Secrets at the Beach House

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Ah.” He was relieved. It was nothing he had done. “Maybe you’re right. I wonder if there’s a way to tell them the truth without being mean.”

  She was an excellent student. He taught her to skate backward in a couple of minutes. The hard part was not touching her. Not taking her hand or guiding her by the shoulders. He never could keep his hands to himself. Had to be touching somebody all the time. There were probably people in his life who were bothered by it. His male colleagues, no doubt. He’d been careful about touching men until he met Jay. With all those brothers in an Italian household, Jay had never learned it was taboo.

  But he didn’t touch Rennie. Not until she was getting into the car and he chanced the flat of his hand on her back.

  She stiffened. Threw her shoulders back to get rid of him, and he dropped his hand quickly.

  Too fast, Perelle.

  He scooped Wendy up in his arms and buckled her into the backseat, then did the same with Becky. One day he’d have to stop touching them, too.

  25.

  Kit wandered around the cafeteria searching for Cole, trying to remember where they’d agreed to meet. Finally she spotted him, waving to her from one of the small tables by the windows. All morning she’d thought about a quiet, private lunch with him. Rennie had been in the Chapel House for only three weeks, but she already owned the rooms and the air that filled them.

  She liked Rennie, maybe even loved her. Still, she couldn’t shake this irritable feeling that had been dogging her for the past few weeks. Maybe it had more to do with Cole than Rennie. Since Estelle left, he’d thrown himself into his work. She felt more cut off from him now than before.

  She’d been thinking again about moving out of the house. It was too late to give her tenants notice that she wanted to move into the Point Pleasant house—she’d let that deadline slip by without a second thought. And what good would it do her to move out of the house when she’d still be working here at Blair, still seeing him each day, still wondering exactly how he was spending his nights? No, if she moved, it would have to be away from the shore, maybe out of New Jersey. But she couldn’t leave yet, she told herself, not when Rennie’s situation was so uncertain. She was Rennie’s main lifeline right now. It wouldn’t be fair.

  “Do you realize how long it’s been since we’ve had a chance to talk, just the two of us?” she said, setting down her tray.

  “I don’t have time to think anymore, much less talk.”

  “How’s the fetal surgery training going?”

  “Fantastic.” He brightened. “Really well. We’ll be ready to open the doors March first.”

  She watched him cut the liver and onions on his plate. His eyelashes were long and straight, his face full of concentration. It had been weeks since she’d let herself study him and she was filled with sadness. She guessed that any attraction he’d felt for her had vanished. After all, he’d had her now, in the flesh, and it had left him with nothing but regret.

  He looked over at her tray. “That’s all you’re eating?” he asked.

  She looked down at the tomato soup and corn muffin. “I don’t have my usual appetite lately. Haven’t been running hard enough, I guess.”

  “When does the serious training begin?”

  “Saturday. Three weeks of speed, then three of hills, three of endurance, and three of putting them all together.” And then Boston. Finally.

  A nurse dressed in blue scrubs nipped at the waist walked by their table, drawing her hand across Cole’s shoulders as she passed. “Hello, Cole,” she said, her voice so breathy she sounded winded.

  He glanced up. “Hi, Lynn,” he said absently.

  Kit watched the nurse walk away from them. “Are you ready for someone new?” she asked.

  He wrinkled his nose. “No.”

  “They’re ready for you. That nurse and a hundred like her.” Women had been calling the house for him since Christmas.

  “Lynn is a doctor, Kit.”

  “She is? She looks about twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-eight, I think.”

  That depressed her. Where did these women get their role models? How come she’d missed out? She watched Cole take a bite of liver off his fork, and her stomach lurched.

  “I have to compliment you on the way you’ve handled Rennie,” she said, trying to get her mind off food.

  “I like having her around. I hope it takes them a long time to find a foster placement for her. The whole situation has kept my mind off . . . other things.”

  She knew he meant Estelle.

  “Do you miss her?”

  He sighed. “I miss knowing I had someone to talk with and go out with and sleep with. But I don’t actually miss Estelle herself, not the way she was at the end, anyway. I think about her, though. I wonder if she’ll ever be happy.”

  Kit thought Estelle’s concept of happiness was nothing like Cole’s or her own. Pure joy and pure sorrow would never exist for her.

  Cole took a swallow of milk and leaned back in his chair. “I wish Rennie wasn’t still afraid of me. I feel like an ogre around her. She’s such a little waif, and life is so overwhelming for her. If she were my daughter, I’d tuck her away in a closet until she turned twenty-one.”

  “And when she got out she’d have had no experience coping with anything. You’d have to take care of her for the rest of your life.”

  “Fine.” He smiled.

  She picked up a piece of the corn muffin and put it in her mouth. She swallowed it and made a face. “Nothing tastes good to me these days.” She pushed her tray away. “I really don’t understand why no one ever told me I could be a doctor.”

  She got up early on Saturday and looked out her window. Good. No snow on the beach. It was January twenty-fourth, twelve weeks before the Boston Marathon. Eight miles to run this morning. She shivered. It must have been the cold that made that task seem monumental.

  She dressed painstakingly, wanting everything to be perfect. First the T-shirt, then the sweatshirt, then the sweater. The jacket on top of all that. She smeared Vaseline on her face and pulled her cap low over her ears.

  The sand was hard and firm under her feet. Her lungs had gradually adjusted to the cold, but today they were tight. Every breath felt like fire in her chest. She wished she had goggles. Something to protect her eyes. They were watering, and the beach was a blur. Damn it. Her nose was running and she had forgotten a tissue. What was wrong with her today?

  Maybe the winter would be too much for her after all. But an indoor track? For the Boston Marathon? She envied those runners with the money to move to a warmer climate while they trained.

  She zipped her jacket up to her chin. Stop being such a baby.

  But something was very wrong. She’d run six miles when she knew she had to stop. She tried to slow down gradually, but a wave of nausea came over her and she dropped to her knees and vomited into the sand. She knelt there for several minutes, shaking and breathless. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten sick to her stomach.

  She rinsed her mouth with ice-cold salt water and headed home slowly. Was she that out of shape? Pushing too hard too fast? Or maybe it was the flu. She wasn’t sure which condition to hope for.

  The Chapel House was in sight when she began to retch again. Oh fine, she thought, annoyed with herself. Off to a great start.

  A week later, she felt even worse, barely able to summon the energy to get up in the morning, much less run. That Saturday morning, she stayed in bed, watching her night table clock tick its way to ten-thirty. She was sleeping all the time these days. Janni and Maris thought she must be depressed. Why aren’t you eating? they’d asked her. How come you’re not training harder? She laughed their questions off. She had no answers.

  She jumped at the sound of a knock on her door and sat up quickly. She’d hate for anyone to catch her still in bed. But it was only Rennie.

  She sat down on the very edge of Kit’s bed, her American history book in her lap. “Are you sick?” sh
e asked.

  Kit smoothed the blanket over her knees, hoping Rennie wasn’t looking for help with her history homework. “I’m just tired and I’m not running well. I’m wondering if I’ll ever be able to run a marathon again.” She caught herself—she hadn’t meant to give words to her fear. “But enough about my problems. What’s on your mind?”

  Rennie had confided in her the past few weeks. About the times Craig beat her, how his threats of sex kept her in a state of terror. And about her grandmother, but that wound was deep and the words hadn’t come easily. She’d told her about the rapists, about their taunting and the pain. She’d told her enough to make Kit sleep fitfully for a week.

  “I think Cole thinks it’s my fault that I was raped,” she said now.

  “That’s crazy. He doesn’t think any such thing.”

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You always know what he’s thinking. It’s like you and Cole are two people with one mind.”

  Kit liked the description. “He cares about you a lot.”

  Rennie looked down at her history book. “Is there something wrong with his eyes?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re so weird. It’s like you can see the white through the colored part or something.”

  Kit laughed. “His eyes are unusual but they’re normal eyes. His mother’s are like that, too.”

  It was a few seconds before Rennie spoke again. “I just don’t understand why a man would want to be a doctor for women.”

  So that was it.

  “Could you ask him, Kit? Why he’s a . . . you know, that kind of doctor, and then tell me his answer?”

  “I know his answer, but it won’t do you any good coming from me. Why don’t I tell him you’d like to talk to him when he gets home today?”

  “No.”

  Kit leaned toward her. She was going to have to get tough on this. It was the only way. “You have to,” she said. “You can’t continue to live in this house for who knows how long pretending he doesn’t exist.”

  26.

  The call from Kit pleased him. He hoped he could finally put an end to the tension between himself and Rennie.

  She was waiting for him in the kitchen when he got home.

  “I heard you wanted to talk to me.” He took off his coat and unwound the scarf from his neck.

  She shrugged, looking for all the world as if she couldn’t care less. “I guess,” she said.

  “Well, let me get some milk and we can sit in the library.”

  She leaned against the counter while he poured his milk, and he felt sorry for her. She was striking a pose of casual indifference, studying the mural of tropical fish on the backsplash, but the frenetic beating of the pulse in her temple gave her away.

  “Let’s go,” he said, guiding her with his hand on her back.

  The library was his favorite room for talking. It was quiet, closed in by the walls of books. They sat in the big leather chairs. “Kit didn’t give me much information,” he lied. “I think she wanted you to tell me yourself.”

  She stared at the glass of milk he was holding on the arm of his chair. “I don’t know what to say,” she said finally.

  “I know you find me hard to talk to.”

  She nodded.

  “What can I do to change that?”

  “Tell me why you’re a doctor.” She blurted the words out.

  “What you’d really like to know is why I’m an obstetrician, right?”

  Rennie blushed.

  “More people ask me that question than any other, I think.”

  “They do?” She looked relieved.

  “Uh-huh. And there’s no simple answer.” He moved his milk to the desk and leaned forward. “Have you ever seen a birth, Rennie?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, we’ll have to arrange that one of these days. The first time I ever felt a new life slip into my hands I knew I wanted that to be a part of my work. I like helping healthy women have healthy babies, and I like figuring out what to do when there are problems. And very soon I’ll be operating on babies still inside their mothers. Can you imagine anything more exciting than that?”

  She shook her head, the shadow of a smile on her lips.

  “And frankly, I prefer women patients to men patients because women are more honest about their feelings. You don’t have to guess at what’s going on with them.”

  “Except with me,” she said, surprising him with a giggle.

  “Well, you are a bit of a puzzle, but that’s understandable after what you’ve been through.”

  “It’s made me afraid of everything all of a sudden.”

  He nodded. “That makes sense.”

  She looked down at her hands. “Kit said you think it was my own fault I got raped.”

  He frowned. He was certain Kit had said nothing of the kind. “Why would I think that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. ’Cause I ran away, I guess. ’Cause maybe you think I asked for it.”

  He got up and moved to the ottoman right in front of her and she let him take her hands. “It wasn’t your fault, Rennie.” He looked straight at her, and for the first time she didn’t try to dodge his eyes. “Please get that through your head. I know it wasn’t your fault. Now you need to accept that for yourself.”

  27.

  Kit sat on the edge of the tub, leaning heavily against the blue tiled wall of her bathroom. The heat was on in the house now that the others were up, but still she shivered. She looked at her watch. Seven o’clock. She’d been sitting there for an hour, fighting the nausea, giving in to it only when she had no choice.

  She’d heard Cole answer the phone and leave the house earlier, when it was still dark outside and she was warm in her bed. She’d rolled over to look at the clock and felt the room spin. It was a miracle that she’d made it to the bathroom in time.

  How much longer could she pretend everything was all right? She was able to run fairly well at night, but that meant using the sterile indoor track at the Y. She had to be the only person in the world training for a marathon indoors.

  She still went out to the beach in the morning. It was part of the ruse. She just walked along the shells now, and it was harder than ever to keep warm. What was wrong with her? She had a new theory every day. Fear of success, poor conditioning, stress at work. Something that could be overcome in a week or two.

  She knew Cole had his own theory. He’d met her on the beach the day before. It had been weeks since she’d seen him out there. She felt exposed. He would have seen her sluggish gait, and she wasn’t certain her face was clear of her latest crying spell.

  He had on his heavy blue jacket and a knit cap pulled over his ears. “Hey,” he called when she was close enough to hear him. “You weren’t running.”

  She didn’t try to speak.

  “You’ve been crying,” he said, very close to her now.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Cole. I can’t run. I feel terrible. When I run hard I throw up.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded.

  “And you’ve been keeping this to yourself, like a little martyr.” He took her gloved hand and held it in his pocket as they walked.

  “I kept thinking it would get better.”

  “You haven’t had sex with anyone since that time with Sandy at the Christmas party, have you?”

  “No.” She was annoyed. “And that was at the end of my period.”

  “Why don’t you make an appointment to come in and we’ll figure out what’s going on.”

  “I think I’m just nervous.”

  “Uh-huh.” He’d sounded unconvinced and she’d been irritated by his self-confidence and his ability to walk along the beach without the slightest fear of throwing up.

  She’d taken his advice and set up an appointment for eleven-thirty this morning. He’d suggested the time so they could have lunch together afterward, but now as she sat dizzily in her bathroom, she doubted she would ev
en be able to watch him eat.

  She was still shaky as she sat in the waiting room of Cole’s office. The pages of the latest Newsweek trembled in her hands.

  “You’re next, dear,” the receptionist told her. “Wait in Dr. Perelle’s office. He wanted to talk with you first.”

  She sank into the leather chair in front of his desk. It felt strange to be there alone, as if she were invading his privacy. She would have felt less intrusive poking around his bedroom at home.

  She looked around her as if she’d never seen his office before. The walls were covered with more fat books than a person could read in a lifetime. The shelf by the window held plastic models of body parts and she looked away, repulsed.

  Neat piles of paper and charts lined the borders of Cole’s desk and a half-full cup of coffee sat in the center of the leather top. The cup had a picture of a tiny doctor on it, standing in the middle of a cornfield. Above the picture it read COLE PERELLE, M.D., and below it, outstanding in his field. She’d never known he had a cup like that. She wondered if Estelle had given it to him.

  He brought her chart into the room and sat in the other leather chair, frowning at her. “You don’t look very well.”

  “I spent an hour throwing up this morning.”

  “After running?”

  “No. It hit me even before I got out of bed.”

  He took a pen from the pocket of his white coat and began to write. He was wearing a tie, pleated wool pants. A far cry from his usual jeans or cords. Why was he dressed like that on a regular day at work? She hoped the fetal surgery stuff wasn’t going to his head.

  “It seems you’re getting worse instead of better.”

  “Not really. I think today was probably as bad as it will get.”

  He looked at her as if to say, Who are you trying to kid? “When was your period due?”

  “Never. My periods are never actually due.”

  “Come on, Kit. You had one in November and another in December.” He picked up a small calendar from the desk and handed it to her. “Assuming your cycle was beginning to regulate itself, when would you have been due?’

  She counted the days on the calendar with the tip of her finger. “If they were actually getting back to normal, I should have started my period around January seventh.”