Luanne Rice

by Summer's Child

  “I’m not happy today,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “I’m scared.”

  He nodded. He crouched down by the side of her bed and looked into her eyes. The balloons bobbed over his head. He tried to tie the strings to her bed rails, but he couldn’t with one hand. Rose helped him out. Their fingers touched, and she smiled. She was still scared, but having him there made her feel like smiling anyway.

  “You brought me balloons,” she said.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I thought balloons were bad. Because if you let go of the string, they might float out over the ocean, and fall, and the sea turtles will think they’re jellyfish, and eat them, and die.”

  “You’re right, Rose. You make a very good oceanographer. That’s why I knew it was safe to give the balloons to you.”

  “Because I care about the sea turtles?”

  “Yes,” he said, holding her hand. “Because of that.”

  Rose closed her eyes and felt her pulse beating fast and light. She thought of how everything had to be protected, in different ways. Her mother had to be protected from worry; the sea turtles had to be protected from balloons; Rose had to be protected from being so scared of what would happen next.

  What did Dr. Neill have to be protected from? She didn’t know. But she knew that there had to be something, and she squeezed his hand to let him know that she was there.

  Chapter 15

  The hot weather arrived in Cape Hawk, making it seem more like the summers Jessica knew. Every morning, haze clung to the cliffs and pines before burning off. Sunlight beat down, the breeze stopped blowing. Jessica wore shorts over her bathing suit, but instead of going to the swim cove, she was hard at work.

  She held the burlap bag in one hand, picked up fallen pine needles with the other. This was messy work—her fingers were sticky with pitch, but she just pressed onward. Bent at the waist, she made her way through her backyard, covering every inch. She ignored fallen leaves or twigs, concentrating only on long needles fallen from white pines.

  Sometimes she’d pass under a hemlock or spruce—trees with short needles. Those were fine too, as long as they were pine. She found many pinecones—tiny ones that looked like doll-size beehive ovens. The hemlock cones were perfect and compact, with their petals drawn in tight like rosebuds. When she found them, she slipped them into a different bag, slung over her shoulder. White-pine cones were longer, with their tips frosted with silvery pitch. She ignored those.

  As she scoured her backyard and the lower fringe of the hilly woods behind her house, she thought of Rose. What was she doing now? Was she getting better? Last night one of the Nanouks had called her mother, and she’d heard them talking. The report had been the same: Rose is holding her own, which didn’t sound bad but definitely didn’t sound all that good, either. Then, afterwards, Jessica had watched her mother go online, to the Johns Hopkins site, and do some researchy thing with a worried crease in her brow.

  Jess tried to tell herself that what the grownups thought didn’t matter. She was working for Rose. Her back ached and fingers itched, but she didn’t care. Back in Boston she had gone to Catholic school, and the nuns had told them about Saint Agnes and Saint Agatha, as well as Joan of Arc: all young girls, martyrs, who had suffered for the Lord. Tales of hair shirts and beds of nails and being beheaded. Jessica had thought it sounded pretty lame at first. Especially hair shirts. She couldn’t quite imagine such a thing; was it like a fur coat, only a shirt?

  But then she had started thinking: maybe martyrdom could be a way to go—not beheading, but the other things. A lot of the problems those old saints had had involved demons. One Irish nun that kind of scared her, Sister Ignatius, had loved to tell them stories about the devil. “Lucifer is incarnate on this earth,” she would say in her squeaky Wicklow accent. “He exists as surely as you or I. We encounter him on a daily basis and must fight to banish him from our lives!” Jessica believed Sister, and she began to think—if she was willing to suffer, or sacrifice something, maybe she could drive Ted out of the house.

  For the first week, she tried giving up cinnamon Pop-Tarts. But Ted stayed and showed no signs of budging. Jessica began doing other things: sacrificing pudding at school lunch. Wearing shoes she had outgrown, that hurt her toes. Kneeling on the bare wood floor until not only her knees ached, but also her hips and spine. She didn’t have a bed of nails, but she tried sleeping in the bathtub one night.

  Her mother found her and thought she had been sleepwalking. She took Jessica back to bed very quickly—before Ted saw. Ted didn’t like anything unusual. He would have somehow made Jessica sleeping in the bathtub seem like a slap in his face. He might have yelled, or he might just have gone silent—with those cold, evil eyes. Jessica could almost hear him hissing, “Why are you trying to hurt me this way?”

  So with the bathtub off-limits and no bed of nails, Jessica had just changed her sheets—from the soft pink ones with white lambs imprinted on the fabric to the hard scratchy ones that her mother had bought by accident, on sale at Max-Mart. They didn’t feel at all good on her skin. She also scratched her legs with pins. It used to give her fierce pleasure to see little dots of blood on the cheap sheets. Her mother just thought she’d been at her mosquito bites.

  Jessica would never know whether her martyrdom actually worked—it didn’t drive Ted from their house. It didn’t save Tally. That was the night her mother decided they’d had enough: when Ted kicked the little dog and killed her, her mother packed them up in the dark of night, bundled them into the car, and drove them away.

  Now, picking up more pine needles, she paused in front of a flat rock where she had seen a garter snake sunning itself last week. The serpent had opened its pink mouth and hissed at her, and even though it was very small, its presence had reminded Jessica of Ted, and shaken her.

  Jessica wished the snake would come now. She would step on it, barefoot, and kill it like Mary. She wanted to drive the serpents and demons and evil wizards and Teds out, so that Rose could get well. It was the only way. She walked slowly through the pine woods, picking up more pine needles—her hand hot and sticky, her back aching—and she saw a flash of blue in the trees.

  At first she thought it was Mary, leading her deeper into the woods, but then she looked up in the branches of a spruce and saw that it was just a blue jay. A bright, beautiful crested jay. Not Mary at all.

  When Jessica had filled three large sacks, Marisa knew it was time to take her to town. They drove down to the harbor, parked in front of In Stitches. Marisa was glad to see that the door was ajar, the shop was open. For a moment she felt excited—to think that Lily might be back, working. But when she and Jessica went inside, she saw that it was Marlena behind the counter, with Cindy restocking shelves.

  “Hi, girls,” Marlena called. “How are you?”

  “We’re fine,” Marisa said. “Have you heard from Lily?”

  “Anne did. She came down with coffee and muffins for us, and said that Rose is improving quickly. She’s lost almost all the extra fluid, and they’re talking about flying her down to Boston in a few days.”

  “That’s a good sign,” Marisa said.

  “You’re a nurse?” Cindy asked. “Anne was telling us. A woman of medicine in our ranks!”

  “Yes, I am,” Marisa said, and it felt good to think of the Nanouk Girls talking about her, including her “in their ranks.”

  “What do you think it all means—all these complications?” Marlena asked. “Poor Rosie, having to go through so much.”

  “Tetralogy of Fallot is very complicated,” she said, “but it’s treatable, especially when the patient is young.”

  “I’ve known Lily since the year Rose was born,” Marlena said. “There hasn’t been a stretch I can remember when she wasn’t taking her to some different hospital or specialist.”

  “Boston, Melbourne, once out to Cincinnati,” Cindy said.

  “Cincinnati has the best pediatric heart center i
n the country,” Marisa said.

  “I remember that what they did there had to do with ‘transposition of the great vessels.’ My father was a boat captain, and I thought it had to do with shipping. But it means that both Rose’s main arteries were on the left side of her heart, instead of on either side,” Marlena said.

  “That’s right. Her aorta was misplaced,” Cindy said.

  “What’s her aorta?” Jessica asked, standing there with one of the sacks of pine needles.

  “It’s the large artery that pumps blood from the heart’s left ventricle and sends it out into the body,” Marisa explained.

  “And the hospital lost it?” Jessica asked.

  “No, honey,” Cindy said. “It happened at birth. Before birth, in the womb. No one knows why, but it was on the wrong side of her heart.”

  “You mean, God did that to her?” Jessica asked, sounding outraged.

  Marisa felt an aura, almost as if she was going to have a migraine. Only it wasn’t that—it was Jessica about to go into a full-blown religious tirade. She watched her daughter’s face turn red with outrage, and it reminded her of when Jessica would react against Ted, against his control and anger. Instead of getting mad at her, or even Ted, Jessica would get furious at God.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say he did it to her,” Marlena said. “It’s more like in his infinite wisdom and design, he thought it made sense at the time. We don’t understand why.”

  “What kind of wisdom and design gives a misplaced artery to a baby?” Jess asked.

  “Jessica,” Marisa said warningly.

  “I’m serious. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “The Lord isn’t supposed to make sense,” Marlena said, a little nervously. Marisa could see that she was rethinking the two newest Nanouks.

  “That’s right,” Cindy said. “It’s one big mystery. One big freaking mystery. Marlena, you might as well say he did it to her,” Cindy said. “You sound all confused, and to tell you the truth, I’ve been confused myself. Who can understand why this happened? To think of our Rosie suffering …”

  “It does pain me,” Marlena replied. “From the time she was a tiny blue baby …”

  “Probably it’s not the Lord who did it,” Jessica said. “Probably it was the devil.”

  “Jess, stop,” Marisa said, feeling the blood drain out of her face. When Jessica got going on God, the devil, and Ted, anything could happen.

  “The Lord doesn’t hurt people,” Jessica said. “I refuse to believe that.”

  Marisa stared at her. She thought of all the sickness she’d seen in her day. The injuries, illnesses, diseases, acts of violence. Although she had raised Jessica in the Church, she had been on a long, slow decline in belief herself. It had reached its final depths during the end of her time with Ted. “I do believe, help my unbelief,” had once been her prayer. Now she just believed in science.

  “God moves in mysterious ways,” Marlena said. “But I’m with Jessica on this. I don’t think God wants Rose or any of us to suffer. I’m going to bring this up the next time the Nanouks are all in one place. I think we should put it in our charter.”

  “Good idea,” Cindy said, laughing. “We, the Nanouk Girls of the Frozen North, hereby decree that the Lord is off the hook when it comes to pain and suffering.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Marlena said defensively. “I just don’t think he does it on purpose.”

  “What’s that lovely aroma?” Cindy asked, raising her eyebrow and changing the subject. “It smells like the North Woods in here.”

  “Pine needles,” Jessica said.

  “What are they for?”

  “Well, to raise money for Rose’s medical care.”

  “Heaven knows Lily could use help with it,” Marlena said, “but how will pine needles help?”

  “I want to make Cape Hawk pine pillows and sell them.”

  Marisa stood back, watching Jessica explain herself. This had been all her idea, coming down to In Stitches, buying the materials from Lily’s shop—they had known the Nanouk Girls were keeping it open, taking turns covering different days.

  “Where will you sell them, dear?”

  “To the tourists who go on the whale boats.”

  “Pine pillows,” Cindy said.

  Jessica nodded. “They’ll smell just like Cape Hawk. All the things that make it so special here—the woods, pine, birds, whales … I thought I could embroider little pictures of Nanny, or the owls that live in the forest behind my house, or the hawks that live on the rock ledges—right into the fabric, along with the words ‘Cape Hawk,’ or maybe even ‘Get Well Soon, Rose.’ ”

  “Do you do a lot of embroidery, dear?” Marlena asked.

  “I’ve never done it before,” Jessica said proudly, chin jutting out. Clearly she didn’t see this as a setback—just another feat to master. Marisa watched Marlena and Cindy for their reactions. They both kept straight faces. What they didn’t know was how determined Jessica could be, or how huge her heart was.

  “It might take you a while to learn,” Cindy said.

  “And then even longer to actually embroider the fabric. And then put the pillows together,” Marlena said.

  Marisa’s eyes filled up. She saw Jessica clutching her big sack of sticky pine needles, her fingers black with tar. Marisa foresaw hours of diligent embroidery ahead for her darling daughter. Jessica stood perfectly straight, undeterred by Marlena and Cindy’s reservations. Her love for Rose was too strong for that. Suddenly Marisa had a memory—after Paul died, she had opened his closet, looking for something—she couldn’t even remember what.

  She’d seen a bulge in the center of his suits. And there, down below, were Jessica’s thin legs. She was just standing there among her father’s suits. She’d loved her father so much, and that was the only way she could think to be with him. Marisa knew that the pillow project was very much like that—a way to stay close to Rose.

  “I’ll help her learn,” Marisa said.

  “Thank you, Mom,” Jessica said.

  “So will I,” Marlena said. “In fact, I give needlework lessons at the high school. I’ll teach you for free, sweetheart.”

  “I’ll go you one better,” Cindy said. “I’ll embroider the pillows myself! And I bet the other Nanouks will too. I’ll call Anne and Doreen, you call Suzanne and Alison.”

  “Fine, and in that case, maybe Jessica and I can concentrate on making the pillow squares—cutting them out, sewing them together.”

  “And stuffing them with pine needles when they’re done!” Jessica said. “And, of course, selling them—”

  “I’ll bet Anne will let us put some up at the inn’s gift shop.”

  “We’ll have to get them by Camille.”

  “Who’s Camille?” Marisa asked.

  “Oooh, Camille Neill,” Cindy said. “She’s the matriarch of the family. Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother of four generations of Neills. Think Catherine the Great meets the Wicked Witch of the West, with a soupçon of Lauren Bacall in the Fancy Feast commercials. She is the official owner of the inn and the whale boats.”

  “Imposing,” Marisa said.

  “Yes. And she’s none too crazy about Lily.”

  “How could someone not be crazy about Lily?” Marisa asked.

  “Well, it dates back to the year she first got here. And it has something to do with Liam.”

  “Captain Hook?” Jessica asked.

  “The kids call him that, but he’s really very dear. He’s down in Melbourne with Lily and Rose right now.”

  “Really?” Marisa asked. “Are they—”

  “An item? No one really knows,” Cindy said. “There has been much speculation. Normally they act as if they can’t stand the sight of each other.”

  “But whenever Rose has a problem, Liam is right there to help,” Marlena said.

  “We’re gossiping,” Cindy said. “It’s beneath us, as Nanouk Girls.”

  “It’s not gossip,” Marlena scoffed. “It’
s concern. We love Lily and want her to be happy.”

  “With Liam Neill?” Marisa asked.

  “I think we’ve said enough,” Cindy said somberly. “Let’s get cracking on the pillows. Unbleached muslin or canvas, Jessica? This is your project. We’re just your assistants.”

  “I just hope the Fancy Feast lady lets us sell them at the inn and on the boats,” Jessica said.

  “Now is a time for prayer,” Marlena said. “Because that’s what it will take to soften the heart of Camille Neill.”

  Chapter 16

  Taking Exit 90 off I-95, Patrick Murphy turned into the most crowded parking lot he’d ever seen. There were cars from every state, tour buses, motor homes, and not a parking spot to be found within walking distance of the Mystic Aquarium. He finally parked on the other side of the little shopping village, after beating a lady in a minivan out for the spot.

  Ten minutes later, he was standing in line with a hundred other people, waiting to get in. Sandwiched between a family of five from Hartford and a honeymooning couple from Philadelphia, he eavesdropped to pass the time. Solving crimes was still his favorite pastime, and he liked to figure out as much as he could about every person he encountered, without them knowing he was listening.

  After a few minutes, the mom of five had to take the youngest to the bathroom, and the dad of five took the opportunity to whip out his cell phone and call someone he addressed as “sweet baby.” Behind him, he heard the young husband tell his new bride that the stocks her father had given them for a wedding present had gone up the night before, and he thought they should consider buying instead of renting their house.

  Both instances affirmed his long-held belief that the only thing necessary to good police work was a deep curiosity about human nature and behavior. But then he got inside the aquarium—the super-cool air-conditioning very welcome after standing in the blistering heat—and was faced with the humbling reason for his mission here.