Beach Girls (30 page)

“She couldn't do that—”

“That's what I said, what I thought,” Madeleine said, thinking back to the trip, to all those hours on the beach, listening to Emma spill the truth and her feelings.

“She must have meant something very temporary—a week, or even a month—you said she'd never even been away from Nell overnight before that trip.”

“No. It wasn't going to be temporary.” Madeleine's heart started pounding.

“Jack said she had a secret life.”

Madeleine nodded. “She did. He's right.”

“Was she having an affair?”

“Not exactly.”

“How can you ‘not exactly' have an affair?”

“They hadn't slept together,” Madeleine said.

“I don't get it,” Stevie said. “Who was it?”

“Her priest.”

Stevie just stared.

“I know,” Madeleine said, seeing the disbelief in Stevie's eyes. “Father Richard Kearsage. He was new to their parish—was very active in getting people involved in the community. He opened Emma's eyes, she said, got her interested in social change. He started a literacy program at the local prison, and Emma claims that helping him completely changed her life—and the way she saw the world.”

“But what did that have to do with her leaving Jack?”

“They fell in love.”

Stevie looked out to sea. The sun was down now, the waves topped with dark silver as they rolled in toward the beach.

“How could a priest do that to a family?”

“Emma said that priests are human, too. That they had desires just like other men. She seemed to feel almost more guilty about the fact that he was leaving the church to be with her than she was about leaving her family.”

“How could she?”

“She was head over heels, Stevie.”

“I don't get it!” Stevie said. “Okay—so she was married, and she fell in love with someone else. That's not good, but it happens. Your brother is wonderful, but say, for whatever reason, she couldn't stay with him. What about Nell?”

The questions, and Stevie's vehemence, brought back memories of Madeleine's own reaction, and of the drive back from the beach to Atlanta. Her hands began to shake, so she clasped them in her lap.

“That's what I said. I couldn't understand it—couldn't believe she'd even consider leaving Nell,” Madeleine said. “She was obviously lost in passion for him. She told me that no one had ever known her the way he did. She said he loved and accepted all her faults, her wounds, the things that she hated in herself.”

“Give me a break—he's a priest. That's his job! How did he even hear about ‘her wounds'? Probably after she went to him for help. You know? I used to do it myself. After I had the miscarriage, I would go to church and cry. One of the priests was so kind. He would sit with me for a whole hour, listening to me talk. I told him such intimate details—but I could never imagine anything more!”

Madeleine nodded. “She and Jack were having troubles. She confided in Father Richard, and he got her involved in his projects. She told me that the world came alive in a new way. Her eyes were glittering, and she seemed . . . as if she might levitate. But it was crazy—she also seemed so grounded. As if she had prayed it through, and had God on her side. As if she and Father Richard had a mission.”

“What was their mission?”

“Working to bring literacy to poor areas—but not in Georgia. It couldn't be near Atlanta, because after he left the order, he would be denigrated in the community.”

“He should be! For seducing a married woman, getting her to leave her family! I was raised Catholic—we all were. We all know there are good priests and bad priests. I'm sorry, but this guy is horrible.”

Madeleine let Stevie rant. It felt good to have someone sharing her outrage.
If only Emma were still alive,
she thought.
Stevie and I could gossip our heads off, full of moral indignation, have a great bitch session, then go kidnap her and deprogram her and convince her to return home.

“Jack didn't know anything?” Stevie asked.

“He knew that something was wrong. Emma told me that he actually encouraged her to see Father Richard. I guess he thought the priest would help their marriage.”

“And instead he abused their trust.”

“Yeah—that's how I see it. Emma defended him, though.”

“Well, she would,” Stevie said. “So would I. Falling in love is like magic. It gets you under its spell, and you're a goner. I know—I've made more mistakes than you can imagine in that condition. But I didn't have a child. . . .”

“That's the part that drove me crazy,” Madeleine said. “Thinking of
Nell . . .” She wanted to tell Stevie about the last minutes, in the car, when she'd driven off the road. But instead, buying time, she spun back a little.

“There we were, sitting on the beach at St. Simons Island, the way we'd done so many times before. And Emma was looking around, picking apart the resort for being too luxurious, and our bathing suits, for being too expensive. She began talking about poverty in rural Georgia—said that Father Richard had opened her eyes to things she had never seen or thought about before. Families who don't have enough money to make ends meet. Mothers who have to struggle to feed their children. Overcrowding in the prisons, the inhumanity with which the inmates were treated.”

“Those are important issues,” Stevie said.

“I know. And I was surprised and—at first—pleased to hear Emma talking that way. I mean, Jack would never call her spoiled, but that's what I thought—the way she always needed the biggest car on the block, or wanted to join the most exclusive clubs. She didn't even want us to read your books to Nell because they were too realistic, showed some ugly things about life!”

“I know,” Stevie said.

“She stared at her diamond ring glinting in the sun and said, ‘People die in diamond mines so rich women like us can wear these.' I told her, ‘They're symbols of love—Jack's and Chris's.' And she said, ‘If love is true, it doesn't need jewels to prove it.' When she said that, I knew something big was going on. Because for a long time before that, she'd measured how good a birthday or Christmas was by how fancy the jewelry Jack gave her was.”

“It sounds as if she was having a transformation,” Stevie said.

“I know. And at first I thought it was all positive.”

“But it wasn't. . . .”

“She told me she and Father Richard weren't having sex. They had kissed and held each other, but they didn't want to do more till they figured out what they were going to do. He told her that he needed to have a period of ‘discernment.' Where he would pray, ask what he should do. He went up into the hills where he'd grown up, all alone for . . . I don't know . . . she made it sound like forty days in the desert. At the end of his time there, he came back and told her he wanted to leave the priesthood to be with her.”

“And all she had to do was leave her marriage.”

“Yes.”

“And Nell.”

“It made me crazy, Stevie,” Madeleine said. “We were driving home from the beach.”

“The day of the accident?”

Madeleine nodded. She heard the waves hitting the beach. Telling this story was so hard, so terrible. But she needed to get it out, needed to have her friend understand. Stevie had known and loved Emma; she obviously adored Nell and Jack.

“I want to tell you,” Madeleine said, her voice breaking. “Because I love and trust you. And I need an ally.”

“An ally?”

“To help me move forward, to figure out what I have to do to heal things with my brother. And to help him heal, too. He's hurting so badly.”

“I know he is,” Stevie said, leaning forward to hold Madeleine's hand. She gazed into her eyes, warm and steady. Madeleine left her hand right there, feeling the pressure of Stevie's fingers.

“We were driving back to Atlanta. Emma wanted to show me where Richard had grown up. It was a small country town, in the Georgia hills. Very poor . . . Emma told me that he had taken her there on a drive, to show her the roots of poverty. He'd told her that some of his neighbors had wound up in prison for terrible things. His own father had gone to jail just for forging a check, and he'd died there—stabbed by another inmate. Richard said that his own family had suffered, and that he'd known that he wanted to do something to help.”

“So he became a priest?”

Madeleine nodded. “He must have been the family's pride and joy. He got a scholarship to Loyola University. From there, he went into the priesthood. Went to graduate school at Georgetown, their Program for Justice and Peace. Emma said he was passionate about social justice.”

Stevie stared at the candle flame and seemed to shiver.

“What is it?”

“Oh, I was just remembering something my father said to me. When I was little . . . and I'd hide in the reeds, to watch sandpipers build their nests. Or I'd stay out on freezing cold nights to catch sight of an owl flying out of the woods. . . . He told me that I was passionate about birds, and that meant I would be passionate about everything. He told me that I had a fire inside. . . .”

“Which you do.”

“He told me I had to learn how to use it—to temper it. I had no idea what he meant then. He told me that studying Irish literature had taught him that passion could destroy as much as it could enliven. He told me he envied what I had, but that it also made him worry about me. . . .” She paused, still staring at the flame as if seeing her own private demons. “Sounds as if Richard had the same fire inside.”

“Yes,” Maddie said. “But
I
destroyed Emma.”

“Don't say that,” Stevie said, looking up.

“I did, though. I drove her into a tree.”

“Tell me, Maddie,” Stevie said. “If you can.”

Madeleine nodded. She took a deep breath, remembering all the sessions with Dr. Mallory, all the waves of shock and terror that had passed through her body, at last passed out of it.

“She told me that she had important work to do,” Madeleine said. “That she and Richard had a mission too important to ignore. She said that Jack could take care of Nell. That when Nell was old enough, she would understand. Here we were, driving down this rutted dirt road way out in the middle of nowhere . . . past houses with tin roofs, tar-paper walls . . . with broken-down cars and old refrigerators out in the yards . . .”

“Past the house where Richard had grown up poor,” Stevie murmured.

Madeleine nodded. “And I was just driving along, feeling that it was all so surreal—and how could Emma not see? So I said to her, ‘You're in love with a man whose childhood pain haunts him still, every day.' I wanted her to see, to hear what she was about to do to Nell, to remember that raising her daughter was the most important work in the world.”

“She couldn't see,” Stevie said. “She was too lost in love.”

“Yes, she was. So I told her—that if she left Nell, it would be like killing a part of her. The part that trusted, and loved, and believed. . . . I told her that she and Richard wanted to do something wonderful to help the world, but that they would be destroying one beautiful, trusting little girl.”

Stevie's eyes filled, and so did Madeleine's, and for a few seconds Madeleine thought of Nell's pain, and the rift in her family, and how it had started with Emma falling in love, and she had to squeeze her eyes tight to keep from sobbing.

“Emma was furious with me. She told me that she and Richard had prayed about it, were praying about it every day . . . and it wasn't that she was abandoning her daughter—she was going away temporarily . . . that Nell would understand. That she could visit—it would be shared custody, she was sure Jack wouldn't give her any trouble.”

“Maybe she didn't know Jack all that well,” Stevie said.

“I know. I just turned to her and said I thought he'd give her more trouble than she could ever imagine. And I told her I'd help him—I'd testify for him in divorce court. I told her that she was being selfish, throwing Nell away. And that if she did that, she'd deserve to lose her daughter.”

“Throwing Nell away,” Stevie whispered hotly, staring at the dark water.

“She went crazy. I guess she thought we'd spent this sisterly time together, bonding about it all—she'd mistaken my quietness, my attempts to be understanding, as acceptance. I think she thought I'd be her ally.”

“You were just trying to listen,” Stevie said.

“Yes. But that was over—she told me she planned to tell Jack and Nell that night. And that she was moving out the next day. I told her I'd help my brother get sole custody and see that she didn't get a penny in alimony. And the funny thing was, that's what made her go insane. She told me she deserved money after all those years of marriage, and that she needed it to help support what she and Richard were going to do.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“I know. I was so angry, I must have hit the gas. We were going fast. . . . She yelled at me, that I was just Nell's aunt, didn't have the right to get involved . . . she made it all about Nell, but I know the thing that really pulled the pin was the idea of losing alimony. She said, ‘You think you care about her more than I do? She's my daughter!' And then she slapped me so hard—”

“Oh, Maddie,” Stevie said, taking her hand.

“Across the face—I saw stars.” Madeleine closed her eyes, still feeling the shocking sting of Emma's hand across her cheek and eye. “The next thing I remember, we were upside down—we'd hit a tree and flipped over. My arm . . .”

Stevie squeezed her hand. Madeleine felt the searing sensations in her shoulder, as if it had been sliced, severed with a hot knife. She trembled, but calmed herself by looking into Stevie's eyes.

“My arm was hanging off. The blood was pumping out—my artery was cut through. Emma lay there, against my body. Her eyes were open . . . she was trying to talk, and blood was gurgling in her throat.” Madeleine began to cry as she remembered. “I wanted to help her, save her.”

“It wasn't your fault, Maddie.”

“She just stared up at me—she wanted to live so badly! I could see the panic in her eyes. She kept saying, ‘Tell him I'm sorry . . .'” Madeleine sobbed.

“Who, tell who?”

“That's what I don't know!” Madeleine cried. “Did she mean tell Jack she was sorry for what she was going to do? Or tell Richard she was sorry for getting hurt and ruining their plans?”