The Wishing Tide (26 page)

Lane stepped out of his reach, certain she would come undone if he touched her now. “I’m fine,” she lied, wrapping her arms close to her body. “You go. It’s my turn to clear my head.”

D
ally was unloading a bag of supplies in the kitchen when Lane returned. She’d forgotten it was Thursday, Dally’s usual day, and that she’d asked her to pick up a few things Sam needed from Sewell’s Hardware to finish repairing the shed roof. She finished checking off the items in the box—nails, caulk, paintbrushes—then handed off the receipt.

“It’s all here. Where do you—hey, you look like crap on a cracker.”

“Thanks. Bit of a bumpy night. Have you . . . uh . . . seen Michael?”

“Professor McDreamy?” Dally jerked her chin at the ceiling. “Been banging around upstairs since I got here. I think he’s rearranging the furniture.”

No, he was steering clear of her, hoping to avoid a sequel to their earlier conversation. And probably packing. He’d said what he needed to. All that was left was the leaving. Part of her—the rational part, at least—understood. He’d been hurt, scarred in every way it was possible for a man to be scarred, and he needed to protect himself. But the other part, the part that had let down its guard long enough to fall in love, needed him to fight through those scars, to risk new wounds in order to heal the old ones.

Was it fair to want such a thing? To ask him to lay himself open,
to trust, when, given their track records, it was very possible they’d both end up hurt? Probably not, but right or wrong, she did want it. If she knew more about those terrible years, about the boy who had endured such loss, the man who, even now, suffered such guilt, perhaps she could—what? He was leaving in a few days. There was no time.

“You left the coffeepot on,” Dally scolded.

Lane blinked at her. “What?”

“I said you left the pot on. Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t look so good.”

“We just didn’t get much sleep, that’s all.”

Dally instantly seized on the gaffe. “We?”

“I meant I didn’t get much sleep.”

“You said
we
.”

Lane groaned, too weary to wriggle out of the noose. “Okay, fine—we.”

“You and the professor? I knew it! Hey, the Christmas trees are in at Sewell’s. They were unloading them this morning. You should get one this year. You and the professor could decorate it together.”

“The professor will be gone by Christmas,” Lane said evenly.

“Gone?”

“In a few days, as a matter of fact.”

“I thought he was staying through the winter.”

“Something . . . came up.”

Dally stared at her. “And you’re not going to tell me what it is, are you?”

“Not now, no.”

“You don’t want him to go. That’s why you’re upset. You’re falling for him.”

Lane shifted her gaze to the window. “Fell,” she said softly. “But it doesn’t matter. He’s going back to Vermont.”

“But why?”

“He says he can’t be the man I deserve.”

Dally’s mouth rounded. “He actually said that? Jesus, he’s a player! A lousy, two-faced player! And not even an original one if he’s using lines like that.”

Lane shook her head. “There’s more to it, Dally. I can’t say what, but there is. He has his reasons. Or thinks he does.”

“Don’t defend him! How do you think the bastards always get away with the stuff they do? No one calls them on it, that’s how. I’ve had experience with his type. I’ve got Skye to prove it. I say you toss him out on his ear. Today. Now.”

Lane winced. She couldn’t say the idea hadn’t crossed her mind. It had. But some tiny, shameful part of her still hoped Michael might change his mind, might be willing to take a leap of faith, to reach for happily ever after.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Dally said, her voice soft now. “You’re upset, and here I stand, telling you how to live your life because five years ago I let myself get knocked up by a bastard. Don’t listen to me. Your lips are blue. You must be freezing. Why don’t you go have a nice long soak? Everything looks better after a bath.”

Upstairs, Lane hovered in the doorway of her room, staring at the discarded bits of clothing strewn haphazardly across the floor, recalling the storm of passion that had erupted in the kitchen and continued all the way up the stairs. She hadn’t bothered to think about the fallout. Neither of them had. At the time, in that breathless, mindless moment, it had seemed right, inevitable somehow. But now, with the breathlessness gone, she saw it for exactly what Michael admitted it was—a night of convenience.

Snatching up the clothes, she dumped them into the hamper, then tidied the bed. Not for Dally’s sake, but for her own. She couldn’t undo what had happened last night, but she could at least hide the evidence.

In the end, she opted for a shower rather than a bath. The last
thing she wanted was to languish in the tub, wallowing in self-pity and recrimination. She needed to do something, occupy her mind with something besides Michael. In fresh sweats, she padded back down to the kitchen for a much-needed jolt of caffeine. Less than two hours’ sleep, compounded by this morning’s rather unpleasant scene on the jetty, was beginning to take its toll. Her head ached dully and she was starting to bump into things, a sure sign that she was heading for a crash, and probably not a pretty one.

The kitchen smelled faintly of scorched coffee, the remnants of Michael’s good deed nearly boiled dry now. Dumping the syrupy dregs into the sink, she scrubbed the pot clean, then measured several scoops of dark roast into the basket. She was relieved to find that Dally had gone up to start her work. She absolutely adored the girl, but she really didn’t feel like being the object of anyone’s pity.

She’d planned to get some work done, to hide out in her writing room as long as she could before having to face Michael again. Now she seriously doubted she’d be able to string two sentences together. She had never been one for naps but was contemplating one when she saw Mary crabbing her way around the corner and up the dune.

The vote.

She’d nearly forgotten about last night’s town council meeting—and the bad news she was going to have to deliver. A sense of dread settled over her as she pulled out the thermos and turned the gas on under the kettle. She was too wrung out to have this conversation now. And yet Mary deserved to know. How exactly was she supposed to say it?
In two weeks the town council is going to vote on whether you have a place to live?

Maybe it could wait a bit, until she received a response to her letter, or heard something from her mother. The news would go down better with a little dash of hope. She could just leave out the part about the mayor calling for a vote, say the meeting had been about Hope House, but only to take the pulse of the community. Would
that be wrong? The thought of lying made her squeamish, but not as squeamish as telling the truth. And it wasn’t as if Mary’s knowing would affect the outcome. Yes, it could wait.

Mary glanced up as she approached, shielding her eyes with one hand. “What’s wrong?” she said instantly. “Something’s happened.”

“No, I just—”

“It’s to do with the meeting, isn’t it? It’s bad?”

Damn.
She should have known better. “It isn’t good,” she said, taking a seat on the sand. “The mayor wants everyone to think the break-ins have to do with someone from Hope House.”

“It’s a lie!”

“I know that, Mary. Lots of people do. But there are some who . . .” She let the words dangle, not wanting to go on but knowing she needed to. “He’s trying to scare people, hinting that you and the others are . . . dangerous.”

Mary’s lower lip jutted angrily. “No one there is dangerous. You can’t go to a place like Hope House if you pose any kind of threat. They’re careful about that.”

“I know that, too, but there are some who don’t, and at the moment, that’s playing right into the mayor’s hands.” Lane unscrewed the thermos, filled a paper cup with tea, and handed it to Mary.

Mary sipped thoughtfully, then surprised Lane by reaching out to take her hand. “You’re a good one, my girl. A very good one. No matter what happens.”

Lane glanced at the hand resting on hers, thin and slightly papery, the knuckles blue with cold. “We’ll hear something soon. I promise. And then we’ll be able to fight.”

It was a promise she knew she had no business making. What if no one came forward with the resources to stand against Landon? She could still see the faces at last night’s meeting when he’d hinted that the tragedy that had taken the life of Peter Rourke could happen again if they failed to heed his warning. Fearmongering at its most
shameless, and yet it had worked. No wonder Michael had gone a little crazy. It couldn’t have been easy listening to that, knowing full well it was his mother Landon was talking about.

“Mary,” Lane ventured cautiously. “You seem to know a lot about Starry Point. Can I ask you something?”

Mary withdrew her hand and sat waiting.

“Last night, at the meeting, Landon hinted around about something that happened here a long time ago in the house across the street, about the boy who died there in the fire. I was wondering if you could tell me anything about his mother. Her name was Hannah Rourke.”

Mary stiffened. “I can tell you she’s dead. Dead and gone.”

“Yes, but when she was alive, was she—”

Mary raised her eyes to Lane’s, the beginnings of a storm quietly churning in their depths. “Crazy?”

Lane bit her lip, wondering suddenly if this was a good idea. “I was going to say ill. But yes, I suppose that’s what I mean.”

Mary was quiet for a time, her attention pinned on the horizon. When she finally spoke her voice was strangely flat, devoid of anything like sympathy.

“She cracked up. They put her somewhere, locked her up good and tight. But then, they had no choice, you see. She kept making noise, going on about her husband, how he wasn’t really dead, just holed up somewhere with his money and a woman. If she was smart she would have gone along nice and quiet and not tried to spoil the man’s plans. But she wasn’t smart.”

Lane pulled her knees to her chest, hugging them tight. It was exactly what Michael had told her. “Do you know how she died?”

Quietly, almost imperceptibly, Mary began to rock. “Does it matter? Does anyone really care how people like that—people like me—die, so long as we do it cleanly and quietly? And why ask me? After so many years, why ask at all?”

Lane sipped her tea, toying briefly with the idea of sharing Michael’s story. That was the real reason she’d brought all this up, after all, to dig for something, anything, that might give her some insight into what Michael had gone through, something that might make him stay. But it was too personal, and not really her story to tell. Instead, she settled for a half-truth.

“Last night, Landon was trying to scare people into agreeing with him about closing Hope House. He brought up the fire, and Peter. He wants to connect Hope House with the kind of people who could hurt a child.”

“The boy,” Mary whispered, rocking in earnest now. “They’ve found out about the boy.”

“I killed a boy once.”

A sudden chill prickled up Lane’s spine. She’d been so desperate for answers that she hadn’t bothered to consider what bringing up Peter Rourke’s fate might mean to Mary’s already precarious psyche, the dark association she might make to her own tragic past—and the ghost of another dead boy?

“Oh, Mary, no. I didn’t mean—”

“My fault,” she muttered. “My fault. My fault. All my fault.”

“Mary, look at me. Listen to me. We weren’t talking about you. We were talking about Hannah, about the fire.”

“Burned,” she wailed mournfully. “All burned.”

“Yes, the upstairs burned in the house across the street. Do you remember now?”

Mary shook her head miserably from side to side. “I was careful. Always careful. But someone must have told about that poor dead boy.” Her head came up, her face crumpled with misery. “Did you tell?”

“Mary, please. You’re just mixed up. What I asked has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with the boy. I want you to forget about it.”

“They’ll close Hope House because of me. Because I’m the dangerous one. I’ll have nowhere to go.”

Lane reached for her. “Mary, please—”

Mary jerked back as if she’d been burned. “I won’t go back! I won’t!”

Before Lane could stop her, Mary was on her feet, scrambling away, up and over the dune. It took a moment to register what was happening, but finally Lane got her legs under her and gave chase, stumbling as she crossed the boardwalk and headed at a run for the empty lot. By the time she reached the road, Mary was already out of reach, on her bike and pedaling away, her neon pink flag bobbing in the wind.

Lane felt a sickening sense of déjà vu creep in as she watched the bicycle disappear from view. She had promised not to pry. And she hadn’t, exactly. Instead, she had raised questions about another woman with mental illness. And another dead boy. It didn’t matter that their pasts were unconnected. The similarities had been too much for Mary. She had melted down—again. And it had been her fault.

Michael

M
ichael surveyed the library wearily. There were books everywhere—spread open on the large mahogany table he had converted to a desk, arranged in untidy stacks on the floor, relevant pages carefully marked with yellow sticky notes—all needing to be packed and loaded for the drive back to Middlebury. He eyed the pile of scribble-filled legal pads on his chair, thought of the dozens of research files he’d filled. He’d done a lot of work here, good work by both literary and academic standards, and yet he couldn’t muster a sense of anything resembling satisfaction.

How was it possible that he’d spent so much time and energy on a thing he no longer gave a damn about, or more accurately, had never really given a damn about? And how in God’s name was he supposed to go back and finish the thing?

He had purposely waited until Lane went out to the dunes to begin packing up. She was angry, hurt. He didn’t blame her. In Dickens’s day his actions would have earned him the reputation of a cad or bounder. Fair enough. Except he’d never set out to hurt her. What happened between them had simply erupted in the heat of the moment. But even as he formed the thought, he knew it wasn’t true. Their lovemaking might have been spontaneous, but he sure as hell
couldn’t say it was unexpected. Not when he’d so thoroughly enjoyed playing house with her, kissing and touching until the lines had blurred and he’d forgotten it was all just a charade. Last night might have been a mistake, but he sure as hell couldn’t call it an accident.

Restless, and not at all motivated to start boxing up his mess, he set down the borrowed volumes of Dickens he’d been about to reshelve. He needed some air, a distraction, maybe another trip down to the lighthouse—alone this time.

He had no desire to run into Lane, or to renew this morning’s discussion, especially when he didn’t trust himself to stand firm. He’d expected her to try to change his mind, to ask him to stay, to give them a chance—but she hadn’t. Maybe he had misjudged her feelings. Or maybe she knew he was right.

Wandering to the kitchen, he considered making coffee, then thought better of it. He was jumpy enough without adding caffeine to the mix. From the window over the sink, he scanned the dunes. No sign of Lane, or of Mary, either, thank heaven. It wasn’t nice, he knew, but the mere thought of the woman, her mismatched clothes and pale, roughly cropped hair, filled him with revulsion, with recognition that wasn’t really recognition but felt too much like it.

His mother had looked like that near the end, medicated to the point of numbness, unkempt and uncaring, so divorced from reality that days often passed without her leaving her room. He’d done his best to look after her, and Peter, too, heating up the casseroles the neighbor women brought by, making her eat when he could, bringing her pills at the appointed times—retrieving them from her various hiding places later on.

The memory still made him shudder, too vivid, too raw. He’d always believed that if he ever managed to spill his guts about the night of the fire, he would somehow feel relieved, released, but he’d been wrong. He’d also believed coming back to Starry Point, seeing the old house, standing in it, would free him from the dreams that had been
plaguing him for months. He’d been wrong about that, too. Then again, maybe he simply hadn’t stood in the fire long enough, hadn’t confronted the darkest of his demons, felt what he needed to feel.

Not bothering to grab his coat, he marched through the parlor and stepped out onto the Cloister’s stone porch. He wavered briefly as he eyed his childhood home, staring back at him now with its frowning front porch and blank dark windows, more daunting, somehow, in the cold gray light of day than it had seemed last night in the pitch-dark. He wasn’t a boy anymore, he reminded himself, and forced his feet to move. He needed to do this.

Crossing the street, he slipped around the sagging side porch, then disappeared between the line of overgrown hedges that ran along the north side of the house. Groping blindly along the stone foundation, he located the small wooden door he’d often used as a boy, the one he’d slipped through to visit the greenhouse the night of the fire.

He had expected to find it boarded that first night, then realized it was doubtful anyone even knew the door existed. The latch had rusted through, leaving only a dangling bit of metal that fell away the moment he gave it a tug. The door itself was bowed and swollen, stubbornly refusing to yield to the pressure of his shoulder. Leaning back on his haunches, he aimed his feet squarely and gave the door a solid kick.

The crawl space was tighter than he remembered, but eventually he made his way through the passage and up the narrow flight of steps to the room off the kitchen his mother had used as a pantry. It was bare now, as was the kitchen, the glass-front cabinets emptied of everything but cobwebs and the faded contact paper that still lined the shelves. As he passed through the vacant dining room, he found himself wondering what had happened to his family’s belongings after the fire. Had they gone to neighbors, to auction, to charity? Or had the smoke ruined it all?

He could smell it suddenly, acrid and thick at the back of his throat,
boiling down the stairs, filling the parlor. And then, weeks later, when he’d managed to sneak back inside, the sickening stench of cold, wet ash. The damage was still visible, in the water-stained floors and soot-smeared walls, the blackened staircase with its charred and tortured woodwork. That was the physical damage. The other damage—the real damage—was invisible, but much, much too real.

As a boy he had known instinctively that his mother wasn’t like other mothers, that his home life was nothing like that of his friends, where birthday cakes and Christmas trees—the normal childhood things—were taken for granted. It was inevitable, he supposed, the implosion of his family, a thing he now realized on some gut level he’d always been waiting for, some vivid and violent unraveling that seemed always to be looming. And yet when it came, it had still knocked him for a loop.

In the front parlor a feeble, dun-colored light filtered through the grimy windows, lending the room a strange, underwater gloom, decades of ash and dust hazing the quiet air, mingling with the pong of mildew and old smoke. Steeling himself for the worst of it, he forced his eyes to the staircase. It was why he’d come, after all. To face all of this, to stand in the metaphorical fire and make himself remember.

The images came more quickly than he’d expected: his mother on the second-floor landing, eyes wide with panic as the flames licked down the railing, the reek of scotch as he grappled with her, the slow-motion shower of buttons raining onto the carpet as he clutched the front of her robe and dragged her forcibly down the stairs.

He’d found one of the buttons the day he left the burn unit—tiny and pink, like the mints she used to have on the table at luncheons—tucked into the cuff of the pants he’d been wearing the night of the fire. He couldn’t say why he’d never thrown it away, a warped sense of nostalgia perhaps, a twisted need to cling to who he’d been before the Forresters changed his name and made him over into some other boy.

They’d meant well, trying to make him forget. What they never understood was that it hadn’t all been bad, not early on, not before his father died, and that some small part of him needed to remember the mother who told him stories and made wishes on flowers. At the end she’d been an ungodly mess, sick and unhappy and overmedicated, but once, long before that, she had loved him.

Unbidden, thoughts of Mary filled his head. It shamed him to feel revulsion for a woman he’d never actually met. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but a visceral one, carved into his heart at an early age and breathing there still, a shameful echo of what he’d felt for his mother toward the end.

Even now he found it difficult to forgive her for being what she was, though the rational part of him knew she’d had little or no control over her condition. If only he’d realized it then, he might have helped her, reached her somehow. With a fresh pang of shame he thought of Lane and the way she was with Mary. It was hard not to wonder how different his mother’s life might have been if she’d had such a champion.

His father had certainly never been a champion, too busy moving his money around, or seeing to his duties as Starry Point’s mayor. Hannah Rourke had been just one more thing to manage, or rather, to delegate to the doctors, who despite a merry-go-round of prescriptions had failed miserably. She had teetered for a while, hovering on the brink of disaster, reclusive and paranoid, until one day something snapped and she hurtled over the precipice.

She’d
gone away
after that—to heal, his father explained. The neighbors never knew all the details, but they knew enough to realize the story about a sick aunt didn’t quite pass muster. She was better when she came home, or at least more docile, with a new set of pill bottles to manage her moods. His father didn’t seem to mind, as long as his wife didn’t embarrass him in front of his constituents. So much for happily ever after.

Not that he’d ever really bought in to all of that. His mother had, and look where it got her. And what of his adoptive parents? They
were content, comfortable, which he supposed was a kind of happy, though not in any fairy-tale sense. But then, maybe that’s when it worked, when expectations were low and duty took the place of passion, when neither partner was looking for the happy ending.

Lane was, though. Even if she didn’t know it.

She liked to pretend she was battle hardened, her armor free of chinks, but the way she’d looked at him this morning when he told her he was leaving said otherwise. She wouldn’t be happy with scraps, nor did she deserve them. It had sounded cliché, the kind of thing guys say just before they beat a hasty retreat, but he really
would
end up disappointing her, and he had no intention of letting that happen.

Stepping to the window, he scrubbed a small circle in the grit and peered across the street at the Cloister, enduring and stoic, its stone towers thrusting against the heavy sky. It had been a kind of prison for him once, its upper rooms lined with narrow iron cots, where homeless, loveless boys dreamed each night of belonging somewhere—anywhere. Now, years later, Lane had made it into a kind of fortress, a place to hide from the world, to insulate herself from her memories and her dreams. Because pretending not to want anything felt safer than wanting something you couldn’t have. He got that, and it wasn’t a bad strategy. It was just a damn lonely one.

He lingered awhile at the window, until the shadows began to stretch and a light came on in one of the towers. Lane’s silhouette drifted past, a glimpse of pale blue sweats, a flash of auburn ponytail. He should step away before he was seen, and yet he found himself rooted to the spot, caught unaware by a homing instinct so sudden, so primal, it almost made him forget to breathe. Suddenly, almost desperately, he wanted to be there, near her, with her, where it felt good and right, and where, he realized now, he’d been happier over the last few weeks than he’d been in a very long time.

All the more reason to get out while he could—while they both could.