Last Kiss Read online

  After tapping out a message to Laird, she closed out of her profile and clicked onto Charlie’s. It did her heart good to keep it alive. She and Charlie had been so close, had no secrets; they’d shared playlists and passwords. She hadn’t cared if he read her e-mail, and he’d liked the way she updated his Talk2Me profile, always including pictures of their life and times at Hubbard’s Point.

  Right now, staring at Charlie’s profile, she felt a little faint. There was his face, smiling out from the screen. The picture showed him standing on the boardwalk, just before the beach movie was about to start: the sky was dark, and the flash was a little too bright, startling him.

  Nell remembered that night so well—last summer, mid-July, hot and humid. The movie had been Charlotte’s Web. They were too old for it, but they didn’t care. Besides, it had been one of Charlie’s favorite books as a kid—his mom had read it to him.

  They’d put their blanket down and settled in, but they’d never gotten to watch. Thunderstorms had rolled off the Sound, driving everyone off the beach before the movie even started.

  Nell and Charlie had scrambled under the boardwalk. Raindrops had come through the cracks, but they hadn’t cared. They’d pulled their sandy blanket around them, kissed in the rain while people ran overhead, bare feet knocking sand and pebbles down on their damp heads.

  “I’m going to do it,” Peggy said now. “Click on the link and find out.”

  “Find out why men pull away?” Nell asked.

  “Yes. And how to create an attraction so powerful, Brandon will never leave me….”

  Nell smiled at her best friend. She knew how hard it was, both of them about to head off to different colleges—Peggy to Wellesley, Brandon to UConn. Nell had planned to apply to NYU early decision, so she and Charlie could be at the same school. She’d wanted to go into filmmaking, too, and work with him, and she’d loved the city, and most of all, she’d loved Charlie.

  Now that was over. Nell wasn’t going to college in the city where Charlie had died. Last fall her father had encouraged her to look in and around Boston, but her heart hadn’t been in it: Emerson, Boston College, Boston University, Regis. Good schools, varied in size, campus, and curriculum. Her father and Stevie wanted her to be excited about choosing Regis, but she felt dead inside.

  She watched as Peggy peered at the screen, reading some craziness about always asking your man what he thought about everything, caring about his opinions, and respecting the kind of car he drove. Totally bullshit stuff that made Nell sad to think people actually believed it. She and Charlie hadn’t needed any lessons or rules for staying in love. They would have loved each other forever. They would have grown old together.

  Someone knocked on her bedroom door, and her dad stuck his head in.

  “Anybody hungry? Stevie’s shucking corn, and I’m about to start the grill.”

  “I’m starved,” Nell said, smiling at her father, even though she wasn’t hungry at all.

  He looked into her eyes and smiled back. She knew he was worried about her since Charlie; his wife, Nell’s mother, had died. Both he and Nell knew the truth, that you could love someone with all the power and force you had, but it couldn’t stop death. And once you lost someone, it made loving everyone else both more precious and more impossible.

  Nell had been a little depressed this past year. Okay, a lot depressed. She’d missed a few weeks of school. She hadn’t shown any interest in the college application process, and her guidance counselor was “concerned.”

  Her father understood her. In fact, they supported each other. He was obviously excited about the new baby he was having with Stevie, but sad and disturbed by the fact Stevie didn’t want to get married. Nell had noticed them not getting along so well. Her dad was having a tough year, too.

  But even with his concerns about Stevie, he was completely there for Nell. He grieved along with her for Charlie—he’d loved him, too. He’d felt sad that Nell couldn’t enjoy her senior year; he’d had to push her to go to college interviews, to make her fill out her applications, write her essays. He’d driven her to four colleges, all in Massachusetts. She both craved his attention and felt sad because she needed it so much.

  “Come help Stevie,” he said. “I know she’d appreciate it.”

  Peggy jumped up, ran into the kitchen. Nell just stared at her father, trying to smile. They’d been through so much together—the loss of her mother, and now the loss of Charlie. He wanted her to be happy.

  “College girl,” he said.

  She kept the smile on her face, didn’t feel it inside. She’d decided on Regis College, the opposite direction from Hubbard’s Point than New York, the opposite in many ways from NYU. It was small, set on a beautiful campus a few miles outside Boston. It had an excellent library and a small museum on campus, and great professors. It was nurturing, the kind of place a person might come back to life. If only she believed that…

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She nodded. “You?”

  “I know this is a tough time of year,” he said. “Coming up on the anniversary…”

  “It’s always tough,” she said. “Because Charlie’s not here.”

  “I know.”

  “It was like this when Mom died,” she said.

  “Yes, it was. And we still love and miss her, but life got better. It will for you, too, honey.”

  “By ‘better,’ you mean Stevie, right?”

  He nodded, but his eyes were so sad. Nell gave her father a hug. She loved Stevie, but couldn’t understand why she was hurting him this way.

  “Maybe she’ll change her mind,” Nell said.

  “I have to be ready for the fact she probably won’t,” he said.

  “Well, have hope,” Nell said.

  “I’d say the same to you,” her father said. They gazed at each other, trying to smile. The words were so hopeful, but it was hard to take them to heart right now. For her father’s sake, Nell nodded and gave him a smile.

  She shut down the laptop. Her father patted her shoulder as she walked with him to the kitchen. She was picturing how this day could have been if only last August 31 hadn’t happened: Charlie would be here for dinner, too.

  He and Nell would sit together, holding hands under the table, dreaming of going to New York, starting their life together away from home. Maybe their love would even inspire Stevie to finally see the light and say yes to Nell’s father. Love like Nell and Charlie’s was so powerful, who knew what might happen….

  CHAPTER 5

  SHERIDAN SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM WITH HER TWO sisters, Agatha and Bunny. The sun was up, so the shades were down. Last night Gavin had been here, and she swore she could still feel his presence. He had sat on the rock ledge for hours, until she’d fallen asleep. When she’d woken up sometime before dawn, he was gone.

  “What’s the point of having a terrace if we can’t sit on it?” Agatha asked.

  “A lovely bluestone terrace,” Bunny said, as if that made all the difference.

  “Stop, will you please?” Sheridan asked.

  “I don’t see why depriving yourself of sunlight is helpful. Come on, honey…let’s go outside,” Agatha said. “I’d like to raid your herb garden, for one thing.”

  “Help yourself,” Sheridan said.

  “Have you ever considered what a waste it is, the fact that you have Grandmother’s herb garden, but that you don’t believe?”

  “She believes,” Bunny said quietly. “And she doesn’t try to profit from it, either. Look at you, marketing love potions and psychic readings to tourists and summer people.”

  “It pays my mortgage,” Agatha said.

  “I’m so glad you came over here to bicker,” Sheridan said, standing up and walking into the kitchen. She reached for three glasses and the bottle of bourbon. Then she thought of last night, of how she had poured drinks for herself and Gavin. She knew she’d caught the alarm in his eyes, watching how fast she’d tossed hers down.

  Instead, she went
to the refrigerator and opened it. There always used to be a pitcher of iced tea in here. Her grandmother had started the tradition, brewing it with Barry’s tea from Ireland and lemon verbena from the garden. Sheridan used to make sugar syrup, Southern style—she’d learned how in Nashville. Charlie had loved that.

  Her sisters were still in the other room, arguing about whatever. Sheridan wasn’t listening. She wondered why she hadn’t told them that Gavin Dawson had stopped by. That would stop their squabbling, she was sure. At one time, they’d assumed he’d be their brother-in-law.

  She noticed that one of her sisters had brought a plate of orange cookies, left it on the table. Charlie had loved his aunts’ cooking…. Sheridan stared at the plate, feeling stabbed through the heart.

  “Sheridan?”

  “Bunny,” she said, turning. “Why didn’t I cook more?”

  “Cook, honey?”

  “He deserved a mom who stayed home and cooked. Like you do for your kids, like Aggie does for Louis.”

  “You made music,” Bunny said, putting her arm around Sheridan’s shoulders. “That was as good as any meal. Charlie loved your songs, he loved how he knew all the secrets in your lyrics. The rest of the country would be trying to figure out who you meant by ‘Dark Heart,’ which lover you were trashing, but Charlie would know you were talking about the mean guy at the gas station….”

  Sheridan looked down; “Dark Heart” and all her love songs, even or especially love-gone-wrong songs, had been about one person. She’d only told Charlie they’d been about less dire situations like a mean man at the gas station.

  “No music was ever as good as your orange cookies,” Sheridan said.

  “I didn’t make these,” Bunny said. “Ag did.”

  “But yours are great, too,” Sheridan said, her eyes filling with tears. She couldn’t say his name with many people, but she couldn’t not say it with her sisters. “Charlie loved having aunts who baked.”

  Bunny stood there. She was small and round, with curly brown hair and big green eyes. She wore a periwinkle-blue sundress with pink scallop shells embroidered around the scoop neck. She adored the sun and loved getting a tan, but Agatha and Sheridan had convinced her to start using sunscreen after she got squamous cell skin cancer two years ago.

  “His aunts loved baking for him,” Bunny said.

  Sheridan saw the tears in her sister’s eyes and had to look down. She shook, thinking of how much Charlie had loved his Aunt Bunny.

  He had adored Agatha, too, but in a different way. He’d gotten the hugest kick out of Agatha’s eccentricities; Sheridan’s grandmother had died when he was a baby, but she lived on in Agatha. Agatha wore black, chanted spells, gathered herbs, played Irish music on her fiddle.

  Bunny was calm, gentle, suburban. The only mark she cared about making in this world was in loving her family. And Charlie had been her family.

  “Why did he have to leave us?” Sheridan whispered.

  Bunny couldn’t answer; she stepped closer, put her arms around her sister. Sheridan leaned against her soft body, and they held each other. They’d grown up in this house, spent so many happy summers and fun times. They’d gathered round their grandmother, begged her to put spells on them. Later, when they were older, they’d sometimes laugh at the believers, even at their grandmother herself for the way she believed in her own gifts. But even so, they’d always loved reading to her from her magic books.

  Agatha walked in behind them. She had lit a candle; Sheridan could smell the honeysuckle-scented smoke. If her sister started in on anything crazy, if she slipped too overtly into Irish-mystic or spiritualist mode, Sheridan would be out of there so fast…. But all Agatha did was put the candle down on the kitchen table, walk over, and slip her arms around Sheridan and Bunny.

  “I heard what you were saying from the other room,” she said. “And all I could think to do was light a candle for him.”

  “Thank you,” Sheridan whispered.

  “He’s on my mind all the time,” Agatha said, her voice breaking.

  “It’s why you baked the orange cookies, isn’t it?” Bunny asked.

  Sheridan felt Agatha nod. She must have been unable to speak, because no sound came out of her throat. The three sisters stood there holding one another. Bunny broke away first, reached down and lifted the plate, held it.

  The smell of orange peel and vanilla bean was sweet and gentle, and reminded Sheridan of sitting on the porch, rocking Charlie in her lap while he ate one of his aunt’s cookies.

  “I’m going to tell you something,” Sheridan said. “But I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Her sisters listened.

  “Gavin’s here.”

  “Gavin Dawson?” Bunny asked, her eyes bright.

  Sheridan nodded.

  “Where is he?”

  “On his boat,” Sheridan said.

  “But…” Bunny began.

  “She told you,” Agatha said sternly, but with light in her eyes. “She doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay,” Bunny said, reaching for a cookie as a warm smile overtook her. “This one’s for Charlie.”

  “For Charlie,” Agatha said.

  Sheridan took one, held it in her hand. She couldn’t take a bite, but she liked holding it. She stood in the sister circle, staring down at the old linoleum floor. She saw a rusty smudged bloody footprint she had missed wiping up, made last night by Gavin’s badly cut foot. Seeing it somehow made her feel a little better. Not much, but a little. She nibbled the cookie’s crispy brown edge.

  “For Charlie,” she whispered.

  After another long hug, they pulled apart. Bunny drifted back to the table, picked up the box of gauze bandages.

  “Who are these for?” she asked.

  Sheridan shrugged, turning away to hide the color rising in her face. Something in Bunny’s smile told her she knew they had been for Gavin. She thought about “Dark Heart,” how she’d written it a year after she and Gavin had broken up, not long after Charlie was born.

  But earlier in her songwriting career—at the very start, when she was a teenage girl with her first guitar—she had sat right here in this kitchen, picking out notes and writing lyrics to fit in sixteen-bar verses and eight-bar choruses, all of them about the bright wildness of falling in love with Gavin Dawson.

  They had been beach kids together, just like Nell and Charlie. Gavin was different from anyone she knew. He was from the tough part of a small Rhode Island mill town; he’d gotten sent here to spend summers with his grandmother, to keep him out of trouble.

  Gavin had a temper, got into fights with the other boys here at the beach. He’d get together packs of kids to go diving off the train bridge into Devil’s Hole, or to dive from the breakwater and poach lobsters from the pots out there.

  But with Sheridan, he seemed like another person. She gentled him somehow; even then she’d known she had that power. She’d be very still, just watching him, and he’d calm down. She’d see him for everything he was: a boy with a jagged scar on his cheek, with holes in his sneakers, who would dive deeper than anyone else, hold his breath, and steal lobsters. He was a daredevil, daring his own personal demons. Life had made him feel unsafe—at home, on the streets, everywhere. With Sheridan, it was different.

  Sheridan saw the best in him, and something in the way she didn’t look away, or judge him, or look down on him, made him lean into her. She didn’t need spells or special herbs—but she’d exerted some kind of magic that made him want to be different around her. She made him want to be his best.

  The sea breeze that swept through Hubbard’s Point, the tides that rose and fell on the beach and the rock ledge, the phases of the moon that waxed and waned through each of the summer months: those rhythms seemed to come not from nature, but from the love that grew between Sheridan and Gavin.

  They had started as friends. He had been devoted to her—she’d known it before he’d ever said. She could tell by the way he looked at her, the way he’
d flinch if anyone ever teased her. Once Ed Moriarty had made a comment about her freckles, and Sheridan had seen Gavin register the moment, store it up for later. He’d broken Ed’s wrist, ostensibly over a spearfishing incident, but Sheridan would never stop believing the real reason had been because Ed had made the mistake of calling her “Freckle-face.” There was danger in Gavin’s devotion. Love with Gavin would always be a fine line between passion and ruin.

  But oh, the passion. She’d first learned about it sitting beside Gavin when they were thirteen. It was the Fourth of July, and they’d gathered with a bunch of friends on the seawall to watch fireworks being shot off across the water, from a barge off Black Point. The display was extravagant—fountains, pinwheels, sky rockets. Sheridan and Gavin were side by side on the wall, arms and legs touching. Just the way his bare arm brushed hers was more heart-stopping than the fireworks. She’d felt stunned, frozen, unable to believe the intense feelings shooting through her body, coming straight from his.

  His hand had brushed hers—was it on purpose? The idea it might have been made her feel faint. Her head was light, but she’d never felt more clear. The moment quivered, holding them close together. She never wanted the fireworks to end. The explosions echoed her heartbeats. The flashes made her blink, and when she turned to Gavin and saw him smiling at her, she couldn’t turn away to look back at the sky.

  Those feelings stayed with her all that summer, through the next winter. The following July, she counted days till the Fourth, her body trembling as she anticipated sitting next to Gavin on the seawall. She’d lie awake at night, her pulse racing, wondering whether he’d touch her hand again. But it rained. A deluge, remnants of a tropical storm, buckets of rain and galloping waves that kept the fireworks barge in port. All she had to do was mention to Gavin that she was disappointed the display had been canceled.

  He misunderstood. Thinking she was upset because she’d wanted to see actual fireworks, not understanding that what she’d been longing for was a chance to sit next to him on the seawall, feel his closeness and the wild thrill of his skin brushing hers, he’d ridden his bike to a construction site in Niantic and stolen some quarter-sticks of dynamite.