As Good as It Got (27 page)

Meditation. Oh good. Another thing she could be bad at.

“I don’t want to go on a hard journey. I’m not that deep of a person. I like to be happy and I like to be comfortable.”

So why was she sitting here, wet seeping through her jeans, talking to a man who couldn’t love her?

Where else would she go?

“Oh, but you are, Cindy. You have tremendous depth.”

He reached across the abyss to lay a comforting hand on her As Good As It Got

235

cheek. “I see in you a light and a spirit and a strength beyond anything you know that you have.”

“Really?” She was tired, terribly tired, and becoming quite damp, and now that she thought about it, his eyes were also the color of the oatmeal they had that morning.

“Oh yes, Cindy. Oh yes.”

She stood, suddenly irritated. Forgive her for unkind thoughts yet again on this soggy gray day, but she thought he sounded like he’d watched too much Dr. Phil, or like those monks in Thailand had scrambled his brain. She knew who she was. A nice person, not very strong, not at all remarkable.

She’d love to believe what he said, but he was wrong about her. Entirely. And if he was wrong about her, what was to stop him from being wrong about Kevin also? Maybe she was too trusting. Maybe she needed to stop trusting anybody but herself.

She lifted her arms and opened her mouth, full of the need to speak, but the futility of not knowing what to say overcame her, so she let her arms drop and started back toward the trees.

“Where are you going?”

“Away. Just away.”

He must have bolted after her, because then he was there, catching her hand, turning her to face him, staring at her with his cooked oatmeal eyes. “You shouldn’t be alone, Cindy. I can help. Let me—”

“I want to be alone. I need to be alone. I don’t want to be with you right now.”

His gaze changed from oatmeal to concrete. His grip tightened. “You need what I have to give you, Cindy. Don’t turn away from me.”

236 Isabel

Sharpe

Cindy stared at his changed eyes, his hardened face. She felt like she was in a scene from some late night horror movie and he was the evil villain just now showing his true self right before he bared fangs and drank her blood. “What, Patrick? What do you have to give me?”

“The strength to be yourself. The strength to leave your husband.” He leaned closer, and he looked sort of odd and manic, like a religious maniac. She didn’t think monks in Thailand behaved like that. Not that she would know.

“I don’t want to leave my husband.” She tried to pull her hand away, and he tightened his grip harder.

“Not even for me?”

Cindy stopped trying to pull away, and her stupidly optimistic heart gave a little flip of excitement and hope. “What are you saying?”

“Didn’t you feel what was between us the other night?”

She nodded slowly, not sure why, when he was finally saying what she wanted him to say, the words and the man saying them didn’t make her feel at all what she’d assumed they would.

“Let me be your strength, Cindy.”

She took a step back so their arms stretched out. He sounded like a stranger offering a child candy. She didn’t want any strength from him. She didn’t want anything from him.

However, an entirely new and startling thought did pop into her head.

She might not want Patrick’s strength. But she suddenly did want her own.

Chapter 15

Dear Paul,

I’m getting used to it here. Sort of. I still hate feeling
like a lab rat, but I have to say it feels better than
being home with Mom and Dad freaking out. I guess
I’ve either adjusted or the mind control drugs they
slip into the food have had their effect. It’s beautiful,
for one. The place seems to cradle you—and I can see
you smirking at my choice of words all the way from
the afterlife, so stop it.

I’ve rediscovered watercolor painting, which I
hadn’t done since college, and now I’m not sure why.

I guess you get into ruts in adulthood, or maybe I
was living too much your life and giving up too much
of my own. Looking back, I think I bought into your
ideas of how people with our wealth and stature must
behave. Somehow I lost how I behave.

238 Isabel

Sharpe

I met someone wise who said good things can come
out of pain, and I’ve been looking for them ever since. I
wish you’d looked for more good things in your life—in
our life. Cynicism can become a kind of straitjacket.

I’m sounding very philosophical right now. How
unlike me. But I’ve been thinking a lot. Which is
different than brooding, which you did all the time,
turning over and over the same angry thoughts. As
you’ve all too clearly shown, people self-destruct from
that kind of thinking. It’s easy to hate, and easy to
feel superior if you tell yourself you are. It’s harder to
slog it out in the trenches and be vulnerable and open
to new experiences and ideas and people, but I’m
trying. Not always successfully, because sometimes
you meet people who simply need a kick in the butt
and always will.

I wish I had discovered—or rediscovered—this
while you were still alive, and I wish I could have
taught it to you. Though I’m not sure you would ever
have listened or heard me.

I miss you. No, I miss who you used to be. No, who
we were when we met, full of hope and possibilities.

Somewhere along the way you felt you’d run out of
both. I’m starting to realize that’s never really true.

Love,

Ann

“Thank you.” Ann smiled warmly at Arnold, who was standing at the helm of the
Tiger Lily
as she’d always picture him. “I had another wonderful day.”

As Good As It Got

239

Arnold touched the brim of his cap. “Pleasure having you.

Come ’round anytime.”

“I’d like that.” She didn’t bother saying it was impossible.

Camp ended in three days, and who knew when or if she’d ever be back here. The thought left her more empty and depressed than it should.

She shook Arnold’s hand and climbed over the gunwale of the
Tiger Lily
into the skiff, where Clive waited until she was settled, then pushed off and started for shore. The day had been much like the last one, plus warmer temperatures, minus the crippling hangover and hostility between her and Clive. There still hadn’t been much chatter, but she felt the acceptance of the men—even managed to haul and rebait a few traps mostly by herself—and experienced the same satisfying immersion into routine, the suspension of time and worry in the small fishing boat out on the big salt pond, similar to how she felt on the days when she’d painted at Clive’s place.

Coming back, watching the shore grow from a postcard fantasy to an actual destination with responsibilities and the burdens of reality, her mood had lowered. No, sunk. No, crashed. Camp would be over and calm moments of forgetting like this would end. Her life would again be on track someday, but this little taste of surface calm would make descending back into the grief mines that much harder.

Last night she’d dreamed again of Paul, the first after several relatively peaceful sleeps. He’d been alive, but the farther and faster she ran toward him, the more he shrank, until he was a tiny stick person someone picked up and struck against the rough strip of a matchbox. Just before his head disappeared into a ball of flame, he’d burst into taunting laughter.

240 Isabel

Sharpe

“You coming to the house this afternoon?”

Ann jerked back to Clive’s broad shoulders working, and the gurgling of oar-made whirlpools in the sea.

“Yes. If it’s convenient. I’d like to paint again, the view from your . . . backyard.” The word seemed ridiculously inadequate, conjuring a manicured fenced-in lawn with a swing set and patio, not forest, sandbar, islands and ocean.

Clive simply nodded, but she had the feeling he was pleased she wanted to stay, and that pleased her; and there they were on a bay in Maine on a sparkling clear day, in a compounded pleasure situation.

On shore, they washed their fashion forward coveralls and boots and put them away in the shed, then climbed into Clive’s truck and started off.

“You hungry?”

Ann raised an eyebrow. “What is it that makes you want to shove food at me?”

“Gee, I don’t know.” He tapped his finger against his chin in deeply exaggerated contemplation. “Maybe the fact that you weigh about three-quarters what you should, and—”

“Aw come on.”

“—I get hungry just looking at you.”

Boom. My my.
“Oh
real
-ly.”

He chuckled when she waggled her eyebrows, which made her smile. She liked a guy who could take a joke. She also liked the way Clive came to life when he was off the boat.

Maybe this afternoon she’d feel comfortable enough to ask why. The last couple of times she’d been over, he’d had to work, and they didn’t get much time to talk.

Her stomach got another sour dose of that desperate feeling she loathed: time running out and too much left to do.

As Good As It Got

241

The truck jostled and bumped down his long rutted driveway, stopped in front of the silent white house with black shutters. Inside it remained frozen, as tidy and untouched as if he and his wife lived in a tent in the woods and only came home to host visitors. Clive heated some excellent sausage lentil and spinach soup, and rolls too fresh to be from a su-permarket. Ann ate ravenously, enjoying the silence between them, which didn’t feel either awkward or hostile, sensing him glancing his approval as her first bowl emptied, then her second.

“I guess the sea air gives me an appetite.”

“Your body gives you the appetite. You just haven’t been listening to it.”

“I’ve had a few other things on my mind.” She tried to keep the poor-me annoyance out of her voice and failed.

“Forget yourself. Just eat.”

“I
try
. But since Paul died, if it hasn’t been my parents hovering, it’s been Betsy or Patrick or my roommates.” She cleared her thickening throat and attempted a smile.
Lighten
up, Ann
. “I can eat around you, though. Which must mean you make me hungry too.”

The intended joke came out like a wobbly schoolgirl crush confession and abruptly complicated their easy silence.

Crap.

“I mean those muffins you brought Saturday were the best things I ever ate. Those tiny cranberries? They were incredible. Are they local? I’ve never seen them that small in Massachusetts.” She yanked up her conversational emergency brake. She’d already thanked him for the muffins when she came by to paint. The babble was only making it worse.

“They grow wild here. You should try them in pancakes 242 Isabel

Sharpe

sometime.” He got up and cleared their dishes, which cleared the awkwardness too. “You do have a point, though. For all the good camp does, it’s not the place to forget your troubles.

Better for wrestling them to the ground so you can move on faster.”

“I didn’t think I could survive two weeks there.” Ann drew her finger along the edge of his counter. “I had a pretty crappy attitude.”

“You were angry and protecting yourself.”

She looked up to find him busy at the sink, apparently not interested in watching his dropped bomb hit the target.

Protecting herself, yeah. The same way Paul had tried to protect himself. And guess how successful that turned out to be. “How do you know all this? Please tell me it’s not in my camp file.”

“I’ve done it too.” He crossed to the refrigerator and searched inside. “Want some raspberries? Cream and sugar?

I picked them yesterday, they won’t last forever.”

Done it too, how? She wished she’d be here long enough to find out. “How can I say no to raspberries and cream?”

“You can’t.” He set a delicate white bowl in front of her, and she dug her spoon into one of her favorite combinations.

Fruity, flavorful berries, sweetened cream . . . Chocolate would make it the holy trinity of desserts, but she wasn’t complaining. Back home she’d have to rethink her Lean Cui-sine lifestyle and see if she could—

“Ann.”

She looked up with a spoon still in her mouth, startled by his serious tone. “Mmm?”

“What’s going on between you and Patrick?”

She put the spoon back in the bowl, staring at the cream As Good As It Got

243

turning pink from an overripe berry, sure her cheeks had turned the same color. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“I’d like to make it my business.”

She lifted her head. “Why?”

“Good reasons.”

“Your reasons? Or Betsy’s?”

“Mine.” He watched her calmly, but his body had gone rock still. “Are you involved with him?”

“I . . . I’m . . . ” Something was riding on her answer, she felt that instinctively, but she didn’t want to say anything until she figured out what. “Why do you want to know?”

He smiled dryly. “Okay. Since I brought it up, I guess it’s up to me to speak plainly.”

“Shoot.” She picked up her spoon, to have something to do.

“It is my considered opinion that Patrick is massively full of shit.”

Ann burst out laughing, feeling manic and off-balance and now a little sick. “Please. Don’t hold back. Say what you think.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Her laughter died. For a moment the careful blankness of his eyes was replaced with concern that ran through her body like a thrill. Right then she decided Clive’s wife was a lucky bitch and that she hated her.