When I was leaving the store, Ms. Loretta walked in, and for a minute I forgot who she really was—the woman who had known where Lainey and Owen’s disappeared mom had gone. Then it hit me and I raised my eyebrows and stared at Mimi. Suddenly Mimi wasn’t just the adorable woman who owned a bookshop and liked movies on opening night and ate pound cake at four p.m.
“You knew,” I said. And then I looked at Ms. Loretta. “How could you have played with George that day and not said anything? Did you know he was your friend’s grandson?”
“I did, Piper. I did know who he was. It was one of the best days of my life.” She smoothed her hands along her flower-print dress, a faded yellow pattern that looked as though it had been left in the sun too long.
“Were you going to tell Lainey and Owen or just stay hidden?” I knew these weren’t my questions to ask, but I loved Lainey. I’d seen her be sad about her mom, heard her talk about the heartbreak. And what would I do without my mom? How could I live without her?
Mimi rested her hand on my arm as if to quiet me, but Ms. Loretta answered anyway. “Yes, I was going to tell them. I just wanted to find the right words and the right time. But I guess that was decided for me.”
“And why didn’t you tell us?” I asked Mimi. “I thought you loved us and that . . .”
“It wasn’t my story to tell,” Mimi said slowly.
“Well, like you said, sometimes your stories tell on you.” I meant to sound funny and witty, but it came out cruel and sharp.
Ms. Loretta set her little purse on the counter. “I understand why you’d be angry, Piper. I really do.”
“It’s not me. It’s Lainey. She was obsessed with finding her mom. It tore her apart.”
Ms. Loretta’s eyes filled with tears and she set her hands, one over the other, on her chest, over her heart.
Mimi stepped in then. “Okay, darling. I think you need to get on home and tell everyone about our grand idea.”
“Okay,” I said and glanced between them. “That really was none of my business. Ryan always used to tell me that I put my nose into . . .”
Mimi placed her hand on my arm and rubbed it as if she were applying sunblock—or enough love to keep me from my terrible thoughts. “Darling, who really cares what Ryan thinks? And honestly, you can ask us anything you want.”
I tried to smile at them both before I walked away, but my mouth didn’t seem to be working toward smiles quite yet.
chapter 36
BONNY BLANKENSHIP
The For Sale sign swung in the wind from its perch in my yard. Lucas had put the house on the market just as he’d said. It was his way of saying, You left? Then I’ll make the decisions. In my haste to escape the pain I’d relinquished everything.
I drove past the house and around to the alley behind to park the car. If Lucas was waiting for me, he would be able to see me out the kitchen window, a place he’d stood all our married life to watch for my return from work late at night or early in the morning. It had always been a comfort knowing someone waited.
The car felt like a shield as I took a few deep breaths before entering the house. I’d thought that going to Watersend would be the answer, the way to peace, but just because I’d left, it hadn’t meant Lucas or my mistakes had gone anywhere else.
The pebbled walkway to the back door shifted under my feet with that familiar crunch of walking toward home, a sound of the past when I’d returned from a long day at work. I entered the kitchen and Lucas stood at the sink, a coffee mug cradled in both hands. I was startled by his good looks, just as handsome even in middle age as he’d been the day I met him. Polished and successful. But he’d become a stranger to me.
He didn’t speak as I dropped my purse onto the counter. Gus came bounding in, all energy, all loping gaiety. He plowed into me and I crouched to hug him, bury my face into his fur. “Hello, old buddy.” He didn’t know my sins; he didn’t know anything but love.
I stood at the table where we’d eaten our meals for twenty-two years, where we’d helped Piper with homework and sifted through mail and bills, where we’d drunk coffee in the morning and wine at night, where we’d entertained guests and family.
“Do you want to tell me what happened with the little boy Piper lost?” he asked and didn’t move to sit.
“That’s where you want to start?” I asked. “I can tell you about that. But first let me go upstairs and take a shower . . . get on some clean clothes.” I pointed to my feet. “And shoes would be nice, too. I just walked out in a daze.”
“It seems like you’ve done a lot of that lately.” He ran his hands across his weary face and then he gazed directly at me. “We’ll talk now. You can take a shower later.” He placed his hand on my arm to stay me.
A battle took place in my chest, one that had warred before, between the two needs: to please and appease him, be the good wife who would make it all okay, and, on the contrary, to do what I felt was needed, do what felt right to me. I took his hand from my arm and took three steps around him. “No, Lucas. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He grabbed me again. “I said you can shower after we talk.”
I again took his hand from my arm and moved forward toward the stairwell. His body passed mine in the hallway, a rough shoulder to shoulder, and then he stood in front of me before I reached the stairs.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “I need to take a shower. I’m a mess.” My voice broke like a brittle twig he’d stepped upon.
“You need? What you need?” he asked, his voice so deep and full of resentment that his words felt like a physical punch.
“Yes,” I said. “Please move out of my way. This is crazy, Lucas. Don’t . . .”
“Don’t what? Don’t be your husband? I’ve already got that part figured out. Don’t stand in your way? I can’t see much that has. Don’t tell you what to do? What is it you don’t want, Bonny?”
“Don’t make this worse than it needs to be. Please move.”
He did. He stepped aside just enough that I could pass while brushing against his body, immovable and firm. I took the steps one by one, shifting to the left as I always had because the right side creaked. The family photos framed and in chronological order marched up the wall against damask wallpaper, a montage of our lives from our wedding photographs to Piper’s high school graduation.
I walked through our bedroom straight for the bathroom, although what I really wanted was to curl into the bed, keep the shades drawn and sleep until it all went away—the guilt, the death, the divorce and the hole in my stomach that seemed to open to the magnet of all my misdeeds.
Once showered and changed, I found Lucas exactly where I’d left him—glaring up the stairwell. Without discussing it, we found ourselves again in the kitchen, our positions resumed, facing each other over the table.
“Right now can we deal with your medical license? Your suspension? And then our divorce and our daughter, Piper, with whom you absconded to another town.”
I laughed, and it felt really good. “Absconded. For God’s sake, Lucas. She’s almost twenty years old.”
His face tightened and his eyes narrowed. His face became a blueprint for all his anger and frustration.
“Right now I need to go to the hospital and meet with Frank Preston.”
“First you are going to tell me what’s going on.”
“It was my fault. I made a mistake and a man died. Is that what you want to hear?” I wasn’t in the room anymore. I was floating above it, watching us having this conversation that seemed unimaginable.
“You’re so cold,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t even know you. You just said you killed a man, and you’re like ice.”
“Ice?” Tremors ran across my face; the twitching of my mouth and eyes were a dead giveaway that I would start to sob. “I’m dying inside, Lucas. This is the worst thing I could imagine. I don�
�t know how to be or what to be. This loss, this death, does not go away. My imagined future is gone. It changed me. It changed my life. Now I have to find new possibilities, a new beginning that wakes up the forgotten parts of me, the pieces of me I’d set aside.”
This was our chance. I saw it from my detached position. He could step in right now in my pain and be the man he said he wanted to be. The man he’d promised all those years ago when he’d said, I will be there for you. For us.
“It’s bad. You’re right,” he said, his face still hollowed out with anger. “I don’t know how you could have done this. What were you thinking that night?”
The bottom of everything there could be between us dropped out right there, and I closed my eyes without an answer.
He tented his hands to prop his chin on two forefingers: the lawyer ready to make an argument. “You don’t know what you were thinking? What you were doing? You have no idea why you were so preoccupied that you made a mistake?”
When Lucas asked a question this way he already had the answer. I’d been here before. His clients had been here before. His defendants and the prosecutors.
I stood and pressed my hands to the back of the chair, then leaned forward so our faces were close enough to kiss. “Stop.” I turned and headed for the hallway.
“Don’t walk out on this.”
I spun around. “Out on what? You berating me? There’s no need for you to tell me how badly I’ve messed up. I’ve berated myself for as long and as deep as I can.”
I moved toward the front of the house and ran up the stairwell. He called after me. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for something in the attic.”
“Hopefully your mind. Because obviously you’ve lost it.”
I opened the hallway door where stairs led to the attic. I flicked on the lights and stepped up. It didn’t take long, but I dug through the boxes in the very back, the ones with my childhood paraphernalia. My Girl Scout uniform. My corsage from the debutante ball. Photo albums from high school. Yearbooks. And there it was under the junior high class pictures, still in its crinkled plastic envelope: the Girl Detective notebook. I sat on the dusty hardwood floor and opened it. The single lightbulb hanging above delivered a circle of jaundiced light on the page. I opened the notebook and a sheaf of dried and golden sea oats fell out. Lainey and I had used it as a bookmark all those years ago. My eyes scanned the words we’d written, the doodles we’d drawn.
But it wasn’t time for this, for reading and delving into the notebook. I also grabbed a box of childhood photos and tucked it under my arm. Before I took this back to the river house, I needed to face Frank. I returned to the main floor and dropped the notebook and box into my bag. I hugged Gus one more time and told him, as I had before, that I would return for him. And I would. But not Lucas. Never again. These were silent promises made to my soul and no one else.
As I left the house, Lucas’s words pelted me like gunshot that followed me out the door and to the car. And even when I could no longer hear his voice, his words repeated over and over in my head. You killed a man. What were you thinking? You’ve ruined everything.
Robotic, I drove into the hospital parking lot and parked in my old spot, which was vacant. Approaching the sliding glass doors of the emergency room, I felt fear swimming inside my belly, gathering strength. One step and then another. Don’t meet anyone’s gaze. Don’t look toward the waiting room where you spoke with the widow. Then I was at the door of Frank’s office.
He greeted me with such undeserved kindness that my knees bent and almost buckled beneath me. I sank into a chair across from him, where he explained all that he had already told me on the phone. I could come back to work. It was a grade-four liver laceration. The widow did not blame me. Errors are made. In fact, up to four hundred thousand errors a year. We are all human. Mr. Rohr had life-threatening injuries already. He wouldn’t have made it through surgery. I was one of their finest doctors. Surely all the good I’d done needed to be balanced against this one mistake, couldn’t I see that?
All the words Frank meant to be a panacea could not change how I felt.
“Do you know the last thing he said to me?” I leaned forward and asked Frank. “While he looked right at me, before that last breath, before he exhaled, before his eyes went from bright and scared to empty?”
“No. You didn’t tell me.”
“He said, ‘I haven’t done the one thing I meant to do.’”
Frank closed his eyes and his hands went to the lapels of his lab coat, grabbed their corners and rested there.
He opened his eyes. “It’s so hard to lose a life, Bonny. We all feel the pain. You let me know when you think you might want to return to the ER. We are ready when you are.”
“I don’t know if I can, Frank. I just don’t know.”
“You can. But if you need more time, I understand.”
“What would you do?” I asked and placed my palms flat on the desk, spread them wide and leaned into them.
“I’ve thought about it every day since you left,” he said. “What would I do? How would I handle it? Where would I go? And honestly, Bonny, I have a new answer every day. I feel your devastation. We are all here to save lives. We are all here to make a difference in the world. We are all here because we’ve never wanted to be anything other than what we are: doctors. And I know that no matter what my answers are to all of those other questions, I would return to being a doctor. It is who I am. It is my one thing.”
“Thank you, Frank.” I stood and shook his hand. I glanced around the room on my way out, the diplomas and awards and accouterments of a well-lived doctor. I thought of my own diplomas and awards on the walls in my study at home, and thought of their worthlessness compared to a life, another breath taken, another day lived.
chapter 37
BONNY BLANKENSHIP
Tory Rohr’s house rested under the twilight of late evening at the dead end of a marsh-lined road. A front porch swing hung empty with a book open and facedown on the seat. She lived in Mount Pleasant, over the bridge from my own home on the way to the islands. I hadn’t called, although maybe I should have, but I didn’t want to take the chance that she would refuse to see me. But as I parked in a curve of the road it occurred to me that she might not be home or, worse, I would be unwelcome.
The pebbled pathway crunched under my feet as I approached the front door, an announcement of an arriving guest proclaimed by a barking dog somewhere inside. The door opened before I reached the porch and a woman’s voice said, “Stop, Lincoln. Stop. It’s just a guest.” Then she looked up, this small woman with silver hair, and waved at me like she’d been expecting me.
“Hello, there,” she called out.
I didn’t answer because my voice was stuck in the depth of my chest, caught on my ribs, trying to make it up. I reached the bottom of her porch stairs and met her gaze.
“Oh, my.” She placed her palm on her chest, her fingers on her throat fluttering like she was reaching for a necklace that was no longer there—something essential missing from her life. “Dr. Blankenship,” she said.
“Yes.” I took two steps back. “I should have called. I see that now.”
Tory released the dog, a black poodle that plodded down the stairs to immediately stick his nose into my crotch. Tory busted out laughing. “Lincoln,” she shouted. “No!” She came down the stairs to grab him by the collar and shoo him off to the yard.
“He has no manners and Nicholas was his only disciplinarian . . .” Her voice trailed off and I knew where it went—along the lost path where Nicholas had gone before her.
I clasped my hands in front of my stomach, a knotted ball to keep myself from wringing them or waving them frantically in the air like I did when I was nervous. “I’m here to tell you how deeply sorry I am about your husband. I was the doctor that night. It was my job to save him.”
“Come, dear,” she said as if I were a child who needed calming. “Come sit with me on the porch.”
I followed her up the stairs and we sat on two rocking chairs facing each other across an iron coffee table. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked.
“No, thank you. I don’t want you to go to any trouble. I’m just here to ask what I can do. How I can help you. To make sure you’re . . . okay.” I stopped and exhaled. “I don’t know why I’m here except to apologize as deeply as possible. That night was the worst of my life. And yet, as awful as it was, it was much, much worse for you.”
“They told me everything,” she said. “How chaotic the ER was with the wreck and then another injury in surgery. Nicholas wouldn’t have made it; I know that. Even if he had rolled into the surgery room, he wouldn’t have made it. There were too many injuries inside his beautiful body. I don’t blame you, Dr. Blankenship. I blame the drunk driver who was texting while he tried to get to the next party. I blame the construction on Church Street. I blame his work partner for making him go out on the night he wanted to stay home. I blame the world and all its misery. I blame myself for marrying an extraordinary man who ran hard and fast and whom I always knew took chances. I blame love and hate and drunks.” She smiled and leaned across the table, held both hands out for mine. “But I don’t blame you.”
“I do.” I took her offered hands.
“Please don’t. There are enough burdens in this world. Don’t make this one of yours. And I beg of you not to let it keep you from being a doctor. I’ve learned of your reputation and it’s one of the best out there.”
“I need to tell you what he said when he died.”
She released my hands and placed hers in a knot on her lap. “You told me that night.”
“Yes, but there was something else.”
The Bookshop at Water's End Page 27