The Invisible Husband of Frick Island - Colleen Oakley Page 0,87

then the silence stretched out so long, Anders thought—he hoped—Piper must be asleep.

Finally, he heard the door creak open. “What are you doing here?” Piper whispered harshly. She did not sound happy to see him. Jeffrey mumbled something in return and Anders strained to hear, his heartbeat now pounding in his ears.

“Jeffrey, you’re drunk. Go home.”

Drunk?

“Please. Don’t send me away. I don’t want to be alone.” Anders heard it then. The slurring.

“Jeffrey, you have to stop coming here. It’s too much.”

“I can’t,” Jeffrey said, his voice breaking. “Don’t you understand?”

Piper’s voice went even softer and Anders could only make out every few words: “. . . have to get over it . . . it was never meant to be . . .”

Jeffrey was full-on crying now. Sobbing, more like, and Anders, though relieved, was wildly confused.

“Piper? Everything OK up there?”

“Yes, Mrs. Olecki,” she called back. And then, her voice a little louder: “I have to tell Tom, Jeffrey.”

“No!” Jeffrey wailed. “Piper, stop. Please stop.”

Anders quietly closed the window, uncomfortable eavesdropping on such raw pain. He stood there for a moment, trying to make sense of it all.

His first thought, the obvious: Jeffrey was in love with Piper.

His second thought: Who wouldn’t be? Objectively speaking, of course. And then he recalled Jeffrey’s words that first night at the One-Eyed Crab. You’re not the first to strike out with Piper Parrish.

Or the last, apparently, Anders thought wryly. But something didn’t make sense. Piper had said he had to stop coming here, which meant this wasn’t the first time he’d done this. Why would Jeffrey continue to lay himself bare, especially given that Piper was a married woman? Well, technically Piper was a widow, but still. She thought she was married. Anders’s head was beginning to hurt.

He saw Jeffrey’s boots come back into view as they clomped their way down the stairs and out of sight. He listened as Piper’s door creaked closed and decided now was not the best timing to visit her and offer his confession.

And then he remembered the trash. He walked into the kitchen and hefted the plastic bag out of the bin. After tying the top into a knot, he walked it into the backyard, where the metal bins rested alongside the shed.

“Anders?”

He froze and then turned his head slowly to find Piper sitting on the top step of her porch, her eyes bloodshot and swollen. He hated to see women cry—his mom, his sister, Celeste once. It made him feel ungainly and awkward, as if he suddenly had three extra limbs and didn’t know how to wield them correctly. He hated to see men cry, too, for that matter. That was why he never watched Good Will Hunting a second time. Or Cast Away. But there was something about Piper crying that made him feel worse than awkward. It made him hurt down to his bones.

“Oh,” he said weakly. “I thought you were—”

“What are you doing here?”

He glanced at the bag in his hand. “Taking out the trash?” he ventured, and then, completing the final steps to the bins, he finished his chore and walked back toward the bottom steps. “Are you OK?” It was a stupid question, like pointing to the sun and asking if it was the moon, but it was the best he could come up with.

“Yeah,” she said, wiping under her eyes and inhaling a big lungful of air. He fought the urge to ask her what in the world Jeffrey’s drunk visit was all about. And then fought the greater urge to vault up the steps and hope that she’d throw herself in his willing arms again. It didn’t help that he knew what he needed to tell her was going to upset her all over again. He stood rooted to the bottom step, feeling helpless, and shoved his hands in his pockets, trying to think of a way to soothe her. Fortunately, something popped in his blank mind.

“You know what I do when I’m upset?”

“What?”

“I pedal a bike eight hundred miles to the other side of the island until I think my legs are going to fall off and then I sit on an extraordinarily uncomfortable rock and watch sad lonely birds hunt for their supper.”

A sound a bit like a hiccup escaped Piper’s mouth. “You do, huh?” she said, a touch of shine reentering her eyes. “Do you stick your feet in the sand?”

“God, no. I’m not a sadist.”

She offered a full-on smile and Anders felt his stomach untwist