Tides of the Heart (39 page)

The man at the counter smiled. “A little inclement for camping, isn’t it?”

She grabbed the edge of the counter and leaned forward, ignoring the sharp pull in her back. “Just tell me where the fuck it is. Someone’s life depends on it.”

Whether he was intimidated by the rain-drenched woman who had not showered or put on makeup in two days, or whether he wanted to get her out of the lobby, Ginny didn’t know or care. He quickly gave her directions to the woods. And she was out of there as fast as her aching back could carry her.

On and off, Jess dozed. As the rain came down harder the woods became noisier; the plop of the drops grew fiercer and firmer; the leaves and the branches and the solid, hard-packed earth grew wetter and wetter.

At some point, she had stopped crying. Now, when she was awake, Jess simply stared into the night.

Once, she had tried to drag her body along the path. But the roots and the ruts poked and dug at her stomach. So she had lain still once more, crying then staring then dozing a little, wondering why God had let this happen to her,
and why it was taking so long for Him to simply let her have her last breath then quietly die.

She thought about something she’s read long ago—maybe it had been in Sedona, where, if Maura had gone, things now might have been different. It was an Indian spiritual belief that we were all put here for a special reason, to work out unresolved issues from our past lives. If it were true, she wondered if she would wake up and be someone else, and if she would ever know if Chuck and Maura and Travis had grown into happy adults, and if Melanie had ever learned the truth of her birth.

Not, of course, that it would matter, for she would be dead.

“Jess!”

A name that sounded like hers drifted through the rain. Jess smiled. Now the raindrops were beginning to talk to her, she thought. She wondered if she would lose all of her mind before God gave her that last breath.

“Jess! Are you here?”

Jess blinked. She sucked in her breath and grew very still. She listened.

“Jess!”

The voice was louder now. More clear.

“Jess! It’s Ginny!”

Jess put her hands to her face and let her tears flow.
Ginny. Ginny is here.
“Ginny!” she cried softly. “I’m over here! I can’t walk.”

“Over
here?
Over
where?
”

“I don’t know. I fell in a hole …” Her words were mixed with her tears.

“Keep talking,” Ginny said. “I’ll find you.”

“I can’t … I don’t know what to say …”

“Tell me what a fucking wonderful friend I am to find you in the rain when I can hardly walk either and you’ve scared the shit out of all of us.”

“All of who?”

“Me. Lisa. Phillip. Dick.”

Footsteps crunched close to Jess’s side.

“Ginny,” she said quietly, “if you keep walking, you’re going to trip over me.”

“Fuck,” Ginny said.

They were silent a moment, rain drenching them both.

“Well,” Ginny said, “what the hell happened to you?”

“I told you. I fell in a hole. I think I broke my foot. I can’t walk.”

“Where’s Richard?”

“He never showed up.”

“That figures.”

Jess hung her head. “Ginny, please …”

“Well, I don’t know how the hell we’re going to get you out of here. I can’t exactly sling you over my back.”

“Maybe I should wait here and you should get help.”

“It’s raining.”

“I’ve been here since before dark. Another half hour won’t kill me.”

Ginny stood still a moment, pondering a solution. Then the sounds of crunching and tromping echoed through the woods.

Jess’s heart began to beat quickly. “Oh, God, Ginny, what’s that?”

“Do I look like a Boy Scout?”

“Maybe it’s a bear. Or a …”

“Jess?” The word was called out so clearly and loudly that it startled them both. “Jess? Are you here?”

Ginny reached out and grabbed Jess’s wrist. She put her finger to her lips to shush her.

Jess frowned and pulled her arm from Ginny’s grasp. “Richard!” she replied. “I’m over here!”

Ginny rolled her eyes and wondered how Jess could be so stupid as to let the man who’d left her here to rot come back and try it again.

“Karin will be here in a minute,” Richard said to Jess, pulling up a chair and sitting beside Jess’s hospital bed, where she lay with her broken foot in a white cast, elevated, as the doctors had ordered.

Ginny stood on the other side of the bed, gripping the metal rail to keep herself steady, to keep her back the only way it did not hurt: straight. “What does your fruitcake sister have to do with this?” Ginny asked.

Jess gave her a look that said
Shut up
, but Ginny ignored it. Just because Karin/Morticia had finally gone to Richard and told him what had happened to Jess in the woods did not mean Ginny trusted her—or him.

Richard sat back in the chair. “She didn’t mean any harm. She only wanted to get Jess to leave. To get you all to leave.”

“She wrote the note about meeting me in the woods,” Jess said to Ginny. “She signed Richard’s name.”

“So it was her all along,” Ginny replied. “It was Karin who sent you that first note. Who made the call.”

Jess and Richard both nodded.

“So why the hell does she want us to leave now? And why the sneaking around in the woods?”

“I expect she didn’t want anyone to see us together,” Jess said. “I think she changed her mind about wanting me to meet Melanie.”

Richard closed his eyes. “If only I’d had some idea of how deeply troubled Karin has been all these years.”

Ginny snorted. “Collecting sea glass in her spare time? Wasn’t that a clue?”

“I never thought …” he said, dropping his face into his hands. “Oh, God, I just didn’t know …”

Jess reached out her hand and touched Richard’s arm. “Richard,” she asked, “I’m still a little confused. First of all, why did Karin do it? After all this time, why did she choose now to get in touch with me? And another thing … she put the note in an envelope I had written to you, Richard. One of the letters I’d sent you when I was at Larchwood. What was she doing with that? How did she get it?”

“Don’t ask him,” came a voice from the doorway, “he never even saw those letters.” Karin walked into the room wearing an orange sarong—the same color orange as the flash of fabric Jess had seen in the woods. She carried what looked like an old cigar box. “I’m sorry about your foot, Jess. I never intended for you to get hurt …”

“What letters, Karin?” Richard interrupted then shot a glance at Jess. “You wrote me letters while you were at Larchwood?”

Ginny groaned. “Letters isn’t the word for it. Every damn day, where was Jess? Curled up on her bed with that scented stationery …”

Taking Jess’s hand, Richard said, “I never got any letters, Jess. I had no idea.…”

“Of course you didn’t,” Karin said, holding out the cigar box. “They were all forwarded to Jess’s father.”

Even Ginny was lost now. But Richard took the box from his sister and opened it. Then he removed a stack of pink envelopes, tied with a ribbon.

“There’s a newspaper clipping there, too,” Karin said. “From Jess’s wedding. That’s how I found out her married
name. That’s how I was able to track her down in Greenwich.”

“I don’t understand,” Jess said, staring at the stack of old letters. “Where did you get these?”

Karin laughed, but it was a laugh of neither amusement nor joy; it was a sad, melancholy laugh that sent a wave of compassion through Ginny that she did not know she possessed. “I found everything in a secret compartment of an old rolltop desk,” she said.

With a frown, Richard asked, “What old rolltop desk?”

“The one I bought a few years ago at that yard sale.”

Richard shook his head. “Wait a minute. You bought a desk at a yard sale and it had my letters inside? That doesn’t make sense, Karin.”

“Yes, it does,” she replied. “I bought it from the people who owned one of the big houses in West Chop. The house I cleaned every summer when I was young. The house that was rented to a man who called himself Harold Dixon.”

Ginny leaned gingerly against the wall, trying to decipher what was being said. She glanced at Jess, who seemed as puzzled as Richard. Then Karin continued.

“All along I knew it was foolish,” Karin said, her eyes taking on a faraway look, “to fall in love with a summer person. But he was so handsome and kind to me. And he did not mind when mother died and I could not go away with him because of Mellie. He did not mind. He just kept coming every summer and loving us both—Mellie and me. I didn’t know his name was not Harold Dixon. I did not know his real name was Gerald Bates.”

The room grew still. The air grew heavy. And then Ginny figured out what Karin was saying. At about the same time as Jess did.

“My father?” she asked. “Was it Father?”

“I called him Brit and he called me Yank,” Karin said. “I did not think that he would lie to me.”

Jess turned as pale as the too-often bleached hospital sheets. “No …” she began to protest.

“Yes,” Karin said, tears filling her eyes. “And he loved me, really he did. At first I guess he came only to see Mellie. To watch her grow up. To make sure she was safe. I don’t think he planned to fall in love with me. But he did. Really he did.” In the silence Karin toyed with the sea glass pendant around her neck. “But then he didn’t come back,” she continued. “He never came back and all these years later those people had the yard sale and oh, how I wanted that desk. It’s where he used to work in the study when he was on the island. I wanted it to remind me of him. It wasn’t until I was looking for a place to keep the best of my sea glass that I came across the secret compartment. It wasn’t until then that I knew who he was.”

“That he was Jess’s father …” Richard said.

Karin nodded. “And Melanie’s grandfather. I don’t know why he had those letters here. Maybe he planned to give them to you, Richard.”

“But how the hell did he get them?” Ginny asked. “Jess wrote them to Richard. She mailed them. More than once I saw her …” And then an idea came into her mind. “Oh, shit,” she said.

“They were all in a big envelope addressed to Jess’s father,” Karin said. “That was when I realized that the man I knew as Harold Dixon was really Gerald Bates. I got so angry I threw the big envelope away, but the return address was from—”

“Bud Wilson,” Ginny interrupted. The scum of a sheriff—who was also the postmaster.

“Right,” Karin answered. “That was the name.”

“He never sent your letters through, Jess,” Ginny said.

Jess’s eyes were glazed, as if she were sleepwalking. “Father probably paid him not to,” she said.

“Your father must have cared a lot about you,” Karin said. “A long time ago I thought …” She stammered a little, blinked, then looked out the window. “I thought he cared about me, too. But I haven’t seen him in so many years.…”

Slowly, Jess began to speak. “How many years?” she asked.

“Not since the summer of 1982. My letters after that all were returned.”

Jess turned her face away from Karin. “He died that October.”

If the air had been heavy before in the room, now it was stagnant, unmoving, as if someone had pushed the Pause button on the remote. Then Karin lowered her eyes and looked down at the floor. “So he did love me,” she said. “He didn’t leave me. He died.”

“He died,” Jess confirmed.

“Oh,” she replied, taking hold once again of the pendant she wore on a chain around her neck.

“I never knew he came to the Vineyard,” Jess said quietly.

“Twelve years,” Karin said. “Twelve summers.”

“And he watched my daughter grow up.”

“Yes. He was a good man, Jess. He loved us—Mellie and me. In his own very proper, sort of British way.” She rubbed the sea glass and closed her eyes. “I called him Brit, you know … and the called me Yank.…” And then she drifted into a world of memories where only she had been.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell Melanie,” Lisa said to Phillip, as Phillip parked Jess’s car in the hospital parking lot.

He turned off the ignition and smiled at Lisa. “Because she’s not like us, Lisa. Melanie has a good life. She’s not single and adrift and doing things she’s not comfortable doing. She’s being herself, or at least she seems to be.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how I hate being a corporate lawyer. Maybe it’s because I was adopted. Maybe that has nothing to do with it. But the bottom line is, Melanie seems genuinely
happy. We have no right to screw that up, just because our lives are a little disjointed.”

“Our
lives? Excuse me, Counselor, but I think you should speak for yourself. My life is perfectly happy. I am a Hollywood
star
, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

He threw her a look. “I noticed. And I also think maybe you’re not always happy in the role of a star.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re nice, Lisa. You’re a good person. What really happened between you and Brad? I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that story that after a whirlwind courtship he suddenly woke up one day and decided to blackmail you and Ginny.”