As Waters Gone By Page 20

  “I’ve been in serious contemplation,” Hope said.

  A twelve-year-old broods, she doesn’t “contemplate,” does she?

  “And I realize I may have overreacted.”

  She had Emmalyn’s attention. “I’m listening.”

  “You don’t know me very well yet. That’s why you’re afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid. That’s not it.”

  Hope’s mouth angled to the right. Her eyebrows arched high over wide eyes. The tilt of her head said, “Really?” without the need for vocabulary. The look spoke of sympathy, not sass.

  “Okay, so I’m afraid sometimes.”

  “That’s a relief,” Hope said. “I thought you were perfect and perfect can be annoying. I’m glad you’re sometimes scared, like me.”

  “And I’m strong.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Off and on.”

  Hope picked up a stone and tossed it into the lake. “Me, too.”

  Emmalyn mirrored Hope’s action, their rocks disappearing under the surface of the water. Tomorrow, the next day, a month from now, they’d reappear farther down the shoreline from the action of several hundred waves. “Off and on. We make an interesting pair.”

  “Are there wolves on Madeline Island?”

  “I’ve heard there are. Haven’t seen any. But yes. Cora talks about hearing them at night.”

  “Cora?”

  “A friend of mine. Her son painted the cottage. Cora put the skylight in the kitchen.”

  Without warning, Hope bent at the waist and grabbed the toes of her boots with gloved hands.

  “Are you okay?”

  The girl stood upright. “Stretching. Don’t you stretch?”

  “Pretty much everything about my life is a stretch right now.”

  The two reversed direction, walking in and out of silence. “Wolves are a reason, I guess.”

  Emmalyn waited for an explanation.

  “A reason for you to be afraid to leave me home alone.”

  “Oh.”

  They jumped a depression in the sand, the place where a creek from somewhere within the heart of the island meandered to that spot in order to join the lake. Emmalyn had often stopped to watch the steady flow of ever-new water rushing through that depression, heading to wherever water goes when it’s tired.

  The terrain grew easier to manage when they neared the wide stretch of packed sand in front of the cottage. They danced back from the edge of an overachieving wave before turning to angle up the slope of rustling sea grass. Hope stopped before they reached the porch. She pointed up. “That’s my room, isn’t it? The window on the left.” Her voice didn’t register excitement, but neither did it speak of disappointment.

  Emmalyn noticed she’d left a light on. Should she mention it? Not this time. “Yes. For as long as you need it.”

  “It’s beautiful from the outside, too.”

  “Just like you, Hope.”

  The girl dipped her head. “Off and on.” A muffled Right Here Waiting for You sang in her pocket. She tore off her gloves with her teeth and grabbed her phone. Emmalyn watched as she listened, keyed a series of numbers, then waited again. “Daddy?”

  Emmalyn motioned that she’d go inside and give Hope privacy. But Hope followed her into the cottage, shrugged out of her coat and boots, and curled into a corner of the couch as she talked.

  Privacy? Her husband was on the phone and she wasn’t clamoring to talk to him? What was wrong with her? She should be snatching the phone and demanding some explanations. Or apologizing for backing off when she should have leaned in. Or just listening to the timbre of his voice and letting it move her back in time to the day they said their vows.

  “We went for a walk on the beach,” Hope said, her voice animated with what the beach does to a person. “Very funny, Dad. No, I don’t have a tan yet.”

  Emmalyn appreciated the easy relationship between Hope and Max. A barb of jealousy chased the appreciation from the room. An easy relationship. She hung her coat, changed from boots to flats, and dove into lunch preparation. She pulled a container of tomato bisque from the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. Plus grilled cheese?

  Not exactly Sunday dinner at Grandma’s house or the chef’s special expounded by a white-shirted server, but it would do. Sunday. Should she try going to a traditional church on Sunday in addition to the anything-but-traditional worship services on Tuesday night at Bougie’s? For Hope’s sake?

  The girl had been listening to her father a long time. Emmalyn pulled two mugs and two small plates from the open cupboard shelves.

  “But, Dad . . . Okay.” She turned to Emmalyn. “He wants to talk to you again.”

  Having to cut her conversation short must have felt like missing the class trip to Disneyworld.

  “Max? Glad you called.” And she was.

  “I apologize that this was sprung on you so fast.” He sighed. “That it was sprung on you at all.”

  “I volunteered. Remember?”

  “It’s just impossible for me to do anything from here. Make any arrangements.”

  “For what?” His voice revived a necrotic brain cell or two. His words weren’t making sense, though.

  “I don’t know. Boarding school, maybe? I have no idea how we could pull that off for the rest of this school year.”

  Emmalyn didn’t want to use the term boarding school with twelve-year-old ears listening. Measuring her words and tone, she said, “That’s not necessary, even if it were possible.”

  “What do you mean? The disruption in your life must have added so much new stress.”

  Did he think she couldn’t handle stress well? What would have given him that idea? “I’m not who I was before . . . before all this.”

  “I can make calls to my lawyer, but I can’t do much research to find a place—”

  “Hope has a place, Max. Here.”

  A sterile voice broke into their conversation. “Two minutes remaining.”

  She despised the finality of the recording. How did a prisoner get anything talked through? “Max, Hope has a place here. We’re . . . we’re talking about home schooling for the rest of the year. Some online work. I haven’t looked into curriculum yet. She just got here. But—”

  “I don’t care for that idea.”

  What? “It’s not like I wouldn’t give her every social opportunity. Madeline Island isn’t the end of the world.” Although that was her first thought crossing the ferry a couple of months ago.

  “Please don’t do that.”

  Four brain cells died for every two that had been activated. She talked as softly as she could. “Max, I respect your right to help guide your daughter’s future, but under the circumstances, don’t you have to cut me a little slack here? Do you really get to choose?” Probably not a chapter she’d find in a relationship handbook.

  “I’m thinking of you,” he said. “I want to make it easier for you.”

  “Me? Since when have you—?” Tongue biting isn’t always meta-phorical. It can be physical, she discovered. “Low blow. I apolo-gize. Max, let us have a chance to work some things out here, okay? If it doesn’t turn out, we’ll shift gears. Max?” She turned to speak to Hope. “I think we got cut off.”

  “I’m here,” Max said. “But we’ll get dropped any second now.”

  “Then use your last few seconds to tell your daughter you love her. Here she is.”

  Emmalyn turned back to the container of soup. Frozen. She grabbed it and pressed the container to the throbbing at the back of her neck.

  20

  Her leg had fallen asleep, her foot pinched underneath her too long while she sat staring into the darkness. Emmalyn shook it, rubbed it, tried to stomp it awake without disturbing the household.

  She had a household. Temporarily. The girl in the spare room upstairs decided to spend the rest of the day alone.

  The prickles in Emmalyn’s leg remained, despite traditional remedies. The cottage interior didn’t leave much space
for walking it off, but she stepped around the trunk to start a loop to and from the kitchen. Her leg buckled. Emmalyn reached out to catch herself, taken aback by how little control she had over a numb leg.

  She collapsed to the floor. Her leg wasn’t the culprit. It was the memory of photos in the courtroom. A paralyzed man no one claimed. Because of Max, homelessness was no longer his primary concern. His legs hadn’t worked well before the accident, he’d reported. They didn’t work at all after.

  Cullen. He had a name. A single name that served as first, last, and middle for him. The investigators conjectured the man had invented it to cover something unsavory in his past. Or an unspeakable regret.

  In that respect, she and Cullen and Max were family.

  He’d been loitering where he shouldn’t have been. Camped out on the sidewalk the night Max made an unscheduled visit to the fertility clinic, using their SUV as a doorbell.

  Skid marks showed Max had tried to stop. A last minute wave of conscience? Clarity? Sobriety? Emmalyn couldn’t look at skid marks on a highway without reliving the mind-numbing stack of evidence and the equally mind-numbing alternate explanations offered by Max’s lawyer. The faulty accelerator raised a few eyebrows in the courtroom, but eyebrows don’t make decisions about a person’s future.

  A sisal rug is perfect for a beach cottage, but it’s abrasive when a person kneels on it, attempting to rise, but pressed down by the weight of a mistake or series of unfortunate events with life- and love-altering consequences. Emmalyn could feel every rough thread, even through jeans. She turned her face toward the back of the couch and dug her elbows into the seat cushions to take pressure off her knees.

  She couldn’t look at Hope without seeing Max in her eyes. She could give a little girl a sanctuary while her mom was in rehab. Emmalyn didn’t realize Hope’s presence would bring her eyeball to eyeball with an icon of imprisonment. She couldn’t shake the thought of him. Didn’t want to shake the thought of him. But the shards of what they’d had were so small now. Infinitesimally small. Like slivers of fiberglass you can’t see to remove.

  Cullen could kneel on broken glass without noticing. If only he could kneel.

  Emmalyn rested her forehead on the tent peak of her clasped hands. She would have taken advantage of the posture and prayed if she could have thought of anything to say. Even the hopeless can squeeze out a “God, help us!” or a “Make this go away!” She’d screamed the words until she’d grown hoarse, years ago. Laryngitis—and hollowness—had prevented her from answering any of the press’s questions post-trial, including the strokes of journalism genius—“How does it make you feel to know your husband was responsible for crippling a man?” and “Do you think your husband’s actions were rooted in resentment over your obsession with wanting to have children?” Genius.

  As if she hadn’t thought of that before. Did no one understand it wasn’t a want, it was a need? And that it wasn’t an obsession, it was—

  The only word that fit. She’d taken a longing and reshaped it into an obsession. In its longing form, it made beautiful sense. Its obsession form drained it of beauty.

  Did the reporters think she’d come up with a sound bite no grieving spouse had uttered? Something headline-worthy? “I’m so proud of my husband for sitting hunched over and silent throughout the trial, so blessed that he’s only being sent away for five years, so grateful we both have this opportunity to step away from the scene and work through what was obviously a symbolic gesture of his latent disgust for me.” Emmalyn’s mother insisted sarcasm didn’t look good on anyone, but Emmalyn insisted on trying it on.

  Stretching her leg to the side to work out the pinpricks must have made her look like a hurdler with bad form. She’d trained long and hard for it.

  Four days after the sentencing, a local plane crash made the national news and attention was diverted from an SUV/fertility clinic collision and its consequences to the virtual debris field, body count, and black box recordings. God help her, Emmalyn was grateful for the diversion.

  No. God doesn’t help people who think like that.

  Not the God she knew then.

  Maybe knew was too strong a word.

  She stood, tested her leg again, and maintained contact with a piece of furniture all the way to the kitchen. If Hope hadn’t been there, she might have bundled up and gone for a walk again. Hope inside. Wolves and other critters outside. When times get tough, the not-so-tough go to bed.

  The bathroom lamp didn’t respond when Emmalyn reached under the shade to turn it on. Since the day she moved in, she’d left a small lamp burning in the bathroom on the low antique dresser. Her version of a nightlight. She padded down the stairs to get another bulb, padded back up the stairs, installed the bulb and hit the switch again. Nothing.

  She traced the cord to the outlet. Unplugged. No wonder. She never unplugged this lamp. But she no longer lived alone.

  Hope’s blow dryer plug occupied the spot normally reserved for the lamp. Emmalyn could gripe, or she could make a note to get an adapter so everything had a spot to call its own.

  She unplugged the inactive blow dryer and let the lamp have the power it needed for the night. Morning was soon enough to talk to Hope. The girl had gone to bed much earlier than Emmalyn assumed she would. Or gone to her room. Not always the same thing.

  Emmalyn brushed her teeth, avoiding her reflection in the mirror as much as possible. Ice-blue eyes caught her. A thought squirmed somewhere just behind those eyes. She’d been jealous of Claire’s reappearance in Max’s life, communicating with him behind bars in a way Emmalyn hadn’t mastered. Hadn’t even attempted for too long, she had to admit. Jealousy sizzled like sausage in a hot pan over Hope’s easy conversations with Max. Emmalyn’s stuttered along and ended poorly.

  She glanced in the mirror again to see if she’d left any toothpaste reminders on her chin. Yeah, well no wonder you look miserable. Total disconnect between how you should have talked to Max tonight and how you did. Total disconnect between what you dwell on about the accident—and a host of other losses—and the depth of grace’s possibilities.

  Unplugged.

  The depth of grace’s possibilities? She had to have picked that up at The Wild Iris. Was it one of the quotes Bougie wanted stenciled on the walls?

  Emmalyn had made things worse than they already were. And she couldn’t pick up the phone to apologize to Max. Not an option. The spouses of the incarcerated don’t get choices like that.

  The chair in her room seemed more appealing than the bed. She’d read for a while, let the guilt crawl off into a corner. But it didn’t. It stayed right there in front of her eyes, blocking her view of the page.

  God, what am I supposed to do?

  She’d resorted to honest to goodness praying. It must be bad.

  Bougie often reminded her not to lose hold of what she knew for sure. When Emmalyn had asked, “What can I possibly know for sure?” Bougie hadn’t answered, but had tapped her heart and her ever-present Bible.

  “What my heart tells me? What God said in His Word?” Emmalyn had flinched. She could feel the remnants of the conversation’s impact even now. “What if my heart isn’t telling me the truth?”

  Bougie had spread her arms and twirled so slowly Emmalyn wondered if the music in her head were moving at all. “If you’re planting your feet in what God said in His Word,” she said, “your heart will tell you the truth.”

  Her book abandoned, Emmalyn stared into the night through the windowed doors to the small deck. Stars now salted the sky over the freshwater sea. Stars governed by the One who, according to Bougie, is never stumped.

  Seriously, God. What am I supposed to do? I don’t know Max anymore. How am I supposed to co-parent with him? How will we ever come to a decision on anything when our time on the phone is so short and every minute I commandeer feels like an hour stolen from his child?

  She rose from the chair to draw closer to the stars. They shone but offered no insight.

  Her fe
et chilled first. She climbed into bed not because she thought she could sleep, but because it seemed like the place to go when you’ve exhausted all other options. She pushed a mound of pillows into a workable nest, then sat up and reached for the extra blanket at the foot of the bed. If Max were there . . .

  He would have heard her bothering the sheets for a comfortable position. He would have felt the mattress jostle as she pulled the blanket from the end of the bed. Without her having to ask, he would have slid closer and wrapped his arms around her like a buffalo robe. He would have cupped his warm feet around hers. His even breathing would have lulled her to sleep, no matter the cares of the day. That’s what she knew for sure.

  She turned on her side, facing the windowed doors, imagining his warmth at her back. Her gaze fell on the leather-bound journal on the bedside table. Emmalyn reached for it, hugged it to her chest. “Letters to Max, until you come home.” That’s how Cora had labeled it. Emmalyn had asked what to write in it. How to communicate with someone so far distant, in more ways than one. Cora told her to write as if he were sitting in the same room.

  “That might never happen for us.”

  Cora had pulled a picture of Wayne from her wallet. Dusty brown camo. Tan helmet. A weapon Emmalyn couldn’t identify strapped across his chest. A tan, barren landscape in the background. “It might not happen for us, either. But I write because it might. And because the marriage will have no chance at all if we’re not communicating somehow.”

  Emmalyn pulled the pen from where it was clipped to the last page on which she’d written. One more glance at the night sky, the same sky that hovered over a cement block pod in a razor-wire compound three hundred miles away, and the pen moved across the paper.

  Dear Max,

  I owe you an apology. Dozens by now. But specifically tonight, for letting the time constraints of your phone call this afternoon and my frustration over . . . everything . . . dictate my response to the current difference of opinion. No excuses from me this time. I’m just sorry.

  It seemed as if she should write more. But everything beyond “I’m sorry” became a defense about why she felt the way she did, or digging to expose the root of what got them into this mess.