by Beverly Bird
"How is he?" Joe asked. "Still getting better?" They’d only let him in to see him once.
Maddie gave her first real smile. "Leslie thinks he might be able to go back to school soon."
"So you won’t have to sing him any more twisted nursery rhymes."
"Not unless he wants me to. And I certainly won’t ever sing that one again."
Joe made a grunting sound. "I called Flannery Reed before you got here today. I had her look up how that song really goes."
Maddie went still. "And?"
"It’s supposed to be, ‘your mama is by.’ Angus just changed that one word to buddy."
Maddie’s throat spasmed. "That was what he called us. Buddies. Oh, God, Joe. For a while there, for years, we were."
"Until you came back all grown-up and didn’t need him anymore. He couldn’t handle it, couldn’t adjust to the change."
She shook her head. "No, it went bad before that, I think. It went bad when he killed Beacher. He just loved me too much, and maybe my mother, too." She shook her head and started for the door again. "I’ll be back in about an hour. Oh, wait!"
She dug in her purse for the picture she’d taken out of the attic that day. "I’ve been meaning to show this to you, but at first you were off in woo-woo land with the drugs, and then I forgot."
Joe cracked half a grin. "Woo-woo land had a lot going for it." Except that she hadn’t been there. He took the picture she held out.
"One of yours from that morning?" he asked before he actually looked at it.
"No. I threw that film out, never even developed it. What was the sense? I found this one in the house, up in the attic, that day when I was taking pictures."
He looked down at it. "Your mother wasn’t a bad-looking chick."
"Be serious."
I am.
"Who are those other people?" she asked.
He pointed to a man with his hand on Annabel’s shoulder. "That’s Boo Cawley. He was your uncle. He died in ... I don’t know, around ’89, I think." He ran a finger over the man who had an arm around her waist and laughed. "That’s Mackie Peters. He lives about four doors up from your house on The Wick. And he’s still a lech, but now he’s an old one."
"What about the woman?" Maddie prompted. "The one there near the front."
"That’s—holy shit. That’s Mildred Diehl."
"That’s what I thought."
"I’ll be damned."
"What?"
"It was Beacher. I’ll bet you good money it was Beacher."
Maddie’s heart squirmed. "So we’re on the same wavelength."
"If you’re thinking that Beacher was the one who knocked her up before her parents whooshed her off the island, then yeah, we are."
"More or less. Look at her hand. She’s sort of reaching for him."
"Yeah. So she went over to the mainland to have the kid, and sometime while she was gone, Beacher married Annabel. I guess she had quite a shock when she came home and found out."
"No wonder she hates me. No wonder she’s bitter." "Yeah," Joe said, "and she was one of the first to figure out that you weren’t Beacher’s kid."
"That could have just made it worse. She’d lost him to Annabel for no good reason."
"Well, I don’t guess she ever really had him," Joe said thoughtfully, "or he would have married her, and she wouldn’t have had to go to Jonesport to begin with."
"Not if her parents wouldn’t let her," Maddie said softly. "Beacher was from The Wick. Maybe there was enough prejudice back then that her parents would rather have made up a husband for her than have a real one who was ... I don’t know, inferior."
Joe shook his head. "So Cassie is Beacher’s kid. Ain’t that a hoot? Cassie Diehl has Wick blood. Too bad I’ll never be able to ride her for it."
"No," Maddie said quietly. "That would be cruel." "Especially right now, with her uninsured Ford at the
bottom of the ocean." Something horrible flicked over his face at the almost-mention of Gina.
"Get some sleep," she suggested, moving for the door again.
"Smuggle me back a Big Mac, would you?" He leaned back, closing his eyes again.
"Those things are loaded with fat and cholesterol and sodium."
"So humor me. I’m a cripple. If I don’t have a lung or a knee, I might as well blow my arteries all to hell, too."
"I’ll think about it." She smiled and left him. feeling soft inside.
foe opened one eye to watch her go. For the first few days, his temper had been foul simply because it had occurred to him that with all Candle’s mysteries solved, he no longer had any good excuse to keep her close, under his personal guard.
Then he’d realized that she was still hanging around anyway.
He fell asleep again, grinning to himself. Those decisions he was going to have to make were looking clearer and easier all the time.
By the time Joe got out of the hospital, Candle Island had another mystery. Somebody had burned down the old Brogan place on The Wick Road until it was nothing but ashes and cinders.
Rumors ran rampant. Some said that Tony Macari had done it for the insurance money. With a past such as that house had, it would be hard to rent out.
Leslie thought that Harry Reiter had probably done it, a symbolic gesture to truly end things. Dierdre had gone back to her house on the mainland, and Harry’s place on Candle had been empty ever since. Though he
still ran the ferry, he never stayed on the island side anymore.
There was a brief flurry of gossip about Harry and Annabel, but it died out almost as quickly as it started. That was old news. The biggest talk was of Gina and Angus. The system had finally taken Angus in, giving him care and shelter in a mental hospital on the mainland.
A few people thought that Maddie had burned down the house herself. Hector Marks thought it had been some gun-toting, inbred Englishman. Whenever anybody mentioned the fire to Joe Gallen, he just smiled. He guessed that Maddie and Josh would just have to stay with him a while longer.
On the day he was released from the hospital, Kenny Halverson brought the Pathfinder to the mainland. They all took the ferry back to Candle. Harry Reiter stood up on the pilothouse deck and waved at them briefly. He spoke only to offer Maddie some Dramamine, in that taciturn, almost-but-not-quite Candle Island accent.
When the ferry docked, Joe drove only as far as the diner. He pulled up there, pensive and thoughtful.
"What?" Maddie asked warily. "What’s the matter now?"
"There’s something I have to do. Leave me here and drop Kenny off at the station. Give me fifteen minutes and come back for me."
Maddie nodded slowly. There was something on his face that told her not to argue with him. "Sure. I’ll catch you later."
Joe limped the short distance from the diner to the southernmost beach of the big island. There was a small cemetery there.
Harry already had half a boatful and the engines were
rumbling as he threw off the lines to go back the other way. Joe saluted him in silent thanks. He’d tried to talk to him on the way over, but the man had made it clear that he didn’t want any maudlin gratitude over the blood he’d given him.
He watched Harry leave, then he went to the small grassy area on the other side of the road. He found the stone monument there shaped like a teddy bear.
Lucy Anna Gallen. Always beloved. Forever missed. 1989-1992.
His throat closed. He rubbed a hand over his jaw. He looked out at the water. Should he have known? Had he known?
She’d been three. Too old, probably, to just stop breathing and die in her sleep. But old Doc Mazur had declared it to be SIDS, and he’d signed the death certificate, and there’d never been an inquest or an autopsy.
Maybe I did know, Joe thought. Maybe that was why the guilt, that wretched guilt, had hounded him all this time. Maybe it was why he had let Gina torment him, why he had let her—in some small, warped measure— hold on to him all this time. Penance. Perhaps he had known, on some l
evel, that Lucy had been too old to die of SIDS. And he had done nothing about it.
He had never asked for an autopsy, and he was pretty much the only one who could have done it. Even knowing what had really happened, he wondered what would have been the point. It wouldn’t have brought Lucy back. And he hadn’t wanted to get Gina professional help, hadn’t wanted to save her.
In some horrible place inside him, in a place that shamed him, he’d been perfectly willing to let her take her own life. Or to go on living in her own private hell, with all her intimate demons. He was only human, only a man, after all.
"I’m sorry," he said aloud, hoarsely, looking at the headstone again. "I’m so sorry, Lucy." He swallowed. Carefully. Hard.
"If I had known how crazy, how jealous she was, maybe I could have been more careful with her," he went on. "But maybe she would have done it to you anyway. Because what she expected ... oh, God, Lucy, I couldn’t give it to her. No man could. The pure devotion. The absolute attention. Sweetie, I’m not God. I guess you know that by now. And I would have tripped up somewhere along the line, even if I had known, even if I had tried to keep your mom happy and not upset her. Something, anything, would have eventually driven her over the edge. As it was, all it took was my loving you. I loved you so goddamned much."
He rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye.
"That’s probably going to burn in my gut for the rest of my life. But if I hadn’t married her, you would never have lived at all. And while you lived, I gave you the best that I could. It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough."
On the other side of the road, the sea rushed and sighed.
"I’ll always be sorry that I didn’t fight for custody. I’ll always have to wonder if I could have saved you. Yeah, that’s going to eat at me forever. That’s my hell. But I guess ... that’s really all I should be tearing myself up over. That was probably the only choice I could have made differently. I couldn’t not have loved you, Lucy, couldn’t not have shown it. Even if I’d known what it would do to you, what I was doing to her, I couldn’t have stopped myself.
"So it’s over, and she’s gone, and I’m here. So." He took a deep breath and looked out at the sea again. "I can either call it a day and join you two, or I can finally put it behind me, start over, try my damnedest to do better the second time around. I can put it behind me now. Because there really was very little I could have done. Not as long as I was just human. Not as long as I was just... a man."
And he thought that, with the wisdom of angels, Lucy Anna Gallen would probably understand.
Maddie killed the fifteen minutes by going to the market. She ran into Mildred Diehl and smiled at her.
The woman harrumphed.
When they got home, Maddie made turkey burgers. Joe watched the process over her shoulder with a jaundiced eye.
"You’ve got to be kidding," he muttered. "Turkey? That’s un-American."
"It's health-conscious. And I’ve been slack on my rules long enough. It’s time to restore some sense of order around here," she answered.
He thought of pointing out that "around here" was his house and as such he ought to have beef if he wanted it. But the fact that she was there, still there, was too goddamned good for him to feel like quibbling over the fine points.
Still, there was the principle of the thing, and he didn’t want to start a precedent with this turkey business.
"Real men don’t eat turkey burgers," he argued after a moment. "Ex-jocks don’t eat turkey burgers."
Maddie ignored him until she had rummaged in the cupboards and realized that he didn’t have a frying pan.
"I don’t believe this." She looked at him, astounded. "What do you cook with?"
"I hardly ever do. Guess we’ll just have to go to the diner." He moved away from the counter and yawned. "Regina makes great hamburgers. Or maybe we could shoot over to the Sandbar. Pizza and beer and sleep doesn’t sound half-bad either. Or we could order in again."
"Sleep?" Maddie lifted a brow. "And here I was planning on testing out that lung of yours when you’re breathing hard."
"Yeah, well, we could do that, too," he said quickly. He caught her in his arms, swinging her around to face him. He felt fine. He felt really damned fine. All his decisions were made, met, and neatly organized.
He hooked his hands behind her back, and realized how amazingly easy it was to say the words aloud after all.
"I love you. I want you to stay here. I don’t want you to find another house to rent. Stay."
Her smiled faded. Her heart roared. She stared at him.
For a moment, an endless moment, he knew fear again. There was raw, unadulterated panic, scurrying and clawing and wild. He felt his face tighten.
"Say something, goddamnit," he snapped.
"Watch your language."
Watch your language? He was dying. "Say something else."
"I already put the house up for sale in Fort Lauderdale."
His heart thumped. "Okay," he said slowly. "Okay, that’s good."
"I called the realtor. She’s sending the papers for me to sign. And I called a moving company. They’re going to pack the place up and ship everything here."
"Okay," he said again.
"I told Harry I didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to stay with you."
"Better." He was starting to be able to breathe again. "I love you," she burst out.
His heart moved hard, incredibly. Good, oh, it was so good to hear that. But there was a great big hesitation at the end of her voice.
"But?" he asked warily. His heart slowed down again as he waited for her to go on.
"What are we, Joe?" she burst out.
"Huh?"
"All your theories. Where do we fit in?"
"The real thing," he answered without hesitation. "Got to be. Your pacing drives me nuts, and I don’t like your health-conscious food, so that sort of rules out the ‘grew-to-love-her’ crap." He eased back from her and rubbed his jaw. "I didn’t even want you right away, which kind of nips the sexual attraction thing in the bud, too."
Her heart skipped. "You didn’t?"
Wildflowers. "Not much."
"What about the one-two punch?"
"Nah. It’s been more like one-two-three-four-five, flattening me every time I try to get back to my feet again."
Maddie grinned slowly. Then she bit her lip.
"Josh and I can’t keep staying here, though, Joe."
His eyes narrowed. "Why not? What am I missing here?"
"Morals. Right from wrong. I can’t just keep"—she thought briefly that Mildred had a good way of putting it after all—"carrying on with you right under Josh’s nose. And you can’t keep on sleeping on top of the covers."
"No. The jeans are getting old."
"So," she said, and she let out her breath carefully. "I want to stay, I do. Oh, God, I do." She looked him in
the eye. "Everything good in the whole world is right here in this house, right now. And I believe in it. I believe in you. I don’t think this can get twisted, dangerous, hurtful. You’re too ... good."
"Goddamn it," he muttered. He grabbed her arm, pulling her.
"What are you doing? And watch your language." "It’s a goddamned technicality. You took years off my life with a goddamned technicality. Where’s Josh?" "On the deck."
"No, he’s not."
They stopped at the doors and looked out. The deck was bare. A box of chocolate chip cookies lay out there on its side, its opened edges fluttering in the wind.
The terror came back, but it was brief this time.
The paranoia was fading more and more every day, Maddie realized. No one had taken Josh. No one had stolen him. He had just... wandered off, as boys would.
Maddie turned away from the deck and called up the stairs. "Josh, you'd best be watching PBS! Rules," she muttered, stomping up the stairs. "I always had rules."
Joe followed her. "Yeah, well, you can’t blame him for the cookies. Hell, you were going
to make him eat a turkey burger."
They found him in Joe’s bedroom watching the television set. It was tuned to PBS, but the edge of the remote peeked out from beneath his right sneaker.
A normal kid, she thought, and fought the urge to cry with the sweetness of it.
"Hey, Josh," Joe said.
Josh took his eyes off the television briefly, reluctantly. "I’m going to marry your mom," Joe went on. "That okay with you?"
Josh smiled slowly, then he nodded.
"O-k-k-kay."