Merritt stood, smoothing her hands on her dull skirt as if wiping away a stain. An ugly plastic headband held back her beautiful hair but couldn’t control it from blowing in the breeze, shifting in the muggy air like an impatient child hopping from foot to foot. The thought made Loralee want to smile, recalling a photograph of Merritt as a little girl wearing sparkly red shoes and a pink tutu she’d made herself. Loralee was sure that girl was still inside Merritt somewhere. What she didn’t know was whether the little girl who loved bright shoes and designing her own outfits was buried under too many years of sorrow to find her way out. She hoped not. For Owen’s sake, she really hoped not.
Merritt’s voice was strong, almost as if she’d been practicing saying the words in her head. “Despite what you might think, I loved my father. We were all the other needed for a long time after my mother died. Until you came along and he didn’t need me anymore, although I still needed him. I never forgave him, but I never stopped loving him.”
She paused, and Loralee imagined all the words in Merritt’s head falling into neat, orderly columns like numbers, rounded and even and organized before she allowed them out.
“I’ll do it for Owen. Because he’s my brother and because our father would want me to. And, as you reminded me, the two of you are a ‘package deal.’ Fine. You can stay here, too, until you can get on your feet again. Just don’t expect me to forge a relationship with you. I never forgave my father, so don’t expect me to forgive you.”
She’d said all this with her back to Loralee, and Loralee was glad, since that meant Merritt couldn’t see the small smile on her face. Somehow, and quite by accident, she’d gotten what she’d wanted. What Owen needed. For the first time in months the terror and uncertainty began to shrink back like the ocean at low tide, calling the waves home.
Merritt began walking toward the kitchen door, but Loralee’s words stopped her. “I loved him, you know. And he loved me. Yes, he was old enough to be my father, but as my mama used to say, love can’t tell what color a person is or how old they are. Love just happens. I know you don’t want to hear that, but you need to. We were very happy together. The only thing missing was you. You would have made our family and happiness complete, and we never stopped hoping that would happen.”
Without a word, Merritt made her way to the back steps and into the kitchen, the screen door shutting behind her like a slap.
chapter 8
MERRITT
Looking down from my spot on the bluff, I saw the ribbon of river shift from light to shadow, dodging the sun as a sailboat made its way toward the bridge. I sat in a rocking chair on the front porch and drank my first cup of coffee, as had become my habit in the last week, trying to identify what was so different there, what made the light seem drenched in yellows instead of the gray-white light of home.
I hadn’t grown up on the water in Maine, but close enough that I could sense its nearness, the frothy power of it, the dark depths of it that could swallow a boat while the waves continued to rise and fall as if nothing had happened. My mother had grown up on the coast in Stonington, in a family of fishermen. Maybe it was my mother’s story of an uncle whose boat had been lost at sea during a storm that made me eye the ocean with suspicion. Or maybe it was the fact that my mother happily moved inland when she married my father and never ventured near it again.
In college I’d gone to Higgins Beach on spring break with a friend. Low tide made an old shipwreck visible not far from shore, and that had been enough to keep me close to land. I’d gotten only as far as my ankles into the water before proclaiming it too cold, and then spent the rest of the break under an umbrella worrying I’d get sunburned, and avoiding looking at the spot where the water claimed the ship again at high tide. That was the first and last time I’d ever gone to the beach. Every once in a while I wondered whether it was because I really hadn’t enjoyed the experience, or if my reluctance to join my friends under the waves had more to do with my mother—with her avoidance that could have been as much about the water as it was about her childhood memories of growing up with my difficult grandmother.
Bringing the cup to my face again, I breathed in the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee. I’d grown up with instant coffee—two scoops and hot water in the microwave. Not because it tasted better or even the same as real coffee, but because it was faster and easier. True to her word, Loralee had breakfast on the table and a steaming cup of percolated coffee for me each morning, somehow managing not to chatter and to disappear from the room when I entered. It made me feel uncomfortable, guilty even, but I had no idea how to change things without her thinking I had forgiven anything, or forgotten that she was living in my house when all I wanted to be was alone.