“I don’t want to dismiss it,” said Will. “I want to squash your spider. I want to kill the damned thing.”
Tess felt the tears rise again. “I don’t want to dismiss your flat feeling either.”
Will reached across the table and held out his hand, palm up. She looked at it for a moment, considering, and then she laid her hand in his. The sudden warmth of his hand, its simultaneous familiarity and strangeness, the way it enfolded hers, reminded her of the first time they met, when they were introduced in the reception area of the company where Tess worked, and her usual anxiety about meeting new people was overwhelmed by a powerful attraction to this shortish, grinning man with the laughing gold eyes looking straight into hers.
They sat silently, holding hands, not looking at each other, and Tess thought of the way Felicity’s eyes flickered when she asked her if she and Will had held hands on the plane from Melbourne, and she nearly pulled her hand away; but then she remembered standing outside the pub with Connor, his thumb caressing her palm, and for some reason she thought also of Cecilia Fitzpatrick sitting in a hospital room with poor little beautiful Polly right now, and of Liam, safe upstairs, in his blue flannel pajamas, dreaming of chocolate eggs. She looked up at the clear, starry night sky and imagined Felicity on a plane somewhere high above them, flying off into a different day, a different season, a different life, watching the inflight movie, reading her book, wondering how in the world it had come to this.
The sensor light on her mother’s back porch flickered, and suddenly they were plunged into darkness. Neither of them moved.
There were so many decisions to be made. How would they manage the next part of their lives? Would they stay in Sydney? Keep Liam at St. Angela’s? Impossible. She’d see Connor every day. What about the business? Would they replace Felicity? That seemed impossible too. In fact, it all seemed impossible. Insurmountable.
What if Will and Felicity really were meant to be together? What if she and Connor were meant to be together? Perhaps there were no answers to questions like that. Perhaps nothing was ever “meant to be.” There was just life, and right now, and doing your best. Being a bit “bendy.”
“We’ll give it until Christmas,” said Tess after a moment. “If you still miss her by Christmas, if you still want her by then, you should go to her.”
“Don’t say that. I’ve told you. I don’t—”
“Shhh.” She held his hand tighter, and they sat in the moonlight, clinging to the wreckage of their marriage.
FIFTY-FIVE
It was done.
Cecilia and John-Paul sat side by side watching Polly’s closed eyelids flutter and smooth, flutter and smooth, as if they were tracking the progress of her dreams.
Cecilia held on to Polly’s left hand, ignoring the tears sliding down her face and dripping off her chin. She remembered sitting with John-Paul at another hospital, at the dawn of another autumn day, after two hours of intense labor. (Cecilia gave birth efficiently; a little too efficiently with their third daughter.) She and John-Paul were counting Polly’s fingers and toes, as they’d done with Isabel and Esther, a ritual like opening and inspecting a marvelous, magical gift.
Now their eyes kept returning to the space where Polly’s right arm should have been. It was an anomaly, an oddness, an optical discrepancy. From now on it wouldn’t be her beauty that would cause people to stare at her in shopping centers.
Cecilia let the tears slide on and on. She needed to get all her crying out of the way, because she was determined that Polly would never see her shed a tear. Cecilia was about to step into a new life: her life as an amputee’s mother. Even as she cried, she could feel her muscles tensing in readiness, as if she were an athlete about to begin a marathon. Soon she would be fluent in a new language of stumps and prostheses and God knows what else. She’d move heaven and earth and bake muffins and pay fraudulent compliments to get the best results for her daughter. No one was better qualified than Cecilia for this role.