Heartbroken (45 page)

“What on earth possessed me to talk to that buffoon?” she’d railed after the media circus began.

“Maybe you just wanted to share it with someone,” Kate had said, though she had wondered the same thing. Her mother, who gave nothing, who revealed nothing, had shared this critical piece of evidence with a virtual stranger. It mystified Kate, as so many things about Birdie mystified her.

“And you wonder why I hate people.”

“I never wondered that, Mother.”

“Well,” said Birdie, “now you know, whether you wondered or not. Everybody is just out for himself.”

The journals had, in fact, burned in the fire. Kate had brought them for Birdie, thinking that she deserved to see them. But now they were gone. It was just as well. She didn’t want anyone to know what Lana and Caroline had written. It was so long ago, and everyone was gone. Her book was fiction, bearing little resemblance to actual events or people. It was her story, not theirs.

B
ack at the hotel, Sean was on the phone with his partner, Jane. He lifted a finger as Kate walked into the room, so she showered while he finished his call. She always had an urge to get into the shower after an interview, as if to scrub away her public persona. She didn’t recognize this Kate. In her mind, she was a wife and mother, a closet writer; she was
justamom
. She liked that woman better. That woman knew what was real, what mattered. Kate the author thought about interviews and book signings, best-seller lists and book reviews (which had been mixed: some glowing, some not). It all seemed like an alternate universe, a place where it was impossible to ground and center oneself.

“You were great,” said Sean when she emerged from the shower. “You’re getting really good at this.”

“Just in time for it to be over,” she said.

She wondered what the event would be like tonight. Small or packed? The crowd sympathetic or accusing? Would the questions be about the actual book or about the fire, about Richard Cameron? Since Emily Burke’s sentencing, there had been a lot of questions about that. How did Kate feel about her? What punishment did Kate feel Emily deserved?

The truth was that Kate felt nothing but compassion for the girl.
Emily had been victimized by Kate’s father and by her own mother, Martha. She was told a lie that had corrupted her entire life. She’d fallen in with awful, murderous men who used her and coerced her into doing terrible things. She’d miscarried while in custody.

When Kate saw Emily on television or in the newspaper, she looked like a paper cutout of a girl, someone utterly defeated. She would serve time, they’d learned this week, a reduced sentence as an accomplice and an accessory to the crimes committed by Dean Freeman and Brad Campbell. To Kate, it didn’t seem fair. This opinion infuriated Birdie.

“She’s a grown woman,” said Birdie. “She made choices, bad ones. You don’t get a pass just because you had a less than perfect childhood.”

Birdie was angry about Kate’s compassion, saw it as a kind of weakness. Often, in the many lengthy discussions they’d had about that terrible night and everything that surrounded it—Joe’s affair (which he flatly refused to discuss, calling it “none of Kate’s goddamned business”), the love triangle among Lana, Jack, and Richard—Kate wondered if Birdie ever for a second suspected that Richard might have been her own father and, therefore, Kate’s grandfather. Since the journals had burned, Kate never mentioned what Lana had written. What good would it do? She couldn’t imagine what words she would use to broach that topic with her mother. Like so many things, it went unspoken between them.

Since hearing about Emily’s sentence, Kate had been asking herself how much choice a girl like that really had. How could you make good choices if no one ever taught you how? How could you choose a good relationship if you didn’t know what one looked like? Kate wondered whether she’d have chosen someone as wrong for her as Sebastian if she’d had a better childhood, if she hadn’t confused control with love. In truth, it was only her desire to find a safe place for Chelsea that had allowed her to recognize the good in Sean. She chose right for them because she didn’t choose from fear, or desperation,
or all the myriad sad and lonely places from which we sometimes choose. When she thought about the baby whom Emily Burke lost, Kate felt irrationally sad.

But Kate couldn’t afford to dwell in that place anymore. She’d spent too much time thinking and talking about Heart Island. She had one more book signing and then a life to get back to. Her children needed her. Over a year later, Chelsea was still having nightmares. On their return to the East Coast, she, Sean, and the kids would be moving into the house with which Sean had fallen in love. As a two-income family, they could easily afford it—without Kate’s trust. And it felt like a time for new beginnings.

chapter forty

I
n the milky gray mornings, in the moments right after she opened her eyes, Emily could almost forget what she had allowed her life to become. For a second or maybe two, the morning dawned with its endless possibilities. She began each day with the slimmest ray of hope. And then the crushing weight of reality would settle on her, press down on her chest, constrict her breathing. The losses—of Dean, of her child, of herself—were almost too much to bear. She was buried beneath a drift of grief and sorrow. Each day, she waded through it, wondering if her life would ever be anything but this.

In her childhood room, there was the same pink cat with the ragged tail, the same torn Backstreet Boys poster, the white desk and chair covered in stickers. She thought of her little house, the house she’d lived in alone at first and then shared with Dean. She and her mother had sold all of the furniture on Craigslist, to help defray some of the costs of Emily’s legal fees.

Her sentence was very lenient. The defense held that she’d been acting under emotional duress; the videotape of her being carried screaming from the Blue Hen, along with the testimony from Jones Cooper that she’d had a bruise on her face, had seemed to confirm that. But it wasn’t the whole truth, and the jury apparently realized that. There were points, moments, when she might have altered the outcome of the situation, and she hadn’t made the right choices. She would serve a year in the minimum-security division of a women’s prison about an hour from where she lived.

Her lawyer had been optimistic about it. “You can use this time to get your head right, Emily,” she said. “This is not hard time. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But I’m saying that you can opt to see it as a new beginning.”

Things could have gone a lot worse for her if it hadn’t been for Carol, who’d pleaded for leniency. Carol had recovered from her injuries—almost completely. She walked with a slight limp, and there was a bit of a slur to her speech. She came to the sentencing hearing, though she’d never answered any of Emily’s letters begging for her forgiveness.

“I could see that she was a girl who was in over her head. I don’t think she had any idea what they were planning until that night, or how things might go,” said Carol. “I think she was coerced into going along with them. And I believe that she thought she could help me by doing what they said. She was always a hard worker and a good person. She made a horrible mistake, but I don’t think she should serve hard time.”

On her way out of the courtroom, Carol offered Emily a sad smile. All Emily could do was weep at the table; the tide of shame and gratitude within her was so great that she thought it might take her away.

She’d enrolled in an inmate program where she would help train Seeing Eye dogs for the blind. It was part of the rehabilitation plan that would reduce her sentence. Honestly, the thought of it, that she could do something that might help people, was the only thing that pulled her from bed in the morning. It was a penance. When she came through, she might be cleansed.

She had another week before she had to turn herself in to custody. She kept thinking:
My life will begin again on that day
. She tried not to think of all the horror stories she’d already heard about even a minimum-security prison.
You will be used and abused, if you allow it
, her lawyer had told her.
The people in there will try to take what they can from you. They will try to hurt you. But if you stay strong
,
don’t look for friends, keep your head down, and go to work, you might survive
.

Her mother had not judged her or lambasted her, as Emily thought she would. She had stood by Emily, helped her get a lawyer, had come every day to court. Joe’s money, the sum that had been intended for her education, made it possible for her to hire a woman who specialized in cases like Emily’s, someone who could help her get a reduced sentence as part of a special occupational therapy program. Joe hadn’t reached out to her personally. At first she’d been hurt. Then it dawned on her fully that the man she thought of as Joe Burke was a fairy tale. He was not her father. The money he’d given for her education—she didn’t even understand why he’d done that. He owed her nothing. She was nothing to him, only a little girl he was kind to once when he had loved her mother. The circumstances of his life had dictated his behavior, just as the circumstances of her life had dictated hers. Maybe it was his way of saying that he would have loved her if he could have. He might have been her father in all the ways that mattered, even if nothing linked them biologically. That was what she chose to believe, even if she had no reason to think it was true.

“Money is easy to give, if you have it,” Martha had said. “The offering of it can masquerade as a good deed, even if you’re just using it to keep people away from you, building a wall against reproach. You can use it to control people, to buy their distance.”

Emily thought maybe it was simpler than that: Some people gave money instead of love because it was all they had to give. A full bank account and a life of good deeds achieved with money didn’t mean a full heart or a giving soul—often just the opposite.

She showered and dressed and went downstairs, where her mother was making her breakfast. They hadn’t spoken much since the sentencing. What was there to say? It was the end of a long journey and the beginning of another. She was shoring up her internal resources, and speech seemed like a waste of energy.

She sat at the table, and her mother brought her a cup of coffee, sat across from her. The kitchen was run-down, the appliances old, the linoleum floors so ancient that they’d never look clean no matter how much you scrubbed.

“I know this is my fault, Emily,” said her mother. Emily looked up from her coffee and saw that her mother had her eyes cast toward the table. Emily could see the gray in her roots, the ragged condition of her cuticles, a stain on her blouse. “I want you to know that I’m sorry for all the ways I’ve failed you.”

“Mom.” Her instinct was to protest, to say that everything was okay, she would be okay. But wasn’t that a big part of the problem with Emily, that she was always trying to make things okay for other people at her own expense, leaving her with a permanent emotional and spiritual deficit? That she was always looking for someone else to fill the emptiness in her, and that was why she was so vulnerable to people like Dean.

“I’ve made mistakes, terrible mistakes—for myself, for you,” her mother said. “And I’m going to help you get through this.”

Her mother, too, had made bad choices in the quest for love. Emily couldn’t judge her, even though righteous anger would be so much easier. It was so much simpler to see other people’s wrongs and make them pay. It was so much harder to have compassion, to see yourself in others and find forgiveness.

“I’ve made mistakes, too, Mom. And I’m going to do better.”

In saying this, Emily felt something shift inside her chest. Something in her that had been closed since the night she helped Dean and Brad rob the Blue Hen. For the first time in a long time, she felt hope.

chapter forty-one

B
irdie stood on the rocks at Heart Island and watched the first light of dawn crack the horizon. She wasn’t going to swim today; her sciatica was dominating her life at the moment. Even though swimming was a suitable therapy for all kinds of pain, this morning she stayed on land.

She surveyed the skeletal structure of the new house she was having built. They had used the old foundation, but the house being erected was of her own design. She wanted to be sure she could see the dawn breaking from the master bedroom. Because while so many people seemed to cherish the sunset (including Joe), it was the dawn of a new day that Birdie prized. It was God’s little reminder that no matter how dark the night, the sun always rises.

The workers would arrive by barge in a few hours, and then the whole island would be alive with the sounds of their hammers and saws, their loud music, their booming voices. They chased away the silence and the birds, but she didn’t mind. It would be worth it to see this new house, the one that was exactly as she wanted it. For a little while longer, at least, there would be quiet.

She was alone with Heart Island. Kate and her family were taking a trip this year to someplace insane—was it Asia or Africa? Even though she and Kate were closer in some ways since the incidents of last summer and since the publication of Kate’s book, there was more distance, too. Kate said no more often, visited less, and said that she’d be taking a year or maybe two off from Heart Island. If
Birdie thought about it too much, she felt things that were uncomfortable for her—sadness, regret, loneliness. So she simply didn’t think about it. Theo made his weekly phone call but announced that he wouldn’t be returning to Heart Island—ever. Though he said the reasons should be clear, she had no idea what he was talking about. It was something else she chose not to contemplate.

Joe would be staying in the city this summer, at her request. They were far beyond the point where divorce was seemly or financially advisable, but they would move in separate orbits for a good portion of the year. They would make the appropriate appearances, have dinner with friends. They could manage that much. This was best, wasn’t it?