The Stone Necklace

by Carla Damron

  Sean positioned the cat like an infant and cooed into her face. “We should get you a kitten. A little yellow tabby. Adam says they make the nicest cats.”

  “Me? Seriously?” She played d-a-m-n-e-d for eighteen points. “Like I need something else to take care of?”

  He ignored her. “We could name her Evita. Miss Saigon would love to have a little sister, wouldn’t you, Doll?”

  “No. And by that I mean, NO. We do not need another cat.”

  Sean twisted his lips into an exaggerated pout as he played w-a-r-m-s, the S, on a double word space, also attached to z-a-p. Another forty-eight points. The guy was a freakin’ Scrabble wizard; you’d think it would take him less than fifteen years to finish college. “I want you to have company. Don’t want you to ever be all by your lonesome.”

  Sometimes being all by her lonesome sounded like heaven to Sandy, like on days when Sean came in from work at one A.M. and felt the need to listen to Kiss CDs before going to bed. “I like the freedom of not being tied down. Animals have to be fed and walked and tended to. I do enough of that at work.”

  “Animals make a home a home,” Sean retorted.

  She pointed at Miss Saigon who, paws in the air, nose pressed into Sean’s t-shirt, snored. “You mean, animals make themselves at home.” She couldn’t imagine another creature living in their house. Sean’s cat produced enough hair to stuff a mattress, and Sandy was the one who did the vacuuming. Besides, she wasn’t sure she’d even stay in Columbia. Once her probation was over and her nursing license fully reinstated, she might choose to start over in Atlanta, or Charleston, or even Canada.

  A bell preceded the front door opening and Adam’s head popping in. “I brought pizza. May I enter?”

  “Come on in.” Sandy realized she was hungry, but then she thought how great pizza went with beer, and wasn’t sure how well ginger ale would measure up. Maybe she should excuse herself, take a drive or something, so the guys could share a couple of Coronas with their meal.

  “Ohhhhh, Scrabble. Can I play?” Adam asked.

  “You can take my seat. Sean’s killing me,” she answered.

  Sean held up a hand. “Nope. You see this through to the end, dear cousin. We’ll give Adam the mean of our scores and he can draw his letters.”

  “After we eat,” Adam said. “It’s white pizza with sundried tomatoes and asparagus.”

  “That sounds sort of horrible,” Sandy said.

  “Stretch a little. It’s much better than pepperoni. I also brought us this.” He opened a bag and pulled out a six pack. “Un-beer. I hope that’s okay.”

  Sandy reached for one of the alcohol-free lagers and studied the label. “Hell yeah, it’s okay. Let’s eat.”

  The beer tasted slightly different than her favorite. It would take a few minutes for her body to miss the alcohol buzz. The pizza went down easier if she imagined it some new haute cuisine rather than her favorite comfort food. Adam’s presence always enlivened a room. She laughed at his jokes and tried to imagine herself living somewhere else.

  The traffic in Atlanta would drive her to madness. Charleston had its charm, and its endless stretches of beach, but summer there was like a hot rag draped over your face, and Sandy no longer had the physique for strapless sundresses. Could she return to Charlotte? She still had friends there—maybe—and the city was large enough that she wouldn’t have to run into Donald. No, Charlotte would be a step backwards.

  Sean was telling Adam his “new kitten for Sandy” idea, and Adam was ready to pile them all in his car to visit shelters.

  “No,” she said, popping a grilled asparagus in her mouth.

  Maybe somewhere north: Virginia or DC or even New England, which she and Donald had visited that luscious green summer when she’d been pregnant. They had gone to every lighthouse they could find and stayed at quaint inns in villages like Boothbay Harbor, Pemaquid, and Castine. Later, they’d picked wild blueberries and cruised along Casco Bay, with Donald taking enough pictures to fill an album.

  “What about an aquarium?” Adam asked. “Beautiful betta fish. All those fluttery fins. Like water rainbows.”

  “Aren’t they killers?” she said. “Don’t they, like, slaughter each other? Do I need that kind of drama?”

  Adam laughed and opened another non-beer.

  Sandy slid her plate away, her mind full of New England breezes. A niggle of sadness tugged at her, but there was also joy there, too, a small bright flash of it, at the glimpse of Donald’s smile, at the feel of his hand on her swollen belly. Sandy realized with amazement that it was the first time she felt something other than sorrow at remembering that time. She could remember Donald without zeroing in on his betrayal. How had it happened?

  “A kitten then,” Sean said definitively. “I’ll bring one home and you’ll fall in love and that will be that.”

  Sandy’s cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number. “I already have a two-legged pet,” she muttered to Sean, carrying the phone into the kitchen.

  “Hello?”

  “Sandy? This is Becca. Do you remember me?”

  “Of course I do,” Sandy answered, stunned that the kid had actually called her. “How are you doing?”

  “Okay.”

  “Hmmm. You sound like maybe you don’t feel okay.”

  “I shouldn’t be bothering you,” Becca said, like she planned to hang up.

  “No, it’s fine. I’m glad you did,” Sandy said.

  “I had a session with Dr. Owens. I’m waiting for Mom to pick me up.”

  “That’s good. Dr. Owens knows what she’s doing.”

  “I guess.” Becca’s voice was hesitant.

  “Was it a hard session?” Sandy asked.

  “They’re all a little hard.”

  “I suppose they are.” Sandy’s therapy in rehab had been that way. She dreaded every entrance into Dr. Flanders’s office and sometimes when she left, she’d want to crawl into bed from sheer emotional exhaustion.

  “I met this girl in the waiting room. She was weird,” Becca said.

  “Weird how?”

  “Skinny. But that wasn’t all. She had strange hair growing all over her arms and neck and face. I asked Dr. Owens about it but she said she couldn’t discuss other patients.”

  “What color was the hair?” Sandy asked.

  “That was what was weird. It was white. The hair on her head and eyebrows was brown.”

  “I’ll bet that did look strange.” Sandy had seen it once before on an anorexic girl in intensive care. She had looked like a mythical creature: a fairy or nymph, except for the machines beeping around her.

  “I thought maybe you would know what was wrong with her, since you’re a nurse.”

  “It’s called lanugo.”

  “Lanugo,” Becca repeated slowly.

  “When people with eating disorders lose all of their body fat, they sometimes grow this layer of soft fur. Our bodies are wired to do that for warmth. Premature babies are often born with lanugo.”

  “She looked like she was part albino ape.”

  They were tube-feeding the girl Sandy had worked on. When she regained enough strength, she tried to tear the sustenance from her body, fighting so hard to die. While they’d gotten her stabilized so she could move down to psych, Sandy didn’t have much hope for her long-term survival. The disease had her in its grip and wasn’t letting go.

  “Did the girl seem self-conscious?” Sandy asked.

  “Not at all. She was proud of herself.”

  Sandy wasn’t sure how to proceed here. She wasn’t Becca’s nurse or counselor. She shouldn’t have given the kid her phone number but she had.

  “She said she weighed ninety-two pounds but that she’d been down to seventy-three,” Becca said. “She acted like they should give her a trophy or something.”

  Trophy was an interesting choice of words. Did Becca now understand the self-deception? How the drive to lose more, more, more, could become a fatal competition? That the trophy wa
s sometimes death?

  “She talked about puking and stuff,” Becca continued. “Like it was something to be proud of.” She grew silent. Sandy heard swallowing, then Becca spoke again, quieter now. “I know how that girl was thinking. You do feel proud when you’ve contained your calories. And especially when you get on the scale and a few pounds are gone. You work so hard and it feels good.”

  “After a while it doesn’t feel good, does it?” Sandy prayed she was saying the right things. She had no real business offering advice to this kid, not with her so screwed up herself. She should tell Becca to talk about this with Dr. Owens and end this call.

  “Sometimes you get so hungry. You don’t mean to. And then you’ve made a big mistake. You’ve eaten and eaten and you feel fat and bloated and all you want is to be empty.”

  Sandy understood this. Twice before rehab, she’d tried to quit using, but had failed both attempts. The slip from the wagon felt good at first, the drugs taking hold, warm pharmaceutical light filling her up. Until the drugs wore off and blackness descended.

  “But then empty feels worst of all.” Sandy hoped this was the right path. “Doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t—” Becca’s voice was so soft, Sandy could scarcely hear it. “I don’t want to be her.”

  “You don’t want to be like the girl you met,” Sandy echoed.

  “She scares me.”

  Scared was good. Scared might give Becca the drive she’d need to recover from the monster. “You’re not her, Becca. You’re not her.” Sandy wanted to keep saying it, let it be a mantra for the troubled kid.

  “I keep thinking about how my dad used to drive me to school,” Becca said, changing the subject. “I’d read the crossword puzzle out loud. He knew most of the answers.”

  “Your dad was a smart guy.”

  “We haven’t done that in a long time. I stopped asking him to drive me to school after Kayla got her license. But what if I’d asked him to take me that morning? Maybe I could have stopped the wreck. Or done CPR sooner. I could have kept him from . . .” her voice trailed off.

  “I don’t think you could have, even if you’d been in the car with him. His heart—there was a lot of damage.”

  Becca didn’t say anything.

  “You were a good daughter. But you could not have saved him.” She used her firm, no-nonsense tone.

  More silence. In the living room, Sean and Adam had the classifieds spread out, undoubtedly looking for a pet for her. Sean looked up and smirked.

  “Becca?”

  “Okay. Bye, Sandy.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Lena sat across from her unexpected visitors. Sims sometimes came over like this, but Bill Tanner, sans clerical collar, showing up right behind him had been a surprise. “Wasn’t sure I’d find you at home,” he said. People didn’t just stop by like that anymore. They did when she was a child, especially on a lazy weekend afternoon. A friend of her mother’s would knock on the door and say, “Brought y’all some zucchini,” then stay for a few hours for sweet tea and gossip. Her mother always kept the house neat as a pin, just in case, and Lena had followed that tradition.

  “I asked him to come,” Sims said, which alarmed her. Had something else happened? “Sims?” she asked.

  He placed a folder on the kitchen table, not meeting her eye.

  “Somebody better tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  Bill held up a stack of envelopes. “I’ve received a ton of memorials in Mitch’s name. I wanted to talk to you and Sims about how to use the money.”

  “Oh.” She exhaled. Mitch had so many friends and colleagues. How should they spend the donations?

  “There’s the church organ fund,” Bill said. “And we have the homeless outreach program. There’s enough money here to sponsor that for a year.”

  “What do you think, Sims?” she asked.

  Sims seemed lost in thought. He fidgeted with the glass salt shaker, spinning it so that it rumbled annoyingly against the table. She almost yanked it from him. “That’s not the only reason you’re here,” she said.

  He twirled the shaker again and let it go. It toppled over, dusting the table with salt.

  “What is it? Just tell me,” she said, as though needing a band-aid tugged off.

  “I’ve been going over Dad’s finances. Things aren’t as—solid—as I’d hoped.”

  “We knew that.”

  “When his business fell off, Dad had to make some changes.”

  “What kind of changes?”

  “For starters, he took out a second mortgage on the house. Damn place was almost paid for. Now we owe over three hundred thousand.”

  “Three hundred thousand.” Speaking the words made them no more real. “He didn’t . . . he never told me.”

  “Didn’t tell me either.” Sims’s voice was edged with anger.

  “What about our bank accounts?”

  “You have enough in checking to cover bills for two months.”

  “And savings?”

  “About six thousand.”

  Six thousand was nothing. Six thousand would barely get them through Christmas. Lena turned to look out the window as the news took root. Mitch’s garden. The expanse of lawn, now a dusty brown. This had been her home for thirty years but she would lose it. She was losing everything.

  She saw Sims looking at Bill, who said, “Tell her the rest. She needs to know.”

  “What?” she demanded.

  “It’s about Dad’s accident. The other vehicle—a mother and kid were injured.”

  Of course she knew that. She remembered the relief she felt when she’d heard they would be okay. “The paramedics said they weren’t badly injured.”

  “Right. But you know how it is. Whiplash and the like. People claim pain and suffering, go to one of those shyster TV lawyers.”

  Bill leaned back, crossing his arms, but didn’t speak.

  “They won’t settle with our insurance company,” Sims said. “They smell money to be made. They could go after Dad’s personal assets.”

  “Personal assets?” It was preposterous. What did they have to go after?

  “We may need our own lawyer to fight this thing. But the bottom line is Dad caused the crash. He was the one ticketed.” He gripped the shaker again, knuckles paling.

  “But we don’t have anything. How can we pay—” She pressed her hands against the table, needing to be grounded by the solid wood.

  “We’ll have to settle. Maybe throw some money at them to see if they’ll go away.”

  Hadn’t he heard her? “Money from where? The life insurance? That’s Becca’s college money.” And what she counted on to cover the mortgage and bills until she found a job.

  “Yeah, about that.” Sims shot an awkward glance at Bill.

  “There is life insurance, isn’t there?” she asked, dread mounting. “He didn’t—”

  “It’s there, but Dad renegotiated his policy around the same time he refinanced the house.”

  “How much?”

  “He’s got twenty-five thousand on his policy.”

  How could Mitch have done this to her? To them?

  “Mom,” Sims said. “It’ll be okay.”

  “How will it be okay? How can you say that? Nothing is okay.” Where would she and Becca go? An apartment? A trailer? Fear spread its icy fingers through her gut. She stood, her hands still on the table, and glared at the two men.

  “So now I know,” she said. “I have a lot to think about. You can show yourselves out.” She left the room. Upstairs, she splashed cold water on her face and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Was this her penance? Maybe she deserved it, but Becca didn’t. Mitch should have told her how bad things were. They would have reduced expenses. She would have gotten a job. Maybe they would have moved somewhere smaller.

  It felt like walking on a tightrope against a fierce wind; it was impossible to find balance. It wasn’t just her—she had Becca to worry about, too. How could she make things right? />
  When she returned downstairs she found Bill Tanner alone at the table. He offered an apologetic smile. “Just wanted to make sure you’re alright.”

  “I’m a long way from alright.” She reached for the coffee she’d poured earlier. It had chilled, but she didn’t care.

  “I know this feels like too much,” Bill said. “But God—”

  “Don’t go there, Bill. I am not in the mood for one of those ‘God doesn’t give us more than we can handle’ talks. I don’t believe it, and quite frankly, I’ll throttle you if you start.”

  He flinched, running a hand over the stack of memorials. Brown spots peppered his skin.

  “My husband worked hard his whole life. He was a good man. And now—he’s gone. Snatched up? Why? What the hell is the point?” Anger unwound itself inside her, frightening but strangely energizing.

  She clutched her coffee cup, a piece of emerald green pottery she and Mitch had bought during a weekend trip to North Carolina. He had chosen a blue one, but broke the handle by overstuffing the dishwasher. He had always done that, cramming pots around plates, bowls around cups, even when the dishes didn’t get as clean that way. They had bought a larger dishwasher when they did the kitchen renovation she now knew they couldn’t afford.

  Bill started to speak but didn’t. His eyes wouldn’t meet hers.

  “And now I find out Mitch kept all this from me,” she blurted out. “He’s gone, and I’m left with this . . . mess.” She had trusted Mitch wholly, completely. Had given herself to him from that fragile place of surviving cancer, and he had lied to her. Lied.

  “Maybe he wanted to protect you.”

  “Or maybe he didn’t trust me enough to tell me. Did he think I’d leave him if I knew? Damn it, Bill. I thought we were stronger than that.” Her hand bound itself to the cup, squeezing, wanting to hurl it. She felt him watching, wondering if he was assessing her for one of the five stages of grief. Well guess what, reverend. I’ve reached the “my life has gone all to hell” stage.

  Lena carried her mug to the sink, rinsed it, and placed it in the dishwasher they couldn’t afford. Out the window, Abby’s rental car pulled into the drive. Elliott had criticized her choice of the mammoth, “gas-guzzling, to-hell-with-the-planet” vehicle, but when Abby said, “I’m used to getting shot at. Forgive me if I want lots of metal around me,” it had shut him up.