Mother May I(102)

On the other hand, his trust was kind of lovely.

He went again, and Bree leaped after him. Robbie was positive, with the willful surety of three-year-olds, that he could swim all the way to the deep end and join his sisters on their colorful floats.

“Stay on the steps,” Bree said again, dragging him back.

He crunched his whole face up and said his favorite word. “No! I wanna go to da floaps!”

The last word devolved into a howl. Marshall got up and lifted him out in one smooth move and carried him away from the pool. Bree’s mom had come along to babysit while they dove each morning. Now she was in the shade of the villa’s long porch, reading her book. Marshall toted his son, writhing and protesting, back to her.

He plunked Robbie down on the lounge chair by Shelly Ann and said, “Time out, kiddo.”

Robbie hurled himself prone, weeping dramatically.

Marshall turned to Shelly Ann. “Can I top you off?”

“It’s just juice!” she said.

“I know.”

“It’s not even one o’clock.”

Vigilant as ever. No way she would drink with the kids in the pool. Even with Marshall and Bree right there.

“Five minutes,” Marshall said to Robbie, who responded by savagely kicking the cushions.

Marshall left him to seethe at the terrible injustice and got a couple cans of Modelo from the patio’s mini-fridge. He brought them back poolside and handed Bree one, sitting next to her, close. She popped hers open and then took his hand.

On the patio Robbie let out a heaving, dramatic sigh. They exchanged smiles.

“So this is three,” Bree said.

“Oh, yeah,” he agreed.

They sat watching the girls drift, holding hands and drinking their cold beers, until it got quiet. Marshall glanced back.

Robbie had forgotten he was in time-out. He was trying industriously to open A-C’s water bottle. He was always like this, busy and engaged and into things, his brow furrowed with concentration. He was like his father, for all that he called laid-back Marshall “Daddy.” A-C and Peyton called him Marshall, of course. He loved Bree’s girls, deeply, and they loved him, but they were Trey’s. It would be disrespectful to try to bust that up by asking them to call him “Dad,” like Cara did.

But Marshall had saved Robbie’s life. He and Bree had come through those long two days together, and in the end he’d pulled the baby from that horseshoe of explosives and set him in his mother’s arms. Perhaps it had been a kind of birth.

Marshall was the only father Robbie would know; Robbie was the only son he’d have. He and Bree had decided it would be hard enough to blend the kids they had, especially since some people, Bree’s in-laws, for example, thought their quiet wedding came a little soon.

Marshall had been pretty absolute and medical about it. The day of the procedure, he’d thought, I am a man who will have one kid. He’d been okay with it. Robbie had snuck up on him, and Cara had confided that Robbie didn’t feel like a step. For as much as he looked like Trey’s small clone, thick and sturdy, with that same round face and snub nose, Robbie belonged to all of them.

A-C had moved her float to the center, and now she and Cara started singing. Harmonizing. Peyton, he knew without looking, would be rolling her eyes. The song was a Roxie-Velma duet from the upcoming show, which meant they would practice it over and over until Peyton lost her mind. The two songbirds were really wailing, Cara’s dusky brown leg hooked over A-C’s longer, paler leg as they sang, asking each other again and again if things were good, or great, or swell. And then they sang the kicker, a repeated line about how nothing could ever stay the same.

No shit, ladies.

Cara and A-C sat up tall, wobbling on their floats, so they could hoist invisible prop Gatling guns and spray the pool with invisible bullets as they sang. All very Chicago. Peyton took advantage of their concentration to slip into the water and tip A-C’s float over.

The locked legs got Cara, too. They came up sputtering and growling, and then all three were giggling and pushing and shrieking, fighting to dunk one another. They’d gone from two juniors and a sophomore to preschoolers like Robbie in a heartbeat. It made Marshall smile.

Bree watched them, smiling, too, but Peyton’s crafty crocodile slide to tip A-C, that was a move straight out of Trey’s playbook. And Peyton had her father’s face, same as her brother. He saw the hollow sorrow in Bree’s eyes.

She was happy, though, he thought. Most of the time. She loved him deeply. She liked that he was a cop. She liked that he had a nose for liars and could almost smell bad intentions. That he understood fighting and violence and guns.

He made her feel safe. That was how she’d come to be his, after everything. She always wanted him around. When he was there, she forgot, first for minutes, then hours, then whole days, and now sometimes for weeks, that her mother saw the world more clearly than she did.

He told her that she was safe and her children were protected with his presence, his actions, his words. That might be the thing she loved about him most of all.

He was lying, of course. The world was dangerous and broken. But people had to feel safe anyway, to get on with the business of living.

She would never truly forget, though. She was changed. She was neither the girl he’d grown up with nor the woman he’d fallen for. No one could go through what she had gone through and come out the same.