The Bookshop at Water's End Read online

  “I don’t know.” I scattered them across the table, a fan of envelopes representing years of aching sadness. “I just felt like this was where they belonged. That I should bring them here and find some way to get rid of them. Maybe even read them before I do. It’s time to stop looking and wondering. I promised Tim.”

  “Don’t you want to keep them? Keep them like you would a journal?” Bonny lifted a letter and held it in her hand like it was the very one I needed to save.

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t. I want it all to end. The wishing for a mom that never was. The absurd wishing to alter the past. What I’d give to make it different, to have her back. But I want that desperation to stop. So I brought them here. These”—I lifted a handful of them and let them flutter to the table—“are all I have left of her. Dad kept all the photos except one I have in a frame at home, and he passed all of Mom’s jewelry to his various girlfriends. This is it.”

  “Why didn’t you ask for some of her things?”

  “I don’t want anything,” I said. “If I wanted anything at all it would be to have my brother in my life more than he is, not some jewelry or pictures. I’m not calling Dad and asking him for some leftover pieces of a mom I barely knew.”

  “I have an idea,” Bonny said. “We could do some kind of ritual, some kind of burial or . . . I don’t know. Do I sound crazy?”

  “No,” I said. “I love that. I’m all about ritual.”

  “Tim doesn’t want you to find her?”

  “It’s not that.” I sank onto the couch and rubbed my face as if waking up. “There’ve been a few times I wasn’t quite as honest with him as I should have been. I spent money we didn’t have on a private investigator. I’ve left the kids with friends while I flew to cities where she might be. When I find something that hints of her, I become preoccupied and irrational. It’s been . . . bad.”

  “Oh, Lainey.”

  “Remember that time I came to visit you and left a couple days early to go home because I said one of the kids was sick?”

  “Yes, the flu,” Bonny said.

  “I lied.”

  “What?”

  “I went to Philadelphia, where there was a woman named Clara who had been found dead in the river. Do you believe that? Whenever the PI calls with some little hint, off I go like I’m an insane person. I’ve stared at dead, nameless bodies. Spied on women in shelters who won’t give their names. Googled until my computer gives out.”

  “I had no idea.” Bonny stood next to me, but I couldn’t look at her.

  I closed my eyes and let out a long breath, took in another and then opened them again to gaze at Bonny. “Only Tim has any idea and he needs it to stop.”

  “I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing. But how does one give up?”

  “You wouldn’t,” I said. “It’s untenable. You are more logical than this.”

  “Really? Because I don’t see half of what I’ve done as logical.”

  “Yes, it is. Look at you when you decided to leave. You didn’t just up and go. You planned and organized and put things in order.”

  “And you can see how well that’s worked out.” She tried to laugh, but it didn’t sound right. “We do the best we can.”

  “Yes, maybe we do.”

  We ended the conversation when Daisy came running through the back door carrying a box turtle she’d found in the yard. She was always and forever wanting one more pet—our cat, Sasha, was never enough for her. I bent and focused on being a mom instead of talking about my own.

  Once Daisy had run off to find George and Piper, I tossed the letters back into the box. I carried it all to the garage and then used my phone to video chat with Tim so he could see I was about to set up my studio.

  “Hi, love,” I said, trying to look at him and not myself in the top right corner. I plodded around the garage and held up the phone, twisting it to show him. “So this is my makeshift space for now. I wish you were here to help me unpack.”

  “Looks like home,” he said. I instantly wanted to be near him and for a moment I regretted my decision.

  “It’s nothing like home. And I miss you terribly. Do you think you could come for a visit?” I asked.

  “Probably not, sweetie. I’m dead in the middle of this new house renovation and even a few days will cost us. But hurry home. Get bored there. Miss me and come home early.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said and kissed the screen. We chatted about the kids and his tomato plants and all the things we talked about twice a day. Then I promised him that I’d call back when the kids came inside.

  “Sweetie,” he said in that voice that meant he had something to tell me that I might not want to hear.

  “Yes?”

  “I have something to tell you, but you have to promise that you won’t change your plans or do anything crazy.”

  “No promises.” I winked at him through the phone, but he didn’t smile. “Shit, what is it?”

  “Lorenz called from New York.”

  “The detective? God, I’d almost forgotten his name,” I lied. “What did he want?”

  “He said he has a lead on a woman in Texas named Kara Ellison. He sent me all the information on e-mail, but I don’t want to send it to you . . . I don’t want you to ruin your trip. And I told him to please stop looking.”

  “Why did you tell him that?”

  “Because we agreed.”

  “We agreed. Yes. But ‘Kara’ is awful close to ‘Clara’ . . .”

  “Don’t.” His voice was tight and I pulled the phone to my ear so he wouldn’t see me cry.

  “I won’t. Being here, I know it’s true. It’s the living with the unknowing. If I just . . . knew.” He was quiet until I asked. “Will you at least e-mail me the information?”

  “Of course,” he said. “This woman . . . she’s in Houston.”

  After I hung up, I sat on a wobbly stool and felt the ache of missing him. I’d loved him so long and so hard that I felt like an essential piece of me was missing when he was away from me.

  I dragged the box to the middle of the garage. The air unit in the window emitted a growling noise and then clicked on, cold air pumping as I unpacked the box and set out my paints, brushes and encaustic medium. I lifted out the hot plate and the few blank canvases I’d packed. Inside a large glassine envelope were the six photos I’d sent myself, ones I wanted to work on. I placed them on the table in a neat pile.

  “Hey, Lainey.” Piper’s voice startled me and there she stood in the doorway with her hands stuffed inside the front pockets of her shorts and her hair in a ponytail. She looked so very young. “Can I help you unpack?”

  “Did your mom make you come out here?” I smiled and lifted a case of paints from the bottom of the box.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I just thought I’d see if you . . .”

  “I’d love some help,” I said.

  She came toward me and then stopped. “Wait,” she said. “We need music.”

  I set up the easel and she slipped away, only to return with a small round speaker. Soon Shelby Lynne’s mournful voice eased from the speakers.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “You like her music?” Piper ran her fingers through a paintbrush I’d just set out and plopped onto a stool beside the workbench that ran along the far wall.

  “I love her songs.” I placed a set of charcoal pencils on the wooden work surface and dusted it off with a rag. “I saw her in San Francisco last year.”

  “You saw her live?” Piper’s eyes widened and she leaned forward, the paintbrush pointed out as if she were about to paint me. “You are so lucky.”

  “I know,” I said. “She was great. Every time I hear her voice I go back to that night.”

  “That’s what a song does sometimes,” she said. “Takes you back to that time you hear
d it first or best or whatever.” She exhaled and stood.

  For a long while unsaid words rested between us as we unpacked, the music playing in the background. It didn’t take long before the right side of the garage was set up like a mini studio. The clean wooden work surface, meant for tools like rakes and hammers, was organized with art palettes, glue, a hot plate and other tricks of my trade.

  “Have you always done this?” Piper broke the silence. “This kind of art, I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Always.”

  “I wish I already knew what I was going to do. You’re so lucky that you decided what to do and did it and now you still do it and I have no idea and . . .”

  “You don’t need to have any idea what you’re going to do,” I said. “I just loved art and I felt like it saved me. I didn’t set out to keep doing it. It just kind of happened. I tried other things along the way. I went to college, and I’ve had loads of other jobs.”

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “I’ve been a waitress, a vet’s assistant, a secretary. I’ve worked in a nursing home and as an ice cream scooper, all along trying my hand at these projects. Art sometimes feels like a calling more than a job.” I laughed. “By that, I mean when it calls, you don’t have much choice even if it’s not your ‘real job.’ Or at least that’s how it was for me.”

  “Well, that makes me feel a little better. I mean, Mom? She just knew. I bet she knew when she was a baby that she wanted to be a doctor. And then everything she’s done since that moment has made her a doctor. Like a beacon from shore that she just sailed toward. But I’m lost.”

  “You’re not lost,” I said. “It just feels that way.”

  I had no real idea what I was saying to Piper. Maybe she was lost. Maybe we all were. But I felt an instinctual need to help her, to make her see that she was sailing her own boat to wherever it needed to go.

  “We all take different paths,” I said.

  Piper lifted her face to the air conditioner. “The only thing I like to do is read and you can’t make a living off of that.” Her ponytail flew backward and waved as if in a photo shoot. Then the conversation shifted to things like concerts I’d been to, places I’d visited, what Tim was like and how we’d met.

  I set out my yoga mat and she asked me about it. I told her she could join me in my morning yoga anytime she wanted. Eventually Daisy’s voice called out for me.

  “Guess they are done coloring in their new seashell book,” Piper said and took a few steps toward the doorway.

  “Oh, I’ll get them.” I gently placed a canvas on the work counter.

  “Lainey?” she asked as I brushed past her.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  “Me, too, sweetie. Me, too.”

  “I don’t know how you could come back here, but I’m glad you did.” She glanced at the doorway and then again looked at me. “I’ll grab the kids. I promised them I’d build a sand castle when they were ready.”

  She was out the door calling Daisy’s name when I sat back on the stool and exhaled. Houston, Tim had said.

  Maybe there was a time to stop wanting what you didn’t have, and do just as Bonny said, to find what matters most and gather those things. But what if Mom was still what mattered? What if I couldn’t stop making her matter? Tears formed in the curve of my chest and I swallowed them, setting off to join Piper and my kids in castle building. Yet on my way, I pulled up my flight app on the phone and searched for flights to Houston.

  chapter 22

  PIPER BLANKENSHIP

  We’d been in Watersend for two weeks and already there was a natural rhythm to the days, not a chaotic upheaval like at home, where anything and everything went wrong all the time. Dad slammed doors. Mom worked a night shift or cried in the kitchen. But here there was calm; maybe it was avoidance or maybe it was just a lull in the storm.

  The morning routine went something like this. I woke to do yoga with Lainey in the garage. If you could call what I did yoga; mostly it involved falling and groaning. She would do it for much longer than I did because then George and Daisy were always waiting in the kitchen. We’d have cinnamon toast and fruit and then pack our lunches for the beach. If it was raining, we’d play old maid and color in coloring books.

  I never thought I’d say it, but there was nothing cuter than these two kids at the beach. I lathered them with sunblock and they turned into little beach butterballs, rolling around in the sand, floating on their tummies in the tidal pools and building entire cities out of sand. They gathered treasures, which weren’t anything more than shells and driftwood that the sea had washed ashore overnight. It was what they found between the tides that was their favorite—sand dollars and starfish, horseshoe crab shells and purple seaweed. We had piles of these in a bucket where we stashed them on the dock behind the house. But there was never enough treasure, always more to be found. Then we ate lunch and I was free until dinner when I had them again.

  They loved to sneak into Lainey’s art studio to see what their mom was painting, and since I loved to do the same, I went with them. I wish I’d known her better all these years, this woman who stayed so calm and spent hours arranging one tiny picture of scraps and made something important. But then again, I wished a lot of things.

  At night, I listened to the women talk. Sometimes it was just a murmur in the background of the novels I read, and sometimes they thought I was reading but I was listening to every word. On these evenings, all the things I didn’t know about my own mom always astonished me.

  It killed me to hear Lainey talk about her brother and her mother—it took up a lot of her talks with Mom. And yet Mom just sat there not saying a word. I couldn’t help but think that my mom had made a choice to leave Dad and Gus at home, while Lainey hadn’t done anything that caused her to lose half of her family. She hadn’t had a choice. I couldn’t fix much in the world, and there was another situation beyond my control. I could only hurt for her, and love her.

  One afternoon, I settled back in the bookshop chair, which I’d come to think of as my chair in Mimi’s store, and opened my journal. Mimi bustled around downstairs, and I heard the little girl who sometimes hung out with her, Ava, chattering away like a bird, a small frantic bird in need of much attention. Ava was a neighborhood girl without a mom, clinging to Mimi whenever her dad would allow her to come to the bookstore. That was Mimi—protecting anyone who needed it.

  Meanwhile, she had started writing quotes from her favorite books in her scratchy handwriting and then leaving them on the side table next to my chair. It’s like she could read my mind and knew what I needed.

  That day her quote was from a poet, Hafez, one of my very favorites. Did she know he was one of my very favorites? Had I told her?

  Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.

  —Hafez

  So melodramatic, Ryan would say. Do you have to be so freaking melodramatic?

  Footsteps on the stairs let me know that either Mimi or Ava was coming to say hello. It was both of them. Mimi held out a cup of coffee from the Market. “This is from Fletch,” she said and handed it to me.

  I smiled just at his name.

  “This is so nice,” I said to Mimi and then looked to the little girl. “Good afternoon, little bug.”

  “Can I pick what kind of bug to be today?” she asked and jumped on one foot to the other end of the room. “Did you see that? I’m learning to jump on one foot. I might be a gymnast one day.”

  “You’re pretty awesome,” I said.

  “Today,” she said, “I’m a ladybug. Okay?”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “How was your morning?” Mimi asked and motioned to my journal on the side table, facedown and open like butterfly wings spread wide.

  “So far so good.” I took a lon
g swallow of the Fletch-delivered coffee. “I’m free until dinner. All my errands are done.”

  Ladybug disappeared down the stairs and I looked to Mimi with the coffee cup held to my face, obscuring my chin and lower lip. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Were you there the night that Lainey’s mom disappeared?”

  “Yes,” Mimi said. “I was.”

  Mimi sat on the chair next to me. I tucked my feet under my bottom and found my way into what I’d really meant. “Mom told me all about it, but she was talking to Lainey about it a few nights ago. I just can’t imagine what that must have been like. To wait and not know . . . and then . . .”

  “Yes,” Mimi said.

  “Do you have any idea where she is? What happened? Do you even have a guess?”

  “I do, but everyone does. Everyone has theories. It was terrible. No two ways about it.”

  “Yes, terrible.” I paused and then hoped I sounded nonchalant, easy. “Did you know Owen, also?”

  “Owen? Of course. We all did.” Mimi glanced away as if she saw him coming up the stairs. “He was so special. A child who was more like a man. He was fifteen or so back then, and he seemed to watch over the girls more than their parents did. I don’t know what happened to him, but I’m sure he’s a great man now.”

  “I’m not sure.” I shrugged. “Lainey hardly ever talks to him, and she misses him a lot. Mom talks to him . . .” I paused because I felt I was betraying Mom and yet I wanted an answer, a hint at what this could be that niggled like a hangover headache. Something, I knew. Something, and I couldn’t quite touch it.

  “They were very close. Like brother and sister,” Mimi said. “I’m sure they’ve kept in touch.”

  “Oh.” I fiddled with the fringe on the pillow. “But I think she knows more than she’s saying to Lainey. It’s kind of weird in a way. Mom is usually so open and all of that. I mean, they sit around and tell stories but not that one.”