When he didn’t after a while, I found enough courage or curiosity to turn my head on the pillow to find blue eyes staring into mine. He had been watching me sleep. For how long? And what had he thought? What had he decided? For he’d come to some decision. I knew him well enough to know that. I just didn’t know what decision. I went to turn away, self-conscious again, and he sighed and turned onto his back, releasing me from his tormented eyes.
“That better?” he asked, but he didn’t release my hand. Our clasped fingers formed the bottom V of the heat that lay between us, a link across the wide expanse of bed that wasn’t wide enough.
I couldn’t believe I’d fallen asleep. I’d meant to lie there, holding his hand, but I must have been more tired than I thought. Or more comfortable. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t leapt out of bed, when that was the first thing I should have done.
“This doesn’t change anything.”
“Is this the part where you tell me we’re still friends?”
“I fell asleep, but I didn’t mean to.”
“This changes everything.” His hand gripped mine a little tighter.
“We didn’t do anything, Ash. This doesn’t change a thing.” “I won’t forget waking up to find you holding my hand under your cheek, your legs tangled with mine.”
“They are not tangled with yours.” Oh, they were and he felt so good. He moved his leg away and the coolness between us had me moving after him before I could stop myself.
“I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
I felt rather than saw his smile, and when he raised our joined hands to kiss my knuckles I almost did jump out of bed. I would have but my legs and weakened muscles wouldn’t have supported me, and he and I both knew it.
“What did Dr. McCloud tell you, Dart?”
I hesitated, considering. When and if Asher Wright and I became a couple, I wanted it to be because he loved me, not because I had no one else to take care of me. But I didn’t want to lie so I told him, “He thinks I’m overworked and underpaid and that my boss should give me a raise.” That was the truth, just not all of it.
“Your boss does as well.” He nuzzled my hand again, and I felt the soft caress that said he cared, that he knew what a relief the doctor’s diagnosis must have been.
“Come for dinner this weekend, Dart. We’ll have drinks on my boat and have dinner at a little restaurant I like on the wharf.”
“I didn’t know you sailed until Dr. McCloud told me you did.”
He sighed.
“I don’t relate well to men,” I said. “I have two failed relationships behind me, my father and my ex-husband. You’d be better off with someone else.”
“Then we have a date to go sailing,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. “It’s time I got back on the Jennifer again.”
That must be the name of his boat. He let go of my hand, and turned onto his side, his back to me as if having settled the matter, he no longer cared whether I would go or stay. What had I done to make him that confident? “Do me a favor, Dart, stop thinking and don’t leave until I’m asleep again. Okay? Just stay a little longer until I fall asleep.”
“I’ll stay.” As soon as I committed, Asher’s breathing slowed and his body relaxed while I counted the patterns dawn etched on the ceiling. I left him in that bed he and Jennifer had shared, to shrug into my coat, slip into my shoes, and close the front door behind me, resisting the temptation to stay.
SEVEN
THE NEXT MORNING, a text from Ellen stopped my headlong dash down the stairs from my office. By the time I reversed my steps and got to back inside to safety, she’d texted again.
Impatience in a person who had decided to die was a good thing. All last week, I’d pick up the phone and start to text her, then put it down again. Better to give her the time she needed than to ease my own panic. Better to let her come to terms with this on her own. Better to let her husband and family rally around her than a cousin. Yet, that had been hard, the times I’d thought about her. I was so glad to hear from her.
You willing to talk to me now?
I’m better. Forgive me?
Of course I would forgive her. We had more important things to worry about than my hurt feelings. Ellen was going to be okay. We’d see this thing through. I’d be with her every step of the way. She knew she could count on me. The first time the cancer had struck, I’d been there for her. I’d be there this time too.
When can I come see you?
Too late for that.
Too late? What did that mean?
I’m on my way to Mexico.
She couldn’t go to Mexico. She was sick. She needed to stay here where people she loved could care for her. Now she was off to Mexico? On the spur of the moment? So much for giving her the time she needed. She’d run out on me.
I had to do something, Dart. And I knew that you would try to stop me.
I thought we loved one another.
I don’t want to hurt you.
Does Bill know?
Of course. He’s glad to have me gone.
Ellen, he loves you.
Have plane to catch.
What is going on?
Call Bill, he will explain.
Don’t go, Ellen.
Love you.
Ellen?
My fingers hurt, that’s how tightly I’d been gripping the phone.
Talk to me.
Nothing. Nothing in response. I couldn’t believe she’d done this to me, to him. What was going on in her tangled mind?
When I came back from my thoughts, I was stroking Brown Bear’s fur while I looked out the window, doing what, I had no idea, watching for what, again no idea. My frantic texts still showed on the phone, and the time stamp of the last one was 11:10 a.m. I must have gotten up to get Brown Bear but, other than that, I’d lost the past hour staring out the window seeing patterns in the clouds.
And I hadn’t been thinking about Ellen. I didn’t know what I’d been thinking about.
I turned Brown Bear to face me, and in those glass eyes, I imagined I saw my own frightened reflection. I let the bear fall to my lap. I had to rely on the Sentinel to take care of me when I had these moments where I lost myself and didn’t remember. But for how long could the Sentinel fight against the enemy within? I folded my arms around Brown Bear and held him safe, while I imagined another cell dying from the fury consuming my mind.
Bill’s and Ellen’s house in Southport was another older home like mine, and it too had been built to last by shipbuilders. I climbed out of the Volvo, breathed in the sea salt air that made Southport a city of healing, and decided that I’d been wrong, I should have pressed the issue and broken past Ellen’s denial.
The front door opened. “Come in, Dart. I’ve been expecting you.” Bill’s welcome surprised me. Blue eyes weary and swollen, he looked as if he’d spent the day crying. Understandable. Despite what Ellen believed, this man loved her; I’d stake my sanity on the depth of his feeling.
“She went to Mexico to consult a faith healer,” he said as I walked past him into the house. “Other than that, I don’t have any information. She said she’d call and give me the name of the place in a few days, but I don’t know where she is or who she’s with.”
“And you let her go?” Ash wouldn’t have let Jennifer go.
“She didn’t give me a choice.”
“She thinks you don’t love her anymore.” As I stepped into the foyer, I expected to find evidence of the chaos that had erupted in Ellen’s body, but the house was as clean and relaxing as usual. Some women had a talent for making a home, and Ellen was one of them.
“I’ve been taking care of her for thirty years. You’ve forgotten; she left me, Dart.”
Ash might have been right about Bill. He did love Ellen. Oh, he hadn’t come out and said so, but thirty years was a long time to take care of someone you didn’t care for. And Ellen had left me, and I loved her like a sister.
“The picture over the mantel,” I said as I looked
around, feeling the tension build within me at his sadness and frustration. “Is that new?”
“Ellen found that in a thrift store last month. Said the painting would be perfect over the mantel.”
“She’s right,” I said, studying the portrait of the black grand piano in a lovely nineteenth-century drawing room. A beautiful girl, her flame-colored hair pulled back into a braid, sat on the piano bench, her delicate hands poised on the keyboard. Dressed in a long, check-patterned, cotton house dress with a white pinafore to protect her clothes as she cleaned, she must have just sat down to play because her feather duster lay on the top of the piano.
I noted a new rug in the living room. Swirls of color in the nubby texture, greens and blues, highlighted the cream couch and the blue-and-green accent pillows that Ellen had placed on the couch and chairs. “She thought she’d beaten it, didn’t she?” I said, my voice low with concern.
“We both did.” Bill shoved his hand through his wings of hair, which he still wore long, then rubbed his jaw as if his jaw bones hurt something fierce. And maybe they did, if the tension of the last week had centered there. He was always at the dentist getting something done. That used to drive Ellen crazy, but not so anymore, I thought.
“What happened, Bill?”
Without looking at me, he gestured toward the wing-backed chairs flanking the fireplace. He took one and I took the other. The small patterned rug in blues and greens swirled between us. Bill reached for the soda he’d set down on the small, glass-topped coffee table between us and rolled the coldness back and forth in his hands. Something to do, I supposed, as he thought about how to start.
“She tricked me. Told me that we were to pick up her friend— you remember Diane, don’t you?—at the Raleigh airport, and I believed her. Then when we got there, she got out of the truck, told me that the friend request was a ruse, and she had a ticket for Mexico and that she was catching that flight, then she disappeared into the terminal. By the time I’d gathered enough sense to go after her, after I parked the car because the policeman didn’t believe me and wouldn’t let me leave it at the departure curb, she’d vanished.” He looked around the room as if he were dazed, and I knew how he felt. This wasn’t at all like Ellen.
“I don’t know how long she’s going to be gone. I don’t know where she is,” he said and put his hand to his eyes to hide the tears.
“Why a faith healer?”
“She went to him to convince those old biddies at church that God does love her.” Despite the North Carolina hillbilly talk that Bill slipped into in moments of stress like this one, he had a first-rate brain. “Doesn’t make any sense at all. You don’t get cancer because you’re evil. You get cancer because your immune system collapses, or your cells grow wrong . . . stuff like that. Not because God is punishing you.” I saw the tears gathering in his eyes. “Why would they tell her that?” he asked.
“I don’t know why they would be that cruel to someone whose cancer had returned.” But I also knew that beliefs are the strongest forces within people. “She thought you might leave her when she enrolled in the master’s program in psychology at NCUW.”
“She told you that?” He frowned. “Why would she think . . . You mean because I have a high school diploma, and she’s working on her master’s, I would feel threatened by that?” He looked surprised. “Ellen and I are renovating this house,” he gestured to the surroundings we were in. “We have a life together that is the strength for what we do. I love Ellen. To me she’s just as pretty and plump as she was the day I married her.”
Ash was right. Bill did love his wife.
“Couldn’t you talk her out of going?”
“Didn’t you hear me? She didn’t give me the chance.” He looked down at the soda he held and took a swallow or two before he answered. “I thought she’d beaten the cancer, Dart. I thought she wouldn’t have to go through this again. And this time, although the doctor said they could try chemo again, he doubted the treatment would work. I’m willing to do anything, sell the house, the car, anything to let her have this chance if she thinks it will work. It took all I had in me to let her walk away from me. Ask Sandy if you don’t believe me. He recognized the car and pulled in behind me in the driveway, and I was too emotional to talk. Why wouldn’t she let me go with her?” His eyes teared up as he looked up at me, pleading with me to help him understand.
“Did you ask if you could go?”
“She wouldn’t have liked that. She’d made up her mind, Dart. You know how Ellen is when she makes up her mind. Nothing sways her.”
“Buy a ticket, Bill, and go after her. Find out the flight she was on, where it was going, and go after her.”
“I can’t do that. She doesn’t want me there. She believes that God sent this healer to her so that she could be well.”
We sat there in silence for a while. Me trying to figure out when my cousin had lost her mind, and Bill . . . I doubted that Bill was thinking much at all. He knew cancer was just as violent to the human body as planes laden with fuel were to towers believed indestructible. “If I interfere,” Bill said in a low, soft voice, “bring her back, and she dies, I won’t be able to live with myself. She wants this chance, and I have to abide by her wishes.”
We talked for a while, and I wanted to tell him that Ellen wasn’t thinking right, that he had to be reasonable, that he had to go get her, but I didn’t say any of those things. Instead, I stayed with him until the silence became awkward between us. Bill saw me to the door with an expression of relief on his face.
“I still think you should go after her and bring her home. They can’t help her in Mexico. If she calls, you’ll call me?” If Ash had believed Jennifer was harming herself, he wouldn’t have abided by his wife’s wishes. He would have brought her home and kept her there where she was safe.
He glanced at his watch. “Let’s give her some time to see if this faith healer can work miracles.”
“She doesn’t have much time, Bill. Not if what the doctor says is true.”
“We’ll try something different if this doesn’t work.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
He looked at me in confusion.
“There won’t be time to go back and try again. This decision negates other opportunities.”
“There’s always time, Dart. Ellen’s a fighter. She’ll lick this.” He knew the truth, but he wanted to believe something different because his brain anchored that deception in another emotion. “She took LamyPie with her.” His wide smile was meant to tell me I was wrong about Ellen, and my heart stuttered.
“She wanted something she could touch, other than her memories,” I murmured because that’s the way I felt about Brown Bear. “I thought that stuffed animal went into the trash. She said it couldn’t be repaired after your cat tore out the stuffing.”
“I didn’t think Ellen would ever forgive me for that. I found a toy surgeon. You may know her, Sally Winey, lives on Oak Island. She fixed him right up.”
“I do know her.” Someone had recommended the toy surgeon to me. Sally had returned Brown Bear with a Band-Aid over his scar where she’d stitched him up. She’d also reattached his arm and re-glued his original bronzy-gold eyes. The bear had been in bad shape living on the farm. Too bad the toy surgeon couldn’t fix Ellen or Bill . . . or me, I thought as I walked to my car in the sharp wind of that fall afternoon.
Bill knew, and he was just making the best of it. Or Ellen was right. He’d used up all the love he’d once had for her. What was that term? Compassion fatigue? Whatever it was, it was real. Or—I paused in the middle of opening the car door—Ellen loved him, her family, and me enough to try for the impossible. And that, I decided, was what I had to do with my relationship to Ash. I would try for the impossible, and if that didn’t materialize, I’d cut myself loose from Ash, like Ellen had done with Bill and with me.
On campus that Monday morning, student voices and movement animated the landscape of grass, trees, and old brick buildi
ngs. I’d spent the weekend binge-watching television on Netflix with an occasional jaunt over to a love story on The Hallmark Channel. I’d also spent time walking the beach, thinking about Ash, about Ellen, about Bill. I didn’t want to be here. For the first time since I’d taken this job, I didn’t want to go to work.
I walked from the parking deck to the psychology building, and at one point, I stepped off the sidewalk to let a group of students pass. They were so absorbed in the conversation that they didn’t see me. Something tickled my brain as they passed. Something said this is what TRI should be.
And that got me to thinking.
A common goal brought students to this campus, and to campuses like it across the country. Campuses channeled energy and thought toward education. What would it take to make insight as essential as education to the human fabric?
I knew the accepted memes the think tank was up against. Our society has been slow to endorse female leadership. We’ve made women the engine for our economic well-being, but we’ve limited their initiative because women have long been conditioned to accept what society offers them. Like my mother, who sold farm eggs for whatever the townspeople were willing to pay. What would it take to persuade women to step into uncertainty and to go against the accepted memes that dictate their behavior?
Something here on this campus would take TRI to the next level. Barriers of location fell beneath technology’s sweeping reform. Opening this brick-and-mortar campus to the internet and online learning had made it less vulnerable to the demands of state politics, budget restraints, and the culture itself. Technology could enable TRI to reach more of women’s collective intelligence and localize insight around local problems. Certainly, increasing the number of members would make the think tank less vulnerable. I’d lost Classy to love, and my Ellen to cancer, and if I lost even one more of my renters, TRI would cease to exist.
When I next noticed my surroundings, I realized I’d walked to Stratton without thinking how I’d gotten there. The Sentinel again, he’d kept me safe and on time for my destination, despite my wandering thoughts.
Bring the Rain Page 10