Page 39 of The Cottage on Blueberry Bay

“You don’t know what it’s like to live with this feeling, okay, Remy? You don’t.” Meredith didn’t mean to be harsh, but it was the truth. “I feel like I was tossed out like garbage.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” Remy said softly on the phone. “But I’ll never know if you don’t let me. You never want to talk about things. You never want our help.”

Meredith exhaled hard. “Alright, come and help me deal with all of this.”

“Finally,” Remy said. “I’ll leave straight away in the morning.” Then just after she said goodbye, Remy said, “I love you, Merry.”

“I love you, too, Frodo,” Meredith said, their sibling joke from when they readTheLord of the Ringson a family vacation.

Meredith sat down on the daybed on the back porch, looking out at the inky black sea under a blanket of stars. The waves drowned out her thoughts.

Why didn’t she want Remy to come up? Was she ashamed? Would Remy look at her differently when she found out her father’s mental state was folklore among the teenagers in town? Would it further alienate Meredith from the family?

She lay down, counting the waves as they pounded along the shore. One after the other, they crashed against the rocks like the thoughts inside her head. She thought about leaving the cottage and going back to a house she couldn’t afford. She thought about the cottage and oceanfront property she could sell to pay for a big empty house that no one even wanted to come back to visit, and about Gordon’s offer to move back in. She flinched at the thought of living with her father again. She felt the pang when thinking about Remy’s happy marriage and fabulous life. Then she felt the suffocation of losing her mother and the drowning of divorcing Phillip.

Her thoughts kept coming again and again, and she felt like the rocks below as the waves kept hitting, over and over.

CHAPTER15

Meredith hadn’t slept a whole night since Phillip had left, so she was pleasantly surprised when she woke up to see the sun rising over the horizon. She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Seagulls called out, landing along the water’s surface. A lobster boat cut through the water and headed east toward the golden light.

Squinting, she raised her hand up to cover her eyes. The sun’s rays raced across the water straight into the porch, its warmth hitting her cool cheeks. She inhaled and the scent of beach plum roses wafted through the muggy air. She could already tell it would be a warm one.

That was when she smelled the musky scent of campfire. A strange wanting to have her own campfire hit her again.

She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and got up from the porch’s daybed. She needed some coffee and a plan for the day before her sister came.

When she opened the door to Jacob’s studio, that was when she saw the hundreds of prisms of light dancing along every surface of the room. Her eyes followed along the south wall where wooden frames sat without canvases. They all appeared to be handmade from old wood and reused frames or large pieces of driftwood for frames. In the corner, an antique standing radio. On the other side of the room, stood a copper sink.

She walked to a long wooden table set up in the middle of the room to the pile of canvasses that sat on top. At first, she just stared at them. Would there be something in there that would reveal something to her, a clue to her life?

Then, she leafed through, scanning each one, mostly landscapes of the ocean, but as she reached the end of the pile, she came across a portrait of a woman standing along the water’s edge, looking out at the endless ocean before her. Meredith knew exactly where that had been painted because she had looked out at the same scene and she knew exactly who the woman was. She could recognize her mother from anywhere.

She pulled the canvas out of its place slowly and set it on top of the pile.

Her mother looked young—mid-twenties; her long auburn hair hung below her shoulders back then. She stood alone, her neck straight, her shoulders pulled back with her hair blowing in the breeze.

He painted her in a sundress, but Meredith didn’t remember that one—not that she remembered all her mother’s things, but Jacqueline had a classic style, not frilly or colorful, whereas the dress in the painting billowed out around her and had deep shades of blue like the blueberries around her.

Only the silhouette of her mother’s face had been painted, but it was enough to feel the happiness radiating out of her as she looked up at the sun. And that’s when a wave of empathy washed over her.

She knew exactly why it was on the bottom of the pile because she had done the same thing with her family photos. Stuffed the ones with Phillip in the back of the pile. Tried to forget what life was like before he’d left her.

Had Jacob lost everything he’d loved, just like her? Or let it go?

She stared at her mother’s face.

And did Jacqueline?

Meredith looked out the window as the sun crept higher in the sky. She walked back out to the porch, getting a better view, looking for the exact spot where her mother had once stood happily.

She grabbed a sweatshirt from her luggage and her phone, then pushed the screen door open and walked toward the beach. It was much easier getting there in the daylight as she noticed a sandy path that Kyle and the young woman must’ve used. The path had been easy to follow as it meandered through beach plums and blueberry bushes. As it reached the granite ledge, she stopped.

Standing on the edge, she felt like she was at the end of the earth. Nowhere else to run away from her problems.

Boom!A wave crashed into the rocks below, spraying sea-foam up into the air and splattering on the rocks below. She jumped for a second, then laughed at the abrupt sound. Like a well-trained orchestra, waves came up against the coast, hitting it one right after another like a percussionist pounding the drums. The steady rhythm filled her chest, and she inhaled the air from the briny, salty sea as it sprayed around her.

She didn’t leave that spot until she saw someone waving their hand at her.

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