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“Bullshit, Ronnie,” he mutters, his mouth full of sandwich. “Try doing something that’ll help guys like me for once.”
Standing in the doorway, I clear my throat. “Dad, I’m leaving.”
“Oh.”
There’s no surprise behind the word. If anything, my father sounds relieved.
“I’m back on the job,” I add when he doesn’t press for details. “My new patient’s a stroke victim. Lives out on the Cliffs.”
I say it hoping he’ll be impressed—or, at the very least, intrigued—by the idea of rich people trusting me enough to take care of someone. If he is, he doesn’t show it.
“Okay,” he says.
I know the one sure way to get my father’s full attention is to tell him the name of my new patient. Just like with Kenny, I don’t even consider it. Knowing I’ll be caring for Lenora Hope will only make my father think less of me. If such a thing is possible.
“Do you need anything before I go?” I say instead.
My father takes another bite of sandwich and shakes his head. The pang I’d felt outside returns with another kick. Harder this time. So hard I swear a chunk of my heart has broken off and is now dropping into the depths of my stomach.
“I’ll try to check in every two weeks.”
“No need,” my father says.
And that’s all he says.
I hover in the doorway a moment—waiting, hoping, silently pleading for more. Anything will do. Goodbye. Good riddance. Fuck off.Anything but this hostile silence that makes me feel like nothing. Worse than nothing.
Invisible.
That’s how I feel.
I leave after that, not bothering to say goodbye. I don’t want to be met with silence when my father refuses to say it back to me.
THREE
Duran Duran blasts from my car stereo as I follow a road that hugs the rocky coastline, climbing higher and higher until the Escort shimmies and the rough waters of the Atlantic become blurs of white crashing against strips of sand far below. In my rearview mirror is an area that is definitely the Cliffs. It practically screams old money, with massive houses clinging to the craggy bluffs like gannet nests, half hidden behind brick walls and swaths of ivy.
How the other half lives.
That’s how my mother would have described those cliffside dwellings with turrets, widow’s walks, and bay windows facing the sea.
I beg to differ. Not even the other half can afford to live at the Cliffs. The area has always been—and always will be—rarefied air. It’s home to the cream of the crop, perched over everyone and everything, as if God himself had placed them there.
“Yet here you are, Kit-Kat,” my mother would have said. “On your way to a job in one of these places.”
Again, I would disagree. Where I’m heading isn’t anyone’s idea of a prime destination.
Hope’s End.
Until today, I’d only heard it referred to simply as the Hope house, usually in that hushed tone reserved for tragic things. Now I knowwhy. Hope’s End strikes me as a startlingly apocalyptic name for an estate. Especially considering what happened there.
My knowledge doesn’t extend far beyond the rhyme. I know that Winston Hope made a fortune in shipping and built his estate on the rocky coast of northern Maine and not in Bar Harbor or Newport because the land here was mostly undeveloped and he could have his pick of pristine ocean views. I also know that Winston had a wife, Evangeline, and two daughters, Lenora and Virginia.
And I know that one long-ago October night, three of them were murdered—with the fourth member of the clan accused of doing the killing. A seventeen-year-old girl, no less. No wonder I thought that morbid rhyme I first learned on the scrubby playground behind the elementary school was made up. It all seemed too Gothic to be real.
But it happened.
Now it’s town legend.