From This Day On

“Why are you here, anyway?”

“You promised to call. I got worried.” He stirred the chowder.

“I didn’t want to talk to you.”

“Yeah, I figured that out.” A fire was burning in his belly. He kind of hoped some food would put it out. “Tough shit,” he added after a moment.

Apparently that silenced her. Her head bent and she stared down at her hands, clasped childishly on her lap.

Jakob got out bowls and plates, flipped the sandwiches and stirred the soup one more time, not once looking at Amy, but aware of her with every cell in his body. He was mad again, and self-aware enough to guess it was a cover for everything else he felt.

Finally, he dished up and set her food in front of her. “You going to tell me what you want to drink, or should I decide for you?”

Her chin shot up. “Wine.”

“Milk,” he decided, and poured them both glasses. Thank God she didn’t buy skim. He could live with two percent.

He sat down kitty-corner from her with his own sandwich and soup. Maybe it would help if they weren’t looking right at each other. “Eat,” he ordered her, and started in on his food. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her stare at the food as if she didn’t know what it was, then finally pick up the spoon. After some hesitant sips, she began to eat faster and faster until she was all but gobbling.

Good.

The meal settled him down some, too. Without a word he got up and set the coffeemaker to brewing, then sat again.

“Okay,” he said. “Now we talk.”

She’d worked up enough spirit to glare. When she opened her mouth, Jakob interrupted.

“It’s not going to do you any good to say ‘I don’t have to.’”

“I don’t understand why you care.”

He fell back on the old standby. “We’re family.”

And finally she quit fighting. The pain in her big brown eyes was so vast, his stomach clenched.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think we are. And you know it, don’t you?”

* * *

SO, WHY DO you care? she wanted to beg him again.

But maybe she didn’t want to know. Because...he was here, and whether she was willing to admit it or not, she’d needed someone. Anyone at all.

“Tell me what you learned,” he said, not addressing her accusation. There were lines on his forehead that hadn’t been there. Despite the neutral tone, she thought he wasn’t only here out of obligation.

Maybe she was kidding herself, but she was going with it for now.

“I’ll show you,” she said, after a minute. Two days ago, she had swept the manila envelope and its contents along with her baby book and the photograph album into a reusable shopping bag—Mom had a whole drawer full of them, neatly folded—and hid it at the back of the coat closet under the staircase, which she went to retrieve.

She returned to find he’d piled the dirty dishes in the sink and was pouring coffee. Amy dropped the bag with a thud in the middle of the table. She pulled out her mother’s datebook.

“Cream? Sugar?” Jakob asked.

She put in her order and he brought both mugs to the table, then retook his seat. Amy shoved the datebook toward him. “I read the whole thing. You can go right to the end. It pretty much tells the whole story.”

He looked down at it for a minute, as if reluctant, then opened it to the back. The pages for April, May and June were blank, of course; by then, the datebook had been entombed in the time capsule. He reached the page that held Michelle Cooper’s final statement, read silently.

Amy knew what it said by heart. The part about how the old me is dead. And finally, This is what happened to me at Wakefield College. This is what I choose to say: Steven Hardy raped me.

Jakob muttered an obscenity and looked up, a storm of emotions in his eyes. Anger was the only one Amy was certain she’d picked out.

“You think this—” he glanced back down at the open page of the book “—Steven Hardy is your father.” The emotions had roughened his voice, but it was also astonishingly compassionate.

“Yes.” The single word sounded so small, so stark. She couldn’t look at him anymore. Instead she gazed, as she had done most evenings since she had moved into her mother’s house, at the garden and the roses she hadn’t watered since she left for eastern Washington.

“Do you have any other evidence?”

“Yes.” She had to clear her throat. She pulled out the baby book. “I was born small enough that no one questioned Mom’s claim that I was premature. But I went through this and compared my milestones with the standard charts. If I really was premature, I should have been behind. I wasn’t. If anything, I was ahead from the very beginning. If my birth weight was evidence that I was premature, I should eventually have gained on my contemporaries, but I didn’t. The truth is, all through school I was in the bottom twenty-five percent in weight. I still am. I’m skinny.”

His gaze flicked over her and he nodded. “You’re small-boned,” he said slowly. “Slim.”

She appreciated his kindness in making skinny sound a little more appealing.

“And then there’s the family album.” She opened that next, turning pages until she found a picture taken, at a guess, not long before the divorce. All four of them were in it. She scooted the album over so he could see the picture.

He looked in silence for a long time. Without looking herself, she knew exactly what he was seeing. Not only the fact that she didn’t fit, but also the tensions that were visible despite smiles for the camera. There was something anxious on her face, bewilderment in her eyes. The adults might be smiling, but they weren’t touching. Josef’s hand lay on his son’s shoulder. Jakob’s expression was stony. Michelle stood behind Amy, but wasn’t touching her, either. There was a distinct distance between the two children, too. Body language all but shouted the news that this family was splintering.

“Not a good moment in our lives,” Jakob observed at last.

“Funny, I remember looking at the picture and not seeing that. I think I’ve been guilty of a lot of self-deception.”

“Maybe.” He waited until she had to turn her head and meet his eyes, closer to gray right now than blue. “But you don’t know, do you?”

“I do,” she said sharply.

“You’re still guessing.”

She narrowed her eyes. “But you already knew, didn’t you?”

He hesitated. “No. I heard things that made me wonder, that’s all. Remember, I wasn’t very old. Mostly, I put what I heard out of my mind.”

The slightest change of intonation in his voice there at the end suggested he was lying, although she didn’t know why he’d bother. After a minute, though, she nodded, as if in acceptance.

“You were only eight. No, I guess nine at the end.”

“Their yelling freaked me out.”

“Me, too,” she admitted. “I pulled the covers over my head at night. Sometimes the pillow, too, when they got especially loud. I knew I didn’t want to hear what they were saying. I was so scared.”