Page 2 of Winter Sun

“Oh no.” Katrina squeezed Grant’s hand with all her strength.

“Fortunately, we were able to avoid surgery,” he went on. “We have put her in a medically induced coma, which should last approximately seventy-two hours. This will give her body time to reduce the swelling and rest. Best of all, she’s not in any pain.”

He said it as though Agatha had been in a great deal of pain when she’d arrived. Katrina could practically hear her mother’s howling echoing through the halls.

Katrina and Grant asked the doctor a series of questions. Katrina felt as though she were outside of her body, floating up by the ceiling and watching this all take place. When her father had passed away, it had been sudden and immediate, and Katrina hadn’t had time to dwell. Now, for better or for worse, she was forced to reckon with the specifics of her mother’s decline. Her heart felt bruised.

After the doctor left to tend to other patients, Katrina and Grant were led to Agatha’s room. Katrina’s heart pounded in her throat as the door opened to reveal the very slight old woman hooked up to wires and tubes. Machines beeped on either side of the hospital bed, illustrating the dimming light of her mother’s life. A ball of sorrow filled Katrina’s chest, pressing hard against her heart. As the nurse closed the door behind them, Katrina burrowed her face in Grant’s chest and tried to breathe.

“She’ll wake up in a few days,” Grant told her, rolling his hand over her back. “The doctor knows what he’s doing.”

Katrina sat on one side of the bed, and Grant sat on the opposite side. Her mother’s wrinkled hand was splayed across the bed, the fingernails glinting with perfection. Agatha had never let more than two weeks go by without doing her nails. This wasn’t something she’d been able to pass along to Katrina.“Just look at the state of your nails, Katrina. Really. Aren’t you embarrassed?”

Agatha’s bruises had begun to appear. They were purple and blue, rising up from beneath her skin. Her wrist and legwere both broken. It was impossible to imagine just how tender eighty-five-year-old bones were. Katrina imagined them like the set of China in her mother’s hutch. Once, she’d accidentally dropped a teacup and watched the shards scatter to all corners of the dining room. Her father had exploded with rage.

As Katrina watched her mother lay there in the hospital bed, she half imagined Agatha would open her eyes, twist her head on the pillow, and bellow,“What happened to you, Katrina? You’ve let yourself get so old.”

But instead, Agatha’s eyes remained closed. And Katrina began to reckon with the real truth of her mother’s fall.

Maybe Katrina would never be able to talk to her mother about the trauma from their shared past. Maybe it was already too late for Katrina to heal.

Chapter Two

The Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting on December 30th was held in the Presbyterian church community room. It was located in the basement, its carpet musty and in dire need of an update. Old newspaper clippings featuring Nantucket teenagers and children doing “good deeds” around the community hung on the bulletin board. The room was connected to the church kitchen, which made it a viable option for NA, especially around the holidays.

“These are often the most difficult weeks for people in the program,” Jeff had told them a few weeks ago. “Which means we’ll take any opportunity to celebrate together and be there for one another. We have to stay strong through this season and beyond.”

Tonight, Sophie reached NA a few minutes before six. She stomped her boots on the welcome mat and unbuttoned her coat, inhaling the warm smell of broccoli cheddar soup, fresh bread, and something else. Chicken? With each step down the staircase, more of the NA crew came into view, their cheeks red from the cold yet their smiles and laughter vibrant. They hugged one another and gripped Styrofoam cups of coffee, recounting their Christmas stories. Sophie knew she was lucky comparedto most of these people. Most of her family had continued to love her through her addiction and recovery. (Her mother, of course, was another story.) But many people’s parents, children, or partners abandoned them when times got tough.

“And it’s not like we can blame them for that,” Jeff had said at another meeting. “We were not ourselves. As addicts, we gave them no love and no respect. We thought only about ourselves and our next fix.”

Jeff was the leader of the Nantucket NA chapter, a guy in his sixties with gray hair to his shoulders and a round silver belt buckle that he brought back from a trip out west. He’d been sober since he was thirty, which was more than half his life. Sophie couldn’t imagine having that much sobriety on her. He wore his sobriety proudly, like a warrior through battle. In many ways, he was exactly that.

Addicts understood that about one another, Sophie knew. It was nothing she could describe to her mother. It was, perhaps, why she’d fallen so deeply in love with Patrick. He understood her down to the core.

“There she is!” Jeff greeted Sophie first, striding forward as she shimmied from her coat. They hugged. “Merry Christmas,” Jeff said. “I hope things went well with your family?”

“As well as can be expected,” Sophie said. “How was yours?”

“Cozy,” Jeff said. “Just Mandy and me at the house with the dogs. I ate my weight in her Christmas cookies, I’ll tell you.” He patted his stomach, which looked exactly the same as it always did.

Jeff smiled and adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. His wedding band glinted on his left hand—a new addition from last summer. His wife, Mandy, was in AA, not NA, but the same rules applied. And they’d fallen head over heels for one another when Mandy had come to the island two summers ago for a solovacation. When Sophie had learned the story, she’d welled up with tears. Love had no timeline. It had no rules.

“Where’s Patrick?” Jeff asked.

“He’s working today, unfortunately,” Sophie explained. “He and his brothers have to finish a project before the end of the year.”

Patrick was Sophie’s boyfriend. The title was a relatively new development for reasons that were difficult to say aloud. Katrina Coleman certainly didn’t like to speak about them—not even to Sophie, who sometimes ached to hear what her mother thought.

The gist was that Sophie had always been an addict. Even when she hadn’t been using, she’d been an addict. That was the way these things went—genetically, physically, and emotionally. Years ago, as she’d snuck around as a high-functioning addict trying to get a fix, she’d met Patrick, another addict. “It was love at first sight,” Sophie told the NA group sometimes when it was her time to share. “It was like we’d always known each other. Like we were just waiting for the other to appear.”

Sophie had been married to Jared when they’d met. An addict with a million secrets up her sleeves anyway, she’d added yet another secret: her love for Patrick. They’d spent nearly two years sneaking around, getting high, and sleeping together. Sometimes, they’d fought about it, wondering what to do when they could take the necessary steps to actually be together. The arguments always ended the same way—they just got high again.

Sophie had been too terrified to leave Jared. For one thing, they’d been together since high school—tied together more or less for forever. Sophie marrying her high school sweetheart was something Katrina was proud of. After all, that was what people did in Sophie’s family on both the Whittaker and Coleman sides. They decided on who they were and who they loved by the time they were eighteen. Somehow.

Beyond that, Jared had been emotionally abusive. Counterintuitively, this made Sophie cling tighter to Jared and think of him as a lifeline. He’d belittled her so much that she believed she couldn’t live without him in some respect. She thought of herself as ugly and less than. Her self-esteem was gone.

But last spring, as Sophie’s addiction had gotten more and more challenging to hide, everything changed. Her cousin, Samantha Coleman, inherited their great-aunt Jessabelle’s old house—colloquially called The Jessabelle House. She then hired three contractor brothers, Derek, Brent, and Patrick, to refurbish the house. Patrick hadn’t mentioned the job to Sophie. Perhaps he hadn’t even realized they were cousins. Sam had still carried her ex-husband’s last name at the time.

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