An Act of Love

by Nancy Thayer

  An Act of Love is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2014 Ballantine Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1997 by Nancy Thayer

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer

  Excerpt from Nantucket Sisters by Nancy Thayer copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover by St. Martin’s Press in 1997.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Nantucket Sisters by Nancy Thayer. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-553-39104-6

  Author photograph: copyright © Jessica Hills Photography

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Cover design: Eileen Carey

  Cover image: © Elin Enger/Flickr Open/Getty Images

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  An Introduction from the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Nantucket Sisters

  An Introduction from the Author

  A good friend once said, “If you break your arm, people rush to bring you flowers, food, and sympathy, but if your mind breaks even just a little, people run away, frightened and dismayed.”

  My desire has always been to write about ordinary families going through ordinary life, and as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that “normal” life contains extraordinary challenges. Emotional breakdowns happen in the happiest of families. The transformation from child to adult can often be dramatically difficult. I want to write about these things, and about the courage, strength, and resilience that can be discovered in the most “ordinary” of homes. And that is just what I did in An Act of Love.

  I’m delighted that my early novels are being made available to my readers as ebooks. My style has changed slightly, as the world has grown faster, but my subject, family life, remains as mysterious and fascinating to me now as it was in these early books: falling in love, raising children, friendships and betrayals and forgiveness.

  I hope you enjoy these early novels and discover some new friends there.

  Nancy Thayer

  Chapter One

  She was aware only of murky darkness, a tilting horizon splintered with light, and then all at once Emily surfaced to air and white brilliance, her throat burning. The tube in her mouth and her throat prevented her from speaking, but she moaned from deep in her chest and twisted on the stretcher, struggling to get free.

  “Blood pressure one-forty-five over ninety-five. Heart rate one-hundred.”

  The glaring emergency room light burned her eyes. Someone had removed her clothes and stuck her into a skimpy cotton hospital gown that scarcely covered her body. She was tubed and wired like a sci-fi creature, from her breast and both arms and her finger and her mouth and her nose and, hideously, from between her legs.

  “Let me go,” she insisted, but only garbled sounds came out.

  “It’s all right,” someone said. “You’ll be fine. You’ll be all right.”

  A nurse wearing blue scrubs bent over Emily. She had a pleasant face, a grandmotherly face. The doctor looked pissed. Emily knew he was thinking: stupid bitch. She was a stupid bitch, so why wouldn’t they leave her alone and let her die?

  The nurse was saying: “You’ll be all right. We’re almost through pumping out your stomach and rinsing it with saline fluid. When it’s clear, we’ll remove the tube.”

  Emily thrashed and bucked. With one hand she tried to rip the needle from the vein in her arm, but the nurse gently checked her hand.

  “You need that. That IV is carrying necessary fluids to your system. Don’t do that, dear. Those wires are for the heart monitor, and your heart rate’s a little faster than we’d like right now. The tubes in your nose are for oxygen. This is just a blood pressure cuff, you know about that. The thing on your finger that looks like a giant paper clip is a pulse oxymeter … it measures your oxygenation. We’ve put in a Foley catheter so we can collect some urine for tests. Settle down for us now and we’ll be able to disconnect you from most of it.”

  In despair, Emily wept. The nurse leaned forward with a tissue and wiped the tears from Emily’s face and the mucus from around the tubes in her nose.

  “Okay, charcoal,” the doctor said.

  Now thick, ink-black liquid flowed through the tube into Emily’s stomach. “This will bind with your system to absorb any bits of the drugs we didn’t get pumped out of you. You’ll be having a little diarrhea later in the day. Just a few more seconds and we’ll have this tube out.”

  “Ninety-nine percent O2 sat,” another nurse said. “Blood pressure one-twenty-five over eighty-five. Heart rate eighty.”

  Her head hurt hideously. They began removing things. Bending over her, the nurse removed the bits of sticky paper connected to the wires stuck just beneath her clavicle and beneath her left breast. She felt a tug in her crotch when they took out the catheter. As the tube came up her esophagus, Emily involuntarily made retching noises.

  The doctor left the room. The nurse bent over the equipment.

  Emily threw herself off the bed and bolted for the door. She raced down the hall, aware of cold on her back, on the soles of her feet, toward the exit sign. She was almost there when they caught her and brought her back.

  Last night’s storm had torn away autumn’s wrenching brilliance, and now the forest circling the farm that had for weeks seemed to shimmer with flame was merely a skeletal, ghostly gray. Beneath an overcast sky the pond rippled darkly in the dying wind. But in the field the horses were playful in the bracing air, nipping and teasing each other. Linda found herself leaning on the windowsill, just staring, savoring the sight, while her computer hummed industriously, waiting. She relished these first cold, dreary days of winter when the heart turned toward inner comforts and joys.

  Owen appeared in the doorway of her study. “Want to make love?”

  Surprised, she laughed. Certainly her husband was compelling, lounging there in his jeans and flannel shirt, short and compact and sturdy, his thick hair gleaming as brightly as spun copper. His pale brown eyes were flecked with gold and amber, like currents of light in his tanned, freckled skin. His hands were massive and hard and sure. As w
as his body.

  “Yes. Let’s.”

  “Good. Take the phone off the hook.”

  With only a twinge of guilt, Linda lifted the receiver and stuck it into a drawer. It would make disturbing noises for a few seconds, then go mute. Anyone calling would get a busy signal. She switched off her computer, rose, and followed Owen into his bedroom.

  After the first year of their marriage, they agreed to have separate bedrooms. Linda was a hopeless insomniac, waking at all hours of the night to read. She never had enough time to read; she often thought she had insomnia just so she could grab an extra hour in the deep heart of the night to spend with books.

  While Owen needed solitude. His antidote to the news of the contemporary world was to listen to classical music. The farmhouse was large enough for them to have separate bedrooms, and it added a bit of spice to have different rooms, to enter, as she did now, her husband’s lair.

  Owen’s room was dark, with heavy Empire furniture, and his parents’ old mahogany sleigh bed was almost regal. Owen liked the past, liked old things, did not like change. Linda had come to accept this as a good sign; he wouldn’t grow tired of her.

  She undressed and slid between the sheets, which were cold and sleek against her skin.

  “I love it that we don’t have to shut out the light, don’t have to draw the curtains.”

  “And the better to see you, my dear,” Owen growled wolfishly, crawling into bed and nuzzling her neck.

  Languorously they rolled together, entwining their arms and legs. They had all the time in the world. Their pulses slowed, they took deep breaths, and for a while they didn’t kiss, but only stroked each other, learning once again the warm, smooth span and fold of shoulder, hip, and thigh. Then Linda forced Owen onto his back and knelt between his legs so that she could feel the erotic friction of his wiry red hair against her cheek, eyelids, lips. Turning her head slowly from side to side, she grazed in the long deep bowl of his belly. He ran his hands over her arms and shoulders and back. His penis grew long between her breasts. He was always very clean, with a cool scent like redwood emanating from his skin. Linda felt almost drowsy, drugged, as if browsing among poppies, and then he turned her over and prepared to enter her but withheld himself, making the tension mount. She arched up toward him. The room was full of light and skin and breath. When he finally penetrated her, she wrapped herself around him in a kind of bliss. She was more in love with Owen now than she was when she first met him.

  Finally they subsided, curled together, fell into an easy sleep.

  Owen woke to see by his bedside clock that two hours had passed. Within the curve of his body, his wife lay sleeping. Almost impersonally, he noted the crow’s feet at her eyes and the slight incipient sag of flesh around her jawline, and all at once he was stabbed through with sorrow at the realization that she was growing older. He wanted to protect her from age, from death. He wanted his love to be a shield.

  Sap, he chided himself, and scratched his naked thigh. But the truth was that he was amazed by their marriage. He had never thought a woman would be able to love him as he really was, reclusive and sardonic and pessimistic, struggling to write novels about the environment that garnered praise but little money, angry most of the time at what men were doing to the planet, often sinking into black moods that made everyone around him, including his son, Bruce, and their old dog, Maud, miserable.

  But Linda accepted him. Perhaps because she was a novelist, too. She understood that writing was his sanity … and his insanity as well. He was haunted by the characters who seem to pummel his brain, by the way the world was headed toward hell in a handbasket. He would write day and night if he could.

  Now he was restless. Quietly he slipped from the bed and padded down the hall, thinking as he went how few women would be content to be stuck out in the country in this place. Old, rambling, and eccentric, with Victorian touches lacing a good solid colonial foundation, six fireplaces, wide board floors, and a wraparound porch, the house had been passed down from his father, who received it from his father before him. Owen loved the house and the land surrounding it; he would never leave it; he would pass it along to Bruce some day.

  Linda loved the house, too, although she occasionally went into fits of distress over its state of disrepair. She wanted to have the rattling, cracked windowpanes fixed; to have the two blocked fireplaces opened up; to have the faded wallpaper dimming the high expanse of walls in the front and back halls steamed off and those walls freshly painted. Some of the work he could do himself, and all of it he could supervise, but it would take time away from his work, which would mean a loss of income, and with Bruce facing four years of college, right now was not the time even to think about that.

  In Linda’s study, Owen dropped the phone receiver back into its cradle, then headed to the bathroom. As he stepped into the old claw-footed bathtub and turned on the shower, he acknowledged to himself he was comfortable with the house as it was, a little shabby, and crowded. All the rooms were crammed with books on shelves or on tables or in piles on the floor or the stairs. Linda liked this, too. Most of the books were Owen’s; but many were hers, many the children’s. He and Linda were always reading, always talking. If one of them came upon a perplexing thought or clever metaphor, they’d wander through the house, searching each other out, and finding each other, lean against a doorjamb and talk for hours. They talked over dinner, over breakfast. They talked as they walked through the damp rock-strewn woods. Or they walked in silence. Linda was the only woman he’d met who was comfortable with silence.

  It was as if they had become two halves of a whole, a pretty amazing thing considering how they’d all started out, two divorced adults, each with a divorced-scarred child. The first year they’d all lived together he hadn’t been certain they could make it. But now, after seven years of marriage, it seemed that his son and Linda’s daughter had gotten so accustomed to each other and to their way of living together that all distinctions of blood and law had blurred and they were at last a real family.

  This was purely a miracle. This was more than he’d ever expected from life.

  As he stepped out of the shower, the phone rang. For a moment he toyed with the thought of not answering. Then he wrapped the towel around his midsection, went down the hall, said hello.

  “Mr. McFarland? It’s Bob Lorimer here. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I’m here at Basingstoke Hospital with Emily. She’s going to be all right, but it seems she attempted to commit suicide today.”

  Chapter Two

  “What happened?” Owen asked.

  “Emily swallowed a number of pills as well as a quantity of alcohol. Her roommate Cordelia Analan wondered why she wasn’t in class, went to their room, and found Emily comatose. She notified us, and we had Emily brought to the hospital by ambulance. We found empty aspirin, Sleepeeze, and Midol containers on her bed, and a half-empty bottle of vodka. Emily’s stomach has been pumped. Physically she’s out of danger now, but emotionally she’s … upset.”

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “No. Emily’s not—coherent. Cordelia appeared as surprised as we are. Perhaps she’ll talk to you.”

  “We’ll come at once. We’ll be there in an hour.”

  “Good.” Mr. Lorimer hesitated, then said quickly, “I’m sorry about this.”

  Linda had come into the study and stood waiting, listening. When Owen put down the phone, he told her, “Emily’s in the hospital in Basingstoke. She tried to commit suicide.”

  Linda blinked and took a step forward. “She—”

  “She’s going to be okay. She’s in the hospital.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you sure? Emily?”

  “We’ve got to go there now. I’ll call Celeste and ask her to take care of the place while we’re gone.”

  Linda nodded, but did not move. “What did they say? Who called? Are you sure it’s not … a prank?”

  “It was Bob Lorimer. He said Emily swallowed a bunch of pills
and some alcohol.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  “Midol. Aspirin. They pumped her stomach. Cordelia found her in her room. She was comatose.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Let’s get moving.”

  Linda nodded and headed for her bedroom to dress. Owen called after her to remind her to pack a bag. They’d probably have to stay the night in Basingstoke.

  There was no direct way to get from the farm outside the small town of Ebradour in central Massachusetts to Hedden Academy, situated on the north side of Boston. The scenic route through rolling mountains and sleepy villages took about forty-five minutes longer, more if they got stuck on the two-lane road behind a truck hauling livestock. Today they took Route 91 down to the Mass Pike, then headed east to 93 North.

  The unsettling flash of cars at the periphery of their vision always took some getting used to after the pastoral pace of their farm and the country roads curving moatlike, protectively, around it. Now the frenetic traffic sounds of horns and brakes and radios and the hurtling rush of air seemed appropriate to the moment. Everywhere the land swept off in all directions, the occasional orange or red leaf flashing like a message of alarm.

  “Sit back,” Owen said.

  “I can’t imagine why Emily would do such a thing.”

  “It’s not like her.”

  “She seemed in great shape this summer.”

  “Both kids did.”

  “She seemed happy to return to school.”

  “Something must have happened there.”

  “You think I was right about the braces, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “She didn’t want them put on now. She said a boy liked her. She wanted to look good. Probably she was thinking about getting kissed.”

  “You were right to make her get them now.”

  “It’s just that … I can remember what it’s like when you first fall in love. The first time you kiss a boy.”

  “Now she can have two first times, one with braces, one without.”

  Linda glanced at her husband. Usually he was not so sanguine, and in spite of his words his face was grim. It was possible that he was concerned, as she was, that they had been wrong to send Emily to boarding school. Just because Bruce flourished there didn’t mean Emily would. But Emily had wanted to go, had begged to go. All the things Owen and Linda loved about the farm, the silence and privacy and peace, the vast stretch of air and sky and rolling fields, the long shared walks through the sweet high wet grasses with only the flash and dart of birds for company, only the fragrance of alfalfa and pine perfuming the air … all that bored Emily.