by Robyn Carr
She knocked on the bathroom door. “Are you in the tub?” she asked. “Can I come in?”
“What for?” Krista called back.
Charley opened the door. Krista was covered in bubbles. “I told Jake I would talk to you.”
“You don’t have to. I don’t think I need the details. I get it. He’s the guy who knocked you up.”
“That’s right,” Charley said.
“Your heart was broken, I remember that. You were a mess. You suffered magnificently.”
“I think you should listen to me,” Charley said. “My heart was broken regularly and dramatically for at least a few years and your friend Jake wasn’t the only culprit. You missed a whole fundamental part of adolescence because you were running wild with creeps and miscreants. Tragic broken hearts, one right after another, is the hallmark of being a teenage girl. I was also in a deep and bloody battle with my mother and Jake was the only thing I could fantasize into a way out of my predicament. But even though I had a crush on him and ended up pregnant, he wasn’t what I really wanted. I thought I wanted who he was pretending to be, but that wouldn’t have worked. And I ended up a pregnant teenager sent away to Florida to have and give away my baby.”
“Is that what I’m supposed to understand?” Krista asked.
“Who are you angry with?” Charley asked.
“Myself!” Krista said. And then she slid under the water. She rose a moment later and wiped the bubbles from her face.
Charley sat on the closed toilet lid. “I had twenty boyfriends in high school. Most of them lasted a few days but there were a couple that lasted weeks. It didn’t matter if I broke up with them or they with me—I was always crushed. I do think Jake was one of the cutest ones.”
“Why’d you have so many boyfriends? Because you were pretty and popular?”
“You don’t remember right—I was kind of a late bloomer. I was better looking in my twenties. I really came into my own when I got a talk show. Nothing makes a woman beautiful like self-esteem and confidence. But back to your Jake...”
“He’s not mine! And definitely not now!” She dunked again.
“Oh, settle down. So, Jake lied to get his job at the lodge. He said he was older than he was, said he was a law student with an important father. We hooked up and of course, being the brilliant teenager I was, I wasn’t on the pill. Can you imagine me asking Louise for birth control pills? I’d rather ask Godzilla. And the genius Jake said he had a condom but he didn’t get it out fast enough. Hmm,” she paused, thinking. “The whole thing was bumbling and clumsy. I wonder if it was his first time? Well, I’m not asking him. So—there you have it. We’d been flirting and making out about three weeks, tops. And it changed a lot of lives. But we’re not long-lost lovers, Krista. We’re both pretty embarrassed by how stupid we were. I was as stupid as he was, all right? Let’s have that straight, should we?”
“You must have loved him,” Krista said.
“I loved love! I wasn’t going to come even close to figuring out what it took to really love someone for at least another five years. Krista, teenagers have no sense. Poor judgment is more normal than good judgment. In fact, those who traveled through those years without major fuckups were lucky.”
“I’m living proof of that,” she said.
“I don’t know that you have to be nervous about Jake because of our history any more than you would be distrustful of me. But there is a favor I’m going to ask.”
“I’d do anything for you, Charley. You gave me my first good underwear.”
“Andrea wants to know who her father is and I’m going to tell her. She will want to meet him. Know him.”
“So?”
“That might happen around here. She was undecided about coming to the lake for a quick visit but when I tell her... It may change her plans.”
“What about him?” she asked. “Does he want to meet her?”
“Oh, yes, though he was pretty blindsided by the news. And he’s scared she’ll hate him, but she’s not that kind of person. He, ah, thanked me for having her.”
Krista went underwater again.
She finally came up and sputtered soap out of her mouth. “Stop that!” Charley said.
Krista wiped the soap off her face with a washcloth. “Is this dating in the free world?”
“It can get a lot rockier than this. Jake seems to have turned out all right.”
Krista shrugged. “How will we know for sure?”
“We watch and learn. He was very nice. He actually got a little teary. I wonder what it’s like to find out you have an adult daughter and grandchildren.” Charley smiled. “I’m an accomplished investigative reporter. Want me to research him?”
“No,” Krista said, standing up in the tub and reaching for a towel. “If he can take me at face value, I can do the same.”
“But you don’t have to,” Charley said. “You have very good reasons to be cautious.”
Krista toweled off. “I missed a lot of social skills in prison but I learned a few things the rest of you didn’t. I can hot-wire a car, slip a wallet out of a breast pocket and I can read the hell out of people.” Then she grinned.
Chapter Sixteen
August was upon them and Charley was growing restless.
“You probably need to get back to work,” Meg said. “I can’t imagine you lying around some lake house all summer long. Go back home. Krista and I will be fine. I’m doing well, John comes on the weekends and Jo is a frequent visitor. You’re bored.”
“I’m not bored. This is lovely.”
Meg laughed at her. “You’re so bored you’re boring me. Go home. Find a great job!”
Work would help if she could bear to be away from Meg, but there was no work for her to go back to. She really thought Michael would have come by now. She knew it would be easy enough for him to get away during the summer session. He was preparing for Cambridge. And he was holding a hard line. They’d talked but they hadn’t made much progress. And she’d only been home to see him once since April. They’d never spent so long apart. No job, no Michael? There were times she felt that at forty-four her life was over.
“It’s Michael, isn’t it?” Meg said. “You’ve been dancing around the subject all summer.”
“We talk all the time,” Charley said. And they quarreled a lot. Enough so that Charley always went down to the dock to talk to him.
“Right,” Meg said. “Unless I missed something, you’re no closer to resolving your standoff. Charley, what are you afraid of?”
“Look who’s talking,” Charley said. “After all your health problems and all the uncertainty, you moved away from your husband to spend a summer at the lake with your crazy family.”
“That was a good idea. For John as well as me,” Meg said. “I’m not the only one who needs a break from cancer. If I were in the city right now, John wouldn’t be able to concentrate on his work. Not only does he need the distraction of work, his patients need him.”
“And he needs you,” Charley said.
“If I needed him close at hand he could take a leave but I’m so glad he hasn’t. When he’s hovering over me I feel so bad. I feel like because of me John has to be worried and sad.”
“John’s a strong man, don’t worry about him. Worry about yourself.”
“Charley, I am,” she said. “This is what I wanted to do and it was the right thing. I’m at peace with everything. And this is good. It’s everything I hoped it would be. Hell, it’s more than I hoped. You bumped into Jake and now Andrea can get to know him. She can connect with her DNA, learn her biological family history. That wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t come here. Have you told Michael?”
“I told him,” she said. “He said, ‘That’s great.’ But it wasn’t convincing.”
“I�
�m sorry. I think you should go home. Work things out with him.”
“Easier said than done,” she said.
Meg was quiet for a little while and Charley didn’t speak. Finally, Meg said, “Listen, Charley, I hope it’s not over between you and Michael. I love him and you two have been so good together. But whatever it is, end it on a high note. There’s a lot to be said for letting go because it’s complete and there’s nothing more to do. Don’t drag it out. Get it resolved. Put your affairs in order. Suffering sucks.”
Charley wanted to ask Meg if she was suffering, if there was something they should talk about. Was Meg giving up?
But instead she said, “I’m fine. It’s just easy to be lazy here, isn’t it? But you’re right—I’m going to write him a long letter. It’s really not like us to be at odds. We’ve negotiated bigger things than this.”
She looked at her sister and smiled. Then she thought, Please don’t leave me, Meg! Please!
* * *
Jo asked Krista when her next day off was. “Great. I want you to get up nice and early and pack us a picnic lunch.”
“Where will we have this picnic?” she asked.
“If no one objects, I thought we’d take the boat across the lake and find a quiet spot. Maybe an empty lot. We’ll find something.”
“Should I invite Meg and Charley?” she asked.
“Can it just be you and me? Just for a few hours.”
“I’m sure that’s okay. But are you staying over?”
“One night.”
Krista wasn’t overly curious about this invitation. When her mother visited they often found some excuse to get off by themselves to talk. There wasn’t much either of them wished to hide from the other two women but there was so much catching up to do. Over the years their phone calls had been so short and their letters so guarded. Krista had tried opening up about her life at Chowchilla but she didn’t want to say too much. So much of that life had been dirty and painful and she didn’t want to see that pain reflected in Jo’s eyes.
Pity. The main reason Krista didn’t talk about prison life was because enduring anyone’s pity was too difficult. Krista had so many adjustments yet to make. She would never be an ordinary, normal woman. She would always and forever be a woman who had spent hard time in a penitentiary.
When Jo arrived Charley and Meg wanted to know how Hope was getting along. “She’s doing pretty well, I suppose,” Jo said. “She’s settled in a very nice rehab facility, but it’s a hospital, not the Ritz. She’s very clear on what’s happening, but it’s so amazing—she still slides into that old delusional way of thinking without so much as a comma in her sentence. She’ll pop out something like, ‘I wonder if Franklin will take time for a couple of weeks at the Cape with us.’ And I just shake my head. She’s depressed, of course. Her life as she sees it or wants it has been taken away. But the doctor said it would probably be like this for a while.”
“Do you visit her a lot?” Charley asked.
“When I can,” Jo said. “I admit, the whole scene depresses me, too! But if Hope will make an effort I’ll support the effort.”
“She’s lucky to have you,” Charley said. “You have such a forgiving nature. I don’t know if I could be as forgiving.”
“If it was your child, you could.”
Their boat was a small fishing craft with a motor and oars in the event the motor ran out of gas or had some other problem. They settled in and Krista worked the motor. “Tell me when you see a spot you like,” she told her mother.
After about fifteen minutes of puttering along Jo yelled her name and pointed. There was a spot with a short beach they could land the boat on. There didn’t appear to be a house on the lot and above the beach was a grassy, shaded area. They pulled the lightweight aluminum boat up onto the beach. Jo spread a towel to put their picnic on, then settled herself on the grass beside it. “Let’s see what you have here,” she said.
“Tuna fish,” Krista said. “With lettuce and pickles and chips and apples. I will never eat bologna again.”
“Got enough of that, did you?”
“Almost every day,” she said. “And I didn’t like it that much before.”
Jo popped the top on a canned lemonade. “We’ve had so much time together, you’d think we’d be all caught up. But things keep changing.”
“With any luck things will stop changing all the time,” Krista said.
“As a matter of fact, I’m making some changes, Krista. I think it will surprise you. I’m going to a part-time schedule at the flower shop for the next three weeks and then I’m retiring.”
Krista gasped. “Can you afford that?”
“It turns out I can. I’ve been in secret talks with your aunt Lou. All these years I thought she was living in luxury—her own type of luxury—but in fact she’s been putting money aside and saving for retirement.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember I told you back in the old days, when you were small, every time Roy and I needed to borrow, Lou would ask me to sign away a piece of my potential inheritance. Well, she said once Roy was gone and I was alone, she changed her mind. When the Grand Avenue house was sold so Grandma could go into assisted living and then the nursing home, Lou put the money in mutual funds and bonds, keeping it safe. Many of the more valuable keepsakes—art, crystal, silver, jewelry—she kept in her house.” Jo laughed and shook her head. “You should see the place. Looks like a hoarder’s dream. It’s like a warehouse. When I asked her why, she said she didn’t think I’d have anyone to take care of me in my old age and, typical of Lou, she didn’t give me enough credit for trying to take care of myself. She was wrong. I was smart enough. I didn’t have much of a job but I had it for a long time. I had a little IRA and I saved here and there. Plus, I lived lean. There wasn’t anything I really needed that I denied myself, but I wasted nothing. It was a habit I formed when you girls were small and we seemed to always be on the brink of collapse.” She took a bite of her sandwich.
“But you always sent me money!” Krista said.
“You needed a little to get you by,” she said.
“Is that why you got rid of the car?” Krista asked.
“When the price of gas went a little crazy, I left it parked and made good use of the bus. Before long I decided it was crazy to keep a car I didn’t drive when the bus worked just fine. Lots of people in my neighborhood used the bus. Lots of people in the neighborhood are now old like me,” she added, laughing. “So, I’m retiring because there are things I want to do. I want to spend more time with you, I want to be sure Hope is getting what she needs and I’d like to see more of Beverly.”
“Does this mean you and Lou are friends again?” Krista asked.
“You girls meeting at the lake for the summer made me realize how much our daughters need us, and need us to be sisters again. I guess we’ll always squabble—we always have. But I’d like us to always make up, the way we used to. Our girls are slipping away from us. Literally.”
“Meg.”
“Lou rejected my comfort when Bunny died,” Jo said. “Just in the way Lou has been secretly preparing to help me through retirement I’ve been trying to think of ways to reunite us. All of us. I’m afraid we might lose Meg. Lou and Charley have been bristling at each other for years. We have to pull together.”
“Well, I hope you can if that’s what you want,” Krista said. “I don’t know why it took you this long.”
“Too much happened to us, Krista. I’m going to tell you about the week that Bunny died. About that summer before Bunny’s death—but you can’t write about it until we’re dead.”
Krista choked and turned it into a cough. “Write about it?” she croaked.
“I know what you’re doing,” Jo said. “Your questions and your hunger for detail lasted far longer than your ther
apy did. But you have to hold on to this last bit. We broke the law, Krista. And we’re not really sure what the end of the story is.”
Krista swallowed hard. “Go ahead, Ma. What did you do?”
Jo began with the sudden appearance of Ivan and Corky and how strange an occurrence that was. Krista remembered them, though vaguely. But she had known their visit was odd and the whole family was “off.” She was not aware that Jo and Aunt Lou were being targeted. Jo explained that it was only a matter of weeks until Lou was convinced that Ivan truly cared for her and could also make her rich.
“You mean she was falling in love with him?” Krista asked.
“Probably not love,” Jo said. “But he was seductive. And so handsome. And seemed so accomplished. He seemed sophisticated, talking about his favorite galleries in Europe, literature that moved him, famous people he knew. Lou found him captivating. And so different from Carl, who was kind and sweet and quite successful in his business, but didn’t talk much and wasn’t social. Ivan had traveled the world and Lou couldn’t get Carl to go anywhere.”
“We thought he was gross,” Krista said.
“You didn’t know the half of what was going on,” Jo said. “I was so afraid Lou was going to make a terrible mistake. And the worst of it was—I knew your father had something to do with it. He brought them, left them at the lake. Roy was in on the con, whatever it was. And Lou would never forgive us, never.”
Jo told her the rest of the story, trying to emphasize how fast everything happened—her confrontation with Ivan in the boathouse, how terrified they were, how certain they were that Corky would freak out and tell the police they were murderers. And suddenly they’d done it. “And I was the one to sink that car,” Jo said. “I saw his body float away.”
“Holy shit,” Krista said. “I almost hate to ask—what did you do with Corky?”
“Told her that Ivan had left her and put her on a bus. But that wasn’t the end of it. A few days later we saw a small article in the paper—he was found and taken to the hospital with a head injury and amnesia. Then he wandered off. There was a picture asking if anyone had any information about him to contact the police. It was him.”