Loralee paused as she stared out into the new day, the river golden in the morning light, glassy and bright like a promise. She hoped Merritt felt that, too: that each morning should always feel like a promise regardless of where you’d been the day before. She remembered the safety training she’d received as a flight attendant, how if they found themselves in water to roll on their backs and lead with their feet so they could see where they were going instead of where they’d been. She’d always thought that was a good way to approach life, too.
“We need to talk about the attic,” Gibbes said to Merritt.
She frowned up at him. “Not today. I can only handle one scary thing per day.”
She said it seriously, but the corner of his mouth turned up. “Me, too.”
Loralee grabbed her own purse from the hall table and followed Merritt out the door, wishing she could tell her what she’d written in her journal that morning as she was thinking about her coming out on the river that day. You are stronger than you think. She couldn’t, of course. Most people just needed to figure that out on their own.
She joined everybody out on the porch, pausing a moment to catch her breath, and waiting for the sound of the door closing behind her.
chapter 13
MERRITT
I could have said no. I had once been a young girl who’d grown into a young woman with opinions and a strong will, both of which the years had leached from my bones, an embalming of the spirit. But I still could have said no.
Maybe it was Owen’s obvious pleas that had made me agree to go along. I knew he’d been prompted by Loralee, or Gibbes, or maybe both, making me curious as to their motive. Or it could have been the memory of my father gently suggesting a family beach vacation, and my mother’s stubborn refusal to revisit a part of her unhappy childhood she wanted left in the shoe box of photos she kept under her bed. A perverse part of me wanted to find out whether our fear was genetic, something I’d inherited along with her dark hair and slender feet. Mostly, I thought, I wanted to prove Cal wrong in his belief that all fears are permanent, that, like bone fractures, they will heal but leave a hairline shadow.
But I could have said no.
Gibbes drove his Explorer with Loralee in the front seat and Owen, me, and Maris in the back. I’d insisted on the seating arrangement as soon as I realized that we would have to drive over the river to get to Lady’s Island, where Gibbes lived. I knew only that his house was on the marsh, and he had a dock, and that Lady’s Island had once been the home of large agricultural plantations before the Civil War—although Loralee had called the war something else. She might have said more, but I’d stopped listening, too intent on watching her toddle on incredibly high heels as we walked toward Gibbes’s SUV.
Where I’d lived inland in Maine, bridges hadn’t really been an issue. I didn’t travel far, and when I did, I would go to great lengths to avoid them. But there in the Lowcountry, the land seemed borrowed from the ocean. With strips of islands separated by creeks and salt marshes, avoiding bridges would be like avoiding snow in Maine in January.
Before my decision to move to Beaufort, I’d gone to the box of books I’d inherited from my maternal grandmother, who’d moved inland when my mother died to take care of me when my father was flying, and had died when I was in college. She was quiet, not unlike my mother, but always wore an aura of wariness, always overly cautious around strangers, events, and emotions. Which was why I’d been surprised to find that she owned a AAA South Carolina travel guide and road map. In all the years I’d known her, she’d never expressed any interest in knowing what might exist outside the small corner of her New England world. I’d felt ashamed, as if I’d never really bothered to know her. But then, she’d never offered, deflecting my questions with a dismissive flick of her wrist. It wasn’t until after I’d married Cal that I began to realize that we rarely really know everything about those whose lives we share.
I’d spread open the map of South Carolina across my kitchen table as if seeing the land itself would make my undertaking somehow real. As if by following red and blue highways with my fingers, crossing bridges, and driving alongside vast bodies of water, I was as good as gone. I was my mother’s daughter, after all. By her own admission she wasn’t a great cook, but an adequate one who surprised herself every once in a while with a flash of genius. Her recipe box was filled with minute, step-by-step instructions on how to make even the most basic item. It was her road map in the unfamiliar territory of the kitchen, just as my map would guide me through an even more foreign place.