“Hi,” Jonah says. Apparently he reserves his hellos for little children. But I can’t resent it, not when I hear how gently he speaks to her. “I came to visit Vivienne. That’s all right, isn’t it?”
Obviously Libby likes being asked her opinion on this subject. Her chubby little face becomes grave. “It’s all right, but you have to help me color later.”
Jonah gets a deer-in-the-headlights look. I whisper, “A little rusty with your Crayolas?”
“You’re the artist,” he says.
It’s only a small joke. But it’s such a relief to smile, to let everything else fade into the background for a moment.
On the porch stand Anthony, hands in his pockets, and Chloe, one arm slung possessively around her husband’s shoulders. Neither of them seems ready to welcome Jonah with open arms—or to welcome him at all. I glance up at Jonah. “Ready to run the gauntlet?”
He picks up his suitcase and takes my hand. “I’ve walked through a lava field,” he says. “I think I can handle this.”
• • •
“Well,” Chloe says as I show Jonah inside. “I hardly expected you to bring a date for the occasion, Vivienne.”
“I’m here for moral support.” Jonah holds out his hand. “Jonah Marks.”
Sometimes “Southern hospitality” is just another term for hypocrisy. But those good manners are carved into Chloe so deeply that she can’t resist them. With a small, pursed smile, she says, “Chloe Charles Whedon. This is my husband, Anthony, and our daughter, Olivia.”
“Call me Libby.” Already Libby thinks she’s made a conquest. “Are you Aunt Vivi’s boyfriend?”
“You’d have to ask your aunt about that.” He looks away from her just long enough to smile at me.
Anthony steps forward, almost a swagger. “What line are you in, Jonah? In soybeans, myself.”
Chloe chimes in, “He’s so modest. Anthony would never tell you his family runs the largest soybean farms in Tennessee and Mississippi.”
She always says this like growing soybeans is better than winning a Nobel Prize. Which makes it even more delicious to watch their faces as Jonah says, “I’m in volcanoes.”
“Beg pardon?” Anthony says.
“I’m a professor at UT Austin. I study volcanoes and earthquakes.”
Libby pipes up, “You study them in books?”
“Not only in books.” Jonah smiles down at her. “I travel around the world to look at geological hot spots. Sometimes I get a plane or helicopter to take me directly overhead. Every once in a while I even have to wear a heat-shield suit, so the lava won’t get me.”
“Coooooool.” Big-eyed, Libby stares up at Jonah like he’s the most fantastic person she’s ever met in her short life. So he’s won over the one family member whose opinion matters.
As for Anthony—it’s as if he’s deflating. All of a sudden he seems to realize he’s shorter than Jonah, and he sits in the nearest chair, like maybe that way nobody will notice.
The formalities have been dispensed with. Jonah turns to me, and it’s as if I’m the only person in the room. “When can you visit your father?”
I glance at the brass-and-marble clock on the nearest mantel. “Two or three hours from now. Mom left for the hospital right after the doctor called, but the rest of us have to wait for him to be moved to his room.”
“Okay.” Jonah slides his arm around me. “We’ll wait.”
Chloe surrenders with good grace. “Would you like some iced tea, Jonah?”
“I’m fine. What about you, Vivienne?”
“I’m good,” I say, thinking, now that Jonah’s here.
At first we all hang out together downstairs. Jonah and I sit on the long velvet sofa, me curled along his side as if we’d been together forever—as if this weren’t the actual day we’d realized how much we might mean to each other.
Jonah must be as rocked by this revelation as I am, but at the moment, his attention is divided. Libby has settled her lap desk on his lap, to make it easier for them to color side by side.
“You must really like volcanoes,” Libby chirps, as Jonah uses the goldenrod crayon to touch up some lava flow.
“I do,” he says, then adds more quietly, “and they’re the only thing I know how to draw.”
That makes me smile, but still, I can’t stop hearing the clicking of Chloe’s boots on the hardwood floor as she paces back and forth. Anthony buries himself in his cell phone, playing some game he doesn’t go to the trouble to mute. The hands on the brass-and-marble clock on the mantel move so slowly I could believe they’re painted on. Jonah’s presence makes me feel less afraid, less alone—but nothing can make me feel comfortable in Anthony’s presence, not even him. So when Libby goes down for her nap, I plead exhaustion and take Jonah upstairs with me.
“Do you need to sleep?” he murmurs as we reach the second floor. “You have to be ready to drop.”
“I am, but I couldn’t fall asleep now. Just come out on the gallery with me.”
Jonah frowns. “The gallery?”
“Like a balcony, except the supports go all the way down to the ground.” New Orleans Architecture 101. “Come on.”
Our gallery is screened in, which makes it a pleasant place to spend long summer nights. By November, the breezes are cooler, but Jonah and I are dressed warmly enough. I sink down onto one of the long bamboo “outdoor chaises,” and Jonah sits next to me.
Although I expect no more than the comfort of Jonah’s presence, after a moment, he speaks. “We never talked about our families. I thought I was . . . protecting myself. I never asked if you had your own stories to tell.”
“You picked up on that already, huh?”
“Kind of hard to miss.”
Jonah doesn’t know enough, and yet he knows too much. So I shake my head. “This isn’t the time to get into it. I just have to get through this, okay?”
“Okay,” he murmurs, pulling me down into his embrace. We lie there quietly for a while before he says, “Do you feel all right? After last night.”
The memory makes me blush. “Oh. Yeah.” Some of the most intense sex of my life was less than twenty-four hours ago, and yet it feels like a fever dream. “Only a little sore. And I scraped my wrist when I fell in the woods.”
When I point out the red place on my wrist, Jonah rubs just below it with his thumb. No idea why that diminishes the pain, but it does.
I murmur, “I feel kind of guilty. You came all the way down here, and we already know my father made it through surgery. I didn’t mean to waste your time.”
“It’s not a waste of time.” Jonah brushes my hair back from my face. A breeze outside rustles the oak leaves, but I don’t feel the chill. “I meant what I said on the phone.”
“About things being different for us?”
He nods, and I feel a wave of almost inexpressible tenderness for this strong man hiding so much vulnerability, so much pain. Maybe that’s what he sees when he looks at me.
It’s so hard to believe that someone might want me—all of me—fucked-up sexual desire, tangled family history, book-hoarding tendencies, everything. I never looked for that. I never even dared to dream about it.
Now, with Jonah, I can finally start to ask myself what it would mean to be totally honest with another person.
Right now, I know only one thing for sure: Whatever dark secrets Jonah has to tell, whatever his past has held, I can hear it. I won’t flinch, and I won’t turn back.
“It’s going to take a while to get there,” I say softly. “You know that.”
“I know.” Jonah’s lips brush my hair. “We’ll get there.”
Finally I can begin to believe that might be true.
When we go back downstairs, Chloe is suddenly occupied with the question of where to put Jonah—as in, tonight. “We haven’t that many guest rooms, and Anthony and I won’t want to drive Olivia all the way back to Metairie—”
I give her a look. My room has a double bed, after all. It might be a tight fit for me and Jonah, but if we made do on a backstage table, I bet we can manage.