On Mystic Lake

Their days together followed a comfortable routine. Annie arrived early and spent the day with Izzy, playing, reading, walking around the forest. In the early evening, she made a hot dinner for the two of them, and afterward, they played board games or watched videos until bedtime.

Every night, Annie tucked Izzy into bed and kissed her good night.

Nick consistently missed dinner, forgot to call, and showed up around nine o’clock, smelling of smoke and booze. Even when he promised to be home, as he did almost every night, he didn’t make it.

She was tired of making excuses for him. Once again, it was bedtime and this beautiful child was going to have to go to bed without a kiss from her father.

She glanced at Izzy, who stood now at the big picture window, staring out at the falling night. She’d been stationed there for almost thirty minutes, no doubt listening for the quiet purr of her dad’s patrol car.

She went to Izzy and knelt beside her on the hardwood floor. She chose her words with care. “When I was a little girl, my mom died. It made my daddy and me very quiet for a long time. When my dad saw me, all he could think about was my mama, and the hurt made him stop looking at me. ”

Izzy’s brown eyes filled with tears. Her lower lip trembled and she bit down on it.

Annie reached up and caught a single tear on the tip of her finger. “My daddy came back to me, though. It took a while, but he came back because he loved me. Just like your daddy loves you. ”

Annie waited for Izzy to respond—so long the waiting became noticeable. Then she smiled and pushed to her feet. Her knees popped and cracked at the suddenness of her movement. “Come on, pumpkin. Let’s get you to bed. ” She started to walk toward the stairs.

Izzy fell into step beside her. Annie slowed her steps to match the child’s as they climbed the stairs. Halfway up, Izzy inched closer and slid her hand into Annie’s. It was the first time Izzy had touched her.

Annie clung to the tiny fingers, squeezing gently. That’s it, Izzy . . . keep reaching out. I won’t let you fall.

Upstairs, after Izzy brushed her teeth, they knelt beside the bed together. Annie recited the “Now-I-lay-me” prayer and then tucked Izzy into bed, kissing her forehead. After a quiet moment, she went to the rocking chair by the window and sat down.

The chair made a soft ka-thump, ka-thump on the wooden floor. Her gaze moved from Izzy to the window. She stared out at the glittering moonlit lake, listening to the slow evening-out of the girl’s breathing.

As so often happened, the nightly ritual made Annie remember. When her own mother had died, she’d been much too young to handle her grief. All she knew was that one day her world was bright and shining and filled with love, and the next, everything fell into a gloomy, saddened, tear-stained landscape. She could still recall how much it had scared her to see her father cry.

That was when the blueprint of her life had been drawn. She’d become a good little girl who never cried, never complained, never asked uncomfortable questions.

It had taken her years to grieve. Her first year away from home had been incredibly lonely. Stanford was no place for a small-town millworker’s daughter. It had shown her—for the first time—that she was poor and her family uneducated.

Her love for Hank was the only reason she stayed at that big, unwelcoming school. She knew how much it meant to him that she was the first Bourne to attend college. And so she kept her head down and her shoulders hunched and she did her best to fit in. But the loneliness was often overwhelming.

One day she started her car, and the sound of the engine triggered something. The memory was as unexpected as a snowstorm in July. All at once, she felt her mother beside her in the car, and Annie’s Volkswagen “Bug” had become the old station wagon they’d once had, the one with the wood-grain strip along the side. She didn’t know where they’d been going, she and her mom, or what they’d talked about, and she realized with a sharp, sudden pain that she couldn’t recall the sound of her mother’s voice. The more she tried to slip into the moment, to immerse herself in the memory, the more flat and one dimensional it had become.

Until that moment, she had actually—naively—thought she’d overcome the death of her mother, but on that day, more than ten years after they’d placed her mother’s coffin in the cold, dark ground, Annie fell apart. She cried for all the missed moments—the nighttime kisses, the spontaneous hugs, the joy that would never be as complete again. She grieved most of all for the loss of her childhood innocence, which had been taken on a rainy day without warning, leaving behind an adult in a child’s body, a girl who knew that life was unfair and love could break your heart, and mostly, that nothing was worse than being left behind by the one you loved.

It took her several days to master her grief, and even then control was tissue-thin, a layer of brittle ice on a cold, black body of water. It was not surprising that she fell in love almost immediately after that. She had been a walking wound of loneliness, and caretaking was the only way she knew to fill the void in her soul. When she met Blake, she showered him with all the pent-up longing and love that was inside her.

Annie slowly got out of the rocker and tiptoed to the bed. Izzy was sleeping peacefully. Annie wondered if the child was blessed with dreams in which Kathy appeared; Annie herself was rarely so lucky.

She was halfway down the stairs when the phone rang. She jumped down the last few risers and dove for the phone, answering it on the third ring. “Nick?”

There was a moment of silence, then a woman’s voice said, “Nick?”

Annie winced. “Hi, Terri. ”

“Oh, no you don’t, don’t you dare act like this is a normal conversation. Who in the hell is Nick and where are you? I called Hank and he gave me this number. ”

Annie sank onto the sofa and tucked her knees up underneath her. “It’s nothing, really. I’m baby-sitting for an old friend and he’s late getting home. ”

“I had hoped you’d changed. A little bit, at least. ”

“What do you mean?”

“You just spent twenty years waiting for a man to come home—now you’re waiting for another man? That’s insane. ”

It was insane. Why hadn’t Annie seen that on her own? It made her angry suddenly, both that she’d lost the ability to really get mad, and that she’d allowed herself to take from Nick what she’d spent a lifetime accepting from Blake. Excuses and lies. “Yeah,” she muttered more to herself than to Terri. “I only have to take this kind of shit from men I’m in love with. ”