Chapter Four #2
The only thing she took from her condominium was an old photograph of their family, one taken at Disneyland when the girls were small. She shoved it in her handbag and left without bothering to check the lock.
She banged along the wall, using it as a guardrail as she tottered toward the elevator.
Once inside, she clung to the slick wooden handrail, praying there wouldn’t be a stop in the lobby.
She got lucky; the mirrored elevator went all the way down to the parking garage, where it stopped with a clang.
The doors opened.
She peered out; the garage was empty. She careened unsteadily toward her car, collapsing against the jet-black side of her Mercedes. It took her several tries to get the key in the lock, but she finally managed.
She slid awkwardly into the soft leather seat. The engine started easily, a roar of sound in the darkness. The radio came on instantly. Bette Midler singing about the wind beneath her wings.
Nora caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror. Her face was pale, her cheeks tear-streaked. She’d chewed at her lower lip until it was misshapen.
“What are you doing?” she asked the woman in the sunglasses. She heard the slurring, drunken sound of her voice, and it made her cry. Hot tears blurred her vision.
“Please, God,” she whispered, “let Eric still be there.”
She slammed the car into reverse and backed out of the spot. Then she headed forward and hit the gas. Tires squealed as she rounded the corner and hurtled up the ramp. She didn’t even glance left for traffic as she sped out onto Second Avenue.
Dean stood on the slatted wooden dock. The seaplane taxied across the choppy blue waves and lifted skyward, its engine chattering as it banked left and headed back to Seattle.
He’d forgotten how beautiful this place was, how peaceful.
The tide was out now, and this stretch of beach, as familiar to him once as his own hand, smelled of sand that had baked in the hot sun, of kelp that was slowly curling into leathery strips.
He knew that if he jumped down onto that sand, it would swallow his expensive loafers and reclaim him, turn him into a child again.
It was the smell that pulled him back in time, that and the slapping sound of the waves against barnacled pilings. A dozen memories came at him, gift-wrapped in the scent of his parents’ beach at low tide.
Here, he and Eric had built their forts and buried treasures made of foil-wrapped poker chips; they’d gone from rock to rock, squatting down, scraping their knees on driftwood in search of the tiny black crabs that lived beneath the slick gray stones.
They had been the best of friends in those days, inseparable brothers who seemed so often to think with a single mind.
Of the two of them, Eric had been the strong one, the golden boy who did everything well and fought for his heart’s desires. At seven, Eric had demanded to be taken to Granddad’s island house on Lopez, the one they’d seen pictures of. And it was Eric who’d first convinced Mother to let them stay.
Dean could still remember the arguments.
They were hushed, of course, as all Sloan disagreements were required to be, full of sibilant sounds and pregnant pauses.
He remembered sitting at the top of the stairs, his scrawny body pressed so tightly against the railing that he’d worn the marks later on his flesh, listening to his older brother plead for the chance to go to the island school.
Absurd, Mother had declared at first, but Eric had worked on her relentlessly, wearing her down.
As a child, Eric had been every bit as formidable as their mother, and in the end, he’d won.
At the time, it had seemed a monumental victory; with age came wisdom, however.
The truth was, Mother was so busy running Harcourt and Sons that she didn’t care where her children were.
Oh, occasionally she tried to do the “right” thing, as she called it—make them transfer to Choate—but in the end, she simply let them be.
Dean closed his eyes, then opened them quickly, startled by the sound of laughter.
But it was only an echo in his mind, an auditory memory.
He hated what had brought him home at last, hated that it had taken a disease to bring him back to his brother.
Even more, he hated the way he felt about Eric now; they’d grown so far apart.
And all of it was Dean’s fault. He saw that, knew it, hated it, and couldn’t seem to change it.
It had happened on a seemingly ordinary Sunday.
Dean had moved off of the island by then, gone to prep school; he’d been a senior, nursing a heart so broken that sometimes he’d forgotten to breathe.
Eric had been at Princeton. They were still brothers then, separated only by miles, and they’d spoken on the phone every Sunday. One phone call had changed everything.
I’ve fallen in love, little bro . . . get ready for a shock . . . his name is Charlie and he’s . . .
Dean had never been able to remember more than that. Somehow, in that weird, disorienting moment, his mind had shut down. He’d felt suddenly betrayed, as if the brother he’d known and loved was a stranger.
Dean had said all the right things to Eric.
Even in his shocked confusion, he’d known what was expected of him, and he’d complied.
But they’d both heard the lie beneath the words.
Dean didn’t know how to be honest, what words he could mold into an acceptable truth.
He’d felt—ridiculously—as if he’d lost his brother that day.
If they’d gotten together back then, talked it through, they might have been okay.
But they’d been young men, both of them, poised at the start of their lives, each one faced in a different direction.
It had been easy to drift apart. By the time Dean graduated from Stanford and went to work for the family business, too much time had passed to start again.
Eric had moved to Seattle and begun teaching high-school English.
He’d lived with Charlie for a long time; only a few years before, Dean had received a note from Eric about Charlie’s lost battle with AIDS.
Dean had sent flowers and a nice little card. He’d meant to pick up the phone, but every time he reached for it, he wondered what in the world he could say.
He turned away from the water and walked down the dock, then climbed the split-log stairs set into the sandy cliff. He was out of breath when he finally emerged on top of the bluff.
The sprawling Victorian house was exactly as he remembered it—salmony pink siding, steeply pitched roof, elegant white cutwork trim.
Clematis vines curled around the porch rails and hung in frothy loops from along the eaves.
The lawn was still as flat and green as a patch of Christmas felt.
Roses bloomed riotously, perfectly trimmed and fertilized from year to year.
It was something his mother never forgot: home maintenance fees.
Every house she owned was precisely cared for, but this one more than most. She knew—or imagined, which to her was the same as certainty—that Eric occasionally visited the summer house with that man.
She didn’t want to hear any complaints from them about the property.
Dean headed toward the house, ducking beneath the outstretched branches of an old madrona tree. As he bent, a glint of silver caught his eye. He turned, realizing a moment too late what he’d seen.
The swing set, rusted now and forgotten. A whispery breeze tapped one of the red seats, made the chains jangle. The sight of it dragged out an unwelcome memory . . .
Ruby. She’d been right there, leaning against the slanted metal support pole, with her arms crossed.
It was the moment—the exact second—he’d realized his best friend was a girl.
He’d moved toward her.
What? she’d said, laughing. Am I drooling or something?
All at once, he’d realized that he loved her. He’d wanted to say the words to her, but it was the year his voice betrayed him. He’d been so afraid of sounding like a girl when he spoke, and so he’d kissed her.
It had been the first kiss for both of them, and to this day, when Dean kissed a woman, he longed for the smell of the sea.
He spun away from the swing set and strode purposefully toward the house. At the front door, he paused, gathering courage and molding it into a smile. Then he knocked on the door.
From inside came the pattering sound of footsteps.
The door burst open and Lottie was there. His old nanny flung open her pudgy arms. “Dean!”
He stepped over the threshold and walked into the arms that had held him in his youth. He breathed in her familiar scent—Ivory soap and lemons.
He drew back, smiling. “Hey, Lottie. It’s good to see you.”
She gave him “the look”—one thick gray eyebrow arched. “I’m surprised you could still find your way here.”
Though he hadn’t seen her in more than a decade, she had barely aged. Oh, her hair was grayer, but she still wore it drawn back into a cookie-size bun at the base of her skull. Her ruddy skin was still amazingly wrinkle-free, and her bright green eyes were those of a woman who’d enjoyed her life.
He realized suddenly how much he’d missed her.
Lottie had come into their family as a cook for the summer and gradually had become their full-time nanny.
She’d never had any children of her own, and Eric and Dean had become her surrogate sons.
She’d raised them for the ten years they’d lived on Lopez.
“I wish I were here for an ordinary visit,” he said.
She blinked up at him. “It seems like only yesterday I was wiping chocolate off his little-boy face. I can’t believe it. Just can’t believe it.” She stepped back into the well-lit entryway, wringing her hands.