What you haven’t heard about is that my mother knew how to forgive. I don’t think she held a grudge against a soul. If I put someone down, she would come to their defense. She had the gentlest way of confronting people who had done something wrong. Once I saw her stop a teenaged boy on the street after hearing him utter a racial slur. She didn’t yell at him, but instead gave him a little, soft-spoken lecture on the way that fear and ignorance can make us hate other people. When she saw a mother yell at her young child one time, she talked to the mother about how hard it could be to have demanding little children, and she gave the woman her phone number to call her the next time she lost her temper at her son. Another time, I saw her confront a boy who dropped a candy-bar wrapper on the sidewalk. Instead of giving him a piece of her mind, she told him about the elderly man who owned the store on that part of the sidewalk, and how he came out of the store every evening to sweep the sidewalk clean.
I’m not writing this to tell you more stories about my mother being a saint, because she wasn’t one. She was just a human being who did her best to understand why other people made mistakes, and she forgave them.
If I could talk to my mother right now and ask her how she felt about Zachary Pointer getting out on parole, I know what she would say. She would tell me he was human, that he had been hurting when he killed her. She’d say that he had paid for his crime, and that he had redeemed himself. She would tell me that, as long as he is no longer dangerous to anyone, he should be set free to become a productive member of society.
So, I am writing to suggest that Mr. Pointer be released from prison on parole. Please give him the chance to continue the good deeds that my mother is no longer capable of doing.
EPILOGUE
At ten o’clock on Christmas Eve, Lacey and Bobby, Clay and Gina and Mackenzie stood in the kitchen of the keeper’s house and bade farewell to their guests. It had been a wonderful, even an amazing evening. There had been fifteen of them for the buffet dinner, all of them in one way or another family, from Nola Dillard to Tom Nestor to Paul Macelli, who was Olivia’s first husband and Jack’s father, down visiting from Washington, DC. Nothing could have pleased Lacey more than to have that diverse group of people together and see everyone get along. Rani provided the bulk of the entertainment, simply by being a two-and-a-half-year-old adorable peanut of a child, and Jack, Maggie and Mackenzie had been coerced into singing carols with everyone else before scooting upstairs to hang out on Mackenzie’s computer.
The only person missing from the holiday celebration was Bobby’s cousin, Elise. Around Halloween Elise had disappeared. The friends she’d been staying with told Bobby that she simply didn’t come home one night. Bobby feared that her contacts in Richmond had found her and dragged her back up there—or worse—but Lacey thought that Elise might have returned to her old life of her own volition. Either way, if Elise’s disappearance was a mystery that could be solved, she planned to help Bobby solve it.
This was the first year that Lacey had agreed to have a real tree for Christmas. After her mother’s death in the battered women’s shelter, where the scent of pine had filled the rooms, she’d been unable even to pass a Christmas tree lot without feeling sick to her stomach. But Mackenzie had pleaded for a real tree. She and her mother had never had one in Arizona, she’d said, and Lacey felt ready to give it a try. Once the tree was up and the scent was strong in the living room of the keeper’s house, she discovered that she actually liked the smell. It was so fresh and welcoming. She would miss it when it was time to take the tree down.
In the opposite corner of the living room stood an enormous poinsettia, a gift from Rick that had arrived the week before Christmas. He was always sending flowers, using any occasion he could as an excuse for the gifts. Lacey had written to him, extending her forgiveness, and he’d written back to thank her, but still the plants and flowers came. Maybe they would come for the rest of her life.
In two weeks, she would be leaving the keeper’s house forever. In the late spring, it would open as a museum. She would be one of the docents, but it would not be the same. The history she knew of the house was not the history the tourists would be paying money to hear. She could not tell them how her parents had met on the beach by the lighthouse. She couldn’t tell them how the old lighthouse keeper, Mary Poor, had allowed her mother to use the keeper’s house for her illicit trysts, or how her mother’s ashes had been tossed into the ocean from the nearby pier after her murder. She couldn’t tell them how the lighthouse had become her father’s obsession, how he probably had thousands of pictures of it still stored in boxes somewhere in his house. And she could not tell them how she had lived in the house for two years herself, turning it into her safe haven as she tried to put the pieces of her life back together.
With all the guests gone, the residents of the house began cleaning up, stuffing used wrapping paper into garbage bags and picking up plates and glasses from all over the house and bringing them into the kitchen.
“Will we finally have a dishwasher in the new house?” Mackenzie asked, as she dried plate after plate that Lacey was washing.
“Yes, we will,” Lacey said.
“And Clay and I will have one, too,” Gina said. “How about you, Bobby?”
“No dishwasher for me,” he said. “Except when Mackenzie comes over.”
It took Mackenzie a second to get it, but then she groaned. “You’re so full of dad humor tonight,” she said.
Lacey smiled at Bobby across the top of Mackenzie’s head. There are and always will be secrets in this family, she thought. Perhaps there were even secrets she was not privy to, but there were definitely two that she knew about. No one other than Clay, Bobby, Gina and herself knew that Clay was Mackenzie’s father. The DNA test had proven it unequivocally, and as elated as Clay had been by that news, Bobby had been equally saddened. Mackenzie was as close to one man as she was the other, though, and Lacey planned to do her best to keep things that way. One day they would tell Mackenzie the truth, and by that time, Lacey prayed the girl would be so attached to both her fathers that the fact of her conception would not erase the endearment she felt to either of them.
One final secret would remain forever between two people only: Zachary Pointer and herself. There was nothing to be gained by revealing his relationship to her mother. Nothing but hurt, all the way around.
Zachary had called her around nine o’clock that evening, when the gifts had all been opened and everyone was full and content. She took the call in the sunroom, away from the chaos of the living room.
“I wanted to thank you for the kaleidoscope,” he said. “It’s amazing.”
“You’re welcome.” It was good to hear his voice. He sounded strong.
“I’ve been thinking about you and praying for you all day,” he said. “I know Christmas Eve must be hard for you.” They both knew he was thinking of the long-ago Christmas Eve that had so irrevocably altered both their lives.
“Your prayers worked,” she said. “This is the best Christmas Eve I’ve had in a long time.”
“Have you and Mackenzie found a place to live yet?” he asked.
“We found a perfect little house to rent,” she said. “And she’ll be able to stay in the same school, which is the most important thing.”
“Wonderful. And Bobby?”
“He’ll be right next door to us.” She laughed. “Literally.”
Their houses were identical. Tiny, a little too old, but affordable, the only difference being that the house Lacey would be renting did, indeed, have a dishwasher, while Bobby’s did not. “And Clay and Gina are in the process of buying a house in Pine Island,” she added.
“Excellent,” he said.
“And how about you, Zachary?” she asked. “When do you start at the seminary?”
“January fifth,” he said. “It will be a wonderful beginning to a new year. To a new life. Thank you, Lacey.”
“You’re very welcome.”
There was a brief
moment of silence on the line.
“Are you ready to leave Kiss River?” he asked.
“It’s going to be hard,” she admitted. “It’s been my refuge while I learned how to avoid following in my mother’s footsteps.”
“You’re still angry at her,” he said.
“Not really,” she said, but she knew it was a lie, and so did he.
“If you could forgive me, you can surely forgive your mother, Lacey,” Zachary said.
“You were mentally ill,” Lacey was quick to answer.
“So was she, honey,” he said. “So was she.”
The conversation in the kitchen swirled around her, now, as the dishes were washed and dried and put away, but Lacey barely heard it. With the revelers gone and the five of them packed into the warm room, she suddenly felt the loss of the house to her bones. She took a step away from the sink, although it was still full of dishes with more waiting to be washed, and dried her hands on a paper towel.
“I want to go out to the lighthouse,” she said.
“What?” Clay sounded incredulous. “You’ll freeze your butt off up there.”
“I’ll get my jacket,” Bobby said, but she rested her hand on his arm.
“I want to go alone, okay?” she asked.
He understood. “Of course,” he said.
She walked to the hall closet and retrieved her down jacket and her gloves, then pulled her thigh-high waders on over her slacks. It had grown quiet in the kitchen, the only sound the rattling of dishes in the sink where Bobby had taken over her job.
“I won’t be long,” she said, walking back through the kitchen toward the door. She was stepping onto the porch when she heard Mackenzie ask in a near whisper, “What’s the matter with Lacey?” and Bobby’s answer, “Sometimes people just need time alone.”
Clay had been right; it was very cold outside. She pulled her knit hat from the pocket of her jacket and put it on, tugging it low over her ears. She pressed her body into the wind as she walked in the direction of the ocean. In a few weeks a fence would be built around the lighthouse, one that would allow the water to pass through it but would keep the tourists out. She had plotted a way to get up in the lighthouse after the fence was built, but then she learned that a padlocked door would block the entrance and she’d been foiled. It was time to give up her attachment to the tower.
The ocean was ferocious, the water nearly reaching the top of her waders as she walked through it to get to the steps. Inside, the octagonal room was cold, the sound of the sea muted by the thick brick walls, and she began to climb. When she rose out of the tower onto the exposed steps at the top, the wind nearly knocked her over, and she held tight to the railing as she turned around to sit down.
God, it was dark! The wind carried with it tiny, sharp ice crystals, which bit into her cheeks. Yet the sky was filled with stars. Sometimes she had to remind herself that the stars existed in the winter as well as the summer. It was easy to forget when all the time you spent outside was rushing from the car to the house.
She tilted her head back to look at the dome of stars above her, and suddenly felt, more deeply than she ever had before, her mother’s presence. The feeling was so strong it frightened her, and she thought of descending the stairs and returning to the warm house. But something kept her there, clutching the railing with her gloved hands, her face lifted up to the sky.
“I have to leave here soon, Mom,” she said out loud, but she couldn’t even hear her own words, the wind stole them from her so quickly. It was not so quick to steal her tears, though. She felt afraid, as though leaving Kiss River meant that she would also be leaving her mother behind. That’s what she’d been trying to do all year, yet now she realized how impossible a task that was. “I want you with me forever,” she said to the sky. “Just, please—” she began to smile “—leave the crazy parts of you behind, okay?”
She wiped the back of her gloved hand across her wet face and stood up. Taking one step down, she stopped and looked up at the sky again.
“Bye, Mom,” she said, watching the tiny diamond lights flicker high above her. “I love you.”
ISBN: 978-1-4268-3687-9
HER MOTHER’S SHADOW
Copyright © 2004 by Diane Chamberlain.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, MIRA Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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Diane Chamberlain, Her Mother's Shadow
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