Jon sometimes wondered how his father had been allowed to get away with it for so long: the intravenous equipment, the gurneys, the scalpels and operating instruments. Jon’s hands burned hotly as he recalled the first time his father had handed him a scalpel.
“You want me to hold on to it?” Jon had asked.
“I want you to cut.” His father’s face had been so even, impossible to read as ever.
Jon had been surprised, but he had also been ready. He had watched his father doing this for years and, at sixteen, he had seen the procedure many times now. Removing a gall bladder was something he could have described with his eyes closed. His father always taught him by asking questions–Why am I doing this, Jon?–rather than simply telling Jon what to do. Why am I holding the clamp here, instead of further up? Why is this area more prone to bleeding? Why do we use less sedative with this procedure?
Jon always knew the answers, and like his father, he was exceptionally calm under pressure. Jon had not hesitated, or questioned, or balked when his father handed him that scalpel. Drawing in a deep breath, he steadied his hand, and made the cut.
But never had he been tested more than when it had been Finn on their table, bleeding and near death.
It was the summer Jon turned sixteen, only weeks after his first surgery with his father. Finn was just thirteen, and was in his reckless, wild phase. Jon had known what Finn was going to do before Finn even did it.
Several years before, their father began teaching Finn how to navigate the old fishing skiff, a project boat that was never quite finished. This act of mentoring was a begrudging one, as Dr. St. Andrews was still deeply disappointed by Finn’s lack of potential, but he saw it as the one way he still might forge a connection with his younger son. By the time Finn was twelve, he was already captaining the boat, though their father never let him go out alone.
“Never trust the ocean,” he would say. “The day you think you have her figured out is the day she will get you.”
But Finn was young, and adventurous, and made up his mind to captain the boat by himself on his thirteenth birthday. Jon figured it out in time to find him, but was unable to stop him.
“You’re either coming or you’re staying, but this boat is going out to sea today,” Finn had said, chest puffed out, hand on the mast, proud.
Jon knew it would end badly, but he wouldn’t let his brother go out alone so he joined him. Jon’s fears came true a half-mile out to sea when the propeller became entangled in an abandoned trawl. Finn panicked and leaned over the side of the boat when a fin broke off and sliced across his chest, knocking him unconscious. The fin then ricocheted and gashed Jon in the chest. It was a blow that should have knocked him out as well, but the adrenaline was coursing through his veins. Jon radioed ahead to his father, who calmly walked him through how to get them home. With his brother dying in his arms, the ride home was perilously long and Jon was trembling so hard that he could hardly hold the radio.
His father had been waiting on the dock, and picked up Finn as if he weighed nothing at all. He sprinted back to the house, with Jon in tow.
“What does your brother need Jon?” His father asked as he cut what was left of Finn’s shirt off.
“You’re asking me that now? NOW?”
“Calm down and tell me what your brother needs,” his father said evenly. His hands were pushing down on Finn’s chest, but the towel continued to blossom red more and more so that the original white could no longer be seen.
Jon’s breaths were coming short and forced and his whole body was hot, his pulse throbbing so hard he thought his heart might burst right through his chest. This was Finn on the table, not just some patient. Finn...his little brother. His only brother.
Jon gripped the table and forced himself to breathe in, slowly; out slowly. “We need to close his wound and dress it. He needs something to stave off infection, and…he needs something for the pain.”
“What else does Finn need?” Andrew St. Andrews asked as he replaced the towel with another, never letting the pressure off.
“He needs blood,” Jon said finally. “He’s lost too much.”
His father looked at him squarely, and then Jon understood. They would stabilize Finn together, and then Jon would need to give his own blood to save his brother.
The next couple of hours were endless to Jon, and, despite his father’s cool demeanor, he saw the wideness of his father’s pupils and the sweat beading around his face and neck. His dad was scared too.
Jon had laid down on a gurney next to his brother then, and let his father take Jon’s own crucial life force and transfer some of it to his brother. Jon was overcome with exhaustion, but before he nodded off, he felt his father pull off the gauze, stitching his wound. In all the commotion, Jon only vaguely recalled his father putting the gauze on to begin with.
“Superficial, but you’ll have a scar to remember it,” was the last thing Jon heard before he drifted off to sleep. Years later, a thin white line, from chest to navel, was the least of Jon’s reminders of the incident.
He never understood how Finn could return so easily to the boat after that. He couldn’t wait to go back out and was on the sea a week later, to their mother’s dismay and their father’s annoyance. “He’s on his own,” his father had said with a dismissive wave of the hand. But Jon never relaxed when he knew his brother was out to sea, even though Forbia was twice the boat that old skiff had ever been. Even now, Jon’s fear was still very real.
As the day wore on, the rain turned to hail and the sky took on a dark, ominous aspect. It crackled with thunder and the air felt still and electric. Jon hoped Finn had the good sense to end early, as he could see more dark clouds rolling in on the horizon. Finn had been saying that the first big storm was coming in about a week, which was a couple of weeks before the weathermen were predicting it. Jon, though a man of science, trusted his brother more.
It had been slow day at the office, but that was to be expected. As that Deschanel girl had rudely pointed out a week earlier, business wasn’t exactly booming on an island of two hundred people. But Jon had earned the respect of veterinarians on the mainland during his residency. Several of them made sincere, ongoing attempts to entice him to practice in a larger office with better equipment, though Jon would not be swayed into leaving Summer Island. They settled for his consultation services, and this is what he did on days when there was little else to do. He liked knowing what was on his schedule for the day. Jonathan was no fan of surprises.
It was not just ritual he craved though, it was quiet. Seclusion. The avoidance of the inevitable awkwardness of small talk or getting to know someone. Uncomfortable silences.
When Jonathan met someone new, he was unable to find within himself the desire to learn about them, talk to them, and absorb them in the same way. Because once he did, he could not let go and move on and forget. He never forgot. Was it any surprise, really, that he had become a veterinarian instead of a doctor? He was a man more comfortable with bonding with animals than people. Had his father really not seen it?
Jon relied on the comfort of how quiet, secluded, and consistent their neighbors were. He had known them all his life, and most accepted that Jon was the way he was, and never forced the awkwardness on him. All except the house that had stood empty on the property just to their east. Every season his anxiety would build as he waited to see if the Deschanel family would fill it for the summer, and bring the unwelcome expectations on him, as the eldest of the St. Andrews household, to entertain and welcome them. But thirty years passed since it was purchased, and no Deschanel had ever visited that home. The only movement in the house came from the weekly visit of the overseer Alex Whitman.
He should have known, when the house never went on the market, that someone would eventually show up.
Jon was in his back office reading about treatment options for a Yorkshire terrier with a pancreatic tumor when he heard the familiar jingling of the bell above the main door, startling him ou
t of his concentration. He set his pen down to the left of the folder, and walked out and down the short hallway, to the reception area.
Ana Deschanel was standing in front of him, drenched and shivering. Water pooled near the door entrance and several rogue balls of hail rolled around near her feet. Jon’s eyes moved from the floor to Ana and back, and then rested on what was in her arms.
She was holding the limp, bleeding body of a brown cat and as Jon moved toward her, her eyes widened with relief. He moved to take the injured, possibly dying, cat from her arms. Ana was crying, and he felt her trembling.
“I...I tried...I couldn’t fix her...I tried,” she sobbed. Of course you couldn’t fix her, you ridiculous girl.
Jon gently lifted the cat into his own arms, and, without making eye contact, he turned and walked back to his procedure room.
As he closed the door behind him, he could hear the soft, muffled sobs from the front. He ignored them and went to work.
Chapter Eight: Ana
By her fourth week on the island, Ana started questioning whether she was really getting anything out of the change of scenery. New Orleans was really no different than this small island. The people who had put down their roots all knew each other; their histories, their secrets. Different accents, same problems.
As a Deschanel, she was different from most people, but it went beyond her family. She was quiet, but not shy. Withdrawn, but intelligent. But she knew–had always known–that she was unlike the girls she went to the Sacred Heart with, and even more unlike those she graduated Tulane with. There was something quiet, and dark, and...craving about her. She had not come to Maine to find herself. She knew who she was. She had come to squash it, privately, away from the eyes of the people who thought they knew who she was already. She was thirty now, and the thoughts were screaming at her to fix it now, before it was too late.
How many men had it been? She had lost count after the first month, and then one month stretched into almost a year. The men she chose didn’t require conversation or understanding. They didn’t need to know who she was, why she was in a seedy bar in the Faubourg Treme, why she couldn’t connect in a normal way with anyone.
She had learned many coping mechanisms over the years; methods of controlling herself so she seemed calm to others, despite how she actually felt. Everyone thought she was so normal, at first. Her friends, teachers, family, her boyfriends. But most of them had not known how to handle her introversion once they penetrated the surface.
But there was nothing normal about her inability to hold a meaningful relationship, nor was there anything particularly normal about sleeping with dozens of random men as a substitute. If it were normal, she wouldn’t have chosen to hide it from the people in her world. She would not have experienced such shame.
Nicolas had known about it, of course, but Nicolas didn’t judge. It was only the last thing that had happened, the catalyst for her departure, that Nicolas would never hear about. Not from her, and likely not from the other party involved. The latter had too much to lose, and it was really to protect him–and to hide from her shame, in what she had done to him, and to herself–that she had left town.
Being in Maine hadn’t helped her to forget, nor had it given her any deeper understanding of how to forge a new path for her life. She felt like an outsider here, an interloper, and this only magnified her existing feelings of isolation and despair.
People had been less chilly to her as time went on, but she was still completely taken aback by the rudeness of Jon St. Andrews. She understood that it was not always easy to meet others...was she not, also, a perfect example of a societal defect? There were those out there who probably thought she was rude as well. But she had never–never–treated anyone the way Jonathan St. Andrews had treated her.
And for what?
Was he also one of those narrow-minded gossips who thought she was some spoiled rich girl here on her daddy’s money? Even if that were true, why did it matter? Why was that such an affront to others?
It wasn’t true, anyway. She had inherited her mother’s share of Deschanel Media, but she hadn’t touched any of it. She lived simply back home. She had her small Chartres Street apartment in the Quarter, but the rest of her money went into savings or investments. She was, after all, a member of one of the most famous of investment families in New Orleans.
She had insisted on taking over all expenses for the house during her visit, including Alex’s pay. She hadn’t mentioned this to Alex, because it was obvious he preferred being the savior of women, not the one beholden to them.
“Come home, Muffins. You can be a whore there or you can be a whore here, but here is so much more fun...” Nicolas said that night on the phone, when she told him she was having mixed thoughts.
To Nicolas, this was affection. “Pot. Kettle. Black,” she joked back. She flopped back in the tall, carpeted armchair in her sitting room.
“Come home.”
“Not just yet.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Ana. There are plenty of insecure assholes out there who blow themselves up with self-importance and opinions who will tell you that there is, but a healthy sexual appetite is nothing to be ashamed of.”
That’s not all I’m ashamed of, she thought. I’m ashamed that I brought someone else down into this mess with me, someone I care about, and I can’t take it back.
To make matters worse, she was distraught over what happened to Cocoa the week before. She had watched Cocoa saunter down the long driveway and out into Heron Hollow Road beyond, and then observed helplessly as a truck swerve out of its way to hit her. The truck then squealed off, leaving Cocoa hurt and broken on the road.
Ana had closed her eyes and placed her hands over the tiny body. Heal...heal damn you! She had focused so hard–imagining positive energies around Cocoa, seeing the little cells come together in harmony–that the blood rushed to her head and she fell back into a puddle. Please Cocoa...please little girl...
When she failed to save her, she didn’t even think twice about taking her to see Dr. St. Andrews; didn’t think about how rude he might be to her when she showed up, or the possibility that he might even turn her away. She simply rushed to save the little cat that had become a part of her life in Maine.
In the end, he had saved her–because I couldn’t; because when it came down to it I couldn’t even save a cat–but Cocoa had some recovery ahead of her. It had been a week since she took Cocoa to Jon’s office, and Ana wasn’t sure if she would ever see the little kitty again.
Then today, she accidentally broke the power cord to the fridge and spoiled nearly everything inside. For the first time, Alex did not answer her phone call when she reached out for help and advice.
If she was looking for signs telling her to go home, they were all around her. Frustrated and feeling hopeless, she threw her hands up in the air in submission. She snatched up the book she was reading and went out to the porch in hopes that reading would clear her head.
Chapter Nine: Finnegan
Finn knew he was tempting fate with his continued jaunts to sea. The weather was going to change soon, possibly that very day, and the experienced fishermen had given up back in October. But Finn kept watching as their food storage dwindled. There were days where all of it went to sale. He was starting to question the business arrangement he had made with Anders Cartwright–the Portland business mogul who had been the first to get Finn St. Andrews to sign on the dotted line–but he knew his father would have been proud that Finn managed to turn a less than academic endeavor into a successful business.
He locked up the boathouse. Instinctively, he looked east toward the Deschanel house and, as usual, Ana was there. He smiled and waved, and she did the same in return.
Today, he thought. I’ll do it today. After I shower. Every time Finn had resolved to do it his nerves had gotten the best of him. Looking at the sky, he knew time was running out. He didn’t know why he was jittery about the whole thing; it was very unlike
him. I’m acting like Jon for god’s sake.
Finn started back toward the house, when he noticed that she had put her book down and was jogging toward him, tripping slightly over rocks on her way over. He thought to go help her, but both his hands were full, and before he knew it she was standing right in front of him.
Blue, he thought. Her eyes are blue.
She was even lovelier than she had appeared from afar. Her red hair sparkled and cracked in the setting sunlight, and she was brushing it from her pale face as the wind fought with her. She had a splash of freckles over her tiny nose, and her lips were full and pale, not much darker than her skin. She pulled her cardigan sweater tightly over her thin frame. He could not help but notice how the hem of her sweater flared just around the hips, and her arms, folded against the cold, did nothing to hide the fullness higher up.
"I'm sorry, I was just wondering if you knew when the last ferry to town leaves?” Ana asked. She had her book in her arms, which were crossed tightly over her chest. He couldn’t help wondering if she realized a jacket would be more appropriate for November in Maine.
"Six, so you just missed it," Finn said amiably. "And unfortunately, there might not be another one for a while, depending on how bad this storm is."
"How bad do you think it will be?"
"If you ask the weatherman, he will say a few inches, and then over in a few days.”
The Storm and the Darkness Page 5