Page 50 of The Summer House
He seemed so absorbed by the lockbox, Callie wasn’t sure if he’d even heard her. He leaned forward and ran his hand over the lid. “It’s open!”
She set her glass down. “Yes—I’m so sorry. Olivia’s son, Wyatt, jimmied it open and I didn’t have the key to lock it again.”
Frederick put the box on the table and stared at the closed lid. “Did you look inside?”
Callie squirmed. “I know I shouldn’t have… Frederick, I’m so sorry. It was none of my business.” Her head pounded. What was she supposed to do now? Tell him she knew Luke? Run away?
Frederick slowly eased the lid open and pulled out the drawings on top. He studied the horses, sketched in perfectly haphazard scribbles, and slid his finger under the edge of the paper, revealing a sketch of just the fingers of a woman’s hand on the next sheet. But he didn’t turn the page.
Callie could feel her heart rising into her throat. “Are these your drawings?”
He blinked rapidly. “Yes.” He looked away.
“Do you still draw?”
“No.”
Callie cleared her throat. “I should go. I’m sorry.”
He looked up. “Please...” His eyes were wide.
It would be best to go right now, before things got even more complicated, but she couldn’t leave him like this—he looked so sad. She lowered herself again. “Why don’t you draw anymore?” she asked boldly.
He didn’t say anything. She reached out to get her water, hoping that her hand wouldn’t shake when she held it. She took a sip to buy herself time. What was she supposed to do? Wasn’t it dishonest of her to sit and pretend she didn’t know what was going on? And this man, he wasn’t a father who didn’t care. He was broken by his loss.
She mustered up her energy and said, “It’s just… I know an artist, and I was so impressed by him that I feel it would be a great loss if he ever stopped painting.” She leaned forward for emphasis. “He painted the horses in Corolla for me. He took me there because he said his mother used to take him as a child.” When she said that, Frederick looked as though he’d been punched in the gut, the color draining out of his face.
“Luke?”
She nodded.
Without taking his eyes off her, Frederick turned to the next sketch. He pulled his eyes away finally and his gaze fell onto the page with the woman. He was quiet as his eyes moved over the drawing. Callie allowed the silence. She sipped her water and watched, waiting for the response that was causing him great emotion to produce.
He cleared his throat. “This was my last drawing.” He tilted his head back as if to catch the tears that brimmed in his eyes. He blinked them away. “When I’d finished it, I walked up to the woman in the picture. So as not to worry Luke, I simply said, ‘It’s a beautiful day.’ She smiled at me. She’d brought Luke there to play so I could see him. And her.” He closed his eyes as if the memory were able to calm him. “I asked her…” He opened his eyes again and looked back at Callie, his shaking hands on his knees. “If she thought there would be more beautiful days like this one in the future. I remember, she pursed her lips and said, simply, ‘I don’t think so.’ She was never going to tell him. She assured me of that. It was the last time I drew her and her son.”
“Your son.”
Frederick hung his head and without warning, he started to sob. Callie didn’t know what to do. She got up, set down her water, and put her arms around him. His back heaved as he cried, and her heart broke for this man. She grabbed a tissue from a box that was on the small table next to them and handed it to him. “He has your smile,” she said, but it only made him cry more.
Luke had said his motherused totake him to that beach—as in more than once. Had she changed her mind and gone back? Had she been waiting for Frederick and he’d never shown up again? Callie sat down on the floor in front of him to try to get him to look at her. “You love him. Why didn’t you ever tell him?” She could feel her own tears rising and she knew that it was because those were the questions she’d had for her own father.
“It’s complicated,” he said, sitting up and trying unsuccessfully to get himself together.
She reached over and got her water, pushing her own emotion back down where it had come from. “I meant to give you the box and leave. But I feel like I have to tell you—I already know half your story. I wanted to find out where you were and I thought there might be some clue in your sister’s journal, so I read it. I had no idea, at first, that it was about someone I knew.’’
Frederick looked unsure, but at the same time he seemed as if he’d held this burden all by himself for so many years that he was dying to let someone else help him deal with it.
“It might not change anything, but you wouldn’t have to endure it all alone. I know you didn’t tell Alice a lot—she wrote about that in her journal.”
“That’s because she judged me. She was angry with me for giving him up so easily, but she didn’t know that I cried myself to sleep every single night. I never married or had kids. I didn’t have any will to after losing him and Lillian, because I knew that I had a son and I wasn’t allowed to be in his life.”
“Said who?”
“Lillian.”
“Why was she the only one with a say in this matter?”
“I was the quintessential starving artist. I had nothing to offer. She’d been unfaithful to her husband, and knowledge of that would’ve caused a messy divorce. She’d have lost everything. But that aside, she told me she regretted it. She felt terribly guilty, and said she would spend the rest of her life being the perfect wife to make it up to him. We agreed to keep it quiet and Luke would have a wonderful life, a life grander than anything I could’ve offered. He went to top schools, he had the best upbringing money could buy. And now look at him.”
