Time Is a River (4 page)

A few stores farther down, Mia stopped before a small shop that carried an eclectic selection of stationery, crafts, paintings, and handcrafted jewelry by local artists. What caught her eye was a sign:
We carry a full line of art supplies.

Mia felt a long-buried love of painting tugging at her. She had been an art major in college and had painted a lot then, fearlessly experimenting with different styles and mediums. After she graduated she found a job, then got married, and she never found time to paint. Since her breast cancer surgery, however, she had been looking to do something creative in her life. The myriad blues and greens of the river and the quality of fractured light on water had her itching to pick up a brush. If the river could elicit some spark again…

Mia pushed open the door and stepped into the smell of perfumed candles and oils. She walked through the aisle letting her fingertips run across brushes, tubes of paint, and canvases, not really knowing what she wanted but finding the textures soothing. A young woman about Mia’s age approached her. She was tall and slender, like Mia, and as pale as milk. Her white blond hair floated around her head like a nimbus.

“Hello,” she said, smiling in welcome. “I’m Maeve MacBride. Can I help you?”

Mia’s eyes scanned the long shelf filled with tubes of paint. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Well, what’s your medium?”

“It’s been a long time.”

Maeve sensed her hesitation. “Watercolors would be a good place to start. They’re not as toxic as oils.”

“Perfect,” Mia replied, leaping at this. After her cancer treatment, anything toxic was an anathema.

It turned out Maeve was the owner of the quaint shop. She helped Mia choose a Sennelier starter kit of small squares of color, brushes, and a block of thick watercolor paper. Mia gathered her bundle, cradled it under her arm, and left the shop feeling the first stirrings of possibilities.

Next door was a twin redbrick building that housed the grocer. It looked like the kind of grocery store she’d walked through with her mother in Charleston as a child. Local produce was arranged in big baskets at the front, a butcher in a stained white apron worked in the back, and in between were narrow aisles with original wood shelving carrying everything from salad dressing and cereal to fishing poles and bait.

Becky was standing near the entrance, leaning against a little pushcart that held two paper bags of groceries. She was talking in the manner of old friends to a stout woman in a greengrocer’s apron. They looked up when she approached and from the look in their eyes, Mia guessed that she was the topic of conversation.

“Hey there, Mia,” Becky called out as if they, too, were old friends. She waved her over. “Come meet Flossie,” she said, indicating the woman beside her.

Flossie was middle-aged and plain with a pale, flat face and small, thoughtful eyes. Her graying blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail as though in afterthought. Yet when she smiled the lines at her eyes made her face appear warm and wise. She was clearly someone’s mother, someone’s aunt, someone’s friend. The kind of woman who would wrap solid arms around you in a hug, knowing when you needed one.

“I’m Flossie Barbieri,” she informed Mia. “I own this place, or my parents do. They’re retired but can’t let go of it, if you know what I mean. Everyone just knows the store as Rodale’s, which is my maiden name.”

“Nice to meet you,” Mia replied, and began walking away. “Oh,” she said, turning to Flossie. “Do you take credit?”

“I prefer cash when I can get it, but I’ll take your credit, too.”

She was careful, buying only what she thought she needed for a few days. It must be hard to make a go of a family-run store, she thought, when farther down the road a giant supermarket with flowers and wine selections offered many more choices, and at a cheaper price. She preferred the smaller store and the slower pace. She felt far removed from the city, not just in miles but in years.

As she wheeled her cart toward the checkout, she heard Becky’s voice calling her name. Mia warily turned to see Becky waving and using the pushcart as a walker. Her legs moved awkwardly and she leaned heavily against it. Flossie was a step behind her.

“I knew I’d heard that name before! Belle Carson, you said, right?” Becky was breathless from the exertion and her eyes were bright. She brought a hand to her chest as she caught her breath. “Belle is such a pretty name, not one you’d likely forget.”

Mia waited with an increasing sense of dread.

“She owns some fishing business in Asheville, that right?”

Mia nodded.

“Yep, that’ll be her,” Becky said to Flossie, nodding her head in affirmation.

“I knew I was right,” agreed Flossie.

An old woman with a floral triangle scarf over snowy white hair walked up to them, already a part of the conversation. “Carson, you say? I remember that name. I went to school with a Carson. Isn’t she the one that up and left town soon after she graduated? Ran off to get married. Surprised some, but not me. I’m older than you so you wouldn’t remember. What was her first name?” She tapped the cheek of her wizened face. “Theo…Theodosia something?”

“Theodora,” Flossie replied, and the old woman’s eyes shifted from puzzlement to recognition. “She was a friend of my mother’s, or as much of a friend as anyone could be stuck out there in that ol’ cabin far from anything. My mama still says how she feels badly that she didn’t go out there more often to pay a visit. But it was such a dark place. Not welcoming.”

“I guess it’s no wonder, with what her mama done,” added the old woman.

“What did her mother do?” asked Mia, suddenly interested.

“She killed her lover, that’s what. Some say she done it right in that cabin,” replied Flossie.

“Theodora killed her lover?” Mia asked, struggling to get the story straight.

Becky shook her head. “No, her mother, Kate Watkins, did. She’s the woman who lived in the cabin. The one you’re staying at.”

Flossie sighed with agreement. “Theo quit the place when she got the chance. Never came back, not once in all these years. Not that I blame her none.”

“Belle Carson,” the old woman said, rolling the name on her tongue. “She must be Theodora’s child.”

“That’ll be the one,” Becky said with authority. Then she turned to look again at Mia, her face filled with wonder. “So she’s gone ahead and opened up her grandmother’s cabin, has she?”

The old woman said softly, “I was of a mind that place should be left closed up.”

Flossie nodded. “Let the spirits rest.”

The three women turned their attention to Mia, looking at her with renewed speculation. Mia was unnerved and felt that old tingling on the back of her neck.

Flossie’s eyes glowed from deep in her cheeks. “Imagine. Kate Watkins’s place is opened up. And you’re staying in that cabin
alone
?”

M
ia sat on a bench at a scenic overlook on the outskirts of Watkins Mill. It was a spit of land just off a narrow road that afforded a breathtaking view of the mountains beyond. The vista seemed to go on clear to the ocean where her sister, Madeline, lived on John’s Island. She had a comfortable marriage with Don, a professor at the college, and their teenage children: a son and a daughter. Mia always thought that Madeline should have had more children. It might have redirected some of Maddie’s worry from her. Her sister was six years older and had been more a mother than a sister since their mother had died of breast cancer when Mia was thirteen. Once Mia’s cancer was diagnosed, Maddie had rarely left her side.

It had been her sister and not her husband who had taken time off from her job to go with Mia to each chemo cocktail party. It was Maddie, not Charles, who held her hand in the sick green hospital room while the nurses poked her veins. Maddie who bore Mia’s complaints and who took her to an upscale wig shop when her hair fell out. Big sister Maddie had watched over her as an adult with her cancer just as she had when she was a child and skinned her knee. It was always Maddie.

Mia leaned back against the creaky wooden bench and dialed the number she knew by heart. She said a quick prayer of relief that there was phone service here.

“Mia!” Madeline screamed with relief when she heard Mia’s voice on the phone. “Oh my God, where are you? I’ve been so worried!”

“I’m fine,” she replied, feeling guilt for causing her sister worry. “I’m in North Carolina. I came home after the retreat but I turned around when…I drove right back.” She paused, then blurted out, “Maddie, I found Charles in bed with another woman.”

Shocked, Maddie launched into a long tirade against Charles and how she couldn’t believe the no-count scum could be so heartless and underhanded. Mia let her carry on, feeling a vicarious pleasure at hearing her husband so vilified.

“Where are you now?” Maddie wanted to know.

“I’m staying at the cabin of a friend.”

“I can understand you needing to escape but it’s not healthy for you to hide out too long. When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Her voice rang with worry, a tone Mia had heard many times before.

“I just don’t know,” Mia said again. “I only know that I can’t come back now.”

“OK, well.” She paused. “I’ll come up there with you.”

“No. Please don’t.”

“Why not? You don’t want me to come?”

“Not yet. I just need to be alone for a while.”

“Oh.” She sounded hurt.

“Maddie—”

“It’s just that I’d think you’d need your friends now.”

“My friends? What friends? Most of them disappeared the minute they caught the first whiff of cancer.”

“That’s not fair. They’re just afraid.”

“Afraid of what? Me?”

“No. Some people just don’t know what to do when someone they care about gets cancer. Watching you deal with it makes it real. If it can happen to you it can happen to them.”

“Do you know what the survivors at the retreat called friends like that? Tupperware friends.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Because when they hear you have cancer they cook up a sympathy meal and bring it over in a Tupperware dish. By the time you eat the food, wash the dish, and try to return it, they’re long gone. You never see them again.”

“I hope you don’t include me in that group.”

“Never, Maddie. Not even once. I’ll always need you. You’re my sister.”

“I have to tell you something. Sometimes I feel you cut me off, too.” “How?”

“You don’t confide in me.”

“Yes, I do. All the time.”

“For little things, yes. But not in the things that really matter. Mia, don’t you trust me?”

Mia paused, acknowledging that what her sister said was true. “It’s not that I don’t trust you.”

“Then why?”

Mia looked out to the vista beyond the short stone wall that bordered the overlook. Her eye was drawn to the broad horizon of rugged mountains covered with rich forest.

“Maddie, it’s not you. It’s me. No matter how hard I try to explain, I know you could never understand what I’m going through. I know you love me, but you can’t fix this. Being at the retreat with the other women made me realize only I can fix my life.” She laughed softly. “Even though I would love you to fix it all and make it better. I want to try to make it up here on my own. Just give me a little time. Please.”

Madeline tsked in frustration, unable to let the bone drop. “Just because that ass of a husband of yours couldn’t keep his family business in his pants doesn’t mean that you have to run off and leave your life in tatters. Let him hightail it to the mountains. He’s the one at fault here. My God, he abandoned you while you’re going through all your cancer and—”

“Maddie, I see this as my first real step out from that darkness. I just need time to think.” She paused and stretched out her long legs in the grass. “You know, for a long time I didn’t think about…well, anything. I just reeled from disaster to disaster. I blamed it on chemo brain, but in truth, I just couldn’t face what had happened to me. When I was at the retreat, it helped me stop and reflect. Thank you, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For arranging for me to go.”

“You mean for nagging and bullying you to go.”

“You’re good at that.” After they chuckled, Mia continued. “It was so much more than just fishing. We talked about random things. Like what happened to us with the cancer and after, during recovery. Some women never got any counseling at all. Not even about medical problems.” She paused, seeing in her mind’s eye the women seated in a circle, tired but flushed with contentment after a day fishing, all feeling the powerful bond forged on the river.

“But the one thing that I was most struck by—I mean it really, profoundly floored me—was when the ladies talked about how, after diagnosis, husbands fell into two extremes. One is the hero. The good guy who stands by you, loves you no matter what, calls you beautiful every day. These women, they’re so grateful, so madly in love with their husbands, blushing like girls.” She paused. “The other is the one who takes one look at the scene and says adios. Unfortunately, Charles falls into that category. I just refused to see it. I was weak.”

“No, you were sick.”

Bless her heart, Maddie was always her greatest defender. “OK. I was both; how’s that?”

“You sound so blasé about it,” Maddie said, her voice indignant. “You should be mad as hell.”

“Mad?” Mia took a breath and looked at her wedding ring, its diamonds catching the light. “I’m not mad as much as I’m hurt. Deeply hurt by his betrayal. It was like getting kicked in the gut when I was already sprawled out on the floor.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. There’s a lot waiting for you here at home. People who care about you. A lot of people like you and respect your work. They’d hire you back in PR, or maybe you want to do something else.”

Mia winced, feeling again the embarrassment of losing her job.
“Something else.”

“You could. You’re young yet.”

“Hardly young, Maddie,” she replied, feeling ancient. “I’ve thought about it. My life in Charleston was wrapped up in my life with Charles. I took on his values and goals. His future was my future. Even my job in PR had a lot to do with making contacts for him. All that’s changed. My job is gone. My husband is gone. The woman I used to be is gone.”

“I happened to like that woman.”

“I did too. But I have to find out who I am now.”

“Can’t you find yourself at home?”

Her gaze drifted again to the valley that stretched below the Blue Ridge Mountains. She couldn’t bear to return to Charleston, where the details of her sordid story would be common gossip. One more sad chapter in Mia Landan’s tragic life. If she went back to Charleston now, she’d have to endure again the looks of pity and the well-meant murmured condolences.

“Maddie, what I went through was too profound. I faced my mortality. I can never be the same person. This is my opportunity to find out where I fit in, what I really want to do with my life. For however long or short that life may be.”

“Oh, Mia…” There was a long silence on the line while Maddie gathered her composure. When she spoke again, the bossy tone was gone. “So, what are you going to do up there all on your lonesome?”

Mia’s relieved smile eased across her face. “It is lonely, I grant you that. There isn’t any television. The only radio I have is in my car. And believe it or not, I can get phone reception only here in town. But it’s a good lonely, if you know what I mean. It’ll be sporadic, but I’ll call you.”

“You’d better. A lot.”

Mia laughed. “Actually, I’m not really alone after all. Apparently the cabin I’m in is haunted.”

“What?”

“I just found out that it belonged to this old mountain woman by the name of Kate Watkins. She was involved in some kind of scandal. They think she murdered her lover.”

“Oh, great. That sets my mind at ease.”

“It happened decades ago. Anyway, she went to live alone in this cabin for years, barely speaking to anyone. She had a child. A girl. Who ran off as soon as she was old enough to get married. Kate stayed on in the cabin alone. She became a real hermit. After she died the cabin was locked up and no one’s stayed in it since.”

“Sounds like a right cheery place.”

“It’s not. It’s quite gloomy. Filthy, in fact. Terribly neglected. I guess I can understand why Belle never went out there.”

“Can you blame her? That’s quite the sordid family history. How can you stand to stay there alone?”

“Oddly enough, I like it. From what little I know about her, I like Kate, too. And the fact that she murdered her lover is not a negative for me right now. Somehow I can get behind that.”

Madeline laughed but her tone turned serious. “Really, Mia, how long do you figure on staying up there?”

“I’ve agreed to take it week by week. I can come home anytime. But for sure, no later than September. Belle will be putting the place up for rent.”

“What are you going to do about Charles?”

“Nothing. Let him do something.”

“Do you want him to know where you are?”

Mia thought about that for a moment. Being away from Charles was what she needed most. “No.”

“A judge can construe what you’re doing as abandonment.”

Mia released a bitter laugh. “That’s rich.” Then she said with resignation, “What does it matter? We have no money to speak of.”

“That was my next question.”

“Let’s just say when I took out a few hundred dollars from the ATM today I practically closed the account. The medical bills continue to run us dry.”

“Jesus, Mia! How are you going to live? Do you need some money? I can send you some.” Then, with a burst of worry she exclaimed, “Come home. Stay with us for as long as it takes to get your life in order.”

“Maddie, that’s exactly what I’m doing,” she replied, believing it. “One day at a time.”

Before she left the overlook, Mia made one more phone call. Her hands trembled as she dialed the number of her home in Charleston. She knew Charles would be at the office. The phone rang four times before the answering machine picked up. The sound of his voice on the recording stung like a slap. She drew in her breath, then tried to speak as calmly as she could.

“Charles, it’s Mia. I’m safe. I’m in the mountains. I don’t want to talk to you now. Don’t worry and don’t bother Maddie. I’ll call again when I’m able to talk.”

Mia closed the phone and let her hand fall into her lap. She leaned far back into the chair, feeling to her marrow the hurt of the broken connection. Crossing her arms she let her gaze wander aimlessly across the greens and blues of the horizon.

The weather had warmed and the afternoon was sunny when she returned to the cabin. Mia gathered her purchases like a general would an army and planned her attack. Then she set to work.

She dragged the carpets outdoors and shook them, sending decades of dust to the winds. She swept up small hills of dust from the floors, then washed them with oil soap till they gleamed. She gagged as she cleaned mouse droppings and dried insect carcasses from the cabinets. Then she scrubbed the wood with disinfectant and hot water boiled on the stove. She boiled more hot water, then washed the tiny gas stove, refrigerator, and all the pots, pans, and dishes, then set them back in the fresh-smelling cabinets. She couldn’t scrub away the ancient stains in the toilet and tub, but she was satisfied that they were as clean as they were going to get.

She enjoyed cleaning the cabin. It made her feel more that she belonged here. Seeing her own food in the fridge, flowers on the table, and a few of her own possessions here and there made the place more her own. A wicked smile formed at her lips as she thought of how Charles’s fabulously expensive golf clubs turned out to be a worthwhile investment after all. Mia had used a five iron to knock the abandoned swallow nests from under the eaves of the porch and a six iron to smash spiders. The putter made an acceptable poker for stoking the fire. She didn’t have a hammer, but she’d discovered that with proper aim, the driver did the job of driving a nail into wood. She was sure she’d find more uses for the other clubs and kept them handy in a corner by the door.