On Mystic Lake

On Mystic Lake Page 12

But it was his eyes—an eerie, swimming-pool blue— that caught and held her attention. His gaze flicked over her, a cop’s look that missed no detail, not the brand-new tomboy haircut or the newly purchased small-town clothes. Certainly not the Buick-size diamond on her left hand. “Annie Bourne,” he said softly, unsmiling. “Lurlene told me you were back in town.”

An uncomfortable silence fell as she tried to figure out what to say. She shifted nervously from side to side. “I’m . . . sorry about Kathy.”

He seemed to fade a little beneath the words. “Yeah,” he answered. “So am I.”

“I know how much you loved her.”

He looked as if he were going to say something, and she waited, poised forward, but in the end he said nothing, just cocked his head and swung the door open wider.

She followed him into the house. It was dark—there were no lights on, no fire in the fireplace—and there was a faint musty smell in the air.

Something clicked. Brilliant white light erupted from a shadeless lamp; it was so bright that for a moment she couldn’t see anything at all. Then her eyes adjusted.

The living room looked like someone had dropped a bomb on it. There was a scotch or whiskey bottle lying beside the sofa, a drop of booze puddled at its mouth; open pizza boxes littered the floor; clothes lay in heaps and on chairbacks. A crumpled blue policeman’s shirt hung across the television screen.

“I don’t seem to spend much time at home anymore,” he said into the awkward silence. Reaching down, he grabbed a faded flannel shirt from the floor and put it on.

She waited for him to say something else, and when he didn’t, she glanced around. The sprawling living room was floored in beautiful oak planks and dominated by a large brick fireplace, blackened by age and smoke. It looked as if there hadn’t been a fire in the hearth in a long, long time. The few bits and pieces of furniture—a faded brown leather sofa, a tree-trunk end table, a morris chair—were scattered haphazardly around the room, all wearing tissue-thin coats of dust. A stone archway led into a formal dining room, where Annie could see an oval maple table and four scattered chairs, their seats cushioned by red and white gingham pads. She supposed that the closed green door led to the kitchen. To the left, an oak staircase hugged the brightly wallpapered wall and led to a darkened second floor.

Annie felt Nick’s gaze on her. Nervously, she picked an invisible lint ball from her sleeve and searched for something to say. “I hear you have a daughter.”

Slowly, he nodded. “Izzy. Isabella. She’s six.”

Annie clasped her hands together to keep from fidgeting. Her gaze landed on a photograph on the mantel. She picked her way through the rubble on the floor and touched the photo. “The gruesome threesome,” she said, smiling. “I can’t remember this one. . . .”

Lost in her own memories, Annie vaguely heard him pad out of the room. A moment later, he was back.

He came up behind her, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on the back of her neck. “Would you like a drink?”

She turned away from the fireplace and found him directly behind her, holding a bottle of wine and two glasses. For a second, it startled her, then she remembered that they were grown-ups now, and offering a glass of wine was the polite way to entertain a guest. “A drink would be great. Where’s your daughter? Can I meet her?”

An unreadable look passed through his eyes. “She’s staying with Lurlene tonight. They’re going to see some cartoon at the Rose theater with Buddy’s granddaughters. Let’s go sit by the lake.” He grabbed a blanket from the sofa and led her out of the house. Together, not too close, they sat down on the blanket.

Annie sipped at the glass of wine Nick had poured for her. Twilight slipped quietly through the trees in blood-red streaks. A pale half moon rose slowly upward, spreading a blue-white veil across the navy-blue surface of the lake. Tiny, silvery peaks rippled against the shore, lapped against the pebbly ground. Memories sifted through the air, falling like rain to the ground around them. She remembered how easy it had once been with them, as they sat together at sporting events, watching Kathy cheerlead at the sidelines; how they’d all squeezed together in vinyl booths to eat greasy hamburgers and fries after the games. They’d known how to talk to each other then—about what, she couldn’t recall—but once she’d believed she could tell him anything.

And now, all these years later, with the bumpy road of their separate lives between them, she couldn’t think of how to weave a fabric of conversation from a single thread.

She sighed, sipping her wine. She was drinking more than she should, and faster, but it eased her awkwardness. A few stars came out, pinpricks of light peeking through the purple and red twilight sky.

She couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “It’s beautiful—”

“Nice stars—” They both spoke at the same time.

Annie laughed. “When in doubt, mention the weather or the view.”

“We can do better than that,” he said quietly. “Life’s too damned short to spend it making small talk.”

He turned to her, and she saw the network of lines that tugged at his blue eyes. He looked sad and tired and infinitely lonely. It was that, the loneliness, that made her feel like they were partners somehow, victims of a similar war. So, she put the small talk aside, forgot about plundering the shared mine of their teenage years, and plunged into intimacy. “How did Kathy die?”

He sucked down his glass of wine and poured another one. The glittering gold liquid crested at the rim of the glass and spilled over, splashing on his pant leg. “She killed herself.”

Chapter 7

Annie stared at Nick, too stunned to respond. “I . . .” She couldn’t say the pat I’m sorry. The words were too hollow, almost obscenely expected. She gulped a huge swallow of wine.

Nick didn’t seem to notice that she hadn’t spoken—or maybe he was grateful for it. He stared out at the lake, sighing heavily. “Remember how moody she used to be? She was teetering on the edge of despair even then—her whole life—and none of us knew it. At least, I didn’t know it . . . until it started to get bad. The older she got, the worse it became. Manic-depressive. That’s the technical term. She started having episodes right after her twentieth birthday, just six months after her folks were killed in a car accident. Some days she was sweet as pie, then something would happen . . . she’d cry and lock herself in a closet. She wouldn’t take her medication most of the time, said it made her feel like she was breathing through Jell-O.” His voice cracked, and he took a huge, gulping swallow of wine. “One day, when I came home from work early, I found her standing in the bathroom, crying, knocking her head against the wall. She just turned to me, her face all smeared with tears and blood, and said, ‘Hi, honey. You want me to make you lunch?’

“I bought this place to make her happy, hoping maybe it would help her remember what life used to be like. I thought . . . if I could just give her a home, a safe place where we could raise our kids, everything would be okay. Christ, I just wanted to help her . . .”

His voice cracked again, and he took another drink of wine. “For a while, it worked. We poured our hearts and souls and savings into this old mausoleum. Then Kathy got pregnant. For a while after Izzy was born, things were good. Kathy took her medication and tried . . . she tried so hard, but she couldn’t handle a baby. She started to hate this place—the heating that barely worked, the plumbing that pinged. About a year ago, she gave up the medications again . . . and then everything went to hell.”

He finished his second glass of wine and poured another. Shaking his head, he said softly, “And still, I didn’t see it coming.”

She didn’t want to hear any more. “Nick, you don’t—”

“One night I came home from work with a quart of butter brickle ice cream and a rented video and found her. She’d shot herself in the head . . . with my gun.”

Annie’s fingers spasmed around the stem of her glass. “You don’t have to talk about her.”

“I want to. No one else has asked.” He closed his eyes, leaning back on his elbows. “Kathy was like the fairy tale—when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, you wanted to be in Nebraska.”

Annie leaned back beside him, gazing up at the stars. The wine was making her dizzy, but she was glad; it blurred the hard edges of his words.

He gave her a tired smile. “One day she loved me with all her heart and soul, and the next day, she wouldn’t even speak to me. It was worst at night; sometimes she’d kiss me, and other times she’d roll toward the wall. If I even touched her on those nights, she’d scream for me to get away. She started telling wild stories—that I beat her, that Izzy wasn’t really her child, that I was an imposter who’d murdered her real husband in cold blood. It made me . . . crazy. The more she pulled away, the more I reached out. I knew I wasn’t helping, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I kept thinking that if I loved her enough, she’d be okay. Now that she’s gone, all I can think about is how selfish I was, how stupid and naive. I should have listened to that doctor and hospitalized her. At least she’d be alive. . . .”

Without thinking, Annie reached for him, touched his face gently. “It’s not your fault.”

He gave her a bleak look. “When your wife blows her brains out in your bed, with your baby daughter just down the hall, believe me, she thinks it’s your fault.” He made a soft, muffled sound, like the whimpering of a beaten pup. “God, she must have hated me. . . .”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“No. Yes. Sometimes.” His mouth trembled as he spoke. “And the worst part is—sometimes I hated her, too. I hated what she was doing to me and Izzy. She started to be more and more like my mother . . . and I knew, somewhere down inside, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to save her. Maybe I stopped trying . . . I don’t know.”

His pain called out to her, and she couldn’t turn away. She took him in her arms, stroking him as she would have soothed a child. “It’s okay, Nick. . . .”

When he finally drew back and looked at her, his eyes were flooded with tears. “And there’s Izzy. My . . . baby girl. She hasn’t said a word in months . . . and now she thinks she’s disappearing. At first it was just a finger on her left hand, then her thumb. When the hand went, she started wearing a black glove and stopped talking. I’ve noticed lately that she only uses two fingers on her right hand—so I guess she thinks that hand is disappearing, too. God knows what she’ll do if . . .” He tried to smile. She could see the superhuman effort he was making simply to speak, but then he failed. She could see when the control slipped away from him, tearing away like a bit of damp tissue. “What can I do? My six-year-old daughter hid under her bed one night because she heard a noise. She wanted to go to her mommy and get a hug, but thank God, she didn’t. Because her mommy had put a gun to her head and blown her brains out. If Izzy had walked down the hall that night, she would have seen bits and pieces of her mommy on the mirror, on the headboard, on the pillow. . . .” Tears streaked down his unshaven cheeks.