The panic returned to me, the blinding light that always washed away my sight and replaced it with dark, silent water. “No.” I shook my head, trying to erase the image to replace it with the dusty road ahead, the moss weeping from the canopy of oak trees above us. “Please. Don’t. I don’t talk about it.”
“Go Fish!” Owen shouted from the backseat, oblivious to our conversation.
“You didn’t drown,” Gibbes said carefully.
My hands gripped my bare legs, my nails making crescent moons in the skin. “Because my mother pushed me through the broken window.” I dug my nails in harder. “And when I tried to turn back to try to help her, she pushed me away again.”
We drove in silence for a while, and I cracked open my window to remind myself that the air outside was warm and dry.
His voice was steady and reassuring, as if he were preparing a patient for a shot. “Until we’re parents ourselves, it’s hard to understand what a mother will do to protect her child. I see that a lot with my critically ill patients. And I see it in Loralee.” He was thoughtful for a moment, weighing his words again. “Be kind to her, Merritt. I think she could use an extra dose of kindness right now.”
I turned to him, anger and surprise battling with each other. “I’m more reserved than a lot of people, but I don’t mean to be unkind. I don’t resent her anymore, if that’s what you mean.”
He nodded, a muscle in his jaw ticking. “She’s a single mother, which is never easy. She appears strong, but I think she could use a little TLC. She’s always worrying about others, and I don’t think there’s anything she wouldn’t do for her son if she thought it would be good for him.”
I looked down at my folded hands and the crescent marks on my thighs that hadn’t yet faded, and listened to the children’s loud giggles from the backseat. A reluctant smile tugged at my lips. “Like traveling to another state so Owen and I could finally meet?” I turned my face to the window and took a deep breath of the sticky, heavy air. “That’s why I resented her, you know. Because my mother had sacrificed herself to save me, and I did everything I knew to honor her memory.”
“And then your father met somebody else, and you thought he was somehow dishonoring her.”
“Yeah, pretty much. He said he’d always love my mother, but that there were so many more years left in his own life and he wanted to live them. It wasn’t Loralee—I would have resented anybody my father fell in love with who wasn’t my mother. I just couldn’t forgive either him or Loralee. It was like I wanted to punish them, to make them suffer as much as I was. Because I’d been there with her, in the water. I was the one who was arguing with her when she lost control of the car.”
He didn’t say anything, and we listened to the roll of tires on dirt and broken shells, and the sound of children playing a card game. A white egret settled delicately on the side of the road in front of us, its slow, graceful movements seeming to calm the wild beating in my chest. My mother loved birds, had loved to watch them at the feeders we kept around the yard. She would have loved that place, with the exotic flowers and the birds that were eerily prehistoric and tropical at the same time.
I pressed my forehead against the window as we drove slowly by the egret, and it seemed to be watching me with its round yellow eyes, prompting me to continue. There was something about Gibbes that invited confidences. I’d once believed Cal was like that, too. Maybe that was why I pressed on, wanting Gibbes to hear my story, to offer the absolution I’d never thought I deserved. Or maybe I was still the old Merritt, and was hoping to push him out of my life and get him to leave me in the solitude I’d come to Beaufort to find.
I continued. “I tried to help her, but she was stuck between the steering wheel and the seat. She just . . . pushed me away. She knew I could swim—she’d made me take lessons at an indoor pool when I was a little girl, even though she was afraid of the water herself. So I swam through the broken windshield—that’s how I cut my leg—until I reached the surface.” I swallowed, tasting the salt air that was so different from home, transporting me away from the cold night and the icy rain so I could remember it almost as if I were watching it happen to someone else. I breathed in deeply, smelling the scent of the marsh mud and sun-heated grass that had once been so foreign to me but had already become so familiar. And I thought of Cal leaving it all behind.
The children were giggling again and I closed my eyes, trying to lose myself in the sound, to escape my thoughts. But the summer air and the gentle presence of the man beside me made the words fall from my mouth anyway. “Cal told me I was a coward for leaving her, just as he’d said I was a coward for being afraid of the water. He said I should have tried anyway.”