When Light Breaks (3 page)

I stood, and he took my hand inside his, and I thought how perfectly it fit, custom-made for me, like one of Daddy’s tailored suits from the seamstress on Magnolia Street. Jack glanced at me with a question on his face. I smiled at him and immersed myself in the new openness I felt below my breastbone; maybe, just maybe this emotion would fill some of the empty space where Mama’s absence ached.

My definition of love did not, then, extend beyond familial devotion, so when I felt the opening, the possibility of another kind of love—my heart stretched as if it had been taking a thirteen-year nap, and it was just beginning to fully awaken.

I pondered this feeling for weeks and months afterward, wondering why it had changed between this boy and me, this boy from next door whom I’d known ever since I could remember. Had I always loved him or did I just miss my mama and want his?

Even now, at twenty-seven years old, I couldn’t answer that question, but thankfully it didn’t matter anymore. Jack was gone and had been for a very long time. I now understood true love, lasting love—not just adolescent angst and want, not the kind of love that would leave me like Mama and Jack had. I was now comfortable in my world, one I did not need to run away from.

CHAPTER TWO

I
met Maeve Mahoney two months before my wedding. The sweet promise of warm spring days and fragrant evenings followed me through the front door of the Verandah House and down the hall of the upscale nursing care facility, my high heels clicking against the linoleum floor. My tailored linen pantsuit from Tahari fit crisply over my white button-down shirt. I glanced at my watch: I was right on time. I’d been dreading this meeting with Mrs. Mahoney—trying to make conversation with a ninety-six-year-old woman assigned to me for my community work through the Palmetto Pointe Junior Society.

My to-do list had spread onto page two of my Day-Timer, and I barely had time to eat, much less spend an hour at the nursing home. I was smack dab in the middle of the busiest time of my life—the most fulfilling too. I mentally flipped through my schedule: right after this appointment, I needed to rush to my wedding dress fitting.

I pushed open the door to room 7. A tiny white-haired woman sat perched in a tartan-covered chair, a James Joyce novel—
Finnegan’s Wake
—open on her lap. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. Her hair stuck up like the cotton on top of a Q-tip while her head leaned back.

Tarnished silver photo frames lined her dresser and bedside table; faded faces stared at me from behind dusty glass. Lace doilies were spread in uneven patterns around the room. A wooden crucifix hung over the headboard of her single bed; worn wooden rosary beads adorned the chain. An oil painting of a bay full of sailboats at evening hung crooked and low on the wall. I walked toward the painting, touched the splintered wooden frame. Despite the thatched roof houses barely visible in the background, and the rough water of an unknown bay, something about the scene seemed familiar.

The room smelled like the rest of the building: Keri lotion and scrambled eggs, carpet deodorizer—an odd combination. The staff of the Verandah House had done their best to make this facility feel more like a nice hotel than a nursing home. An ice cream store with a red-and-white-striped awning, a movie theater and a chic salon were all situated in the front foyer to give visitors the feeling of a miniature hometown.

I sat next to Maeve Mahoney on the remaining chair—a thin metal chair with a pink-flowered cushion. I attempted not to disturb her as I pulled the wedding files from my satchel and flipped through
Southern Bride
magazine, scouting ideas for my bouquet until I found just what I was looking for: white and pink peonies with a satin bow tied around the bottom, Swarovski crystals on the end of thin silver rods poking out of the flowers like rain. I reached for my tabbed wedding notebook, turned the plastic-sheathed pages to “Flowers” and stuffed the picture inside. I wrote the details on a lined, legal-sized pad of paper.

Forty minutes passed as I worked on my wedding, and Maeve slept, making soft snoring noises. Then her voice cracked. “Is that a wedding magazine you’ll be looking at?” There was an Irish lilt to the words.

I startled, glanced up at her. “Yes, it is. Hello, I’m Kara Larson. I’ve come to sit with you a while . . . maybe read to you or whatever you’d like.” I spoke the words the volunteer coordinator had told me to say.

Maeve’s wrinkled hands stroked the sides of the chair; she squinted at me and leaned forward, pointed to the magazine. “You getting married?”

“Yes. In about eight weeks. . . .” I nodded.

“To your first love?” She pushed a strand of curly gray hair off her face. Her eyes were the color of green sea glass, the kind that has been washed in the ocean for years, worn clear and smooth.

I laughed. “No, but I love him very much.”

Her eyes filled with tears, glistening over the green. “No one ever marries their first love anymore. There is just too much . . . else to do. Too many options. Always looking for the next best thing, when it is usually the first best thing that was the best thing all along.” In her Irish accent, her simple words sounded like a poem.

I took a deep breath—what could we talk about now? “Did you marry your first love?” I asked.

“Now there is a story,” she said. “A beautiful story of love and betrayal, full of truth.”

“Tell me,” I said, glancing sideways at my watch.

“You first, you first. Who was your first love?”

A twinge of betrayal pinched beneath my chest. I shouldn’t even think about my first love, not with my fiancé—Peyton’s—four-karat princess-cut diamond perched on my left hand.

“Peyton . . . he’s the man I’m marrying.” Why was I having this discussion with a woman who still had oatmeal from breakfast on her chin?

“No . . . go back. Before him. Before the first kiss. Before the first time you said you loved him. Back further.”

“What?” Yes, she was mad. “Before what?” I asked, groping for some appropriate response.

“Back to the first boy who gave you butterflies. The first boy you wrote about in your diary; the one you loved, really loved. Not the first boy you slept with, but the first boy you dreamed about.”

“Slept with? Why, Mrs. Mahoney.” I covered my mouth with my palm. Where was she going with this?

“Yes, before him.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t have to reach that far back—he lay like the cornerstone of my memories, as if all the others were formed on top of his. His name rolled off my tongue as though I’d said it yesterday. “Jack Sullivan.”

“Yes, him. That far back. What happened to him?” Maeve leaned forward in a quick movement.

“I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen years old.” I looked at her.

Then a tear dropped from her eye, ran to the top of her cheek and joined the oatmeal on her chin. I reached for a Kleenex on her wooden bedside table and wiped both from her face. A slow wave of something painful and lost long ago overcame me. If I was forced to define it, I’d have called it hopelessness.

“Why not?” she said, or maybe sang.

“What?” I threw the Kleenex in the wicker wastebasket.

“Why haven’t you seen him?”

I shrugged. I would not discuss Jack Sullivan.

Mrs. Mahoney took a deep breath. “He lived across the lane. His father and brothers were involved in the ‘troubles,’ and my mother disapproved. Before he left, he told me he loved me and would come back for me. And I knew he would.”

“Did he?” I glanced again at my watch—one minute remaining until I had to leave to meet the dressmaker downtown.

Mrs. Mahoney sighed, picked up the book, then placed it back on her lap. “Did he what?” she asked.

“Come back for you?”

“Who?”

“The boy across the lane,” I said, then blew a long breath.

“You need to find him.” She lifted both hands in the air, as if in supplication.

“Who?”

“The boy across the lane.”

“Mrs. Mahoney, I don’t know the boy across the lane.”

“Not my boy. Your boy.” She rolled her eyes, as if I exasperated her and not the other way around.

“He lived next door, not across the lane,” I said. We had obviously steered into the land of confusion. “I’ve got to get going, Mrs. Mahoney. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Ahya,” she said, “you be thinking about what I said now, won’t you? I don’t want to be the only one telling stories around here. We trade stories, you and I. You know, when you start to think about things, talk about them . . . they happen.”

“Oh?” I stood.

“You know, dear, everything happens for a reason. You’ve been sent to me, I do believe. Yes, I do believe that. You look much like me in my younger days—dark waves of hair, green eyes, marrying the right man. Now you be careful what you believe—it is who you are.”

“What?” I gathered my satchel, looked down at Maeve.

“You will help me, I know you will.”

“Well . . . ,” I said, “I will visit you. I promise. I’m not sure how much I can help you, though.”

“Oh, we’ll get to that in good time. We will. As I tell you the story, we’ll get to that. There has to be a way to find him now.”

I nodded, not knowing what else to do, and completely unsure who she wanted me to find. She lifted her right hand as though she were giving a benediction.
“An áit a bhfuil do chroí is ann a thabharfas do chosa thú.”

Gibberish, I was sure. So I nodded and smiled at her.

“It means, Your feet will bring you to where your heart is.” Her eyes slid shut.

A sinking feeling of inadequacy overwhelmed me. I had no idea what language she was speaking, but it wasn’t mine.

I left Verandah House and ran out to the car—the Mercedes Daddy had given me when he bought his new Ford F-150 after he decided he was truly a pickup truck kind of man. Which is absolutely not the kind of man he was; a Mercedes was just his style. But what twenty-seven-year-old woman in her right mind tells her daddy she doesn’t need a Mercedes, that he looks like a fool driving back and forth to his law office in a four-by-four pickup truck?

I drove through Palmetto Pointe to the dressmaker and thought about Peyton Ellers—the man I would marry. And I smiled.

I once believed love was an elusive emotion—coming and going, leaving and staying whenever it caught a whisper of ocean breeze. The kind of love that stays, that sticks in the chambers of the heart, is the type of love that is only a mere longing or remembering. I believed this because it was all I knew, all I understood.

I loved Mama, but she was gone. I once loved Jack Sullivan, but he was also gone. I loved Daddy, but he was a changed man, and sometimes I thought I only loved what I knew of him, what I remembered of him from the days before Mama died. I watched couples who professed their true love, and I often, very often, wondered if they really loved each other right then, right at the moment they said it, or only that they had once felt it, experienced it and then convinced themselves it was forever.

I had come to understand that I would never love enough to marry, enough to say, “Okay, yes—let’s spend the rest of our lives together.” I’d become fond of a couple of men, even forced the word “love” from my lips. But never enough, never quite enough to promise forever. As women can do, I’d spent hours discussing my failure with my best friend, Charlotte. “Why can’t I love enough? Well enough?”

Through the years Charlotte had had many theories about why I hadn’t fallen for someone. In college she believed I missed my mama too much to let anyone in. Then she believed—on college graduation night, when I had had too much red wine—that I was waiting for someone to make me feel
just
like Jack Sullivan had made me feel. By the time we’d started our careers and moved back to our hometown, she surmised I just hadn’t found the right man.

I’d worked at my job as a PGA TOUR manager for five years when I met Peyton. I didn’t usually have much contact with the pro golf players or their families—I worked behind the scenes making sure everything was organized for the golf tournaments. Although my job was insanely demanding, it offered me a sincere sense of accomplishment. I did everything from ordering the volunteer uniforms, to picking out the menus for the catered meals, to finding child care for the players’ kids. I arranged the trophy ceremony and the pro-am tournament the day before the major, along with handling a thousand other details associated with the tournaments.

My many responsibilities—taking care of the house, my daddy, and my job—ensured that I was constantly busy. It wasn’t that Daddy was sick or disabled. As I’d grown up, I had just naturally and slowly taken over Mama’s role at home. Sometimes I felt that I missed her less when I was acting in her place. If I stepped directly into her shoes—did the grocery shopping, prepared the meals, washed the dishes and did the laundry—she was somehow still present, still in the house if those chores were done and done well.