The Promise of Paradise - By Allie Boniface Page 0,40
around, or who flirts with lots of women, but doesn’t mean anything by it.”
She found herself holding her breath. “I don’t think that.”
“Sure you do.”
Ash looked at her lap until he reached over and stroked her cheek with his thumb. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” he confessed.
Her heart sped up a little.
“I thought… there’s so much I don’t even know about this woman.”
Guilt replaced giddiness inside Ash’s chest. She didn’t mean to keep secrets from Eddie. Really, she didn’t. She just wouldn’t know where to begin to tell him the truth.
“But then, there are things you don’t know about me, either. Things that might help you understand.”
She looked up at the odd tone in his voice. “What things?”
Eddie looked past her, over her head, to a shadow that might have danced on the wall behind her. “When I was eight years old, my mom got cancer.”
“Oh, Eddie… I’m so sorry.” The words left her mouth and bounced like hollow cylinders around the room. How much we hide, wrap close to the skin. Just when it seemed she knew her housemate, more layers of him peeled away, so that each time she saw him, a new Eddie emerged.
“She was just thirty-two,” he went on. “God, it was scary, especially for a little kid. I couldn’t understand what was happening. Everyone else’s mom came to Open House and baked cookies for snack time and rode on the bus with us to the zoo. Mine just changed from this happy person who smiled all the time to a skeleton that lay on our couch in the living room and slept. Fourth grade? I can’t tell you a thing about it. I spent all my time at the hospital visiting my mom, or taking care of my little brother and sister at home.”
“I didn’t know you had siblings,” Ash interrupted. He’d never mentioned them, and only one picture of Eddie, at his high school graduation with both parents, stood in a frame on his television downstairs.
His face clouded. “Kelly’s eighteen. Just finished high school. And my brother Cal…” He left the sentence unfinished.
“But after awhile, she got better, like the huge miracle everyone had prayed for. She got better, and went into remission, and things were great then. My dad was in a good mood, and even Kelly and Cal didn’t annoy me so much. I was happy, really happy, you know?”
Ash nodded.
“I thought, if only things stay just like this, with my mom healthy and all of us getting along, then I couldn’t ever want anything else.” Eddie took a long breath. “For a long time, I really was that happy.” His hair fell over his eyes as he looked down at his lap
“Then Cal died in a car accident.”
“Oh, Eddie.” My God, how much sorrow could one soul take? Ash looked again at her housemate, and this time she saw pain deep and lasting. He does know what it means to have a family ripped apart. Maybe he’d understand about mine, after all. Little pieces of the reserve inside her began to crack apart.
“It was three years ago. We were driving home from the movies, and Cal was laughing over some stupid joke he’d heard in school,” Eddie continued. “He was seventeen, you know, trying to act all grown up, but still a stupid kid, too big for his shoes and tripping over his feet.”
A smile flashed onto his face but was gone in an instant.
“I was driving, and we were just a couple of blocks from home when this car ran a red light, ran right into us without even slowing down. I tried to stop, but everything happened so fast…and I wasn’t looking the way I usually do. I was watching Cal tell the joke and thinking how cool he was going to be when he got a little older. I’d always thought he was a dork, but he was starting to get it. He was starting to turn into a man.” Eddie swallowed as if something in his throat hurt him. “He would have been such a good man.”
His next words came out in a sob. “The light was green, my way. It wasn’t red, or even yellow. It was green. I know it was, because I still see it every night in my sleep.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose, but two tears spilled over his fingers before he could stop them.
“Eddie, you don’t have to…” But he waved away her words with a damp hand. “It