The Sound of Glass (31 page)

“I think it was a luggage tag,” I said, turning it over in my hand. “I wonder what it’s doing in the garden.” My eyes met Gibbes’s.

“That’s a very good question,” he said.

Owen hopped into the kitchen, leaning on the doctor’s arm, while Maris raced ahead to open the door and pull out a kitchen chair for Owen to sit on. I stayed in the garden for a moment longer, feeling the weight of the luggage tag in my hand and the decay of years against my skin. I listened as a warm breeze stirred the wind chimes that hung from the back of the house, making them chatter like voices from the past.

MERRITT

A
fter all the coolers had been loaded, I stood by the back door of Gibbes’s Explorer, waiting for Maris and Owen to get in. I was distracted from my anxiety when I noticed how Owen held the door open for Maris and waited for her to get in before climbing in himself. I was about to ask him why I wasn’t getting the same treatment when I looked up to see Gibbes holding open the passenger door.

I realized that without Loralee there, I would be expected to sit in the front seat. I could probably climb into the backseat with the children, and endure their looks as well as any from Gibbes, but I wasn’t sure I could live with myself afterward.

“Thank you,” I said, putting my beach bag on the floorboard, then allowing him to help me up into the seat. I wanted to tell Gibbes that there was a running board and that I didn’t need the help, but I
had to admit that knowing he was there was oddly comforting. And a good example to Owen, I thought, feeling fully justified.

As soon as he closed the door, I moved the seat back as far as I could, then secured my seat belt. I briefly wished that I had my life jacket on already, prepared to float in the water if necessary.

After Gibbes began driving, I felt the panic inside me like a moth spreading its wings, filling my throat.

“The seat belt wouldn’t fit right if you had your life jacket on, you know. And you’d probably feel a little claustrophobic,” Gibbes said.

I stared at him. “How did you know what I was thinking?”

“Your eyes. They give you away. Most children are like that, which is probably why I noticed.”

“Are you calling me a child?”

His gaze flickered over me for a brief moment as a smile teased his lips. “Oh, no. Not at all. Just thought you should know that you’d make a horrible poker player. Or police interrogator.”

Despite myself, laughter bubbled from my lips, the moth tucking back into its chrysalis. “That’s good to know, just in case I ever want to switch careers.”

I glanced out the window, surprised to see that we were already almost at the bridge, realizing Gibbes had distracted me on purpose. He looked into the rearview mirror at Owen. “Rocky—tell us some interesting facts that we might not know.”

Owen practically bounced up and down in his seat. “Did you know that all clown fish start off as boys and later on in their lives become girls?”

“And seahorse boys have the babies,” Maris piped up.

I turned to look in the backseat. “Seriously?”

Two small heads nodded vigorously.

When I turned back around my smile faded. We’d just reached the bridge, the shadows of the side rails flickering as we sped forward. It had come so quickly that I hadn’t had time to prepare myself, to begin my breathing exercises.

Gibbes reached over and squeezed my hand before returning his to the steering wheel. “You’d probably rather I use both hands to drive.”

I looked down at my lap, where my own hands were pressed tightly together. But I still felt the warmth from his hand, my skin tingling where he’d touched me. I felt better somehow, the crossing made bearable because somebody had thought to hold my hand. The loneliness inside me seemed to shift, allowing in a small shard of light.

Lifting my head, I forced myself to look at the bridge in front of us, at the tall beams and grids of the swing portion, although I couldn’t quite muster the courage to look over the side to the water. “You didn’t tell me we had to go over the bridge again.”

“Well, we have to go to my house to get the boat. It’s a long swim otherwise. If you like that kind of thing, there’s an annual charity Beaufort River swim each May.”

“No,” I said quickly. “Although I’d be happy to be a spectator and watch you.” The words were said through clenched teeth as we neared the end of the bridge, the talking helping by making me not hold my breath.

“I haven’t done the official river swim, but I have done it accidentally.”

I looked at the receding bridge in my side-view mirror and felt all of my muscles unclench.

“You did it,” Gibbes said softly. “I guess you just proved Cal wrong.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t afraid anymore. But I did make it across,” I said, allowing myself a small smile. Turning to him, I asked, “How do you accidentally do a river swim?”

Gibbes glanced into the backseat, where Owen and Maris were playing Go Fish with a deck Owen had brought with him.

After raising the volume on the radio, he said, “I was being a stupid teenager. Me and Sy Williams drank a couple of six-packs and
thought it would be fun to walk the bridge at night. We were on the pedestrian part, not too high up, and I managed to go over the side.”

My heart seemed to flip over and shrink all at the same time. “Was he able to pull you back up?”

“Heck, no. He kept on walking. Didn’t even know I wasn’t there. He walked home, then got in bed and passed out.”

“Your grandmother must have been frantic.”

“She didn’t know until the nice people in the boat that plucked me out of the water about a mile downriver called her.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t tell many people that story, because it’s embarrassing to admit that my brush with death was completely due to my own stupidity. But I learned something, too.”

I waited for him to speak. Finally I asked, “What?”

“I figure Loralee has probably said this before, but everything must happen for a reason. Maybe being a doctor is part of that. Who knows? Did you ever think that surviving your accident prepared you for something else?”

The panic returned to me, the blinding light that always washed away my sight and replaced it with dark, silent water. “No.” I shook my head, trying to erase the image to replace it with the dusty road ahead, the moss weeping from the canopy of oak trees above us. “Please. Don’t. I don’t talk about it.”

“Go Fish!” Owen shouted from the backseat, oblivious to our conversation.

“You didn’t drown,” Gibbes said carefully.

My hands gripped my bare legs, my nails making crescent moons in the skin. “Because my mother pushed me through the broken window.” I dug my nails in harder. “And when I tried to turn back to try to help her, she pushed me away again.”

We drove in silence for a while, and I cracked open my window to remind myself that the air outside was warm and dry.

His voice was steady and reassuring, as if he were preparing a patient for a shot. “Until we’re parents ourselves, it’s hard to
understand what a mother will do to protect her child. I see that a lot with my critically ill patients. And I see it in Loralee.” He was thoughtful for a moment, weighing his words again. “Be kind to her, Merritt. I think she could use an extra dose of kindness right now.”

I turned to him, anger and surprise battling with each other. “I’m more reserved than a lot of people, but I don’t mean to be unkind. I don’t resent her anymore, if that’s what you mean.”

He nodded, a muscle in his jaw ticking. “She’s a single mother, which is never easy. She appears strong, but I think she could use a little TLC. She’s always worrying about others, and I don’t think there’s anything she wouldn’t do for her son if she thought it would be good for him.”

I looked down at my folded hands and the crescent marks on my thighs that hadn’t yet faded, and listened to the children’s loud giggles from the backseat. A reluctant smile tugged at my lips. “Like traveling to another state so Owen and I could finally meet?” I turned my face to the window and took a deep breath of the sticky, heavy air. “That’s why I resented her, you know. Because my mother had sacrificed herself to save me, and I did everything I knew to honor her memory.”

“And then your father met somebody else, and you thought he was somehow dishonoring her.”

“Yeah, pretty much. He said he’d always love my mother, but that there were so many more years left in his own life and he wanted to live them. It wasn’t Loralee—I would have resented anybody my father fell in love with who wasn’t my mother. I just couldn’t forgive either him or Loralee. It was like I wanted to punish them, to make them suffer as much as I was. Because I’d been there with her, in the water. I was the one who was arguing with her when she lost control of the car.”

He didn’t say anything, and we listened to the roll of tires on dirt and broken shells, and the sound of children playing a card game. A white egret settled delicately on the side of the road in front
of us, its slow, graceful movements seeming to calm the wild beating in my chest. My mother loved birds, had loved to watch them at the feeders we kept around the yard. She would have loved that place, with the exotic flowers and the birds that were eerily prehistoric and tropical at the same time.

I pressed my forehead against the window as we drove slowly by the egret, and it seemed to be watching me with its round yellow eyes, prompting me to continue. There was something about Gibbes that invited confidences. I’d once believed Cal was like that, too. Maybe that was why I pressed on, wanting Gibbes to hear my story, to offer the absolution I’d never thought I deserved. Or maybe I was still the old Merritt, and was hoping to push him out of my life and get him to leave me in the solitude I’d come to Beaufort to find.

I continued. “I tried to help her, but she was stuck between the steering wheel and the seat. She just . . . pushed me away. She knew I could swim—she’d made me take lessons at an indoor pool when I was a little girl, even though she was afraid of the water herself. So I swam through the broken windshield—that’s how I cut my leg—until I reached the surface.” I swallowed, tasting the salt air that was so different from home, transporting me away from the cold night and the icy rain so I could remember it almost as if I were watching it happen to someone else. I breathed in deeply, smelling the scent of the marsh mud and sun-heated grass that had once been so foreign to me but had already become so familiar. And I thought of Cal leaving it all behind.

The children were giggling again and I closed my eyes, trying to lose myself in the sound, to escape my thoughts. But the summer air and the gentle presence of the man beside me made the words fall from my mouth anyway. “Cal told me I was a coward for leaving her, just as he’d said I was a coward for being afraid of the water. He said I should have tried anyway.”

Gibbes was silent, making me believe that I’d finally succeeded in pushing him away. I tried to console myself, to tell myself that
that was what I wanted, but all I could feel was a heavy dread that felt oddly like disappointment.

He didn’t look at me when he spoke, and although his words were soft, his hands gripped the steering wheel with whitened knuckles. “Courage isn’t about the absence of fear. Courage is doing the one thing you think you cannot do. Swimming away from your mother took more courage than most people have.” He stretched his fingers, encouraging the blood to flow through them again. “I think I’ve told you this before, Merritt: You’re a lot braver than you think you are. And you’re a survivor. Never forget that.”

My spine seemed to soften against the leather seat, the breath I’d held escaping through my opened mouth as if I were expelling demons. It was like being crippled for years and then being told I could run.

“Go fish!” Maris shouted from the backseat, reminding me of where I was and where we were heading.

Facing him, I asked, “Are you telling me this because I’m about to get in a boat again?” I thought he would smile but was surprised when he didn’t.

“In part,” he said. “But I imagine there are lots of times in life when you’ll need to remember that.”

There was something in the way he said it, something in the way he measured his words like doling out cough syrup, that made me believe that he wasn’t talking about the boat.

When we reached the house, the children retrieved their bags full of sand toys and towels, and two small beach chairs from Maris’s mother, then raced each other to the dock despite Gibbes’s reminder to keep Owen’s weight off his ankle. Owen responded by hobbling as fast as he could.

I felt lighter somehow, as if something I’d been carrying around for a long time had been jettisoned. I took off Loralee’s sandals and allowed myself to feel the soft soil beneath my bare feet, unable to remember the last time I’d been outside without shoes.

I helped Gibbes carry everything to the boat, but allowed him to load it all. I’d put on my life jacket and insisted the children put on theirs, too, but Gibbes waited until he’d gone inside and changed, which made me nervous every time he stepped onto the boat before he did.

He caught me frowning and grinned. “Are you worried that I’ll get hurt?”

I frowned back at him. “I’m worried that if you get hurt I’m going to have to drive us back across the bridge.”

Gibbes straightened, his eyes serious. “I wouldn’t make you do that. Not until you’re ready.”

Not until you’re ready.
His words meant that he believed it possible, that I would someday be able to drive across the bridge by myself. Because he thought I was brave.

“When alligator eggs are laid, they’re not already boys or girls,” Owen announced. “It depends on where the nest is. If it’s warm, the eggs become boys, and if it’s colder, they’re girls.”

“Why are you talking about alligators?” I asked, glancing around nervously.

“Because they’re all over the place,” Maris announced matter-of-factly.

I took a step off the dock and looked at Gibbes, hoping he’d reassure me that they were joking. Instead he said, “They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.”

“Yeah,” I said through gritted teeth. “I think you’ve mentioned that.”

“They’re not aggressive like crocodiles,” Owen explained. “These are just alligators. I hope we get to see one.” He bounced on his toes with excitement, just like our father used to do.

A loud splash caught our attention about thirty feet from the dock, and I reached a hand out toward Owen and Maris, getting ready to pull them away from danger.

“It’s a dolphin!” Owen shouted, pointing at where large ripples
of water were pulsing toward us, the dock gently bobbing under our feet.

A gray fin appeared above the surface of the water, nearer now and close enough that I could see the sleek texture of the animal’s skin, the sun reflecting off the arched back as it dived under the dark water. We watched in silence for a full minute, our patience rewarded as it rose above the water again, its large almond-shaped eyes seeming to be full of human emotions, its long mouth with tiny, sharp teeth curved upward like a smile. It jumped in an arc, showing off its loveliness, then dived beneath the water one last time before disappearing.