Chapter Thirty-Four #2
This is what he remembered when he smelled the roses in this very garden: he remembered how it felt to be deeply in love.
He remembered in exquisite detail the night he’d asked Millie to marry him.
He found himself once again on one knee, looking up into Millie’s shining, searching brown eyes.
Her gorgeous chestnut hair curled around her ears.
The restaurant was dimly lit, but there was a candle on the table, and her skin glowed in its light.
She had never looked more beautiful. Her hand was impossibly light in his.
Her perfume encircled him—the dark, sensual scent of amber mixed with the something softer and sweeter, something like honey.
He wanted to look into her lovely face for the rest of his life.
His heart hammered in his chest. Around them, the restaurant was a swirl of muffled conversation and low string music, but Fitz hardly noticed because he was watching Millie’s face so closely, and his body was filled with a decadent sort of warmth because he could see now, and he’d known already, really, amid the din of his clattering heart, what she was about to say, and then—oh, thank God! —she said it.
“Yes.” Her rosebud lips had spread into a smile around the word. “Yes!”
And then he was standing and pulling Millie to her feet and the sensation of kissing her, of his lips against hers, tumbled through his body in crashing, sparkling waves, once again as he stood decades later in the rose garden.
He held her in his arms, his vision blurred with elation and relief, and the warmth that he felt within him when he gazed at her, his great and startling love, wrapped itself around both of them, pulling them into each other, binding them.
He’d carried his anger toward Millie for so long that he’d somehow forgotten this… the delicious, incomparable ecstasy of the love he’d once felt for her.
But now Fitz remembers. How could he have ever asked his son to turn his back on that feeling?
“Wait,” Lucy says slowly, staring at him. “You didn’t want my dad and mom to be together?”
“I never told Lucy what happened,” Gregory says. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“No,” says Fitz. “I can understand that.”
Lucy looks back and forth between them. “Should I leave?”
Gregory shakes his head. “Stay. It’s all in the past.”
But Fitz only needs one look at his son to know it isn’t all in the past. The pain is right there with them on that bench, making it difficult for them to reach each other. He turns to Lucy and takes a deep breath.
“Before your mother came to visit me here, I’d only met her once,” he says.
“I only knew a few things about her. I knew she was an artist. I knew that as far as your father was concerned, the sun rose and set for her.” He feels Gregory shift on the bench beside him.
He needs to hurry past all of this, before Gregory has a chance to stand up and leave.
“When I met your mother, she reminded me of my wife, Millie. And that… well, your father knows. That upset me very much.”
Lucy glances at her father.
“My mother left us when I was a baby,” Gregory tells her quietly. “She moved across the country and married my father’s boss.”
Lucy’s eyes widen.
Fitz remembers vividly how it felt when Millie had ripped her arm free from his grip and strode out the front door of their house on Spruce Street on that horrible night decades earlier.
He would have run after her and begged her to stay, but he did not want to leave Gregory—asleep in his crib—alone in the house.
Long before the divorce was finalized, everyone in the office knew that Fitz’s wife was seeing his boss, Bruce Leonard.
Eventually Bruce and Millie were married in New York.
She wanted nothing to do with Fitz or with Gregory.
Many years later, when Gregory was a teenager, Millie passed away from cancer.
Fitz and Gregory attended her funeral in New York, and no one who had gathered there to mourn her had any idea who they were.
“I never wanted you to feel that kind of pain again,” Fitz tells his son.
He turns to Lucy. “I worried your mother would prove to be… flighty like Millie.” He shakes his head apologetically.
“That’s the truth of it—that’s how I felt at the time.
I worried for your father. Maybe it was because your mother was…
bohemian. I worried that she was not the type to stick around, and I didn’t want your father to repeat my mistake.
I didn’t want him to be abandoned by another woman.
I didn’t want his heart—his spirit—broken.
And even though your father was a grown man, I thought I had the right, the obligation even, to tell him that he should not, could not, marry your mother. ”
There is more to it, but Fitz isn’t going to tell his granddaughter that as charming as her mother was, he felt there was something cloaked about her expression the entire time she sat at his dining table.
She had secrets, he thought, secrets that Gregory didn’t know.
Fitz was convinced that there was something not quite up front about her, some sort of darkness or pain that she would inevitably burden Fitz’s only son with as well.
Fitz wondered if maybe when you had an enthralling mother who abandoned you, you spent your life looking for an enthralling woman who promised to never leave you. It all seemed like bad news to him. Bad, bad news. Another Barnes man cursed to do anything in the name of love.
“Nell,” Gregory says now, his voice hard. “You don’t seem to know her name. Her name was Eleanor McKinney Barnes. Nell.”
Fitz looks at his son and nods. “Nell,” he says softly. “Nell. Yes. I’m sorry.”
Now he wonders if the secret that Nell was hiding during that visit was that she was pregnant with Lucy.
He wonders if after not being able to control the way he felt for Millie, and not being able to control Millie herself, he simply wanted to control his son.
“He gave me an ultimatum,” Gregory tells Lucy. “If I married your mother, he didn’t want to have anything to do with either of us. He told me to choose her or to choose him. If I chose your mother, I would no longer have a father. I was never to contact him again. It was not a difficult decision.”
And looking back now, Fitz can understand that of course it was not a difficult decision.
Here was a captivating woman, possibly carrying Gregory’s child, who was not afraid to express how much she loved him.
On the other hand, there was Fitz, who had grown so scared of love that he’d hardly shown his own son an ounce of it in all the years he’d raised him.
It was no wonder that Gregory walked out the door that night and never came back.
Fitz has always thought that love made people weak, but he understands at last that that isn’t true at all.
It is the people who try to resist love who are the weak ones, the cowardly ones.
Somehow, his son knew that. Gregory left that day and cut all ties with Fitz, just as Fitz had ordered him to.
Fitz hangs his head. “I regret it all. I regret the things I said to you, Gregory, and the way I behaved. And not just on that day. I was not a good father. I thought I was doing what was best for you. I thought I could make you stronger than I was, but I should have shown you all the love that I felt for you instead of hiding it away where you couldn’t see it or feel it.
I’d start all over again if I could, but I can’t, and that…
and I…” He trails off, struggling to contain his emotion.
He’s speaking to Gregory, but it’s Lucy who takes his hand, her palm as soft as a salve against his gnarled knuckles.
He looks into her lovely young face, her big blue eyes. “How could I have been such a fool?” he asks. “How could I have lost all of those years with my son?” He clutches her hand tightly. “And my granddaughter. My very own granddaughter.”
If he can just somehow make this right, he thinks, he will no longer be alone. He will have a family. The thought twists through him, scraping as it goes.
“Oh, Fitz,” Lucy says, squeezing his hand again. She gives her father a hard, searching look, but Gregory presses his lips together and stares off into the distance. Fitz almost smiles at that. He recognizes the expression, having glared right at it in the mirror for decades.
It’s okay, he thinks. He doesn’t expect forgiveness from his son—not now, certainly. Perhaps not ever. Acceptance, though? Maybe someday. Maybe.
“Now that I know you’re my grandfather,” Lucy tells Fitz, giving up on her father saying anything, “I plan to make up for lost time.”
Fitz is astonished to see not only friendship in her eyes, but also, perhaps, love.
“And not a moment too soon,” he says, somewhat darkly.
Gregory and Lucy both look at him with alarm.
He shakes his head and chuckles. “Oh, I’m not dying.
Not imminently, at least. But the Oceanview Home isn’t a nursery school, you know.
It’s the last stop on the train. Well,” he adds, “I suppose that isn’t strictly true.
This place is about to become a hotel, so I suppose I’ll have to make another stop after all. ”
Lucy straightens, her hand flying to her mouth. “Oh! I missed it. The developers were coming, and I… I’m sorry, Dad, Fitz, but I have to go. Can I leave you two here? You have so much to catch up on.”
Gregory shakes his head and stands. “I came to see the work you’ve done here, Lucy. That’s all. Let me walk you back to the terrace, and then I’ll show myself around a bit more.”
“I’ll walk with you both to the terrace,” Fitz says. “If that’s okay with you, Gregory?”
Gregory seems surprised to be asked. He nods, his face softening slightly. “Yes. That’s fine.”
Fitz catches Lucy’s smile. He walks through the garden beside his son and granddaughter.
The noises of the party grow more distinct with every step they take.
They walk slowly—or, Fitz supposes, he walks slowly, feeling a bit tired from the turns of the day, and the other two politely match his pace.
The afternoon is fading into evening. The sky, he notices, is a swirl of blue and gold.
The light gilds the roses and makes their pink petals glow.
“My mother used to say that the golden hour is twice as long in Bantom Bay as it is anywhere else,” Lucy says. She cups her hands in front of her as though to catch the light, and it seems to Fitz that she really does manage it, that she holds the light there in her hands for a moment.
But the light changes an instant later, the sun slipping just enough so that it no longer spills over the walls and into the garden.
And in that very moment when everything seems suddenly darker, the lights that have been strung throughout the gardens turn on, twinkling like stars against the watercolor sky.
Fitz is certain he has never experienced anything more beautiful in his long life.