Between Sisters

Claire’s gut was clenched, her mind was clouded, but her heart was crystal clear. “What would I do without you?”

“The same thing I’d do without you—drink too much and whine to strangers. ”

Claire heard the tiny thread of depression in Gina’s voice. It made her love her friend all the more for listening to her problems while her own whole world was caving in. “How are you doing?”

“This day or this week? I’ve got more mood swings than a teenager, and my ass is starting to look like a Buick. ”

“No jokes, Gigi. How are you?”

She sighed. “Shitty. Rex came by last night. The son of a bitch has lost about ten pounds and dyed his hair. Pretty soon he’ll ask me to call him the Rexster again. ” She paused. “He wants to marry that woman. ”

“Ouch. ”

“Ouch with a blowtorch. I’m remembering the day he proposed to me, and he’s pricing diamonds. It hurts like hell. But you haven’t heard the real news: Joey’s back. ”

“You’re kidding. Where’s he been?”

There was a pause, the sound of movement, then Gina lowered her voice. “I don’t know. Here and there, he says. He looks bad. Older. He got home yesterday. He’s been asleep for almost thirteen hours. Honestly, I hope I never love anyone as much as he loved Diana. ”

“What’s he going to do?”

“I don’t know. I said he could stay here, but he won’t. He’s like some animal that’s been in the wild too long. And this house brings back a lot of memories. He stared at the picture of my wedding for almost an hour. Honest to God, I wanted to cry. ”

“Give him my love. ”

“You got it. ”

They talked for a few more minutes about ordinary, everyday things. By the time they hung up, Claire felt better. The ground beneath her feet felt firm again. Thinking about Joe and Diana helped, too. With everything that had gone wrong between those two, they still were proof that love could be real.

She looked down at her left hand, at the engagement ring she wore. It was a strip of silver foil, carefully folded and twisted around he

r finger.

She refused to think of what her sister would say about it, and remembered instead how she’d felt when Bobby put it there.

Marry me, he’d said, on bended knee. She’d known she should smile gently, say, Oh, Bobby, of course not. We barely know each other.

But she couldn’t say those words. His dark eyes had been filled with the kind of love she’d only dreamed of, and she’d been lost. Her rational self—the part that had been alone for almost three dozen years and become a single parent—had warned her not to be a fool.

Ah, but her heart. That tender organ would not be ignored. She was in love. So much so that it felt like drowning.

Gina was right. This love was a gift she’d been given, one she’d stopped looking for and almost stopped believing in. She wouldn’t turn away from it because she was afraid. One thing motherhood had taught her—love required boldness. And fear simply came with the package.

She grabbed her sweater off the back of the sofa and slipped it over her shoulders, then she went outside.

Night had almost completely fallen now; darkness enveloped the salmon-hued granite peaks. To the tourists who sat around their campfires making s’mores and roasting hot dogs, it seemed like a quiet time in this patch of green tucked up against the mountains’ vertical walls. The locals knew better. Within walking distance, there was a whole world unseen by the casual observer, unheard by those who spent their lives listening on telephones and watching computer screens.

On peaks nearby, ones with names like Formidable, Terror, and Despair, the glaciers were never still, never silent. They slid forward, groaning, creaking, crunching every rock in their path. Even the heat of an August sun couldn’t melt them away, and along the banks of the mighty Skykomish, just beyond where the humans walked, a thousand species of wildlife preyed on one another.

Yet the night felt still and calm; the air smelled of pine needles and drying grass. It was that time of year when, for a few weeks, the lawns in town would turn brittle and brown. That rarest of times in the Northwest—a patch of dry.

She heard the quiet buzz of the campers’ dinner conversations, punctuated every now and then by a barking dog or a child’s high-pitched giggle. Underneath it all, as steady and familiar as the beating of her heart, was the chattering of the river. These sounds had become the music of her youth, long ago replacing the jumbled cacophony of raucous music that had been Mama’s soundtrack.

She didn’t bother with shoes. Barefoot, her soles toughened by summers spent along this river’s banks, she strolled past the empty pool. In the small, shingled pool house, the filter’s motor thumped on, buzzing. A pair of inner tubes—one shocking pink and one lime green—floated on the darkening water.

She made her nightly rounds slowly, stopping to talk to several of their guests, even sharing a glass of wine with Wendy and Jeff Goldstein at campsite thirteen.

It was completely dark by the time she reached the small row of cabins on the property’s eastern edge. All of the windows glowed with fuzzy golden light.