Harry the Heron was the only other being awake when I got up the next morning. I found him admiring his reflection in the glassy surface of the river. I joined him at the riverside with my coffee and offered him some. I took his relocation to the far end of the dock as a no.
“You’re not missing much,” I told him. “I’m out of whipped cream.”
Although I was sure that, for once, no amount of pure fat and refined sugar could keep at bay what had driven me off of my futon at that hour.
“That’s part of it right there,” I said to Harry. “My husband came hundreds of miles to see me, and I didn’t even sleep with him.”
Harry remained unimpressed. He was obviously a loner. He knew nothing about relationships.
We had that in common.
“I believed every lie he ever told me,” I said to Harry. “And now, when he actually might be telling me the truth, I can’t even listen to him.”
Chip had seemed generally concerned for me, beginning with the fact that he looked—and smelled—like an unmade bed. I had never seen him with patches of facial stubble or a plaster of unwashed hair, even on those gray Sundays when I’d gone faithfully to the prison to see him and sat among the pinched, weary mothers who were there to try and redeem their sons. I was one of the few wives. Most women didn’t stay married to men who wrecked their lives. But I’d gone back over and over, looking for a glimpse of the Chip I fell in love with, the Chip who couldn’t imagine a world without me in it.
“Now he’s here,” I said to Harry. “Ready to go back to that time with me. And I don’t know if I can.”
Harry beat his wings, and with the obnoxious squawk I had come to appreciate, he flew to his favorite piece of tree that had lodged itself in the middle of the river. From there he accused me, right down the spear of a beak that gave him his noble profile.
“You know it, and I know it,” I said. “I can’t go back to that life—because I hate it. I hate every part of it. I hate it with everything that’s in me.”
My hands ached as I squeezed the coffee cup. Sullivan said I’d buried it. He didn’t know about the times when I couldn’t make it stay, and some of its rancid juice spurted out over everything. Its rot had started to spew the day I told Chip I was coming here, and I’d managed to drain it back down.
But, curse Sullivan Crisp—I didn’t seem to be able to do that now. Not this time.
I flung the coffee into the river, and with it the next layer that wouldn’t stay buried.
“I hate my fat. I hate the silence in my house. I hate my job. I hate the women in the hospital nursery who take their babies home. I hate it—do you hear me? I HATE IT !”
With a heave that brought up yet another stratum of pain, I hurled the mug downward and watched it smash against the limestone below. Harry squawked away. But I was no longer talking to him. In the tantrum of screaming and smashing and hating, I was talking to God.
I got my arms around my knees and pulled them to my chest. They didn’t resist me; space had been made, and I breathed into a small nook of freedom.
Dear God—is that You?
“I brought you some coffee.”
I wrenched myself around and grabbed for the edge of my rock perch to keep my balance. Chip stopped several feet away and shook his head.
“You’re scarin’ me, babe. Come back up here where you’re not hanging off a precipice.”
I could see steam still rising from the mug he held out.
“I’m fine here,” I said. I turned back to the water and heard him pick his way toward me.
“Is this where that guy made his escape?” he said.
I nodded sharply.
“And you’re out here by yourself.”
I put up my hand and collided with the cup he extended. Coffee slopped onto the front of his shirt—a clean white polo that had replaced the slept-in look. I glanced at him only long enough to see that he’d shaved and returned his hair to its spikes.
Chip set the cup gingerly on the rock and squatted beside me as if he himself might also tumble. He lowered himself to his seat, arms shaking with the effort. One sandaled foot slid, and he jerked to catch himself. Several chips of limestone jittered loose and danced off the edge, and he shuddered visibly. A kinder woman would have suggested a different place for this nonswimmer to sit. Maybe a younger Lucia.
I felt like neither.
“I was lying awake last night, babe,” he said, “thinking about what you told me, and I know where you’re coming from.”
“Do you.”
I pulled my knees in tighter. It was one thing to hurl my hate at Harry. Even God. But I couldn’t trust flinging it at Chip.
“When I’m alone and I’m making plans,” he said, “I tend to forget that you don’t know how much I’ve changed. We haven’t had a chance to see what that’s going to do in our marriage. I was living down here in Nashville—and then Sonia’s crash—and then you came down here.”
“I get that.”
He had to hear my teeth grinding.
“I want that chance, Lucia. It isn’t just about me being scared for you—it’s about me missing you.”
I watched Harry return to his tree and preen again into the watery mirror. I hadn’t missed Chip much at all. When he touched the hair at my cheek, I smacked his hand away. He clutched at the rock.
“Look,” he said, “I know how this place can get its claws into you.”
“It isn’t this place.”
“You don’t see it because you’re right in the middle of it. I experienced that firsthand, and it’s worse for you, because Sonia makes you forget you even have a life of your own.”
“I don’t!”
“That’s what I mean.”
“It’s not what I mean.”
I looked back at Chip—at the faded physician still sure that he had the diagnosis correct. I hated that too—that assumption that only he knew what was right for me—that down-the-nose belief that I would buy into what anyone told me about myself. I hated it, and God wasn’t holding me back from saying it.
It was God who pushed me forward.
“Babe—”
“Stop. Just stop—or so help me, I will push you off this ledge.”
Amusement lit up in his eyes like tiny birthday-candle flames.
“I am as serious as I know how to be,” I said. “It isn’t here that has its claws in me. It’s there.”
“Where, babe?”
“Wherever we are—you and I. I hate our life together—do you get that? I hate every single thing it has become, and it just makes me want to scream.”
Which I was currently doing, in a voice topped only by the roar of a bass fishing boat flying past, its nose pointed arrogantly out of the water. I felt like that. I just wanted to go.
I even rolled to the side to start to my feet. Chip’s hand came down over my arm.
“Let go of me,” I said.
“I want you to listen.”
“I don’t want to listen.”
“Babe, please—”
“Stop calling me babe! I hate that too!”
“Do you hate me?”
“What?”
He put his face close to mine. I could smell anxiety’s breath.
“Do you hate me?” he said.
My heart slammed. “No, I don’t hate you.”
“But you hate our life.”
I scraped his fingers from my arm. “Did I not just say that? Get off me!”
“If you hate our life, then I’ll make us a new one.”
“You will.”
“I know that most of what’s gone wrong has been the result of the bad breaks that have come to me. I didn’t always make the best choices to deal with them, and that’s why I have to be the one to lay the groundwork.”
He put up his hand as if he were going to touch my hair. I stopped him with my eyes.
“Tell me what you want changed,” he said. His voice pleaded. “Whatever it is, I’ll make it happen.”
“You can’t.”
“Let me try. I’ll get us a new place to live, away from the bad memories, yeah? And I’ll be somebody you can be proud of again. I’ve made some good money working for Mussen, and I’ve saved it for us. We can make any kind of new start you want.”
Those were the promises I’d ached to hear when he was released from prison. Now they fell with empty thuds to the rock I sat on. I pried my gaze from the figure Harry cut against the now-brightening sky to find Chip’s eyes straining against tears.
“We’ve lost so much,” he said. “Please just give me a chance to get it back for us.”
“You can’t give me back what I want.” I turned again toward the river, drained and spent. “Have you forgotten that we can’t have children?”
“Uncle Chip?”
I was up and onto the lawn almost before Bethany’s chirp reached me. She stood a few yards from the bank, bare feet on tiptoes as she clutched at the rag still hanging from her neck.
“Is that Uncle Chip?” she said. “He came back?”
“Hey, there’s my princess!”
Bethany’s face became an enchanted land of dimples. She took two tiny, pointed-toed steps before she broke into a run and flung herself into the big bear arms that reached down to pull her up. Her own chubby ones went around Chip’s neck and squeezed as tightly as the eyes that crinkled closed in pleasure.
Chip engulfed her and found her cheek with his. “How’s my princess?” he said.
“How’s my prince?” she said back.
“Better now that I’m with you.”
I could only gaze stupidly at the scene. I had just come upon a relationship already in progress. One I’d never known existed in this way until now.
“Do you know Aunt Lucia Mom?” Bethany said. She’d loosened one arm from Chip’s neck and pointed a happily trembling finger at me.
“Aunt Lucia Mom.” Chip grinned. “Know her? I love her.”
Bethany nodded. “I do too. I love both of ya’ll.”
And then she stretched her pink, pudgy, hitherto stiff little arm out to me. When I went to her, she pulled me into her hug with Chip, and she held me there.
Sully was glad the podcast was audio and not video, because he looked like he was doing The Jerry Springer Show. He put down the microphone and went to the fridge for the last of the Frappuccinos, which he took onto the balcony. The air out there was hotter than the surface of the afternoon sun, but the room was closing in on him.
Just like everything else.
He poked his sunglasses onto his face and was about to flop into the canvas deck chair when movement by the river caught his eye. He had to blink to make sure he was seeing correctly.
Lucia was knee-deep in the water, pants rolled up, with Bethany beside her. They were splashing Chip, who crashed in after them, hoisted Bethany up onto his shoulder, and took off with her, to the tune of a full octave of happy squeals.
Sully watched, mouth open, as the brute who’d flattened him tossed a sturdy six-year-old in the air and called out, “Who wants to grill some hot dogs?”
Sully turned his eyes away. But the image stayed with him. Bethany was more Lucia’s child than Sonia’s in every way he could think of, and the mad wrestler had turned into every kid’s dream of a dad. The irony of it pricked at him.
Now the guy was there, acting like a family man, just when Lucia had begun to see their past for what it was. Not that he would ever advise her to leave him; that had to be strictly her decision. Miracles happened. There could still be healing and family for Lucia. With a lot of ifs.
Sully propped his feet on the railing and took a drag from the bottle. For him the chance was gone. No matter what he did to change his life, no matter what he believed in, he was never going to carry Hannah on his shoulders or roast a weenie for her or watch her play a tooth in the school play. Lynn had taken that away forever. And he would probably never know why.
“That is a thing I know to be true,” he murmured into the bottle.
Now there was something uplifting to release out there into cyberspace.
“J. Edgar!”
Sully pulled his feet off the railing and leaned over. Bethany ran toward the pug, who raced down the slope to meet her as if she were already holding one of those hot dogs. They fell to the ground together in such a tangle of tails—pigtail and canine—Sully couldn’t tell where one stopped and the other began.
One thing he knew: Agent Schmacker wouldn’t be far behind. She appeared, clad in mint green, just as Lucia joined the puppy pile. Chip was slower to approach.
“Sorry to interrupt the family gathering,” Sully heard Agent Schmacker say.
“Oh, I don’t think you’re sorry at all,” Chip said.
His face was congenial. His voice was not.
“How can I help you?” Lucia said.
But Schmacker had spotted Sully backing away from the railing.
“Dr. Crisp—perfect,” she said. “Will you come down and join us? I have something to show you.”
Three faces looked up at him: Bethany’s shy, Lucia’s startled, and Chip’s as hard as the muscles twitching in his arms.
Sully nodded. Dang. He should have stuck to his podcast.