Last Summer (2 page)

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Authors: Holly Chamberlin

BOOK: Last Summer
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J
ane rubbed the sponge in widening circles across the counter she had already cleaned that morning. In the past few weeks she had caught herself acting mindlessly, straightening pillows that had already been straightened, adding to the grocery list items she had already bought, even forgetting the day of the week. This was unusual behavior for Jane Ella Patterson. One of the things she prided herself on was her highly developed sense of purpose and organization.
The counter beyond clean, Jane rinsed the sponge and squeezed it until it was close to bone dry. The physical effort caused a dull ache in her right hand. She sighed and flexed her fingers. She wondered if she was developing arthritis. It would seem likely, given all the years of working with her hands. Well, if that was the case there was nothing much she could do about it. Her mother had developed severe arthritis in her fifties. Jane thought it might be an inherited condition.
Jane Patterson was about five feet seven inches on a good day, which was getting harder to find; she often caught herself slumping, and a muscle under her right shoulder seemed to have permanently clenched itself into a throbbing ball. Just after her forty-second birthday last summer, her normally perfect eyesight had begun to fail and she now wore prescription glasses for close work and reading. Wearing glasses didn’t bother her; it was the cost of the prescription that was problematic. Both she and her husband were self-employed and that meant outrageous insurance costs. They weren’t poor but they weren’t rich, either, at least not by local standards. All you had to do was drive through certain parts of York County or the town of Ogunquit and you would find massive mansions overlooking the ocean and estates that went on for miles. But Jane loved her house on Pond View Road and enjoyed making it a home. Some women might balk at the term “homemaker,” seeing it as old-fashioned and somehow demeaning. But Jane thought otherwise.
And her husband took pride in their home, too, and in the life they had made together. Mike was an accountant with his own small firm. He rented an office on the first floor of a large house on Riverton Road; a family practitioner worked from an office across the hall. On slow days Mike was able to come home for lunch, and when the roads were impassable due to severe weather, which happened several times each winter, he worked from his office in the basement. During tax season, when he regularly worked late into the night, the basement office became something of a bedroom as well. An acquaintance back in Boston had called Mike a workaholic. Jane thought he was just a very conscientious man.
Counter cleaned, lunch dishes long ago put away, laundry folded ... What next? What could she do to distract herself from the nagging sense of failure that loomed over her like a thundercloud?
Jane went over to the fridge and straightened one of the photographs attached to the door by a magnet. Over the years the fridge had become the family portrait gallery. Jane ran her eye over the current display. Rosie’s latest school picture, taken last September; a picture of the three of them at a Sea Dogs game up in Portland; Rosie at the age of four on Santa’s lap. That was one of Mike’s favorites. And then there was a photo that had been taken just about a year ago. It was—or at least it had been—one of Jane’s favorites. The three of them had gone to Kennebunkport one afternoon to visit the galleries and shops. Totally by chance she and Rosie had come down to breakfast that morning wearing almost identical outfits: pink blouses, tan chinos, and white sneakers. The only thing that set them apart was Jane’s wedding band and earrings and her shorter hair. In the picture, they were sitting side by side at a restaurant where they had stopped for a late lunch. Mike had called them his “beautiful twin girls.” Now the smiling faces of their former, innocent selves mocked Jane.
She turned away from the photograph. Since Rosie was a toddler, people (Jane’s mother Rosemary, for one, for whom Rosie was named) had been describing Rosie as her mother’s Mini-Me. In Jane’s opinion, her daughter was much prettier than she had ever been. Of course, she was prejudiced in Rosie’s favor, but she really believed her daughter had a quality she had never had, what Jane liked to call a “specialness.”
Rosemary Alice, her special little girl. Rosie was in the living room now, at the piano. Jane had coaxed her to practice. She had hoped that playing would bring her daughter some pleasure. But from the lackluster sounds reaching Jane’s ear, it was clear that her heart was not at all into the music. In fact, Jane had noticed that for the past several months Rosie’s interest in the piano had been waning. How much that had to do with what had happened to her daughter at the hands of those bullying girls, Jane didn’t know.
A car horn sounded from the street out front and Jane flinched.
I should go back to work,
she thought,
at least for an hour.
She had accomplished her goals for the day but there was always something else that could be done, even if it was just re-ordering her collection of antique buttons or reviewing her schedule for the coming weeks.
And it would be a busy few weeks, what with it being wedding season. Jane had started her small tailoring business when Rosie was about four and finally in preschool. (The preschool had been at Mike’s insistence. He was afraid Rosie wasn’t learning to socialize with other kids her own age. Except for Meg, of course.) Her sewing room was in a sectioned-off part of the finished basement and contained two sewing machines, one of which she’d had since college, and a large worktable. Shelves along two walls contained neat rows of thread, bolts of fabric, and a collection of interesting and useful items Jane found at the better thrift stores, things like bits of old lace and lengths of brocaded trim. A dress form stood in one corner. Next to the sewing room was a changing room for clients. Mike had installed full-length mirrors in such a way that the client could see herself from every angle.
Much of Jane’s business was taken up with minor projects, like alterations to dresses for special occasions or to suits for the office. Sometimes, though rarely, a woman would come by with a request for a jacket or a skirt or a pair of pants made from a pattern. Jane enjoyed those challenges; there wasn’t a lot of thrill in hemming a skirt. As a child she had taught herself to sew on her grandmother’s old machine, and she had been making most of her own clothes since she was in high school. Unlike her mother, Rosie had very little interest in clothes and absolutely none in sewing. Still, Jane liked to daydream about Rosie’s far-off wedding. She imagined the two of them working together to design the dress and the veil and the handbag. She imagined—
The piano had gone silent. Jane’s entire body tensed. She fought the urge to rush into the living room. Rosie was probably just stretching her fingers or taking a bathroom break.
There’s no need to panic,
she told herself.
Rosie is not necessarily in trouble.
And then the piano sounded again and Jane sighed audibly.
That was the best thing about working from home, she thought now. She was almost always available for her daughter. When Rosie got home from school, Jane was there to ask about her day and put out a snack. When Rosie was sick enough to stay home from school, Jane was there to bring her homemade chicken soup and flat ginger ale. The situation had seemed ideal. She had considered their lives to be very close to perfect. Absolute perfection would have been another daughter or even a son, but no one achieved absolute perfection, Jane thought, no matter how hard she tried.
And Jane had tried.
Jane glanced again at the photograph of her and her daughter in their matching outfits. She knew that human beings were biologically wired to be fearful. It was a basic survival tool, but for Jane, especially after two failed pregnancies, fear had become her default mode. Not that she hadn’t always been a somewhat high-strung person, prone to nerves and to what some (Mike, for one) would say were groundless terrors. That was the reason she had forced herself to become an exceptionally organized person. Organization was a way of staving off chaos. At least, you could tell yourself that it was.
But no amount of organized and disciplined behavior could entirely mask her basic fearful and cautious nature, and Jane was afraid she had passed that fearful and cautious nature on to her daughter. Clearly, Rosie was not tough and resilient in ways that perhaps she should be. If she had been tough and resilient, then ...
For a moment Jane thought she was going to cry. She willed away the impulse, reluctant to have Rosie find her in tears. She wondered if the heavy sense of guilt she labored under would ever go away.
Sure, she worked from home and was almost always available to her daughter. Then how had she not known at the very start that something was seriously wrong? When she had begun to suspect that Rosie was unhappy, why hadn’t she pushed harder for answers? She had attributed Rosie’s unusual moodiness to mere adolescence, hormones wreaking havoc with her once generally sunny nature. It was normal for a fourteen-year-old to lock her bedroom door. It was normal for a fourteen-year-old to beg off activities in which she used to take pleasure. Though when Rosie had stopped going to the library each Saturday morning, her absolutely favorite activity, Jane should have known that something more than hostile hormones was going on. She should have known.
It was only back in May—just last month!—when Rosie’s best friend Meg told Mackenzie Egan and her awful cohorts about Rosie’s youthful trouble with bed-wetting that Jane had finally seen the truth. And then she had learned about the bullying her daughter had endured, and about the harm Rosie had been inflicting on her body. The traces of those angry wounds broke Jane’s heart. They were a vivid and ugly reminder of her failure as a mother to protect her child. Even if the scars on Rosie’s arm completely healed someday, they would never be forgotten.
Just like the memory of that fateful morning when Rosie refused to get out of bed to go to school. It was entirely out of the norm. Jane had asked her if she felt sick and Rosie just shook her head and said nothing. When after fifteen minutes Rosie still hadn’t budged, Jane had actually raised her voice, demanding that Rosie stop fooling around.
And then, in a completely uncharacteristic action, Jane had yanked the covers off her daughter and been confronted with the brutal reality. Rosie’s skinny arms, hugged around her skinny body. And the left arm scored with nasty red scars from her elbow to her wrist. Jane stood there, hands clutching the sheet and lightweight comforter, her head filling with an awful buzz. She was sure she was going to be sick all over the bed. Rosie lay still, her eyes wide open but staring at nothing, almost as if she were dead. And then Jane had dropped the covers and run from the bedroom.
Why had it taken so long for her to realize that something was terribly, terribly wrong, that her well-behaved, hardworking, always polite little girl was truly suffering? Why had it taken so long for her to realize that her only child was seriously ill and not playing an adolescent game?
Memories of that morning still made Jane feel sick to her stomach, but she couldn’t chase the images away. In a way, she didn’t want to forget. She remembered now with vivid recall the frantic call she had made to Mike at his office. He had raced home and, after looking in on Rosie, had called the school to tell them that she wasn’t well and wouldn’t be coming in that day. And then Jane and Mike had painfully learned the truth, at first in bits and pieces and then, in a torrent of words, finishing with what Meg Giroux had done to their daughter. Rosie had sobbed for what seemed like hours and then she had finally fallen asleep, utterly exhausted.
Over the following days there were meetings with the school’s principal and guidance counselor, an appointment with the Pattersons’ doctor to ascertain Rosie’s physical health, and then the family interview with Dr. Lowe, psychotherapist, at her office in her charming old house in Kittery. It had been the most trying week of Jane’s life.
Jane took the broom from the tall, narrow closet where it lived alongside a mop, bucket, and cleaning supplies. She had swept the kitchen floor after breakfast, but there always seemed to be stray bits of food or dust to catch. As she swept, methodically, starting in one corner of the room and working with short, rhythmic strokes, she thought back to Mother’s Day. It had been a bittersweet occasion, coming hard upon the heels of Rosie’s breakdown. Mike had done his best to make the day enjoyable—he had made Jane’s favorite breakfast, eggs Benedict, and given her a lovely bouquet of flowers from her favorite local florist—but her heart had felt too bruised for celebration.
Of course she was glad that her daughter hadn’t tried to kill herself, as so many bullied children did. Of course she was glad that Rosie genuinely seemed to want to get better. She went without protest to Dr. Lowe’s office once a week, and while school was still in session she had kept up with her homework. The school administration had been very supportive. A teacher had come to the house to bring Rosie her final exams and to monitor her while she completed them. She had passed each class, even math, and most with flying colors.
There was a lot for which to be thankful. But there was also a lot to regret. True, Rosie had given her a beautiful Mother’s Day card. But it had only partly reassured Jane that her daughter didn’t hate her for not coming to her aid quickly enough against those awful girls. Jane suspected that someday, sooner or later, Rosie would lash out. She just had to be angry. But so far she had displayed nothing but sadness. At least, that was all that Jane could see. Maybe Dr. Lowe was seeing and hearing a different story.

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