The Girls of Tonsil Lake (7 page)

I waited for her to call me on it, to assert that I’d never done anything on my own in my entire life, but she didn’t. She just gave me a brooding look and said, “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning. Your dad’s taking us all to the airport. We’re going to meet Vin in Bangor and go from there. We have to ride a ferry to the island and then take a taxi. Vin doesn’t keep a car there—she says hardly anyone does.”

I closed the suitcase and hefted it off the bed, placing it beside its partner near the bedroom door. “There, that’s done. I sure hope there are a washer and dryer in the house. Going to a Laundromat on foot doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“Well.” Carrie looked down at the clock on the bedside table. “I have to pick up the kids at Kelly’s and head home. Tim will be there soon. He and Brian were playing golf with Daddy.”

I walked her to the door. “I hope you and Tim have a good time in Florida,” I said.

“Thanks.” She gave me a hug and kiss. “Call, okay?”

It made me sad that she didn’t wish me a good time, too, but Carrie was twenty-eight. It was a little late for me to work on her manners.

Still dressed in the sundress I’d worn to church that morning—I wear them because David likes them even though I don’t like my flabby arms hanging out—I wandered through the empty house. It was cleaned within an inch of its life, which it suffers every time I finish a manuscript.

The cupboards and the freezer side of the side-by-side in the kitchen were stuffed with things David could prepare for himself. All of his clothes except for the khaki shorts and polo shirt he was wearing out on the Fallen Tree Golf Course were clean, pressed, and put away.

When I couldn’t avoid it any longer, I sat down at the computer. I always had a new project on the back burner waiting to come forward when I finished a book. Until now. There it was on the screen in front of me:
Chapter One
. That was as far as I’d gotten.

What was that term people used when they talked about writing exercises? I couldn’t think of it, but I knew what it was. I laid my fingers on the keys and let them move.

They were four little girls living in house trailers on a forgotten Indiana lake. They didn’t have anything and the social workers who visited the lake families whispered among themselves that they never would. It was too bad, too, they said, because that Sharon was sure a pretty little thing and Althea was smart as a whip. Leona had an air about her that would give her stature in a place that promised good things to those who stood tall. And Joanne, well, she was a nice little girl. Such a shame nothing would ever come of any of them.

They didn’t know, those social workers, about the dreams...

I didn’t stop writing until I heard the back door open and close. I looked up, startled, realizing that the dining room had darkened around me and I was sitting in the little pool of light afforded by the desk lamp.

“David?” Where in the world had he been? It was eight o’clock, for heaven’s sake, and he’d left to play golf seven hours ago. “David, are you all right?”

“Don’t turn around till I say to,” he called from the kitchen.

“Okay.” I faced the screen again. “Since when do you play golf in the dark?”

I heard the rattle of a plastic bag and felt a slight thunk when something was set on the dining room table, then David said, “Okay, now.”

Half irritated, as much because of the interruption of my writing as with his lateness, I swiveled in my chair.

Sitting on the table was a new notebook computer.

“I know you’ve never really wanted a laptop,” said David, “because of the smaller keyboard. But you can’t take the desktop computer to Maine with you.” He sat in the dining room chair closest to me and looked into my eyes. His were very, very blue.

“You said you didn’t plan on writing in Maine, that it was going to be a vacation from life,” he said, “but you may as well stop breathing. You wrote your first book sitting on the bleachers at football practices, your second one sitting beside my mother’s bed for days and nights on end because she was afraid she’d die alone, and this last one even though you’re unhappy. You’re always going to write.”

“I’m not unhappy.” The protest was automatic.

He grinned at me. “Right, and I can drive a ball as far as Tiger Woods and putt like Phil Mickelson.”

I’d watched enough golf on television to know better than that. “Really,” I said, touching the keyboard of the laptop, “I’m not.” I leaned in to kiss him hello, feeling the brush of his day-old beard on my cheek. “What do I have to be unhappy about?”

“I don’t know that,” he said. “Maybe if I did, I could do something about it.”

I shrugged. “Menopausal women, honey. You know what they say.” I kissed him again. “I love the laptop, though. Does its software match mine so I can work back and forth?”

“Yes, it does. Tim and Brian went with me to get it, and Josh even drove up to meet us with a list of stuff Laurie said you would need on it. It was like Keystone Cops in the computer store, with all three of them telling the salesman what we needed.” He reached across the computer for another plastic bag. “Kelly sent orders to get you this. Said it wasn’t something you’d buy yourself, but that you’d need it.”

The leather attaché was small, slim, and soft, with room for the computer and whatever other writing paraphernalia I carried with me. I could actually put my wallet and keys in it and forego carrying a purse for the first time since entering junior high.

I could suddenly see myself getting on the plane. No purse holding everything but the kitchen sink, no canvas tote I always used in lieu of a briefcase. I felt excitement shiver along underneath my skin. It would be a new kind of freedom for Jean O’Toole.

Freedom.

Free writing, that’s what it was called, what I’d been doing on the computer all afternoon!

I turned toward it with every intention of deleting it, but a look in the corner of the screen informed me I had written fifteen pages. I shook my head and named the file before saving it. Then, with a little “why not?” shrug, I saved it to a jump drive, too, and tucked it into the new attaché along with several others.

Later, David and I sat on the couch together and watched an old movie. At one point, he turned to me and said, “I just want to be sure you’ll come back to me when it’s over.” He rubbed a hand up my arm and ran a finger under the armhole of my dress.

I knew he wasn’t only talking about the trip to Maine when he mentioned “it” being over. He wanted his cheerful wife back, the Pollyanna who had a smile and a good meal for him on the worst of days. Well, I wanted something back, too; I wanted a husband with a direction that took him further than the Fallen Tree Golf Course.

We were in a trap, I realized. He kept thinking he was going to come home to Carrie, Josh, and Kelly’s mother, the good daughter and daughter-in-law, the dutiful wife, and instead he returned to a woman who went through the motions on automatic pilot. As for me, I kept expecting the company vice-president I’d known for so long: in command and in demand and never falling short in either category.

We loved each other, these two virtual strangers on a leather couch in a custom-built house in the Willow Woods subdivision. We had loved each other through early marriage poverty, children’s emergencies, a brief affair on David’s part, the deaths of all of our parents, and the empty nest. But was it enough? Would it ever again be enough?

Suzanne

Andie was yelling again. I sighed and continued to lay out my underwear in sets.

“How could you?” she shouted. “How could you be so stupid? How could you try to kill yourself? How could you forget for one forny frigging minute how precious life is?”

“Okay.” Done with the underwear, I counted out shorts and shirts. “Number one, it was an accident. Number two, it was an accident. And number three, it was an accident.”

She wasn’t listening. Sometimes I thought she never listened.

“What did you expect us to tell Sarah and Tom? ‘Well, hey, kids, she’s dead, but she looked real nice lying there.’ That would have been a great comfort to them.”

I laid socks up against the tops that matched the shorts, coordinating their colors, and thought about my kids. Sarah, the beautiful veterinarian at the clinic on the edge of town, who seldom gave me the time of day. And Tom, who twelve years ago had moved in with his father as a troubled thirteen-year-old. My son had been in and out of detox so many times I could hardly keep track of his address. The only time I was sure of it was when he called and asked me to send money.

“Somehow,” I murmured, “I don’t think they’d have needed a lot of comfort. Are you taking anything to dress up in?”

“No! Why are you worried about clothes when you damned near died less than a week ago? I swear, Suzanne, sometimes I think—”

“Shut up, Andie.” I got into the bottom drawer, searching for sweatshirts. When I straightened and looked at her, she was staring at me.

“What?”

I almost grinned, but not quite. “I said shut up. And listen. I did not try to kill myself. The end.”

“But all that booze and those pills,” she said. “Suzanne, you don’t do that kind of thing. None of us do. Remember the pact?”

Of course I remembered it. We’d made the pact the day Vin’s stepfather’s old Mercury had found its way to the bottom of Tonsil Lake. We’d sat on the bank and watched the men fish the car out of the lake with a winch attached to a wrecker. The men had looked up at where Vin’s mother stood and shaken their heads.

Mrs. Hardesty hadn’t even looked over at where her daughter waited with Andie, Jean, and me. She’d just turned and gone back to her trailer, supported by Jean’s mother and mine—which was like the blind leading the blind.

We’d moved closer to each other so that all our shoulders touched, and we’d watched as they loaded Mr. Hardesty into a black bag and zipped it closed before carrying him up the bank to where an ambulance sat.

I looked at Vin and saw that Andie and Jean were looking at her, too. I wondered if I looked as sick as they did. Although there was no emotion showing on Vin’s face, I understood the relief in her eyes. We’d all done our share of eluding Mr. Hardesty’s advances when he had a snootful; we also knew Vin had been unable to escape.

Actually, we knew a lot of things; it had been a very long day that had started in those darkest hours before dawn. A day that had started bad and gotten worse, ending on sins and secrets.

Jean finally spoke. “I think we should make a pact,” she said quietly.

Andie snorted. “We’re thirteen, Jean, not little third-graders or something. And what good’s a pact going to do anyone?”

“It could do us some good,” said Jean. “I think we should agree we’ll never let ourselves get out of control because of alcohol or drugs, and if we find ourselves heading that way, we should call the others.”

I liked this, even though I couldn’t say things as well as Jean did. “And the others can’t get mad or refuse to come.” I scowled at Andie when I said that. She was always mad.

Including now. “It’s dumb,” she had said angrily, starting to get up. “This whole thing isn’t because of drugs or booze. It’s because—”

Jean’s next words stopped her. “And there are things we’ll never tell another living soul unless we all agree.”

“I’ll agree to it,” said Vin quietly. “I’ll swear.”

Jean put out her hand and Vin laid hers on top of it. I put mine on, resplendent with Passionate Plum nail polish.

Andie scooted back into her position, passed a disgusted look all around, and laid her sun-browned hand on top of mine.

“It’s done,” said Jean, “until we die.”

“Until we die,” I repeated.

Vin nodded, just one jerky motion of her head. “Until we die.”

“Fine,” said Andie. “Until we forny die.”

“It was an accident,” I now repeated to Andie, for what seemed like the hundredth time. “And the pact worked. I called and you came.” This time I did grin at her. “Of course, you got mad, which you weren’t supposed to.”

She grinned back. “Hey, you ruined the end of my date.”

I put each complete outfit into a zippered plastic bag, smushed the air out, and laid the bags into my suitcase. “Ruined it or delayed it?”

Her smile widened. “Oh, well.” And then she wouldn’t say anything more.

I laid the folder with the retirement plan on top of the bags of clothes. Andie looked at it.

“What are you going to do, Suze?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

Then I was the one who wouldn’t say anything more, because I couldn’t talk with panic pushing up into my throat. I just shook my head and leaned over the bed to zip the suitcase closed.

I went to get my cosmetics case out of my closet and spied one of the bags my company gives away during promotions. I brought the bag with me back to the bed. After clearing my throat to get my voice working again, I said, “These are for you guys. I sent Vin’s to her then forgot to give you and Jean yours.”

I pulled the flat black cases out and looked at the pressure-sensitive labels on the edges that told the color combinations of the makeup inside. “Here’s yours. They’re travel cases, so you don’t have to take everything with you.” I gestured at my own bag; it was the size of a weekender.

Andie opened her case and gave its contents a cursory look. “Thanks,” she said, closing it and looking from it to my big blue one. “I think you should leave that here and just take one of these.”

“Oh, but...” I stopped. If I didn’t take my full battery of cosmetics, I probably wouldn’t be able to cover the fine lines around my eyes and mouth. The light tan spots on my hands might begin to darken. I wouldn’t have samples with me to offer other women who showed an interest in makeup.

I would have nothing to hide behind and nowhere to run.

I put my cosmetics case back in the closet.

Vin

“Would you be wanting me to go with you, Mrs. Stillson?”

I looked up from my packing. Archie stood in the doorway of my bedroom, holding a long-handled duster like a staff.

“The Maine house hasn’t been opened since last summer,” she said. “The guest rooms and bathrooms aren’t ready, there’s no food, the linens need to be re-washed because it’s so damp up there.”