Page 45 of Savage Blooms
Adam stared at the small framed photo on the gallery wall behind Eileen, the one he had looked past a dozen times before. It was a photograph of Eileen’s grandmother atChristmas, school-aged, beaming, with her dark hair in curls and a porcelain doll hugged to her chest. The background was blurry, but there was something there in the corner of the image that knocked the wind from Adam’s lungs.
It was a little boy off to the far right, lifting up his hand to grasp at a bulbous ornament on the mammoth Christmas tree. He must have been eight or nine, and he might have been some child of a houseguest, except it was impossible not to notice the exceptionally fair hair, the strong nose, and the cornflower-blue eyes that Adam saw every time he looked in the mirror.
Eileen followed his line of sight, identified the photograph, and then strode over with all the determination fitting her station. She plucked the picture from the wall and, upon realizing it was stapled shut on the back, whacked the photo against the edge of her father’s desk to crack the frame. Then, sliding the weathered photo from the mess of shattered wood and broken glass, Eileen held it up to the light.
Adam pressed in beside her, Finley and Nicola close behind. It was the nearest they had all been to each other, huddling around a picture to identify a ghost from the past.
Eileen turned the photo over. On the back, in spindly antiquated script, someone had written:Arabella and Robbie, Christmas Eve, 1970.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Robert
Robert pushed up on his toes to reach the Christmas ornament, tantalizingly just out of his reach. It was the sort of blue he only saw on the gleaming heads of the mallard ducks who paddled in the nearby loch. He was so close, close enough that the tips of his fingers gently brushed the rough stripe of silver glitter latticed over the cold glass. He had thought about asking his mother to help him reach it, but he wanted to do it himself. Besides, she was distracted talking to one of her friends with a full glass of eggnog in her hand. He would only bother her.
“Cheeeeese!” Arabella sang, offering a big smile to the photographer. Once the camera clicked and the photographer gave her a thumbs-up, she stumbled backwards in satisfied delight, right into Robert.
Robert jostled into the tree and the ornament crashedto the ground, where it shattered into a hundred tiny pieces.
“Oh!” Arabella said in distress. “I’m sorry, Robbie, I—”
“Robert.”
Robert tensed up as his father strode over, his lips pursed in disapproval beneath his mustache. Robert was usually good at keeping track of wherever his father was in the house, even having memorized the sound of his footfalls, but now, he appeared out of nowhere. Robert loved his father very much and he never wanted to upset him, but he was also a little bit afraid of him, which is how the minister had said children ought to feel about their parents.
“Daddy, he didn’t mean to,” Arabella said, puffing out her chest like a little gorilla wearing hair ribbons. “I fell into him, and he just—”
“Let him take responsibility for his own actions,” their father said. He hadn’t raised his voice, but then again, he never had to for Robert to be devastated. “Robbie, did you break that ornament?”
“Yes,” Robert said, bringing his thumb to his mouth before remembering that, at eight, he was far too old to be sucking on his thumb.
“You’ll clean it up, then. Arabella, go get the broom and the dustpan from the kitchen.”
Robert waited for his sister to rush down the hallway before he spoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said, lip wobbling.
“Hey now,” his father said, a little more gently as he clasped Robert’s shoulder in his big hand. “No need to go to pieces over an accident, all right? Men fix what they break, they don’t cry about it.”
“All right,” Robert said, swallowing down the tears. “I only wanted to hold it.”
“They’re just glass and glitter, Robbie, that’s all. Clean this up and I’ll get you something better.”
“All right,” Robert repeated as his sister appeared with the broom.
He dutifully swept up the shattered glass, not missing a single piece, even kneeling down to sweep under the tree skirt for good measure. The party swirled on around him, without anyone taking much notice of a child doing penance over something as silly as an ornament. Still, his face burned with embarrassment. He wanted so badly to be good, but he always ended up doing something wrong anyway.
“There we are,” his father said, taking the dustpan and broom from Robert’s small hands as soon as the cleaning, which felt like it had gone on for an eternity, was done. “Mind your footing better next time, eh? And Belle, don’t jostle your brother like that. He’s littler than you. You’ll knock him over.”
“All right!” Arabella chirped, then ran off to go crawl into their mother’s lap and steal a sip of eggnog. Their mother welcomed her without missing a beat, smoothing her hair as she continued to gossip with her friends.There were fewer people at the party this year, Robert noticed, and there had been fewer people last year than the year before that. Did the grown-ups not want to drive out to the big house from the cities any more? Or were his parents simply not as well liked as they once had been?
“I promised you something better, didn’t I?” his father asked. He was a tall, broad man, with wide shoulders and a square jaw and a gut. Robert, who was short for his age and scrawny besides, wondered if he would ever grow up to be so strong.
“You did,” Robert said, hope coming to life in his chest.
His father pointed with the broom to one of the countless presents under the tree, a hefty rectangular box wrapped in gold-foiled scarlet paper and decorated with a velvet bow.
“That one’s for you.”
