36. Keaton Copilot
I am so antsy, I’m practically wearing a hole in the dark wood of Harris’s pristine apartment floor. I have been practicing what I’m going to say to Bowen when we get back to Beaufort, how I’m going to tell him that I know he and Kerry have a past, but that we could have a future. When my phone rings in my hand I’m positive it’s him. I’ve manifested him! Just like Allison would say. Crazy Allison. And crazy me for going back. But it isn’t Bowen. I sigh. “Hi, Uncle Lon.”
“Keaton, Keaton, Keaton, remind me to never doubt you again!”
I love the cheeriness of his tone, but I’m confused. “Oh, I will. Don’t you worry. But why are we never doubting me again?”
“We got an offer on the house this morning, out of the blue! One of the attendees of your Old Homes Tour found my name and number on the deed and made me an offer. And, Keaton, it’s a winner. We’re in high cotton, dear niece of mine!”
My heart sinks. The house is going to be gone. “Well, great. Then I guess it’s a good thing Mom is coming for a final walk-through.”
“I think so. So proud of you, Keaton! You deserve that commission.”
I tell him thanks and drop my phone in my bag, feeling so many emotions at once. On the bright side, I’ll have a nice big commission check. On the other bright side, I’m no longer unemployed. I think I just got so swept up in the moment in Allison’s office that I forgot Beaufort was always meant to be temporary. This is good; this is right. Mom and I will get this finished, and I can walk away.
On that note, I’m about to text Harris to ask where he is when there’s a knock at the door, right by my head, and I jump. I open it. “Two minutes early. I’m so proud.”
But when I look up, it isn’t Harris. It’s Bowen. He’s wearing a rumpled linen button-down with jeans and has this two-day beard that I find irresistible. I have to fight back tears when I see him—though of joy or sadness, I can’t really say.
So many things are fighting for top position in my mind that I can’t think of where to start. So I blurt out, stupidly, “Did you miss shark tagging for this?”
I hear a voice I positively adore say, “We’ll do anything for the people we love.” I rush into the hall to wrap Anderson in a hug and kiss his cheek. I can’t help it. I begin to cry with relief. “You’re so tall,” I say.
He looks at me like I’m nuts. “Keaton, you saw me yesterday. I couldn’t have grown that much.”
I wipe my eyes. “Maybe it’s just that you look older in New York.”
He shrugs like that’s a good possibility.
“How did you find me?” I ask Bowen. But I know before he answers.
“Violet,” Bowen and Anderson say simultaneously.
Harris flies around the corner. “I know. I know. It’s eleven oh one.” Salt yanks away from him and I lean down so he can smother me with kisses. I instantly feel better. Harris stops dead in his tracks when he sees Bowen and Anderson. “But I guess… why go to Beaufort when Beaufort can come to you?”
He looks at me questioningly, then looks down at Anderson. “I’ve always felt eleven oh one is the ideal time for an ice cream sandwich.”
Anderson nods and follows him inside, and I turn and gesture for Bowen to do the same. Harris guides Anderson to the kitchen while Bowen and I sit on Harris’s white couch under the huge picture window. Salt jumps up beside me, which is not technically allowed, but I’m in crisis here. Bowen looks around. “Wow,” he says. “This is like a TV show apartment.”
Suddenly, all my resolve to tell him how I feel is replaced with anger that he put me through the last twenty-four hours without so much as a text. And fear that he is here to tell me he is getting back together with Kerry in person, that I’m too late. “Why are you here?” I ask. “Did Kerry turn you down? Bail already? Because I’m super disinterested in being your second choice.”
“Keaton, if you had let me explain instead of just running off, I think we would be in a different place right now.”
“There’s nothing to explain,” I say. “You dreamed of her coming back for a decade, and she came. I’m happy for you,” I lie. “I’m happy for Anderson.” That part is true. “I get it. I’ve been the third wheel in one family already this year. Now I’m the fourth in yours.”
This is not the speech I have practiced, but I’m so raw, so emotional that I realize my pride won’t let me fight for him. Not without knowing first that he is willing to fight for me.
Bowen is staring at me. “Are you finished?”
I feel a stabbing pain in my heart, remembering the way he looked at her. But I nod anyway because I’m afraid if I talk, I’ll cry.
“Keaton, I told you I had decided years ago that things were over for good between Kerry and me. She might feel like she’s finally ready to be in Anderson’s and my lives, but I have heard that from her before. And even if she ends up being mother of the year and getting a trophy for it, she is only ever going to be Anderson’s mom to me.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said,” he interrupts. “And if you had bothered to let me explain, you would know that Kerry said she had been thinking and she wanted to start over, try for us to be a family.” My eyes widen, and my heart sinks. “But if you had stayed, like, two seconds longer, you would have heard me respond that I dreamed of her coming back for the first couple years after she left. But then I realized we weren’t right for each other, that I deserved someone who was all in, who was sure. That Anderson deserved that too. You would have heard me say that I never even wanted to try with another woman—until I met you. And for the first time since she walked out the door, I had this sense, way down deep inside, that maybe Anderson and I could let someone else into our family after all.”
“Oh,” I said, looking down at my hands, trying to hide my smile. “Well that’s nice to hear.”
I’m starting to feel better until he says, “I almost didn’t come here.” There’s an agitation in his voice, and I can see we’ve switched places. I want to be indignant, but, really, he has reason to be upset with me too.
I look up and see the hurt in his eyes. “But then I realized how easily the situation could be misinterpreted, and I realized that you must have thought history was repeating itself—that I was going to get back with Kerry just like Allison got back with Jonathan. And I know that must have brought out the urge to flee, and so I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that leaving without so much as a goodbye is not your typical go-to move. So I guess I packed my kid up and flew here to allow you to explain.”
I look into his blue eyes, which seem grayer against Harris’s cool walls, and reach my hand up to touch the stubble on his cheek. I bite my lip. “I’m sorry, Bowen. I really am. And, just so you know, my bags are packed by the door because I was champing at the bit to get back to Beaufort to apologize to you, to see if I was wrong, and there was the possibility of a future between us. I know she hurt you by running away, and I did the same thing. Even if it was hard, I should have at least given you the courtesy of a real conversation.”
My eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t realize until this morning that leaving you with no warning would be the worst thing I could do to you—and to Anderson too. That it would bring back all your fears and all your hurts and could end up breaking us for good.”
He looks up, asking an unsaid question.
I shake my head. “I shouldn’t have left like that. I should have been more sensitive. It’s just that I really, truly thought you had chosen her.”
He nods. “I get it. It’s a wound for you. But, Keaton, I do need to be up front about the fact that while I am not romantically interested in her, Kerry is always going to be in my life—and Anderson’s—in some way, shape, or form, whether she’s physically present or not. Do I prefer it when she disappears for years on end? Yup. I sure do. But the reality is that I can’t control her, and she is Anderson’s mother.”
I feel really embarrassed that he feels he has to even say that. “Oh my gosh, Bowen. Of course she is. I know that. I hope for Anderson that she is a huge part of his life in a really positive way.” I smile. “But even if she’s not, I know she’s in your life. And I know she’ll always be a part of your heart. She gave you the coolest kid on earth. I just needed to know that the romantic part of your relationship is in the past.”
“Definitely, one hundred percent, all the way, in the past.” He pauses. “And maybe all this was for the best, actually.”
“How so?”
“Because it wasn’t until Kerry told me that she still loved me that I realized I was in love with someone else.”
I scoot closer to him. “This person you love. Do I know her?”
He nods. “And what I’m hoping is that maybe, one day, she might learn to love me too.”
My turn to look down at my feet. I shake my head. “She won’t learn to love you.” Then I look back up, and I see the pain in his eyes. “Because she already does.”
He stares at me for a long moment, as if he is taking in my face, memorizing it, like it’s new.
“Bowen?”
“Yeah?”
“I know you’re out of practice, but this is when you kiss me.”
He laughs and pulls me close, kissing my lips, then my cheeks, then my neck. Harris calls from the kitchen, “Is it safe to come out? If we’re going to beat Mom to Beaufort, we’ve got to get going.”
Harris and Anderson trail out of the kitchen. Harris looks around at the small group sitting in his apartment—all of whom have to get back to North Carolina—and sighs. “Bowen and Anderson can come with us. Will be better in the long run than having everyone here eating my granola.”
“Can I be copilot?” Anderson asks, looking up at Harris.
“Obviously,” Harris says. “You think these two could do it?” They both shake their heads skeptically.
An hour later, Bowen and I are in the back two seats of the plane, Salt between us, his leash looped through my seat belt. Bowen looks over the dog and kisses my hand. I love you, he mouths.
And I believe him. I truly do. For the first time in a long time, I think I might have made the right choice. I think I might be right where I’m supposed to be. “This is absolutely awesome!” Anderson says as we take off. I’m so happy to be beside Bowen that I am panicking far less than usual. And… the single Xanax I found in the bottom of my purse has helped ever so slightly too. Even still, I realize I’m squeezing Salt to me way too tightly. But he just rests his head on my chest, not seeming to mind. I swear he knows when I’m scared. And I suddenly get the whole emotional support animal thing.
“Do you know there’s no minimum age to learn to fly in North Carolina?” Harris asks.
Bowen shoots me a panicked look as Anderson cheers, “That’s awesome! Will you teach me to fly?”
“Maybe when you’re sixteen!” Bowen chimes in.
Harris winks at Anderson, and it’s the first time I’ve ever considered what Harris might be like as a father. It’s the first time I’ve considered that, if this all goes well, I might be someone’s stepmother.
It’s the best thought I’ve had in quite some time.
My stomach drops as we pull up to the house. It is only three thirty—half an hour before Mom is supposed to arrive—but she is sitting on the front steps, looking bewildered. “I told you we needed to leave earlier,” I say to Harris, who is driving my Bronco.
“Oh, yes,” Harris says sarcastically. “I can see why you would blame this on me. The confession of love in my living room was all my fault.”
“Well, if you had come home earlier—”
“Do you guys do this a lot?” Anderson asks. He doesn’t sound accusatory. Just curious.
“Ah, the life of an only child,” Harris says. “You have no idea what you’re missing, buddy.”
Bowen eyes me over Salt, and I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking, if he is imagining a world and a future in which maybe Anderson isn’t an only child forever. But I know I’m getting way ahead of myself.
As Harris pulls into the driveway, I take a deep breath. “I don’t feel emotionally equipped to deal with this,” I say.
“Me neither,” Harris agrees.
“Well,” says Bowen, “Anderson and I would love to take Salt for the evening while you attempt to handle the crisis with your mother.”
I sigh, and Harris looks at me over the seat. “Now or never.”
As we get out of the car and walk slowly to the front porch, I feel like it’s a march to the executioner. But then I notice that Mom isn’t on the porch alone. She’s with a pirate. My favorite pirate. Alex. He has her laughing at something. Instead of us having to go over to comfort Mom, she jumps off the step.
“My babies!” she exclaims.
“Hi, Mom.” I give her a big hug and kiss, suddenly feeling guilty that I didn’t want to deal with her impending meltdown. She is my mother, and dealing with meltdowns is what daughters do. I don’t realize how very much I’ve missed her until I sink into her hug. She would hate hearing this; she raised me to be stronger than this. But I need her here. I realize I don’t know how to finish clearing out the house without her.
“You two look sensational,” Mom says, pulling back. Then she gasps, and I see the Dockhouse Dames entering the front gate. They are carrying trashbags and Post-it Notes, and I love them for being here to help—not just with the physical load but also with the emotional one.
Mom hugs them one by one as they file onto the porch, then takes a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
Harris and I exchange a glance, and I know we’re thinking the same thing: We haven’t expected her to be so level-headed.
I smile gratefully at Alex. He pulls me to the side. “Your mom’s cool,” he says. “Oh, and don’t go on the back porch. I painted the floor today.”
I give him a thumbs-up. “Thank you, Alex. You’re a lifesaver.”
He shrugs. “It’s just porch paint.”
I was talking about the way he handled my mom, but I let it go. He’s a lifesaver either way.
I let Mom be the one to put the key in the front door, the one I struggled with when I first got here. She opens it instantly, and it breaks my heart a little to think that this home of hers, where she can still open the tricky door, has become a burden and a sadness for her. It breaks my heart that this place that has felt so much like home is going to be gone. But I have to think it will be a relief for my mom. So that’s a good thing.
Her chin quivers as she leans over the threshold. I realize that she is laughing, not crying. “It’s exactly the same,” she says. She hugs me. “You really didn’t change a thing.”
“Well, not anything I didn’t have to.”
Mom walks from room to room as if in a trance, and we follow her. Upstairs into her parents’ bedroom, Lon’s room, the guest rooms, her childhood room, down the back stairs, and into the library. She runs her fingers along the spines of her parents’ books and says out loud, “What happened to you two?”
I haven’t said one word to her about any of the things I’ve discovered, any of the mystery I’ve unraveled—not that it has led me to any answers. But this question is all it takes for me to know that she isn’t convinced of the car wreck story either. I’m not quite brave enough to ask her yet if it’s true that she thought Becks and Townsend were murdered—or why.
Harris pulls a notebook out of his back pocket and slides it back in place on the bookshelf. “This was Townsend’s last journal,” he says. “I’ve read them all. And no hint of what happened. The last entry I read was that he knew Becks was sick but she hadn’t confided in him, and it was eating him alive.”
Mom whirls around. “What? Mom was sick?”
“She didn’t know,” Harris and I say to each other at the same time.
She shakes her head. Then she pauses. “Well, okay. I was worried about her. But I thought she was just aging quickly, not sick.”
My four friends are pretending to busy themselves in the kitchen, but I know they’re listening.
“And if his journals are to be believed,” Harris adds, “Townsend had early-onset Alzheimer’s, and his doctor had told him he shouldn’t fly anymore.” He paused. “But he hadn’t told Becks either.”
Mom puts her hand to her heart. “Poor Daddy. Flying was his favorite thing. He always used to say he didn’t want to live when he couldn’t fly.”
I don’t know why, but all the hairs on the back of my neck stand when she says that. Maybe because flying always gets me so worked up. But I had done it twice in two days. I was really maturing.
“If Daddy wrote about the disappearance, if he had any idea what was coming, he might have hidden it,” she says. I’m not sure what this means. She stands on her tiptoes and grabs Call of the Wild. She opens the cover, which reveals an empty hollow inside. She hands the book to me and grabs Antigone. Also empty. She appears to be searching and finds Sense and Sensibility and then Heart of Darkness. She lifts the covers to reveal a perfectly bound stack of cash in each. “Huh. There’s still some cash here. I just assumed all of it was gone.”
Harris mouths to me, Faked their deaths.
I roll my eyes, and Harris chuckles.
“What?” Mom asks.
“They were so clever.” He holds up the spines of the books: “C, A, S, H. Cash.”
I laugh. “That is clever.”
“It was Mom’s idea,” Mom says. “So Lon and I would remember which books had money in them.” Her voice quavers, but she doesn’t break down.
“Well, this was a really good hiding spot,” I say. “I wiped those books down and never noticed they weren’t real.” I pause. “Anderson would never have let that slide because he was really good about inspecting the insides of all his books. I was a little less detailed…” I perk up, thinking of something. “Wait. Why didn’t you come back for the money after they died?”
Mom squints at me. “Honey, I don’t know quite how to express this, but I never walked through the front door again. Lon came to look in the library, and when he realized the cash was gone from the first two books, he got spooked and ran. After that, we didn’t even come back for the things in our rooms.”
She walks over to Townsend’s credenza, kneels down, fiddles with what looks like the foot and, in one motion, slips a latch to reveal a hidden drawer underneath.
I gasp. “Mom, were you ever going to tell me about any of this stuff? What if I had just sold this house with all the cash and…” I pick something up from the hidden drawer of the credenza. “Gold?” I question.
Mom nods. “Gold.”
“Why do they have gold? Maybe pirates got them!” Harris says. I shake my head sternly at him.
By the way Mom rustles around in the drawer I can tell these coins and bars aren’t what she is looking for. “My parents lived through the Great Depression, a world war, a cold war, the Vietnam War, and more social and economic unrest than you can imagine. They were always prepared for the worst.”
“Clearly,” I say.
“It looks like it’s all here…” she muses more to herself than to us.
“Where are the guns and liquor?” Harris asks.
“In the basement,” Mom says absentmindedly.
“Seriously?” I squeak.
She smiles up at me. “Come on, Keat. We’re at sea level. A basement would be underwater.”
Oh. Right, right.
Mom unearths what she has clearly been searching for: a journal that matches all the others, with TSJ embossed on the leather cover. She hands it to Harris. “I don’t think Dad had any deep dark secrets to leave behind. But if he did, they’d be in here.”
I look at Harris. “This would have saved us so much time.”
Harris nods. “Forty years’ worth of reading.” He pauses. “Although I wouldn’t take back a single page. I feel like I know my grandfather now.”
“Me too,” I say. “And my grandmother.”
Mom shakes her head. “You know your grandmother through your grandfather’s eyes. He thought she could do no wrong.”
“I like the image of her I have through his eyes,” I say.
Mom smiles. “Me too.”
She lies down on the oriental rug, seeming almost out of breath.
“So, we’re taking a short break?” I ask.
That’s when Mom finally notices and grabs my hand. “Whoa,” she says. “I’d forgotten how beautiful this ring was.”
I start to slip it off, but she stops me. “No. You wear it so well. Mom would have wanted you to have it.”
As much as I don’t want to part with this ring I’ve come to love so much, I know Mom isn’t quite right. “Becks left the ring for you,” I say. “I know she did. Because she left it with the letter.” I pause, trying to read Mom’s expression, but she doesn’t seem to have one. “I can go upstairs and get it if you—”
“No,” Mom says. “Please don’t. Baby steps.”
I nod. She has tackled more in the past hour than I thought she’d make it through in days. It’s as if she’s possessed by the spirit of something or someone else. My heart swells with pride for her. She looks over at Harris, who is rifling through Townsend’s journal. “So, what have you figured out?”
He looks up at both of us, wide-eyed. “I think I might have figured out what happened to Rebecca and Townsend Saint James.”
I look down at Mom, who is still lying on the floor as if she’s in savasana pose.
“We can talk about it later,” Harris says.
“It has been almost fifty years,” Mom says. “I think it’s time I knew the truth.”
I have no idea what my brother has just read. As he fills us in, I have the sinking suspicion that whatever it says might be a version of events. But I highly doubt it’s the whole truth.