Cottage by the Sea

by Debbie Macomber

  “Oh right.”

  Her mother had yet to recognize how unreasonable she was being. “I’m genuinely sorry to disappoint you, Mom, but this whole family Thanksgiving just isn’t going to work this year.”

  “Okay, honey, I understand. We’ll miss you.”

  “Mom, I really need to go.”

  “Okay. Just one more thing. I wasn’t going to tell you since I thought you’d be home for Thanksgiving, because I wanted to surprise you.”

  Time was ticking away. Grabbing her yoga mat and her bag, Annie headed for the front door of her condo.

  “Dad and I remodeled the kitchen. We bought all new appliances and countertops. You won’t recognize it!” Her parents loved their home and had saved thirty years to build it. It was on a hillside that overlooked Puget Sound. The views were stunning. Her parents had purchased the property years earlier and then diligently saved and sacrificed to build the home of their dreams.

  “That’s great, Mom. I’ll see it at Christmas. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  “Before you go, your dad wants to say hi.”

  “He’s not going to pressure me about Thanksgiving, is he?”

  “No, silly.” She must have handed off the phone because the next voice Annie heard was her father’s.

  “How’s my daughter, the doctor?” her father asked. He’d wanted Annie to continue on to medical school.

  “I’m not a doctor, Dad.” Annie had grown tired of school. The breakup with her college boyfriend had devastated her, and she’d been eager to be done. Instead of continuing school to get a medical degree, she’d opted to become a physician assistant.

  “Someday,” her dad said. He never seemed to lose a chance to remind Annie of her dream of working in medicine. What he didn’t understand nor seem to appreciate was that she did work in medicine, just not as a physician.

  They spoke, and Annie found herself glancing at the time. “Dad, I’d love to chat more, but I’m meeting a friend.”

  “Bye, sweetheart.”

  “Bye, Dad.”

  * * *

  —

  Annie pulled into the gym at the last minute and found Steph impatiently waiting outside. Together they rushed into their class. Afterward, Annie felt worlds better, relaxed and in good spirits.

  They stopped for a smoothie at the juice bar, and while Steph wasn’t looking, Annie snapped a selfie of the two of them and tweeted it.

  “Let me see, let me see,” Steph protested and then laughed. “You’re bad.”

  “Hey, we both look great.”

  “Is it Gram-worthy?”

  Annie laughed. “Looks like it to me,” she confirmed, and posted the photo on Instagram, so Gabby would see it. She couldn’t wait for Gabby to arrive on Wednesday; Annie had looked forward to cousin time for weeks. The two were close in age and had been best friends nearly their entire lives. Gabby had recently ended a six-month relationship, and Annie intended to do everything she could to make her forget Geoff, starting off with a pre-Thanksgiving party with friends from the clinic at a popular night spot.

  * * *

  —

  Thanksgiving morning, Annie woke with a killer hangover. Her head felt like someone was inside swinging a sledgehammer, and her mouth was as dry as an Arizona riverbed. The incessant ringing of her phone, which was sitting on the nightstand by her bed, made it even worse. Caller ID showed that it was her aunt Sherry, Gabby’s mother. Why, in the name of all that was decent, was she calling Annie at this time of the morning? Gabby had checked in with her mom when she landed. She was more than ready to hand the phone off to her cousin, who rolled over and grumbled at the interruption.

  “Hello,” Annie barely managed to say, holding her hand firmly against her forehead, hoping that this would appease the tiny men inside her brain, so they’d stop hammering.

  “Annie.” Aunt Sherry’s voice was breathless, as if someone had knocked the wind out of her. “Oh Annie…Annie.”

  Sitting up in her bed at the sound of tears in her aunt’s voice, Annie asked, “Aunt Sherry, do you need Gabby? She’s here.”

  “No…no. I need to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  A gasping sob escaped her aunt.

  Annie tensed and keeping her voice steady and low, asked, “Are you okay, Aunt Sherry?” Seeing how serious the conversation was sounding, Annie put the call on speaker for Gabby to listen in.

  By this time, her cousin had sat up and was rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The two exchanged looks and Annie shrugged, unable to decipher what was happening.

  “Do you…Do you…television…Is it on?” her aunt asked, barely getting the words out.

  “No. Aunt Sherry, for the love of heaven, just tell me what’s happened.” As Annie spoke, she reached for the remote and turned on the television, switching channels to the twenty-four-hour news station. She tuned in, and the first thing that popped onto the screen was a Thanksgiving Day advertisement from Macy’s, which told her nothing.

  Instead of answering, her aunt started sobbing. “It’s horrible, Annie. I…I don’t even know how…I don’t know…how to tell you.”

  As a physician assistant, Annie had often dealt with people in crisis mode. “Take a deep breath, count to five, then take another breath, and start at the beginning,” she advised her aunt in a calm, soothing voice. Her immediate suspicion was that something had happened to Lyle, the man her aunt had been dating for the last fifteen years. That didn’t make sense, though. She would have called Gabby if that had been the case.

  “I’m…trying.” Aunt Sherry counted softly, out loud, and sucked in another breath, just as Annie had recommended. “Your mom…and dad…”

  Annie tensed. “My mom and dad?”

  “They…invited me to breakfast.”

  Her mother had always made a big deal about breakfast on Thanksgiving, inviting family and friends over.

  “I…wanted to see…the baby…Bella.” Her words were staccatolike between sobs; she was having trouble even getting the words out.

  “Aunt Sherry,” Annie said softly. “Has something happened to my parents?”

  Her aunt ignored the question. “When I got…close…just…two blocks away…” She continued in the same jerky speech. “The police…they…stopped me.”

  “The police?” Annie repeated, her mind whirling. “What were the police doing there?”

  “They…had…It was barricaded.”

  “A barricade?” Annie hated that she sounded like an echo, but her aunt wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.

  “It’s…been raining…and raining.”

  “Well, that happens in Seattle quite a bit.” Annie impatiently added, “Especially around this time of year.” The Seattle area was known for its rainfall, which was another reason Annie chose to live in California.

  “Annie,” her aunt said, sobbing hysterically, while sucking in deep breaths between her words. “You…You…don’t understand, the entire hillside…is gone. It…simply…gave way, taking…taking everything with…it.”

  Gabby gasped at the news.

  Annie slowly rose out of her bed, standing with one hand pressing against her forehead while the other pressed the phone to her ear. “Are you telling me Mom and Dad’s house slid off the hillside?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Sherry said and gasped. “Their house…and…twenty…other homes.”

  Annie froze and glanced at the television screen. Breaking news had just interrupted the newscast. A helicopter was flying over the water, identified on the screen below as Puget Sound. A single home was breaking apart in the mud-caked waters below the helicopter and sinking into the water.

  “Mom and Dad?” Annie pleaded, as her heart pounded at the seriousness of what had happened. “Did they get out?”

  “I…I do
n’t know…I don’t know how they could have. Everyone said it happened so fast, and so early…”

  Annie fell back onto her bed, her legs shaking so hard they wouldn’t hold her up any longer. Her entire body began to tremble. “How early this morning?”

  “The officer said…it happened around four…They think…most everyone was still in bed. No…notice. No…warning.”

  The tightness in Annie’s chest made it impossible to speak. It was highly likely that her entire family had just been wiped out in a mudslide.

  Her mother.

  Her father.

  Her brother.

  Her sister-in-law.

  And her baby niece.

  Annie’s mind couldn’t absorb what she was hearing and seeing on the television. Her aunt’s sobs echoed in her ear and seemed to be reverberating against the walls of her head.

  “Annie?” her aunt sobbed. “Are…Are you there? Say…something.”

  “I’m here,” Annie managed to whisper. She inhaled and followed her own advice, counting to five and then breathing in again, hoping the technique would calm the rising sense of panic that threatened to overcome her. “I…I need…I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  “Good. Have Gabby…make…Have her do…the flight arrangements.”

  “I will.” How calm she sounded, Annie thought to herself, but her voice wasn’t her own. It seemed to come from across the room somewhere. Her cousin placed her arms around her, hugging her closely. “Find out what you can before I get there.”

  “I’ll…do what…I’ll see what I can learn.”

  “There must be survivors,” Annie insisted, doing her best to think positively, convinced her parents had somehow found a way to escape. She had to believe they were alive, because anything else would be impossible to accept.

  “I’ll do…what I can. I promise, but…”

  “But what?” Annie demanded, her voice gaining in strength.

  “But…Annie…there’s little hope for survivors. I’m so sorry, so very sorry.”

  Annie and Gabby sat on the edge of the bed, sobbing and holding each other. The television showed the result of the entire hillside that had broken away. The only home visible was the one still slowly sinking into the water. Every other home was either completely buried by the slide or had gone before the others into the sound.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sixteen months later

  Annie had never felt more alone. Fitting, she supposed, because she was alone. Her entire family had been wiped out in a single day. Even now, all these months later, she continued to find it hard to believe. Countless times she’d reached for the phone to call home, only to remember that her mother was dead, buried in a deluge of mud, debris, and seawater, killed in what was called an unforeseeable tragedy.

  The news of the mudslide had filled the airwaves, getting both local and national coverage. Crews from all the major news networks descended on the area to do their reporting. But then, a few days later, there was another catastrophe in another part of the country that commanded media attention, and the mudslide became old news and was forgotten.

  But not by Annie and the others who had lost family and friends. Their lives had been forever marked, forever changed.

  In the aftermath, Annie sold her condo and left her job in L.A., moving back to Seattle to deal with the horrific consequences. Waiting for rescuers to locate the bodies, identifying her family, planning the funerals, settling the estate, or what was left of it. Then there were the attorneys, determined to find who best to blame: the city, the state, the builders. Someone needed to accept responsibility, to pay the price for this awful tragedy and to compensate those who had been left behind.

  Left behind.

  This was exactly the way Annie felt. She should have been with her family that day. She should have died with them. As the months wore on, she wished she had died. But instead, Annie was alive, thrust into the complicated legal issues and ugliness that followed. It was more than she could mentally handle, and she spiraled into a deep, dark hole. The grief and regret weighed her down until she wasn’t convinced she could resurface. How could she possibly ever be the same again?

  A counselor she’d started to see claimed Annie suffered from survivor’s guilt. Perhaps she did. Annie didn’t know. It demanded too much of her emotionally to give any thought to it, as her endless days were filled with so much else. Support came in the form of the counselor and group sessions with other people who had lost loved ones. All of this stood in stark contrast to the countless meetings with attorneys and city officials.

  The first year passed by in a fog. Friends, and what was left of her extended family, Aunt Sherry and Gabby, gave her books to read: books on grief and dealing with the death of a loved one…so many books that Annie found it impossible for the words to hold her attention. It wasn’t that she didn’t try to move forward. She made a gallant effort but found it impossible. Instead, she spent countless hours working sudoku puzzles. Hour upon hour she’d buried herself in numbers because numbers made sense. Everything fit neatly together in a small square on the page with tidiness and logic, the way her life once had.

  Only her life felt out of control, lost in the mire of grief as she struggled to dig her way out, trapped as she felt in this void of darkness.

  The next four months were no better. Gabby did her best to encourage and support her, but even she was at a loss on how to give Annie what she needed. That was the crux of the matter.

  What Annie needed was her family back. But that wasn’t going to happen.

  Her friends from Los Angeles had kept in touch. Trevor and Steph would call every now and then, and she was pleased to learn they were now dating. They flew up to Seattle to spend time with her on the one-year anniversary of the mudslide. They wanted to offer their love and support but left early. Annie was even more depressed after their visit than she’d been before they arrived. It didn’t take them long to realize that the mudslide and losing her family had changed her. They seemed to think that after twelve months—a single year—she would return to the same Annie she’d once been. What they didn’t understand, what no one did, not even Gabby, was that burying her family wasn’t something she would ever “get over.”

  Through her counselor, Annie learned that she had to accept that she would grieve for the rest of her life. Her counselor had assured her that what she felt was normal. The pain of loss would be with her forever, but with time, she would eventually learn to live with it.

  With time, she would gradually learn to rebuild her life around this horrific loss.

  With time, she would be whole again, but with the knowledge that she would never be the same. Annie was willing to accept that reality. The truth was she wouldn’t want to be the same person she’d been.

  At night, when she was most vulnerable and when thoughts and regrets bombarded her, Annie recalled the last conversation she’d had with her mother. It was as if her mother had had a premonition of what was about to happen when she’d mentioned that Annie should take the time to be with them because they were both going to die one day. Little did either of them realize how quickly that day would come.

  In the months since the mudslide, it seemed like someone had been holding Annie by her feet in the air, dangling her over the edge of a high-rise, asking her to make sense of it all. The days spun past in a whirl, and before she realized it, sixteen months were gone. Sixteen months—four hundred and eighty-six days—had passed by in one fell swoop, and Annie didn’t remember a one of them. They all blurred together in her mind.

  A settlement was said to be coming. A settlement. Apparently, that was supposed to replace her family. A check she would deposit in the bank that would compensate for her loss. That was a joke, right? How do you replace your parents, your only sibling, your sister-in-law, and your baby niece? It wasn’t possible. No amount of cash, no
matter the agreed-upon number, would ever make up for her entire family.

  “Annie?” Gabby sat across the table from her at Starbucks, trying to bring her back into their conversation.

  Looking up from her coffee, Annie attempted a smile, but even that demanded more resolve than she could muster.

  “You’re depressed.”

  No kidding, Sherlock. Even during the daytime, not just at night, Annie was unable to get that last conversation with her mother out of her mind. It haunted her. Annie had been stubborn, self-absorbed, and so wrapped up in herself that she’d shuffled her family aside. It hadn’t seemed unreasonable at the time to refuse to change her plans and head home for Thanksgiving instead of Christmas. In retrospect, Annie would have given anything to have been with her family that day. At least she would have escaped the horror and emptiness that had since become her life.

  “I’m on antidepressants, Gabby, you know that.” She wasn’t sure what more could be done to get her through this. Perhaps subconsciously, she didn’t want her spirits lifted. It was doubtful she would ever smile again. That sounded melodramatic, she realized, worthy of a soap opera. But joy, real joy, was forever lost to her. It had been buried in the mud and in the sea, along with her family. Annie felt as if her entire life had slid down that hillside, trapping her as well. She would have rather died with them than live in this void.

  “What advice did the counselor give you today?” Gabby asked.

  “She wanted me to think about some thing or some place that made me happy before this all happened.”

  “You used to love to dance!” Gabby tossed her arms into the air and let out a shriek that caused everyone in Starbucks to glance their way.

  “At one time I did.” Annie sipped on her Frappuccino and tried to smile. The counseling sessions had gone on all these months, yet Annie didn’t feel any better. She listened, took notes, and tried, but nothing had seemed to help.