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Since Charlotte had said, “You’ve missed so much,” to Andrew on the ferry boat, they hadn’t managed many words to one another. They stood out on the dock, with Charlotte’s suitcase in front of them and Andrew’s military duffle bag flung over his shoulder. Snow fluttered around them, just as beautiful as any Christmas card, as Andrew acknowledged the world he’d once given up on. There it was: the magnificent Oak Bluffs— now transformed for Christmas. There was holly lining the streets, each tree decorated with bulbs and lights, and that old, familiar, terribly historical carousel twinkling in the distance. It looked like a picture out of a Christmas card. It was so magical.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte interjected suddenly.
Andrew arched his brow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I didn’t mean to say that you’ve missed so much. I’m sure you’ve been through so much of your own chaos. I never want to make you feel guilty.”
Andrew nodded somberly. He wanted to say a million things, like, I’ve thought about you, Kelli, Claire and Steven every single day since I left. I’ve missed you terribly. When I first read about your daughter, Rachel, I nearly wept.
But some things were better off not said, maybe. Or maybe he just wasn’t the sort of guy capable of saying them.
He was like his father in that way, which to him felt like he had been tainted.
Before Andrew had the chance to answer, there was a loud honk of a horn. He searched the sea of vehicles to find a little blue car with one Claire Montgomery standing out of the driver’s seat and waving a long arm to alert them. Her smile was electric.
“That’s our Claire,” Charlotte said with a laugh. “She always likes to lighten the mood, however, she can. However, you should have seen her while we put that wedding together. I would catch her crying in every corner. I wasn’t sure any of us would make it out of that alive.”
“But you did,” Andrew said as they headed toward the car. He tried his hardest not to limp at all, which was a struggle with every step. Probably, Charlotte had noticed and had decided not to mention it. That was always her way.
“We did. We’ll have to tell you more about it when there’s time,” Charlotte said. “I’m still reeling from all the emotion of it. It was like a marathon, but we had to sprint the whole thing.”
At the car, Claire whipped around and barreled her athletic body into Andrew’s in only the kind of hug an older sister could give a younger brother. She screeched and gripped him as hard as she could. Andrew was surprised to feel his heart grow just the slightest bit warmer.
“Look at you,” Claire breathed as she fell back. “You look—”
“Like an old man?” Andrew interjected.
“Not in the least,” Claire said. “I was going to say, like a young and scruffy Brad Pitt.”
Andrew rolled his eyes, even as the sides of his mouth ticked upward into a smile.
“Look at him. There’s that smile I remember so well,” Claire teased. “Charlotte, you see it, don’t you?”
Charlotte’s eyes were a tad cloudy. She’d felt the sadness that fell from Andrew.
“He’s our little brother alright, through and through,” Charlotte said.
Charlotte then turned around to wave into the backseat of the car, where two identical teenage girls sat. They peered curiously at their Uncle Andrew with faces that reminded Andrew so much of both Charlotte and Claire when they’d been teenagers.
Claire rapped at the window and called, “Girls! Come out here and meet your Uncle Andy.”
Andrew stood like a statue as the girls barreled out of the car and stood side-by-side to blink up at him.
“Andy, these are my girls, Gail and Abby,” Claire announced. “They turned fifteen this past July. And girls, this is your Uncle Andy, who you’ve heard so much about over the years.”
“Hello, Uncle Andy,” one of them said.
“Hey,” the other said.
Andrew had no idea which one was which.
The one on the left gasped, yanked open the car door, then reappeared with a bouquet of marigolds. She pressed them into Andrew’s hands and said, “We made this for you.”
Andrew’s heart fell into his stomach. The smell of the flowers overwhelmed him. Through his years as a bachelor, he hadn’t so much as purchased a single candle.
“Thank you, Gail and Abby,” he said softly. “It’s wonderful to meet you.” He made eye contact with each of them. He wanted them to know how much it meant.
“The girls are wonderful with flowers,” Claire affirmed. “Seems to me they’re even better than I was when I started the flower shop. You remember that Andy, right? When I made you help me set up all those cabinets and the front counter...”
“How could I forget?” Andrew said with his first real smile. “You hardly had two pennies to rub together.”
“Things are a little bit different now,” Claire said.
Silence fell over them as the snow picked up. Andrew shivered slightly as Gail and Abby exchanged glances. Finally, Claire insisted that they all pile in the car so they could drop off their stuff and head up to the hospital.
Everything about the drive felt sinister to Andrew. It all seemed the same but different: the same houses with different people living in them; the same restaurants with different names. On the way to the house he’d grown up in, they stopped briefly at Charlotte’s, where apparently, their cousin, Christine and her boyfriend, Zach, had stayed while Charlotte had run off to California. She dropped off her suitcase and spoke with Christine on the front porch. Christine waved a hand to the car, and Gail, Abby, and Claire all waved back. Andrew couldn’t do it. He hadn’t seen Christine since he’d been something like ten or eleven years old. She was basically a stranger to him now.
When Charlotte got back into the passenger seat, she said, “Christine reports that Rachel was on her best behavior while I was away. I think she missed you, girls, at school today, though.”
“We’ve all just been so sick to our stomachs about Grandpa, haven’t we? I couldn’t make them go to school,” Claire explained.
A few moments later, one of the twins said, “How was California, Aunt Charlotte?”
“And Everett! How was he?” the other asked.
Charlotte turned toward the back, where Andrew sat on the left, with the two girls beside him. “It was a dream come true,” she said. “Everett showed me all his favorite spots in LA, and we went to the beach three times.”
“He’s so handsome,” one of the twins said.
“Gail!” the other one said.
The one in the middle is Abby; the one on this end is Gail. Got it. Maybe.
Charlotte laughed good-naturedly. “He’s a keeper for sure. I think he might try to come out here for Christmas. He fell in love with the island.”
“He loved a little more than the island,” Claire teased.
Did Jason leave her? Did they get divorced? Where is Jason?
Andrew couldn’t breathe when he first spotted his house for the first time: that three-story old-world beauty that was built in 1880 and restored when his parents had latched onto more money than they had known what to do with. It had always been blue, a glorious dark-sky-blue and the shutters were dark grey. If Andrew hadn’t been fully aware of the pain in his right leg and his heart, he might have felt he’d just stepped back in time.
“Here we are,” Claire said. She glanced into the rearview to catch Andrew’s eye as she said, “Nothing much different about it, huh, Andy?”
Andrew shook his head. “Not at all.”
Andrew escaped the tightness of the backseat a bit too quickly and landed hard on his bad leg. He winced just as Claire got out of the car and caught him. Her eyes scanned down to his leg, but she didn’t say a thing.
“Let’s get you inside. You must be exhausted and starving,” she said.
Older sister, younger brother alert.
His mother had updated the interior quite a bit since 2003. There was a new couch in the living area, a new-to-them antique table in the dining room, and updated photographs of the grandchildren scattered around the house. An old photograph of Kerry and her brother, Wes, hung in the kitchen, and an old photograph of the Sheridan clan before Aunt Anna had died sat on the piano. Andrew’s heart hammered in his throat as he dropped his duffel bag to his side and ogled it all. The nostalgia was so overwhelming that he had to swallow the lump that had formed in his throat.
“Have any idea where I’m supposed to stay?” he asked Claire.
“I don’t think they’ve done much to your bedroom,” she said without making eye contact. “You can make yourself comfortable there if you like.”
Andrew’s eyes traveled up the length of the staircase as he made his way to his room.
It was like entering a tomb.
Andrew stood in a somber reflection in the old bedroom, the one he’d taken over after Steven had left the house and married Laura. His Blink-182 poster still hung over his bed; a photo of him and Kurt near the baseball diamonds still sat on his dresser; his bed was made up in fresh sheets and a comforter, as though his mother had expected him to return home any time.
His leg gave out on him and he collapsed on the edge of the bed. He massaged the area just beneath his knee and tried to cut out the ringing in his ears.
You’re okay. You’re still here. You’re going to get through this.
Downstairs, he heard Claire, Charlotte, Gail, and Abby’s murmurs. Were they talking about him? Of course, they were; he was the elephant in the room, wasn’t he? He was the black sheep of the family—the one who had run away as fast as he could, only to literally limp home seventeen years later.
When Andrew reappeared downstairs, a man that looked nearly fifty years old sat on the brand-new couch. He wore a worn baseball hat, a thick coat fit for skiing, and rugged-looking boots. The television was on in front of him; it showed a rerun basketball game for a local college team.
The girls were in the kitchen, out of sight, if not out of earshot. Andrew stood like a shadow near the staircase and waited for a long moment as the outline of the man’s nose, his eyebrows, his lips formulated a memory of an old-world Steven Montgomery.
If his calculations were correct, his brother would be forty-seven years old.
“Steve?”
The man turned toward the sound. The smile that jumped to his lips was every bit Steve, the brother Andrew had looked up to with adoration and the tiniest bit of envy. He leaped to his feet and extended his arms into a bear hug that required no words. There in Steven’s embrace, Andrew felt for the first time like the little Andy he had left behind in the past. It was crippling, even in how beautiful it was.
The hug broke and Steven’s arms fell to his sides as he evaluated Andrew. His smile didn’t falter, not even once. Steven’s heart had always been the purest of the pure.
“It’s so good to see you, man,” Steven said.
“You too,” Andrew said. He was grateful Steven hadn’t called him Andy. Maybe he recognized how painful it was for him. “I wish the circumstances were different.”
“Me too,” Steven said as he adjusted his baseball cap. Even in the rapid motion, Andrew caught that Steven had lost quite a bit of hair. “I spent most of the night at the hospital with Mom. I had to put in a bit of work today. Claire called me this morning and said she’d finally gotten ahold of you. I couldn’t believe it.”
That moment, the screen door that led in from the garage slammed shut. Andrew stepped forward to catch sight of another woman—not the family beauties Charlotte and Claire but an older woman, beautiful in her own right, with eyes filled with sorrow.
The moment Kelli’s eyes found his, Andrew’s entire right leg spasmed and his heart almost leaped out of his ribcage.
He gasped and gripped his knee and crumpled against the nearest wall. Steven jumped for him, even as Andrew said, “Don’t worry about it. Just a cramp.” Kelli walked slowly into the room with worry and sadness marred over her face. Andrew had never wanted to cry his eyes out as hard as he did right then.
“Kelli,” he whispered.
That was all he had to say. Kelli rushed toward him and swallowed him in yet another hug, the kind that made his heart stop and his mind pray that you could turn back the clock. Gosh, he’d always loved her so much. He had prayed for her and wanted his fist to end all the problems she’d had all those years ago with Mike.
When she drew back from the hug, he glanced to see that, in fact, she still wore that same damn wedding ring.
“How have you been?” she asked. Her voice rasped.
“I’m good. I’ve been good,” he lied. She could always, always tell when he lied. It was a game they’d played, especially when she’d asked, Are you drunk again? Or, Did you skip class today? She understood, somehow, that the traditional life that had been okay for all of them wasn’t right for him.
She reached up and brushed a few strands of hair from his face. “Do they not have barbers in Boston?”
“They haven’t invented them up there yet,” he told her.
Kelli’s eyes shone with humor. “Remember that time I cut your hair? You were what? Three? Four? I was just Rachel’s age, I guess. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. I thought I’d done such a good job, but Mom almost bit my head off.”
“I think age three is a little young for much memory,” Andrew said. “Although the story’s been recounted enough times for me to have made up a memory of my own.”
Kelli chuckled. “You were like my little toy doll for those years. Until one day, you came up to me, covered in mud, and you hugged me like your life depended on it. I realized in those moments: oh. This kid is not a doll. He’s a boy.”
“Horrible. Boys are horrible,” Steven affirmed. “Now that I’ve raised one of my own, I know the truth. Isabella was a dream compared to Jonathon.”
“Wow. How old are they now?” Andrew asked.
“Jonathon’s married if you can believe it,” he said. “Twenty-four years old with two kids of his own. And Isabella is twenty. She’s dated half the island, it feels like. She drives me wild in her own way.”
“And you, Kelli? Sam, Josh, and Lexi...”
“I’m surprised you remember all their names,” Kelli said softly. “You left when Lexi was just a little baby.”
“I remember,” Andrew said. “You taught me how to hold her head. Her eyelids were thinner than paper.”
A tear rolled down Kelli’s cheek then. The emotion between them felt like being in the very center of a horrific storm.
“I can’t believe you remember that, either,” she confessed.
Charlotte and Claire appeared in the living room. Claire held a platter of Christmas cookies, which she shoved out in front of the other three siblings. “Come on, guys. Gail and Abby have baked and decorated these all day long. We saved some for Grandpa and Grandma up at the hospital, but we need you guys to taste test.”
Kelli, Steven, and Andrew all reached in for a Christmas tree or a candy cane or a reindeer-frosted cookie. Andrew tapped his teeth on the outside of his reindeer and was overwhelmed with memories. When all the others had left the house, it had been up to him to help his mother decorate the cookies. They’d had a kind of assembly-line process for it; they’d produced enough for the family and for the Sheridans and for all their neighbors and friends.
“Is this Mom’s recipe?” he asked Claire.
“Of course it is,” Claire affirmed.
“Delicious, girls,” Steven called. “Really. I don’t think I’ve eaten anything all day long. Too nervous.”
It was decided that they needed to head up to the hospital. Charlotte mentioned that nobody had had the time or the inclination to tell their mother about Andrew’s arrival. “It’s too heavy,” she whispered to him as he headed toward Steve’s truck.
Steve’s truck was a 4x4 dark blue monster, with loads of tools from his auto shop in the back. When they were inside the truck together, the smell of the auto shop was almost overwhelming, but in a nostalgic way. All those years ago, Andrew had treasured his brother’s ability to make a path for his own future and family. He didn’t need to follow the real estate path or whatever life his parents had wanted for him.
“This is a nice truck,” Andrew commented.
“Thanks, man,” Steven said. “I just got it last year. Laura told me I should treat myself after all the years of hard work. Plus, now that the kids are out of the house, we don’t have as many expenses. It’s just us. Us and this truck.”
Andrew laughed appreciatively as Steven revved the engine. Suddenly, someone placed their hand on the window beside him. When he turned his head, he found Kelli, who called, “Can I ride with you guys?”
Andrew, being the youngest, shoved into the middle of the truck to allow Kelli the passenger seat. She thanked them and breathed into her hands to warm them. Every single time Andrew noticed her looking at him, she looked ready to burst into tears. So for a distraction, he fiddled with the radio and found a song they all loved. It was Nirvana. “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
“I showed this to you the first time,” Steven insisted as they drove to the hospital. “You nearly lost your mind.”
“I never really got over it,” Andrew said with a laugh. “Me and Kurt thought Kurt Cobain was our God.”
“He was,” Kelli said. “He really was.”
**
ANDREW HADN’T BEEN to the hospital since his injury. As he stepped through the double-wide doors, flash-backs of that horrific time came in droves. The early days of bandages and heavy painkillers and the kinds of headaches that felt like throwing a boomerang around his head. They were nothing he wanted to relive.
Now, his father was going through something similar. No, ten times worse.
Kelli, Charlotte, Claire, Steven, Gail, and Abby led Andrew down several hallways, past rooms that made beeping sounds and frantic nurses who hadn’t slept enough. With each step Andrew took he felt like he was headed toward war again. Once upon a time, he thought he was brave. Now?
Steven glanced at him a few times. His eyes did that little up-down thing as he noticed Andrew’s limp. Andrew hated it, but there was nothing to be done. He gave Steven a half-smile and continued until they appeared before a closed-door, one that, presumably, was the final passageway through which they would find their father.
“The five of us. Back together again,” Claire whispered.
Suddenly, a nurse opened the door to reveal an overly white room, the tail-end of a bed where some feet pointed upward, and an older woman, just seventy maybe, with her head pressed forward a bit with her eyes closed, as though she was in the middle of prayer.
That moment, as though she knew somewhere in her heart, her eyes flashed up. They found Andrew through the crack in the door. Their eyes locked and suddenly, she moved with the speed and agility of a much younger woman. She tore toward the door, grabbed the handle just as the door began to click shut, and yanked it open just enough to hold her little frame. All the while, her eyes had nowhere else to go, but Andrew’s.
“Andy?” she breathed. She spoke as though she walked through a dream. “Andy, is that you?” She took another step closer as her eyes went wide and the tears rolled down her cheeks. Her fingers pressed against her mouth to contain the shocked gasp that almost escaped.
Her four children who had stayed behind stepped to the side to allow their mother full access to her youngest son. Yet again, her arms reached out to hold onto him and she drew him tightly against her. Andrew’s cheek fell onto her shoulder; he shook slightly as her hand rubbed his upper back, the way it had when he’d had a fever.
“Andy. Andy, my boy,” she breathed. “Andy.”
The tears were heavy and once they flowed freely, everyone had tears in their eyes, with some wiping their cheeks with their sleeve as they watched the emotional reunion. On instinct, Andrew laced his arm through his mother’s and led her toward a breakroom they had passed on the way. He poured them both a cup of coffee and sat across his mother as her tender eyes continued to study him.
“I never imagined you would be gone so long,” she breathed. “And now, look at you. You’re a man and so handsome.”
Andrew tried his best to keep it together and gave her a small smile. He reached for her hand and gripped it. “I’m here now, Mom.”
“You can’t leave before your father wakes up,” she whispered. Her voice was urgent. “He will want to see you. He needs to know you’re all right.”
Andrew felt like he had been stabbed. According to what his siblings had told him, there was a good possibility that their father might never wake up. It might be too late to make any of their past heartaches heal.
“I’ll stay,” he breathed. He needed to say this; it was what she wanted to hear.
“Good,” she said. She took a small sip of coffee and grimaced. When she sat it back down, she brought her other hand over his so that she was totally wrapped up in him. “Andy. Andrew. You don’t know how long I’ve dreamed of this. Here you are. And I have so, so many things to say.”
That moment, the breakroom door burst open to reveal Claire. Her cheeks were bright pink and splotchy.
“He’s awake. Mom, Andy. He’s awake.”