he might disappear when she wasn’t looking. “We were grieving alone, each of us. I was consumed with fear and anger. You and Robert were growing up; I felt as though all of my children had been stolen from me. I wanted more time.”

The openness swayed uneasily in him, a pendulum where before had been stillness. Many years they had sat in silence together, an unspoken communion for the lost. After that summer, they’d never spoken of the pain again. But every night, all summer, when she’d tucked him in and they’d read a story together and the soothing lap of the waves on the shore floated through the screen, he’d close his eyes, and she would kiss his forehead and whisper— “You told me I was enough.”

“And you are.” Her gaze traveled beyond him, peering into memories only she could see. “Sometimes, when we pour all our belief into a thing, we can make it true. I still wanted the children I had lost, Henry. The two little girls between you and your brother, and the two after you.”

He remembered only the last. Robert would have different memories. They’d never discussed their siblings, not since that long-ago December.

“But I couldn’t bring them to life, no matter how much of myself I poured into mourning them. And I was in my forties then, confronting those first fears of aging.”

Mother then had been barely older than he was now. Hadn’t he too begun questioning his purpose? Seeking stability and love with more urgency. He’d been terrified as he contemplated losing first Alice and then Jay to the past demons he couldn’t quell for them. But the years ahead offered tantalizing visions of the life they would lead together. “Nothing brought you joy? Hope?”

“Not until I made a deliberate choice to be grateful for what time I would have left with you.” Her soft smile flitted past. “The world had shattered. I saw despair, not hope. Life and youth looked to me as the creeping decay of age, a thin veneer above the horror beneath.” Her hands trembled, and he gently enclosed them in his own. Her pulse ticked lightly away in her wrist, steady under his fingertips. “I had no career but social obligations and you boys. The world was changing, but I hadn’t been raised for it. We raise children to inhabit the culture they inherit when they are born, not the culture they will create when they are grown. Everyone does; we can’t help it. We cannot know the future that will come to pass. We can only prepare you for the present, and that will be past when you are grown.”

He would learn for himself, someday. Although—he would return to therapy first. His response to Mother’s illness had ambushed him. His overprotective panic could not be permitted to stress Alice during pregnancy. “But something changed for you that summer.”

“Started to change, yes.” Mother lifted her chin toward the fallen sketchbook and scattered pencils. “I had learned to paint in school—an acceptable pastime for young ladies. I couldn’t have imagined it fulfilling me for the long years ahead, with you and Robert living lives of your own, and your father enamored with his work. Yet…” A wave flowed through her, the muscles of her face relaxing, the hands in his still and calm. “That summer by the shore, I discovered myself. I could have no more expectations of motherhood; I needed a wellspring within. You were enough to anchor me in the present while I searched for a future me, darling. Painting grew into a peace that sustained me. I’m not in any danger of choosing to leave this world too soon anymore, Henry. When I go, it will be because it’s my time. And that time is not yet.”

A choking sob burst from his chest. She urged him forward, and he slid from the table and knelt, clinging to her slight shoulders as she patted his back and hummed to him of sunrises over the water. For every ounce of fear he released, its equivalent in relief seeped into the rough edges left behind. Composure arrived unexpectedly, the faucet open but the fear vanquished. He shifted back, lightheaded, steadying himself with a hand on the table. “Thank you, Mother. I believe I dearly needed to hear that.”

“Perhaps we both did.” She took a sturdy breath, deep and untroubled. “I feel better myself. Though there is one thing I miss.”

A sly curve took hold of her mouth, and he matched it. They would be all right. The mess he’d created for all of them, though far-reaching, was not catastrophic. “And that is?”

“The rug in my bathroom.” Her eyes sparkled as she flashed her impish smile. “The tile is dreadfully chilly on my feet in the morning, Henry.”

Laughing, he pledged to prioritize the purchasing of non-slip padding and the restoration of her warmth. “After breakfast.” He gained his feet and offered his arm. “Shall we?”

“In pajamas?” She clasped his forearm and pulled herself up. “I did hope you would relax, darling, but that’s going entirely too far.”

He tucked her arm safely in his. “I see you’re considering a new career in comedy.”

“I’m unexpectedly joyous this morning.” Hugging his side, she poked his shoulder. “And devilishly curious about these daily cards of yours. Any hints about what Alice and Jay will uncover today? I’m so pleased you’re all here, Henry. More than I could possibly convey.”

“As am I.” They walked slowly, but he followed her pace rather than forcing an even more sedate one upon her. He would prepare the tea; if Alice and Jay had not appeared by then, he would dress when he fetched them and fix breakfast while they revealed the day’s activity. “No hints. You’ll simply have to wait.”