Pieces of the Heart (5 page)

Drew flicked off the power switch on his buzz saw and stopped, listening. The house was perfectly quiet: no loud music from Jewel’s room, or TV blaring from the living room. And no shrieking on the phone to her girlfriends. He had no idea if they actually said anything to one another, but there was certainly a lot of shrieking. He’d hoped that in the year since they’d moved to Lake Ophelia his daughter would have chosen to spend time talking with him instead of listening to loud noises that seemed to obliterate the emptiness that moved around the two of them still. They had not yet found a way to get through it and find a way into each other’s lives.

He looked down at the table he had made, at the rich patina of the cherrywood, at the smooth, graceful lines of the legs, the irregular sides of the tabletop. He was creating something new here, something his years as a lawyer had never prepared him for, but something Shelby had always told him he had within him. It had taken her death to give him the courage to reach inside and pull out the yearning that his father had succeeded for years in suppressing.

If only he could make Jewel understand this. Instead she looked at him with hostile eyes, silently accusing him of running from his grief and ruining her life in the process.

He moved to the door of his workroom and opened it, surprised again at the silence.

“Jewel?”

A muffled response answered him. “What?”

“Why is everything so quiet?”

There was a short pause. “I’m reading.”

That alone was enough to cause worry. He was about to say something else to her when he heard the sound of two female voices outside on the lake side of the house. They were raised in argument.

He walked to the large glass door and peered out toward his dock that sat adjacent to his neighbors’, the Colliers. He spotted Margaret and another woman who sat on the dock in a lawn chair, her back to him, her hair scraped back in a long blond ponytail. She and Margaret seemed to be fighting over some handheld device and were playing a bizarre game of tug-of-war with it. The other woman stood and Drew put his hand on the door as he watched Margaret pull the device into her hand and raise it high over her head. From the younger woman’s stance, Drew had no doubt that she wouldn’t stop at shoving Margaret into the lake to get back whatever it was. Margaret seemed to have the same thought as she drew back her arm and threw it pretty far out into the lake.

Sliding open the door, he rushed outside, forcing a smile as he approached the two women. He saw the recognition in the younger woman’s eyes at the same time he registered where he’d seen her before.

“Oh, God. Not you. Please.”

He smiled in her direction, feeling oddly smug at her embarrassment, hoping she was remembering the toilet paper on her face. Rainy had told him who she was the night before but hadn’t had a chance to tell him more before she’d received a telephone call. “It’s nice to see you again, too. Is there anything I can help with? Carry a chair, dive into the lake to retrieve something?”

“You could go sniff the bottom of the lake.”

Margaret moved between them. “Hello, Drew. Please don’t mind Caroline. She’s . . . delicate.”

“I am
not
delicate, and I wish you’d stop telling that to people. What I
am
is pissed off. You just threw my BlackBerry into the lake. Now what in the hell am I supposed to do? How do you expect me to keep tabs on what’s going on at the office?”

Mother and daughter faced each other, and Drew almost smiled at how alike they were.

Margaret put her hands on her hips. “You’re not supposed to be keeping tabs on the office because you’ve taken a leave of absence. They’ll survive—but you won’t if you don’t start taking care of yourself.”

Margaret turned to Drew with an apologetic smile. “Please forgive us. I don’t mean to argue in public, but sometimes Caroline forgets herself and will pick a fight anywhere.”

Outraged, Caroline put her hands on her hips, accentuating her strong resemblance to her mother. Drew pulled on his self-preservation instincts and did not point this out. Caroline’s voice practically quavered. “
I’m
not the one tossing expensive equipment into the lake—equipment that doesn’t even belong to you.”

Ignoring her, Margaret continued to address herself to Drew. “Her doctor has ordered her to get completely away from stress— mostly caused by her job. Dr. Northcutt said that she’s so stressed that not only is it bad for her heart but she’s also started to have digestive problems that he normally doesn’t see in patients under sixty.”

“Mother!” Caroline dropped back into the lawn chair and put her hand over her eyes.

Margaret nodded in her daughter’s direction. “I’m just trying to explain to our new neighbor, Mr. Reed, how delicate your heart is and how everyone, including our neighbors, needs to work together to keep stress out of your life.”

Caroline shook her head, her hands now pressing against either side of her face like a vise. “Living with you and next door to him will probably kill me within days without intervention. A job as an air-traffic controller would be less stressful.” She jerked to a stand and faced Margaret, her face a mottled red. “Mom, I know that you’re going to say that you’re doing this because you love me, and deep, deep down inside me somewhere I might even believe that’s true. But if you open your mouth to say one word to me right now, I can’t be responsible for what I might do. So I’m going inside to lie down and practice breathing and maybe tie my hands behind my back so I won’t hurt myself or anyone else. Do not follow me. Please.”

She turned her back on them without another word and stalked toward the house. For the second time in as many days, Drew had the pleasure of watching her retreating backside and had the thought that somebody’s boot could do a lot of good planted on her rear end.

When Margaret looked up at him again he expected to see anger or at least embarrassment. He saw neither. Instead it looked like she was about to cry.

“Are you all right?”

She clenched her lips together and nodded. “I’ll be fine. I’m used to it.” She sent him a weak smile. “She’s not really like that, you know. She’s just . . . hurt. And she’s been hurting for a very long time. I just don’t know how to make it better. I thought that . . .” Margaret looked back at him, as if remembering she wasn’t alone. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to burden you with all our family’s woes. I just didn’t want you to think I’d raised a monster.”

He smiled back at her. “I wouldn’t think that at all, Mrs. Collier. Besides, Rainy seems to have a particular fondness for your daughter, which says a lot.” Although in this particular instance, he might doubt his mother-in-law’s judgment.

Margaret clutched his arm. “Yes, well. I guess I’d better go in. But I’m glad I saw you. I wanted to invite you and your daughter over for supper Saturday night.”

“That’s nice of you, Mrs. Collier, but I don’t think your daughter likes me very much. . . .”

“Drew—first, call me Margaret. Second, Caroline doesn’t seem to like anything very much unless it’s a column of numbers. Just give her time, and maybe you’ll see what I used to see when she was a young girl.” She patted his arm. “I’ll see you and Jewel at six then.”

It wasn’t a question and he realized he wasn’t expected to answer, either. She said good night and he watched her go back to the house, noticing how she stopped at the back door and squared her shoulders before entering in the exact same way her daughter had done minutes before.

C
AROLINE HEARD THE CALL OF THE LOON IN THE DARK OF HER dream and she stirred, picturing the long, sleek body of the water bird sluicing into the deepest parts of the lake, down to the invisible places that lived only in her memories and pushed insistently at the placid surface of her life.

Opening her eyes, she crossed to her window and stared out across the lake where Hart’s Peak sat shadowed under a full moon and heard the loon again, its call something between a cry and a laugh. She remembered the times she and Jude had slipped their canoe into the black water in search of the elusive bird, always disappointed but gratified, too, knowing that this was a secret adventure they shared while their parents slept: a quest to look for something they couldn’t see. Their loon—they called it that even though they were never sure if it was the same one—returned to the lake each summer, even though it wasn’t supposed to. Loons, Jude explained, summered in Canada and the northern states, not the mountains of North Carolina. But each summer the loon called, and she and Jude went out to find it.

Straining her eyes, Caroline tried to make out the profile of Ophelia, of the smooth stone forehead that remained unlined over the centuries as she stood sentinel over the lake that bore her name—never aging, never dreaming, never living; just being. Thinking of the mystical woman made her sad, and the restless feeling of the past weeks fell on her again. Silently she slipped on her fuzzy slippers and ancient terry cloth robe and moved through the house to the back porch and down to the dock.

The loon called again, and Caroline watched as its dark shape moved across the surface of the lake, hearing the
flap-flap-flap
of its feet against the water as it gained momentum to drag its ungainly body into the air. During Caroline’s awkward adolescent years, her mother had likened her to the loon: ungainly and clumsy on land, but sleek and powerful in the water. She hadn’t been all that upset, because even back then she had recognized the truth in it. Caroline’s swimming had been her refuge from being an awkward teenager, and she had the trophies to prove it. She didn’t know where those trophies were anymore. They had been forgotten and left behind somewhere in her haste to grow up and get beyond the horrible summer of her seventeenth year.

The loon dove under the surface, leaving the lake silent again. Caroline sat and pulled her knees into her chest, turning her head toward her neighbor’s house. She was surprised to see a light on in the small addition stuck onto the back of the house. It was probably that annoying man Drew Something-or-other.
God.
Just thinking his name made her skin crawl with irritation. She was pretty sure it had nothing to do with the humiliating toilet-paper incident, either. It was more to do with his being a bump on what she had thought would be an uncluttered road to recovery. She’d envisioned lying on the sofa or the dock for three months, keeping in touch with the office through her BlackBerry, and not having to do anything except tolerate her mother and catch up with Rainy.

She thought of her BlackBerry at the bottom of the lake and swore under her breath just as the loon crashed through the surface and flew away, its late-night snack clutched in its beak. It made her miss the water again and the way it made her feel: strong, sleek. Beautiful.

She stood and stared at the black water, her body itching to feel the cold wetness, her hands cupping on their own as if remembering moving water with deft strokes.
I’ve been too long from the water.

Turning her back, she faced her mother’s house again just in time to see the light go off in her neighbor’s house.
Probably up late plotting the transformation of Rainy’s shop into a burger franchise.
She felt her heart pound. Until now she’d forgotten about the FOR SALE sign in the shop’s window. She’d go see Rainy tomorrow and demand to know what that was all about. No way could she be allowed to sell it to that . . . tourist. Soon there would be nothing left to remember Jude’s presence. Only old memories held by people who were getting older every day.

She felt weepy again.
Damn! What is wrong with me?
Plopping herself into the chaise longue on the back patio, she sucked in the night air one large lungful at a time. She lay back and closed her eyes, just to rest for a moment before going back to bed. But there was something about the night air, something about the smell of the lake that brought Jude back to her. She could almost feel him beside her in the canoe, paddling silently. Absently she moved her fingers over the old chest scar and fell asleep with her hand pressed against her heart, dreaming of slipping farther and farther out onto the dark lake with only the call of the loon to guide her.