Folly Cove (38 page)

“She was hospitalized several times after your father left,” he said. “I remember, because my grandmother and Flossie were friends. My grandmother used to bring me here when I was a kid to help Flossie take care of you girls. I think my grandmother also helped out at the inn from time to time.” He smiled at Anne. “You were little, still in elementary school. I'd already gone off to middle school and thought you were a royal pain.”

Anne laughed, then bit her lip, thinking back. “I don't remember you coming to the house. Or anything about that time, really. Why was Mom hospitalized?” She imagined everything from cancer to a hysterectomy, but not the answer Sebastian gave.

“She had several nervous breakdowns,” he said. “Three that I remember. She was in and out of McLean Hospital for several years.”

McLean was a psychiatric hospital outside of Boston. “My God. I never knew any of that. I just remember her going away sometimes.”

“I'm sure that was by design. Your mother wouldn't have wanted anyone to know. Maybe not even her own people.”

“What people? Mom's parents died before she married my father, and she didn't have siblings,” Anne said, then caught herself: she was repeating her mother's lies. “No, I take that back. Flossie just told us Mom has a sister, and her mother was still alive when Mom married Dad, though we never met our grandmother.”

Sebastian nodded. “I remember my grandmother saying, ‘That poor woman, cut off from her real family.' I was impressed at the time because my own grandmother was tough as an old boot. She never felt sorry for anyone. In any case, Flossie kept the inn going and took care of you whenever your mother wasn't well.”

“God. How horrible for Mom. I still can't believe Dad could leave her flat like that. Never mind his own children,” she said, aware of the bitterness lacing her words.

“Your father might not have survived if he'd stayed here,”
Sebastian said gently. “I don't excuse his behavior. But after living with my wife, I know it's possible for mental illness to make people do all sorts of things. Your father was an alcoholic. He probably had to remove himself from places and people that triggered his drinking.”

Anne looked at him, her face hot with shame. “You knew?”

He shrugged. “Most people in town did.”

Anne thought of her mother, of the strength it must have taken to keep going. “I'm surprised Flossie didn't tell us any of that.”

“Perhaps she was only telling you the things she thought might impact you directly.” He glanced at his watch. “I should probably go. It's getting late and you've had an emotional day. I really am sorry about your dad.”

“Don't go. Please.” Anne unwound her arms and legs and leaned over to touch his knee. “Why don't you spend the night?”

He didn't exactly flinch, but his eyes were wary. “It's probably not a good idea.”

She removed her hand. “I take it you're regretting our night together.”

Sebastian's eyes were dark with pain, all of the gold light rinsed out of them. “Of course not,” he said softly.

“Then what? You felt ambushed,” she guessed. “The same way you felt ambushed by me in high school.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don't remember?” Anne laughed. “Boy, that's the perfect end to a hideous day. Here I've been worrying about it pretty much since it happened, and you haven't given that night a thought. You don't even remember!”

“Anne, what are you talking about?”

“Your sister's graduation party and the way I stalked you, then practically threw myself into your car!”

“I wasn't aware of you stalking me.”

“Of course you weren't!” Anne lowered her voice because of Lucy. “I don't remember meeting you when I was little. The first time I remember seeing you was at Paige's party. I watched you all night. Biding my time. I'd chosen you, you see.”

“Chosen me for what?” Now he sounded really confused.

Anne willed him to put his arms around her and tell her that she hadn't made yet another mistake, becoming involved with him. You'd think she'd learn to be more cautious. But maybe having a father who left you and a mother who was never truthful only taught you that pain was the natural course of love.

“I wanted you to be my first lover,” she said. “That's why I chose you.”

“You're kidding.”

“No.” Anne stood up and went to the counter, flicked off an imaginary crumb, then moved the jug of dried hydrangeas to the center again. “I was a virgin and didn't want to stay that way. You seemed like the perfect choice, because you were older and about to go away and see the world.”

“Why was that a good thing? Me going away?”

She turned around. Sebastian was sitting straight up on the couch, his hands on the knees of his gray trousers like a man at a bus stop. “Because I didn't want any complications, just like you don't want them now,” she said. “And I don't blame you. Love is for fools.”

Oh God. She'd said the one word she'd been determined not to say:
love
.

Sebastian stood up and came over to her. “Anne. Stop this. You're nobody's fool.”

“You should go,” she said. “It really is getting late.”

“I'm not going anywhere until I explain,” he said.

For a minute she felt a flutter of hope. Maybe Sebastian would take her in his arms and kiss her as he had before, warm her with his breath and hands.

No. He was pointing to the couch and politely asking her to sit down. Once she had, he sat on the coffee table facing her.

“I can't believe you think I don't remember the night of Paige's party,” he began. “It was like a dream. You were so beautiful. So honest and open. I was sick to death of girls I'd met in college. All those games. I thought about you every day for months after I left. I wanted to get in touch with you, but I knew it was foolish: you were only sixteen and I was already in college, ready to go abroad. I knew it wouldn't work. You needed time to finish high school and grow up.” He rubbed
his face with one hand, bringing color to his cheeks. “I had no idea I was an experiment for you, but I'm flattered that you chose me for your first time.”

“You are?” Anne felt her shoulders relax a little. “I was afraid you'd feel used or something.”

At that Sebastian laughed, and it made her realize he hadn't laughed since his arrival for dinner. “I assure you, that never crossed my mind,” he said. “I just felt lucky as hell.”

They smiled at each other for a moment, and then Sebastian grew serious again. “But having said all that, I'm not ready for you, Anne.”

“What do you mean?'”

“Exactly that. I was in a terrible marriage. A very painful one. I haven't recovered from how Jenny,” he began, and took a deep breath. “From how Jenny chose to end her life, and our baby's. When I look at you and Lucy, like I told you before, it gives me hope. You're a wonderful mother. Everything a mother should be. But I'm not ready to be a father.”

“I wasn't asking you to be,” Anne said, hurt making her sound sharper than she'd intended. “Making love doesn't mean we're going to get married. Sex doesn't catapult you into fatherhood. Believe me,” she added bitterly, “Colin taught me that well enough. You and I are just getting to know each other. I don't even know if I'm staying at Folly Cove.”

“I understand all that,” he said. “But being with you does mean being with Lucy, too. It's a package deal, right? And I'm not equipped to be around a baby. I can't even bring myself to hold her.”

Anne thought about this and realized she hadn't seen him touch Lucy, other than the day she'd fallen off the horse and Sebastian had been the one to put Lucy in her crib. “Why not?”

“Isn't it obvious? I'm afraid,” he said. “My wife killed herself and our child. I wasn't able to protect them. I feel cursed. I know that's not logical, but there it is. So, as much as I care about you, I don't think it's wise for us to continue seeing each other.” He stood up. “I hope you understand.”

“I don't,” she said. “I think you're being a jerk and a coward.” She stood up, too, anger making her back and knees feel stiff. “But since
that's the case, you're right. You should leave. I had a father like you. A quitter! And the father of my child isn't any better. I don't need a man in my life who quits the minute he's afraid. We're all afraid, Sebastian. But some of us stick it out anyway.”

He pulled on his jacket. “We could be friends,” he said. “We could take things slowly.”

“No,” Anne said. “We've gone too deep for us to take things slowly now. But I wish you luck and a happy life. I really do.”

Sebastian walked through the door, head down. Somehow she prevented herself from slamming it shut behind him.

Her phone rang on the counter. Laura's number was on the screen. Anne grabbed it, ready to rant and weep. “Hey.”

Anne had expected her sister to recognize from her tone that something was wrong. To ask. Instead, Laura was the one sobbing. “You have to come to the hospital.”

“Why? What happened?” Anne asked, clutching the phone so hard to her face that she bit the inside of her cheek and tasted blood.

“It's Mom! She fell. They think she had a stroke. They're doing tests now. I'm here and so is Elly. Hurry, Anne!”

“I'll be there as soon as I can.”

Anne hung up and ran out the door. Sebastian was just backing out of the driveway. “Wait!” she shouted. “I need you to take me to the hospital!” she said once he'd rolled down the window.

“What's going on?”

“My mom's had a fall, maybe a stroke.” Then she remembered the baby. “Shit. Lucy. I don't have a car seat. It's still in Flossie's car.”

“Take my car,” Sebastian said. “I'll stay with the baby.”

Anne nodded, mute with gratitude, and ran inside to grab her jacket and boots.

S
arah was lying in a dim room, but this wasn't her bed. Not her sheets and pillows. These were rough and smelled of bleach. She would never allow these linens on her bed! Or on any of the beds at the inn.

She tried to turn over, but something restrained her. As if her wrists were tied. There was a beeping sound, loud beside her. As if a truck were backing into the bed.

She panicked. She was in a hospital!

Her eyes flew open. Sarah saw the hospital bed, the white blanket on her body. But she couldn't be back at McLean! Not again! She'd done everything they'd asked! The therapy, the medications!

She reached up with her free hand to touch her scalp and was relieved not to feel any sticky spots. The last time at McLean there had been electric shock therapy. They'd put her under for that. She'd wake up not remembering anything, but she'd have telltale spots where they used the gel to make the electrodes adhere to her scalp.

“You won't feel any pain,” the doctor had assured her. “You'll sleep like a baby. And you'll wake up feeling so much better. We've made a great deal of progress in this area of mental health.”

Some progress. Still the white gowns, the shuffling patients medicated until their eyeballs rolled around in their heads.

Three times she'd been hospitalized. The ECT treatments came
last. They had worked, somewhat, to help her overcome the crippling anxiety, the depression. But Sarah was determined never to return. So far she hadn't.

So where was she now? A hospital, yes, obviously. But this place felt different. Busier. And nobody was moaning or screaming or muttering.

Sarah forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly. She tried to sit up. Instantly, she felt a restraining hand on her arm. She tried to shake it off.

“Easy, Mom. Let me fix the bed.”

Elizabeth was here! Then this must not be the terrible past but the beautiful present. Thank God.

Elly,
she reminded herself.
She doesn't like the name you gave her. How could she know you named her for that choral director in high school, the one teacher who ever thought you'd amount to something? God bless Elizabeth Murphy.

There was her daughter's lovely face, hovering above her own. The eyes wide and clear and blue, the blond hair a smooth curtain. Sarah tried to smile, but something felt wrong with her mouth. She felt one side go up but not the other, as if it were stitched in place.

And Elly looked all wrong, too. There were lines around her eyes. The cobwebs of age.

Her daughter was a woman now, with a life of her own, Sarah remembered. Older like the rest of them. How was it possible that all three of her daughters were this old and this unhappy? Disappointed with their lives, even with so many options at their fingertips? Options she'd never had.

Disappointment was like an epidemic among today's young women. If you could have it all, maybe you were never satisfied with any of it. Tragic.

Sarah winced at a sudden pain in her neck. She remembered everything now: today, and the days that came before it. Maybe this was it, the death she'd thought was coming. Never enough time in a life.

The weeks and months and years had flipped by so fast that she could still remember dancing the very first time with Neil, the two of them swaying cheek to cheek to “Summertime,” and then “I've Got the
World on a String,” his male scent of starched shirts and spicy aftershave. She could recall those moments with her husband as if they'd been last night, even as she was massaging her arthritic hands. Hands so thin now, the veins showed through the loose skin like blue twine.

Goddamn Neil. The nerve of him, to die.

Elly looked worried, but she was still angry with her, too. Sarah could see that in her daughter's eyes: the flinty gray beneath the blue. Elly's anger felt physically painful, like the sharp pricks of a Swiss Army knife.

Yes, that's what Elly would be, if she were a weapon: something small with multiple blades. Sneaky and quick.

“Death by a thousand cuts.” Wasn't that what the Chinese did for punishment, once upon a time?
Lingchi
. Neil had taught her that word. Neil, who read everything. Who had gone off and seen the world without her. Then died before he could come home again. Had to be shipped home in an ordinary little box, manhandled by incompetent postal carriers.

Well, whose fault was that? She thought this, but was aware of tears. Of a dark hollow space beneath her rib cage. Her chest heaved. So unpleasant, grief. It left a bad taste in her mouth and an anvil pressing down on her heart.

Laura was here, too, approaching the bed to peer down at her. She would never be a small and sneaky knife. Laura's misery and anger turned her into something blunt and hard, a war hammer or a mace. Sarah could imagine her eldest daughter wielding a weapon on horseback. Fearless. Determined. Steadfast. Furious.

Laura had certainly been furious last night, when Sarah had called and asked her to come to the inn. “Why didn't you dial 911, if you could get to the phone?” Laura had shouted when she'd arrived and found Sarah on the floor. “Why did you call me instead? What if it's too late?” Yelling at her. Red in the face. Terrified and angry.

Sarah had passed out again before she could explain the shame, the need to avoid hospitals at all costs. She'd held her head high, always, even knowing people talked about her hospitalizations. How unstable she was.

“Her husband left and took her mind with him,” she'd heard a woman say once as she passed.

But Sarah had shown them. She was a rock, as solid as the granite around Folly Cove.

Now she remembered the phone call that had sent her tumbling down the back staircase. Flossie. Saying she didn't care if Sarah kicked her out of the house. Off the property. She was sorry, but she had told the girls everything.

“It was time,” Flossie had said. “You should have been there to do it yourself. This foolishness has gone on long enough, Sarah. You don't want these lies hanging over your head forever. It was one thing to lie to your husband, but these are your daughters.”

Sarah had been upstairs, checking on a room that Betty said had a mold issue. She was on her way back down to the office when Flossie called. She had started shouting at her husband's sister the way she used to shout at Neil toward the end. She'd finally thrown her phone down the stairs. How tremendously powerful that anger felt, as if she could hurl the phone through the walls!

Then a moment of confusion as Sarah's vision blurred and her face tingled. She'd chalked that up to being angry, too. But her balance was off, and as she began her descent she slipped and lost her footing.

She'd fallen all the way down the back staircase. There was nobody to hear her cry out. Rhonda, Betty, Rodrigo, and the rest of the kitchen staff had gone home for the night. She didn't even know if Anne had been cooking for the dinner shift.

Anne. What sort of weapon would she be, if she were angry?

Anne was her strongest daughter. The one who had never needed her. She would be something nuclear. Poof, and you were nothing to her. Vaporized. Ash.

Laura's face had floated out of view and Elly was speaking. “Mom? Mom, can you hear me? Do you need something? Should I call the nurse?”

Sarah moved her lips. Or thought she did. Hoped. She wanted to ask for water, but no sound emerged.

“Nurse!” Elly called.

•   •   •

“I feel like absolute crap,” Elly said, cradling her chin in her hands, elbows balanced on her knees. “You know what my last words to Mom were yesterday?” She dropped her hands from her face. “‘Don't expect me to help you,' or something like that. It's probably my fault she had a stroke and fell down the stairs.”

Elly looked at her sisters, who looked back at her with expressions smoothed blank by shock. The three of them were in the waiting area while the nurse examined their mother. They'd already spent two hours in the ER, where Sarah had undergone a series of tests, including an MRI, and where several times they'd had to tell the nurses to stop shouting at her.

“Just because she has white hair, that doesn't mean our mom's deaf, for Christ's sake!” Elly had yelled at them. “She can hear you fine!”

Still, they'd had to correct the paperwork to give the nurses their mother's real birth date. Oddly, the nurses didn't seem all that surprised.

“You'd be amazed how many people lie,” one chatty RN told them.

“Elly, your mother had an ischemic stroke,” Ryder said now. “No way was this your fault, babe. Her fall was an unlucky accident, that's all.”

She and her sisters swiveled their heads to look at him. Elly had nearly forgotten he was there. Ryder was sitting apart from them, off in a corner. He looked so out of place that he seemed to have come from another country, or maybe even a different dimension, with his long blond hair, his earring, his leather jacket and blue jeans.

“He's right,” Laura said. Elly could tell by the look she gave Ryder that Laura was surprised he was here, too, even though she was the one who'd invited him. “Nothing anybody said or did caused this.”

“I don't know about that.” Anne was curled up against Laura on the short orange plastic sofa, some sort of cooking sauce splattered on her off-white sweater.

“What do you mean?” Laura demanded.

“Maybe the stroke was caused by stress. Like, by Mom knowing Aunt Flossie told us everything. Everything except the fact that Mom was hospitalized before. Three times, at least.”

“What?”
Elly and Laura said in unison, loudly enough that Ryder sat up straighter.

Anne nodded. Her red hair was bright beneath the fluorescent lighting, streaked with gold highlights. “I found out Mom suffered from depression and spent time at McLean's. You don't remember that?”

“No,” Laura said, “and I was a lot older than you. If that really happened, Mom and Flossie must have been pretty crafty to keep it from us.”

“Do you ever remember Mom being gone?” Anne asked. “Because I definitely do.”

Laura frowned. “A few times, sure. Flossie stayed with us when Mom went to a hotel conference once. I think she was gone about a week. Oh, and Flossie stayed with us another time, too, when Mom had to go away and take care of a sick cousin or something. I remember that because Mom missed my sixth-grade graduation.”

Anne lifted an eyebrow. “There you go. Flossie must have been covering for her.”

“I don't get it, though,” Elly said. “Why didn't Flossie tell us that while she was spilling the rest of it? Maybe it's not true, Anne. Mental breakdowns? Does that sound like Mom?” She looked from one sister to the other, but saw only doubt on their faces.

“Where's Flossie now?” Laura said. “Did either of you call her?”

Elly hadn't. Neither had Anne. That was probably better, Elly thought. “Let's not call her yet,” she said. “If she's the reason Mom got so worked up, it won't do her any good if Flossie shows up here. What about Lucy?” She turned to Anne. “Where is she?”

Anne's cheeks turned pink. “I left her with Sebastian. He was at my house having dinner.”

“Oooh,” Laura and Elly chorused.

“Really!” she protested. “I'd like it to be different, believe me, but it's not.”

Elly reached over to pat her hand. “Give it time.”

Ryder stood up and stretched. All three sisters turned to stare at him, Elly inhaling sharply as Ryder's shirt rode up, revealing his strong tanned stomach above his jeans.

They hadn't made love yet—Elly had spent the afternoon showing
him the area, hiking around Halibut Point and having coffee on Bearskin Neck at a café overlooking the water. He'd made her see Cape Ann with a Californian's eyes, marveling at the small wooden houses with their picket fences, the rocky coves, the birch trees and pines, the vibrant colors of the leaves, and the Gloucester fisherman's statue—which Ryder claimed he recognized from the boxes of frozen fish sticks his mother used to serve.

She'd been intending to take him to bed right after dinner, after making polite conversation with Laura, who she guessed would still be reeling from having told Kennedy that she and Jake were separating. But Jake was still at the house with Kennedy and said Laura had gotten a call from Sarah. Everything had moved fast from there; Ryder had driven her to the hospital in his rental car.

“I'm going to find the cafeteria,” Ryder said now. “Anybody else want something?”

They asked for soup and coffee, offered him money. He refused it and left.

“So what's up with that guy, Elly?” Anne gestured at the door after Ryder was gone. “He looks like Leonardo DiCaprio on steroids. Like, if I were a bear, I'd totally wrestle him.”

Laura snorted.

“Don't you dare laugh,” Elly warned her, then turned to Anne. “Laura invited Ryder to film Mom's birthday party. He's a cameraman I know from Los Angeles. A friend, that's all.”