On Mystic Lake

Annie waited for Izzy to respond—so long the waiting became noticeable. Then she smiled and pushed to her feet. Her knees popped and cracked at the suddenness of her movement. “Come on, pumpkin. Let’s get you to bed.” She started to walk toward the stairs.



Izzy fell into step beside her. Annie slowed her steps to match the child’s as they climbed the stairs. Halfway up, Izzy inched closer and slid her hand into Annie’s. It was the first time Izzy had touched her.



Annie clung to the tiny fingers, squeezing gently. That’s it, Izzy . . . keep reaching out. I won’t let you fall.



Upstairs, after Izzy brushed her teeth, they knelt beside the bed together. Annie recited the “Now-I-lay-me” prayer and then tucked Izzy into bed, kissing her forehead. After a quiet moment, she went to the rocking chair by the window and sat down.



The chair made a soft ka-thump, ka-thump on the wooden floor. Her gaze moved from Izzy to the window. She stared out at the glittering moonlit lake, listening to the slow evening-out of the girl’s breathing.



As so often happened, the nightly ritual made Annie remember. When her own mother had died, she’d been much too young to handle her grief. All she knew was that one day her world was bright and shining and filled with love, and the next, everything fell into a gloomy, saddened, tear-stained landscape. She could still recall how much it had scared her to see her father cry.



That was when the blueprint of her life had been drawn. She’d become a good little girl who never cried, never complained, never asked uncomfortable questions.



It had taken her years to grieve. Her first year away from home had been incredibly lonely. Stanford was no place for a small-town millworker’s daughter. It had shown her—for the first time—that she was poor and her family uneducated.



Her love for Hank was the only reason she stayed at that big, unwelcoming school. She knew how much it meant to him that she was the first Bourne to attend college. And so she kept her head down and her shoulders hunched and she did her best to fit in. But the loneliness was often overwhelming.



One day she started her car, and the sound of the engine triggered something. The memory was as unexpected as a snowstorm in July. All at once, she felt her mother beside her in the car, and Annie’s Volkswagen “Bug” had become the old station wagon they’d once had, the one with the wood-grain strip along the side. She didn’t know where they’d been going, she and her mom, or what they’d talked about, and she realized with a sharp, sudden pain that she couldn’t recall the sound of her mother’s voice. The more she tried to slip into the moment, to immerse herself in the memory, the more flat and one dimensional it had become.



Until that moment, she had actually—naively—thought she’d overcome the death of her mother, but on that day, more than ten years after they’d placed her mother’s coffin in the cold, dark ground, Annie fell apart. She cried for all the missed moments—the nighttime kisses, the spontaneous hugs, the joy that would never be as complete again. She grieved most of all for the loss of her childhood innocence, which had been taken on a rainy day without warning, leaving behind an adult in a child’s body, a girl who knew that life was unfair and love could break your heart, and mostly, that nothing was worse than being left behind by the one you loved.



It took her several days to master her grief, and even then control was tissue-thin, a layer of brittle ice on a cold, black body of water. It was not surprising that she fell in love almost immediately after that. She had been a walking wound of loneliness, and caretaking was the only way she knew to fill the void in her soul. When she met Blake, she showered him with all the pent-up longing and love that was inside her.



Annie slowly got out of the rocker and tiptoed to the bed. Izzy was sleeping peacefully. Annie wondered if the child was blessed with dreams in which Kathy appeared; Annie herself was rarely so lucky.



She was halfway down the stairs when the phone rang. She jumped down the last few risers and dove for the phone, answering it on the third ring. “Nick?”



There was a moment of silence, then a woman’s voice said, “Nick?”



Annie winced. “Hi, Terri.”



“Oh, no you don’t, don’t you dare act like this is a normal conversation. Who in the hell is Nick and where are you? I called Hank and he gave me this number.”



Annie sank onto the sofa and tucked her knees up underneath her. “It’s nothing, really. I’m baby-sitting for an old friend and he’s late getting home.”



“I had hoped you’d changed. A little bit, at least.”



“What do you mean?”



“You just spent twenty years waiting for a man to come home—now you’re waiting for another man? That’s insane.”



It was insane. Why hadn’t Annie seen that on her own? It made her angry suddenly, both that she’d lost the ability to really get mad, and that she’d allowed herself to take from Nick what she’d spent a lifetime accepting from Blake. Excuses and lies. “Yeah,” she muttered more to herself than to Terri. “I only have to take this kind of shit from men I’m in love with.”



“Well, that answers my next question. But what—”



“I’ve got to run, Terri. I’ll call you later.” Annie could still hear Terri’s voice as she hung up the phone. Then she punched in another number.



Lurlene answered on the second ring. “Hello?”



“Lurlene? It’s Annie—”



“Is everything all right?”



“Fine, but Nick isn’t home yet.”



“He’s probably down at Zoe’s, havin’ a drink—or ten.”



Annie nodded. That’s what she’d suspected as well. “Could you come watch Izzy for a little while? I want to go talk to him.”



“He ain’t gonna like that.”



“Be that as it may, I’m going.”



“Give me ten minutes.”



After she hung up, Annie went upstairs and checked on Izzy again, then she hurried back downstairs and paced the living room. True to her word, Lurlene showed up in ten minutes, wearing a puffy pink chenille bathrobe and green plastic clogs.



“Heya, honey,” she said quietly, stepping into the house.



“Thanks for coming,” Annie said, grabbing her purse off the coffee table. “This won’t take long.”



Chapter 11



Annie stood on the sidewalk below a cockeyed pink neon sign that read: Zoe’s Hot Spot Tavern. It sputtered and gave off a faint buzzing sound.



Clutching her handbag, she went inside. The tavern was bigger than she’d expected, a large rectangular room, with a wooden bar along the right wall. Pale blue light shone from tubes above a long mirror. Dozens of neon beer signs flickered in shades of blue and red and gold. Men and women sat slumped on bar stools, drinking and talking and smoking. Every now and then, she heard the thump of a glass hitting the bar.



Way in the back were two pool tables, resting beneath pyramids of fluorescent lighting, with people bent over them, and others standing alongside, watching. Someone broke up a rack of balls and the sound was a loud crack in the darkness.



Keeping her back to the side wall, she edged deeper into the place, until she saw Nick. He was at a table in the back corner. She pushed through the crowd.



“Nick?”



When he saw her, he lurched to his feet. “Is Izzy—”



“She’s fine.”



“Thank God.”



He was unsteady on his feet as he backed away from her. He stumbled and plopped into his chair. Reaching out, he grabbed his drink and downed it in a single swallow. Then he said softly, “Go away, Annie. I don’t . . .”



She squatted beside him. “You don’t what?”



He spoke so quietly she had to strain to catch the words. “I don’t want you to see me here . . . like this.”



“Did you know that she listens for you every night, Nick? She sits beside the front door for as long as her little eyes can stay open, waiting to hear your footsteps on the porch.”



“Don’t do this to me . . .”



Her heart went out to him, but she didn’t dare stop, not now when she’d finally found the courage to begin. “Go home to her, Nick. Take care of your little girl. This time you have with her . . . it goes away so quickly, don’t you know that? Don’t you know that in a heartbeat, you’ll be packing her bags and watching her board a plane for somewhere far away from you?”



The look he gave her was sad and hopeless. “I can’t take care of her, Annie. Haven’t you figured that out? Christ, I can’t take care of anyone.” In an awkward, jerking motion, he pushed to his feet. “But I’ll go home and pretend. It’s what I’ve been doing for the past eight months.” Without looking at her, he tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the table and walked out of the bar.



She rushed after him, trying all the way through the crowded bar to figure out what to say to him. At the curb outside, he finally stopped and looked at her. “Will you do me one more favor?”



“Anything.”



A quick frown darted across his face, made Annie wonder why he’d expected to be let down. Why was it so hard for him to believe that she wanted to help him?



“Drive me home?”



She smiled. “Of course.”



The next morning, Annie arrived at Nick’s house an hour early. She slipped through the unlocked door and crept up the stairs. She checked on Izzy, found her sleeping peacefully, then went to Nick’s bedroom. It was empty. She went down the hall to a guest room and pushed the door open.



The curtains were drawn, and no sunlight came through the heavy Navajo-print drapes. Against one wall was an old-fashioned four-poster bed. She could just make out Nick’s form beneath a mound of red wool blankets.



She should have known that he didn’t sleep in the master bedroom anymore.



Annie knew it was dangerous to enter his room, a place where she didn’t belong, but she couldn’t help herself. She went to his bed and stood beside him. In sleep, he looked young and innocent; more like the boy she’d known so long ago than the man she’d recently met.



It came to her softly, whispering on the even, quiet sound of his breathing, how much she had once loved him. . . .



Until the night she saw him kiss Kathy.



She needs me, Annie, don’t you see that? he’d said afterward. We fit.



I can fit with you, Nicky, she’d pleaded softly.



No. He’d touched her cheek, and the gentleness of his touch had made her cry. You don’t need someone like me, Annie Bourne. You’re off to Stanford in the fall. You’re going to set the world on fire.



“What are you doing here so early?”



With a start, Annie realized that he was awake, and that he was looking at her. “I . . . I thought you might need me.”



Frowning, he sat up. The covers fell away from his body, revealing a chest that was covered with coarse black hair.



She waited for him to say something, but he just sat there, his eyes closed. His skin had a waxy, yellow cast, made even more noticeable by the tangle of silvery-white hair and the blackness of his eyelashes. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead and upper lip.