Redemption Page 6

  That wasn't enough, though. Divorce wasn't enough. I knew that now better than I ever would have known it then.

  I would never really know what exactly had led him to look at her that way or what had built up inside of him to the point that he could wrap his fingers around the handle of the knife that was sitting on the kitchen table. Something must have happened that day to bring him to the house and to lock them in that confrontation, but no one ever told me. I didn't know if I wanted to know. Nothing could ever explain what he did. It didn't matter what he had gone through or what was happening between them. Nothing would ever make me believe that the fury in his eyes and the tightness of his grip on that knife were justified.

  Even now as an adult I wondered if I would be able to understand what was going through his mind or his heart in that moment. As a child, I certainly didn't understand. All I understood was terror. I should have run. I should have tried to get out of the house. Maybe if I had I would have been able to find help. Instead, I was paralyzed with a fear that was coursing through me. I couldn't move beyond the corner of the room where I sat on the carpet playing with my army men figurines. I tightened my hold on those toys in the same way that my father tightened his hold on the knife that was in his hand. I could still feel the hard, green plastic digging into my palms and fingers as I squeeze the men tighter and tighter. To this day I don't know if my father even knew that I was there. His focus was unbreakable. He was thinking of nothing but the blade and my mother's throat.

  I stayed right there where I had been sitting until the smell of the blood filled my lungs and my mother's screams deadened in my ears. They had ended, but they were never silenced. Even now I could still hear them. My father left the knife embedded in the carpet beside my mother and returned to the kitchen. I didn't know what he was doing. I couldn't see him any longer. That was when I left. I ran for the phone that was in my parents’ bedroom, but there was nothing but a disheartening silence on the other end when I picked it up. It wasn't until I put it back in its cradle that I realized the wires had been torn from the wall. It was the same with the phone in the small office. By the time that I got back into the living room, the front door of the house was standing open and my father was no longer in the kitchen. I didn't bother to go for the phone there. If he was in that room that meant that the wires to the phone would be dangling in the same frayed condition as the other phones. I went back into the living room and my eyes fell on my mother. I didn't want to look at her that way, but it seemed that I couldn't keep my gaze away from her. I wanted to see her face. Instead, all I could see was the wound in her throat. There was fraying there, too, and for many years after I wasn't able to look at the wires of a phone without my stomach turning and tears stinging the back of my eyes.

  I ran out of the front door of the house that day, not knowing that I would never step foot in it again. Instead, I ran down the street, afraid that at any moment my father was going to be there in front of me. I didn't know where he was. I didn't know then that he had gone into the kitchen to get more knives. I didn't know that he had gone to the next-door neighbor's house. I didn't know that the screams I was hearing in my mind weren't reverberations of my mother's voice. I was still holding onto my army men when I got to the police station. Maybe that was why they didn't seem to believe me when I first told them what I had seen. They thought that it was my imagination, that it was part of the game that was playing out through the little plastic figures gripped so tightly in my young hands. Finally, someone noticed the footprints that my shoes had left across the floor of the lobby. It glistened with the blood that I had picked up crossing the living room to the front door.

  I squeezed my eyes closed, tightening my grip on the bathroom counter and trying to count.

  1... 2... 3... 4... 5... 6... 7... 8... 9... 10

  I tried to focus, to pull myself out of those bitter, painful memories and thoughts. I drew myself inward, dragging my consciousness away from the edges of my mind where those memories lurked and forcing them to think only of the numbers I kept repeating.

  10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4...3...2... 1

  Finally, my heart rate normalized, my breath returned to its steady pace, and I felt in control again. I had been told countless times before that these memories would always be with me and that I would never truly escape them. That never stopped me from trying.

  I pushed away from the counter and turned the bathroom light off. I walked down the hallway to Jason's bedroom and knocked on the door with one knuckle.

  "Jason," I called through the door. "We need to get going."

  "I told you that I'm not going," he called from inside his room.

  "And I told you that you don't have a choice," I said.

  I heard a few stomping footsteps approach the door and it opened. Jason stared out at me with a look of exasperation on his face.

  "Why? Why do I have to go with you to this thing? They're throwing the party for you, not for me."

  "They're throwing the party to welcome me into the community. That means that they're going to want to meet you and welcome you as well."

  "What if I don't want to be welcomed?"

  "Again, you don't have the choice. And you need to cut the attitude."

  "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just that I wanted to go hang out with some new friends tonight."

  "New friends?" I asked.

  I was surprised to hear Jason mentioning having made any new friends. He had only gone to one day of school, and when he came home he didn't have anything to report other than the fact that he didn't like his History teacher. He hadn't mentioned even meeting any new people, much less making any friends who he would want to spend any time with.

  "Yeah," he said. "I met a couple of guys and they're going to be hanging out tonight."

  "Well, I'm sorry, but we have something else to do. You can hang out with them another time. Come on. We've got to get going."

  Jason let out another of his masterfully teenaged sighs but followed me out of his room and through the house.

  There were already several cars in the parking lot at the community center when we arrived, and I was worried that we might be late. When we stepped inside, however, I saw that the people there were still scurrying around making preparations for the party. We had only been there for a matter of seconds when a bright-eyed woman rushed up to me.

  "Oh! Mr. Allen! You're here!"

  "Yes," I said, "but it's Garrett."

  The woman smiled at me and extended her hand toward me. I took it and she shook it enthusiastically.

  "Yes, Garrett, of course. I'm Sarah. I'm the head of the committee throwing the party tonight."

  "It's very nice to meet you," I said. "And thank you for doing all this for me."

  She blushed so deeply I wondered if that sentiment meant something different here.

  "Oh, it was nothing. It's the least that we could do to welcome you here and show you how excited we are to have you as our fire chief. I have it on good authority that your firefighting career has been very impressive."

  "Thank you," I said. "I'm happy to be here and look forward to serving the community in my new post."

  "Come with me," she said. "There are so many people who want to meet you."

  I started following her further into the room and Jason fell into step behind me. As we made our way through the room meeting other members of the committee and watching as the final touches were being put on the preparations for the party, more people started streaming in and soon the small room started to feel almost crowded. I turned to introduce Jason to one of the firefighters who would be working with me and found that he was no longer standing behind me. I looked around but didn't see him. At some point, he had disappeared into the growing crowd and I assumed that he had ventured off to hang out with his friends as he had planned, feeling as though he had fulfilled his obligation of coming to the party by at least coming to the community center with me and meeting some people. I was angry with him
for going against what I had told him, but at the same time, I was happy that he had managed to meet people and make friends so quickly. I reminded myself that that was part of the reason why we were here in the first place, and I should be glad that he was assimilating into his new community, rather than trying to find any way that he could to go back to our old home. I couldn't be angry that he wanted to go out and enjoy himself. It was a good thing, and hopefully the first step on the right path. We just might need to have a conversation about his interpretations of my instructions.

  Half an hour later I was standing with several older members of the community eating my way through a towering plate of dessert. I probably should have stuck with the vegetable tray and intriguing interpretation of a fruit sculpture, but my sweet tooth was hard to control when I was presented with an entire table of treats. I figured in the greater scheme of my character flaws, the occasional indulgence in far too many refined sugars and carbohydrates were the least of my worries. I would just spend some extra time in the tiny gym I was setting up in the house. Just as I expected they would, the people standing around me were asking questions and trying to figure out as much about me as they could. I was carefully navigating telling them about myself without delving too deeply into my past. I focused on my time in the military and the years that I had spent fighting fires rather than my family or my broken marriage. When they asked, I simply told them that my parents were dead, and I had no extended family. And it was just me and my son. Fortunately, they seemed satisfied. I was fairly sure that I wouldn't be getting as many bright smiles and encouraging pats on the back if they knew that the reason I was a single father was because I left my wife behind after she cheated on me with my best friend and made it abundantly clear that she had no interest in being a mother. Part of me hated that I was doing that. The fact that she was gone wasn't Jason's fault. It wasn't even my fault. Yet it left both of us marked, just as I had been marked by my father. I didn't want him defined by the past, but I didn't know how to escape it.

  I was taking a bite of my third helping of a trifle that I had gotten from the table when I glanced up and saw a woman staring at me. She was across the room and people were passing in between us, periodically blocking her from my view. But every time that they passed, and she became visible again, I saw that she was looking at me. Her pale blonde hair was hanging to her shoulders and she wore a sweater over a dress that went nearly to her ankles. She glanced away, talking to the bubbly woman who had greeted me, then down at the food on the plate that she was holding. A few moments later, she looked up at me again. I stared at her, trying to remember if she was one of the people who I had met during the party. I couldn't remember talking to her, but there was something familiar about her face. I saw Sarah return to her side, looking frantic, and the woman followed her away deeper into the crowd. I continued to eat and meander through the party, going over the speech that I knew that I was going to make, in my head. I had been hesitant when they told me that they wanted me to make a brief speech. I had never been one to enjoy public speaking and I didn't really know what I should say to them. They had been insistent, however, and I had spent the last several days methodically trying to come up with a statement that would seem sufficiently friendly and grateful without leaving me up at the podium for more than a few moments.

  I was debating over the way that I would wrap up my speech when I looked up and noticed the woman again. She was now standing next to the dessert table, but she was still staring intently at me. I was a few steps closer to her than I had been the first time I saw her, and she looked even more familiar. Suddenly she reached up and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, at the same time licking her bottom lip and a memory burst into my mind. This was the gorgeous, sultry woman I had the one-night stand with. It was shocking to see her standing there, but it was equally shocking to see her in such a different way. When she was at the bar, she looked nothing short of Lycra and leather-packaged sex. Now her face was fresher, her hair soft and without the styling product that it had, and the clothing she was wearing was demure. The effect made her seem older than I would have thought she was when I met her and made her look like she hoped she could fade into the wallpaper of whatever room she happened to find herself in. I raised my eyebrows at her and her cheeks flushed. I knew that she recognized me too.

  Making my way across the room, I didn't take my eyes away from her. I didn't want her to have a chance to disappear into the crowd. She seemed to be busying herself arranging the silverware and straightening the piles of napkins on the table when I approached and stood beside her.

  "Hi there, Debbie," I said softly. "Are you here advertising your flea circus?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about," she said, her voice a hushed whisper.

  I scoffed.

  "Of course, you do."

  She looked up at me sharply. Though the expression on her face didn't continue it, there was still hunger in her eyes.

  "What are you doing here?" she asked.

  I laughed.

  "What do you mean what am I doing here?" I asked. "What are you doing here?"

  "I'm helping with the party," she said. "Sarah is fantastic at coming up with ideas, but she gets a little flighty when it comes to actually pulling it all together."

  "So, you are moral support?" I asked.

  "Not entirely," she said. "I hung some crepe paper and I pushed a bunch of balloons that were apparently too blue to be blue into a back storage room. I also made a dessert."

  She was adorable trying to explain her involvement in the party and I felt my stomach tightening. She had been sexy and exciting when I met her at the bar, but she was enticing in a different way now. She was cute, but not in the giggly, flaky way that so many women were. She was sassy, and I could see a spark in her that intrigued me.

  "Which dessert did you make?" I asked.

  She pointed to the nearly empty trifle dish in the center of the table.

  "The trifle," she said. "It's my signature dessert."

  "That was my favorite," I told her. "I had three servings."

  "So, it's your fault that we're almost out of it," she said.

  I shrugged.

  "The other people just weren't fast enough."

  She laughed softly, then quieted and continued to look at me for several seconds.

  "So," she said. "I guess we managed to find each other again."

  "I guess we did," I said.

  "Well, if we're going to be in the same town, we should probably come clean."

  Oh, lord. What did she mean by that?

  "Come clean?" I asked.

  She nodded.

  "I happen to know that your name isn't Ethan," she said.

  I withheld a sigh of relief.

  "And you're not Debbie," I said.

  She shook her head.

  "My name is Gwendolyn," she told me. "And I don't run a flea circus."

  "To be fair," I said, "you didn't say that you ran the flea circus. You said that you were the costume designer for the flea circus."

  She laughed.

  "Alright," she said. "Well, I'm not the costume designer, either."

  "So why did you pick Debbie? You don't really look like a Debbie."

  "I've been having a major craving for a snack cake," she admitted.

  "A snack cake?" I asked with a laugh. "You can make a trifle like this and you reach for box snack cakes?"

  "Hey," she said with mock defensiveness. "I might be able to layer, but I don't have anything on Little Debbie."

  "Fair enough," I said.

  I started to reintroduce myself to her, but I felt a hand on my elbow and I looked over my shoulder to see Anthony, the man who had hired me, standing behind me.

  "I'm sorry, Gwendolyn, but I'm going to need to steal him for a minute."

  She shrugged, and I smiled at her before following Anthony toward the podium across the room. I knew it was time for me to do my speech. By the time that I stepped behind the pod
ium my nervousness at speaking in front of the group was gone as was virtually everything that I had planned to say. Fortunately, I managed to ramble on for a few minutes, elicited a few laughs, and walked away with the applause of the crowd I felt I had effectively convinced that if they happened to find themselves in a fire or other such an emergency, they could trust me to actually be there for them and help them out of it. Shaking hands and graciously accepting the congratulations and welcome wishes of the people who crowded up to the podium after I spoke, I made my way back across the room toward the dessert table to continue my conversation with Gwendolyn. When I arrived, however, I found the plate that she had been holding sitting on the edge of the table, and she was gone.

  This wasn't exactly the reenactment of our last encounter that I was thinking about.

  Chapter Six

  Gwendolyn

  I was still thinking about Garrett when I got to school the next morning.

  Garrett. Not Ethan. Somehow that fits so much better.

  Every thought about him made me feel a little bit woozy and I couldn't get my mind off the night that we had spent together. It was those thoughts, though, that had caused me to rush out of the party the night before, while he was still up at the podium speaking. I didn't know how I could possibly be so stupid that I didn't know who he was when I saw him. How could I possibly help throw a party to welcome the new fire chief in town, and then not recognize him when I saw him? Even more than that, how could I not know that I had already been his very own welcome committee in a way I'm sure the elderly members of the community were just not up for providing?

  As soon as I saw Anthony leading him away from me and up to the podium to make his speech, I had felt my stomach drop. He hadn't had the opportunity to, so it was up to me to make the slow, embarrassing realization of who he was as he stood up there and thanked everyone in attendance, including me, for being so friendly and gracious. It wasn't that we had a one-night stand. It wasn't even that I had left the hotel in the morning before he was able to wake up. What embarrassed me is that he had uncovered who I really was. Now it made so much sense why he was more than happy to give fake names and create ridiculous stories for ourselves when we were still in the bar. He didn't have anything to cover up. Other than his name, he was essentially the same person that I had met in the bar. Gorgeous. Strong. Charismatic.