CHAPTER FOUR
When Andie retired to her room to rest and unpack, the silence that settled over the house was enough to jar Rhys’s thoughts onto a far less promising track. He stared pensively at his phone before tapping back into the e-mail message from his ex-wife that had dinged into his in-box earlier that afternoon. For probably the hundredth time, he studied the inscrutably brief missive, trying to make out its subtext.
I’m back in Concord. We need to talk about our son.
There were so many things wrong with those two short sentences he hardly knew where to begin.
I’m back in Concord. What the hell did that mean? For someone who’d been incommunicado for close to two years, Karina offered surprisingly little context. Was she announcing her permanent return to Massachusetts? Or was this simply a fly-by-night visit? The last thing he knew, she’d been shacked up in Silicon Valley with Lance Bello, their former department chair at MIT, who’d been lured away to join Stanford’s engineering faculty.
Karina, brilliant but notoriously flighty, was still finishing her doctorate and transferred to Stanford when she’d walked out on Rhys, seeing Lance’s West Coast job offer as her chance to escape the confines of motherhood. With their on-again, off-again affair definitively on again, she and Lance had taken off for warmer climes, leaving his wife and two children in the dust.
Our son. Our son? He skipped back to the phrase that really blew his mind. Did she really think she had any kind of claim on Will when she’d walked away and not looked back?
Rhys still couldn’t understand how Karina had failed to see it: the manifest glory of the small being they’d created together. For her, the pregnancy was more of a dramatic flourish than the beginning of a lifelong commitment. Just one more live grenade dropped on the battlefield of their relationship. But, by the ninth month, the scene-stealing impact of it was not nearly enough to compensate her for the insults and inconveniences of her changing body. By Will’s fourth month of life she’d announced that she still wanted to be the star of her own story, and “a baby”—she wouldn’t focus on the particular wonders of their specific baby—would make that impossible. Her defection to California had followed shortly after.
For Rhys, parenthood hadn’t effaced his identity. It only enriched it. From the first moment he saw the miracle of Will’s face—the wonder in his hazy, unfocused eyes, and the adamant point of his tiny chin—he knew that being this child’s father would forever define him.
We need to talk. What could they possibly have to say to each other? And why now? A flicker of unease rippled through him as he thought about the timing. Could she have somehow heard about Will’s diagnosis? But why would that have prompted her return? Rhys doubted that a woman who ran away from the demands of a perfect infant would come rushing back to take on the challenges of a toddler with autism.
And who would have told her? He’d planned to tell her himself, of course, once the reality of Will’s diagnosis stopped tripping him up all over again every time he thought about it. But her return had preempted his plans, and now he’d have to deal with it.
They’d set up a meeting on neutral ground for the following morning: a café in the center of town, where they’d once spent leisurely Sunday mornings. Even in a crowd of unflappable New Englanders, Karina had always turned heads, with her flawless skin, long black hair, and feline ice-blue eyes. Eyes Rhys had taken such pleasure in admiring but had never been able to read. He still cringed to think how easily he’d been dazzled by the drama that clung to her like a signature scent.
Suddenly the baby monitor crackled as Will let out a passionate yell. He almost never woke up calmly but was instead racked with emotions larger than the small body that contained them. Rhys knew the feeling. Like his son, he experienced life at a high-torque intensity, his central nervous system simply generating more heat and force than the average person’s. His senses delivered the world to him in vivid Technicolor, gifting him with deep jewel-toned moments of great passion, joy, and focus. If they occasionally extracted their cost in sharp-edged sensations of dissatisfaction or intense disquiet, when life seemed to crash in on him—loud and insistent—then that was a price he’d learned to pay. He only hoped Will would one day find the same balance.
He ran up to Will’s room, noticing as he approached that Andie’s door was open. She peered around the doorway as Will’s next scream echoed down the corridor, and Rhys waved to signal that he had things under control as he hastened to the rescue.
Will stretched out his arms as he entered, and Rhys gathered him up, struck as always by the perfect sense of rightness that settled over him when he held the sturdy little toddler against his chest.
He stroked Will’s hair, letting his fingers slip into the soft, dark waves at his nape. He needs a haircut, he thought with foreboding. Will had suffered through his first little-boy cut at fifteen months. The strokes of the comb, the brisk snipping sounds of the scissors beside his ears, and the synthetic fabric of the cape fastened around his neck sent him into paroxysms of distress. Since then, Rhys had spun out the weeks between trims. Another thing Andie might be able to help them with.
They moved out into the corridor, and all too soon Will wriggled to be set down, captivated by the shaft of peach-colored light slanting into the corridor from Andie’s doorway. He ran to explore but was brought up short by the surprise of seeing the normally empty room occupied. Rhys hung back, suddenly afflicted by a creeping reluctance, knocked off balance by the strange—disconcertingly attractive—new person he’d invited into his space.
He’d brought this woman into his home for Will’s sake, but personal interactions sapped his energy. Too often he was confounded by the petty games and mixed messages that complicated most dealings with fellow members of the human race. He’d learned from hard experience that others didn’t necessarily engage with the world the same way he did: always saying what he meant and meaning what he said. For some, the thrust and parry of communication was a sport, with words and gestures delivered to win a point, to obfuscate, or to resound simply for effect. He’d always needed a refuge, a place to process and recover. A place where he could simply be, without the need for constant vigilance.
“Andie!” Will cried, pulling Rhys’s attention back to the moment. Will was so excited that the exclamation ended with his classic pterodactyl shriek, and he practically danced in Andie’s doorway.
Rhys smiled ruefully. Say my name, he willed for the millionth time as the familiar chasm yawned in his chest. It still confounded him that this woman had moved Will to speech where he had failed. Nothing could quite erase the sting, not even the balm of gratitude that she’d agreed to help them. And it was a big request, expecting her to uproot herself from her home and her life in the city . . . from friends, family, and a possible boyfriend. A woman like Andie Tilly didn’t walk through the world without gathering something of an entourage.
Perhaps that was what accounted for her initial resistance to taking the job: some guy she cared about. But that hypothesis shed no light on the fear—the near panic—he thought he’d glimpsed in her eyes at their first meeting. What was she hiding? Unless her anxiety had simply been her first, honest reaction to Rhys himself. He knew he could be brusque, intimidating, graceless.
He halted in Andie’s doorway as he came upon a sight that was unlikely to diminish the woman’s almost supernatural appeal in his son’s eyes. The late-afternoon sun burnished her west-facing room with a copper glow, and she knelt on the floor by an open suitcase—the long, loose waves of her hair limned in light. She looked like some kind of sylph, her slim body arranged in a casually graceful posture, her legs neatly tucked under her. Who are you?
“Will, have you come to help me unpack?” Everything about her seemed to glow.
“Be careful about extending that kind of invitation,” Rhys warned, propping himself awkwardly against the doorframe. “It’s one of his favorite pastimes, although he usually ends up inside the suitcase, so the ‘help’ factor is debatable.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Andie responded gamely. “Let’s see if he wants to put these shirts in the drawer.”
Taking Will by one hand, she took a folded shirt in the other and led him the few feet to the open bureau.
“Like this, Will,” she demonstrated, laying the garment flat in the bottom of the drawer.
Rhys watched in fascination as Will followed Andie back to the suitcase, accepting the shirt she placed in his hands. Taking another, she scooted back over to the drawer and demonstrated once more. The tip of his tongue sticking out in concentration, Will lifted the shirt over the lip of the drawer and let it fall on top of the pile. The neat folding unraveled as the silken garment came to rest, but Andie praised him effusively.
Will’s lack of speech made it all too easy to forget how much he was really taking in, Rhys reflected. Too often he gave up on asking him to perform tasks for himself, wary of the bleak depression that swamped him when he came up against the limit of Will’s abilities. The fear was always there, an alien presence trying to annex him from the simple pleasure of being with his son.
He forced his thoughts to be still and immersed himself in the scene in front of him: Andie’s gentle patience and Will’s earnest focus. Not to mention the sheer sweetness of his son’s face as he stole sidelong glances at her, unable to quite meet her gaze but soaking in her approval.
“When I came back from the Caymans last month, Will insisted on being zipped into my carry-on,” Rhys commented idly.
“A lot of kids with sensory issues crave the joint compression they get from squeezing into tight spaces,” Andie observed. “Just be careful there are no places around here that he can get stuck. No toy chests with heavy lids. Nothing airtight.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty paranoid about that kind of thing,” Rhys said. “Nothing is more important than Will’s safety.”
“Of course,” she responded hoarsely, turning back to her task.
“The Caymans, huh?” she commented a moment later. “You entrepreneurial types with your offshore tax havens and white-sand beaches.”
“I was there for a conference,” Rhys hastened to explain, not sure why he suddenly felt embarrassed.
“Well, it explains one thing I was wondering about.”
“What’s that?”
“Your feet,” she said, gesturing across the room to where his bare toes sank into the high-pile rug. “You were barefoot when we first met as well, and I couldn’t figure out how on earth a Massachusetts resident would have tanned feet in the middle of February.”
He glanced down at his own toes, habitually bare and even more bronze-toned than usual in the afternoon light, and looked back at her, surprised she would have noticed such a detail. Rhys hated the confinement of shoes—their close, humid pressure a constant aggravation. He didn’t feel grounded, fully at ease, unless he could dig his toes into sand, wet grass, or the silken fibers of the Persian rugs he selected for their rich plushness.
Averting her eyes, Andie handed Will another folded shirt and turned her back to Rhys, busying herself with arranging the drawers.
Soon the stack had been dispatched, and Will straddled the side of the suitcase, trying to slide into the empty spot vacated by the shirts.
“Careful, Will,” Andie said gently, removing a hair dryer from his path before he could sit on the prongs of the power cord. Will plunged his hands into the soft contents of the suitcase that surrounded him, his chubby forearms emerging festooned with scraps of satin and lace.
“Ahem.” Andie cleared her throat. Yes, that was definitely a blush riding high on her cheeks as she stared pointedly at Rhys. “You should probably turn around.”
“Turn around?” Rhys repeated, clueless until he looked more closely at the fabric adorning Will’s wrists. If he wasn’t mistaken, that was a black lace thong, and the raspberry-colored confection beside it was another garment of the same type. Now it was Rhys whose cheeks were flaming as he turned to face the corridor.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I didn’t mean to let Will rifle through your . . . unmentionables.”
“Unmentionables?” Andie couldn’t restrain a giggle. “I’m sorry, Rhys. I know you’re British, but I didn’t realize you were a nineteenth-century Quaker.”
Rhys rested a hand against the doorframe, gripped with embarrassed laughter.
“You’re the one who made me turn around,” he protested weakly.
“Okay, then, maybe I’m a Quaker, too,” she admitted, still convulsed with giggles.
Their laughter was matched by a delighted squeal from the direction of the suitcase, and Will was chortling, too, each cheek imprinted with a dimple, his laughing eyes narrowed to twin crescents.
The sight almost brought Rhys to his knees. It was so rare for Will to be able to join in with the hilarity of those around him. He was so often emotionally off-kilter that this moment of connection was ineffably precious. Rhys wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Andie’s tenure inside his home, and he reflected upon this as he swallowed down the lump of emotion rising in his throat. But her stay with them was certainly off to a promising start.