Kristin Hannah

by On Mystic Lake (v5)

  Izzy fell into step beside her. Annie slowed her steps to match the child’s as they climbed the stairs. Halfway up, Izzy inched closer and slid her hand into Annie’s. It was the first time Izzy had touched her.

  Annie clung to the tiny fingers, squeezing gently. That’s it, Izzy . . . keep reaching out. I won’t let you fall.

  Upstairs, after Izzy brushed her teeth, they knelt beside the bed together. Annie recited the “Now-I-lay-me” prayer and then tucked Izzy into bed, kissing her forehead. After a quiet moment, she went to the rocking chair by the window and sat down.

  The chair made a soft ka-thump, ka-thump on the wooden floor. Her gaze moved from Izzy to the window. She stared out at the glittering moonlit lake, listening to the slow evening-out of the girl’s breathing.

  As so often happened, the nightly ritual made Annie remember. When her own mother had died, she’d been much too young to handle her grief. All she knew was that one day her world was bright and shining and filled with love, and the next, everything fell into a gloomy, saddened, tear-stained landscape. She could still recall how much it had scared her to see her father cry.

  That was when the blueprint of her life had been drawn. She’d become a good little girl who never cried, never complained, never asked uncomfortable questions.

  It had taken her years to grieve. Her first year away from home had been incredibly lonely. Stanford was no place for a small-town millworker’s daughter. It had shown her—for the first time—that she was poor and her family uneducated.

  Her love for Hank was the only reason she stayed at that big, unwelcoming school. She knew how much it meant to him that she was the first Bourne to attend college. And so she kept her head down and her shoulders hunched and she did her best to fit in. But the loneliness was often overwhelming.

  One day she started her car, and the sound of the engine triggered something. The memory was as unexpected as a snowstorm in July. All at once, she felt her mother beside her in the car, and Annie’s Volkswagen “Bug” had become the old station wagon they’d once had, the one with the wood-grain strip along the side. She didn’t know where they’d been going, she and her mom, or what they’d talked about, and she realized with a sharp, sudden pain that she couldn’t recall the sound of her mother’s voice. The more she tried to slip into the moment, to immerse herself in the memory, the more flat and one dimensional it had become.

  Until that moment, she had actually—naively—thought she’d overcome the death of her mother, but on that day, more than ten years after they’d placed her mother’s coffin in the cold, dark ground, Annie fell apart. She cried for all the missed moments—the nighttime kisses, the spontaneous hugs, the joy that would never be as complete again. She grieved most of all for the loss of her childhood innocence, which had been taken on a rainy day without warning, leaving behind an adult in a child’s body, a girl who knew that life was unfair and love could break your heart, and mostly, that nothing was worse than being left behind by the one you loved.

  It took her several days to master her grief, and even then control was tissue-thin, a layer of brittle ice on a cold, black body of water. It was not surprising that she fell in love almost immediately after that. She had been a walking wound of loneliness, and caretaking was the only way she knew to fill the void in her soul. When she met Blake, she showered him with all the pent-up longing and love that was inside her.

  Annie slowly got out of the rocker and tiptoed to the bed. Izzy was sleeping peacefully. Annie wondered if the child was blessed with dreams in which Kathy appeared; Annie herself was rarely so lucky.

  She was halfway down the stairs when the phone rang. She jumped down the last few risers and dove for the phone, answering it on the third ring. “Nick?”

  There was a moment of silence, then a woman’s voice said, “Nick?”

  Annie winced. “Hi, Terri.”

  “Oh, no you don’t, don’t you dare act like this is a normal conversation. Who in the hell is Nick and where are you? I called Hank and he gave me this number.”

  Annie sank onto the sofa and tucked her knees up underneath her. “It’s nothing, really. I’m baby-sitting for an old friend and he’s late getting home.”

  “I had hoped you’d changed. A little bit, at least.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You just spent twenty years waiting for a man to come home—now you’re waiting for another man? That’s insane.”

  It was insane. Why hadn’t Annie seen that on her own? It made her angry suddenly, both that she’d lost the ability to really get mad, and that she’d allowed herself to take from Nick what she’d spent a lifetime accepting from Blake. Excuses and lies. “Yeah,” she muttered more to herself than to Terri. “I only have to take this kind of shit from men I’m in love with.”

  “Well, that answers my next question. But what—”

  “I’ve got to run, Terri. I’ll call you later.” Annie could still hear Terri’s voice as she hung up the phone. Then she punched in another number.

  Lurlene answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Lurlene? It’s Annie—”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Fine, but Nick isn’t home yet.”

  “He’s probably down at Zoe’s, havin’ a drink—or ten.”

  Annie nodded. That’s what she’d suspected as well. “Could you come watch Izzy for a little while? I want to go talk to him.”

  “He ain’t gonna like that.”

  “Be that as it may, I’m going.”

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  After she hung up, Annie went upstairs and checked on Izzy again, then she hurried back downstairs and paced the living room. True to her word, Lurlene showed up in ten minutes, wearing a puffy pink chenille bathrobe and green plastic clogs.

  “Heya, honey,” she said quietly, stepping into the house.

  “Thanks for coming,” Annie said, grabbing her purse off the coffee table. “This won’t take long.”

  Chapter 11

  Annie stood on the sidewalk below a cockeyed pink neon sign that read: Zoe’s Hot Spot Tavern. It sputtered and gave off a faint buzzing sound.

  Clutching her handbag, she went inside. The tavern was bigger than she’d expected, a large rectangular room, with a wooden bar along the right wall. Pale blue light shone from tubes above a long mirror. Dozens of neon beer signs flickered in shades of blue and red and gold. Men and women sat slumped on bar stools, drinking and talking and smoking. Every now and then, she heard the thump of a glass hitting the bar.

  Way in the back were two pool tables, resting beneath pyramids of fluorescent lighting, with people bent over them, and others standing alongside, watching. Someone broke up a rack of balls and the sound was a loud crack in the darkness.

  Keeping her back to the side wall, she edged deeper into the place, until she saw Nick. He was at a table in the back corner. She pushed through the crowd.

  “Nick?”

  When he saw her, he lurched to his feet. “Is Izzy—”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Thank God.”

  He was unsteady on his feet as he backed away from her. He stumbled and plopped into his chair. Reaching out, he grabbed his drink and downed it in a single swallow. Then he said softly, “Go away, Annie. I don’t . . .”

  She squatted beside him. “You don’t what?”

  He spoke so quietly she had to strain to catch the words. “I don’t want you to see me here . . . like this.”

  “Did you know that she listens for you every night, Nick? She sits beside the front door for as long as her little eyes can stay open, waiting to hear your footsteps on the porch.”

  “Don’t do this to me . . .”

  Her heart went out to him, but she didn’t dare stop, not now when she’d finally found the courage to begin. “Go home to her, Nick. Take care of your little girl. This time you have with her . . . it goes away so quickly, don’t you know that? Don’t you know that in a heartbeat, you’
ll be packing her bags and watching her board a plane for somewhere far away from you?”

  The look he gave her was sad and hopeless. “I can’t take care of her, Annie. Haven’t you figured that out? Christ, I can’t take care of anyone.” In an awkward, jerking motion, he pushed to his feet. “But I’ll go home and pretend. It’s what I’ve been doing for the past eight months.” Without looking at her, he tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the table and walked out of the bar.

  She rushed after him, trying all the way through the crowded bar to figure out what to say to him. At the curb outside, he finally stopped and looked at her. “Will you do me one more favor?”

  “Anything.”

  A quick frown darted across his face, made Annie wonder why he’d expected to be let down. Why was it so hard for him to believe that she wanted to help him?

  “Drive me home?”

  She smiled. “Of course.”

  The next morning, Annie arrived at Nick’s house an hour early. She slipped through the unlocked door and crept up the stairs. She checked on Izzy, found her sleeping peacefully, then went to Nick’s bedroom. It was empty. She went down the hall to a guest room and pushed the door open.

  The curtains were drawn, and no sunlight came through the heavy Navajo-print drapes. Against one wall was an old-fashioned four-poster bed. She could just make out Nick’s form beneath a mound of red wool blankets.

  She should have known that he didn’t sleep in the master bedroom anymore.

  Annie knew it was dangerous to enter his room, a place where she didn’t belong, but she couldn’t help herself. She went to his bed and stood beside him. In sleep, he looked young and innocent; more like the boy she’d known so long ago than the man she’d recently met.

  It came to her softly, whispering on the even, quiet sound of his breathing, how much she had once loved him. . . .

  Until the night she saw him kiss Kathy.

  She needs me, Annie, don’t you see that? he’d said afterward. We fit.

  I can fit with you, Nicky, she’d pleaded softly.

  No. He’d touched her cheek, and the gentleness of his touch had made her cry. You don’t need someone like me, Annie Bourne. You’re off to Stanford in the fall. You’re going to set the world on fire.

  “What are you doing here so early?”

  With a start, Annie realized that he was awake, and that he was looking at her. “I . . . I thought you might need me.”

  Frowning, he sat up. The covers fell away from his body, revealing a chest that was covered with coarse black hair.

  She waited for him to say something, but he just sat there, his eyes closed. His skin had a waxy, yellow cast, made even more noticeable by the tangle of silvery-white hair and the blackness of his eyelashes. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead and upper lip.

  She pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed. “Nick, we’ve got to talk.”

  “Not now.”

  “You’ve got to make a better effort with Izzy.”

  He looked at her finally. “I don’t know how to help her, Annie. She scares me.” The words were spoken softly, and they were steeped in pain. “I mean to have one drink with the boys after work, but then I start thinking about coming home . . . to my empty bedroom and my disappearing daughter, and one drink turns into two. . . .”

  “You’d be fine if you’d stop drinking.”

  “No. I’ve always been shitty at taking care of the women I love. Ask Kathy about it.”

  Annie fought an unexpected urge to brush the hair away from his face—anything to let him know that he wasn’t as alone as he felt. “You couldn’t make her well, Nick.”

  He seemed to deflate. A low, tired sigh slipped from his lips. “I’d rather not talk about this now. I don’t feel good. I need—”

  “Izzy loves you, Nick. I understand your broken heart— at least to the extent anyone can understand such a thing— but nursing it is a luxury. You’re her father. You simply don’t have the right to fall apart. She needs you to be strong. But mostly, she needs you to be here .”

  “I know that,” he said softly, and she could hear the heartache in his voice, the hushed admission of his own failure. “I’ll be home for a family dinner on Friday night. It’ll be a beginning. Okay? Is that what you want from me?”

  Annie knew that it was another lie, a promise that would be broken. Nick had lost faith in himself, and without it, he was in a turbulent sea without any sense of direction, waiting to be sucked under the current once again.

  “It isn’t what I want from you that matters, Nick,” she said softly, and in the deep sadness that seeped through his eyes, she knew that he understood.

  If Izzy stood very, very still, she could feel her daddy in the house. There was the faintest smell of him, the smoky smell that always made Izzy want to cry.

  She hugged Miss Jemmie to her chest and inched out of her bedroom. She heard voices coming from her daddy’s new room, and for a split second, it sounded like it used to, before the bad thing.

  But it wasn’t Mommy who was talking to him. Mommy was up with the angels, and down in the ground, and once you went to those two places, there was no coming back. Daddy had told her that.

  She crept down the darkened hallway and went downstairs. Everything looked so pretty; there were fresh flowers in a vase on the table, and the windows were open. Her mommy would have liked the way it looked now.

  She opened the big wooden front door and went out onto the porch.

  A pink sun was hanging just above the tops of the trees, and she knew it would soon rise into a blue sky. But it was still too early, and a layer of soft hazy fog clung to the sides of the lake and peeked out from the trees. Her heart started beating faster and she had trouble breathing.

  She cast a quick glance back inside to make sure no one was watching, then slipped past the screen door. Birds chirped from the high branches of a big old tree as she made her way across the wet grass.

  Ducking into her hiding place in the forest, she stared hard at the fog. Mommy?

  She listened really, really close. After a few moments, she heard it, the whisper-soft answer of her mother’s voice.

  Hey, Izzy-bear, are yah busy?

  Her eyes popped open. In the wavering gray fog, she saw a woman’s outline, golden hair and all.

  I’m disappearin’, Mommy, just like you.

  Her mommy’s voice was a sigh that sounded like the breeze. She felt her touch, a gentle ruffling of her hair. Oh, Izzy-bear . . .

  For the first time, her mommy sounded sad, not happy to see her at all. She peered into the mist, saw her mommy’s blue, blue eyes through the gray. Red tears fell from her mommy’s eyes, like tiny drops of blood. It’s getting harder for me, Izzy, coming to see you.

  Izzy felt a rush of panic. But I’m comin’as fast as I can!

  She felt it again, the softness of her mother’s hand in the coolness of the breeze. It won’t work, Izzy-bear. You can’t follow me.

  Tears stung Izzy’s eyes, blurred everything until she couldn’t see anything anymore. She blinked away the tears.

  The fog was moving away from her.

  She ran after it, following the pale cloud to the edge of the lake. Mommy, don’t go, Mommy. I’ll be good this time . . . I promise I’ll be good. I’ll clean my room and brush my teeth and go to bed without a sound . . . Mommy, please . . .

  But sunlight hit the surface of the water and cut through the fog until there was nothing left of it.

  She knelt down on the cold, gravelly bank and cried.

  Nick limped out of his bedroom. It had taken him forever to dress in his uniform, and buttoning the collar was flat impossible. With one hand on the wooden wall for support, he made his way down the hallway. Clutching the slick wooden handrail, he went down the stairs, one painful step at a time.

  His body felt as brittle as a winter leaf. Sweat crawled across his forehead and slid in cold, wet streaks down his back.

  It was a miracle that he reach
ed the bottom of the stairs without falling or puking. Still holding the banister in a death grip, he paused, sucking in air, trying to keep the bile from rising in his throat. Tears stung his eyes from the effort.

  He blinked and forced the nausea away.

  When he reopened his eyes, he noticed the changes Annie had made in his home. A fire leaped and danced in the gray river-rock opening. The two leather chairs had been shined up and now sat opposite the sofa, and between them the rough-hewn wooden coffee table glowed a beautiful reddish brown. On the table was a polished silver water pitcher full of fern fronds and white blossoms.

  He had often dreamed of a room just like this one, filled with the sounds of laughter . . . instead of the hushed silences and sudden outbursts that had been Kathy’s way.

  With a heavy sigh, he moved away from the stairway.

  That’s when he saw his Izzy. She was standing beside the big windows that overlooked the lake; golden sunlight created a halo around her face. Time drew in a sudden breath and fell away, leaving Izzy as she once was, a porcelain doll dressed in pretty clothes, with satin ribbons in her braided hair.

  She looked at him from across the room, her eyes wide.

  “Hey, Izzy,” he said, trying to smile. “You look gorgeous.”

  She blinked and didn’t move.

  He wet his dry lips. A bead of sweat slid down his temple.

  Just then, Annie came bustling out of the kitchen, carrying a steaming pot of coffee and a covered serving dish. At the sight of him, she stopped dead. “Nick! This is wonderful, you can join us for breakfast.”

  The thought of breakfast sent his sour stomach into revolt. “Izzy, go help your daddy into the sunroom. I’ve got breakfast set up in there. I’d better add another place at the table.”

  She apparently had no idea he was about to throw up. She just kept on talking—about what, he had no idea— and fluttering between the kitchen and the sunroom. Her chatter buzzed like gnats around his head.

  “Annie, I don’t—”

  “Izzy,” she said again. “Go help your daddy. He doesn’t feel well.” And she was off again, scurrying toward the sunroom.