Chapter 20 #2
I don’t look at Nash, but I can feel him mirror my position.
Elbows on our knees, staring at the scene ahead of us, we’re quiet.
I give up on fighting the bugs, I just let them eat me alive as I swim in my sludge of thoughts.
She forgets names, I know that. I’ve seen it for a while now, but it was easier when I didn’t know why.
Easier when it made me feel frustrated instead of helpless.
Easier when we could’ve cut a check if something was wrong.
Ignorance is the sweetest bliss until it’s gone.
And Nash doesn’t know, not really, but he knows something. I saw it the second it registered with a flash of worry. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. Like him knowing makes it a bit lighter on my own back.
Once again, Nash breaks the silence. “Remember the time your mom came into the store wearing that 1920s flapper dress and carrying a little CD player?” he asks. “And then she cranked it and started dancing a very period-specific dance? What was it?”
I laugh—loud. I absolutely do. I can see those silver tassels swishing as she moved. “The Charleston.”
“That’s right,” he says. “The Charleston. She was practicing for something, right?”
“Her audition for some rendition of The Great Gatsby.” I remember instantly. “That was her community theater phase.”
“I remember.” He chuckles. “And she didn’t get a part because instead of studying lines, she only practiced the dancing.”
He’s right. I told her she needed to read the script; she told me Daisy Buchanan was an idiot.
Nash and I face each other, eyes bouncing like we’re reading the new rules of how to handle each other.
Of what to say and not say. A silent testing of the waters.
Despite the fact we’re legally married, we aren’t man and wife, not anymore, but simply being in his presence and breathing the same oxygen as him is so .
. . familiar. Like it was just yesterday he rearviewed Fontain and not nearly eight years ago.
And it’s telling that neither of us adds the rest of that story—that while my mom danced like a fool in a costume for a part in a play she’d never get, we danced right along with her, the way we always did.
Whether we were so angry we wanted to tear each other to shreds or so happy we couldn’t keep our hands off each other, it didn’t make a difference.
We’d wrap our arms around each other and sway to real or make-believe music.
Grocery store aisles to outdated songs, dive bars to the sound of pool balls clanking, the dark closet of a courthouse to the tune of muffled conversations on the other side of the door.
“Dancing has been part of every good moment of history,” he once whispered in my ear amid an especially intense argument.
I was ready to snap when he pulled me close, swaying our hips without a note of music playing. We were in the tiny storage-room-turned-apartment, littered with his laundry and history books haphazardly strewn about. I’d tripped over one and fallen into the other. He was clueless; I was fuming.
“That’s not true,” I snapped, softening into him. Letting him lead me with his hips and hands. “And I’m still mad at you. You’re like living with a damn teenager.”
He ignored my grievances.
“You don’t think the Soviets danced after the Battle of Berlin, Rue Conway?” He quirked a brow. “Or Washington himself didn’t do a little jig after Yorktown?”
I said nothing, biting my cheek.
“If they didn’t, they should have.” The amused way he said it infuriated me, as did his tightening grip. “And you won’t be mad at me forever.”
It worked. Every damn time.
Thirty more seconds of us swaying to silence led to lips on lips and skin on skin, right in the middle of his frustrating clutter.
The only argument we ever had that didn’t end with a dance was the last one. I wasn’t letting him touch me, much less dance with me and whisper his perfect words into my ear that would have inevitably changed my mind and led to a colossal mistake.
“Damn bugs!” a voice barks, making me jump. “Like the goddamned jungle out here.”
A round man with red cheeks next to the bench blasts bug spray, sending a cloud of DEET our way. Nash and I stand, choking through it.
“Okay.” I brush my bangs out of my face, refocusing on the pond and remembering the whole point of us being here. “What are we looking at?”
Nash faces the swamp, which I now see has a bright white bridge crossing it, and effortlessly slips into historian mode.
“Long Bridge,” he begins. “It’s believed to have been built by enslaved workers in the early 1840s. After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, plantations in the South suffered—a lot of them going under.”
“No free labor to keep them in the black,” I say cynically. “How ironic.”
“Exactly. Either way, the owner of this one decided in the early 1870s to repurpose the land by opening the grounds to outsiders in hopes of generating income. The beauty of the gardens and history of the place did the trick. Where we’re standing, with the reflection of the trees on the water and view of the bridge, became one of the most popular spots on the property. ”
Even with the bugs and despite it being a swamp, I can see why. There’s an untamed peacefulness to it, and compared to the bold, punchy colors of the garden, it feels private.
“1870?” I ask. “Anson Burns was here in 1865. Does that make sense?”
Nash smiles, proud, and gives me a playful nudge. “You pay better attention to history than you used to.”
I snort a laugh. “I’m less distracted than I used to be.”
He gifts me with another smile, this one filling my belly with the whisper of butterfly wings.
“Either way, you’re right,” he says. “I thought the same thing when I read it. My only guess is that the owner at the time—John Drayton—was desperate for money. He sold nearly three hundred acres off just to stay afloat. If someone had wandered up and offered payment to walk around—” He shrugs one shoulder. “He likely would’ve taken it.”
On the large, algae-framed pond in front of us, the water is completely still, a perfect mirror of the cypress trees and knees surrounding it and the bright blue sky above. The white bridge cuts the scene in half. Green, brown, blue, and white, just like Anson wrote.
A turtle rests on a log; Bennie would love it.
“You into turtles?” Nash asks as I squat to take a picture.
“Not me. My—” I eat the rest of that sentence. I can’t finish it truthfully. Not yet at least. Judging by the sick feeling in my stomach, maybe never. “Friend.”
He gives me another testing-the-waters look. “Bee?”
At this, I fully panic. “Bee?”
He dips his chin. “Your mom said Bee on the phone.”
“Ha!” Nothing is funny. “That Bee. Bee is not a friend.” His eyes narrow. “That’s not true. Bee is-is kind of a friend.” His eyebrows lift; this is a fucking disaster. “A psychic.”
“A psychic?” Disbelief fills his face. “You’re seeing a psychic now?”
He knows I haven’t changed that much.
“For my mother.”
I force a too-big smile that he shakes his head at but drops it.
Around us, it’s all nature. Not a single man-made element as we approach the bridge except modern signage instructing visitors about where to walk beside a few benches and trash cans.
Even if Anson stood in this very spot, there’s no way any evidence still exists.
Fires, hurricanes, and human intervention would have destroyed everything.
“You think there’s anything here?”
He shakes his head. “You?”
My shoulders pitch forward, deflated. “Same.”
At the bridge, teenage girls and couples pose for photos in the middle.
“I’ll take y’all’s picture,” a woman with a thick accent says. “You’re such a cute couple. Dan” —her voice turns to a holler—“aren’t they a cute couple?”
Dan—a man with knee-high socks and binoculars around his neck—nods, disinterested.
My “We aren’t a couple” is lost to Nash’s “We’d love a photo.”
I glare at him, and he grins, handing the woman his phone and dragging me to the middle of the bridge.
“We’re celebrating our eighth anniversary this summer,” Nash tells the woman, winking at me as he wraps one arm around my waist and pulls me close. Too close. “Sometimes my wife here forgets we’re married because we haven’t fought in years.”
I poke him in the ribs, making him laugh through a grunt.
“That’s because my husband is so quiet around the house, it’s like he’s not even there.”
“Don’t be silly, honey.” Nash gives me a dopey look. “It’s because of all of those dirty cartoons you keep on your side of the bed—especially the ones of Popeye and Olive Oyl you love so much.”
I can’t contain the laugh that pulls out. All roads lead to the Tijuana bibles.
“Dirty cartoons?” the woman says from behind the phone, pushing the shutter button eight hundred times. “Didn’t know those existed. Get one where you wrap your arms around him.”
I look at Nash—I don’t want to do this—but when he challenges me with a whispered, “I won’t bite,” I do as she says, ignoring how well we fit, just like this.
When she’s pleased with her work, the woman’s voice rises again.
“Did you hear that, Dan? These two have been married for eight years!” Softer, to us, “Would you mind taking one of me and my husband?” My arms drop from Nash, and up goes her voice.
“Dan! Get over here! This handsome man’s gonna take our photo! ”
Back on the trail after all pictures are taken, Nash shows me us on his phone. We are mid-laugh and it’s perfect.
“I hate it,” I tell him.
“Really?” His lips twitch. “I think I look pretty good.”
I slap him on the arm, but I’m also smiling. “Think it’s a waste of time to keep walking and see if anything sticks out?”
“No place else I’d rather be, Rue Conway.” He grins, so easy. Like he always has and probably always will. Like this moment is the only one he’s concerned about being in and every next moment is the next moment’s concern. I’m envious.
For the next hour, Nash shoots down every possible clue location I spot.
In the quiet between, it’s comfortable. More than once, our hands brush, and as much as it makes my skin buzz, he doesn’t react.
Nash is still Nash, but we are not us. He’s him—whoever that is now—and I’m me, engaged to Jonathan, and mother to a child he knows nothing about.
We aren’t who we were all those years ago.
At the bench where we started, Cap is napping upright.
“Crazy that’s my dad,” I say to Nash.
“I like him.”
Cap’s oxygen tube moves with his breaths. I didn’t come here looking for a new dad—even if not biologically, I had a good one—but twenty-four hours here, and Cap’s growing on me.
I move to wake him, and Nash stops me with a hand around my arm.
“Hey,” he says, voice lowering as he leans close to me. So close I could count every strand of day-old stubble lining his jaw or shade of color in his dark eyes. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
Like a freak bolt of lightning from a cloudless sky, adoration for him rips through me from top to bottom. I can’t tell if he feels it—it doesn’t matter—the concern he’s radiating is the only thing I need.
Nash was a lot of things—we were a lot of things—but one thing I seem to have forgotten is that when we were together, it was time spent with a constant soft place to land beneath me.
Maybe he never wanted a normal house or a normal career, but when I had a bad day, he didn’t shy away from the hard conversations.
Unlike Jonathan who takes action with every problem, Nash gave me space to be.
He pushed and he talked and he forced me to dance when I wanted to build tall walls and slap him across the face.
It takes every ounce of my strength not to wrap my arms around him and cry.
“Me too,” I tell him.
It’s a lame response and doesn’t hold a candle to the simple fact his sorry feels like the one I’ve been needing to hear since I got the news. Even as I drive and Cap tells us about the hurricanes he’s weathered on his boat, it’s the only word I think of.
I don’t think Jonathan ever said it once.