And, finally, this: I know a lot more people will love you in your life but nobody will love you the way I have.
Her mother, who Eliza had always thought was perfect, had not been. Her mother’s happiness, which Eliza had accepted as an absolute truth, had been fragile. She, Eliza, as a little girl of two, had been deserted, and then reclaimed. She didn’t know what to do with these new pieces of information, but she couldn’t let them go either, so she just kept turning them around and around in her mind, breaking them into jigsaw puzzle pieces, trying to fit them back together again.
She was crossing the Wiscasset bridge, more than two hours into her journey, when her cell phone rang. The screen showed her father’s number. Her nerves were already on edge because she hated driving over bridges, but now the too-familiar ball of panic and dread rose in her throat. This was it. He was having another seizure, or worse. She swallowed around the dread and scraped out her question in place of a greeting: “What’s wrong, Dad?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Guy can’t call his daughter?”
“Do you need to go to a doctor? Are you in pain?” She kept her eyes straight ahead, her peripheral vision snagging on the steel-gray water, tinted here and there with azure, with turquoise. “Have you been taking your AEDs?”
“Don’t know what that means.”
“Your anti-epileptic drugs, Dad. Your seizure meds.” Deep breath, and she was over the bridge.
“I took the pill, just as I was supposed to. My head’s fine,” said Charlie. And: “Why would I want to go to a doctor now, after all of this time not going?”
“Maybe you changed your mind.”
“Nope.”
“Does something else hurt?”
“Not a thing.”
“So why’d you call?”
“I just wanted to hear your voice, Eliza, something wrong with that?”
“Of course not.” Except that it was wildly out of character.
“Your voice sounds just like your mom’s did, you know that?”
The ball of panic and dread took on weight and rolled back and forth somewhere deep inside Eliza. “Dad. You’re scaring me. Do you want to come stay in Barton for a little while? I’ll turn right back around and get you. I’m only two hours away, I have plenty of time. I can set up the guest room for you, I promise you’ll be comfortable, you can see the girls, see the play tomorrow…” She pulled over into the first parking lot she saw and prepared to reverse her journey. Sprague’s Lobster, with the requisite picnic tables, the signs for lobster rolls and clam fritters, the tourists.
“I just saw the girls. I wanted to say goodbye, that’s all. I was sleeping when you left. Getting lazy, I guess.” He forced out a little laugh that made her want to cry.
“Dad. Not lazy. Obviously. You’re sick. Your body is fighting itself, you need to sleep. Let me come back for you.”
“No. I just missed saying goodbye to you, is all. Wanted another shot at it.”
Eliza pulled back out into the traffic. She said, “You said goodbye, last night, remember? When I was packing up. I said I’d leave early in the morning, I wanted you to sleep in.”
“That’s right. Yuh. Must’ve forgot.”
Eliza blinked and concentrated on the road, on the car in front of her. The car had Maryland plates and she could just make out the words TREASURE THE CHESAPEAKE before her watering eyes started to make them blur. No, stop it, Eliza, no crying. She just had to get used to the new reality of having a sick parent, that was all. This could drag on for months, a year, more. She couldn’t panic over every short phone call, she couldn’t read disaster into every tone of voice. She’d drive herself crazy. She’d definitely drive Charlie crazy. What she needed was a plan to get through each day. So her plan for now was that she’d go home for Evie’s play, and then the very next day she’d come back, and she’d be the best caretaker the world had ever known, and she wouldn’t give up on trying to get her dad to Zachary Curry, and no matter what she wouldn’t leave her dad’s side.
“Sorry,” he said now. “Didn’t mean to worry you.”
“That’s okay, Dad.”
She thought about what Val had told her; she thought about herself at sixteen, running out the door, into Russell’s truck, not looking back, leaving her father alone in the living rom. At eighteen, packing for college, salivating at the thought of starting fresh. At twenty-five, thirty, thirty-two, thirty-five, setting up a whole different kind of life while all along Charlie continued his: up every morning, out on the boat, each day so similar to the one that had just passed and the one that would follow, just like her mother said in the letter. She thought about how Charlie had carried that burden around with him forever, the knowledge that there had been times when he hadn’t been enough for his wife or his daughter.
“Daddy?” she said after some time. She tried to keep her voice steady. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” The way Charlie’s voice was gruff and vulnerable at the same time tore a little hole in Eliza’s heart.
Stop and go, stop and go, the car with the Maryland plates couldn’t make up its mind.
“For being a jerk,” she said. “When I was sixteen. Running around with Russell Perkins, thinking only about myself. Leaving you alone all the time.”
“Eliza, when you were sixteen you were an angel. The best I could have asked for.”
“There’s no way that was true.”
“That’s how I remember it, and how I always will.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry for a thing. Not a thing, Eliza. Not ever. Goodbye now.”
There was more she wanted to say. But what? Sorry that I failed you? Sorry that I made you feel like you weren’t enough for me either? Sorry that you won’t let me help you now, when I might be able to?
No. It wasn’t possible. It was all unsayable. So instead she said this: “Bye, Daddy. I love you. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
Outside of Wiscasset the traffic eased suddenly, and Eliza felt the liberation of unrestricted movement; it felt like a breath of fresh air after leaving a stifling room.
47
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Mary
Late in the afternoon on the 3rd of August, two days after she turned eighteen, Mary Brown knocked on the door of Charlie Sargent’s house. She didn’t hear an answer, and her first thought was, Okay, maybe it’s done already, so she let herself in. Then she heard his voice.
“That you, Mary?”
“Yup.” She sounded small and frightened.