Mrs. Sullivan laughed, squeezed my cheeks.
“He talks all low and monotone. He doesn’t run through the rain with me anymore, or let me get extra sprinkles on my ice cream cone. He won’t let me wear shoes in the house or get sand in the cuff of my jeans or even bring home a starfish for my dresser—says they smell. I’ve been thinking that the real Daddy will come back—that he’s not really what everyone calls him, grumpy and moody—but four years seems long enough to wait for my real Daddy to come back. And he hasn’t. So—here I am.”
The kitchen screen door slammed and we both turned to her son, Jack, who came running through the doorway, sand flying out of the cuffs of his pants, shoes on his feet. “Hey, whatcha doing here?” he said to me as he threw his baseball cap on the kitchen table. I was stunned when no one yelled at him to put his hat in its proper place.
“I ran away,” I said, hit my palm on the table for emphasis.
“Oh, you did?” He looked at his mom, then blew a large Bazooka bubble. “Must’ve taken you a day or two to run this far.”
Mrs. Sullivan laughed, and it felt like a betrayal. I wanted to give a smart answer to Jack Sullivan with his dirty face and bubble-gum lips, but tears found their way into my throat, then rose to my nose and finally my eyes. I turned away. I’d known Jack my entire life; our birthdays were three days apart, and he’d never made me cry—except that time he’d thrown me in the river and I’d sliced my heel on the oyster bed.
He lifted his hands in the air. “Oh, I was only joking, Kara. Only joking. You didn’t really run away, did you?”
I nodded. “My mama’s gone and now Daddy is too.”
Jack dropped the baseball glove I hadn’t seen in his left hand—it was so much a part of him that I didn’t even notice it. “What? Your daddy . . . ,” he said.
Mrs. Sullivan held up her hand. “No, she just means he’s changed.”
“At least he’s around,” Jack said.
I glanced at Mrs. Sullivan. Pain flew across her face like a shooting star I wasn’t sure I saw. I flinched as I thought of her husband, who came and went as the alcohol allowed.
“He might be around, Jack Sullivan,” I said, “but he’s a different man. My real daddy is gone.” I straightened in my chair.
Jack sat down at the table with his mother and me, took a bite of my sandwich, then punched my shoulder lightly. “You wanna go help me find a conch shell for my summer project? I have to make a musical instrument out of something in nature.”
I jumped up. “Sure.” Then I turned to Mrs. Sullivan. “What time do we need to be getting home for dinner?” In my home, punctuality was a god to honor at all costs, and I assumed it was the same here.
Mrs. Sullivan stood, drew me in her embrace again. “Honey, you need to be at your own home by dark.”
“No.” I didn’t yell this or even have a fit, just stated the fact.
She nodded. “This family is a big enough mess without adding kidnapping to its list of charges.”
I shook my head. “Well, I’ll find somewhere else to live then.”
“No, you won’t,” she said, and pulled me closer. “Because you can come here whenever you want, and because if your Daddy lost one more thing he loved, he’d be destroyed for sure.”
And I knew this was true. Guilt washed over me, and it tasted like the time I’d been slammed down by an unexpected wave, biting my tongue and swallowing more seawater than I’d thought possible.
I followed Jack Sullivan out the door and into the pre-twilight evening of summer. This was the time of day when I wondered what had happened to the day, where it had gone. Had I used up the sunlight, guzzled the day like one should during the summer? Had I done everything . . . right?
I caught up to Jack, and skipped next to him; he looked at me and stopped.
“What?” I squinted at him against the fading sun, pink and periwinkle in the edges of the clouds.
“Do you really want to run away from home?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” I said, surer than I’d ever been.
He touched the bottom edges of my dark wavy hair. This was something he’d never done—touched me in a gentle way like I was a fragile shell that would fracture under his hands. He twisted a curl around his finger, and I felt it all the way to the inside of my head, through my scalp—a tingling of a sort I hadn’t known existed, like electricity, but deeper and wider and less jolting.
Then he let go, looked at me. “Why would you leave? You have the best family I’ve ever met.”
“Because it’s not the same anymore, at all. Mama’s gone and now it seems Daddy is too. Deirdre is mad all the time and Brian is too busy with his friends to notice me. So, it’s time for me to go.”
I thought Jack would laugh, but he didn’t. He stared straight ahead, looking at me but not. His eyes were gazing almost through me. “Just because your family changes doesn’t mean you can leave them. I wish my dad would change. . . .”
And it was right there, after he touched the edges of my hair, as he spoke of his dad with a color and depth to his brown eyes I’d never seen before, that I knew the need for his touch. Not the touch I’d felt with him wrestling in the ocean or shoving me off the dock into the river, but a different kind that at thirteen years old I could not define. A kind of touch I didn’t know how to ask for and didn’t know how to give. But I tried.
I held out my left hand; it wavered in the air before I knew what to do with it. Then I reached up and touched his cheek; my palm against his skin, my thumb ran over to his top lip, and stopped there. He stood still, stiller than the snow-white egrets on the marsh, which looked like statues. Then he reached up and put his hand on top of mine. Fear—the kind that makes your stomach loose like you’re on a dropping plane—overcame me; fear that he’d remove my hand.
But he didn’t; he closed his eyes and let our hands stay there—together. In the next second, he opened his eyes and leaned toward me, dropped his forehead onto mine. Our noses touched, then our lips. It was my first kiss, and more gentle and kind than I had expected after watching spin the bottle at our middle school parties. It lasted only a moment, a split second of time that could repeat itself over and over if I allowed it, like the waves coming one after the other even if you weren’t watching.
Neither one of us said a word; we stood back and stared at each other as if we’d just met, as if we’d just discovered something so new and strange that we didn’t know what to call it.
We turned together and walked toward the sand dunes, over the footbridge covering the sandburs, which dug themselves into your bare feet and stung worse than a bee. When we reached the beach, we sat and watched the sun disappear in a hundred colors and patterns of light below the horizon.
I lay on my back and he sank down next to me. Instinctively, as we’d done a hundred times, we made silent snow angels in the sand, brushing our arms back and forth, allowing our fingertips to graze against each other. We lay like that in silence, knowing the game we were playing: the first one to see a star in the disappearing day won. I focused on the sky . . . wanting to find it, wanting to wish upon it. Then a small speck rose above me—appearing like it always did, as if it had always been there, but I hadn’t paid enough attention. Usually I hollered when I won this game, but this time I whispered. “There it is.”
Jack touched my elbow. “I see it.”
“Did you see it first?” I whispered.
“Nah. You win. Come on, we best get to dinner or we’ll be grounded for sure.”
And I knew that for the first time he’d let me win the game, and this was the one fact, beyond the kiss or the brush of his fingertips, that let me know he loved me. Yes, he most definitely loved me. And I loved him.
I stood, and he took my hand inside his, and I thought how perfectly it fit, custom-made for me, like one of Daddy’s tailored suits from the seamstress on Magnolia Street. Jack glanced at me with a question on his face. I smiled at him and immersed myself in the new openness I felt belo
w my breastbone; maybe, just maybe this emotion would fill some of the empty space where Mama’s absence ached.
My definition of love did not, then, extend beyond familial devotion, so when I felt the opening, the possibility of another kind of love—my heart stretched as if it had been taking a thirteen-year nap, and it was just beginning to fully awaken.
I pondered this feeling for weeks and months afterward, wondering why it had changed between this boy and me, this boy from next door whom I’d known ever since I could remember. Had I always loved him or did I just miss my mama and want his?
Even now, at twenty-seven years old, I couldn’t answer that question, but thankfully it didn’t matter anymore. Jack was gone and had been for a very long time. I now understood true love, lasting love—not just adolescent angst and want, not the kind of love that would leave me like Mama and Jack had. I was now comfortable in my world, one I did not need to run away from.
CHAPTER TWO
I met Maeve Mahoney two months before my wedding. The sweet promise of warm spring days and fragrant evenings followed me through the front door of the Verandah House and down the hall of the upscale nursing care facility, my high heels clicking against the linoleum floor. My tailored linen pantsuit from Tahari fit crisply over my white button-down shirt. I glanced at my watch: I was right on time. I’d been dreading this meeting with Mrs. Mahoney—trying to make conversation with a ninety-six-year-old woman assigned to me for my community work through the Palmetto Pointe Junior Society.
My to-do list had spread onto page two of my Day-Timer, and I barely had time to eat, much less spend an hour at the nursing home. I was smack dab in the middle of the busiest time of my life—the most fulfilling too. I mentally flipped through my schedule: right after this appointment, I needed to rush to my wedding dress fitting.
I pushed open the door to room 7. A tiny white-haired woman sat perched in a tartan-covered chair, a James Joyce novel—Finnegan’s Wake—open on her lap. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. Her hair stuck up like the cotton on top of a Q-tip while her head leaned back.
Tarnished silver photo frames lined her dresser and bedside table; faded faces stared at me from behind dusty glass. Lace doilies were spread in uneven patterns around the room. A wooden crucifix hung over the headboard of her single bed; worn wooden rosary beads adorned the chain. An oil painting of a bay full of sailboats at evening hung crooked and low on the wall. I walked toward the painting, touched the splintered wooden frame. Despite the thatched roof houses barely visible in the background, and the rough water of an unknown bay, something about the scene seemed familiar.
The room smelled like the rest of the building: Keri lotion and scrambled eggs, carpet deodorizer—an odd combination. The staff of the Verandah House had done their best to make this facility feel more like a nice hotel than a nursing home. An ice cream store with a red-and-white-striped awning, a movie theater and a chic salon were all situated in the front foyer to give visitors the feeling of a miniature hometown.
I sat next to Maeve Mahoney on the remaining chair—a thin metal chair with a pink-flowered cushion. I attempted not to disturb her as I pulled the wedding files from my satchel and flipped through Southern Bride magazine, scouting ideas for my bouquet until I found just what I was looking for: white and pink peonies with a satin bow tied around the bottom, Swarovski crystals on the end of thin silver rods poking out of the flowers like rain. I reached for my tabbed wedding notebook, turned the plastic-sheathed pages to “Flowers” and stuffed the picture inside. I wrote the details on a lined, legal-sized pad of paper.
Forty minutes passed as I worked on my wedding, and Maeve slept, making soft snoring noises. Then her voice cracked. “Is that a wedding magazine you’ll be looking at?” There was an Irish lilt to the words.
I startled, glanced up at her. “Yes, it is. Hello, I’m Kara Larson. I’ve come to sit with you a while . . . maybe read to you or whatever you’d like.” I spoke the words the volunteer coordinator had told me to say.
Maeve’s wrinkled hands stroked the sides of the chair; she squinted at me and leaned forward, pointed to the magazine. “You getting married?”
“Yes. In about eight weeks. . . .” I nodded.
“To your first love?” She pushed a strand of curly gray hair off her face. Her eyes were the color of green sea glass, the kind that has been washed in the ocean for years, worn clear and smooth.
I laughed. “No, but I love him very much.”
Her eyes filled with tears, glistening over the green. “No one ever marries their first love anymore. There is just too much . . . else to do. Too many options. Always looking for the next best thing, when it is usually the first best thing that was the best thing all along.” In her Irish accent, her simple words sounded like a poem.
I took a deep breath—what could we talk about now? “Did you marry your first love?” I asked.
“Now there is a story,” she said. “A beautiful story of love and betrayal, full of truth.”
“Tell me,” I said, glancing sideways at my watch.
“You first, you first. Who was your first love?”
A twinge of betrayal pinched beneath my chest. I shouldn’t even think about my first love, not with my fiancé—Peyton’s—four-karat princess-cut diamond perched on my left hand.
“Peyton . . . he’s the man I’m marrying.” Why was I having this discussion with a woman who still had oatmeal from breakfast on her chin?
“No . . . go back. Before him. Before the first kiss. Before the first time you said you loved him. Back further.”
“What?” Yes, she was mad. “Before what?” I asked, groping for some appropriate response.
“Back to the first boy who gave you butterflies. The first boy you wrote about in your diary; the one you loved, really loved. Not the first boy you slept with, but the first boy you dreamed about.”
“Slept with? Why, Mrs. Mahoney.” I covered my mouth with my palm. Where was she going with this?
“Yes, before him.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t have to reach that far back—he lay like the cornerstone of my memories, as if all the others were formed on top of his. His name rolled off my tongue as though I’d said it yesterday. “Jack Sullivan.”
“Yes, him. That far back. What happened to him?” Maeve leaned forward in a quick movement.
“I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen years old.” I looked at her.
Then a tear dropped from her eye, ran to the top of her cheek and joined the oatmeal on her chin. I reached for a Kleenex on her wooden bedside table and wiped both from her face. A slow wave of something painful and lost long ago overcame me. If I was forced to define it, I’d have called it hopelessness.
“Why not?” she said, or maybe sang.
“What?” I threw the Kleenex in the wicker wastebasket.
“Why haven’t you seen him?”
I shrugged. I would not discuss Jack Sullivan.
Mrs. Mahoney took a deep breath. “He lived across the lane. His father and brothers were involved in the ‘troubles,’ and my mother disapproved. Before he left, he told me he loved me and would come back for me. And I knew he would.”
“Did he?” I glanced again at my watch—one minute remaining until I had to leave to meet the dressmaker downtown.
Mrs. Mahoney sighed, picked up the book, then placed it back on her lap. “Did he what?” she asked.
“Come back for you?”
“Who?”
“The boy across the lane,” I said, then blew a long breath.
“You need to find him.” She lifted both hands in the air, as if in supplication.
“Who?”
“The boy across the lane.”
“Mrs. Mahoney, I don’t know the boy across the lane.”
“Not my boy. Your boy.” She rolled her eyes, as if I exasperated her and not the other way around.
“He lived next door, not across the lane,” I said. We had obviously steered into the lan
d of confusion. “I’ve got to get going, Mrs. Mahoney. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Ahya,” she said, “you be thinking about what I said now, won’t you? I don’t want to be the only one telling stories around here. We trade stories, you and I. You know, when you start to think about things, talk about them . . . they happen.”
“Oh?” I stood.
“You know, dear, everything happens for a reason. You’ve been sent to me, I do believe. Yes, I do believe that. You look much like me in my younger days—dark waves of hair, green eyes, marrying the right man. Now you be careful what you believe—it is who you are.”
“What?” I gathered my satchel, looked down at Maeve.
“You will help me, I know you will.”
“Well . . . ,” I said, “I will visit you. I promise. I’m not sure how much I can help you, though.”
“Oh, we’ll get to that in good time. We will. As I tell you the story, we’ll get to that. There has to be a way to find him now.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to do, and completely unsure who she wanted me to find. She lifted her right hand as though she were giving a benediction. “An áit a bhfuil do chroí is ann a thabharfas do chosa thú.”
Gibberish, I was sure. So I nodded and smiled at her.
“It means, Your feet will bring you to where your heart is.” Her eyes slid shut.
A sinking feeling of inadequacy overwhelmed me. I had no idea what language she was speaking, but it wasn’t mine.
I left Verandah House and ran out to the car—the Mercedes Daddy had given me when he bought his new Ford F-150 after he decided he was truly a pickup truck kind of man. Which is absolutely not the kind of man he was; a Mercedes was just his style. But what twenty-seven-year-old woman in her right mind tells her daddy she doesn’t need a Mercedes, that he looks like a fool driving back and forth to his law office in a four-by-four pickup truck?
I drove through Palmetto Pointe to the dressmaker and thought about Peyton Ellers—the man I would marry. And I smiled.
Patti Callahan Henry Page 2