End of the Strand
The phone’s ringer blared into the dark bedroom.
Whitfield reached toward the nightstand without turning on the light and grabbed the handset. “Hello.”
“Whitfield, it’s Brooke. Did I wake you? It’s not that late, is it? I need to talk to Leah.”
“Hold on.” Whitfield rolled over and shook Leah’s shoulder. She was sleeping on her side facing away from him. He felt her roll toward him but still couldn’t see her for the darkness and his sleep-blurred vision. “It’s your sister,” he said.
Leah made no verbal response but he felt her sit up in bed. By then he’d wakened sufficiently to realize that Leah had her processors off and couldn’t hear him. He reached behind with his free hand to turn on the bedside lamp; but before he found the knob, the room leapt forth in light from Leah switching on her lamp. He rolled over to face her, blinking his eyes against the sudden brilliance and the thin glaze coating his pupils.
Leah, sitting against the headboard in her flannel nightgown, tilted her head in question. Though she could speak quite well without her processors, she rarely did, a vestigial reticence even among loved ones, from her days of deafness.
Whitfield held up the phone then carefully annunciated, recalled from their days of dating and first years of marriage, “It’s Brooke on the phone.”
Leah quickly looked at the bedside clock—11:38. At first she was annoyed—Brooke being self-centered, again. Then she became alarmed. Brooke rarely called these days, and never late. She looked back at Whitfield, raised one finger, pointed toward her ears—the missing microprocessors—and then toward the hall study that had been Jasper’s nursery but was now her personal space. She’d take the call in there.
Whitfield nodded and put the phone to his mouth. “Leah will put on her hearing and take the call in the study,” he said.
Brooke said, “Why do y’all go to bed so early?”
Whitfield knew that if he said anything, it wouldn’t be nice. So he said nothing.
Leah jumped out of the bed. She lifted the right-side processor off its charger base on top of the dresser—she’d only need the one for a phone call—and quickly attached its magnet to her implant and hung the microphone over her ear. She raced across the bedroom and down the hall. Just before ducking into the study, she waved back toward Whitfield, still lying flat on his back with the covers to his chin.
He heard Leah say on the phone, “I’ve got it now.” So he pressed the center button to hang up, returned the handset to its holder, and rolled over to go back to sleep. The light bothered him, so he reached across the bed and switched it off. Leah could find her way back in the dark, with perfect cat-like eyesight much refined from her decades of deafness.
On hearing Leah’s voice, Brooke said again, “Why do y’all go to bed so early?”
“It’s eleven-forty, Brooke. Most of America is asleep by now.”
“Not me.”
“Clearly. Why are you calling?”
“Can’t a Big Sis call the Little Sis just to talk?”
“Not at eleven-forty at night. Not out of the blue.”
“Why not? It’s a special privilege, being able to talk to you on the phone. Remember all those letters we used to write because we couldn’t talk on the phone? Think of how our lives would’ve been different if I could’ve just picked up the phone in the dorm hall and called you up and talked about all the day’s trials and tribulations. Think of it, Leah. Instead, I had to sit down and pour my heart out in a letter and wait a week for a response and by then all the trials and tribulations had changed.”
When Brooke had started what was clearly a diversion, Leah was committed not to fall for the ploy. It was classic Brooke. But somewhere halfway through, she lost her determination. “I still have those letters,” she said quietly.
“You do? That’s wonderful, Leah! The keeping them part, that is. But don’t you dare show them to anyone. Lord knows what I said during those days of adolescent turmoil!”
“I remember a lot of what you said, Brooke.”
“You read them again?”
“No. I just remember. You were trying to grow up and discover who you were.”
“And screwing up every way I knew how. On second thought, burn those letters!”
“No, Brooke, I won’t”
“I lost yours, somewhere in all those moves back then.”
“That’s O.K.”
“At least I think I lost them. Maybe they’re in some box in the attic. I don’t know what all is up there.”
“That’s O.K., Brooke.”
“I’ll have to go up there tomorrow and look for them.”
“Why did you call?”
“Maybe they’re in with my school papers.”
“Brooke!” Leah said with a rare raising of her voice. The word sounded strange at that volume and through only one ear.
“What?”
“Why did you call?” Leah said, her volume back to normal but her words slow and insistent.
“Do you remember that cottage on the end of Bogue Island?”
“The three-story one with the gables and the widow’s walk?”
“Hard to forget, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve rented it.”
“It’s still there? I figured it had been bulldozed and turned into a development decades ago.”
“The opposite. That end of the island is plagued by erosion and storm surges. It was declared off limits to development after Fran cut a channel through the road and took out the bottom floor of that cottage. They tried to get the house condemned but the owners fought in court and won the right to keep the house, for now anyway. They remodeled using only the top two floors, so now the cottage sits way up in the air on piers. It will probably still be there when the rest of Bogue Beach is washed away.”
“So how do you get to it?”
“Four-wheeler or walk.”
“And you rented it.”
“I’ve always wanted to stay out there, since we were kids.”
“I know. You once threatened to drag me out there and break in. It was always empty. I thought it was haunted—scared me to death.”
“The idea of breaking in or the house?”
“Both.”
“Well, you’d better get over your fears because I’ve rented it for a girls’ weekend.”
“What girls?”
“The Fulcher girls—you, me, Jodie, and Penni.”
“For when?”
“Week after next.”
“That’s Easter.”
“Duh.”
“I’ve got plans with Whitfield’s family. We’re taking his dad to church.”
“Change them.”
“It’ll be cold and windy out there.”
“We’re not going for sunbathing.”
“What are we going for?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there.”
“Brooke!”
“That’s why we’re going—for me to tell you something.”
Leah took a breath to protest, to flat deny Brooke’s order to turn her life and plans upside-down without more explanation or justification. But she let her refusal dissipate unspoken. Some long dormant intuition told her that Brooke wouldn’t be swayed from her plan, no matter how hard she pushed. And an even deeper intuition, something approaching her genetic wiring, told her that Brooke wouldn’t be pulling this outrageous stunt if it weren’t important. “When are you going to get there?”
“We’ve got it from Friday through Monday. I’ll be there by noon Friday, in Dave’s big-wheel pickup to get us back and forth. There’s a parking lot at the end of the paved road where you can leave your car.”
“What should I bring?”
“I’ll bring everything we need.”
Leah sighed. “You’re scaring me, Brooke.”
“Like when I wanted us to break in?”
“Worse.”
“I’ll explain when you get out there.
”
“O.K.”
“But you need to do me one favor.”
Leah paused. “What’s that?”
“You have to get Jodie there.”
“Brooke!”
“She won’t come if I ask, but she’ll do it for you.”
“She’s your daughter.”
“I’ll get Penni. You bring Jodie.”
Leah didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.
“Thanks, Sis. See you a week from Friday.”
Leah said, “I love you,” just as the line went dead.