The Girls of Tonsil Lake (18 page)

When the weeping finally subsided and we were sniffing into crumpled tissues Sarah pulled from her pockets, she said, “I’m very proud of you, too, Mom.”

It was the first time since Tommy died that I thought I might actually live. It was the first time I wanted to.

Vin

My work at the office was so backed up that Gunderson’s actually broke down and hired me an assistant. He’s a brand new college graduate who’s spent the last few months interning at another publishing house. He’s smart and eager and he wants my job.

Most days, I’d like to let him have it.

I don’t believe I’ve ever known such discontent. I’ve been unhappier—I’ve just come off the worst two years of my life—but I’ve never been so restless.

It would be so easy to chuck it all and move to Hope Island, bag and baggage. I love it there, I believe I love Lucas, and I could do free-lance editing to stave off boredom. It would be easy, yes, but something holds me back and I don’t know what it is. At least I didn’t till I talked to Andie.

“You’re afraid Hope Island will become Tonsil Lake,” she said bluntly when I told her. “What if it doesn’t work out with Lucas? What if you can’t stand the winters there? What if you wake up and you’re facing the same dead end we were facing back there in those trailers?”

“I guess so.” I leaned back in Mark’s leather desk chair and stared at the ceiling. “I think I’m scared of starting over.”

“With good reason,” she said. “It’s a forny bitch.”

“How’s Suzanne?”

“Scary.”

“What?” I sat up.

“She retired and went to work at a daycare center, sold her car, and put her condo on the market. You knew all that, but, Vin?”

“Yeah?”

“We all had lunch today because Jean’s working too hard and looks like a dishrag, and I saw Suzanne’s roots. I saw Jean’s earlier this summer, but I think that was just a fluke because her hair was a mess. But Suzanne didn’t have a hair out of place and I could still see them.”

“Get real.” Andie and I had teased Suzanne about her perpetual blondeness ever since she’d discovered a peroxide bottle in our freshman year of high school. I wanted to keep doing that.

“No, I’m serious. She doesn’t seem miserable or anything, but when her lipstick disappeared while we were eating, she didn’t put more on. And she was wearing sweats. Jean and I were, too, but we always do. Suzanne always wears skinny pants with a shirt tucked in. I’m afraid she’s doing some kind of self-imposed penance because of Tommy. You know that game everybody plays when somebody dies.”

“The ‘if only’ game? Yeah, I know it well.” I had been at a writers’ conference in New Jersey when Mark died. I went against my own better judgment because he insisted. It took me months to forgive myself. I don’t think his daughters have forgiven me yet. “Give her time.”

“I know. It’s just that...”

I waited a minute. “What? Just that what?”

“Time’s so damned precious. I hate to see either of you wasting it.”

“What do you mean, Andie?” Alarm made the hairs on back of my neck stand up. “Are you okay?”

“Me? Of course,” she answered too quickly. “Hey, you should see Jean’s office. Actually, you should have been here while we all created it. It looks great, but she worked us to death. David threatened her with a hammer one day, I swear.”

I laughed in spite of the prickles of unease I still felt. “What did she do?”

“I’m pretty sure she offered him sex. We told her that was probably the only thing that would save her. So then all the guys were fighting over the hammer to threaten us with. It was a really mature kind of afternoon.”

“I’m glad she got it. The office, I mean.” I looked at the clock, surprised at how long we’d been on the phone. “How’s Jake?”

“Not good.”

“Ah, Andie, I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

“No. Probably later I’ll be calling you screaming my brains out against wicked fate, but for now we’re just doing one day at a time.”

“Well, call if you need anything.” I yawned. “I need to get off here and go to bed. Tomorrow’s another forny wonderful day at the office.”

“Vin?” Her voice was quiet. “I’m serious when I say time’s too precious to waste. Don’t let that second chance we talked about in Maine pass you by, okay?”

“I won’t,” I said. “Promise.”

I hung up and went into the bedroom to crawl between the sheets, wondering if that was a promise I’d be able to keep.

Chapter Twelve

Andie

Paul and I had just come back from a four-mile walk. I like walking a lot, but I like sauntering. You know, just cruising along sniffing at flowers and tossing beer cans into a garbage bag and noticing that so-and-so’s lawn needs mowing in the worst way.

One does not saunter when she’s walking with Paul Lindquist. We do a lot of cardio-vascular stuff and warming up and cooling down. The cooling down part is the only one I really like, and if I had my way, I’d never get hot enough to need it.

Of course, it’s August now, which is no laughing matter in the Midwest. All you have to do to get hot is exist. I was all for giving up walking altogether in August, but Paul wouldn’t hear of it. Now we go after dark, which is cooler—or it would be if he’d let me saunter.

“How’s Jake doing?” asked Paul, when I was leaning against the relative chill of the refrigerator pouring a bottle of water down my parched throat.

He hadn’t even broken a sweat, drat his in-shape hide.

“He’s had to quit work and go on disability,” I said. I looked past Paul and out the kitchen windows at the darkness that lay beyond. In life, I guess there’s always darkness just beyond. And in death. “He gets tired just talking on the phone.”

Silence stretched between us, not comfortable as it usually was, but tense like the heavy air before a thunderstorm. I knew what Paul was going to ask and what I was going to say. The silence was probably better.

“What’s he going to do when he can’t take care of himself?” He spoke carefully, his eyes on mine.

I opened the refrigerator door to replace my water bottle and answered with my back turned to him. “He’ll come here. We’ve already made all the arrangements with hospice.”

Paul’s hand rested on my shoulder. “Andie?”

I turned back to face him, closing the door and leaning against it. “Yes.”

“Don’t you think you might have mentioned it? That we might have talked about it?”

“It wasn’t your decision to make, Paul. It was mine. He can’t go to Miranda’s because both she and Ben work and because of the kids. Lo doesn’t have the time, room, or temperament for it.” It was funny how, after twenty-eight years of “young Jake,” it was so easy to call my son Lo. I wondered if it was one of those rites of passage, when you see your children as real adult people rather than beloved responsibilities.

“And what about you? You’re still trying to get your health completely back.” Paul looked angry, and I didn’t know whether it was at me, Jake, or himself. “What about you, Andie?” he said again. “How could Jake ask—”

“He didn’t,” I inserted crisply. “He wouldn’t. And he fought us tooth and nail on it. Do you want some coffee?”

“Please.”

I made it as I talked. “We discussed it in Maine, and the children and I had talked about it before then. Jake was all for staying in Chicago, but that’s too far for them to see him often. So then he wanted to go into a nursing facility down here.” I poured the water into the reservoir and turned back to Paul. “None of us could stand the idea. We want him to die among people he loves. People who love him. That’s us.”

I wanted him to understand, but I’d been on my own too long to plead for that understanding. I had survived without Paul Lindquist before; I could do it again.

He didn’t say anything at all until we had gone out to the patio with our coffee and taken our accustomed seats in the two lounge chairs Lo had bought me for my birthday.

“When my wife was sick,” he said quietly, “it got to where I couldn’t take care of her alone anymore. It was hell on her, me, and the kids. On a good day, she asked me to put her in a nursing home so that we could remember her as the woman we’d loved.”

He cleared his throat, staring toward the stillness of the woods behind the house. “I wouldn’t do it, so we got help and we kept her at home and took care of her till the end.” He looked over at me, and his eyes looked hot and unhappy in the dusky light from the kitchen. “It was the hardest thing I ever did. The last month or so, she wasn’t even the person I knew. The medication and the disease had made her into someone else, someone I wasn’t in love with. Someone who...I was relieved when she died.”

“But you still loved her,” I said. I swung my feet to the ground between the chairs so that I could look into his face. “I haven’t been in love with Jake for years, and I know full well that it will be a relief when he dies—the idea of seeing him suffer is unbearable—but I still love him. He’s still Miranda and Lo’s father. This is something I can do for him and for them.”

“You don’t think it’s above and beyond what you need to do?”

I smiled. “When I was sick, Jake Logan called me almost every day. He sent flowers, and silly presents, and armloads of books he’d go into a bookstore and buy at random. He called from Chicago and had pizza delivered on nights I didn’t feel like eating, called Jean and Suzanne to come over when my voice didn’t sound right on the phone, had Miranda steal hospital bills right out of my mailbox and send them to him so he could pay what the insurance didn’t cover. And he never once came to see me because he knew how low my resistance was. Not once in a whole year.”

I felt tears pushing against the back of my eyes and sniffed to hold them at bay before accepting the handkerchief Paul held out to me. “So, no,” I finished, “I don’t think it’s above and beyond.”

He sighed. “Well, damn.” He reached for me and pulled me over into his lap. His words were muffled against my hair. “I guess the rest of the story of my wife’s last months is that it was—I don’t know—a precious time, I guess. Those random moments when we laughed together or shared memories. Even though everything had changed, I guess you’re right when you say I still loved her.”

He gave me a kiss and met my eyes in the near-darkness. “Tell me how I can help.”

Jean

I typed “The End” and started the printer. I had written a hundred thousand words in three months and I hadn’t any idea whether any of those words were even remotely marketable. What was more, I didn’t care. This book,
Dancing in Moonlight
, had come directly from my heart, leaving it both eased and full at the same time.

I looked around my office with satisfaction. The room was everything I’d wanted it to be. Even Carrie had been delighted when it was finished. There was something of everyone I loved in here: the wallpaper the girls had hung, the bookshelves David and the boys had built, the book covers the Tonsil Lake girls had framed for me. One wall was devoted to family pictures and there was a small round table with four chairs for brainstorming or man-bashing sessions. But it was my room. Mine.

A sound from the doorway made me look up. David stood there, dressed in a tee shirt and the cotton pajama pants we’d both taken to wearing around the house as the mornings and nights cooled. “It’s done,” he guessed.

I nodded. “It may be the end of my career.” Then I frowned at him. “Why aren’t you dressed? Aren’t you going to work?”

David had gone back to work at his old office as a consultant. He worked a few days a week and traveled when he wanted. It was an arrangement that made David, his employer, and me all very happy.

“Not today.” He looked at his watch. “I think my wife has a doctor’s appointment in an hour-and-a-half. I’m going with her.”

“Don’t you trust me to tell you what the tests show?”

“Nope.”

I had finally broken down and gone to Carolyn the week before. The pain had progressed to the point that I could no longer hide it, and no amount of antacid I took touched it. She had taken some tests and sent me to the hospital for more.

“I know what it is,” I told her flatly. “We’ve talked about it before. You know my history.”

“Do you mind letting me do my job?” she asked testily from her chair beside me. “Maybe it is. I’m not going to lie to you about that. But maybe it isn’t, either. Those symptoms don’t belong exclusively to advanced ovarian cancer. And who are you to just give up without a fight? Your daughters are my patients, too. Is that the kind of example you want to set for them? If it’s your history, it’s theirs, too. How would you feel if it were Carrie or Kelly deciding to martyr herself?”

“You always were the meanest mom in the carpool,” I said.

“Nah. Andie was.” She shook my folder at me. “If you’re not back in here next week, Jean, I’m coming to your house. You don’t have to come to me for this if you feel like we’re too close or if you’d rather have a doctor from Indy, but don’t let it go any longer. All right?”

And now it was next week.

I was strangely calm as I dressed, did my hair, and put on makeup. David was happy, the children settled, the book done. I could deal with whatever came next.

He held my hand in the car on the way to the doctor’s office. We talked about things like bringing in the plants before frost, making sure the cars were winterized, what to serve for Birthday Saturday that week.

When David had parked and we were walking toward the professional building beside Lewis Point Memorial Hospital, he took my hand again. His was trembling.

“David?” I stopped walking and looked up at him, drawing my hand free to lay it on his chest.

His heart beat strong and safe against my fingertips. The leaves overhead fluttered in the breeze so that the sun dappled the ground around us in a dance of lights. I thought, as we stood there together, that life had given me many perfect moments—the children’s births, sitting on a rock in Maine with my best friends, time after time with this man that I loved. How could I ask for more?

He smiled and reached to frame my face with his hands. “All I want in this life,” he said, “is you.”