But when he walked back into the bedroom she was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The next day, she called in sick to Haven House and spent the day with Bea.
She was exhausted and raw in a way that could only be helped by time spent off her phone, away from her computer and deep into the kind of absolutely present state of mind that being with her daughter required.
She didn’t want to talk about Micah. She didn’t want to think about him. She didn’t want to process the last two days. Maybe, in time, she’d get her head around it, but right now she couldn’t do it.
They went for a long walk on the trails behind the inn and watched honeybees in the clover Alice had planted in the hopes of starting a honeybee colony. They ate jam sandwiches by the fire pit and played one hundred rounds of Slap Jack at toddler speed.
“I win,” Bea said, flopping back onto the rug in her bedroom. “I’m tired, Mommy.”
“Yeah? Me too,” she said, and crawled over on her knees and flopped down next to Bea.
“Why are you tired?” Bea asked, rolling onto her side and tucking her hands under her cheek like she was in some kind of commercial for girl talk. Charmed and deeply in love with her daughter, Helen did the same.
“I didn’t sleep very well,” she said.
“Did you count the sheep?”
“I did,” she said and brushed her daughter’s curls back off her face. “Bea?”
“Yeah.”
And suddenly, Helen was here. At this conversation. And she hadn’t planned it or expected it. She hadn’t created a speech, but in the day with her daughter, the back of her brain had been chewing this up, getting it ready for the right moment. Which apparently was this one.
“How would you feel if we…lived someplace else?”
“Like the moon?” Bea asked with wide eyes.
Helen laughed. “No, like an apartment. Like Daniella and her daughter.”
“Oh,” Bea said. “I like that pool.”
Daniella’s apartment had a pool and a playground. It was beyond family friendly.
“We would go by ourselves,” she said, giving Bea the whole picture. “No Grandma and Grandpa.”
Bea’s face crumpled. “Who makes dinner?”
“Me.”
“Oh, Mommy, no.” Bea wrinkled her nose.
Helen laughed. “Do you want to make dinner?”
“We can go to McDonald’s.”
“Would you miss Grandma and Grandpa?” Helen asked carefully.
“We would never come back? To visit?”
“No, we’d visit a lot. And they can visit us.”
“Grandma doesn’t like McDonald’s.”
“No.” Helen laughed again. “She doesn’t. We’ll have to figure out something else for dinner when she comes.”
Bea yawned and Helen realized she might be able to convince her three-year-old to take a rare nap. “You want to go lie down in my bed?” Mommy’s bed was a big treat, reserved for sick days and those mornings after Josie was in town and she and Helen had had too much wine.
Bea nodded so Helen got to her feet and pulled her daughter up into her arms. The apartment thing wasn’t decided. It was only the first conversation of probably many, but as far as first conversations went, that could not have gone better.
It was funny, she thought as she curled up in her single bed, like a parenthesis around her daughter. Her life had changed once, in a terrible instant. It had torn in half fast and without warning. And she realized, three years later, that if she wanted it to change again, she couldn’t count on fate knocking on her door. She had to do it. All on her own. One grueling and unsure step at a time.
Micah
They were all walking around a little aimlessly, waiting for Miguel to show up in White Plains. The band did not do well with waiting. Or boredom. In the corner Sean was flipping cards onto his drum set, trying to flip them hard enough to make noise.
“Hey,” Alex said, approaching Micah where he sat on a folding chair in the far corner of the room, resisting the phone in his back pocket with everything in him.
“What?” Micah said.
“Well, you’re a little ray of sunshine this morning,” Alex said, handing him a cup of coffee.
“Fuck off.”
“What happened to you?” Alex asked. “The good girl charity case dump you?”
Micah stood. “Hey! Hey!” Alex laughed, hands up, getting in front of him so he couldn’t walk away. “Holy shit, okay. I get it. No jokes about Helen.”
Micah sat back down. “Honestly, someone should punch you.”
“You’ve been saying that for years,” Alex said. All no harm, no foul. “You all right though? You haven’t been yourself since you got back from your little field trip.”
Alex sat down next to him in another folding chair and stretched his legs out beside Micah’s.
Before every tour, a stylist came in and they discussed their “look” for the tour. It always seemed like bullshit to him, but he’d realized looking around at all the big acts—they had looks. It was a whole curated thing.