Pieces of the Heart (2 page)

“There’re a lot more houses than I remember—and a lot fewer trees. It’s hardly the same place anymore.” Caroline sighed and watched a black-and-white loon settle on a dock piling in front of one of the enormous cookie-cutter houses across the lake and wondered if her brother, Jude, would even recognize any of it. He had always loved this place, the pungent smell of the lake and the warmth of the people who lived around it. Only the cold stone face of Ophelia herself seemed not to have changed.

Caroline could hear her pulse beating in her head, recognizing it as a warning sign from her doctor. Closing her eyes, she took long, slow breaths, focusing on the smell of the water and the sound of the lake nudging the dock under her, and waited for her pulse to slow. With her eyes still closed, she said, “At least we can be thankful for the ban on waverunners.”

As if on cue, an engine started up across the lake and a teenage boy shot off from a dock on a sapphire-blue waverunner, the solitary loon and other birds rising in a panic all along the edge of the lake.

Her mother sounded apologetic. “Some of the new people are on the town council. They voted down the ban eight to one.”

“Damn,” Caroline said, forgetting that her mother didn’t like her to swear. “Who was the holdout?”

“Rainy Martin. She’s always been such an environmentalist.”

Caroline looked up at her mother, the ash-blond hair a shade darker than her own. “What about you, Mom?”

Margaret Collier crossed her arms and met Caroline’s gaze. “They’re my neighbors and I didn’t want there to be any bad will between us. Besides, it’s not so bad. You can hardly hear the noise from inside the house.”

Caroline shook her head slowly. “Good ol’ Rainy. This world would be a much better place with more people like her in it.” Even saying the name filled Caroline with warmth. Rainy was the one connection to Jude she clung to, the only person who knew what she’d lost.

“Dad would have voted with Rainy.”

Her mother’s back stiffened. “Yes, well, your father has made his life in California for the last twelve years, so any speculation as to what he would or would not do is pointless.”

The waverunner came closer, drowning out Caroline’s thoughts and making her pulse thrum louder in her head. She took another deep breath.

When the noise had faded enough to be heard, Margaret said, “Dinner’s almost ready. I’m having a steak but I’m making you a skinless chicken breast.” She paused, the air heavy with all the unsaid words that had grown between them in a lifetime.

Caroline looked up at her mother again. “I was hoping we could stop by Roberta’s Bar-B-Que Shack for dinner. I remember going there every Saturday when we were at the lake.”

“Oh.”

Her tone made Caroline snap to attention. It was the same tone Margaret used to tell her daughter news like all the cookies were gone or nobody had called to ask her to the high school dance. She normally delivered the bad news faster, as if somehow Caroline would miss the details and not be as upset. It usually just made Caroline’s stomach turn over and set her teeth on edge.

“Roberta’s changed ownership about a year ago. I’m sure I mentioned it to you at some point. She was bought out by one of those big chains. I’ve been there a couple of times—it’s not bad. I could put the meat in the fridge if you’d prefer to go there.”

Caroline swallowed her disappointment, wondering why she suddenly wanted to cry. “No, that’s all right.” She forced a polite smile. “I can eat at a chain restaurant every night in Atlanta. Chicken breast is fine.” She had a brief flash of memory of her and Jude in Roberta’s kitchen, sitting on tall stools and helping her make her famous barbecue sauce, and she felt the urge to cry again.

Margaret cleared her throat. “I saw you hadn’t unpacked yet, so I put away your things in your old room. I noticed you didn’t pack a bathing suit.”

Caroline closed her eyes and took three deep breaths, forcing her irritation to flow out of her body from her nose and ears and mouth, as Dr. Northcutt had suggested. She imagined a small puff emanating from her left nostril but that was it. The irritation was definitely still there.

She stood and faced her mother, plastering her well-worn polite smile on her face again. “I haven’t worn a bathing suit since I was eighteen. Surely you’ve noticed that in the last thirteen years.”

Her mother’s head pulled back slightly in the way she had of hiding her hurt. But Caroline knew better than to feel guilt, because Margaret Ryan Collier could give as good as she got. Like an offended porcupine with sharpened quills, her mother raised an eyebrow.

“Now, Caroline—not that I don’t think a woman your age shouldn’t be figure-conscious; I just don’t think it’s necessary with only the two of us around. You know that you could wear a potato sack and I’d still think you were beautiful.”

Caroline stared at her mother, once again thinking she should have her DNA checked. She took three more deep breaths, and imagined a larger puff of irritation floating out of her right ear. She was
not
going to argue with her mother. She had been forced into a leave of absence to rusticate at the lake to get away from stress, after all. Although more than once during the two-hour drive from Atlanta in her mother’s Cadillac she’d wondered if giving her mother a quick shove out of the moving vehicle would alleviate most of the stress from her life.

Caroline smiled again, her face stiff. “My figure has nothing to do with my not wearing a bathing suit.” She thought of the scar on her chest again and how it still hurt her to know that her mother never seemed to remember it. “I’m hungry. Let’s go eat.” She stood and walked toward the house, the familiar feeling of needing to put as much space between them overriding everything else. “I need to wash up first.”

Her mother’s voice called out to her. “Your chicken is almost ready, and I made a salad. You wouldn’t be hurting my feelings, though, if you just had the salad. I have low-fat dressing, too.”

Caroline’s smile fell as she counted to ten again, but she didn’t turn around to respond. She kept walking toward the house, its weathered gray boards familiar yet strange to her at the same time.

Damn,
she thought, wearily pulling open the back screen door. It had taken only three and a half hours in her mother’s presence to elevate her blood pressure and make her cuss. “Damn,” she said out loud, letting the screen door bang shut behind her.

C
AROLINE STUMBLED THROUGH THE MUDROOM AND INTO THE great room with its high-beamed ceiling, memories of the old house guiding her toward the small bedroom in the back. Her mind registered the changes her mother had made in the thirteen years since Caroline had been there.

As she passed through the back of the house, she saw that the pale pink walls were now painted a neutral cream, and the thin metal blinds had been replaced with wooden plantation shutters. After her parents’ divorce and her father’s move to the West Coast, Margaret’s career as an interior designer had progressed by astonishing degrees. She’d even had a living room featured in
Atlanta Home
magazine. Unfortunately, during the remodeling of her childhood vacation home, Caroline had been forced to listen to the things that were being removed from the lake house and of the new, seemingly improved items that were taking their places. It had been like a debridement of an infected wound to speed healing. Yet it had always seemed to Caroline to be more like putting a Band-Aid on a bleeding artery. She hadn’t returned to see the wreckage.

Caroline looked with some surprise at her old room. It was unchanged—even down to the rose-colored chenille bedspread and the big yellow dog Jude had won for her at a long-ago Harvest Moon festival. It still had the smear on the faded yellow of its cheek where ketchup had dripped from her brother’s hot dog as he’d tried to show her how he could shove it into his mouth in one bite.

She absently stroked the dog’s head as she glanced around at the old unpainted pine furniture with pink drawer pulls and the plastic beaded ropes that hung in front of her closet door. Caroline had thought them cool and magical but her mother considered them tacky and not appropriate for their Atlanta home. But they’d been a Christmas gift from Jude, so they were allowed to hang in her closet at the lake house, where it wasn’t possible for anyone who mattered to know that Margaret Collier allowed hippie beads into her home.

Caroline heard her mother gently open and shut the screened door before the tapping of her heels across the pine floors marked her passage to the kitchen. Silverware clinked on the wood surface of the kitchen table, followed by the sound of the oven door screeching open.
She’s baking the steaks with the chicken breast.
Caroline stifled a grin at her mother’s ineptitude with the outdoor grill and lifted the hippie beads, listening to them clack against the pale white closet door frame.

“Dinner’s ready,” her mother called out.

She wanted to say she wasn’t hungry, but her stomach grumbled as she stuck her head out the door. Glancing back into her room, she spotted her now-empty suitcase sitting against the wall near the dresser and remembered how there had once been two twin beds in the room. The second bed had been moved to the adjacent bedroom at her own insistence when she was twelve and much too old to be sharing a room with a brother who was eleven months younger than her.

“Coming,” she said, taking a deep breath and counting slowly to ten before heading for the kitchen. She’d stick to safe topics like the weather and the cost of milk. The soft notes of a Chopin prelude drifted through the great room from tiny Bose speakers poised inconspicuously behind a large fern and a framed child’s pastel drawing, the telltale scrawl of Jude’s signature blasted across the bottom in blue crayon. She scanned the walls quickly for the Andrew Wyeth print she’d given her mother for Christmas the previous year and felt the familiar stab of disappointment when she didn’t see it. She let her fingers slide over the closed top of the piano, and wondered briefly why her mother still kept it.

Walking toward the kitchen, she heard the first drops of rain against the skylights. Rainstorms in the mountains always caught you by surprise, like jumping into cold water on a hot day. She watched her mother toss the salad, studying her in her high heels and apron for a moment before she became aware of Caroline’s presence.

Margaret Collier had one of those faces that seemed to get better with age. Instead of filling out and sagging, her skin had tightened over beautiful bones, sharpening her nose and her chin. It was as if life had shrunk her somehow, made her more compact and better able to duck the sharp winds life had a habit of blowing at you.

Her mother turned her head and smiled, her makeup fresh and perfect. Caroline couldn’t think of a time she’d seen her without makeup. Even Christmas morning her mother never appeared downstairs without at least powder, eyeliner, and her signature red lipstick. Jude used to say that he wasn’t sure if he’d recognize her without it.

“Have a seat, dear. I’ll be done in just a minute.”

“I don’t mind helping. Why don’t I finish the salad?”

Her mother waved her toward the table. “Don’t be silly. You’re here on doctor’s orders to relax. Take a seat and I’ll have this on the table in just a second.”

“Smells good.” Caroline pulled out a chair and sat down, noticing the linen napkins and silver napkin rings. Their starched whiteness and perfect creases were as formal as the strange, polite dance she and her mother seemed to be performing.

“You’ve done a lot with the house.”

Margaret smiled. “Yes, I suppose I have. It’s been a sort of experimental work in progress. Do you like it?”

Caroline watched her mother take out a pitcher of sweet tea and set it on the table, and avoided meeting her eyes. “It’s . . . different.” It was all she could allow. How could she explain that it wasn’t about liking it or not? It was more like staring at the stump of a severed limb. It was about missing something that was no longer there.

To change the subject she asked, “Where’s that Wyeth print I gave you last year?” and then immediately wished she hadn’t said it. Her comment went beyond white starchiness and crisp creases. It bordered on real emotions and deep hurt, of things not spoken aloud by implicit agreement.

Her mother sat down, an uncomfortable flush rising in her cheeks. “I haven’t hung it yet. Guess I’m still looking for the perfect spot.” She raised her eyes to her daughter’s. “Actually, I thought you’d let me hang it in your apartment. You don’t have a thing on the walls—or on the windows for that matter. I wish you’d let me do the whole thing—pro bono, of course.”

Slowly Caroline pulled her napkin from the shiny sterling ring and placed it on her lap, listening to the pelting of rain on the roof. “I don’t like living around a lot of fuss. Besides, I’m rarely there. My job keeps me at the office.”

She watched her mother mirror her own movements with the napkin. “Maybe you’d feel more of a desire to leave your office if you had a nice place to come home to. I hope you’ve been listening to Dr. Northcutt. You’ve got to stop working so hard. You’ve been lucky with just a stress attack as a warning. It could be worse next time—much worse.”