IAN
Lacy sits across from me at the dining table, hands folded on the worn pine surface.
“You said a friend dropped you off?” I reaffirm, looking for a logical explanation to her sudden appearance on the porch, like a ghostly apparition.
She smiles, humming an affirmation. It’s conceivable I walked past her without registering her presence. More than once I’ve walked into the front room at home and stared out the window, deep in thought while drinking my coffee, without realizing Caty is sitting on the couch near me until she pipes up with a “Hi, Daddy.”
But I should have heard Lacy’s arrival. The crunch of gravel under the weight of a car. The porch cracking and popping when she walked up the front steps. This house doesn’t hide visitors. It announces them.
Lacy traces the divots on the table’s surface, scars left from my mom’s work. A dropped stack of embroidery books, the pointed tip of a pair of scissors, the weight of equipment. As I watch Lacy touch each mark, I get the sense she’s reading them, learning their memories. Her smile fades, she frowns, and then she murmurs, the words indecipherable to me. When I realize where my thoughts have taken me and that Lacy is visualizing my mom, I shift uncomfortably in the chair.
“Did you fly in this morning?” I ask, and the image of her on a broom wielding a wand gels in my head. Thank you, Harry Potter. I silently curse my imagination. That’s what I get for reading the book to Caty.
“Your father will be here soon.”
“When?” I look out the window.
Before she answers, Aimee appears with refreshments. “I found Crystal Light mix and ice cubes. It’s not fresh-squeezed lemonade, but it’s better than the scotch I found in the cabinet.”
I wouldn’t turn down a finger, or three, of the hard stuff. She moves by me to set a tray on the table. I catch a whiff of her perfume. It’s all Aimee. Playful and sensual at once. Familiar and grounding. Calming. Needing to touch her, I rest my hand on her lower back as she stretches across the table to give Lacy a glass.
“Thank you.” Lacy sips her drink.
She hasn’t changed much from my memory from when she found me in a ditch on the roadside, or the photo from the café’s soft opening. Just an older version of herself. Her hair is more silver than the platinum it used to be and is cut into a bob. Those mysterious lavender-blue eyes that have both fascinated and haunted me since I was nine have faded, as eyes do with age. They are a light shade of blue. A spiderweb of fine lines edges her eyes and mouth. Her hands are weathered.
Aimee pulls out the chair beside mine. I thread my fingers with hers and hold her hand in my lap when she’s seated. She pushes a glass in my direction and I drink obediently, finishing off half. What I wouldn’t give for that scotch. I can’t pinpoint why, other than there are too many unanswered questions where Lacy’s concerned, but she makes me nervous.
Aimee looks at me, her expression questioning. I squeeze her fingers reassuringly.
“I was right about you two.”
Aimee and I turn in unison toward Lacy.
“You’re meant to be.”
“What do you mean? Like soul mates?” Aimee asks.
Lacy lifts her shoulders and makes that affirmative noise again behind a closed-lipped smile. She looks at me, then through me, and I inhale deeply against my rising sense of anxiety. My knee bounces. This soul mate stuff is fun and all, but I want to get to the heart of this meet and greet. What does she know about my mom, and what’s so important my dad has to tell me? The man’s not even here.
“You have a lot of questions, Ian. You both do.”
I lift my brows, ignoring the uneasiness her comment incites, and invite her to elaborate.
“You wonder why I had you go to Mexico,” she says to Aimee and turns to me. “You wonder how I found you all those years ago. And you both wonder how it’s all connected.” She draws her hands in the air around an imaginary globe.
I resist the urge to quip about tarot cards or show her my palm when Aimee says, “A smidge.” She spreads her index finger and thumb an inch apart.
“Have you heard about the Red String of Fate?”
“No,” Aimee says as I inwardly groan. Did we really come all the way to listen to this?
“It’s an ancient Chinese myth about soul mates,” I explain. “The red string connects two people destined to spend their lives together.”
“You’re right, Ian, but it’s more than that. The string connects us for all sorts of reasons. It connects two people who are destined to meet under extraordinary circumstance and it connects people destined to help each other. Some of these connections are stronger than others, and I sense them.”
I glance over at Aimee, wondering if she’s buying this. She doesn’t look at me, her expression intent on Lacy.
“I met Imelda Rodriguez while on vacation with my daughter and son-in-law. I knew right away I was meant to help her, but I didn’t know why or how. Imelda and I became good friends, and one night she confided in me her arrangement with Thomas. She was miserable. She hated deceiving James, but she was financially strapped, and Thomas scared her. I couldn’t not help her, and the only way I knew how was to eliminate Thomas’s need for her. To do that I had to get rid of James, and make it look like Imelda had nothing to do with him going back home.”
“That’s when you found me.”
“Exactly.” Lacy points her finger at Aimee. “I told Imelda I tried talking with you at James’s funeral.”
“I wouldn’t call it talking.”
I nod my head in agreement. Lacy had chased Aimee through the parking lot. She spooked her.
“That’s true,” Lacy laments. “Looking back, I should have waited for a more appropriate time.”
I want to agree with Lacy, but had she waited, I wouldn’t be the guy sitting beside Aimee. This conversation wouldn’t even be happening.
“It took months for me to convince Imelda to allow me to approach you again, and only on the condition it couldn’t be traced back to her.” She looks at the table. Her finger traces a groove.
“What happened, Lacy?” I ask.
“Thomas saw you at the cafe’s soft opening. He figured out what you were doing.”
I look at Aimee, wide-eyed, then look at Lacy. She’s nodding. “Something else happened at the café. Fate is a mysterious, fickle woman who loves to play practical jokes. Imagine my surprise when I saw you.” She snares me in her gaze. Her words are cubes of ice dropping from a freezer dispenser through me. My limbs chill. “I saw your connection to Aimee, and I saw again, my connection to you. There’s a red string that binds us. I realized, once again, I was destined to help you. That’s when I decided to speed up the process, Imelda’s fear be damned. I shipped James’s painting to Aimee. She had to see for herself that the red string didn’t link her to James. It links her to you, Ian.”
Aimee and I share a look. Soul mates or not, psychic meddling or not, I didn’t want to spend my life with anyone but Aimee. But something else occurs to me and I frown. “You might think you helped me, but what about Imelda? James didn’t go home.”
“But I did help her. She no longer had to lie to James. That’s the secret that was making her miserable.” She sips her lemonade.
“Huh.” I look at Aimee, wondering what she thinks about all this. She shrugs a shoulder and I make a show of looking under the table for the string that attaches us. A short laugh escapes her and she shushes me to stop messing around. Red strings, soul mates, fated connections, oh my! I’ve mentioned to Aimee on several occasions that I’ve seen and experienced some surreal things during my travels that I couldn’t necessarily explain. There was that out-of-body experience I had after a night of hookah smoking in India. There were three of us—me, Dave, and Peter—and we’d just finished a three-day photography hike in Manali. I had an insane dream of running back up the trail we’d just come down because I wanted to take more photos. The kicker is that the temperature at night dropped into the tens and I was shirtless. Dave, who didn’t smoke, and I had a good laugh when I told him the next morning about how Peter was in my dream and he wasn’t. Peter didn’t have a shirt on either or his shoes. Thank God, it was a dream, else we’d have frozen our asses off. Anyway, it was a good laugh until Peter woke up and told us he had the same dream. Then he showed us his feet. They were cut up, bruised, and caked with dirt. The ridiculous thing is, Dave was up most of the night reading. He said we never left our mats after we’d passed out.
I don’t have a logical explanation for that night, other than we were too high to remember, and Dave had to have fallen asleep for several hours for Peter and me to slip past him on our way to be idiots. As for Lacy’s “red string” theory, she can call it what she wants. I think her connection to Aimee and me is nothing more than an it’s-a-small-world coincidence. Serendipity.
Lacy looks around the dining room, studying the crystal chandelier overhead and satin curtains, the hems dirty from years of dust. “I always wondered what Sarah’s house looked like.”
I sit upright in the chair. She said my mom’s name with the familiarity of a friend. That’s not something I expected. “How do you know my mother?”
Lacy smiled tenderly, her sadness evident in the gentle curve of her mouth. “She’s my stepsister.”
Aimee gasps. My back slams into the chair. I feel the blood drain from my face, and my fingers reflexively squeeze Aimee’s hand. The woman sitting across from us, sipping lemonade from my father’s glass, the one I welcomed into his home, is Frank’s daughter, the man Jackie shot. I read about him in my mom’s court transcripts. He’d sexually abused my mom since she was twelve, around the time her mother, my grandmother, married him and he moved into their home. He continued to abuse her until the day she ran away. She’d been eighteen.
My mom had taken on odd jobs to survive, doing what she could to remain invisible to Frank until the day she met my dad. She saw a protector in him, the one man who could keep her safe from Frank. Move her far away from the stepfather, which made sense to me once I connected the story my mom told me of how she met my dad to her testimony at the trial.
Something clicks inside me and I make another connection. The legal name Thomas gave Aimee for Lacy. Charity Watson. Charity.
“Impossible,” I murmur to Aimee. “She can’t be her stepsister.”
“I don’t understand,” Aimee whispers back.
“My father was abusive. Sarah wasn’t his only victim,” Lacy acknowledges.
“Oh dear,” Aimee says.
“We should all be thankful that man is locked away.”
My mind takes an excursion to that night. I hear the gun blast, feel it reverberate in my ears, see it blow out Frank’s knee. My skin itches the way it had when it healed from the asphalt abrasions. I scratch at my thigh.
“As Ian recalls it, you met Stu at a diner and offered to help find Ian, but that’s not what happened, is it?” Aimee asks, and Lacy slowly shakes her head. “I’m going to venture to guess you didn’t use ‘psychic powers’ either.” She draws quote marks in the air.
I peel my hand from Aimee’s and look at her in question. “What are you saying?”
“If she really is Sarah’s stepsister, I think she was told where you might have been, which would have made it easier to locate you.”
“Is that true?” I ask and Lacy nods. Damn, my wife is perceptive. “What happened?” I demanded, needing answers to all the questions I had as a kid.
“Sarah showed up at my house. She wasn’t acting herself. She insisted her name was Jackie. I didn’t know then that she had a personality disorder. I thought she was on something. Her behavior was erratic.”
“That was Jackie.”
“And she was looking for Frank. Sarah had left Jackie a note on where to find me. She thought I’d know where he was. I didn’t at the time, of course. And I didn’t want to look for him. My parents had joint custody when I was a kid. I hated the weekends I spent at Sarah’s house with my father. But that’s beside the point. Jackie bragged about what she’d done to you. She was betting you were stupid enough to listen to her and walk home. Then she left. I assume she eventually returned here.” She looks around the room. “I called your father and he confirmed you were still missing. Together we found you based on what Jackie told me.”
My hands fist under the table. “Did Stu know who you were?”
“That I was his stepsister-in-law? Not at first. I think Sarah eventually told him.”
I shoot up from the chair. It falls back with a thud. Hands gripping my hips, I pace the room. Aimee gets out of her chair and leans over to right mine. I’m at her side in two long strides. “Thanks, hon, I’ve got it.” I pick up my chair for her and brace my hands on the seat back. “You’ve got my attention. What’s going on? Why’d you bring me here?”
“Your father won’t listen to me. You must talk to him. You have to convince him to tell you the truth about your mother.”
“Do you know where she is? Why not just tell me?”
“It’s not my place. That’s Sarah’s request, not mine. This is between you and your father. Get him to talk. Listen to him and keep an open mind.”
“Give me one good reason I should give that man my time when he never gave me his.”
“He’s dying.”