What's Left Behind (25 page)

“Abigail!” Lily Beth held a hand to her throat. This from the woman who’d painstakingly explained deer mating rituals. The way the bucks pursued females, like serial monogamists. The way the does sometimes moved into a second breeding season and pursued the bucks.

Abby shook her head, but the sentiment persisted, the feeling that she was the elder, sent back to the past to protect her mother’s honor. “How old were you when you first slept with him?”

Lily Beth took a sip of Abby’s water. “Sixteen,” she said.

Abby inhaled through her mouth, a near sigh of relief.

“We made love on my sixteenth birthday.”

Abby sputtered on the exhale. Her thirty-two-year-old married father had known exactly what he was doing, the entirely intentional seduction of an innocent. Happy sweet sixteen. “Oh, Mom.”

Abby had also read online that if a man of twenty or older slept with a fifteen-year-old girl, it was considered a crime. Abby was 100 percent sure that thirty-nine years ago her father hadn’t Googled sexual abuse. She was equally sure he’d known the law, assuring he didn’t cross the legal line some bureaucrat had drawn in the sand, and telling himself that took care of the moral implications.

Another pretty little lie.

“I thought I loved him,” Lily Beth said. “I knew he was married, but I was too selfish to care.”

“Selfish in love. Sounds like any other teenage girl.” Hadn’t Abby been selfish with Charlie, not wanting him to leave for college, but refusing to leave with him? She’d laid out a plan—her plan to have their baby in Hidden Harbor. But had she ever engaged in a back-and-forth conversation? Had she ever been open to compromise? At eighteen, had she listened to Charlie’s plan?

“When I found out I was pregnant with you, baby girl, I was going to tell his wife. He said he loved me, but even then, I doubted his affections. Why hide what you loved? So I came to his house. I came here.” Lily Beth’s bottom lip trembled, the petulance of a girl. “I sneaked around the cottage to the beach when I knew he wouldn’t be home.” Lily Beth tapped her fingertips to her lips. Keeping words in or letting them out?

“What happened?” Abby asked, imagining Lily Beth stepping onto the beach Abby had always associated with her mother, with the sun in her eyes, a secret in her belly, and the power to upend a stranger’s life. She imagined Lily Beth’s heart clenched tight as a fist before you threw the first punch.

“I couldn’t do it. I don’t know what I expected, or hoped, to find. When I came around the house, she had her back to me.”

“His wife?” Abby asked.

Lily Beth nodded. “She was kneeling in the sand, helping a toddler make a sandcastle. A towhead with the most angelic face. Could’ve been Luke’s brother.”

“Luke’s uncle,” Abby said. “My big brother.”

“With another big brother or sister on the way.” Lily Beth’s mouth twisted. “His wife . . .” Lily Beth looked out toward the beach, as though searching for the spot where she’d last seen her. “At the time, she looked like a woman to me. But she was probably no more than nineteen or twenty. Hardly a woman. More like an older sister.”

“How horrible for you.”

Other people needed him more than we did.
Lily Beth’s day-old declaration sounded in Abby’s mind, another string from her knot of riddles unraveled.

“How horrible for them,” Lily Beth said. “If I hadn’t lured him with my long blond hair and my siren song . . . Believe it or not, your mother was once quite a seductress.”

“First of all, you’re still a dish. Second of all, he seduced you.” Lily Beth turned her head and squinted, the look she got seconds before she’d reach for her phrase-clarifying reading glasses.

“If you and my father”—for the first time in Abby’s life, she translated the misnomer to sperm donor—“had made love the day before your birthday, he would’ve been a criminal.” As far as Abby was concerned, he was a criminal. “He could’ve been charged with the sexual abuse of a minor. He could’ve gone to jail for ten years. He must’ve known that, Mom. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”

“I was sixteen . . .” Lily Beth said. “What did I know?”

Spoken with the hindsight of maturity.

As a teenager, you thought you knew everything. Then, year by year, the stockpile of what you knew for sure, what you could depend upon, dwindled. Until, Abby imagined, you died an old woman, knowing nothing at all.

If Lily Beth had thought herself an equal to a thirty-two-year-old married man, had she held herself equally responsible, a partner in adultery?

“Mom,” Abby said. “Why haven’t you ever dated?”

“I have you, baby. What else do I need?” Lily Beth said, the same thing she’d told Abby when, growing up, Abby had first tired of imagining an absent father who swam beneath the waves. Back when Abby had gone to school and discovered other little girls had real-life flesh-and-blood daddies, who hoisted their daughters on their shoulders above the waves and held them up high.

“I’m not talking need,” Abby said. “I’m not talking food and shelter. What do you
want?
Don’t you want someone to come home to? Someone to share your life with?”

“Want,” Lily Beth said, “gets you into a world of trouble. When you want what you can’t have—When you take what doesn’t belong to you—” Lily Beth covered her eyes and cried silently into her hands, her body rocking forward with each sob.

Abby had only seen Lily Beth cry in front of her three times.

The day Abby had told her Luke had died.

The day Abby had revealed Tessa was carrying Luke’s baby.

Today.

Abby’s lips trembled and she swallowed through the thickness in her throat, but the melancholy refused to budge. The side table to Abby’s right held photos of Abby and Luke, their faces smiling out from shell-encrusted frames, grinning beneath garlands of antique buttons, strings of tiny silver jingle bells. The side table to the left displayed older photos of Lily Beth holding Abby on her narrow hip, walking along the beach, climbing from the sand to higher ground.

Lily Beth and Abby against the world. Abby and Lily Beth.

Growing up, Abby had noticed the way men looked at her mother. Hadn’t Lily Beth?

Abby touched the back of Lily Beth’s hand, and she startled, as though waking from a dream. Then she caught her breath and swiped the wetness from her cheeks. Abby passed her water to Lily Beth, and she gulped it down.

“You said my father, his family, was staying here.” Abby’s belly quivered, ghosts moving through her. “Did they rent the cottage or . . . ?”

Lily Beth wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “His parents owned the property. They sold it to me for a dollar.” Lily Beth laughed, releasing more tears, which she ignored. “Sounds crazy, I know. But it worked out for us, didn’t it?”

“What about property taxes? How did you afford to start Heart Stone? Where did you get the down payment for Briar Rose? Who was he? Where did he go?” Who’d paid for Lily Beth’s clothing? Groceries? Doctors’ bills? Before Abby’s pregnancy, Lily Beth had offered to pay for half of her college. And, if that had come to pass, Lily Beth probably would’ve forgiven that, too.

From what Lily Beth was telling her, she could forgive anything and anyone, except herself.

Lily Beth unclipped her hair and it fell around her shoulders, a blanket of protection. “Give me a minute.” Lily Beth retreated to the kitchen and returned with a glass of white wine, as if she needed something stronger than water. She tucked her feet beneath her, pulled closed her robe around her knees, storytelling mode. “Fire away.” Lily Beth held up a hand. “One question at a time, please.”

“What did my father do for a living?” Abby asked.

“He was a navy doctor. Working in Portsmouth when I met him, preparing to ship out.” Another piece of Lily Beth’s riddle, another truth buried in a lie. Abby’s father was, had been, a healer.

He was never mine to keep. He was of another world. He belonged to the ocean.

How could a healer do so much harm? To the family he’d recognized? To the family he’d ignored?

But a thirty-two-year-old doctor couldn’t have had that much money. He would’ve been just starting out, trying to stay afloat and care for his young family. He couldn’t have afforded a second family, not on his own. Not without help.

“Mom,” Abby said. “Did he give you money? Did he help you with expenses?”

“His family was well-heeled. They made all the arrangements. Money doesn’t bring you happiness, but it does smooth the way. It did smooth the way to sever our connection. I took a lump sum,” Lily Beth said, as though she’d won the lottery. But, no, that’s not how she felt. Abby knew the look of a woman just trying to survive.

“How much?” Abby asked.

“I would’ve walked away. After seeing her—I couldn’t let him hurt another woman.”

But Lily Beth had let him hurt her.

“How much?” Abby asked again.

“More than enough.” Lily Beth took a generous sip of her wine, and Abby inhaled the scent of fermented grapes. She could almost taste the alcohol. “A lot,” Lily Beth said. “I was planning on living a long life.”

That life could seem unceasingly long if you’d unnecessarily denied yourself the chance for love.

That had to be one of the saddest stories Abby had ever heard.

“Mama,” Abby said, the term of endearment Abby hadn’t used since she was a girl.

Lily Beth touched Abby’s cheek.

“You deserve happiness,” Abby said. “Stop denying yourself.”

Lily Beth flashed Abby the same expression she’d wave in front of any man who’d tried to ask her out. The look she slipped on her face while she’d pressed a girlfriend’s phone number into a hand that reached for hers. The rue-tinged smile she’d offered potential suitors in lieu of her heart.

That feeling Abby had had as a new mom, warning boys away from her, wanting to call them back? She’d seen the outer expression of that inner turmoil on Lily Beth’s face. She’d learned denial from Lily Beth. She’d learned how to hang on to the past and never let go. “My father, whoever he was—I don’t even care anymore,” Abby said. “I bet he was ridiculously handsome, though. Too handsome for his own good, like Charlie.”

That wasn’t fair. A flirt wasn’t the same as a cheater. A broken promise wasn’t the same as an adulterous lie.

Lily Beth nodded. “He was.”

“And charming. I bet he said all the right things. I bet, at first, he made you feel all the right feelings. But he was the person in the wrong. For heaven’s sake, Mom, you were sixteen years old. You were just a kid.”

Lily Beth stared at Abby and then shook her head. She took the shawl from the couch back and draped the pale cotton around her shoulders, sighed in time with the white noise of breaking waves. The constant soundtrack of Lily Beth’s, and Abby’s, life.

Abby scooted closer to Lily Beth and tugged a corner of the throw around her shoulder. She laid her head on Lily Beth’s arm, and Lily Beth took her hand.

Lily Beth and Abby against the world. Abby and Lily Beth.

Abby had always considered her mother married to the cottage on the beach, the peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, the sea surrounding and protecting her. What if this cottage filled with stones and crystals, shells and mermaid dioramas, hadn’t protected Lily Beth from the elements, but kept her prisoner to the past?

What if Lily Beth had imprisoned herself?

W
hen the person you’d built your life around was gone, where did that leave you?

If Abby lived to eighty-six, she’d have another seventeen thousand four hundred and forty-one days left to throw her arms wide, take risks, and embrace her big beautiful life. Anything less would be a sin against all she’d lost.

Anything less would be a sin against Luke.

Abby sat outside her mother’s cottage, keys in the ignition, the truck vibrating beneath her thighs. Her cell phone trembled in her hands. She’d wanted to make a clean sweep of her mother’s cottage, pack away the aquamarine and mermaids in satin-lined boxes, fix them with padlocks, toss the keys into the Atlantic, and watch the tides ferry them down shore. Instead, she’d left Lily Beth on the couch, traded her wine for water, tucked the throw around her, and kissed her on the cheek. Her mother was still beautiful. Her hair just as blond as when she’d been a girl, her skin clear and flawless, as though she were Sleeping Beauty, forever frozen in time, having fallen into a spell on the night of her sixteenth birthday. Someday, Abby would convince her mother to wake up, get up, and find her strength.

Right now, Abby needed to make a phone call. She’d already wasted twenty years under Charlie’s curse.

Abby smiled at Rob’s photo seconds before he picked up.

“Hey, there,” Rob said.

She liked that whenever he answered the phone, he sounded as though he’d been expecting her call. She liked his most recent reveal: the way he treated the college guys working for him with clear instructions, concrete praise, and enthusiastic pats on the back. She liked that it was taking a long time to get to know him, and the way he shared bits and pieces of himself, instead of dumping his whole life on the table. She liked so many things about him.

She planned on learning even more.

“What are you up to?” Abby said, her fingers jittering madly. Stupid, silly hands. Now wasn’t the time to hold back.

“Let’s see. Left your place, showered. Time to wind down, rinse, and—”

“I miss you,” Abby blurted out.

Oh, God. Say something. Say something, say something.

Rob’s voice lowered, deepened, warmed her ear. “I miss you, too.”

“Feel like going for a hike?”

Rob didn’t hesitate. “Always.”

Abby knew her plan was crazy, but she couldn’t stop herself. Didn’t want to. Wasn’t that how it had felt when she was a teenager? The heck with danger and breaking the law. Pile on the risk. Bring it on.

Luke used to say, if you weren’t pushing yourself, how did you know you were alive?

This one’s for you, baby.

“How do you feel about Morse Mountain?” Not the 4,000-footers Rob was used to, not even much of a hill. But the two-mile hike brought you to Seawall Beach. And Seawall led to a virtual hill she’d yet to summit.

“When?”

“Depends. How fast can you get there?”

“Doesn’t it close at sundown?”

“Not if you’re planning on skinny dipping,” Abby said. Rob was a good guy, played by the rules. She planned on corrupting him. “The parking lot closes. That means there’ll be plenty of spaces. We meet there, and then we walk in. It’s a stealth operation.”

A jangle sounded from the other end of the phone.

“Rob?”

“Gettin’ my keys.”

Abby did a mental scan of her truck and came up with her year-round supplies: grocery bags, light-weight blanket, hat, pair of gloves, and two ice scrapers. “Wait!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Could you bring a couple of towels?”

“Done. See you in ten.”

Seven minutes later, Abby pulled onto Morse Mountain Road and found Rob’s truck in the otherwise empty lot, waiting for her.

She cut the engine, and the canopy of trees dimmed the moonlight. They’d have better luck on the beach, where the clouds weren’t expected to roll across the waxing moon until much later.

Abby thudded her door shut, and Rob shot through the low light. His hands found her waist, eliciting a tickle. The tension started in her belly and bubbled through her chest. He lifted her so her back was up against the driver’s side door, pressed his chest to hers. Beneath her truck, the heat shield pinged and popped.

Abby couldn’t stop smiling. She touched his cheek, smooth from his shower, inhaled the menthol of his skin. The part of her brain with no impulse control wanted to taste him, memorize every inch of his body with her tongue, and then bring him home to test her memory. “Glad to see me?”

“Little bit.” Rob’s lips captured hers and pressed the shape of a smile into her mouth, the taste of mint and sweetness. His breathing promised energy at the ready. His hips held back.

Abby had the urge to slide her hands to his buttocks and pull him in until nothing was left between them. Toss him into the backseat of her truck. First, she had a river to cross, one item to scratch off a very long bucket list. And then, on neutral turf, after a cooling swim, miles away from the demands of Briar Rose and Tessa, far away from the constraints of Rob’s office-apartment, she needed to talk. Rob needed to listen. She slipped a fisted hand into the pocket of his shorts and dropped her truck keys on top of his.

Rob pulled away, chuckling. He fished the keys from his pocket, slung a daypack from his shoulder, and zipped the keys into the front compartment. “Using me to carry your stuff, are you?”

Abby took his hand, gave it a squeeze. “Yup, that’s right. I’m totally using you. I don’t like sneaking around in the dark alone.” Abby got the cream-colored cotton blanket from the backseat of her truck and fit it into Rob’s pack alongside two towels.

Rob kissed the top of her head. “You’re so much fun.”

Abby Stone? Fun? She liked the sound of that.

“You’d better stick by me,” Rob added. “Brought along a headlamp.”

“Shh. After we pass by the guard booth.”

The cicadas hummed a roadside backbeat. At first, she felt awkward, their legs groping through murky light, each step unsure. Then they fell into a rhythm. No one was there to block their path. No guard manned the parking lot booth. No flashing blue lights. No barbed fence to bar their entry.

Just the same, Abby’s pulse kicked up, ticking in her ears. Her arms prickled with the knowledge she was getting away with something, living on the edge.

Living.

Rob, her partner in crime, tickled her palm with his finger.

No wonder Luke had loved sneaking out at night. Under the cover of night, anything could happen.

You could hike into a closed-after-dusk conservation area and break the law.

You could escape out from under the yoke of a childhood dream and reach for something real.

You could risk your heart.

Rob stopped, dug a headlamp from his pack, tested it. Dead. “How’s your night vision?”

“Pretty good right now. But I heard clouds are heading in later tonight.” Abby smiled at the absurdity of her hiking in a sundress and without a headlamp. Of Abby Stone going out without making sure she was 100 percent prepared for every eventuality. As if you could ever prepare for the unknown.

She’d buried that notion with her son.

Rob put away the headlamp and reclaimed her hand. They started down the path, following moonlight through the thick woodland growth. “Another hailstorm?”

“You never know what you’re going to get.”

“True enough.” Rob’s voice trailed off, as if he were mulling over that particular thought.

He smacked his forearm.

“Wha—” A buzzing sounded against her ear, and then a prick behind the lobe. She slapped her neck. Her fingers came away tacky with blood. Mosquitoes swarmed in the light before them, one vibrating body. “Would you happen to have insect repellent in your bag of tricks?”

Another skin-on-skin smack, and then Rob’s voice skipped on a chuckle. “Nope.”

“Then I hope you’re ready for a two-mile run.”

How could she have forgotten insect repellent? She’d walked the trail enough times in the light of a humid day to know that even with a thick layer of protection, you came away scarred and itchy. She and Luke used to call the marsh-side trail the mosquito swamp, a nod to the fire swamp in
The Princess Bride.
In eighty-degree weather, nighttime would do little to hamper the insects’ appetites for blood.

But when she’d called Rob with her idea to go for their hike, she’d had two thoughts in mind: surviving the hike through the woods, and what she’d planned once they arrived at the beach.

Turned out when every moment dripped with potential, you didn’t waste precious time planning for an uncertain future.

“Rob?”

“Yeah, baby?”

Mosquitoes flitted around her grin. Last time he’d called her
baby,
they’d been making out on his bed. The details were dreamlike and sketchy. But the way she’d felt? Wide-awake double rainbow.

Abby grabbed Rob’s hand, infinitely grateful she was wearing sports sandals and not the teeter-totters she’d attempted on their dinner date. “Ready to make a run for it?”

“I was born ready.” Rob cracked up, Mr. Reserved laughing at his own joke.

Despite his attractiveness, Rob wasn’t a player. Not even a monogamous player, like Charlie. When she’d first spotted Rob, his energy had been directed at his daughter, Grace. Then his energetic field, or whatever Lily Beth called it, had reached out, tapped her on the shoulder, and pulled her in close.

Rob held his pack before him to secure the zipper, making Abby think of front-facing baby carriers. And then, strangely, a sea horse, the only creature where the male of the species carries the young. Weren’t sea horses also one of the few animals that mated for life?

Abby widened her smile long enough for a mosquito to sneak into her mouth.

She scraped the interloper off her tongue. “What are we waiting for?” Abby said, and they started off at a jog.

Their feet pounded on the asphalt and gravel. Moonlight cast the pines and low-lying shrubs into a black-and-white photograph. The wind of movement blew her hair behind her. Her legs pumped to keep up with Rob. Her heart pumped to keep up with her legs. No hope of turning back.

A memory bubbled up through the darkness, natural as a breath. She’d brought seven-year-old Luke on a daytrip to Whale’s Tale Water Park. And much to her horror, he’d been tall enough to ride on the Eye of the Storm, even though it was clearly meant for older kids.

Not wanting to let Luke go alone, she’d taken her turn in line before him, holding down her own fear. For Luke, she’d given over control to the Eye of the Storm and shot down a fifty-degree enclosed tube that shoved her out into the light, where she’d spiraled in circles before hitting the water.

Later, safe at a picnic table, Luke had scarfed down two burgers and a grape soda. Just watching Luke eat had upended Abby’s stomach. “Weren’t you scared?” she’d asked him.

Luke’s grin had stretched a purple mustache across his upper lip. “Yeah,” he’d said. “That was the best part.”

Abby and Rob shot out of the woods and onto the path that ran a straight line through the first of two salt marshes. A cement form-covered wooden bridge spanned the Sprague River. Tides moved beneath their feet. Her calf muscles burned, her lungs struggled for air. When was the last time she’d gone for a run, not counting a dash to Shaw’s to replenish the fridge and pantry or Reny’s to stock up on batteries and bulbs? When was the last time she’d given herself a day to just be?

Their feet pounded across the wooden bridge, padded back onto the path. Rob’s breath huffed beside her. The steady beat of their shoes fell in sync. Just when she thought she’d gotten the hang of it, the trail steepened, making her work for every step.

She paused at the top of the hill, hands on hips, breathing hard. “I need a break!”

Rob jogged in place, his breath only marginally affected. “How much farther, do you think?”

It amazed Abby that avid hiker Rob had lived forty-five minutes away for the last ten years, and yet never ventured the easy—if you were walking—stroll to Seawall Beach. It amazed Abby even more that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d carved out the time to make her way to the hidden gem.

A slap in the face to Luke, who’d reached for the world, and had it snapped from his fingers.

“ ’Bout halfway?” she said, sure of nothing.

“Great! Then we’re almost there!” Rob tugged her arm, pulling her along.

“Time out!” she said, but the words tangled in her throat, forced back down by the need to breathe.

Sooner than she’d remembered, the trail veered to the left, sloped gently downward, and crossed the second marsh. Through the last stretch of woods, she finally hit her stride.With Rob beside her, life surged through her muscles, and every responsibility fell away.

The path narrowed. Beneath their feet, the beat changed from the hard thud of gravel and asphalt to the soft give of sand. Then they ran through the roped-off dune grass and broke onto the wide-open expanse of Seawall Beach.

Not bright as day, but close enough.

The nearly full moon shone down from a clear sky, seeming brighter because of the threat of clouds. The ocean growled, roared, bellowed, so much louder than the gentle seaside lull that rocked her to sleep. The waves whipped the shore, evidencing the notoriously strong undertow. And when she tilted her head back, a few glittery pinpricks of stars greeted her, the rest obscured by the candle blaze of the moon.

Abby imagined Luke’s child as a full-cheeked three-year-old girl, kneeling on one of Abby’s dining room chairs, her face a study in concentration as she squeezed Elmer’s glue onto black construction paper and dumped a tube of glitter on its head.

If Abby got a second chance, she’d welcome the whole glorious mess of childhood with open arms.

Sweat cooled her face and trickled down her spine. She inhaled through her nose to catch her breath. Ocean air cooled the back of her throat.

Rob touched her shoulder, his voice clear, as if they’d gone for a casual stroll. “Fantastic.”

“Told you so.” Abby expected to see Rob’s face in profile as he gazed toward the ocean. Instead, he was looking her way, close enough to see inside her. He handed her a water bottle from his pack and then drank from the same bottle.