From This Day On

The tsunami lifted, as if launching itself. She must look like him. The horror was more than she could hold inside. Amy shoved away from the table, staggering to her feet when the chair crashed backward. She felt filthy, contaminated, ugly. Why hadn’t her mother aborted her?

But she knew that, too. Mom wasn’t a regular churchgoer, but she still wore a gold cross on a fine chain around her neck. She had been raised Catholic. Abortion wouldn’t have been on the table as an option.

The part of Amy that was still thinking understood what her mother had gone through, how she had reasoned. She couldn’t take her disaster to parents who had been stern and strict. The only truly acceptable choice to her was marriage. So she had latched onto the first guy who came her way, slept with him, lied to him, let him think the monstrous thing she was going to bear was his.

And then she got lucky, because Amy was small enough that Josef hadn’t guessed the baby wasn’t his. But somewhere along the way he had begun to wonder.

Or had he? Amy asked herself with near-clinical detachment. Perhaps instead something had happened. Blood type would have been a dead giveaway. Amy had given blood and knew she was B positive. She was willing to bet that Mom wasn’t...and neither was Josef Nilsson. Yes, that would have done it. So then came the yelling that the adults had silenced when she came into a room, the intense, hissing arguments that she could almost hear clearly through her bedroom wall at night. Only a kindergartener, she had pulled her covers over her head and huddled, not wanting to make out words.

No wonder the man she had believed to be her father had gradually lost interest in her! Looking back, she knew he had tried. Really, he had been kind. It was for her sake that he’d maintained the facade. But even then, at six and seven, at ten and twelve and fifteen, she had known something was wrong.

She had known that neither parent truly loved her.

And her brother Jakob sure as hell hadn’t.

Oh, God, she thought in shock. He knew. He must know.

He’d endured her weekend visits, and she wasn’t even his sister. No wonder he’d resented her. Despised her.

She stood in the middle of her mother’s kitchen, almost catatonic. A soft, keening sound came from her throat. Her very existence felt like an abomination. She wanted to wipe herself out.

Every time her mother looked at this child born of rape, she must have felt violated all over again.

Able to move again, Amy backed away from the table that held the baby book with all those careful notations, the album filled with pictures that reinforced how different she was. Empty stomach or not, sickness rose inside her, pushed by the huge swell of emotions she couldn’t let herself feel.

This time when she ran, it was for the shower, where she scrubbed herself over and over, not stopping even when the water ran cold.

* * *

JAKOB CIRCLED THROUGH the alley and saw Amy’s small white car parked beside the garage that he assumed held Michelle’s and Ken’s vehicles.

So she was home.

He had started calling yesterday. Her phone rang, but he always ended up at voice mail. She ignored messages. He tried email. No response. He hadn’t gotten a damn thing done at the office yesterday or today, worrying about her. By last evening, he’d been pissed. To hell with her. He’d offered his support, she didn’t want it. Her privilege. No skin off his back.

That didn’t keep him from trying to call his father. Who didn’t answer, either.

Jakob kept remembering the way Amy stared down at the women’s panties in her hand, and anger vaulted back into worry and then into something even more compelling. He was going to feel like an idiot if she was absolutely fine, didn’t need him. She might have been busy, that’s all, entertaining friends or working.

Feeling like an idiot was a risk he was willing to take.

He rang the doorbell and got no response. After an interval he rang it again, then started pounding. An old guy was out in the front yard next door, using hand clippers to nibble away at a hedge that was already trimmed to perfection. He straightened and glared. Jakob didn’t care.

“Amy,” he bellowed. “I know you’re in there. Open this door.”

He heard noises inside at last. Fumbling with the locks. Then the door opened a crack.

“What?” she snarled.

Oh, man. She didn’t look good, even though he was seeing only a slice of her face. What he could see was wan, freckles he’d hardly known she had standing out like splotches of paint.

Jakob planted a hand on the door and pushed her inexorably backward despite her obvious alarm.

“What are you doing?” she cried in panic. “I told you, I want to be alone.”

“And I’ve left you alone,” he said grimly. “Apparently, for longer than I should have.”

He slid inside the opening and felt a new jolt of shock. “You’re sick.”

Her glare was surly. “I am not.”

He bit off an expletive. “You look like hell. Damn it, Amy...!”

Her hair, that beautiful mass of red-brown curls, was a thicket of tangles, flattened on one side, kinked on the other. Amy’s eyes were huge in a face that he would swear had lost flesh in only two days. It was six in the evening and she wore wrinkled flannel pajama bottoms and a tank top that was faded and stretched out. Her arms, long and skinny, were wrapped around herself as though they were all that held her together.

The defiant stare stayed in place, but as he watched she swayed on her feet.

He swore again and reached for her. She scrambled backward.

“Don’t touch me!”

Was she afraid of him?

“You’re ready to keel over.”

“I’m not. I’m fine. I’m...” She apparently derailed. Her eyes became increasingly glassy. “I’m...”

“Sick.”

“I’m not! I’m fine, I’m...”

“Either sick or in shock.” So what if she was afraid of him? Jakob grabbed her arm. “Where’s the kitchen?”

“What?”

He made a decision and marched her toward the back of the house. She stumbled beside him but seemed to have run out of protests.

The kitchen, he saw, had been entirely remodeled at some point with white cabinets, granite countertops and a copper rack for pans. A table sat in a breakfast nook in front of French doors. He pulled out a chair and let Amy drop into it.

“When’s the last time you ate?”

Her face held no comprehension. “Ate?”

Answer enough. Jakob opened and closed cupboard doors and the refrigerator until he had the ingredients for a primitive and quick menu. Soup and sandwiches. He dumped a spicy corn chowder he liked himself into a saucepan and started it heating while he assembled cheese sandwiches and heated a small frying pan to grill them.

“You can’t make me eat,” Amy said sulkily.

“Watch me,” he told her.