Chapter 38 Lindy
Lindy
After Hailey and Jack, and Tiffany and Raj, set out for their designated tasks and Greta went up to bed, Lindy called Cody
to confess. No answer. She left a voicemail just asking him to call, but he was no doubt out with friends and likely wouldn’t
call back till late tomorrow morning.
At least he’d be preserved from the worst awhile longer—and she would be preserved from what he’d think of her when he learned
it.
Then she swallowed her pride and called the state police again. She was grateful it was a woman who answered, and that, when
Lindy explained what had happened—her mistaken assumption about the affair—the officer made no comment, just took down the
information about David’s vehicle again and told her the same thing that other officers had before: Because David had not
been known to be in distress prior to his vanishing, he wasn’t eligible to be placed on the missing person’s registry.
Lindy knew she should go over to the yellow cottage to confess to Kate and Josh, too, but it was late.
If the kids weren’t in bed yet, she might rile them up just as they were winding down.
Either that or the whole house might already be sleeping.
Or, if Kate was up, a confession from Lindy would definitely trigger her into drinking.
Lindy decided to wait till morning.
But Innisfree was quiet and dark, and she didn’t know what to do. She wished her children would come back. She just wanted
them in the same house, the same room . . .
But would they ever come back, truly, now? Would they ever trust her again? Emma and Eli had agreed to go along with her lie
the other day, but now they were furious with her for having put them in that position. And who could blame them? She was
their mom, so they’d trusted her to guide them to do the right thing—and she had steered them entirely wrong, instead.
She thought of Tiffany’s theory that David could have simply . . . turned down a different road. On the spur of the moment,
without letting anyone know?
In some ways, it was plausible. Often, he and Lindy would decide over dinner which Netflix DVD to watch, he’d go into the
den to start it while she made popcorn, and by the time she got in there, he would have something else loaded up. It drove
her totally nuts. So, sure, it was possible to imagine that, on his drive up to The Cove last Saturday, he could’ve just changed
his mind and headed somewhere else.
But, alone in a room after dark, having heard nothing from him in nearly six days, it was almost impossible to believe.
She was grateful when Tiffany and Raj came back.
They reported that none of the hospitals in the entire state of Maine had any record of David.
Lindy’s emotions were so dulled with shock that she felt only a slight flare of relief, a tiny wave of disappointment.
She thanked them, said they should all try to get some sleep, and showed them to the attic, trying not to think about the gun she knew her mother had stashed somewhere in the storage area.
Raj hauled in air mattresses and sleeping bags from their car, joking this was “certainly different” from camping in Bar Harbor as they’d planned, but “no doubt more interesting!” Then he sobered and said he hoped everything would be resolved quickly.
“Pardon me, pardon me,” he said, disappearing up the stairs loaded down with gear, and Lindy realized then that Innisfree was changing already, that the only people in the house now were practically strangers—other than her mother, who was making plans to leave her, and her father, whose mind was leaving him.
Innisfree. She had never dreamed she would lose it. Not once had she imagined even the possibility, and, as with her emotions
over David, and over her father, the loss was too profound to be believed.
She got ready for bed, hoping Hailey would come home soon and praying that somehow, somehow, after all this time, David might
just call out of the blue. It was possible, wasn’t it? Trying to tell herself it was, she went back downstairs to the couch
and, when the phone rang a few minutes later, her heart took off in a stampede.
Her hand trembled as she picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Kaufmann?” As she recognized Noah’s voice, her body collapsed with disappointment. He politely asked to speak with Hailey,
saying he was at work and had only a minute.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Noah,” Lindy said, and her voice was shaking with the noise of her own broken heart. The last thing she
wanted was for her daughter’s heart to be broken, too, and she didn’t think it would do anybody any good if Noah learned that
Hailey was over at Jack’s house right now. “Hailey’s asleep, and I don’t want to wake her if you don’t really have time to
talk.” Only after the lie was out of her mouth did she realize: another one. They seemed to be coming easier and easier.
“Well,” Noah snapped. “Tell her I called, and I’ll talk to her tomorrow.” In his voice was a barely contained rage. “Thanks,”
he remembered to say, then the line went dead.
Lindy hung up the receiver and lay awake a long time in the overwhelming quiet, stewing over whether the wedding that she’d been visualizing and planning all this time would actually happen (it was not seeming likely) and wondering if, after all these years, she was married to a stranger who would do incalculable harm intentionally, or to the boy she’d known a long time ago—and which was the more dangerous thing.
She’d been so hellbent on saving David all these years. She’d never imagined there would be a need to save herself—from him.
And she didn’t know what she would do if it turned out David had truly left her for good and she was a widow, suddenly. She
didn’t feel old enough to be a widow, but nothing made sense right now, so it seemed anything could be true. And if David
was dead—she had to admit it to herself, finally—it was the exact thing she’d been fearing since she was fifteen years old.
She was awake again in the dusky light of dawn as her mother came quietly down the stairs and headed to the kitchen to make
coffee. Hailey hadn’t come in yet from Seabreeze, which gave Lindy an unsettled feeling, and she was glad to think of seeing
her mother, who was one of the few people in the family who didn’t seem to be mad at her right now.
Lindy waited for Greta to cross to the front of the cottage, heading for the deck and the sunrise. “Mom?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to wake you,” Greta said softly, with a mild note of alarm.
“You didn’t.” Lindy scooted closer to the back of the couch so her mother could sit beside her again, the way she had the
other morning when Lindy had first told her that David was missing, that David hadn’t shown up for his own birthday party.
That felt like years ago.
Greta sat down, set her coffee on the table, and reached to hold Lindy’s hand atop the blanket. “My poor girl.”
Lindy blinked back tears. “Poor you,” she managed to say. “Your fiftieth anniversary.” They’d never even eaten dinner last
night, let alone had celebratory lobsters.
Greta smiled a little. “It’s all right. As long as I still have Tom, everything’s all right.”
Lindy squeezed her mother’s hand, wanting to cry again at the thought of her father slipping away, even as she remembered the sight of her mother with the gun.
Was everything “all right,” really? To be losing your husband of fifty years this way must be simply intolerable. Just as bad,
if not worse, as what Lindy was going through right now.
The gun, she had to think, must have been a cry for help.
But she didn’t know how to ask her mother about the more profound things, so she just spoke bluntly about the most concrete.
“Mom. Why did you pull a gun on Noah? Why do you even have a gun?”
Greta gave another small, involuntary smile and pulled her hand from Lindy’s. She folded her hands in her lap and looked down
at them.
Lindy propped herself up. “You said it’s been here a long time. Does Dad know about it? Seriously, you’re not planning to
hurt yourself, are you? Or . . . hurt Dad?”
Greta looked at her then, still smiling slightly. “That’s a lot of questions for so early in the morning after a night like
the night you had.” She spoke rhythmically, as if she were playing a sonata, and Lindy had a sudden flash of memory of Greta
reading poems to her when she was a very little girl. She’d forgotten about that. Her favorite had been one about a witch.
What was that? She would have to ask her mother. But not now. (Those words Greta had just spoken had not been reassuring.)
“Please answer me, Mom. No more secrets, remember? We agreed.”
Greta sighed. Her eyes flashed to her coffee on the table and then to the deck outside, as if she was craving escape. Then
she looked back down. “Your uncle Harrison gave it to me. For protection. Right after the war. We put it in the attic, and
I hardly ever thought about it again.”
Greta had said before that the gun had always been up there; still, Lindy’s heart thundered. “Does it work? I mean, the boys
have been staying up there since they were little. You had a gun up there that whole time?”
“I suppose it works. But it was in a place where they never would have found it.”
“Who’s to say they wouldn’t have found it!” Lindy had managed to go a whole two minutes without being angry at her mother, but that was over now.
“Oh, please, Lindy. You don’t . . . you don’t understand.”
“Was that the reason you didn’t want me to go up there when I was a kid? Was that the reason you wouldn’t let it be my room?”
“No. No, it wasn’t.”
There was something defeated-seeming in her mother’s manner that made Lindy take pity on her, dial it down a notch. She reminded
herself about the anniversary. About everything her mother was losing, the gradual eking away of it, which must have felt
like a slow-drip torture. “Okay. Well. We have to get it out of there. Before the boys come back.” Not that they were children
anymore, but still. “Okay? You’ll show me where it is, and we’ll get rid of it?”
“I . . . I don’t like to go up there . . .” Greta began, but then stopped herself.
“What is it, Mom?”
Greta didn’t answer, just shook her head.
“Oh, Mom.” Lindy sighed.
“I . . . I’m sorry,” Greta said, and Lindy would have expected there to be more, but Greta said nothing else. And Lindy saw
the shadow of something long-ago on her mother’s face, and it spurred a new memory.
The firelight flickered on David’s face. It was 1985, seven weeks after David had gotten out of the hospital in Blue Hill.
He was studying hard for the bar exam, eating every hamburger and steak his mother put in front of him, and walking a mile
or two a day on his aching knee.
Lindy had hesitated to go back up into the woods, to the old campsite, but David had insisted.
Toby and Mike weren’t around anymore; they hadn’t been in a long time.
Toby’s family had sold their place, and Mike, having headed to college in Seattle some years ago, hadn’t been back in four or five summers.
The campsite was overgrown; Lindy and David had had to clean fallen branches and leaves out of the old fire ring.
It had been seven years since David had slit his wrist inside the tent up here—so why did the place still feel haunted? Lindy
was not going to spend the night up here, ever. She would insist he didn’t, either.
“I still like it up here,” he was saying. “It was never that I didn’t like it.”
Lindy shivered a little. She still loved The Cove, loved Innisfree more than any place else in the world, but she would really
be glad to have seen the last of this old campsite.
David had seen the shiver. “I think it’s important to confront things,” he said. “Otherwise, they lurk. They attack you from
behind.”
Lindy flinched at the sounds of a branch cracking, leaves rustling, in the forest nearby. She could only hope it was a squirrel.
“I don’t like to think that’s true,” she said.
“I don’t like to feel surrounded,” David went on. “I like to be out at the edge of things. That’s why I went all the way to
Eastport, this last time. It’s the first place in the United States to see the sun rise, you know? And I thought if I could
get to the end of the road, and to the beginning of something else, I’d feel better.”
This made no sense to Lindy. She cupped her hand over her belly. She hadn’t told David yet; she wouldn’t mention even the
possibility of the baby till she was a hundred percent sure. “But, at the end of the road, you’ve got nowhere left to go.”
“Exactly,” David said. “It’s where you make your last stand.”