The Bookshop at Water's End Read online

  Confusion swept over me like a cold wave. Had I done it in my sleep? Had I done it in a fit of missing him? Had I drunk too much? No was the answer to all of the above, and then I said it just as I knew it. “Piper.”

  “What? Why would she?”

  I shook my head. “She’s mad at me. And she asked me about you a couple days ago because she heard how much Lainey misses you, and she loves Lainey, so . . .”

  “Screw Mom, right?”

  “Exactly.” I paused and then asked, “How did you get here so quickly?”

  “I was in North Carolina helping a group start on the Appalachian Trail, and I came straight here.”

  “We can’t talk about this right now. I have to go inside, see Lainey.”

  “Maybe I should, too . . . She’s my sister.”

  “You’re right.” I stepped aside.

  My insides collapsed. There were so many better ways for this to have gone. I didn’t know what those ways were, and if I’d had a chance at all to find those ways, I’d missed out. All those secret times that felt so closely ours, so absolutely only Owen and me, weren’t any longer. We’d hurt Lainey with our closeness that had excluded her.

  Owen entered the house, and I followed him. I wanted to reach out and place my hands around his waist, hide behind him, let him drag me to Lainey’s room. But this was mine to face without protection.

  We both materialized in her doorway. Her suitcase was on the bed, splayed open like a wound, and she threw clothes inside, unfolded and rumpled. Her face was wet with tears, anger contorting her features. “What is wrong with you people?”

  “Everything,” I said. “But it has nothing to do with you or loving you. Or . . .”

  “Really?” She threw a pile of clothes into her suitcase and then turned to us. “Nothing to do with loving me?”

  Shame tasted like bile. I moved two steps toward her. “I kept saying it was over, wanting to believe it was over. And it has been over for a long time.”

  “It wasn’t to hurt you, sis. It was something we just could never get right,” Owen said quietly.

  I hadn’t heard him say this before—how we could never get it right—but it was the simplest explanation, if not the best one.

  “Please don’t leave, Lainey. Please. Don’t. Leave.” I grabbed her arm as she reached for another dresser drawer. “I need you here.”

  She tossed my hand from her skin as if I’d burned her. “You need me?”

  “Yes. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

  Owen stepped between Lainey and me. “Don’t be angry at her. Be mad at me. This isn’t her fault. It’s mine.”

  “Oh, trust me, big brother, I’m mad at you, too. But at least you didn’t pretend to be something you aren’t. You cut and run. You hide. Bonny here was pretending to be real, to be honest and ready to find her ‘one thing’ and ‘gathering what matters most.’ Well, Bee,” she said in an imitation Owen voice, “looks like you always knew what your ‘one thing’ was.”

  “Please just stop,” I said and went to close her suitcase. “Stop packing. Stop . . . Just let me at least try to explain. There’s nothing you haven’t known. Nothing. I haven’t lied about seeing him or anything.”

  “Try to explain?” Lainey sat on the edge of the bed and dropped her head into her hands. “I know the facts. Of course I do. But seeing you two, seeing how you, Owen, want her more than you’ve ever wanted what was left of your family, it’s heartbreaking.”

  I sat next to her, my heart pushing in a race to find the right words to make her stay, to make her understand. I looked to Owen and he to me. Both our hearts were splintering.

  “It’s been like a sickness,” I said. “The way we can’t let go and then can’t get it right.”

  “A sickness?” She looked at me and then directed her attention to Owen. “Do you feel that way also?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I knew I’d screw this up,” I said and closed my eyes to center myself, catch my breath. “He isn’t the sickness. Me not being able to let him go, that’s the awful part. In me. Not him.”

  “I don’t get any of this,” Lainey said.

  “Okay.” Owen’s voice sounded tight, like he was on the edge of tears, which I’d only heard once, so long ago, the night before my wedding. “I have loved Bonny for as long as I’ve known her. I have screwed it up on every level there is. I have shown up and left. I’ve begged for another chance and not taken it. I have disappeared and reappeared at the worst times. I have done nothing good for her life. And nothing good for yours,” he said. “Lainey, I’m so very sorry. This time, I meant to come here and make things right with Bonny. To help. To find a way out of the mess.”

  “And here I am,” Lainey said. “To interfere with you two lovebirds. What I will do now is leave so everyone can live happily ever after.”

  “No!” I took her hand.

  “No,” Owen’s voice joined mine. “I’ll leave . . .”

  “Of course you will,” Lainey said. “It’s what you do best.” Then she grabbed a T-shirt from the bed and wiped at her face. “I’m being so mean. I don’t know why I’m being so mean.” She blew her nose into the T-shirt.

  “I get it,” I said.

  “I don’t.” She stood. “I can’t go anywhere tonight. What am I doing?” She glanced around as if waking and confused.

  Owen took her hand. “I’m going to leave. I have a room in town. I will come back first thing in the morning and we will talk. I want to . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Lainey said.

  “If I’d known you were going to be here I would have come even sooner.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have. You haven’t come to see me in years.”

  “I hadn’t seen Bonny until the kite-boarding accident and ended up in her emergency room. But it wasn’t planned, Lainey—I had no intention of seeing her during that trip.”

  Lainey’s eyes opened wide and she stood. “Oh, my God, you are the reason for her mistake, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I said, too quickly, too loudly.

  “Yes,” Owen answered at the same time.

  I turned to him. “No, you’re not. Whatever mistakes I made were my own. You didn’t do anything.”

  Lainey stared at me as if she didn’t know me, which maybe she didn’t. Maybe I didn’t know me.

  We backed out of her room as she waved us out, a dismissive move that felt like an indictment. Owen and I stared at each other and all our times together were water, drowning us.

  “I’m a sickness?” he asked in a low whisper.

  “No.” I shook my head and my body ached for him. “Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Bonny . . .” His voice broke.

  “All I know is that even as I loved another, I wasn’t able to stop loving you. I’ve tried. Oh, God, how I’ve tried. But you never really stayed away—you’ve always been there, even if not in person: your calls; your texts; our long phone conversations. You’d think that at least not seeing you for twenty-two years would have helped, but it hasn’t. I don’t know if that’s a curse or a wish come true or all I ever wanted. Or a sickness. I just don’t know.”

  He reached to pull me into his arms and I held mine up to ward him off. I’d heard Piper come inside and she was in her room down the hall. His sister was behind a closed door a few feet away. I needed the desire for him, for something that would never work, to end.

  I turned away, walked unsteadily to my bedroom and shut the door. If only I could do the same with my heart.

  I needed to remind myself of the truth: this had been his pattern—he’d arrive at just the right minute and then leave again while I was left waiting in the maybe; the possible happy ending; the could-be.

  But he left; he always left. And even as he stood outside my door there in Watersend, I could l
et him into my bedroom, but he would leave again. Lainey was right about that: it was what he did best. And it wasn’t the coming that I couldn’t handle; it was the leaving that was inevitable.

  chapter 28

  PIPER BLANKENSHIP

  Did Mom and Lainey think I didn’t hear them last night, or that I was too stupid to get it? It was my fault Owen was at the river house. I was beginning to understand that there was just as much unsaid as there was said—Owen was there to see my mom. He’d just sauntered into the bookshop and turned the quiet summer upside down and inside out. I wasn’t going to stick around that morning to see what happened next. That would be like watching a car wreck I’d caused.

  Lainey shuffled out from her bedroom, her laptop held in her hands and open as she clicked away with one finger. She set the computer on the kitchen counter before she spoke to me. “Do you mind taking the kids to the beach for a couple hours? I have some things I need to do.”

  Her voice sounded taut, and on her screen was a travel search engine open to a list of flights to Houston, Texas.

  “Are you leaving?” I asked.

  She slammed shut her laptop. “Piper, I just need you to take the kids out for a couple hours. That’s all.” It was like someone had replaced Lainey overnight. Maybe Owen. He was a replacement specialist, turning Mom and Lainey into people I didn’t know. I hated him.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got them.”

  I gathered George and Daisy and took them outside, ready to go to the beach as we had every morning, already a routine. George was nearly at the street before I hollered after him. “Wait for us.”

  “I am,” he said and stalked back and forth along the road.

  In the cart were two beach chairs, one blanket, three towels, a Thermos of coffee and one full of lemonade and a cooler with snacks in little Baggies, which Lainey had made and labeled. Peanut butter on celery, raisins, trail mix with chocolate chips and sliced apples, which always ended up crusted with sand. There were buckets and shovels and plastic molds to make starfish and mermaids out of wet sand.

  Daisy and I reached the road where George was now jumping from foot to foot.

  “We did it,” Daisy said, pretending we’d had to sneak out of the sleeping dragon’s house, a game I’d made up to let Mom sleep in. Not that I was courteous but I dreaded seeing her and explaining and apologizing for how Owen had surprisingly arrived at our front door.

  “We made it out of the castle without waking the monster,” Daisy said.

  “You’re stupid,” George said and bent to pick up a beetle and roll it around in the palm of his hand. “There was no monster. Piper just told us that so we wouldn’t wake up the moms.”

  “You’re the one who’s stupid,” Daisy said and took my hand. “It was just a game anyway. So you’re the stupidest.”

  George looked at the beetle in his hand, crawling toward his thumb, and then he flung his hand out to toss the bug onto Daisy’s shoulder. She screamed, just as he meant for her to do, and I swiped it off. She clung to my leg and looked at her brother. “I hate you,” she said.

  I crouched next to her. “Boys. They do stuff like that.”

  “Boys,” she said and stuck her tongue out at her brother.

  I glanced left and right and we crossed the street together, a threesome who seemed like we had done it every day for all time, a silent amble across the street and then through the sand dune path to the beach beyond.

  I spread the towels one by one in a row. The blue striped one for George, pink for Daisy, red for me and then the big ragged blanket on which I threw the beach toys and cooler. George made it to the water’s edge first with his shovel, and he settled in to dig. I watched him with hazy laziness as Daisy sat next to me and colored in her mermaid book. The morning was uncharacteristically cool, or if not cool, at least not its usual ninety-eight degrees by sunrise. I drank from my coffee Thermos and stretched out my legs to dig my toes into the warm sand.

  Daisy sang a little song to herself, the theme song from Frozen, permanently etched into my brain now. George made tractor noises from the water’s edge. I closed my eyes and tossed through the options for what might have happened last night. Besides the fact that Owen had ruined what might have been a perfect night with Fletch.

  Owen could have arrived here for a million reasons, but I was the one who’d brought him here. I groaned out loud.

  “What?” Daisy asked, her little face lifting to mine.

  “Nothing, little nut. I was thinking to myself.”

  “I do that all the time,” she said.

  Like every other time, once the anxiety vine started growing I couldn’t make it stop. So quickly it ran up my ribs and into my throat, and I wanted to cry, to find my way out of my body, which was betraying me with fear. It made me think of Ryan with Hannah, of Dad slamming doors, of Mom weeping in her bedroom, of the police flashlights on the common, of . . .

  I took in a long inhale and stood from the beach blanket. I felt like I needed to run or jump in the water because, even though it was only seven a.m., what I really wanted was a drink. I looked to the ocean and George’s shovel, the hole he was digging so far into the sand. Daisy, now my shadow, stood also.

  “Where’s George?” she asked.

  The emptiness of the beach, which moments before had felt peaceful, now felt threatening.

  “George!” I called out his name, louder than I ever had.

  I ran to the shoreline and peered inside the hole he’d dug. A tiny Matchbox pickup truck floated in the bottom of the hole where seawater had soaked upward.

  “George,” I hollered again, peering into the hole as if there was a way he’d hidden in there.

  “He does this all the time,” Daisy said.

  “Does what?” I turned to her standing next to me, my heart now inside my throat, threatening to strangle me.

  “Hides on purpose to scare us. It makes Mommy crazy.”

  “George,” I said to the empty beach, to the waves and to the sky. “If you are hiding, please come out now because I’m really scared and I’m about to call the police and you have to show me where you are. Right now. Right now. Right now.” My voice rose with each sentence.

  “Right now,” Daisy repeated.

  We stood together and she slipped her hand into mine and we waited for George to obey us, but nothing happened. No little boy popped out from behind the scrubby sand dune or the trash can. There was no place to hide.

  I let go of Daisy and took her face in my hands. “Stand here,” I said and splashed into the ocean. The tide was in, so there was a long stretch where George could have splashed and played without going underwater. It would be up to his little belly for twenty yards or more. I splashed through the water, scanning the sand below.

  Nothing but scuttling crabs and shifting sand.

  Had I fastened his life jacket on? I looked to the blanket and saw the orangeness of it sitting on the sand, a beacon. No, because he wasn’t swimming. He was digging, not swimming.

  I ran back to the blanket and lifted my cell phone.

  “Fletch.” My voice cracked as he answered the phone. I didn’t know why I’d called him first. Because he was from there, because he might know what to do, because I was scared out of my mind and didn’t want to tell Mom or Lainey, who had trusted me with her children.

  “I need help. I lost George . . . I think he’s hiding on me, but I don’t know and I’m scared and . . .”

  “Where are you?”

  “The beach in front of the house.”

  “I’m calling the police and I’m on the way.”

  “The police?” My chest felt like it would explode. I couldn’t take in a full breath.

  “Yes, just in case. I’m coming.”

  “Should I go find Lainey and Mom?”

  “God, Piper. Yes. Right now.”

&nbs
p; “But I don’t want to leave the beach . . . just in case.”

  “I’m coming. Don’t move.”

  I hung up and pushed the number for Mom. She didn’t answer. Then I tried Lainey, but same thing, straight to voice mail. I held tight to Daisy, who had become completely quiet, her usual chatter gone. I bent to her, tears in my eyes. “Is there somewhere he hides that I can look? This is serious, Daisy. It’s not a game.”

  She shook her head, back and forth. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She started to shake, her little face quivering.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to know. Help me look.”

  We held hands, Daisy and me. We ran up and down the beach. We called his name and we peeked behind the sand dunes and into the grasses. Lainey could not lose one more loved one to this beach or this town. Even though I hadn’t known Ms. Clara, her absence settled around our house like an old curse. I needed to throw up, or faint, or float away: this couldn’t be happening.

  It was only minutes, but felt like hours, before Fletch came running onto the beach and I heard the sirens approach.

  “Go get them,” I yelled at him before he reached us. I pointed toward the house. “They aren’t answering the phone.”

  He turned around and ran as two policemen sauntered toward me as if they had all the time in the world, as if I’d lost a backpack and we would now search for it.

  I ran to them, words flowing so quickly that they felt like they weren’t in the right order, tumbling like Scrabble letters onto the table.

  “Whoa,” the older man said and adjusted his sunglasses. “Slowly. Tell me what happened so we can start searching. I need a description and a photo if you have it.”

  From there, time took on a weird quality like someone had control of the button on a recorder and would push fast forward and then slo-mo and then normal time. Mom and Lainey ran out to the beach. Lainey screamed George’s name, and Mom came to me and threw her arms around me the same way she had the times I was called into the principal’s office and she was there to defend me. This time there was no defense, but that didn’t matter—it was what she did, who she was. “This is my fault.” I collapsed against her. “Also, I’m an idiot and I sent a text from your phone.”