Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [4]
The shuffling downstairs faded into the kitchen. She stared at the floor. “They’re good people. They do this every day. We’ve only got to do it once.”
“Yeah…and once is enough.”
Our bed was one of those old, four-poster, Southern things that Southern women go gaga over. Dark mahogany, it stood about four feet off the ground, was bookended by steps on either side and Lord help you if you rolled off it at night. There were two advantages: Abbie slept there, and when I laid on my side, my line of sight was above the windowsill, giving me a view of Charleston Harbor.
She stared out the window where all the world rolled out as a map, the green and red channel lights blinking back. Red right return. She slid her fingers into mine. “How’s she look up there?”
I loosened the scarf and let it fall down across her shoulders. “Beautiful.”
She rolled toward me, placed her head on my chest and ran her fingers inside my button-down where both my chest hairs grew. She shook her head. “You need to get your head examined.”
“Funny. Your father just told me the same thing.” I stared back out across the water, blindly running my finger along the outline of her ear and neck. A shrimp boat was working her way out to sea. “Actually, he’s been telling you that for almost fourteen years.”
“You’d think by now, I’d listen.” The boom lights of the shrimp boat rolled slowly east to west, seeming to skim the ocean’s surface as she reached the larger swells.
Her eyes lay sunken, the lids dark and dim, as if eye shadow had been tatooed in. “Promise me one thing,” she said.
“I already did that.”
“I’m being serious.”
“Okay, but not if it involves your dad.” She pressed thumb to index finger, snatched down and plucked out one of my chest hairs. “Hey”—I rubbed my chest—“it’s not like I’ve got a surplus of those things.”
Her fingers, like her legs, were long. Now that they were skinnier, they seemed even longer. She pointed in my face. “You finished?” She fingered a circle around the opening in my shirt. “’Cause I see one more.”
That’s my Abbie. Thirty pounds lighter and still making jokes. And that right there is what I held to. That thing. That finger in the face—the one that threatened strength, promised humor and said “I love you more than me.”
She scratched my chest and nodded at the picture of her father. “You think you two will ever talk?” I studied the picture. We had taken it last Easter as he christened his new darling, Reel Estate. He stood, broken bottle held by the neck, champagne dripping off the bow, white hair ruffled by the sea breeze. Under other circumstances, I would have liked him, and sometimes I think he would have liked me.
I glanced at his picture on her dresser. “Oh, I’m sure he’ll talk.”
“You two are more alike than you think.”
“Please…”
“I’m serious.”
She was right. “He still rubs me the wrong way.”
“Well, me too, but he’s still Daddy.”
We laid in the darkness listening to the footsteps of well-intentioned and unwelcome strangers shuffling below us. “You’d think,” I said, staring at the sound coming up through the floor, “they’d come up with a better name than ‘hospice.’”
She rolled her eyes. “How’s that?”
“It just sounds so…” I trailed off.
We sat awhile longer. “Did Ruddy call?”
I nodded.
“All three?”
I nodded again.
“No better?”
I shook my head.
“What about the guy at Harvard?”
“We talked yesterday. They’re still a few months out from starting that trial.”
“Sloan-Kettering?”
I shook my head.
“What about the website?” Two years ago, we’d created a website for people with Abbie’s condition. It had become a clearinghouse of information. We gleaned a lot from it. Got to know a lot of people who led us to a lot of really knowledgeable people. A great resource.
“No.”
“Well, that just sucks.”
“You took the words right