“I’ve got her, Pearl,” he said gently, once the shrieking had subsided. He slid his arm around the woman’s frail shoulders. “Come on, Arlene. Let’s get you home.”
He escorted her slowly back up the street and Pearl returned to the porch and Anders, who was standing there with his mouth open big enough to fit the baby sea turtle he’d seen on the beach.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“That’s Arlene. Tom’s mother.”
“His mother?” Anders’s eyebrows shot up even higher, if that was possible. The woman, with her streaked white hair and frail frame, looked old enough to be his grandmother.
“She had Tom . . . later in life. She was forty-eight, forty-nine maybe? She and Tom Senior had accepted long before that having children wasn’t in the cards for them, and then surprise!” Pearl smiled at the memory. “That was a happy day. Anyway, you should have seen her ten years ago—so energetic, full of life. But after her husband died, and then her son, well—the years have not been kind.”
“I’ve heard that sound before,” Anders said. “At night. I always thought it was some kind of wild bird.”
“Yep,” Pearl said, wiping her house shoes off on the porch mat and crossing the threshold back into the house. “She likes to wander at night. Hates when someone finds her and we make her go back home. We’d let her be if it wasn’t for that time we found her waist-deep in the water, like she was trying to drown herself.” She said it as easily as if she’d come upon the woman eating an ice cream cone.
“She tried to kill herself?”
“I don’t think so. That was probably just the dementia. That’s Dr. Khari’s best guess.”
“The dentist.”
“Mm-hm. Piper and Tom tried to take her to a doctor on the mainland once. That didn’t . . . go well. Anyway, Dr. Khari keeps her in Valium, which is the only thing that seems to help calm her, though Piper and Tom were never thrilled with that. Said it made her sleepy and slur her words.” Her brow crinkled. “I don’t think that’s the Valium, though.”
“What is it?”
Pearl looked at him then, as if she just realized he was standing there and she was not, in fact, talking to an empty room. “Well, that’s none of your business, is it? I’m no two-bit gossip.” With one last stern look and a huff for good measure, she bid him good night for the second time that evening.
But Anders did not go to bed. When Harold got home from walking Arlene back to hers—giving her one of her pills with a glass of water to wash it down, staying on until he made sure she was good and asleep—he found Anders sitting at the dining room table, staring at the floral chains of roses on the wallpaper. Harold paused and thought about speaking, but then remembered the anguish of being a young man in love. And wanting nothing to do with that, he gratefully took his creaky back and knees upstairs to bed.
—
Anders was still sitting at the table when Pearl came down a few hours later to start the coffee. “Well, you’re up early,” she said brightly, as if the entire previous evening had not been one of the most eventful of Anders’s life. Though he’d had plenty to mull over—how the next episode of the podcast would nearly write itself, what with Pearl’s explanation of why the town was going along with Piper’s delusion—Anders hadn’t spent the past three hours contemplating any of those things.
All he could think about was Piper. The way she threw herself at him with such joy on the beach. How sorely he wanted to press his lips to hers under the moonlight. How extraordinarily unqualified he was to help her in any meaningful way. And—what was occupying most of his thoughts—how deeply hurt she would be by his podcast, one way or another.
There was no getting around it, and it made Anders sick to his stomach that he could be the cause of pain to her in any way.
By the time Harold came down and took the seat across from Anders, taking out his deck of cards and dealing another game of solitaire, as if he were just picking up from the evening before, and Pearl circled the table pouring them both glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice, Anders had made a decision.
The second he got home, he would delete the podcast.
—
At the ferry, BobDan greeted him with a solemn nod. “Anderson Cooper.”
Anders nodded in return, barely noticing the rib, and loped over to the fiberglass bench, where he spent the entire boat ride back to the mainland convincing himself he was making the right choice. It would be fine to delete the podcast. Sure, it was the first story in years that had captivated any kind of audience, but at least he had an audience now. Nearly fifty thousand of them, to be exact. And surely some of them would stick around for a new story. If he could find one.
That was how things worked. People moved on to the next bright and shiny. Some of them might be irritated that they weren’t going to get any kind of satisfying conclusion, but then they’d forget about it. And he could keep his friendship with Piper, maybe even convince her to get real therapy. Though if he deleted the podcast, he didn’t really have an excuse to keep returning to the island, and that
