Page 13 of That Birthday in Barbados
“Catherine. Please don’t hang up.”
Connor’s voice shocks me into silence, and I hold the phone to my ear, waiting.
“I called from a number I knew you wouldn’t recognize. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have answered.”
“What do you want, Connor?” My voice has an edge to it, and I resent him for bringing that out in me.
“Just to wish you happy birthday,” he says softly.
“You didn’t need to do that.”
“I wanted to.”
“Thanks. Is that all?”
“Catherine.” There’s pleading attached to my name, and I’m suddenly irate that he thinks there is anything I can do about his own need for redemption.
“What do you want from me, Connor? Both you and Nicole willhave to figure out what to do with your guilt. I can’t fix it for you.”
“I know that. But wouldn’t it be good for all of us if we tried to get to a better place?”
“Where exactly would that be? Sunday dinners at my place? The three of us talking about old times?”
“Catherine-”
“You tore my heart out, Connor. There, I said it. Thanks for the birthday reminder.”
And on that, I hang up.
Chapter Five
“Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heartand the wound lasts a lifetime.”
?Mineko Iwasaki
Nicole
SHE KNOWS THERE won’t be a reply to the birthday email.
In three years, how many messages has she left for Catherine? How many emails has she written, knowing all the while they won’t be opened?
Too many to count, actually.
Nicole kicks up her pace along the boardwalk in West Palm Beach. At just after seven, she isn’t the only one out early. A woman on a bike pedals past her, going in the opposite direction. She’s wearing ear buds and doesn’t make eye contact. A dark blue Maserati rolls by on the street, its engine revving a protest against the twenty-five mile per hour speed limit.
It’s beautiful here, but for a moment, Nicole misses Greenville, South Carolina, the town where she’d grown up, with a pang that yawns wide in the pit of her stomach. She could love it here, mainly because of the weather and the fact that blue skies make an appearance nearly every day of the year.
But if she’s honest, she’s not sure there’s anywhere she really belongs anymore. Hoping to give Catherine space three years ago, she’d left New York, moved back to Greenville where she’d been unable to face her own family. She’d reached the point where she could no longer school her expression into sympathetic questioning when her mother had shaken her head and said, “I don’t understand what happened with Catherine and Connor. They were such a good fit and seemed to be so in love. And she’s too busy to come home anymore. I don’t know what to make of it, Nicole.”
Whether she’d been standing in her mother’s kitchen during a visit, or listening to the pain in her voice from the veil of her cell phone, Nicole’s guilt grew with every mention of her sister’s divorce.
There were times when she wanted to blurt the entire disastrous nightmare out loud to both her parents, lift the lid to the Pandora’s box she herself had created, let them know once and for all what a terrible person their youngest daughter turned out to be.
It would be a relief, really, to bring it all out in the open, to feel the full force of their anger and disappointment.
She deserves it all. And more.
She picks her pace up yet another notch, her lungs starting to burn from the effort. It feels good though. She likes the discomfort, wishing for a way to keep it on full-time, an external source of pain to extinguish the one inside her that stays at a permanent low burn.
