Memo to self and brides everywhere: if you’re standing in front of a justice of the peace, about to get married, and all you can think about is why your husband-to-be looks very uncomfortable, it’s a red flag worth paying attention to.
The ceremony occurred. That’s how I think of it now: words and music. What did they all mean? It’s hard to say, harder still to not be cynical. The ceremony disguised one basic truth: marriage is a contract. Let’s put romance aside. First and foremost, marriage is a legal, binding contract, where two people are joined in partnership, their assets merged, their fates legally entwined through powers vested by no less than the state.
When I think back to the look in Edward’s eyes, I believe that he was afraid that I might not follow through on the deal, might not sign on the dotted line. What would have happened if I hadn’t? If I had listened to that tiny voice inside, if I had felt the cold chill and known that it meant something worth paying attention to?
But I didn’t listen. I pushed my feelings aside and pulled other things out of the summer air: love, hope, faith, resolve. I held Edward’s hand. “I do,” I said, “I do,” he said. He kissed the bride. People cheered, and when I looked out at my friends, I saw more than one of them crying and grinning at the same time. They were so very happy for me.
We stood there, husband and wife. Our brilliant summer wedding day, blue sky and sparkles on the calm water, Mozart and the sound of leaves fluttering in the breeze—everything was so beautiful, so spectacular, it had to be a harbinger of a joyful life to come.
I turned to look at him. It’s true, my own eyes were moist, and my voice was thin with wild and rising emotion. “Edward,” I said, trailing off into all the hopes and dreams and possibilities of our future together. He stared at me—the fear gone from his eyes, replaced by something else. It was the first time I saw—well, you’ll hear about what I saw as my story goes on. All I can say is, I felt the earth—the thin layer of grass on granite ledge—tilt beneath my feet.
He touched the flowers in my bouquet and said, “You’re so delicate, Mara. Like a white rose. And white roses bruise so easily. Is that what your grandmother meant when she said I should take care of you?”
His words took my breath away. Don’t they imply great tenderness? Show true depth of caring, of understanding? Of course they do. He could be so tender. I’ll never deny that. But do you also see, as I do now, that his words implied a threat?
It was as if he’d been focused on Granny’s gentle direction—just an offhand comment was how I’d taken it, a rather protective grandmother giving away the bride. Had Edward even heard the ceremony? Had he even been there? His hazel eyes flashed black as he mentioned Granny’s words.
Just recently, I dreamed of a woman who lived under veils. Black, gray, white, silver, slate, dark blue—layers of veils covering her face. Take one off, there’s another underneath. The woman lived in darkness, even when the sun was shining. She existed undercover. She could barely see out, and others could not see in. The question was: Who put those veils on her? Did she do it to herself? In the dream, she took them off one by one—and at the very bottom, the very last, or first, was a white wedding veil. In my life, I had them torn from me. I wanted to keep them on—you have no idea how much I needed those veils.
Women learn how to hide the worst. We love the best, and show it to all who want to see. Our accomplishments, our careers, our awards, our homes, our gardens, our happy marriages, our beautiful children. We learn, by tacit agreement, to look away from—and hide—the hurt, the blight, the dark, the monster in the closet, the darkness in our new husband’s eyes.
But in some lives, there comes a time when the monster comes out of the closet and won’t go back in. That happened to me. He began to show himself. My grandmother was the first to see. Only the wisest people can observe a woman in such a relationship and not sit in judgment. Judgment is easy: It is black and white, as brutal as a gavel strike. It keeps a person from having to ask the hard questions: What can I do to help? Could that be me?
My grandmother didn’t judge. She tried to understand—and if anyone could understand it would be her, the woman who had raised me in her rose-covered cottage by Long Island Sound. A woman patient enough to coax red, pink, peach, yellow, and white roses from the stony Connecticut soil, to ease her broken-hearted orphan granddaughter back into life, could sit still long enough to see through the lies, see past the veils—and instead of judging, try to help, really help.
People said, “How could you have stayed with him so long?” The true answer, of course, is that I had the veils. But the answer I gave was, “I loved him.” In its way, that answer was true, too. My grandmother understood that.
It wasn’t real love. I didn’t know that for a long time. Love is a boomerang—it comes back to you. With Edward, it was a sinkhole. It nearly consumed me, taking every single thing I had, and then some—until I, and everything surrounding me, collapsed.
I have Liam now, so I have learned the difference. And I have my daughter, Rose. The day Rose was born, nine years ago, I was on the run. I had left my home, my grandmother, my beloved Connecticut shoreline where I had always lived, to escape Edward and try to save something of my life. The Connecticut motto is Qui transtulit sustinet—“He who transplants sustains.”
Leave it to the founding fathers to say “he.” Perhaps they knew that “she”—or at least “me”—“who transplants shatters.” I left home, pregnant with Rose, and I fell apart. But Rose coaxed the love right from my bones. I built myself back, with the help of Rose and Liam. And, although she wasn’t right there in person, my grandmother. She was with me, in my heart, guiding me, every single day while I lived in hiding, in another country, far from home.
You see, my grandmother let me go. She made the ultimate sacrifice for me—gave me and Rose, her great-granddaughter, the chance and means to get away from Edward. She was a one-woman underground railway for one emotionally battered woman. And it cost her so dearly, I don’t know whether she will survive.
My name is Lily Malone now. It was my on-the-run name, and it has stuck. I have decided to keep it forever. Lily, for the orange and yellow daylilies growing along the stone wall of my grandmother’s sea garden, waving on long, slender green stalks in the salt breeze. Malone, for the song she used to sing me when I was little:
“In Dublin’s fair city, where girls are so pretty,
I once laid my eyes on sweet Molly Malone.
She wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow,
Singing ‘cockles and mussels alive, alive-oh.’”
Those lyrics are so sweet; and because my grandmother sang them to me when I was little and couldn’t sleep, they seemed full of life and romance and the promise of unexpected love. I took the name Malone to honor my grandmother’s lullaby, but also for a darker reason. The name helps me stay on guard—reminds me that someone once laid eyes on me, too. And like Molly Malone, I was a hardworking woman; he liked that about me. He liked it very much.
I would like to explain my chosen name to my grandmother. I would like to see her again. To introduce her to Liam—and, especially, to Rose.
More than anything, I’ve come back from my nine-year exile to try to save my grandmother, as she once saved me. I am remembering all this for her. I want to recapture every detail, so I can appreciate exactly what she did for me—for the woman I was, and the woman I have become.
This story is a prayer for her, Maeve Jameson.
It begins thirteen years ago, four years before I left Hubbard’s Point for the most remote place I could find—back when I was Mara. Back when I was a rose that bruised so easily.
Now Available in Paperback
BY
LUANNE RICE
New York Times Bestselling Author
of Silver Bells
A long-awaited opportunity for readers to discover Luanne Rice’s acclaimed early novel—one of this cherished storyteller’s most powerful and complex portraits
of the fragile bonds of family and home.
“A highly suspenseful, multilayered novel about the complex subtleties that lie beneath the surface of a family.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Deserves a place among the best fiction of its kind, alongside Judith Guest’s Ordinary People and Sue Miller’s The Good Mother.”—Eileen Goudge
“Powerful…electrifying…The contrast between romance and reality is what gives this novel its wonderful, terrifying, always compelling tension.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The sense of foreboding is almost overpowering.”
—Atlanta Journal & Constitution
SUMMER’S CHILD
A Bantam Book / June 2005
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by Luanne Rice
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN 0-553-90152-4
www.bantamdell.com
v1.0
Luanne Rice Page 31