A Simple Thing (24 page)

She drank Barefoot's tea after dinner that night, and slept for ten hours straight. The next morning she got up and went into the kitchen and started to mix up griddle cakes and fry bacon. She ate a big breakfast, then walked over to the post office and told Chet McNabb that she needed help with the plowing and could he please ask around and that she'd pay a fair price for the help out of Bill's life insurance money. And that night, before bed, she washed her hands and trimmed her nails, and rubbed some salve Barefoot had left into the painful cracks in her skin.

Within a week, the cracks had healed over.

Chapter 24

Susannah 2011

“I'm sorry,” Susannah said to her scrap metal angel. “I'm sorry.”

The grief she felt now wasn't for Janie, she realized, but for herself. She remembered that day sitting in the tree, talking to Betty. What did Betty say? Something about mourning the loss of possibility. The accident was so long ago. Susannah had no idea who Janie might be had she lived. She knew only that she herself would be someone else entirely, someone she would much rather be.

The door to the barn slid open and Matt walked in.

“Hi,” Susannah said. She stood up from where she'd been kneeling, on the barn floor by her angel. “I'm sorry about what I said earlier. I didn't mean it. I shouldn't have said those things.”

Matt shook his head. “I don't know what to say. You were really
mean
to your mother. She is not an evil woman, Susannah.”

“I didn't mean to be rude to her. I don't know why she irritates me so much.”

“Well, maybe you should figure it out.”

“I guess I should,” Susannah said. “It's like dominoes. My mother drives me crazy; I drive Katie crazy. I can't wait to have grandchildren so Katie can drive them crazy and continue the family legacy.”

“This isn't a joke,” Matt said. “Something is wrong with you.”

“It's always
me,
” Susannah said. “I'm rude to my mother; I'm too controlling with the kids; I'm I don't know
what
to you, since you never say anything about how you feel.”

“Stop being a martyr,” Matt said. “You do a million things right. But this whole thing with Katie that started last year has changed you—you've become this uptight, overprotective crazy woman, and you need to back off.”

“Crazy woman?” Susannah said. “You tell me what's crazier: to love my kids with too much intensity, or to be so indifferent to danger, like my mother, like
you,
that I put their lives at risk.”

“Oh, Christ,” Matt said. He paced back and forth in the barn, then stopped and looked at her. “Now I'm ‘indifferent to danger' because I don't see death around every corner? Sometimes that bear you think is about to devour your kids is really just a tree stump.”

They faced each other furious, panting.

“I came here to protect Katie.”

“You came here to run away from the reality that Katie is growing up. You can't protect them, Susannah. You can try. But you have to learn how to live with some uncertainty. You have to trust them. You have to trust us, trust that we've done a pretty good job of raising them. But you can't control everything that happens, at home or here.”

“I'm not an idiot,” she said. “I know that. But you of all people should understand why I'm overprotective,
if
I'm overprotective. The unimaginable does happen, Matt, and it happens to normal people like you and me, and my mother. And it happens when you're not even thinking about it, or prepared for it, or expecting it”—her voice caught now, but she sucked in her breath and continued—“and I'll be damned if it happens to one of
my
kids.”

She stood facing him, the grief that had haunted her since she'd arrived on Sounder filling her soul.

“Our
kids,” he said. His face softened. “Susannah.
Jesus
. You've turned watching over our kids into some kind of penance, and it shouldn't be. It doesn't have to be.”

“I don't want to talk about it,” she said. She turned away.

“Fine,” he said. “You know what? I'm done here.” He turned and walked out of the barn, and she heard the door of the white cottage open and close. She followed him.

Matt stalked into the bedroom, pulled his duffel bag out of the closet, and ripped open the top dresser drawer. He pulled out his T-shirts and socks and boxers and stuffed them into the bag, then opened the closet and grabbed his pants and shirts and rolled them up, still on the hangers, and shoved those in the bag, too.

“What are you doing?” Susannah said.

“Leaving,” Matt said. “This time
I'm
going to run away. I'm taking the mail boat out of here today.”

“But you're supposed to be here until Sunday. We haven't seen you in more than a month. Come on, Mattie, be reasonable.”

“Reasonable?” He stood up to face her, his face suffused with anger, the scar on his cheekbone glowing white in contrast.

“I've
been
reasonable. I agreed to let you take
my
kids and come to this fucking island for nine months, while I sit home alone. Just how reasonable do I have to be?”

She winced. “Don't swear at me. You know I hate that. Listen, coming here wasn't about you and me, it was about Katie, and Quinn, about doing what was best for them.”

“Really?” He tugged at the zipper on his duffel bag. “Well, maybe if you worried a little more about you and me and a little less about Katie and Quinn, we'd all be happier.”

Susannah felt a sense of panic so profound she had an urge to bolt from the room and run, across the meadow, into the woods, down the gravelly roads. And then what? She was on an island; she could only run so far.

“Matt. Please. Stay and let's talk about this. You're right; I know there are things we need to work on.”

He stood up and slung his overstuffed duffel over his shoulder. He looked her in the eye. “We'll talk when you come home,” he said.

“But I can't pull the kids out of school here now, halfway through the year, and bring them back to Tilton.”

“I didn't say you should. I said we'll talk when you come home.”

“But what am I supposed to say to them? How am I supposed to explain that you're leaving early?”

“I'll go find them now,” he said. He looked at his watch. “The mail boat comes at, what? Four? I'll tell them I got called back for work.”

“But—”

“Susannah.” He stood across from where she stood in the doorway of their bedroom, still in her rain parka. “Whatever it is—Janie or your dad or Katie or your own mixed-up ideas about how perfect you're supposed to be—you need to figure it out.”

“I thought I could figure it out here. I'm trying, Matt.”

He shook his head. “I don't know what the answer is. I only know that being patient and letting you find your own way through it isn't working. At least, it's not working for me.”

“So you're leaving?”

“That's what you've done when you couldn't cope, right?”

“Mattie—”

“I'm going to find the kids,” he said. “I'll be back for Christmas.”

He came over and squeezed past her in the doorway, his chest brushing against her shoulder, his breath warm against her face. “I love you, Susannah,” he said. “But I'm not sure I can be married to you.”

And before she had time to say anything, or to wrap her arms around him, he was gone.

 

Matt left on the mail boat that afternoon. Susannah drove him to the dock in the truck, silent, befuddled. He hugged her before he stepped on the boat, but he didn't apologize or reassure her, and she didn't know what to say to him, other than “I'll miss you. I love you. I'm sorry.” She knew it wasn't enough.

The funny thing was that Matt's love was the one thing in her life she had never questioned. From the time they'd met on the beach at age seven, he had been drawn to her and she to him. Her emotions ran close to the surface; his were buried deep inside. She was focused and organized; he could never remember things, or find them. She knew how to talk and listen to draw people out; Matt liked to keep to himself. With Matt, she was creative and interesting and empathetic and generous—the version of herself she longed to be. She in turn was a touchstone for him, the emotional center of his life, and she knew it. But what did she know now?

The boat pulled away and she watched it disappear around the curve of Crane's Point. Thick clouds covered the horizon, and her mood darkened with the skies. Susannah got back in the truck and drove home. The white cottage was empty, and Matt's absence so large it filled every room, pressing on her until Susannah couldn't breathe. Katie and Quinn were with Lila at Betty's, making blackberry jam. Susannah felt in desperate need of a friend and decided to find Jim.

She saw smoke rising from the black stovepipe that jutted out of the roof of Jim's cabin, just over the rise from her white cottage. Jim had painted the cabin a bright royal blue that made Susannah smile every time she saw it. Cedar shingles covered the roof, and a rustic bench made of gnarled juniper branches sat next to the front door. The cabin was tall and narrow, with a main floor, a bedroom downstairs, and a loft upstairs. Susannah usually walked around to the side of the cabin, to the door that led into the mudroom, but today the front door looked so inviting, with a bright spray of huckleberry set in a jar next to the bench, that she was drawn to it, and decided to go in that way.

She didn't knock, but opened the door and stepped into the living room, which was at one end of the room that made up the main floor of the cabin. To her right was a small table, and across from her, near the woodstove, was a navy blue couch where, to Susannah's surprise, Hood lay on top of Katie, kissing her, one hand on her breast. Katie's shirt was pushed up above her ribs, and her arms were wrapped around Hood. At the sound of the door opening they split apart and Hood leaped up. Katie stood up, too, pulling her shirt down. The top button of her jeans was undone.

“What the hell is going on here?” Susannah said, although it was clear exactly what was going on.

“Wow. Oh, wow. I'm sorry,” Hood said. “This isn't as bad as it looks.”

“Really?” The iceberg that had been a distant point on the horizon now loomed in front of Susannah, huge, menacing.

“God, Mom, don't you knock?” Katie said.

“I thought you were at Betty's making jam with your grandmother.”

“Quinn and Baker are there,” Katie said. “It was boring.”

“I guess so.”

Hood reached for something on the wooden coffee table in front of the couch, and Susannah stepped forward.

“What is that?”

She saw it just before he picked it up and slipped it in his pocket.

“A condom?
My God,
making out is one thing. Being here alone with a condom is another thing.”

“Mom! We weren't doing that. We weren't going to use it.”

“Katie, you are way too young for this. I don't know what you're thinking.”

“Susannah,” Hood said. “It isn't like that, really. I had it as a joke.”

“I don't find anything funny about it.”

“I know. I know,” Hood said. He stood next to the couch with his hands in his pockets. “But it's not like that. I really like Katie. I mean I wouldn't—I mean—”

“You bet you wouldn't,” Susannah said.

“Listen,” Hood said. He cleared his throat. His face was flushed with embarrassment, and he looked at the floor by her feet. “Katie and I have this running joke about how I'm ‘always prepared,' like some Boy Scout. I always remember to bring stuff, like the binoculars or Swiss Army knife or flashlights, when we do things. So last time we were in Friday Harbor, Baker and I bought these, you know—” His blush deepened. “It was part of the ‘always prepared' joke. You know, living here you can't run out to the drugstore if—oh, God. Never mind.” He looked up at Susannah. “It was a joke.”

Hood was a good kid; Susannah knew it. But seeing Hood and Katie together had called up something in her. There was the usual visceral fear—
Katie's in danger!
—but also, now, something more.
Matt.
She remembered herself with Matt when she was just a year or two older than Katie was now, remembered the heady rush of feeling that he—so athletic and loyal and smart and passionate—loved her and wanted her beyond all others. She remembered the vulnerability in his face and voice years later when he had said, “Do you ever think about getting married?” and the way his love and desire for her were so clear and direct. She remembered her joy at creating the little study for him in their Victorian apartment, his surprise and gratitude, their shared sense of purpose in those days. She wanted all that back and she wanted it right now.

“We're going home to Tilton,” she said.

“What?” Katie said.

“You heard me. I need your father. You kids need your father. I'll go talk to the Pavalaks. We'll leave next week, when school ends for Christmas break.”

“I don't want to leave!” Katie said.

“This is my fault,” Hood said. “Don't leave. I promise Katie and I will just be friends. I'm sorry.”

“I'm sure you are sorry, but this really has nothing to do with you,” Susannah said. “I need to take care of my family. We're going home.”