Beach Trip (61 page)

Annie sat quietly, feeling the gentle rocking of the boat beneath her.
Forgiveness comes when you least expect it
, she thought,
dropping from the heavens like a cool rain.
She smiled faintly and said, “But it’s okay now, isn’t it? I’ve told you.”

“Yes, you’ve told us,” Lola said, touching Annie’s hand. “You don’t have to think about it anymore.”

“You’ve been happy together for thirty years,” Mel said. “Don’t let anything spoil that.”

It was then that Annie put her head down and began to cry.

They all cried for a while and then it was over. They wiped their faces, blew their noses, and looked at each other sheepishly. Mel got up and poured everyone another glass of tea, then she sat down again. She took a deep breath, pulling one knee up against her chest and resting her foot on the edge of her chair. “There’s something I have to say,” she said, and the others, sensing her gravity, steeled themselves for another revelation. She breathed again, more quietly this time, and turned to Lola. “I don’t know how to begin,” she said.

They waited patiently. Lola stirred the ice in her glass with a straw.

“Just say it,” Annie said.

“Get it off your chest,” Sara said.

Mel sighed heavily. She paused, avoiding Lola’s eyes, and then said quickly, “Back in college. The night Briggs put Lonnie in the hospital.” She hesitated again, but this time she met Lola’s steady gaze. “It was me who told him about you and Lonnie.”

No one said anything. Lightning flashed along the distant horizon.

Sara shook her head mutely. “I don’t believe it,” she said finally.

“How could you?” Annie said.

“I had no right,” Mel said, and Lola dropped her chin to stare at the candle, a reticent expression on her face. “I was afraid you’d run off with Lonnie and be unhappy, and I didn’t want that to happen, but I had no right. It was none of my business who you ran off with. It was your life, not mine.”

Lola stared at the candle. “Did you tell my mother?”

“No. Briggs must have done that. Lola, I’m so sorry.”

Sara stood up abruptly and walked over to the side of the boat. She put her hands on the railing and leaned out over the water as if she might jump. Annie chewed a mint leaf and stared solemnly at the moon.

“I didn’t want to see you get hurt,” Mel repeated slowly.

Lola took a deep breath. Her face, lit by the moon and the flickering candlelight, was calm but thoughtful. “It’s all right,” she said finally. “I know you did it for the right reasons.”

“I was trying to protect you. But I shouldn’t have done that. If I hadn’t done it, you wouldn’t have married Briggs and been so unhappy all these years.”

“Hush,” Lola said.

“I just wanted you to be happy.”

“I know,” Lola said. “Everyone wants me to be happy.”

There was nothing else Mel could say. She sat back with her hands dropped carelessly in her lap. Lola’s features, small and delicate, maintained their passive expression. The only sign of any inner agitation was a slight trembling of her chin.

She cleared her throat and leaned over, stretching her hands out across the table to Mel. “I forgive you,” she said. “I know you did it with the best of intentions.” She held on to Mel, then let her go, leaning back in her chair. “Besides, my mother would have hunted us down and had the marriage annulled, and I would’ve wound up married to Briggs anyway.”

“But I didn’t have to make it easy for them. I was your friend.”

“You’re still my friend,” Lola said.

A sudden gust of wind blew the candle out. The sea was dark and still.

Mel said, “You know, I used to dream of rescuing you from that place your mother took you. That hospital. I used to dream of crashing in there like Sylvester Stallone and taking you out.”

“Which is pretty funny,” Sara said, “considering that you helped put her there.”

“Don’t,” Lola said. “None of that matters anymore. This is all I want, the four of us right here, right now.”

Annie leaned to relight the candle. There was a smell of rain in the air, subtle yet persistent, and she lifted her nose and sniffed. Sara came back to the circle and sat down. Mel smoothed her hair off her face and stared up at the bright moon. After a while, she said sleepily, “Can you believe the way this night’s turned out?”

“I feel like I’m in therapy.”

“You
are
in therapy.”

“We’re all in therapy.”

“Here’s to friendship,” Annie said, lifting her glass and thinking how peaceful it all felt, the slumbering sea, the spreading moonlight. A bank of translucent clouds scuttled across the moon. It was impossible to believe in the randomness of life when looking at a sky like that.

“To friendship,” they all said in unison, lifting their glasses.

The tension, which had been steadily growing between them all week, was gone. The elephant had tiptoed out on its huge feet. Annie drained her glass and set it down on the table. She felt better than she had in years, filled with an airy lightness of spirit. What was it Lola had said?
Thaumaturgy.
The working of miracles.

Mel leaned back expansively and opened her arms to the night sky. “See, Lola, you’re the only one with nothing to confess. You’re the only one who’s never done anything rotten enough to ask for forgiveness.”

Lola put her head back and laughed, a bright swelling laugh that made the others smile to hear it.

“Why are you laughing?” Mel asked.

“What’s so funny?”

“If only it were that easy,” Lola said.

Mel slept fitfully. She dreamed of a great cat resting on her chest and purring in her ear and she awoke to a distant puttering sound growing fainter, like the hum of an air conditioner or the slight clatter of bilge pumps. She looked at the clock. It was one-thirty The room was shuttered, and dark and cold as a tomb. The bed was vast and covered in down. Mel quickly fell back to sleep and awoke later to a loud pounding on the door.

Captain Mike was standing in the dimly lit passageway. His face looked pale and worried. “I’m sorry to wake you,” he said, “but there’s another storm moving in. I think we should head back to the marina early.” He looked past her. “Mrs. Furman?” he said. Mel turned around. The bed was empty. She went into the bathroom to check but that was empty, too. “She’s not here,” she said, still groggy with sleep, stepping into the hallway.

Sara’s cabin door swung open. “Who’s not here?” she asked, yawning.

“Where’s Lola?”

Sara blinked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought she was with you.”

Annie stood behind Sara, wrapping her robe tightly around her.

“Have you seen Lola?” Mel asked her.

Annie shook her head no. Captain Mike swore and pushed past Mel, heading for the stairs to the deck. They could hear him pounding up the stairs, running now. The wind had picked up, and the boat was shifting heavily in the waves. The women made their way up to the deck. All the lights were on in the salon and galley as they passed through and went out onto the aft deck. Captain Mike was leaning over the deck rail, calling
frantically for Lola. They all began to call, leaning over the rail to peer into the dark rolling water. A few minutes later, Captain Mike ran up the stairs to the bridge, and they could hear him shouting into the radio.

Mel climbed the steps to the flybridge. The dinghy sat in its cradle, its seats glistening wetly in the moonlight. The instrument dial glowed dimly at the other end of the bridge. Captain Mike turned on the floodlight and slowly swept the dark rolling water in front of them. He shouted for Lola, his voice edging gradually toward panic. April came up on the bridge and said, “She’s not in the engine room. She’s not below.” Mel turned and followed her back down to the aft deck.

The sky was growing light to the east. The mainland was a dim shape, shrouded in fog. Mel leaned over the railing, staring down into the pitching waves, fighting a rising sense of panic. She gripped the rail and shouted Lola’s name.

It was then that she noticed Lola’s eyeglasses, lying forlornly on the deck at her feet.

he memorial service was to be held at the Episcopal church in Birmingham where Lola had been christened as a baby. Mel made arrangements to fly into Nashville and then drive down to Birmingham with Annie and Mitchell.

It was a beautiful day, warm and ripe with the promise of summer. The trees were green and leafy, and all along the roadside wildflowers bloomed. Mel had forgotten how pretty Tennessee was in late spring. She sat in the backseat watching the distant rim of blue hills that rose to the east, listening to Annie speculate endlessly about Lola’s death.

“She may have gone up on the deck to get something and accidentally knocked her glasses off,” Annie said over her shoulder to Mel, for maybe the fiftieth time. “You know how Lola was. And she was legally blind. Maybe she leaned down to pick up the glasses, lost her balance, and fell overboard.” Mitchell patted Annie reassuringly on the shoulder, like the good husband that he was.

Mel stared out the window at the rolling landscape, trying not to
imagine Lola, alone and nearly blind, stooping to pick up her glasses before pitching forward into the dark ocean. But that image was still preferable to the other one, that of Lola throwing herself purposefully over the railing. So far Mel was the only one to have imagined this scenario, at least to her knowledge. Annie had never mentioned it, nor had Sara in any of their late-evening conversations.

Outside the window the sunlight glinted off the limestone cliffs rising on either side of the expressway. Mel could see the holes the highway engineers had drilled to place the dynamite. In the front seat, Annie was still chattering away about someone named Agnes Grace, a child she’d met at some church orphanage. Annie’s face was animated, and despite her obvious grief over Lola, she seemed happy. Mel was sure if she leaned over the seat she’d find Annie and Mitchell holding hands like teenagers.

She leaned her face on her palm and thought about her new novel, the one she’d begun to think about writing, the one she’d been incubating in her subconscious like a great, speckled egg. She was through with Flynn Mendez, at least for a while. She needed to try something else. She needed to recapture the excitement she’d felt that night in the darkened auditorium listening to Pat Conroy, that moment of epiphany when she’d felt like her whole life lay before her, and anything was possible if only she had the courage to try. Her agent told her it would be career suicide, but somehow it didn’t feel that way. What was it the Native Americans said?
If you come to the edge of a tall cliff, jump.
Maybe that’s what she needed to do to get her life back on track. To jump.

“What are you working on these days?” Annie asked politely.

Lola’s body had never been found. Two pink slippers had washed up on Lea Island but that was all.

“Something new but nothing I’m willing to talk about yet.”

Mel tried not to think about Lola, or the memorial service. She stared out the window at the green rolling landscape. It was hard to think about death on a day like this. As they came through the ridge cut, the glass towers of Nashville rose before her. She’d always liked Nashville, an artistic city with a small-town feel. Not like Howard’s Mill, of course. Nothing like Howard’s Mill. She sighed, thinking about her girlhood home.

“How’s your daddy?” Annie asked, craning her head so she could see Mel.

“He’s fine.” He wasn’t, of course. He was a mess. Leland was nearly blind, and he walked now with a walker. The long-suffering Mercedes had
finally had enough and she’d left, and Mel had had to hire a long line of home-care nurses to come in and check on him. She could look down the road and see Leland’s inevitable move to a nursing home. The last time she spoke to him, she’d tried to break it to him.

“Daddy, you can’t stay by yourself.”

Leland said, “Did you just call me Daddy?”

“Oh, my God, Leland, focus.”

“Promise me you won’t put me out to pasture,” he said. “Promise me you won’t put me in one of those old-folks’ homes where the diaper-wetting bastards sit around waiting to die.”