The Sound of Glass

by Karen White

  Merritt was on the ground in front of her, her face creased with worry. “Do I need to call an ambulance? You look really sick.”

  Loralee wanted to say something about how Merritt needed to work on her Southernisms, but the pain seemed to have stolen her voice.

  Merritt whipped out her phone, but Loralee managed to put her hand on her wrist to stop her. “No. Please.” She took a deep breath. “Just help me up, and don’t let Owen see.”

  Two strong hands gripped her elbows and gently lifted her up, then continued to hold on as she and Merritt waited for Owen to reach them.

  “I did William Bull’s grave marker. He must have been an important person, because there was a lot of writing.”

  “Good job, sweetie.” She tried to straighten up all the way, but couldn’t. Merritt continued to hold on tightly, even letting Loralee lean into her as they began walking toward the exit. “We’ll go to the library tomorrow and look him up and then you can write a report,” she managed to say through gritted teeth.

  “Oh, boy,” Owen said. “Most kids go to summer camp, you know.”

  “Maybe next year,” Loralee said, afraid to make a promise she couldn’t keep. “You get to ride shotgun on the way back, okay? I’m going to let Merritt drive us back, and I think I’m just going to nap on the backseat.”

  Owen was too busy studying his brass rubbing to notice how much she needed Merritt’s help to get inside the car, or how the hot leather of the backseat should have burned her if she could only feel it.

  Before Merritt closed the door, Loralee touched her arm. “I think you’re a lot like Edith.”

  Merritt gave her a hard look. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because there’s a lot of strength and determination in you, too.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  Loralee wanted to argue with her, to tell her that through Robert she felt as if she’d always known Merritt and the girl she’d been, the daughter she’d been. The survivor she’d been after the accident that had killed her mother. Loralee wasn’t sure what had happened in the intervening years—years that she was pretty sure hadn’t been good ones—yet Merritt had come out on the other side still kicking.

  Instead, she said, “Call Gibbes. Ask him to meet us at the house.”

  “He’s a pediatrician, Loralee.” She glanced at the front seat, where Owen was busy studying his wax rubbing. “Why don’t we go to the ER instead?”

  Loralee shook her head. “No. He’ll know what to do.”

  Merritt looked doubtful, but nodded. She shut the door, then climbed into the driver’s seat. “Owen, fasten your seat belt. I can’t promise I’m going to follow the posted speed limit.” She handed her phone to him. “And please dial Dr. Heyward—he’s in the contact directory—and see if he can meet us at the house in about thirty minutes.”

  He glanced into the backseat with a worried expression. “Are you going to be all right, Mama?”

  “Yes, sweetie. My stomach is upset is all. I figure a pediatrician knows all there is to know about tummy troubles.”

  Satisfied with her explanation, he faced forward again and began scrolling through the contacts on Merritt’s phone, apparently a short list, since he found it quickly and hit the call button.

  Despite the increasing pain, Loralee managed to smile to herself as she saw Merritt’s profile and the determined set of her jaw that reminded her of a bulldog. In a good way.

  You are stronger than you think, she thought as she watched her stepdaughter and felt the surge of acceleration as they pulled out of the dirt parking lot and onto the asphalt road. A sharp pain radiated around from her stomach to her back, sucking the air right out of her lungs and making her recall something else her mama had once told her. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Loralee closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the tires on the road as they sped back to Beaufort and she prayed for the oblivion of sleep.

  chapter 23

  MERRITT

  It was almost dusk by the time we returned to the house on the bluff, and I nearly sighed out loud with relief when I recognized Gibbes’s Explorer in the driveway, his tall figure leaning against the side. I pulled in behind him, then stole a glance at the backseat. Loralee was curled on her side in the fetal position, her eyes closed, her hands pressed against her stomach.

  Owen’s head was pressed against the window, his glasses fallen to the tip of his nose, gentle snores telling me that he was sleeping. After turning off the ignition, I opened the door and bolted from the SUV.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” I said, happier to see Gibbes than I cared to admit, and not just because I was worried about Loralee. “She’s in the backseat and is in a lot of pain. She thinks it’s food poisoning.”

  He was already walking toward the car and had pulled open the back door by the time I reached him.

  He leaned in and gently touched her forehead. “Loralee? It’s me—Gibbes. We need to get you into the house, all right? I can carry you, but I’ve got to maneuver you out of the backseat first. Can you help?”

  Her hands fluttered like lost butterflies, unable to land, then returned to her abdomen. She lifted her head, the effort too much for her as it quickly fell back onto the upholstery.

  Gibbes looked at me. “Has she taken any medication?”

  “I don’t think so. She forgot her purse here, which she didn’t realize until we were almost at the ruins. I know she carries medication in it.”

  He nodded, then glanced at the still-sleeping Owen. “I need you to run inside and turn on lights so I can see. Find her purse and leave it on the bedside table so I can figure out what types of meds she has in there.”

  “Do you think any of them will help with food poisoning?”

  He sent me a sharp glance. “I won’t know until I look. Or maybe something she’s been taking is the cause of the pain—I just can’t say for sure.”

  “I hope I did the right thing. I wanted to take her to the emergency room, but she insisted on calling you and coming here instead.”

  “You did the right thing. If I can’t help her, then I’ll take her to the ER myself.”

  He gently slid Loralee out of the backseat, and she began to mewl like a hurt kitten. Unable to stand by and do nothing to help, I headed inside, grabbed her purse from the hall table, then flipped on the outside lights and every single switch I passed as I made my way up to her room. Her bed was neatly made, and I carefully folded back the covers and plumped her pillows. I had just finished when Gibbes entered, carrying Loralee.

  He laid her on the bed while I carefully took off her sandals and placed her feet under the covers.

  “Does she have a nightgown you can put on her so she’ll be more comfortable?”

  I thought of the leopard-print peignoir I’d just hidden under one of the pillows and knew that I couldn’t do that to either one of them. “No. But I have a bathrobe I can put her in.”

  It was old, gray, and flannel—three adjectives that I was pretty sure didn’t describe anything in Loralee’s existing wardrobe, but it zipped all the way up to the neck and wouldn’t unnecessarily expose any body parts. I raced to my room to get it, and when I returned, Gibbes turned his back to give me privacy while he went through her purse.

  Loralee’s eyes were glazed with pain; she seemed barely aware of where she was or what was happening. Her limbs seemed boneless, pliable as I moved them to slip her out of her shirt and jeans. I paused, really seeing her for the first time, noticing how large her joints appeared to be, how caved-in her chest was, her collarbones clearly outlined under yellowish skin. Her abdomen was distended, looking grossly out of proportion to the rest of her.

  I zipped up the bathrobe and she immediately turned back on her side, drawing her knees up to her chest. I turned to Gibbes, whose hands were filled with various prescription bottles, while more sat on top of the nightstand, along with a bottle of Tums and one of Benadryl, and a bubble packet of a laxative.

  B
efore I could even form a question, Gibbes said, “Go downstairs and find Owen, and keep him occupied until I figure out what’s going on here, all right?”

  I nodded, then sped downstairs and out of the house into the night and found Owen right where we’d left him, in the front seat of the SUV, sound asleep. The yard seemed lit with fireflies, their staccato light show pulsing to music I couldn’t hear. I watched Owen sleeping, a soft snore drifting from his slightly opened lips. He looked like a baby, and I felt a soft pang at the thought, realizing that I could have known him as an infant. I slid off his glasses before they fell, then gently shook his shoulder. “Rocky?”

  He jerked upright, and I was glad I’d saved his glasses.

  “Where’s Mama?” he asked.

  I cleaned his glasses off on the bottom of my skirt like I’d seen Loralee do, before sliding them back on his nose. “Dr. Heyward is upstairs with your mother, making her feel better.” I looked out into the new night, mesmerized by the dance of the fireflies. “I thought we could catch fireflies in the back garden while we wait.”

  Owen slid from the Navigator and slammed the door shut all in one movement before running toward the house and up the porch steps. “I guess that’s a yes,” I called out, but he’d already run into the house.

  I retrieved the jars I’d found in Edith’s closet, the ones Gibbes had said had once belonged to him and Cal, and met Owen on the back porch. The waxing moon was nearly full, eliminating the need to turn on the back lights.

  I’d been so busy cleaning out the inside of the house that I hadn’t come out to the garden since the first week I’d moved in. Even in the moonlight I could see the transformation Loralee had created. Paths full of bright white stones—stones that I remembered agreeing to and paying for and seeing delivered—led the way through the garden, which no longer seemed full of tall, untamed weeds. Instead it resembled what a garden should be, a place of fragrance and beauty, where delicate flowers could tilt their heads toward the sky in search of light.

  A soft blue light settled on the garden, giving the stone bench and the statue of Saint Michael a phosphorescent glow. Even the stone bunny, now sporting a bow tie and vest, seemed more dignified in the moonlight. The fireflies danced and swayed around us, their flashes like tiny beacons punching holes in the night.

  Please let her be all right. The silent prayer surprised me. It had been a long time since I’d thought to ask for intervention, and it was the first time I’d admitted to myself that I was worried about Loralee.

  “It’s not really dark, is it?” Owen whispered.

  I shook my head. “Kind of makes the dark much less scary, doesn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.” He clutched his jar while tilting his head up toward the sky. “Did you know that it takes one hundred thousand years for the light on one end of the Milky Way to make it to the other side?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said quietly, somehow comforted by the thought that light was everywhere, even in the far reaches of the Milky Way, always traveling, always in search of the dark it needed to fill.

  “Can we have a contest to see who gets the most fireflies?” Owen asked.

  “Sure. Although I will admit to being rusty. I don’t think I’ve done this since I was a little older than you.” I’d been with my mother in our front yard. She hadn’t had her own jar, preferring to point out the brightest lights for me to pursue. She’d sat under the large maple tree, the one where each year on the first day of school she’d taken my picture as I held my newest backpack and lunchbox. I often wondered whether the tree was still there, or if it was another victim of my father’s wish to leave that part of our lives behind us.

  “We’ll have to have a prize for the winner, though.” Owen pretended to think for a moment. “If I catch the most, I get to have ice cream before I go to bed.”

  “All right. But what if I win?”

  “Then we both get some.” He giggled, and I saw the shadow of his dimple in the moonlight, in the same spot as my own.

  “Deal,” I said, unscrewing the lid of my jar. “Just watch out for that little dip in the ground by the bench. Looks like your mother has been digging a hole.”

  He turned around to acknowledge the spot before facing me again. I waited for him to take the lid from his jar. “Ready?”

  He nodded, positioning himself in a runner’s pose, with one leg in front of the other.

  “Set.” I paused for dramatic effect. “Go!” I shouted. He took off so fast that I was afraid he’d run into something or trip. But he was as sure-footed as a cat, quickly disappearing around the other side of the large oak tree dominating that part of the garden.

  “Got one!” he shouted.

  Feeling a little silly, I began stalking the garden, waiting for a firefly to alert me to its presence. They were everywhere, busy in their mating ritual of blinking hindquarters. I felt almost guilty interrupting them, but hoped maybe they’d make a romantic connection while held captive in my jar.

  “I think I have about a hundred,” Owen called out.

  I looked down at my own jar, where I had nowhere near that amount. “I think I have about twice that!” I shouted back. I smiled to myself. It was something my father would have done. My mother said he was prone to gross exaggeration, which was probably why she was so exacting in her praise and encouragement. I had sometimes found it deflating as a child, so much different from Loralee’s constant building up of Owen’s fragile ego.

  “I’m not done yet,” he called, a definite challenge in his voice.

  A hand touched me on the arm, and it seemed as if somebody had suddenly turned off all the light in the garden, and I was alone in the dark with just the feel of hand on my skin. “No!” I shouted, twisting around and raising my arms to protect my face. The jar fell from my hand, hitting the soft dirt by the side of the path with a dull thud.

  “Merritt, it’s me. It’s Gibbes.”

  I lowered my arms and looked into his familiar face. I was breathing heavily, a thin sheen of perspiration covering my body. I bent down to retrieve my jar, trying to hide my embarrassment.

  When I straightened, he hadn’t moved. “You need to sit down.”

  Hesitating only a moment, I allowed him to lead me to the bench, both of us walking around the dip in the ground. I clutched the jar in my lap, wishing I could somehow hide inside.

  “How is Loralee?” I asked, steering the conversation to where it needed to be.

  There was a short pause before he answered. “She’s resting now. She usually takes prescribed pills throughout the day, but today she couldn’t, because she forgot her purse. That sort of messed her up, but she should feel much better when she wakes up.”

  “So it wasn’t food poisoning?”

  He looked down to where his hands were resting on his thighs. “No. It’s not food poisoning.”

  “Is she going to be all right? I saw her collection of pill bottles. I can’t imagine those are all for ulcers.”

  He continued to stare at his hands. “Although I’m not officially her doctor, I can’t discuss her health with you. You’ll have to ask her yourself. Just wait until she’s feeling a little better, all right?”

  “Now you have me worried.”

  “Loralee is one of the strongest people I’ve ever met. She can handle this, and would definitely not want you to be worried on her behalf. She promised she’ll be up making breakfast tomorrow morning.”

  I let out a breath, feeling inordinately relieved that it wasn’t as bad as my imagination had led me to believe. “She’s awfully thin,” I said, remembering what she’d looked like while I’d put the bathrobe on her.

  I heard the grin in his voice. “She’ll probably take that as a compliment, but, yes, she’s definitely too thin. See what you can do to get food in her.”

  “Well, I know she likes fried foods. Maybe I could learn how to fry chicken.”

  “That’s pretty ambitious, coming from somebody who was raised in Maine. Call Mrs. Wil
liams. She’d be happy to show you how it’s done.”

  I nodded as I desperately sought for something else to say so he wouldn’t fill the silence with questions I didn’t want to answer. “Who knows?” I said quickly. “Maybe I will be saying ‘y’all’ before the end of the year. And not thinking it’s really so hot when it hits the nineties with ninety percent humidity in the middle of May.”

  “Do you miss Maine?” His voice was deep but soft and even, perfect, I thought, for a pediatrician. Calming to children yet authoritative to their parents.

  “You should ask me that in January. You know what we call our four seasons? Early winter, midwinter, late winter, and next winter.”

  He chuckled. “I’m guessing it’s pretty cold most of the time.”

  “Yes, but we do have summer. The days are long and filled with warm air that starts to fade after only a few weeks. And it’s always chilly in the evenings. Very different from here, but still very beautiful. There’s nothing like a blueberry field in winter. The fall turns the plants a bright crimson, almost like blood against the white snow. It seems like another world to me sometimes. Or another life, really.”

  “Do you think you’ll go back?”

  I shook my head. “No. I needed to move forward. My father was a pilot and spent his entire life traveling, yet I’d never been outside of Maine. And when I was going through my grandmother’s books and found a travel guide to South Carolina, it seemed almost serendipitous when I learned I’d inherited a house here, too. To be honest, I didn’t even give that much thought to it—maybe because I thought if I did, I’d change my mind. I just knew it was time to leave, and where I went seemed immaterial.”

  “Cal was like that, too. He’d never left the state until he left for good. He lived in California for a while, and I heard from him from time to time, how he’d started out being a bar bouncer and then decided to become a fireman. And then I didn’t hear from him anymore. I guess at some point he decided to move to Maine, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  I felt him watching me, and I turned my head to look at him and saw moonlight reflected in his eyes. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”