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Now That You Mention It
Kristan Higgins
New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins welcomes you home in this witty, emotionally charged novel about the complications of life, love and familyOne step forward. Two steps back. The Tufts scholarship that put Nora Stuart on the path to becoming a Boston medical specialist was a step forward. Being hit by a car and then overhearing her boyfriend hit on another doctor when she thought she was dying? Two major steps back.Injured in more ways than one, Nora feels her carefully built life cracking at the edges. There’s only one place to land: home. But the tiny Maine community she left fifteen years ago doesn’t necessarily want her. At every turn, someone holds the prodigal daughter of Scupper Island responsible for small-town drama and big-time disappointments.With a tough islander mother who’s always been distant, a wild-child sister in jail, and a withdrawn teenage niece as eager to ditch the island as Nora once was—Nora has her work cut out for her if she’s going to take what might be her last chance to mend the family. Balancing loss and opportunity, dark events from her past with hope for the future, Nora will discover that tackling old pain makes room for promise…and the chance to begin again.


New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins welcomes you home in this witty, emotionally charged novel about the complications of life, love and family
One step forward. Two steps back. The Tufts scholarship that put Nora Stuart on the path to becoming a Boston medical specialist was a step forward. Being hit by a car and then overhearing her boyfriend hit on another doctor when she thought she was dying? Two major steps back.
Injured in more ways than one, Nora feels her carefully built life cracking at the edges. There’s only one place to land: home. But the tiny Maine community she left fifteen years ago doesn’t necessarily want her. At every turn, someone holds the prodigal daughter of Scupper Island responsible for small-town drama and big-time disappointments.
With a tough islander mother who’s always been distant, a wild-child sister in jail and a withdrawn teenage niece as eager to ditch the island as Nora once was, Nora has her work cut out for her if she’s going to take what might be her last chance to mend the family. Balancing loss and opportunity, dark events from her past with hope for the future, Nora will discover that tackling old pain makes room for promise…and the chance to begin again.
Also by Kristan Higgins
ON SECOND THOUGHT
IF YOU ONLY KNEW
*
The Blue Heron Series
ANYTHING FOR YOU
IN YOUR DREAMS
WAITING ON YOU
THE PERFECT MATCH
THE BEST MAN
*
SOMEBODY TO LOVE
UNTIL THERE WAS YOU
MY ONE AND ONLY
ALL I EVER WANTED
THE NEXT BEST THING
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
JUST ONE OF THE GUYS
CATCH OF THE DAY
FOOLS RUSH IN
Now That You Mention It
Kristan Higgins


www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-08233-4
NOW THAT YOU MENTION IT
© 2018 Kristan Higgins
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This book is dedicated to Stacia Bjarnason, PhD—
kindness incarnate, brilliant beyond measure, brave, funny
and a dog lover to boot. It’s an honor to be your friend.
Contents
Cover (#u7506d49d-def6-5673-ab40-28d0103360c0)
Back Cover Text (#u2fb0106b-11ea-5103-bf76-9e9cd4bebe06)
Booklist (#u0b6e97d4-a3e8-54e1-8798-9839475d2da4)
Title Page (#u8ea7d0fa-0f0a-56cd-b561-6d4ab5f3f91f)
Copyright (#u69d094ca-d745-56ca-a4b0-2aad589acdad)
Dedication (#u8903f6cd-3334-552c-8a48-90fbdae38de9)
Chapter 1 (#uc24511a4-b479-5016-bb25-5ff7753a4bdd)
Chapter 2 (#ud2b98573-3cf6-5235-985b-017eb6d91e98)
Chapter 3 (#ud2f37660-30ba-5cbb-b76d-2103f950a7ff)
Chapter 4 (#uf62c1d58-3389-51f0-9dca-9c680fea9bfc)
Chapter 5 (#u641329bc-7766-5533-9f42-12c71ca1fc4c)
Chapter 6 (#uc87d9be6-f99c-59e7-bbb2-a427a531b4a2)
Chapter 7 (#u3815e949-590c-5509-af2f-ffd4df0fcf99)
Chapter 8 (#u6ed1fcfb-466d-5e7a-b987-422c635ffde8)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
For Book Club Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#u3ec61b32-5ed6-5084-bdec-d56c97ffb0c1)
The first thought I had after I died was: How will my dog cope with this?
The second thought: I hope we can still go with open casket.
Third thought: I have nothing to wear to my funeral.
Fourth: I’ll never meet Daniel Radcliffe now.
Fifth: Did Bobby just break up with me?
* * *
Let me back up in an hour or so.
It was a quiet night at Boston City Hospital—for me. It usually was. While I worked at New England’s biggest and busiest hospital, I was a gastroenterologist. Most of our patients were diagnosed in the office before things got too critical—everyone freaks out if they can’t eat or poop, after all. So aside from the occasional emergencies—hemorrhages or burst gallbladders—it’s a pretty mellow field.
It’s also a field with a low mortality rate.
I had just checked the four patients my practice had on the unit—two elderly women, both impacted, sent in by their nursing homes for enemas, basically; one small bowel obstruction, resolving nicely on a clear-liquid diet; and one case of ulcerative colitis which my colleague would operate on tomorrow.
“So more fiber, Mrs. DeStefano, okay? Lay off the pasta and add some greens,” I said to one of the impacted patients.
“Honey, I’m Italian. Lay off the pasta, please. I’d rather die.”
“Well, eat more greens and a little less pasta.” She was ninety-six, after all. “You don’t want to get all bound up again, do you? Hospitals are no fun.”
“Are you married?” she asked.
“Not yet.” My face felt weird, as it always did when I fake-smiled. “But I have a very nice boyfriend.”
“Is he Italian?”
“Irish American.”
“Can’t win them all,” she said. “Come to my house. You’re too skinny. I’ll cook you pasta fagioli that will make you cry, it’s so good.”
“Sounds like heaven.” I didn’t point out that she no longer lived in a house. And that no matter how sweet the little old lady might be, I didn’t visit strangers, even strangers who thought I was skinny, bless their hearts. “Get some rest tonight,” I said. “I’ll check on you tomorrow, okay?”
I left the room, my heels tapping on the shiny tile floors... I always dressed for work, having come to my love of clothes later than most. I adjusted my white doctor’s coat, which still gave me a thrill—Nora Stuart, MD, Department of Gastroenterology stitched over my heart.
I could do computer work, I supposed. The nurses would love me for it. My rounds were finished, and I was just killing time, hoping that for once, Bobby would be ready to leave at the end of his shift. He worked in the ER, so the answer was usually no.
But I really didn’t want to go home alone, even if Boomer, our giant Bernese mountain dog mutt, would be there. Boomer, the bright spot in my increasingly gray life.
No. My life was fine. It was great. Best not to navel-gaze right now. Maybe I’d call Roseline, my best friend here in Boston, an obstetrician. Even better, maybe she’d be on call, and I could help deliver a baby. I texted her, but she immediately responded that she was at her in-laws’ for dinner and contemplating homicide.
Too bad. Roseline understood the grayness. Then again, maybe I’d been leaning on her too much. I wrote back suggesting various ways to dispose of the bodies, then stuck my phone in my pocket.
I ambled over to the nurses’ station. Ah, lovely. Del, one of my favorite CNAs, was sitting there, lollipop in his mouth, going through a pile of papers. “Hey, buddy,” I said.
“Dr. Nora! How’s it going?”
“Great! How are you? How’d the date go the other night?”
He leaned back in his chair, a huge smile coming over his face. “She’s the one,” he said smugly. “I knew it the second she smiled at me.”
“Really?”
“Really. I mean, she looked up, and I practically got down on one knee. It was like we’d known each other forever. Like we were made for each other, special order, you know?”
“Sure!” I said, a bit too emphatically. “Same with Bobby and me.”
Del’s smile faltered just a little.
Just then, an overhead page went off. “Attention, please. Attention, please. Dr. Stuart, Dr. Nora Stuart, to ER Eleven, stat.”
I jumped. “Oh! That’s me!” A GI call to the ER was rare enough to still be thrilling. “Off I go, then. Bye, Del!”
I ran down the hall, feeling very badass, one hand over my stethoscope so it wouldn’t bounce, wondering what the call was. Foreign body in esophagus (choking, in other words)? Hemorrhagic lower GI bleeding? Always exciting. More common in a city ER would be esophageal varices due to alcoholism or hepatitis—blood vessels in the throat that burst and can cause the patient to bleed to death.
I loved going to the ER. Gastroenterology was just as important as emergency medicine, but no one wrote shows about my specialty, did they? The ER was where the cool kids hung out, and my boyfriend was their king. Bobby often said there was little the emergency department couldn’t fix—but if they’d paged me, well, then... I was the captain now.
I ran down the stairs into the ER, over to the triage nurse. Ellen looked up and said, “Twelve-year-old with a bellyache, looks sick, number eleven.”
“Thanks, Ellen!” She failed to smile back. Bobby loved her, but to me, she was as charming as the Dementors in Harry Potter, always looking for some happiness to smite.
To Exam Room Eleven I went, walking briskly but not running. The ER was fairly quiet tonight; the usual suspects—the elderly, a few kids, a few addicts, a guy with a bloody hand who smiled as I walked past.
Gastroenterology...well. Someone had to do it, right? And I liked it, mostly. Ninety percent of my patients got better. The colonoscopies...believe it or not, there was a Zen to them. But yeah, it didn’t make the best party chatter. I couldn’t count the number of flinches I got when I told people what my field was, but they sure cared when they had an ulcer, didn’t they?
Jabrielle, one of the newer ER residents, stood outside the exam room. She was a little too infatuated with Bobby, as demonstrated when she gazed deeply into his eyes at the last party we’d gone to, one of those we can’t break eye contact because this conversation is so intense situations. Jabrielle was also irritatingly beautiful.
“Are you the GI consult?” she asked, failing to recognize me. Again.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Nora. We’ve met. Three times.” She still looked blank. “Bobby’s girlfriend?”
“Oh. Right. Anyway, I suspect appendicitis, but his pain is a little more midline. We’re waiting on labs. I was going to scan him, but the attending wanted the consult to see if we can avoid the CT.”
The patient looked young for twelve, his skin ashen, face drawn with pain. We didn’t want to expose him to radiation from the CT scan if we didn’t have to. “Hi, bud,” I said. “We’re gonna take good care of you, okay?” I smiled at the mother as I washed my hands. “I’m Dr. Stuart. Sorry your son is having trouble.” I glanced at the chart. Caden Lackley, no trauma, eating mostly normally until today, acute abdominal pain, fever, nausea and vomiting. “Any diarrhea or mushy poop, Caden?” Like I said, not the best party chatter.
“No,” he answered.
“Okay. Let’s take a look.”
I felt his stomach, which was tight, one of the signs for appendicitis. But the pain wasn’t in the expected place; in fact, it wasn’t anywhere near McBurney’s point in his lower right abdomen. “It’s not his appendix,” I said.
Jabrielle pursed her perfect lips, irritated that she’d been wrong. All the ER docs were this way, hating when we specialists disagreed with them.
The kid sucked in a sharp breath as I palpated just under his ribs on the right side. There was no pain on the left. I rolled him to his side and tapped on his back to check for kidney problems, but he didn’t react.
He was probably too young for gallstones. Pancreatitis, maybe, but again, given his age, it was a bit unlikely. It wouldn’t be Crohn’s disease without diarrhea. “How long has your stomach been hurting, Caden?”
“Since Sunday.”
That was a nice specific answer. Today was Thursday, so five days of stomach pain. “Has it stopped and started?”
“No. It’s been there the whole time.”
I thought a second. “Did you eat anything different over the weekend?”
“We went to a party at my sister’s,” the mom said. “There was a lot of food, but nothing he hasn’t had before.”
“Anything with small bones in it? Fish, chicken?”
They looked at each other. “No. Nothing with bones,” she said.
“How about a toothpick?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Those scallops wrapped in bacon.”
Bingo. “Did you maybe swallow a toothpick?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“He was eating them like popcorn,” his mother said.
“Well, they are fantastic.” I smiled. “Sometimes people can swallow things without noticing it, Caden, so I’m going to do an endoscopy. Basically, you get some nice relaxing medicine, I slip a tiny camera into your stomach and look around and maybe I’ll see a toothpick. Sound like fun?”
It did to me.
I told Jabrielle to give him some Versed to relax him, then sprayed his throat with lidocaine to numb it, so he wouldn’t gag. His mom sat next to him, holding his hand.
“This won’t hurt a bit,” I said, then I got to work, sliding the scope into his throat, talking quietly through it, looking up at the screen as Caden’s esophagus and stomach were revealed. Healthy tissue, the beautiful web of blood vessels, the grayish walls of the stomach pulsing and moving with life.
And there, in the lower part of the stomach, I saw the toothpick, now black from stomach acid, sticking out of his duodenal wall. Using the endoscopy forceps, I gently grabbed it and slowly pulled it out. “Ta-da,” I said, holding it up so my patient could see. “We got it, Caden. You’ll feel a lot better tomorrow.”
“Good call,” Jabrielle murmured.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll order up some antibiotics, but he should be right as rain. In the future, big guy, eat more carefully, okay? This could’ve done a lot of damage. It could’ve slipped through into your liver, and that would’ve been really bad.”
“Thank you so much, Doctor,” the mom said. “We had no idea!”
“My pleasure,” I said. “He seems like a great kid.”
I pulled off my gloves, shook her hand, tousled Caden’s hair and went out to write the prescription.
Felt a little heroic.
If left untreated, that toothpick could’ve caused sepsis. It could’ve been fatal. Though it didn’t happen too often, I think I could firmly say I’d saved a life tonight.
Just then the doors to the ambulance bay burst open, and a pack of people ran down the hall next to a gurney. “Drive-up gunshot to throat” barked someone—Bobby, it was my honey! “Extensive blood loss in vehicle, get the Level One infuser running with four units of O positive. Call the blood bank for a mass-transfusion pack, and call trauma code for Room One, now! Stop sitting on your asses, people! Move!”
The place exploded with action, people running in every direction, doing as their lord commanded. I inched toward the room where the action was, hypnotized. Good God. It looked like half the man’s throat was missing, a meaty hole about the size of a fist, Bobby’s hand inside it.
“I’m clamping his carotid with my fucking fingers!” Bobby yelled. “Where the hell is the surgeon?”
Indeed, Bobby’s arm was drenched in blood, his scrubs sprayed with arterial spatter. The rest of the team buzzed around the patient, cutting off his clothes, inserting lines.
“No, you can’t intubate, idiot!” Bobby barked at an intern. “Can you not see my hand in his throat? Bag him, you moron!”
I sure didn’t miss residency. The ER doctors had been brutal.
Dr. McKnight from Surgery burst in, pulling on her gloves, a face shield already in place to protect her from blood-borne diseases. Someone draped her in a gown. “Clamp,” she snapped. “Now!” If there was anyone more, ah, self-confident than an ER doc, it was a surgeon. “Keep your hand there, Bobby, and don’t even breathe. You lose your grip, he bleeds out in five seconds. How the hell did he make it here with a pulse?”
Then a nurse saw me gaping and closed the door. I wasn’t ER staff, after all.
I snapped out of my awestruck stupor and closed my mouth. Janitorial was already mopping up the trail of blood, and half the residents—including Jabrielle, who shot me a dirty look, since I made her miss the good stuff with my boring endoscopy—hovered at the exam room window to see if the guy would make it.
The other patients in the unit were quiet in their exam stalls out of respect, it seemed—a TV-worthy trauma had just passed through their midst.
I wandered back to the triage desk. “Hi again, Ellen,” I said. “That’s some—”
“You done with that consult?” Ellen asked.
“Oh, yeah. Um...he swallowed a toothpick. I did an endoscopy and—”
She gave me the stink eye and picked up her phone. Right. She was busy, and I was an irritating doctor who made her life harder...which was true for a lot of nurses, especially in the ER. All the more reason I bent over backward to make sure they knew I appreciated them. But Ellen wasn’t the type to drink in the milk of human kindness, so I slunk to the computer and entered the report.
Just as I finished, the door to Bobby’s exam room opened, and out came the team again, heading for the elevator up to the surgical floor. I could hear the beeping that indicated a regular heartbeat. Somehow, they’d saved his life or at least given him a chance.
Dr. McKnight got on the elevator with the transport team, and as the doors closed, she called, “Nice work, people. Bobby, awesome job!”
The doors closed, and applause broke out throughout the department.
The next shift of ER staff was coming on, already aware that there’d been a good save, already jealous it hadn’t happened on their shift.
Bobby and his team were in no hurry to pass the torch, either. They high-fived, made much ado about their bloody clothes, their part in the drama, Dr. McKnight’s speedy and delicate end-to-end anastomosis.
Bobby didn’t say much—he didn’t have to, because it was clear he was their god.
Finally, his eyes stopped on me. I smiled, proud of him, even as that little irritating voice said it was about time he’d seen me.
“Oh, hey,” he said. We’d been together long enough that I could tell he’d forgotten I was working tonight, too. “Uh...we were gonna order a pizza and stick around to see how the patient’s doing.”
“Sure. Of course. Hey, Bobby, that was amazing. I saw a little bit.”
He shrugged modestly. “Were you waiting for me?” he asked.
The irritation flared again. “No, I was on a consult. Twelve-year-old ate a toothpick. I scoped him, and it doesn’t look perfed. Think we caught it before he got septic, too.”
“Cool. Well, you want to hang out with us?”
I suppressed a sigh. I didn’t. I wanted to go home and take a walk with Bobby and Boomer and get pad Thai. If we stayed here, I’d have to call Gus, our dog walker. I wanted to tell Bobby about my good call, my instincts of guessing what had caused the pain, which was what separated good doctors from mediocre ones.
But he was the one who’d had his hand in a man’s throat.
“Sure,” I said.
“Cool. Just let me get washed up.” He left, stopping so the janitor could shake his hand.
Five minutes later, we went into the staff lounge, where the rest of the team was already in full adrenaline-junkie-chatter mode. More congratulations were given. More high fives. More jokes.
“Who’s gonna get the pizza?” Jabrielle asked.
Everyone looked at me, the outsider. The boring gastroenterologist (who had also saved a life tonight, though that story wouldn’t get aired).
“I’ll do it,” I said. “What would you like?”
Despite a magna cum laude degree from Tufts, medical school at the same and a profession in which I earned a third more than my boyfriend, it seemed I was back in the days of waiting on customers at Scupper Island Clam Shack.
“Thanks, Nora,” Bobby said. A couple other people paused in their self-praise to echo him.
“You bet.” I walked through the ER, trying not to sigh.
In the hallway was a gurney. A young woman in a neck brace lay there, holding hands with a young man about the same age, also in a neck brace. College kids in a car accident, I’d guess. He leaned down so his forehead touched hers, and her hand went to his hair. They didn’t speak. They didn’t have to. Their love was that palpable.
Bobby and I had been like that once, right after the Big Bad Event.
But not for a long, long time.
It made me feel...gray.
Outside lurked the typical raw Boston April night—rain splattering, a cold wind gusting off the bay, the smell of ocean and trash, since the sanitation workers were on strike. It was eight-thirty, which meant a quiet night in our fair city. SoHo we were not.
I started off the curb, glanced to my left.
There, right there, was a giant green ant on top of a van and the words Beantown Bug Killers. In a flash I saw that the driver had one of those hideous lumberjack beards with crumbs in it, and he wore a Red Sox hat and there were Dunkin’ Donuts napkins on the dashboard, and then the van hit me. I didn’t feel anything at first, but it would hurt, I knew that, and, boy, a lot of thoughts can go through your head in one second. Have they ever measured that? Brakes screeched as I sailed through the air like a rag doll, distantly aware that this would be bad. I hadn’t taken one step to get away; there hadn’t been time. Then the ground slammed up at me, my head bouncing on the pavement, hard. A car door slammed, followed by a thick Southie accent. “You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me, lady. I didn’t even fuckin’ see ya. Oh, my Gawd! You okay? Fuck!”
His voice was fading.
The smell of trash only now, sour and sickly sweet. I was lying near an overheaped garbage can. Would that be the last thing I saw? Trash? I wanted Boomer.
I wanted my mom.
The trash can was graying out. I couldn’t see anymore.
I’m dying, I thought. This time, I’m really going to die.
And then I was gone.
2 (#u3ec61b32-5ed6-5084-bdec-d56c97ffb0c1)
How will my dog cope with this?
My soul, it seemed, wasn’t ready to leave just yet and was still hung up on the concerns of the material world.
Poor Boomer, the Dog of Dogs, my sweet little hundred-pound puppy, who protected me and came into the bathroom when I showered to stand guard just in case someone broke in. Boomer, who loved me with all his giant heart, who would put his head on my leg, who asked for nothing other than an ear scratch, who was afraid of pigeons but adored ducks... No one would love him the way I did. He’d be sad and confused for the rest of his life.
I knew I shouldn’t have waited for stupid Bobby! And why the hell was I the one getting the pizza? Why hadn’t I stood up for myself and told beautiful, snotty Jabrielle to go her damn self? She was a resident! I was a fully vested doctor, thank you!
But I hadn’t, and now I was dead.
I hope we can still go with open casket.
I had often envisioned my funeral—me lying against the rose-colored satin, looking utterly stunning, U2’s and Ed Sheeran’s sadder songs playing gently in the background while my friends wept and laughed over their precious memories of me. A closed casket was not part of the scenario, hit by Beantown Bug Killers or not. I wondered if my face was smooshed in. Eesh.
I have nothing to wear to my funeral.
Granted, in life I’d been a clothes whore, at least during the past fifteen years or so. But for my funeral, I wanted something special. The navy-blue-and-white polka-dot Brooks Brothers dress I’d been eyeing, or that pink floral Kate Spade. But maybe that would be too festive.
I’ll never meet Daniel Radcliffe now.
It had always been a long shot, I knew that, but I’d imagined stalking him after he did a show on Broadway, waiting by the side door, our eyes meeting, his inimitable smile, going out for a drink, sharing our favorite moments from Harry Potter, me finding out that he, too, hated the destruction of Hogwarts and agreed that Ron was nowhere near worthy of Hermione. Now, with me dead, it definitely wasn’t gonna happen.
True, no one was acting like I was dead, but I was fairly certain I was. Maybe they just hadn’t noticed yet. I guessed this ER wasn’t quite the be-all and end-all of modern medicine, was it? I thought I’d heard the words dislocated patella and ortho consult and trauma alert. I was pretty sure I’d seen the tunnel of light, but my spirit was tuning in and out.
What was that beeping? It was really hurting my head.
I’d read about this kind of thing happening. Out-of-body experiences. The soul lingering a little while before heading for the afterlife. Did I know anyone who’d greet me from heaven? My dad, maybe, if he was dead? That mean-ass grandmother of mine who used to tell me I was fat? I hoped she wasn’t there. Who else? Maybe that sweet patient who’d died of pancreatic cancer during my fellowship. God, I had loved her. My first fatality.
“So she’s your girlfriend?” someone asked. I knew that voice. Jabrielle. Couldn’t miss that hint of sneer.
“Yeah.” Bobby.
Was he about to start sobbing? Wait, did Bobby have to call the code on me? Or had he been hysterical, calling my name, having to be dragged out by two burly orderlies? Either way, the poor, poor man. Dang, I wished I remembered! I guess I’d shown up a little late to my own death. Which did seem to happen a lot in the movies.
The beeping was persistent and annoying.
“How long have you been together?” Jabrielle again.
“Oh, a little more than a year. It’s funny, though. I was gonna break up with her this weekend.” A pause. “She’s not in the best shape, anyway.” Gentle laughter.
I almost smiled.
Wait. What?
Did Bobby just break up with me?
I was barely even cold! Did he—Was he—
“So what will you do?” Jabrielle asked.
“It would be pretty shitty to dump her now, I guess.”
A female purr. “Well, when you’re a free man, give me a call.”
“Wish I didn’t have to wait so long.”
Are you even kidding me?
No. No, no. I was dead. I didn’t care about these things. Soon, I’d be floating up to the stars or something.
But just in case, I decided to try to open my eyes.
Oh, shit. I wasn’t dead. I was in the ER. That beeping sound was the heart monitor, nice and regular, 78 beats per minute, O2 sat 98 percent, BP 130/89, a little high, but given the pain, not unexpected.
And Bobby was fondling a piece of Jabrielle’s hair.
“Do you mind?” I said, my voice croaking.
They jumped apart.
“Hey! You’re awake! Take it easy, hon, you’re gonna be okay.” Bobby took my hand—ow, my shoulder!—and smiled reassuringly. He did have the prettiest blue eyes. “You were hit by a car.”
“Beantown Bug Killers,” Jabrielle added.
“Did I die?”
Bobby smirked. “We had to sedate you. You have a concussion—we scanned you, but you’re fine. Bruised kidneys, broken clavicle and a patellar dislocation, which we reduced. It’s splinted, and we’re waiting on ortho to check you out. Can you feel your toes?”
Everything hurt. My back, my head, my shoulder, my knee. I was one giant throb of pain. But whatever they’d given me made it so I didn’t really care.
I guess my tunnel of light had been the CAT scan.
“I want another doctor,” I said.
“Hon, don’t be that way.”
“Bite me. You were flirting over my corpse.” I pulled my hand free. Ow.
He rolled his eyes. “You weren’t dead, Nora.”
Fury blotted out the pain for a second. “Well, I thought I was. Get out. Both of you. Don’t be surprised if I file a complaint for unprofessional conduct. And call Gus to walk Boomer.”
The tug of the sedation or concussion pulled me back under, and before the door had closed, I was asleep again.
* * *
When I woke up, I was in a regular hospital room, Bobby asleep in the chair beside me. Some weary white carnations were in a vase next to me, their edges brown. If that wasn’t a metaphor for our relationship, I didn’t know what was. I sensed that moving would be very painful, so I breathed carefully and took stock.
My left arm was in a sling. A brace of some kind was on my right leg. My back hurt, my abdomen ached, and my head throbbed, little flashes of light in my peripheral vision with every heartbeat.
But I was alive. Apparently, the concussion and drugs had given me that out-of-body feeling.
Bobby stirred, never a good sleeper. Opened his eyes. “Hey. How you feeling?”
“Okay.”
“Do you remember what happened?”
“Hit by a van.”
“That’s right. You were crossing the street, and you got hit. Besides the patellar dislocation, your left clavicle is broken, and you’ve got fractures in the sixth and seventh ribs on the left. Pretty good concussion, too. The trauma team admitted you for a night or two.”
“Did you call Gus?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” He was quiet for a moment, then leaned forward. “I’m sorry about Jabrielle.”
Surprisingly, my throat tightened, and tears welled in my eyes, slipping down my temples into my hair. “At least you made it easy,” I whispered.
“Made what easy?”
“Breaking up. I can’t really overlook you hitting on another woman when I’m bruised and battered in the ER, can I?”
He looked ashamed. “I really am sorry. That wasn’t classy at all.”
“No.”
“Roseline came by. I called her. She’s upstairs on L and D, but she’ll come down later.”
“Great.”
We were quiet for a few minutes.
Once, I thought I’d marry Bobby Byrne. Once, I thought he’d be lucky to have me. But somewhere in the midst of our year and change together—after the Big Bad Event—I got lost. What was once a bright and shiny penny had become dirty and dull and useless, and it was high time I admitted it.
Bobby hadn’t loved me for a long time.
I was going to need help for the next few weeks. Concussions were serious business, and with my injured arm and leg, I had mobility concerns. I’d need help, and I wasn’t about to stay with Bobby.
Problem was, we lived together. Roseline was a newlywed; otherwise, I’d stay with her. Other friends... No.
“I want to go home,” I said.
“Sure. Tomorrow. I’ll take a few days off.”
“I meant home. To the island.”
Bobby blinked. “Oh.”
Strangely enough, I wanted my mother. I wanted the pine trees and rocky shores. I wanted to sleep in the room I hadn’t slept in for fifteen years.
I wanted to see my sister.
Yes. I’d go home, as one does after a brush with death. I’d take a leave of absence from the practice and go back to Scupper Island, make amends with my mother, spend some time with my niece, wait for my sister to come back and...well...reassess. I might not have died, but it was close enough. I had another chance. I could do better.
“And I’m bringing Boomer,” I added.
* * *
A week later, still sore and slow, arm in a sling, leg in a soft brace, one crutch to balance me, I looked around our apartment for the last time. Bobby’s apartment, really. Roseline had come over last night, and we got a little weepy, but she said she’d come see me on Scupper. Bobby had thoughtfully made himself scarce and had been sleeping on the couch all week.
I should never have moved in with him. We’d only been dating a couple of months before the Big Bad Event, after which we shacked up. Way too early. But then, going back to my place was out of the question. He said we were moving in together, I said yes. Also, we’d been in love.
And lest we forget, Bobby got off on saving people.
In the week since I was hit by Beantown Bug Killers (who had sent flowers every day), I’d done a lot of thinking. I wanted to stop being afraid, to stop settling for the half love Bobby gave me, to stop feeling so gray. The time had come.
Bobby stood by the door, Boomer on the leash. There were tears in his aqua-blue eyes. “This is harder than I thought it’d be,” he admitted.
“We’ll still see each other. Joint custody and all that.”
He smiled, petting Boomer’s big head. “Thanks for that.”
Yes, we were sharing the dog. After all, we’d gotten him together.
“You want to go for a ride, Boomer?” I said, uttering the most wonderful words a dog could hear. “You want to go in the car?”
Bobby drove us to the ferry station, where people could grab a boat to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Provincetown or, in my case, Scupper Island, my hometown, a small island three miles off the rough and ragged coast of southern Maine. The ferry came to Boston almost every day; it was also the mail boat and could carry all of three cars.
Bobby unloaded my suitcases and bought my ticket. Our breakup had made him once again solicitous; he’d been a prince these past few days, fetching me my painkillers, reading to me as I fell asleep, even cooking for me.
I didn’t care. He’d been fondling someone’s hair in my hospital room, and that was not something I’d forget.
The ferry pulled in, a battered little thing, same as it had always been. Jake Ferriman, the eponymous captain of the Scupper Island ferry, was a fixture. He didn’t acknowledge me, just tied up the boat and jumped off, a small sack of mail in one hand.
I’d hoped my mom would come on the ferry to get me; I’d called her when I was discharged from the hospital and told her I’d be coming home, that I’d been hurt but was okay—I think I used the words expected to recover, always looking for attention where my mother was concerned. Her only response had been a sigh, followed by “I’ll pick you up at the dock when you get here,” and I bit down on all the things I wanted to say. It could wait. I was starting over, after all.
Jake returned from wherever he dropped the mail, carrying the return post in a bag in one hand. He checked his clipboard. “You travelin’ alone?” he asked, eyeing Boomer.
“With the dog here.”
He frowned, glanced at me again, then made a check mark on his clipboard.
“I guess this is it, then,” Bobby said. “Call me when you get settled, okay?”
He hugged me carefully, then buttoned my coat over my sling. There was the lump in my throat again. “Take care,” I whispered.
We’d been friends for a long time and a couple for more than a year. All that was over and done with now.
Bobby’s eyes were wet, too.
Jake hefted my suitcases onto the boat, then took Boomer’s leash. My dog jumped happily onto the boat and snuffled the wind. I followed more carefully.
I went inside the ferry’s cabin and sat down, laid my crutch next to me. Looked at Bobby through the window and waved. Tried to smile.
“Ever been to Scupper before?” Jake asked.
I blinked, surprised he didn’t know who I was. Then again, I was an adult now. I wasn’t the overweight girl with bad skin and worse posture. “I grew up there. I’m Nora Stuart, Mr. Ferriman.”
“Sharon’s girl?”
“Yes.”
“The one with the kid?”
“No. The other one.” The doctor, I almost added, but that would’ve been prideful, and Mainers didn’t like that.
Jake grunted, and I sensed our conversation was over.
Then he started the engine, pulled the lines, and we were off, Boston’s pretty skyline growing smaller as we headed out on the dark gray water, toward the clouds hanging on the horizon.
My hands tingled with nerves, and I petted Boomer’s head. He looked up at me with his sweet doggy smile. “Sorry about this, pal,” I whispered. “No one is going to be too happy to see us.”
3 (#u3ec61b32-5ed6-5084-bdec-d56c97ffb0c1)
Scupper Island, Maine, was named for Captain Jedediah Scupper, a whaling captain who left Nantucket after he lost an election on the church council. He came to settle his own island and give Nantucket a big middle finger. Nantucket didn’t seem to mind. Captain Scupper brought a wife and five kids, and those five kids found spouses, and before you knew it, there was a legitimate community here.
Over the years, its residents lived the same way as those on most Maine islands did—they suffered after the whaling industry died, then turned to fishing and lobstering.
Islanders prided themselves on survival and toughness, bonded together by hurricanes and nor’easters, drownings and hardship. When the Gilded Age hit, it gave Scupper a new industry—service. Cleaning, gardening, catering, carpentry, plumbing, nannying, taking care of the rich folks and their property.
That never changed.
I grew up with the belief that while the rich people came in June—the summer nuisance, we called them—Scupper Island was for us, the tough Yankees. We’d deal with the summer people, those who owned big houses on the rocky cliffs and moored their wooden sailboats in our picturesque coves. The kids were attractive and polite, but never our real friends, not when they wore Vineyard Vines and Ralph Lauren and had European nannies. Not when they ate at the local restaurants where our parents worked.
But they were our bread and butter, and lots of them were genuinely nice people. They donated to our schools, paid the taxes that kept our roads patched and plowed, fed the local economy. Still, we were glad when they left every Labor Day. Being cheerful representatives of their summer getaway was a little wearing.
Scupper belonged to us. To my sister and me, to our dad and absolutely to our mom.
My mother, Sharon Potter Stuart (and believe me, her maiden name was the source of great joy to this Muggle), was a fourth-generation islander, born and raised here. She was a typical tough Maine woman—able to shoot a deer, dress it and make venison chili in the same day. She cut and stacked her own wood, made her own food, viewed going to restaurants as wasteful. She knew how to do everything—fish, sail, fix a car, make biscuits from scratch, sew our dresses. Once, she even stitched up a cut when the one doctor on Scupper was attending a difficult birth.
Scupper was not just the name of our founder. It’s also part of a ship—a drain, essentially, that allows excess water to flow out into the ocean, rather than puddle in the bottom. It was almost fitting, then, that so many of Scupper Island’s residents left, slipping away to bigger waters. If you didn’t make your life off the sea or tourism, Scupper Island was a tough place to stay.
Mom never went to college, never took a vacation. Once, I made the mistake of asking if we could go to Disney World, like just about every other American family. “Why on earth would we go there? You think it’s prettier than this here?” she said once, her thick Maine accent turning earth to uhth, here to heeah.
My earliest memories of my mother were all good. She was safe and reliable, as mothers should be. Our meals were nutritious if unimaginative. She braided my somewhat-wild hair every day, patiently taming the snarls without ever pulling. She made sure we were clean. She drank black coffee all day long, the kind that she brewed in a pot on the stove, and watched us play while she did housework and chores, a hint of a smile on her face.
Our house, though plainly furnished, was clean and tidy. Homework was done at the kitchen table, under her gaze. She went to all the parent events at school. When we walked through a parking lot or across the Main Street and Elm intersection, she held my hand, but otherwise, there wasn’t a lot of physical affection. When I was very little and she gave me my bath, sometimes she put the washcloth on my head and told me I had a fancy hat. Otherwise, she was simply there. And don’t get me wrong. I knew how important that was.
She loved me, sure. As for my sister...well, Lily was magical.
My sister was twelve months and one day younger than I was, and different in every way. My hair was brown and coarse, not quite curly, not quite straight; Lily’s was black and fine. My eyes were a murky mix of brown and green; Lily’s were a clear, pure blue. I was solid and tall, like our mother; Lily was a fairy child, knobby elbows and bluish-white skin. Lily often got carried, snuggled up on Mom’s sturdy hip. When I asked if I could be carried, too, Mom told me I was her big girl.
I loved my sister. She was my baby, too, despite the scant year between us. I loved her chick-like hair, her eyes, her skinny little body snuggled against mine when she crept into my bed after a bad dream. I loved being older, bigger, stronger.
Those early years...they were so sweet. When I thought of them now, my heart pulled at the simplicity of it. Back when Lily loved me. Back when my parents loved each other. Back before Mom’s heart was encased in concrete.
Back when Dad was here.
My father had a mysterious job, something Lily and I called “businessing.” Dad wasn’t an islander; he’d been born in the magical city of New York but grew up in Maine. He had an office and a secretary in town. I later learned he sold insurance.
But when I was about six, just starting all-day school, he started working from home. He took over our little den and tapped away on a computer, the first one we ever had. He was writing a book, he said, and he’d be around for us a lot more. Lily and I were thrilled. Both parents home? It’d be like the weekend all the time.
Except it wasn’t. There were a lot of terse conversations between our parents; we couldn’t hear the words from the bedroom Lily and I shared, but we could feel the mood, the energy between our parents brittle and tight, humming with unspoken words.
Mom took a job as manager at the Excelsior Pines, the big hotel at one end of Scupper. She’d always kept books for half a dozen local businesses, her calculator tapping into the night, but now she left the house before we got on the bus and didn’t get back till suppertime.
Life changed on a dime. Before this, we’d only see Dad for an hour or two each day. Now he seemed completely dedicated to making fun for his girls. After school, he’d be waiting for the school bus, would toss us in the back of the truck, and we’d go adventuring. No wash your hands, start your homework, here’s your apple. No, sir.
Instead, we’d hike up Eagle Mountain, pretending to be on the run from the law. We explored the tidal caves on the wild side of the island, wondering if we could live there, surviving on mussels like the Passamaquoddy Indians Lily and I wished we were.
In late spring, Daddy would hold our hands at the top of the ominously named Deerkill Rock, a granite precipice that jutted out over the ocean. “You ready, my brave little warriors?” he’d ask, and we’d race to the edge and jump out as far as we could, gravity separating us almost immediately, a drop so far I thought I might fly, the air rushing past my face, through my tangled hair, the thrilling, icy embrace of the ocean. We’d pop up like corks, Lily and I, coughing, shrieking, our legs already numb as we swam back to shore, our father laughing and proud, swimming beside us.
He’d take us to the top of Eastman Hill Road, that patched-up testament to frost heaves and potholes, and unload our bikes from the back of the truck. Down we’d go, the streamers from my handlebars whipping, the wind whisking tears from my eyes, my arms shuddering with the effort of staying in control. No bike helmets for us, not back then. Lily was too small and skinny to manage it, so Dad would perch her on his handlebars, the two of them soaring in front of me, the sound of their laughter lashing back, wrapping around me.
Dad would cook us the best meals, too. Travelers’ food, he called it—stew cooked over the campfire, the way his Hungarian grandmother had taught him. He’d tell us stories of magical people who could hypnotize you into flying, people who could turn invisible, who could talk to animals and ride wild horses. There in the firelight, the ocean lapping at the granite rocks of the island shore, a saw-whet owl calling its lonely cry, it seemed more than just possible. It seemed true.
Then Mom would call us in and get that pinched-mouth look, shaking her head over our filthy feet, and send us to take our baths.
In the summer, we’d make forts and sleep outside, then come in covered in bug bites; grimy, happy and itchy. During the day, when Mom went to her job or did the grocery shopping on her afternoon off, Dad would let Lily and me out into the wild while he worked on his book. We’d wander, spying on the rich folks’ houses, scouring the rocky shore for treasures, unsupervised and happy, returning home with Lily sunburned and me brown.
And meanwhile, my mother grew angry. Not that she showed it through anything other than terse orders about homework and chores. But the allure of all that freedom, especially with Dad’s beaming approval and frequent participation...we learned not to care what our mother thought.
Sometimes, I tried to make my mother feel better—I’d bring her lupines picked from the side of the road or find a piece of sea glass for her bowl, but the truth was, I loved having Daddy in charge. As our mother became more and more brittle, our love for Daddy mushroomed. While once I’d had friends—Cara Macklemore and Billy Ides—they didn’t come over anymore, and I turned down invitations to go to their houses to play. Home was more fun. We didn’t need friends, Lily and I. We had each other and Daddy. And Mom. Sure. Her, too.
So I pretended the tension between our parents wasn’t there. Mom worked grimly, Dad wrote his book and played with us, and life was mostly wonderful.
Except when Mom would track us down. I don’t know how she knew where we were, but every once in a while, her car would appear where we were adventuring, and she’d get out and yell at our father. “What are you doing out here? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
“Sharon, relax!” Dad would say, grinning, panting from whatever activity we’d been doing. “They’re having fun. They’re outside, playing, breathing fresh air.”
“One of these days, we’ll be standin’ over a casket if you don’t stop this!”
Dad’s smile would drop like granite. “You think I’d let something happen to my girls? You think I don’t love them? Girls, do you think Daddy loves you?”
Of course, we’d say yes. Mom’s mouth would tighten, her eyes would grow hard, and she’d either order us to get in the car or, worse, get in the car by herself and drive away, the rest of our day tainted.
“You’re so brave, my girls,” Dad would say. “Why be alive if you can’t have adventures, right? Who wants to end up all clenched and angry all the time?”
To prove his point, we’d go for one more swim, one more jump, one more thrilling ride down Eastman Hill. Stay out an extra half hour, have ice cream for dinner.
Lily was especially good at embracing Dad’s philosophy. Once Mommy’s girl, she started to avoid her, ignore her or, worse, talk about why Daddy was so much fun in front of her.
My flowers and sea glass didn’t cut it. “Thanks, Nora,” she’d say. But I couldn’t undo the hurt—I wasn’t Lily, after all, the magical, beautiful daughter.
Nothing I did seemed to make much impact on my mother, not the As on my report card, not the Mother’s Day art project—a little pinch pot painted yellow with blue polka dots. (Lily said she forgot hers at school; it never came home.)
I learned to kiss my mother hello when she got home, tell her about my day so I could check the mental box that said Talk to Mom. Every once in a while, Mom would give me a look that said I wasn’t fooling anyone. She wasn’t a little black rain cloud, our mother, but her skies were unrelentingly gray.
But Daddy laughed a ton, and he and Lily and I had so many fun times, so many goofy games and adventurings and imaginative meals, long stories at bedtime or in the car when we’d take a ride to nowhere. Of course, I loved him best.
The guilt hardly ever panged at me. Lily, she was the one who was really mean to Mom. Not me. At least I tried.
One spring day when I was eleven, Lily and I came off the bus to find my mother sitting at the kitchen table, unexpectedly home from work, drinking her coffee. Lily buzzed right past, running up the stairs to throw her backpack on the floor and flop on the bed, as was her custom.
“Hi, Mom!” I said in my fake-cheery voice. “Guess what? Brenda Kowalski threw up during our math test, and it almost got on my desk! She had to go home early.”
“Well, that’s too bad.” She didn’t look up, just sat there, staring ahead, holding her mug. She’d changed from her work uniform of black pants and a white shirt and was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.
No other words were spoken. Mom just sat there, twisting her wedding ring.
“Where’s Dad?” I blurted, unable to take the silence anymore.
Her eyes flicked to me, then back to the middle distance. “He’s gone,” she said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Off island.”
Without us? That was strange. Usually, he’d wait for us, take us on the ferry to Portland, where there was a bakery filled with the most beautiful pastries, and let us get whatever we wanted.
“When will he be back?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.”
My heart started to whump in my chest. “What do you mean, you’re not sure?”
“I don’t know, Nora. He didn’t see fit to tell me.”
Something was wrong. Something big. In that second, I felt my childhood teeter.
I pounded up the stairs. Our room had a slanted ceiling and was divided exactly in half; mine neat and tidy, as Mom requested, Lily’s a snarled mess. She was lying on her unmade bed with her headphones on, waiting for Mom to leave, for Dad to appear with the afternoon’s entertainment, because there was always something fun. Every single day.
I went into our parents’ room, and my breath started to shake out of me.
The closet was open, the top two drawers of the bureau—his—open, as well.
Open and empty. Our father’s shoes—he had more pairs than Mom—were gone. His socks were gone. Empty hangers hung like bones in the closet.
On top of the bureau, dead center, was his wedding ring.
I ran into the bathroom and threw up, my stomach heaving, my whole body racked with the violent expulsion of my ham-and-tomato sandwich and two oatmeal cookies, bits of apple floating on the surface.
“What’s wrong with you?” Lily asked. At ten, she already had a bit of a sneer.
“Daddy’s gone,” I said, my eyes streaming. I puked again, my sinuses burning with throw-up.
“What do you mean, gone? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. His clothes are gone. He packed.”
As I sat there, retching into the toilet, my sister ran into our parents’ bedroom, then pounded downstairs. She screamed accusations at our mother, whose flat, implacable voice answered questions. Something ceramic broke—Mom’s cup, I bet, throwing up again at the thought of the smell of coffee.
“I hate you!” Lily screamed. “I hate you!”
Then the door slammed, and it was quiet again.
I waited for my mother to come upstairs and take care of me. She didn’t.
Later that night, Lily told me what happened. Her version of it, anyway. Our mother, who was so boring and hateful and mean, had driven our father away. He’d gotten sick and tired of putting up with her, taken his novel and moved to New York City, where he was born, after all, and he was probably about to become a famous author. He’d call us and tell us to pack our things, that New York was the biggest place of all for adventuring, and we’d move, and Mom could stay here on her stupid Scupper Island.
If that was true...if our dad couldn’t stand our mother anymore, I honestly couldn’t blame him. He was a scarlet tanager, a rare, beautiful bird I’d only seen once in my life, flashing with red, its song happy and bright. She was a mourning dove, gray and dull, endlessly sighing the same notes over and over.
But I didn’t want them to get a divorce.
In my version of what had happened, which I dared not tell Lily, Dad would come home with a bouquet of roses. Mom would be wearing that white dress with the red flowers on it, the only dress she had, and they’d be hugging, and we’d move to New York but come home to Scupper for summers, like the rich people.
Days passed. A week. Lily refused to go to school, and I was put in charge of breakfast while Mom went to work. At night, I listened to the suddenly scary noises of our old house, the muffled sobs from Lily’s side of the room. I tried to climb into her bed to comfort her, but she shoved me away.
I waited for my father to call. He didn’t.
He hadn’t left a phone number, either. He had a brother in Pennsylvania—Jeff, eight years older than my father, a man we’d only met twice before. I called him one afternoon when my mom was at a meeting at school—Lily was acting up. There was a long silence after I asked if he knew where my father might be.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I don’t. But if I hear from him, I’ll let you know.”
I could tell by his voice he didn’t think this would happen.
Another week crept by. Mom came home on Saturday morning and told us she’d switched her hours so she’d be able to be home with us after school.
“No one wants you here,” Lily said, her voice so cold and cruel I flinched.
“No one asked you,” Mom said mildly.
And that was the end of our deep family discussion.
What if Mom had killed Dad? Was that possible? She could lop the head off a sea bass, slide the knife down its belly and gut the thing in seconds... She could use a gun... We lived on an island, so she could dump his body anywhere and let the tides do what they would. I regretted reading the Patricia Cornwell novels I’d been sneaking out of the library, not to mention Stephen King, the patron saint of Maine. Was my father down the well, like Dolores Claiborne’s husband?
We didn’t have a well. Mom didn’t talk to the police.
He had packed. Left his wedding ring. Sure, Mom could’ve faked it, but she didn’t. I knew.
He was simply...gone. But Lily and I were the lights of his life. He told us that all the time. He wouldn’t just leave us. He would obviously come back for us.
He didn’t. He didn’t come back, he didn’t write, he didn’t call.
The weeks turned into months. I tried to console Lily, asked if she wanted to do things together, but she ignored me, alone in her grief, which she clearly viewed as deeper than mine. I’d lost my father and his buoyant, exhilarating love, and it seemed I’d also lost Lily’s.
I’d lay awake at night, heart pounding, tears slipping into my hair, missing them both with an ache in my heart that blotted out everything else. My childhood had ended, and I never even had the chance to say goodbye.
4 (#u3ec61b32-5ed6-5084-bdec-d56c97ffb0c1)
Jake helped me off the ferry. It was a three-hour ride, and I felt a little seasick. Or a little nauseous from my throbbing knee.
Or maybe it was just being back home.
Without a word, he got my bags and led Boomer off the boat, leaving me to crutch it alone, hobbling awkwardly up the gangplank, then onto the old dock.
Though it was mid-April, spring had not yet come to the island. My mom wasn’t here yet, and the downtown was quiet. A raw wind blew the smell of fish and salt and donuts from Lala’s Bakery, and with it, childhood memories. On cold winter Sundays, my father used to wake Lily and me at 5:00 a.m. to get the first donuts Lala made, almost too hot to hold, the sugar crusting our faces, the heat steaming in the wintry air.
I would see her soon, my sister. I would set things right again. That was the chance Beantown Bug Killers had given me, and I would make good on it.
And I would find out what happened with my parents. Where my father was. If he was still alive, I was going to find him, damn it.
When I was in my first year of residency, I’d stitched up a former Boston cop who did private investigations. I hired him to find my father, but he’d come up empty. With such a common name—William Stuart—and nothing else to go on since the day he left, the cop didn’t turn up anything. It was time to try again, and this time, start from square one.
But for now, I had to get down the dock. One thing at a time.
With the sling, the brace and the crutch, I had to think about every step, and the rough, splintered wood of the dock didn’t help. Step, shuffle, crutch. Step, shuffle, crutch. It was slow going.
Jake was already tying Boomer’s leash to the bike rack; I was only halfway there. He walked back to his boat. “Thank you so much, Mr. Ferriman,” I said as he passed. He grunted but didn’t look at me, the charmer.
Slightly out of breath, I got to the end of the dock and patted my dog’s head. A seagull landed on a wooden post, and Boomer woofed softly. Otherwise, the island was quiet, and ominously so, like one of Stephen King’s towns. I missed the cheerful duck boats of Boston Common, the elegant shops of Newbury Street. Here, nothing was open.
Scupper Island Clam Shack, where I had worked for two summers, sat at the end of Main Street, right on the water. It wouldn’t open until Memorial Day, if it was the same as it used to be.
I’d worked there with Sullivan Fletcher, one of the two Fletcher boys in my class. Sully had been in a car accident our senior year shortly before I left Scupper, and I wondered how he was. I’d wondered often over the years. Word had been that he’d recover, but I’d never asked for details (nor was my mother the detail type).
I looked to my right, and there was my mother’s elderly Subaru turning onto Main Street. I waved, not that she could miss me; I was the only one here. She pulled over, turned off the engine and got out, looking the same as ever, and unexpected tears clogged my throat. “Hi, Mom,” I said, starting to move forward for a hug.
She nodded instead, then hefted my two suitcases into the back of the car. “I didn’t know you were bringing your dog,” she said. Boomer wagged his fluffy tail, oblivious. “He better leave Tweety alone.”
Tweety was Mom’s parakeet (and favorite creature in the world). “Tweety’s still alive, then?”
“Of course, he is. Where’s that dog gonna sleep?”
“It’s good to see you, too, Mom,” I said. “I’m fine, thanks. In a lot of pain, actually, but doing okay. After being run down in the street. By a van. Sustaining many injuries, in case you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget, Nora,” she said. “Get in the cah.”
Boomer jumped in at the magical words, filling the entire back seat.
A thickly built woman with hard yellow hair approached our car. “Hey, Sharon. Who you got there?” Who y’gawt they-ah? Good to see the Maine accent was alive and well. The speaker was Mrs. Hurley, mother of Carmella Hurley, one of the mean girls from high school. I’d called them the Cheetos back then (not aloud, of course)—the popular, mean girls who’d go to Portland to woo cancer at tanning salons, resulting in a skin tone not found in nature.
“It’s my daughter,” Mom said.
“Lily, you’re back, sweethaht?”
“Uh, no. I’m Nora. Hi, Mrs. Hurley. Nice to see you. How’s Carmella?”
Her face hardened. Right. I was not an islander who had brought pride to my hometown. I was the girl who stole the prince’s crown. Also, I looked a lot different from the olden days, when I’d been a fat, lumpy teenager with bad hair and worse skin.
“Cahmeller’s wonderful,” Mrs. Hurley bit out. “Well. You have a good day, Sharon. Nora.”
It would soon be all over town that I was back.
Mom got into the driver’s seat, and I flopped gracelessly in mine, ass first, bumping myself in the face with the crutch.
“So how is Carmella?” I asked, fastening my seatbelt.
“Good. Five kids. Cleans hotel rooms in the summer, bartends at Red’s. Hard worker.” Hahd wehrkah. Man, I guessed my accent had faded more than I realized. That, and I hadn’t talked very much to my mom these past few years. Perfunctory phone calls, her annual twelve-hour visit to Boston.
“You’ll be sharin’ your room with Poe,” she added.
“I will?”
“Well, where do you think she’s sleepin’?” Mom pulled away from the curb.
Good point. I suppressed a sigh and looked out the window. Main Street had gentrified a bit. There was a bookstore I’d never seen, called The Cracked Spine. Cute name. Lala’s Bakery, which would have a line around the corner every day in the summer, was fairly deserted now. A kitchen goods store. Huh.
“How is Poe?” I asked. I hadn’t seen my niece for five years.
My mother shrugged.
“Mom, could you actually tell me?” I snapped. Five minutes, and already I was irritated.
“She’s grumpy. Hates it here.” She turned onto Perez Avenue, renamed for the man who’d sent a Scupper Island kid to college every year for the past quarter century...including me. We passed the ubiquitous made-in-China souvenir shop, unimaginatively called Scupper Island Gift Shoppe (I always hated the spelling), a restaurant I’d never seen, an art gallery, another restaurant.
We’d never be Martha’s Vineyard—too far, too cold, too small—but it seemed my hometown had blossomed.
“Did things go okay in Seattle?” I asked, referencing my mom’s recent visit to fetch Poe.
“Dirty town,” Mom said. “Lots of litter. And beggars.”
Of course. Look on the dark side, that was my mother’s motto. She didn’t approve of panhandling, having grown up poor herself. But her version of poor was scrappy. It meant hunting and fishing for your food if you had to, knowing how to put up the vegetables from your garden, dry fish, smoke meat. If you didn’t have something, you made do.
I’d been to Seattle four times to see my sister. I would’ve gone more, but Lily was always slippery about letting me come out there to see my niece. Once, Roseline came with me, which was a good thing, because Lily became “too busy” to see me, and I only got to see Poe for an hour. I’d been crushed, having pictured the four of us going out for pastries, visiting the public market on Pike Street, eating at the top of the Space Needle. Rosie stepped up, and we did have fun—we ate crab and salmon till we just about turned pink, kayaked in Puget Sound, almost peeing ourselves when a pod of orca whales came within a hundred yards of us, giggling hysterically with fear and awe.
But in the back of my mind had been the thought, If only Lily was here. Now this is adventuring! If only it was like old times. The fact was, those old times had been old for more than a decade at that point.
“And how is Lily?” I asked, when it became apparent my mother wasn’t going to mention her.
My mother’s gaze didn’t stray from straight ahead. “She’s in jail, Nora. How do you think?”
I took a slow breath before speaking again. I knew she was in jail. My mom didn’t have to be an ass about it. “Is she doing okay? Did you see her?”
“Ayuh. She seems fine.”
Fine. Really? Was she devastated? Heartbroken? Remorseful? Angry? She was probably angry. She had been for the past twenty-four years, at least as far as I could tell. Since the day our father left.
Within three months of landing in Seattle at the age of eighteen, Lily had gotten tattooed, pierced and pregnant. She had a series of boyfriends; I had never met Poe’s father, and to the best of my knowledge, neither had Poe. Lily’s job history was spotty—barista (of course, it was Seattle), band manager for a local group, temp, barista again, tattoo artist.
My sister was also a petty criminal. Identity theft, credit card fraud and drug dealing, though the legalization of marijuana had put a dent in her business. I hadn’t known about any of that until last month, when my mother told me she had to fly out and get Poe, because my sister had been sentenced to two years, out in August with good behavior.
Beantown Bug Killers had given me a plan. Stay on Scupper until Lily got out. Then she’d either come east to fetch her daughter, or I’d fly back with Poe. And I’d...fix things.
How, I wasn’t sure.
We turned onto the dirt road that led to our house, and I held my arm across my chest to minimize the jostling. My collarbone ached. Mom glanced at me but said nothing. In the back seat, Boomer whined with excitement, sensing we were close to our destination. The car jolted over a pothole, and I sucked in a breath, my knee and shoulder flashing white with pain. My back ached, too, heavy and dull thanks to the bruised kidneys. Hopefully, I wouldn’t be peeing blood later on.
And there it was. Home. A humble, gray-shingled Cape with a screened-in deck on one side, almost exactly as I’d left it, the bushes in front taller than I remembered.
I’d been away for so long.
My mom pulled into the unpaved driveway—we didn’t have a garage—and threw the car into Park. She got out, opened the back door for Boomer, who raced off to sniff and mark his territory.
Lily and I used to think home was the most magical place on earth—the sound of chickadees and crows, gulls, the frigid ocean slapping against the rocks a few hundred yards away, the gray seals that would visit the shores with their pups. The wind would scrape and roar across the sky almost constantly, howling in the winter. The yard was just a carpet of pine needles, and beyond that, forest and ocean. The Krazinskis were our next-door neighbors, and they were half a mile away. Lily and I, and sometimes Dad, used to sit for hours in trees or makeshift forts and wait to see animals—fox and deer, pheasants and chipmunks, porcupines and raccoons.
I opened the car door, the smell of pine and wood smoke thick and rich.
Though I wouldn’t go so far as saying it was good to be home—not yet—I knew this was where I needed to be.
I tried to get out of the car, but since my knee was in a brace and I couldn’t bend it, I flopped right back onto the seat, jarring my collarbone, pain flashing all the way into my fingertips.
Being helpless sucked.
Also, my mother wasn’t the world’s most loving caretaker. She was halfway to the house with my suitcases. “Mom? Can you give me a hand?”
“Poe!” she yelled. “Get out here and help your aunt!” She went inside.
The wind gusted, cutting through my jacket, pressing me back into the seat as I struggled. The Dog of Dogs came up to check on me, and I patted his head with my good hand. Dogs beat people every time. “Are you my pretty boy?” I asked. He wagged in the affirmative, then trotted off again.
Finally, the door opened, and out came my sister.
No. It was Poe, but the resemblance was shocking.
My niece was beautiful. Her hair was dyed blue, shaved on one side, jagged on the other. She wore torn leggings and a T-shirt with a skull on it. As she got closer, I could see she was bedecked with black rubber bracelets and more ear piercings than I could count and had a tattoo on her neck.
She looked far, far older than fifteen. But her skin was pure and sweet, and her eyes were the same shade as blueberries, just like Lily’s.
“Hi, honey,” I said. “You got so big.” My voice was husky. The last time I’d seen her, five years ago, she asked me for piggyback rides, which I happily gave. She’d had long black hair back then, and I taught her to French-braid it.
She gave me a dead-eyed stare, looking more like Lily than ever.
“Uh, can you just...” I held out my hand. “Take my crutch, okay.”
She did, and I hoisted myself out, then hopped, grabbed onto her with my good hand and steadied myself. Took the crutch back. “Thanks, Poe.”
“What happened to you?”
I blinked. “Gran didn’t tell you?” Wasn’t it important enough for a mention? “I was hit by a van.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. I broke my collarbone, got a concussion and dislocated my kneecap. And bruised my kidneys.”
“Gross.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you sue them or something?” she asked with a flicker of interest. “Like, if it was FedEx or the cops?”
“It was Beantown Bug Killers, and no. I was jaywalking.”
The interest faded, and the disgust returned.
We went inside, though she was faster than I was, obviously, and failed to hold the door for me. “Come on, Boomer,” I said, and he trotted in, nearly knocking me over, unaware that he no longer weighed twelve pounds. I followed awkwardly. Poe was already slumped on the couch, engrossed in her phone. Mom was in the kitchen, her yellow parakeet on her shoulder.
The interior of the house was the same. I looked into the little den, almost expecting to see my father there, clacking away on his computer, or Lily, playing with her Barbies on the floor in the living room. The woodstove sat on the hearth of the stone fireplace, a more efficient way to heat the house. Same brown plaid couch, same old recliner, same coffee table where Lily and I had colored and chattered.
Of course, it was the same. My mom wasn’t the type to throw things away, and she could fix anything.
I thought of my apartment—not Bobby’s, but mine, the one I’d had before the Big Bad Event. The pale green couch, the balcony, the pretty throw pillows on the bed. All those lovely things, packed away in a storage unit in Brookline.
“Get away from me, dog,” Poe said. “Is he really going to live with us?”
“This is Boomer. He loves people.” He whined, echoing my message, and licked Poe’s hand. She turned away without looking up from her phone.
I crutched it into the kitchen. Same creaky table where I’d done so much homework.
Mom was pouring herself a cup of sludge. “Want a cup?” she asked. The bird was sitting on a shelf. Near food.
“Does that bird ever go in its cage?”
“Sometimes. At night. Mostly, he flies around where he wants. Coffee?”
“Sure.”
When I was in medical school, my mother came on one of her annual Visits to Boston because I Have to See My Daughter and informed me she’d gotten a bird. Tweety, not the most original name. She taught it (him? her?) tricks, such as eating a cracker held between her lips or sitting on her head while Mom drank coffee. Tweety could give kisses, which made me shudder and envision my mother dying an agonizing death from bird-borne encephalitis. When I called twice a month, I could often hear Tweety in the background, sounding much like a knife scraping against a plate.
But my mother loved the bird and sometimes laughed while describing Tweety’s intellect, so who was I to judge?
Mom set a mug down in front of me. Scupper Island Chamber of Commerce, as boring and unimaginative a mug as could be. Again, I pictured my pretty things—my green-and-blue coffee cups, packed, hopefully, in bubble wrap. I hadn’t been able to do it myself.
I sat down, my knee flashing with pain. “Mom, can I have an ice pack?”
“Bag a’ peas okay?”
“Even better.”
She got one and propped my foot up on an extra chair, then laid the frozen peas on my knee. “How’s that?”
“Great. Thank you.” I took a sip of the coffee (black; Mom didn’t believe in half-and-half or sugared beverages) and tried not to shudder.
She sat down across from me. “So what are your plans, Nora?”
“I thought I could stay here until I was a little bit better. And then...well, I don’t know, really.”
I want us to be close. I miss Lily. I want to love Poe. I was hit by a car, and according to the Hallmark Channel, I’m supposed to come home.
I want to find out why Dad left us, and where he’s been all these years...and if he’s still alive.
“How long till you get better?”
She meant how long till I could move out. Tweety screeched, probably wondering the same thing, and I eyed the bird warily. “I’ll probably need help for a week or two.”
She nodded. “All right. And after that? You goin’ back to Boston, I imagine?”
“I thought I’d stay here for the summer. I took a leave of absence.”
“Now, why’d you do that? You’re a doctor, Nora!”
“I’m well aware of that. But, Mom, come on. I was hit by a van. I almost died.”
“That’s not what Bobby said.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Should I have gotten more hurt for you? Being knocked out cold and lying broken in the street wasn’t quite dramatic enough?”
For a second, I thought about telling her about the Big Bad Event, but I doubted that would impact her. I’d lived, after all. How bad could it have been?
“Well, I’m just sayin’ we don’t have a lot of room here. What with Poe and all.”
“I’ll rent a place in a couple weeks, okay?” I took a slow breath, remembering my resolutions, my new take on life. I was going to be sunshiny again, goddamn it. “I’ve missed you, Mom. I want us to spend time together.”
I sensed she wanted to roll her eyes, but she didn’t. “So we’ll hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s my favorite song.”
That got a tiny smile.
“I’m gonna take a shower,” I said. “And a Vicodin.”
“Don’t get hooked on those,” my mother said.
Wrong daughter to be lecturing about drug abuse. “Thanks for the advice.”
I stood up, positioned my crutch and hobbled into the living room. “Poe, could you bring my suitcases upstairs?”
She inhaled a very long, slow breath, exhaled and raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Sure.”
I went up the stairs, one at a time, Boomer trying to help, running up and down, nearly killing me. The bird flew right at my head, either attacking me or trying to nest in my hair. “Jesus! Get away, Tweety!” He zoomed past again, and Boomer lunged. “No, Boomer! Down.” Imagine if my dog ate my mother’s favorite living creature on my first day home.
“No bird,” I told him, and he looked deeply ashamed. Luckily, my mom called for Tweety, and the creepy little thing whizzed past again, diving at Boomer, who ducked, this time and went into the kitchen.
By the time I made it to the top, I was drenched in sweat and in a bonfire of pain. God, my ribs were killing me! And my back. And my knee! And my stupid collarbone. I was one giant ball of hurt.
I went into my room. Poe had taken my old bed, based on the snarl of sheets. The other bed, once Lily’s, was covered in clothes, magazines, makeup.
Poe came in with my suitcases and dropped them.
“You’ll need to clear off that bed,” I said.
“Then where am I supposed to put my stuff?”
“The bureau? The closet? The trash? I don’t know, honey, but I have to sleep there. Let’s try to get along, okay? I’ll be here all summer.”
“I have to share a room with my elderly aunt all summer? Do I have to rub lotion on your feet and Tiger Balm on your shoulder, too?”
“I was hoping you’d shave off my corns.”
“Jesus!”
“Poe. I’m kidding. And I’m not elderly, okay? I’m thirty-five. I’ll rent a place as soon as I can get around on my own. If I sleep well and don’t break another bone tripping on your crap, I’ll get out of here sooner. See? Clearing off the bed works in both our interests.”
“Whatever.”
My eye twitched. “Would you please get me a glass of water?” I asked sweetly. “I have to take some medication.” I cleared a spot on the bed, then used my crutch to snag my purse as Poe went into the bathroom. She returned instantly with a slightly grubby glass filled with water which, if experience was an indicator, would be tepid, since she didn’t run the water beforehand.
It was lukewarm, all right, but my knee was on fire, and my left arm felt like lead. I swallowed a pill. Poe picked up the bottle. “Oh, the good stuff,” she said. “No generics for you doctors, I guess. Can I have one?”
“Put that down and stay away from it.”
“I was kidding. Jesus.” She stomped down the stairs.
Boomer came up and nuzzled my hand. “You love me, right?” I asked. He licked my hand in affirmation.
The travel and stress of my injuries caught up with me. I lay back against Poe’s clothes and closed my eyes. To my surprise, tears leaked out. Though he didn’t deserve it, I missed Bobby. I missed Boston. I missed Roseline and the hospital and Dr. Breckenridge, that old flirt.
I missed my old life and the old me, the way things were before, when Bobby and I were still new and life seemed so perfect and clean and pure.
I wasn’t wanted here. There was a pretty huge chance that coming back had been a big mistake.
5 (#u3ec61b32-5ed6-5084-bdec-d56c97ffb0c1)
With all the speed of an elderly slug, the first week passed. Poe had a habit of sleeping through her alarm (a lovely little ditty called “Black Dying Rose,” which consisted of someone screaming so hard I imagined he’d eventually cause variceal hemorrhaging). Somehow, Poe wasn’t jolted into a state of terror as I was, so I had to throw my pillow at her every morning.
“What? God!” was her customary greeting. Then she’d stumble about the room, tossing clothes, grumbling, accusing me of moving her stuff, before using up all the hot water in her way-too-long shower. She’d stomp downstairs like Hagrid the giant, refuse to eat breakfast, then get in the car with my mother, who dropped her at school on the way to the hotel. At least they let Boomer out on their way.
My dog loved it here. He’d come in after a half an hour of romping in the woods, burs or twigs stuck in his feathery fur. I’d brush him as best I could with my good arm, Boomer crooning as I did so, going into his doggy trance.
My knee was already a lot better, though too much weight on it still made me see stars. The collarbone would take a little longer, but the pain had subsided to a dull ache.
I napped. I read. I watched three seasons of House of Cards. I was recovering from a shock, I told myself, and not just lazy. Tweety watched my every move and, if my guess was right, whispered my activities to my mother later in the day.
But being lazy felt pretty good. I was also starting to feel...safe. Since the Big Bad Event, I’d put a lot of effort into life, especially where Bobby was concerned—trying not to be too much of a downer, to have something interesting to say, to save pajamas for actual bedtime, to pretend I didn’t mind his nights out with friends, when Boomer and I would lock every window no matter what the weather was and stick a chair in front of the door, too.
Here, it was surprisingly great to do nothing. Being alone in my childhood home didn’t freak me out the same way being alone in Boston had.
At night, after a supper of Food That Would Keep Us Alive, Tweety occasionally eating a piece of bread from my mother’s lips, as I struggled not to dry heave or mention bird-borne pathogens, I’d ask Poe if she wanted to play Scrabble or Apples to Apples or Monopoly. Shockingly, she did not and would go upstairs to listen to more screamo music. I’d take a Vicodin in lieu of a glass of wine, put an ice pack on my knee and watch Wheel of Fortune with my mother. Chatting was not allowed, though shouting out the answer was. Mom beat me every time.
On the eighth night of my exciting new life, Boomer and I were on the couch, and Bernard from Duluth, Georgia, had finally managed to figure out CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS four letters after my mother had, winning a vacation to Hawaii. Mom clicked off the TV and went into the den, Tweety swooping in from somewhere to land on her head. Gah.
Fun was over. I decided to seek out company and distraction in cyberspace.
Shit. My laptop was upstairs. “Poe?” I called over the music. “Would you mind bringing me my computer, honey?”
Nothing. I waited ten seconds.
“Poe?”
“I’m coming! I answered you already. Jesus.” Eight angry thuds shook the house as she came down the stairs. She practically threw the computer at me.
“Thank you so much, sweetheart.”
She stomped back upstairs.
Was it wrong to want to kick one’s niece? It probably was. I forced myself to smile, stroked Boomer’s ears, took a cleansing breath and reminded myself that Poe was going through a hard time. Her whole life had been hard. Maybe. I didn’t really know, did I?
But my sister was in jail, Poe was far, far away from her friends, and last night, I’d forgotten to bring a towel into the bathroom, so she had to see me lying in the tub with only a washcloth for cover, which is pretty much every teenager’s most horrible nightmare.
One of these days, though, I’d win her over (pause for laughter).
I opened my email. Ah, there was a funny note from Roseline asking me about hot lobstermen (none), my mother, Boomer, my niece. She’d also attached a picture of herself with a huge smile on her face, holding up a little voodoo doll of Bobby—I could tell, because he was wearing scrubs and a mask, and Roseline had written Bobby on his shirt. Adorably, he was stuck full of pins.
My ancestors have your back! read Roseline’s note. Bobby should be coming down with explosive diarrhea any second.
I snorted. Aw! You’re the best, I typed. Also, Harvard wants their degree back. Everything is fine here. I heart Vicodin! My mother’s bird is trying to kill me. Send help.
I started to type more, then realized I didn’t have a lot to say. The truth about my mom and Poe would concern her—We barely talk, but they’re tolerating me! Besides, I had a stiff upper lip now. I didn’t whine or complain, because I wasn’t a smear on the pavement with a bouquet of flowers marking the spot I’d died. I was alive! Yay. Besides, it was only my first week (plus one day). So I just asked her questions about Amir and married life and if she’d had any fun baby deliveries lately.
My computer pinged. Another email...this one from Bobby.
Hey there. Missing you. The place seems too big without you and Boomer. Are you doing okay? Doing your PT? Sleeping all right? Maybe we can talk tomorrow.
Bobby
Damn. I wanted to hear his voice, and I absolutely didn’t want to hear his voice. Was he dating Jabrielle already? Why was he saying he missed me? I hoped he missed me. I was so glad he missed me. I hoped he was suffering and had explosive diarrhea.
But no. I was a bigger person now. Near-death experience, et cetera, et cetera.
Doing fine here! I typed. Boomer loves the island and finds something dead to bring home almost every day. I’m feeling much better and really love getting to know my niece again. She’s fantastic!—Lies, all lies—Boomer misses you, too—Truth—Mom sends her best—Lie—Sure, give me a call tomorrow. I have plans for dinner—to eat survival food with Mom and Poe—but am mostly free in the afternoon.
I hit Send.
It seemed so long ago that Bobby and I had been that couple. That couple in neck braces I’d seen in the ER—okay, fine, not the most romantic image, but you know what I mean. That couple who’s connected by a shimmer of energy. Whose love made other people disappear so that they were the only two people in the world.
He dumped you after you were hit by a car, Nora, said my smarter half.
Chances were pretty high that he’d blow off tomorrow’s call. If history was an indicator, he’d have a patient or coworker who needed him.
I sighed. Then I glanced in the den, where my mother was still working, opened Google and typed in the same words I’d typed a hundred times before.
William Stuart, Maine, obituary. From the little den, Tweety screeched, channeling Edgar Allen Poe’s raven. Boomer whined. Tweety had pecked him on the head the other day, and now he was terrified of the bird. Like owner, like dog.
For some strange reason, my father didn’t have a middle name, something Lily and I had tried to remedy, everything from Toad, as in Frog and Toad Are Friends, to Denzel, as in Washington. It would’ve been helpful in tracking him down, that was for sure.
There were plenty of dead William Stuarts out there and Bills and Wills. But the ones who had the same birth year as my father never seemed to fit.
This time was no different. If my father was dead, I had no way of knowing.
Sitting here, in the house where I had once felt so loved and safe, it was hard to believe that my father had never come back at all.
Never even called.
But maybe, now that I was back on the island, I could find out what happened.
6 (#u3ec61b32-5ed6-5084-bdec-d56c97ffb0c1)
On the ninth night of my convalescence, my mother told Poe and me to get out of the house. “I have something going on here,” she said. “Can you two go out for ice cream or something?”
“I’m injured,” I said. “And I just took a Vicodin, so I can’t drive.” Also, Game of Thrones was on, and like any good viewer, I was in love with Jon Snow.
“Then go upstairs and close your door,” she said.
“I’m a little old to be sent to my room.”
“Believe me, you’ll want to go,” Poe said.
“Why?”
“It’s work,” my mother said. But her cheeks flushed.
Now that was odd. My mother never blushed. Ever. Nothing embarrassed her. Once, when I was in high school and Mom was in the throes of a particularly gruesome menopause (or meno-go, as the case was), she’d bled so much at the grocery store that she left a red trail in her wake. She’d opened a package of paper towels, cleaned up and added an economy-size box of adult diapers to our cart. Didn’t so much as flinch.
So her blushing now... Was this one of those sex-toy parties? “What kind of work?” I asked.
“It’s a new venture,” she said, putting Tweety in the cage. At least there was that.
“What kind of new venture?”
“Nora, just get upstairs,” she growled.
“It’s hug therapy,” Poe said.
I snorted. No one else cracked a smile. “Seriously?” No answer. “Mom, if you need a hug, I’m right here.” I tried to remember our last hug. Failed.
“I give the hugs, Nora. I don’t get them.”
“Really?”
“People pay for it,” Poe said.
“Like prostitution?”
My mother frowned. “It’s a recognized therapy—”
“Recognized by whom?”
“—and people are pathetic and will pay for just about anything,” my mother said.
“That’s beautiful.”
“And sometimes, they take a nap here.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Just fix your face and get upstairs. Take your dog with you.”
“Don’t you want him for pet therapy? Which is actually a recognized therapy?”
“Nora, get.”
I glanced at Poe, who, for once, made eye contact. “Does she turn into a pillar of salt when someone touches her?” I asked. “Get!” my mother said, her face redder now.
Boomer raced up the stairs, then back down, then up again as I hobbled up the stairs. Rather than going into our room, I paused. “Let’s spy,” I suggested.
“It’s gross,” Poe said.
“All the better.”
I stationed myself just off to the side of the stairs, where I was hidden but could peek. Poe went into our room and emerged with the pink velour beanbag chair, sat in it, then looked at me. She sighed, hauled herself out and shoved it my way.
“You’re a good kid,” I whispered.
She rolled her eyes.
“So Gran does this every week?” I asked.
“Just in the last month.”
A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. “Hello there, Hazel,” Mom said. “Bawb. Jawn.”
Who were Bob and John? I peeked down. Holy crap! There were eight or nine people there. For hugs! From my mother!
“How much does she charge?” I whispered.
“Twenty bucks,” Poe whispered. She almost smiled.
My mother was about to make almost two hundred dollars giving hugs? Huh. Maybe she was onto something.
“You’re all very welcome here,” she said. Holy crap, there was Amy, who’d dated Sullivan Fletcher in high school! She needed a hug from my mother? And Mrs. Downs, who had the best example of resting bitch face I’d ever seen. I worried for my mother; Mrs. Downs seemed like the type to bite the head off a baby polar bear and eat it. Mr. Dobbins, the first selectman of Scupper Island for the past twenty years. A widower, if I wasn’t mistaken.
A thought occurred to me.
My mother needed a man.
“Does Gran have a special someone?” I whispered to Poe.
“A what?”
“A boyfriend?”
“Oh, Jesus, Nora. No.”
“I think we should find her one.”
Poe’s phone buzzed, and she stood up and went into our room, closing the door. I guess we weren’t going to bond over making fun of hug therapy.
I sighed, then turned my attention back downstairs. This was the same spot where Lily and I would spy from on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa Claus to come. We never did manage to stay awake.
A yearning for my sister squeezed me so hard I couldn’t breathe for a second. My skinny little sister of the milky-white skin and big blue eyes, who used to always be so affectionate, always touching me in some way—snuggled at my side or holding my hand or with her arm around my shoulders, her sweet, sleepy smell that made my heart swell with love every time.
Lily. My little flower.
How had we lost that? How had so many years passed without us being close?
My mom started talking, jolting me out of my memories.
“Welp, you’re all here for hug therapy, so let’s get stahted.” Mom’s accent thickened. “Amy, sweethaht, ovah heah.” I saw slim legs clad in skinny jeans and ballet flats make their way over to my mother’s sturdy Naturalizers. I tilted my head down, making my collarbone flare with pain, but I had to see.
Yes. My mother was hugging a human. It was a long hug, too. “You’re a good person,” she said. “You’re a nice girl.”
Actually, Amy had been a raging bitch—Queen of the Cheetos—who’d made my mother’s daughter utterly wretched, but hey. Maybe people changed. Probably not, but still.
They were still hugging. Amy was getting more affection in this hug than I’d gotten from my mother in the past twenty years. Was I jealous? You bet your life I was.
“What’s her deal?” I whispered to the dog. He didn’t know, either.
Mom released her, and Amy sniffled and moved toward the kitchen.
Next up was Mr. Dobbins. “Bawb. You’re a good man. You have a good haht.” He bent down to hug my sturdy mother, and she hugged him tenderly, firmly.
This was really freaky. Maybe it was the Vicodin. Maybe I should cough up twenty bucks and get a hug, too.
I looked at Boomer, who lowered his head to lick my hand. Nah. Who needed a mother when I had the male version of Nana from Peter Pan? Plus, I was pretty sure that somewhere in the mother’s handbook, it said your kids shouldn’t have to bribe you to get hugged.
My mother moved through the crowd, hugging people and telling them nice things. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and texted Roseline that I was either hallucinating on painkillers, or my mother was offering hugs for twenty dollars apiece in our living room.
Video or it didn’t happen, was her answer.
Mr. Dobbins came back for another.
Yep. My mother needed a man. It seemed very clear. Maybe this was for her sake, too. Alone all these years (Hello, guilt, how’ve you been?). And since I was here on the island for the summer, I might as well find her someone. Why not, right? Another text to Roseline. Am going to find my mother a boyfriend.
Don’t make rash decisions while on powerful narcotics, she responded. Go to bed.
I was pretty dizzy. And while I did want to see my mother tuck some people in with blankies on our old couch and chairs, I also knew I was too jealous to watch.
7 (#u3ec61b32-5ed6-5084-bdec-d56c97ffb0c1)
The day after hug therapy, I took a little crutch walk, as I’d been doing, a little farther every day. The sun was hard and bright, the oak trees topped with fuzzy, pale green buds, and the salty air filled my lungs and woke parts of my soul I’d forgotten about. Sure, Boston was on the water, but it wasn’t like this. Here, the air was both clean and alive with scents, sometimes thick with the promise of rain, sometimes carrying smells of pipe tobacco—presumably from Burke Hollawell, a lobsterman from my childhood (and potential bae for my mother?). Last week, I got a whiff of blueberries—somewhere, a pie was fresh out of the oven. And always, the smell of pine.
I hobbled to a rock at the shore and sat down to catch my breath. Boomer ran up, smiling his doggy grin, and dropped a pinecone at my feet. “Oh, good boy!” I said and threw it. He bounded off, forgot his mission and chased a squirrel into a tree.
I slid out of the backpack straps, took out my water bottle and drank. Then I dug out a notebook and pen and started writing to my sister.
Dear Lily,
I hope things are going okay for you. I don’t know if Mom or Poe told you, but I’m back on the island for a while after I had a little accident. Poe and I are sharing our old room. You’ve done an amazing job raising her. She’s really great and smart, and I love talking to her.
Well, that would be a lie. I tore off the sheet, crumpled it up and stuck it in my bag.
Dear Lily,
I’m back on the island for a while, and I want you to know I’ll try to keep an eye out for Poe. Even though you stopped answering my emails and texts and letters, I still love you and will try to help Poe in any way I can.
Too condescending, with that healthy slosh o’ bitterness. I crumpled up that one, too.
Dear Lily,
You’ll never guess where I’m sitting right now. Lookout Rock. I’m back on Scupper for a while and will probably spend a few months here; I took a leave from the hospital after I got banged up in a car accident. Home is the same. Mom’s bird is trying to kill me. Kind of creepy, the love they share.
A cormorant just popped up in front of me, then slipped back under the water. The ocean is choppy today, making lots of noise against the shore.
Mom and Poe are doing well. I hope you are, too.
Love,
Nora
That one I could send. At least I had an address for her now. Washington State Women’s Correctional Facility.
For reasons unknown, my sister had given me up long ago. Granted, I hadn’t been a whole lotta fun after Dad left, but neither had she. Why didn’t we become even closer after his desertion? God knows I wanted to. But sisters who didn’t get along was hardly an original problem. There was the ugly sister/beautiful sister thing, of course. The fat/thin issue. There was the fact that I made it off the island into a better future, and she’d made it off into...well, single motherhood, borderline poverty and now jail.
She did have Poe. From what I’d been able to tell on the few visits I was granted, my sister loved her child.
That night, as Poe and I were lying in our beds, I decided to go for it. It was dark, and the night was cold and clear. Through the skylight, I could see the thick, brilliant smear of the Milky Way.
“Have you talked to your mom recently?” I asked.
Poe didn’t answer for a minute. “What’s it to you?”
“Just wondering how she is.”
“She’s fine.” Poe rolled over to face the wall.
“If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here, honey.”
She muttered something.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t need to talk to you,” she said, enunciating clearly, her voice loud, as if talking to a room full of slightly deaf simpletons. “Though my circumstances are challenging, I am quite well-adjusted.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I’m glad.” I took a long, slow breath, still staring at the stars. “Your mom and I were really close once.”
“Whatever.”
“I loved her more than I loved anyone.”
“Hooray for her.”
“And I love you, no matter what. I would love to be closer, and I’d—”
“Could you shut up now? I’m trying to sleep.”
I reached down to pet Boomer, who slept next to me, since we both couldn’t fit on the twin bed. His tail thumped, letting me know I was loved. God, grant me the serenity to not tell my niece she’s a royal pain in the ass. “Good night, Poe. Sleep well.”
* * *
The second weekend after I returned to Scupper Island, my mom asked if I wanted anything in town. It was Saturday, her day to do the grocery shopping.
“Can I come with you? Please? Please?”
“Sure, but only if you calm down.” She kissed Tweety on the beak—I suppressed my scream—and went to the bottom of the stairs. “Poe, you need anything?”
“No.”
“Text me if you think of anything.”
There was no answer.
“Give me a few minutes,” I told my mom. “I need to brush my hair.” And change and put on makeup. Without a doubt, I’d run into someone I knew.
Half an hour later, I was shiny and clean and ready to go. “Go see Poe,” I told my dog. Given time, I knew he’d win her over. He obeyed, galumphing up the stairs, the genius.
I’d graduated to a plain old runner’s brace, which made my knee look lumpy but was a vast improvement over the soft cast. My mom was waiting by the front door, puss on her face, arms crossed.
We drove into town, my mom grumbling about the “crowds” that would be at the market, now that it was 10:00 a.m. By crowds, she meant four to six people.
We pulled into the store’s parking lot. “I think I’ll take a hobble around, if that’s okay with you,” I said.
“Suit yourself.”
“Here, let me give you some money for groceries.” I took out my wallet.
“Save it.”
“I make a good living, Mom. Let me help.”
She gave me a dirty look, then threw the car into Park. “I can afford to put food on the table, Nora.”
“Well, I’m an extra mouth to feed, and—”
She got out the car and walked off, her canvas bags flapping indignantly.
“Thank you!” I called. She didn’t look back.
I would definitely be needing that rental place, fast. Otherwise, there’d be blood everywhere, and soon. I hated to use words like killing spree, but between Poe talking on the phone at 3:00 a.m. this morning, then using all the hot water again and my mother’s refusal to have a conversation of more than two sentences, I was getting a little homicidal.
I maneuvered myself out of the car. Sammy’s Grocery was behind Main Street, the heart of our happening downtown, and it was probably time for me to start walking without the crutch.
And you know...I didn’t want to look quite so pathetic. Bad enough that I was still limping.
Slowly and carefully, I wobble-walked up the slight incline. It was the end of April now, and in the years I’d been away, the town had planted crab apple trees along Main Street. They were thinking about blooming—the little pink buds were still clenched, but giving a sweet glow. A restaurant—Stone Cellar—had window boxes of pansies. I peeked inside. Wooden beams, dark floor, nice-looking bar. And looky here—it was open on weekends in the off-season. That was something. Only Red’s, the bar frequented by the hard-core drinkers, had been open year-round when I was a kid.
I stopped at the corner. The gray-shingled building here was, conveniently, a real estate office, pictures of houses in the windows.
Time to be independent and all that.
Suddenly, I missed Bobby. I missed him so much it wrapped around me like a lead blanket, heavy, tugging me down. He had called the other day, at two-fifteen in the afternoon, and his voice had made my eyes well up. We’d talked gently and sweetly to each other, asking about work, what the other was doing. We’d listened to each other breathe, and it was...nice.
If he was dating Jabrielle, he didn’t say so.
Once, I’d imagined marrying Bobby. Before we started dating even, and once we’d started, I couldn’t imagine anyone more perfectly suited to me. We had so much fun together! Life had seemed impossibly wonderful.
Then the Big Bad Event happened, but even that showed me how great he was. About three months after the BBE, he’d said, “When we make it official someday,” just an offhand remark that had made me so embarrassingly happy I almost floated. I’d told Roseline, who was already engaged, and she’d brought me to the posh bridal salon where she’d bought her gown, and we played dress-up for an hour.
Now I was getting a place of my own, back in the hometown I never wanted to return to.
At least I didn’t have to remember our fun times here. Bobby had never been to the island. I’d never let him come. I hadn’t come, always making the case that Mom should come to Boston, which she did, stoically, without a lot of fuss, never staying more than a day.
The man in the real estate office saw me standing there and opened the door. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“I’m looking to rent a place for a couple of months,” I said. Until Lily comes back. Until I make things right again.
“Come on in!” he said with such good cheer that I knew he was an island transplant. “I’m Jim Ivansky. We handle lots of rentals here. What brings you to Scupper?”
I filled him in, mentioned Boomer, and he smiled and smiled as Realtors do. “We have some great places. You’ll be renting during the summer, so the price will go up after Memorial Day, but I’m sure we can find you something.”
The first few houses he showed me were the summer people’s McMansions—five-bedroom, six-bath places on the water, complete with boathouses.
“It’s just me and my dog,” I said. I paused. “Maybe something with two bedrooms, in case my niece wants to stay with me once in a while.”
He scanned his listings. “How about this?” he asked, swinging the computer screen around to show me. It was the Krazinskis’ place, an unremarkable ranch on Route 12, the closest house to Mom’s. I wondered why their house was vacant. The interior pictures showed a pretty bland, somewhat-careworn place and a kitchen last updated in the 1970s, based on the Harvest Gold appliances.
“Got something with a little more...character?” I asked, feeling guilty. Lizzy Krazinski—or Lizzy Krizzy, as she’d been known—had been a year behind me in school. We’d ridden the school bus together. She’d been okay, Lizzy.
“I know what you mean,” Jim said. He scrolled down. It seemed that it was McMansion or meh.
“Oh, hold on, what was that one?” I asked.
“This? It’s a houseboat.”
“In Maine? Isn’t the water a little rough for that?”
“It is, but it’s moored in Oberon Cove,” Jim said. “Some rich tech goober had it built over at WoodenBoat and then bought most of the Cove. Built a nice dock to moor it. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn’t even lived here yet. One of those guys who has houses all over the world.”
“Think he’d rent it?” I asked.
“It’s not for sale; I just have the listing for tax reasons. I’m on the assessment board here in town. But let me give him a call. I think he’s in New Zealand on a spirit quest.”
“Of course.” I smiled. Rich tech goobers did things like that.
Jim punched in a string of numbers, and miraculously, the guy picked up. “Collier, Jim Ivansky from Island Real Estate here. I’ve got a beautiful young lady here who’s absolutely in love with your houseboat.” He put his phone on speaker. “You’re on with Nora Stuart. Nora, meet Collier Rhodes.”
“Hi there!” I said in my Cute Nora voice. “It’s such a pleasure to talk to you! Jim’s right, I’m madly in love. What an amazing place you’ve built!”
“Thank you so much!” he said. “So you’re looking for shelter and inspiration, is that it?”
Not really, but... “You got it.” I told him my story of returning home after an accident, the siren call of the sea, the rugged beauty of Maine. “I wonder if you’d consider renting it to me. It’s so lovely, and I’d take excellent care of it. Something about it just spoke to me.”
“I hear you. Returning to your roots, taking time to breathe in the cosmic power that saved your life. Absolutely get it. I’d be honored to rent it to you. You know what? You don’t even have to pay me.”
Jim winced. There went his commission.
“No, no,” I said. “I’m more than happy to pay.”
“All right. I totally respect that. Okay, then. I’ll let Jim work out the details. Namaste, Nora Stuart.” He hung up.
“Ah, tech geniuses,” I said, and Jim laughed.
Ten minutes later, the houseboat was mine until mid-September, though I planned to go back to Boston in August. But maybe Poe and Lily would like to stay there when Lily got out of jail. In the meantime, it was all mine. It was even furnished. I couldn’t wait to see it. Maybe my mom and Poe would like to come with me. Or not.
Boomer, I was sure, would love it.
I went out of the office, keys in hand, and started down the street, feeling rather pleased with myself. No more Tweety giving me the evil eye.
I’d be living alone again. First time since the Big Bad Event.
My heart suddenly went into A-fib, a hummingbird trapped in my chest, buzzing frantically, trying to get out. My mouth was sand, palms sweaty.
I’d be okay. It was fine. I had Boomer now. And it was Scupper Island. A very safe place.
Shit. I couldn’t do it. I’d have to stay with my mom. She wouldn’t kick me out. I turned to go back in the real estate office, then turned around again.
No. Now or never. No more gray, no more fears. Plus, when Lily came back, she could stay with me.
“Time for a donut,” I muttered. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Lala’s was four shops (or shoppes) down the street. I could use a sugar boost, since my mother didn’t believe in dessert, viewing it a moral weakness like her Calvinist ancestors before her. Poor thing. I mean, sure, I was a GI doc and believed in good nutrition, but I also had a beating heart.
There. The thoughts of donuts had helped. I was calmer.
“Let me get the door for you,” said an older gentleman, approaching with a newspaper under his arm. Mr. Carver, who did handyman work for the summer people—opening their houses, clearing their lawns, letting them know if a tree fell during the winter.
My dad used to help him out once in a while.
“Hi, Mr. Carver,” I said.
“Ah...hello there, young lady.”
“Nora Stuart. Bill and Sharon’s daughter.” I glanced at his left hand. Married, and therefore not a contender for Mom.
“Is that right? Jeezum crow, you got big. Have a good day, now.” He smiled and headed off.
Not everyone hated me. That was nice to know. “Hey, Mr. Carver,” I said, gimping out after him. “Do you have a minute?”
“Sure thing.” Steam rose from his coffee.
“Um...” It was embarrassing that I had to ask someone I hadn’t seen in almost two decades a deeply personal question. “Do you remember my dad, Mr. Carver?”
“Of course. He was a nice fella.”
“Did you ever hear from him? After he left the island?” Because he never bothered getting in touch with me. My face felt hot.
“Cahn’t say that I did, sweethaht.” He thought another second or two. “No. I don’t think so.” His weathered blue eyes were so kind that I had to look away.
“No, I figured it was a long shot. But thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Nice to see you.”
So. The first stone had been overturned and revealed nothing. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, but...well.
The humid, sweet air of Lala’s was like a much-needed hug.
Standing in line was a mother with three little kids. The older two stood silently, staring down at their phones, their necks curved in that unmistakable posture that said, Don’t bother me, I’m emotionally dead inside. The littlest kid, about six, blond with a puffy winter coat on, pulled on his mother’s hand. “I want a cookie,” he said.
“You’re not getting one. I already told you that.” She adjusted her purse strap and sighed.
The little boy pushed out his lip, then saw me looking. “What happened to you?” he asked, eyeing my sling.
“I didn’t look crossing the street, and I got hit by a car,” I said. “So you make sure you look both ways and always hold a grown-up’s hand.”
The mom looked back at me.
It was Darby Dennings, sidekick of Amy Beckman, Queen of the Cheetos, receiver of hugs. Amazing how I knew everyone instantly, as if I hadn’t been gone for fifteen years.
“Sorry if he’s bothering you,” Darby said with a smile. Her eyes flicked up and down, assessing my injuries, her gaze lingering on my purse. “That’s a great bag,” she said. “Mind if I ask where you got it?”
“Oh, um...I think I got it at—”
I’d bought it at a snooty boutique on Newbury Street after I was hired by Boston Gastroenterology Associates. Roseline, who had a serious shopping addiction, believed that every woman needed to own a purse that was way too expensive. We’d made a day of it, both of us still heady with our salaries, and settled on this one, made of buttery brown leather so smooth and supple I wanted to date it.
It had cost an amount that still embarrassed and thrilled me.
“I got it at T.J. Maxx,” I said.
“You can get great stuff there,” she said. “The one in Portland?”
“Boston.”
“Is that where you’re from?” There wasn’t so much as a flicker of recognition in her eyes.
“Mommy, I want a cookie!”
She ignored the little guy, smiling at me, and I saw myself through her eyes for one deeply satisfying second. Granted, the sling. But still, my hair was shiny from the straightening iron and the high-end products I used to tame it. Makeup was Chanel. I wore a blue cashmere sweater and Lucky Brand jeans and buttery leather Kate Spade flats.
“I’m from here, actually,” I said. “Nora Stuart. How are you, Darby?”
Her jaw dropped, and her face went from pleasant to flushed, her smile fading. “Well, holy crap.”
“These are your kids?”
“Yeah. Uh, Matthew, Kaylee and Jordan.”
“Hi, kids,” I said. “I went to school with your mother.”
The children didn’t respond or notice or care.
“You lost weight. Christ. I didn’t even recognize you.” Her eyes narrowed as if I’d played a trick on her.
“Whatcha want there, Darby?” asked Lala.
Then the door opened again, bringing a gust of cold air, and in came a good-looking guy.
Darby glanced at him, too. “Hey, Sully.”
Good God. Sullivan Fletcher. Twin brother of Luke Fletcher, god of high school. For a second, I wobbled on my bad knee.
He did a double take when he saw me.
“Nora! Hey. How are you?” He didn’t smile, but he didn’t scowl, either.
“Hi,” I breathed. “Fine, thanks, Sullivan. Um...how are you?”
He looked good, thank God. I never did learn exactly what had happened to him in that car accident senior year...just that he’d had a brain injury. I remember they said he was expected to recover, but you never knew what that truly meant.
But the years had been kind to Sullivan Fletcher. Once, he’d been an ordinary-looking boy, brown hair, brown eyes. Now age had given him character. His face had lost its boyish softness, and his jaw and cheekbones were hard and well-defined. Curling hair, on the shaggy side. He was tall, maybe six-one and rangy and...well, interesting.
And he was normal. My adrenaline burst was followed by relief. Those words—traumatic brain injury—had haunted me. Every time we’d had a TBI case in residency, I’d thought of Sullivan Fletcher.
But here he was, looking completely healthy and...well...good.
Really, really good. My mouth was dry with relief.
“I heard you were back,” he said.
“Yep. I am.” So much for witty repartee.
I wondered if Luke had turned out, as well. Once upon a time, I had loved Sullivan Fletcher’s twin, right up until I hated him.
“Darby, what do you want? I don’t have all day,” said Lala.
“A loaf of rye. Jesus. Do I ever get anything else?”
“I want a cookie, Mommy!” said the little guy. The other two had yet to look up from their phones.
Lala put the bread through the slicer, wrapped it and handed it over, taking Darby’s money at the same time. “Help you?” she said to me.
“Could I please have a donut?”
“Just one?”
“Yes, please.”
“You’re in Boston now?” Sullivan asked.
“That’s right,” I said, nodding. “Here for a little while. Are you getting donuts? I love them. I mean, you know, who doesn’t, right? Donuts should be the universal sign of happiness. We could win wars with donuts. And, hey, no one makes donuts like Lala, right?”
You are a highly trained physician, my brain told me. Snap the fuck out of it.
Sullivan’s eyebrows drew together a little.
“What do you do for work?” Darby asked, making no move to leave.
I dragged my eyes off Sully, trying to regain my cool “Um...I’m a doctor.”
“A doctor?” she said. “A real doctor?”
“Yep. I’m a gastroenterologist.”
“What’s that?”
“Stomach and digestive track.”
“Gross,” Darby said.
I usually had a reply for that, some alleged Mark Twain quote about the joys of pooping, but my mind was blank. Was Sullivan mad at me? What had happened to Luke? Did he still live here? Should I apologize? Maybe I should just get out of here.
Yes. That one.
“Here you go,” Lala said, and I handed over a couple dollars, then hobbled out, my bad leg locked, the other feeling weak.
Sully held the door for me. “See you around,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. Another eloquent answer.
Then, before I made more of an ass of myself than I already had, I stiff-legged it down the street. I kept my head down, the fear that had splashed at me earlier now rising like a fast tide.
Luke Fletcher would definitely know I was back now.
8 (#u3ec61b32-5ed6-5084-bdec-d56c97ffb0c1)
When it finally became clear that my father wasn’t coming back anytime soon, I did what unhappy girls do all over the earth, and especially in America.
I ate.
That first, joyless summer crept past in inches. A new school year started, and I was hungry all the time. Loneliness for my father was like a sinkhole, and I couldn’t find enough food to fill it, despite always taking seconds, always scraping my plate.
Then I started eating in secret, sneaking down to the kitchen at night when my mother was in bed to stuff a leftover meatball in my mouth, chewing the cold, tasteless wad, reaching for another before I even swallowed. I told my mother I could make my own lunches now and added extra slices of American cheese, folding one in quarters, pushing it into my mouth while I slathered the bread with mayonnaise.
At school, I started stealing dessert from the cafeteria, even though I was a cold-lunch kid. Pudding or Jell-O with fake whipped cream on it, the big hard cookies that spattered crumbs everywhere. I’d go through the lunch line, pretending I needed an extra napkin, and subtly grab a little bowl or cookie or Twinkie, then slip off to the gym, which was always empty at lunchtime, and swallow my treat in gulps, tasting only the first bite, shoving the rest in as fast as I could.
I didn’t have friends anymore. All those years of rushing home to see what Dad and Lily and I were going to do (because it was better than anything in the world) had left me outside the harsh world of junior high, where cliques were carved in stone, and cafeteria seating was more complex than the British peerage.
At home, I helped myself to seconds of my mother’s boring, unvarying dinners. Monday night: chicken, baked potatoes, carrots and peas. Tuesday night: meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans. Wednesday night: pork chops, rice, peas again. You get the idea. But I ate and ate and ate.
“You’re getting fat,” Lily accused. She remained elf thin. Soon, I knew, she’d start to become beautiful. “Stop eating, Nora. It’s gross.” She pushed back her own untouched dinner, superiority and disgust shining from her blueberry-colored eyes. One of our shared chores was after-supper cleanup. I always volunteered to do it solo. That way, I could eat her meal, too.
“Go do your homework, Lily,” our mother said, her eyes on me.
My father wasn’t the only one who’d left, it seemed. The day he packed up was the day my sister stopped loving me.
I ate and waited out the year, trying to be as invisible as possible in school that year, counting the weeks till summer, when I prayed Lily and I would recapture the magical times we’d had with Dad. When she would love me again. When I’d once again have a place in the world.
When summer finally arrived, I tried to re-create some of the things we’d done before—draw little maps in the dirt of the secret ancient Mexican cities Dad told us about or make birds’ nests that a real bird might want to live in, shinny up the saplings that lined the rocky shore, make forts.
It didn’t work.
Lily wanted nothing to do with it. One time, I brought up the subject of our father and put my arm around her to reassure her—I was the big sister, after all. She shrugged it off like my arm burned. “Get over it, Nora,” she said bitterly and went back inside.
In a lot of ways, Lily seemed older than I was. She had a sharpness about her, a complexity that I lacked. While I had hidden in sixth grade, Lily started the year off by talking to the prettiest, richest girls in our school without fear, without hesitation, as if she was one of them. And they accepted her.
Everyone knew about our father leaving. In Lily’s case, it made her edgy and badass. In my case, it made me a loser.
My solitude continued into the next school year. I worked hard, because homework could fill up hours, because if I was hunched over a math work sheet at our kitchen table, I didn’t have to see my younger sister, once so loved, glaring at me. I asked for extra-credit projects so I could spend more time at the library, sitting in the cool, dim stacks, reading, scribbling notes, so I didn’t have to go home to the home where my father no longer lived. The one bright spot in my life was straight As every semester.
I worried that our dad called Lily, that he was coming to get her, but he’d leave me with Mom. Every day when I got home, I checked the answering machine. Every day, a zero sat unblinking.
One time, I screwed up my courage when my mother was driving me to the dentist. Somehow, talking in the car was always easier. “Do you think Dad will ever come back?” I asked, looking out my window.
There was a pause, then, “I don’t know.”
Thus ended our conversation.
So I had homework, I had my secret food (which wasn’t that much of a secret really). And then came puberty. Overnight, it seemed, the plagues of Egypt visited my body. I went from a chubby adolescent to someone with breasts and a beer belly, thick thighs that chafed, a butt that was both wide and flat. The hair on my legs was as thick as on my head. I had to shave my armpits daily, or the stubble would prick my skin. I had a ’stache. I had bacne. I got warts on my knuckles.
There was no indignity too great. My first period—white pants. My second period left a puddle in my chair in math class. During that special time of the month, I would sweat like I’d just finished the Boston Marathon during a heat wave. I had inexplicable halitosis, despite flossing and brushing three times a day. A new clumsiness happened upon me when I grew boobs, throwing me off balance, causing me to trip and stumble more than anyone else in the world, it seemed.
I started researching witchcraft to see who had done this to me.
And as I had predicted, my sister grew beautiful.
For a while I just existed, watching my sister live without me, even if she did sleep four feet away. My mother went to and from work at the hotel, did the books for her freelance clients in the evenings, made our dinners, packed our lunches. She didn’t say anything about my weight gain. If she knew I was wretched, she didn’t say anything. Told me I did well on my report card, resting her hand on my shoulder for a second, which made me just about cry.
Every day, I prayed my father would call. Would come back. Would bring happiness back into our lives.
Then came ninth grade, and I fell in love.
It was ridiculous, really. There I was, a “husky” girl in a world of beautiful waifs, wearing my homemade jumpers (because jeans cut into the soft fat around my waist), my turtlenecks to cover up as much skin as possible, sturdy shoes and knee socks to mask the fact that the warts had spread to my feet. My hair was a horrible combination of frizzy, wiry, curly and straight, and because spitballs were good at hiding in there, I wore it in a ponytail most of the time. I looked like the definition of spinster, even at the age of fourteen.
Of course, Luke Fletcher wouldn’t notice me.
But love is stupid, isn’t it? My brain couldn’t stop the free fall of my heart. I knew even the idea was a joke, but my insides leaped and wriggled when he walked by. He’d always been cute—the better-looking, funnier, more athletic Fletcher twin. Sullivan wasn’t hideous or anything...just average.
Luke, on the other hand, was breathtaking. My lungs literally stopped working at the sight of him. He had tawny blond hair, green eyes, dimples. A flashing, easy smile, and a laugh that echoed in the chambers of my swollen, empty heart.
He was great at sports, already six feet tall, and had gone from lean to muscled over the summer. He was tan from working outside—his father owned Scupper Island Boatyard, and both boys worked there, and now Luke’s skin was golden and perfect, hypnotic. He was on the soccer team, a starter his freshman year.
My crush was horrible, absurd, embarrassing. I wished with all my heart that it would wither and die, but it didn’t. It grew. It was a virus.
If God hadn’t already blessed Luke enough, he was smart. As smart as I was, smarter even, because my grades came from studying and reading, and his came from simply being. He and I were the only two kids from our class to take Algebra II as freshmen. The only two kids who got put into the Honors English class. The only two who got an A-plus on our biology midterm.
He was nice, too.
When it suited him, he was nice.
I knew I’d never have a chance with a boy like that. Of course, I didn’t. But my stupid, ridiculous heart lived for any notice, any opportunity just the same. Once, I sat next to him in assembly by some miracle and sweat and blushed for the entire hour, drunk with the smell of him—shampoo and sweat. His arm brushed mine, and my whole body clenched with lust.
Twice a week, Mr. Abernathy, the English teacher, made us (like it was a sacrifice for me) stay after school to do college-level writing prompts. The math teacher wanted us to compete as a team in the Math Olympiad, and in the two glorious weeks leading up to it, we crammed together at the library, four nights in all. Sitting with him at the competition, scribbling notes, looking at each other with smiles when our answer was correct... It was magic. We took third in the state. When the principal broadcast our results in the morning announcements, I blushed so hard my face hurt.
“Way to go, Fletcher!” Joey Behring called. “Too bad it had to be with the Troll.”
Did I mention my nickname? Yeah. My physical appearance wasn’t unnoticed by my peers. Did I have some good features? Who cared at that age?
“She’s okay,” Luke said, and my face burned hotter from the gallant defense.
Sullivan Fletcher paused at my desk as homeroom let out. “Good job, Nora,” he said.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
And so went high school. Study, savor every second my academic achievement let me have with Luke. More than college, more than the urge to do well, his presence was my motivation.
The summer between freshman and sophomore years, I got a summer job at the Scupper Island Clam Shack, which meant I deep-fried a lot of seafood. Ate a lot of seafood, too. Working there was a relief; most of the customers were the summer nuisance, and I tried to be cheerful and sunny and pretend I wasn’t fat when I waited on them. I gave my mother my paychecks—money was always tight—and she told me I was a good kid.
Sullivan Fletcher worked at the Clam Shack as well as at his father’s boatyard. He was not as blessed athletically as his twin, not particularly brainy, though not dumb, either. He wasn’t mean, didn’t talk much, and I might’ve liked him, had he not dated Amy Beckman, one of the beautiful Cheetos, one of Lily’s pack. Amy went out of her way to mock me, and Lily pretended not to notice (or didn’t mind).
Lily...sharp-tongued, model thin, blue-eyed and graceful, carelessly sexual, an expert at conveying everything with a look. Her grades were in the toilet, but she didn’t care. When Mom suggested I tutor her, Lily made a face of such disgust that tears came to my eyes.
Worst of all, we still shared a room. Our little house only had two bedrooms. Every day, Lily would dress in front of me, totally unselfconscious about her body, her ribs striating through her skin, her vertebrae rippling as she pulled on pants. She was tiny and perfect, still so beautiful to me, as she had been when she was little. I tried not to look, but her body fascinated me. What would it be like to bend over and not have a stomach bulge? To not have to wear a bra? To have arms as long and slim as a ballerina’s, an ass that was both round and shapely but still fit into size 00 jeans?
At night, I’d cry sometimes, fully embracing my misery like any teenager worth her salty tears. I lacked my mother’s ironclad pragmatism, lacked Lily’s sense of self-preservation. Instead, I wrapped myself in melancholy, remembering when my sister and I were little, when we were close, when we were happy. I missed my father and hated him and loved him and hated him some more for ruining everything. Tears would slip into my ears as I listened to Lily breathe.
Or listened to her sneak out, slipping open the window, out onto the roof, down onto the lawn, as light and silent and beautiful as a dragonfly.
I missed her so much my bones hurt with it. The fact was, my sister had become a bitch, and it would’ve served me well to tell her that and show some gumption, as my mother would say...but that was the gift of hindsight. As it was, I yearned for her love, the friendship that I had never once questioned before our father left. “When will you be done in there?” was about the lengthiest conversation we had in years.
So Luke Fletcher was my heaven and hell. Any excitement in my life came from occasionally being paired with Luke in school. Every time was a mixed bag—we’d do a calculus problem on the board, extra credit going to the person who finished first; me acutely aware that my arms jiggled as I wrote, that the whole class was pulling for Luke.
But either way, if he won or I won, he’d smile at me, and it was everything.
Until senior year, that was.
Twenty years before I started high school, Scupper Island had produced a super genius named Pedro Perez, son of a fisherman, who was off-the-charts brilliant. He went to Tufts, then Harvard, then Oxford, then Stanford, and before he was thirty, he had three PhDs and had invented a computer algorithm that tracked consumer data and changed marketing forevermore. He had seventy-nine patents on all sorts of things, from agricultural tools to advanced rocket engines (and time-travel machines, if you listened to the rumors). Like any good billionaire hermit, he owned a ranch in Montana and moved his family out with him.
But once a year, Dr. Perez came back to Scupper to show his appreciation to his hometown by sending the kid with the highest GPA to Tufts. This Scupper Island slot at the university may or may not have had something to do with the fact that Dr. Perez had given the school tens of millions of dollars. It might simply have been a testament to our good public schools, funded by the tax dollars of our summer residents. But each year, a Scupper Island kid went off to Medford, Massachusetts and never looked back.
The scholarship covered everything. Tuition, room, board, books, a generous allowance that, rumor had it, covered everything from dorm-room furnishings to eating out. Dr. Perez’s only requirement was that the recipient finish college; dropouts would have to repay him.
No one ever dropped out.
Scupper Island was so grateful they renamed a street after him—Maple Street became Perez Avenue, and every year at the start of the second semester, Dr. Perez left Montana, returned to the island and announced the winner. He asked that grades not be posted after December midterms, so the winner could be kept a secret until the first week of January, when the entire school assembled to see who the lucky senior would be.
Most years, it was obvious who’d win, but occasionally, it would be suspenseful.
Going into our senior year, Luke and I were neck and neck. I had a 4.115 GPA, thanks to the weighted grades from my AP classes (an A in those meant a 5.0, not a 4.0).
Luke’s GPA was 4.142, because he got A-pluses in gym... And every year, for that miserable semester, as if changing in the locker room in front of my slender female classmates wasn’t punishment enough, I got an A-minus.
I tried, I was a good sport, cheering on my classmates even if they ignored me. I sweat and ran and played volleyball, diving for balls, trying my best, and I still got an A-minus. I wondered if that had been deliberate; the gym teacher was also the soccer coach. If Luke went to Tufts, he’d almost certainly play soccer, which would be a feather in Coach’s cap.
“An A-minus is a good grade,” Coach said when I meekly approached him freshman year and asked what I had to do to bump that grade up. His eyes scanned me. “For a girl with your physique, I’d say it’s a very generous grade. You work hard. You’re doing fine.” The implication was clear. Only the really fit kids got As.
Luke, of course, was a god.
In the spring of my junior year, my mother sat me down and told me if I wanted to go to college, I’d have to get there myself, a fact I already knew. She didn’t want me to get my hopes up that there was money “lying around for that.”
If I won the Perez Scholarship, I’d go for free. To Tufts! The name itself was beautiful, light and sunny, full of promise.
Only 0.027 of a grade point average stood between Luke and me.
And so, shit got serious...at least, for me. Luke and I took the same AP classes. If I could get even half a grade higher than Luke, I could erase my deficit.
He didn’t seem concerned. Luke was gifted at English and history; I had to sweat over those subjects to get my grades. But I had an edge in science, and it was a weighted class. AP bio was my chance.
I pictured going to Tufts. I sent away for information, and Luke’s mother, who ran the post office, snarled at me when I collected the fat catalog, knowing full well why I wanted it. She ignored me when I thanked her, but I barely cared, inhaling the sharp, rich scent of the catalog before going to the park bench to pore over the pictures and course descriptions.
Oh, the campus! The brick buildings and unnaturally green lawns! I could see myself in one of the dorm rooms, a puffy white comforter on my bed, throw pillows and...and whatever else people brought to college. I’d be in the beautiful city of Boston (well, Medford, but practically Boston). I could see my future self: slim and pretty with better hair, at ease, laughing with friends—friends!—treating them to pizza with Dr. Perez’s expense account.
I would get an A-plus in AP bio. I didn’t think Luke could.
But he pulled a rabbit out of a hat...or a human, more accurately. Xiaowen Liu was a Chinese girl whose family had just moved to Maine from Boston and lived in a big house on the cliff. On the first day of school, Luke asked her to be his lab partner.
“Hey, Nora,” he said with a grin. “Guess who got a perfect score on her biology SATs?” He gave Xiaowen a one-armed hug, making her blush. I didn’t blame her. I understood. She had an accent; the Cheetos had immediately pretended not to understand her and didn’t even try to pronounce her name—She-ao-wen, not terribly hard. But they insisted on calling her “Ex-Ee-Oh-whatever,” the feral, skinny bitches.
I said hi to Xiaowen on her first day, and she said hi back, but that was it for the “Outsiders Bonding” moment. I lacked the confidence to ask if she wanted to hang out sometime, and besides, her mother chauffeured her to and from school in a new Mercedes. The money thing, you see. I was an islander; she was a rich person from away. She had what I wanted to pull off and failed—quiet confidence.
All three of us got an A-plus on the first big bio test.
There went my edge in science.
Then came the English class speeches.
Luke knew he’d ace his. I was the Troll, after all; he was Apollo.
Public speaking was my greatest dread—standing in front of my peers, their judgment and disdain enveloping me like a poison gas. I’d have to suck in my stomach. I’d break out in hives on top of acne. I’d sweat. My scalp would ooze oil. Seriously, I was cursed.
But I needed every A-plus I could get. We were assigned topics; mine was the failure of the juvenile justice system in Maine. Luke’s was on genetic engineering, an unfairly interesting topic.
I worked on that speech for weeks. Researched and studied, outlined and organized. I went to the library to watch speeches by MLK and Gandhi and Maya Angelou for body language and rhythm. Practiced in front of a mirror. Filmed myself. Memorized. Tweaked. Memorized again.
Luke gave his speech, and it was an unsurprising success. He was relaxed and confident, friendly and informative. Was it one for the ages? Not really, but if I’d been his teacher, I’d have given him an A. Maybe an A-plus.
Mr. Abernathy congratulated him fondly and told the class that tomorrow, we’d be treated to mine. Sweat flooded my armpits and back at the mention of my name. There were groans and sighs from the Cheetos.
“Don’t worry, Nora,” Mr. Abernathy said absently as I left the class. “You’ll do fine.”
“That’s a tough act to follow,” I said.
“I’m sure you’ve worked hard, dear. Try not to worry.”
Ha.
I thought Mr. A liked me. Maybe he was even rooting for me. He was the classic English teacher—rumpled and kind, disorganized and eloquent. His classroom was cheerfully messy, books overflowing from the back bookcase, faded posters of great authors hanging on the walls, a few straggling plants on the windowsill. His desk was covered in papers and books, and the huge dusty blackboard (which was actually green) was crowded with homework assignments he never managed to erase, quotes from literature and abbreviations like GMC for goal, motivation, conflict, or KISS for keep it simple, stupid and doodles of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Though I was a science geek, he made me love reading.
“Don’t worry,” he repeated, sensing my insecurity. “I have every faith in you.”
At least someone did. I went home and practiced the speech again and again and again in the cellar, so Lily and Mom wouldn’t overhear me. I slept horribly, having nightmares about getting lost, missing my speech, then giving it, only to realize my legs were covered in fur. I couldn’t eat that morning (a rarity, let me tell you), and my heart thudded and twisted all morning.
I slid into English and slunk to my desk. “All right, then,” Mr. Abernathy said. “Nora, you’re up, dear.”
I went to the front of the class, and before the sweat could start oozing from every pore, I began.
The class was about to be stunned. So was I.
That saying about practice makes perfect? Being prepared? It worked.
Rather than give statistics (as Luke had), I had chosen a fellow student to use as an example.
“Sullivan Fletcher was convicted of underage drinking and illegal drug use after a devastating car accident in which he was the driver,” I began. “Tragically, his twin brother, Luke Fletcher, was also in the car at the time and suffered the complete severing of his penis.”
The class burst out in surprised laughter. Except for Luke.
The rest of the speech followed the fictional life of juvenile delinquent Sully Fletcher, his poor-quality education, the violence he would encounter in our woefully underfunded correctional facilities, his difficulties in getting a job, finding a wife, his high odds of divorce and becoming a deadbeat dad. I talked about his struggles with drug use and alcoholism.
I walked between the rows of desks, addressing the students by name. “Picture that, Lonnie. Seven out of ten. What if you were in the bunch? Caroline, you have a little sister. Imagine if she had to visit you in State.”
I ended by stopping by Sullivan’s desk. “I hope you’re never in an accident, big guy,” I said fondly, as if I could actually have a conversation with a Fletcher boy, let alone call him by a nickname. Then I turned to his twin. “And, Luke, I hope your parts stay intact.” Another big laugh. “But now you all know what to expect once you start down the dark road of a criminal.”
Then...shockingly...applause. I think Xiaowen started it.
“Very entertaining, Nora,” said Mr. Abernathy. “Well done.”
I went back to my seat, my face now burning, the sweat now drenching me, my face so slick with oil that I could write my name in it, but the speech was over. I had faked my way through that composed, relaxed, funny persona, and it worked. The minute class was over, I bolted for the bathroom before my bowels melted.
I had to miss my next class, thanks to nervous diarrhea.
The next week, when our speech papers came back, there was a big fat A-plus at the top of mine.
I covered my grade with my hand, but Luke saw mine...and I saw his. A-minus.
He gave me a cool, assessing look. In that moment, it seemed like Luke Fletcher realized that he might not get something he wanted. Something he felt was his due.
Later that day, he hip-checked me in the hall, sending me sprawling, my corduroy jumper riding up over my thick thighs, my books splaying all around me. “Watch where you’re going, Troll,” he said, his voice the same sneer the Cheetos used, slashing like a razor because it came from his perfect mouth.
He stepped on my notebook and pivoted, tearing the cover.
He had never called me Troll before.
It was November; the semester would be ending in December, just before Christmas. Per Dr. Perez’s request, our grades would not be posted from now until the announcement. We had midterms coming up, and based on what I knew, I ran the numbers.
Despite the A-minus on his presentation, Luke was more than likely going to pull an A, if not an A-plus, in English. Because of my stupid gym grade, even if I got a perfect score on every test (as I fully intended to do), Luke’s GPA would be 0.008 higher than mine. He’d get the scholarship. He’d go to Tufts.
I’d have to go somewhere else. I’d be saddled with debt, have to take on a couple of jobs, try for every merit scholarship there was. It was possible. I could do it.
I’d applied to the colleges like Harvard and Yale that had huge endowments for kids in my shoes, but I wasn’t likely to get in. All their applicants had fabulous grades, too, and grades were the only thing I had going for me. I lacked any extracurriculars aside from the Math Olympics, too busy studying. No sports to sweeten the pot, no hours of community service, no trips abroad to dig wells.
I wanted to be a doctor—I loved science, and I could see myself in surgery, saving lives, beloved by my peers, not having to worry about clothes because of scrubs. For that career to come true, I needed great grades from a great college to help me get into med school, which would cost at least another quarter of a million dollars.
It would be a long, long road without the Perez Scholarship.
The Fletcher boys had everything. Two parents who loved them and each other. Their father owned the boatyard, his mother was not only the postmistress of our town but also ran the general store (same building, very cute, a must-visit if you were a tourist). As year-rounders went, they were set. They weren’t wealthy but they were solid. I imagined that Luke would be accepted at many colleges, get plenty of merit and sports scholarships.
But I needed the Perez Scholarship. And it looked like I wasn’t going to get it.
One day in early December, as I sat in the cafeteria, not eating (chubby girls didn’t eat in public), reading The Scarlet Letter, Luke approached me, his sycophants trailing behind him.
“Hey, Troll, guess who called me yesterday?”
Even as he insulted me, I couldn’t help the blush of attraction that burned my chest and throat. “I don’t know.”
“The soccer coach from Tufts. Said he can’t wait to have me on the team. Guess the scholarship’s mine. Nice try. But you knew it would go to me, didn’t you? Deep down inside that fatty heart of yours?”
His fan club laughed. He rapped his knuckles on my table, making me jump, getting another laugh, then left.
Tears stung my eyes, and hatred—for Luke, for high school, for myself—churned in my stomach. There had to be something I could do. Something that Luke couldn’t. What that was, I had no idea.
Finals were approaching, and both Luke and I knew we had to ace every damn test. Uncharacteristically, he was studying, no doubt to make sure he wouldn’t hand me the win. Every day after school, I saw him in the library, once my refuge, and he’d mouth, “Sorry, Troll.”
I was doomed.
With two weeks left in the semester, with the January announcement of the Perez Scholarship recipient coming just after break, I was desperate. I pored over my report cards, doing the math again and again. Even if I got an A-plus on every exam, if Luke did the same, he’d win.
But there was that matter of the A-plus on my speech to his A-minus. The tiny ray of hope. It was possible that one A-minus could drop his term grade to an A, and if that happened...well, shit. Even if that happened, he’d still be the tiniest bit ahead.
On the last day of classes before exams, Mr. Abernathy wished us luck, told us to study hard. “Won’t make a difference,” Luke said as he passed my desk, bumping it with his hip.
I sat there, my face burning, pretending to take a few last notes, waiting for everyone to leave. It didn’t take long.
“Everything okay, Nora?” Mr. Abernathy asked, gathering up his own stuff from his cluttered desk.
“Oh, sure,” I lied.
“I have a meeting, I’m afraid. Do you mind turning out the lights?”
“Not at all, Mr. A.”
He smiled and left, and I sat there for another minute. Told myself I’d done all I could. That the University of Maine would give me a good package. Or maybe I’d go to community college for a couple of years and then transfer somewhere. I told myself that while the road to my adult life would be longer and harder without the scholarship, it was still a road I could travel.
But my heart, that stupid organ, ached. My stomach, that bottomless pit, growled. I’d go home, stuff my face, have a cry and a binge before Lily came back from whatever she did after school.
Tufts had been so close. A free ride. The beautiful dorm room. Expenses. The pizzas. The friends.
I got up to turn off the lights.
Then I saw it.
There, on the messy, dusty blackboard filled with quotes from Shakespeare and Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and homework assignments from the last two months, was my chance.
It had been there all along, written in Mr. A’s messy scrawl on the very first week of school, on the far left-hand side of the board. Underneath a caricature of Edgar Allan Poe and above a quote from Heart of Darkness, was my future.

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