“Come on up, if you don’t mind. Come right on up to the bedroom.” He sounded pretty chipper, considering.
Mary walked up the stairs. There were two bedrooms at the top, one on either side of the staircase, and she followed his voice to find the right one. Charlie Sargent was on his bed, propped up by pillows so that he was sitting with his legs straight out in front of him. His hair was wet and neatly parted and combed over to the side, and he wore a long-sleeved plaid shirt that looked new, or at least recently ironed, and a pair of blue jeans. It took Mary a minute to figure out why he looked so different from how he usually looked and then she realized that he wasn’t wearing one of his usual ball caps. Almost all of the lobstermen wore ball caps, almost all the time.
She had expected this to be a somber occasion, but Charlie smiled at her, a big, open smile, and she realized she was smiling back.
“You have what I’m looking for, Mary Brown?”
“Yes.” She pulled the baggie out of her pocket.
“Orange!” he said. “Aren’t they sort of cheerful.”
“Um. Yeah. So, I did some research. Sixty milligrams each. Which means between three and four to get to two hundred, which is the amount you want. So I guess four?” She tried not to let her voice crack when she talked but it cracked anyway. When in doubt, choose brave. Choose brave choose brave choose brave.
Charlie nodded. “Sounds right.” Then he said, “I hope it was no trouble, bringing these to me. I never did want to cause anyone trouble.”
“I know you didn’t. Don’t worry.”
Mary saw then that next to Charlie on the bed were the photos she had seen downstairs the last time she’d been here: Eliza and her mother, and the photograph of Eliza’s family. It was seeing the photographs that made this all seem real, and suddenly her hands were slick with sweat and her face was warm and her eyes were wet.
“Are you scared?” she whispered.
“Nah,” he said. “Not anymore, not like I was last time we talked. My head was hurting something awful this week, but all of a sudden it’s not hurting anymore.”
“Okay,” she said. “Good. I’d be scared.”
“I bet you wouldn’t.”
“I bet I would.”
When in doubt, choose brave.
“Now, Mary. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to put the pills down but don’t hand them to me. And then I want you to leave. After a little bit, maybe an hour, I want you to call Val and ask her to come by the house. Just tell her I asked you to, that’s all. There’s a note with her name on it in the kitchen. Never been much of a writer, but I did my best. She’ll find it, you don’t need to worry about that. There’s one for Eliza too. Val’ll take care of talking to Eliza, so you don’t need to worry about that either. I know Eliza, she’s going to make a lot of bother about it, but my note explains that this is exactly how I wanted it, and you’re not going to be involved.”
“Got it,” Mary said. She didn’t know exactly what she had expected, but definitely not for it all to be so…so businesslike. So organized. On the nightstand was a glass of water with two fresh ice cubes in it. She did as she was told, putting the bag of pills on the nightstand.
“The most important thing is you get out of here, okay? No reason you should be around for any of it.”
“But then…but then you’ll be all alone.”
“I’m not going to be alone at all. I’m going to see Joanie again. Soon I’m going to be less alone than I’ve been in twenty-five years.”
Well, that did it. She couldn’t talk any longer, she was crying.
“Don’t cry, Mary. Hell, I’m not crying.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding and wiping at her mouth. “Can I—do I, uh, say goodbye?”
“Hell yes, Mary. Come and give me a hug.”
“That’s okay, for me to do that?”
“I’m not so fragile, not yet. Could do with a hug.”
When the hug was over Charlie’s voice got softer and he said, “You’re my angel, Mary, and I thank you for what you’ve done for me.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered, because You’re welcome seemed too formal, and also too casual.
“Now it’s time you were getting out of here.”
“Yes,” she nodded. “Right. I will.”
Downstairs Mary opened the front door and then closed it again, so if Charlie was listening he’d hear the sound of that. But she didn’t leave.
48
BARTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Eliza
Evie’s play took place in the auditorium of the high school attached to the girls’ private day school. Eliza drove Rob, Zoe, and herself to the play. Rob couldn’t drive. His arm was bound up in a sling, and he was jacked up on prescription painkillers—he said he felt pleasantly fuzzy some of the time, but when the medicine started to wear off he just felt glum. He looked glum. His arm hurt, and his pride hurt, and even more than his arm and his pride, his heart hurt. His heart hurt the most.
Judith said she’d meet them at the play—she’d been running lines with Evie for weeks, and she wanted to see how the whole thing turned out.
(“The spider dies,” Zoe had said in reply. “That’s how it turns out.”)
Eliza couldn’t help looking around the auditorium and wondering how, without Cabot Lodge, without Judith’s money, without the prospect of more work for Rob, they’d ever be able to keep the girls in that school. Maybe she could get a job, but she was basically just a medical school dropout, trained only in quitting, mothering, and hauling traps. The lobster population in the waters near Barton was minimal, not enough to support a family of four accustomed to living at a certain level.
Eliza sat between Zoe and Rob, and Judith sat on Rob’s other side. Rob immediately got caught talking to another parent, a dad who was obviously only thirty percent okay with missing work to attend an amateur theater production. He kept looking at his phone. Judith’s eyes were searching the auditorium, probably wondering if they sold cocktails in the lobby like they did at the Ethel Barrymore on Broadway. Zoe was tapping away on her iPhone. Eliza reached over and slid the phone gently from Zoe’s hands and into her own bag.
“Hey!” said Zoe.