Page 51 of The Lost Hours
“You need to get back on a horse again, Earlene. You’re not afraid of horses, I see that now. And you and Captain Wentworth have a mutual fan club. He’s definitely ready to ride again, but needs an experienced rider. I think he’s just been waiting for you.”
I struggled with warring emotions, remembering what Helen had told me, about how Tucker had once dug up a grave looking for pirate treasure, and I thought I saw a glimmer of that boy now. He was a doctor by profession, in search of healing others, yet unable or unwilling to see that his own wounds remained unbandaged.
I shook my head, not even sure if I understood my reluctance enough to explain it to someone else. Or maybe I was just too ashamed of the real reason I suspected I couldn’t do it. I felt my anger at myself and quickly turned it on him. “Stop pressuring me. I’m in a lot of pain with my back and my knee, which precludes my riding. I have pins holding my knee and leg together, if that draws a clearer picture for you.”
He didn’t look away, and his eyes reminded me of Helen’s and her ability to see behind the words, and I knew I hadn’t fooled him at all. “I’m a doctor. I know about these things. I also know that there are exercises you can do to strengthen muscles to lessen the pain and increase your flexibility. Emily can probably help you, if you just ask.”
I stood, wondering if there was a mass conspiracy going on. “I’ve heard, thank you. I tried exercises in the beginning and they didn’t help. But if it will get everybody off of my back, then I will, okay? But I’m never getting back on a horse. Not ever, so you can stop asking.”
He stood, too, and smiled a brilliant smile, surprising me. “We’ll see. In the meantime, I’ll tell Lucy that she’ll have to wait to ride Captain Wentworth until after you’ve broken him in. That was her idea, by the way, and not mine.”
The image of Lucy negotiating to ride Captain Wentworth made me want to laugh, but I managed an inelegant snort instead.
“My Lucy has a sense of humor.”
My Lucy.I wondered if he was aware he’d said that. “She comes by it honestly at least,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your name’s William Tecumseh Gibbons. Obviously, somebody in your family would have to have a sense of humor to name you after the Yankee general most Savannah residents still refer to as Satan. It’s sort of like naming the British heir apparent ‘Napoleon’ or something.”
He pulled out a few tall blades of grass and pressed them between his fingers. “My mother named me. I don’t know if it was because she had a sense of humor or because she wanted to piss off my grandmother. Not that it mattered. My grandmother called me Tucker the first time she saw me and that’s what it’s been ever since.”
He turned his gaze to me again. “My wife—Susan—called me William. She thought that using a nickname was a sort of deception. As if it gave me license to pretend to be someone else.”
I tasted the roof of my mouth, my tongue suddenly too thick to speak. I wanted to tell him then who I was, but I thought about how I’d told him about my Olympic dreams and how he hadn’t laughed, and how he’d stayed with his daughters the night under the oaks when I’d told him he should be with them. I liked William Tecumseh Gibbons, and I liked that his nickname was Tucker and I knew that whatever relationship we’d forged over the last month would be over the minute he learned that I was Piper Mills and that I’d been lying to him from the first moment we met.
I knew I should probably steer the conversation in another direction, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t forget the grave that rested in unconsecrated ground outside of the family cemetery, or not be curious about the mother who’d abandoned Lucy and Sara. “How did you introduce yourself to her when you first met?”
He didn’t answer right away. “I didn’t, actually. She was a . . . patient of my medical school mentor, a psychiatrist. He’s actually my partner now. But I met her in his office.”
I looked at him in surprise. “She was his patient?”
“I didn’t know at the time—patient confidentiality and all that—but she was seeing him for several things, mostly severe depression and a substance-abuse problem she’d struggled with since adolescence. She’d been in and out of rehab since she was a teenager, trying to cope with the fallout from a dysfunctional childhood. She was responding well to therapy, so when I met her, I didn’t . . .” He closed his mouth, seeming to struggle between loyalty and honesty. “I didn’t realize how emotionally unstable she was until we got engaged during my second year of medical school.”
“And you didn’t break it off?”
He looked away. “She found out she was pregnant and wanted the baby. I couldn’t let her have the baby on her own. It was my child, too. And at least if I were with her, I could keep her healthy if not for her sake, then for the baby’s.”
“Lucy?”
He nodded.
I was silent for a moment. “How did she handle motherhood?”
“After Lucy was born, she went back on her antidepressants. She seemed to be herself again, and I thought we could still make a go out of our marriage now that we were parents.”
“But that didn’t happen.”
Tucker shook his head. “Susan became more and more dependent on me, almost as if I were a substitute for her drugs. And if I didn’t give her the attention she needed, she’d stay in her room for days until I could find a way to get her to forgive me.” He flattened his hands against the garden wall, studying his callused fingers. “I knew she had serious issues dating back to her childhood. The details she gave me were sketchy, but enough for me to agree with her choice to cut off all contact with her family. But there were demons she fought every day. Shortly after Lucy was born, Susan started stealing prescription drugs from my medical office. We didn’t notice at first because she was just taking samples, but we eventually caught on and I knew immediately who it was. She went to rehab—again—and it seemed to help.”
His eyes held the haunted look I remembered from the first time I’d seen him, and I wanted to look away. “So things got better then?”
“For a while. But then she got pregnant with Sara. I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen. . . .” He shrugged. “And it was different this time after Sara. Her old antidepressants weren’t working and it took us a while to find one that did. When Sara was three, I took a leave of absence from my practice and moved us to Asphodel in the hopes that a change of scenery would help, and to get her away from her drug sources. She was too busy self-medicating for us to figure out something that might help, and taking her away was pretty much a last resort.”
He smoothed the dark hair from his forehead with both hands. “Then I thought we had the answer to all of our prayers when Susan got on this genealogy kick and seemed to have found a purpose for her life. Maybe she was pretending that the lives she was discovering were her own, in some warped way of erasing her own past. I didn’t bother to analyze it. She was happy and excited for the first time since we got married. And then it sort of . . . fell apart about a year and a half ago.”
“What happened?” I asked, watching as he stooped to pick up another handful of grass before disintegrating the blades between his fingers.
