Book Lover, The (33 page)

                            
37

M
UCH TO MEGAN’S CHAGRIN, LUCY PITCHED IN at the bookstore, organizing the bills and paperwork that Ruth had apparently never let Megan touch. She also spruced up the bathroom/storeroom where she’d fallen apart all those months ago.

Before she knew it, she was locking the door of the cabin and heading to LaGuardia Airport. Driving around the lake, she took one final look in her rearview mirror, and felt a shiver run up her spine, though she wasn’t sure why. Colin had promised he wouldn’t try to swim to the island and back alone. Yesterday, when she was at the store, she’d reminded him of that promise. He nodded, then handed her a CD. “I thought this might help with your research on eagles.”

“Thanks, I’ll watch it on the plane.”

“When you come back you can tell me what you think.”

She’d looked at him, realizing what he was asking. “I’ll even take notes,” she’d joked.

But for once he didn’t smile. Since that kiss a few nights ago, he’d been looking at her differently. The wanting was right there, in his eyes. How had she not noticed it before, or her own growing attraction to him? She’d responded to him instantly when he’d pulled her onto his lap, and since then it was hard to get him, or that moment, out of her mind.

“I’ll see you in two days,” he finally said and she nodded.

In two days, she would be free and he’d want to take things to the next level. She had to be very careful. She did not want to hurt him. Or Ruth.

On the plane her anxiety grew and she began to laugh. It was her old fear of flying, of course, and nothing more, that’s what was unnerving her. And this was the first time since she’d met David all those years ago that she was flying alone.

Lucy hoisted her bag into the overhead compartment and took her seat. She bit a Xanax in half, enough to relax but not make her loopy. Then she closed her eyes and waited, saying a small prayer. It was funny how it came automatically when she was in fearful situations. The last time she’d really prayed was when Ben was born. And that night in front of David’s office, when she’d thought he was dead.

As the plane backed out of the gate, then bounced across the tarmac, her heart began to race, despite the Xanax. Gripping the seat rests, she closed her eyes and thought of David, that first time she’d done this very same thing, but grabbed his warm hand instead. How he’d always made her feel safe.

The plane turned, the engines firing up to full throttle, and then they were hurtling down the runway. She waited for that moment they left the earth, praying they wouldn’t fall, as it seemed they should from the sheer weight of the jet. Her stomach dropped as the plane lifted and she counted Lamaze breaths over and over until finally they were at cruising altitude and everyone began to chat and relax. She immediately opened her tote bag and pulled out the research material she’d printed over the past week from the internet, enough pages to distract herself for three flights.

As she leafed through the enormous file, she remembered the CD from Colin. She got out her laptop, opened it on the tray and slid the disc in, pressing earphones into her ears. A moment later, the screen filled with a panoramic shot high above a glittering blue lake and in the distance, mountains dotted with snow. Classical music began, a gorgeous piece that tugged at her emotions immediately, and a woman began telling the story of the struggle for independence that led to the newly formed United States. How the founding fathers searched for a majestic symbol of their hard-won freedom, finally choosing the bald eagle.

Lucy watched as a distant object on the screen slowly came into focus and she recognized an eagle, which then spread its wings and took flight above forests and woodlands, skimming treetops, gliding across frozen, snow-covered fields, as if surveying his world in all of its magnificent glory. It was a stirring opening and a sudden lump of tears grew in her throat. She couldn’t help but think of Colin and his wounded veterans who had all fought, just as those men fought centuries ago, to reinforce the freedom this bird represented. Something like this, she thought, might be a perfect opening for Colin’s program.

The bald eagle is one of the largest birds of prey,
the narrator went on.
Its startling white head and penetrating yellow eyes make it the most recognizable raptor, but most people know very little about its difficult and inspiring life in the wild.

The music changed and as the eagle flew back to its nest, another eagle soared into view. It was a female, checking out his home. Noticing her, he suddenly took off from the nest, following her across the sky for a long distance, growing ever closer until they began to circle each other over and over at a leisurely pace, the male just above the female. Lucy marveled at this intricate aerial ballet until suddenly he dove toward the female. Lucy thought he was going to attack her, but with just seconds to contact, the female suddenly turned upside down, thrusting her feet toward him. He grasped her talons with his own. They were locked together, unable to fly. She watched in horror as the two eagles plummeted toward the earth, bodies twirling as they held onto each other. This was the dance of courtship, although it seemed to Lucy as though they were destined for death. At the very last second the birds suddenly broke free, soaring off in opposite directions. But the bond was established. Hopefully, they would now mate.

She paused the video and sat there, moved beyond words by what she’d just witnessed. The trust it would take for the female to be held like that, it was beyond comprehension. She pressed play, and watched as the male, back in his nest which he’d been tending all winter, began filling it with huge twigs, fish carcasses, and other goodies that had attracted her at first glance. Her arrival soon afterward was proof, the narrator continued, that mating had indeed occurred.

It was a tentative beginning as they worked to improve the nest together. Eagles, like many birds, have “site fidelity,” meaning that each bird is drawn to the area in which it was born to build its own nest, sometimes flying back from several hundred miles away. She imagined Kit, working tirelessly in a nest, readying it for his own mate’s arrival, no doubt somewhere near the Water Gap. Had Kit left a mate behind, or even worse, babies which she was then forced to care for alone?

Once the female eagle laid her eggs, they took turns keeping them warm. He would bring her food, then sit on the eggs while she flew off, fishing with amazing accuracy, diving from great heights into a river, despite her blindness in one eye, then swooping up with a fish dangling from her talons as she flew it back to the nest to be shared. Then it was his turn to hunt again. It was grueling work. Lucy was amazed at the hardships these wild creatures endured to bring their young into the world. They were fierce predators, yet gentle parents. Their diligence and sensitivity touched her heart, especially as he carefully maneuvered his powerful talons over the eggs so he didn’t crack them when he sat to warm them. The eggs could freeze in a minute if exposed.

It went on for weeks, as early spring turned cold again and suddenly a late blizzard blew in. The nest swayed and pitched as each eagle took turns sitting on the eggs, their feathers rippling in the cruel, gale force winds and blinding snow, yellow eyes ever alert. Soon they were all but covered in snow. And yet they never moved, never wavered, mother and father guarding their young with all their might. How difficult their lives are, she thought; how easily the nest could have blown away, or one of them freeze to death. But there they sat.

She stopped the video suddenly, and closed her eyes. Thoughts of Colin and his program, or her book, had evaporated long minutes ago. Because as she watched this pair of eagles struggling to make something happen that seemed so against the odds, ironically even against nature, it was impossible not to think of her and David. All they’d endured, for nothing.

* * *

FROM THE MOMENT SHE GOT IN THE RENTAL CAR and headed toward St. Augustine, the familiarity of the roads came back instantly. For almost five years, this was coming home.

With each mile closer, her nerves began to tick harder. In a little while, she’d be at the house on Charlotte Street, which David had agreed to vacate. She’d taken very little when she left months ago. Now she had to sort through the rest, though it wouldn’t take long.

Exiting Route 95, she drove east toward the coast, past houses and churches and soon there it was ahead, the beautiful little city. She passed Flagler College, and the beautiful Casa Monica, which looked more like a castle than a hotel. The green on her left was filled with vendors, and in that moment the cathedral bells began to ring, as if in welcome. When she came to the Bridge of Lions, she made a sudden decision and drove straight, instead of turning toward the house. Over the harbor she soared, onto Anastasia Island. A few minutes later she drove through the gate for the state park beach.

Wind surfers and fishermen filled the lagoon as she passed, continuing to the parking lot by the beach. Late summer in Florida is intense, with blistering humidity and strong sun, but at the moment she didn’t mind. Standing beside the car, she could hear the roar of the ocean just beyond the dunes, the crash of waves, and the lone cry of a gull.

She crossed the boardwalk and a moment later stood there, her heart catching at the wide swath of pure white sand, the glittering sea stretched out before her. She walked toward the water and there, where the soft wind came off the ocean and the sand was cooler, slipped off her sandals and rolled up her pants.

She walked north, forcing her mind not to dwell on the memories of all her walks here, simply wanting to enjoy this last one. But they came anyway, like the waves, one after another, starting with that first time she and David had walked here, wondering if this could be the place to start over, when suddenly that flock of white gulls lifted and hovered above them, like messengers from God.

There was the morning she finished writing
A
Quiet Wanting,
when she nearly ran to the tip of the island, so filled with excitement she thought she’d explode—thinking it would soon be published. Then the long string of rejections. And of course coming here again and again after David’s arrest. Now she was here for the last time, ending their marriage.

The image of David cutting the grass came to her then, spurred no doubt by the video of the bald eagle in his exhausting routine. Every single day after they lost Ben, week after week, he was out there filling the long lonely hours after work when she’d been emotionally absent to him. Punishing himself.

She turned, staring at the water, at that distant line on the horizon where the light green sea and blue sky met. David had been grieving, too, in his silent, senseless ritual. But she hadn’t thought about that because she’d only had room for her own grief. She was the one who’d carried Ben for nine months. Who’d felt him moving inside her. She was the one whose engorged breasts leaked, longing for the moment when she’d be able to feed her baby the way she’d always dreamed of. But of course it had never happened.

David had brought her Xanax every six hours in the days that followed, and for a while she allowed herself to succumb to the fog of feeling half-alive. It was easier that way. Then one morning she woke up, got in the car with the manuscript she’d started while bedridden, and drove to the park and sat there, writing by hand again.

She went for therapy, but he’d refused. And she’d had this other world of Hope and Matthew she was creating, that she could bury herself in. She went to the park every day and began to think that if they could just remove themselves from that house, that life, all of it built around the dream of a child, they could somehow survive.

She’d never gone into the nursery again. David had donated everything to a women’s shelter. He sold the house, pared down their belongings, and arranged for the movers. She kept writing, lost in someone else’s problems, heartache, and eventual joy—Hope’s. And back to her dream of being a writer. But in all the time she was escaping, David was facing the day to day realities of their loss. David, who had been honest early on that he didn’t want children.

She wondered if he’d told his therapist here how she’d withdrawn, how she’d let him pick up the pieces alone. How he’d brought her cups of tea in the middle of the night when her breasts had turned to bricks, as she waited for the milk to dry up.

Now as she walked up that beautiful beach in the harsh light of midday, all of the mistakes that had been rising to the surface for so long hit her square in the face. She’d left everything up to David. She hadn’t taken responsibility for any of it. First she’d lied to him; she’d always wanted children. Then she was blinded by grief and David, as usual, took care of everything. No wonder he’d hated her.