I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(7)
“Yes!” I said. “But that’s what makes it so beautiful! It’s hard and he does it anyway. I told you how his mother died when he was a baby, and he grew up with that horrible father (sorry to speak ill of the dead but the man was a nightmare) and that mean older brother. Even his uncles and cousins are awful. All those cold, stone-faced, judgmental men. Can you even imagine growing up like that?”
“It sounds difficult,” said my mother.
“Beyond difficult,” I said. “It warps you. Wait, that sounds bad. Zach isn’t warped, but goodness has to be something he chooses. It’s not a knee-jerk no-brainer for him the way it is for people who grew up loved every second of their lives.”
I heard the note of contempt in my voice, contempt for the consistently loved, the thoughtlessly thoughtful, and even in my worked-up state, I knew I couldn’t let that stand. My voice went tender. “And yes, I’m one of those people, and I’m grateful. To both of you especially and to Teo and Gordon and everyone else. All I mean is that goodness might not always be Zach’s first impulse, and sometimes he gets it wrong, but he always feels terrible afterward and scrambles to make up for his mistakes.”
“Does he often get it wrong?” asked my mother, evenly.
I flashed on his face, still and shadow-carved, his eyes flat as glass. A “shut up” like a slap. Mean laugh scything toward me out of nowhere.
“Not often at all,” I said. “And he’s so sorry afterward.”
“All right. But about his having to try so hard . . . Now, don’t get mad,” began Cornelia. “I just want to understand. Wouldn’t it be easier—”
“To be with someone effortlessly kind and good?” I said.
“Even naturally kind people struggle with it sometimes,” said Cornelia. “But yes.”
“Don’t you see, though? I love how much he wants to be different from the rest of his family. He could so easily have gone down the same road as the others, but he refused. He refuses all the time, every day, as best he can. That takes courage, I think, to fight what comes easiest to you. And he says I make him want to try even more.”
Cornelia stood up, walked around behind me, looped her scrawny arms around me, and held on hard. “Oh, darling Clare, girl made of sunshine, of course you do.”
I held on back. Cornelia was a tiny person, with a little angled face and child’s wrists. One of my hands covered both of hers. But when she held you, you felt instantly stronger and also like a bird in a nest.
“His sister disappearing the way she did,” said my mother, shaking her head. “That kind of loss changes a family forever.”
When Zach was ten, on a summer night, his tempest-haired, shimmering, rebellious eighteen-year-old sister, Rosalie-called-Ro, who had been his only mother for most of his life, vanished from their family’s house in Northern Michigan. No note. No good-byes. Not even a fight with her father to explain her disappearance, even though there had been many, many fights before that. Just her car parked at the lip of the inland lake near their summerhouse, the water lapping the front tires, the keys still in the ignition. Local police investigated, dredging the lake while Zach looked on, a fact I had been horrified to learn. But they never found Ro. Everyone assumed she had run away to California (a place she’d never visited but worshipped, plastering the walls of her room with photos of beaches and deserts, the Hollywood sign, the Golden Gate Bridge) or else had gotten drunk and drowned in some other body of water of which there were many nearby.
And once the authorities had given up the search, despite his virtually unlimited resources, financial and otherwise, Zach’s father had refused to look for her or to allow anyone else to look for her. “She’ll come home when she’s hungry,” he said. But she never did, and Zach’s older brother, Ian, their father, and the rest of the family simply erased her, until eventually no one even said her name, not in front of their father or anywhere else. Zach’s father wrote her out of his will, paid a stranger to box up and give away her belongings, disappeared her as surely as if he’d lit a match and burned her right out of the family picture. I’d immediately assumed it was because he was heartbroken at the loss of her, but Zach said no, that was giving the man credit for heart he didn’t have. She was the bad, ungrateful child; the family was better off, his father said. Still, I understood that her absence, that smoking, black-edged, wild-child-shaped hole, was at the center of all their lives.
“His father was pretty gruesome even before, but Zach thinks there might have been hope for his brother, Ian, if she’d stayed. Now, there’s only hope for him,” I said, then added, “A lot of hope, though. At least, I think so.”
“I’ll bet you’re right, sweetheart,” said my mother.
“So?” said Cornelia. “List complete?”
I nodded.
My mother waggled my poor broken-down iris. “Pay your last respects, and let’s get back to these everlasting centerpieces.”
“Adios, iris!” I said, and my mother tossed it over her shoulder.
“Now then,” she said, taking up a centerpiece-in-progress. “Just to refresh your memories: you put a few spikes of iris into each hydrangea bouquet, placing the irises so that they stick up a bit from the hydrangeas, as if the white flowers are butterflies that have just landed on the purple. If you stick the irises too deeply into the hydrangeas, all will be lost.”