The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [59]
“Maybe you should see someone, Carol. A therapist, someone you could talk to,” she says with a twinge of hypocrisy.
“Could you come, Nora? We wouldn't have to go anywhere, just sit by the pool and talk. I'd really like that.”
“I can't, Carol. I wish I could, but I can't. Things're just so … so up in the air right now. So busy.” Busy trying to hold her own life together. Busy trying to stave off the looming storm that is Eddie Hawkins.
“That's right. I'm sorry, I wasn't even thinking of your job.”
“It's not just that.”
“You were so smart to go back to work. I wish I had. I should have, but I didn't want it to be like Mom. I wanted to be there for the kids, and for Les. But all I did was make him carry the whole load, and now look what I'm left with. Nothing!”
“That's not true.” Nora can't think of a way to steer the conversation back, twenty-six years.
“I've been thinking of taking a trip.”
“You should. Get your mind off things.”
“Maybe I'll come see you.” Carol poses it as a question. A timid one.
“That would be … nice.” Great idea, she should have said. Or wonderful. Or when, soon, I hope. Instead she is asking her sister if she remembers anything of that long-ago night when she called her frantic mother, needing help to get home.
“Well, yeah, that Mom was beside herself. Out of her mind. For an entire week she just sat by the phone.”
“I know. God, when I think of it, how upset she must have been. But did she ever say anything? You know, details like, where I ended up. What state I was in.”
“You mean you don't even know?”
“It's just that I'm having a hard time remembering.”
“What were you, on drugs or something?”
Nora bristles with her sister's scorn. Obviously Carol finds this conversation therapeutic, restorative to be back on old footing, good sister-bad sister.
“So you don't know? Mom never said?”
“She was a wreck. I mean, you and everything else that was screwy in her life.”
“Poor Mom.”
“There I was, three and a half months pregnant, but once again it was ‘Oh, Carol, please. I need your help.’ I flew home. Don't you remember?”
Nora squirms. Yes, now she does. How could she have forgotten? The first of Carol's many miscarriages, and it happened the very day Nora arrived on the bus. Her poor, poor mother, Nora keeps thinking. She never should have called Carol. The psyche protects itself by forgetting. The last thing she wants to remember is the pain she caused her mother, alone and having to deal with one daughter a runaway, the other losing her first pregnancy.
“I never should've gone. Les kept telling me,” Carol is saying. “But it was all such a mess. That whole thing with you and what's-his-name, that teacher, and him coming on to Mom. No wonder you ran away. I mean, God, what was she thinking? He was closer in age to you than her, that's what happened!”
“That was a real hard time for Mom.” Nora cringes with the memory. Mr. Blanchard, her handsome, young English teacher.
Carol laughs. “I'll say, dating a pervert.”
“He wasn't a pervert.”
“Oh, really? Then what was that whole trashy mess all about? All the screaming and crying?”
Wincing, she holds her head. “Do you mind, Carol? I really don't feel like talking about all that. I mean, why? What's the point?”
“You're the one that brought it up, asking me what state you ended up in, for godsake!”
“I'm sorry, but you're confusing things. You weren't there when it happened, the teacher, I mean.”
“No, I'm just the one you kept calling night after night, remember? Crying, sobbing into the phone, telling me how you were going to kill yourself if Mom said anything to him. And then she'd call and tell me how it was her mandated duty, her professional responsibility.