Diane Chamberlain - Secrets She Left Behind

After a few minutes, I drew away. “Can you eat?” I asked. “I made beef stew yesterday. I can heat some up.”

He reached for my hand as he sat down at the kitchen table. “Just sit with me awhile,” he said. “Okay?”

I sat across the corner of the table from him while he told me about his father. How smart he was. Tolerant and good-hearted. People called him Daddy L, even those outside the family. Jamie wished I could have met him. He’d been so shrewd, buying up the Topsail Island property when it was cheap, making money that would keep the Lockwoods wealthy for generations.

We sat that way for a long time, Jamie holding my hand while he talked. I focused on the sensation of his skin against mine, so I could remember later exactly how it felt. That’s when my double life truly began to take hold. I pretended to care about Laurel, wanting her to get better for the sake of her husband and daughter, yet at the same time hoping she didn’t, so I could hang on to the part of Jamie and Maggie that I had. Without them, my life would have been too empty to bear.

I was shocked when I realized I was fantasizing about both Steve and Laurel dying. It was easy enough to picture with Laurel. She’d starve herself to death. Maybe even kill herself. Then there was that whole big Iran and Iraq mess heating up in the Middle East and maybe Steve would be deployed there and maybe he would be killed. Then Jamie and I would gradually get closer and closer, comforting each other in our grief until we finally realized we belonged together. We’d get married, and I would adopt Maggie. Maybe we’d go on to have kids of our own.

The fantasy came with a terrible, gut-wrenching guilt, but it was hard to control. I could be sitting in the living room with Steve while he studied for an exam, and I’d be knitting a scarf and killing him off in my mind at the same time.

And then, everything changed.

One day, while Maggie was with Jamie at the chapel, I took some groceries to the Sea Tender. I knocked on the door and when I didn’t get an answer, I went inside to find Laurel sitting on the kitchen floor. It was so unusual to see her off the sofa that I dropped the groceries on the counter and rushed to her side.

“Laurel!” I said. “Are you okay?”

She looked up at me. There was an electric drill in her hand.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Screwing up,” Laurel said with a small laugh. She looked at the drill. “In a couple of months, Maggie’ll be crawling and then walking, and I got worried she could get into the things under the sink here and in the bathroom.”

I saw the small plastic clip in Laurel’s left hand and realized she was trying to childproof the cabinets. Trying to protect her daughter. The brittle part of my heart that I’d reserved for Laurel cracked into slivers like a broken window.

I sank down next to her. “Can I help?”

Laurel stared at the drill. “I think I did it wrong,” she said. “I don’t think the part on the door is exactly in the right place to match up with this piece.”

“Let me see.” I checked the plastic piece she’d screwed into place on the door. It was off just slightly. In the plastic latch and the small crooked screw and the cumbersome drill, I saw the love of a mother for her child. The love that Laurel’s stubborn depression—her stubborn mental illness —could not extinguish.

My eyes suddenly filled with tears. “It’ll be okay,” I said. “We can just put this one a little to the right.” I considered taking the drill from Laurel’s hand and making the hole in the door myself, but it would be better if she did it. With a pencil, I marked the spot for her to drill. I held the door steady and Laurel, biting her lip in concentration, drilled the hole. When she screwed the plastic hook in place, she sighed with exhaustion, as if she’d swum a few laps in a pool.

“Beautiful, Laurel!” I said.

Laurel closed the cabinet door and saw that it hooked. She unhooked it. Hooked it again.

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