chapter 40

THE ART SHOW

 

 

lainey

The Sea La Vie living room thrummed with music and Bonny and I bustled around, trying to grab everything we needed before we left for the art show. Bonny gently placed a few vases of wildflowers into a box. “I think we’re ready,” she said.

“I’m never ready for something like this,” I told her. “Never. It’s very nerve-wracking to stand in a room full of people with the art you created. Sort of like being naked with a spotlight on your worst flaws. You know I don’t do very many of these, but having it here, in this town, feels right.”

Things were still tenuous between us, but we weren’t going to let it destroy our friendship. The loss of George had made clear what Bonny had been talking about all along: draw close to you what really matters. And Bonny really mattered. “Bonny,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I think when you came here you unleashed the past.”

She laughed. “Not exactly what I meant to do. In fact, I meant to do the opposite. Start a new future.”

“My brother. Your daughter. Tim here now. My art . . .”

Bonny came close to me, her voice soft. “Lainey, in the busyness of getting ready for this art show, I haven’t been able to say what needs to be said.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” I told her. “I know.”

“I’m going to say it anyway. I must.” She sat on the sofa and patted the seat next to her. “I should never have kept it from you that Owen and I talked so often, that he was so important to me. I could hardly admit it to myself, let alone another person. I know now how much I’ve hurt you, and others, while trying to survive in a lonely marriage. Deep inside I knew that it wasn’t going to work, but I rationalized.”

“Do you still love him, Bonny?”

“Yes.” She looked away and pressed her forefingers into the corners of her eyes. “But not everyone or everything we love is good for us.”

“What will you do? Will you go back to your job? Back to Charleston?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I love that city and the hospital wants me back. That job was the only place where I knew who I was, but in the other places of my life I’d become someone I didn’t like or admire: I was living with a husband who didn’t really love me but wanted the safety of family. I was keeping secrets from my best friend and loving a man I couldn’t have and couldn’t change. I set a terrible example for my daughter. I don’t want to go back to that way of living. Now that I have exactly what I couldn’t live without—my career—I still don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Isn’t it funny when we get what we want?” I asked and then stood to look at her.

“What do you mean?” She also stood.

“So often, our wishes are fulfilled and then we see things altogether differently. You have your job and Owen is here for you, and yet you’re confused about what to do. But you’ve always seemed so sure of everything you decide.”

“Right now I’m completely unsure. But also right now we are late for the party and it’s all about you tonight.” She squeezed my hand. “Let’s go!”

It was an odd thing to stand in a room full of people with the art created in solitude and then shared in community. I held on to Tim’s hand as we moved through the party.

Ever since his disappearance, George had been my shadow. He stood right behind me, his little hand in mine or else holding the tail end of my shirt. Daisy was attached to Piper with fierce loyalty. They took turns carrying Ned around the room, or running after him under patrons’ feet.

When a quiet moment offered me some space, I turned to Tim, who stood next to me. There were things I needed to say, and that was as good a time as ever. “Sweetie, you’re the one who has suffered because I’ve felt incomplete without a mom. I’ve believed that I couldn’t be fully me without her. But I now know that’s not true. I’m all of me. And all of me loves you. I was waiting for something that I already had: a full sense of myself. I wish I could take back every minute you didn’t believe I was committed to you, or you thought I didn’t want our family just as it is. I wish I could take back every minute I searched for her while neglecting you or our kids.”

“Love, I understood every single time.” He laughed. “Doesn’t mean I liked it, but I understood.”

“Well, it’s over. No more wondering . . .”

“Is knowing she’s gone better than wondering?” he asked and squeezed my hand, letting me know he was asking with compassion.

I gazed around the room at my art hanging on walls and stacked on easels, hidden messages in photos and scraps of words and images. “I don’t know which is better. I don’t know if there is a better,” I said. “Like my art sometimes reveals my internal life, this was her other life, the one she decided to live. It wouldn’t have been the one I chose for her, or for us, but it was hers.”

“And yours?” he asked.

“Is with you.” I squeezed his hand. “Take me home,” I said. “Please take me home.”

“I think you need to finish your party and then I’m taking you home, and loving you for as long as forever. Sound good?”

“Sounds perfect.”

piper

There was so much energy in that one party that it felt like electricity had been let loose in the bookshop. Lainey was so cool and collected, as though people weren’t strolling around talking about something she’d made in private. I’d be a wreck, hiding behind bookshelves and listening to what they were saying about me. But she’s like Audrey Hepburn or something, just tall and beautiful and emitting this I-dare-you attitude, which I wanted so badly.

Mimi and her beau were sequestered in a little corner like they were trying to avoid talking to anyone else, which, come to think of it, they probably were. Owen wasn’t there yet, but how could he possibly miss his sister’s show? Fletch was with Loretta and they seemed to be having more fun than anyone there. I was kind of in love with him, but I hadn’t said a word out loud. I’d been wrong before, completely wrong, so I would tread lightly. As if I knew how to tread lightly.

Honestly, I felt like part of a family I hadn’t even known existed. I wasn’t going back to school yet. Mimi said I could work at the store, and Fletch’s mom said I could pick up shifts at the Market, also. I knew it wasn’t permanent, but if there was anything I might have known by then it was this: nothing was permanent.

It was in this calm place that I didn’t even think about a joint or a beer, about Jack Daniel’s or sneaking off into the night. Living this way, I liked being me.

I’d been destroying myself. And I decided that I would do my very, very best not to do that anymore. Feelings came at me so hard and so fast that I needed to remember that the goal was not getting rid of the feelings, but letting them flow through me.

Fletch caught me staring at him and he winked from across the room. I waved with one little finger and he sauntered toward me, one slow step at a time, and it was like I was watching a movie about someone I wanted to be. There I was, standing in a bookshop with a boy who loved me, surrounded by stories and by friends.

bonny

Lights flickered everywhere—candles and string lights, the moon, the stars and tiny flashlights given to the kids to play with. I needed solitude and had stepped outside for a few minutes when an empty storefront caught my eye. The All Things Seashell gift store had closed only the week before, and through a grimy window, I stared into its cavernous space. Crumpled paper and empty coffee cups littered the floor. A seashell wind chime hung from the ceiling: the remaining vestige of someone’s dream.

Footsteps echoed behind me and I turned to see Piper. Her cotton dress caught in the wind and for a moment she seemed like a sailboat the way she glided.

“You okay, Mom?”

“Yes, I am, sweetie. Why aren’t you at the party?”

“I saw you leave and just wanted to make sure . . .” She stood next to me and linked her arm through mine. “What’re you looking at?”

“This empty store.”

“Okay . . . are you going a little nuts?”

Laughter bubbled and I squeezed her arm close to my ribs.

“No. But I was thinking about that night you had a fever and we needed IV fluids. I was thinking about how scared I was and how . . .”

“Mom. Don’t. This is such a beautiful night and we’re celebrating. Don’t think about that because it makes me think about George.”

“No, something else about that night—this town needs an emergency clinic. When we desperately needed one, there wasn’t one.”

“Oh.” Piper’s voice raised an octave and she, too, stared into the empty space. “Maybe it’s your one thing,” she said in a reverential whisper.

“Maybe.”

Piper unwound her arm from mine and faced me. “Do you really think we all have a one thing? Like we have to find that one thing or nothing is right? Because that kind of makes me crazy. I can’t figure out what mine is . . .”

“Slow down, sweetie. I think that Mrs. Rohr had it right—maybe there’s one thing at a time. When we came here, my one and only goal was to save us from whatever downward spiral we were in. I didn’t know how. I just believed that coming here and gathering only what mattered most would save us. But now there might be another one thing.”

“It feels like my one thing is just figuring out what my one thing is.”

“I think that is exactly perfect.”

“Mom, do you remember in third grade when the teacher told you that I wasn’t fit to be in a regular classroom because all I did was wiggle and talk and draw and fall out of my chair?”

“How could I forget?”

“I was in the hallway during that conference. I never told you. I heard everything.”

“My God, Piper. You remember this? You were eight years old.”

“Yes. And I heard you.”

“What did you hear?”

“You told the teacher that she was confused as to who wasn’t fit to be in a classroom. You told her that she was the one who wasn’t fit if she really believed that a creative, inventive, beautiful child like me didn’t belong there. And then you walked out and took my hand and we stopped at the art store and bought more colored pencils. You never told me what you’d done or what you were doing. But you were protecting me. Saving me.”

“I remember that,” I told her. A crow cried out, and a breeze lifted my hair off my neck as a siren squealed far off. I shivered in the heat and then it passed, like the breeze, like a quick wave that slammed us when we’d bodysurfed as kids. There. Gone. I focused on my daughter.

“Well, that’s what you did when you brought me here. You saved me without me even knowing it.”

I pulled my daughter close. “I don’t do the saving, Piper. I just do what I think is right at that moment, and I’ve been wrong many times. Sometimes I don’t save at all.”

“Maybe one day I’ll finally get my act together and surprise the world. Surprise those teachers who didn’t understand what I’m made of.”

“I know what you’re made of, Piper. Brilliance and light and dark and surprise . . .”

“And a dash of you,” Piper said.

“Yes, a dash or two of me.”

She smiled at me. “Let’s go back to the party.”

“I will in a minute. You go on and have fun.”

Piper left me there on the sidewalk and I gazed into the empty seashell store for a long while, forming an idea that seemed far off and close at the same time.

“Bonny.” Owen’s voice.

I turned to him. How long had he been standing there? How long had he watched me gaze into an empty storefront with a smile on my face? When he hadn’t shown up for Lainey’s party, I knew it had happened again: he’d left.

I wanted to wind myself around him, but I stood firm. “I thought that you’d left by now. Gone back to Colorado or . . .”

“No.” He came closer, took me in his arms. “I know everything that’s happened has been terrible. But now you’re free, Bonny. You can go anywhere or do anything. I want you to come to Colorado. Start over with me.”

I fell against his chest, listened to the rap of his heart, a one-two beat of waiting. “I can do anything. I know that. But that’s not what I want. I don’t belong there. Maybe you do, though.”

“I belong wherever you are,” he said.

It was the perfect thing to say, and the magnetic draw to him consumed me. He pulled me closer and his hands were in my hair, his body arched against mine. I wanted to let him pull me closer and closer, until closer couldn’t be had. I could do this—be with him again and find myself exactly where I always dreamed of resting. Except in that moment, it wasn’t where I wanted to be. What I’d once needed for love, warmth and connection had become, in the death of another, something else altogether. Mr. Rohr’s death was alchemy that had changed the safe to the dangerous, if Owen had ever been safe at all.

I held my hand on his chest and pushed back an inch or two. “I can’t.” I finally understood the truth of it and I needed him to understand also. “The minute you touch me, I feel the old pain of your leaving. I want to believe you. I want to trust you, but I can’t, and my heart won’t stand one more loss when you decide you must leave again.”

“I can’t talk you into trusting me. But I can show you. And I will.” He kissed me, but even as the desire for him awoke, I tasted heartbreak. Our endings had seeped into the beginnings, suffusing hope with dread.

I already missed him and he hadn’t yet left. I already hurt and he hadn’t yet abandoned me.

I let him go, stepped back. He took me in with his gaze, a slow reckoning. “I can walk away right now because you want me to,” he said. “Or because you need me to. But I’m not leaving Watersend until you believe me.”

“I love you, Owen. I do. But I’ve been accommodating to one life while waiting for another for far, far too long, and I won’t do it again. For all those years, I’d hoped for you and I’d wished for you and I’d lived in the maybe-this-time, and yet I never once changed my own life. I’d only hoped that you would come change it for me. This time is different.”

My sight shifted, and instead of fixing upon his dark eyes, I gazed into the storefront and imagined a check-in counter with a large white clock above it; comfortable red-and-blue-striped chairs in a waiting area; a corner with bright plastic toys to keep children occupied. Then, behind the counter with the sign-in sheet, there was a bright blue door swishing open to a medical clinic for minor emergencies: locals and vacationers, children and adults. There were crisp white curtains separating the exam rooms; stainless steel equipment against the walls and locked cabinets with labeled supplies. There were patients with sunburns and lacerations, with broken bones and rashes. It was a clinic for the community. A clinic for Watersend.

I gently kissed Owen. “Not now, Owen.”

“Ever?” he asked, his hand in my hair, his mouth so close to mine.

“I don’t know. I can’t know. But right now, I know my one thing.”

“What’s that, Bonny?”

I pressed my hand to the window of the empty storefront. “This,” I said, and then for the first time in our long, complicated history, I was the one who walked away.

mimi

Logic tells me that the river isn’t magic, unless you consider nature magical, which I do. I believe that the rich estuary brought these people of the past here at the same time, just as divine timing brings the tide in and then draws it out, just as the osprey knows when to return to the nest it made years ago. Just as these things happen in and on my tidal river, so had the gathering.

I’d hidden Clara’s secret and yet when I’d seen Piper walk into my bookshop, I’d understood that something had been set in motion—the gathering of the past to unfold the future. Bonny might have believed she was coming here to forget everything, but she’d come here to remember. So had Lainey.

I watched the party in my bookshop, lights strung from the ceiling like stars winking their secret messages, voices a symphony of such a myriad of relationships they couldn’t be counted. Lainey’s mixed-media artwork hung from hooks and leaned on easels. I stood in front of my favorite: a photo of Nancy Drew and the hidden staircase. There she was, the girl detective who’d once inspired the Summer Sisters to shine light into places where light wasn’t welcome. Nancy Drew stood at the bottom of a dark stairwell, her flashlight spilling a cone of light into the darker corners, just as they had once done.

Lainey had pasted on words like “illuminate” and “shadow.” Streaks of bright yellow paint and scraps of golden paper flew across the artwork.

I tapped the microphone; it crackled and reeked of spoiled beer. I spoke softly, but the crowd hushed immediately.

I welcomed everyone and thanked the appropriate helpers. I called out Piper’s name and each of the Summer Sisters’ like an invocation, an uttering of gratitude.

“Art and stories,” I said, “offer meaning to our lives in a way nothing else can. Science can’t. Logic won’t. The soul needs story and meaning to help us endure this life. This is what Lainey’s art does for us—it offers us meaning. You know I believe stories do the same. Books can be medicine for the heart just as Lainey’s art is medicine for the soul. There is magic here.”

I nodded my head as my words resonated through every empty space. Fletch clapped first, and the sound rippled through the crowd as everyone joined in, adding a few whoops and hollers. I handed the microphone over to Fletch, who would strum his guitar and cause the girls to swoon with his love songs about losing and loving.

When the night was over and the crowd had dispersed, the women gathered. We walked to the white AME church, its steeple glowing under soft moonlight. No one had suggested it, but by some quiet acquiescence we moved that way. Lainey and Bonny. Loretta, Piper and me. Loretta carried a bundle of sunflowers, which she often did to leave on Clara’s grave.

I’d kept my promise to Clara. She’d never wanted her children to suffer, or to know of her suffering. She believed they’d finally found a way to thrive in their lives, and she didn’t want to cause more pain. Although I’d encouraged her so very many times to at least let them know she was alive, she wanted to wait until she’d completely cleaned herself up. It had been Opal who’d told her, “God doesn’t ask us to come to him clean, and I’d bet your kids don’t either.”

But Clara had wanted to call them when she felt whole again. She was almost there . . . almost. Her dream had been to reunite in this very place. Meanwhile, I’d promised her, a promise between best friends who support and keep each other safe, that I would not betray her whereabouts. Now with Lainey by my side, for the first time I wondered if I’d done the proper thing. By Clara’s request I’d done the right thing, but by this wounded child, had I? A promise kept to one, causing heartbreak in another.

We all walked to the river’s edge, and one after the other we each tossed a sunflower from Clara’s garden into the moving water. No one spoke but Lainey as she repeated what I’d said to her only days before: “We all do the very best we can.”

There was forgiveness in this admission. We were all doing the very best we could: as women, as mothers and as daughters. We hurt each other; we heal each other; we mend and we break and we try again, until we can’t and the headstone has its final say. And yet still our hearts reach out for both love and forgiveness, granted and accepted.

Lainey walked to the exquisite river and knelt at the marsh’s edge, her knees sinking into the dark, rich mud of low tide. She didn’t toss her flower but placed it gently upon the current, holding on to it for long moments before speaking broken lines from the poem on her mother’s grave. “‘You do not have to walk on your knees . . . repenting.’” She then released the yellow sunburst of a flower and stood.

I closed my eyes and listened to that flowing river, for what it would bring to us next.