Anna’s eyes widened, but she nodded in agreement. “Yeah, fine. I’ll stick close to my room for the next two weeks.”
“Thank you,” Linnea said, meaning it. “Then we’re agreed. And I will call Cara immediately and let her know about Luna. Until we get your mama’s verdict, honey,” she said, directing this comment to Hope, “I’m afraid you have to stay away from Luna. I think she’s making you sneeze.”
Hope was crestfallen. “I’m sorry!”
“Oh no, honey. It’s not your fault.” Linnea’s heart went out to her. She was still so young. She thought that somehow she’d made the puppy sick. Linnea wrapped her arms around the child, who had begun to cry.
“I hate germs,” Hope wailed.
“We all do, honey,” she said, looking up at John for support. “But we’ll be okay. And so will Luna. You’ll see.”
“On that note,” John said, “I’d say this meeting is adjourned.”
chapter seven
Sometimes a touch, a hug, the feel of an encircling arm—more than words—had the power to restore one’s faith that all would be well.
ACROSS THE STREET on Ocean Boulevard Cara sat alone on the white suede Chesterfield sofa in her living room leafing idly though Charleston magazine. Out the large plate-glass windows, the sky was ominous. Gray clouds hovered over a turbulent gray ocean littered with white-capped waves. It would be dark soon, she thought. The end of another day. A wave of loneliness swept over her. So many days without David and Hope. She wondered again how she had lived so many years alone.
When she’d left Charleston at age eighteen, she’d been hell-bent on heading anywhere north to start her life, as far away from her abusive father as she could get. She’d thought when she left town, it would be for college. She was academic, had excelled at school and extracurricular activities, and rarely dated. She had her dream ahead of her like a carrot in front of a mule. When she’d received her acceptance from Boston University, she was elated. She’d succeeded!
Or so she’d thought. Her success was what had started that last, desperate argument with her father. Stratton Rutledge had reared up, stomped his foot down and thrust his chin out, and laid out his rejection of her dreams—of her—in a final challenge.
Cara closed her eyes and shuddered, alone on the sofa, the whole scene coming back to her, vivid and real, even after nearly forty years. She brought the cashmere throw up around her shoulders as the memory played itself out.
She was just eighteen, and the family was sitting in the dining room, their favorite battleground. During family dinner conversations at the long, polished table, her mother had usually sat quietly, or moved silently from kitchen to dining room to serve. Only when asked a direct question did she participate in the debates that usually raged over some point no one could remember or even cared about. For Cara and her father, these arguments were all about firing shots and winning. For her mother and, to a lesser degree, Palmer, it was about dodging the bullets. They thought she was so strong. What they’d never understood was that, for Cara, firing back was a means of survival.
That evening, her father was drunk again. Her mother sat at the opposite end of the dining table, her eyes cast down at her plate as Cara and her father argued about her choice of college. Palmer was frozen across the table from her, begging her with his eyes to just be quiet, to go along and not cause trouble. But Cara had been accepted to Boston University, her dream college. Her number-one choice. She was not backing down.
“This is where I want to go,” she’d shouted back at him when he’d refused to send her. “I worked hard, real hard, for four years. I got straight As, glowing letters of recommendation. I earned this, Daddy.” She’d set her jaw, not knowing she was a mirror of her father. “I’m going!”
Stratton Rutledge, patriarch, favorite son, husband, father, the man who sat at the head of the table, planted his elbows on the gleaming wood and pointed his finger at the young female who dared challenge his authority.
“Who the hell do you think you are, little girl?” her father had roared. “You’ll do as I say. And if you step one foot out of this town—out of this house—that’ll tear it between us, you hear? You are not going north, and that’s final. I’ll not tolerate this arrogance. Especially not from some blunt-mouthed teenage girl who won’t act like the lady she’s been bred to be. You’re an embarrassment to your mama. And to me. Where do you think you’re going? Come back here! Caretta Rutledge! You leave and you’ll not get one dollar, not one stick of furniture, not so much as a nod of the head when you pass on the street with me, hear?”
If that had been the end of it, just another drunken episode, her life might have been different. But Cara had shown her independence. She’d risen from the table, glared at him, and, without another word, walked out of the dining room.
She hadn’t expected him to follow her. In a drunken rage, he’d struck her down as she tried to escape up the stairs. Howling with fury, he hit her, again and again, as her mother and brother watched, frozen in terror in the front hall. Cara still remembered his lips, tight with a line of spittle. His eyes, glazed red with fury. The slap of his hand across her face. Yet she did not remember the pain. It was as though she were numb, unable to feel. What she remembered most clearly as the blows came was staring at her mother, meeting her gaze in a silent challenge: Why aren’t you stopping him?
By dawn, she’d left the house, her family, Charleston, all she knew, to head to any point north. It was an act of survival. She’d ended up in Chicago with nothing but the clothes in her suitcase and a few thousand dollars in her bank account. A cousin living there had let her crash in her apartment. Once her bruises healed, Cara went out in search of a job. She was hired as a receptionist for an advertising firm. She worked during the day and took college classes at night. It had taken seven years, but she got her bachelor’s degree and, in the following years, rose up the ladder to become one of the youngest executives at the firm.
At forty, Cara had achieved all she had set out to do when she’d left her family that horrid night. And in the blink of an eye—or rather, a financial shift of power—she’d lost it all. She was summarily fired. There was a particular kind of humiliation associated with being escorted out of the building by an armed guard.
Staring out the window of her Chicago condo at a stormy Lake Michigan, with her mother’s letter begging her to come home for a visit in her hand, Cara had the cold realization that in all those years focusing on work and success, she had forgotten to live. Gazing at the threatening water, she’d faced the fact that she had no real friends, no relationship, and, at forty, no children.
Cara had never felt so utterly alone. Used up. Depleted. Picking herself up, she went where most children went when the world kicked them to the ground—home. Her father was dead, opening the door in her mind to reconciliation with her mother. Once again, her life had changed, and she had to start over. It wasn’t easy. She’d spent the past twenty years carefully crafting her world and her response to it. Her mother had named her Caretta after the loggerhead sea turtles she adored. Cara had always hated it, choosing to be called Cara. Yet she’d adopted the signature lone-swimmer lifestyle of the turtle for which she’d been named.