Snapshots

by Pamela Browning

  I shook my head to clear it. “This is really bad timing,” I said. “I have to hurry back inside, get dressed, see if Martine needs anything.”

  “I’ve missed you. I lie awake every night wishing you were beside me.”

  Rick’s Toyota stuttered off into the distance. My knees were wobbly, my tongue tied. And certainly I had no more patience.

  “Graham, you and I have to talk,” I said as a means of preparing him.

  “Talk?”

  “About—about our relationship.”

  “This sounds like bad news,” he said jovially, though there was a thread of tension drawing the words tight.

  I drew a deep breath. “Come on, let’s walk down to the park.”

  “You’re supposed to be helping Martine,” he said.

  “Yes, but—oh, Graham, can’t you make this easier for me?” I blurted the words and was not surprised when Graham’s face turned white.

  I brushed past him, charged out of the utility room and down the driveway. It was all Graham could do to keep up with me.

  I don’t want to go over the terrible scene with Graham that day. It’s enough to tell you that I broke it off as kindly as I could, and he reacted with anguish and more in-your-face belligerence than I thought he was capable of displaying to me or anyone else. I considered myself fortunate to have learned about his tendency toward out-of-control anger before I married him. In the end, I ripped his ring from my finger, and he jumped back in his car and roared back to Raleigh, leaving me stony-faced but unrepentant. I was convinced I’d done the right thing for both of us, but just between you and me, I haven’t been able to stomach baklava ever since.

  At the church a few hours later, my bouquet of roses and baby’s breath gave off a sickening-sweet fragrance and created a headache that two hastily swallowed aspirins would not cure. Before I started my march down the aisle, I had to wait for CurryAnne, Tottie and the two other bridesmaids to reach the altar and turn to face the assembled guests. Then, feeling faint from the combination of flower fumes and emotional tension, I preceded Martine to the altar and assumed my place to the left of her. I avoided looking at Rick.

  When Dr. Stith indicated with a nod that it was time for the ring ceremony, things began to get crazy. Hal, Rick’s best man, was so nervous that he dropped Martine’s ring, setting off a Keystone Kops scramble. One of the groomsmen dropped to his knees to grab the ring as it rolled merrily past him, and I tried to stop it with the toe of my shoe. The ring jumped down the altar steps, and Rick chased it, setting off amused murmuring and a snicker or two from the wedding guests. Finally, in front of the first pew, Rick pounced on the ring and slowly rose, waving it overhead as if in victory. Then everyone broke into laughter.

  While the guests were settling down, Rick walked up the steps and turned his head to stare at me, a panoply of emotions flitting across his features. And then he spoke to me in a terse whisper.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to break off with Graham?”

  No one else heard what Rick said to me, and if anyone noticed that he spoke, they would have merely attributed it to a comment about the dropping of the ring. Old Dr. Stith was almost deaf, and no other attendant stood near.

  Martine was the only one whose attention was focused on us, but her expression was serene. She probably hadn’t heard. Probably.

  “Because it wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said fiercely, and Rick recoiled as if I’d slapped him in the face.

  Dr. Stith cleared his throat. “Shall we proceed?” he asked mildly as we all resumed our places.

  I know I must have looked faint as I returned to my position beside Martine. Beside me, Tottie steadied me with a hand to my elbow.

  “Now, Richard, repeat after me…”

  The rest of the ceremony is lost to my memory except for the very end. When the minister said benevolently, “And now you may kiss the bride,” I handed Martine her bouquet and threw back her veil.

  Turning to Rick, Martine lifted her lips and closed her eyes. And it was in that brief moment, that tiny space in time, that Rick’s gaze met mine. In his expression I read reproach and mute anguish. It stabbed through me like the coldest, sharpest icicle, and I swayed with the pain.

  Tottie asked in a low tone, “Are you okay?”

  I nodded as Rick kissed my sister with a passion that I believed driven by an emotion more profound than I had ever witnessed between them, the sight of which pierced me to the heart.

  Chapter 9: Trista

  2004

  I was overcome with a giddy feeling of expectation as I anticipated spending the first Easter after Rick and Martine’s divorce at Sweetwater Cottage. Lindsay and Peter planned to come also; they’d settled in Aiken, where Peter ran an alcohol and drug rehab center. Since returning from Uganda, they’d become the parents of a four-year-old boy, Adam, and a two-year-old girl, Ainsley, who closely resembled Lindsay.

  In our phone conversation a couple of weeks before, Martine had been vague about her holiday plans. Naturally, I had refrained from mentioning the cottage because it was an awkward subject now that she and Rick were divorced. I felt somewhat uneasy that Martine wouldn’t be there, but under the circumstances, I didn’t expect her to be welcome, nor, I was sure, would she. The rest of us would be a comfort to Rick, and we all agreed that we were exactly what he needed.

  I set out from Columbia early one morning after a difficult week at work, during which I’d lost all confidence in my relationship with my coanchor, Byron Stott. I’d recently learned that Byron was making a play to cut me out of the evening news, and I was still smarting over it because I’d considered him my friend. The stress of our differences had made me weary, and I was happily anticipating a week at the beach.

  As always, the gentle rise and fall of the country roads soothed me, and soon my sporty little Miata was rolling through glimmering marshes and lush, flat woodlands. By the time I reached Berkeley County I was hungry, so I stopped and grabbed a plastic-wrapped sandwich out of the glass case at a convenience store and munched it along the way. Later, at Jeter’s Market, I wheeled into the parking lot and bought serious food—shrimp, fat and freshly caught; Little Debbie fudge rounds; a case of Cheerwine, our Carolinas soft drink of choice.

  As I left the market, my tires stirring up a cloud of white dust, Jolly Jeter, who was emptying garbage out back, lifted a hand to wave, though it was more like the gesture he’d use to brush one of the Low Country’s pesky gnats away. No wasted motion in that wave, no sirree. I could imagine him saying that in his native drawl, which is something I’d worked hard to excise from my speech. Native South Carolinian or not, I was expected to speak like a Midwesterner when I read the news. People say that I still talk like a Southerner, though. It’s in the inflection.

  The air presented a veritable feast of scents—the marshy smell of estuarial mud freshened by the flow of brackish water, a salt breeze carrying with it the inevitable suggestion of fish and spiced by a pungent pine fragrance from the woods. I realized that my palms were perspiring and that I was actually nervous at the prospect of seeing Rick again.

  Sweetwater Cottage was located down a jolting road that Boyd McCulloch had promised would never be paved. “All that would do is bring a passel of tourists down heah,” he’d said seriously. “Let them stay on the beach road when they invade in the summer. Sweetwater Cottage is not for gawkers.”

  Not that any of the Northerners who have recently discovered the barrier islands off the South Carolina coast would be interested in the cottage. Although genteel, the big rambling house is nothing like the modern glass-and-wood-siding abodes favored by newcomers. We South Carolinians prefer our beach houses slightly out of fashion, so shabby that they’re chic. You can’t get that gently softened effect until a property has been lived in and loved by a couple of generations.

  As I slowed my car in approaching the house, I saw that Rick’s Taurus was parked under the oak in its usual spot, and it was spattered with mud;
dead bugs were encrusted on the windshield. Rick had always taken such pride in his cars, keeping them waxed, turning them over to a car detailer for a thorough cleaning a couple times a year. Stranger yet, there was no sign of him or of the Tolsons, either.

  The house always seemed dormant when no one was in residence. It took people to wake it up. But now the curtains were drawn across every window, something I’d never seen before, and this was peculiar since Rick had been here for weeks. Shutters hung loose, and the shrubbery was leggy with neglect. In all the years I’d been visiting, I’d never seen the cottage in such a state of disrepair, and I felt a sudden shiver, as if a chill had settled over me.

  Carrying the bags of groceries, I hurried up the back steps. “Rick?” I called. The door was open, and I peered through the screen into the kitchen. A mound of dirty dishes caught my attention first, followed by a trail of clothes on the sandy floor. I set the groceries on the porch swing, sending it into a wild little jig of protest, and knocked. No answer.

  I cracked the door open and slipped inside, forgetting any attempt at stealth. “Rick?”

  I skirted the blue picnic table in the kitchen, where we had all traced the outlines of our hands with white paint years ago. The ticktock of the old schoolhouse clock, a McCulloch family relic from the days when Rick’s great-grandmother taught school on one of the neighboring islands, punctuated the silence.

  I started down the hall, still wary but figuring that Rick would be out on the front porch, enjoying the sweet, balmy breeze. As I passed the room where I always slept, the one off the dining room to which Martine and I laid claim long ago, I did a double take.

  Rick was sleeping sprawled across one of the beds, his mouth open. He snored softly, and a rank sour smell hung in the air. He was buck naked. I stopped dead in my tracks.

  I started to shut the door between us, planning to flee outside and regroup, but the bracelet on my right wrist jingled against the metal of the doorknob. At the sound, one of Rick’s eyes opened, then the other. Both locked into mine.

  “Trista, what are you doing here?” he asked. Showing great presence of mind, Rick yanked the rumpled sheet over himself.

  With my hand poised delicately on the doorknob and speaking as if I walked in on naked sleeping guys every day of my life, I said, “I drove over from Columbia today. I told you I was coming, and Lindsay and Peter, too. They’re not here yet, so I’ll just—”

  “Damn! I thought it was tomorrow.” Rick pushed himself up on his elbows. I was shocked at his appearance, at the reddened whites of his eyes, the pouched skin beneath, and his beard showing an unexpected touch of gray. This was a man who had always turned heads wherever he went, but I almost didn’t recognize him.

  Then, so help me, I yanked the door closed and fled, knocking a plant to the floor with a crash as the phone rang.

  I hurried into the living room, taking note of the beer cans, the line of liquor bottles on the hearth. Lilah Rose, who was aided every summer by the meticulous Queen, had never been guilty of sloppy housekeeping. The cottage had always been kept obsessively clean and neat. Scooping up the phone beside the bar, I noticed absently that the plant I’d sent flying was a dead fern, its fronds brown and brittle. The condition of the fern fit in with the wisps of spider-webs trailing from the light fixture and the dirty clothes covering every available surface.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Trista, is that you?” Lindsay’s voice crackled through a bad connection on her cell phone.

  I sagged against the bar in relief. The image of Rick’s naked body was burned into the inside of my eyelids, and I couldn’t make it go away. I pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger, not that this helped. “Lindsay, this is an emergency. When will you and Peter get here?”

  Her tone was sharp. “What kind of emergency?”

  “The worst. I can’t talk about it right now.” From behind the bedroom door emitted a series of muffled thumps that could possibly mean that Rick was getting dressed.

  “Fine, because I have my own problems,” said Lindsay, never one to mince words. “We’re driving on the interstate about an hour away from you, but we’re heading home to Aiken. We called home, and Adam’s sick.” Lindsay sounded more resigned than alarmed.

  “Sick? What’s wrong?”

  “Peter’s mother suspects the chicken pox. Adam’s been vaccinated, but it was only a few weeks ago. He may have a mild case—no one can tell yet—and if Adam has it, Ainsley might come down with it, too. My mother-in-law is panicking.”

  I was sliding headlong into a panic attack of my own. “Lindsay,” I said urgently, “you and Peter have to show up. I’m not sure I’m capable of dealing with Rick all by myself.”

  “I’m sorry, Trista. Is it bad?”

  “It’s certainly not good. For starters, the cottage looks run-down. And oh, the living room—damp towels ornamenting every chair, dirty dishes supporting unknown life-forms on the coffee table, and if you stacked the beer cans end to end, they’d probably reach New Jersey. Rick—well, he was asleep,” I said, lowering my voice and glancing back over my shoulder.

  “Asleep? When he was expecting us?”

  “Yes, and—I don’t know. I’m not sure he’ll react to me the same way he would if we were all here.”

  “I can’t believe you’re so negative, Trista. And Rick was supposed to be seeing to repairs around there.”

  “He was?” This was news to me.

  “I talked with him a couple of weeks ago. Remember I told you about it?”

  “Vaguely,” I said.

  “Well, he said that Hal had been neglecting the cottage with their parents gone and hadn’t been able to get down there much because they recently took in Nadia’s father, who has Alzheimer’s.”

  “That explains a lot,” I said. “But not everything.”

  “Wait a minute, Trista. Here’s Peter.”

  I heard the rustle of the phone being passed, and Peter said, “Trista, you’ve always been our cheerleader. You can pump Rick up better than Lindsay or me.”

  “Uh, right.” I didn’t add that Rick seemed in no mood to accept succor from me.

  “Tell you what, Trista. Lindsay and I will go home, calm my mother and check on our sick kid. Once we get the situation squared away, we’ll join you and Rick in a day or two. If it’s at all possible, that is. Does that sound better?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Peter chuckled. “Attagirl, Trista. Here’s Lindsay.”

  Lindsay came back on the line, her tone apologetic. “It’s been a long time since Peter’s mom nursed sick children.”

  “I understand, Lindsay. Your place is with the kids.” I considered Peter and Lindsay to be model parents, all too rare in my world, which was populated by people who made the news by breaking the law and who were generally not sterling examples of parenthood or anything else.

  Lindsay became more concerned. “Trista, if it gets rough for you, maybe you should head back to Columbia.”

  “I didn’t really want to be alone over Easter,” I said, though I could have visited Mom and Aunt Cynthia in Macon. They’d have been thrilled if I’d showed up, but I was scheduled for a visit with them to celebrate Mom’s birthday the first week in May.

  Lindsay sighed. “How about if I call you tomorrow and find out how things are going?”

  “I’ll settle for that. Give the kids a big hug from me.”

  “I will. Bye, Trista.”

  “Goodbye.”

  I hung up and stood pensively gazing around the cottage. Even in the dim light, I recognized the sweetgrass basket of sand dollars on the mantel. The bookcase held books that we’d brought with us at various times, all lined up to greet me like the old friends they were.

  The click of a door latch jarred me out of my reverie, and I whirled to see Rick sauntering out of the bedroom, hair mussed, khaki shorts pulled on in haste and the waistband left unsnapped.

  “Trista,” he said, his voice rusty from
sleep. “I guess I should apologize. I must have lost track of the days.”

  I forced a smile. “I—well, there’s no harm done. Other than to the plant, that is.” I waved my hand in the direction of the upended fern. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “No problemo.” He yanked the fern up by its crumbling fronds, marched to the back door and pitched the plant out. The unbroken pot met the same fate. He nudged at the dirt on the floor with one bare foot, as if that might make it disappear. It didn’t.

  Such a display made me uncomfortable. I’d expected Rick to be levelheaded, the way he’d always been, but clearly something in him had changed. He’d been through a lot, I’d grant that, but wasn’t he grateful I was there?

  Flustered, I turned toward the kitchen. “I’ll put the food away,” I said. I needed something to do, something to cover my awkwardness and confusion.

  I went outside and retrieved the grocery bags from the porch swing. Inside, Rick had angled his frame against the doorjamb, from which vantage point he observed with heavy-lidded eyes as I slid the curtains open at the kitchen window to allow light into the room, then self-consciously busied myself stashing the packages of shrimp and collard greens in the refrigerator.

  “Who was on the phone?”

  I spoke briskly. “That was Lindsay, calling to say that she and Peter won’t be here for a day or so. Adam may have chicken pox, but they didn’t find out until they got more than halfway here, and Ainsley might be coming down with it, too. They’re going home to check on them. I guess Peter’s mom isn’t comfortable staying with two sick kids.”

  Rick’s trademark smile had always started in his eyes and worked its way down; there was no sign of it now. “Chicken pox. Sounds miserable.”

  I murmured something in agreement, making a giant effort to collect myself.

  “Is your car unlocked?” Rick asked. “I’ll get your suitcase.”

  Mutely, I dug the keys out of my pocket and tossed them to him.

  “Be right back,” he said with a curt nod.

  Feeling more and more as if I should give Lindsay’s suggestion that I go back to Columbia serious consideration, I threw open the draperies to admit more light into the living and dining rooms.