Secrets at the Beach House

by Diane Chamberlain

  She pictured them at breakfast. Where’s Kit? someone would ask. Must have decided to sleep in, someone would answer. A third person would suggest they check on her. It’s not like Kit to sleep in on a beautiful Saturday morning. That would probably be Cole.

  But no one came to her room until noon, and by that time she was so consumed by depression she could barely speak. It was Janni who finally knocked on her door. She was wearing black denim jeans and a green sweater that hung to her knees. “Are you going to sleep the day away, Kitty?” she asked.

  Kit began to cry and Janni sat on her bed, holding her close. It felt remarkably good to have a woman hold her. Closeness for the sake of closeness. “What’s wrong, sweets?”

  “I felt the baby move last night.”

  “That’s wonderful!”

  Kit shook her head. “It made me feel so lonely. There was no one to tell.”

  “You’re crazy.” Janni leaned away from her, her brow furrowed but a smile on her lips. “You live in a house full of people who love you. How can you say there was no one to tell? You should have come to our room and jumped on our bed. We could have celebrated.”

  I didn’t feel like celebrating. She couldn’t say that out loud, not to Janni. Cole maybe, but not Jan.

  “I’ve been thinking about this, Kit,” Janni said. “If you’d like, I’ll be your labor coach. I’ll stay with you every minute, and we can pant and push together.”

  “I’d like that,” she said, not wanting to talk about it. She carefully avoided thinking about labor these days. It made her feel trapped and frightened, and she saw no point in worrying about it yet. She took a tissue from the box on her night table and blew her nose.

  Janni smiled. “The coaching starts right now. You’ve got to feed that little critter, especially now that he’s going to use up his calories kicking.”

  “Hers.”

  “You’d prefer a she?”

  Kit sighed. “To tell you the truth, Janni, I don’t think I really believed this was a baby at all until last night when it gave me the sign.” She got out of bed and picked up her bra and T-shirt from the top of the bureau and began to dress. “I think I’ll go for a run before I eat. And Janni?” She touched her friend’s shoulder. “Don’t tell anyone, please. About the baby moving.”

  She pulled on her shorts, ignoring the confusion in Janni’s face, and slipped out her bedroom door.

  30.

  Rennie was subdued at dinner that night. Cole watched her pick at her food and swirl the milk around in her glass. Finally she looked across the table at Maris. “I’m sorry you had a nightmare last night,” she said.

  They all looked at her in surprise. She sounds like an adult, he thought. She sounds like one of us.

  “Thanks,” Maris said, buttering a roll. “It’s a bitch all right.”

  He looked at Maris. It was hard to believe that the woman sitting next to him in her slinky jungle-print skirt with her diamond-studded nostril was the same woman who had stood paralyzed in the hallway the night before. She’d reminded him of a deer, frozen in the headlights of a car.

  “I’ve only ever had one nightmare,” Rennie said.

  “What was it about?” Kit asked.

  Rennie shook her head and speared a Brussels sprout with her fork. She did this a lot, teased them with a tidbit or two to make them draw her out.

  “Talking about nightmares can make them lose their power,” said Janni.

  “I think talking about them makes it worse,” said Maris. “Life goes on and you have to put the terrible things behind you.”

  There were times he wanted to hurt Maris enough to make her cry. Times when he wanted to tell her, Yes, damn it, remember the fire. Remember your brothers’ burned bodies. And remember your babies—how old would they be now? How about Chuck’s accident, the hours he spent trapped in his car before he died? Sometimes he wanted to twist her fingers until he saw a tear in those golden eyes. But he never did. He comforted her on her terms—brought her back from the dream to reality, where she could bury her emotions deep inside once again. He wondered if he was really being a friend to her.

  Cole turned to Rennie. “I’d like to hear your dream,” he said, knowing she was waiting for someone to say those words again.

  She looked directly at him, as directly as she could, and then dropped her gaze to the table. “Um . . . well, I dreamt that I came home from school and went to my grandmother’s room to see her like I did every day, and I saw that she was asleep. I knew that my mother was out with her boyfriend, so I just walked around my house waiting for Grammy to wake up. I kept walking and all and eating things, just waiting and wondering why she was napping so long. Hours went by, and finally I went to try to wake her up because it was almost time for me to make her dinner. I called her and she wouldn’t wake up, and I shook her a little and she was still asleep, and then I saw that her skin looked different . . . and her shoulder where I shook her was cold and kind of stiff . . . and I shook her really hard then and I tried to make her sit up but I couldn’t . . . and I tried to make her eyes open with my fingers, and I screamed ‘Grammy, wake up!’ but she didn’t. Because she was dead. I was all alone with her and she was dead and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.” She lowered her head, her cheeks crimson.

  “What a terrible dream,” said Cole.

  “I wish it was a dream,” Rennie said under her breath.

  “That’s what really happened?” Maris asked.

  Rennie nodded, two fat tears starting to fall over her cheeks. “That’s why I wanted my knapsack so bad. She was in there.”

  “You mean you had a picture of her?” Cole asked.

  “No. I had her. In a plastic box. Her ashes,” she whispered reverently. “I took them with me when I ran away. My mother didn’t care about them. She wouldn’t even buy an urn and I didn’t have enough money to get one myself. Now I keep wondering where she is? What did they do with her?”

  Cole looked at the others, four openmouthed faces. What would those bastards have done with an old lady’s ashes?

  The snow had long ago melted from the yard but the house was still boarded up and Cole began his methodical search, starting at the corner near the patio, kicking through the sand. It was fine and pure and offered nothing more than a few clam shells. But when he reached the beach heather, he spotted something blue jutting out of the ground. He dug at it and unearthed a blue knapsack, empty except for a yellow sweatshirt and a plastic box filled with ashes.

  31.

  She loved running in the rain. There was no escaping it, so it made no sense to try. She let it soak through her T-shirt and plaster her hair to her scalp. The sand was as dense as concrete beneath her feet and she sent wet clumps of it behind her with every step.

  Cole had been right. At four months, better than four months really, Boston would have been a mistake. She felt wonderful and strong, but to put a baby through twenty-six miles of jostling would be cruel. Even on these four-mile runs home from work, she imagined that something would pull loose or that her baby’s little head might take one too many knocks against the wall of her uterus. Cole said that was nonsense, but still she worried.

  The house rose up in front of her like part of the rain-soaked landscape, its features blending into the gray evening sky so that it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the house began. It reminded her of the photograph that hung above the mantel in the living room.

  Jay met her at the sliding glass doors of the kitchen, water dripping down his raincoat. His hair clung to his head and he looked tired. His face was full of lines.

  “Have you heard anything from Cole?” he asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “I thought he’d be home by now.” Jay rubbed his hands together, slowly, as if he were trying to flatten a piece of clay between his palms. “He left the hospital around two, and he wasn’t in very good shape. He lost a patient today.”

  An obstetrician losing a patient? “A mother patient or a baby
patient?” she asked calmly, as if the answer didn’t matter.

  “Abortion.” Jay took off his raincoat and laid it over the back of a kitchen chair. “It was bad. He had this patient, forty-one or forty-two, I think, with severe cardiac disease. Really obese. Nice woman. Nice husband. Anyway, she gets pregnant after twelve years of a childless marriage. First pregnancy.” Jay’s Brooklyn accent was almost too thick to follow when he spoke fast. “There’s no way she could have had this baby. Her cardiologist said she couldn’t survive the pregnancy. Her husband wanted her to have the abortion. Cole recommended it too, of course. She was only ten weeks. She knew she had to abort, but that didn’t stop her from being really upset about it. Crying on the way into the treatment room and all. I’m sure Cole felt like shit. Then in the middle of the procedure her heart stops.”

  “Oh, God.” She pictured the scene in her mind: the glaring lights, the woman draped and asleep—or maybe she’d only had a local? Maybe she knew exactly what was happening the whole time. She could see Cole, his eyes above the mask full of terror. Or panic. Or maybe he’d stay perfectly calm through something like that. She really didn’t know.

  “Cole did everything he could,” Jay continued. “He did everything right. No way was it his fault. But you feel like it at times like that, like, damn, maybe I could have done something else. They worked on her twenty minutes but . . .” He turned his palms up in a gesture of defeat. “I saw Cole afterward and he was really shaken up. Cheryl too. She blew lunch in the scrub sink. Cole spent some time with the husband, and then he said he needed to get out of there and left.”

  She wondered where he was. Driving in the rain? What was he thinking? Did he blame himself?

  They were still in the kitchen when he came home. He walked through the room without a word and threw his raincoat on the table, knocking over a vase. Kit rescued it before it fell to the floor and grabbed a paper towel to mop the water from the oak tabletop. Either he didn’t notice it or he didn’t care. He walked into the library and slammed the door behind him.

  If he still wanted to be alone, he wouldn’t have come home, Kit thought. She walked toward the library.

  “You’ve got guts, girl,” said Jay.

  He was sitting in the chair closest to the window, and the cool April rainstorm cast a gray tint to his face. He stared out at the darkening beach.

  She closed the library door behind her and stood in front of it, ready to make an escape. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Lousy weather.”

  She hurt for him. “Jay said there was nothing you could have done.”

  He made a noise in his throat as if he were choking on a laugh, and a sick-looking smile came to his lips. “Nice of him,” he said.

  “You don’t agree?” She walked toward him and sat on the ottoman. She was shivering. She still had on her wet shorts and T-shirt.

  He spoke without looking at her, and she saw the reflection of the rain in his eyes. “I knew there were risks. I thought I’d taken every precaution. I did. It just wasn’t enough.”

  She shrugged. “These things happen.”

  “Tell that to her husband.”

  They were both quiet for a moment.

  “Maybe I should have let her try to carry that pregnancy and not pushed so hard for the abortion,” he said.

  “Could she have lived?”

  “I don’t see how. And she was taking drugs for her heart that would have damaged the fetus. But she was happy about being pregnant. At least she could have tried.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You know you’re not responsible for her death, and you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for ways to blame yourself.”

  “Don’t counsel me.” His eyes hit her like bolts of lightning. “The last thing I need right now is a goddamned counselor.”

  She stood up, ready to retreat, but he caught her hand.

  “Don’t go,” he said. I’m sorry.”

  She sat down again, thinking that maybe she’d better just listen. She watched his face as he spoke, studied the sharp, strong features that couldn’t save him from looking vulnerable. She wished she could hold him, comfort him. But for months now they’d been cautious in their touching.

  He was still holding her hand, though, and he stroked the back of it with his thumb. His eyes had softened. “Her husband fell apart,” he said. “She was all he had and they really doted on each other. Did Jay tell you she was one of my first patients?”

  She shook her head.

  “She had such complete trust in me. Shit. I keep remembering her face when they wheeled her into the room.” He shuddered. “She was crying and I thought, she’s not ready for this. But she squeezed my hand and said, ‘Do what you have to do, Cole.’ She was comforting me.”

  “It was as if she knew.”

  “Exactly. It was just like she knew.”

  “Where did you go, Cole?” she asked. “Today, when you left Blair?”

  “The inlet.”

  The muscles in her chest contracted but she kept her face calm. “Why?” she asked. “Did you have a sudden urge to watch the boats go out to sea or was it the condo?”

  He smiled. “I can’t say. I just drove straight there. I walked out on the jetty for about ten minutes, and I could feel the condo behind me saying, come on in, Cole, it’s been a while. And when I looked up I half expected to see Estelle on her balcony.”

  “You were hoping.”

  “Yeah, I guess I was hoping. I don’t know why. She was never much good at comforting. Anyway, I went in and talked to the guy at the desk. It’s sold. I thought maybe she’d just rent it out, but she sold it. So . . .” He shrugged, let out a sigh. “Then I went back to my car and sat there watching the boats and the fishermen and feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Oh, babe.” She wrapped her arms around his calves and laid her cheek on his knee. It felt good to be this close to him.

  He set his hand on the back of her head. “This has implications for you. Kit.” His voice sounded different, and she lifted her head to look at him. He wound a strand of her damp hair around his finger. “I did a lot of thinking this afternoon and I decided that I don’t want to be your doctor any longer.”

  “Cole. You have to be.” She felt panicky.

  “If anything happened to you, I could never forgive myself.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen. Cole, I’ve been counting on you. Please.”

  “You shouldn’t trust me as much as you do. I’m not infallible. And I don’t think straight when my emotions are involved.”

  “You did Janni’s hysterectomy without any problem.”

  He groaned. “That was torture for me. She was so excited, finally thinking she was pregnant after all those years, and I told her not only wasn’t she pregnant but I was going to take away any chance she’d ever have of getting pregnant. You know she didn’t talk to me for two weeks after the hysterectomy? It’s wonderful, taking care of a patient who won’t talk to you.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I’m asking a favor, Kit. Let me refer you.”

  She felt hot tears forming in her eyes and put her head on his knees again so he wouldn’t see. “How would you feel if you referred me to someone else and they made some terrible mistake while they were taking care of me?”

  He was quiet and she hoped she’d hit a nerve.

  “I’d rather die at your hands than at anyone else’s.”

  He laughed. “That’s a pretty inane statement.” He sat back in the chair, sighing again. “Let me think it over,” he said. “What happened today is too fresh in my mind.”

  32.

  Her cheeks were turning pink in the May sunshine. It was just one more change in her body. She’d never burned before, or tanned for that matter. But now, as she ran the last block to the pier, she felt her cheeks beginning to sting.

  She stood on the end of the pier and squinted out at the expansive blue circle of water in front of her. This part of the bay was border
ed by large, sturdy-looking houses. She imagined that living in one of them would be the next best thing to living on the ocean.

  The Sweetwater was somewhere on the bay today on her first outing of the year. They’d worked on her over the weekend, scraping and painting. She’d been impressed by how hard Rennie had worked on the boat. As hard as any of them.

  Kit wished the county would put aside its concerns and approve the Chapel House as Rennie’s permanent foster home. It was obvious they had no place else to put her. Why not let her stay with people who wanted her, with people who, to be honest, would grieve if she were taken from them?

  She sat down on the bench and stretched her legs out along the seat, wondering if for once they might tan. They were still tight and strong-looking.

  She was working hard to convince Cole that she didn’t have a fragile bone in her body. The tougher, the healthier she seemed, the less he’d regret his decision to keep treating her. She’d twisted his arm on that one, but she’d had no choice. The terror she felt at going through it all without him had shaken her. She began to wonder if she’d continued the pregnancy just to guarantee his closeness to her.

  She lifted the leg of her shorts and smiled at the pink and white line the sun was making on her thigh. Setting her hand on her stomach, she shut her eyes. It was taking her longer to catch her breath today. Every day she was a little more winded than the day before. Cole had told her to slow her pace a little, to listen to her body. But she had to keep running so she could get back into training right after the baby was born.

  She wished the next four months could be compacted into one week. Feeling quick and slender again was only part of it. She wanted to hold her baby in her arms. That was a surprise. The feeling had crept up on her out of nowhere. Sometimes her arms ached to have her baby in them. She liked the way strangers stared at her in the grocery store, and she couldn’t resist thumbing through the magazines in the checkout line, hunting for articles on pregnancy and babies. She shopped for maternity clothes with Janni and Maris. At work she felt on display, and she didn’t mind a bit. She was providing grist for the rumor mill: she was definitely pregnant and she was definitely not married. The others were probably getting pumped for the facts, though they never spoke to her about it.