Chapter Eighteen
When Blaine got home, he sat at his computer and tried to work on a slope stability analysis, but he couldn’t concentrate. It was unusual for him. He could usually lose himself in his work pretty easily.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Cassie. Earlier, when they were lying in bed together, he’d thought for sure she would decide to stay. But now he wasn’t so certain. After all, she was going to see the flapper girl who’d given him a hard time on Friday. Maybe this weekend really would be the end for him and Cassie.
It was too awful to contemplate.
He pushed that thought out of his mind and went downstairs to clean up the living room and dining room. On the table, he found a pencil drawing of an ammonite, and he smiled. She’d probably done that when he was out buying her clothes yesterday.
He put it on his ammonite shelf, and from another shelf, he picked up the picture of him and his father on Cape Breton two years ago. That was the only remotely recent photo he had of the two of them. He wasn’t sure he even had another picture of them together since his graduation, when he’d gotten his master’s degree.
It had been his dad’s idea for him to study geological engineering. In high school, he’d been debating between lots of things. Maybe chemistry, maybe geology, maybe electrical engineering. How was he supposed to choose when they all sounded interesting? His father had a colleague whose brother was a geological engineer and had arranged for Blaine to talk to him, and that was when he’d made his decision. It would allow him to take a paleontology course, too, and he’d have the geology background he’d need in case he wanted to study paleontology in grad school. But he’d stuck with engineering. It really was interesting—designing things, understanding how they worked. Plus there were more jobs, and it would be easier to stay in Ottawa.
He was glad he’d been here to see his father every month, glad he’d been here when he got the awful news.
There was one other picture on the shelf, an old one he’d found in his father’s photo album when he was clearing out the house. It was of the two of them in Alberta, in front of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. Blaine had been eight.
It had been his first big trip. His first time on a plane. His father had arranged it the summer after the divorce. A trip that had clearly been planned for Blaine—it was like the equivalent of Disneyland for him. They’d flown into Calgary and went to the Badlands, Dinosaur Provincial Park, and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. It had been awesome.
Blaine smiled as he remembered that summer.
His father had always been supportive of his interests. He hadn’t thought there was anything wrong with Blaine being able to spell the names of a hundred dinosaurs at the age of seven. Hadn’t thought there was anything wrong with him memorizing all sorts of chemical formulas. His mother, on the other hand, had worried that he was too much of a weirdo, not that she ever said it. But his father rarely worried about anything.
Although Blaine’s parents would argue about him on occasion, as far as divorced parents went, they’d gotten along reasonably well. They’d never tried to turn him against the other. He’d lived with his mother and stayed with his father every other weekend, but they’d talked on the phone most days.
But after his father’s death, he’d felt like he’d never really understood the man.
Perhaps he should tell Cassie more about what had happened last summer. He’d told her that his father had died unexpectedly, but he hadn’t explained just how messed up that had made Blaine and why. The complicated grief and guilt. Perhaps that would help her understand what an odd state he’d been in when he’d met her. And why he’d reacted as stupidly as he had.
…
Blaine picked up Cassie when she texted him. He brought her home and pulled her onto his lap on the sofa.
“I want to talk to you,” he said, looking into her pretty brown eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “About what?”
“My father’s death… It was a suicide. He drove out to the middle of nowhere, called 911, and shot himself in the head. There was no note. No hint that he was depressed or otherwise sick. He just did it.”
Her eyes went wide, and she tightened her arms around him.
“Oh, Blaine,” she whispered.
“Often we think of suicide as something that young people do. But suicide actually peaks in middle age, at least here in Canada. And men kill themselves more frequently than women, even though women are more likely to attempt—”
Cassie gently covered his mouth with her hand, then trailed it over his cheek. “Stop with the statistics. I don’t think that’s what you wanted to tell me.”
No, it wasn’t. But in the aftermath, he’d been numb, and he’d read too much about suicide, taken comfort in tables full of numbers. He memorized the suicide rates for dozens of countries.
Numbers made sense to him, gave him a semblance of control. The fact that his father had killed himself—that didn’t make any sense.
“For a while,” he continued, “I was obsessed with understanding why he’d done it. I thought back to every time I’d seen him in the past year, looked all over his house for clues. The only odd thing about the house was that he’d cleared out the basement. It was as if he’d wanted me to have less to deal with afterward. But there was nothing else. He’d retired two years earlier, and maybe that was part of it, that his life felt empty without a job. But he was never particularly attached to his job. It was just a way to make a living. And if you knew my dad, he was nothing like me. He was the sort of easygoing guy who’d enjoy sitting around the TV with a few friends, watching the football game. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t understand how he’d come to take his own life. Eventually, I had to let it go and just accept.”
Blaine moved Cassie slightly apart from him, needing to see her face as he spoke. Her chin wobbled, but she said nothing as she trailed her hand up his back.
“Did you feel guilty?” she asked.
He let out a humorless laugh. “Lots of suicide survivors—the people left behind, that is—feel guilty, thinking, ‘If only I’d done this or that.’”
She nodded. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
“But not me. My dad never gave me a hint that anything was wrong, and I talked to him regularly, saw him once or twice a month. So even though I tried to understand what had happened afterward, I didn’t feel there was something else I should have done while he was alive. I didn’t feel guilty about that…but then I started feeling guilty that I didn’t feel guilty.” He laughed again without humor.
The silence stretched for a minute or two. Cassie was here with him, and he didn’t feel the need to fill it with meaningless words.
“I thought I was broken,” he said at last. “Most people have to learn to let go of the guilt, but I didn’t. I felt like a freak, like I wasn’t normal. And the one person who’d always thought I was okay just the way I was…he was dead. There was no one to reassure me.”
“Oh, Blaine.” She sounded so pained. “You are not a freak because you didn’t feel guilty. Don’t put that on yourself. You are okay, just the way you are.”
She sounded sincere. That made him feel a little better, so he went on.
“I kept working after he died. I liked having the structure of my regular life. But after a few months, I knew I needed to get away. So I threw a tent and a sleeping bag in the back of my car, and I just started driving. And then—”
“You met me.”
He recalled that moment in Tim Hortons when he’d first seen her. Just another Tim Hortons in a nondescript Ontario town, and he’d just been there to get a coffee, on the way to who-knew-where. Nothing special should have happened there, but it had.
“I saw you,” he said, “and the fog lifted. The world was in color again, and I could finally breathe. It felt just like love—love at first sight. But my rational side said it had to be an illusion, that I was feeling things that weren’t real. It was just me being emotionally needy because of how awful my life had been. That made more sense to me than love at first sight. How can you love someone you don’t know? So I told myself I would enjoy that wonderful feeling for a week, but it couldn’t last.”
She cupped a hand over the side of his face and stroked his cheek.
He swallowed. She could be so gentle and understanding.
“But it did last,” he said. “For over a year, half of me loved you, and the other half thought I was kidding myself. None of it made sense. Then I started dating again, and I knew. It was only you.”
He placed his hands on her cheeks and brought her face toward him in slow motion. He kissed her on the lips. Once, twice, three times.
“I also knew that I’d treated you badly and you might be reluctant to take me back. But I was finally convinced my feelings for you were real. I hoped yours were real, too, and if I apologized enough, you wouldn’t be able to say no to a relationship.”
He’d tried not to think about the alternative, not then.
“They’re real,” she said, pressing a kiss to his lips.
His heart stuttered. “You’ll stay with me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
The stutter became a painful twist. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll give it to you.”
She gazed into his eyes. “I need to believe, with absolute certainty, that you won’t leave me again. Because I wouldn’t survive that. I think I finally understand why you did what you did. But that doesn’t mean I can trust you.”
Despair washed through him. “What can I say to convince you?”
“I don’t know if there is anything.” She shook her head bleakly. “I just don’t know.”
Tonight he would drive her back to Georgeville.
It might be the last time he ever saw her.