She knew she’d always been demanding of his time. When Gran or Wilton took her to Alden’s football games or soccer tournaments, she’d whine and pout when he went with his friends afterward instead of coming home to play with her. Sometimes he did go home with her when she became too demanding, and now she burned with embarrassment. Even when he was away at college, he always called or wrote her silly little notes.
When she was in college, he was the first person after Gran that she wanted to see when she visited. How selfish she’d been. His marriage was falling apart and she’d wanted him all to herself.
It was normal to her, something she took for granted. But since having brothers who barely took time to text or phone or visit unless they had dirty laundry to bring home, she understood now how unusual his dedication had been. But again she had taken it for granted . . . until now.
Even now he was still taking care of her. Meri let out a breath. She’d have to tell him that he didn’t need to feel responsible for her anymore. She could take care of herself. She knew she had to tell him, but already she felt a little bereft. Once she acknowledged it, could things ever be the same between them?
She reluctantly turned the page, but the rest of the diary seemed to be about her growing up and continued sporadically through the first couple of years and finally ceased all together. Meri had a feeling the writing stopped with the appearance of Dan Hollis.
Her grandmother said they would talk after dinner if she felt like it. She’d tried calling Alden to invite him to dinner, but “The man has his phone turned off.”
“He must be working,” Meri said.
“He works all the time.”
“Shall I walk over and ask him?” Meri asked.
“No, no. You just stay put and take care of that hand. I’ll go.”
But Meri insisted she felt fine. Besides, she wanted to talk to Alden alone.
Around five Meri set off across the dunes, wondering if she had been too precipitous about wanting to talk to him. What would she say? What she was really afraid of? I know you promised to take care of me. I hope that’s not why we’re friends.
He’d probably look at her like she was crazy. Chances are there were times when he didn’t even remember making that promise. Kids did stuff like that all the time. And he hadn’t always taken care of her. He’d gone to college, moved to Manhattan, so there were years they’d hardly seen each other except at holidays.
By the time she walked over the dunes, Meri had talked herself out of the whole assumption. She’d blown the whole thing out of proportion. He’d promised as a boy, and it was vain of her to think he was still keeping that promise out of an exaggerated sense of duty.
Because that would mean that their whole relationship was built on something that had nothing to do with her. That she couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe. He was older. Naturally he would have looked out for her, just as she looked out for her younger half brothers. That was perfectly normal. Surely he had forgotten his promise a long time ago.
And most of her believed that.
Regardless, she wasn’t to find out that night. The house was locked up; not even Alden’s habitual reading lamp lit the interior. She even walked around to the garage, an unattached wooden building that looked as if a brisk wind would knock it over. It was empty, except for two dinghies propped against the wall.
Just as well, Meri thought as she trudged back across the dunes toward home. Her whole arm was hurting now. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk. Or maybe he was just busy getting ready for Nora’s visit. He probably had shopping to do. Plans to make. And Meri had to confess, the walk had exhausted her; she was too tired to learn any more tonight. She’d eat dinner with Gran, then pop one of those pills and go to bed early.
She had two more days to find out the whole story, or at least all of the story that anyone knew. Then she remembered that Nora would be arriving sometime tomorrow. That too was okay, because the longer she waited, the longer she thought, the easier it was to make herself believe she didn’t need to know the real reason Alden had always been her friend.
Chapter 13
By the time Meri returned home, her feet were dragging, her hand was throbbing, and pain shot up her arm in bursts like electrical shocks. She hoped that didn’t mean something was wrong.
“Probably just means you’re doing too much,” Gran told her and made her sit down while she inspected the bandage and her arm. “I don’t see anything unusual, but if it’s not better in the morning, we can drive in to the doctor’s. What I think you should do is take one of those pills the doctor gave you and go to bed early.”
Meri nodded. She forced down some baked chicken and didn’t protest when Gran handed her a pill and a glass of water and helped her upstairs to her room.
She fell asleep almost immediately but was visited by such dreams of storms and demons that they could have rivaled Alden’s drawings. She was surprised to open her eyes to sunshine the next morning.
She lay there blinking in the light, wondering if she should just take the day off, not worry any more about her past, concentrate on the present, maybe even contemplate her future. She hadn’t talked to Peter since the night at the hospital, and she didn’t want him to think she was neglecting him. (Or that she had chosen Alden over him.) She hadn’t. She just wanted to go to Gran’s where she knew comfort and acceptance, even now.
She would call him later and make amends. This morning she would talk to Gran and to Alden, but later. Right now she could use some catch-up sleep. She began to drift off, then jerked awake. Nora was coming today. Alden didn’t say when. If Meri wanted to talk to him before another week went by, she had better get up and do it now.
Not that she’d figured out what she wanted to say. Mainly just that she knew what had happened and to thank him. Which seemed kind of like being a day late and a dollar shy, but it needed to be said. The consequences be damned.
She settled for a sponge bath. Later she would use Gran’s walk-in shower downstairs. Her mom and father had insisted on installing a full bathroom off her grandmother’s bedroom.
Maybe with Peter gone, Meri should move back in with Gran, help out with her chores and the house and be company for her. She’d hate to give up her apartment, but when she thought about what Gran and her mother had done for her, Meri knew it was the least she could do. She owed everything to them . . . and to Alden.
Meri dressed in jeans and a sweater, though she couldn’t manage the stiff buttonhole and had to ask Gran to do it for her. Gran insisted that she have at least some oatmeal even though the pills had taken her appetite away.
So while Meri forced coffee and oatmeal down, Gran sat down with a cup of coffee and answered all her questions.
Most of what she remembered coincided with what Laura had written in her diary. Some of it veered away, until the part about Riley’s handwritten will.
“Can we get in trouble for what happened? The authorities wouldn’t come after us now.”
Gran smiled. “You mean me and Katy?”
Meri said nothing, not looking at her grandmother, but tracing a pattern with her spoon in the surface of the oatmeal.
“Well, Katy’s got a bit of dementia, I’m sorry to say. Got a full-time caregiver. She’s not done yet, but she does have moments of forgetfulness. I doubt if they could get anything out of her if they asked. Katy, bless her, is sly like a fox.
“As for me?” Gran shrugged. “I stopped worrying about that the first time you smiled at me.
“We were worried about what they could do with you and to Riley. That was her name, Riley.”
Meri nodded.
“She was feverish, weak and sick, but her mind was still sharp, so there was no thinking she wasn’t in her right mind. She insisted we get paper and pen and write her wishes down. She dictated it out in a voice so weak and thin I worried that she’d have the breath to finish it. ‘I bequeath my baby girl, Merielle, to Laura Calder Rodgers. (That was your daddy’s, I mean, Huey�
�s name.) I know she will love her and do right by her. She’s her mamma now.’
“What kind of craziness was that? We let her write it, and Katy Dewar and I witnessed it, just like it was real. Though I doubt if you can bequeath another human being. We were just humoring her. She was worried, afraid, kept saying they were going to kill her. We didn’t think anyone would really want to kill her, but we let her sign it, and then we signed it and put it away in an envelope just to calm her down.
“Of course, after Laura and I met the family, there was no question of giving you back. I’m sorry to say this, but I’ve never met a colder, more self-righteous couple than the Rochforts. Some story about Riley dying in France and being buried in the ancestral plot.
“I don’t know if anybody believed them, but they took off after that to spend the rest of the spring in Europe, didn’t come back until the following fall.”
Her grandmother slapped the table lightly with both hands. “And we’ve never looked back.” She started to rise.
“Just one more thing.”
“I’m listening.”
“Did Riley step out in front of that truck on purpose?”
Therese sat back down. “No, we don’t think so. We were all feeling more than a little guilty, so we contacted the driver of the truck that hit her. One of those big trucks from the mattress store.
“He didn’t think she did it on purpose, least that’s what he said. He said she wasn’t even looking when she stumbled into the road. She didn’t see him coming. He tried to swerve, but it was just too late.
“Poor man broke down and cried. So did I. And it’s something we all will have to live with for the rest of our lives.
“Selfish creatures that we were, it did set our minds at ease. She wasn’t trying to kill herself; she was going somewhere or running away. We’ll never know, I guess. We told her we would love and protect both of you, and I thought she believed us. I don’t know why she ran. It was just an unfortunate, unfortunate accident.
“Now enough of the past. You just spend the day relaxing.”
Meri stood and put her bowl in the sink. Then she leaned over and kissed her grandmother. “I’m glad you kept me.”
“We never thought of doing anything else.” A worry line creased Gran’s forehead. “One more thing—we all understand if you feel the need to make contact with your other family. It’s only natural and we won’t feel slighted in the least. You will always be ours no matter what you do, even if you decide to go back to them.”
“I would never, not after what I read about them, not after what they did to Riley.” Meri was curious, but there was no rush. She’d gone thirty years without contact or even knowing of their existence. Someday maybe, but she was in no hurry to do it now.
“Gran?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Mom wrote about Alden’s part in all of this. She said she thought it might have damaged him, scarred him for life, I think she said. Did I do that to him?”
“Lord, no. It could have cost him his life, having the boat out in that weather. But it’s a good thing he did. He saved Riley Rochfort and he saved you.”
“And he’s watched over me ever since.”
Gran pushed out of her chair. “In the same way he watches out for me and your mother. The same way we watched over him. He may have lost his innocence younger than need be, but he’s not anything but a fine man and a loyal one. Don’t you forget it.”
Meri was a bit taken aback at her grandmother’s vehemence. Almost as if she were defending him, which she didn’t need to do at all. Meri was acutely aware of what she owed to their neighbor and longtime friend.
It was about time she told him so. And before he was distracted by Nora’s arrival.
Meri put on a jacket, told Gran where she was going, and struck off across the grassland. It was a walk she had taken hundreds, thousands of times in all kinds of moods and in all kinds of weather. But today the sun turned the old grasses gold, reflecting off the new, delicate shoots with a vibrancy that felt fresh and new—new and wonderful.
The sky was blue, a different blue from the sea, which she could glimpse through the bluffs. She didn’t hurry but took deep breaths of the fresh air, hyperaware of being outdoors, and not balanced on a scaffolding high above a dusty wooden floor, breathing in paint fumes and chemicals. And a huge weight seemed to fall from her shoulders.
This is who she was, Meri Calder Hollis, architectural restorer, and a part of this land as sure as if she were the blood progeny of Cyrus Stillman Calder, gentleman farmer.
There wasn’t much sign of life, when Meri arrived at Alden’s house. But with the brilliant daylight, he was bound to be at work in the sunroom. She followed the trampled grass from her last visit and let herself inside.
He wasn’t there; she called out, but there was no answer. But his worktable and pens were set up, so he must not be far away.
She walked across the room and stole a look at what he was working on. And stopped. He was working on a children’s Odyssey and this must be a siren calling Odysseus to his doom. He’d borrowed the breakers from their own beach. The boulders were dark and slick in a storm, the sea churning around them. And in the distance a boat, a ship, not a dinghy, was being drawn inexorably to its doom.
But it was the figure standing at the crest of the rocks, her arms extended, beckoning, that held Meri spellbound. The gown of rags whipped in the wind, and her hair lifted wild, coiling with a terrible beauty. And most frightening still, it was her own face that stared back at her.
The glass door opened and Meri started.
Alden came in from the outside, his shoes in his hands. He tossed them on the mat by the door and stopped as Meri stepped out from behind the board.
“Meri.” His hair was windblown much like the siren’s. As she thought that, he thrust his fingers through it, pushing it out of his eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Looking at your latest. It’s . . .” She grasped for a description.
“Not finished.” He strode past her and covered it, then turned to her. “How are you feeling?”
“Is that me?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand. “No.”
“Her?”
“It’s a siren. I told you I was working on an Odyssey.”
“Is that the way you feel, that she—we—lured you to your . . . what . . . death of childhood, innocence?”
“I think you’d better take it easy with those pain pills. You’re talking nonsense.”
“Is that what Riley was to you? A siren?”
He looked at her long and hard, long enough to make her squirm beneath his gaze.
“Is it?”
“No.”
“Is that the way it happened that night? Did she wave you down, tempt you to the rocks?”
“Stop it.”
“I don’t want us not to be friends. I just want to understand.”
They were interrupted by the sound of a car.
“It’s Nora.”
Nora, who Meri would love to run out and greet, and Jennifer, who she wouldn’t mind avoiding for the rest of her life, and she guessed from Alden’s body language, he felt the same.
“I’d better get home. You and Nora are invited for dinner tomorrow, around six? Unless you have other plans.”
He shook his head, but he was tucking in his shirt, already headed through the house to the front door.
Meri let herself out the back, still shaken by the picture and determined to get away unseen. She would take the long way back. It was the least she could do to avoid any meeting with Jennifer. The woman had never liked her, probably because Meri had witnessed some of her worst moments.
Meri followed the path down to the rocky beach. She’d always loved the rugged shoreline that joined the two properties. Part pebbles, part coarse sand and the occasional boulder at the base of barren bluffs and dunes that rolled into a grassy meadow, it was the best of all possible worlds Meri had always thought.
But she did stop to imagine what Alden saw when he looked out to the boulders. Well, she had seen it, hadn’t she? Just now in his studio.
She moved on, carefully stepping across the shifting stones until she came to the oval of coarse sand they all considered the beach. It was about fifteen feet long and ten feet deep, beneath the bluffs on one side and protected from the tide and waves by the breakwater.
She didn’t linger today, but climbed the narrow path through the beach roses and dune grass and over the bluffs to the meadow. She could see a minivan stopped at Alden’s house. She turned and made her way back to Gran’s.
Alden stood in the yard watching as three car doors opened on the late-model minivan. Nora practically fell out of the back, but Mark was the first to reach Alden. He stuck out his hand, and they shook hands like two business associates in the boardroom.
They let go just as Nora launched herself at Alden.
“I’ll get her stuff,” Mark said and stepped away.
Nora threw her arms around Alden, whispering, “Thanks for letting me come.”
Jennifer appeared from the other side of the car. For a change she looked less than put together, though she was putting on a good front. Not that it was easy; her face was more rounded than usual, and her pregnancy showed tastelessly beneath a tight tank top and sweater. As far as he was concerned that look didn’t work on young mothers, and Jennifer was pushing forty. This surely had to be her last baby.
“Well, here she is,” she said without preface. Alden’s arm automatically tightened around his daughter.
Nora made the sign of the cross. “Yes, you can go now with a clear conscience.”
Jennifer glared at Nora, then turned it on Alden. “See what I mean.”
Alden refused to rise to the bait.
Mark came back with a huge suitcase and stuffed backpack and put them down at Alden’s feet. “We’re very disappointed in her behavior,” Mark added, in his jovial superior way that made Alden want to deck him. But mainly he just wondered where Lucas was. And why he hadn’t gotten out of the car, at least to say hello.
Breakwater Bay Page 14
