Lies of the Heart (55 page)

For a while Katie and Sandy talk about the shower, and about Jill, whom Sandy is getting to know slowly.

“She broke up with
another
guy?” Sandy asks.

“What else is new?”

“That girl,” Sandy says, shaking her head and laughing.

Katie laughs, too, thinks of Jill and how much their relationship has changed since their conversation last winter.

—I’m going to try to be better, Katie had said.—To be a good friend.

—You
are
a good friend, you idiot, Jill said.—And I wasn’t sad about Amy at that lunch, Katie, I was sad about
us.
You barely tell me anything, but I thought that would change, with Nick, and the trial.

—I try.

—Do you?
Really?
Jill had said.—Do you have any idea how much work it is to be around you sometimes?

And there it was again, that impatient edge in her friend’s voice.

—Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep the conversation going sometimes, to keep everything happy and upbeat, so I don’t feel like it’s just me, complaining all the time?

—I trust you, Katie had replied simply, knowing that was what Jill needed to hear.—I respect you.

—I know. I know you do, Jill said, sighing.—But sometimes it’s hard to believe, you know? (Katie realizing suddenly that she wasn’t so different from Richard after all: acting her way through life at times, putting on different faces for her family, her friends.)

But Jill has stuck by her, has even offered to go to therapy if Katie likes.

—I think for now I can handle it, Katie told her last week.

—I didn’t mean for you, Jill joked.—I have a couple of issues with men I need to work out myself!

“Another baby,” Sandy says now, shaking her head, her hands coming up to rest on her stomach. “I must be insane!”

Katie smiles, and then they become quiet. Inside, they hear Sandy’s mother talking with her friend, the whir of the dishwasher starting.

“Sometimes I think I’ll never have this,” Katie says, spreading her hands at the garden, but Sandy understands.

“You’ll fall in love again,” she says. “You’ll get your family, too.”

Katie shakes her head—impossible to think of love again, of coming home to happy voices and the kind of chaos Sandy lives in. She doesn’t even know if she
wants
children, or even another man by her side anymore, but that, apparently, is a good thing.
Not knowing means you’re thinking about what you really want,
the therapist said
. And when you’re ready, love will compliment your life, not define it.

One of the last party stragglers steps outside with her son, and Katie helps Sandy off the bench so she can say her good-byes. Hanging back on this woman’s leg is a little boy Katie had glimpsed during the shower—a chubby, shy little four-year-old with light blue eyes that remind her of Jerry’s, and she thinks of him again, of who he would have been if his mother were a different person. Of who he would be today, if
Katie
had been a different person, too.

Sometimes, in quiet moments like this, she wonders what Jerry is doing, if he is drawing pictures of new families—if he is placing himself firmly in the middle of the new frame of his life. They’ve stopped mentioning him in the paper, and the last thing they reported, back in the spring, was that there wouldn’t be a new trial—the DA deciding against it due to “mitigating circumstances.”

Every once in a while now, Dana will reveal something to Katie—she used to work with a psychiatrist who’s at the Institute of Mental Health—and Katie holds her breath as her sister talks.
He’s making progress. His appetite has come back. There’s a counselor there, a woman who has become really attached to him.
Katie isn’t allowed to visit him, and she tells herself it’s for the best—still not knowing, really,
who
it’s best for: her, or Jerry. But sometimes she listens to Dana’s updates and she puts herself inside those walls that have become his home now—sees Jerry in his room, the bookshelf beside his bed, filled with his pads and pencils. Pictures him sleeping, his arms wrapped around the Bugs Bunny pillow they let her send, his face peaceful. Even when the picture changes—Jerry waking, his eyes pulsing open in panic—she sees a woman walk into the frame, her arms wrapping around him, comforting him. And Jerry, trusting her more each day, letting his head drop to her shoulder. The tears leaving as this new person keeps him safe from the dark.

Katie doesn’t know what the future holds for him, if he will ever be allowed to leave, if she will ever be allowed to see him again. But if it happens, if by some miracle they decide that Katie can be in his life again—his room has been put back into its proper order, waiting. A long shot, yes, virtually impossible. But the pictures are taped back onto his wall, the beluga whale propped back up on the mahogany dresser. Just in case.

“Katie?”

Sandy walks slowly to the bench, lowers herself back onto it.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said you look a million miles away,” Sandy says. “What are you thinking about?”

“Jerry,” Katie says simply.

“Okay,” Sandy says, nodding. She pats her leg. “Spill it.”

“It’s nothing—”

“Katie
.
”

Katie sneaks a look at her friend. “I guess I was just wondering,” she says, and then she turns her body around, until she is facing Sandy. “What do you think he’s doing? Right now?”

The car has been packed since early this morning. She’s getting ready to leave for a cookout at her parents’ house, a little party to send her off on her trip tomorrow. Jack dances in circles around her legs, not helping one bit.

“Where’s your leash, Jack?”

He runs to his wicker toy basket, noses around, pulls out a big rawhide. Wags his tail at Katie, supremely proud of himself.

“Nice try.”

Her mother will give her a hassle about taking Jack along again, but Katie doesn’t mind. Just last week she caught her mother sneaking a piece of chicken to him, as he sat underneath the picnic table, waiting hopefully.

“What?” her mother said when Katie smiled at her. “It was just a piece of skin.”

If Katie decides to move, and it seems inevitable that she will once Nick’s insurance money runs out, it appears that not only will Jerry’s belongings go with her, Jack will make the move, too.
Keep him, girl. It’s obvious he loves you to death,
Sandy said last December, over coffee.
And it’s going to be even crazier around here soon enough.
Her hands covering the slight bump under her shirt.

Before long, Katie will have to find a job, go house hunting, but not before this trip.

She finds the leash hanging off the deck outside, turns when Jack sprints outside for one last pee before they go.

“Good boy, Jack.”

He sniffs around the lawn, lush now thanks to her father’s attentions. As soon as the rain stopped, he showed up every morning, spreading fertilizer and laying down new seed where the leaves had suffocated the grass over the winter. And watering like crazy, until her backyard was flooded in a dozen different places. Her mother wagging her head, eyeing the puddles from the deck. “Moderation,” she had said to Katie. “A term your father does
not
comprehend.”

Beside the shed, underneath the shade from the oak trees above, bright green sprouts of baby grass have pushed their way to the surface.

“I could get up on the shed,” her father said last week, “cut down some of those branches and let more light in.”

“Don’t you dare, Jimmy,” her mother replied. “You’ll break your neck.”

“You’re the boss, Grace,” he said to his wife. He turned to Katie, winked. “Hey, sweetie, did your mother tell you about those hoodlums we ran into outside the Blue Grotto a few days ago?”

“There was nothing wrong with those men, Jimmy. One of them had a
walker,
for God’s sake.”

After her mother shook her head and retreated to the air-conditioned house, her father bumped her arm, gave her another wink. “It drives her crazy,” he said, completely unrepentant.

“Then why do you do it, Dad?”

He coiled the hose around his arm, walked to the side of the house. “I used to talk about all these dangerous men to take her mind off the cancer,” he said. “To occupy her mind with something else. And now it just drives her nuts. A win-win situation.” He grinned at Katie.

“Dad,”
Katie said, incredulous
. “
I can’t believe you!”

“What?” he asked innocently, and turned to the big bag of fertilizer leaning against the house.

Outside in the baking car, Katie settles herself in as Jack pants and scratches at the window. She rolls it down, cranks the air conditioner.

She’ll stop at Korb’s Bakery for a loaf of Italian bread, maybe make a quick trip to the Green Thumb for flowers for her mother.
Suck-up,
Dana will say, without a hint of malice. understanding that the tenderness and peace between Katie and her mother won’t last forever, that at some point very soon there will be too many questions, too many looks that might still hint at her mother’s opinion of her. But for now, while the fragile harmony lasts, Katie will take full advantage of it.

She casts one last look at the house—did she remember to turn the A/C down, shut off the dryer?—and Nick comes back to her again.

Part of trying to let him go in the past seven months has included looking around her house, trying to see it as a real home without him in it. But another part—more important than the first—has been her struggle to let go of all the questions she has about Nick, and for Nick—this need to continue waiting for answers from him, from Jerry. Attempting to forgive herself for her part in Nick’s death, even if she’ll never know the entire truth or how much of the blame is hers. But knowing, nonetheless: he may not have come back to her, but if it weren’t for Katie he’d still be here. Not in her life, not the center of her world anymore. But still here, somewhere in the world.

She adjusts the rearview mirror, catches the expression on her face. It’s all there, especially in her eyes. The guilt, the futility of forgiveness.

She knows that she will spend a lifetime wrestling with these guilty, tormented feelings—knows that they might ease, they might fade over time, but they will be a part of her life, always. She will carry them through the years, she will take them with her into new relationships, into a new home and a new job—they will always be as natural to her as breathing. And she knows she
deserves
this burden—for Nick and the life that was taken too soon; for Jerry and the love that saved him, and then almost destroyed him. Her burden such a small price to pay compared to theirs.

She puts the car in drive.

“Ready, Jack?” He turns to Katie, his paws slipping on the ledge of the window. “Here we go.”

She reaches the Topsail Island exit in North Carolina just after midnight. Her original plan was to drive seven or eight hours a day so she would be rested and get to the house in daylight, but somewhere between the Delaware Gap and the heavy traffic in Washington, D.C., she decided to keep driving until she reached the house. The weariness of waking at 5:00 A.M., of what lay ahead of her, suddenly replaced by this determination to
keep going.

The house is in darkness, no surprise. She should drive to a hotel, but instead she sits in front of the house and peers into the blackness. In the passenger seat, Jack whines in his sleep, legs kicking.

In the morning Katie will ask the new owners for Mr. Barber’s phone number, or maybe his address, though she understands that even if they have this information and are willing to share it, Mr. Barber might refuse to meet with her. That he still might be “twitchy.”

But if he does agree to meet, what then?

She rolls down her window, turns off the car. The warm air rushes in, and she closes her eyes, breathes in the scent of ocean and oleander.