What's Left Behind (24 page)

“What did you just say?” Tessa asked.

Abby nearly laughed. “Climbing from window to window to prove his loyalty. He couldn’t have sent you flowers? Taken you to dinner? Something that didn’t involve risking his life?”

Maybe Abby didn’t understand. She couldn’t blame Luke. It wasn’t his fault. It was Tessa’s fault. “My hand was all sweaty.” Tessa’s hand had been sweaty, hadn’t it? Or had Luke’s been perspiring? “I was supposed to pull him into the window. I wasn’t supposed to let him fall. He wasn’t supposed to die. Don’t you understand? Don’t you—?”

“It was an accident. No one’s fault. That’s the meaning of an accident. I don’t blame you for Luke’s death. I don’t even blame you for being angry with him. Poor kid got all of Charlie’s best features, and some of his worst traits. On one hand, Luke was loyal, Tessa. I doubt he cheated on you. But flirting? Lily Beth used to say our Luke could flirt with a rock and get it to blush. Funny thing was—or maybe not so funny—that’s what I still say about Charlie. When a boy, or a grown man, flirts with other women, it’s diminishing. Makes you feel not quite so special anymore. Makes you doubt what they feel for you. Makes you doubt what you feel for them.”

“But, but you love Charlie.”

“Everybody loves Charlie,” Abby said, her tone resigned, sad, and definite.

Tessa pictured her baby walking hand in hand with Abby, Charlie the weekend daddy who visited on Sundays. No better than the way Tessa had grown up. Actually worse. What if her baby wanted his parents together, too? What if instead of giving her baby Luke’s fondest wish, Tessa gave him Luke’s worst nightmare? “You’re not going to marry Charlie?”

Abby sighed. “No, Tessa, I’m not.”

Tessa rubbed her baby bump, imagined massaging a tiny back.Who would love her baby? “Don’t you want to adopt my baby?’

“With all my heart.”

“But if you’re not going to marry Charlie, how can I give my baby to you?”

Abby started toward Tessa, as though she might embrace her, and then she stopped short, as if she’d hit a wall. “You want me to tell you, to explain, why you should let me adopt your baby? I have only one thing to say to you. One thing only. So you’d better listen carefully. You’d better pay attention. Are you ready, Tessa?”

Tessa wanted to go back to Sunday. To sitting in the shade and letting Abby hold her, as though she were the mother she’d never had. To hanging on tight and never letting go. Tessa had thought that telling Abby about the day Luke had died would enrage her. That when Abby found out Tessa’s part in Luke’s death, Abby would chase her out of town and out of her life.

Turned out threatening to keep Luke’s baby from Abby was the only thing that could inspire Abby’s hatred.

“Are you ready to hear me, Tessa?” Abby’s voice was soft but powerful, echoing into the low light. Echoing into Tessa.

“I’m listening.” Tessa wanted to hide her head, to cover her burning cheeks, to run from whatever was coming her way. But she was tired of hiding from what she deserved, even if what she deserved was an impossible riddle.

“A good mother,” Abby said, “always does whatever is best for her child.”

T
wenty years ago, Abby had believed convincing Charlie to stay with her in Hidden Harbor was her last best chance to keep their child safe. That two parents, two sets of eyes, two sets of quick hands, provided a better safety net than one.

August had been winding down, tourists packing up their bags of found shells, banging the sand from their flip-flops, and packing away summer for another year. Still, the sun was warm, strong, and bright, and refusing to bow to the calendar’s whims. If she’d held her breath, she could’ve almost believed she could hold back time. Dug in her heels and refused to budge. Refused to let Charlie budge. She and Charlie had gone to Spinney’s, neutral battleground. Between bites of fried clams, amid the clutter of menus and wadded straw wrappers, she’d laid their revised life plan on the table, as if she and Charlie had been two parts of a whole, instead of distinct people. As if laying her heart on the table was enough to keep him from leaving her and their unborn baby.

Little had Abby known, twenty years later, she’d be at Lily Beth’s cottage on Edgewater Lane in the exact same position. Digging in her heels and on the verge of losing everything.

Lily Beth stood before her kitchen sink, barefoot and wearing her blue summer robe. Instead of leaving her hair down, her usual do, she’d piled her loose curls on top of her head, in deference to the humidity. Tiny lighter-than-the-rest hairs curled at the back of her head, making her mother’s neck look childlike, vulnerable. A dirty cast-iron fry pan sat on the stove. The skin of a salmon stuck to its innards and added its funk to the scent of seawater and roses, traces of sandstone incense. An old TV played on the counter, the volume down low—local weather predicting clouds moving in—but Lily Beth didn’t seem to be listening. When had her mother begun the habit of keeping the TV on for company?

Abby shut off the TV.

Lily Beth turned and held a hand to her heart. Soap suds dripped from her pink dish gloves onto the floor. When had Abby’s sudden appearance ever startled her mother?

When had her mother become human?

“Hi, baby.” Lily Beth peeled off her gloves. Under the unforgiving fluorescent light, the veins in her hands showed, too close to the surface. “What brings you around?”

Abby pictured Tessa at a dorm-room window, her breath hanging in the winter air. Abby imagined Luke dangling from the sill, trying to sweet-talk Tessa into forgiving him for playing with her affections.

The medical examiner had told her Luke’s death had been instant, that he hadn’t suffered, an impossible-to-disprove pretty little lie. But what about Luke’s fall? What about the descent, the shift from desperate love to the desperate need for self-preservation? Had Luke, however briefly, felt the magnitude of his own loss? Had he envisioned the gaping, empty hole he’d leave behind?

Had he, too late, realized he’d traded his life for a Spiderman grand gesture to win back the mother of his child?

Of course, Luke hadn’t known about the child. If her son had stuck around, then he could’ve proven himself a real superhero, just by being a father to his baby.

“I’m so angry I could spit,” Abby said, repeating what she’d told Tessa. This time, her feelings bled through her words, rasping her voice and getting the better of her.

“With me?” Lily Beth asked.

“Why would I be—?” Last night’s visit and her frustration over the mermaid tale seemed like eons ago. “No, Mom. I’m not angry with you. It’s—I’m—” That swell, that tsunami pressure swell she’d been holding at bay for months pressed, threatened. Abby tilted her face to the ceiling, and her vision blurred with unshed tears. When her gaze returned to Lily Beth, her mother shimmered, like a vision underwater. Not a mermaid, but a woman drowning. “I’m angry at Luke. I’m angry at Charlie. I’m angry at
everyone
.”

Lily Beth nodded. “Baby girl.”

“Mostly I’m angry at nature and genetics. And stupid, stupid boys!”

Lily Beth took a highball glass from the open shelving, poured Abby ice water from the glass pitcher she kept in the fridge. Just like the days when Lily Beth worried Abby might cry herself dry over Charlie.

“Let’s go have a nice talk,” Lily Beth said.

“I don’t want to be nice anymore.” As if to prove her point, her body responded, her jaw and neck tightening, her hands curling into fists.

“Even better.” A smile tugged at the corners of Lily Beth’s lips. “It’s about time.” Lily Beth led Abby into the great room and set her water down on the glass curio table, a container for sand dollars, aquamarine, and mermaids. Similar collections decorated the side tables, tiny sea-themed altars everywhere.

When Abby had been a girl, she’d eschewed Barbie dolls for the resin mermaid figurines, pretended she was a princess under the sea, waiting for a prince to awaken her. Years before she’d first slept with Charlie, the game had soured. She’d replaced the child’s fantasy with the grander scheme of saving herself. She’d told herself Charlie had only been around for the ride. She’d told herself a lot of impossible-to-disprove pretty little lies.

“Do you remember when you told me Charlie would never change? That he couldn’t help but be a shameless flirt? That he was cursed. People take one look at him, get in his energetic zone—whatever you called it—and they’re powerless against his charm?”

“Which time?”

“Do you remember when I came home from school and told you I’d broken up with Charlie because he was flirting with Caroline Eastman in trig?”

“Charlie said that was impossible. He couldn’t be flirting because his forever girl—you—were right beside him at the time. Nope, I don’t recall that day. Must’ve slipped my mind. How does the story end?”

Beyond Lily Beth’s glass patio doors, beneath the moon, the sea glimmered. Below the surface, those same waves were, little by little, changing the shape of her childhood beach. Abby sipped her water, let the cold soothe her temples. A poor substitute for diving beneath those numbing waves.

“Do you remember when we both noticed how much Luke looked like Charlie?”

“Day he was born. One of the two best days of my life.”

“Do you remember when we took Luke for his first haircut?”

“The look on his face!” Lily Beth said, letting Abby know her mother was imagining the identical scene that played in her head. Her fifteen-month-old baby, batting his big blue eyes, playing coy, and charming the thirty-year-old hairdresser every man in town was in heat over. Word on the street had been that every full moon, the eligible men of Hidden Harbor lined up beneath her window and howled.

“Do you remember the trail of broken hearts Luke left in Hidden Harbor?” Abby asked. “All the girls who called the house crying?”

“The select few who showed up on your doorstep?”

“Yes.” Tessa hadn’t been the first girl who’d cried on her shoulder, only the most recent. “The day Luke died,” Abby said, and the rueful smile drained from Lily Beth’s face.

“The day we lost our baby,” Abby added, and Lily Beth squeezed Abby’s hand. “Tessa was trying to break up with Luke.”

Lily Beth inhaled sharply, and her eyelids drifted shut. Her eyes flitted beneath her pale lids. Then she opened her eyes and nodded for Abby to continue. Abby’s cue to share Tessa’s tale, not a pretty fable you told a child, not a magical yarn, but the human complicated truth.

When Abby was finished, Lily Beth gave her a hug. Cheek-to-cheek, chest-to-chest, Lily Beth’s pulse rapid-fire fluttered like the baby growing beneath Tessa’s heart. “That boy,” Lily Beth said.

“Why did Luke have to inherit Charlie’s personality? Wasn’t it enough he got Charlie’s looks? No matter how many times I talked to Luke about how he should treat girls—”

“He was an eighteen-year-old boy, Abby,” Lily Beth said, reminding Abby of the nature lesson her mother had tried to impart on her. Lily Beth’s warning that a male’s biology compelled him to try and plant his seed in as many females as possible.

And if Luke had survived the fall, maybe he could’ve grown out of his heartbreaking ways, instead of following in the steps of his thirty-eight-year-old father. Charlie couldn’t help but perpetually charm the world. The heck with the trail of heartbreak. The heck with
Abby’s
heartbreak.

“Mom, I could never marry Charlie. I don’t know how I ever thought we were a good match.”

Lily Beth looked to the ceiling, sighed into a grin. “I’ve lived to see the day! You’re finally ready to leave the fantasy world behind. It’s a good thing he didn’t take you up on your offer last year. It’s good—”

“Yesterday,” Abby said, “Charlie asked me to marry him again.”

Lily Beth angled Abby a sideways glance. “Why now? Does this have something to do with Luke’s baby?”

Something, everything, nothing.

Abby could blame Tessa, uncover the way she’d been playing her and Charlie. Reveal the way Tessa had swept them into her whirlwind, and the way she’d been attempting to reconfigure their lives.

Or Abby could shrug, feign ignorance, and protect Tessa from Lily Beth. Mothers always protected their daughters.

“It doesn’t matter, Mom. I can’t marry Charlie. I don’t love him.” Abby shrugged. “Not that way, not the forever way. Not anymore.”

Not the way she was falling in love with Rob.

Abby waited for her chest to palpitate with the thought, for the muscle in her temple to twitch, for her fingers to grow cold. All she felt was a gentle uptick of her heartbeat, and a quiet sense of peace. Considering Rob’s unwillingness to discuss Luke’s baby, and her unwillingness to just see what happened, that made no sense at all.

Did love ever?

“What about you?” Abby said, and Lily Beth’s mouth fell slack, her brow furrowed, as if she knew what was coming next. “Why didn’t you marry my father?”

Abby stared into Lily Beth’s eyes, expecting her mother to, any second now, break her gaze, leave the room, and reach for the familiar tired fable.

Lily Beth smoothed Abby’s hair from her face. “I couldn’t marry your father.” Lily Beth blinked away tears, pressed a hand to her mouth, and then her chest. “He was already married.”

Abby’s chest gave two sharp out-of-sync kicks. A muscle on the left side of her temple twitched and her fingers went cold. Abby must’ve heard Lily Beth wrong. Because the woman she knew, the woman she thought she’d known, would never take something that didn’t belong to her.

The woman Abby knew had been a sixteen-year-old girl.

Lily Beth looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap. Were Lily Beth’s hands cold, too? “I’m sorry to disappoint you, baby,” Lily Beth said, letting Abby know she’d read the look on her face—childish, selfish, careless with fragile emotions. Not much different from that beautiful, tormented girl who was carrying her grandchild. And Tessa had good reason to be disappointed with her mother.

Abby wrapped her hands around her mother’s. All she felt was warmth. “Not disappointed. Never disappointed in you.” How would Abby have known how to survive on her own with a baby, if her mother hadn’t shown her the way? Lily Beth was everything to her. Mother, father, her entire family. “Did you really meet him swimming off Head Beach? Who was he? What did he do? If he was married, he must’ve been older,” Abby said, imagining a young man of twenty-one or so, that tender age when you touch a toe into adulthood. At that age, she could almost forgive his misstep.

Lily Beth laughed. “I’ll answer all of your questions, and then some. I did meet your father swimming off Head Beach, my day off from working at the Kelp Shed. That part is true.”

Lily Beth rubbed her thumb nail, the way she’d buff the outside of a tumbled stone till you could see your reflection. “He was staying at a cottage nearby, one with a private beach and a view of the ocean, and so many lovely roses.”

“This cottage?” Abby said.

“Uh, hum,” Lily Beth said.

Abby’s stomach tensed, the tug of Lily Beth’s admission dredging up history, like sand from the ocean’s bottom clouding still waters. Had Abby made a terrible mistake? “Did he own our cottage?”

Lily Beth didn’t seem to hear her. “He told me he liked to get away to clear his head. So he’d ride his bike to Hermit Island, pretend he was alone in the world.”

“But he wasn’t alone for long. He met you.”

“When he spotted me swimming offshore, at first he didn’t recognize me as the cashier from the snack bar. He thought I was a beautiful magical mermaid—”

“From the painting in the Kelp Shed.”

“Come to spirit him away from his earthly life.”

According to legend, mermaids seduced unwitting young men away from their homes and to the deepest seas. But Lily Beth’s story of Abby’s origins had always portrayed her father as the mythical creature, the parent who’d left for his own survival. Could both versions speak a facet of the truth?

“In his earthly life, he was married,” Abby said. And Lily Beth had been the fantasy, playing the part of the nymph from the sea.

How would Abby have felt if a man, a married man, had bedded her sixteen-year-old daughter? But Lily Beth’s birthday wasn’t until the beginning of August, the middle of the summer season—

“You were sixteen when you met my father?”

“Fifteen and three quarters,” Lily Beth said, with as much seriousness as when a preschool Luke had once proclaimed himself three and three quarters. Every month mattered to a child eager to hasten the years. How much had it mattered to Abby’s father?

“Mom?” Abby drew her bottom lip between her teeth, gnawed on the spark of a thought, frissons of sharp light catching. “How old was my father?”

Lily Beth didn’t skip a beat. “Thirty-two.”

Not a boy-man, but a full-grown adult who ought to have known better. “He was twice your age!”

“Age didn’t matter to him. We’d lie on the shore, talking for hours . . .”

When Abby had first discovered Luke was sexually active, she’d Googled Maine law, and verified that the age of consent was sixteen.

“. . . He loved Steinbeck and Hemingway,
The Old Man and the Sea
.”

And at fifteen, Lily Beth, old soul that she was, must’ve eaten up Abby’s father’s attention with a spoon. What girl didn’t want to feel herself the equal to an older man? “When did he touch you?”