The Edge of Nowhere (27 page)

BECCA WAS STRUGGLING
into her backpack out in the hospital corridor when Rhonda came out of Derric’s room. Jenn had resumed her position by the door, where she had returned to the work of copying the sign-up sheet. Rhonda looked from Jenn to Becca and said, “Would you like to go into town for an ice cream?”

Becca looked toward the door of Derric’s room. Rhonda said with a kind smile, “I think she’ll be in there for a while. She said she’s planning to read the whole book of Gideon to him. Jenn, you come, too, okay? It’s time for you to take a break.”

Becca saw that Jenn was looking like a girl who’d rather take strychnine than have an ice cream with Becca King. Becca eased the earphone from her ear in time to catch
has to that’s what
 . . . before the other whispers in the corridor from people passing began to overwhelm her. She replaced the earphone quickly and said, “That’d be great. Thank you, Mrs. Mathieson.”

“Rhonda.” Rhonda looked at Jenn and said, “Come, too, Jenn.”

Out in the parking lot, Jenn made for the front passenger’s seat, and Becca let her. She could tell it was important to Jenn to ride shotgun, and she herself was happy enough to climb in the back where she could go unnoticed and where the seat was cluttered with old copies of the island’s newspaper as well as flyers for fund-raisers: a group supplying food to the unemployed, an animal shelter, an orchestra, a playhouse, a land conservation organization . . . Everyone on the island was looking for money. Good causes crawled out of every corner.

Becca had not yet been to the downtown of Coupeville, which sat on the far west end of Penn Cove. Like Langley, the downtown comprised only two streets, and cottages and Victorian houses climbed a hillside behind them. The buildings were quaint and colorfully painted, interrupted by a pier that stretched into the harbor with a wharf building sitting at the end of it, with the white letters C-O-U-P-E-V-I-L-L-E above a wide double door.

Rhonda parked in front of an old tavern called Toby’s where a screen door was banging in the wind. She said, “Over there, girls,” and she pointed across the street to four wooden steps. These led to an ice cream parlor. Inside there were three tiny tables, all of them vacant. It was getting rather cold to be eating ice cream.

Rhonda said, “Order up, ladies. I’m going for a banana split myself.”

Jenn ordered a tin roof parfait. Becca wanted a strawberry sundae. But old habits are the most difficult to break and her old habit was “In through the lips and onto the hips,” so she settled for a biscotti, only to see Jenn scowl as if her choice made her a goody-goody or something. Rhonda added a scoop of strawberry ice cream to Becca’s order and said she wouldn’t feel so bad herself if she had a partner in her own crime.

They were quiet for a bit as they ate their ice cream, and Becca couldn’t help noticing that Jenn seemed content for the very first time since she’d met her. She took note of ice cream, chocolate syrup, and peanuts perhaps being the answer to appeasing the anger that coursed through Jenn’s whispers like poison.

Rhonda dipped into her banana split and said, “
Anne of Green Gables
was one of my favorite books when I was a girl, Becca. It’s perfect to read to Derric because, obviously, he was adopted just like Anne.”

“He told me you came to his orphanage in Uganda,” Becca said.

Rhonda explained that she had gone with her church group to help out at a mission that took street kids in. She said that there were thousands of children homeless on the streets of Kampala because so much of the adult population had been devastated by AIDS. She said, “We
think
that’s what happened to Derric’s birth parents but no one knows for sure. He was only five when he was found by the mission. He’d been living behind a bar in the city, with eight other children. They’d cobbled together a little shelter from cardboard and tin. The oldest child was ten. The youngest was not quite two.”

Gently, Becca pushed the rest of her strawberry ice cream away. Jenn continued with her tin roof parfait as if she hadn’t heard what Rhonda Mathieson had said, but perhaps, Becca thought, Jenn knew the story and was used to it. She herself couldn’t imagine becoming used to it. He’d been five years old, on the street, alone.

Rhonda said, “When I first saw Derric . . . Well, who could resist that smile? We adopted him, and it all worked out. Just like Anne Shirley being adopted by the Matthew and Marilla in your book, Becca.”

“Except Marilla didn’t want her at first.”

Rhonda said nothing. She was thinking, obviously, but Becca couldn’t pick up her whispers because she had the AUD box’s earphone in her ear. Then Rhonda said with a quick smile, “No. Not at first. She didn’t want Anne, did she? I’d forgotten that part.”

Rhonda got up to go to the counter, where she said something about buying more biscotti “to take home to Dave.” Becca then looked at Jenn for the first time since Rhonda had begun telling her story. Jenn, she saw, had finished her ice cream. She’d begun to simmer. Loathing was emerging right out of her eyes and Becca could feel its intensity.

She looked down and saw her own ice cream had become a bit soupy and the biscotti remained uneaten. She wondered if Jenn was thinking what a waste of food and money Becca King was turning out to be, and she said to her, “I’m not too hungry. D’you want my biscotti?” as a way to explain why she hadn’t been able to finish either.

Jenn whispered fiercely, “Are you crazy or something? Why would I want your leftovers? What’s
wrong
with you?”

BECCA WAS DOING
some homework for Eastern Civilization when Debbie knocked at her door and popped her head inside. She said, “I’ve got to go to a meeting.” She tilted her head in the direction of the little cottage on Second Street where she and Becca had first met. “Can you watch Chloe and Josh? Just for an hour or so? There’s a woman who needs me to be there . . . ?”

She meant one of the ladies she helped in Alcoholics Anonymous. Becca understood this because time and again she’d come in on Debbie having a phone conversation with someone she was trying to help stop drinking. Becca said she was happy to help out. She was falling asleep over her homework anyway.

In the apartment behind the motel office, Josh was working on his Social Studies, while Chloe was supposed to be listing all the adjectives she could think of that could be used to describe the picture on a postcard that her teacher had given her. Two adjectives were required for every noun, and Chloe was finding this a stupid assignment.

Becca couldn’t disagree. “But if you get through it, we can do something fun,” she said.

“Like what?”

“We’ll have a drawing contest.”

“What’s the prize?” Josh asked shrewdly.

“Sweet Mona’s for a treat. Winner’s choice.”

That was all Josh needed to hear, and wherever Josh went, Chloe followed. The kids finished their homework in record time and were ready for the drawing contest before Becca had a chance to get into the English homework she’d brought with her. Act 1 of
The Merchant of Venice
. It was proving as tough to get through as the Eastern Civ.

She set the play aside. She said, “Okay. Here’s the contest. You draw me, and the best drawing wins.”

Chloe protested that she couldn’t draw Becca. Josh would win too easily. But Becca said that wasn’t the contest. The contest was to draw Becca in her favorite place in the world and they had to guess what it was. Whoever guessed closest would win. “It’s not about the best drawing,” she told Chloe. “It’s about the best guess.”

This was acceptable to Chloe, and both of the kids settled into their drawing while Becca settled back into figuring out what was going on in
The Merchant of Venice.
But she was tired and it was warm, and soon enough she fell asleep.

She woke with a start when the motel’s office door snapped shut. She was about to swing herself to her feet, when she recognized Debbie talking to someone. They came into the apartment’s living room.

Debbie’s companion was Tatiana Primavera, the counselor from the high school. Debbie said, “Look who I found walking home from choir practice,” and to her grandkids she said, “You guys finished with your homework? What’re you doing?”

“Contest,” Josh said.

“Drawin’ Becca,” Chloe said.

Debbie said, “That right? Well, Becca looks wiped out. You can finish tomorrow. She needs to go to bed and so do you.”

“No! We can’t!”

“Grammer!”

“Hey, you guys, listen.” Debbie and Tatiana Primavera exchanged the kind of look that passes between adults when their plans have just undergone a change that they didn’t anticipate.

Becca said, “I c’n stay. I think they’re almost done anyway. You guys almost done? What d’you say? Ten minutes?”

“Ten minutes, Grammer!” Chloe cried.

Debbie huffed, said, “No more than that,” and took Tatiana Primavera into the kitchen. The running water and banging around suggested she was making some coffee. With this came some whispering, the real kind and not the kind that floated to Becca on the air.

She could hear it well enough. She might not have even listened had it not been said in whispers. But whispering suggested adult information, and adult information suggested something she might need to know. So she sat quietly and picked out from the hushed conversation what she could.

Tatiana was talking. “. . . and now Dave wants to come to the office to
look
for her. I keep
telling
him that it’s nothing. Just some kid on a cell phone who got unnerved by the accident and didn’t want to hang around. But he doesn’t believe that. He’s sure it has to do with why Derric was in the woods. I can’t convince him otherwise. Then when he had the phone traced and told me the name—”

Debbie said, “You
sure
that’s the name you heard? I mean, it was a while ago, wasn’t it?”

“Sure. Right after she died. But I remembered it because I thought I
knew
all of Carol’s friends, and this one . . . someone called Laurel. I’d never heard of her.”

Becca froze. Every muscle that she could feel in her body went tense.

“Maybe it was Laura, not Laurel,” Debbie said.

“It was Laurel. I know that’s the name I heard,” Tatiana was saying. “I’m sure of it. Evidently she called that evening when Carol collapsed, and with everything going on, Pete didn’t pick up the phone. Her message was still on the machine. He played it for me because it was so odd. ‘Carol, this is Laurel. Just wanted to make sure you two made contact. Remember, it’s not Hannah, okay?’ Pretty strange, huh? But that was it. And that was the name. And Laurel’s not that common so Dave’s convinced it’s
got
to be this Laurel Armstrong person he’s looking for. So
now
he wants—”

“I’m done!” Josh shouted. He jumped to his feet and waved his drawing in the air in front of Becca’s face.

“Me too, me too, me too!” shouted Chloe. “You got to decide!”

Deciding anything was the last thing Becca wanted to do. She wanted to know what else Tatiana Primavera was going to say. She looked at the pictures: herself in the forest reading a book and herself on the sofa reading a book. She said, “Amazing! Both of you win. Yea!”

“No fair!” Josh shouted.

“You got to choose,” Chloe cried.

“But you’ve both got it,” Becca said. “My favorite place is anywhere I can read a book, and you’ve both got that. So you’re both the winner. We’ll go to Sweet Mona’s on Saturday, okay? You each pick what you want. Let’s put the crayons all back in the carton now.”

That got them relatively quiet for a minute or so, long enough for Becca to ease closer to the kitchen door where she was close enough to hear Tatiana say, “I told him that the voice on Carol’s machine didn’t sound like a kid to me. But because of the connection to that stupid cell phone . . . You know how Dave is. He’s fixated on finding her. If Carol were still alive, she’d be able to tell him, but as it is. . .”

As it is, Becca thought. She looked down at the two pictures she was holding: herself in the forest and herself on the sofa. But she had in her mind another picture altogether and that was of Becca King at Carol Quinn’s house on Blue Lady Lane the very first night she had been on Whidbey Island. Exactly
when
had Laurel phoned Carol Quinn, Becca wondered. And why hadn’t she come back to Whidbey to look for her daughter when Carol Quinn failed to return her call?

TWENTY-FOUR

I
t hadn’t taken long for Hayley Cartwright to discover Seth had been to the farm. Brooke told her. She said he’d come by to say hello and he’d
claimed
, Brooke said, that he was there to say hi to
her
. But
she
knew he’d really come because he wanted to know what Hayley had been doing.

“He was looking all around,” Brooke added carefully. “He could tell everything’s not good here, Hayley.”

Hayley said in response, “Everything’s
fine
,” but Brooke just looked at her with that sad, wise look she had. She said, “Whatever,” and wandered off.