The Edge of the Light

by Elizabeth George

  Olivia grabbed her. The vision was there: that final used-car lot where Becca and her mom had traded for the last car, the one that had brought them to Whidbey Island, the 1992 Ford Explorer. How had she found that place? Becca asked herself. In that moment, she missed her mom so badly that she cried out with the pain of it and in that cry, she knew she’d given the game away.

  Olivia linked her arm tightly with Becca’s. There was no way that she could escape. Even when she pulled, Olivia held her fast.

  The visions began to come one up after the other, like a motion picture being run too fast: talking to their next-door neighbor in San Diego; talking to Connor West; looking at a photo album in which Becca could see the pictures of her as a child and a hand removing those pictures and passing them over and then the sight of Jeff Corrie as the person doing it; talking to someone in an office with piles of papers and awards on shelves.

  “I’m just after a story,” Olivia said. “I’m not trying to wreck your life.”

  “You just wrecked it,” Becca said.

  “I haven’t. And only part of the story is here, right now. I’m not writing it till I have the rest. There’s no point. My editor wouldn’t take it, and I don’t write anything my editor won’t take.”

  “So?”

  “So I need to find the other half of this story. I need to find your mom.”

  Becca laughed bitterly. “Good luck with that. I’ve been trying to find her since the night I got here. I got no clue where she is.”

  “I can find her,” Olivia insisted. “When I do, will you talk to me?”

  “How can you do something that no one else can?”

  “I found you, didn’t I?” Olivia said. “I can find her. Will you help me do it?”

  “What’s in it for you if I do?” Becca asked her.

  “An exclusive. That’s all I want.”

  “That and a Pulitzer Prize,” Becca pointed out.

  Olivia shrugged, a delicate movement that Becca could imagine won hearts and souls and the trust of people she interviewed. “If that happens, I’ll take it. What do you say? Do you want my help in finding your mother?”

  “I don’t see I have any choice,” Becca told her.

  45

  The thing was, Seth loved her. The thing was, you don’t abandon someone you love just because life gets tough. If you find out they have a problem, you step up to the plate to help them solve it.

  He believed Prynne. He believed in Prynne. He believed her when she said she’d tried, that she didn’t want to be an addict, and he believed she had the power inside her to win the coming battle. He understood that she had to keep doing heroin until he could find the best recovery place for her. If she didn’t do that, she might catapult herself into a withdrawal that none of them would be able to handle. She protested at first when he told her that he was looking for a recovery place for her, one that would work this time. She said, “I should be doing that at least” to which he replied, “Your hard work is coming. Let me do this part.”

  She told him she loved him and she would always love him: for caring so much when others had discarded her. “You’re the best,” she said. “There’s no one like you.”

  What Seth did first was talk to Jake. He made Prynne talk to Jake with him. The plan was that she would smoke just enough junk to keep herself from going into withdrawal. In the meantime, Seth would search for the best place for her to get over it.

  Jake didn’t like this plan. He didn’t like the idea of anyone doing heroin anywhere near Grand. But after listening to both of them swear that this would work and that Prynne was serious, he reluctantly said he would keep the peace and not let anyone know what was going on.

  Seth couldn’t bring himself to tell his parents. His mom had been right in voicing her early concerns about Prynne. But she had been wrong in thinking that sticking with Prynne was going to mean permanent trouble for him.

  So Seth worked on finding a place for her to go into recovery. He looked at programs in Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Spokane, Pullman, Ellensburg, and Bellingham. He rejected them. Some were too vague with their promises and others were too far away. He wanted Prynne near enough for him to visit her because he wanted to be able to encourage her. The program that looked the most promising turned out to be in Burlington, well within striking distance of Whidbey Island.

  The cost was staggering, though. He discovered that depending upon the person’s need, the price tag would be between $10K and $40K. Need was determined in an intake interview, physical exam, and conversations with a psychologist and an addiction specialist. An individual program would then be designed, and the addict would first go through withdrawal under the care of a physician. After that, the real work of recovering would begin.

  “But it works?” Seth said.

  That would always depend on the addict, he was told. The individual would have to spend the rest of her life fighting the hunger for heroin. This was impossible to do alone.

  “I’ll be there for her.”

  Which was nice, he was told. But the addict needed the support of other addicts who were also in recovery. Giving up heroin did not stop a person from being an addict. That person was just someone currently not using the substance to which he was addicted. That was why the addict needed the support of other similar people trying not to use again.

  Seth felt discouraged at this news. His picture had been that Prynne would go somewhere, get the heroin out of her system, and return to him as the Prynne he’d first met, the love of his life, his partner and his friend. That this would not be the case was something he needed to talk about, and he wanted Becca to be his listener.

  But he was on his own. Something had happened with Becca. He knew it wasn’t good, and he knew it was about Derric, who was totally missing in action. But when Seth asked her about it, Becca only shook her head and got teary-eyed. Seth didn’t want to force the issue. So he let it go because of his own concerns, the biggest one of which was how to come up with the money to pay for the program in Burlington.

  Oddly enough, it was his aunt Brenda and her husband who gave him the answer, on an evening when Seth and Grand were having a go at playing chess again. Seth had just taken the second of Grand’s castles, when a triple knock at the front door—taptapTAP—told him trouble was on its way.

  Brenda had been keeping her distance, but the rest of the family hadn’t taken heart from this. They knew that Brenda wasn’t the kind of person who was going to give up easily, since mostly she never gave up at all.

  When she and Seth’s uncle Mike entered, Aunt Brenda was all smiles. She was wearing her Medina best: from the sunglasses perched on the top of her head to the designer stilettos on her feet. Seth gawped at these and wondered how the heck Brenda had got down the hill in them. Uncle Mike was duded up as well: GQ central, right down to the three-day-old beard thing that he had going.

  Brenda came over to the chess table. She knelt at Grand’s side, took his good hand in her own, and said to him, “I’ve been a mule about everything, Dad. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Grand’s bushy eyebrows moved toward each other. He didn’t say anything. Neither did Seth. Celia was puttering around in the kitchen and she called out something about coffee and cake, which everyone except Uncle Mike turned down.

  Brenda said, “I completely understand that you want to stay here in the house, Dad, and Mike and I have finally come up with a way that you can do it. It’s a compromise, but I believe it’s one that all of us can live with.”

  There was something about her approach that Seth didn’t like. She was being too oily, he thought. It was the only word that he could come up with to describe how smooth her presentation was. He said, “I c’n call Dad so you c’n tell him whatever you got to say.”

  Brenda looked at him brightly. “Of course you can,” she said. “But we don’t have a lot of time right now.
Mike?”

  Seth’s uncle pulled a chair over to join them. Together they unfolded their plan: Grand would definitely stay in his house. In fact, he would stay in his house till he gave the word that he wished to live elsewhere. Since the current setup had people coming and going all the time—Jake, Celia, Becca, Seth, Prynne—and since there was no real expert there to work with Grand, an honest-to-goodness nursing and physical therapy staff was going to be employed for him. There would be a twenty-four-hour nurse on the premises along with an aide. A physical therapist and a speech therapist would come and go on a regular basis. Nutritious meals would be provided. The only thing that would really change was that family and friends would not be responsible for his care and could thus be able to get on with their lives.

  Seth was seething at the end of this. Grand merely looked confused. Seth said, “So how’s this all supposed to be paid for? Did you and Uncle Mike decide to fund it?”

  “We do have three children in college, sweetie,” Aunt Brenda said coolly.

  “Whatever. So how’s this plan of yours going to be paid for?” Seth felt hot under the collar with the way she’d spoken to him.

  “Mike will explain,” she said.

  This was, obviously, where they’d been heading. Uncle Mike spoke directly to Grand. Ralph, he said, was sitting on over 170 acres of forest, and Mike had a buyer who wanted to purchase 165 of those acres for a destination resort. He’d be putting a hotel and spa at the highest point on the property, so Ralph wouldn’t have to see it. No one would see it, in fact, until they actually arrived. This resort would have a 360-degree view that would encompass the forest below it, the waters around Whidbey Island, the Olympic Peninsula, Camano Island, and the Cascades with the crown jewel of Mount Baker shimmering in the distance. It would have a yoga studio, a thirty-thousand-square-foot spa, two swimming pools—one outdoor and one indoor—trails for hiking, lawns for lounging, quiet rooms for reading and napping. . . .

  “The whole nine yards,” Uncle Mike finished. He added that a resort of this kind would bring an enormous amount of money to Whidbey Island. People would come by boat and be picked up at the Langley marina; they would come by car from the mainland; they would come by bus from Canada. The resort would be a destination, and creating this destination would be good for them all. Grand’s 170 acres merely needed to be platted appropriately so that he would retain the five remaining acres and live comfortably upon them.

  “So,” Brenda said in happy conclusion, “you won’t ever have to leave home again, Dad. I get how important that is to you.”

  “Uh. . . . ’Scuse me?” Seth said. “Thing is, Aunt Brenda, you don’t get everything.”

  She put a manicured hand to her chest and said, “Exactly what don’t I get?”

  “Grand gave the property to me.”

  Such utter silence greeted this that you could hear the wind stirring the branches in the nearby cedar. Brenda finally gathered herself enough to say, “What do you mean, he ‘gave’ it to you? One doesn’t just ‘give’ property to someone. There’re procedures to be followed. You’ve probably mistaken a conversation you had or a remark he made.”

  “Nah,” Seth said. “You c’n check it all out. See, Grand kept saying ‘banks’ to us and we kept thinking he was telling us to go around to the banks for some reason. You knew that, right?” He didn’t wait for a reply because he was sort of enjoying watching his aunt trying not to fall over, since she’d never risen from her position in front of her father and her stilettos were tough to keep her balance on, considering the shock she was in the process of having. “Well, the thing is, he didn’t mean banks like in where you keep your money. He meant Betty Banks.”

  “Who the hell is Betty Banks?” Mike was still seated but he’d leaned forward and he thrust his face in line with Seth’s.

  “She’s the land attorney who did the paperwork. This was about two years ago. I signed it but I didn’t know what it was. You know me: too dumbnuts to read all that legal stuff. I thought maybe it was his will or something.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Brenda said evenly. “You signed a document and you had no idea what it was.”

  “Like I said, I’m dumb,” Seth told her. “Anyways, Grand took me to someone, and I signed and he signed and there was this person who stamped it and made it all official and recorded it in a book and the whole deal. So the thing is . . . ? It’s not up to Grand when it comes to selling property. It’s up to me.”

  Brenda took this in with ever widening eyes. She turned to her father, who was watching her as he’d been watching her since she’d entered the house. She said, “But . . . why? I’m your daughter. Rich is your son. What were you thinking? You had to have been . . .” She whirled on Seth and nearly fell over for good. “You tricked him!” she cried.

  “I didn’t trick anyone,” Seth said. “I wouldn’t even know how. I’m way too dumb. Like I said, check it out. And just to add . . . well . . . no one’s building anything around here.”

  • • •

  THEY LEFT WITH promises of lawsuits and court appearances and blah blah blah. But Seth knew that Grand was smart enough to have hired an attorney who knew how to do things right. So the land was safe. Only . . . there was still Prynne, her recovery, and the cost of it.

  He had to tell Grand about her, and he did. He told the whole story, leaving nothing out. Addiction, heroin, Port Gamble and her parents, Port Townsend and Steve, his mom’s Oxy, the failed trip to Seattle to play for the music agent, Jake’s discovery of the heroin, his confrontation of Prynne, her need for treatment, his search for a place she could go. And finally the cost.

  Ralph didn’t flinch from any of it. Seth knew that his grandfather wanted to talk to him in the old way, in the warm and supportive and loving and wise way that he’d always employed in the past. But he hadn’t progressed far enough with language to do that, and chances were that he never would. Seth nearly lost his courage then. To continue, to get to the crux of the matter, felt like a blow he’d be dealing Ralph, felt like a betrayal of him by the very person his granddad had decided to trust. But a human life had to be worth more than land. And he knew he couldn’t live with himself if he allowed his own actions to discount that fact. So Seth told him he would have to sell some of the property in order to get the money to send Prynne to a recovery program. He knew his grandfather understood what he meant, but he wondered how Ralph would find the words or even the way to give a reply.

  There was silence for a bit. Seth waited and watched. Please, he thought. Please understand. Ralph finally raised his good hand. He reached onto the table where the chess set was. He toppled his own king. Seth watched him do it and then raised his eyes to meet the blue eyes of his grandfather that had shone with love upon him for his entire life.

  Ralph smiled and spoke, for the first time, quite distinctly. “Favorite male grandchild,” was what he said.

  46

  When Cynthia invited Jenn to go to the Rainbow Prom with her, Jenn hesitated. It was one thing to attend meetings of the Gay Straight Alliance and to help Rupert with the posters. Going to the prom itself—not to mention going with Cynthia—meant moving forward in a way she wasn’t sure about.

  It was Mrs. Kinsale who persuaded her. She said, in that Mrs. Kinsale way of hers that Jenn was becoming used to, “You’ve taken a step, Jenn: the meeting at school. This is just another that you might want to take. It might help to remember that to get anywhere, you always have to take the steps.” When Jenn had asked her where she was supposed to be going, Mrs. Kinsale smiled and replied, “Where we’re all going: into greater understanding and into the future.”

  Jenn hadn’t expected to like this old lady. She’d decided she would keep her distance. She figured she would merely do her bit in exchange for a place to stay. Her bit was the dogs: cleaning their run—they pooped like hell on wheels, she discovered—exercising them either in the back yard o
r in the field next-door or down on the beach, feeding them, and making sure they had water. She also did some gardening under Mrs. Kinsale’s careful direction. She also kept the pots watered and the flower beds weeded and the lawns mowed. Mrs. Kinsale did the cooking, though. Jenn’s skill there was limited to making something from nothing, and faced with a refrigerator and cupboards and a pantry that were well stocked, she was out of her depth.

  Her dad had come twice to see her, once with Petey and Andy, who tumbled on the lawn with the dogs, rolling in ecstasy with furry playmates who were only too happy to wrestle with them. The other time, he and Jenn and Mrs. Kinsale had sat in her sunroom, and Bruce and Mrs. Kinsale—to Jenn’s astonishment—had tested a brew and Jenn had sampled her dad’s newest venture, which was homemade soft drinks.

  During that visit, Jenn’s dad had told Mrs. Kinsale that he was a live-and-let-live kind of person. He said that, frankly, he didn’t care one way or the other what Jenn decided about her sexual preference, but the real difficulty lay with Kate. “She has beliefs like we all do,” was how he put it, “and I respect that. I can keep trying to bring her around, but right now she doesn’t want to see Jennie, and that’s how it is.”

  Mrs. Kinsale said that she understood, and what could Jenn do but say the same? Mrs. Kinsale also said, after Bruce McDaniels had left, that time and patience sometimes surprised one with the changes they could bring about. Jenn had her doubts about that, but since she was a guest, she went with the program and said she hoped that would apply to her mom.

  When it came time for the Rainbow Prom, Jenn went with the program again. She accepted the invitation with Cynthia and was relieved when she learned that Lexie and Brian were going with them. There remained, then, only a costume to create, and in this, Jenn discovered that Mrs. Kinsale had a whimsical side to her. Once she heard from Jenn that the theme was steam punk but that the kids really didn’t have to go in costumes, Mrs. Kinsale pointed out that costumes were at least 50 percent of the fun and they would design something together.