Every Breath

As she walked the beach, the damp, cold air began to make her lungs ache, and she decided to turn around. At the sight of the cottage in the distance, a memory of Scottie flashed through her mind. Had he been with her, she knew he would have been disappointed and stared at her with those sweet, sad eyes of his.

The kids had little memory of Scottie. Though he’d been part of the household when they were young, Hope had read once that the part of the brain that processes long-term memory isn’t fully developed until a child is seven or so, and Scottie had passed away by then. Instead, they remembered Junior, the Scottish terrier who was part of their lives until both Jacob and Rachel were in college. While Hope had doted upon Junior, she secretly admitted that Scottie would always be her favorite.

For the second time on the walk, she felt her phone vibrate. While Jacob hadn’t yet responded, Rachel had texted back, telling Hope to hav fun! Any cute guys? Luv u with a smiley face. Hope knew that kids these days had their own texting protocols, complete with brief responses, acronyms, incorrect spelling and grammar, and a heavy use of emojis. Hope still preferred the old-fashioned way of communicating—either in person, on the phone, or in a letter—but her kids were of a different generation, and she’d learned to do what was easiest for them.

She wondered what they would think if they knew the real reason she’d come to Carolina Beach. She often had the sense that her kids couldn’t imagine her wanting more from life than doing crosswords, occasionally visiting the salon, and waiting around for them to visit. But then, Hope recognized that they had never known the real her, the woman she’d been at Sunset Beach so long ago.

Her relationship with Rachel was different than it was with Jacob. Jacob, she thought, had more in common with his father. The two of them could spend an entire Saturday watching football; they went fishing together, enjoyed action movies and target shooting, and could talk about the stock market and investing for hours. With Hope, Jacob mainly spoke about his girlfriend, and often seemed at a loss for words after that.

She was closer with Rachel, particularly since her heart surgery as a teen. Although the cardiologist who oversaw Rachel’s case had assured them that repairing her complicated defect was a reasonably safe procedure, Rachel had been terrified. Hope had been equally fearful, but she’d done her best to exude confidence with her daughter. In the days leading up to the operation, Rachel cried often at the thought of dying, and even more bitterly at the idea of having a disfiguring scar on her chest if she did survive. Consumed with anxiety, she babbled as if in a confessional: she told Hope that her boyfriend of three months had begun to pressure Rachel for sex and that she was probably going to say yes, even though she didn’t want to; she admitted that she worried constantly about her weight and that she’d been bingeing and purging for several months. She said she worried all the time about almost everything—her looks, popularity, grades, and whether she’d get accepted to the college she wanted to attend, even though the decision was years away. She picked at her cuticles incessantly, ripping at them until they bled. Occasionally, she confided, she even thought about suicide.

While Hope had known that teens were adept at keeping secrets from their parents, what she heard in the days both prior to and after the surgery alarmed her deeply. After Rachel was released from the hospital, Hope found her a good therapist and eventually a psychiatrist who prescribed antidepressants. And slowly but surely, Rachel began to feel more at ease with herself, her acute anxiety and depression finally subsiding.

But those terrible days had also been the start of a new stage in their relationship, one in which Rachel learned she could be honest with her mom without feeling judged, without worrying that Hope would overreact. By the time Rachel went off to college, she seemed to feel as though she could tell her mom almost anything. Though grateful for the honesty, Hope admitted there were some subjects—mainly concerning the quantity of alcohol that college students seemed to drink every weekend—where a little less honesty would have meant less anxiety on Hope’s part.

Perhaps their intimacy was the reason for Rachel’s text. Like any loyal girlfriend, Rachel reflected her concern for Hope’s relationship status by asking about “cute guys.”

“Have you ever thought about maybe meeting someone?” Rachel had asked her a little over a year ago.

“Not really.”

“Why not? Is it because no one has asked you out?”

“I’ve been asked out by a few different men. I just told them no.”

“Because they were jerks?”

“Not at all. Most of them seemed very kind.”

Rachel had frowned at that. “Then what is it? Is it because you were afraid? Because of what happened between Dad and Denise?”

“I had the two of you and my work, and I was content with that.”

“But you’re retired, we don’t live at home anymore, and I don’t like the thought of you always being alone. I mean…what if the perfect man is out there just waiting for you?”

Hope’s smile bore a trace of melancholy. “Then I suppose I’ll have to try to find him, won’t I?”

As terrifying as Rachel’s heart surgery had been for Hope, the slow-motion death of her father had in some ways been even more difficult to endure.

The first few years after Sunset Beach hadn’t been so bad. Her father could still move around, and with every passing month, Hope could remember growing more firm in her conviction that he’d contracted a slower-progressing version of ALS. There were periods when he even seemed to improve, but then, in the course of six or seven weeks, it was as though a switch had suddenly been thrown: Walking became difficult for her father, then unsteady without support, and then altogether impossible.

Along with her sisters, Hope chipped in to help as much as possible. They installed hand railings in the bathtub and hallways and found a used van for disabled people with a wheelchair lift. They hoped it would enable their father to get around town, but his ability to drive lasted less than seven months, and their mother was too nervous to drive the van at all. They sold it at a loss, and in the last year of his life, her father never ventured farther than either the front porch or back deck, unless he was going to see his doctors.

But he wasn’t alone. Because he was loved by his family and revered by former students and coworkers, visitors flocked to the house. As was customary in the South, they brought food, and at the end of every week, Hope’s mother would plead with her daughters to take some of it home with them because the refrigerator was overstuffed.

Even that relatively uplifting period was short-lived, however, ending for good when her father began losing the ability to speak. In the final few months of his life, he was hooked to an oxygen tank and suffered from violent coughing fits because his muscles were too weak to dislodge the phlegm. Hope could remember the countless times she pounded on his back while her father struggled to breathe. He’d lost so much weight that she sometimes felt as though she would break him in half, but eventually her dad would cough up the phlegm and take long, gasping breaths in the aftermath, his face as pale as rice.

The final weeks seemed like a single extended fever dream—home health nurses were hired, at first for half the day, and then around the clock. Her dad had to be fed liquid through straws. He became so weak that finishing even half a glass took nearly an hour. Incontinence followed as his body rapidly wasted away.

Hope visited him every day during that period. Because speaking had become a challenge for him, she did all the talking. She would tell him about the kids, or confide her struggles with Josh. She confessed that a neighbor had seen Josh at a hotel with a local Realtor; she confirmed that Josh had recently admitted the affair but was still in communication with the woman, and Hope wasn’t sure what to do.

Finally, during one of his last lucid periods, six years after her stay at Sunset Beach, Hope told her father about Tru. As she spoke, he maintained eye contact, and when she reached the part of the story where she’d broken down in front of her father on the porch, he moved his hand for the first time in weeks. She reached over, taking it in hers.

He breathed out, long and hard, sounds coming from the back of his throat. They were unintelligible, but she knew him well enough to understand what he was saying.

“Are you sure it’s too late?”

Six days later, he passed away.

Hundreds of people attended the funeral, and afterward everyone made their way to the house. When they left later that evening, the house went quiet, as though it had died as well. Hope knew that people reacted to stress and grief in different ways, but she found herself shocked by her mom’s downward spiral, which was furious in its intensity and seemingly unstoppable. Her mom fell into bitter fits of unpredictable weeping and started drinking heavily. She stopped tidying up and left dirty clothes strewn about the floors. Dust coated the shelves, and dishes would sit on the counters until Hope came by to clean. Food spoiled in the refrigerator and the television blared nonstop. Then her mom began to complain of various ailments: sensitivity to light, aching joints, waves of pain in her stomach, and difficulty swallowing. Whenever Hope went to visit, she found her fidgety and often unable to complete her thoughts. Other times, she would retreat to her darkened bedroom and lock the door. The silence behind the door was often more unnerving than her fits of weeping.