A Seaside Story Read online

  It was his offhand comment about cake though, that made her hesitate between the spontaneity of throwing her arms around his neck or simply smiling politely and asking him how he had been. Within the space of a nanosecond, the memories of their last bittersweet encounter on this very porch came hurtling back and she could feel an unbidden heat start to steal into her fair complexion.

  “So, how have you been?” she heard herself ask in a voice that mistakenly suggested she had just whiffed a shot of helium.

  If he noticed the definitive octave spike at all, he was too much of a gentleman to comment on it. “Doing great,” he said. “How ‘bout yourself?”

  You haven’t seen me in fourteen years, she thought in dismay, and that’s the best you can come up with?

  “Uh, fine,” she replied, annoyed even as she said it that her reply was no more scintillating or inspired than his question. A sudden sense of inadequacy swept over her and she realized she needed a prop to deflect his attention. “You remember my mom,” she blurted out, physically pulling Lydia into his immediate radar screen.

  The warmth of John’s smile echoed in his voice. “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Toscano,” he said.

  Lydia turned to Kate, her thin face registering total cluelessness.

  Oh great, said the little voice in Kate’s head. How do you work ‘John Neal’ into a sentence without making it obvious? She tried to force her confused emotions into some semblance of order, but the result was less than stellar. “You know, Mom, I was just saying to myself the other day, ‘I wonder whatever happened to John Neal’ and, lo-and-behold, here he is.” Lo-and-behold? Where did that come from?

  She felt Lydia perceptibly stiffen as the older woman quickly returned her attention to him.

  “Sean’s younger boy?” she asked with an underscore of disapproval.

  “Actually, the middle one,” he politely corrected her. He tilted his head in Kate’s direction. “Jeremy was still in eighth grade when the two of us were graduating.”

  Kate flashed briefly on the memory of a tow-headed kid—a smaller version of John except for the hair color—who clearly adored both of his older siblings but especially always tried to tag along with John whenever he went with friends to the Boardwalk.

  Funny, she thought, that Mom doesn’t remember that.

  She opened her mouth to ask whether Jeremy had grown up to be the heartbreaker she always predicted he’d be but was cut short by a surprising suggestion from her mother.

  “You know, it’s really much too expensive for the two of you to be taking a cab. I’ll just run upstairs and grab my purse.”

  Kate’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “It won’t take me but a second.” Lydia turned to John, lifting her chin in a somewhat defiant manner that wordlessly communicated he was being dismissed from her presence.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Mom. The cab’s already here.” Kate hoped her face wasn’t turning as red as it felt in reaction to her mother picking this particular moment to provoke an unfathomable scene of contention.

  Lydia’s back had now gone ramrod straight. “Well, are you sure you haven’t left anything behind?” she pressed. “You know how many times I had to keep picking up after the boy.”

  Unsubtle a ploy as it was to get Kate back inside the house and tell her goodness-knows-what, Kate opted to ignore it. “If you find anything, just mail it to me in Vegas,” she said. She turned back her cuff to make a point of checking her watch, even though she knew she had allowed plenty of time to get to the airport. “Wow, how did it get to be so late?”

  If she had been hoping for John to rescue her with a convenient comment about traffic being bad at that hour of the morning or that his meter was running, it was soon apparent that he wasn’t going to accommodate her. Apparently, misinterpreting Lydia’s discomfiture as a message she simply didn’t want him to witness a mushy motherly goodbye, he amicably volunteered that he wasn’t in that big a hurry. “I’ll just go wait in the cab with your son,” he told Kate.

  My son? How could he think that I was—

  Dumbfounded by such a casual assumption, she couldn’t rally fast enough to correct his mistake before he returned to his seat behind the wheel of the cab. My son? All right, so maybe they hadn’t seen each other for fourteen years, but Avalon Bay wasn’t that big a community. Hadn’t any of the resident gossipmongers dropped her name into a conversation at least once in a while? Wouldn’t he already have known that she was doing well for herself in Vegas and that she hadn’t married?

  She suddenly realized that Lydia hadn’t spoken up on her behalf either. The fact that her mother relished any opportunity to set other people straight, including total strangers, made the omission even more glaring.

  “You know I don’t think I like the idea of you getting in a car with him,” Lydia was now murmuring to her in a dark whisper. “Maybe we should call someone else.”

  The corner of Kate’s mouth twisted with exasperation as she turned to look at her. “What am I? Thirteen? Honestly, Mom, you’re going completely nuts on me. What’s wrong with John driving us to the airport?”

  Lydia shrugged. “I’m just saying that you know how people in this town like to talk about things.”

  “Yes, I’m sure they’ve got their high-powered binoculars trained on us even as we speak. Listen, I have no idea what this is about, but I’ve really got to get going.” She moved in for one last hug but extricating herself from her mother’s clinging grasp proved to be not as easy or graceful a maneuver.

  “He is just a cab driver,” Lydia remarked as if her daughter were on the verge of abandoning all sense of modesty and passionately throw herself at the waiting feet of her former high school swain.

  Kate reiterated that she’d call from the Las Vegas airport as soon as their plane landed. Still baffled by the concerned look on her mother’s face, she asked, “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Well, there is one more thing…” Lydia cryptically replied. She cast a fleeting but wary look at the cab before continuing. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go asking any questions about his brother.”

  “Sorry to hold you up,” Kate apologized as she slid into the back seat. “Mom has a hard time with goodbyes.”

  John’s eyes briefly met hers in the rear-view mirror. “No problem. Big Man here and I had fun talking.”

  Big Man? Talking? She glanced over at Jimmy who was now in a studied concentration of the mechanics of powered windows.

  “Actually, I was doing most of the talking. He was just listening.” John turned the key in the ignition. “He’s kind of a quiet little guy, isn’t he?”

  Kate hesitated a moment between whether she should tell him that Jimmy was autistic or that he was just playing The Quiet Game for a handful of the promised Fruit Loops. First things first, of course, and that was to explain the relationship.

  “Jimmy’s my sister’s little boy,” she said. “Cassy. She was a couple of years behind us in school.” As the words left her mouth, Kate remembered that her sister had skipped a grade when she was in elementary school and thus, been in the same class as John’s brother, Jeremy. All of which made her mother’s mind-slip about the Neal brothers’ hierarchy that much more peculiar.

  John nodded in recognition. “Oh yeah, right. So, how’s she doing these days? You guys just back to the ol’ stomping grounds for a visit, or what?”

  Whether it was her uneasiness at speaking the truth out loud or Jimmy being in close enough proximity to hear it, Kate stalled with a reply by pretending to clear her throat.

  “You okay back there?” he asked in concern. “I’ve got a water bottle if you need it.”

  “No, no,” she declined. “It comes and goes. Just allergies.” She hoped a change of subject would make him forget his question. It didn’t.

  “So, I heard she hooked up with a musician or something,” he continued. “How’s that working out?”

  Safe enough ground for the time being, she thought, though
it was disconcerting he hadn’t heard anything about her sister’s memorial service when it was so recent. “Oh, you know Cassy,” she forced herself to cheerfully reply. “Always living for the moment.” She paused. “They broke up when Jimmy was only two.”

  “When was that?”

  “A little over three years ago.” Inwardly, she still seethed whenever she recalled the ugly reason that Luke had given as justification for his bailing on his marriage to Cassy and his responsibilities as a father.

  John nodded sympathetically at Kate’s disclosure that the break-up had left her little sister a single mom. “Always rough when you’ve got kids in the picture. I don’t know how they do it.”

  Was he speaking from personal experience? She tried to remember if she had seen a flash of gold on his left ring finger, but everything had happened on the porch too quickly for her to even notice. Not that you should notice, the little voice in her head chided. If he had cared where you’ve been for the past decade, he could easily have—

  “So, you like being an aunt?” he said, cutting into her thoughts.

  “Huh?”

  “An aunt,” he repeated. “I bet that’s a lot of fun.”

  “It…uh…has its moments.”

  At that moment, of course, she was too distracted by her self-initiated charade of verbal dodge ball about Cassy to come up with any examples if he asked her. She glanced over at her young nephew, his head animatedly bobbing along to the rhythm of a happy song that only he could hear. Maybe it’s a blessing he’s the way he is, she thought, trying to equate her bewildering feelings of parental loss as a teenager and feeling grateful that Jimmy was much too young, and much too detached, to fully comprehend that his life was never going to be quite the same again.

  John was now chuckling as if enjoying a private joke. “I remember how my Aunt Patty used to say that being an aunt beat motherhood any day of the week, probably because she’d load us up with sugar, spoil us rotten, and then drop us off and go home to a Whiskey Sour on the rocks.”

  Kate smiled, wistfully reminded of what a close-knit family the Neal’s were. “Maybe I should ask her for some pointers next time I’m out,” she said.

  “Only if it’s by séance.”

  It took a second for the meaning of his response to register. “Oh, John, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize—“

  “It’s okay,” he assured her. “She went pretty fast and without much pain. Just the way she would have wanted it.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “I guess we should all be so lucky when our number’s up.”

  Okay, so if you were waiting for an opportune segue, she told herself. Still, the words couldn’t come. Maybe they don’t have to. What were the odds of their paths crossing again, anyway? Whatever was going on with her family wasn’t really any of his concern. She could just play along, get on a plane home, and that would be the end of it.

  John said, “So that’s nice of you to be giving your sis a break. How long do you get to keep him?”

  The cold knot that had formed in her stomach ever since this conversation began refused to untie itself. She measured her words carefully, trying to discipline her voice to maintain control. “Cassy was…in an accident,” she murmured. Even without looking, she knew that John’s attention had instantly shot up to the rear-view mirror. “She…uh…didn’t…”

  The sentence went unfinished, but its tragic significance had not been lost on him.

  He was suddenly pulling the cab over to the shoulder, getting out and opening the back door. A muscle quivered at his jaw as he extended his hand to her, his blue eyes gently imploring her to step out. He started to say something as she emerged from the back seat but as if propelled by an unseen force, she gave him no chance to, burying her burning face against his broad chest and surrendering to the feelings of helplessness she had held inside ever since she first heard the news of Cassy’s death.

  Within the safe but transitory refuge of his muscular arms, she allowed herself to be tenderly rocked back and forth, only vaguely aware that he was whispering her name over and over as one hand compassionately stroked the nape of her neck.

  And in that fragile moment by the side of the road, Kate was overcome with a wave of déjà vu remembrance that it was not the first time in her life John Neal had tried his valiant best to hold her world together as it slipped away.

  Chapter Three

  Embarrassed by the ease with which she had let down her defenses, she hastily tried to compose herself with a mental reminder that Jimmy was depending on her to be a strong and steadfast adult; not one who fell apart at the drop of a hat. This was no time to give in to the temptation of emotional resonance that lingered as hauntingly as the scent of John’s sandalwood aftershave. A sense of having to hold close to herself, to not let anything distract her, had to be her mantra if she was going to get through her newly acquired yet unexpected responsibility.

  “I’m okay, really,” she lied, as she clumsily withdrew from the reassuring comfort of his protective embrace. “We should get going.”

  She could almost feel his thoughts as his hands reluctantly relinquished their hold on her upper arms. This is too familiar, she realized, recalling the last time she saw John all those years ago. Ironically, it had ended the same way this was starting.

  Whatever this is, she thought to herself, her emotions bouncing from one extreme to the other. That it had taken all these years to bring her to this precarious juncture only made her former boyfriend’s presence that much more bittersweet.

  John’s brows were now lifting a question in response to the humming sound coming from the back seat. Jimmy, oblivious to what was transpiring between them, continued to roll the window up and down, meticulously studying the mechanics of the electronic switch as he did so. To the casual observer, Kate knew that he probably looked no different from any other fidgety five-year-old. Even those who tried to coax a conversation out of him, especially older ladies, were inclined to misinterpret his apparent inattentiveness and short attention span as nothing more than childhood shyness.

  “I never know what’s going on in that little head of his,” Cassy used to tell her, always punctuating her observation with a deep sigh of resignation. “It’s like he’s living on another planet or something.”

  Ironically, her own death had proved no exception when it came to deciphering Jimmy’s emotions or cognitive abilities. That he had just lost the most important person in his life, Kate realized, would certainly not be concluded by anyone witnessing the distractive, seemingly random behaviors he was currently exhibiting. But Kate knew his mother’s death must have affected Jimmy deeply. As they eulogized Cassy only a few hours ago, her eyes remained on the small boy sitting quietly beside her. She could see the emptiness in his eyes. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking on her part to believe that his world had somehow connected with hers, a difficult feat for any autistic child.

  In a lowered voice and with her back discreetly turned toward the open door, Kate recounted how she and Lydia cautiously broached the subject with the story that his mommy had been hurt and had to go away. “The experts say you’re not supposed to use the ‘D’ word with kids,” she reflected. “But how do you know they’re not going to think they were deserted? That’s a ‘D’ word, too.”

  More than anything, she explained, she had tried to convey to him through words and gestures that Cassy’s being gone had nothing to do with anything he had said or done and that they loved him and that he was the best little boy in the world. Her throat still ached from the deflating awareness that none of her earnest attempts seemed to register and that he had been more transfixed with rotating her jade bracelet over and over on her wrist than acknowledging anything she had to say. An anguished Lydia had left the room shortly thereafter, too consumed by the devastation of losing a daughter to even begin to give comfort to a child whose responses to personal tragedy weren’t “normal”. Not on the surface, anyway.

  “I sat up with him that entire first night jus
t in case he woke up and was afraid,” Kate confessed with a sad smile.

  Her nephew, it turned out, had slept more soundly than either of the women beneath the same roof, quietly absorbed in a strange world of his own making that defied easy translation.

  John glanced at Jimmy, then back to Kate, the warmth of his smile echoed in his voice. “I’m sure you and your mother have got plenty of love to make him feel secure until he’s old enough to understand what happened.”

  Me, yes. Mom, the vote’s not in yet.

  Out loud, she remarked that the symptoms of autism varied from child to child. “Even the doctors we’ve talked to – and Cassy talked to quite a few of ‘em herself – they told us it’s hard to know for sure how much gets through to him and how he processes what he sees and hears. For now, I guess we just have to take it a day at a time.”

  John nodded thoughtfully as he reached out to caress her cheek with the knuckle of his forehand. “Sometimes, a day at a time is all you can do.”

  Kate reflected on his last words as the Jersey landscape, an alternating mixture of shoreline, factories and blue-collar suburbia, glided past the backseat windows. She wasn’t sure how she was going to take care of Jimmy by herself and maintain her career at the magazine. Take it day by day. That’s how she thought she would be able to keep her relationship with John alive while away at Amherst.

  Was it purely a defensive mechanism on his part, she wondered, to keep either of them from clumsily sliding into an abyss of “what-if’” fairy tales that had no bearing on the here and now? Or was it just that his life, like countless others she knew who never left their hometown borders, had simply become a palette comprised of neutral colors and, accordingly, detached emotions? That the mere touch of his hand on the side of her face had sent a warming shiver through her entire body made the latter speculation a disturbing one, especially since her mother had cautioned her fourteen years ago against falling for someone whose ambitions weren’t comparable to hers.