Free Threading the Needle by Marie Bostwick Page B

there was something about her expression, her eyes.... Strangely, she looked almost younger than she had at our last meeting.
    All these years later, I could remember every wounding word she’d uttered, every stabbing inflection of her voice, the utter loathing in each glance of her piercing, icy eyes.
    Now she sounded relaxed, happy, and there was a definite spring in her step. She hustled past me without a glance, took a sharp right turn into the old Cobbled Court, and disappeared, the sound of her voice and the echo of her heels on cold gray stones fading behind me.
    I walked past the door of the café until I was sure she was gone, and then stopped, reaching my palm out to rest against a gritty red-brick wall. My heart was racing and the aspirin-dulled pain in my head was back. The rest of me felt numb. I couldn’t keep standing there on the street, but I couldn’t force myself to go inside the café either. Instead, I made an about-face, fighting off nausea as I retraced my steps back down Oak Leaf Lane. The crisp sunny morning and the chittering birds mocked my retreat.
    Three doors from my destination I looked up and saw it—the painted porch of the old Kover house—and the memories . . . all those awful memories came flooding back.
    Why was I here? The scene of my most humiliating failures? Of all the cities, towns, and villages in the world, why did I find myself a refugee in the one place that never welcomed me, filled with people and the memories of people who never wanted me? Why? What kind of cosmic joke was God playing now?
    Eyes glued to the sidewalk, I walked the last half block to Edna’s garden gate with quickened steps, went inside the house and back to bed, pulling the covers over my head to block out the light and the memories—all the memories.
    Impossible.

7
    Madelyn
    I slept off the cognac and dreamed about my dad. I didn’t remember my dream, I never do. But it was something about Dad and a ship. Dad on a ship. Something like that.
    The ocean is more than an hour’s drive from New Bern. Even so, Dad wanted to be a ship captain when he grew up. It didn’t work out. Instead, he became a shipbuilder, actually a submarine builder. He worked for the Electric Boat Company, out of Groton, Connecticut, where I grew up. When I was nine he was knocked unconscious by a piece of swinging steel and never woke up. Grandma Edna came to Groton after Dad’s accident. She had to. There was no one else.
    I kept vigil in the hospital waiting area, a room with gunmetal gray tile on the floors and stiff plastic sofas, where people dozed or wept or drank cardboard cups of coffee bought from the vending machine while keeping one ear tuned for the sound of nurses in rubber-soled shoes, bringing news. They wouldn’t let me in Dad’s room, not until the last day, when I was told to come and say good-bye. It didn’t matter. Dad was already gone. He had been from the moment that slab of metal cracked his skull. The tubes and screens and beeping monitors had only delayed the inevitable.
    It was terrible to see him like that, and frightening. I tried to put my hand into Edna’s, but she pulled back and closed her fist on empty air, pulling herself in as tight and hard as a pillar of polished marble. We’d scarcely exchanged a score of words since she arrived in Groton but, somehow, I already knew she could never forgive me. Though I didn’t know why. Not yet.
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    I never met my mother. Until Dad died, I didn’t know where she was or who she was. Edna lost no time filling me in on the details of my unplanned arrival in this world. The history she imparted was one-sided and colored by hate, but it’s all I have to go on. Hers was the only voice in the room.
    My father was bright and a good student, good enough to be accepted into the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, on Long Island. The competition for admission was fierce