Beach Season (21 page)
Authors: Lisa Jackson
Hugh’s expression had tightened into the closest resemblance of anger Thea had ever seen on his face. “But what about your parents?” he said. “You were so close with them in high school. You must have turned to them for help?”
“My parents were useless,” Thea said vehemently. “They thought I was just being dramatic. They thought I was worrying for nothing. All they saw—all they wanted to see—was a picture-perfect son-in-law. He kept up a fine act with them.”
“That must have been horrible for you,” Hugh said. “I hope they eventually came around?”
“Oh, finally. One morning my mother stopped by our house unannounced. I’d stayed home from work because ... because of my black eye. Which wasn’t the first black eye I’d had. She was just going to slip something through the mail slot, some magazine article or other she thought I’d like. The last thing she expected to see was my sneaking out the front door with the garbage, wearing a big floppy hat and an enormous pair of sunglasses, neither of which was enough to cover the damage.”
Hugh hugged Thea tightly. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
“Me, too. After that, of course, I had their support. But it was kind of too little, too late.”
“What happened then?”
Thea sighed. “I’ll spare you the details, but I got a restraining order on Mark. He was the one who sued for divorce. And he wanted spousal support. Needless to say, that was not granted. And here I am. No condo, no nice car, no good job. I quit the job Mark had convinced me to take, of course; I had to. And I had to get away from my parents so I came here to ...” Thea looked up at Hugh. “Well, to hide out for a while and lick my wounds until I was ready to go back and rebuild my life.”
“And instead,” he said, “you found me.”
Tears sprang to Thea’s eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “Instead, I found you.”
Their lips met in another kiss and it was some time before they headed back to the Cove.
C
HAPTER
17
HAPTER
17
“This is the most beautiful day ever. I don’t think I’m exaggerating.”
“I don’t think you are, either,” Hugh said. It was the following afternoon and they were at the beach again, and it was true that the sun was bright and the water was glittering and what few clouds there were in the sky were definitely the happy kind. Thea had borrowed Alice’s blanket and beach bag again. Hugh had bought two small folding beach chairs at one of the shops in town. It was less painful for his leg, he explained, when his back had some support.
“And less painful for my back, period,” Thea said. “Though I’m not complaining. I’m sure any back pain I have is due to inactivity, which is something completely in my control.”
“The older you get, the harder it is to maintain flexibility and strength.”
“Ugh. Let’s not talk about getting old! Let’s enjoy this moment.”
“Deal.”
They had each spent the night before in their own beds. Thea would have been more than happy—ecstatic, in fact—to have spent the night with Hugh, but he had—in his usual thoughtful way, Thea noted—suggested they hold off a bit before having sex.
“There’s a lot at stake for us, Thea,” he had argued. “For each of us as an individual, as well as for our future as a couple. I don’t want to risk ruining things by forcing an intimacy we might not be ready for. I don’t mean physically,” he’d added quickly, with a grin. “I mean emotionally. We’ve both been through a lot of bad stuff.”
“I know,” Thea had agreed. “I agree. But you know I’m at my sexual peak, right?” she teased.
“All the more reason to build up to spending the night together, or the afternoon, or the morning, or all three. Expectation,” he pointed out, kissing her forehead, “can be very exciting.”
“Okay, but let’s not wait too long.”
“Patience is a virtue.”
Thea had laughed. “Well, then, I’m not very virtuous!”
Now, stretched out in the warm sun, Thea felt calm and satisfied. Patience, she recalled, was said to have its rewards.
“I brought lunch today,” Thea said, taking two sandwiches, two bags of chips, and two bottles of water from the bag. “I can put two slices of bread together. Anything more complicated and I need a manual.”
“You made me a birthday cake in high school. I don’t remember getting sick.”
Thea blushed. “That’s because my mother was standing over me the entire time, making sure I didn’t add salt instead of sugar.”
Hugh looked over at her and smiled. “This is the most important moment in our life together, Thea. I’d say it’s even more important than the first time we talked. Remember, before history class that day?”
“You asked me to go for pizza. I thought it was a prank devised by some mean girls.”
Hugh’s eyes widened. “Then what made you say yes?”
“You looked so disappointed, I had to take the risk that you really wanted to go out with me.”
“Very courageous!”
They ate in companionable silence for a while, save for Hugh once commenting on how good his roast beef and Swiss cheese sandwich tasted. The beach was crowded but Thea was enjoying watching others enjoy themselves. A teenage couple to their right was lying side by side on beach towels, holding hands. A much older couple, browned almost beyond belief and glistening with oil, sat in chairs complete with cup holders, side trays, and padded foot rests. She smiled as a tiny toddler in a bright pink bathing suit made her way determinedly, if crookedly, toward the water, her daddy a nervous inch or two behind. Life can be okay, she thought. People are often nice.
Thea looked over to Hugh. “I feel I have to apologize,” she said. “I was so mad at you by junior year. It never really occurred to me to be mad at your parents for whisking you away every Christmas season. I was just mad that you agreed to go to Vienna or wherever they were jetting off to and not to come home to see me.”
“I’m sorry,” Hugh said, reaching for her hand. “I mean it, Thea.”
“Oh, it’s all right now. Were you ever mad at me?” she asked. “Did you blame me for the breakup?”
“Well,” Hugh said, “only a little, and only in my more immature moments. And you know me, Thea. I’m not one to hold a grudge. I try to be as fair as I possibly can. Deep down I always knew I was partially—maybe mostly—to blame for letting things happen the way they did. I guess I just wasn’t strong enough to say no to my parents. It was easier to find ways to be disappointed with you. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, me, too. What a waste.”
“We ended with a whimper,” Hugh said, “not a bang.”
“Not that I wanted us to end at all, but I know what you mean. A whimper is somehow sadder than a bang.”
“You know, I’m still embarrassed to admit that I actually allowed my parents to manipulate my life to such a degree. Sometimes a devotion to duty becomes badly destructive. Sometimes it becomes an excuse not to live your own life, to make your own choices, good or bad. I mean, my parents chose my wife for me, and I let them. It sounds pathetic, doesn’t it? It sounds medieval.”
“Closer to home than medieval,” Thea said. “Arranged marriages happen in all sorts of societies. Sometimes it works out. But when it’s a union made for dynastic purposes, chances are pretty strong the couple will be unhappy as a couple, though maybe successful as politicians of a sort.”
“Or when it’s a union made for money,” Hugh said, “plain and simple. Like my marriage pretty much turned out to be. Susanne was a nice enough person. She was very social; she loved giving parties; she was the ultimate hostess. She had absolutely no career ambition other than marrying the right sort of man. Apparently, I was that right sort of man, and all the parents thought so, too. I convinced myself I was in love with her. But in the end I was just being a good son, which was unfair to Susanne and unfair to me. My parents were furious with me when I filed for divorce. Thank God there were no children. And then after getting engaged to Raina and then the accident ... well, let’s just say I’ve proved a big disappointment to them.”
Thea felt a surge of anger toward the Landrys. She didn’t see how Hugh could prove a disappointment to anyone with half an ounce of sense. And if his parents had indeed intercepted her letter all those years ago, it was evidence of a deep dislike of Thea for no good reason at all; worse, it was an indication of a deep disregard for the emotional welfare of their child.
“We were manipulated,” she said forcefully.
“Yes,” Hugh agreed. “But parents often manipulate their children. Mostly, I think, parents aren’t even aware they’re being puppet masters, or trying to be.”
“I think our parents knew exactly what they were encouraging when you went off to college in California and I stayed home. What were your parents afraid of, that I was pretending to love you for their money?”
“Even if they did consciously manipulate us—and, okay, I do think that they did—it was a long time ago. And look, we’re here together again now. That’s all that matters.”
“But the lost time ...”
“You can’t think like that, Thea,” Hugh said forcefully. “At least we found each other again.”
Thea smiled. “Always trying to see the positive in a messy situation.”
“The alternative is not a choice for me. It never was.”
“An eternal optimist?”
“Maybe,” Hugh admitted, “but one with limits. I like to think I don’t foolishly put faith in something or someone not worthy of that faith. Sometimes, often, it’s a hard call.”
Thea nodded. She certainly had learned all about putting her faith in a worthless person. “You know,” she said, “we can’t pick up again where we left off because where we left off wasn’t in a good place. I want us to start again from when we were parted, from those last days of summer vacation before you went off to college, when we spent every moment possible together. Do you think that’s possible?”
“I have to believe it’s possible,” Hugh said. “So do you.”
“I know. But our breakup wasn’t entirely our parents’ fault. Why did we stop trying, Hugh? Why did we allow ourselves to drift apart?”
Hugh shrugged. “We were young.”
“But isn’t youth the time for great romance,” Thea argued, “for making lifelong promises? Youth is when you believe that anything is possible.”
“In storybooks, maybe. Maybe sometimes in real life. Honestly, Thea, I’m not sure it would have been a great idea for us to have stayed together back then. It’s impossible to know what might have happened if we had, of course, but I can’t help but think, given all that’s happened to both of us since then, that we’re stronger people for having been apart. Okay, for having been torn apart, if you want to be dramatic about it.”
“I do want to be dramatic about it,” Thea insisted. “Our love was rudely interrupted.”
“But maybe it was a good thing that it was. Look, if I was so easily persuaded by my parents to not come home during the holidays and eventually to marry a girl they practically threw at me, what sort of husband would I have made to you? I wasn’t half as tough as I am now. I’m guessing you weren’t, either.”
Thea wondered about that for a moment. “Yes,” she said then. “Maybe you’re right. We were—maybe I still am—parent pleasers. It certainly didn’t hurt Mark’s cause that my parents adored him and that by marrying him I knew I would be giving them a gift of sorts.”
“Being a people pleaser isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”
“No,” Thea agreed. “It isn’t. I know now that I had no real idea what marriage was or what it involved. Mark is a bum, but in some ways I do blame myself for having gone into that marriage for such—feeble reasons. I’m not even sure I was ever actually in love with Mark. Maybe I was using him in some way, like he was using me. The bottom line is that I never should have married him.”
“Do you remember how we talked about running off to city hall to get married?” Hugh asked.
“Maybe we should have done it. Everything could have been so different for us!”
“Maybe different in a bad way. My parents probably would have cut me off. Maybe I didn’t care so much at the time, but from the perspective of a thirty-five-year-old, the idea of being eighteen and entirely on my own—with a wife to support—seems insane. Which is not to say people don’t risk such things all the time, but what about college? Our careers? It wouldn’t have been smart. It probably would have destroyed us.”
“Yes,” Thea said reluctantly. “I can’t imagine running into you after all these years and being so happy about it if we’d been through a messy divorce. We might have come to resent each other, even to hate each other.”
“Let’s not think about the what-ifs anymore, okay? We need to keep talking and learning about each other all over again. We need to face forward.”
“Were you born mature?”
Hugh laughed. “I wish! You in the mood for ice cream?”
“Have I ever said no to that question?”
Hugh reached for his cane and got to his feet. “I’m on it.”
C
HAPTER
18
HAPTER
18
Thea was up not long after dawn. She had slept incredibly well, deeply and dreamlessly. Now she was ravenous. She made a small pot of coffee with the brand Alice had suggested she try. It still didn’t taste as good as the stuff Alice brewed, but it was a major improvement on her own previous efforts. And then she managed to scramble two eggs without them becoming pasteboard and toasted two slices of bread without burning them. It was going to be a fantastic day.
Thea felt that she hadn’t stopped smiling, not since that magical moment on Marginal Way when Hugh had declared his love for her. Okay, they hadn’t slept together yet and he hadn’t asked her to marry him, but she felt sure that both sex and a proposal would come in the not-so-distant future. Hugh, always Mr. Responsible, wanted to pace things for a while. Fine, Thea thought. She could handle that. Maybe.
After breakfast, Thea opened her laptop with the intention of checking her e-mail, though she expected to find nothing of importance. Then she would check the local weather. The air felt slightly damp and the sky was overcast. She wondered if it was going to rain. She hoped not as she and Hugh had planned to go blueberry picking that afternoon.
There were only three e-mails, one from her college’s alumni association; she would read that at some other time. There was an e-mail from Peggy; the attached photo showed her two small children in their plastic wading pool with Daddy. Thea smiled. She didn’t recognize the address of the third e-mail. Without the caution that had become her constant companion, she opened it.
There was no subject line. The message had been typed in caps. There were only three lines and even if Thea had slammed the computer shut or hit the delete key, her eyes would have seen and her mind would have read the words before they could disappear from view.
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO ... HOW’S THE NEW VENTURE GOING? YOU’LL HAVE TO TELL ME ALL WHEN WE MEET.
Now she did hit the delete key and slammed the screen down over the keyboard. She was furious and she was frightened. Her heart thumped painfully and her stomach roiled. How had he gotten her contact information? She had changed her e-mail address after the divorce and closed out her Facebook account. Who would have given her new e-mail address to her ex-husband? Could her parents have betrayed her—again?
Thea took a deep breath. It need not have been a betrayal. The culture was obscenely public; there was no real privacy unless you went entirely off the grid. She had gotten a restraining order on Mark after he had moved out of her condo and filed for divorce, but that was long outdated. And a restraining order did not prevent him from using a search engine or even a phonebook to find her.
Thea got unsteadily to her feet and fearfully scanned the fields surrounding Alice’s house. No standing male figure, watching her. But he could be lurking ...
The nightmare had come true. Mark had returned. He could very well be in Ogunquit, as she had feared, watching her. What did he want from her? He had already taken her money, her peace of mind, her dignity. What else was there for him to plunder!
The fury she had initially felt upon reading Mark’s e-mail was now entirely replaced by the fear. The e-mail had been jaunty and vaguely threatening. Hadn’t it? For a moment, Thea wished she hadn’t deleted it. She thought it had implied that he would be in touch again ... and what had he meant about her “new venture”? Her life postdivorce? Or her relationship with ...
She would call Hugh. She would be totally honest with him, like in the old days. Hugh was all for being totally honest with each other; he had said so. Thea dashed over to the occasional table, reached for her phone, and then snatched her hand away from it as if it were on fire.
No. No, she couldn’t tell Hugh that the man who had terrorized her had returned. She couldn’t admit to him just how terrified she felt, how one brief e-mail had made her feel completely vulnerable, how it had sapped every bit of strength she thought she had recovered since the divorce. A feeling of deep mortification engulfed her and she stumbled into the kitchen. She barely reached the sink before the meager contents of her stomach came roaring up.
With shaking hands, Thea pulled a paper towel from the standing roll, wet it, and wiped her face. No. She simply could not ask Hugh for his protection. She would not involve him in her sordid past. She would leave all the lights on that night; she would remain vigilant. No doubt Alice would see the lights from her bedroom and comment. Thea would make up an excuse—a bout of insomnia—but what about the next night, and the one after that? Mark had made her a prisoner again ...
Her cell phone rang and Thea cried out. She stumbled back to the occasional table and peered at the bit of machinery warily. It was Hugh. She let it ring twice, three, four times before answering.
“Hi,” she managed.
“Hi, back. Guess where I am?”
“Where?”
“On my way to the emergency room. Now, don’t panic. I’m just taking a precaution, though some people would have you believe the place you don’t want to be if you’re afraid of infection is the hospital.”
Thea’s grip on the phone tightened. Had Mark gotten to Hugh? Had he hurt him? “Oh my God, Hugh,” she cried, “what happened?”
“I was shaving and the razor slipped and I cut my hand. Clumsy of me. The cut’s pretty deep, but I cleaned it immediately and I’m wearing a bandage and antibiotic cream, so it should be okay, but I figured I’d have a doctor check it out, just to be safe.”
“Do you want me to meet you at the ER?” Thea asked automatically, her sense of duty momentarily overriding her terror.
“No need. I probably won’t be able to use a cell phone there and I’m not sure how long I’ll be, so don’t worry. I’ll call as soon as I get out. Okay?”
“Okay.” Thea’s tongue felt thick and heavy in her mouth.
“I’m sorry I won’t be able to make our date to go blueberry picking this afternoon. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
“Okay, yes.”
“Thea? You sound—upset. Please don’t worry about me. I’ll be just fine.”
Thea nodded, though there was no one there to see. “Just ... be careful, Hugh,” she said. “Be careful.”
Thea spent the endless afternoon on the move. She drove down to the outlets in Kittery through a steady drizzle of rain, watching as best she could to be sure she wasn’t being followed. Blindly, she went into Old Navy and walked up and down the aisles seeing nothing, watching over her shoulder for Mark. She got back into her car and drove the winding, picturesque roads of Kittery Point, and then turned back north, all the time vigilant. She worried about Hugh. She tried to figure out how best to avoid Alice and her keen questioning when she got home. Not that she wanted to go back to her apartment in Alice’s house. Everything that had become commonplace and comforting—the field, the woods, the old stonewall—had been tainted by the reappearance of Mark. Everything that had come to feel welcoming in her world of refuge now seemed sinister and threatening.
But eventually, exhausted and enervated, she turned the car toward—no, not toward “home” because no place was home now. She turned the car toward what had been her temporary shelter. She would have to leave Alice’s apartment, soon; she would have to move somewhere else, maybe someplace even more remote, someplace where Mark would have trouble tracking her down. But how would she live? She needed money... . Thea’s grip on the steering wheel tightened so that her knuckles were dead white.
It would be so simple, a tiny part of her mind said, so natural, to tell Hugh what had happened and to ask him to stay with her that night. But Hugh might be spending the night, and the next night, in the hospital. He might have a dangerous infection. She couldn’t burden him with her troubles; he had enough of his own.
Thea turned the car onto Oak Street. She was amazed she had made it back to the apartment without having gone off the road, distracted as she was. She peered intently at the driveway, at the house itself, at what was visible of the surrounding fields and the far-off tree line. Nothing obviously foreign leapt out at her. Alice’s car, she was relieved to see, was there; Alice was home. Not that she would trouble her landlady with her woes.
Thea parked the car and hurried around back and into the apartment. Quickly, she locked the door and leaned against it, her eyes closed. No. No one had come to her rescue before and yet she had survived. She was damaged, but she was alive. She would survive again, even if she had no one to rely on but herself. And if I don’t survive, she thought, well ... she wasn’t so sure that she cared.
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