Kristin Hannah

by On Mystic Lake (v5)

  She looked up, her brown eyes painfully dry and too big for the milky pallor of her tiny face.

  The words were wrong; he knew that instantly. He wasn’t just sorry about what had happened at school. He was sorry about all of it. The death, the life, and all the years of distance and disappointment that had led them to this pitiful place in their lives. Mostly, he was sorry that he was such a failure, that he had no idea where to go from here.

  He got up slowly and went to the window. A glimmer of moonlight skated across the black surface of Mystic Lake, and a dim bulb on the porch cast a yellow net across the twin rocking chairs that hadn’t been used in months. Rain fell in silver streaks from the roofline, clattering on the wooden steps.

  He knew that Izzy was watching him warily, waiting and worrying about what he would do next. Sadly, he knew how that felt, to wait with bated breath to see what a parent would do next. He knew how it twisted your insides into a knot and left you with barely enough oxygen to draw a decent breath.

  He closed his eyes. The memory came to him softly, unintentionally, encoded in the percussive symphony of the rain, the plunking sound of water hitting wood. It reminded him of a day long ago, when a similar rain had hammered the rusty hood of his mother’s old Impala . . .

  He was fifteen years old, a tall, quiet boy with too many secrets, standing on the street corner, waiting for his mother to pick him up from school. The kids moved past him in a laughing, talking centipede of blue jeans and backpacks and psychedelic T-shirts. He watched enviously as they boarded the yellow buses that waited along the curb.

  At last, the buses drove away, chugging smoke, changing gears, heading for neighborhoods Nick had never seen, and the school yard fell silent. The gray sky wept. Cars rushed down the street in a screeching, rain-smeared blur. None of the drivers noticed a thin, black-haired boy in ragged, holey jeans and a white T-shirt.

  He had been so damned cold; he remembered that most of all. There was no money for a winter coat, and so his flesh was puckered and his hands were shaking.

  Come on, Mom. That was the prayer he’d offered again and again, but without any real hope.

  He hated to wait for his mother. As he stood there, alone, his chin tucked into his chest for warmth, he was consumed by doubt. How drunk would she be? Would it be a kind, gentle day when she remembered that she loved him? Or a dark, nasty day when the booze turned her into a shrieking, stumbling madwoman who hated her only child with a vengeance? Dark days were the norm now; all his mother could think about was how much she’d lost. She wailed that welfare checks didn’t cover gin and bemoaned the fact that they’d been reduced to living in their car—a swallow away from homelessness.

  He could always read her mood immediately. A pale, dirty face that never smiled and watery, unfocused eyes meant that she’d found her way to a full bottle. Even though he went through the car every day, searching for booze like other kids searched for Easter eggs, he knew he couldn’t stop her from drinking.

  He rocked from foot to foot, trying to manufacture some body heat, but the rain hammered him, slid in icy, squiggly streaks down his back. Come on, Mom.

  She never came that day. Or the next. He’d wandered around the dark, dangerous parts of Seattle all night, and finally, he’d fallen asleep in the garbage-strewn doorway of a tumbledown Chinese restaurant. In the morning, he’d rinsed out his mouth and grabbed a discarded bag of fortune cookies from a Dumpster, then made his way to school.

  The police had come for him at noon, two unsmiling men in blue uniforms who told him that his mother had been stabbed. They didn’t say what she’d been doing at the time of the crime, but Nick knew. She’d been trying to sell her thin, unwashed body for the price of a fifth of gin. The policemen told Nick that there were no suspects, and he hadn’t been surprised. No one except Nick had cared about her when she was alive; no one was going to care that another scrawny, homeless drunk, turned old before her time by booze and betrayal, had been murdered.

  Nick buried the memory in the black, soggy ground of his disappointments. He wished he could forget it, but of course, the past was close now. It had been breathing down his neck ever since Kathy’s death.

  With a tired sigh, he turned and faced his utterly silent child. “Time for bed,” he said softly, trying to forget, too, that in the old days—not so long ago—she would have mounted a formal protest at the thought of going to bed without any “family time.”

  But now, she got to her feet, held her doll in the two “visible” fingers on her right hand, and walked away from him. Without a single backward glance, she began the long, slow climb to the second floor. Several of the steps creaked beneath her feather weight, and every sound hit Nick like a blow. What in the hell was he going to do now that Izzy was out of school? She had nowhere to go and no one to take care of her. He couldn’t stay home from work with her, and Lurlene had her own life.

  What in the hell was he going to do?

  Twice during the night, Annie awoke from her solitary bed and paced the room. Kathy’s death had reminded her how precious time was, how fleeting. How sometimes life snipped the edges off your good intentions and left you with no second chance to say what really mattered.

  She didn’t want to think about her husband—I love her, Annie—but the thoughts were always there, gathered in the air around her, crackling like heat lightning in the darkness of her room. She stared at her face in the mirror, studying the haircut, trying to figure out who she was and where she belonged. She stared at herself so long, the image changed and twisted and turned gray, and she was lost in the blurry reflection of a woman she’d never known.

  Without Blake, she had no one who’d witnessed the past twenty years of her life. No one but Hank who could remember what she’d been like at twenty-five or thirty, no one with whom to share her lost dreams.

  Stop it.

  She glanced at the clock beside the bed. It was six o’clock in the morning. She sat down on the edge of the bed, grabbed the phone, and dialed Natalie’s number, but her daughter was already gone for the day. Then she took a chance on Terri.

  Terri answered on the fifth ring. “This better be important,” she growled.

  Annie laughed. “Sorry, it’s just me. Is it too early?”

  “No, no. I love getting up before God. Is everything okay?”

  Annie didn’t know if things would ever be okay again, but that answer was getting stale. “I’m getting by.”

  “Judging by the hour, I’d say you weren’t sleeping well.”

  “Not much.”

  “Yeah, I pretty much paced and cried for the first three months after Rom-the-shit-heel left me. You need to find something to do.”

  “I’m in Mystic; the choices are a bit limited. I suppose I could try my hand at beer-can art. That’s a big seller up here. Or maybe I can learn to hunt with a bow and arrow and then stuff my own kills.”

  “It’s good to hear you laugh.”

  “It beats crying.”

  “Seriously, Annie. You need to find something to do. Something that gets you out of your bed—or into someone else’s. Try shopping. Go buy some new clothes. Something that changes your look.”

  Annie rubbed her shorn hair. “Oh, I’ve changed my looks all right. I look like Rush Limbaugh on Phen-fen.”

  They talked for another half hour, and when she hung up, Annie felt, if not stronger, then at least better. She roused herself from her bed and took a long, hot shower.

  Dressing in a white cashmere boat-necked sweater and winter-white wool slacks, she went downstairs and cooked Hank a big breakfast of scrambled eggs, orange juice, pancakes, and turkey bacon. It wasn’t long before the aroma drew her dad downstairs.

  He walked into the kitchen, tightening the gray cotton belt around his ankle-length robe. He scratched his scruffy white beard and stared at her. “You’re up. Are you out of bed for long, or just roving until the headache starts again?”

  The perceptiveness of the question reminded Annie that
her father had known tragedy and had more than a waltzing acquaintance with depression himself. She pulled some china plates from the old oak breakfront in the corner and quickly set two places at the breakfast table. “I’m moving on with my life, Dad. Starting now. Starting here. Sit down.”

  He pulled out a chair. It made a grating sound on the worn yellow linoleum. “I’m not sure feeding a man is a big leap forward.”

  She gave him a crooked grin and took a seat across from him. “Actually, I thought I’d go shopping.”

  He plucked up a mouthful of egg in his blunt-edged fingers. “In Mystic? Unless you’re looking for the ideal steel-head lure, I don’t know how much luck you’ll have.”

  Annie stared down at her eggs. She wanted to eat—she really did—but the sight of the food made her faintly nauseous. She hoped her dad didn’t notice. “I thought I’d start by getting a few books. This seems like a good time to catch up on my reading. Hell, I could get through Moby-Dick in my spare time. And the clothes I brought won’t work up here.”

  “Yeah, white’s not a very practical color up here in mud-land. ” He poured a blot of ketchup alongside his eggs and peppered everything. Reaching for his fork, he glanced across the table at Annie. She could tell that he was doing his best not to grin. “Good for you, Annie Virginia.” Then, softer, “Good for you.”

  Mystic dozed beneath a bright spring sun. The town was full of activity today, with farmers and housewives and fishermen scurrying up and down the concrete sidewalks, in a hurry to get their errands done while the clouds were slim and spread out beneath a pale blue sky. Everyone knew that those same clouds could suddenly bunch together like school-yard bullies, releasing a torrent of rain so vicious that even a full-grown eagle couldn’t take flight.

  Annie strolled down Main Street, peeking into the various stores, a couple of times pushing through a half-open door. Invariably a bell tinkled overhead and a voice called out, Hiya, miss. Fine day, isn’t it? At the Bagels and Beans coffee shop, she ordered a double tall mocha latte, and she sipped it as she moved down the street.

  She passed stores that sold trinkets for tourists, hardware, fabric, and fishing tackle. But there wasn’t a single bookstore. At the H & P Drugstore, she picked up the latest Pat Conroy bestseller but couldn’t find anything else that interested her. There wasn’t much of a selection. It was too bad, because she needed a manual for the rest of her life.

  At last, she found herself standing in front of Eve’s Leaves Dress Emporium. A mannequin smiled down at her from the display window, wearing a bright yellow rain slicker and matching hat. Her awkwardly bent elbow held a sign that read: Spring is in the air. Multicolored silk flowers sprouted from watering cans at her booted feet, and a rake was slanted against one wall.

  Annie pushed through the glass door. A tiny bell tinkled at her entrance.

  Somewhere, a woman squealed. “It can’t be!”

  Annie looked around for the owner of the voice. Molly Block, her old high school English teacher, came barreling through the maze of rounders, her fleshy arms waving.

  “Annie?” she said, grinning. “Annie Bourne, is that you?”

  “It’s me, Mrs. Block. How are you?”

  Molly planted her hands on her wide hips. “Mrs. Block. Don’t make me feel so old, Annie. Why, I was practically a child when I taught your class.” She grinned again, and shoved the wire-rimmed glasses higher on her nose. “It’s grand to see you again. Why, it’s been years.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Molly.”

  “Whatever brings you up to our neck of the woods? I thought you married a hotshot lawyer and were living the good life in smoggy California.”

  Annie sighed. “Things change, I guess.”

  Molly cocked her head to the left and eyed Annie. “You look good; I’d kill to be able to wear that haircut, but I’d look like a helium balloon. That white cashmere won’t last long in this country, though. One good rainstorm and you’ll think you left the house wearin’ a dead rabbit.”

  Annie laughed. “That’s the truth.”

  Molly patted her shoulder. “Follow me.”

  An hour later, Annie stood in front of a full-length mirror. She was wearing a nineteen-dollar pair of jeans (who knew they still made jeans at that price?), cotton socks and tennis shoes, and a baggy UW sweatshirt in a utilitarian shade of gray.

  The clothes made her feel like a new woman. She didn’t look like the thirty-nine-year-old soon-to-be-ex-wife of a hotshot California lawyer; she looked like an ordinary small-town woman, maybe someone who had horses to feed and porches to paint. A woman with a life. For the first time, she almost liked the haircut.

  “They suit you,” Molly said, crossing her beefy arms and nodding. “You look like a teenager.”

  “In that case, I’ll take everything.”

  While Molly was ringing up the purchases, she rambled on and on about life in Mystic, who was sleeping with whom, who’d gone bankrupt over the spotted owl fiasco, who was running for city council.

  Annie glanced out the window. She listened vaguely to the small-town gossip, but she couldn’t really concentrate. Lurlene’s words kept coming back to her, circling, circling. Kathy died eight months ago. She turned back to Molly. “I heard . . . about Kathy Johnson . . . Delacroix.”

  Molly paused, her pudgy fingers plucking at a price tag. “It was a true shame, that. You all used to be awfully close in high school.” She smiled sadly. “I remember the time you and Nick and Kathy put on that skit for the talent show—you all sang some silly song from South Pacific. Nicky wore that outrageous coconut bra, and halfway through the song you all were laughing so hard you couldn’t finish.”

  “I remember,” she said softly, wondering how it was she’d forgotten it until this very second. “How’s Nick doing since . . . you know?” She couldn’t bring herself to actually say the words.

  Molly made a tsking sound and snipped the price tag from the jeans with a pair of scissors. “I don’t know. He makes his rounds and does his job, I guess—you know he’s a cop, right? Don’t see him smile much anymore, and his daughter is in pretty bad shape, from what I hear. They could use a visit from an old friend, I’ll bet.”

  After Annie paid for her new clothes, she thanked Molly for the help and carried her purchases out to the car. Then she sat in the driver’s seat for a while, thinking, remembering.

  She shouldn’t go to him, not now, not spur-of-the-moment, she knew that. A thing like this needed to be thought out. You didn’t just go barging into a strange man’s life, and that’s what he was: a stranger. She hadn’t seen Nick in years.

  Besides, she was broken and battered herself. What good could she be to a man who’d lost his wife?

  But she was going to go to him. She had probably known from the second Lurlene mentioned his name that it was inevitable. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense; it didn’t matter that he probably wouldn’t remember her. What mattered was that he’d once been her best friend, and that his wife had once been her best friend. And that she had nowhere else to go.

  It was approaching nightfall by the time Annie gathered the nerve to go see Nick. A winding brown ribbon of road led to the Beauregard house. Towering old-growth trees bracketed the road, their trunks obscured by runaway salal bushes. Every now and then, through the black fringe of forest, she could see a glittering silver reflection of the lake. The last few rays of gray sunlight fell like mist through the heavy, moss-draped branches.

  It wasn’t raining, but tiny droplets of dew began to form on the windshield. In this, the land of ten thousand water-falls, the air was always heavy with moisture, and the lakes were the aquamarine hue of glacial ice. Some, like Mystic Lake, were so deep that in places the bottom had never been found, and so remote that sometimes, if you were lucky, you could find a pair of trumpeter swans stopping by on their migratory patterns. Here, tucked into the wild, soggy corner of this secret land, they knew they would be safe.

  The road twisted and tu
rned and finally ended in a big circular dirt driveway. Annie parked next to a police squad car, turned off the engine, and stared at the beautiful old house, built back at the turn of century, when woods were solid and details were hand-carved by master craftsmen who took pride in their work. In the distance, she could hear the roar of the mighty Quinault River, and she knew that this time of year it would be straining and gnawing at its bank, rushing swollen and headlong toward the faraway shores of the Pacific Ocean.

  A pale yellow fog obscured half of the house, drifting on invisible currents of air from the lake. It crept eerily up the whitewashed porch steps and wound around the carved posts.

  Annie remembered a night when this house had been spangled in starlight. It had been abandoned then; every broken window had held jagged bits of shadow and moonlight. She and Nick had ridden their bikes here, ditched them alongside the lake, and stared up at the big, broken house.

  I’m gonna own this house someday, Nick had said, his hands shoved deeply in his pockets.

  He’d turned to her, his handsome face cut into sharp angles by the glittering moonlight. She hadn’t even seen the kiss coming, hadn’t prepared for it, but when his lips had touched hers, as soft and tentative as the brush of a butterfly’s wing, she’d started to cry.

  He had drawn back, frowning. Annie?

  She didn’t know what was wrong, why she was crying. She’d felt foolish and desperately naive. It was her first kiss—and she’d ruined it.

  After that, he’d turned away from her. For a long time, he’d stared at the lake, his arms crossed, his face unreadable. She’d gone up to him, but he’d pulled away, mumbled something about needing to get home. It was the first and last time he’d ever kissed her.

  She brushed the memory aside and fixed her thoughts on the here and now.

  Nick and Kathy had fixed up the old house—the windows were all in place, and sunshine-yellow paint coated everything. Hunter-green shutters bracketed each window, but still the whole place looked . . . untended.