by Liz Flaherty
She sniffed. “It would surprise me if Andie doesn’t have it. All those men that aunt of hers had in and out of that trailer, and then she died of that mysterious thing in her head. How could some of that wickedness not have passed down to Andie?”
Rage made the turkey stick in my throat. I picked up my glass of ice water and drank half of it. “Rosie took care of all of us. She kept us safe. How can you talk that way about her?”
“Kept you safe?” Mother said scornfully. “By giving you girls a place to run to every time things didn’t go your way?”
For the first time in a very long time, I remembered the night my stepfather raped me. I could usually swing my mind away from it, but this time it caught me unaware, like someone opening the bathroom door when your hair’s full of shampoo.
It was as it had been during the years of reliving it every single day; I could recall every second of an event that seemed to go on for hours. I could smell the mildew that climbed the paneled walls of the trailer, feel the gritty sheets beneath me, see the place I forced my mind to take me to in order to survive. I remembered my mother’s voice—“Don’t fight him, Vin. What will we do if he leaves us? How will we live?”
Rosie had taken me to a doctor she knew the next morning. She’d sat with me and held my hand and chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes. “Just make sure she’s not hurt, Fred.” Her eyes had met Fred’s over the table where I lay with my feet in stirrups.
I had been too numb to be humiliated or frightened. Too numb to understand her next words. “Make sure she doesn’t have any little reminders of that asshole.”
To this day, I don’t know who Fred was, only that he was kind and that he didn’t hurt me. And that there hadn’t been any “little reminders.”
On the way home, Rosie bought me a chocolate malt and told me quietly and succinctly what to do with my knee, where her gun was kept, and that there was nothing wrong with running like hell.
The day my stepfather’s car was pulled out of the lake, Rosie went to the sheriff’s office. We rode along with her, but she made us wait in the car. It seemed as though she was gone a long time, but when she came out, her bright smile was in place.
Afterward, we sat at the ice cream shop, with vanilla shakes this time, and Rosie said, “This part of you girls’ life is over. You don’t have to look back on it, remember it, or worry about it. You are safe and you’re all together and I’ll do my damnedest to keep you that way.”
If there was any further investigation of my stepfather’s death, I never knew about it, and there were no charges filed. Rosie’s gun was never found and none of us ever talked to her about that day again. I don’t know if I ever even thanked her.
I drank the rest of my water and refilled the glass from the crystal pitcher that sat on the table. “Yes,” I said, “she always gave us a place to go.”
Mother sniffed delicately. I propped my chin in my hand and looked at her. She was a remarkably pretty woman, beautifully made up and elegantly coiffed. Her nails were perfect, her clothes tasteful and expensive. I thought of Suzanne, with her fear that there was no depth of character behind her beauty, and realized my mother didn’t even have enough substance to have that concern.
Then I thought of Jake, who had more grace dying of That Disease than the woman across from me had ever had. I thought of Mark, of Andie, of Jean and David. Of the wedding surprise I’d been unable to help with because I’d come here instead. I thought of Archie, puttering happily in the house on the island. And of Lucas, whom I loved.
What in the hell was I doing here?
I reached into my purse, pulled out all the cash I had with me, and laid it beside Mother’s plate. “For Christmas,” I said. “I have to go now.”
I was all the way outside before the frigid air reminded me that my raincoat was hanging over the tub in Mother’s apartment. I looked back at the front of the building. Then I got into my rental car and drove away. I didn’t look back again.
Chapter Sixteen
Andie
I came awake suddenly, my eyes popping open in the darkness like those of the star of a made-for-television thriller. I had slept hard and dreamlessly, an unusual occurrence these days, and felt strangely rested even though I’d gone to bed only four hours ago.
“Mom?” Lo’s voice came from the doorway. “Mom, wake up.”
“I’m awake.” I sat up, reaching for the robe on the end of the bed. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but something’s changed. Dad’s different. Sarah already called Miranda.”
Jake was awake. He smiled when I sat beside him, and the expression eased the lines of pain from his skeletal face. “Close now,” he said.
“I know.” I took his hand, wanting to rub some warmth into it but knowing it was too late for that. Already his fingertips were turning blue.
“The kids know…how much…I love them?”
“They know. They love you, too.” I touched his face. “And I do, Jake.”
“You, too. Always…my best girl.”
Although I could barely speak, I said what I knew he wanted to hear. “I better be your only girl, Logan.”
The laugh was little more than a catch of his breath. “Keep on dancing.”
“Just as fast as I can.”
“You and the girls need to…go to Tonsil Lake.”
“We’ll go soon. Promise.”
He moved his head, looking up. Miranda and Ben had come in, and they stood with Sarah and Lo around the bed as though if they guarded its perimeter they could stop him from leaving.
“Take care of your mom,” he said, “but don’t…let her…push you around.” The laugh again, even weaker this time.
“We can handle her, Dad,” said Lo.
“I love…” The words faded away, and his dimming gaze moved back to me.
“Sleep tight, Jake,” I whispered. “I’ll go to the lake. We’ll be all right.”
And he died.
Jean
None of us wore black to Jake Logan’s funeral. We wore bright colors and jewelry that made noise when we moved. “No ugly black dresses or sad dirges,” he’d instructed us. “If I have to lie there all dignified, I at least want to hear clanking bracelets and see women’s legs with high heels on the ends of them. And the music has to make people remember happy times, not dwell on the shitty business of dying.”
The funeral director hadn’t been at all thrilled about playing CDs by the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash during the visitation, but he had done it.
It was far too soon after Tommy’s funeral that we once again found ourselves cleaning up after the crowd who had gathered following Jake’s services. The flowers and most of the plants had been taken to the nursing home and the hospital. The contributions had been turned over to the police department’s teddy bear fund, a field trip fund at the school where Miranda and Ben taught, and the Humane Society. I had passed out the letters Jake had dictated.
“Our mothers used to like this,” I said. “Not that they wanted anyone to die, I guess, but they enjoyed the social aspect of funerals.”
“Especially when they were the bereaved ones.” Vin poured coffee for all of us and brought it to the table. “My mother loved being widowed, when the man she married became a hero and she became ‘oh, you poor little thing.’ ”
“People even said that to me,” said Andie, “though Jake and I had been divorced for twenty years.”
She got up, restless in her red dress, and went to the doorway that led into her dining room. She stopped abruptly, with her back to us. “I’m still looking for him, still checking on him. When we came back from the viewing yesterday, I hurried into the house because I wanted to tell him how many of the kids he coached had come to pay their respects. That Lucas had flown in. God, wouldn’t he have laughed the other night, Suzanne?”
She looked back at Vin and me and explained, “I woke up and came rushing out here to check on him even though some
semiconscious part of me knew he was gone. Suzanne was already up, half-awake, staring at the dining room table as though it didn’t belong there.”
“Everybody does that,” said Vin. “I woke listening for Mark. Suzanne heard Tommy calling out to her. Jean, after all those weeks of caring for David’s mother, would wake every night at the same time and go sit in the dining room.”
“It’s where I’d slept,” I said. “It was hard to get used to being in a bed again.” I met Andie’s eyes when she came back to the table. Are you okay? I was doing it again, asking the question we always asked, expecting the slight nod, the even slighter smile that meant I’m fine. Don’t worry.
She nodded, smiled, picked up her coffee cup.
“I wake up mad,” said Suzanne. “Tommy slept through the night from the time he was a few weeks old. Why is he all of a sudden waking me?” She looked haunted, and I reached to squeeze her hand.
“I keep thinking, though,” said Andie, “how we didn’t do that after they hauled Chuck out of the lake. We should have had nightmares, but none of us did. We slept better than we had for months.”
I felt my eyes widen. We never, ever talked about this. Even when Rosie died and we stood gaunt-eyed and grieving beside her open grave, we hadn’t talked about Chuck Hardesty.
“Our nightmares came from his living, not his death,” said Vin tersely and accurately. “Although I have to admit that sometimes I wonder…”
She stopped, looking down at the cup in front of her, picking up the paper napkin that lay beside it and shredding it. There was silence between us, then Suzanne’s hand came to the middle of the table. I placed mine on top. Andie’s and Vin’s hands came to the stack of intertwined fingers at nearly the same time.
“That’s funny,” said Andie, “when we used to do that, no one had wrinkly knuckles or brown spots on their hands. What the hell happened?” She rolled her eyes at Suzanne. “You, of course, still don’t have brown spots or wrinkly knuckles.”
Vin never finished her sentence. She didn’t have to, because we all wondered the same thing. Had these past two years of our lives—deaths, illnesses, and emotional traumas—been punishment for something that happened nearly forty years ago?
It was time to go to the lake.
Suzanne
I have to go somewhere. Although Andie’s guest room is comfortable and I’m glad I’ve been able to be of some help to her through these last horrendous weeks, that time has passed.
“Come and stay with me,” Trent invited the first time we woke up together in his big house in one of Indianapolis’s most affluent suburbs. “Let’s see if we can make it work.” He tugged at the sheet that covered my breasts and leered at me. “We know one faction of it does.”
It would have been so easy to do that. I was more than a little in love with this man who’d been my first husband—I had, as a matter of fact, felt less for him when I married him than I did now. Having—and losing—a child together creates a bond that mere hormones and an urge to play house do not.
Not that there was one little thing wrong with our hormones now. This is something I wish I’d known during all the years I spent trying to stay young. It would have been nice if someone had told me that sex at fifty-one was a hell of a lot more fun than it had been at twenty or even thirty.
“So?” said Jean when I mentioned this to her. “It was a nice surprise.” Then she got this satisfied expression on her face and I saw her looking at David’s butt as he walked across the yard. If it hadn’t been so cute, it would have been disgusting.
Watching her, I wondered how she’d done it. I remembered when she’d discovered David’s brief affair.
I’d started cleaning my guest room and Andie had laid in a supply of white zinfandel in preparation for the stormy separation that was bound to occur before she forgave him. Vin had been home at the time, and the three of us had gone to Jean’s house en masse to be supportive. She’d looked at us with hot, dry eyes, and said, “Let’s go to the lake.”
That’s what we’d done. We’d driven up there in the dark and gotten drunk and talked about everything in our lives except husbands either present or past. David had come to pick us up, and somewhere between the Tonsil Lake Tavern and his car, Jean had forgiven him.
I guessed that’s how they’d done it. They’d forgiven each other everything and never forgotten the love, and I was pretty sure they had great sex.
If I could have based my decision on sex and emotion alone, I’d be settled in Trent’s house instead of living out of a suitcase in Andie’s.
“You can always build a house on our property,” said Sarah. She blushed endearingly and a slow smile crossed Lo’s face. “You’re so good at taking care of little kids, it would be nice to have you here in a year or two when we decide to produce a couple of little cops or veterinarians.”
The idea of grandchildren turned me into an instant puddle, but I didn’t need to be a puddle right in their back yard.
“I’ll always be here,” I promised, “no matter where I am.”
That had been Jake’s farewell in his letters to us. I don’t think I’m particularly spiritual, but the words had made me feel better, just as Jean’s had the night Vin arrived, when we sat on Andie’s patio and looked at the stars. He’d told me to go back to being blonde, too, which had made me laugh.
“You should go to the lake, Suzy-Q.” Lo looked up from where he was detaching Elmer’s claws from his uniform pants. His gaze left me quickly, though, to settle on his wife. “The bed and breakfast is great, but the feel of the whole place is even better. Growing up hearing so much about it, we felt like we’d gone home. Maybe that’s what you need to do.”
Sarah nodded agreement, looking back at Lo with an expression that made me feel like an intruder. “It made the past few days more bearable,” she said, scooping up Elmer and handing him to me. “Jake’s letters said, ‘Home’s wherever you hang your heart.’ You need to find that place, Mom.”
I cuddled the cat. “I may go there for a weekend. It’s been a while.”
“Take your makeup,” my daughter said. “I know you want to find the person inside you. Me, I just want my mom.”
“Me, too. I want her mom, I mean.” Lo looked at his watch and bent his head to kiss Sarah. “I have to go to work.” He stopped beside me to kiss my cheek. “And lose the red hair.”
Vin
“The islanders aren’t going to know what to think of you, taking off twice in one year.” I lay on my side in the king-size bed in Lucas’s hotel room, facing him across the crust of the pizza we’d just shared. “They’ll be thinking that two years is up.”
“I’m not so sure it’s not.”
“Oh, pooh.” I pushed against his chest. “You’re as attached to your practice and the people of Hope Island as Mark was to his boardroom. You’d never leave there.”
He reached over, pushing aside the strand of hair that persisted in falling into my face; I hadn’t yet found a stylist to replace Mr. Jacques, who was actually Jack Richards from the Bronx. “I would,” Lucas said, “if my wife wanted to live here.”
I stared at him. “Wife?”
“Would you consider it?” He moved the pizza box aside and pulled me into his arms. “Would you lie here in the dark with me and think about making it a permanent thing? Not permanently in the Lewis Point Inn, probably, but in a house that was ours.”
“I don’t have to think about it.” I couldn’t believe the words had come out of my cautious mouth, but once they started, they didn’t stop. “I’d love to marry you.”
He reared up in bed, pulling me with him. “You would?”
“You bet, but I’m only marrying you if you continue that two-year obligation until you’re ready to end it.”
He shook his head. “Be careful what you say. I love being a doctor. I especially love being a doctor on Hope Island. It could go on for a really long time.”
“I’m counting on it.” I hooked my hands around his neck. �
��But you’re right about something, too. I want to be here part of the year. The Tonsil Lake girls and their families are important to me in a way that a week every summer no longer takes care of. I’d like it if you could be here with me, but if you can’t, will it bother you if I come back here a lot?”
“It probably will if I can’t come with you,” he said. “There’s another young doctor coming along in January who owes Hope Island two years. That should allow me to spend part of my year playing bad golf with David and Paul and talking shop with Trent.”
We leaned back on the headboard, my head finding its comfortable place on his shoulder.
“So, when do you want to do this thing?” asked Lucas. “We need time to do a pre-nup and get some other ducks in a row.” He slanted me an accusing look. “It would be easier if you weren’t rich.”
“Ah,” I said, “but some things will be easier because I am. Are you willing to move into my house on the island?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And are you willing to sell me your house to give to Archie?”
“No, ma’am. I figure we can give my house to Archie and she’ll be so appreciative she’ll keep on cooking for us.” He shuddered. “I love you for a thousand reasons, Lavinia, but your cooking ain’t one of them.”
I couldn’t argue that one. The cookbooks I took to the island this summer had been a success—with Jean, who was already a good cook, and with Archie, who was an inspired one.
“I’d like to get married in the spring,” I said. “That’ll give us plenty of time to do everything we need to beforehand.”
“Works for me.”
“And now I’d like for you to go home.”
“Alone?”
“Uh-huh. I’ll be there by Christmas.”
“Okay.” He nodded agreeably. “Any specific reason you don’t want to come with me now?”
“Just one.” I sat up straight to meet his eyes. “I have to go back to Tonsil Lake.”
Part Five
“How could they return to this place that had deferred their dreams, broken their hearts, and made sinners of them all?
