chapter 24

BONNY BLANKENSHIP

 

 

 

“You saved his life,” Lainey said simply.

Back at the house, the little ones settled in bed, I sat on the back porch with Lainey and stared into the darkness. I couldn’t see the river, but I knew it was there, pulsing and moving. Same with my life. I couldn’t yet see it, but tonight had given me a glimpse into the darkness—I was going to be okay. Not yet, not tomorrow, but someday soon I would be.

“I just saw the symptoms,” I told her.

“You know, he was getting ready to leave. And if he’d walked off and gone home . . . I know enough about strokes to know it’s all about catching it in the first hours. You saved his life.”

“It was surreal, Lainey. We talked about your mom and the kids and home; I knew Lucas was gone; and then I was paralyzed. I couldn’t do anything at first. I was frozen as solid as I have been for months. But some part of me, something inside, broke loose from the iceberg and took over.”

“The real you.”

I laughed. “Maybe.”

“It was the woman who told Lucas you would not go back. The woman who saved a life. It is the woman who sits on this porch with me.”

“We are never just one thing, are we?” I asked. “Never just this or that.”

“Never.”

“Where’s our Piper?” I asked.

“Asleep in bed with Daisy,” Lainey said. “Too adorable to even tell you.” She paused and then asked, “Do you think Mimi was weird about Mom? I mean, defending her and all that.”

“No,” I said. “I think she was just trying to make you feel better. That’s how she is.” I settled back into the cushions and exhaled. “I know this sounds crazy, but sometimes when we’re alone like this, and our kids aren’t yammering around, I feel like your mom is going to walk in the door. Or my mom. That we have sand on our feet and we’re rubbing aloe on our sunburns. That we’re scribbling in our notebook. That we have a half-finished game of Monopoly on the kitchen table, and peace sign appliqués ready to stitch onto our jeans.”

“Me, too, Bonny. Me, too.”

We were silent for a time and then Lainey stretched and told me good night, leaving me alone on the porch. And, as if she’d summoned her brother with her voice, my cell buzzed and his name showed on my screen. I would answer this time—the need for him winning out over my strength to stay away.

“Hi, Owen.” I tried to keep my voice calm, steady.

“Finally, Bonny. I’ve tried so many times. You know when you don’t answer I think something terrible has happened.”

“Nothing is wrong,” I said. “Or everything is, depending on your take.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

I laughed. “That is usually my question for you,” I whispered and walked off the porch to the backyard, where I hoped neither Lainey nor Piper could hear me.

“I’m in North Carolina,” he said.

“Tell me you aren’t back in the air,” I said. “Not with that broken collarbone and dislocated shoulder and . . .”

“No, Doc. I’m not in the air. My feet are firmly on the ground. Where are you?”

He repeated his question and a wash of realization almost made me smile. It was the first time he’d ever had to ask me anything twice. So willing was I all the time to give him exactly what he needed when he needed it. The urge when he arrived, always at that last minute, was to keep him there as long as possible, with the everlasting hope that “as long as possible” meant “forever,” which I knew it didn’t. But wouldn’t it be nice if it did?

“Are you still there in Watersend?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

This was the chance to tell him that his sister was with me, that she was just a few hundred yards away in a room next to his niece and nephew. I didn’t. “Yes, I’m okay.”

“God, give me something. Tell me . . . I mean, have you heard about your job?”

“I really can’t talk to you about any of it.”

“Oh, Bee, why can’t you?”

“Because it breaks my heart to share it with you. Because you shatter my heart. Every. Single. Time. And this time won’t be any different. And I want to begin again, and I want to start over and I want to focus on the things that are most important to me. And when you are anywhere near me I forget everything else. You become the one thing, and I lose my way.”

“That’s a lot of ‘and,’” he said in that light tone that came with a smart-ass grin and his hand coming to the back of my neck to pull me to him, to kiss me so anything I said and anything I thought faded. No matter how many years had passed, still that memory lingered.

“There’s more of them,” I said, “but none of that matters. You have to leave me alone.”

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me—what are the most important things?”

“Saving my daughter and myself. Anything else comes second. Everything else.”

“I’ll be second. Or third. I don’t care. Just don’t take me out of the lineup.”

“Like I’m a baseball coach.” I laughed and felt our banter begin.

“Yes. I’m on the B team and you’re trying to decide if maybe I need to be sent back to the farm team. Or worse, sent home.”

“How could I send you home when you don’t have one?”

“Good point.”

There was a beat or two of silence, a time when we measured our own breath. I closed my eyes. I was falling into his voice; I always did. God, I always would. There was no way out. It was a magnetic force, a terrible gravity.

“Do you remember the night before my wedding?” I asked. “The night you showed up at my house?”

“Yes,” he said, so softly I barely heard him.

“You begged me not to get married, but you said you still had to leave the next day. Just wait, you said. Just always and always wait. That’s what you wanted. It’s what you still want.” My voice rose and I felt the sickness of his desertion again, as if it was that night and my wedding dress hung in the bedroom closet.

“But you married him,” Owen said. “Then what was I supposed to do? I can’t leave you alone. I can’t ever give up.”

“You gave up every single time you left,” I said.

There was silence for a moment and I heard him gathering his breath, slowly.

“Can I come visit?” he asked.

“You’ve never asked before,” I said. “Why now?”

“Because it seems different now.”

“It is different, and you can’t come. I’m with my daughter . . .”

“Well, there you go,” he said. “It’s why I’ve never asked before. Because you’ll say no.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say that you miss me, and that you don’t blame me and that you still love me . . .”

“I can’t say those things.” I closed my eyes against the lie, held my hand over my chest. I did miss him. I didn’t blame him and I loved him. But I couldn’t tell him that because it needed to not be true.

“I understand,” he said.

We hung up without good-byes, and it was a foreign feeling, keeping my heart hidden from him.

Inside the house, Piper slept and a fierceness rose in me, the kind of protective feeling I felt when someone else tried to hold her when she was a baby or when I placed her in the crib at night. A doctor knew what could happen between dark and morning light. It was a mother’s lioness-protection that caused me to do anything, absolutely anything, to save my daughter from sorrow or pain. I’d wanted to set a dome around her—a force field where nothing harmful might penetrate.

I ached for her heart, and her safety, and for my mistakes. Why would she choose to drink herself into oblivion or skip her classes or choose a boy like Ryan who would hurt her in such awful ways? Where had I gone wrong? The Halloween when I had to work and so sent her to stay with friends? The fourth birthday party where I was so tired I barely got through the candle-wish-blowing before falling asleep on the couch? The lunch boxes I forgot to pack? The mommy group I didn’t join. The mommy group I did join. The list was endless and formidable. I wasn’t the woman, the mother or the wife I’d meant to be. If I’d meant to be one at all.

Loving a man who wasn’t her father seemed the biggest sin so far and yet one she didn’t even know about. I’d never done anything about it, unless you counted the one true fact that my heart was always with him, with the possibility of him.

Had I destroyed my daughter’s concept of love, all the while meaning the best? I felt nauseated at the possibility of all my mistakes cascading down to her, invisible and as powerful as a waterfall. I wanted to prevent all heartache, all damage and all failure from touching her fragile soul.

I gingerly stepped across the damp and dark backyard, fireflies flickering and diving, and the moon high. I startled as I reached the porch and opened the screen door. Piper stood there with a glass of water in her hand.

“Hey, sweetie. I hope I didn’t wake you.” I kept my voice low and calm.

“No, Daisy was kicking me. Who were you talking to? Just now?”

“An old friend.”

“Owen?” she asked.

Hearing the rounded sound of his name made my heart lurch and roll inside my chest. “Yes,” I said. There was nothing else to say but yes.

“Isn’t that Lainey’s brother?”

“It is,” I said.

“Why don’t you tell her that you talk to him?”

“She knows I talk to him.”

“She talks about him all the time, about how much she misses him.”

“Yes, she does.”

“I don’t get it.” The porch lights illuminated Piper’s face and she squinted at me as if trying to read my own expression.

“I know. I don’t think we get it either, Piper. He doesn’t think we should be here after what happened to their mom. That’s all.”

“Whatever.” Her face told me she didn’t believe me, and she slammed the screen door a little too hard and left me alone.

How could I have believed my life was ever separate from hers? That we weren’t inextricably tied together in a way that what I did affected her and what she did altered me? Our lives were mirrors, and tangled at more than the level of DNA. She was more than the sum of my parts plus Lucas’s genes. She was all of herself and all of me and all of him.