“Not to worry.” Bud has trotted over and is wagging his tail at Lilly. She reaches out to pat his head. “Hello, dog.”
Mae goes outside and carries the bag into the kitchen.
“Did you have a nice walk with . . . the dog?” Lilly asks. She’s filling the kettle.
“With Bud? Yes. It was cold. It’s not cold like this in the city. I forgot.” Mae pours Bud’s food into a chipped bowl that Lilly has produced. Water goes in a Tupperware container. He drinks and sloshes it all over the floor.
Mae makes to rip some paper towel off the roll, but, “Here,” says Lilly, handing her a fraying dish towel. Mae has a memory of George hanging paper towels out to dry on the line one summer, when Lilly bought the extra-heavy-duty kind and he insisted they were so absorbent they could be used more than once. They were never wasteful, her grandparents. Because they had lived through a war, George had once explained.
“Are you hungry?” Lilly asks.
“A little. I can make something myself, you don’t need to.”
But soon there’s a plate of toast alongside a little jar of strawberry jam, and her egg sits in a blue cup with a yellow flower on it that has been hers since she was a child.
Mae sits. “I think I saw Jonah Broadbent out on the river this morning . . .”
Lilly stops, one hand on her hip. “That can’t be. Jonah is sick. He’s in the hospital. A stroke, Vivian said.”
Mae’s spoon falls from her fingers and lands with a clunk on the table. If Jonah is sick—but, no. It can’t be. There was a time when Mae believed she saw Gabe everywhere, replayed scenes of his return in her mind, and now is not the time to go back there again. Every man walking on the river, every man walking down the street, cannot become a version of Gabe.
“I have my volunteer shift at the hospital this morning,” Lilly says. For as long as Mae can remember, Lilly has gone to the hospital once a week to sit with elderly people. People who have forgotten who they are, Lilly once said. It seems like a sign to Mae that everything is fine with her grandmother, that whatever she saw in her last night was just because she was tired—and because of George’s absence. “I plan to find out what I can about Jonah’s condition,” Lilly says.
Mae focuses on swallowing, but toast and egg sticks in her throat. “Who cares what happens to Jonah.”
In the long silence, Lilly pours her more coffee. “Any plans for the day?”
Still nothing about George, so Mae brings it up. “I was thinking of going to see Grandpa, at The Ship, if that’s all right with you.”
“No, actually,” Lilly says. “No, actually it’s not all right with me. I’ll tell him you’re home. But this is between us, so please don’t go there today.”
The toast has turned to sawdust in her mouth. She forces it down. “Oh. Okay. If you really don’t want me to—”
“I really don’t want you to. Thank you. Now, I should go take my bath and get going.”
Mae sits at the table until her coffee grows cold. Her grandmother waves on her way out. “We’ll order in tonight?” Lilly says cheerfully, as if nothing were amiss. “Just us two girls?”
“Sure,” Mae says. More silence, after Lilly is gone. Mae goes upstairs. Bud follows, but continues to wander up and down the hall when she lies on top of her unmade bed. A moment later there’s a crash, and Mae knows the girl in the blue dress has danced her last. George would be upset; the figurine was his mother’s.
But he isn’t here either.
Do something nice for someone else-even just a little thing. Sometimes on rainy days, people feel sad.
Lilly is walking through a set of double doors on her way to the wing where she is to meet Dr. Turnbull for the appointment she had lied and told Mae was a volunteer shift when the young man swings through the doors; they nearly hit her. A drop of hot coffee lands on her arm. “Oh, shit,” he says. “Sorry.”
The youth of today. They say things like “Oh, shit” as if it isn’t even rude.
But when she looks up, it’s not a stranger’s face she sees. There’s that moment of searching for the name, and then—“Gabriel Broadbent. My goodness. Well, hello.” Her heart is racing. Her mind, thank God, is staying where it is.
He has stepped away from her. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to bump into you, and I . . . Hello, Lilly. How are you?” He has reached the wall and can’t get away, though he appears to want to.
“I’m fine, Gabe. How are you? I heard about your father. I’m sorry.”
Gabe runs his hand through his hair. He could use a good cut, Lilly thinks, and a good shave.
“Yeah. Thanks. Well, I mean, he’s not dead.” It’s impossible to know whether Gabe is happy or sad about this fact.
She steps toward him and pats his shoulder in an awkward gesture she means to be tender, even though she knows she also threw away her right to be tender with him years ago. “I’m so terribly glad to see you,” she says. Terribly, she thinks. Terrible.
Gabe doesn’t say anything, but he moves away from the wall. He was always like this, you had to draw him out. Virginia was good at it, Mae was even better.
“You’re well?” he asks. “You and George? He called me. But I haven’t talked to him. I went to the hotel last night when I got into town, and they told me Jonah was here. So I haven’t had a chance . . . I was just waiting until . . .”
Lilly tries to smile, cranes her neck to look up at Gabe and pushes the feeling of betrayal down and away. George is not important right now. George is living his own life entirely. “We’re fine. Still alive, anyway.” Was that the right thing to say? Probably not. But Gabe is staying put.
“And Mae? How is she?”
“Mae is fine. She’s . . .” Lilly clears her throat. Words are stuck there and she isn’t sure if she should release them or not. Gabe, oh Gabe, I wanted her to be happy so I sent you away. Now she’s here and she’s so sad and broken. Instead of this, she says, “She’s just fine. Now tell me what’s going on with your father. How bad is it?”
“Bad. Very. I’ve just given them permission to stop the—” He shakes his head.
“It’s all right, Gabe, I understand. Where is he?”
“Just down the hall.”
“Can I see him?”
“He’s not a pretty sight.”
“Your father never was.”
Gabe chuckles. Lilly remembers him sitting with Mae on the couch, reading jokes to her from a book. Mae would laugh with her mouth open, and he would laugh quietly. Just like this.
Gabe leads her to his father’s room and Lilly knows she’s going to miss her appointment with Dr. Turnbull, but she doesn’t care.
The man in the bed doesn’t look like the Jonah she remembers. He resembles a victim of famine. Sunken cheeks, hollow eye sockets, loose skin. Ragged breathing. Jonah but not. Gabe stands beside her, looking down at him. “See?” he says.
A machine beside the bed beeps and Lilly is seized by a sense of urgency.
“Maybe I should have done something,” Gabe says. “They say he had some syndrome, it ate away his brain. From the booze. It killed him, year after year, and no one did any—”
Lilly has to stop him. She can’t listen to this. She feels the edges of her memory sharpening. “Gabe, do you think you could give me a moment with him?” she manages.
“Oh. Uh, sure.”
As he backs away, Lily is seized by a sense of urgency. “Mae is home. She arrived last night. Come for supper tonight. Come to the inn.”
Gabe is silent. Has she made a mistake? Has she come at him too quickly? Don’t forget: you cannot do that with Gabe.
But still, she continues. “She’s having some troubles. She could use a friend.”
His eyes are locked with hers. “Okay. I’ll be in the cafeteria.”
When he’s gone, she pulls up a chair and sits beside Jonah’s bed. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, it’s Virginia. Her girl. In the hospital bed. Waxy skin and lips tinged blue. Beautiful and
fragile, like a sleeping princess.
Virginia is surrounded by machines. There is a blanket on her that seems to breathe: the doctors have explained that it’s delivering warm air to her body in careful doses. A rewarming system, treatment for severe hypothermia. George is getting coffee, Mae is at home with a neighbor. Chase is gone. Nothing will ever be the same.
Virginia’s eyelids flutter, then open. She’s awake! Thank God, she’s awake. Were her eyes always so big, so beautiful?
Virginia licks her lips, then speaks: “Chase?” she says.
Lilly knows what she’s asking, but no. Not yet. “It’s me, Virginia. I’m right here with you.”
“How is Mae?”
“She’s fine. As well as can be expected. She’s at the inn, with Gabe.”
“Promise me that no matter what, you’ll always take care of her? Promise she’ll always have the inn? And that you’ll take care of Gabe, too? Jonah isn’t bad but he”—she shakes her head—“can’t help but hurt other people. He doesn’t know any better.”
“I promise. I do. But you’re going to be fine, darling. You’ll be able to take care of them yourself, soon enough.”
“Yourself,” she repeats, and Lilly senses the slow dawning. “Myself. Mom. Please, tell me Chase is not dead.”
What was Lilly thinking? Why, in that moment, did she not protect her daughter from the reality that awaited? Now those exquisite eyes are spilling over with tears that will break Lilly’s heart for the rest of her life. Lilly thinks maybe this is her do-over, her chance to set it right. But she has no control over what she says next. “I’m sorry. He’s gone,” Lilly says.
“No, you’re not,” Virginia whispers. “You’re not sorry at all. Remember in the summer, those harsh things you said to him?” Of course Lilly remembers. The way she lost her temper with her son-in-law, the way Virginia responded, with cold silence at first, and then by taking her inadequate husband and their little family—Gabe included; he was always included—to that cabin in Quebec, right in the middle of the high season, when Lilly needed her daughter’s help the most.
“I am,” faraway Lilly insists, but from here it feels weak. She can see herself standing at the window of the inn, watching impassively as Chase put the empty beer bottle in the snowbank, walked toward the dock, got in the hovercraft. Stop him. But she didn’t. She turned away from the window.
Virginia speaks again. “I ran so fast. I asked Jonah for help. I tried. But it was too late.” Those blue-green eyes pin Lilly like a butterfly mounted on a spreading board. “Why didn’t you believe in him? Why didn’t you, why couldn’t you, believe in us?” So much to say to that, but this is the moment everything stops. Those eyes reflect shock, then pain, then a strange blankness, and Lilly is calling for the nurses, the doctor, George, anyone.
She can hear it, the sound of the flat line, and it’s so loud, too loud—Lilly blinks several times. But before she can remember the worst part, the part about how they came in and explained, too late, the type of shock the body could go into during the rewarming process, Virginia is gone.
A nurse has entered Jonah’s room. Lilly looks down at all the tubes and wires attached to the man there. Jonah.
A nurse is looking at her. “Excuse me, ma’am? Are you a relative?”
Lilly can’t speak.
“Ma’am?”
“If I had been a better mother, he never would have died, and she never would have died either. If I had just been a better mother . . .”
“It’s okay. . . . Now let’s just try to calm down,” the nurse says. Then she leaves the room and soon there is another nurse who is gently leading her away from the bed and out into the hall.
“Are you family?” this second nurse asks, leading her to a chair.
“She was my daughter.”
“You should sit, ma’am. Maybe you’re confused? In the wrong room?”
Lilly sits, obedient. She closes her eyes. There’s something she’s forgetting. Something important. Something she didn’t do, turn the kettle off, lock the car door?
Gabe.
She opens her eyes. “Excuse me,” she says to a young woman in indigo scrubs. Her face is plain but her hair is remarkable: thick, mahogany, in waves. “Was there a young man here before? Visiting Jonah?”
The nurse’s expression reflects sympathy, concern. “Yes,” she says. “He was here. His son.”
“Do you know if he’s coming back?”
“We’re trying to reach him now, to tell him his father has died.”
Dead. Jonah is dead.
And Lilly has an appointment. That’s it. That’s what she’s here for.
She stands. “I’m late.”
“Ma’am, would you like some water, or some tea, or anything?”
Lily doesn’t answer. She’s had enough of the woman’s condescending manner. She’s not going to sit in a home for years, drooling onto her collar, staring at a television screen with her hands twisting in her lap. She remembers saying to George, “Please, don’t ever let that happen to me.” It was after an afternoon spent volunteering in the aphasia care center at the hospital, just downstairs. She had been showing one of the patients a picture book of mountain vistas when he became agitated. He kept pointing at the mountains and asking for something, but what? “I’m sorry,” Lilly had said. “I’m sorry you can’t talk anymore.” She had reached for his hand. Eventually, he cried himself to sleep in his chair. She won’t be that man. She’s going to tell Dr. Turnbull that he needs to put a stop to whatever it is that’s happening to her.
“Is there a washroom?”
“Just down that way, on the left. You’ll see the sign.”
She walks straight past the washroom and escapes the hateful ward. But where was Dr. Turnbull’s office? Oh, yes. She wrote it down. She retrieves the piece of paper from the pocket of her cardigan. She finds the intake desk.
“I’m Lilly Summers,” she tells the young man behind the reception counter. “I have an appointment.”
He shakes his head. “You missed it. We tried to call you at home. You’re going to have to reschedule.”
“Tell him it’s me. We know each other,” Lilly says. “I’ve volunteered here for years.”
“I’m sorry, but he’s in with another patient now.”
He isn’t even looking at her; he’s staring at his computer screen.
“You’re a rude young man,” Lilly says before she walks away and makes her way down the stairs and out the doors of the hospital.
There’s a record player in the lounge and a bin of records beside it. Turn it up nice and loud, and you might soon have yourself a little rainy-day party. My parents prefer Etta James, but I’m into the Beatles.
Gabe gets to the main floor and keeps walking, past the cafeteria doors and toward the main lobby. The double doors at the front of the hospital open and close, open and close. He runs through them, as if they might close a final time and lock him in. A patient stands outside, smoking a cigarette, oblivious to the cold, but Gabe is immediately freezing. He has no coat, no hat, no gloves, no idea what is happening to him. A panic attack? A nervous breakdown?
“Fuck!” He thought he said this inside his head, but a woman passing him clutches her handbag to her chest.
It was soothing, being with Lilly. But with every step he took away from her, out of that hospital room, it all came back. She’d sent him away. And she’d done it because he wasn’t good enough to be a part of her family, to be a part of her life. He believed this, because of her. So how could she turn around, all these years later, and casually invite him to dinner, especially with Mae home? What was he thinking, coming here? The look on Lilly’s face when he said George had called him! She had no idea. Not a clue. George hadn’t even mentioned it to her.
He can’t breathe.
He walks until he can no longer feel his hands, until he has to either breathe or pass out. He gulps air. Then he goes through the first door he sees. A bar.
* * *
When did it happen, exactly, that he fell in love with Mae? They were kids one minute, and then they weren’t and he was dying for her, following her around like she was dropping crumbs of his soul. He remembers her eighth grade graduation, when the pangs of longing began. He sat with Lilly and George near the front of the auditorium. Some of the girls were gawky, and some of them were almost beautiful, and Mae was just Mae to him, until that night. She still wore glasses, and her hair was braided around her head, and as she crossed the stage, Gabe grinned at her and gave her a thumbs-up, and she grinned back and his heart did something: skipped a beat. He felt like the most special person in the room, because Mae had grinned at him like that.
That summer, she got contact lenses. One afternoon when he was working in the boathouse, he saw her out the window, walking down the bank. Her hair was down and she was wearing a sundress he didn’t recognize—white with yellow flowers, gathered around her chest—and for a moment he didn’t recognize her. She was magnificent. She probably always had been, but he was just noticing. And it wasn’t just her looks: that only sealed the deal in his shallow adolescent mind. It was everything she was, everything she was becoming. She wasn’t like anyone. He loved that about her. She was thoughtful and kind. She was funny, but mostly only around him. She didn’t try too hard, but she wanted things. He could tell. And he wanted those things for her. He wanted everything for her. From then on, officially, she wasn’t childhood Mae when she passed him in the halls at school. She was a young woman and he was falling in love with her. He tried to conceal these feelings from her for years and he believed he succeeded.
But he couldn’t hide it, not from everyone.
One afternoon, he ran into his father in town. He tried to cross the street, but it was too late. “I saw you with her,” Jonah said, his voice cruel, disdainful. “Saw you two sitting at Cathy’s. Didn’t even say hello to your own father.” Gabe had seen Jonah that day but had steadfastly ignored him until he went away.
“You know there’s going to come a time when a girl like that’s not gonna want anything to do with a moron like you, right? Because that’s what happened with her mother!” Gabe crossed the street then, walked away from his father as fast as he could.
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