Rescue (Ransom Book 5) Page 21

  “Let’s rest here for a minute,” she says, pointing to a bench in the garden. Most of the flowers have died by now, but the plants are still green. I try to concentrate on that. On how cute Haylee looks with red cheeks, her masses of black hair flowing out from under a knit beanie cap. I try to concentrate on the feel of her fingers in mine as she takes my hand.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say immediately. “I’m ruining this.”

  “You’re not ruining anything. This is a tough day for you. Sightseeing first probably wasn’t the best idea.”

  “I think we should go back,” I whisper, not meeting her eyes.

  “To the inn? Okay, that’s totally fine with me.”

  “Not the inn. To London. I think we should forget this whole thing.”

  She doesn’t speak for a moment, just brushes her fingers across my hands. “I think you might regret that, Lennon. You’ve been having a rough time for a few weeks now, haven’t you?”

  I nod.

  “And that has to do with your mother.” It’s not a question. “So maybe this will help. Talking to her. I mean, it was important enough to you to come all this way.”

  Because I have no argument against any of that, I tell the truth. “I’m scared.”

  “Of course you are. You haven’t seen her in what—fifteen years?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “I think that would scare just about anybody. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the right thing to do.”

  I swallow a few times, trying to get my heart rate under control. “Do you think we could go see her now?” I ask, even though it’s the last thing in the world I want to do. “If we get it over with, then maybe we could enjoy the morning before we have to head back tomorrow.”

  “I think that’s a great idea,” she says, smiling at me. It makes me feel a little better, the ease of that smile. “Let’s get it over with.”

  So we stand and leave the garden, walking down the winding streets of Giverny. It’s a beautiful fall day, the sky blue overhead, the air cold enough to bite but bearable. A few of the trees are still holding onto their colorful leaves high above the little stone buildings of the town, contrasting with the solid green of the pines on the hills in the distance. It really is a beautiful place. I imagine being here with Haylee in some alternate universe where I can just enjoy myself, ignorant of how close my mom is.

  “Maybe we could come back here too,” I blurt out, my voice sounding panicky. “When we come back to go to Montmartre.”

  “Maybe we could,” she says, but her eyes tell me she knows the truth. I won’t ever be enjoying a day in Giverny again. “Do you have the address?”

  I hand her the scrap of paper from my pocket. I don’t tell her that I’ve been carrying it with me the entire time we’ve been in Europe. But maybe she can tell—the thing is creased and soft with wear, evidence of how many times I’ve unfolded it just to stare at the words.

  It was a private investigator that found her. It was one of the first things I did when we signed our record deal and I had a little cash. I wasn’t sure why I did it. It wasn’t like I wanted to see her. There weren’t many positive feelings toward our mom in my family. She had left us. She hadn’t wanted us anymore. But it was the kind of thing that got into my head and wouldn’t leave. The idea of knowing. Where she was. What she was doing. What life she had chosen over us.

  Finding out she had been in Europe was a shock. She had no family there, no friends that I was aware of. But it wasn’t like I would have really known. My dad didn’t talk about her, not ever. The investigator had photos as well, but I didn’t take those. I didn’t want to see her face.

  Yet here I was.

  “We’re pretty close,” Haylee says, her voice gentle. “Just down this road here.”

  I nod, not trusting myself to speak, and follow her down the sidewalk. The houses on this road are small and tidy. Brick cottages behind brick walls, postcard-sized gardens in the front. They all look fairly similar.

  I know which one is hers before we see the address. Maybe it’s the wind chime hanging from the front gate. Or the birdhouse in front of the wall. There’s a little sign on the gate, words about home being the window to your heart. I swallow, and Haylee tightens her hold on my hand. I’m grateful she doesn’t ask me if I’m okay, that she doesn’t give me any out. Because I know there’s no way I would have swung that gate open if she wasn’t standing there next to me, silently holding my hand.

  More wind chimes hang in the small garden, along with several sculptures of wire and glass. The feel is funky, a little eclectic. I have a flash of her walking through the grass at our house in California, barefoot, her sundress swinging around her legs, and I have to stop walking to catch my breath.

  “I’m right here,” Haylee says softly, and somehow I make my legs move again. Then I’m knocking on the door, and I can’t breathe, and I’m praying that she isn’t home, that the investigator was wrong, that a French woman will open this door and I can run away and pretend none of this ever happened.

  But that’s not how life works. When the door opens, it’s not a stranger standing in the foyer looking out at me with wide, knowing eyes. It’s not a stranger bringing her shaking hand to cover her gaping mouth. It’s my mother.

  “Lennon,” she whispers. “It’s you.”

  ***

  I don’t know what I imagined when I tried to picture her house, but it wasn’t this. The cottage is tiny, the living area smaller than the one on our tour bus. She’s filled the space with comfortable, slightly worn furniture. The walls are painted vivid shades of blue and green, splashed with bright color from paintings and tapestries. She has vases of flowers everywhere and more wind chimes inside.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asks, once we’re sitting on a creaky little sofa. “Tea or coffee? Water?”

  “Tea would be good,” I hear myself say, my voice strange in my ears. I don’t really want tea, though a shot of Jack Daniels sounds pretty good. All I really want is her out of the room for a minute. So I can pull myself together.

  “Of course. Just give me one moment.”

  She hurries into the kitchen, and as she passes I see that her hands are still shaking.

  “You okay?” Haylee asks. It’s funny, I’ve been hearing those words for months, so often that they’ve started to drive me crazy. But hearing them now, from Haylee, while we sit in my mother’s living room, I want to answer honestly for the first time in years.

  “No,” I mutter, staring at my hands. “I think this was a bad idea.”

  “It will be fine,” she says, slipping her hand through the crook of my arm. “It really will. We can leave if you need to.”

  I nod, looking around the room, hardly taking in anything I’m seeing. No pictures stand on the mantle or any of the surfaces. Plenty of art and not one photograph of a real person.

  “Here we are.” I look up and see my mother standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a tray. A tray that’s shaking in her hands.

  “Let me grab that,” Haylee says, jumping up to rescue the tray before it can fall. She sets it on the coffee table in front of us. My mother looks adrift now that she doesn’t have a task. She fidgets for a minute then sits on the edge of a purple armchair directly across from us.

  “I haven’t met your friend,” she finally says, nodding at Haylee.

  “Oh.” My voice is dull, and I clear my throat. “This is Haylee Hunt.”

  My mom smiles. The first smile I’ve seen on her face in seventeen years. I feel like I’m going to throw up. “You’re the singer,” she says.

  “You know who I am?” Haylee asks, incredulous.

  “Of course!” She jumps from her chair and walks to a leather trunk in the corner by the fireplace and lifts a large cloth book from inside. It’s the same kind of book that Paige had us use to make scrapbooks this summer. I have a sudden, horrible urge to laugh and bite down on my tongue as my mother brings the
book over to us. “Here you are,” she says, turning toward the back of the book. She places it on Haylee’s lap, and I look down to see a clipping from a magazine. It’s a press picture of me and my brothers, a smaller picture of Intrigue in a box in the corner. Ransom announces tour dates for Europe; brothers to be joined by Intrigue.

  I look up at my mother. “You have press clippings about us?”

  “I do!” Her voice is a shade too high pitched; she’s definitely nervous and trying to cover it. She flips to the front of the book. “I’ve been collecting since you opened for Grey Skies.”

  Haylee looks up at me, worried, and it occurs to me that I’m digging my fingers into my thighs. I make a conscious effort to relax them and reach over to take the book from her.

  “Have you enjoyed the tour?” she asks Haylee, returning to her seat across from us.

  “It’s been really great,” Haylee says, her eyes flicking back and forth between me and my mother. “We’ve had really great turnouts at all of the stops and…”

  I tune her out, focusing on the book in my lap. I flip idly through the pages. Promo photos, magazine spreads, album reviews, sales figures. What did she say? She’s been collecting since the Grey Skies tour. Collecting. Like she’s some kind of fan or something.

  “Were you at the concert?” I ask, interrupting them.

  “The concert?” she asks, her voice squeaky. “You mean—”

  “We played two shows in Paris.” I have no idea how I’m keeping my voice so controlled. I feel like I should be screaming. “It’s a forty-minute train ride.”

  “I didn’t go to the shows, Lennon. No.”

  “Why?” I hit the book in my lap with my knuckles. “You’ve been collecting info on our tours for years. Why wouldn’t you want to get the first-hand experience?”

  Haylee reaches for me, but I brush her off, staring at my mother across the forgotten tea service. She looks different from the way I remember. Was it just my little kid’s brain that painted her as so beautiful in my memories? Her face is lined, much more so than my father’s, four years her senior. She’s thinner than I remember, all boney angles. And her hair is shorter and lank now, a dull brownish shade. It used to be so long, shining and smooth. Blond, almost white, just like Daltrey’s. Daltrey. Who was five when she left. I feel something like a sob—or maybe a yell—rise in my throat, and I have to dig my heel into my other foot to keep it together.

  She holds her chin up a little, her voice stronger now. “I didn’t think it would be appropriate,” she says. “Or fair to you.”

  “Fair.”

  “Lennon—”

  I shake my head, the desire to laugh overtaking me again. She didn’t think it would be fair. “Don’t mind me.” I wave between the two of them. “You were talking about the tour. I interrupted.”

  “Lennon,” Haylee whispers. My mother is staring at me with wide eyes.

  “What? You don’t want to talk about the tour?” I know my tone is nasty, know that Haylee doesn’t deserve to sit here and listen to me like this. But I can’t help it. “What should we talk about instead?” I gesture down at the scrapbook. “Looks like you know all about how we’ve been, huh? So what about you? How have you been, Mom? Been keeping busy?”

  She swallows, straightening her shoulders, like she’s walking into battle. “I have been, yes. Giverny is a very nice little town and close enough to Paris for an afternoon trip once in a while.”

  “And what do you do here, in this nice little town?”

  If my tone is affecting her, she doesn’t show it. “I’m an artist.” She gestures at the wall next to the fireplace. “I’ve been selling my paintings for several years now. My garden sculptures bring in more money, but it’s the painting that I really enjoy.” Those wire and glass sculptures outside. She made those. And the painting on the wall—maybe all of them? I squint at the one near the fireplace. A swirling sea of blue and green, a bright, oversized sun above casting light onto the waves. I try to imagine the woman I knew painting that, painting anything, and I can’t. Her life now has no connection to the life we had then. No connection to who she used to be. No connection to us.

  Except for this book. When I don’t reply, Haylee takes a deep breath. “Lennon and I saw a lot of beautiful art in Paris,” she says, clearly trying to keep things civil.

  My mother’s face brightens. “Did you go to the Louvre? What was your favorite?”

  “Uh, no, not the Louvre. We spent a lot of time at Musee d’Orsay.”

  I can see Paige’s face so clearly in my head, looking at me in the van outside the museum. Telling me that she chose it specifically for me. That it reminded her of me. Because Paige knew me. Your heart is, Paige told me when I asked her about beauty and light.

  After my accident this summer, I refused to talk to anyone. Once Levi and my father dropped the bombshell of what had been happening with me, my brothers freaked out. There was so much yelling that night. Cash had broken things. Punches had been thrown. When the doctors finally kicked them out of the room, I refused to let any of them back in for days. Not my father, not the boys, not Levi. I couldn’t face them, not after what I had done. In the end, it was Daisy who finally forced her way in to see me. She sat next to my bed for three hours and talked to me about everything that had happened. Talked to me about her suicide attempt two years earlier and what her recovery had been like. Told me how it felt in her head and her heart back then, how hopeless and broken and worthless she had felt. And then she held my hand and told me that it could get better, just like it had for her.

  I can’t look at my mother anymore. I can’t think about how Daisy and Paige know me better than she does. How they were with me on the worst day of my life. Or how Haylee was the one with me for the happiest moments. And my mother wasn’t around for any of them.

  I stare down at the book in my lap, idly flipping through the pages. Toward the back there’s a magazine clipping, an article from a gossip magazine. It’s Daisy and Daltrey walking into a restaurant back in Nashville, before the tour. He has his hand on her back, opening the door for her. It was still summer then, and she’s wearing a tank top, the material stretching across her slightly swollen stomach. A baby makes three? questioned the headline. On that page my mom had used a paperclip to attach another picture. An old Polaroid of four little boys sitting on a couch. The older two looked a lot more similar back then than they do now, the color of their hair the only really distinguishing feature. The third is barely a toddler, looking up at his older brothers and laughing. A baby is laid across the oldest one’s lap, and none of them seem to know what to do with him.

  He used to cry all the time, I think, bringing the tip of one finger to Daltrey’s tiny face. That is the first thing I remember about him. That he would cry. And Reed and Cash used to sing songs at the top of their lungs to cover the sound, to make me laugh.

  I go to the very front of the scrapbook and turn the pages with shaking fingers, looking at every single one, moving faster and faster until I get back to the end. The shot of us with Daltrey the day he came home from the hospital is the only real photograph.

  “Lennon?” Haylee asks, and I look up, realizing they’ve both stopped talking to watch me. I toss the book onto the table in front of me, knocking over one of the empty tea cups.

  “One photo,” I say, unable to stop my voice from shaking. “One photo of us.”

  Her face crumples. “I didn’t have the chance to take more.”

  One photo from the day Daltrey came home and then not another reminder of us until we became famous. And all those years in between—moving, starting over, birthdays, crushes, learning to play music, all those shitty gigs we played as teenagers, all those heartbreaks—nothing.

  Suddenly I want to turn the table over, want to rip the paintings from the wall, to destroy this sunny, happy little room filled with her art and her colors. I understand, for the first time, why Cash likes breaking things so much when he’s upset. I want to break everythi
ng.

  “This was a mistake,” I say, standing. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

  “I’m glad you came,” my mother says, crossing to me, her face desperate. “I’m so glad you came. Please, let’s talk—”

  “What’s there to talk about?” I cry, feeling savage satisfaction when she flinches. “You don’t know me, and I don’t want to know you.”

  “Of course I know you, Lennon—”

  “Shut up!” I scream, turning to grab the book and throwing it to the ground at her feet. “A lot happened between that picture and the start of the first damn tour.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I don’t think you do! I don’t think you could have any idea what it was like for us after you left.”

  She flinches. “I can’t ask you to forgive me, Lennon. I don’t deserve to be forgiven. But I am sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

  I hate myself for the tears in my eyes, hate myself for wishing she would touch me, that she might put her arms around me. “Then why didn’t you come back?” My voice cracks, and I sound fifteen years younger. Like a little kid, left behind, wishing his mom would come home. “You had years to change your mind, to be sorry. Why couldn’t you come back?”

  It isn’t until she wipes her eyes that I realize tears are streaming down her face. “Because you all deserved so much better than me. I couldn’t come back.”

  “That’s bullshit. It’s an excuse.”

  “No, Lennon, it’s the truth.” She reaches for my arm, and the yearning I feel for her touch is so strong it horrifies me. I jerk away from her. “I couldn’t come back.”

  “Why?”

  She looks me straight in the eyes and responds with a question of her own. “What do you remember about me leaving?”

  We were in the car. She took me back to that place that scared me so much. And when I cried she left me in the car.

  I reel back, feeling like she slapped me. “Nothing,” I say, my voice shaking.