Chapter Twenty-two

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

William Stafford, “You Reading This, Be Ready”

Colleen climbed into the passenger seat of Beckett’s old Audi. “This day went by so fast I barely went outside. Let’s find a place to eat with a patio.”

“Paperwork?” Beckett asked, looking down at her with his hand on the top of the passenger door.

“Loads of it, and diving into the past. Isn’t that odd? Diving into the past making the present go by too fast?”

“In what way are you diving into the past?” Beckett shut the door for her and walked around to the driver’s side.

When he’d settled into the driver’s seat she said, “You know that memory book we’re making for my dad?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“Well, the situation is a little worse than I’ve let on. I thought the memory book was meant to remind him, but now I wonder if it’s really just helping us know him better.”

“How so, Colleen?”

“You know,” she said, “everyone around here calls me Lena.”

“So I’ve heard.” He smiled as he stared out the windshield, guiding the car along the narrow, winding roads. They were quiet as he drove for only a few minutes; one left turn and two rights, and then he pulled into a gravel driveway shaded with a canopy of oaks. He put the car in park. “Would you like me to call you Lena?”

“No, I like Colleen now. I’ve been using it for ten years and become used to it. I can’t get my family to switch.”

“Why the switch at all?”

Even a few seconds without air-conditioning in a closed car was too much in the August heat. Colleen opened the door. “It’s a long story.” She swung her legs around and then stood before leaning in again to look at Beckett in the car. “Or maybe not so long. I just don’t want to talk about it.” She stepped away and then realized she didn’t know where he’d taken her. “Where are we?”

Beckett stepped out of the car and faced her over the top. “My parents’ house. I wanted to drop off my dad’s tackle box before we go to dinner.”

Colleen turned to look at the modest home. “You grew up here?” If he’d been in Watersend, how had she not known him?

He slammed shut the driver’s-side door and walked around the car to pop open the trunk and withdraw a rusted red tackle box. “No. My parents moved here a couple years after I did. So they’ve been here about five years. My dad retired and when they visited me, they fell in love with the town. They packed and moved.”

“From?”

“Michigan, where I grew up.” He set the box on the ground.

“Michigan,” she said. “I’ve only been there once, and it was in the middle of January. I thought I was going to die from the cold, that it would never leave my bones. I’d have moved here, too.” Colleen fell into step with Beckett, heading toward the front door with a flagstone pathway beneath their feet. “So they moved here for you?”

“They’d like me to think so, but they moved here for the town. So far two of my siblings have followed.”

“How many do you have?”

He paused on the doorstep, his hand resting on the brass knob. “Six.”

“What?” Colleen burst out. “Six? Gosh, tell me they aren’t all inside this house waiting to meet me.”

He grinned.

Colleen flinched and bit her lip. “Sorry, that came out wrong. I’d love to meet your family. I’m just not prepared.”

“I don’t believe anyone is home except my parents and you can wait out here if you’d like.”

Colleen touched his wrist, circled her fingers around it and then took his hand in hers. “I want to meet them. Six is just a lot. I have only two and I can’t seem to manage all the drama between us.”

Beckett kissed her cheek and then opened the door without knocking and called out, “Mom?”

Colleen had always wondered what it would be like to say “Mom,” as it was always “Mother” in their house. The formality matched Elizabeth’s personality, but under her breath at times when no one could hear her, Colleen had called her Mommy.

A tall woman, elegant even in jeans and a white T-shirt, came from the back of the house. She held a cell phone to her ear. “Gotta go, bug. I’ll call you later. Your brother, my favorite, is here.”

Colleen stood stunned until Beckett burst into laughter and hugged his mom. “Nina loves when you say that.”

“She’s fuming right now, crafting an e-mail about my horrid sense of humor.” The woman had long dark hair, a lined face free of makeup, and large blue eyes with eyelashes long enough to sweep up and almost touch her eyebrows. She hugged her son and then turned to Colleen. “Well, hello, sweetie, I’m Denise.”

“Hi, I’m Colleen. It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

The woman’s smile bloomed larger and she set her gaze on her son. “Don’t you just love the South? If I’d known I could be called ma’am I would have moved here long, long ago.”

Beckett held out the box. “I brought this back for Dad. He said he wanted it for some tournament tomorrow. I’ll put it in the shed.”

“Just leave it in the kitchen for now. Come in and say hello to Dad, and Sylvia’s here, too. Some mess with her job.”

Colleen followed them down a narrow hallway, its walls covered in pale blue shipboard with photos of family and loads of boats, many different kinds of boats. The images were framed and lined in neat rows. They entered a small kitchen so green that Colleen almost squinted. The countertops were white, and the wooden table was painted one shade lighter. The fabric—on chairs and across the tops of the windows—was a green and white check reminiscent of the curtains in her own house. At the table sat an older man with hair to match the countertops, and a girl facing him. They were deep in conversation but turned their faces to Beckett and Colleen as they entered the room.

“Son.” The man stood and hugged Beckett, effusive as if he hadn’t seen him in months.

“Hey, bro.” The girl wiggled her fingers at her brother and he bent over to hug her.

“Hey, sis. What’s going on?”

“My boss. I hate him. Nothing new. You?”

He placed his hand gently on Colleen’s arm and then withdrew it. “This is my pal Colleen Donohue.”

Dad shook her hand first. “Welcome. I’m Bubba Joe.”

“Dad!” Sylvia’s voice rang out and she stood, jostled her dad with her elbow before turning to Colleen and holding out her own hand. “Hi, I’m Sylvia. And this is my dad, Raymond.”

“Ever since I moved south, I’ve wanted to be Bubba. Couldn’t you have let it go for a few minutes? Let me live my fantasy?”

And then everyone was talking at once, while still somehow carrying on the conversation about the dinner they were having when the passel of siblings came in from Nevada next month.

“Where does everyone else live?” Colleen asked.

Denise rattled them off, top to bottom, where they lived and what they were doing. Colleen couldn’t keep up. She glanced at Beckett, who shrugged and said, “You asked.”

Within minutes they were back in the car. Colleen exhaled. “What a fun family you have. I’m a bit envious.”

Beckett’s face wrinkled in confusion. “You have a fine family from what I can tell.”

Colleen felt the lurch of despair. How could she explain to this man that yes, it appeared she had a family, but she’d also willingly given up on being an intimate part of their tribe.

She grew quiet, running a finger along the passenger-side window, making tiny circles until Beckett parked at the Oyster Shack and they both climbed out. Once seated at a small outside table with a fan whirring overhead, Beckett said, “I feel like I’ve said or done something wrong. You’ve retreated.”

Colleen shook her head. “I’m just not that hungry and . . .”

Beckett stood and held out his hand. “Come on. I’m not one to force a girl to eat. Let’s take a walk instead. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

“You can take me home.” Colleen said the words she’d said so many times before when she’d felt the urge to open up, to crack the door that led to the room where all her sadness and grief were stored. Beckett wanted to talk about family. She did not.

“I don’t understand.” He exhaled and stepped back. “Listen, if you want to go home, I’ll take you. But if I’ve said or done something to upset you, then you must tell me.”

“No.” Colleen shook her head, her hair falling from the clip that held it back. “It’s my family. It’s complicated, and seeing yours so funny and loving just brings up things I try my best not to dwell on. If I talk about it—it all comes rushing back at me and that is the last thing I want right now.”

“We’ve had rough times, too, Colleen. Everyone does. I put them all through hell—that’s why it’s a big ol’ joke that I’m the favorite. Mom doesn’t say that because I’ve been the angel, or because anything is perfect.”

“How so?”

“It’s why I don’t drink. I’ve hinted at that. I had a terrible problem in my twenties. I was arrested. I put them through hell and back, and then to hell again.”

Colleen stared at Beckett—a man who seemed so together, with a family so intact.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s walk on the riverfront and we’ll eat if and when you get hungry.”

After apologizing to the waitress and vacating their table, they ambled to the river park, where a sidewalk followed the curving shore of the rushing tidal waters. Gas lanterns and spotlights punctuated the darkness. “I’m sorry to ruin the night,” Colleen said.

“So what happened, Colleen? What happened that you had to change your name and leave this place?”

She paused at the edge of the river and stared at the man who had asked her what no one ever had—the real reason. Other men had probed in different ways, but he’d nailed it: why did you change your name and leave this place? Tears bloomed in her eyes; a thunderhead of anguish built in her chest. And right there, with the exact right question asked, Colleen blurted out the truth. “On my wedding day ten years ago, I found my sister and my fiancé kissing in the hallway of the church. I ran. They married soon after. I’ve avoided this place as much and as often as I can.”

“Oh, Colleen.” He rested his breath on those words and then said softly, “I’m so sorry that happened. When she came outside with her husband . . . behind the pub, I figured something had gone wrong, but I didn’t think . . .”

“I know. Who would think that?” Colleen’s pulse bounced in her temples and she felt the flush of embarrassment begin to creep up.

“Did you have any idea?”

“None. Hallie had never betrayed me in the slightest. We were so close. So close. I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t suspect it.”

“I don’t mean to pry. Only talk about it if you want to.”

“Honestly, I didn’t have a clue. She was planning our wedding. Planning our wedding! She was picking out the flowers and the cake and the dresses and I guess she was also picking out her own groom. I didn’t get a tingling sense of anything weird or wrong. I’ve gone over this a million times in my mind and tried to find the one place or time or hint. Hallie, up until then, had never had a serious boyfriend. She was naïve in a way. She’d never stopped living at home, even in college, and although she certainly wasn’t simpleminded or anything like that, she was easily influenced by others.”

Colleen rolled her neck around to shake off the ideas that had so long haunted her. “So he probably seduced her. But I’ve never wanted to know what happened.” She covered her mouth with her hand as a laugh erupted. “No, that’s not true. I totally wanted to know what happened. I just didn’t want it to be Hallie who told me. Or my family—I was too embarrassed. So I’ve just made up my own stories, but I had no idea until she told me the other day.”

“I can only again say I am so sorry. I know it must have broken your heart.”

“Yes. But it felt like more than my heart. I felt like it broke . . . me. Now I come home only to see Dad and Shane. This week is the first time I’ve spoken to Hallie since it happened.”

“You’ve avoided your sister for ten years?”

“Essentially, yes. It took careful planning, but I managed.” She laughed, but he shook his head—he wasn’t going to let her joke her way out of this.

“You know, if there’s one thing out of a million I’ve learned it’s this: when you are powerless over a situation, and everything rises in you to do something, to hurry and do something, sometimes there is just no fixing it. Sometimes there is . . .”

“Don’t you dare say acceptance.” Colleen closed her eyes. “Don’t say it.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

Colleen kicked at a fluff of Spanish moss that had fallen to the path. “I want a better solution than that.”

He shrugged. “We all do.”

“Actually I found a better solution than that—build a new and different life.”

“Was it worth it to forfeit what’s here?”

“Who are you? A counselor?” Colleen squeezed her hands into little fists, feeling her fingernails dig into the soft places of her palms. “See? This is why I don’t talk about it. Now I’m being mean to you. I can’t talk about this.”

Beckett nodded. “I understand.” He smiled, but his expression was sad, as if she’d let him down. God, she was tired of letting people down.

“No, honestly you don’t understand. I think I have to go now, Beckett. I know my way home.”

She set her feet to leave but then turned to see him still standing there, still looking at her with gentle kindness. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you don’t hate me. You should be mad as hell. I’m being . . . rude.”

“I told you. I’ve been there. I get it.”

“Been where?” Colleen took a few steps toward him.

“In the place where you don’t want to accept what you must and so you try every damn thing in the world not to feel it or know it. I drank. Sounds like you run.”

“That’s not what’s happening here.”

He shrugged. “Then maybe I’m wrong.”

“You are so frustrating!” Colleen’s voice echoed across the plaza and she lowered it. “What happened that you had to accept?”

“I was driving and there was an accident, and the girl in the passenger seat, a friend, didn’t . . . make it.”

His words fell on her like a bag of wet sand between her shoulder blades, holding her immobile. “Oh, God, Beckett. I am so sorry . . .” And she forgot everything about Walter and Hallie. She touched the thin scar by his ear. “This scar, right? Tell me what happened. I mean, you don’t have to talk about it. Here I am going on and on about a love affair and there you are with life and death and I’m . . .”

“No.” He took Colleen’s face in his hands, kissed her softly. “It all matters. I’m not saying my tragedy mattered more. I’m just telling you that I had one.” His hands dropped to his sides and he was far off for a moment. “It was my fault. They told me over and over that it wasn’t, that the rain and the dark night and the spilled oil on the road contributed.” His attention returned to Colleen. “But it was my fault. I was preoccupied, fiddling with the radio, flirting with her, acting like a fool, and when the car started to skid I overcorrected. And I had been drinking and was set to drink even more that night—not drunk yet but damn well planning on it. I see it in my mind’s eye every day. I remember it every day. I was careless and reckless and inattentive to anything but my own desires. And I will never stop trying to atone for it. I descended into a dark place for a long time—where the drinking was all I did or thought about. So I know how you feel—not the blame, but the inability to forget. You can’t erase something that painful. I know.”

“I am so, so sorry.” Colleen felt a sadness that had nothing to do with her own life. “Isn’t it strange?”

“What?” His voice broke free from the snags of the past. “What’s strange?”

“What memories can be?” Colleen couldn’t express exactly what she meant, but the thought hovered just beyond her consciousness, a gnat buzzing, a realization forming. “Memories are alive, and they can take over; they have their own life apart from us. But what are they really? Just some amorphous, dreamy things that shift with time, almost like ghosts. Still they cause us pain or happiness or they keep us from doing things or cause us to shiver inside and wake us in the middle of the night.”

“Wow.”

“Huh?” Colleen found his face in her sight again; she’d been staring across the river’s blue expanse to the horizon, where green marsh grasses winnowed the sky from the water.

“That was beautiful. What you just said. I want to write it down.”

Colleen tried to laugh, but laughter didn’t want to join the conversation. Instead she offered Beckett a small smile. “I have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s just that memories seem to be all we talk about these days—my siblings and me, I mean. How to save them; what they are; how to record them; how confusing they can be. And what are they, Beckett? Just some chemicals along a neural pathway?”

“No.” He brushed back her hair and ran his finger along her hairline. “They are who we are, little strands of who we are, all tied together.”

“Why can’t we just pull out one memory strand, or ten or twenty for that matter, and keep only the ones we want?”

He didn’t answer her, because of course there wasn’t an answer.

Instead he told her, “I’ve only told one other person that story. It’s mine. I don’t like dumping it on people.”

“I’m honored that you told me. My dad has this saying he’s repeated for as long as I can remember. ‘As the Irish say . . . ’ and one of them is, ‘No matter how long the day, the evening comes,’ which means, all things do end. But these bad memories of ours don’t seem to have an end.”

“Indeed.” Beckett attempted an Irish accent that wasn’t convincing. He laughed at himself and dropped his arm over her shoulder. In comfortable silence they took a few steps along the river walk. Colleen moved a few inches from Beckett, allowing his arm to fall from her shoulder, and they held hands.

Then quickly, a shiver ran up Colleen’s arm, and then down again. What was it? What was amiss? Something. Or was it that she was moving too close to Beckett too fast—alarms sounded inside.

There were so many people out enjoying the riverside at day’s end. Two teenage boys ate something out of a paper bag. A set of three girls took selfies with their phones and then snapped them again and then again in various poses. A couple stood kissing, her arms thrown around his neck and tears on her cheeks. He consoled her with strokes on her hair and cooing noises.

So familiar: that stance and those noises.

Walter.

Colleen squeezed Beckett’s hand too hard. “What?” He paused in midstep and Colleen released his hand and pointed at Walter and the young woman with the bright red hair, so unnatural it looked painted on.

“That’s him.” Her voice fell as low as her quickly plummeting stomach. And the label came from habit. “My fiancé.” She shook her head. “My brother-in-law.”

“That’s not your sister . . .” Beckett dropped his hands on Colleen’s shoulders and spun her around to face him. “Don’t get involved.” Beckett then took her face in his hands, kissed her.

Colleen stared at him for a few breaths and then broke free. “Of course I have to get involved. It’s my sister.” She twisted her neck to watch the train wreck, to see what she’d seen before as a repeating echo. But he was gone. Instead there stood a family of five, rough-and-tumble toddlers and two exhausted parents trying to get them to stand still for a photo next to the flagpole. The kids were having none of it.

There was no way Walter and the woman could have disappeared in that short time. Colleen broke free of Beckett and jogged the few yards to where they had stood only moments ago. She scanned the river walk, back and forth, and then looked toward the parking lot to see them climb into a bright red VW Bug—he in the passenger side, she in the driver’s seat.

“Walter!” She hadn’t planned on calling out his name; she hadn’t planned on running toward the car. But she did.

The driver was quick on the pedal and the car gone before Colleen reached the pavement. Beckett was behind her in a moment. “Colleen . . .”

“I know that was him. He’s cheating on my sister.” Tightness gripped her chest.

“I’m sorry.” Beckett’s voice came sad and low in her ear.

“I have to go home. I have to tell her.”

“Are you sure it was him? Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said with certainty now. “But what I’m not so sure of is if she’ll believe me; she’ll think I’m making it up to get back at her or . . .”

“I don’t think it so much matters what anyone believes as long as we speak the truth, right?”

Colleen stared at this man she’d only come to know days before and smiled at him. “Who are you, Yoda?”

He laughed so deeply that Colleen could only smile in return.