Page 21 of Tomorrow Belongs to Us
My client starts talking and I fumble around in my bag for a notepad which I set down on the table. “Just a moment.” I rummage around in my bag some more. “I don’t have a—” But Lance holds out a pen in front of me. “Go ahead.” I take the pen and scribble down the details and ask a few more questions. I steal a quick look at Lance who watches me with a bemused look. “Great, thank you.” I hang up.
This encroachment on my life with clients’ calls coming at all hours is a high price to pay. I need to find a better balance, to not be so fast to respond to client calls. I need to defer and delegate, but I can only do that when I reach the next rung on my career ladder. I apologize to Lance for the intrusion, then check the time. “I must go. I didn’t realize I’d been here that long.”
“But I haven’t finished.” He grabs my hand, as if he doesn’t want me to get up. “Wait, Megan. Please.” It’s the same plea I heard in his voice the last time. I move my hand away, determined not to give in. “We’re done here.”
“You haven’t heard all of it.”
“I’ve heard enough.”
“My sister died,” he cries. The shock of his words hits like a wrecking ball. “Anna.”
His little sister that he helped teach how to ride a bike.
“What?” Horrified, I slump back against the booth, my fingers spreading like a fan against my breastbone. “Your sister?” I pray I’ve misheard.
“They were in an accident. A pickup truck collided with an eighteen-wheeler on the highway and my brother-in-law, Brett, couldn’t stop in time. Their car hit the collision head on. My sister didn’t stand a chance. Brett was in a coma. Luckily, their daughter Sarah had been at home with Brett’s parents who’d been visiting. Sarah was only a baby, not even a year old at the time, and my parents flew out to Nebraska and both families rallied around but everything fell apart when Anna died.
“She—” I can’t say the word.
Lance scratches the lid of his milkshake cup. “I had to be there for Brett and Sarah.”
Shivers roll all over me. I reach for his hand. “I’m so sorry.” Something melts inside me. “Nobody ever said a word about it. I never knew.”
“Principal Fielding had already given me a warning. He’d told me he didn’t like what he was hearing and to watch out.” Lance wipes a hand across his face. “I didn’t leave because of my job, or because of the rumors. I didn’t leave because of what happened between us that night. I left because of the accident. Because my sister died.”
I thought he’d left me to save himself, but he’d left to go to his family, and he’d stayed because of the tragedy. All that time I’d assumed he’d left to protect himself, worried that somehow the word would get out about us. I believed he was protecting himself.
“I hadn’t intended to leave. That night … I shouldn’t have… but …”
“I tempted you. I couldn’t help myself.” I make my confession in a lowered tone.
“I couldn’t have kept away from you. I couldn’t have stopped myself. I wanted you, I did, because my feelings changed the more we got to know one another. I tried to keep my distance but then … that night happened.” He looks like a man racked with guilt.
I shake my head. “You remember how it happened, don’t you?”
“I can’t ever forget it.”
“Then you should remember that it was me, not you.” I’d been a young girl desperate for connection. He’s quiet, cut off from me. It doesn’t seem right to dwell on that night. “You left, and then?”
“With news of the accident, I rushed to be with them, but when Anna died, it seemed like the perfect solution to stay there and help them cope. How could I not be there for my niece? She was only a baby.”
How selfless of him. “Your sister would have been so proud of you.” I choke up just thinking about it.
“We helped as much as we could. Sarah was very young and she missed Anna so much. It was difficult to settle her and take care of her, but we managed. Brett was in a coma for a month. It was touch and go. I hadn’t intended to stay there forever, but within a week of Anna’s death, it was obvious that my parents couldn’t look after Sarah on their own even with Brett’s family helping. We did the best we could but there’s no replacement for a mother.”
At last I understand. “How is your niece now?” I whisper.
“Like any other young child on the verge of becoming a teenager. She’s fine. She was too young to understand the gravity of her loss. In time, Brett recovered, but his parents couldn’t stay there forever. Neither could Brett’s. They all returned home once Brett was released from the hospital, but I stayed on. Anna and I were so close. She was my baby sister. I felt responsible for her child, for her legacy. It was heart breaking to see Sarah and to know that she would never know her mother. Something like that changes you, it wasn’t only the way Anna died and the tragedy of it all, but the real sadness was in the day-to-day, of knowing she wouldn’t be around to see her daughter grow up, and would never know what she had left behind. That she’d never see the milestones of her daughter taking her first steps and …” His voice dies to a whisper. “I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to contact you. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t deal with that, as well as with things happening in my own family. I meant to, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t. We managed to get through those early dark weeks, and I resigned after Anna’s funeral. A new life for me in Nebraska beckoned.”
I look down to find our hands are joined together on the table. I don’t pull mine away because I can see the suffering this man has endured. “You should have told me.” My voice is croaky. “One phone call is all it would have taken. I could have tried to help you. I could have been there for you like you’d been there for me.”
“How could I have told you?” he asks, our fingers still touching. “You had your own set of problems. It wasn’t the right time. It took months for Brett to get better and then I thought you’d be off to college and that you’d be starting over. You would forget about me. What we had back then was a moment, Megan. I got caught up. You did too, maybe, and then it passed. You understand that, don’t you?”
It hadn’t been like that for me. If he thought it was a moment, then the moment had dragged on for me. I’d been caught up in it for years. No way could I now bring myself to tell him that he’d left me broken. Feeling abandoned and unwanted. It confirmed to me love is ugly, and hard and twisted.
There’s no point in me telling him that my mother recovering was the start of my problems. That my father never came back. That I never went to college but took a year out and worked. That it was up to me to keep the family together while my brother and sister went to school. I can’t tell Lance any of this because it would make him feel worse than he already does.
“Isn’t it strange how we’ve ended up in the same place?” he asks.
