“When I had trouble sleeping sometimes as a kid, he used to tell me I shouldn’t be scared because angels were always watching us, taking care of us. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s what he does now, with me, from wherever he is. Is that crazy?”
“I don’t think it’s crazy.” Jake used his other hand to brush a strand of hair off her face. “I think it makes perfect sense.”
They kissed. She felt the wetness of tears as their faces rubbed together but didn’t understand why she was crying.
“When we find him, you can ask him yourself,” Jake said. It was all part of their plan for after her graduation—to find Rob. To build a life together, one that included her brother. Even then, as Jake rubbed her arm trying to reassure her, Alice had to close her eyes to stave off the panic. Unlike when she went looking for Rob in the canoe, with so many years between them, she feared what she might find, how she would feel, what she would say. She felt the prickle of anger, of blame even then, the rage that he would take off without even a sign for her.
She felt what would surely be Jake’s coming disappointment too. Jake seemed to have the solution at the ready, so sure he could fix her, by only locating Rob. But Alice knew her real self was beyond the repair even Rob could bring, and it was only a matter of time until Jake found out too.
* * *
Alice heard the honks of a bus and loud songs from open windows as the girls celebrated their arrival to the Center. She put the photo back, next to the letters that threatened to wreak the same havoc if she let them. She called Buddy, her chest still buzzing, a warning of coming trouble, like how she could feel from the heaviness of the air on her skin when it would storm. She shook it off. Together, Alice and Buddy exited to the front porch, where the girls were already filing out of the bus.
She walked down the steps yelling “Good morning!” as the last girls leapt off the bus steps and gathered with their parents on the lawn in front of the cabin.
“I can’t hear you. I said, ‘GOOD MORNING!’” They thundered back the greeting at her—still young enough to revel in this often-practiced routine.
“Welcome to the Georgia Creekside Center. My name is Alice, and I’ll be your guide today, and this is Buddy. Since we’ll be learning about Native Americans, you can also call us Flying Creek and Chief Barkerton.” Alice whispered “speak” to Buddy, and he let out several barks as a testament to his true name. The girls giggled.
After a quick orientation for the girls and their chaperones, they pulled canoes from the dock, furiously snapped life preservers, and chatted excitedly. Three girls and one adult climbed into each canoe with their paddles. Once everyone was on the water, Alice climbed into her own canoe with Buddy in the front. As she threw everything in her dry bag, her phone screen glowed 9:15 a.m. She had about an hour on the lake before she needed to meet Meredith for their weekly brunch, then she would read her mother’s letter and accept whatever it unleashed.
She paddled out to join the girls. “Today, I’m going to tell you the story of the Muscogee tribe. Because they settled around Georgia’s rivers and lakes, Southerners called them the Creek tribe…”
The girls smiled at the lake and the adventure and leaned in close to listen.
As she always had, Alice lost herself in the water. She let the gentle rippling of the lake eclipse the tumbling music in her head of Rob and Jake, the figure of the man’s body, memories of too many whispered secrets. As her paddle disturbed the water, these thoughts floated away and her mind calmed.
Chapter Nine
Meredith placed the first page of the autopsy report on the table in front of Alice. With a long intake of breath, she started on the second page. Alice watched her friend’s face turn from surprise to worry before she noticed Alice studying her.
They sat in one of the tattered red leather booths at the Grit, Athens’s famous vegetarian diner. Colorful paintings with papier-mâché fingers stuck out at 3-D angles decorated the light-green walls, where beneath, paint peeled randomly. The spot was less than a mile off the University of Georgia campus where they first met as assigned roommates. Now, when Meredith wasn’t in New York or on book tour, they met there every Tuesday at noon.
A college-aged waiter with tattooed arms brought their coffee.
“Be a dear and bring us something stronger than these. Do you need to see my ID?” Meredith said.
While Meredith moved on to the contract with the private investigator, Alice sipped the cup of coffee she’d promised herself she wouldn’t have. She was getting jittery. She bounced her foot as she looked away from Meredith’s facial expressions and focused on possible meanings of the painting on the wall opposite their table. It had two boobs with huge nipples sticking out, decorated with magazine covers showing women in swimsuits. Caitlin would have liked it.
“You found these in the closet?” Meredith said.
“I found the letters in the closet. Jamie had the big envelopes. I don’t know where he found them, but I think in my father’s office. There were papers everywhere.” Alice had already given her the Reader’s Digest version of the state of the house and her argument with Jamie.
Meredith flipped through the letters, looking at the fronts and backs, inspecting them closely from all sides as if she were Nancy Drew. The hipster waiter’s hovering broke her gaze.
She stacked the papers and letters to one side of the table and waved her hand at the waiter. “Well, go ahead, honey. We don’t have all day.”
He set down a cowboy omelet and a vegetable platter, along with two Bloody Marys.
Once the waiter left, Alice asked, “What do you think it means?”
“What do you think it means?” Meredith countered. One of her favorite tricks—returning a question with a question, something she had done countless times at author events, when people asked her why her characters acted like they did. It wouldn’t work today, though, because unlike the audience members, Alice had no theories, or rather had so many that none seemed worthy of being voiced aloud.
“I don’t know.”
“Only one way to find out. Open the rest.”
“Daddy’s was different since he can’t read it. They aren’t addressed to me.” Alice said it matter-of-factly, but her chest panged with the reminder. There wasn’t one for her. She bulldozed over the feeling. “And what if he didn’t want them sent?”
“What if he did?”
Alice didn’t ask the obvious next question—if he meant to send them, then why didn’t he? Because she knew Meredith would give her the response her brain had already filled in, that she didn’t want to say out loud: What if he had died before he could send them? And besides, neither theory would explain how they ended up in a box postmarked for her parents’ house anyway.
“At least Google the names, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t need to because I’m not opening them.” Even a Google search would release secrets she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “Besides, I’m pretty sure that would be mail fraud,” Alice said, trying to lighten the conversation a little.
“Did you really just use mail fraud as an excuse? I think you’ll be…” Meredith’s eyes stared at the top of Alice’s head, and she trailed off, no longer fully paying attention.
Alice turned behind her to see what her friend saw. Nothing there. She looked again at Meredith, whose eyes had narrowed. “What, do I have something…?” Alice patted the top of her head until she heard a crunch. A leaf.
Meredith ducked her head under the table and back up. “Nice shoes,” she said, referring to Alice’s muddy hiking boots. “You went to the Center this morning?”
Alice took a big drink of the Bloody Mary, nodding over the glass.
“So, you find letters written by your dead brother, his autopsy report, and proof that your mother and Jamie were tracking him down, and you go to the Center, even though you’re off for the first time in years?”
<
br /> “I went out on the lake with the cutest group of Girl Scouts. There was this one girl, she was shy, but you could tell she was really listening, you know? And of course, Buddy was a hit like usual.” She glanced out the window where a group of college girls was petting him as they walked to class. He tried to follow them but stopped when his leash went taut.
“Hmm.” Meredith picked up her fork and poked at her omelet.
Alice waited. Meredith said “hmm” again. Alice spread her napkin into her lap.
She couldn’t remember a time when Meredith had hmmed before saying something Alice actually wanted to hear. The hmm usually warned of trouble before the bomb hit. The hmm said “Do you want my opinion, or should I let it go?” The hmm said “I want you to be happy, but if acknowledging what I’m about to say is too painful, I can wait a year or ten because I’ll still be around.”
Meredith hmmed through the favors Alice did for professors and bosses. She hmmed through group projects that turned out to be anything but. She hmmed through Alice’s wedding; she often hmmed through dinner with Walker, when they actually invited him (and he actually decided to join them). More than anything, the hmm said what Alice already knew, deep in her subconscious where she only let dreams penetrate.
Finally, she gave in.
“Why are you hmming?”
“I’m hmming because you are fucking ignoring the situation.”
Alice scanned the restaurant, like she always did after Meredith cursed. She wanted to make sure she didn’t need to apologize to any young children or old ladies on her friend’s behalf. She relaxed a little, seeing that the patrons looked like college students still nursing hangovers from the night before.
“Ignoring. The. Situation.” Meredith punctuated each word with a movement of her fork.
“What situation am I ignoring?”
“The situation that your family kept this from you. For years. When I met you, you were still so upset about Rob leaving. Doesn’t this make you angry?”
Alice pictured Rob screaming into the clearing that day, telling her to scream what she was most angry about. Rob was wrong, though, she reminded herself. And that was Rob, the child. A Rob of the past. She didn’t know the real Rob, the adult Rob, and he hadn’t wanted to know her.
“They thought they were doing the right thing. And my mother left the boxes for me! I went to the Center because I just needed a break after Jamie and the house, my mother, all of this”—she gestured to the papers still laid between them—“Walker. To deal with something…logical. For a few hours. Before I go visit my mother with her letter.”
“Walker? Is there something going on with him…other than the usual?”
Oops. Alice stopped.
She wasn’t ready to tell her friend about Walker’s cheating. She knew Meredith—always a woman of action—would expect a decision to be made. And saying it out loud, seeing the look on her friend’s face, would make it worse.
“No.” Alice spooned a heaping portion of black beans into her mouth and chewed. She changed the subject. “When I was in my room, I found an old picture of us and one of Jake.”
Alice took out the pictures and showed them to Meredith. Meredith smiled at them both. “Good times.”
“Wonder what he’s up to now.” Alice moved the food around on her plate, trying to decide how much more to eat.
“Probably only a Facebook search away. Want to try it?” Meredith twirled her iPhone between her fingers.
Alice had used Facebook when it first came out, friending some high school and college classmates with whom she had fallen out of touch. But since the newness wore off, she had let her page languish, preferring to let Grace and the interns handle the Center’s website and social media. She knew Meredith was somewhat of a Facebook celebrity though.
“Umm… Let’s not. With everything going on with my mother and Caitlin applying to colleges and the house, it’s not a good time.”
Meredith shrugged with exaggerated nonchalance and clicked the phone off. They ate in silence for a couple of minutes, both drinking their Bloody Marys and spreading jam on toast. Even though Alice hadn’t told her friend about the texts, she could feel it between them as they ate, as if Meredith either knew or sensed a difference in her attitude with Walker, could feel the tiptoeing. But as always, Meredith was patiently determined, letting it sit between them until Alice was ready. Her friend was satisfied to fight a war of attrition, to wait, listen, and understand. Alice liked to think that quality was one of the reasons Meredith had accomplished everything she’d talked about on those nights they lay awake discussing dreams in the dark across their lofted beds.
Meredith continued her well-paying day job at a large consulting firm for years out of college, but at night began writing novels, her real dream. Her third book skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller list and made her sexy books a feature on every housewife’s bedside table. Meredith quit her job and traveled around the country to shake hands with women who left their husbands, bought a vibrator, had a threesome, or whatever other activity they’d never imagined themselves doing before they started reading her books. The New York Times had recently called her “the voice behind a collective sexual awakening.”
Now, Meredith split her time between an apartment in New York overlooking Central Park and her house outside of Athens in Oconee County, where she lived on the lake. She restored the property over the years, turning the barn into a hanger for her two vintage planes. She shared it with her current live-in boyfriend, Christian, who was twelve years her junior.
“I thought I was done with this, with Rob.”
Meredith watched her.
“When I started dating Walker, I didn’t want to think about Rob anymore. And even after he died, I gave myself a few days to remember him, but that was it, and I stuck to it. But, Rob and I… I loved him. So much.”
“Then why not remember him? Why not think about all the good memories you have with him?” Meredith asked.
Alice locked eyes with Meredith.
“You know why. You were there before. With Jake.” Unlike their laughter over the pictures she found, this time, Alice struggled over the name.
Meredith pushed her plate forward two inches to signal she was done eating, as if the statement had soured her appetite. “Yes, I was there.”
Alice did the same.
“Mere, that and after Rob left were the worst times of my life. But I just want to know what happened to him. More than anything.”
Robbie, she thought. The only thing she had ever wanted more. The little boy who took so many years to stick.
Meredith caught the waiter’s eye and gestured toward Alice’s empty coffee. He came over to fill it, and they both watched in silence as he poured it and walked away. Alice took a sip.
“What if I read these letters, and I don’t find out anything? What if they’re all like my father’s, nothing but some poetic wild-goose chase? Or worse, if I find out something terrible… If I find out it was my fault, if I could have done something, if he expected me to come. What if I find out he’s not the person I thought he was?” She choked on the last words.
“Oh, honey.” Meredith reached out and put her hand on Alice’s.
“I can’t do that again. I can’t go to that bad place like I was in college. I have Caitlin and Robbie now.” Alice slumped into the side of the booth by the wall where she could hide her face.
“I’m here. You won’t. You’re strong. Stronger than you know. Stronger than you were then.” Meredith paused. “I have a sense you’ll find what you are looking for,” she said, smiling at Alice. Alice laughed, wiping the last tear from her cheek.
It was a joke with them: the “senses” Meredith felt that Alice never really believed in. Meredith sensed Caitlin would be a girl when Alice was pregnant the first time—this she held as all the necessary proof of her skill. G
ranted, it had been a fifty-fifty shot.
“I hope you’re right.”
They finished their Bloody Marys and paid the bill. Meredith drew a heart on the receipt and wrote “Stay hot!” Alice shook her head when she saw it. She knew Meredith only did it to cheer her up.
As she put everything back in her bag, she left out her mother’s letter. She carried the letter with her as she untied Buddy and they got in the car. She fingered the seal as she drove home and dropped him off, then knocked the envelope’s sharp edge against her thigh as she drove to her mother’s “apartment.” She would find out what it held. Today.
Chapter Ten
St. Margaret’s Care Facility pretended not to be the type of place where you dropped off your memory-challenged mother. With the bright windows shaded by navy awnings and the flower boxes with the dusty millers spilling out, it seemed like somewhere you might vacation for a long weekend in the fall, or at least that’s what the guilty children told themselves as they drove away from their ailing parents.
Alice practiced what she would say to her mother as she signed in. She would read the letter to her, if it was a good day. Hopefully, it would be.
Inside, cushioned benches and iron sconces lined the hallways. St. Margaret’s didn’t look like a hospital, but its scent mixed stale urine, the heavy musk of clothes that have been in storage, and the sharp, clinical smell of a doctor’s office. Alice hated it.
Entering her mother’s room reminded Alice of a game she used to play in the summers with the neighborhood kids. A “king” stood next to the pool with his or her back to the water while the other kids floated on one side of pool. The object was to swim to the other side without being tagged by the king, who could turn around three times and jump in the pool to tag a prisoner. Once someone reached the other side without being tagged, they could sneak up to the king and push them in the water to dethrone them. She preferred to watch Rob pumping his fists from the sidelines, feeling the pride of his victory as if it were her own; he lived for his time as king. Unlike him, when it was her turn to be king, every muscle in her body tensed as she waited for the coming attack or flipped around, ready to dive into the water and race to tag her peers.
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