“You don’t owe me anything, Owen. You do not have to follow me to fix anything or save anything. This is mine alone, and I don’t want you with me. I don’t.”
“I want to be with you. I want to go with you. Please.”
“For the first time in my life, Owen, I do not want you. I’m not being cruel, or maybe I am, but I need to go home.”
“I’m not leaving. I’m going to be right here when you return.”
“Here’s the problem, Owen. Now you’re tangled with all that is dreadful. Right now when I look at you I think of the night we lost your mom. I think of killing a man. I think of losing my job. You’ve become entangled with all that breaks my heart. With all that hurts.”
“Let me untangle myself,” he said.
The river moved by the dock, and there Lainey and I were, thirteen years old and jumping into these waters at high tide, baptizing ourselves and believing that we could wish ourselves a perfect life. We knew our future was charmed, that whatever we did, from that underwater moment on, would be as magical as the full moon and the dolphin that had nosed by us, touching us with its silken skin. Lainey and I, naked and making wishes, diving our heads underwater with each wish, wanting life to unspool itself at our command.
“Lainey and I skinny-dipped here one night, made wishes.”
“I know,” he said. “I saw you.”
“You saw us then? You never told me.”
“It was so beautiful and private. And I loved you even then.”
“Owen.” It felt as if everything I’d ever wanted or needed to say had already been spoken. “I have to go.” I touched his cheek and walked away. I’d driven halfway to Charleston before I realized I’d grabbed my purse, my phone and my wallet, but not my shoes. I was barefoot, humbled and returning to what I’d left behind.
chapter 34
LAINEY MCKAY
The sun beat with viscid weight as I walked to the bookstore alone. Fear joined with expectation as I walked along the Watersend sidewalks. Would Mom be there with Loretta? Would they show me pictures? Would the old woman tell me something awful or wonderful?
Loretta had been right to make me wait, to send me home with my son and family to sleep and reconcile both the losing and the finding. Whatever there was for me to know about my mom, or even see, couldn’t have been done with any consideration the day before. Tim had arrived hours after George was found, and it was my family, the one I’d chosen and made, that had mattered last night.
I hadn’t told Tim why I was walking into town, and this was a betrayal. Yet for me to explain to him that I was leaving for a few hours, when he’d only just arrived, and that I was sneaking off on one more possible wild-goose chase, would have seemed to be another kind of betrayal. Which was worse? Sin by omission or by acting yet again on my obsession?
I hadn’t told anyone, actually. Not even Owen, who must not have heard her say “tomorrow at noon.” I felt that this moment was all mine, right or wrong. I’d left the house with some mumbled excuse about going to the store, needing fresh air.
Yet again I had walked away from my family to discover if someone else knew about Mom, if someone else had found her. I would ask a woman who lived in a cottage by the edge of the ocean, a woman my son had wandered to for crayons and apple juice.
The bookshop door was propped open, and Mimi stood at the front table rearranging the display. I glanced at my watch: noon exactly. I could become preoccupied and lose a son, lose track of time, and yet arrive on the dot to discover what these women knew about my lost mother. Mimi glanced up as if she felt me outside on the sidewalk staring at her, as if I’d whispered in her ear, I’m here. She smiled and waved.
I entered the store, and the cold blast of air hit me like a splash of water. I shivered. The other woman, Loretta, came from somewhere in the back of the store. She wore a long muumuu, flowered and as bright as her smile. Her hair was plaited into two braids like a child’s, one falling over each shoulder. “Good morning,” she said.
I nodded, not trusting my voice just yet.
She came to me and placed her hand on my forearm, and then took my hand. “Follow me,” she said.
Mimi called out Harrington’s name and he appeared from behind a bookshelf. “I’ve got the store covered,” he said.
The three of us exited the shop. I dropped Loretta’s hand and found my voice. “Where are we going?”
The two women glanced at each other and then both at me, but neither answered. A block later we turned left at the corner where the barbershop light twirled in a hypnotic swirl. We walked two more blocks until we reached Thomas Street, and then walked past the hardware store and the real estate office with photos of houses and lots pasted on its windows. Onward for another minute or two until, still in silence, we reached the town’s small African Methodist Episcopal—AME—church. It was a simple wooden structure on the river, painted white with a spire reaching toward the clear sky. The river, the same waters that coursed behind Bonny’s house, ran alongside the church as a companion.
Had Mom been hiding inside a church? I moved toward the front, a curved double door with an iron handle. I placed my hand upon it and glanced at the cross, which was carved into the door. Mimi placed her hand on mine. “No, dear.”
I spun around. “What?”
“This way,” she said, and she led me around to the side of the church where the graveyard, simple and surrounded by a rusty iron fence, filled the yard and ended abruptly at the river.
We stopped beneath a wild and exuberant live oak tree, its branches gnarled and spread into many arms of green and canopied protection. “Can you please tell me what is going on?” My heart beat in the bottom of my throat, slow and sluggish.
“Hold on, dear,” Loretta said. “Hold on.” She took in a long breath and lifted her face to the sky, closed her eyes. A small tear ran down her cheek and she allowed it to settle in the wrinkles that webbed from the corner of her mouth.
I glanced around. Was Mom on a bench? Living homeless on the river’s edge in a tent or, worse, out in the elements? Crazy? Roaming Watersend like a haunted and wasted ghost? Tim was right—some things are best left to mystery. Some knowings are best left to their secret places, crouched in the dark to stay.
“Enough,” I said.
“Yes,” Mimi said. “Enough is right.” She then stepped out from the shade of the tree and I followed. Only steps later we reached the ornate gate of the graveyard. A week before, I’d come here with the kids to let them walk out onto the church’s long dock. They’d giggled at the fact that “dead people” were only a few yards away. “Were there ghosts here?” they’d asked with horrified laughter. “Why would they plant them here?” Daisy had wondered out loud.
“I’m sure they were here long before the rest of the town,” I’d told her.
Dead people. The phrase caught in the back of my mind, in the sticky places where I’d feared this answer.
Loretta and Mimi entered; I followed. Headstones were scattered in a random pattern. No planning here. I already knew but didn’t want to know. Maybe Mom was standing behind a tree or waiting at the river. Maybe . . . always a maybe.
Mimi stopped at a worn headstone, then brushed off a magnolia leaf and a web of fallen moss. One large sunflower lay on the ground before the stone. I squatted to read the etchings. Rosie O’Hare: May 24, 1941–January 28, 2016. Then, below that: Announcing her place in the family of things.
“Who is Rosie O’Hare?” I asked, even as I knew. “And announcing her place?” I ran my hands over the etchings, slowly tracing each letter.
“She changed her name,” Loretta said in a voice full of tears, flooded in sorrow. “And that is the last line to a poem she discovered during her final days. A poem by Mary Oliver that begins . . .”
“‘You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees . . .’” I quoted the beg
inning of a poem I knew well. “I know it. I’ve used it in my art.”
“Yes.” That was Mimi’s voice.
“You know this?” I glanced up.
“Yes, she followed your career. She bought that piece. I have it now,” Loretta said. “It hangs in my bedroom.”
“What?” I stood then, a great surge of anger and fear and confusion in a hurricane of conflict. “I don’t understand.”
“Your mother died less than a year ago, after a horrid battle with the flu. Pneumonia took grip of her fragile body and she couldn’t fight it.” Mimi’s voice cracked with emotion.
“She’s gone?” I cried out. “And no one thought to tell me? To call me? To call Owen? Her children?” One emotion won out: anger. It flooded and overflowed; my voice echoed across the yard, bouncing against headstones.
“We promised,” Loretta said and glanced at Mimi.
“You promised what?”
“That we would not betray her by telling you what she did not want you to know until you were ready,” Mimi explained. “We vowed.”
“Until I was ready? I’ve been ready for over thirty-five years. I was ready when I waited all night for her to come home. I was ready when I went to live with my distracted aunt. I was ready when I went to boarding school and then college. I was ready when I married and wanted her there. I was ready when I gave birth to two of her grandchildren and searched for her, hiring detectives, combing morgues and searching homeless shelters.” I ran out of breath and sank to the ground, next to her grave. The warm and damp earth soaked through my shorts.
“Oh, darling,” Mimi said.
“Why would she let me wonder? Why would she . . . ?” A sob of great pain broke free. “What did I do so wrong that she couldn’t come back to me?”
Mimi lowered herself to the ground, slowly, until she sat next to me. She rested her hand on the earth of the grave. “There’s much to tell you. But whatever you may believe now, know this: any choice she made was out of love. Every single choice. We didn’t always agree with her. But those were her choices, not ours. And as I said, they were made in love.”
“Tell me everything.”
We stood and made our way to a bench under a live oak. A plaque stated: Dedicated to all those who mourn yet have hope.
Hope.
Right.
“Everything,” I repeated.
Loretta began. “She made us vow that we would not tell you or Owen of her life unless you returned here. She believed that if you came back to this place, to the river house, then you’d be ready.”
I closed my eyes. My God, they were right. Maybe they were right. “I thought the worst thing that could happen was knowing my mother was dead. But the worst thing might be finding out that she was here all along but didn’t want to tell me, to be with me.”
Loretta spread her hands toward me, a supplication. “That’s not it at all, Lainey. Not at all. This, my child,” Loretta said, “was not a case of not wanting. She ached. She wept. She felt unworthy to return to you. No matter how much we told her that she was worthy, she didn’t feel ready. She’d only been clean a few months. She knew you were happy and safe and she didn’t want to disrupt your lives.”
“Happy and safe?” I said this in a voice that wasn’t mine, one I’d never heard, and I almost turned to see where it had come from, a scratchy yelp. “How could she have possibly known that?”
“She kept up with both of you—on the Internet and even using us to ask questions and seek answers.”
“And you think the Internet is the best source to tell you that I’m okay?”
Loretta cringed, her face tight, and then relaxed. “It was more than that. Do you remember the time someone bought your large piece of Marilyn Monroe, the one with newspaper articles about her life, covering her body?”
I paused. “Of course.”
“That was all of us . . . for your mom.”
“Oh.” The world as I knew it slowly shifted. “You are going to have to start earlier. When did she come back here or was she always here?”
Mimi took over now. “No. She wasn’t always here.”
“I’ve been looking for her all these years. I even hired a detective. For a little bit I even thought of leaving this vacation to fly to Texas, where a woman named Kara came out of a facility without ID, and I was going to go there. That’s how desperate I’ve been through the years. That’s how . . .”
“She never wanted you to hurt.” Mimi’s voice broke and I took terrible satisfaction in it. “She wanted the opposite. In some ways she did die the day she disappeared,” Mimi said. “And every day afterward for years. To herself and to the world. There’s no way to tell you how she crawled out of that grave. It took years and years.”
“I would have helped her,” I said. “I would have helped her dig her way out. No matter what.”
Loretta looked me in the eyes. “You were a child. She would have dragged you in with her.” She shook her head. “And your dad was going to have her locked up by the time she crossed the Georgia border. First jail time, and then make sure she never saw you again while you were children. When your dad told her that everyone would be better off without her, she believed it to be true. She killed the dog, and it could have been you.”
“She didn’t kill the dog,” I said. “We adopted him and had him for another twelve years. He was the best part of my life after she left.”
“What?” Loretta lifted her eyebrows as if they’d been pulled from above.
“Yes,” I said. “We named him Ned.”
“After Nancy Drew’s boyfriend,” Mimi said, and she closed her eyes. “Right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Ned Nickerson.”
“She didn’t kill the dog.” Loretta stated the fact one more time.
“Does that matter?” I asked. “If she’d known that, would she have come back?”
Loretta opened her eyes and tears sat in them unspilled. “No. She didn’t leave because she thought she’d killed a dog. She left because she’d endangered the only things in her life she loved: both of you. Because she could have killed you. If she’d stayed, she would have lost you anyway. That was the living hell of it all. She could lose you her way or your dad’s way. She chose her own. After she was locked up for a while, he was going to make sure she didn’t have custody. He threatened to cut her off from the family. It was his way, or hers. And with her way, she could find a way back to you. At least she thought so.”
“But she didn’t.” My mind raced, wanting all the information to download without having to wait for explanations.
“You’re right.” Mimi shifted in her seat to allow shade to fall across her face.
“What happened? . . . Everything,” I said. “Every little thing.”
“Well, here is what she told us. After she left that night, she wandered from city to city. She tried to get clean.” Mimi took a breath. “But for all her life, she had nightmares of that car wreck, but in her dreams you were both gone . . . dead. And she would descend into the drink or the sedating pills again.”
“Dear God,” I said. “But it didn’t happen! We didn’t die. Where did she go at . . . first?” I asked so quietly that Loretta strained forward to hear me.
“That first night, she walked as far as she could and slept in an empty house, and then another and another, until she found a shelter in Columbia. She told them that her name was Rosie O’Hare, and from there she moved from shelter to shelter. She lost the names of cities and towns. Or she didn’t tell us. Either way, she stayed mostly with the Salvation Army, where she could work and help others. She put her sewing skills to use, and although she never lived on the street, she never again had a home. She never told us the exact reason for returning here, other than one day, while sewing a wedding gown for a woman in South Carolina, she decided to come back. We can’t know all her reasons, a
s she never told us, except to say that she just knew the only place she might find hope for finally becoming clean was in the place it had all started . . . or ended.”
“That sounds like something Bonny would say,” I said. “What is it with this place?”
“There’s a little bit of magic in our river,” Loretta said with a small smile. “When she arrived, the first thing she did was go to Mimi, who’d always been her ally, even during those summers when everyone else shunned her. Mimi called me and we gathered. She asked us to keep her secret and we did. She’d only been sober for a few months and she wanted it to last before she called you or your brother.”
“How long ago was this?”
“A little more than a year.”
“She’s been here? Right here? Didn’t she wonder about us?” I asked. “I mean, all the time? Didn’t she think we might need a mother in the world?”
Loretta’s face crumpled with the threat of tears, and she took off her glasses to look directly at me. “I will not ever”—her voice shook—“be able to tell you of the hurt and pain your mother experienced being away from the two of you. You were the only reason she even tried again. Every day she was sober she thought it brought her closer to the day she would see you again. She stayed away because she thought it was best for you and because she was ashamed of not only the life she’d lived since leaving you but also the way she looked, how she’d done damage to her body and mind. She felt she looked . . . ravaged. She wanted to get right and then see you.”
“That’s not how it works!” I cried out. “I didn’t love her only when she ‘got right’ but because she was my mom.”
“She believed that one day it would be the right time. Don’t you for one second believe it was because she didn’t hurt or that she didn’t care. She loved you both deeply.” Loretta waved her hand toward the direction of the river. “I understand you must hurt, but she loved you without wavering.”
“Love is showing up. It’s being there. It’s not just a feeling.”
The Bookshop at Water's End Page 25