Morning Glory(87)

“You did?”

“Yes.” I remember the photographs Alex took, the ones where Naomi had been doubled over in her sadness.

Her eyes are misty, and I can see the anguish brewing in her gaze, like a storm that’s gaining strength over the ocean. Whatever tough exterior she has been fronting is gone now. Jim hands her a handkerchief. “It’s OK, Mom,” he says, “you don’t have to—”

“Was he well?” she asks, ignoring her son.

“Yes,” I say. “Well, for his condition.”

“His condition?”

“He has a heart condition.”

“Oh,” she says, dabbing the corner of her handkerchief to her eye. “If you want to know the truth, I was in love with him. Madly in love.”

“Mom,” Jim says, “please, Father will hear you.”

She holds up her hand to silence him. “It makes no matter. It’s no secret to him.”

Jim looks at his hands in his lap.

“Yes, I loved Dexter Wentworth. But it was all a mistake, a terrible mistake. Not just because he was my patient, but because he was married. I destroyed everything he had with Penny.”

Jim stands up and walks into the kitchen as if this revelation is too much for him to take.

“She was everything I wasn’t,” Naomi continues. “Sweet and gentle. Innocent.” She lets out a nervous cackle. “I wanted to be like her.”

Naomi looks at Jim. “I’m so sorry, son,” she says tearfully. “I wasn’t the mother I wanted to be. Will you ever forgive me?”

“I forgave you a long time ago, Mom,” he says, sitting beside her again.

“Naomi, what happened the night that Penny disappeared?”

She closes her eyes as if the memory is close, perhaps painfully so. “She and Dexter had a fight,” she says, opening her eyes. “He was distraught. I took him into my arms.” She closes her eyes and embraces the air as if he’s kneeling in front of her. The vision seems to soothe her, momentarily, before Jim speaks.

“You told him you could never be happy unless you were together,” Jim says to his mother. “It’s funny, after that night, I realized that your unhappiness had nothing to do with me.”

“Oh, Jim, dear, of course it had nothing to do with you.” She pauses, and her eyes widen. “Wait, how did you—”

“I was there,” he says. “I saw you together when I was looking for my stick. I found it and I ran back to the dock. But it was too late then. She was gone.”

I cover my mouth and shake my head. “Jim, what happened?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Dad was standing there. He was crying. It was the first time I saw him cry.”

I take a deep breath. “So she just slipped and fell into the water? It doesn’t make any sense. She’d lived on a houseboat for years; surely she had good balance.”

Naomi looks pained by something. I look into her eyes. “Tell me what you’re thinking about,” I say.

She bites her lip. It’s as if she’s trying to keep the memories bottled up and hidden away, but there’s a crack in the bottle now. They’re seeping out and she has no control over them anymore.

“It was the best and the most terrible night of my life,” she says. “Dexter told me he was leaving Penny. One minute I was elated, imagining us finally being together. It’s all I could think about. And the next minute, that dream was gone, forever.” She dabs her handkerchief to the corners of her eyes once more. “After . . . the accident . . . Lenora and Tom knocked on our door. I guess they knew I was inside with Dexter; maybe everybody knew. Well, they told us what had happened. I’d never seen so much pain in a man’s eyes. He ran out of the house, with his shirt unbuttoned. He didn’t care anymore. He didn’t care about me anymore. The only thing that mattered was Penny. I followed him down the dock and pushed through the crowd of onlookers.

“He just kept pacing the dock, screaming her name. I had to look away,” Naomi continues. “It was the last night I saw Dexter. His houseboat was always rented out after that.”

I nod. “Naomi, if she . . . if she was killed, who might have been to blame?”

She stares at a speck on the wall and shakes her head as if deep in thought. “I knew it when I saw him standing there crying,” she says. “I could see it in his eyes.”

“Gene?”

Jim looks away.

“Yes,” Naomi says. “I’ve come to believe that he did it for me. He did it so I’d be happy.”

“And is that why you forgave him?”

“Yes,” she says, before a shadow of concern comes over her face. “You aren’t going to have him arrested, are you?” she pleads. “Not in his condition.”