Chapter Thirty-Four
FITZ
Fitz is having some sort of episode. He can hardly bring himself to move. He doesn’t want to upset the illusion in front of him: his son, whom he has not seen in nearly thirty years, stands right in front of him in the rose garden, chatting with Lucy.
“Dad?” Gregory says again. He looks shocked and wary, his body very still.
This can’t be. Fitz blinks. The marsh in his chest shifts, growing turbulent.
“Gregory?” he says in barely more than a whisper. “Gregory?”
He pushes his walker to the side, not needing the damn thing, and walks unsteadily but with determination to his son, and puts his arms around him. He holds Gregory for a long moment before he feels his son shift and slowly lift his arms to return the embrace.
But soon, Gregory pulls back. His brow is deeply furrowed as he looks from Fitz to Lucy.
“Did you know that he was here?” Fitz’s son asks Lucy.
Lucy’s face conveys utter bewilderment. She opens her mouth to speak, but Fitz finds his words first.
“This is Lucy,” he explains to his son. “She’s the gardener.
” She is so much more than that, of course, but it hardly seems important to recite her entire résumé at the moment.
Fitz can’t take his eyes off Gregory. His son is right here!
His son was a young man when he saw him last, thirty years ago.
Now he has deep grooves across his forehead and silver hair.
“Lucy is my daughter,” Gregory says stiffly.
Fitz releases a huff of laughter, but the sound dies quickly when he realizes that Gregory and Lucy aren’t joining in. Fitz stares at them.
“Lucy, this,” Gregory says, gesturing toward Fitz, “is my father.”
Lucy’s eyes are wide. “I don’t understand. I thought my grandparents were dead.”
“Technically, no,” Gregory tells her, not meeting Fitz’s gaze.
Fitz feels every bit as confused as Lucy looks.
His son has a daughter… and that daughter is Lucy?
Lucy! His Lucy. His… his friend, he supposes.
And all this time she has been his granddaughter!
His granddaughter. No wonder she has Millie’s exact hair coloring—no wonder he’s been so mixed up.
He feels a bit unsteady then and reaches for his walker.
“Oh, Fitz,” Lucy says. “Let me help.”
Before he can stop her, she pulls his walker closer to him. Her warm hand rests on his for a moment as she helps him find his grip. He stares at her, wondering how he possibly missed it, when he can so clearly see now that she is part of him.
Perhaps he didn’t miss it, though. Perhaps there has been something between them all along, something he has not been able to put his finger on, something he has not been able to comprehend.
He recalls now that she said she was living with her father temporarily.
And then he remembers that Lucy’s mother has died.
Oh, he thinks. Oh.
Realization unfolds within him, rearranging his understanding of the past.
“You’re really my grandfather? Is that true?” Lucy asks, shaking her pretty head in astonishment, tears shining in her eyes.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Fitz says. “But it does look that way.”
“Bad news?” She laughs. “No. I have a grandfather! And it’s you!” She puts her arms around him, hugging him as best she can with the walker between them. Fitz cannot remember the last time he was hugged like this. His throat feels thick with emotion.
“I can’t believe it,” she says. “All this time, you’ve been my grandfather, and I had absolutely no idea. You’re Mr. Fitz!”
“Actually,” Fitz says, “I’m Mr. Barnes.”
“Arthur Fitzpatrick Barnes,” Gregory says. He’s stepped slightly away from them. “He’s always gone by ‘Fitz.’ ”
They both turn to Gregory. His face is hard and pale like something left out too long in the cold. Lucy reaches toward her father and rubs his arm. “Should we sit down?” she asks, looking back and forth between them, her expression turning serious to match theirs.
There are others walking along the paths, and Louis the Lump, shuffling around with his granddaughter, looks over at Fitz with a surprised expression, undoubtedly shocked to see that he has some family of his own.
I’m as surprised as you are, Fitz is tempted to shout to him, but manages not to.
As Lucy leads them deeper into the rose garden, the noise of the party slowly fades.
“How long have you lived here?” Gregory asks as they round the fountain. His son’s voice, Fitz notes, is terse. He doesn’t blame him for it. Not one bit.
“Oh, nearly a decade.”
“And before that?”
“The house on Spruce Street.” It was the house that he and Millie brought Gregory to from the hospital as a newborn, the house in which Gregory lived until college. And then Fitz stayed there, living with the memories of Gregory and Millie long after they’d both left him.
Fitz has so many questions for his son, but each one is caught in his throat.
This sort of trepidation is not a familiar feeling for him.
He is a man who has always spoken his thoughts.
But now… He doesn’t want to make Gregory angry.
After what he remembered yesterday when he smelled Lucy’s roses, everything has changed.
He wants to tell Gregory and Lucy this, but he does not know how to begin.
Lucy leads them to a bench along the far wall of the rose garden.
Silence falls over them. Three generations of Barneses, sitting right in a row, with Fitz in the middle.
It’s a startling thing. Fitz draws in his breath and releases it.
He turns to Lucy, thinking he’ll work his way up to facing his son.
“I see your mother in you,” he says. And he does now—it’s the shape of her eyes, if not the color. And the slant of her nose. And something else, something intangible.
“You met her?” Lucy asks, leaning toward him, and there’s something in her expression that tells Fitz that she knows the answer.
“Once,” Gregory mutters bitterly.
Fitz turns to face his son. “More than once, actually.”
Surprise flickers over Gregory’s face.
“She came here, didn’t she?” Lucy says excitedly. “She came to see you!”
Fitz nods. “She wanted to mend the rift between your father and me.”
“What are you talking about? When was this?” Gregory demands.
“Oh, seven or eight months ago, I think. She only came that once. She said she was going to talk to you, Gregory. She wanted to bring you back with her, and she wanted to know if that would be okay with me, if I wanted to see you. I said yes, I wanted to see you. I wanted to see you very much.” She didn’t mention that he had a granddaughter.
Maybe she thought that Gregory should deliver that news himself.
Fitz swallows. “She never returned. I assumed that you told her that you wanted nothing to do with me. I didn’t blame you a bit for that, Gregory. I still don’t.”
There is a stretch of quiet, and then his son says, “Nell never told me that she came to see you. But I know that our estrangement was very hard on her. She blamed herself. Nothing I said could convince her it wasn’t her fault.”
Lucy’s eyes search her father’s face, but he doesn’t say anything more. She reaches over and squeezes his hand.
Then she looks at Fitz and says quietly, “My mother died seven months ago. She had it on her calendar to come here the week after she died. I think… I think she never had a chance to speak with my dad about her visit with you, about her plans to bring you together again.”
Fitz nods. It’s what he has begun to piece together himself over these last minutes. All these long months, he thinks. All these months of thinking his son had refused to see him, even with his kind wife hoping to set things right between them.
But that isn’t what happened. Gregory had not known that Fitz was here, just miles from his own home. He hadn’t known that his wife had tracked down Fitz and visited him, that she had looked at Fitz with her bright, endlessly forgiving eyes and told him that she would try to bring his son to him.
“That note in my mom’s calendar,” Lucy tells Fitz, wonder shining in her expression.
“It’s the whole reason I ended up at the Oceanview Home.
We might never have met if I hadn’t seen it.
My mom brought all of us together, just like she hoped.
” She pauses. “No, not all of us,” she amends softly. “I wish she were here with us.”
“I’m so sorry,” Fitz says, looking first into Lucy’s open face and then his son’s closed one. “She was a lovely woman.”
He watches Gregory’s jaw twitch with anger.
“I should never have told you not to marry her,” Fitz says in a quick, low voice, hoping he can say all he needs to say before his son stops him.
“I was wrong. I remember now how it feels to love someone the way you loved her, and I know it is nothing anyone should get in the way of, no matter what may or may not come. I should never have tried to stop you from being with her. You were in love. I’d forgotten how that felt, but I remember now. ”
Gregory eyes him warily. “What do you mean, you remember now? What do you remember?”
“Love!” Fitz says, lifting his hands off his walker and shouting a bit. “I remember love! It’s a spectacular feeling. It changes the whole look of your world, changes the light, changes the air, changes you.”