Between Husbands and Friends (40 page)

Back in the room, Kate announces, “Time to head home, Abigail.”

“Not yet, Mom!”

“We’ve got a long ride and you’ve got school tomorrow.”

“But Mom—”

Kate kisses Jeremy’s forehead. “Bye, guy. See you.”

“Good-bye, Auntie Kate.”

I hug Abby. “Good-bye, Abby. Thanks for the gift.”

“Good-bye, Aunt Lucy,” the little girl says, pouting as her mother ushers her toward the door.

Kate’s shadowed eyes, her sulking child dragging at her arm, her thinness, all make her appear so vulnerable, even frail.

“Kate—”

Kate stops in the doorway and looks back at me guardedly. “Yes?”

I love you, Kate, I want to say, but she looks too stern, too defensive. I’ll have to wait until she’s ready. “Thanks for coming.”

She nods. “Good-bye, Lucy.”

They go off down the hall, Abby tired and still protesting all the way to the elevators that she doesn’t want to leave yet. Jeremy’s tired, too, and crabby with it, and more than ready to collapse back into the comfort of his bed watching
The Little Mermaid
video. I pile the new videos on a table, ready for tomorrow. The rest of the ward is quiet now. Visitors have left, patients are asleep.

I stand at the window, looking out into the night. This room has a view of the parking garage, and suddenly I see Kate and Abby, four floors below, crossing the street.

They seem both far away and near. Kate’s head shines golden, no gray visible from this distance, in the glow of the streetlight. Kate is holding her daughter’s hand and after they’ve crossed the street, they still hold hands, so Abby has already forgiven her mother for taking her away from Jeremy. I can imagine the conversation they will have in the car on the way home. Abby will want to know about the hospital room, Jeremy’s shunt, cystic fibrosis. Kate will explain it all to her in simple terms, then she’ll change the subject, guiding Abby’s thoughts to more cheerful matters so that Abby won’t have trouble falling asleep. Perhaps during the drive to
Sussex Kate will sing songs to Abby, songs that we once all sang together as we drove down to Hyannis to begin our August vacation.

Kate and Abby walk across the sidewalk and through the glass door of the parking garage where only last night I stood with Chip. My window provides me with a view of my friend and her daughter as well as a reflection of myself and Jeremy in this hospital room. The futuristic-looking components of the Space Wars game lie at the foot of Jeremy’s bed. Jeremy rests, eyelids heavy, watching the television screen. Overlaid, blurrily, are the hem of Abby’s pink dress, her white socks, the gleam of her black dress shoes, then it all disappears as Kate and Abby head into the cavernous building.

I feel so alone.

Suddenly they come back outside. Standing on the very edge of the sidewalk, they tilt their heads, looking up, counting the floors, scanning the lighted windows, and then all at once they see me standing pressed against the glass. From here it looks as if Kate’s face is wet, but perhaps that’s a trick of the light. Kate and Abby are holding hands, and with their free hands they wave at me. They wave and wave and wave. When I wave back, making great sweeping arcs with both my arms, Kate drops her daughter’s hand and presses the tips of her fingers to her lips, then cups her hands beneath her mouth and blows, as if sending an invisible balloon of kisses into the air all the way up to where I stand. I can almost feel them arrive. I clap my hands together above my head, as if catching the kisses. And from all this distance away, I can see Kate smile.

This book is for my friend, my sister, Martha Wright Foshee, B.S.H.A., R.N. She saves lives.

I want to thank the many people without whose generous assistance I could not have written this book.

At Children’s Hospital, the brilliant, dedicated, and absolutely awesome Mary Ellen Beck Wohl, M.D., Chief, Division of Respiratory Diseases, and Harvard Medical School Professor of Pediatrics; social worker Judy Bond, who responded to my questions with knowledge, patience, and humor; physical therapist Ann Gould; Annemarie Fayemi, staff nurse; Robin Emmerling, staff nurse; Adam Courchaine, pulmonary technologist; Mark Dovey, M.D.; Donna Giromini, secretary, Division of Respiratory Diseases; and Allen Clapp and Lillian Shulman, who gave me my first tour of Children’s Hospital.

I am grateful to all those connected with Children’s Hospital for taking the time from their busy schedules to talk with me. Children’s Hospital is a wonderful place; its staff is knowledgeable and generous. Any mistakes in this book about the complicated disease of cystic fibrosis are mine alone. For information about cystic fibrosis, call The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation at 1-800-FIGHT-CF or check out the CF website on the Internet.

The Sea Man
, by Jane Yolen, is published by Philomel Books, New York.

I also want to thank: the authentic Nantucket woman, the beautiful Toni Ramos, who helped me begin; Attorney Kevin Dale, who is humane, thorough, and wise; Susie Robinson, who showed me Tuckernuck and who knows how to steer a boat through dangerous currents; Susan Pitard, head, Weezie Library for Children, Nantucket Atheneum, for researching literature about mer-boys; Maryanne O’Hara, for her insights and support; my superlative editor, Jennifer Weis; my excellent agent, Emma Sweeney; and my wonderful family, Sam Thayer, Josh Thayer, and Charley Walters.

Nantucket Sisters

A Nantucket Christmas

Island Girls

Summer Breeze

Heat Wave

Beachcombers

Summer House

Moon Shell Beach

The Hot Flash Club Chills Out

Hot Flash Holidays

The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again

The Hot Flash Club

Custody

Between Husbands and Friends

An Act of Love

Family Secrets

Everlasting

My Dearest Friend

Spirit Lost

Morning

Nell

Bodies and Souls

Three Women at the Water’s Edge

Stepping

Ballantine Books

It’s like a morning in Heaven. From a blue sky, the sun, fat and buttery as one a child would draw in school, shines down on a sapphire ocean. Eleven-year-old Emily Porter stands at the edge of a cliff high above the beach, her blond hair rippled by a light breeze.

The edge of the cliff is an abrupt, jagged border, into which a small landing is built, with railings you can lean against, looking out at the sea. Before her, weathered wooden steps cut back and forth down the steep bluff to the beach.

Behind her lies the grassy lawn and their large gray summer house, so different from their apartment on East 86th in New York City.

Last night, as the Porters flew away from Manhattan, Emily looked down on the familiar fantastic panorama of sparkling lights, urging the plane onward with her excitement, with her longing to see the darkness and then, in the distance, the flash and flare of the lighthouse beacons.

Nantucket begins today.

Today, while her father plays golf and her beautiful mother, Cara, organizes the house, Emily is free to do as she pleases. And what she’s waited for all winter is to run down the street into the small village of ’Sconset and along the narrow path to the cottages in Codfish Park, where she’ll knock on Maggie’s door.

First, she waves back at the ocean. Next, she turns and runs, half skipping, waving her arms, singing. She exults in the soft grass under her feet instead of hard sidewalk, salt air in her lungs instead of soot, the laughter of gulls instead of the blare of car horns, and the sweet perfume of new dawn roses.

She flies along past the old town water pump, past the Sconset Market, past the post office, past Claudette’s Box Lunches. Down the steep cobblestoned hill to Codfish Park. Here, the houses used to be shacks where fishermen spread their nets to dry, so the roofs are low and the walls are ramshackle. Maggie’s house is a crooked, funny little place, but roses curl over the
roof, morning glories climb up a trellis, and pansy faces smile from window boxes.

Before she can knock, the door flies open.

“Emily!” Maggie’s hair’s been cut into an elf’s cap and she’s taller than Emily now, and she has more freckles over her nose and cheeks.

Behind Maggie stands Maggie’s mother, Frances, wearing a red sundress with an apron over it. Emily’s never seen anyone but caterers and cooks wear an apron. It has lots of pockets. It makes Maggie’s mother look like someone from a book.

“You’re here!” Maggie squeals.

“Welcome back, Emily.” Frances smiles. “Come in. I’ve made gingerbread.”

The fragrant scent of ginger and sugar wafts out enticingly from the house, which is, Emily admits privately to her own secret self, the strangest place Emily’s ever seen. The living room’s in the kitchen; the sofa, armchairs, television set, and coffee table, all covered with books and games, are just on the other side of the round table from the sink and appliances. In the dining room, a sewing machine stands on a long table, and piles of fabric bloom from every surface in a crazy hodgepodge. Frances is divorced and makes her living as a seamstress, which is why Emily’s parents aren’t crazy about her friendship with Maggie, who is only a poor island girl.

But Maggie and Emily have been best friends since they met on the beach when they were five years old. With Maggie, Emily is her true self. Maggie understands Emily in a way her parents never could. Now that the girls are growing up, Emily senses change in the air—but not yet. Not yet. There is still this summer ahead.

And summer lasts forever.

“I’d love some gingerbread, thank you, Mrs. McIntyre,” Emily says politely.

“Oh, holy moly, call her Frances.” Maggie tugs on Emily’s hand and pulls her into the house.

Maggie acts blasé and bossy around Emily, but the truth is, she’s always kind of astounded at the friendship she and Emily have created. Emily Porter is rich, the big fat New York/Nantucket rich.

In comparison, Maggie’s family is just plain poor. The McIntyres live on Nantucket year-round
but are considered off-islanders, “wash-ashores,” because they weren’t born on the island. They came from Boston, where Frances grew up, met and married Billy McIntyre, and had two children with him. Soon after, they divorced, and he disappeared from their lives. When Maggie was a year old, Frances moved them all to the island, because she’d heard the island needed a good seamstress. She’s made a decent living for them—some women call Frances “a treasure.”

Still, it’s hard. It isn’t that kids made fun of Maggie at school. Lots of kids don’t have fathers, or have fathers who live in different houses or states. It’s a personal thing. The sight of a television show, even a television ad, with a little girl running to greet her father when he returns from work at the end of the day, or a bride in her white wedding gown being twirled on the dance floor by her beaming, loving father, can make a sadness stab through her all the way down into her stomach.

Plus, her life is so cramped by their lack of money.

When a friend asks her to go to a movie in the summer at the Dreamland Theater, Maggie always says no, thanks. She can’t ask her mom for the money. In the winter, when friends take a plane off island to Hyannis where they stay in a motel and swim in the heated pools and see movies on huge screens and shop at the mall, they ask Maggie along, but she never can go. She
hates
the things her mom makes for her out of leftover material saved from dresses she’s sewn for grown women. Frances always tries to make the clothes look like those bought in stores, but they aren’t bought in stores, and Maggie, and everyone else, knows it.

Frances
never
makes her brother Ben wear homemade stuff. Ben always gets store-bought clothes—and nice ones, ones that all the other guys wear. Their mom knows Ben would walk stark naked into the school before he’d wear a single shirt stitched up by his mother. Ben’s two years older than Maggie, and bright, perhaps brilliant—that’s what his teachers say. Everything about him’s excessive, his tangle of curly black hair, the thick dark lashes, his deep blue eyes, his energy, his temperament.