Home at Last--Sanctuary Island Book 6

by Lily Everett

  Marcus’s legs shook, his knees going watery. He sat down on the piano bench with a thud. “Mama wanted me to stay away.”

  “She wanted you to finish your exams,” Will explained. “It was all she could talk about, in those final days. Her son, the doctor. Imagining your future enabled her to let go of her own.”

  Marcus wanted to deny it, to argue and rage and tell his father he was wrong. But through the dim clouds of memory, a moment surfaced where a little girl on a bike told him something very similar mere moments after he’d shouted at his father that he never wanted to see him again. As much as Marcus didn’t want to believe it now, he hadn’t been ready to hear it then at all.

  “It was still wrong,” he rasped. “I should have been here.”

  “I agree,” Will surprised him by saying. “And I am sorry for the way it hurt you, not to be here. That’s not what your mother or I wanted.”

  Complicated feelings cascaded through Marcus, rearranging everything he thought he knew about his family. His past. His life. “Mama wouldn’t have wanted me to fight with you after her funeral, either. And she definitely wouldn’t have wanted me to storm off and join the army instead of becoming a doctor.”

  Will looked away. “Maybe not. But she wanted you to be happy more than anything else. Are you happy, son?”

  The question threw Marcus off balance. “Happiness is for children. Or people who don’t know how fragile life is. I’m not sure it’s meant for people like me.”

  Sinking down into an armchair, Will bowed his head over his knees. “You sound so much like me after a bad day at the hospital. After losing a patient at the end of a ten-hour surgery or fighting with insurance companies for the chance to try a lifesaving operation. I know I wasn’t much fun to be around, on those days. I know I wasn’t much of a father to you.”

  Marcus felt like he was supposed to deny it, to tell his father he’d been great, but the words stuck in his throat. And as he stared at the remote figure who’d been so distant and untouchable for most of his childhood, he didn’t believe his father expected a denial. “I had Mama,” Marcus said hoarsely. “She made up for a lot.”

  A slight smile creased Will’s cheeks. “Your mother was the ultimate proof that happiness exists, and it’s meant for everyone. I could come home at the end of one of those days and look into her eyes, and I knew happiness was real. And it was right there, for me.”

  “I miss her all the time,” Marcus said, the words falling out of his mouth like they’d been dying to escape. “It’s been how many years? And part of me still expects to be able to pick up the phone and call her.”

  “Sometimes I get mad about it,” Will said, with a broken laugh. “She’s been gone too long. It’s time for her to come home. But she is home. We’re the ones who still have a ways to go. Longer for you than for me, I hope.”

  Marcus felt a thread of connection wind around his heart and extend to wrap around his father, pulling taut and strong between them. “Christmas is hard. And my birthday.”

  “She had a way of making those days special.”

  “It’s dumb. I’m a grown man, not a little kid.”

  “Everyone is a little kid when they’re missing their mother,” his father said matter-of-factly. “I miss her most in the mornings, the early hours we spent together with coffee and the newspaper and making plans for the day.”

  This was exactly the conversation they should have had at the funeral, Marcus was realizing. Years late, but better late than never. Every word lanced a wound he hadn’t realized was still infected. “I miss her most at night. Right before I turn out the light. I always get the urge to beg for one more story.”

  His mother had been a wonderful natural storyteller, insightful about people and what made them tick, with an instinctive grasp on the kinds of things that made stories magical for kids. Her stories were full of dinosaurs and dragons, moon landings and ancient cursed pyramids, and dogs who talked and solved crimes. Marcus had told her for years that she ought to write them down and try to turn them into books, but she’d always laughed him off.

  A strange expression had come over his father’s face. “I’m retired,” he said out of nowhere.

  “I heard,” Marcus said shortly, not seeing the connection and not quite ready to stop talking about Mama.

  His father fidgeted a bit with the untucked hem of his slightly wrinkled button-down shirt. “I meant … did Quinn tell you what I’m doing with myself these days?”

  “She was mysterious about it,” Marcus admitted, suddenly curious despite himself.

  “Come with me,” his dad said, rushing from the room.

  Marcus followed more slowly, his mind racing. He felt as if he’d been sipping a cup of poison, every day another sip for years and years, and he’d finally managed to put it aside. His vision was still clouded with the residue of a decade of resentment, but it was clearing.

  It wasn’t only that Marcus had resented being kept away from his mother’s deathbed. He’d blamed his father for his mother’s death, on some deep, irrational level. It wasn’t fair. She’d had cancer; she’d decided when she no longer wanted to pursue treatment. She’d made the choice to go home to die. At the time, Marcus had wanted his mother to fight to live, but with the benefit of age and experience, he understood better how tired of hospitals she must have been, how pointless another round of painful, unsuccessful treatments would have seemed. And how much she longed to spend what time she had left in a place that she loved.

  It wasn’t fair to blame his father for any of that. He couldn’t quite blame his father for carrying out his mother’s last wishes, either. Maybe it was time to forgive his father and move on.

  He couldn’t imagine they’d ever be close, but there didn’t have to be an ocean of pain, regret, and anger between them, either.

  Marcus tracked his father through the kitchen to the nook, where the old, wooden table they’d used to eat breakfast at was covered in paper. Large pages filled with pencil-scratched writing were spread across the scarred surface, mingling with line drawings shaded gray and rolling up at the edges.

  Will had dragged the lamp down from their bedroom, Marcus saw, to cast its buttery yellow light over the table. And instead of the ladder-back dining chairs they used to sit in, there was a cushy armchair piled high with extra pillows. This was clearly where his father spent most of his time. But doing what? Marcus still didn’t get it.

  Chapter 20

  “What is all this stuff?” Marcus asked.

  Will shuffled through the papers eagerly. “My work! You could call it a retirement project, I suppose, but really, I think it’s the most important work I’ve ever done.”

  Marcus, who’d never imagined his father caring more about anything than he did about being a surgeon, felt his jaw drop open in shock. Clamping it shut again, he held out his hand to receive the paper his father wanted to show him.

  It was a story, he realized with a sense of wonder. A story that tugged at the softest and sweetest of Marcus’s memories. There was the dog, Mr. Meander, yes, of course, confronting a suspicious-looking young bird about the theft of a dinosaur fossil from the Natural History Museum.

  “I remember this one,” he said slowly, his eyes scanning to the end of the page. “It turns out there’s a witch who brought the dinosaur back to life, so he stole his own bones.”

  “Because he needed them,” Will agreed, smiling broadly. “And really, they belonged to him already, when you think about it.”

  Against his will, Marcus felt the corners of his mouth stretching into a smile. He didn’t know why, since his eyes and nose were burning with tears at the same time, but the urge to smile won out.

  “You’re writing down Mama’s stories?”

  Will sat down in his chair and pulled another pile of papers closer to him. He ran his fingers over the pages lovingly. “I can almost hear her voice in my ear, sometimes. The way she’d do the different voices for the characters to make you laugh.”


  “I didn’t know you ever heard us,” Marcus said blankly, staring down at a drawing of the intrepid Mr. Meander’s furry, bearded face and expressive eyebrows. “I thought you were always reading medical journals in your room.”

  “Sometimes. But a lot of the time, I sat outside your room and waited for your mother to kiss you goodnight.”

  “Why didn’t you come in?” Marcus’s voice broke at the end, but he didn’t even care.

  “You and your mother—what you had was so special.” There was a wistfulness to his father’s smile, but a sort of pride, too. “You were everything to her, Marcus. And vice versa. I was happy to live on the edges of that. Just to hear you whispering together, and laughing—that was enough for me.”

  The fault line down the middle of Marcus’s chest cracked open. “Dad.”

  “But then she was gone,” his father continued, still staring down at the clever, quick drawings that somehow perfectly evoked the characters as Marcus had always imagined them. “And I didn’t know how to talk to you. I didn’t know how to be the one who made you laugh, who held you and comforted you. And I’m sorry for that, son.”

  Marcus dropped the pages on the table and went to stand next to his father’s chair. He looked down at the man whose absence had colored every memory from his childhood. His father was smaller than he ever realized.

  Will Beckett was his father. But he was also a man, a man who had expected a long life with the woman he loved, and who’d had to say good-bye to her much too soon. He was a man who hadn’t always known how to be a father—but looking at the drawings and stories Will had so laboriously created, Marcus realized that his father was a man who knew how to love.

  “Dad, I forgive you. And I hope you can forgive me, for lashing out at you, for staying away for so long, for never even trying to understand what you were going through.”

  “My boy.” Will blinked up at him, his cheeks damp and his hair a mess. “You’re my son. If I had never seen you again in this life, I would still have loved you every day. Every minute.”

  Marcus crumpled down to hug him tight, painfully aware of the brittleness of his father’s bones.

  Maybe he still had a few things to learn from his old man, after all.

  So Marcus spent the next couple of days trying to do just that. He found out how his father had coped with his mother’s death—mainly by burying himself in work until he had a cardiac episode that scared him into stopping. And by then, he’d removed himself so completely from the social life of Sanctuary Island that even when he retired, it was hard to get back into the habit of seeing other people. It became easier to close his door and retreat to his nest … retreat into his memories.

  It worried Marcus, because being completely on his own wasn’t good for his dad. He didn’t need medical training to see that. But on a deeper level, it freaked Marcus out because he could envision himself reacting exactly the same way. It had always been one of Marcus’s deepest fears—that he might be more like his father than he wanted to admit. Like father, like son. And the more he got to know the man his father had become, the more Marcus had to admit the truth of that old adage. He and his father were a lot alike.

  One area where they were not in sync? Will Beckett had turned into a man who loved asking personal questions. That would be a reason for Marcus to dislike his father’s total isolation, if nothing else.

  “Tell me again why you aren’t staying with that sweet Quinn girl?” Dad asked while bent over the sketch he was working on.

  Marcus listened to the fast, fluid strokes of his father’s pencil while he scrambled eggs and popped some bread in the toaster.

  “Because we broke up,” he explained, as patiently as he could manage, given the rawness of the wound. “It’s over. She doesn’t want to see me anymore.”

  “Did she say that? Because I got the impression when she visited me that she liked being around you. Quite a bit.”

  How to explain to this man who had loved one person in his life, so entirely that he felt as married to her now when she was long dead as he had when she was alive—how could Marcus tell his father that sometimes love wasn’t enough? Sometimes people were too far apart, too different, to make it work.

  “Quinn has her whole life ahead of her,” he finally said, scraping the eggs onto a pair of plates. “I know she had feelings for me, an infatuation, but she came to her senses and she’s better off.”

  “I don’t believe that.” His father blinked up at him reproachfully as he approached the kitchen table. “No one could be better off without you.”

  Castigating himself for the years he’d wasted being pointlessly angry at his father did no one any good. But Marcus couldn’t help wishing he’d gotten his head out of his ass earlier. It wasn’t easy to ignore the role Quinn had tried to play in this reconciliation, but he managed it.

  “Thanks, Dad. But it’s more complicated than that.”

  “More complicated than you wanting to be with her and her wanting to be with you?” Dad accepted his eggs, and Marcus could feel his questioning gaze on his back when he went to get the toast.

  “Yes,” Marcus said, aware that he sounded stubborn but unwilling to soften the blow. He couldn’t take too many more versions of this same conversation without cracking. “In fact, I’m thinking about taking a break from Sanctuary Island for a while.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Marcus shrugged, setting down the plate piled with golden-brown toast. “I could close the Buttercup Inn for a while, and we could take a trip. You and me. Maybe someplace you went with Mama. Would you like that?”

  “No!”

  Surprised and a little hurt, Marcus looked up from buttering his toast to see his father wince and wave his hands. “No, I mean, yes, I would like to spend time with you. I don’t care where, here or somewhere else, it makes no difference to me. But you can’t run away from Sanctuary Island now!”

  “It’s not running away,” Marcus snapped, although maybe it was, a little. So he didn’t want to be around to see it when Quinn moved on and found someone more age-appropriate to lavish her smiles and kisses on. That didn’t make Marcus a coward, it made him smart enough to be aware of what he could and couldn’t handle.

  “Look, son.” Dad scraped his fork through his eggs, moving them around on the plate without eating them. “It’s been a long time since we sat at this table, talking this way. Maybe we never did, when your mom was alive, because she was there to be the linchpin of our family. But you’re all the family I have left, now, and I’m all you’ve got, too. So maybe it’s a bad idea for me to rock the boat. Maybe I risk sending you out of here, mad as hell and not wanting to talk to me for another ten years. I’d hate that, but I have to take the chance. Because, Marcus, my boy. You’re making a mistake.”

  The food in his mouth turned to sawdust. Marcus hadn’t heard this solemn tone from his father in more than a decade—since the phone call that informed him his mother was gone. That tone made him want to get up from the table and head for the door, as fast as his legs would take him.

  But the sorrow and determination on his father’s face kept Marcus in his chair.

  “Dad, I want to build a relationship with you,” he said, attempting to halt this runaway train before it crushed them both. “But I don’t want to talk about this. My love life is off-limits.”

  “I’m not talking about your love life,” Dad argued. “Where you take some date for dinner or whether you’ve kissed yet. This is your life I’m talking about. You can’t separate the love out of this equation and still have a life.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  Dad dropped his fork with an impatient clatter. “It means … look. You wanted to be there when your mother was dying. You wanted to be around not only for the good parts of her life, but the hard parts, too. That’s love.”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t there.” Marcus felt his throat close.

  “Only because I prevented it. That was my fa
ult, not yours. You were brave enough for love, back then. Your mother taught you that. I don’t know what’s happened in your life since then, but it was something that made you afraid. Of love. The hard parts, and the good parts, too. But I know you’re strong enough to face it all, to let it all in. I want that for you, Marcus. Very badly. And your mother would have wanted it, too.”

  Marcus pushed back from the kitchen table so quickly, his chair skidded across the floor with a loud noise. He gathered up his still full plate without even looking at it and carried it over to the sink.

  He needed to move, he couldn’t just sit there and listen to that garbage.

  “You want to know what happened to me?” Marcus flipped on the hot water and grabbed the dish soap. “I grew up. I stopped expecting love to mean anything except pain. I learned that some people are bad at being there in the ways that matter, when it counts, and I’m one of those people.”

  “Marcus, that simply isn’t true.”

  Infuriated, Marcus scrubbed harder at the plate with the sponge, as if he were trying to take off the enamel. “It is true, Dad. You don’t know anything about me. But you, of all people, you know that the worst part is … when you love someone, they leave. The people you love leave. And it sucks.”

  His mother, Buttercup, now Quinn. All gone.

  Except. His hands stilled in the soapy water, the plate slipping through his fingers to clink gently against the bottom of the sink. He knew what his father was going to say before the man even opened his mouth.

  “Except you’re the one who’s leaving this time. Aren’t you? Not Quinn.”

  The truth blazed down over Marcus like a searchlight, leaving him nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. He braced his hands on the edge of the sink and hung his head, trying to catch his breath. It was like sucking oxygen after a body blow.

  A tentative hand touched his back, settling between his shoulder blades. Paradoxically, the solid weight of it seemed to lift some of the pressure from his chest.

  “People do leave,” Dad said quietly. “But that’s why you have to grab onto love with both hands. Because life is uncertain. Happiness isn’t so common that you can afford to let it go without a fight.”