by Liz Flaherty
“I think we always have known it,” said Jean quietly. “Even though you never invited us, and we did wonder why, we knew we were welcome if we ever came.”
Suddenly I understood. It was as though someone had written the truth in the stars and I could finally read the message that had eluded us for years. “Mark didn’t like us, did he, Vin? Or at least one or two of us, and when he died you would have felt disloyal if you’d let us come to you.”
Vin was silent for a long moment, and when I looked over at her, I saw that a tear had trickled from the corner of one eye. Damn, I had done it again. I really do get tired of feeling like a shit because I’ve hurt someone’s feelings. “I’m sorry,” I said.
This was something new with me, apologizing for my bluntness. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I was positive I didn’t like making a good friend cry, even Suzanne who wept at the drop of a hat. “I didn’t mean…” I stopped. Exactly what didn’t I mean?
“No,” she said, putting her hand on my arm again and leaving it there. “He didn’t dislike you, but he didn’t feel comfortable with you or with our friendship. You knew he called me Vincent sometimes, didn’t you?” She looked down the row of us and we all nodded. “It was because he didn’t feel comfortable with Lavinia, either.”
The tears came fast then, heartrending in their silence. “After this afternoon, with Lucas,” she said, “I realize that perhaps Mark never loved me at all, but this version of me that was only real in his mind. He was happiest when we were in New York or Palm Beach, only tolerating the time we spent here, and this was the place I loved best. He wouldn’t even come to Indiana, remember?”
“Oh, Vin, of course he loved you.”
It was Suzanne speaking, and we all looked at her. I felt familiar “oh, Suzanne, what do you know?” impatience welling up inside, but I had learned in the past few weeks that she knew a lot, and if I’d kept my mouth shut a little more often, it wouldn’t have taken me so long to figure it out.
“Okay,” she went on, “so he didn’t like the island, but he bought you this house and handed you the deed with just your name on it so that it was yours no matter what happened. And he wasn’t crazy about us, but he never tried to stop you from being with us.” She grinned. “His not loving us only showed that the man’s character had limits, not that he didn’t have any.”
I remembered Suzanne’s first husband, Trent, who’d thought he could have one life in Indianapolis and another in Lewis Point. And then there was Phil, who had hidden from his colleagues the fact that his wife was a beauty consultant. She knew what she was talking about when it came to men’s characters.
I just wish she knew about Jake.
“You know, she’s right,” I said. “And let’s be honest here, you hate Palm Beach and I don’t think you’re really happy in New York. Does that mean you didn’t love Mark?”
Vin snatched her hand from my arm. “Of course not,” she said indignantly, spoiling her hauteur with a sniffle. She looked down at all of us again. “Do you think he did?”
“Yes,” Suzanne and I said together.
“Sure do,” said Jean, who seemed to be getting a little color back. I don’t know whether it was the conversation or the roll of antacids she’d pulled out of her purse. “After all,” she went on, “the man thought you were a C-cup when he met you. If he still wanted you when the falsies came out, I’m sure it was love.”
Our laughter seemed to bounce off the rocks below, coming back to us in the stillness of the night. We stayed on the porch, going in only for sandwiches or glasses of something cold, until darkness crept in and slid into the water. We slapped at mosquitoes, but none of us wanted to go inside. Jean finally found a can of repellent and we sprayed each other down and resumed our seats.
It’s been said that time heals all wounds, but sometimes friendship does, too.
Jean
The story is flowing so rapidly it’s as though I can’t type fast enough. I was afraid David’s visit would stop that flow, or at least impede it, but if anything it accelerated it. I’m writing nearly all the time that I’m awake.
The pain in my abdomen is worsening, waking me sometimes with the gasping fear that I’m going to die on the spot. I can’t though until I finish this book, make things right with Carrie, and separate myself enough from David to ease his grief.
Sometimes, when I’m not feeling so bad, I wonder if I’m wrong. Maybe it’s a misplaced appendix or a bad gall bladder or just a cyst that’s attached itself to something. I am not, after all, particularly intuitive except where my children are concerned. I’ve never felt the foreshadowing of bad things or “just known” when something was wrong. Andie’s cancer was as big of a shock to me as it was to her, or nearly.
My own, however, is not. It is as though I’ve known since the dreadful days of my mother’s illness that her end would also be mine. I have schooled myself for years not to be angry, as she was, or afraid, as David’s mother was.
Sometimes I am anyway. After making love with David, I raged that I couldn’t grow old with him, couldn’t stay with him until we were fragile little people who knew only our memories and each other. And in the night, I’m frightened. I believe in the afterlife, but the people I love are still here. Common sense tells me I won’t be alone, but without my family and my friends, how can I be otherwise?
Lying in the soft, feathery bed in Vin’s house, I remember the nights when I was small. My parents would leave for days at a time, looking for a different job, a place to live, or just a good time. They’d leave a row of canned chicken and noodle soup on the cluttered counter along with a crank can opener. “Don’t tell anyone we’re gone,” they’d say. “You never know who or what might come in here looking for a little girl like you.”
I was so scared. I’d go to bed as soon as the nine-o’clock TV shows were over, lying silent and afraid beneath scratchy old military blankets until sleep overcame both my dread and me. If a storm or just the creaky sounds of night woke me later, I learned to make up stories, telling them out loud to stave off the noise and the fear.
The other girls found out about me being alone at night—I don’t remember how. They didn’t tell anyone, but Andie would drag me into her trailer. “Jean’s staying with me,” she’d say to Rosie, the aunt she lived with.
Rosie would nod and give me a smile. “Keep the noise down.”
We knew gentlemen callers didn’t like knowing there were kids in the house. Later on, when puberty struck us all at once, Rosie wanted us to be quiet for other reasons we didn’t quite understand until Vin explained them.
I’ve always believed there is a special place in heaven for people like Rosie. She died when an aneurysm in her brain burst our freshman year in college. The four of us stood hollow-eyed over her grave at the back of the Tonsil Lake Cemetery and realized that the only person who’d ever taken care of us was gone.
Maybe Rosie will be waiting for me.
Lucas made me promise to see Carolyn as soon as I return home, and the pain is getting bad enough I will keep that promise. He was angry when we talked about it, but I don’t know whether the anger was at me, disease, or fate. He is such a nice man.
We are down to our last few days of this month on the lake. Vin and Andie have finished the editing of what Andie persists in calling “that book,” and the mood has been both celebratory and sad.
I don’t think Suzanne has made a decision concerning her job. We all put on our reading glasses one night and pored over the retirement offer made by her company. It was adequate if not generous, but she really doesn’t want to retire.
“You don’t seem to understand,” she said patiently. “I am a beauty consultant. It’s not just something I do.”
Looking down at my laptop and thinking of the pages I have written in this idyllic place, I understand very well. Very well indeed.
Suzanne
Jake came yesterday. It was a real surprise to all of us. We were eating our breakfast on the porch, w
hich has become a habit the past couple of weeks, when we saw a tall, lean man coming up the path. He was even thinner than he’d been when I saw him last month and he was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap that covered his dark hair.
I didn’t recognize him right away, but Andie did. I saw a smile cross her face before she lifted an arm in greeting.
“Good Lord,” he said, stepping onto the wooden porch, “if you women get any more beautiful, they’re going to have to make this island into the eighth natural wonder of the world.” He clasped a column as he spoke, and even though the movement was casual, it was as though he needed the post’s support as much as the porch roof did.
“I believe that’s being considered,” said Vin. “Jake, you old dog, how are you?” She got to her feet first and went to meet him with her arms outstretched.
He hugged us all indiscriminately, telling us the whole time about all he’d gone through to get here in time for breakfast. His arm lingered warm at my waist when he was done. I looked up at him—probably with a goofy smile all over my face—and intercepted a look that passed between him and Andie.
It was like standing at the edge of the ocean and feeling the tide washing the sand out from under your feet. You start out ankle-deep in water and end with the surf lapping over your knees while you try to keep your balance against the surge.
I’d always known at some level of thinking that getting interested in one of your friends’ ex-husbands was a bad idea, made even worse when the friend tells you she minds that interest. I had told myself that Andie’s friendship was more important than a romance with Jake, but I hadn’t believed it.
Men who were an integral part of your lives were always more important, weren’t they? And Jake had become, through the months and the whirlwind time together we’d had, a very integral part of my life.
I thought Andie wouldn’t stay mad when the relationship deepened. Friends just didn’t. They fought about things and moved on. That’s what the girls from Tonsil Lake had always done.
But with the look exchanged between Jake and Andie, I knew how wrong I was. Their connection went much deeper than their children and the friendship they’d always shared. I had always thought Andie never married again because she was embittered and couldn’t fall in love again, but that wasn’t the case at all.
She couldn’t fall in love again because she was still in love with Jake.
And he with her.
Vin
I showered before I went. I sprayed expensive cologne into the air and walked through it, shaved my underarms and legs for the second time in the same day, and slipped into the apricot bra and panties that had been my part of a shopping trip to the boutique in the village a week ago. If that’s not premeditated, I don’t know what is.
So?
I pushed my bare feet into scuffs, belted my silk robe at my waist, and slipped away through the darkness.
When Lucas opened the door after my knock, it was as though he’d been waiting for me. He took me into his arms without so much as a “hello” and I went willingly. Later, lying half on top of him in the king-size bed that took up most of his first-floor bedroom, I realized I’d been waiting for him, too.
We didn’t ask each other the obvious question: What now? We didn’t speak of love and forever and New York and Hope Island. There were no flowers or wine or seductive fragrances or candles flickering on the windowsills.
This was not a carved antique bed with imported linens and a heavy spread that coordinated with the window appointments, but a cherry wood four-poster he’d bought on the mainland and hauled across the bay on Zeke’s boat. The sheets were soft cotton—Lucas thought Maggie had bought them at Wal-Mart on the mainland—and the quilt had been a gift from a grateful patient. There was only Lucas and me and the night we gave each other.
It was everything.
Chapter Ten
Andie
I had flown in a day early to surprise him. We’d planned the long weekend for months in advance. Jake would already be in San Francisco on business and I would come on Thursday’s earliest flight and be there in time for a late lunch. Miranda was staying with Jean, young Jake with Suzanne.
It seemed as though he’d been gone for months, though it had been less than a week. He traveled a lot as half of a manufacturing consultant team, and sometimes the trips seemed to run together. I told him he spent more time with Ted, his partner, than he did with me. He told me he knew that was true, though he couldn’t get Ted to do his laundry.
I was able to get a flight on Wednesday afternoon, so I drove my kids over to Jean and Suzanne in Lewis Point and went on to the airport. On the flight, I had a few second thoughts that skittered through my mind like air turbulence. Suzanne had sought to surprise Trent once, too, but she’d gotten the surprise, finding him with another woman.
But Jake wasn’t Trent. He was the best of husbands, the best of fathers. He hated our separations as much as I did and he loved surprises. It was more fun throwing a birthday party for him than for one of the kids.
It was nine o’clock San Francisco time when I reached the hotel. I showed my driver’s license to the desk clerk and was given a key to Jake’s room. The elevator to the third floor was slow, and I remember thinking I should have taken the stairs, but I was too tired to look for them. Nine o’clock in California time meant midnight and exhausted in Hoosier hours.
I knocked lightly on the door before unlocking it. The safety chain wasn’t on—Jake never remembered that—and I stepped inside, surprised to find the room dark and the television off since he’d said he was staying in tonight. We had laughed that he was saving himself for my arrival, and I giggled again there in the dusky vestibule of his room as I remembered the conversation.
And then I didn’t laugh for what seemed, even in memory, like a very long time.
Jake was in the queen-size bed in the hotel room, but it wasn’t me he had saved himself for.
It was Ted.
****
I’m not sure Suzanne believed me at first. “But you’re still in love with him,” she said. “I saw you look at each other yesterday when he got here. It was one of those David and Jean looks, like a silent secret.”
I sat with my legs drawn up into the chair. I’d gotten chilly while I told the story I had never told another living soul. Jean went into the house and came out with a knitted blanket. She gave it to me, letting her hand rest on my shoulder for a wordless space of time.
“Oh,” said Vin. “Oh, Andie, why didn’t we know? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because we didn’t tell anyone. That was how we decided to do it. Because we didn’t want the kids to know till they were much older. Because, at that time, it probably would have cost Jake and Ted both their jobs had it gotten out. And because”—I stopped, meeting Suzanne’s gaze—“because sometimes the love doesn’t stop just because the marriage can’t go on. I couldn’t live with a bisexual once I knew he was one, couldn’t bear the idea of sharing my husband with a man, but I loved Jake Logan with every breath I breathed.”
“And you still do,” said Suzanne.
I heard the wonder in her voice and smiled at her, though none of it was the least bit funny. “I’m not in love with him anymore,” I said. “Being in love isn’t static, it requires forward motion, and that all stopped that day. But I’ve loved him for thirty years and I don’t know that I can ever love someone else as much as I do him.” I thought of Paul and realized there was a chance I’d just spoken a lie. “Or that I would subject myself to that kind of pain again.” That part was the truth.
Vin’s voice slipped into the silence, so quiet it barely disturbed it. “Andie, is Jake sick?”
I hadn’t wanted to tell them this, had wanted to spare Suzanne if no one else, but Vin’s question left me little recourse. “Yes.”
“AIDS?”
“Yes.” I took a deep breath, then another, and almost laughed when I noticed that we were all doing the same thing. In. Out. In. O
ut. If we kept up with this heavy breathing, we could go into business as crank telephone callers.
“He’s been HIV-positive for some time, but it’s gone into full-blown AIDS in the past two years. There isn’t much time left.” It hurt so to say those words, to imagine life without Jake Logan, but the relief at having them said was almost greater than the pain. “Suzanne, I—”
Her hand gripped mine, and I held on.
“How could we have helped you through any of this?” asked Jean. Tears trembled on her lashes. “What could we have done?”
Before I knew what was happening, I was crying. Oh, hell, no, I was blubbering like a baby. “Oh, Jeannie, you guys always helped me. God, that day around the pool, talking about—all I can remember is Suzanne being the only first grader with a bra—but it kept me from thinking my life was over.”
I tried to laugh, but it spluttered into a sob. “Vin, you sent me money, remember? And I sent it back. So you sent it again, the same bedraggled check, with lots of cuss words in a note, and you paid book rent and bought my kids’ school clothes that year because even with Jake helping beyond the limits of child support, I couldn’t do it all on a hostess’s salary.”
The blanket fell from my shoulders to my lap, and I left it there. I wasn’t cold anymore. “And the past two years, between Jake’s illness and mine,” I said, “I don’t believe I would have survived without the three of you.”
****
We left the house on Hope Island the next day without looking back. None of us wanted to cry again. Vin flew out first, after long, hard hugs all around, then Jean, Suzanne, and I got on the plane to Indianapolis. David met us at the airport and drove us home. Paul was waiting at my house with dinner ready. We invited Suzanne to stay, but she said she wanted to go and see Sarah.
It was almost dawn when the phone rang.
Jean
David took me through the house blindfolded, but he tickled me in the hallway and ended up walking me into a wall. By the time we finished laughing, my blindfold was askew and so were our clothes. Reunions, we decided, were great things.
