The Unwanted (41 page)

His father’s words still echoed in his mind.

He knew they were true; had always known.…

He pulled himself upright, his body stiff, his mind muddled. An image of his father seemed burned into his memory, and he could still feel the venomous look Ed had given him and recall the words he’d uttered.

He stood silently for a moment, then crossed the room to the window. When he looked out, Cassie was still at her window.

But now she was staring at him.

He left his room and started toward the stairs, pausing at the landing to listen to the house and sense the atmosphere. He heard no sound, but neither did he feel the tension that always hung in the air when his father was at home. Slowly, almost against his own wishes, he started down the stairs.

He found his mother in the parlor, sitting stiffly on one of the wing-back chairs which were only used on special occasions, her eyes fixed on some point beyond the window. When he spoke to her, she didn’t seem to hear him, but finally, just as he was about to speak again, she swung around to look at him. Her eyes, usually filled with fear, had taken on a look of tired resignation, as if she had finally faced herself and found herself wanting.

“I’ll never get out,” she said, and the emptiness in her eyes was matched by her voice. “After everything he’s done, I forgave him. How could I have done that, Eric? How could I?”

Eric’s eyes glittered with barely contained fury. “What happened?” he demanded, his voice low but with an edge so sharp it made Laura flinch. “He said Miranda should have let us die. He said no one ever wanted us. Tell me what happened, Mother. Tell me what he was talking about!”

Laura gazed blankly at her son for a moment, then seemed to focus. “Miranda,” she breathed, nodding slowly. “But it was so long ago. So very long ago.…”

It had been a Saturday. One of those hot humid Saturdays when the house was almost unbearable. Ed had been on edge all day, and she’d done her best not to do anything that might annoy him. After lunch, when he suggested he take Eric to the beach, she was relieved. It would give her a chance to catch up with the laundry and the thousand-and-one
other things she somehow never quite found the time to keep on top of. And so she’d packed a change of clothes for
Eric
and sent them off. But a couple of hours later, when she’d finished the laundry, the heat had finally gotten to her
.

She’d decided to join Ed and Eric at the beach
.

She knew where they always went—far out to Cranberry Point, where the summer people never went. And it hadn’t taken long to find them
.

Find Ed, at least
.

He was lying on a blanket making love to Diana Winslow, the two of them locked in a passionate embrace. Then Ed must have sensed her presence, for he looked up. As Laura stared at him, speechless with shock and disappointment, she saw his humiliation turn to rage
.

And the children—Eric and Cassie—were gone
.

She never remembered much about what happened in the next half hour. All she’d known was that she had to find Eric
.

And she’d found him
.

Found him in Miranda’s house
.

Miranda had smiled at her as she’d come through the front door—a strange smile that chilled Laura’s heart
.

“I found them,” Miranda told her. “I found them in the quicksand, and they’re mine now. They belong to me.”

Laura said nothing. Instead she snatched both of the children up into her arms and fled from the cabin in the marsh, rushing almost blindly through the bog until she was back on the beach. And there she had found Ed and Diana, waiting for her. She demanded to know how they could dare behave as they had. Didn’t they know the children could have been killed in the marsh?

Neither of them had said a word, and as Laura watched them, she slowly realized why they weren’t speaking to her
.

They weren’t speaking because they had nothing to say
.

Consumed by their own desires, neither of them, neither Eric’s father nor Cassie’s mother, had cared if the children lived or died
.

Laura never spoke of the incident afterward, never told anyone what had happened that day on the beach. A month later Diana had left False Harbor, taking Cassie with her.

And Laura—unable to face raising Eric alone—had stayed with Ed.

After that day on the beach the beatings began. In his own mind, Ed had blamed her. Blamed her—and Eric too—for what she witnessed that day. Now, brokenly, painfully tearing away the scars that had hidden her wounds for years, she told Eric the whole story. “That’s why he hates us, Eric,” she finished, her voice barely audible. “He hates us because of his own shame—shame for betraying me, shame because he knows that you could have died and it would have been his fault. He hates me because I
know,”
she finished, her voice cracking. “He must have thought I’d leave him. But I couldn’t—I just couldn’t!”

Eric froze, staring at his mother, who finally turned back once more to face him with beseeching eyes.

“You have to forgive me, Eric,” she pleaded. “You have to.”

The room reeled, and a black abyss seemed to yawn at Eric’s feet. As his mind spun with his effort to grasp what his mother had said, the memories came flooding back to him.

He saw a face looming over a bed—his bed. Eyes filled with hatred glared down at him from above, and a horrible odor hung in the air. He tried to roll away from it, but every time he tried to squirm under the blankets, rough hands—hands so big they could have crushed him—reached down to snatch the blanket away. And there was a voice, and words he’d never been able to remember before. Now they rang clear in his memory.

“You’re nothing,” the voice had said. “You should be dead now, you understand me? Nobody wants you, boy. And I’m gonna make you wish you
had
died!”

After a while the voice had stopped, but the beatings had started. And all his life, no matter what he’d done, it had never been right, never been quite good enough, never pleased his father.

And all because of something that had happened when he was only two years old.

“Why?” He uttered the word as an almost formless croak, but he could see that his mother understood.

“It was the shame,” Laura said brokenly. “Can’t you see, Eric? It was the shame. He never got over the shame.…”

“Shame?” Eric repeated, the shattered fragments of his life suddenly coalescing into a rage that surpassed all the anger he had ever felt before. “He wasn’t ashamed of what he did! He was ashamed that he got caught! But he’s never been ashamed of what he’s done to us! And what about you? Didn’t you care what he was doing to me? I figured out a long time ago you don’t give a damn what he does to you! But what about me? I didn’t know what he’d done. I was just a baby! How could you let him do that to me?”

He was shouting now, and Laura cowered on the chair, shrinking away from his words.

“How?” he screamed. “How could you let it happen?”

Laura pushed herself to her feet and took a step toward Eric, but he backed away.

“Don’t touch me,” he whispered. “Don’t you ever touch me again.”

“No, Eric,” Laura pleaded. “No. I love you, Eric … I’ve always loved you. Please …?”

“Loved me?” Eric wailed. “If you loved me, you wouldn’t have let it happen!”

“I couldn’t help it, Eric. I tried … I tried so hard—”

Eric’s hand clenched into a fist and he drew his arm back, ready to strike the pathetic figure before him. Laura froze—like a rabbit trapped in the glare of a headlight—waiting for the blow.

“Do it,” she whispered. “You hurt so much, and you’re so angry. Do it, Eric.”

Slowly, through an agonized exercise of sheer will, Eric unclenched his fist and dropped his arm to his side.

Something in his eyes changed, and Laura felt her blood run cold. In that moment when Eric had refused to strike her, she knew she had lost him forever. “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said quietly. “If I’d known what would happen—”

“But you did know, Mother,” Eric said quietly. “You knew right from the beginning. You knew what he did to me. And you didn’t do anything about it.”

As he turned and walked out of the house, Laura sank back into her chair.

He’s gone
, she thought.
He’s gone and he’ll never be back
.

*  *  *

She’s dead
, Ed Cavanaugh thought.
I was there and saw her die, and if she hadn’t died, I would have killed her!

But she wasn’t dead.

She had been standing there in her bedroom window, staring at him as if she could see right into his brain, and she’d been smiling at him.

She knew. She knew what he’d tried to do, knew what he’d wanted to do. Somehow she had tricked him.

He turned the key in the ignition of the
Big Ed
, then waited for the glow-plug indicator to go out. The engine turned over slowly, started to die, then caught. It coughed loudly, and a plume of black exhaust belched up from the stern, filling the cabin with choking fumes.

Ed stumbled toward a window, pushed it open, and breathed deeply of the fresh air outside. Then, while the engine warmed up, he took a swig from the fresh bottle of bourbon sitting on the chart table next to the helm, and went out to start casting off his mooring lines.

He had to get away, had to think it all out.

The engine smoothed out to a steady rumble, and Ed cast off the last line then stepped to the secondary helm on the after deck of the trawler. He put the transmission in reverse and began backing out of the slip.

The bow of the
Big Ed
swung around, hitting the starboard side of the boat next to it and scraping its entire length before clearing the slip to drift out into the channel. Ignoring the damage he’d done to the other boat, Ed went back inside the cabin and slid onto the helmsman’s seat. Throwing the transmission into forward, he pushed the big engine up a notch, then gulped another shot of bourbon out of the bottle. Tending the wheel with one hand, he maneuvered the trawler down the channel toward the open sea. Not until he had passed Cranberry Point did he begin to feel safe.

They couldn’t get at him now.

Maybe he’d head toward Hyannis and spend a day or two there. He had a lot of friends in Hyannis, and most of them owed him a drink.

*  *  *

I have to
do
something, Laura Cavanaugh thought. I can’t just keep sitting here, waiting for something to happen. I have to do something.

Outside, the light was beginning to fade as the sun set, and it occurred to Laura that she hadn’t moved all day. She’d simply sat, her mind numb, staring sightlessly out the window, waiting.…

Waiting for what?

For Eric to come home?

But Eric wasn’t coming home. Deep in her heart she was certain that Eric would never come home again.

Ed, then.

Ed would come home. And then what would happen? Would she tell him that Eric was gone and wouldn’t be coming back?

He would blame it on her, and then—

She couldn’t go on with the thought, knowing too clearly where it would lead.

She had to get out. If she was still there when Ed came home, this time he would kill her.

She tried to move but couldn’t, and a terrifying feeling of being trapped swept over her. She wasn’t going to be able to get out of the house, wasn’t even going to be able to stand up. Her mind seemed to have lost control over her muscles, and when she gave herself the command to rise up from the chair, her legs refused to respond. She waited a moment, forcing herself to be calm, then tried again. At last, aching from the hours of immobility, her legs reluctantly responded, and she shakily got to her feet. She left the living room, moving slowly down the short hall to the kitchen, feeling the emptiness of the house.

Neither of them is coming back
.

The thought flashed through her mind, and though she tried to reject it, there was a feeling of abandonment in the house now, which told her with more certainty than any words ever could have that she was never going to see either her husband or her son again.

She moved through the kitchen unseeingly, then went out the back door. Without thinking, she crossed the driveway that separated her own house from the Winslows’ and knocked on the back door. After what seemed a long time,
Rosemary Winslow, her eyes red, opened the door and looked out at her. It was the look on Rosemary’s face that reminded Laura that she had neither washed nor dressed since Ed had left so many hours ago. As her right hand clutched at her worn housecoat, her left ran spasmodically through her hair in a futile attempt to put it in order.

“I’m sorry …” she said. “I shouldn’t have—”

But Rosemary pushed the door open wide. “Laura? Laura, what is it? What’s happened?”

“They’re gone,” Laura said hollowly as she allowed herself to be led down the hall to the living room. “They’re both gone.”

Jennifer, who was sprawled on the floor with a book open in front of her, looked curiously up at Laura. “Who’s gone?” she asked.

Laura’s eyes fixed vacantly on Rosemary, and when she replied, it was as if Rosemary herself had asked the question. “Eric. And Ed. They both left, Rosemary. They both left, and they aren’t coming back. What am I going to do?”

Rosemary glanced at Jennifer, and considered sending her back up to her room, then rejected the idea. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll fix you a cup of coffee.” But when they got back to the kitchen and she fished in the cupboard above the counter for a mug, Laura shook her head.

“A drink,” she said quietly. “I haven’t had one in years—because of Ed, you know—but I really need one.” She sank down on one of the chairs at the table, then immediately stood up again, moving restlessly around the kitchen, finally leaning against the sink as she tried to find the words to explain to Rosemary what had happened.

All the years of lying for Ed, and covering up, and finally I have to tell the truth, she thought. I wonder if I even still know how.