The Healing (20 page)

chapter twenty-four

August 2002

Karen couldn't enjoy the walk to the beach. She was too worried about Mike, who was shuffling beside her with his walker. He had refused to rent a wheelchair, claiming it was useless on the sand anyway, and now his legs were giving out beneath him. It was only a short distance to the boardwalk from the rustic house owned by Richie's cousin, but watching Mike sweat and strain in the midday heat made it feel like a five-mile trek.

They hadn't been to the Jersey shore in over five years, and the only reason they consented to spend a week cramped in the small house with three other couples and a few of their adult children was because their friends convinced them it would do Lori a world of good. It had been only two months since the accident, and she had been walking around like the living dead.

God knows it didn't feel like a vacation for Karen. Lately everything she did, no matter how routine or familiar, felt like it belonged in someone else's life. In her own life, she and Mike would have been carrying coolers and beach chairs, and they would have been laughing with their friends as they marched toward the sandy shore. In this unrecognizable life, their friends were ahead of them on the road, and Mike couldn't carry anything. In her own life, Lori would have been excited to get to the crowded boardwalk with Vinny's younger daughter. In this unrecognizable life, Lori wasn't happy anywhere. Not even at Wildwood.

“We're almost there,” Karen told Mike as they neared the boardwalk. She heard the bustling tourists and the breaking surf—sounds that should have lifted her spirits. Their week at the Jersey shore was something they used to look forward to all year. Now Karen couldn't help but wonder if the whole trip had been a mistake.

There was a short incline from the road to the boardwalk, and Mike almost didn't make it. He collapsed on the nearest bench. “You guys go on ahead,” he said, wheezing. “I'll catch up in a few minutes.”

Karen glanced at their companions, who were already descending the ramp to the beach. She noticed how everyone looked to Vinny for the tactful response, since he was the one who had known Mike since the age of four. She also noticed how Vinny's eyes glazed over whenever he looked at Mike with the walker, not allowing his brain to register the image.

Mike was sweating and breathless. But in his shorts and tank top, he almost resembled the athletic long-distance runner he once was. Wearing his Yankees cap and sunglasses, he could've passed for a veteran lifeguard. The walker looked totally out of place.

Vinny pointed to a spot only a few yards from the boardwalk. “We'll be right over there,” he said.

“Go closer to the water,” Mike replied. “Don't stay all the way up here for me. I'll make it after I take a breather.”

Karen watched to see what Vinny would do. “It doesn't matter,” he said. He resumed walking, and the others followed. There weren't any little kids in tow who wanted to be closer to the shoreline, so nobody protested when Vinny dropped the beach chairs he was carrying. Joe claimed their territory by spearing the sand with the pointed end of the beach umbrella.

Karen perched dutifully on the bench beside Mike, but he sat with his eyes closed, as if mentally recharging some invisible battery within himself. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Mike nodded once.

She should have reached out at that moment and taken his hand. But something held her back. She wasn't sure what it was. Was it a fear of infringing on a restful moment? A reluctance to offer solace that might be shrugged off? Or, more likely, a denial of what was happening before her very eyes?

Mike was becoming physically disabled. That was the painful truth, and everyone was pretending not to see it. Since Lori's accident, even Karen found it easier to act as though Mike's illness did not affect her.

Did he prefer it that way? Nobody would dare ask him.

Karen was uncomfortable with her own thoughts, so she shifted gears. “I think Lori will enjoy the time with Melissa and Jen,” she said, her voice so soft that the noise along the boardwalk almost drowned her out.

Mike's eyes opened, but he didn't look at Karen. He peered into the distance with a tired squint, and Karen didn't have to follow his line of sight to know he was looking at Lori. She was sitting cross-legged on the sand, absentmindedly smoothing its fine grains while the sea breeze blew her dark hair about her face. She looked like the saddest teenager alive.

Mike closed his eyes again and expelled a small sigh.

Karen knew he felt their daughter's pain as keenly as his own, and it was the reason his physical symptoms had all worsened since that terrible night Nick Pappas was killed. At least Karen was distracted by the necessary chores of life and didn't have too much time to dwell on their misfortune. She was too damn busy. Mike's activity, on the other hand, was becoming more and more restricted, and he had way too much time to think.

“Do you want some water or something?” she offered after a few minutes.

“No,” Mike replied. “I think I can make it the rest of the way now.”

He gripped the walker, and Karen helped him up. People strolling by had the expected reactions—some glanced at them indifferently, some softened with pity or empathy, some never looked their way at all. Nobody really stared.

As they made their way down the ramp from the boardwalk, it would have seemed right for Vinny to herald their delayed arrival with a mock cheer.
It's about time
or
Look who decided to join us
was what he should have said. Ten years before, when Mike had dropped a cobblestone on his foot and fractured it, Vinny had called him “Gimp” and broke into howling applause every time he hobbled into the room on his crutches.

Vinny kept foraging through the cooler as Mike approached, which only made his denial more obvious. Richie, however, unfolded a beach chair in the shade of the umbrella and held it steady while Mike settled into it. Someone should have quipped,
Next time carry your own stuff
. But nobody uttered a word to him.

Karen fished the sunblock lotion out of her tote and silently handed it to Lori. All around them, their friends were engaged in normal activities and normal chatter, but for the Donnelly family there was no such normalcy. It was apparent that their dearest friends just didn't know what to say to them. Vinny could still talk about his job. Joe could complain about having a twenty-eight-year-old son who still lived at home. Janice could make jokes about shopping for bathing suits when she was thirty pounds overweight. But what could Karen and Mike add to the conversation? Anecdotes about their latest visit to the doctor? Monologues about how they agonized over their daughter's state of mind?

After they'd been at the beach almost an hour, Lori still hadn't moved from her yogalike position on the sand. She hadn't even opened the sunblock. She was preoccupied watching a group of young people who were laughing and horsing around nearby. It wasn't hard to guess what was going through her head.

Karen tried to imagine how she would've felt if something had happened to Mike that first summer they met. The thought wrenched her heart. “Hey, Lori,” she called, breaking her daughter's trance. “Do you want to take a walk along the shore?”

“Sure,” Lori replied, and rose to her feet a bit stiffly. The long incision from her surgery was still tight and sore.

Karen glanced over her shoulder at Mike, but he was dozing. “We'll be back in a little while,” she told their friends, who watched in awkward silence as mother and daughter walked toward the water hand in hand. She could almost hear them whispering behind her.

“How are you feeling so far?” Karen asked her daughter when they were alone at the water's edge.

“I'm tired.”

“The surgeon said you have to expect that for a while.”

“I know.”

As they ambled along, their feet splashing in the surf, Karen gazed at Lori's profile. “It's nice to be with Melissa and Jen, isn't it?” she said. “It's been a while since you girls got to spend time together. They were always like big sisters to you.”

Lori nodded, but without enthusiasm. “They're great,” she replied. “But they don't understand.” Her lip quivered. “Nobody does.”

Not even your own parents,
her mother realized.

It broke Karen's heart to see the tears rolling down her daughter's face, yet there was nothing she could offer in the way of comfort aside from a maternal shoulder to cry on. “Daddy and I are very proud of you,” was all she could say, feeling how inadequate the words were.

At the mention of her father, Lori's eyes gushed anew. “I can't get used to seeing him with a walker,” she confessed. “He looks so—crippled.”

“At least he's getting around,” Karen said, trying to appear optimistic for her daughter's sake. “It's nice to be here at Wildwood together, isn't it? Like old times.”

But Lori's memory apparently couldn't backtrack far enough. Not past that terrible night in June. “No matter where I look, all I see are people who have what I'll never have. Girls my age with their boyfriends, women your age with their husbands, old couples—”

Karen stopped walking and looked at her daughter with a pained expression. “Oh, Lori,” she said, wishing they could all start over and travel down a different path.

Lori looked at the horizon through her tears. “I feel cheated, Ma.”

“Of course you do. But you have your whole life ahead of you. And I promise things will get better.”

“When?” Lori asked.

When you can accept that Nick is dead and Daddy is getting worse.
“In time.”

“But how?”

Karen wanted to tell Lori the truth. Her life would never be the same. Period. But Karen had no pearls of wisdom to impart. Even if she could answer “how” and “when” things would get better, she knew damn well there would never be an answer to “why” they happened in the first place.

Her daughter met her gaze a little too knowingly. “You feel cheated, too, Ma,” Lori said in a hushed voice. “Don't you?”

Still no words would come. There was no argument to what Lori was stating so frankly and so wisely. So Karen just put her arm around her daughter and resumed walking, their feet moving in slow, synchronized rhythm.

Lori bent her head sideways, leaning it against her mother's and taking the only solace Karen could provide. She certainly had no control over the fate that had swept them all away.

Karen settled in the old chair by the window and opened her book. She took one last glance at Mike stretched out on the bed before allowing her focus to rest on the pages. He seemed content to be surfing the TV channels for whatever sports he could find. The ceiling fan whirred above him, keeping him cool and providing the perfect white noise for some much-needed rest. They had been in Wildwood for three days, and being on the go with a disrupted schedule and less sleep had drained him. Karen understood why he didn't want to spend the day at the amusement park with their friends.