31. Catherine
The pages of Wuthering Heights were thick and luscious in a way that no longer exists in publishing unless you spring for a special edition hardback. They were also crisp and virtually untouched despite the fact that I’d left the book on the cabin bookshelf for Jasper to find.
“You were supposed to read this,” I accused as I sat next to his bedside. He had yet to wake up from the faint that had sent him tumbling into Zach’s arms, but his breathing was steady and he kept muttering in his sleep, so I assumed he’d just collapsed like one of those fainting goats and wasn’t ready to face me yet.
The room where I sat over his bedside wasn’t his own; Zach was a strong kid, but even he could only manage to drag a man this size as far as the boys’ bedroom in the Sampson house. It reminded me a lot of Bates’s room growing up. He and I rarely had much money in those early days, since employment opportunities for an undereducated woman in the sixties left much to be desired, but he’d been a collector of all things nature. Rocks, leaves, the long-desiccated corpses of various beetles—if it was filthy and normally found outdoors, he found a way to keep it. Even a hastily painted-over scar on one of the walls felt familiar. Bates had once tried to light a campfire in the middle of his room so we could have an impromptu weenie roast.
I let the book fall open to a section about halfway through. Chloe had been carrying the copy in her bag, and even though I could tell she was burning to ask me all manner of questions—and to keep the book for herself—she’d willingly handed it over.
“‘You said I killed you—haunt me then!’” I read aloud from the pages. “‘The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe; I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I can not find you!’”
A sigh escaped me at the passage, especially once I saw what I’d written in the margins.
Youcanlive without your life, J, and you can live without your soul. Youhaveto. For my sake as well as yours, I’m begging you to try.
“Can you believe we were ever this dramatic?” I asked as I ran my fingers over the words. I was pretty sure I could still make out the splotches where my tears had dropped, but that might have been memory turning me sentimental. “I sometimes see kids today, falling head over heels in love and acting as though they’re the first ones to ever feel that way, and wish I could get that passion back. Then I recall the agony of those first few years and change my mind. I don’t know about you, but I had a rough go of it there for a while. I can’t tell you how many times I thought about coming back here to find you.”
I might have done it, too, only the radar base closed its doors a few months after I left. My father had been devastated to lose his position, but my mother was more than ready to move on to greener pastures. As soon as they packed up the house and moved to their next posting—in Philadelphia, if I remember correctly—Colville was essentially erased from their memories.
Not mine, though. It forever lived inside me as the place where I’d learned to stand on my own two feet, even if I’d only managed it because I’d been propped up by the two extra feet I was growing inside me.
“How was I supposed to know you’d leave this book on the shelf for sixty years and refuse to touch it?” I continued with a soft tsk. “It was meant to comfort you, you old fool. I was giving you a ghost to chase so you could live up to your full Heathcliff potential, and you wasted it.”
“Get. Out.”
The words were dragged out of Jasper’s lips as if by force. My gaze flew to his face, but his eyes were still closed and his pallor too white for my liking. He was in good shape for his age, it was true, but sudden frights did strange things to our circulatory systems. A few weeks ago, a car backfired a few streets down from me, and I spent a full ten minutes searching my body for what I felt sure was the bullet hole.
“Hello to you, too,” I said as I reached for his hand. Even though his eyes remained closed, he snatched his fingers back before I could make contact. I clucked my tongue. “Well, now. Is that any way to treat an old flame? No wonder why you have this whole town in a quake. If you treat your old friends like this, I can’t imagine what you do to your enemies.”
He finally opened his eyes and fixed that oh-so-familiar gaze on me. He looked about as deflated as I felt, but the second those clear blue eyes met mine, it was as if the years fell away. I was no longer a retired book editor who was finding the sudden influx of time on her hands a little wearing, no more a devoted mother and grandmother somewhat consternated to find that she’d outlived her usefulness. In that moment, I was nineteen years old again, falling in love for the first time and recklessly plunging into the heady, all-consuming delight of it.
“You’re dead,” he said, still in that voice that sounded as though each word was being wrested from him by force. “You’re a ghost.”
I couldn’t help smiling down at him. “Is this where you’re going to start quoting Wuthering Heights at me again? ‘I have a strong faith in ghosts; I have a connection that they can and do exist among us’ and all that?”
Instead of continuing the quotation or even countering with one of his own, Jasper bolted upright and flung back the blanket I’d been careful to pull over him. He raised a hand and pointed it toward the door, his arm unwavering.
“Get out,” he said again, this time with more force. “I don’t know what you’re doing here or why you’ve come to break my heart again after all these years, but I want nothing to do with it. Or you.”
“Jasper, please,” I said. I knew that my coming back here would be a surprise to him, but I’d assumed the years would have mellowed him the same way they had me. That was what time did; it trampled on the dreams and wishes of youth, replaced them with the more substantial, if mundane, realities of life. In the past sixty years, I’d lived and done a lot of things. Some of them—my son, my grandson, my career—I was proud of. Others—the way I’d cut ties from my parents, the too-many hours I’d spent hunched over a desk, a few of my more spectacularly failed relationships—made me long for a do-over.
Regardless, they were all a part of me now. Good and bad, brave and cowardly, my decisions had been made. The only option now was to live with them.
“I know I should have called first,” I said, attempting a rueful smile. “Or at the very least, sent a letter. Or a book.”
“Chloe!” he called, ignoring me. “Zach! Unless you want to be responsible for my death, you’ll get me out of here. Now.”
The speed with which the door flew open seemed to indicate that the two young people had been waiting in the hallway for the first sign of distress. And the distance they placed between their bodies as they stepped into the room seemed to indicate that neither one of them had enjoyed the wait very much.
However, either Jasper didn’t prepare himself for how much the shock of seeing me and Zach in a room together would affect him, or he hadn’t put our relationship together until he saw us standing side by side, because he took one look at the pair of us and blanched.
“No,” he said. “Impossible. It’s impossible.”
“Hello again, sir,” Zach said with a slight smile. “Or should I say, Grandpa?”
It was the worst possible thing he could have said in that moment, but I could hardly blame him for it. When Bates had shown little to no interest in getting to know the man who’d sired him, I thought I’d dodged a particularly nasty bullet. It was much easier to close the door on my past than to leave it open a crack, where light and sound and memories could creep in.
But Zach had wondered. Zach had wanted to know. Now the door was thrown all the way open, and there would be no closing it again.
“Please don’t be upset with Zach,” I said, aiming for peace. It seemed the least I could do after he’d saved Jasper from breaking a hip back there—or worse. “He has nothing to do with my visit. In fact, he tried to talk me out of it, but you know me. The more I’m told not to do a thing, the harder I push to do it.”
Jasper ignored this with a tight clamp of his jaw. “A son or a daughter?” he croaked instead.
Now it was my turn to feel the world start to tumble around me. “What?”
“Do I have a son or a daughter?” he repeated, his voice balancing on a razor’s edge. “It’s a simple question. I’d like to know about the child. Our child.”
All at once, I felt as though I’d been sideswiped by a red Mustang going too fast down the road. I was all skinned palms and shaking knees, the wheels of my bicycle endlessly whirring, whirring as it fell on top of me.
Zach had his arms around me almost immediately, those strong, capable arms leading me to a rickety chair in the corner of the room, but that only made things worse. Those arms were the same arms that had once pulled me out from under my bike, his smile the same smile I’d once had to drag out of Jasper with all the wiles at my disposal.
“A son,” I said, gasping. Zach tried to soothe me with some kind of low-murmured nonsense, but I barely heeded him. “We have a son.”
Jasper closed his eyes. For the longest moment, I feared he wasn’t going to open them again, but all he did was draw a deep breath before blinking. “A son,” he said, and something almost like a smile hovered over his lips. “Okay. Thank you.”
Chloe reached out and touched his arm—gently, like someone touching a fragile piece of glass. “Can I get you a glass of water or something, Jasper? Milk? Coffee? A stiff drink?”
“What I want is for you to get them out of here,” he said, his voice oddly free of emotion. Then, with a sudden puckering of his brow, he added, “No. You know what? Leave them here. In fact, get that mother of yours to join us.”
“My mother?” Chloe echoed. “Why do you need her?”
“I don’t need her,” he said grimly. “I don’t need any of them, but if we’re going to start sharing our so-called truths, we might as well do it right. I’ll be damned if I’m going to slink away without saying what needs to be said. I did that once in my life already, and look where it got me.”
Ravenna must have also been listening at the door, because she popped her head into the room almost at once. “Did someone want me?” she asked.
“No,” Jasper said as he struggled to his feet. This time, Zach was wise enough not to help him. “No one wants you—not in this conversation and definitely not in your children’s lives. That’s the whole point.”
Ravenna went suddenly white, her jaw slack. “I beg your pardon?”
“It’s not my pardon you need,” Jasper retorted. He swept a glance around the room, his thoughts more evident on his face than I’d ever seen them before. When we were young, his expressions had always been impossible to make out, which, if I was being honest, had been a large part of my early attraction to him. A rough, closed-off man who only wakened to vitality in your arms was a heady thing for a girl of nineteen.
The extra lines about his face now, carved as if from stone, were a lot easier to read…even if they had been earned cut by deep, painful cut.
“Look around you, Ravenna,” he said, sweeping his arm around the room. “This is what you walked away from. This is what you gave up.”
The woman wrinkled her nose as her gaze snagged on a stack of visibly dirty laundry shoved halfway under one of the beds. “My sons’ dirty bedroom?”
He practically spit his reply. “No, you fool. Life. Mess. Family.” Even though he didn’t look at me as he spoke, I knew his message wasn’t meant for Ravenna’s ears alone. “Things were hard. You felt trapped and were trying to make the best of a bad situation. So you left.”
“How do you—” Ravenna took one look at Chloe and immediately clamped her mouth shut again.
“I know why you abandoned your kids,” Jasper continued. “I know how you did it, too. You turned yourself around in all kinds of circles, rationalizing to yourself that you were only doing what was best for everyone. They’d be better off without you. They needed more than you could give. A clean break would be the kindest gift you could offer. It would hurt, obviously, but they had their whole lives ahead of them. They’d get over you and move on, and so easily that you felt pretty sure you’d suffer more than they did in the end.”
A hot well of tears sprang to my eyes. I made a motion to wipe them away, but Zach, bless his all-seeing heart, slipped his hand into mine and refused to let go.
“Only that’s not how it works, is it?” Jasper asked. His voice had grown so quiet by this time that he held the entire room spellbound. “You don’t get to decide how other people feel. The things you do matter. The way you hurt these children matters. Maybe you genuinely thought you were taking the only path available to you, but the truth is that you took the path you wanted. And you didn’t give a single, solitary damn what would happen when your kids tried to run after you only to find that you’d barred the way for any of them to follow.”
All at once, two things started happening. Ravenna, who’d gone completely white, started to fold in on herself as if her legs could no longer bear her own weight. And Jasper, equally spent, started to do the same. Since Chloe was the one standing between them, she could only help one.
She chose Jasper.
“Come on, Jasper,” she said, bracing her arm under his and helping him toddle to the door. “I think we should get you home before you say something you regret.”
He smiled down at her in a way I never thought to see again in my lifetime. That particular twist of the lips, all the more valuable because of how difficult it was to extract, had once been my sole delight and joy.
“I don’t regret one word of it,” he said. “They don’t get to walk away and then come back like it doesn’t mean anything. We’re human beings, Chloe. Real live goddamned human beings. Not just some side characters who disappear the second they decide to turn the page.”
“That we are,” she agreed as she led him into the hallway. She paused at the threshold to look at all of us: me and Zach holding hands, Ravenna slowly sinking to the bed. Then she turned her back on us and kept walking. “That we are.”