The Law of Bound Hearts (18 page)

Libby

Libby lay tensed until after the maid's cart had wheeled past her room and down the corridor. She'd hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob, but that didn't guarantee anything. The Libertyville motel, chosen because Richard would never think of looking for her there, was two steps above seedy, the kind of low-cost motor inn parents stayed at when they came to see their sons and daughters graduate from basic training at Great Lakes, and nothing was guaranteed, not even cleanliness. There were ancient stains on the carpet—she didn't even want to
think
of their origins—and a buildup of dust around the baseboards where the chambermaids had missed with the vacuum. Libby could only imagine what she'd find if she took a look at the mattress, let alone under the bed. And the flimsy paper strip encircling the toilet seat didn't ensure anything, certainly not that the fixture had been sterilized.

The room was narrow, with simple furnishings: a double bed— where Libby now lay—a nightstand, one chair upholstered in a faded maroon fabric, and a three-drawer maple dresser on which perched a television. Remnants of last night's dinner—take-out pasta—and a partially consumed bottle of red wine remained on the nightstand. The wine, the first she'd had in months, had resulted in a bitch of a headache.

She picked up the remote and flipped on the television, pretuned to a cable station that specialized in sensational news. She stared at the picture—obviously shot from a helicopter—of a car chase in Texas that, according to the anchorman, had been going on for more than two hours, during which the semi involved had sped through intersections and on and off highway ramps, trailed by a half-dozen police cars with dome lights flashing. “This is unbelievable,” the reporter was shouting as the rogue flatbed barreled head-on into a stream of traffic. “He just crossed the median strip and now he's going the wrong way on the interstate. Unbelievable!”

This was not the kind of thing Libby normally would have watched, but anything, even this, was preferable to the scene she had been replaying in her head for the past day and a half: Richard with his arms around Sarah James, his cheek resting against her temple, his eyes closed; then, as Libby fled, the sound of his voice calling out her name.

She could fully picture how things would have unfolded if she had stopped, turned, waited for him. He would have reached for her, mouthing predictable explanations and proclamations of innocence. The sad thing was, part of her would have
wanted
to believe him, would have embraced his words instead of challenging them, would have sought the comfort that could be found in hiding behind militant denial. But another, wiser inner knowing wouldn't have bought one word of his earnest explanations.
Fool me twice, shame
on me.

For Richard had fooled her once. She had believed him then, even when all the evidence pointed to a train wreck waiting just round the bend. She had wanted to believe him and so she had and it was that simple. (Who was it that said the most damaging lies are those you tell yourself?) But even her denial hadn't been strong enough to prevent either the wreck or the chain reaction collision that followed. In the years that followed, they had both worked on patching together their marriage and rebuilding trust.

Libby reached for the remote, turned down the sound. On the screen, the semi was now off the highway. It tore down a two-way street, careened past a yellow school bus, all in eerie silence. What had set off the chase? Was the driver drunk? On drugs? Certainly he couldn't believe escape was possible. The end was inevitable. He'd either crash or run out of gas. He was going down and the only question was how many people he'd take with him. Libby's stomach tightened and her head throbbed, although she continued to watch, unable to turn away. She clicked the volume up.

“It's a miracle no one has been hit,” the anchorman was saying.

A miracle, Libby thought. How easily we throw the word around, often when it was really a matter of luck. But what was the difference between good luck and miracles? Was it a question of degree? Divine intervention? If you believed in that kind of thing. She stared at the flatbed as it cut through a parking lot. If bad luck was the opposite of good, she wondered, did “miracle” have an antonym? People spoke of the miracle of birth, but she had never heard anyone talk about the miracle of death. She was sure not even Jesse and her prayer group talked about that.

Her mother used to say you made your own luck. Had she made her own luck, both the good and the bad? Was it bad luck yesterday that had caused her to drive to the college to find Richard just when he was giving the lesson? Or had it simply been bad timing? Was everything that capricious? Or was there something larger, more complicated at work?

If she was dividing her life into two sections delineating times of good and bad luck, the line would be drawn horizontally, not vertically. The early years had been charmed. The later ones, less so. If luck ran in streaks, she had been on a bad streak for years. Losing her parents in the plane crash. Her disease, which even Carlotta said was bad luck. The incredibly bad luck six years ago.

What were the chances of Sam leaving class early that night and returning home? What were the chances that Libby herself would be so susceptible to Jay's flattery? Only that one time, she'd thought, as if the sin would be lesser for having occurred only once. He had come on to her and she had been drunk and vulnerable because of Richard's betrayal. But these familiar excuses were poor even to her own ears. There was no justification for what she had done.

In spite of her headache, she reached for the bottle on the nightstand and poured two inches of wine into the tumbler. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps there is no such thing as luck. Perhaps it is just a word made up to explain what is no more than life unfolding.

Outside, in the hall, the maid's cart rolled back down the corridor. It did not slow as it passed her door. Libby wondered how long she could remain holed up in this room. Tomorrow she was scheduled for dialysis. What would happen if she skipped her session? How long could she live without the treatment? One day? Two? A week? She had no idea. The subject had never come up with Carlotta. She had heard that kidney failure was easy. Relatively painless. You fell asleep and didn't wake up. Could that be true? Could it be that simple?

And if she died here in this room, who would mourn her? The twins, certainly, but after the first shock of loss and paralyzing grief, they would go on, as she had after her parents' deaths, gradually reabsorbed by life—with, occasionally, pockets of pain, triggered by memory. Memory. In a sophomore anatomy course she'd learned that memory lay in the limbic system, one of the deepest, oldest parts of the brain. And she had heard or read somewhere that memory held only the story one could bear to know, but she knew the lie of that. Her memory was full of things she couldn't bear to know but couldn't forget.

In the end, what saved us? Faith, as people like Jesse believed? Or creativity, as Professor Rauh had said? But faith had never prevented even the most devout of believers from dying, nor had any act of creation. As in the drama playing out on the screen in her hotel room, the end was inevitable.

The semi was pulling back onto a four-lane highway, pursued by the patrol cars. Cars swerved off the road and onto embankments as the caravan passed. Libby stared at the picture. She was gripped by cold desperation. She didn't know whether it was for herself or in empathy for the unknown truck driver barreling across Texas in a race he was destined to lose.

Sam

Through the night, Sam tracked the full moon as it crossed the sky. At eleven o'clock it shone through the south-facing windows. By two, it hung fat and golden in the west, witness to her sleepless night. This time of year it seemed nearly possible to touch it. Was it the harvest moon? Or was that in September?

When she was a girl and sharing a room with Libby, on nights like this the two of them would get out of bed and cross to the window seat, where they would curl up on the padded bench. Then Libby would make up a story about the moon as it passed through its monthly phases, speaking in a whisper so their mother wouldn't hear and make them go back to bed. One time, Libby told her the moon was made of salt and that a herd of cattle roamed the sky, cows exactly like the ones they saw every day in Mr. Farnham's pasture. Each night, like the Farnham's Holsteins at a salt lick, the cows lapped the moon, until it gradually disappeared. Another time Libby told her that the reason the moon grew smaller each night was because it was really a ball of the finest, silver silk and an old woman who stitched for the fairies flew there and clipped away material she used to make gossamer gowns, and blankets for their babies.

When Sam was in the second grade, her teacher, Miss Granger, showed the class a newspaper picture of astronauts on the moon, one driving an LRV. A Lunar Roving Vehicle, Miss Granger explained in a big voice. To Sam it looked like something she could have made with her set of Legos. She'd tuned out Miss Granger and her talk about moon rocks and manned lunar missions and looked out the window, where it had started to snow. She much preferred to listen to Libby's stories about a moon made of silk or salt or sugar than one formed of rock.

Even after Sam had outgrown fairy tales, Libby continued to draw her to the window seat on full moon nights. Now she told Sam about the moon's powerful force that controlled not only the motion of the sea but the monthly cycles of women. She said that its energy was female and ancient goddesses were named for it. When Sam was fourteen she had woken in the night to find Libby writing in the moonlight. “What are you doing?” she asked. But that night her sister did not invite her to join her at the window. “Go back to sleep,” Libby said. The next day, when her sister was off with Russell Fuller (leaving her behind, as she did more and more lately), Sam had found Libby's notebook and read her poem: “Wandering Hecate.” The poem made her feel even lonelier than her sister's date with Russell. She couldn't figure out what it meant and couldn't ask Libby, since that would mean confessing that she'd snooped in the book.

The moon slid further through the western sky. A lovers' moon. Sam wondered if six states away in Annapolis, Lee was awake and watching it, too. The day before, he'd left for Maryland to conduct another yacht survey. He had slept over the previous night, but things had seemed different between them. Something unresolved. It wasn't that he was cool, just quieter than usual. More reserved.

“Are you sleeping?” he asked her around midnight.

“Not technically,” she said.

He turned to her and held her. “I've been trying to imagine how I'd feel if, say, I found you with my brother.”

“And?”

“And I guess what I came up with is that I'd be angry and I'd be hurt.”

She snuggled closer. He did understand.

“But,” he continued, “I want to believe that eventually I'd forgive him. I'd remember that our whole history was about more than one betrayal and I'd want to hear his side of it.”

“I hate it when you do that, Lee,” she said.

“What?”

“Try and take away my anger.”

“That's not what I'm trying to do, Sam. I'm just saying that families are about people who fail and who make mistakes. But when all is said and done, we have to work together.”

“How nice for you that you never had to find out how you'd really react,” she said. She turned away from him, stiffening when he tried to embrace her.

In the morning, he'd left without waking her. She tried to read nothing into that, only that he was being considerate and letting her sleep. Later, on the kitchen table, she'd found the stone he had picked up that night on Silvershell Beach, the one she had thought was for Alice. She'd brought it upstairs and now it lay on her nightstand. She reached for it and cupped it in her hand. It was nearly flat and it fit neatly in her palm. She traced the white band in the center with her finger and wondered why he'd left it for her and why Alice believed such markings meant good luck.

Libby used to know all the symbols for good luck. Four-leaf clovers, elephants with upturned trunks, rainbows, horseshoes, shooting stars, the number 7. Their mother's wedding band.

Sam twisted the ring on her hand.

Libby.

Always Libby. Thoughts of her—a ghost who had never left— crowded the room.

Despite the six years of silence between them, despite her determination never to speak to Libby again, Sam could no more exorcise her sister from every part of her life than she could carry water in her hand. Over the years, Josh had updated her with news. She knew when the twins graduated from high school and how Matt had given his parents a little trouble in his senior year and where each was going to college. Mercedes was at Brown, Matt at Cal Tech. Josh knew about Sam and Libby's fight—although neither had told him the specific details—but he refused to take sides. I love you both, was all he ever said. She assumed that over the years he'd told Libby news about her, about her divorce, her move to Sippican—a move her brother had disapproved of. Too small-town to sustain her business, he'd told her. She should consider Boston or Cape Cod, or at least New Bedford. When the
Globe
article had come out, she'd clipped it and sent it to him. She wondered if he had mailed that along to Libby.

She wondered, too, how Libby had explained their estrangement to Richard. Had she told him the truth? If not, how had she accounted for the fact that they no longer spoke? Had she in some way blamed Sam?

She cupped Lee's stone between her hands, felt it draw warmth from her body, tried to draw comfort from it. She wished she could talk to Lee. She wanted the reassurance of hearing him tell her that he loved her.

She regretted not asking Richard more questions during their brief phone call. Exactly how sick was Libby? How long had she been on dialysis? What was wrong with her? Sam had automatically assumed it was diabetes, but now she thought it could be something else. Cancer. She felt heaviness inside her chest, as if a rock, the mate to the one she held in her hands, had lodged there.

At four, the moon now low in the western sky, Sam made a decision, and having made it, could at last fall asleep.

In the morning, Stacy hadn't even poured herself her first cup of coffee when Sam brought up the subject.

“I'm going away for a few days.”

Stacy smiled. “You and the Hottie taking a vacation?”

“No. Lee's in Annapolis. I'm thinking of going out to the Midwest.” She handed Stacy a steaming mug. “To my sister's.”

Stacy raised an eyebrow and continued to spoon sugar into her mug. “When?”

“Tomorrow.” She did not tell Stacy she had made the reservation earlier that morning, made it and paid for it before she could reconsider or get cold feet.

“Tomorrow? For how long?”

“I'm not sure. Three or four days? A week?”

Stacy crossed to look at the work calendar. “What'll you do about the Chaney wedding?”

Sam picked up the sketch and passed it to Stacy. “I've already made the sugar-paste roping and the tassels.”

Stacy didn't take the drawing. “Yeah?”

“Do you think you could finish it?”

“You're kidding, right?”

Sam shook her head. “You've seen me do it a million times.”

“Jeez,” Stacy said, looking at the drawing. “You think I can do this? What have you been smoking?”

“Of course you can do this. If you can put on eyeliner, you can decorate this cake.”

“I don't know,” Stacy said.

“On Friday you use an offset spatula to spread sugar paste over the layers. Then you paint the stripes on with food coloring. Use a string for a guide. Silver-dust lines go between the stripes. They don't have to be perfect. Use royal icing for the pearl designs.

“Saturday morning, you'll get to the reception early and assemble the cake there. You've helped with that before, so you know how to do it.” Sam pointed to a detail in the sketch. “Once the layers are assembled, you just have to pipe a border along the bottom edge of each tier, attach the roping to alternate layers, and you're done.”

“That's all?” Stacy said. She combed her fingers through her gel-spiked hair. “Why don't I make the bride's gown while I'm at it?”

Sam flicked her hand, a don't-be-silly gesture. “You finish up by gilding the rope and tassles. I know you can do it. Taken in steps, this is an easy cake. And I can hire Tricia Nelson to come in Saturday and help.”

“I don't know,” Stacy said again. “What if the bride complains because you're not there?”

“You've been at enough weddings to know that the bride is far too crazed to be worrying about whether or not I'm there. As long as the cake is there, she wouldn't care if Charles Manson brought it.” It's the bride's mother you've got to watch out for, she thought but knew better than to say. “Besides,” she added, “it's my cake, my design they want, not me.”

“Don't kid yourself,” Stacy said. “They want you there.”

“Listen, if you're worried, I can call Liz Chaney and tell her I have a family emergency and have to be out of town, but you'll be there. After the wedding, I'll give her a discount if she isn't happy. But she will be, because it's a gorgeous cake and you'll do a great job putting it together.”

Stacy looked unconvinced. “Can't you wait until Sunday to go?”

Common sense said that she could. What was the rush? She'd stayed away for six years. What was one more day? She couldn't explain to Stacy the urgency that had overtaken her at dawn and compelled her to make a plane reservation. She didn't really understand it herself. She just knew she needed to go to Libby immediately.

She was scheduled for a six a.m. flight, the only seat she could get on such short notice, which meant she had to set the alarm for three. After Stacy left and she'd finished for the day, she called Lee, reaching him on his truck cell.

“Hold on a sec, Sam,” he said. Before he lowered the volume, she heard Bon Jovi blaring in the background.

When she told him her plans, he was silent for a moment.

“Lee?” she said.

“Listen,” he said, “call Alice. She'll drive you to the airport.”

“That's silly,” she said. “There's no reason for her to do that. I'll drive to Providence and leave my car at Green. No big deal.”

“Sam, let her do this,” he said. “And let me know when you're coming back. I'll pick you up.” He paused. “Unless you want me to join you out there.”

“No. I mean, I don't know what I'll run into when I get there or exactly when I'll be back. Probably two or three days at the most.”

“What about the wedding on Saturday?”

She laughed. “Stacy's covering for me.”

“You're serious?”

“If she doesn't have a coronary first.”

“She'll do fine,” he said.

She wondered why Lee had so much confidence in people's abilities. Why was he so sure that she could sail and Stacy could manage the wedding cake? Why was he so certain that she could mend the past with Libby?

“What about when you get there?” he asked. “Is someone meeting you at O'Hare?”

“No. I thought I'd rent a car when I landed.” She didn't tell him that she hadn't told anyone out there that she coming.

“Are you nervous? About flying?”

“No.” Everyone assumed that because her parents died in a crash, she was phobic about air travel. She wasn't nervous. At least not about flying—but the thought of seeing Libby again made her stomach churn. If she was a smoker, she'd definitely be reaching for a pack.

“Listen” she said. “Please don't bother Alice. There's no point in her getting up that early when I can easily drive to Green.”

“She'll want to,” Lee said. “That's what family's for. So call her, okay?”

“Okay,” Sam said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“And phone me when you get there.”

“I will.” She pressed the receiver against her cheek, reluctant to let him go. “I love you, Lee.”

“I love you, too. And Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm proud of you. You're doing the right thing.”

After they hung up, she went up to her bedroom to pack. Lee's praise warmed her.
You're doing the right thing.
Why was it, she wondered, that the right thing to do was always so hard?