This Love of Mine

by Miranda Liasson

“No one knows this place. It’s super secret.”

  “Super scary if you ask me,” Meg said, looking around at the dense brush that practically scraped the car. “And I think all the kids know about this place. In fact, in recent years the cops have cleared it out. Too much trouble going on deep in the woods.”

  The car rolled to a stop. Ben opened his door and walked around for her. “Let’s go sit over here.”

  They were about a quarter mile from Dove’s Point, the fan-shaped ripple of rock that had reminded someone long ago of a dove’s tail. He led her through some brush to a clearing with a bench that overlooked the lake.

  “What is this place? Your private make-out spot?”

  “I took girls to the Point but I came here by myself. To think. It’s along one of the old trailheads. Out of the way. Private.”

  They stood against an iron rail and admired the view of the water. The lake spread itself wide and dark in the distance, a few lights from town twinkling like little diamonds at its periphery, its middle regions pure black velvet.

  “I’ve always wanted to live on the lake,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s an instant de-stress, looking out on something so peaceful and quiet. Sort of makes you forget your own troubles, you know?”

  He’d always been trouble. From the thickly shorn layers of his hair that had always made her yearn to tug her fingers through it, to the sharp-angled profile of his face that stood out against the dimly lit lake behind him, to the hard set of his shoulders as he leaned against the rail. Even now, when she was wary and angry and uncertain, his physical presence impacted her and she supposed it always would.

  “Who was that guy you were with up at the point that one time?”

  “You scared him off. I was so embarrassed.”

  “He was out for one thing.”

  “I could’ve handled him myself.”

  “Well, I wasn’t taking any chances.”

  “You did play big brother to me after Patrick died.”

  He turned abruptly and grabbed her by the upper arms, his eyes drilling into hers. “I wasn’t being brotherly,” he said. “I was being jealous.”

  She searched those eyes, dark and mysterious as the night but with a strange flare of brightness. An uneasy feeling fluttered around her insides like moths circling light. He’d been jealous? Ridiculous. No. Impossible.

  “I let you think I was looking out for you.” His grip on her was relentless, his voice filled with passion.

  “You—why?”

  He released her suddenly and turned toward the lake, leaning his elbows on the railing. For a long time he didn’t say anything. She saw his Adam’s apple working. He seemed lost in a world of his own.

  Or a hell of his own.

  At last he spoke, so quietly she had to strain to hear. “Do you blame me for your brother’s death?”

  “Of course not.” An easy question. She never had. Unlike her mother, Meg knew that Patrick wasn’t a saint. He’d engaged in dangerous behaviors, but unlike most teenagers, wasn’t lucky enough to survive them.

  “Your mother does.”

  “My mother’s never been able to accept that Patrick sometimes did foolish, risky things.” She stood a little behind Ben, uncertain what this was leading up to. He stared over the quiet water, stock-still, an explosion of raw emotions threatening to break loose, held in check only by years of keeping them behind locked doors.

  She saw the price it had cost him. His shoulders were steeled as if he were in combat against some imaginary foe, his posture rigid, his chin set. Suddenly all the anger she’d felt earlier in the night dissipated like a handful of glitter a child tossed into the wind.

  She curled her hand around his arm, feeling its hard, solid strength. “Seeing you will always be a reminder to her of the son she lost.”

  Silence stretched long and wide as the clear, calm lake. Crickets and bullfrogs sang background, and somewhere in the woods, an owl hooted.

  He turned. “I want to talk to you about that night.”

  Her grip on his arm froze. Part of her wanted to run. She didn’t want to stir the terror that still managed to chase her, usually in the depths of night when she relived it all in her dreams. Every day she felt a void, a sadness that never quite went away, and it was a feeling she chose to avoid at any cost, like touching a sore. What kept her planted was one thing—Ben needed to talk, and he’d chosen her to listen.

  They’d finally broached the one topic they’d managed to dance around for years. It had become an invisible wall that had kept them apart. And no matter how painful, she wanted to claw away at every blessed block.

  “Tell me,” she said quietly.

  “I was a wreck that summer. Acting out after my parents died, feeling sorry for myself and angry at the whole damn world. I drank, smoked weed, even tried blow. Thank God my grandfather intervened or who knows where I would have ended up. I was so pissed when he told me one Friday night to report to his office at 8:00 a.m. the next morning. I got in his face and said make me, old man. That night when I was asleep he snuck into my room and took my wallet and car keys. Woke me up at seven the next morning and told me I wouldn’t get them back until I reported for duty.”

  He absently plucked off a leaf from an overhanging oak and fingered it. “I spent that whole first day greeting patients, signing them in, taking their pulses and blood pressures. I saw things. Heard things. Understood that I wasn’t the only one on the planet with problems. A long time later, I learned that my grandfather’s nurse had quit and he was short in the office.” He laughed. “He saved me from myself. He saved my life. I owe him everything.”

  Meg stood quietly beside him, leaning on the railing, although she longed to surround him with all of her warmth and strength, wrap herself around him until he would know beyond all doubt that she would be there for him, for the traumatized boy he was and for the tortured man he was now.

  “A few weeks after I’d started working for my grandfather, Patrick asked me to party with him one night at the quarry. I was tempted, but we’d just found out my Grandma Rushford’s cancer had recurred and I’d gone to visit her in the hospital. She was hooked up to oxygen and monitors and IV’s. My grandfather was at her side, holding her hand, stroking her fingers, singing some old-fashioned song. He looked stricken, like if he lost her, he wasn’t certain he’d be able to go on.

  “It shook me to see my grandfather like that. I never thought he could be vulnerable to the same things I was. He saw me looking at him and he said, This is what you hold on for. What you become a good man for, a man worthy of being loved.

  “I cancelled on your brother. I thought he was meeting another buddy of ours, but the guy never showed. I ate dinner with my grandfather in the hospital cafeteria, and on the way home I ran into that kid. He said Patrick was upset about something. Really upset.”

  “My parents had had a huge fight,” Meg said. “We overheard them talking about divorce. I knew he was upset—we both were, but I had to work and he told me he was meeting friends. Besides, I was wrapped up in my own troubles. I never thought twice about leaving him.”

  “When I found out he’d gone alone, I went to the quarry. But when I got there, it was too late.” His voice cracked.

  She moved to hold him, but he held her at arm’s length. “You have to hear what I have to say. And you’re not going to like it. It may make you hate me.”

  She looked into his eyes, so serious, so burdened. “I could never hate you,” she whispered.

  “I called for him so loudly and so long I got hoarse. Finally I jumped into the water and swam to this island, this mound of gravel in the middle where we used to hang out and sun ourselves. There was a bunch of beer cans scattered around, and his shirt and wallet.

  “I had no phone. I didn’t know what to do. I was so scared, the kind of scared you get when you know—you just know—that something terrible has happened.”

  Meg shook her head and squeezed
her eyes shut. She didn’t want him to go on. But she knew he had to, for both their sakes.

  “How did you find him?” she asked.

  “I dove in a handful of times before I did. Somehow I managed to pull him up.”

  His gaze was focused on some faraway place, deep in the past. She reached up and cupped his cheek with her hand, pulled his face toward her until he saw her. “It’s enough. You did all you could. Don’t relive it again.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  He heaved a heavy sigh and sat on the bench. “I shook him. I screamed his name. I tried to blow breaths into him but I had no idea how to do CPR. Basically I floundered for ten minutes while I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do without any way to call for help. Fortunately for me, a sheriff’s deputy was doing his rounds and found me. By then it was way too late. If I would have known what I was doing he might have had a chance. Funny thing was, I blew off CPR class in health. I was cocky and arrogant. And that cost my best friend his life.”

  “Ben, how do you know he wasn’t gone when you pulled him out?”

  “I’ll never know. I was panicked, I didn’t try for a pulse, I didn’t listen for breaths. I tried to breathe for him but I just . . . fumbled.”

  “Nothing you could have done would have been enough. But you didn’t abandon him. How many people would be brave enough to do what you did? Your actions were brave, not cowardly. And you were just a boy.”

  Ben shook his head adamantly. “I should never have let him go alone. I’ve never felt so helpless in my entire life. I vowed never to feel that way again.”

  Grief strained around his eyes and mouth. She suddenly saw a man who had spent his entire life from that defining moment trying to make amends for circumstances he couldn’t have prevented. The reasons he became a doctor suddenly became abundantly clear.

  Tears were rolling down her face. She touched his cheek, spoke in a choked whisper. “There’s nothing you could have done. You’re—you’re a good man. A kind, good man.”

  “Your mother doesn’t believe that.” Her mother, in her grief, had not been kind to him. She’d lashed out at him at the funeral, saying it was his bad influence that had driven Patrick over the edge.

  Her own family had perpetuated his guilt, and his mind had magnified it. An image suddenly came to her of her brother, laughing as he usually was when she thought of him. On his eighteenth birthday, he and Ben had lit sparklers and were dancing around their backyard with them. There was a photo of the two of them, arms around each other’s shoulders, holding the sparklers and grinning like they were little kids.

  That was how Patrick would have wanted to be remembered. Happy. He never would have wanted the friend he loved to carry this burden all his life.

  “Ben, I—”

  He held up a warning hand. “There’s nothing you can say. But I wanted you to know what really happened. I wanted you to know how sorry I am.”

  “I’m sorry, too. For my brother’s bad choices. For my mother’s anger. For the wasted years you and I could have had.”

  He looked at her then. “Every time I look at you, I feel the pain of what I could have done for him. What I should have done.”

  “Every single one of us feels that, Ben. My mother feels upset that she fought with my father. If I had known how upset Patrick was, I never would have gone to work. Maybe I could have stopped him. Sometimes I’m still so angry at him for a stupid, stupid choice that cost us everything. But all this pain has to end. Patrick wouldn’t have wanted it. It’s torn apart my family and none of us have been able to heal.”

  The wound had been stripped open again. She could tell from his face he was unconvinced of anything she’d tried to tell him.

  “Let me take you home,” he said. He pushed his tall frame off from the rail. Without waiting, he made his way back to the car, and she had no choice but to follow after him.

  She wanted to utter some magic words that would absolve him, absolve them all, but she knew there weren’t any, at least not from her. So she got into the car and closed the door.

  CHAPTER 16

  “Hi, Prince Albert,” Ben said the second he walked into Brad and Olivia’s darkened house and was suddenly attacked by a giant hairy creature with hair in his eyes and a predilection for sniffing Ben’s crotch.

  As he bent to pet the Saint Bernard that Meg was dog sitting, the animal didn’t hesitate to give him a big slurpy lick all along the side of his face.

  “Albie needs his nightly gallop around the square,” Meg said as she turned on lights that illuminated the back hall, a brand-new kitchen, and a family room with a large fireplace and two cushy couches. The corner was littered with a pink push-scooter with wheels, several baby dolls, and enough large pink plastic toys to supply a full yard sale. The old Victorian had been under constant renovation for the past year, a headache Ben vowed he’d never undertake when it came time for him to own a home.

  The dog parked his rump on top of Ben’s feet, basking in being petted and rubbing up against his legs. There was never any problem getting affection from Albie. But after all the emotional baggage Ben had just spilled, he’d pretty much guaranteed there was no possibility of that from the one who really counted.

  He should feel some sense of relief from their conversation but he was more riled up than ever. He could tell that dredging up the past had upset Meg, and she kept sending him sympathetic looks. But he couldn’t bear to have her pity him. A jog around the square with the animal was just what he needed. “I’d be happy to take him,” he told Meg and headed out the door.

  The summer night was hot and humid after the earlier rain. Tourists strolled along the lit pathways of the square and queued up in a long line outside the Dairy Flip for homemade gourmet ice cream that was always worth the wait.

  Ben jogged around the square three times with the dog, who would’ve dared him to go a fourth, then took a breather on a park bench. Families strolled over to the marina, a short walk away. Long tendrils of vines spilled over moss-covered baskets that hung from old-fashioned lampposts, and bright-colored flowers displayed their full blooms. Happy couples meandered by holding hands, their little tinkles of secretly shared laughter making him irritable.

  Meg was right. It was time for the pain to end and for healing, but how? She said she didn’t blame him, but how could he believe her when he still blamed himself?

  He felt caught in a tangled web of anguish and need, a conundrum of wanting and not having. Restless, he raced the dog into the quiet neighborhood off the square—Albie bounding gleefully, happily keeping pace. Except when he took time out for his usual nightly romp through a neighbor’s lawn sprinklers.

  Meg’s words swirled around Ben’s fatigued brain. You didn’t abandon him. How many people would’ve been brave enough to do what you did? She’d put her hands on his face and looked at him so tenderly he thought he might die. Not from the bittersweet war with himself he’d fought all these years, but from the absolute mercy she showed. Not your fault. You’re a good man. Words he drank in like a man dying of thirst. Words he wanted to wash over him and absolve him forever, to wipe away the ugliness that still clung to his skin and his soul like dirt that never washed off.

  Anger rose up inside him. At himself, because she made him hope. Her kindness and her genuine belief in him—her soothing touch—had tricked him into believing for just a brief blaze of a second that he could overcome this, that this scar could heal. He wanted it to heal. He wanted a chance with her, but all the pain they had dredged up had made it seem impossible.

  Even if Meg understood and didn’t hold it against him, there was still the problem of her mother, who over all these years had barely thrown him a glance. Nothing he could do would ever fix that, and he would never force Meg to choose between her mother and him.

  He needed to leave. He vowed to say a quick good-bye to her and hightail it back to his apartment in Hartford where he could drink beer and watch movies all night, ones with lot
s of shooting and cussing and where the good guys always closed the deal.

  A good twenty minutes later, he entered the back door of the house and let himself into the old slate-floored hallway. The dog bounded in before Ben could remove his leash, eagerly lapping water from his bowl and making a slobbery mess. Ben liked animals but this guy needed some serious table-manner training.

  “Don’t forget to wipe off his paws,” Meg called from the great room, clearly aware of Albie’s sprinkler addiction.

  Ben went to seize the dog by the collar, but at the sound of Meg’s voice, Albie bounded down the hallway, leaving a trail of black finger-paint paw prints. Ben grabbed an old towel off the row of coat hooks hanging in the hallway and ran after him.

  The family room was dark, except for a dozen candles flickering on the coffee table. The soothing aroma of vanilla cupcakes reminded him vaguely of the times his grandmother would bake a batch of his favorite treat to take to class on his birthday.

  Ben’s vision adjusted to the darkness in time to see the dog go on a seek-and-find mission, bounding over to Meg where she stood against the wall nearest the kitchen wearing a pink robe. As she reached down to grab the dog’s leash, Albie dodged and dove, yanking it and Meg a little way across the slippery floor.

  “Ow,” she said, dropping the leash and holding her flank.

  “Damn dog,” Ben mumbled, grabbing the leash as the dog flew past and dragging him into the back hall. “Are you okay?” he called as he wiped Albie’s muddy paws.

  “Twisted my back,” she said, her voice guarded with pain. She limped gingerly to the couch and sat down. “Before you go, would you mind having a quick look at it?”

  He went and sat beside her. A plastic toy person’s arms poked him in the butt. He pulled it out from between the couch cushions and set it on the table.

  Meg was barefoot and had on a light cotton robe. At first glance, he’d simply written it off as her settling in for the night. But the candles made him wonder if she was up to something.

  “I know you’re anxious to get back, and I don’t want to keep you,” she said.