Kit wanted to point out what he’d missed—the tufts of hair and button nose, the tiny fingers clutching the yellow wire attached to her chest—but she said nothing.
Orrin shifted in the chair. “I have to go out of town for a few days so I won’t be able to visit for a while.”
“Oh. Where are you going?”
“New York. There are some depositions I have to take up there. I’ll be gone about a week I think.”
“Will you call me when you get back?” She was suddenly afraid of losing touch with him. With anyone.
“Of course,” he said, standing, ready to make his exit.
“Thank you for coming. And thanks for the flowers.”
“Sure.” He was practically backing away from her. “I’ll see you in a week or so,” he said, turning quickly toward the door.
When she got back to the Chapel House, she would have to check the dictionary to see if she were a leper or a lepress.
There was no doubt about it. Cole was pulling away from her.
At noon on Wednesday Jay announced he was driving her home. “Cole’s really swamped today,” he said when he saw the surprise in her face. “He said he’d see you at the house tonight.”
Her bed in the house was an invitation. Someone had made it up with flowery pink sheets. Somehow she found the energy to change out of her pants and cotton top into the baggy man’s T-shirt she’d worn while she’d been pregnant and she climbed into her bed, tucking Alison’s picture under her pillow. She felt pleasantly pressed into the mattress. She would never get out of this bed. Cole would tell her she had to get up and walk around. He’d been after her about it since Sunday. But what was the point? This was the place to be.
Except for the heat. Jay brought the fan into her room before he went back to Blair, and it blew hot, damp salt air across the bed.
She slept all afternoon. Cole woke her at six. “Dinner’s ready.” He stood next to her bed. He was wearing his oatmeal-colored suit and looked newly tanned.
Maybe he would be different now that she was home. She tried to sit up, but her body was too heavy to move. “I couldn’t get up if I wanted to,” she said.
“You need to keep moving, Kit. And you need to eat. Now come on.”
“Just for tonight,” she begged. “Tomorrow I’ll get up, but for tonight I just want to lie here.”
He frowned at her. “Okay. I’ll ask someone to bring your dinner up.” He looked at his watch. “I have to go. I’m supposed to pick Cynthia up at six-thirty.”
So that was why he was dressed up. She grabbed his wrist, the bronzed wrist of a stranger. “Wait,” she said. “I’m so out of touch. You haven’t told me how things are going with her. I’m not so full of my own problems that I can’t listen.” It was a desperate ploy to keep him with her. She didn’t care how things were going with Cynthia. She didn’t want to hear about Cynthia at all.
“Things are better,” he said. “We’ve seen each other a lot this week.”
She pictured the two of them, sunbathing on the Chapel House beach while she lay crying in her airless hospital room.
“That’s good,” she said. She had the feeling she was keeping him. He stood first on one foot, then the other. “Well, have fun tonight.”
A quick smile. “I will. Bye.” He left without touching her.
Thursday morning he didn’t even come in her room. He stood in the doorway, badgering her to eat, before he left for Blair.
When did this start? She pressed her fingers to her temples. He’d been very kind the morning he brought Alison to her room. Kind, yes, but a little distant. Even that Saturday, he’d come to tell her about Alison’s death, and then he didn’t come back. He’d hugged her, though. Her body ached to remember it—his arms around her, the scent of his neck and hair. But maybe he’d felt he had to. She’d been crying, talking fantasy nonsense about Alison. She’d left him little choice but to comfort her. It embarrassed her to remember it.
No, she could trace the change right back to the day of Alison’s birth. She’d been so demanding, as if she were his only patient. Whiny and childish. What a drain she’d been on him. He probably lived for those moments when he could get away from her complaining and her fear. By the end of that day she must have been no more than a repulsive mass of body parts to him.
Could she ever erase the image he had of her now? Not this way. Not lying here, glued to her bed with sweat.
She moved slowly through a shower. It took her forever to wash her hair. She planned to get dressed and go downstairs. Maybe eat something. But she began to cry again for no reason, and her bed with its hot, rumpled pink sheets drew her in again.
She slept until one o’clock when Rennie knocked on the door.
“Cole said it would be okay for you to sit out on the beach with me,” she said, stepping into the room. She had on a white eyelet beach jacket Kit had never seen before. Her tan had deepened to a rich golden brown.
“Oh. Thanks for asking, honey, but I’d rather stay here.”
Rennie made no movement toward the door.
“Is there something else, Rennie?”
The girl stared down at her bare feet. “I wish you’d get better soon. Things are different.”
“Different how?” She didn’t have the strength for this.
“Nobody gets along as well. I get afraid sometimes things won’t ever be the same again.”
“I get afraid of that too, Ren,” she said, knowing that was not what Rennie needed to hear. “I’ll be all right in a few days. I’m just very, very tired.”
“Can I bring you something to eat? Some cookies or something?”
She smiled. “I’m not hungry.”
Rennie stared at the floor again. “Cole said if you didn’t eat you’d have to go back to the hospital.”
A current of alarm shot through her. Would he do that? Did he want to get her as far away from him as he could?
“Okay, honey. Bring me some toast, please.” She’d flush it down the toilet, but she wouldn’t let him put her back in the hospital.
Cole looked genuinely concerned that night as he sat on her bed.
“Maris said all you had today was some toast.”
And I didn’t even have that. “Maybe I’ll get my appetite back tomorrow,” she said.
“You need to eat, and more than just toast. And you’re hardly drinking anything. And you need to get moving, Kit. When you wouldn’t exercise in the hospital I thought maybe you just needed to get home with us.”
She looked at his hands instead of his eyes and said nothing. She felt ugly.
“Kit”—he looked uncomfortable—“I thought I might ask Frank Jansen to come see you.”
“I don’t need a shrink,” she said.
“It’s normal to be depressed after you’ve lost a baby but I’m concerned that your depression’s taking a toll on your health.”
He was talking to her gently, doctor to patient. He’ll be glad to get out of here, she thought. Glad to get to Cynthia. She pictured Cynthia’s sleek dark hair and slender body. Was she going down on him now?
“All right, I’ll drink and eat and get up,” she snapped. “Okay?” She rolled onto her side and shut her eyes, relieved to escape his scrutiny.
She woke to the sound of a baby crying. She stared at the ceiling, lacy with moonlight, trying to get her bearings. It was her own room, not the hospital. It was very early Friday morning and somewhere—down the hall, maybe in the nursery—a baby was crying.
She lay still, willing the sound to come again, but the murmur of the sea was all she could hear.
She sat up, a thin veneer of perspiration coating her body. I’m going crazy, she thought. She got out of bed, startled by the weakness in her legs, and walked slowly to the door. She had to stop there to catch her breath.
She opened the door and stepped into the hallway, feeling a pang of sadness when she saw Cole’s door in front of her. How confidently she’d knocked on that door in the past, knowing s
he was welcome on the other side. It was the last door in the house she would knock on now.
She moved slowly, breathlessly down the hall until she reached the nursery. She turned the knob. Please, God, let there be a baby inside. She held her breath as she opened the door. There was no need to turn on the light to see that the nursery was empty. The moon washed any mystery from the room with its stark light. She could see the shine of the blue plastic mattress in the bottom of the crib.
She was relieved to get back to her bed. The mattress was molded to the shape of her body now.
Was she going out of her mind? She had to do something, take some action. She would talk to Cole. She had little left to lose. She’d tell him that she needed him. No. Too demanding. Should she tell him she knew he was disgusted with her? Then he’d try to defend himself. She’d never needed to think through her words to him before.
She was tense the second she opened her eyes in the morning. She didn’t remember falling asleep, just rehearsing in her mind what she would say to Cole. He would stop in her room before he left for work and she would tell him, “Cole, I miss you.” She would try not to cry, but thinking those words to herself put a lump in her throat.
He knocked on her door at eight-fifteen. “How are you doing?” he asked from the doorway.
Please come in. Her heart was pounding. “Better,” she said. “Do you have a little time to talk?” She said it so coolly, so casually that he would never guess the trepidation behind the words.
He looked at his watch. “I wish I did, but I have a slew of patients starting at nine,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ll call you later.”
“No, it’s not that important. I just haven’t really talked with you in a while.” She steeled herself. “How about after work?”
He shook his head. “Cynthia and I are going to an early movie and then out to dinner. But, listen,” he added suddenly, “I can cancel with her . . .”
“No, don’t do that.” She smiled. “It’s nothing.”
For the first time she became aware of the house functioning without her. From her window seat, she watched Rennie and one of her girlfriends on the beach, stretched out on blankets. Even at this distance she could see that Rennie’s hair was streaked blond from the sun. She could hear indecipherable snips of their conversation as the hot salt air blew through her window. At noon, she watched Maris dive into the water and swim back and forth beyond the breaking waves. Kit felt dead to them now. Everyone was doing fine without her.
Janni yelled at her. The new tack. Long hours of gentle talk about Alison and patient encouragement to get out of her room hadn’t worked.
“Look, Kit, you’re rotting in here,” she said in a voice that was painfully loud. “I want you to come downstairs. I don’t care if you’re miserable as hell down there, you need to get out of this . . . this tomb.”
Yes, a tomb. Her room seemed to fit that description now, holding her in, shrinking in size with each day.
“Please leave me alone,” she said.
“And you need a shower,” Janni added with brutal frankness. She came over to the window seat and grabbed her hand. “Come on, sweets. You and I are taking a shower together. You’ll feel much better, you’ll see.”
“Not so fast!” She nearly fell. God, she was weak. It would be easier to go with Janni than to fight her.
She let Janni wash her hair and soap her body while she leaned against the shower wall, eyes closed. It took all her effort just to stand there and breathe at the same time.
Maris changed her sheets while she was in the shower. Someday she would have the strength to thank them for this, but not now. She headed in the direction of the bed.
“Oh no you don’t.” Janni grabbed her arm. “You’re coming outside. On the beach.”
“No, Janni, please.” She began to cry.
“Kit, Rennie misses you. She needs you.” Another new tack. “Come on, sweets.”
She sat on her bed. “Let me stay here, Janni. Please.”
There was some pleasure in seeing Janni give in.
She felt undeniably better now that she was clean and lying between fresh sheets. Maris had propped her pillows up for her, and she leaned back against them with a sigh. It had been a rough hour.
Alison’s picture. She leaped up and threw the pillows to the floor. Nothing beneath them but the pure white cotton sheet. What if Maris had put it in the laundry? Her heart raced as she pulled open the drawer of her night table. There it was, resting on the tissue box. She clutched it to her chest, breathing hard. She could hear the wheeze when she exhaled like the string section of an orchestra.
She turned away from Cole when he came to her room the next morning. Her head throbbed and she didn’t want him to see the red in her eyes. He turned her face toward him with two fingers on her chin.
“You look dehydrated.”
She shrugged.
“What do you want to drink? Water? Juice? Iced tea?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I think we need to lock your bedroom door the next time you go to the bathroom so you can’t get back in here.”
“Then I won’t go to the bathroom.”
He sat down on her bed with a sigh. “You know, I don’t know how to help you.”
“I’m not asking you to help me.”
“I thought you were doing better yesterday. You seemed in better spirits when I saw you in the morning and Janni said you ate more.”
She had eaten nothing. Everything had gone in the toilet.
“But you’ve got to get out of this bed, Kit. I don’t expect you to be cheerful, but you should at least get dressed and eat your meals at the table with the rest of us. You haven’t been downstairs since you came home.”
Downstairs. She’d forgotten this house had a downstairs. It had been nearly three weeks since she’d seen it. She pictured the airy comfort of the kitchen, imagined walking out to the beach, the white sand hot under her bare feet.
She picked at a flaw in her sheet. She had nothing to say to him.
He looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ve got a baby to deliver.” He caught himself and made a face. “I’m sorry. That was tactless.” She felt his eyes on her. “What can I do, Kit?”
She slid down into the bed and pulled the sheet over her face. She didn’t even hear him leave the room.
It wasn’t until that afternoon that she remembered what day it was. Saturday. Exactly one week since Alison’s death. She still remembered everything about her, every eyelash, the swirly pattern of her hair on the top of her head, the bow-shape of her mouth. By now she would have been a week old. Everyone in the house would be fighting to hold her, maybe joking about how her crying kept them awake at night. But she never would have let her cry for long. She would have sat up with her in the rocker or brought her into bed with her to nurse.
She was plummeting. As low as she’d been all week, she was falling even lower. By the time Virginia Perelle appeared at her door, she’d been crying for over an hour.
“Can I come . . . Kit, dear, you poor thing.” Virginia walked briskly across the room and sat on the chair at the side of the bed. “Janni told me you’ve been crying for days. It must hurt terribly to lose a baby.”
“It’s not just the baby, it’s your goddamned son!” She bit her tongue, too late.
But Virginia looked unflustered. “What’s my . . . goddamned son . . . done?”
“He’s forgotten I exist, except as a baby machine. An inferior one at that.”
“Oh, Kit, he cares so much for you. I can’t believe for an instant that . . .”
Kit shook her head. “He’s avoiding me. I’m not imagining it.” She told her about his brief visits to her room from the safety of the doorway, how he only seemed concerned with her physical well-being.
“You need to talk with him,” Virginia said.
“I’m afraid to.”
“When you see him tonight just say, ‘I need to talk to you.’ It’s simple.�
�
“And he’ll look at his watch and say, ‘Oops, sorry, Kit, gotta run.’”
“‘Cole, I really need some of your time and I need it now. Tonight.’” Virginia was pretending to be Kit.
Kit decided to play along with her. “Okay,” she said. “What is it?”
“I’ve been feeling as if you’ve changed toward me since I had the baby.”
“I haven’t changed.”
“Yes, Cole, you have.”
“All right!” Kit sat up straight, her eyes flashing. “I’ll tell you. You disgust me. You’re a whiny bitch. You look like hell, all washed out like that. You look twice your age. I can’t get it out of my mind that I cut you open, that I had my hands in your guts. And your baby died. You never really, completely wanted her and you balked at taking good care of yourself. So I feel like a failure because I delivered a defective baby and it’s your goddamned fault. There’s this . . . this aura of death around you. I can smell it when I come in your room. How the hell can you expect me to still care about you?” Kit’s voice broke and she fell back against the pillows, tears running down her cheeks.
“Oh, Kit,” Virginia said softly. “Your last sentence sums it up, doesn’t it? How can you expect him to care about you when you’re thinking about yourself that way? They were your words, dear, not Cole’s.”
She knew by Cole’s face that he’d spoken with his mother. He stood at the foot of her bed, leaning against the wooden footboard.
“How do I begin?” he said.
“She had no right to tell you anything.”
“I’ve been dense, Kit. I never would have figured this out on my own. I’m sorry.”
What had Virginia told him? She felt her cheeks burning, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was lost inside his head, struggling to get something across to her without words. He used to be able to do that so easily, but it wasn’t working now. He sat on her bed near the footboard, looking down at his hands.
“The night Alison was born,” he said, “I had a conversation with Janni. I don’t want to go into it all . . . some day I’ll tell you, but not now.”
She couldn’t imagine where this was leading, but she felt sorry for him. It was as if she was seeing his face for the first time in days, and it was full of misery.
Secrets at the Beach House Page 25