Page 16 of The Light Year

“We talk on the phone once a week, but she writes me a letter every single day.”

“What?” Jo looks surprised. “Every day?”

Jude nods. “Yep. She chooses a different topic every day and she writes about it. I usually get one letter a day in the mail, and sometimes they’re about flowers, or why she loves Hawaii, but other times she’ll write about me as a little girl, or about my brother, who she wants me to meet. It’s been special.”

Jo shakes her head, awed. “I think this is such a beautiful story. Better than anything I could dream up or write.”

Jude looks impressed by her own scenario. “It is pretty incredible. I hadn’t seen her for almost twenty-five years—can you imagine?”

Barbie shakes her head; she can’t imagine, although it’s already been nearly eight years since she’s seen her own mother.

A wave rolls up and crashes loudly, licking the sand before it retreats. As her friends talk, Barbie is transported back to summer at the Jersey shore. The house her family had rented was large and directly on the water, and though she and Todd were newlyweds, they’d joined everyone there for a week, prepared to mingle with Ted and his wife, Elizabeth, as well as Barbie’s parents and any guests who happened to be staying in one of the well-appointed rooms that overlooked the ocean.

The commotion downstairs the morning after their arrival had woken Barbie from a deep sleep, pulling her to consciousness as she rolled over to touch the empty spot where Todd had been the night before.

“Hello?” she called out, sitting up in the piles of white bedding and looking around in the morning light. “Todd?”

They had a bathroom attached to their room—a suite—but the door was open and the bathroom silent, so Barbie knew the noise that had woken her wasn’t from Todd showering or shaving.

She slid out of bed and found a robe and slippers, pushing her hair from her eyes as she heard a wail from below that alarmed her. She tightened the belt of the robe and rushed out of the bedroom and down the stairs.

What greeted her there was a sight she would never forget: her father, on his knees, keening and howling as a police officer stood to the side, looking helpless and guarded. Ted was huddled on a couch with Elizabeth next to him, eyes wide in shock.

Todd stood on the front porch, visible through the open door, as he spoke to another uniformed officer.

“What?” Barbie asked, panic rising in her chest. She’d forgotten instantly that she was clad only in a thin robe and that her father and brother were in the room. “What’s going on? Where’s Mom?”

Barbie’s brother looked up from where he’d buried his face in his hands, looking traumatized and wrecked. “Mom,” he said. “Mom drowned.”

Barbie felt the floor meet her hands and knees as she fell, and only when Todd rushed in from the porch to help her back to her feet did she realize that she’d landed on all fours.

“What?” Barbie asked, looking at Todd searchingly as he led her to a chair. “What happened? Where’s my mother?”

“Hey,” Todd said gently, setting her down and helping her to close her robe over her thighs as she stared up at his face, looking lost. “I’m trying to get information from the police officer now.”

George Mackey’s wailing hadn’t stopped, but instead morphed into deep, body-racking sobs that pulled Barbie’s attention to him.

“Dad?” she rasped. “Dad?”

She tried to stand up from the chair to go to him, but Todd didn’t let her. He kept her in the chair, ostensibly to prevent her from taking another fall.

“I’ll get more information,” Todd said, pointing at her to stay in the chair as he walked back outside to speak with the police officer, leaving the room a confused, shocked, heartbroken mass of Mackey family members with Barbie at its center.

As it turned out, and as the family deduced over the coming days, Marion Mackey had mixed sleeping pills with her wine, and then proceeded to get into an argument with her husband on the balcony of their suite. Ted, who had heard the yelling, had gone to check on them, and assured by his father that everything was fine, he’d left his parents to it. After all, both Ted and Barbie had heard their parents yell and argue over the course of their lifetime, and a wine-fueled argument was nothing new.

But when George Mackey woke in the morning to find his wife gone, he’d searched for her first in the house, then walked outside and into the unfortunate scene that unfolded in one horrifying moment: Marion, sprawled face-first in a small tide pool, her satin nightgown soaked and drifting around her body, her brown hair loose and floating in the water like seaweed.

In the ensuing years, Barbie had wondered a thousand times whether her father had known how drunk and distraught her mother was, and if there was anything he might have done to stop her from going outside. In her darkest moments, she’d even wondered whether George Mackey had somehow encouraged—even a little—his wife’s demise, perhaps by locking her out of the house, or leading her out into the darkness and then pushing her into the water. But those thoughts were fleeting,and the trusting, innocent part of Barbie didn’t even want to contemplate such things.

Still, George Mackey had remarried exceptionally quickly, and within months of the funeral, he refused to even speak to his children about their mother.

At first that had seemed cold-hearted to Barbie, and she hadn’t understood—as a woman in the first blush of the honeymoon phase—how love could end so abruptly and with no looking back, but as the years have gone on, she’s come to understand what it means to love someone and to lose them. She’s grown into a woman who understands the complexities of love and loss, and now she thinks that maybe, just maybe, her father had found it easier to bury that part of his heart along with her mother.

“I’m so happy for you,” Jo says to Jude there on the beach.

Barbie blinks away the memory of that trip to the Jersey shore and nods along with the other women. “Me, too,” she says, smiling through her own sadness. To have the chance to talk to her mother now would be a gift; to share with her all that’s happened in the past eight years—including the births of all three of her sons—would be a blessing. But instead of feeling sad for herself, she brings forth a real smile for Jude, because sheishappy for her friend. She truly is.

Huck carries over another bucket of sand and dumps it right in Barbie’s lap. At this, the women all laugh knowingly, and Barbie looks down at the way the sand is sifting into the cracks and crevices of her thighs and shorts.

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