Where Your Heart Is (Lilac Bay Book 1)

by Rachel Schurig

  My dad went silent on the other end of the phone. Finally, he cleared his throat, and there was no more excitement to be heard anywhere in his tone. “I had to pull a lot of strings to even get you this chance, Iris,” he said. “Kent was basically doing me a huge favor.”

  “Well, that’s a nice shot for my confidence.”

  “I have no idea what’s come over you these last few weeks,” he said. “You should be thanking me, Iris. And thinking about ways that you can use this opportunity to your full advantage.”

  “What do you mean? I thought they wanted me to have the job.”

  “Do you honestly expect it to be that easy? Iris, you have seriously damaged your own reputation with your antics this spring. You’re going to have to work doubly hard to get your edge back. Put in the work, put in the hours.” I had a sudden image of myself on my last birthday. Phillip had planned a dinner out with some of our mutual friends, and I’d had to cancel, too involved in whatever deal it was at the moment to get away. God. No wonder he broke up with me. I tried to envision going back to that kind of life. Worse, even, if my dad was to be believed. It sounded like I was going to have to basically start over.

  A bead of sweat dripped slowly down my spine. I had a feeling it had nothing to do with the heat.

  “I’m having the maid prepare your room right now,” my dad was saying, and I struggled to pick up the thread of conversation.

  “My room?”

  “Here at the apartment.”

  “Your apartment?”

  “Aren’t you listening?” He sounded angry now. “You need to hit the ground running! I’m having a room prepared for you so you can stay in the city and get right to work. I’m having drinks at the Drake tomorrow night. It would be good for you to start doing some networking, get back into it.”

  “I have to go back to Lilac Bay,” I said, my mind still doing that weird blank thing. Nothing was making any sense. “All of my things—”

  “You can ask your mother to send the rest of your things,” he said dismissively.

  “But, Mimi and—”

  “There are telephones for goodbyes, Iris. Now, I can send a car for you if you like or—”

  “No,” I whispered. My hands were shaking so hard, I almost dropped the phone. “I’m not coming to stay with you tonight.”

  “Iris—”

  “I haven’t even accepted the job yet.”

  The line went quiet, and I felt a little spark of fear. Somehow, I knew exactly how mad he was. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything, Dad. I just… I’ll need to think about it, right? Talk it over and—”

  “There is nothing to talk over! This is a fantastic opportunity, and you won’t find anything better!”

  Was he right? Was there anything better out there for me? Was working fifteen-hour days the best I could hope for? Constantly networking but never really having fun, never making friends. Too busy even to go back to say goodbye to my family. To David.

  A cold fear filled me, shocking away the rest of the numb fuzziness in my brain. “No,” I said, my voice stronger now.

  “You’re turning this down?” he spluttered.

  “I didn’t say that. But I’m going to wait until I actually hear from them myself. And then I’m going to make a decision.” I looked over at my mother. She had been sitting silently throughout the entire conversation, watching me. “Based on an examination of all the evidence.” She smiled, and I felt a strange sense of triumph.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have to go, Dad. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Iris!” But for once, I was the one hanging up first, without saying goodbye.

  I sat there on the bench, breathing heavily, feeling like I’d just completed a race of some kind.

  “Well,” my mother said after a moment. “It sounds like we could use a martini.”

  I laughed, ready to agree. And then the strangest thought occurred to me—I wanted to see the water.

  “Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of ice cream. Maybe on the beach?”

  She stood without hesitation, holding out her hand for me. “I never say no to ice cream.”

  Lake Michigan looked different from this shoreline. The waves were larger, the color a lighter blue than the nearly navy shade I had gotten used to up north. Thinking about how much water stretched between us and the island still gave me a little shiver, but looking out at the water no longer filled me with the same panic it once had. I knew it couldn’t hurt me as long as I was careful and respectful, the way David had taught me.

  “So,” my mother said after fifteen straight minutes of silence. We’d both finished our ice cream and were sitting in the sand, shoes off. I was probably going to ruin my nice suit, but I couldn’t muster the energy to care. My mom looked much more appropriate for beach-sitting in her faded jeans and blue tank top, her sun-bleached waves flowing around her face in the wind.

  “So,” I replied, and she bumped her shoulder with mine.

  “I’m sensing you’re not super excited about this job offer.”

  I blew out a deep breath. “Your senses are correct.”

  “Then say no.” She said it like it would be the simplest thing in the world.

  “And do what instead? It’s a really good job, Mom. A top firm. I would get to travel and work on big projects, much bigger than what I was doing before. I’d be able to make a name for myself.”

  “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

  I sighed, digging my toes deeper into the sand. “I don’t know.”

  She mimicked my pose, and I noted that my fifty-five-year-old mother was sporting bright blue toenails, while mine were a more sedate shade of baby pink. Sedate—more like boring. I sighed.

  “Iris, just because it’s a good job doesn’t mean you’re obligated to take it. Just because you think it would have made you happy at one point doesn’t mean it will make you happy now.”

  “You know, it wasn’t a rhetorical question when I asked what I would do instead. I have no idea, Mom. I’ve been working toward this my whole life. I have no idea what I would do if it wasn’t this.”

  “I didn’t know, either,” she murmured, and I felt my spine stiffen. It was her turn to sigh. “I know you don’t approve of my choices, Iris. That’s okay. I had to make decisions for myself, not based on what someone else thought I should do.”

  “I thought mothers were supposed to make choices for their family,” I said before I could stop myself, my voice sharp.

  She drew in a ragged breath. “I thought I was.”

  I turned to her in disbelief. “You thought leaving was the best choice for your family? Come on, Mom. That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “I thought leaving was the best choice for you,” she argued.

  I laughed bitterly, moving to stand. I wasn’t going to sit around and listen to her rewrite history. But she grabbed my arm, her expression fierce. She looks like my mom, I realized with a jolt of surprise. Like the mom who yelled at me for breaking off the heel of her Manolos and trying to hide it. Like the mom who insisted I finished my homework before talking on the phone for hours. She looked… parental.

  “I thought getting you out of the environment that your father and I created would be good for you, yes,” she said.

  “What environment? Our home?”

  “The environment that put so much pressure on my shoulders that I thought I would collapse under it.” She sighed, running her hands through that long hair. “Iris, I was unhappy for a long time. The work, the schedule, the stress of it. It was ruining me. It was ruining my marriage. And I saw the way you looked at your father and me, the way you seemed to idolize everything that we were and it… scared me. I didn’t want you growing up like that. Feeling like the only measure of your success in life was how much money you could make.”

  “And you thought leaving was the answer?” I felt like crying. I wanted to be angry at her words
, to tell her that she was wrong, that there was nothing wrong with the way she and my father had worked all those years. But I just couldn’t. Something about her voice—maybe it was desperation—felt too familiar to me. “Why couldn’t you have just quit? Gotten a different job? Why couldn’t you have been an artist in Chicago, Mom?”

  She looked at me, her expression sad. “Your father didn’t want that.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have been up to him—”

  “He told me he wasn’t interested in change, Iris. That if I wasn’t the person he thought I was, maybe our marriage wasn’t what he thought it was, either.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m not putting this on him. I’m the one who left. But I left because I felt like I couldn’t be who I needed to be and stay.” She opened her eyes, and they were wet. “I’m sorry if that’s hard to understand.”

  I shook my head, running my fingers through the sand. I had no idea how to respond.

  “When I got home to the island, I was happy, Iris. I know that didn’t make sense to you at the time, I knew how you felt about the place, but it was good for me. Right. Being home with my family…” She trailed off, looking out over the water. “It gave me the security to figure out what I wanted to be, who I wanted to be. I wouldn’t have had that here.”

  The security to figure out who I wanted to be. Those words hit my heart like a hundred little pin pricks, resonating with me in a deep place I wasn’t sure I wanted to look at.

  “I know you were disappointed in me,” she whispered. “That you saw me giving up my job to become an artist as the great failure of my life. But I was happy, Iris. It took me a long time to learn that—that the only happiness worth having is the kind you find for yourself. The kind you find in your own skin. I don’t think leaving made me a failure, sweetheart. I think success if what you want it to be.”

  But what about me, a little voice asked in my head. Where did I fit into your happiness and success?

  As if reading my mind, she leaned forward and brushed a lock of my straight dark hair, so different from hers, over my shoulder, playing with the ends for a moment. “My one regret is not making you stay with me.”

  I gaped at her. “On Lilac Bay?”

  She nodded, her expression guilty and so sad. “You hated it there so much. I wish you could have seen your face back then. I’ve never seen such an unhappy girl.” She sighed. “And I didn’t know what to do for you. I considered moving back to Chicago, but everyone told me you needed more time. I thought if you could see how good things could be, how nice it would be to not be overwhelmed by all that stress and pressure, that you might come around. And then you started dating and…” She sighed. “I wanted you to be happy there so badly. And when you told me you weren’t, when you said you would rather be in boarding school… I should have said no. I should have kept you there and worked our way through it.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, and when she spoke again, her voice was shaking. “But I felt like such a hypocrite. Because there I was, making this big stand to be happy and make my own choices. And there you were, trying to do the same thing. How could I tell you no? How could I tell you that you didn’t have the same right to your choices as I did?”

  “Mom—”

  “But I regretted it every day, Iris. You were my baby.” Her voice broke. “And I should have kept you with me, no matter what.”

  I found myself reaching for her without even thinking about it. She wrapped her arms around me, her embrace so familiar, and then we were both crying. “I thought it was a relief for you,” I managed through my tears. “That I was nothing but a hassle, standing in the way of your happy life there.”

  “Oh, Iris, never. You’ve never been a hassle. I’ve always wanted you with me. Always. I just couldn’t figure out how to get you back.”

  “You didn’t lose me, Mom. I’m right here.”

  She squeezed me so tightly, I was sure she’d leave marks in my arms, squeezed me until I could barely breathe. And it still didn’t feel close enough.

  “Look at us,” she finally said, pulling away to smile at me through mascara-smudged tears. “I thought we were supposed to be talking about ways to be happy.”

  I laughed, accepting the tissue she pulled from her purse to blow my nose. I wondered if things might feel awkward now—I’d never been raised to be really big on crying and hugging. But my mom wrapped her arm around me, pulling me close to her side, and rested her head on mine. “I love you, Iris.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.”

  “I can’t tell you what it meant to me, having you home this summer. Especially when…” Her voice broke. “For the funeral. It was so nice to have you home for that.”

  My stomach clenched at her words, thoughts of Posey and Mimi rushing through my head. “It meant a lot to me, too,” I told her. “I just wish I’d spent more time with him before he got sick.”

  “They were both so proud of you,” she murmured, smoothing my hair back. “You should hear the way they talked about you.”

  I thought of all those people on Lilac Bay who seemed to know me before we even met. And I pictured Mimi and Pops, maybe Posey, maybe even my mom, telling them about me. Making me a part of their world even when I was absent. Suddenly, I knew exactly what I needed to do.

  “What time is it?” I asked, sitting up straight and reaching for my phone.

  “You and that phone,” my mother gently chastised, checking the old leather watch on her wrist. “It’s nearly two. Why?”

  “If we leave now we might be able to get there before dark.”

  “Get where?”

  “Lilac Bay.” I stood up, dusting the sand from my pants. “Come on.”

  She stared up at me, something like hope on her face. “Does this mean you’re not taking the job?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is this is a big decision. And it’s not one I can make without talking to my family.”

  Chapter 20

  My plans to get home as soon as humanly possible were thwarted by that universally loathed troublemaker—traffic. By the time we fetched our things from the hotel and got on the road, we were nearing rush hour. Not a fun time to try to get out of Chicago. The traffic gods were further set against us once we crossed the border into Michigan. Construction had the freeway down to one lane. What should have been a six-hour trip stretched to seven, then eight. It was dark, and we still had a good three hours of driving to go. At this rate, the ferry wouldn’t even be running by the time we got to the dock.

  And then the storm came in.

  “We’ll be on the road first thing in the morning,” my mother assured me as we pulled our bags into the Days Inn through a torrent of rain and hail. “We’ll get there in no time.”

  She could clearly read my agitation about the delay. I wasn’t sure why, but I felt desperate to get back. I needed to set things right with Mimi and Posey. And I needed to talk to David. I spent an anxious night tossing and turning before finally waking her up at seven to get back on the road.

  “You owe me so much coffee, kid,” she muttered as she blearily followed me down to the car. It’s better this way, I tried to convince myself, looking up at the blue sky and bright sun above. I was upset to have lost the time, but in all honesty, the thought of getting on the ferry, at night, in the kind of rain we’d had, made me feel sick.

  But when we got to the long-term lot at the ferry dock, something else happened that made me feel a little sick about the crossing. Standing on the dock waiting their turn to board, their arms full of shopping bags from the mall in Traverse City, were my grandmother and Posey.

  “Here’s your chance,” my mom said brightly, nudging me. “Isn’t this what you dragged me out of bed at seven a.m. for?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think I’d have to talk to them in public,” I muttered. There were a lot of tourists standing between me and my cousin and grandmother. I didn’t add that the thought of an emotional conversation hardly soothed my growing worry
about getting on the ferry and crossing the bay. I might be better about water after my time with David, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t still sure that I was destined to die on this rusty old bucket of a boat one of these days.

  Before I could decide what to do, Posey looked up and saw me. Immediately, her eyes filled with tears, and she threw herself through the crowd of waiting tourists to get to me, her arms going around my shoulders before I could even react, the shopping bags abandoned on the dock beside us.

  “I’m so sorry!” she cried. “Oh, Iris, please forgive me. I said such terrible things to you. I was just so upset about Pops, and I was so tired and nothing seemed right.”

  “It’s okay—”

  “It’s not!” She pulled back to look at me with tears running down her face. “You were grieving, too, and I had no right to be such a…a bitch. I just…” Her face crumpled again and I decided that now was probably not the right time to congratulate her on using a real swear word. “The thought that you would want to leave already, after everything, it broke my heart. And I took it out on you, and I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Posey, really, it’s okay.”

  “And you had your interview, and I didn’t even call you to wish you luck! I’ve never felt this terrible in my life.”

  “Okay, sweetheart,” my grandmother’s voice drifted over to me through the cloud of tears and curly red hair that was my cousin hugging me. “Let’s just calm down.”

  Posey stepped aside, still holding my arm, and there was Mimi, looking every bit as regal and tall as always, but her face was a little tight. Was she still mad? Then she was pulling me into a hug of her own, and though her tears weren’t nearly as noisy as Posey’s, they shocked me much more.

  “I’m so sorry, Iris. I should never have lashed out at you the way I did. It was unacceptable.”

  “Will you guys stop apologizing?” I cried, pulling away from her. “I’m the one who should apologize.”

  “Iris, there’s nothing wrong with going on an interview. We should have supported you—”

  “I’m not talking about that.” I looked up into my grandmother’s face. She was so strong, so completely steady and reliable. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be just like her—someone who could be counted on.