Chapter 31
TAYLOR
‘So, you are still alive then,’ he said, when Jack and I entered the house.
‘Obviously.’
I watched him take in my crumpled dress and messy hair and felt like a guilty teenager caught sneaking into her house after curfew.
Beside me, Jack looked clean and fresh, courtesy of the two-minute shower he’d had while I’d got dressed.
His hair was damp, and he was wearing a clean T-shirt and a pair of shorts.
I felt like a swamp monster next to him, conscious that my body was sweaty and sticky from our night of lovemaking.
‘I called all the hospitals,’ Ray said. ‘When you didn’t come home.’
I stared at him in surprise. ‘You did?’
‘No. Of course I didn’t. I’m not an idiot. I figured you and he had… what is it you young people say? Hooked up?’
Jack snort-laughed, as my whole body cringed.
‘Can we not talk about this?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I stayed out all night and worried you.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t worried. You’re big enough and ugly enough to look after yourself.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I was, however, hungry,’ he complained. ‘I had to make my own breakfast.’
I gasped dramatically, clutching a hand to my chest. ‘And it didn’t kill you? I’m shocked.’
‘You will be when you see the state of the kitchen,’ he replied smugly.
I turned slowly, surveying the mess he’d left. Pots and a frying pan, plates and cups. Crumbs everywhere, an open butter dish. The milk was even still sitting on the bench with the lid off.
‘It’s fine, I’ll clean it up,’ I said cheerfully.
‘Really?’ His tone was suspicious. ‘Why aren’t you telling me off?’
‘Do you want me to tell you off?’
‘I want to know why you’re being nice all of a sudden.’ Then he looked at Jack and his expression changed. ‘Never mind. I can guess what’s put you in a good mood.’
‘Life puts me in a good mood,’ I informed him primly. ‘So, shut up.’
He gave Jack a look. ‘Good luck to you,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can say.’
‘Er, thanks?’ Jack replied. ‘You go and shower, Taylor. I’ll clean up the kitchen.’
I smiled at him gratefully. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course.’ He smiled back. ‘I don’t have to be at work until later, so until then, I’m all yours.’
‘Thanks.’ I tiptoed up to kiss him on the cheek. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘Take as long as you want.’
Ray interrupted. ‘Don’t listen to him. I need you to take me to the doctor, so hurry up. I’ve made an appointment for ten.’
‘Why? What’s wrong?’
He sniffed. ‘My leg feels weird.’
I looked at it for some kind of clue, but he was wearing his usual beige trousers. Everything looked normal from where I was standing.
‘The one you fell on?’
‘No, the other one.’
‘Well, what do you mean, weird?’
‘I don’t know, like it’s damp.’
I narrowed my eyes, trying patiently to understand. ‘Damp?’
‘Damp,’ he confirmed.
‘You mean your skin?’
‘My leg.’
‘Yes, but, the skin of your leg?’
‘The whole leg.’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘I don’t know how else to explain it.’
I looked at Jack, who shrugged.
‘Do you want me to take a look at it?’ he asked Ray.
‘Are you a doctor?’
‘Well, no, but—’
‘Then you can keep your hands to yourself, thank you.’
Jack suppressed a smile. ‘Understood.’
I checked the clock on the wall. ‘I’d better hurry up, then.’
‘Yes, you’d better,’ Ray agreed. ‘But also, do a good job. I’m not going anywhere with you looking like that.’
I poked my tongue out at him as I headed for the stairs, unable to keep the smile off my face as I ascended.
Not even Ray could kill my good mood today.
Last night had been the best night of my life.
Being with Jack had felt incredible, and my body was sore and aching in all the right places to remind me.
There was only one, small niggle. A seed of doubt that was trying to get in, to plant itself, to grow into an entire tree of worry.
Where to from here?
I would still be leaving in a few weeks.
And no matter how many times I told myself, or Jack, that we could just live in the moment and enjoy whatever it was between us for just that, whatever it was, it turned out that maybe I wasn’t that kind of woman after all.
Feelings were creeping in and that would make it harder to walk away.
Feelings were definitely a complication I wasn’t sure I was ready for.
‘What do you mean, damp?’ the doctor asked Ray later, in the examination room.
‘You know, damp,’ Ray replied. ‘Wet. Moist.’
‘Oh God.’ I squeezed my eyes shut. ‘Please don’t say that word again.’
‘What, moist?’
I stood up. ‘I’ll wait for you out in the waiting room.’
The medical center hadn’t changed much since I was a teen.
The walls were still plastered with posters, some of them so faded as to be illegible.
The building was old and in need of repair, but according to a sign by the front counter, a new medical center was in the process of being built on the other side of town, near the sports fields.
I was reading about how this was thanks to community fundraising efforts when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Taylor?’
I turned. ‘Dawn?’
She squealed, embracing me. ‘How are you? God, it’s been forever since I’ve seen you.’ She looked over my shoulder. ‘Is Adam with you?’
‘Uh, no. Adam and I are no longer together.’
‘Oh.’ Her nose crinkled up. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘It’s fine, honestly. All for the best, as they say.’
‘It seems like just yesterday I was the maid of honor at your wedding. Do you remember?’
‘Of course I remember.’ Although not, I suspected, for the same reasons she did.
‘I still have the dress,’ she exclaimed. ‘In my wardrobe. Couldn’t bring myself to throw it away or donate it to the thrift store. It’s so pretty.’ She pulled a face. ‘Obviously I’ll never be able to wear it again though. I’m at least fifty pounds heavier than I was then.’
‘You look great,’ I assured her, and I meant it. She’d been too skinny back then. Rail-thin.
‘So what are you doing back here?’ she asked, then clutched my arm and squealed again. ‘Please tell me you’re moving back to Pine Harbor?’
‘Sorry, no.’
Her face fell. ‘Damn. That would have been so cool, to have you to hang out with again. We used to have so much fun, all of us together. Before… well, you know.’
‘Yes,’ I replied in a clipped tone. ‘We did. How are you, anyway? Did you become a writer, like you planned?’
‘Working on it. It’s a lot harder than you might think, actually. Writing a book. And the publishing industry is a tough nut to crack, but I’ll get there. In the meantime, I work in the library to pay the bills.’
‘You’re kidding, you’re a librarian?’
‘What’s so unbelievable about that?’
‘Nothing. It’s just, the Dawn I remember was a little… wilder than I imagine your typical librarian to be.’
‘Hey, for your information, librarians can be freaky too.’
‘Remember the night of the festival once, when we all borrowed dinghies and made it a race to row across the bay at midnight? Winner was the first one to ring the bell at the lighthouse on Sandbar Point? That was your idea, if I remember correctly.’
She looked wistful. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Remember that cop, Donald? He was so sure it was us but couldn’t prove anything.’
‘He was a miserable old guy. I don’t know what his problem was, anyway. We put the boats back where we found them.’
‘Yeah, but Cal and Adam painted faces on some of the marker buoys with glow-in-the-dark paint, remember?’
I stared at her. ‘They did?’
‘Yeah, that’s why they were the last ones back, long after the rest of us.’
‘I thought they were just drunk and rowing in circles.’
‘Nope. They switched some of the markers around too. There were some pissed-off oyster farmers the next day. My dad drilled me on whether I knew anything about it. I lied. Just like I lied when they put dish soap, food coloring and rubber duckies in the town fountain.’
I smiled. ‘God, I’d forgotten all about that.’
‘We were little shits really,’ she admitted.
‘But that’s what you get with teens in a small town.
We had to find some way to amuse ourselves.
The teens these days are the same. They thought it was funny to move all the books around a few months ago.
Mix it all up. Took me ages to get them all back in the right places.
’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t tell them off. We did far worse than that.’
‘You weren’t even tempted to get out?’ I asked.
She looked genuinely surprised at my question. ‘Leave Pine Harbor? No. Never. It’s home.’
‘You don’t find it, constricting?’
She shrugged. ‘Sure, sometimes it can be annoying, when everyone knows your business, sometimes before you do. But as much as people here love to gossip, you know they’ve got your back when you need it. Did you hear about Bronwyn?’
I searched my mental memory bank. ‘Meecham?’
‘Yeah.’ She checked to make sure no one was listening. ‘She got breast cancer last year. Only thirty-one, with two small kids. It was pretty aggressive when they found it. She couldn’t work, had to take time off to go through the treatments.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘She got really, really sick. I mean, I’ve never seen anyone alive look the way she did.
It was horrible. Her husband, Ben, was trying to juggle work, with the kids, and ferrying her back and forward to the city for treatments.
I organized a meeting at the town hall and so many showed up.
By the time we left two hours later, we had a roster and a plan for everything.
Filled their chest freezer up with frozen meals and lunches.
Washing was picked up twice a week and dropped back clean and pressed.
The kids were taken to playcenter; Bronwyn was driven back and forward to her appointments.
Even the dog was walked twice a day by volunteers.
Ben could carry on working, knowing that everything was taken care of. ’
‘How is she now?’
‘She’s doing OK. The treatment regime seems to have worked and she’s currently in remission.
Very grateful to everyone for helping out while they were in the thick of it.
That’s why I love this town. You can count on the people here to support you through the hard times, you know?
And there’s going to be hard times, no matter where in the world you are.
I know I’d rather be here if it came down to it.
Besides, there’s plenty of fun times too.
The festival is in a few days; that’s always cool. Will you still be here?’
‘Actually,’ I admitted. ‘I kind of got talked into running a tattoo stall.’
She stared at me for a moment, before she burst out laughing. ‘No way Celia asked you to do that.’
‘Oh, she was firmly against it,’ I confirmed. ‘Tried her hardest to persuade the town it was a bad idea, but sadly for her, she lost.’
‘Was that at the town festival planning meeting?’
I nodded.
‘Damn, I missed it. I had to work that night. Pity, I’d have loved to have seen her face. I remember when we all used to go over to Adam’s house sometimes after school; she’d look at us like we were sewer rats or something. Stuck-up cow.’
‘You won’t find me arguing with that.’
A door opened and Ray shuffled up to us. ‘Done.’
‘What did the doctor say?’
‘I don’t know,’ he grumbled.
‘Because you weren’t listening, or because she said something you don’t agree with?’
He glared at Dawn, giving her a quick up-and-down.
‘Who’s this?’
She pointed at herself. ‘It’s me, Dawn. We’ve met before, but it was years ago. I was a friend of Taylor’s and Cal’s at school.’
‘Say no more. Another troublemaker.’
‘Actually, she’s the town librarian now,’ I told him. ‘Very respectable.’
He grunted. ‘At least one of you grew up and got a proper job.’
Dawn frowned. ‘You know Taylor makes way more than I do, right? And has won numerous industry awards, not to mention the fact that she owns her own business. She’s accomplished way more than most of our high school year has, so if anyone has a “proper” job, it’s her.’
‘I’ll wait for you at the car,’ he said, ignoring her. ‘Don’t be too long, we need to get to the pharmacy before it closes. And you need to bring me back in two days to get my ears cleaned out.’
‘Again? I’m sure Mom told me you had that done not long ago. I remember because it was disgusting, and I told her never to mention it to me ever again.’
‘I get a lot of buildup.’
‘Do me a favor and never say that again, either.’
‘Just you wait until you get old,’ he complained, shuffling off. ‘It’s no picnic. My eyes need checking, my ears need cleaning, my hip hurts, and now I’m retaining too much fluid, apparently.’
The complaints continued until he was out the door.
‘Man,’ Dawn said, shaking her head. ‘That guy hasn’t changed at all.’
I stared at her, my eyebrows arched, questioning.
‘What?’
‘How do you know all that stuff about me?’
She shrugged. ‘I followed you on social years ago.’
I got a sinking feeling. ‘Did I follow you back?’
‘No. But that’s OK.’
‘It wasn’t intentional,’ I promised her, digging my phone out of my pocket. ‘I get a lot of notifications. Half the time I don’t even bother checking them, so I must have missed that one. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine. It’s not like I post anything newsworthy, anyway. Photos of my cat, mostly. Books I’m reading. Photos of my cat pretending to read the books I’m reading.’
I typed her name into the search bar on Instagram, scrolling until I saw one with a cat for the profile picture. ‘Is that you?’ I asked, showing her.
‘Sure is,’ she confirmed. ‘That’s Ziggy, my calico cat. I know, I’ve turned into the stereotypical single librarian with a cat.’ She brightened. ‘But at least I only have one. That’s got to count for something, right?’
I clicked the follow back button. ‘Done.’
‘You didn’t have to do that just because I’m standing in front of you.’
‘I know. I want to keep in touch.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t.’
‘That’s OK. I know things weren’t exactly easy when you left. I wish things hadn’t gone down that night the way they did.’
I swallowed hard. ‘I’ve spent the last fourteen years wishing that too.’
She reached out and gave my arm a squeeze. ‘I’m really glad I ran into you. We should catch up for coffee before you go.’
I smiled. ‘I’d like that.’
The doctor emerged from the examination room and checked the file in her hand.
‘Dawn Porter.’
‘That’s me,’ Dawn said. ‘I’d better go.’
‘Yeah I’d better get going too. Ray hates waiting.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Ray hates everything.’