They stood in the entryway, silent, not moving, until her sobs turned to hiccups, and she began to shake with cold.
“I’ll get you some dry clothes,” Alden said and dropped his arms abruptly, leaving her alone and appalled at her behavior.
He hadn’t turned on any lights and Meri stumbled through the dark toward his bedroom, which had at one time been the cook’s quarters, long before her time or his.
She met him coming back.
“Towel on the bed along with some sweats. You’ll look ridiculous in them. But I think we could use a little humor, don’t you?”
A shrill whistling sound came from the kitchen. “Take a shower if you want. I’ll make you some tea.” He was acting as if she’d just been caught in an April shower instead of passing through the eye of hell. She stepped inside and slammed the door.
Even that was aborted, since the door was swollen from the humidity and refused to close. It made her laugh, but she quelled it. Laughter was too close to tears. She grabbed the towel off the bed and went into the bathroom.
Meri lost track of time in the shower. The water was hot and the jet was strong, and for a second she forgot that her life had just come tumbling down around her ears. She stood under the spray much like she had run through the rain, mindless, trying to drive the knowledge away. But it wasn’t going away—even if she shriveled up to nothing.
She turned off the water and climbed out of the tub. Toweled off her hair, and smelling like Alden’s soap and shampoo, went to the bedroom to put on his clothes.
There was something weird about that and on a better day she might have found something clever to say about it, but tonight, she just let it wrap around her. Protective, even though the sweatshirt sleeves were a good six inches too long, and the pants had to be rolled up several times just so she wouldn’t trip on them. And apropos of the man who was something between enigma, work in progress, and sage of the ages, he’d left her a pair of wooly socks to wear.
Raw and exhausted, she padded out to the living room, where a tea tray and newly lit fire were waiting. Alden wasn’t there, but she heard his voice from the dining room.
She had meant to come out and apologize for treating him like a punching bag, for being ungrateful and selfish, but the apology died on her lips.
“Why don’t I keep her here for a while tonight? Give her a chance to calm down.”
She marched over to the archway and ambushed him as he hung up.
“Keep me? Keep me? You make me sound like a child or a half-wit.”
“Do I? I just thought that you might want to get a little distance on the whole thing and give them a chance to recover from your outburst. They’re pretty upset, and I think we’ve all had enough drama for one day.”
Her eyes filled up again. She didn’t think she had any tears left.
“Plus it’s still raining and I’ll have to walk you home, and then I’ll have to walk home again. I’ve gotten wet enough for you this evening.” He walked past her to the coffee table and began to pour tea into two mugs.
Like a slap to a hysteric, his attitude drove any tears away. He always knew just when to administer a dash of cold water, this reclusive, sometimes bitter, man. She probably needed it, but tonight she was too bruised to withstand it; she lashed back.
“Why do you sit around in the dark? You have money.” It was a cheap shot, and she didn’t expect an answer.
“Not as much as you might think.”
It surprised her so much that she blurted out. “Two kids can’t cost that much.”
He handed her a mug. “When their mother is Jennifer, they can. Besides, this is all I need.” He made an offhanded gesture at the room; the couch, chair, and a few tables spotlighted by the fire and reading lamp, the ceiling disappearing into darkness, the windows and French doors framing the night.
When she was a child and Alden’s dad had been alive, there had been much more furniture. Antiques and family heirlooms and all the detritus from several generations of Corrigans.
But Alden had begun minimizing after his father’s death, and his ex-wife had helped herself to many of the family heirlooms.
Meri took the mug. Alden’s divorce had not been amicable, she knew that. She remembered coming home from college once, anxious to consult him about the internship she was up for. But when she reached the house, she heard them arguing. Yelling, really. Nora and Lucas were sitting outside on the steps, huddled together. There was a crash from inside the house. Nora pulled the younger Lucas to his feet, and they ran toward the beach; Meri crept away and tried to forget.
“Why don’t you sit down?”
“What? Oh.”
Meri squeezed past the wingback chair, its crinkled leather patched with gaffer’s tape. Stepped over the pile of books that littered the floor, and curled up on the couch. It was old like everything else in the room and was beginning to sag. But it was as comfortable as her grandmother’s lap. Her grandmother. A half sob escaped.
“Enough. You’ve had your cry; you took long enough in the shower to decipher the Rosetta stone, so you must have had time by now to get your head screwed on right.”
“You could be a little sympathetic. It’s horrible to show up to your birthday dinner and find out you were . . . you were . . .” She couldn’t say it.
“Switched at birth?” he said in sepulchral tones.
“Sometimes I hate you,” she blurted.
With the rain pelting against the glass of the French doors, and the waves crashing in the distance behind him, with the fire flickering against his harsh features, he looked like how she imagined Mephistopheles had looked when he pinned Faust to certain damnation.
“Do you?”
She shuddered. “No. But you’re not funny. It’s too close to a gothic horror story to joke about.”
“All we need is a crazy lady in the attic.”
“There isn’t one, is there?”
“No.” He picked up his mug and walked to the fireplace. “Just a few skeletons in the closets.”
“In my closet anyway. I just found out I’m not really my mother’s daughter. I don’t know who my mother is. Instead of proposing to me, Peter’s going back to law school . . .” She hadn’t meant to tell him that.
“The boyfriend?”
“Not the boyfriend, my boyfriend.”
“You have had an exciting birthday, haven’t you?”
She glared at him, a thousand things going through her mind.
“Don’t say it.”
“What?”
“Whatever you were about to say about me being a big brute, distant and unfeeling, callous and out of touch, and that I never really liked him anyway.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“I didn’t not like him.”
It had been exactly what she was thinking, even though she knew it wasn’t really true. Except about Peter. Alden was worse than her dad about Peter. Her dad. Had he known when he married her mother that Meri wasn’t really hers?
“I was just going to say that you don’t understand.”
“Actually I do.” He put his mug down and sat down next to her. “You have a family who loves you, no, who dotes on you.”
“But—”
“No buts. They adore you. Always have. Always will.”
“But I’m not really—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, will you give it a rest? Blood is highly overrated. Family is not about somebody who can get knocked up in thirty seconds of poor decision making. It’s about who loves you unconditionally for life. When you’re good, when you screw up, when you hurt them more than they deserve.
“My mother left my father and me when I was eight. Dad neglected her, so she found somebody else. She had to choose between him and us—him and me. She chose him. That’s blood for you. After she left, your mother and Gran became my mother and gran. That’s family. Finish your tea. I’ll walk you back.”
They finished the tea in silence. She knew he was mad at her, but
that was because he didn’t really understand what she felt.
He put his cup down and stood. “Come on. I’ll find you a rain slicker. I think Nora left one that might fit you. She’s as tall as you are now.”
She put her cup on the tray. “Don’t be mad at me.”
“I’m not mad.”
“You are. I know you all want what’s best for me. I know they love me, and I love them.” I even love you, you big bully. But she would never say so. “I just wasn’t expecting this; I wish it didn’t have to be so complicated.”
Alden passed his hand over his face.
“What now? I said I was sorry.”
“Let’s just go.”
Dan hung up the phone. “That was Alden. He’s bringing her back.”
Therese held tight to the back of the kitchen chair. She felt old. Maybe too old to face what might lay ahead. And she hated being in the position she’d been placed.
She’d had two choices, either lie to her dying daughter or lie to her granddaughter. What choices. Maybe she should have stuck with the living. Did the dead know whether their wishes were carried out or not? Did they care?
“How can I face her after what I’ve done? I should never have given her the letter, but I promised.”
“I know, Therese. This is what Laura wanted. But for heaven’s sake, hide that box. I don’t want to put her through any more tonight. She has enough to come to terms with. There’s plenty of time for the whole story to come out, once she’s gotten used to this part.”
Therese Calder slowly shook her head. “No. No more tonight.” She turned toward the hutch. God, she wanted to take the contents of that box and throw them into the fire. But it was too late for that. Once you started unraveling the past, you couldn’t stop it until you came to the end.
She slid the box toward her. It sagged a bit when she lifted it. It had been hidden away for a long time, and it was carrying a heavy cargo. She looked around the kitchen, suddenly uncertain as to where to put it.
“Here, give it to me. I’ll put it in the attic.”
“No, not the attic. Put it in the closet in my room.” Where I can watch over it as I have for thirty years.
They walked silently back over the dunes to the cottage. The rain had let up some, but a fine mist coated their slickers. Alden didn’t take a flashlight. Neither of them needed it. Even with the cloud cover they knew their way.
There had been back and forth between the houses for generations. A path had gradually formed from the tramp of years to and from.
What would happen now? Alden wondered. Would things change irrevocably? Would the path grow over? Which one of them would leave first. Him? The woman walking beside him, carrying her wet clothes in a plastic grocery bag?
Thirty years old. It was hard to believe. He still could remember the night she was born, most of it anyway. There were big gaps that he’d never been able to coax out of his subconscious. Maybe he didn’t have to know. Maybe none of them did.
He’d been against telling Meri. He didn’t like change. Not that kind of change anyway, the kind that brought upheaval as this was sure to do. Would she forgive them for keeping her in the dark all these years? Would she forgive him?
And what would learning the truth do to her?
“What?”
He looked sideways at her.
“What was the sigh for?”
“It was a yawn,” he lied. “Sorry. I was up early this morning.”
“Oh.”
They walked on. Toward the cottage, toward the yellow rectangles of light that could have been taken straight from Arthur Rackham. Hansel and Gretel, the Seven Dwarfs. Only when you got closer did it look like what it was, not a fairy tale, but a New England shake and stone farmhouse, built by pragmatic, hardworking farmers over a hundred years before.
Behind them, his house loomed like a bad memory—a monstrosity left over from the Gilded Age that didn’t quite make it to Newport. Now it was a drain on his finances and sorely in need of renovation.
Meri hesitated when they reached the kitchen door. Alden opened it and nudged her inside, shutting the door behind her. Then he shoved his hands in the pockets of his rain slicker and began his solitary walk home.
Was his promise to that poor girl fulfilled now that Meri knew? And when had his promise changed from obligation to joy?
Chapter 4
Meri heard the door close behind her. She’d been hoping Alden would stay for a few minutes at least, to help with the transition or lend moral support. But she should have known better.
Her dad and Gran stood together facing her like a photograph, stuck in time.
Feelings of love and remorse swept over her. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” her dad said and scooped her into a hug. “We all love you, sweetheart.”
“I know, Dad. It was just such a shock. I had no idea at all. And now . . . Well, I just feel like I don’t know who I am.”
“You’re a Calder Hollis,” Gran said.
Dan opened one arm and included Gran in the hug. She was small next to her son-in-law and granddaughter. Because Meri was her granddaughter—Alden was right. She knew Gran loved her, would always love her; she knew that. The problem wasn’t with them; it was with her, and she needed to figure out a way to come to terms with the other stuff herself. But that could take some time, once it had settled in, and she found out the whole story, and found her birth family, and then . . .
The next morning broke clean and sunny. It was going to be a gorgeous day and for seconds after waking in her room upstairs at Gran’s, Meri forgot the trauma of the previous night. But even the sun couldn’t keep realization at bay for long.
It all came back to her as soon as she saw Alden’s sweatpants and sweatshirt lying over the back of her desk chair. She curled up, unwilling to face the day. Face her new status.
Damn Alden and his “switched at birth” nonsense. But it wasn’t nonsense. Her mother had taken a baby that wasn’t hers and raised it as her own.
It would be laughable if it hadn’t been her. And she tried to imagine what she would think if she heard the story of someone else in that situation. Would she shrug it off and think so what? Laugh and say lucky kid? Or dismiss it as a fabrication since it would be impossible to pull off something like that in twentieth-century Rhode Island? Of course that proved not to be the case.
She groaned, then stopped herself, remembering Alden’s other words. They love you even when you hurt them. And she was not going to hurt them again. They had been good to her all her life. Whether she deserved it or not. She wouldn’t repay them by throwing that love in their faces.
Meri dressed in jeans, scrubbed her face, held a cold washcloth over her swollen eyes, covered the worst of the blotches with makeup, pulled her hair, a bit unwieldy from sleeping with it wet, into a ponytail, and went downstairs to face her new life.
Her father sat at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of steaming coffee. Gran was standing at the stove. “What would you like for breakfast?”
Meri didn’t think she could eat, but she’d taken Alden’s words to heart about hurting them so she said, “Do you still have some of that farm bacon from Scully’s?”
Gran’s face and body lightened about ten years. “Of course I do. It’s your birthday.”
Meri poured herself coffee and went to sit at the kitchen table with her father. She slowed down as she passed the hutch and noticed that the cardboard box from the night before was gone.
Had that been a part of their disclosure last night? Would they have shown her the contents if she hadn’t run away? Had they changed their minds about showing her the rest? Or was it just a box that had made its way to recycling this morning? Either way, Meri wasn’t ready to face anything more today. And really, what more could there be?
“Do the boys know?”
Her dad looked up from his coffee cup. “Not yet, but it won’t make any difference to them. They’re your brothers. You’re their sister.
Period.”
“Will you tell them, or should I?”
“I will, and I’m sure they’ll be calling you.”
And what would she say to them when they did?
After a hearty breakfast, which everyone forced down with a smile, Dan collected his gear and threw it in the trunk of his car, along with a plastic container of cioppino.
“Sorry I have to run out on you like this.”
“That’s okay. I’m going to have to leave pretty early myself. Dinner with Peter tonight.”
“How’s that going?”
“He’s decided to go back to law school.”
“Smart move, but how do you feel about it? It’s a long haul, law school.”
“Yeah, but he won’t go until the fall, so we’ll have a few months to figure out what we want to do. If—”
“Don’t even worry about the other thing. If he loves you, he won’t care.”
She smiled and wondered if that was true. She thought about it. Would she love Peter if he told her he wasn’t who he said he was? Of course she would. Her dad was right.
It wouldn’t matter to her. So why did the circumstance of her own birth matter so much?
“Love you.” Dan kissed her forehead and gave her grandmother a hug. “You two take care. I’ll call you.”
They stood together and watched him drive away. Stood there until he reached the road and drove out of sight.
“Let’s get the dishes done,” Meri said. “And then I want to go over and say good-bye to Alden and thank him for letting me drip all over his floor.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mind a bit.”
“He’s always there, isn’t he? I don’t mean at home, but . . .”
“Ever since he was a boy. Reliable. Good man. His father was a good man.”
They went inside. “And his mother?”
“Alden’s mother?”
Meri nodded. “What she was like? Alden said she ran off with another man when he was eight. He never told me that before.”
Gran sniffed. “She was a piece of work, that one. Lorded it over the whole neighborhood. Called that old monstrosity ‘the big house,’ like one of those public television shows.” She snorted. “Though Laura used to say it made it sound like the state prison.
Breakwater Bay Page 3