“Okay,” I said. “Right now I just need sleep.”
“Don’t call anyone or do anything,” he said. “When I get home tonight we’ll figure something out.”
“Got it.” The fatigue felt like concrete in my veins and sand scraping across my retinas with every blink. I had nothing left in me but agreement.
He walked out the back door without another word.
There hadn’t been a life-saved-at-the-pool moment when Lucas had become this man I needed to leave. I had loved him. I know I had. The change happened incrementally—like growing old or gaining weight—and it had come with his burgeoning success. Maybe it started the night he told me to quit my job because his was more important, because he was the head of the house and the breadwinner. I’d spent a few years analyzing our descent the same as I would a diseased cell under a microscope, trying to find ways to diagnose our marriage’s demise as I would a set of complicated symptoms in the ER. But in the end it didn’t matter why he’d changed; it only mattered that his alteration had destroyed our marriage. Or, in better terms, it had destroyed our love and partnership. I’d gone from living with my best friend to living with a boss. And it had become untenable and exhausting.
This time I didn’t do as Lucas asked—I didn’t lie low. After a long, hot shower, and a few restless hours of tossing around in the bed, I returned to the hospital and marched into the office of Frank Preston, my administrator.
The man’s name, I learned, was Nicholas Rohr. Yes, it appeared that the dosage of pain med had contributed to death, dropping his blood pressure, but more facts needed to be gathered. I was asked to take a sabbatical; after all, I was one of their best doctors, and they didn’t want to take action until they knew what had really happened. This was just a precaution. A rest. I’d been working too much and too long. My hours had been obscene.
With Preston’s condemnation and my exile, I stood outside his office. The familiar post-op hallway of ward 2D wavered. The world that was mine—of doctors’ rounds and medical jargon mixed with the low hum of machines and softly padded shoes hurrying along the halls—now felt precarious and dreamlike.
This was one of the many times in my life I wished again for Lainey’s physical presence. She was my best friend. I’d call her the minute I arrived home, but California was as far away as another world when I needed her as I did right then.
Marie, the doctor who had been there with me in the ER, stood a few feet away talking to a resident I didn’t recognize. I shifted my feet, heavy with dread, to speak to her. Maybe she would remember something, anything, about last night, a moment that would free my fear. But I heard her before I arrived at her side. “I don’t know what happened to her,” Marie said. “She just fell apart.”
I didn’t need to hear my name or be told that she spoke of me. I froze in place; a paralysis of shame.
Marie continued, her voice low but not quiet enough. “She had it all.”
I came behind Marie and spoke the truth. “No one,” I said, “has it all.”
chapter 3
BONNY MORELAND
thirteen years old
SUMMER 1978
WATERSEND, SOUTH CAROLINA
We believed in magic and in rivers, and that quite possibly they were one and the same. Our tidal river, pulsing behind the river house, called that night in a haunting whisper that beckoned us outside. Lainey and I lay flat on the splintered wooden dock peering at the swirl of stars, the full moon bloated and resting on its invisible bed.
We were forbidden to enter the river’s blue-gray waters. But our moms and dads were inside playing poker on the back screened porch, half-drunk and full drunk, their voices falling into the backyard, punctuated by laughter and the distinctive deep reverberation of my father’s voice. The world orbited around us, doing whatever it is the world does, while Lainey and I existed as a nucleus, bound tight. Thirteen years old and best friends. Summer Sisters, we called each other.
The tide was so high that it licked the very edges of the dock. I stared into the sky, believing that if we just found the perfect crack in the world, we could have anything we wanted. The little metal johnboat slapped against the pillars in a tinny, one-two beat. We held hands, our fingers knitted together.
The cloudless sky domed over us, small holes pricked through the fabric of the universe so we could see diamond glimpses of heaven. “I bet that if we dive into the river at high tide, naked, under a full moon, any wish we make will come true,” I said in a voice full of something I hoped was older, grown-up.
I stood first and stripped off my shorts and T-shirt, my white training bra glowing in the moonlight.
“Really naked?” Lainey asked.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I think it’s the only way.”
Lainey jumped to her feet and stripped. Warm air and whispers surrounded our bare skin.
“Hold hands,” I demanded. “We have to hold hands.”
Together, we jumped into that water. The river appeared peaceful, but once inside, it was a powerful force that could whisk us away. But that night, under that full moon, the river felt asleep. The sluggish water was warm while our legs thrashed below, keeping us afloat in the ebb tide—a stillness that came twice a day for a slice of eternal time.
“Go underwater and make your wish,” I said.
Together we sank into that murky darkness, perhaps not knowing the magic that can be wrought while wishing underwater with the unseen inhabitants of that saltwater vein. The dolphin and the otter, the fish, the baby sharks swam invisibly around us. The oysters clung to the sides of the banks, and the crabs scuttled below. We floated alone and yet completely surrounded by life. A baby dolphin, about the same size as us, swam past. I reached out and stroked its silky skin, felt my fingers trail along its back until it was gone as if it had never been there at all.
Salt and particles of pluff mud stung my eyes as I opened them to the brackish water. I believed that the longer I held my breath, the longer I stayed under, the more likely it would be that my wish came true. I remained until my lungs burned as much as my eyes, until I believed that I could breathe water as I did air.
I finally surfaced with a gasp to find Lainey clinging to the edge of the dock, wide-eyed with fear. “You scared me,” she said. “How did you stay under so long?”
The river flowed stronger then, the muscle of the earth pulling as a slow draw. I grabbed the side of the dock so the tide wouldn’t carry me out to sea, and yet there was an instinctual part of me that wanted to ride that river, allow it to take me. I closed my eyes to the feeling and when I finally peeked at Lainey, I loved her as fiercely as I’d ever loved anyone.
I kicked my legs, holding tight to the warm wood of the dock, and I whispered, “I love you.” I spoke to Lainey, but also to the core-burning ember of myself, to the river, to the world.
“I love you, too,” Lainey said from a few feet away, both her hands clinging to the dock and her face bobbing above the water, a silhouette and a moon in eclipse. “What did you wish for?” she asked.
“We can’t ever tell,” I said in the most solemn voice. “It won’t come true if we tell.” I took in a cleansing breath. “Right here we promise to never leave each other. To always be there for each other. To be best friends for all time.”
“For all time,” Lainey said.
We moved our hands along the splintered wooden dock, scooting closer until our legs found each other, winding and unwinding, our skin stroked by the silken water. The tide pulsed through us, moving away, taking our wishes with it.
But tides return; they always do.
bonny moreland’s river wish
I wish for two things: to be a doctor and to love and be loved by Owen McKay for all of my life.
chapter 4
BONNY BLANKENSHIP
Late afternoon in Charleston, South Carolina, can be the most beautiful sight on ea
rth. The soft light feathers through the Spanish moss, the water reaches and pulses to absorb the sun, reflecting it back to the sky, and the breeze carries an earthy elemental mix of sea and fecund earth. I stood on my back porch, noticing each of those details and holding the cell to my ear until Lainey answered.
“Hello, love,” she said, her voice reaching me all the way from California.
In the background, soft music composed of flutes and chimes played on. I calculated that I’d caught her in her art studio before her two kids arrived home from school.
“You busy?” I asked, my hint that this wasn’t a quick call.
“Not for you.”
I imagined her sitting in her large floral chaise lounge, her legs curled into lotus and her back straight. She’d close her eyes and focus only on me. She knew how. I bet incense burned slowly and everything around her smelled like sage. I desperately ached to be there with her.
“Something terrible happened,” I said.
“Not Piper.”
It was an incantation, a statement of fact that she would not form into a question. Piper was her goddaughter and although they rarely saw each other, Lainey loved her deeply.
In my life and in our conversations, Piper was always the low-grade and constant worry: my daughter who couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble, who couldn’t color inside any line, or stand still, who ran instead of strolled, who slept in a wildflower field, who talked too loud and too fast, who memorized entire paragraphs from her favorite books before first grade, who found meaning in every small sign offered her. Wildness and vulnerability were her curses in a world that wanted her to sit straight and take notes. Now she was off at college in Vermont, and still I’d had a call from the campus security about public intoxication and another call from administration about academic probation. But this wasn’t the reason for my call—not this time.
“Nothing more than her usual,” I said. “This is about me.”
“I’m listening,” she said.
I poured out my story to Lainey, telling her of the job offer in Atlanta and then the terrible mistake in the ER. All my plans shattered. Fear coursed through my body in a river of adrenaline.
“Are you sure, Bonny? Are you positive you made a mistake?”
“No. And that’s the hell of it. There was so much chaos that I don’t know. I’ve tried so hard but it’s like trying to bring back a dream: the more I try to remember the less I do.”
“What was it that made the night different from any other?” she asked.
“The chaos. Too many of the same kinds of injuries all at once. Exhaustion. Long hours. Preoccupation. Incompetence on my part. And, Lainey . . .” I took a breath and paused to watch a cardinal light upon an oak branch, flicker its head left and right before swooping to my bird feeder. Smart, I thought, check for danger before, not after. “Your brother. He was here in town for a kite-boarding competition, and he had a terrible accident. He’s okay now; please don’t worry. But when he showed up without warning, I was thrown off balance.”
“Oh, God, Bonny. I haven’t heard from him in six months and he was there with you?”
“No. He wasn’t with me. I didn’t even know he was in town until he was rolled into the ER on a stretcher. I had no idea . . .”
The silence that momentarily rested between us vibrated with the barbed resentment we rarely acknowledged—how Owen contacted me more often than he did his own sister. This hurt her, and I knew it. Mostly I avoided the subject of Owen with her and, honestly, with myself. I tried not to think about him or what we’d lost or what could have been. I’d never even told Lucas about my first love. I’d wanted it to be over and needed it to be over, and talking about it didn’t seem to help to that end.
But it was the truth—I’d been in love with Owen since I was thirteen years old. Our first kiss was the night before his mom left. He found me on the dock, spread like a starfish and gazing at the sky, memorizing the constellations, ones even now I can name: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Taurus, the Seven Sisters. His presence carried warmth, and I spoke before he knew I’d seen him. “Isn’t the sky a mystery?” I asked quietly. “It’s a thing without being anything. It’s air and emptiness and nothing and everything.”
“You’re crazy,” he said and sat next to me.
At thirteen years old I wanted to be a lot of things but crazy wasn’t one of them. “I am not.”
“It’s okay to be,” he said. “Some of the best are.”
What I really wanted was for him to love me. Even then, I knew that he must love me or something fragile inside me would fracture. I sat, gazed at him, brought my knees to my chest and rested my chin there. He peered back at me as if I, not the sky, was the mystery, a star just found, something unknowable that he wanted to know.
The first kiss landed on my hairline, and maybe that was all he’d ever meant to do. I’ve never asked. But I lifted my face, at thirteen years old, to the fifteen-year-old boy I loved, to the wish I’d made inside a river, to all I thought I wanted, and he kissed me again.
I was too young to date or even understand much about the stirrings inside that began that night, a low-grade fever that loosened my limbs and distracted me from my schoolwork. I couldn’t have said what it was that uncurled, but from that moment on, whatever awoke inside me longed for Owen McKay.
Lainey’s voice startled me from the past. “But he’s okay?” Her voice shifted with a tinge of annoyance.
“Owen?”
“Yes, Owen.”
“I think so, yes. When I left the hospital he was already in recovery and doing fine. All they had to do was set his bone and . . .”
“I’ll call him when we hang up,” she said. “Did you go check on him?”
“No, Lainey. I didn’t. I only went to meet with my administrator to find out what happened with the patient who died.” I sounded angry and maybe I was. I didn’t want it to be about Owen.
“Whatever happened, the hospital knows and you know that your mistake wasn’t on purpose or even negligence. Right?”
“I don’t know.”
“What can I do?” Her voice softened, sounding like my best friend again.
“I don’t know what you can do or what I can do. I have to take some time off, I’m told.”
Crickets, and one lone bellowing frog, joined our conversation and I almost couldn’t tell which sounds came from Lainey’s background music and which were from my backyard.
“What did Lucas say?” she asked quietly.
“He’s angry. He hopes it isn’t true and wants me to hide until we know all is well. I hadn’t even told him about Atlanta yet. He didn’t know . . .”
“Does he now?”
“No. Because I’m going to have to tell Atlanta about this . . . and I will tell them tomorrow. But that’s not the worst part. It’s the thought that I might have killed a man. I’m scared to death.”
“You didn’t kill anyone, Bonny. Even if you made a mistake, it was the car wreck that killed him. Words have power. Don’t say that.”
“I don’t know what to do next. Everything was . . . ready to go.”
“Go home,” she said, so simply.
Those two words shimmered in the evening, and I knew what she meant. She spoke of Watersend, South Carolina. Until last year, I hadn’t returned since our summer together at thirteen years old. And neither had she. But whenever I talked of that town and that river house I used the word “home.” After Mama had died last year, I’d gone to see the house but only to make plans to fix it and sell it. I hadn’t dipped my toes into the water or even ventured into the quaint town to satisfy my internal thirteen-year-old’s curiosity.
In our family, the river house held no sentimental value for anyone but me. Only I still held a candle for the sand-crusted memories of childhood summers. Mama and Daddy had owned numerous rental homes in various coast
al towns—Dad’s retirement job (hobby) and source of income. When they’d passed, they’d left it up to my brother, Percy, and me to sell off the houses, one by one. The river house in Watersend, South Carolina, was the last to go. I’d hired a fix-it crew and had modernized the house, opening the kitchen to the family room, and repainted. I’d ordered stainless steel appliances and planned on staking a For Sale sign in the front yard in three weeks. I’d been dragging my feet through the Lowcountry mud and muck of memories, hesitant to give it up.
“It’s still a mess,” I said. “I’ve had the management company working on it. I haven’t checked on it in months. They send photos, but I was going to go before . . . before the new job. The last I heard, a vagrant had made herself at home.”
“I think you should be the vagrant.” Her laughter was as comforting as it had always been. “It can’t be that bad. It’s been rented until only a year ago. If you really are being forced to take some time off, for God’s sake, use it.”
The sun sank lower and faded into the horizon as Lainey’s advice melted through my panic and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it. “I’m supposed to start at Emory in thirty days, if I still have that job,” I said. “Maybe I could go for a couple weeks while the storm dies down here. But, Lainey, I won’t go without you.”
She was silent, and the flutes and chimes were louder, as if she’d set the phone down. She had vowed, long ago, to never return to the place where she and Owen had lost their mother. I was testing her vow. I tried again. “We’ll both go,” I said. “Together. Bring the kids. I’ll bring Piper. I’ll finish fixing it and we can go for one last visit before I sell it.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t go back there. You know that.”
“It’s been over thirty years. Maybe it’s time.”
The Bookshop at Water's End Page 3