Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

“Congratulations.” Jack Ahern took her hand again with a courtly bow. “I hope you and the groom will be very happy.”

“Take care of yourself, Rachel.” Brian was already moving away with a distant smile and too-bright eyes. “Great seeing you.”

They walked down to Park Street and took a left and passed from view.

She stood on the sidewalk and took stock of the encounter. Brian Delacroix had filled out some since 2001. It became him. The Brian she had met had been too skinny, his neck too slim for his head. His cheekbones and chin had been a little too soft. Now his features were clearly defined. He’d reached the age — thirty-five, she was guessing — where he’d probably begun to resemble his father and had stopped looking like someone’s son. He dressed far better and was easily twice as handsome as he’d been in 2001, and he’d been plenty handsome then. So in regards to personal appearance, all changes to the good.

But the energy that had come off him, cloaked in pleasantries though it may have been, struck her as mildly unhinged and anxious. It was the energy of someone trying to sell you a timeshare. She knew from her research that he ran International Sales and Acquisition for Delacroix Lumber, and it saddened her to think that nearly a decade in sales had turned him into a glad-handing, air-kissing showman.

She pictured Sebastian, working away at 6 right now, probably leaning back in a chair, chewing a pencil as he cut tape, Sebastian the king of the crisp edit. Actually, everything about Sebastian was crisp. Crisp and clean and squared away. She could no more picture him in sales than she could picture him tilling the land. Sebastian was attractive to her, she realized in that moment, because there was nothing desperate or needy in his DNA.

Brian Delacroix, she thought. Such a shame life turned you into just another salesman.

Jeremy walked her down the aisle at the Church of the Covenant, and his eyes were wet when he lifted her veil. Jeremy, Maureen, Theo, and Charlotte all came to the reception at the Four Seasons. She only saw them a couple of times, but it was as comfortable with Jeremy and as awkward with Maureen and the children as it had always been.

After their first meeting, when Maureen had seemed genuinely pleased Rachel had found them, she grew more distant with each subsequent encounter, as if she’d only been welcoming of Rachel because she’d never expected her to hang around. She wasn’t rude by any means, or cold; she was simply not present in any substantive way. She smiled at Rachel and complimented her looks or clothing choice, asked about her job and Sebastian, and never failed to mention how happy Jeremy was to have her back in his life. But her eyes refused to lock onto Rachel’s and her voice carried a tone of strained brightness, like an actress trying so hard to remember her lines she forgot their meaning.

Theo and Charlotte, the almost half siblings she never had, treated Rachel with a mixture of deference and furtive panic. They hurried through all conversations, bobbing their heads at the floor, and never once asked her a question about herself, as if to do so would confer upon her the stature of the factual. Instead, it seemed imperative for them to continue to see her as something out of the mythic mist, inexorably moving toward their front door, but never actually arriving.

When Maureen, Theo, and Charlotte said their good-byes, about an hour into the reception, the relief at standing five steps from the exit door was so total it infused their limbs. Only Jeremy was shocked by the abruptness of their departure (both Maureen and Charlotte feared they were coming down with summer colds, and the drive back was long). Jeremy took Rachel’s hands in his and told her not to forget about the luminists or Colum Jasper Whitstone on her honeymoon; there’d be work to do when she returned.

“Of course I’ll forget,” she said, and he laughed.

The rest of the family drifted out to the valet stand to wait for the car.

Jeremy adjusted his glasses. He fiddled with his shirt where it bunched up around his belly, always self-conscious around her about his excess weight. He shot her his uncertain smile. “I know you would’ve wanted your real father to walk you down the aisle, but—”

She gripped his shoulders. “No, no. I was honored.”

“—but, but...” He shot his wavering smile at the wall behind her but then looked at her again. His voice grew deeper, stronger. “It meant the whole wide world to me to be able to do it.”

“Me too,” she whispered.

She placed her forehead on his shoulder. He placed his palm on the back of her neck. And in that moment, she felt as close to whole as she imagined she ever would.

After the honeymoon, she and Jeremy found it difficult to get together. Maureen wasn’t feeling well, nothing serious, just age, he supposed. But she needed him around, not gallivanting off to Boston to while away the summer in the reading rooms of the BPL or the Athenaeum. They managed to squeeze in lunch once in New London, and he looked weary, the flesh on his face too gray and tight to the bone. Maureen, he confided, was not well. She’d survived breast cancer two years ago. She had endured a double mastectomy, but her latest scans had come back inconclusive.

“Meaning?” She reached across the table and covered his hand with her own.

“Meaning,” he said, “her cancer could have recurred. They’re going to run more tests next week.” He adjusted and readjusted his glasses, then looked over them at her with a smile that said he was changing the subject. “How are the newlyweds?”

“Buying a house,” she said brightly.

“In the city?”

She shook her head, still coming to terms with it. “About thirty miles south, give or take. It needs updates and renovations so we won’t move in right away, but it’s a good town, good school system if we have kids. It’s not far from where Sebastian grew up. It’s also where he keeps his boat.”

“He loves that boat.”

“Hey, he loves me too.”

“I didn’t say he didn’t.” Jeremy shot her a wry smile. “I just said he loves that boat.”

Four days later, Jeremy suffered a stroke in his office at the college. He suspected it was a stroke but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure, so he drove himself to the nearest hospital. He drove his car halfway up onto a curb and staggered to the entrance. He made it to the ER on his own two feet but promptly suffered a second stroke in the waiting room. The first orderly to reach him was surprised by the strength in Jeremy’s soft professor’s hands when he grabbed the lapels of the orderly’s lab coat.

The last words Jeremy would speak for some time made little sense to the orderly or to anyone else, for that matter. He yanked the orderly’s face down to his own and his eyes bulged in their sockets.

“Rachel,” he slurred, “is in the mirror.”

Maureen shared the orderly’s claim with Rachel during Jeremy’s third night in the hospital.

“‘Rachel is in the mirror’?” Rachel repeated.

“That’s what Amir said.” Maureen nodded. “You look tired. You should get your rest.”

Rachel had to be back at work in an hour. She’d be late. Again. “I’m fine.”

In the bed, Jeremy stared up at the ceiling, his mouth agape, his eyes wiped clean of awareness.

“The drive must be terrible,” Charlotte said.

“It’s not bad.” Rachel sat on the windowsill because there were only three chairs in the room and they were all occupied by family.

“The doctors said he could be like this for months,” Theo said. “Or longer.”

Both Charlotte and Maureen began weeping. Theo went to them. The three of them huddled in their grief. For a few minutes all Rachel could see of them was their heaving backs.