She said it as though she were trying to convince herself. Paul reached for her hand.
"Adrienne... last night, after you went to sleep, I got to thinking that maybe I could stay a little while longer. Another month or two isn't going to make much difference, and that way we could be together--"
She shook her head, cutting him off.
"No," she said. "You can't do that to Mark. Not after all that you two have been through. And you need this, Paul. It's been eating you up; if you don't go now, part of me wonders if you ever will. Spending more time with me isn't going to make it any easier to say good-bye when the time comes, and I couldn't live with myself knowing that I was the one who kept you and your son apart. Even if we planned for your leaving the next time, I'd still cry then, too."
She flashed a brave smile before going on. "You can't stay. We both knew you were leaving before the we part of us even began. Even though it's hard, both of us also know it's the right thing to do--that's the way it is when you're a parent. Sometimes there are sacrifices you have to make, and this is one of them."
He nodded, his lips pressed together. He knew she was right but wished desperately that she wasn't.
"Will you promise that you'll wait for me?" he asked finally, his voice ragged.
"Of course. If I thought you were leaving forever, I'd be crying so hard, we'd have to eat breakfast in a rowboat."
Despite everything he laughed, and Adrienne leaned into him. She kissed him before letting him hold her. He could feel the warmth of her body, smell the faintest trace of perfume. She felt so good in his arms. So perfect.
"I don't know how or why it happened, but I think I was meant to come here," he said. "To meet you. For so many years, I've been missing something in my life, but I didn't know what it was. And now I do."
She closed her eyes. "Me too," she whispered.
He kissed her hair, then rested his cheek against her.
"Will you miss me?"
Adrienne forced herself to smile. "Every single minute."
They had breakfast together. Adrienne wasn't hungry, but she forced herself to eat, forced herself to smile now and then. Paul picked at his food, taking longer than usual to clean his plate, and when they were finished, they brought the dishes to the sink.
It was almost nine o'clock, and Paul led her past the front desk toward the door. He lifted one duffel bag at a time to sling over his shoulders; Adrienne held the leather pouch with his tickets and passport, which she handed to him.
"I guess this is it," he said.
Adrienne pressed her lips together. Like hers, Paul's eyes were red around the edges, and he kept them downcast, as if trying to hide them.
"You know how to reach me at the clinic. I don't know how good the mail service is, but letters should reach me. Mark's always gotten everything Martha has sent him."
"Thanks."
He shook the pouch. "I have your address, too, in here. I'll write to you when I get there. And call, too, when I get the chance."
"Okay."
He reached out to touch her cheek, and she leaned into his hand. They both knew there wasn't anything more to say.
She followed him out the door and down the steps, watching as he loaded the duffel bags into the backseat of the car. After closing the door, he stared at her a long time, unwilling to break the connection, wishing again that he didn't have to go. Finally he moved toward her, kissed her on both cheeks and on her lips. He took her in his arms.
Adrienne squeezed her eyes shut. He wasn't leaving forever, she told herself. They were meant for each other; they would have all the time in the world when he got back. They would grow old together. She'd lived this long without him already--what was one more year, right?
But it wasn't that easy. She knew that if her children were older, she would join him in Ecuador. If his son didn't need him, he could stay here, with her. Their lives were diverging because of responsibilities to others, and it suddenly seemed cruelly unfair to Adrienne. How could their chance at happiness come down to this?
Paul took a deep breath and finally moved away. He glanced to the side for a moment, then back at her, dabbing at his eyes.
She followed him around to the driver's side and watched as he got in. With a weak smile, he put the key in the ignition and turned it, revving the engine to life. She stepped back from the open door and he closed it, then rolled down the window.
"One year," he said, "and I'll be back. You have my word on that."
"One year," she whispered in response.
He gave her a sad smile, then put the car in reverse, and with that, the car began backing out. She turned to watch him, aching inside as he stared back at her.
The car turned as it reached the highway, and he pressed his hand to the glass one last time. Adrienne raised her hand, watching the car roll forward, away from Rodanthe, away from her.
She stood in the drive as the car grew smaller in the distance and the noise of the engine faded away. Then, a moment later, he was gone, as if he'd never been there at all.
The morning was crisp, blue skies with puffs of white. A flock of terns flew overhead. Purple and yellow pansies had opened their petals to the sun. Adrienne turned and made her way toward the door.
Inside, it looked the same as the day she'd arrived. Nothing was out of place. He'd cleaned the fireplace yesterday and stacked new cords of wood beside it; the rockers had been put back into their original position. The front desk looked orderly, with every key back in its place.
But the smell remained. The smell of their breakfast together, the smell of aftershave, the smell of him, lingering on her hands and on her face and on her clothes.
It was too much for Adrienne, and the noises of the Inn at Rodanthe were no longer what they had once been. No longer were there echoes of quiet conversations, or the sound of water rushing through the pipes, or the rhythm of footfalls as he moved about in his room. Gone was the roar of waves and the persistent drumming of the storm, the crackling of the fire. Instead, the Inn was filled with the sounds of a woman who wanted only to be comforted by the man she loved, a woman who could do nothing else but cry.
Sixteen
Rocky Mount, 2002
Adrienne had finished her story, and her throat was dry. Despite the breezy effects of a single glass of wine, she could feel the ache in her back from sitting in one position too long. She shifted in her chair, felt a tinge of pain, and recognized it as the beginnings of arthritis. When she'd mentioned it to her physician, he'd made her sit on the table in a room that smelled of ammonia. He'd raised her arms and asked her to bend her knees, then gave her a prescription that she'd never bothered to fill. It wasn't that serious yet, she told herself; besides, she had a theory that once she started taking pills for one ailment, more pills would soon follow for everything else that doomed people of her age. Soon, they'd be coming in the color of rainbows, some taken in the morning, others at night, some with food and some without, and she'd need to tape up a chart on the inside of her medicine cabinet to keep them straight. It was more bother than it was worth.
Amanda was sitting with her head bowed. Adrienne watched her, knowing the questions would come. They were inevitable, but she hoped they wouldn't come immediately. She needed time to collect her thoughts, so she could finish what she'd started.
She was glad Amanda had agreed to meet her here, at the house. She'd lived here for over thirty years, and it was home to her, even more than the place she'd lived as a child. Granted, some of the doors hung crookedly, the carpet was worn paper thin in the hallway, and the colors of the bathroom tiles had been out of style for years, but there was something reassuring about knowing that she could find camping gear in the far left corner of the attic or that the heat pump would trip the fuse the first time it was used in the winter. This place had habits; so did she, and over the years, she supposed they'd meshed in such a way as to make her life more predictable and oddly comforting.
It was the same in the kitche
n. Both Matt and Dan had been offering to have it remodeled for the last couple of years, and for her birthday they'd arranged to have a contractor come through to look the place over. He'd tapped on doors, jabbed his screwdriver in the corners of the cracking counters, turned the switches on and off, and whistled under his breath when he saw the ancient range she still used to cook with. In the end, he'd recommended she replace just about everything, then dropped off an estimate and a list of references. Though Adrienne knew her sons had meant well, she told them that they'd be better off saving the money for something they needed for their own families.
Besides, she liked the old kitchen as it was. Updating it would change its character, and she liked the memories forged here. It was here, after all, that they'd spent most of their time together as a family, both before and after Jack had moved out. The kids had done their homework at the table where she now sat; for years, the only phone in the house hung on the wall, and she could still remember those times when she'd seen the cord wedged between the back door and the frame as one of the kids tried his or her best for a bit of privacy by standing on the porch. On the shelf supports in the pantry were the penciled markings that showed how fast and tall the children had grown over the years, and she couldn't imagine wanting to get rid of that for something new and improved, no matter how fancy it was. Unlike the living room, where the television continually blared, or the bedrooms where everyone retreated to be alone, this was the one place everyone had come to talk and to listen, to learn and to teach, to laugh and to cry. This was the place where their home was what it was supposed to be; this was the place where Adrienne had always felt most content.
And this was the place where Amanda would learn who her mother really was.
Adrienne drank the last of her wine and pushed the glass aside. The rain had stopped now, but the drops remaining on the window seemed to bend the light in such a way as to make the world outside into something different, a place she couldn't quite recognize. This didn't surprise her; as she'd grown older, she'd found that as her thoughts drifted to the past, everything around her always seemed to change. Tonight, as she told her story, she felt as if the intervening years had been reversed, and though it was a ridiculous notion, she wondered if her daughter had noticed a newfound youthfulness about her.
No, she decided, she almost certainly hadn't, but that was a product of Amanda's age. Amanda could no more conceive of being sixty than she could of being a man, and Adrienne sometimes wondered when Amanda would realize that for the most part, people weren't all that different. Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: They wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life without turmoil, they wanted to be happy. The difference, Adrienne thought, was that most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed that they lay in the past.
It was true for her as well, at least partly, but as wonderful as the past had been, she refused to allow herself to remain lost in it the way many of her friends had. The past wasn't merely a garden of roses and sunshine; the past held its share of heartbreak as well. She had felt that way about Jack's effects on her life when she'd first arrived at the Inn, and she felt that way about Paul Flanner now.
Tonight, she would cry, but as she'd promised herself every day since he'd left Rodanthe, she would go on. She was a survivor, as her father had told her many times, and though there was a certain satisfaction to that knowledge, it didn't erase the pain or regrets.
Nowadays, she tried to focus on those things that brought her joy. She loved to watch the grandchildren as they discovered the world, she loved to visit with friends and find out what was happening in their lives, she had even come to enjoy the days she spent working in the library.
The work wasn't hard--she now worked in the special reference section, where books couldn't be checked out--and because hours might pass before she was needed for something, it offered her the opportunity to watch people who pushed through the glassed entryway of the building. She'd developed a fondness for that over the years. As people sat at the tables or in the chairs in the quiet rooms, she found it impossible not to try to imagine their lives. She would try to figure out if a person was married or what she did for a living, where in town she lived, or what books might interest her, and occasionally, she would have the chance to find out whether she'd been right. The person might come to her for help in finding a particular book, and she'd strike up a friendly conversation. More often than not, she'd end up being fairly close in her guesses and would wonder how she'd known.
Every now and then, someone would come in who was interested in her. Years ago, those men had usually been older than she was; now they tended to be younger, but either way, the process was the same. Whoever he was, he would start spending time in special reference, would ask a lot of questions, first about books, then about general topics, and finally about her. She didn't mind answering them, and though she never led them on, most of them eventually asked her out. She was always a bit flattered when that happened, but at her core she knew that no matter how wonderful this suitor might be, no matter how much she enjoyed his company, she wouldn't be able to open her heart to him in the way she once had done.
Her time in Rodanthe had changed her in other ways as well. Being with Paul had healed her feelings of loss and betrayal over the divorce and replaced them with something stronger and more graceful. Knowing that she was worthy of being loved made it easier to hold her head high, and as her confidence grew, she was able to speak to Jack without hidden meanings or insinuations, without the blame and regret that she'd been unable to hide in her tone in the past. It happened gradually; he'd call to talk to the kids, and they'd visit for a few minutes before she handed off the phone. Later, she'd begun asking about Linda or his job, or she'd fill him in on what she'd been doing recently. Little by little, Jack seemed to realize that she was no longer the person she used to be. Those visits became more friendly with the passing months and years, and sometimes they called each other just to chat. When his marriage to Linda started to unravel, they'd spent hours on the phone, sometimes until late in the night. When Jack and Linda divorced, Adrienne had been there to help him through his grief, and she'd even allowed him to stay in the guest bedroom when he came to see the kids. Ironically, Linda had left him for another man, and Adrienne could remember sitting with Jack in the living room as he swirled a glass of Scotch. It was past midnight, and he'd been rambling for a few hours about what he was going through, when he finally seemed to realize who it was that was listening to him.
"Did it hurt this bad for you?" he asked.
"Yes," Adrienne said.
"How long did it take to get over it?"
"Three years," she said, "but I was lucky."
Jack nodded. Pressing his lips together, he stared into his drink.
"I'm sorry," he said. "The dumbest thing I ever did was to walk out that door."
Adrienne smiled and patted his knee. "I know. But thank you anyway."
It was about a year after that when Jack called to ask her to dinner. And as she had with all the others, Adrienne politely said no.
Adrienne rose and went to the counter to retrieve the box she'd carried from her bedroom earlier, then came back to the table. By then, Amanda was watching her with almost wary fascination. Adrienne smiled as she reached for her daughter's hand.
As she did, Adrienne could see that sometime during the past couple of hours, Amanda had realized that she didn't know as much about her mother as she thought she did. It was, Adrienne thought, a role reversal of sorts. Amanda had the same look in her eyes that Adrienne sometimes had in the past, when the kids would get together over the holidays and joke about some of the things they'd done when they were younger. It was only a couple of years ago that she'd learned that Matt used to sneak out of his room to go out with friends late at night, or that Amanda had both started and quit smoking as a junior, or that Dan had been
the one who'd started the small fire in the garage that had been blamed on a faulty electrical outlet. She'd laughed along with them, feeling naive at the same time, and she wondered if that was the way Amanda was feeling now.
On the wall, the clock was ticking, the sound regular and even. The heat pump clicked on with a thump. In time, Amanda sighed.
"That was quite a story," she said.
As she spoke, Amanda fingered her wineglass with her free hand, rotating the glass in circles. The wine caught the light, making it shimmer.
"Do Matt and Dan know? I mean, have you told them about it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I'm not sure they need to know." Adrienne smiled. "And besides, I don't know if they would understand, no matter what I told them. They're men, for one thing, and a little on the protective side--I don't want them to think that Paul was simply preying on a lonely woman. Men are like that sometimes--if they meet someone and fall in love, it's real, no matter how fast it happened. But if someone falls for a woman they happen to care about, all they do is question the man's intentions. To be honest, I don't know if I'll ever tell them."
Amanda nodded before asking, "Why me, then?"
"Because I thought you needed to hear it."
Absently, Amanda began to twirl a strand of hair. Adrienne wondered if that habit was genetic or learned by watching her mother.
"Mom?"
"Yes?"
"Why didn't you tell us about him? I mean, you never mentioned anything about it."
"I couldn't."
"Why not?"
Adrienne leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. "In the beginning, I guess I was afraid it wasn't real. I know we loved each other, but distance can do strange things to people, and before I was willing to tell you about it, I wanted to be certain that it would last. Then later, when I started getting letters from him and knew it would... I don't know... it just seemed such a long time until you could meet him that I didn't see the point in it...."