by Mia March
At five, Isabel had finally gotten out of bed and sat on the balcony, trying to breathe, trying to remember it was just a dream, even though Edward had said as much more than once during their marriage. He’d said it with anger, during arguments that neither of them could win, and she was 75 percent sure he didn’t mean it. She supposed it was that 25 percent of uncertainty why she’d let him win. As she’d stared out at the harbor, at the shimmering blue water and the boats of all sizes, watching the fishermen hauling over nets and cages, watching the joggers and bicyclists and a daddy longlegs make its way along the railing, the needs of the inn had begun pushing out her dream. She’d mentally gone over all Lolly had shown her the past two days, from signing in the guests, how to use the credit-card machine, handling the ledgers, checking up on their advertising with the B&B associations, making sure the rooms had an adequate supply of linens and toiletries. More went into the daily running of the inn than Isabel had realized; she’d discovered that just by helping Lolly check in the Deans last night, which seemingly involved greeting them and showing them to the large room. She’d assumed Mrs. Dean would appear any moment with a suitcase or two, but when she checked Lolly’s records, the reservation was for one adult and two children. For an entire week, through Labor Day Monday.
He stood on the far side of the yard, beside the crabapple tree with his hands in the pockets of his army-green cargo pants, facing the house and the open view of the harbor down the slope.
She was about to say good morning when the stray dog scampered over from out of nowhere and lay down at her bare feet, resting his soft, little, white chin on her toes. Twice this weekend he’d come to find her. Yesterday, she’d been looking out the window when she saw the dog stop in the yard as though looking for her. He hadn’t scampered up to June and Pearl, who were playing cards at the picnic table. But when Isabel had come out, exhausted, with her iced tea and dropped down on a chaise longue, she’d felt the familiar furry chin on her arm.
“Oh, fine,” she said now as she had yesterday, petting the dog’s adorable head. Which made him try to jump on her lap. The dog wasn’t big, but he wasn’t a terrier, either. And she was dressed typically, in a ruffled, pale-lavender silk tank top and white pants and her jeweled flat sandals. White pants, ruffled silk, and a jumping dog didn’t mix. “Whoa there.”
“What’s his name?”
Isabel turned at the sound of the voice. Griffin Dean’s. “I don’t know, actually. He just sort of adopted me this weekend. And for some crazy reason, he seems to only like me.”
He smiled. “Dogs have a sense about people. You must be one of the good ones.”
“I think it’s more that I gave him my nephew’s leftover hot dog on Friday,” she said, petting him under the chin. The dog put a paw on Isabel’s arm. “I feel like he’s adopted me. My aunt—you met her last night, she’s the owner of the inn—is fine with keeping him if no one claims him. We put up a few flyers around town and alerted the police and animal control and—” And once again she was rambling. She glanced up at Griffin, unused to being unnerved, then quickly back down at the mutt.
Isabel had never had a dog, never had a pet, except for the goldfish her mother had allowed if she won one in a fair. She had enough on her plate, but she wanted something of her own to take care of. I’m kind of a stray too, she thought, giving the underside of the dog’s chin a rub.
Griffin Dean smiled again, and for a second Isabel couldn’t take her eyes off his face. Something world-weary but kind was in his expression. And he was attractive. Very, actually. Midthirties, she guessed. He had dark wavy hair and dark eyes and wore army-green cargo pants and a blue Henley T-shirt. And a wedding ring.
“I hope your room was comfortable,” she said, remembering that she was standing proprietress. “If you or your daughters need anything, just let me know.”
“Thanks. My fourteen-year-old slept in that little room across from ours—I hope that’s all right. By the time I realized she’d sneaked out and I found her in there, she was out cold—her legs hanging over the arm of the love seat.”
Isabel smiled. “That’s fine. It’s a room my sister and cousin and I used as teenagers when we wanted to be alone while we were growing up here. So I understand.”
“You all grew up here together?”
She nodded and was about to ramble again—was it that he was so attractive?—when the dog started chewing on Lolly’s tulips, and Isabel rushed over. “No, dog! No, no, no.” But the dog wouldn’t listen. He ripped off a tulip and brought it over to Isabel in his mouth, his tail wagging.
“He does like you,” Griffin said with a laugh. “I could help you train him while I’m here. I’m a vet.” He handed her his card.
GRIFFIN DEAN, DVM. BOOTHBAY HARBOR, MAINE.
“That would be great,” she said. “Thanks. Boothbay Harbor? You’re not very far from home.” His office was right in the bustle of the harbor, just around the corner from Books Brothers.
“We needed to get away from the house, even though it’s just a few miles out from here. This is one of the last places we—” He didn’t finish the sentence and instead went over to the dog and knelt down and gave him a good rubbing all over. Which was when Isabel realized that the slim gold band he wore was on his right hand—not his left. “I’d better go check on my girls. Alexa will sleep till noon if I let her, but Emmy, the three-year-old, is probably coloring the walls. Kidding.” He gave the dog another vigorous petting. “I’ll work with him later.”
He smiled at her, then went back inside. She wanted to follow him, ask him to finish his sentence. One of the last places we… But of course she couldn’t.
The Coastal General Hospital smelled the way all hospitals did. Like antiseptic. Like hope and despair combined. Lolly had a private room in the oncology ward, where they were met by the resident on Lolly’s team. Lolly’s doctors had briefed her when she’d been diagnosed, so she knew what to expect, but Isabel and Kat didn’t. Before they’d left for the hospital, Isabel and Kat had had a long talk in the kitchen about how little they knew about cancer, about chemotherapy. How it worked. Why. Kat had been on the verge of tears, and Isabel found herself drawing on her strength as a grief counselor; she’d been able to steady Kat, and they’d both been able to be strong (in other words, neither had broken down) for Lolly, who’d sat silently in the car, looking out the window, refusing to talk.
Kat asked the resident to overexplain, to speak to them as though they were twelve, and they were both grateful for his sympathetic tone and manner—especially as a nurse set up the IV for Lolly’s chemotherapy. The treatment would take about four hours. Lolly would return every three weeks for six weeks, then her plan would be adjusted if need be.
Once Lolly was in the green recliner, the IV doing its job, the nurse let Lolly know to call for her if she needed anything, and the resident excused himself. Kat followed him, and Isabel had no doubt Kat had many more questions—questions she wasn’t comfortable asking in front of her mother.
“Isabel, would you run and get me a cup of chamomile tea?” Lolly asked. The ten magazines Kat had brought, ranging from People to Coastal Inn, and the two novels June had bought from Books Brothers, rested on the end table with a pitcher of water. “I’ll be fine.”
“Sure,” Isabel said, grateful for the chance to catch her breath. She took that deep breath the moment the door closed behind her. Up the hall a bit, Kat was deep in conversation with the oncology resident, a patient young man with a lovely Italian name that Isabel suddenly couldn’t remember. She could hear him speaking gently but knowledgeably to Kat, his words banging against each other in Isabel’s head. Slow the progression. Inoperable. Metastasized. Standard chemotherapy drug is gemcitabine. Relieve symptoms…
He was explaining how chemotherapy drugs couldn’t tell good cells from cancer cells and so attacked all fast-growing cells, which was why chemo patients of
ten started losing their hair, as cells in the hair root were among the fastest growing. Isabel thought of Lolly’s silky gray-blond hair, her long eyelashes and arched eyebrows, and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then interrupted Kat and the doctor to stop the words she couldn’t bear to hear as much as to ask if either wanted something from the café. Both declined with a thank-you, then resumed talking. Cells. White blood cells. Platelets. Cancer, cancer, cancer.
When the elevator doors opened on the third floor and someone got off, Isabel noticed the arrow sign LABOR AND DELIVERY AND NURSERY. She found herself getting off too and following the arrows until she stood in front of the glass wall of the nursery. It had been months since she’d let herself visit the newborns in the Connecticut hospital.
She stared down at her wedding ring. Last night, when she’d been unable to sleep at 3:00 a.m., she’d broken down and called Edward on the house phone, though she had no idea what she was going to say. Maybe to tell him about Lolly. She’d just needed to hear his voice, even still. He’d answered right away and then said, “Hang on a minute,” and had picked up another extension, which told her that Carolyn Chenowith had been next to him in bed. She’d been about to hang up when he said, “I’m here.” For a moment, she’d been unable to say anything.
“You’re really doing this” was what had come out of her mouth.
“I’m sorry, Izzy.” He was crying, she’d realized.
He hadn’t said anything else. Seconds ticked by and finally Isabel hit END CALL and slipped her phone back inside her purse and sat out on the balcony, her heart squeezing in her chest to the point that she’d had to take deep, gulping breaths.
She let herself remember a moment in which a piece of her love for him had died. She’d worked so hard to bury it, but now welcomed the terrible memory. A few months ago, she and Edward had been at yet another law-firm dinner, the partners and their wives, the loud stories and expensive scotch and cigars making her want to run. One of the older partners had said to Edward, “So, when are you and the Mrs. going to start a family—if you’re going to have three children, like everyone else, you’d better get started.”
Edward had leaned in to whisper with fake gravitas, “We wish we could have four, but, unfortunately, Isabel isn’t able.”
The clichéd wind had been knocked out of her at the lie. She’d had to leave the table, which had apparently bolstered everyone’s compassion for poor Isabel. Running off to cry for the four children she couldn’t give her deserving husband.
It was the first time she’d felt anything like hatred for Edward. But he’d used his skill as a lawyer to talk his way out of it, to beat her over the head with a fifteen-year-old pact she’d made as a child in the throws of grief—and worse, self-loathing.
Let him go, she told herself. Let it all go.
She stared down at her beautiful rings, twisting them and quickly sliding off the diamond ring and then her wedding band before she could change her mind and leave them there, where they didn’t belong. Was she supposed to put them in her purse? Or on her right hand, like Griffin Dean? She stared at her bare left hand and felt so strange without the sight of the rings that she put them on her right hand, where they didn’t belong, either. Tomorrow was their ten-year anniversary. She forced her gaze up to the nursery, at the sleeping babies swaddled in the familiar white and blue little blankets.
A little voice inside her told her to come back tomorrow to see about volunteering in the nursery, and she took a deep breath. She could hold the babies that needed comforting. Could stroke the fingers of tiny newborns in the NICU. Bottle-feed. In all the years she’d volunteered back home at the hospital for the newly grief-stricken, she hadn’t felt she could volunteer in the nursery, as if the pact she’d made somehow meant she could look but not touch.
When she returned with her aunt’s tea and a blueberry muffin, Lolly’s favorite kind, though it would be tasteless compared to Kat’s, Kat was still talking to the resident. Isabel poked her head into Lolly’s room, and Lolly gestured at her to come in.
Lolly sipped the tea. “Perfect, thank you, Isabel.” As Isabel sat down in the chair across from her aunt, Lolly said, “Before I forget to mention it, Isabel, I’d like you to do something for me later.”
“Of course, anything.” Isabel was feeling much more confident about running the inn, had a notebook full of little things that needed seeing to.
“Your mother kept a journal, did you know that?”
Isabel stiffened. “No.”
“When I packed up your mother’s bedroom all those years ago, I found them, just two of them, from the last year of her life. She was taking a journal-writing class at the rec center. I used to read them over and over when we first lost her, just so I could feel her with me, hear her voice. She’d write about what she would make for dinner, that June got a sunburn, that you looked so pretty, so grown-up in your dress for the dance, just real everyday family stuff, and I’d feel her right there with me.”
Isabel stared at Lolly for a moment, surprised to hear her talk about her sister, Isabel’s mother. And so warmly. Lolly had never been one for reminiscing.
Maybe Lolly was now because she wasn’t sure how much time she had left, Isabel realized with a wallop to the stomach.
She walked over to the window to have something besides Lolly to look at. She couldn’t bear it if her aunt started to cry.
And she didn’t want to know there were journals. Her mother’s words. Especially from that final year. Their worst year.
“Would you find them for me?” Lolly asked. “I know it’s a mess down there in the basement, but they’ll be in one of her trunks—you know how she loved those old-fashioned trunks and kept buying them from flea markets.”
That brought a smile from Isabel and she turned around to face Lolly. “She loved the ones with stickers best.” Her mother would come home with another trunk, making Isabel’s father roll his eyes and say, “Now, Allie, where are you going to put that?” And she’d smile and say, “But, look, this trunk has been to Indonesia! Bali! And Australia too!” Isabel remembered how her mother had closed her eyes and said, “God, I’d love to see a kangaroo. Wouldn’t you, Isabel?” And Isabel, even in her gloom and doom, headphones in her ears that she’d uncharacteristically turned down, had said, “Yes, actually. That’s something I would like to see.” Her mother had turned triumphantly to her father and said, “See. Even Isabel is charmed by the thought of a hopping kangaroo.” That had stung her, the “even Isabel,” but she’d deserved it, sulking about the house, complaining about her curfew, which she always broke, and the house rules, which she rarely paid attention to.
They’d never gotten to Australia, had never seen a kangaroo, but on her sixteenth birthday, her mother had given her a silver bracelet with a tiny silver kangaroo charm, and she’d worn it for years, never taking it off, even at her wedding. “That goes beautifully with your gown,” Edward had whispered, quite reverently, at the altar. “It’s like she’s here.”
Isabel closed her eyes against both memories. And another, of the day two years ago when she’d been about to take a sip of a cappuccino at Starbucks and realized the bracelet was gone. Gone. In a panic, she’d retraced her steps, had the barista unlock the garbage so she could tear through it for the bracelet, but she’d never found it. Not in the parking lot or her car or anywhere she’d been that day. She’d posted signs, offering a reward, but no one had ever turned it in.
“I’d love to read the journals again,” Lolly was saying. She took a sip of her tea, then a nibble of the muffin. “Have my sister with me, hear her voice, you know?”
“I’ll find them today,” she promised, though Isabel wouldn’t read them herself. In between writing about lobster bakes and flea-market finds, her mother must have written about how miserable Isabel had made her and her father. “You’re destroying us,” her mother had said to
Isabel a few months before she died. Isabel didn’t need to go back there.
“I know there was friction between you and your mother,” Lolly said, glancing at Isabel. “But you might want to read those journals too. It’s important to know the truth about things instead of what you think you know. I don’t know how long I have here, Isabel. Weeks? Months? I don’t know. And now it all seems so dumb, all that tension and estrangement, family not speaking, treating one another like strangers. I’ve been guilty of that too. But it’s wrong.”
Isabel stood in front of the window and glanced out at the trees against the brilliant blue sky. “I don’t want to remember who I used to be.”
“Reading her journals won’t tell you who you used to be. It’ll tell you who your mother was, what she thought. Really thought. Not what you think she thought. Not who you think you were through her eyes. There’s a lot you didn’t know about your mother.”
Isabel let out a deep breath. She didn’t want to read her mother’s diaries and she knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t. A lot was going on right now, and even seeing her mother’s handwriting could push Isabel over the edge. But her aunt was sitting there with a needle of poison in her arm and tears in her eyes, so Isabel just took her hand and held it tight and assured her again she’d find the diaries.
It had taken Isabel hours to bring herself to open the basement door in the short hallway between the kitchen doorway and the back stairs and walk down the creaky wooden steps. The basement was full of old furniture that Lolly had planned to refinish or sell and the furniture from Isabel and June’s old apartment in the two-family house their parents had rented. Isabel had kept her old dresser, which was antique with a beautiful oval mirror, and had it refinished so that it barely resembled the junky thing it used to be. Her parents’ old headboard and footboard were against a wall lined with shelves containing every possible supply, from potting soil to paint thinner. And over by the row of short, narrow windows were her mother’s old trunks.