chapter 4

BONNY BLANKENSHIP

 

 

 

Late afternoon in Charleston, South Carolina, can be the most beautiful sight on earth. The soft light feathers through the Spanish moss, the water reaches and pulses to absorb the sun, reflecting it back to the sky, and the breeze carries an earthy elemental mix of sea and fecund earth. I stood on my back porch, noticing each of those details and holding the cell to my ear until Lainey answered.

“Hello, love,” she said, her voice reaching me all the way from California.

In the background, soft music composed of flutes and chimes played on. I calculated that I’d caught her in her art studio before her two kids arrived home from school.

“You busy?” I asked, my hint that this wasn’t a quick call.

“Not for you.”

I imagined her sitting in her large floral chaise lounge, her legs curled into lotus and her back straight. She’d close her eyes and focus only on me. She knew how. I bet incense burned slowly and everything around her smelled like sage. I desperately ached to be there with her.

“Something terrible happened,” I said.

“Not Piper.”

It was an incantation, a statement of fact that she would not form into a question. Piper was her goddaughter and although they rarely saw each other, Lainey loved her deeply.

In my life and in our conversations, Piper was always the low-grade and constant worry: my daughter who couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble, who couldn’t color inside any line, or stand still, who ran instead of strolled, who slept in a wildflower field, who talked too loud and too fast, who memorized entire paragraphs from her favorite books before first grade, who found meaning in every small sign offered her. Wildness and vulnerability were her curses in a world that wanted her to sit straight and take notes. Now she was off at college in Vermont, and still I’d had a call from the campus security about public intoxication and another call from administration about academic probation. But this wasn’t the reason for my call—not this time.

“Nothing more than her usual,” I said. “This is about me.”

“I’m listening,” she said.

I poured out my story to Lainey, telling her of the job offer in Atlanta and then the terrible mistake in the ER. All my plans shattered. Fear coursed through my body in a river of adrenaline.

“Are you sure, Bonny? Are you positive you made a mistake?”

“No. And that’s the hell of it. There was so much chaos that I don’t know. I’ve tried so hard but it’s like trying to bring back a dream: the more I try to remember the less I do.”

“What was it that made the night different from any other?” she asked.

“The chaos. Too many of the same kinds of injuries all at once. Exhaustion. Long hours. Preoccupation. Incompetence on my part. And, Lainey . . .” I took a breath and paused to watch a cardinal light upon an oak branch, flicker its head left and right before swooping to my bird feeder. Smart, I thought, check for danger before, not after. “Your brother. He was here in town for a kite-boarding competition, and he had a terrible accident. He’s okay now; please don’t worry. But when he showed up without warning, I was thrown off balance.”

“Oh, God, Bonny. I haven’t heard from him in six months and he was there with you?”

“No. He wasn’t with me. I didn’t even know he was in town until he was rolled into the ER on a stretcher. I had no idea . . .”

The silence that momentarily rested between us vibrated with the barbed resentment we rarely acknowledged—how Owen contacted me more often than he did his own sister. This hurt her, and I knew it. Mostly I avoided the subject of Owen with her and, honestly, with myself. I tried not to think about him or what we’d lost or what could have been. I’d never even told Lucas about my first love. I’d wanted it to be over and needed it to be over, and talking about it didn’t seem to help to that end.

But it was the truth—I’d been in love with Owen since I was thirteen years old. Our first kiss was the night before his mom left. He found me on the dock, spread like a starfish and gazing at the sky, memorizing the constellations, ones even now I can name: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Taurus, the Seven Sisters. His presence carried warmth, and I spoke before he knew I’d seen him. “Isn’t the sky a mystery?” I asked quietly. “It’s a thing without being anything. It’s air and emptiness and nothing and everything.”

“You’re crazy,” he said and sat next to me.

At thirteen years old I wanted to be a lot of things but crazy wasn’t one of them. “I am not.”

“It’s okay to be,” he said. “Some of the best are.”

What I really wanted was for him to love me. Even then, I knew that he must love me or something fragile inside me would fracture. I sat, gazed at him, brought my knees to my chest and rested my chin there. He peered back at me as if I, not the sky, was the mystery, a star just found, something unknowable that he wanted to know.

The first kiss landed on my hairline, and maybe that was all he’d ever meant to do. I’ve never asked. But I lifted my face, at thirteen years old, to the fifteen-year-old boy I loved, to the wish I’d made inside a river, to all I thought I wanted, and he kissed me again.

I was too young to date or even understand much about the stirrings inside that began that night, a low-grade fever that loosened my limbs and distracted me from my schoolwork. I couldn’t have said what it was that uncurled, but from that moment on, whatever awoke inside me longed for Owen McKay.

Lainey’s voice startled me from the past. “But he’s okay?” Her voice shifted with a tinge of annoyance.

“Owen?”

“Yes, Owen.”

“I think so, yes. When I left the hospital he was already in recovery and doing fine. All they had to do was set his bone and . . .”

“I’ll call him when we hang up,” she said. “Did you go check on him?”

“No, Lainey. I didn’t. I only went to meet with my administrator to find out what happened with the patient who died.” I sounded angry and maybe I was. I didn’t want it to be about Owen.

“Whatever happened, the hospital knows and you know that your mistake wasn’t on purpose or even negligence. Right?”

“I don’t know.”

“What can I do?” Her voice softened, sounding like my best friend again.

“I don’t know what you can do or what I can do. I have to take some time off, I’m told.”

Crickets, and one lone bellowing frog, joined our conversation and I almost couldn’t tell which sounds came from Lainey’s background music and which were from my backyard.

“What did Lucas say?” she asked quietly.

“He’s angry. He hopes it isn’t true and wants me to hide until we know all is well. I hadn’t even told him about Atlanta yet. He didn’t know . . .”

“Does he now?”

“No. Because I’m going to have to tell Atlanta about this . . . and I will tell them tomorrow. But that’s not the worst part. It’s the thought that I might have killed a man. I’m scared to death.”

“You didn’t kill anyone, Bonny. Even if you made a mistake, it was the car wreck that killed him. Words have power. Don’t say that.”

“I don’t know what to do next. Everything was . . . ready to go.”

“Go home,” she said, so simply.

Those two words shimmered in the evening, and I knew what she meant. She spoke of Watersend, South Carolina. Until last year, I hadn’t returned since our summer together at thirteen years old. And neither had she. But whenever I talked of that town and that river house I used the word “home.” After Mama had died last year, I’d gone to see the house but only to make plans to fix it and sell it. I hadn’t dipped my toes into the water or even ventured into the quaint town to satisfy my internal thirteen-year-old’s curiosity.

In our family, the river house held no sentimental value for anyone but me. Only I still held a candle for the sand-crusted memories of childhood summers. Mama and Daddy had owned numerous rental homes in various coastal towns—Dad’s retirement job (hobby) and source of income. When they’d passed, they’d left it up to my brother, Percy, and me to sell off the houses, one by one. The river house in Watersend, South Carolina, was the last to go. I’d hired a fix-it crew and had modernized the house, opening the kitchen to the family room, and repainted. I’d ordered stainless steel appliances and planned on staking a For Sale sign in the front yard in three weeks. I’d been dragging my feet through the Lowcountry mud and muck of memories, hesitant to give it up.

“It’s still a mess,” I said. “I’ve had the management company working on it. I haven’t checked on it in months. They send photos, but I was going to go before . . . before the new job. The last I heard, a vagrant had made herself at home.”

“I think you should be the vagrant.” Her laughter was as comforting as it had always been. “It can’t be that bad. It’s been rented until only a year ago. If you really are being forced to take some time off, for God’s sake, use it.”

The sun sank lower and faded into the horizon as Lainey’s advice melted through my panic and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it. “I’m supposed to start at Emory in thirty days, if I still have that job,” I said. “Maybe I could go for a couple weeks while the storm dies down here. But, Lainey, I won’t go without you.”

She was silent, and the flutes and chimes were louder, as if she’d set the phone down. She had vowed, long ago, to never return to the place where she and Owen had lost their mother. I was testing her vow. I tried again. “We’ll both go,” I said. “Together. Bring the kids. I’ll bring Piper. I’ll finish fixing it and we can go for one last visit before I sell it.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t go back there. You know that.”

“It’s been over thirty years. Maybe it’s time.”

“I only meant for you to go. You need to clear your head. You need to have some time alone in your favorite place in the world. Your mother never let y’all go back. You can go now . . .”

“Not without you,” I repeated, and I knew I was pushing hard.

“Let me think about it, Bonny.”

“I can get it cleaned and ready. When your kids get out of school, you can meet me there.”

“I love you, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

“It was your idea,” I said. “And now it makes sense as if that’s what we were meant to do all along.”

“For you, not for me.”

“We promised each other—for all time.” I threw out my last desperate rope.

“Oh, Bonny. I’ll think about it.”

We hung up and I closed my eyes as the sun disappeared and ended the day I was exiled from my hospital and decided to return to Watersend.