C
HAPTER
8
Thea saw Alice coming around the side of the house. Before her landlady could knock, Thea opened the door for her. Henrietta appeared from somewhere under the house and began to circle Alice’s ankles. The cat’s purr was deafening.
“Good morning, Alice,” Thea shouted over the noise. “How does she do that?”
As if knowing she was the topic of conversation and not caring to be, Henrietta darted off into Alice’s small vegetable garden to wreak havoc on the worms and bugs.
“Henrietta was on the stage in her younger days,” Alice said, raising the plate she held in one hand. “I made these muffins earlier this morning and if I don’t get some out of my house I will eat them all by lunchtime. Here.”
“Oh, corn muffins!” Thea exclaimed, taking the offering. “They’re my favorite. I waited tables at this little diner by my college. They made the best corn muffins. I pretty much ate one a day for four years.”
“Good. They’re best with butter, but then again you probably know that.”
Alice made no move to leave. “Um,” Thea said, “do you want to ...”
“I’ll just stay for a minute, thanks.”
Thea put the plate of muffins on the kitchen counter. When she turned back around, she found the door closed and Alice standing in the living room.
“If I’m not mistaken,” Alice said, “you went out last night.”
“What? How did you know I went out?”
Alice waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t be alarmed. I’m not stalking you. But it’s a bit impossible not to hear a car pull out of a gravel drive, especially at night when it’s otherwise dead quiet. Except for the occasional owl or coyote whooping it up over dinner.”
“Oh,” Thea said. She felt embarrassed, caught out. She felt guilty, but of what, she couldn’t say. She was also dying to blurt the truth about Hugh, and, equally, to keep him a secret all to herself. “Of course,” she said finally. “I ran into an old friend yesterday. He’s on vacation.”
Alice nodded. “So, you guys went out for dinner?”
“Yes. Just dinner. Then I came home. He didn’t come with me. I drove myself.”
Thea thought she saw a twinge of a smile on her landlady’s face, but maybe she had imagined it. “That’s nice,” Alice said casually. She shoved her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. “Say, what was it about this ex-husband of yours that was so bad? Mind you, I’m not implying he wasn’t guilty of all sorts of crimes. I’m just curious as to what they were.”
“He lied,” Thea blurted, taken aback by the bluntness of the question, and by the bluntness of her answer.
“Everyone lies.”
“These were big lies. And he spent all of our money. My money, really. And he ...” Thea felt herself blush, whether in shame or in anger, she didn’t know.
“Ah.” Alice removed her hands from her back pockets and let them fall to her side. “Enough said. You were smart to throw the bum out.”
“He sued for divorce, not me. Though I was working up the nerve to.”
“Sounds like a real tool.”
Thea laughed, the tension the conversation had caused suddenly gone. “Well, that’s not a word I would have chosen, but yeah, he is.”
“They’re out there, no doubt about it.”
“How do some people turn out to be so awful?” Thea said. “That’s a rhetorical question.”
“Blame the parents. Blame society. Chalk it up to mental damage, something wrong with the brain’s wiring. It almost doesn’t matter, not to the victims, anyway.”
“No,” Thea agreed. “It doesn’t.”
Abruptly, Alice turned toward the door. “Well,” she said, without looking back, “I’d better get down to work. Articles don’t write themselves.” She left the apartment and a few minutes later Thea heard her footsteps overhead, retreating into the sunny alcove where she worked at a small, old rolltop desk.
And then, the phone rang. Daylight, and knowing that Alice was only a shout away, made Thea’s reaction to the call close to calm. She picked up the phone and recognized the number as her parents’. It would be her mother calling; her father didn’t do too well on the phone. His conversation ran to about three sentences: “Hello, it’s your father.” “So, how’s the weather there?” and “Okay, let me put your mother on.”
Thea put the phone down again on the occasional table. The call could go to voice mail. She really had nothing to say to her parents. And if they had anything of significance to say to her, well, then they could call again. And maybe she would take that call. Or not.
Right now Thea had a more pressing matter with which to deal: What to use as a blanket when she met Hugh at the beach later on. And she would deal with that matter right after she ate one of Alice’s corn muffins.
C
HAPTER
9
When Thea had suggested the beach as their destination, she hadn’t really considered the fact that it would be so very crowded on a sunny afternoon in mid-August. She and Hugh walked for almost a mile toward Wells before they found enough space on which to lay down the blanket Thea had borrowed from Alice. If Hugh found walking on shifting sand difficult, he didn’t say. Thea resisted the urge to take his arm, to offer assistance that he might not need and might even resent. She was relieved and sweaty when they settled on the blanket, looking out at the receding tide sparkling in the sun.
Hugh sat with his damaged left leg stretched out in front of him. He wore a bright blue T-shirt and a bathing suit that came down to the knees. On the damaged leg, two long scars ran from his ankle up past his knee. The calf was slightly misshapen. “I’m not sure you want to see the thigh,” he said with a bit of a laugh. “Doctors do wonders with reconstruction these days, but in my case there’s a gnarly factor ...”
“Oh, Hugh, don’t joke about it,” Thea cried. “I just feel so terrible this happened to you. Your poor leg.”
“Actually,” he said, “in some ways the leg wasn’t the worst of it. I had to have an emergency splenectomy when the paramedics got me to the hospital.”
“Oh.” Thea wasn’t quite sure what the spleen did, but she assumed it had some importance. “Um, what does that mean in terms of ...”
“Well,” Hugh said, “it increases my risk of sepsis, so I’m vigilant about cuts not getting infected. It might also increase my risk of developing diabetes at some point. Or not. I don’t dwell on it.”
“Oh,” Thea said, deciding that if she were the one with no spleen she would be thinking about it an awful lot. “Do you want to tell me what happened, exactly? With the accident, I mean. Of course, you don’t—”
“No,” Hugh said, “it’s okay. I don’t remember much of it, but I pieced together the story afterward. There were witnesses. A truck, one of those huge eighteen-wheelers, went out of control. I tried to avoid it and wound up flipping over the guardrail and tumbling down an embankment. Somehow I managed to get myself out of the wreck before it caught fire. I was incredibly lucky. Not everyone was. The truck hit a woman in another car head-on. She never had a chance. The driver of the truck didn’t make it, either.”
Thea gasped. “Oh, Hugh,” she said. “I’m sorry I asked you to talk about it.”
Hugh reached over, took Thea’s hand, and squeezed it briefly. His touch made her feel dizzy; she didn’t think it was merely the oppressive heat or her growing hunger. The restorative effects of the corn muffin were rapidly wearing off. No, Hugh’s touch was still electric.
“Actually,” Hugh was saying, “talking about the accident helps make it less of a trauma and more of just ‘one of those things’ that happen.”
“If you say so ...”
“I do. Anyway, after the surgeries I was in the hospital for some time, unconscious for the first few days. Then I was released to rehab for the leg. I continued to go to physical therapy for almost a year after I moved back home. Fortunately, I was in good shape to begin with so the whole thing wasn’t as bad as it might have been.”
Thea handed Hugh a bottle of water from the canvas bag she had also borrowed from Alice. She opened a bottle for herself before commenting, “You always did try to see the bright side of things.”
“ ’Try’ is the operative word. There were some bad moments during the ordeal. My fiancée at the time was an avid skier—an all-around athlete, really—and she didn’t exactly relish the idea of saddling herself with a husband who wasn’t going to be roaring down the slopes with her. So, she ended the engagement and took up with one of the guys we used to ski with on weekends.”
“She doesn’t sound like a very nice person!” Thea cried. “I’m sorry, Hugh. I had no right to say that.”
“Oh, she was nice enough,” he said mildly, “just kind of limited. I’ll say this much for her. She knew what she wanted and what she didn’t want. That’s got to stand for something.”
Thea smiled. “And you always did try to say something nice about a person, even someone not at all nice. Do you remember that kid in our homeroom junior year? The one who bullied some of the quieter kids? I thought he was just awful, but you really tried to find the good in him. You tried to understand why he did what he did. You tried to forgive him.”
“If he had bullied you, I wouldn’t have been so forgiving, or so understanding.”
“The only reason he didn’t mess around with me was because I was dating you!”
Hugh looked surprised. “You can’t tell me I actually scared anyone. I’ve never been in a fight in my life.”
“No,” Thea explained, “I think it was that people knew that if Hugh Landry didn’t approve of them, they were toast, socially speaking. No one wanted you on his bad side.”
“Interesting. I didn’t know I had such—authority.”
“You could easily have been class president,” Thea said. “If you had ever bothered to run.”
“You know that politics has never been my thing, beyond voting, I mean.”
“I know. And I always liked that about you.”
“Well, you’re about the only one,” Hugh said with a small, uncharacteristically bitter laugh. “My father and my former wife saw my lack of interest in a political future as a sign of laziness. Dad doesn’t bring up the topic anymore, thank God. He’s focused all of his unfulfilled political ambition on Piers now.”
“Is Piers planning on running for office?” Thea asked.
“I’m not sure. We haven’t talked about anything personal in a long time. But I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Yes,” Thea said musingly. “I can see Piers as a politician. There’s something—well, something a bit ruthless about him.”
“Yeah,” Hugh agreed. “I stick to volunteer work. There’s a lot less of an ego requirement.”
“Where do you volunteer?” Thea asked.
“For the past year I’ve been working at a center for grieving children. There was an awful lot of training involved. It’s tough work, but worthwhile. At least, I like to think we help some of the kids who come in.”
“I used to volunteer a fair amount,” Thea said. “But then, when I got married ... Well, my husband didn’t like my spending time with anyone but him. So I cut back ...” Thea felt herself blush. “Eventually, I stopped altogether. I’m afraid that since the divorce I’ve been pretty useless to anyone. Even to myself.”
“Thea.” Hugh’s tone was entirely sympathetic. “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. It seems to me this is the time for you to concentrate on your own well-being. The time will come to focus on others again. You know what I’m saying is true.”
“Sorry!”
A boy about ten or eleven years old waved with both arms to accompany his shout. The Frisbee he had been tossing around with some friends had gone wild and landed a few feet from Thea and Hugh’s blanket.
Hugh got up, left his cane on the blanket, and limped over to the Frisbee. With a smooth throw, he sent it flying back to the boy, who waved his thanks. Thea watched nervously as Hugh came back to the blanket. “You can walk without the cane,” she said, knowing it was an inane thing to say.
“Of course. It’s just not as safe. Speaking of safety, I’m pretty sure I saw a sign forbidding Frisbee and ball games this far down on the beach. The parents of those kids should be on that.”
Parents. Back when they had been but kids themselves, Thea remembered, she and Hugh had talked about having a family. She both wanted and didn’t want to ask Hugh why he and his wife hadn’t had children. And Hugh, Thea surmised, might be wondering why she hadn’t had children, either. In Thea’s case, the answer was simple, if not easy. The notion of having children with anyone other than Hugh had always seemed wrong. It had seemed an impossibility.
She was about to venture what might have been another inane comment when Hugh spoke. “The only reason I feel badly about not being close to my brother,” he said, “is that I miss out on spending time with his children. I mean, I’m at as many birthday parties and holiday functions as I can be, but other than that, well, let’s just say the invitations to hang out on a Saturday afternoon aren’t exactly forthcoming. He was my best man at the wedding, but that was more because it was expected of me to ask him than the fact that he was a real friend.”
“That’s too bad,” Thea said. “How old are Piers’s children?”
Hugh dug his phone out of his bathing suit pocket and found photos of his niece and nephew. “Five and three, Amelia and Arthur.”
“Nice names,” Thea said. “And they’re adorable children. Arthur has your eyes!”
“They’re good children, too. Whatever my opinion of Piers, I have to admit that he and Patricia are doing an excellent job of raising their children.”
“Maybe when Amelia and Arthur get older,” Thea said, “you can spirit them away for magical weekends in New York. You can be the glamorous uncle, the one they go to when they’re mad at their parents for being, well, parents.”
“Yeah,” Hugh said, “I guess. It would be better than nothing. Look, are you hungry?”
“Starved,” Thea admitted.
Hugh got to his feet, this time with the aid of his cane. “Me, too. Why don’t I go get us some hot dogs or something?”
Thea began to rise from the blanket. “Oh, I could go,” she said.
“No.” Hugh smiled down at her. “You stay here and watch for stray Frisbees.”
“Okay.” Thea smiled back at him. “If you happen to find some cookies or something ...”
“I’m on it.”
Thea tucked her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. And she watched as Hugh Landry, the man who was undoubtedly the love of her life, the man who should have been the father of her children, made his careful way amid prone sunbathers and toddling children and boys illegally playing ball. Tears had been threatening yet again since Hugh had told her more about his horrible accident and now they began to roll down Thea’s cheeks. She let them.