The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [60]
“I'm sorry, Carol. I am, but that was an awfully long time ago. And besides, you're mixing up two totally different things.”
“No, Nora. I'm just being honest. Not like you and Mom, all your little secrets, then expecting me to come pick up the pieces. And don't think I—”
“I can't hear you,” she lies. “You're breaking up, Carol.” She holds the phone at arm's length while her sister rages on. She hangs up and the phone rings seconds later. She won't answer.
In the days that follow, memory and regret lodge in her heart like a wide, thick blade that constantly aches. Eddie Hawkins has become the provenance of all sorrow and fear, the pain of her marriage. Her mother's loneliness. Her sister's bitterness. If only she'd never met him. If only he'd go away.
liver is in the hospital. He and Annette had just been seated for dinner at the Renwood Club when the numbness hit. The waiter was handing them menus, but Oliver could only stare across the table at Annette, unable to lift his arm. When he tried to speak his garbled words made no sense. Nora is in the emergency room lobby. She has been on the phone for the last fifteen minutes, trying to track down Ken, but no one has seen him. His cell phone must still be off because the voice mail cue starts with the first ring. The lobby door flies open and Stephen rushes in. She tells him the little she knows. Annette has come out twice to brief her. Oliver's CAT scan showed there wasn't any bleeding, so the doctors are giving him tPA to break up any other clots.
“I knew this would happen. These weird pains he's been getting. Like tingling in his arms and legs. And here.” Stephen touches his neck, the carotid artery. “I told him, do something. Don't just sit there. But he's a mess. The man's a mess. An absolute mess. He and his brother, they just stay mired.”
Mired? Her marriage, is that what he means? But this isn't the time to lash back. With distress, Stephen's emotional volatility rages. He and Oliver are not only first cousins born weeks apart, but they were raised almost as brothers. Stephen's mother and Oliver's mother were identical twins who did everything together until Stephen's mother died of a burst appendix when he was twelve. With his own father long divorced and remarried, Stephen was brought up by his aunt Addie and uncle James, Oliver and Ken's parents. When he was seventeen he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for months. After years of therapy and, more recently, antidepressants and a long relationship with unflappable Donald, he is far more stable and happy.
“If anything happens to him,” Stephen declares, shaking his fist. “I don't know. I don't know what I'll do.”
“Oh, Stephen, I know.” She holds his hand in hers. As exasperating as she has found his snarly pettiness through the years, it is impossible to stay mad for long. She has grown deeply fond of him in spite of his early coldness to her, all part of his unbreachable loyalty to family. His first allegiance was to Robin, “Kenny's little friend,” he used to call her. Being that much older, Stephen had known Robin since she was a child. But Nora and Stephen quickly found common ground, the death of a parent in their early adolescence. “But we mustn't think like that,” she says to soothe him now as he fears the loss of one of his two closest living relatives. “The EMTs got him here right away. And there's so much more they can do now.”
“I blame myself,” Stephen says with a gasp, covering his mouth for a moment to compose himself. “Why didn't I do something? Why did I just let it happen?” His ragged whisper echoes past confidences. His beautiful mother's sudden