CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Five days later, Rhys was stuck, in more ways than one. He cursed as an Audi boxed him into the parking spot he’d just started to back out of. He’d given Mrs. Hodge a couple of hours off and left work early to pick Will up from preschool to spend the afternoon with him. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find any quality time at all with his son now that Rhys had effectively barred himself from the shared areas of the house during waking hours.
Unable to face Andie, he’d buried himself in work ever since the incident in Will’s room. He’d handed bath duty back to Mrs. Hodge, who, with raised eyebrows, had agreed to work with Andie on the task.
Rhys felt he was the worst kind of coward. He’d left extra early for work the morning after the brush in the dark. He hadn’t been ready to face Andie—hadn’t known how on earth to finesse the strangely intimate screwup that threw the unacknowledged tension between them into such stark relief. It was easier not to deal with it at all.
The problem was that each moment of avoidance drove the wedge between them that much deeper. If he’d shown up at dinnertime on the first evening after the snafu, he now imagined, they might have been able to laugh it off over a casual glass of wine in the kitchen. But he hadn’t manned up, and the longer the void stretched between them, the more impossible it was for him to imagine bridging it. This afternoon he couldn’t just head home with Will, because Andie would probably be there, and he’d be struck mute with excruciating self-consciousness the moment he fell under the spell of the woven spokes of gold in her eyes.
If only he’d followed his impulse and kissed her that night in front of the fireplace, tasted the mellow red wine on her lips. He thought he’d read her signals correctly, that she wanted it, too, but then something had spooked her. He’d missed his window. And what had he done next? He’d blundered into Will’s room like some sleep-addled zombie and groped her. Way to go, Griffiths. Talk about suave.
He burned to think of the careless touch in Will’s room, to recall the incomparable softness of Andie’s skin, still imprinted on his clumsy fingertips, and her gasp of shock. Occasionally, he would stare in disbelief at his own hand, as if to disavow its traitorous presence on the end of his arm. But the critical problem was not with his fingers, he thought wretchedly. It was with him, with whom he was to the very core. I’ve botched it all.
With Andie barred from him, he took no solace from the fact that he was able to see Karina. A couple of days into his self-imposed exile from the house, he fidgeted and fumed through another visit between Will and her, this time at a local children’s museum. She was doing a little better with Will and seemed to be making a genuine effort to engage with him, but their meetings still had the uncomfortable habit of devolving into tears—either Will’s or Karina’s.
Now Will squirmed and hummed in his car seat as Rhys finally backed out of the parking spot and pulled the Range Rover into the stream of traffic heading for the center of town. But where would they go? It was with a little flash of inspiration that he remembered the ice-cream shop near the commuter-rail station.
“Want to get some ice cream, Will?” he proposed with exaggerated jollity. The truth was he’d become so dependent on Andie’s company that without it he felt off balance, insular, morose. There was something transformative about the sessions they had spent working with Will—those engrossingly practical efforts that swept away sadness with action and progress. She brought to their world a life-giving buoyancy. Without her, he could feel the pull of the dark current that had consumed him in the weeks surrounding Will’s diagnosis.
At the prospect of ice cream, Will had started to babble animatedly, injecting the stream of sounds with a richer range of vowels and consonants than he usually used. Following the advice of the speech therapist, Rhys tried to mimic the complex vocalizations and reflect Will’s excited inflection right back at him. Like two prehistoric birds, they squawked back and forth as they pulled into the lot by the station.
Rhys leaned in and placed a kiss on Will’s forehead as he unbuckled the safety seat. He swung the toddler into his arms and went up the steps into the store, which was actually more crowded than he had expected on a sleet-ravaged winter weekday. People waiting for the train had sheltered inside to avoid the cold and—ironically—wound up buying ice cream.
As soon as they were inside, Will struggled to get down. Rhys resisted for a few seconds but recognized the danger signs in the increasingly frenzied flapping of Will’s hands and his shrill tones of protest. He reluctantly lowered his son to the floor. Will immediately toddled into the forest of jean-clad legs of the moms, kids, and teens scattered around the open space of the store.
Rhys tried to fix one eye on the board of ice-cream flavors and coffee drinks, but Will was making a beeline for a couple of middle-school kids playing with the door in the corner that let out right onto the commuter-rail platform. They were idly opening and closing it, oblivious to the cold blast of air that poured in with each arc of movement. Rhys was forced to leave his place in line and dash over to scoop Will up before he got outside and headed right for the target of his fondest obsession: train tracks. Maybe this hadn’t been such a great idea, after all.
An older woman and her daughter had unknowingly taken his place in line by the time they returned to the front of the store, Will voicing his disapproval. Rhys bounced Will in his arms, bobbing in place as he examined the flavor selections, trying to halt Will’s thin squeal of displeasure. Rhys was dying for a coffee, but with Will to wrangle, he knew he’d have to cut his losses and focus on the vanilla soft-serve. He could caffeinate himself later.
Will’s cries gradually dwindled, to Rhys’s immense relief. But there was a middle-aged pair at the front of the line who seemed determined to sample every ice-cream flavor in the lineup. They held their little white plastic spoons with pinkie fingers extended, like connoisseurs, deliberating as if the choice between Moose Tracks and Peanut Butter Cup was a decision of national significance. Too irritated to watch them, Rhys let his gaze wander around the cluster of small tables. His eyes lit upon another pair seated at a table for two.
They were just another local father and son—the dad in jeans and a casual button-down shirt, with a toddler boy who appeared only slightly older than Will—but they enjoyed their ice creams, and each other’s company, with a conspicuous ease that drew Rhys’s attention like a magnet. What must it be like to live in a world where a trip to the ice-cream shop was a sure thing? An instant hit.
Rhys jiggled Will in his arms and watched as the father playfully snatched a napkin up from the tabletop and perched it on his head. The redheaded toddler giggled manically as his dad pantomimed searching for the napkin, checking under his coffee cup—because of course he got to have coffee—under the table, under the little boy’s T-shirt, behind his ear. “No, Dada! Your head! Your head!” the boy called between peals of laughter. Taking the cue, his father rolled his eyes upward and tilted his head back, searching for the scrap of paper, which was now in the process of floating to the floor. “Down! Down!” the child gasped, doubled over in hysterics.
“Dada!” The word mocked Rhys as he stood there in line. His temples throbbed as he cataloged the series of impossible preconditions that would have to be met in order for him to enjoy a similar exchange with Will. First, Will would need to be able to tune out the sensations inundating him from every direction in the noisy space. Then he would need the calm and endurance to tolerate sitting at the table. Even more difficult to navigate would be the finer points of the joke itself—the ability to read the humor in his father’s expression, the shared laughter at the silliness of a napkin sitting on someone’s head, and the fiction that his father didn’t “know” the napkin was there and needed to be made aware of it. The whole concept was light-years away from Will’s current level of development, even aside from the issue of language. Rhys’s chest was tight with sorrow.
The couple at the head of the line finally moved off to the side, licking their ice creams with self-congratulatory zeal as they looked about for an unoccupied table. Will began to whimper, not sure why he was no longer being jiggled, so Rhys started up the motion again, wondering how he would keep up the rhythm while retrieving his wallet and holding the ice cream steady when it was handed to him.
They finally made it to the counter, and Rhys placed their order, still bouncing. He somehow managed to complete the transaction, take the ice cream—a cone tipped into its own bowl for safety’s sake—and move toward the seating area, only to find that there were no tables available. The connoisseur couple had taken the table previously occupied by the father and son and had settled in for a leisurely feast, trading licks of each other’s cones.
Rhys couldn’t make Will eat outside, and he wasn’t crazy enough to let his son into the car with an open container of ice cream, so he found a spot where they could stand by the window. The sill formed a shelf wide enough to hold the bowl while he set Will back down on the floor. All it took was a brief pause for Rhys to stretch the tense muscles of his arms and back, and, almost as if in slow motion, Will reached an arm up and swiped the bowl down from its perch. The container tipped in midair, depositing half its contents on Will’s sleeve, before coming to rest in a gelid heap on the floor.
Will screamed as the cold, sticky substance began to melt through the fabric to his skin. He flailed his arm to free himself from the sensation, sending a large blob of vanilla ice cream sailing into the open top of a quilted leather designer handbag that was dangling from its owner’s arm as she passed by.
“What the—” the woman screeched. The tone of her outburst mingled with Will’s cry in a discordant din that messed with Rhys’s brain. He dabbed at Will’s sleeve with one hand and tried to pass the outraged woman a handful of napkins with the other but somehow found himself mopping at her bag when she refused to take his peace offering. He was disturbed to see a distinctive logo on the bag in the shape of interlocking Cs, which he feared was a designer label that came with a hefty price tag. Karina had had one like it—but the name eluded him.
“I’m so sorry.” Rhys flung his apology at the bag owner, and at the room more generally, as every eye in the place was riveted to the unfolding scene.
“Get away from me!” the woman snapped, fury flashing in a pair of heavily mascaraed blue eyes. Will caught the full impact of her rage at close range. He scrunched his eyes closed, flinging his head back, as a full-blown tantrum took possession of his body just as Rhys knelt down to soothe him.
The force of Will’s tough little head slamming into the bridge of Rhys’s nose was almost blinding. He couldn’t answer for the expletive that escaped his lips as he reeled in agony, feeling for the hot trickle of blood or the sickly crunch of misaligned bone. To his relief, his face seemed to be intact, but it was ringing with pain as he bent down to wrestle a rigid, keening Will into his arms.
“People who can’t control their children should think twice before inflicting them upon the rest of us,” the self-righteous handbag owner pronounced. Rhys had been considering trying to fish his business card out of his wallet and offering to reimburse the woman for the professional cleaning of her bag, or even to pay for a replacement. Now, in the hot rush of rage and hopelessness, he simply hugged Will close and made for the exit, leaving the ice-cream bowl upended on the floor.
What do you expect when you go to an ice-cream shop? If Designer Bag Lady wanted a mess-free, child-free afternoon, she could take her fucking bag to a wine bar or a spa, he thought as he hauled Will out to the car. Why was she risking her delicate sensibilities—and her designer gear—at an ice-cream shop? Nose still throbbing and eyes smarting, he fought the urge to turn back around and lay into the woman.
Now he was furious that his knee-jerk reaction had been to apologize. He should have had some scathing response at the ready, a pithy comment that would have made Bag Lady shrivel with shame all the way down to her designer-clad toes. And all those sanctimonious onlookers, too. How dare they try to make me feel ashamed of my own son!
But Rhys, like his son, just didn’t have the words—or at least never at the right time. If he hadn’t caused this stupid rift with Andie, for instance, he and Will never would have been roving the streets of Concord that afternoon in the first place. They would have been safely at home, probably enjoying Andie’s company. The suffocating, leaden sensation in his chest flooded back with a vengeance. Will deserves better than this.
Shushing and soothing, Rhys finally prevailed upon a rigid, flailing Will to conform to the shape of his car seat. Finally able to start the car, his hands still sticky with ice-cream residue, Rhys gave in to thoughts that continued to circle fruitlessly from rage to sadness to self-recrimination, as Will’s screams filled the car, and they turned in the direction of home.