“She would want you to love again, Daddy. She would.”
He turned around and walked from the room without speaking. My stomach knotted like a rope pulled tighter and tighter.
Daddy and Peyton: wanting and needing only the Kara they knew. A sob began to rise from the back of my throat, but I held it tight, let it dissolve before I moved, ran up the stairs to my room and grabbed several rolls of undeveloped film.
I stood in the Palmetto Pointe Photography Studio’s darkroom with only the developing pictures beneath my fingers, beneath the fluid in the pan. Clarisse, who managed the studio, had taught me years ago how to develop my own pictures, and she rented me the space when I needed it. There were at least fifty photographs on the rolls of film. I watched the pictures appear one by one, taking my time, focusing only on the pictures, not on my fatigued and shadowed thoughts. I focused on the skill of developing, on creating the right light contrast for each photo.
I knew exactly how to fix the rift between Daddy and me, between Peyton and me. I could just say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring Jack Sullivan back into this house. I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean I would leave and go to photography school.” And I’d probably still say these things, smooth the rougher edges of our relationships with my words, but now I stared at the developing photos below the water.
One of my favorite things about seeing the pictures was that often I forgot what was on the film, what I’d taken pictures of. This roll held mostly landscapes of the Palmetto Pointe golf course and the river behind it at Peyton’s house. I’d become enchanted with the way in which the sun—from the rising dawn to the fading evening—played with the river, tossed its light and shadows across the water, around the edges. The hummocks were exposed during low tide, then covered with the thick ribbon of blue-black water during high tide, with the spartina swaying behind the water in sage-gray contrast. I could taste the air when I’d taken this last shot right before the rain came.
Now a body formed on the photo paper beneath the water, its form taking shape as I watched: Peyton on the eighteenth green. I stared at his face, glancing down at the golf ball, at his body with his club in the air. He was such a familiar figure, part of a comfortable and known world. I knew this man: the way he walked, the way he raised his club or glanced up at me. I understood the words to say to him, where to touch him and how to make him smile.
I did love him. Then why was I having these doubts, these new . . . feelings for Jack, for another kind of life than the one I’d planned? It was a big question, the answer looming so far out on the horizon, beyond the sun, that I couldn’t catch a glimpse of it. I stared at the photo as if it could tell me. His body came into full focus and I leaned down, watched it below the water until it started to overprocess. I had left the picture in too long; it was time to take it out, let it dry. But my fingers did not move to pick up the prongs, yank the picture from the solution. I stared and watched Peyton fade without disappearing.
The next few photos were more landscapes: river, sea, estuary. I hadn’t realized I’d taken so many of the water—all kinds of water in every shade of light. Then Jack appeared with his lop-sided grin, sitting at a restaurant table in Savannah. It was the last photo in the roll, the last picture I’d taken. I took a deep breath, leaned too close to the solution. When the light fell directly on his features, I lifted the photo from the water, hung it on the wire above my head and stepped back. Photographers often joked how the last photo was always the best, how it surprised them because they had only meant to take one more photo to finish the roll.
I remembered snapping the camera; but I also remembered that I’d focused on the entire table—all six of them sitting there with their empty plates and beer mugs, with their arms around each other, smiling at the camera.
But this photo showed the band and singers in the background, fuzzy and clipped off at the edges. In this photo I’d focused only on Jack.
I piled my photos together as a buzzer went off; my time in the rented developing booth was over. I swung the revolving door around and stepped into the light, into a bright room with four long metal tables. I nodded at the next person in line and walked toward the tables, laid my photos out in a row.
Clarisse came up beside me. “Kara, your photos get better and better.” She grabbed four of them from the row, lined them up against each other. “These are the exact same scene taken from four different angles. These are an amazing study of light and shadow.” She looked up at me.
“Thank you,” I said. “I was trying to catch that section of the river at different times of the day. It’s right behind Peyton’s house.”
“You do know you have a gift, right?”
“A wedding gift?” I glanced toward her desk.
She laughed. “No, I meant you have a gift for photography. You have a natural eye for light and composition.”
“I do?” My spirits lifted, rose above the room, where her compliment seemed to float.
“Surely you know that.”
“No, I just love to do this.”
“Usually the one thing we love to do most is a hint of the thing we are most gifted at. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“I never thought about it like . . . that.” I gathered up the photos, put them in a pile.
A bell rang across the room, a signal that someone in a darkroom needed assistance. Clarisse touched my arm. “I mean it, Kara. I see a lot of photographers—professional and amateur—come through here, and you are one of the best.”
“Thanks.” I smiled at her, then patted the pile of photos. “I’ll just take these and go. Put it on my bill.”
Clarisse pointed to the top photo as she walked off. “Now look at that photograph—you knew exactly what to focus on, whose face held the most interest, and yet you didn’t cut out the remainder of the scene. You are very good, Kara.”
Clarisse disappeared into one of the developing rooms, and I stood in the main hall for a long time, just stood and stared at Jack’s grinning face. Had I focused on him for art or heart? And was there a difference?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The ICU machines hummed around me like white noise. The atmosphere in the room was tense, fearful. My heart stuttered and breath caught below my throat as I sat and stared at Maeve.
A tube pulled at the side of her mouth and intermittently burst forth with sucking noises; another tube with two prongs fit snugly in her nose. An IV ran into her arm with a clear yellow fluid. Suddenly the mechanical box where the IV fluid hung began to beep and flash lights. I jumped up, waved at a nurse. “Something is wrong over here,” I called out.
The nurse in pale green scrubs ran over. She was younger than me, with long brown curls pulled into a ponytail. She patted my arm. “The IV fluid just needs to be changed. Nothing to worry about. I’ll be right back.”
I sat down again and dropped my head into my hands. She returned and replaced the bag. I tapped her arm. “Is she going to come out of this coma?”
The nurse gave me one of those sympathetic looks they must teach in nursing school, but not medical school. Squint your eyebrows together, they must say, purse your lips and tilt your head. There you go, that’s it—now you look like you care.
She sat next to me, placed her small hand on my knee. “Sometimes they do come out of it, sometimes they don’t. Despite all of medical science’s breakthroughs, strokes are still a mystery. Patients surprise us all the time. It is up to her body whether she will come out of this.”
“Can she hear me?”
“Some experts say that people in comas can hear us, and absorb the information. Others believe that to be bunk.”
I laughed with my palm over my mouth. I’d never heard anyone under fifty years old use the word “bunk.” “Do you think she can hear me?”
“Yes, I do.” The nurse stood, patted the arm rails of the bed. “Go ahead, talk to her. Even if she can’t hear you, you’ll feel better.”
I nodded and watched her take long strid
es across the room to another beeping machine. I leaned down to Maeve. “Hi, Maeve, it’s Kara.”
I glanced around, feeling foolish, but no one paid any attention to me.
I took Maeve’s hand. “I’m so sorry you’re here in the hospital. I wish you could tell me your story, that we could take a walk at the edge of the sea you talk about. Maybe that’s where you are right now. . . .”
I laid my head on the edge of the bedside table, turned to stare at Maeve with her oxygen tubes and IV fluids. Her face was faded, like an old sweater that had been bleached one too many times. Her eyes moved back and forth under her eyelids, and I wondered what she saw: Richard, the three brown sails dipping and swaying across the bay, or nothing at all—just blank and empty space where love and family once lived.
I left Memorial Hospital with a leaden weight on my chest, and drove to the post office to mail the wedding invitations. I dropped the box of ecru envelopes onto the counter. “I just need to mail these,” I said to the round man in the blue U.S. Postal Service uniform.
“Wedding invitations?” He picked up an envelope from the box.
“Yes.” I nodded. “They’re already stamped.”
He held his palm out flat, placed the envelope on it. “This here weighs more than the postage you have on it.”
“What? I have a regular stamp.” I pointed to the white dove stamps I’d spent half an hour picking out.
“Yes, but these are too heavy. You must have high-weight paper and response cards.”
I groaned. “Now what?”
He turned his back to me, tossed the invitation on a scale, then glanced over his shoulder. “They need five more cents of postage on each one.”
“What if I leave it off?”
“They’ll all end up back in your mailbox.” He pointed to the return address. “How many five-cent stamps you need?”
“Four hundred.” I dropped my head into my palm.
He laughed. “Don’t worry, I see this happen all the time.” He motioned to a table in the corner. “Just take your box over there and I’ll bring you the stamps.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
He shrugged. “Then don’t mail them.”
I picked up the box, heard my name being called. I turned to see Sylvia Ellers waving from the back of the line.
I nodded at her, then turned back to the man and handed him my credit card. “Thanks for telling me. I’d hate to get all these back.”
“Might save you some money on the food and drink at the reception.” He smiled.
I was on the fourth page of stamps, peeling, sticking, peeling, sticking, when Sylvia came up next to me. “Hello, Kara. What’re doing?”
I held up a forefinger with a five-cent stamp stuck to it. “I didn’t have enough postage on the invitations.”
“Oh.” She stood staring at me for a brief moment, then picked up a page of stamps and assisted me.
“Thanks,” I said. “I had no idea they’d weigh too much.”
“You’re mailing them today?” She set a pile of envelopes to one side.
I nodded.
She opened her mouth, closed it.
I lifted my eyebrows at her. “You don’t think I should mail them today?”
“No . . . I mean, yes. I just . . .”
“What?” I exhaled.
“You love my Peyton.”
“Is that a question?” I stopped plucking stamps, stared at her.
“No. I just . . .”
“I love him, Sylvia. I do. I wouldn’t wear this ring or—”
“I’ve just seen his heart broken too many times.”
I leaned against the table, dropped a handful of stamped envelopes into the box. “Not by me.”
She nodded, walked over to the nearest mailbox, and dropped a handful of invitations in the slot. “I’ve got to go—late for a manicure. See you . . . soon.”
I smiled at my future mother-in-law. “Thanks for the help.”
“It’s the least I could do.” She pushed open the door and walked out, allowing a flush of warm air to pirouette into the room.
I stood without moving for long moments and wondered whose invitations Sylvia had dropped in the box. If I didn’t mail the remainder, who would receive their invitations, a result of Sylvia’s show of belief in me? Panic, like thin fingers of icy mist, spread along my arms and legs. I didn’t have any guarantees that this would all work out, that I was doing the right thing.
I filled the box with stamped envelopes and dropped them off with the postal worker, then watched as he tossed them into a large bin behind the counter.
“Invitations mailed,” I said to him.
He nodded at me. “Yes.”
“Thank you.” I turned and walked out the door of the post office, headed toward home.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Afternoon sunlight fell in the striped pattern of the plantation shutters onto the pine floorboards in my bed room. I stood at my dresser staring at the dented Claddagh ring. Recent events seemed odd and coincidental, and yet I felt deceived by everyone.
Peyton had been engaged twice before; Maeve had made me believe that a legend was her real-life story; Daddy never told me Mama had fought to live until the end, or that she’d left a dying wish for her children. Truth played hide-and-seek with me, shrouded in the dark corners of story and memory.
I slipped the ring on my finger, turned it around and around, then sank down on my bed, spread flat on my back, as though I were making snow angels in the sand with Jack beside me. I groaned. Back to Jack. I had to settle this, find some conclusion to that story, because it was an old one. I’d let Maeve’s legend take me back to a story that didn’t belong to me anymore. I had a new story . . . one that was not a myth or legend, but a real fiancé and a real life to build.
I stood and wiped my face. A soft knock came on my bedroom door. “Come in,” I called.
Daddy stood at the threshold. “Are you okay, darling?”
I nodded as he came and sat on my vanity chair. Daddy had never, in all these years, done more than stand in my doorway. He looked oversized and overwhelming in my room, sitting at my makeup table. “Are you and Peyton okay?”
I nodded.
“Don’t blow this, Kara.”
“Don’t blow what, Daddy?” The room would spin if I allowed it, but I focused tight on his face, his words.
“This engagement. This is all you’ve ever wanted, Kara.”
“Is it?”
His elbow knocked my hair dryer to the floor in a clattering noise he didn’t notice. “I promised your mama I would make sure you girls grew up with integrity and character, that you married the right men. If you break this engagement, I’ll have broken a promise.”
“You’ll feel that you’ve failed if I don’t marry Peyton?”
He looked up at me. “Yes. I shouldn’t have told you what she said during this vulnerable time in your life. I know she didn’t mean you should see how you feel about Jack Sullivan before you get married.”
“Oh, Daddy. I am not doing that because of what you told me....”
He shook his head. “You cannot hurt others to pursue selfish, childish dreams. Just do the right thing.”
“You’ve been telling me that my entire life. Well, maybe not my entire life, but at least since Mama died. What I remember you telling me is how to see the difference between a high or ebb tide, how to identify a blue crab from a ghost crab, the path of the migrating osprey or the impact of the full moon on the marsh.” Tears choked my memories of my other daddy, the one before Mama died.
He dropped his hands to his sides, and in my small chair they almost touched the floor. “Oh, Kara. I did tell you to do the right thing back then. I did.”
“Well, you might have, but it was mixed up in all the other great things you told me. What happened to that daddy? That man who knew the rhythm of the land around us, the one who laughed?”
“My role changed, Kara. I had to be both parents w
hen she left.”
“She didn’t leave. She died.” The truth grew larger, substantial as I spoke it.
He nodded. “And there were promises made.”
I leaned forward on my knees, reached for his hand. “You teach me to do the right thing just by the way you live. You don’t have to tell me all the time and you don’t have to leave the fun parts out. Really you don’t.”
His eyes opened wider. “Oh, now you tell me.” His laugh held little gaiety.
“Isn’t there a way to combine what your heart wants and the right thing?” I asked.
He stood and looked around my room as though he couldn’t believe he’d come in and sat. “I don’t know, darling.”
“Daddy, I promise this confusion I’m going through has nothing to do with you not teaching me character or integrity. It has everything to do with . . .” I stared off to the ceiling, heard Maeve’s words. “With what I believe.”
He squinted at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You asked me yesterday if I could love again.”
“Sorry . . . I overstepped my bounds.” I pressed my lips together.
“No . . . I just wanted you to know that I love you. I don’t say it enough, do I?”
“You show it, Daddy. I promise.”
As he walked out of the room, he looked over his shoulder. “Don’t forget, you’re the cook for the family dinner tonight.”
I groaned and slumped in my chair. “Damn.”
“This is quite possibly the worst family meal you’ve ever made.” Deirdre pushed her plate away. “What was that?”
Brian lifted his fork and waved a piece of dry, burned pork chop. “Five star, if I do say so myself.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “I’m so sorry, y’all. Really. I was at the hospital with Maeve and . . .”
Peyton leaned forward from his seat across the table from me. “How is she?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Still in a coma. . . . So anyway, how is everyone else doing?”
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