Heartbroken

by Lisa Unger

  He pressed something into her hand. “I don’t know what I can do for you, Emily. But if you need some advice, give me a call.”

  She felt the vehicle buck as he exited. Someone outside said, “They’re going to impound your vehicle for evidence, Jones. You’ll have to ride back with me.”

  The card in her hand was plain white with black type: Jones Cooper, Private Investigations. There was a number and an e-mail. She tucked it into her shirt. She didn’t know what anyone could do for her. But it gave her some comfort, however small.

  Birdie heard the creaking of the dock and saw John Cross making his way down to her. She’d thought he was on the mainland, for some reason. He came to stand beside the boat and looked out across the water. The fire was contained, though the main house and many of the surrounding trees had been destroyed.

  “What a nightmare.” His voice was an awed whisper. “I’m so sorry, Birdie. What can I do?”

  You can shut up. That’s what she wanted to say. She didn’t want his pity while he stood on the safety of his own island, his home and life perfectly intact. Of course, she couldn’t say that. He’d pulled her daughter, her granddaughter, and the little trollop from the water. Not that they wouldn’t have made it on their own. But she supposed she should offer some gratitude.

  “I’m not sure there’s anything we can do right now. But thank you. Thank you for helping my family.” She thought it sounded sincere enough.

  “ ‘My barn having burned to the ground,’ ” he said, “ ‘I can now see the moon.’ ”

  Perfect. That’s just what she needed. Haiku.

  On a whim, she reached down and picked up the photo album. She opened it and removed the photograph. She handed it to John Cross; she couldn’t say why. It was such a personal item, meaning so much to her. And she wasn’t one to share. He stared at it a moment, then looked at Birdie. There was some kind of strange light in his eyes.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “That’s my mother.”

  “With Richard Cameron?”

  “Apparently.”

  John looked at the photograph for a long moment, then turned his eyes back to Birdie. “Why don’t you come up to my house?” he asked.

  The truth was that she was cold and so tired. There was nothing left to see, so she took the hand he offered and followed him up the path to his beautiful home. She sat on his couch while he made her some tea and then came to join her.

  “I haven’t been totally honest with you,” he said.

  “Oh?” She couldn’t care less what he had to say. The sky out the window was so clear that it was impossible to imagine it had been raining at all earlier in the evening. It seemed that a glow emanated from the island, a kind of radiant heat. She would rebuild that house. She’d rebuild it her way.

  “I’m Richard Cameron’s great-nephew,” he said. “He was my mother’s uncle.”

  He delivered the information grimly, as though it should mean something to her. It didn’t. No matter what he was to her mother, Richard Cameron was only a ghost to Birdie. She’d just recently learned his name. She looked over at John more closely. He bore no resemblance whatsoever to the man in the photographs, blond where Cameron was dark, big where Cameron was slim.

  “The mystery of his death has been something of an obsession of mine,” he said. “There were always rumors of an affair. But I’ve never heard a first-person account.”

  “Who told you there were rumors?”

  “Roger Murphy,” said John. “He used to work at the marina when he was young.”

  Birdie remembered, of course. He’d been so gorgeous; Caroline and she had always dissolved into giggles when he helped load the boat or pump the fuel. He was earthy and innocent. But that boy, those girls, were so long gone, it was as if they never existed.

  Birdie found herself telling John Cross what she had seen that night so long ago. It was something she had always held on to, never shared with anyone, like some kind of secret shame. Tonight it seemed she couldn’t stop from telling the story. It felt good to know that she was right after all. Even if it meant the destruction of everything she had believed about her parents.

  “He wasn’t a nice man,” John said after Birdie had finished. “He battled clinical depression. He and his sister weren’t close. In fact, she hated him.”

  “I understand that he was troubled.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?” He asked the question sheepishly, as if it embarrassed him to want to know.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know. My mother never confided this to me, obviously. I only recently learned of the affair, the truth of what I’d seen. I always thought it was a dream.”

  She wouldn’t tell him. She wouldn’t give it to him. It belonged to Kate now; it was her story to tell, passed down from Mother, to Caroline, and then to Kate. Even Birdie, as angry as she’d been, could see that Kate should be the one to tell it. She would do them all justice with her writer’s heart.

  “There’s another rumor,” said John. He wore a small smile. “That Kate has written a book. A thinly veiled fictional account of her grandmother’s affair with a famous writer.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I hear it’s quite good.”

  “Of course it is,” said Birdie. “She’s Katherine Elizabeth Burke. Anything she chooses to do, she does well.”

  John offered a gracious nod, a lift of his teacup. But there was something dark in his expression. Birdie assumed it was jealousy. He was probably a failed writer, bitter and thinking everyone published was less talented than he. “You must be very proud.”

  Birdie was used to the pinched expression and tone of envy. It didn’t bother her in the least. “I suppose I am.”

  chapter thirty-eight

  The marina was a chaos of police vehicles, ambulances, and fire trucks. As her mother docked the boat in its slip, a news van was pulling down the rocky drive, gravel crunching loudly beneath the tires. She could hardly begin to process all the things that had happened, everything she’d learned. How could nothing be as you imagined it? It seemed to Chelsea that below the surface was another universe. Everyone wore one face, told one story of themselves, and then underneath was a whole other life, a rushing current of secret pains and buried shames, ugly truths. Was it so hard to just be what you were?

  Chelsea stayed in her seat at the bow of the boat, even after her mother killed the engine and started tying off the lines. Once she set foot on land, Chelsea felt as if she were going to be swept away into chaos.

  “Are you all right?” Kate asked. She came to sit beside Chelsea and wrap her in a tight embrace.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fair enough,” her mother replied. Only her mother told the truth, the whole truth of herself. There was nothing hidden in Kate; she wore it all out in the open. Chelsea could see that, and how much it hurt sometimes to be that way.

  “Are you all right?” asked Chelsea.

  “I am,” Kate said. “I really am.”

  “How?”

  “Because everyone I love is safe,” she said. “And I really don’t care about anything else.”

  “Not the house or the island?”

  “The island was there before me, and it will be there after I’m gone. The house—well—we’ll build a new one.”

  Kate then spoke about how new things couldn’t grow until old things were destroyed. Even though Chelsea could understand how that might be so, it didn’t offer any comfort. She remembered how her mother had bought her a snow globe of the city, a pretty skyline inside a big ball filled with glittering flakes. She’d loved it. But one day, while dusting, her mother had knocked it from the shelf, and it shattered on the desk. The shards went everywhere, the tiny sparkles flying onto the walls, the bed, and the pile of the carpet. Even though Chelsea had been too old to cry over such things, she had.

  “I’m so sorry, sweetie,” her mother had said. “I’ll get you a new one.”

 
“I don’t want a new one,” she said. “I want the one we picked out together.”

  She wanted the one that her mother had carried to the register and paid for, the one that had sat on her shelf for years, the one that she had picked up a thousand times and watched as the swirling pieces of silver rushed around the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the little taxicabs. She wanted the one that was part of her room and all her memories of that room. She couldn’t see how that thing could be replaced or how a replacement would do anything but remind her of the thing she had lost.

  After her mother grew tired of her sulking about the snow globe, Kate had said, “It’s just a thing. And things don’t mean much, Chelsea. Only people matter.”

  Although she realized that was true, it didn’t feel true. Even now sometimes she thought of that snow globe and how pretty it was and how much she had loved it. The finality of its being gone had never ceased to amaze and frustrate her. It’s silly to attach to objects, honey. We have to let go of everything eventually. Why? Another of those questions that no one seemed able to answer.

  On the air, she could smell smoke, the smell of the house burning. That was another thing that had been lost and would not be replaced. Everything on the island would be defined as before and after the fire. There was something eternal about loss, something endless. You could always lose the things you had, but you couldn’t always get back the things you lost.

  She found she couldn’t say any of this to her mother, that she hardly had the words for all of it. It was just a mute and helpless feeling that she carried with her as they walked up the dock to find Lulu. When Chelsea saw her friend sitting small and alone in the back of an ambulance, she ran to her. They clung to each other. “I’m so sorry,” Lulu kept saying.

  Chelsea didn’t know what Lulu was sorry about—all the awful things that had happened on the island, the fire, the lie she had told, the fight they’d had. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Chelsea realized that her mother was right after all.

  “Chelsea?” said Lulu.

  “Yeah,” said Chelsea.

  “This was the worst vacation I ever had.”

  Somewhere deep inside, Chelsea wanted to laugh. But she couldn’t; instead, she started to cry. Lulu did, too. Chelsea wondered how long it would be before she’d stop seeing that man coming after them, pushing through the door like some kind of horror-movie freak. Or when she would stop hearing Lulu scream as she beat at him with a shovel and he kept on coming. Or when she would stop feeling the pain that rocketed up her arms when she hit him in the face with that fire poker, and the sickening sound of iron on bone that followed the impact.

  “We really kicked that guy’s ass,” said Lulu, still crying. “I had no idea you were such a killer.”

  “It runs in the family,” said Chelsea. “On my mother’s side.”

  Then they did laugh, in a way that was more like weeping, ragged and unhinged. But it felt good.

  As Kate watched the girls embrace, she felt the first tide of real sadness, and a deep shudder moved through her body. She started shaking as if from a chill at her core. Then she saw Sean pull up and get out of the car. He looked frantically around the scene. Their eyes met, and he moved quickly toward her, past a police officer who tried to stop him. She watched him pulling away, pointing toward her, and finally, the officer let him pass.

  “What happened? Where’s Chelsea?” Sean said. He held her by the shoulders, then pulled her close.

  “She’s there,” said Kate, pointing. “We’re fine. Where’s Brendan?”

  “He’s with my mother. What happened? Do I smell smoke?”

  “I don’t know where to begin,” she said.

  “Why don’t you begin with me?” There was the young female FBI agent whom Kate had seen on the island. She introduced herself as Agent Eliza Griffin. “Are you up to answering a few questions about what happened out there?”

  “Of course,” said Kate.

  “Come with me where it’s warm,” said the agent. She looked like a girl, maybe in her twenties. Somehow that happened. First you were the kid, no one taking you seriously. And then, all of a sudden, people much younger were in positions of authority, and you were supposed to listen to them. It was truly weird.

  “I need to stay near my daughter,” Kate said. It was impossibly cold. She felt like she would never be warm again.

  “Do you need medical attention?” asked the agent.

  Kate was about to refuse, but she did need medical attention—a blow to the head that had caused her to lose consciousness, a frantic swim through frigid cold water. She felt herself leaning against Sean.

  “You’re shaking,” he said.

  “I just want to tell it, what happened,” she said. They moved to the back of an ambulance, and a paramedic wrapped her in a blanket. Sean was with her as she started to tell the story of what had happened that night. It was a rundown of events: the storm, the intruders, the stranded boat, watching one man kill another, running to Chelsea, getting knocked to the ground, getting the girls to safety. The federal agent asked questions that Kate answered to the best of her ability. But it was merely the surface, the events as they unfolded in chronological order. The meaning of everything was a current that flowed beneath it all. So much had happened here, not all of it tonight, that wouldn’t mean anything to a young FBI agent looking to make a big arrest.

  “Who were they to you?” asked Agent Griffin. “Why did they come to this place?”

  Kate hesitated; it was private, wasn’t it? Her mother had told her on the boat briefly that for some reason, the girl thought she was Joe’s daughter. There was more to the story, she knew. She had some vague memory from her childhood. It lingered on the edge of her consciousness, though she couldn’t access it. It was something Birdie would never want anyone to know. But the police had to know the truth. “The girl believed that my father, Joe Burke, was her biological father. I’m not clear on why. I think you’ll have to ask my mother.”

  The news didn’t seem to shock or surprise Agent Griffin; she wrote the information down in her book. Sean, on the other hand, was slack-jawed with shock. He looked like a caricature of surprise.

  “So why would she come here?” asked Agent Griffin. “Did she think he was here?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently, the men she was with thought there was a safe.”

  Really, hadn’t that girl come looking for the same thing everyone came here looking for, some feeling of family, a place where she belonged and was happy?

  “Did you know Emily Burke?” asked Agent Griffin. “Did you ever have any contact with her before today?”

  The girl had introduced herself as Anne, but Birdie had called her Emily. Kate hadn’t realized they shared a last name, and something about that unsettled her. “No,” she said. “Never.”

  The agent chewed on her pen, regarded Kate carefully. “Emily claims your mother pulled her from the burning house.”

  “If she did that,” said Kate, “she had her reasons.”

  Kate suspected that it didn’t have anything to do with altruism or compassion. Birdie probably wanted the girl to live to pay for her crimes. That would be just like Birdie, to risk her own safety to satisfy some rigid idea she had about justice. To her, death would be a way out.

  “So you don’t think they had a relationship?”

  “My mother doesn’t really have a relationship with anyone,” Kate said. Then she started to laugh. She doubled over with it as the agent regarded her with a confused smile.

  “Oh, boy,” said Sean. Kate felt his hand on her back. She’d lost it like this a couple of times over the years. Once the floodgates opened, they were hard to close. “Kate, it’s okay.”

  The laughing quickly turned to sobbing as all the pent-up terror, anger, and grief of the evening rushed up from within her.

  “Kate,” said Sean. She buried her face in his chest as the great sobs shook her. “It’s all right. It’s all go
ing to be fine.”

  Even in the middle of the chaos, with the flashing lights of emergency vehicles and the smell of smoke thick in the air, even as she felt herself losing all of that in a field of white stars that had appeared before her eyes, she knew it was true.

  chapter thirty-nine

  After Birdie saw us, I knew things had to change. Jack and I had a terrible fight that night. We kept up appearances during the day, for the sake of the children, but while they slept, we walked to Lookout Rock. It was no less bitter for the fact that we had to keep our voices to whispers. He delivered an ultimatum for me to give up Richard or give up our family. During the summers, Jack would come and go from the island for work. Richard and I had our evenings after the children went to sleep. He’d wait for me near the trees on the north shore. There was no choice to be made, really. I told Richard the next night that we were through, and he seemed to accept my decision.

  The letters he sent all through the following autumn were so desperate; I had to go to him. I told Jack that I needed to visit my sister because she was ill and none of us was sure how much time she had. That was true without being the whole truth. I spent a day and a night with my family, and on the way back to the city, I stopped at the marina and took the boat to Richard’s island. It was cold, too cold by then to be up there. I didn’t like it; it felt wrong to be there when the water was gray and the air was biting. Even as I headed out, there were flurries, a light coating of snow on the dock. It filled me with sadness. Heart Island was a summer dream. In my mind, it was never winter there.

  We passed a day in the house. It was too cold otherwise—I couldn’t stay in his tent, huddled by the fire. I’ve always hated the cold. I urged him to come back with me. I didn’t want to leave him there, depressed and alone, slipping into that dark place he always tended toward. That was the problem with Richard, he always chose that sinking blackness over life. It was why I chose to be with Jack. Poor Jack. He deserved so much better than me. He was such a good man, and I was a terrible wife.