Forty

Failure.

The word bobbed around in my brain, but it seemed housed in a tight knot in my guts. I’d failed Justine and my beautiful stalker. I’d let my guard down and left the apartment without my pepper spray.

Fool. Fool with a black bruise on her head and scabs on her knees and hands. With every bone in her body on fire with pain. Sitting in a hospital room with the best cop I’d ever known. Maybe the best man.

I closed my eyes, trying to wish away the throbbing, and Jean Harlow’s image emblazoned itself in my brain. The weird image of a nude, carefree woman reveling in herself and joking around about being naked. Imagine.

There was a space between sleep and awake in which I was quite happy. That’s where I was, floating, thinking of Jean, when I was yanked back into reality.

“Okay,” Den said. “The wheelchair is here. Let’s get you up and out of here.”

Den helped me as I slid in, dizzy, nauseated, a little in shock. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I’d spent a lot of time in the Big Apple. The scariest part was not even the attack, but how my brain was moving in slow motion. It was so hard to think. It was scary how one slip, one accident, and you could almost become a completely different person. My case wasn’t exactly that dramatic—but I still felt as if a piece of myself had been stolen.

“Any word on our Harlow impersonator’s case?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said. “We know where she had her implants done in London. But with the time differences, we’re having problems connecting.”

Made sense.

“I wish we could rush the tox screen, but they tell me they’re doing their best.”

He was quiet on the drive to the harbor. I figured he’d drop the breakup bombshell on me any minute, although it wasn’t technically a breakup since we’d never even gone on a date. It’s been my experience that most men don’t want to be bothered with a woman who isn’t healthy, let alone one with Lyme disease. Den understood all that now. I figured he might have the class to wait for a few days, though. Again, we’d never dated. He owed me nothing. Nothing at all.

A police escort wasn’t a bad thing in this city. When we got to the harbor, another police escort waited in a boat to take me home to Cloister Island—yet again broken and bruised. Like the last time I’d had a police escort in a boat. I wasn’t living right.

Kate apologized for not coming with me. If anybody had reason not to go to Cloister, it was her, shunned by her family and other islanders when she’d transitioned into a woman. She was welcome at my home, but being on the island still brought up too many painful memories for her.

I tried not to examine Den too closely. But when I glimpsed his face, an odd, almost sick-looking bearing had fallen across it.

Den and the other officer help me into the boat, along with my bag, my laptop, and my purse. The choppy and gray river carried me away from the city, its famous skyline fading. Den stood on the edge of the dock until I couldn’t see him anymore. I wondered if I would ever see him again.

If the murder cases went nowhere, which apparently was where they were going, there’d be no reason for us to see one another again. And I doubted his attraction to me after this.

The journey across the river out to the sound and sea was tortuous. Every rough wave echoed in pain in my head.

Thirty minutes later, my island came into view. St. Peter’s steeple came into sight first, as it always did, then each shop and restaurant along the boardwalk. Houses perched along the mountainside. Some of those houses were incredible.

My mother and gram stood at the dock waiting for me, along with Ed, a family friend who was also a nurse. He’d tended to me before, taking no money, only asking for Gram’s oyster soup as payment.

The officer in the boat helped me to solid ground. My sea legs took a moment to adjust.

Gram stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me. “Charlotte, what happened to you?”

Mom stood shaking her head as she took me in, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes, and finally moved to hug me.

Ed nodded at me. “Here we are again, Charlotte.” Long and lean, with a bad complexion, he studied me.

“I suppose,” I said.

It always took more than a few moments to adjust from the city to Cloister Island, with its wide-open spaces of the sky and sea. In Manhattan, buildings hovered over me, providing a barrier to real air and space.

Cloister Island is one of the many smaller islands off the coast of New York. It was founded by a group of Irish nuns, and next to arrive were the Irish fisherman and oystermen with their families. My family had been here for four generations, its root in deep.

We rode in Mom’s car to our house. As it came closer into view—its fading turquoise blue color, its sagging front porch with the empty swing—warmth came over me. Underneath, a deep sense of regret and foreboding. Here I was again. A failure. Hurt. Sick. And coming home to heal.

∞

I dreamed of boxes.

I was searching through them for something important, and almost frantic about it.

Where is it? Where is it? I kept saying.

I shoved aside a big box, peeking inside at the piles of linen inside. Another box brimming with scrapbooks and photos. But I wasn’t interested in those. What was I seeking? I’d know it when I saw it. Not the wine boxes, not the cigarette boxes. No.

A soft floral scent wafted through the air as I searched, and I got distracted by it for a moment or two.

Finally I spotted it. It was the box I was looking for—an old hat box with a sweet vintage floral pattern and Paris stamped on it. My heart raced. What was inside? I was certain I’d find what I sought.

A bell sound jarred me awake.

“What the—” I grabbed my chest.

I was at home, in my bed, and someone was ringing the front doorbell. I struggled to get out of bed, still deep in the clutches of sleep and my dream.

“I’ve got it,” Mom said.

Discombobulated, I wondered about the time of day. When I spotted the clock, I realized I’d been sleeping for hours.

Mom opened the door.

“Did I wake you up?” she asked. She’d colored her hair red, a sort of plum color. And it spiked up in tufts on her head. She held a glass of water in her hands.

I nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you should get up. Don’t you think?”

My head was pounding. I should take more pain pills.

“I need more medicine,” I said, more to myself than to her, but she brought my pills along with the water. “Thanks. It’s past time for me to take one, and I’m feeling it.”

“How about some soup?”

Food still made me queasy. But I needed to eat to keep my strength. Whatever I had left.

“Maybe a little,” I said. I laid back down, my head in my pillow.

“I had the weirdest dream,” I said.

“Yeah, you look a little spacey for someone who hasn’t had their pain meds,” she said, sitting at the edge of my bed.

“I was in such a deep sleep,” I said. “I dreamed of boxes and searching through them.”

“Well, you’ve been cleaning Justine’s place, right? Makes sense,” Mom said.

Every time I was away from her and came back to her, she aged. Or maybe it was the booze taking its toll. The lines in her face were deeper than my grandmother’s.

“Yes, but this was different. I was on a mission to find something. I’m not sure what.”

“You hardly ever dream,” Mom said. “But when you dream, it’s always interesting. It’s that imagination of yours.”

It was true. We’d talked about it once when one of the neighbor’s kids was having nightmares. I used to have them too. Not exactly nightmares, but strange dreams that frightened me. Yet when I tried to tell my mom about them, the dreams didn’t sound frightening at all. After all, it wasn’t monsters and goblins I’d dreamed of; it was more the eerie feeling I’d gotten from the dreams. In fact, I recognized nobody or anything in my dreams. But I’d always come away from them in sorrow and fear.

“Maybe it’s the medicine or the bump on the head,” I said.

“Could be,” she said standing. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ll heat up some soup. Ed will be here tomorrow to check on you.”

Was Gram right? Had Mom stopped drinking? Hoping seemed liked the worst kind of self-hatred. I shoved it aside for now. With everything else going on, I didn’t want to lead myself down the path of hope. The path I’d been down so many times before.

I situated myself with several pillows, and just when I got comfortable, my cell phone rang. It was Maude.

“Hello, doll,” she said. “Where have you been? What’s going on?”

I explained to her what had happened.

“How dreadful!”

“I was getting too close to whatever the mystery is on this Harlow thing,” I said, almost more to myself than her.

The sound of her inhaling smoke from her cigarette and shuffling papers around came over the phone. “What Harlow thing?”

I explained to Maude what had been happening. “They wanted me out of the way,” I said. “And that’s what they’ve got. I’m just going to finish the damn book and not worry about the rest of it.”

Justine’s image popped into my mind’s eye as Mom came into the room with a tray holding chicken soup and a few pieces of buttered bread. She set the tray on the bed in front of me. I breathed in the scent and steam of the soup.

“Smart,” Maude said to me. “How are you feeling?”

“Like hell,” I said. “My head hurts. I’m having weird dreams. This concussion stuff ain’t for sissies.”

She blew out air. “No.”

“I’d like to know more about those dreams,” Maude said. “That’s the psychoanalyst in me. You’ve been through a lot these past few weeks, doll, and your dreams might give you some insight. I could help you,” she said. I heard her exhale and imagined the smoke from her cigarette circling outward.

“It was just one dream,” I said. “I was searching for something and I found the hatbox it was in. I went to reach for it and woke up.”

“It was vivid, hey?”

“Yes,” I replied. “But as my mom pointed out, I’ve just been digging through boxes, so …”

Some commotion erupted in the background. “I need to go,” Maude said. “I’ll touch base with you later.”

Exhausted by the end of our conversation, I wondered if this was a normal thing for people with head injuries or if my Lyme’s was acting up.

I spooned the chicken soup into my mouth, its warm flavors popping. Nobody made chicken soup like my mom.

“How is it?” she said, smiling.

“So good, Mom.”

She beamed. Such a little compliment made her so happy, which made me a little sad. She’d had a rough life after my dad disappeared, her only comfort the booze. I couldn’t fault her for that, could I? But it became a problem. Her showing up at events plastered, embarrassing me—and herself. Her not remembering to fill in school forms or to file her taxes because she was on a drinking binge.

She’d gone through treatment a few years back and had attended AA meetings. I had wracked my brain trying to figure out what could have set her off this last time.

I stared down at my bowl and lifted the spoon to my mouth. With one bite, it was as if Mom had delivered me a magical brew, a potion. The warmth of the soup spread through me along with a bubbling notion: what next?