Jennifer Haigh (47 page)

"Stay the whole week," Paulette urged. "It will be wonderful to have you close."

"I will," said Gwen. As before, as always, she had no other plans.

"You left him?"

They were sitting in a Mexican restaurant on the North Side, a few blocks from the Stott. Heidi Kozak was still in work clothes. She had a new hairstyle she called the Rachel, inspired by the star of a television show.

"I don't get it. A few weeks ago you were so happy I couldn't stand you. Seriously. I'd get off the phone and think, enough with these local yokels. I need an island guy." Heidi drank deeply from her margarita glass."God, these are good. We need a whole pitcher. Now: What the hell happened?"

"He lied," Gwen said. Then, flushing mightily, she told Heidi about the envelope in Rico's glove compartment, how she'd placed it on the bed the morning she left.

Heidi looked utterly perplexed. "Let me get this straight. You didn't even
ask
him where he got it?"

"No," Gwen said. "Honestly, it doesn't matter. He could have robbed a bank for all I care."

Heidi frowned."Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is that he's a liar. He said he was broke, and I believed him." The words came out in a rush."I was going to fly up here and sell my car. Empty out my bank account. The money my grandfather left me. I was going to put
every cent I had
into that business. And Rico would have let me." Gwen stopped for a breath. "He was using me. He only wanted my money."

Heidi poured half her margarita into Gwen's empty glass.

"I thought he loved me. Isn't that ridiculous? I feel like such an idiot."

"Are you sure?"

Gwen nodded. To her horror she felt her eyes tear.

"Well, fuck him, then. You're better off without him."

"That's what my mother says. Not in those exact words, of course." Gwen grinned feebly.

"Your mother? She must be loving this." Heidi gave the Rachel a fluff. "It's exactly what she wanted, isn't it? You back in Pittsburgh.

Rico out of the picture for good."

Gwen hesitated. "Sure. I guess so. But she means well. Billy, Scott—they were all worried."

"Oh, right: Scott." Heidi signaled the waitress with two fingers: two more margaritas."I still can't believe he showed up there."

"It was bizarre," Gwen agreed.

"Interesting . . ." Heidi's voice trailed off.

"What?"

"Don't you think the timing is weird? Your brother shows up out of the blue, and—a week later? two weeks?—Rico has twenty thousand dollars."

Gwen drained her glass, licked the salt from her lips. "What are you saying? That
Scott
gave him the money?" She frowned. "Why would he do that?"

"How would I know? But you have to admit, the timing is freaky."

Gwen shrugged. "Anyway, Scott doesn't have twenty thousand dollars lying around. Trust me. I'm surprised he could afford a plane ticket."

"Well, what about your mother? Didn't she have some rich old boyfriend who died? No offense, but it sounds like she might have some spare change." Heidi covered her mouth with her hand. "Oops.

I shouldn't have said that. My point is, somehow or other, your mother got exactly what she wanted. Am I wrong?"

Gwen blinked, and remembered.

I'm just glad you're back, and safe.

It will be wonderful to have you close.

Promise me you'll never run off that way again.

"No," Gwen said slowly."You're not wrong."

chapter 10

Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts.

Creeping along the highway, at the frustrating speed of fifteen miles an hour, Paulette remembered the verse. The traffic was even denser than she remembered. No longer a small knot of cars approaching the Sagamore Bridge, the jam now extended for miles in both directions. It was Saturday, changeover day on the Cape: a flood of weekly tenants passing over the bridge to take possession of their cottages; an equal volume headed in the opposite direction, heading home to the Empire State, the Constitution State, or north to truculent New Hampshire (which had given the world Gil Pyle) to Live Free or Die.

We're tenants now
, Paulette thought. This had occurred to her a month ago, when she wrote the crushingly large check to the rental agent; but the realization had been fleeting. Now, sitting in changeover traffic on Route 6, she felt its full force.

The backseat she'd packed full of picnic gear and beach towels. In the past they'd kept such items at the Captain's House, ready for whomever might need them: the cousin who turned up without warning, the unexpected guests. In her attic Paulette had found two old wooden tennis racquets, a badminton set, an inflatable raft somebody—Gwen or Billy—had used as a child. In a dusty corner was a bag of golf clubs. (Martine's? Why would she have Martine's clubs in Concord?) Feeling foolish, Paulette had lugged these items, minus the clubs, out to the station wagon. Of her children only Billy was a golfer.

She hoped he'd remember to bring his own clubs.

She thought of the dozen bags of groceries in the hot trunk of the car, and worried about the perishables. Extra eggs for Billy (he ate only the whites, so an omelet used up half a carton), Canadian bacon for Scott's eggs Benedict. Strawberry ice cream for Gwen, who devoured it by the pint, or used to. Did she still eat ice cream? For years Paulette had seen her only at Christmas. Of Gwen's adult habits and tastes, she had no idea.

She had a great deal to learn.

In addition to the towels and tennis rackets, she'd packed two books Gwen had given her, in different years, as Christmas gifts: one a paperback thriller, the other a hefty tome involving women and wolves. For years they'd sat unread on a shelf. Now Paulette was determined to read them, to understand why Gwen had chosen these books for her. Who was this daughter she'd raised? This scuba diver, this anthropologist (or archaeologist), who was brave or foolish or passionate enough to run away to a tropical island and fall in love with a total stranger: Who was this independent, secretive, impulsive young woman? Paulette was looking for clues. For years, struggling to raise the daughter she'd
expected
to have, she had failed to see the one she'd gotten. But it wasn't too late. The week at the Cape stretched ahead of them. There was plenty of time.

At long last, she reached the turnoff. The cool shade of the No Name Road soothed her like a poultice. She felt herself in sympathetic company, the tall trees for whom twenty-two years was a trifle.

I'm back,
she told them.
I'm back.

On the No Name Road Frank had taught her to drive. It was early March, the house still closed for the season. They'd driven down from Boston on a false spring day: hot sunshine, an evening chill, an early dark.

Paulette had made a decision she'd confided to no one, not even Tricia Boone. She and Frank would become lovers in the Captain's House. But first, the driving. That afternoon, coasting down the No Name Road, he had surrendered the wheel of his old Chevy.
Gently now. Let out the clutch.

Each time, for emphasis, he had touched her. This was more distracting than helpful, the warmth and weight of his hand on her thigh.

She rolled down her window. A seagull squawked in the distance.

The air smelled of sweet ocean, a special thing. As a little girl she'd identified a half dozen ways the sea could smell, briny or fishy or sandy or green. A few times each summer, for reasons she couldn't explain, the breeze smelled of molasses, dark and sweet.

She was remembering the six ocean smells when a remarkable thing happened. A car whizzed past her, a convertible with its top down, a bald man at the wheel. A moment later a second car followed, a Range Rover with a kayak strapped to its roof.

Cars on the No Name Road!

Who
were
these people?

Then, as the road curved, she saw the houses. Two of them, built close together, high on the ridge. The places were immense, twice as large as the Captain's House. Their brand-new clapboards glowed yellow in the afternoon sun.

To her relief the lane had not been paved. Paulette parked in front.

The familiar dry rasp of tires on gravel filled her with pleasure. Oh yes, she thought, closing her eyes. I'm here.

She got out of the car, taking an armload of groceries. It would take several trips to unload the rest. Had it always been such a chore to unpack the car? No, it hadn't. Not with a sister, three children, and occasionally even a husband to help.

She stood there a moment, staring at the front of the house, the three diamond-shaped windows above the entryway. Roy, Martine, and Paulette.

Billy, Scott, and Gwen.

The key was under the doormat, as the leasing agent had promised. Paulette turned it in the lock.

Her heart fluttered.

As she stepped over the threshold of the Captain's House, as she set down her groceries and rushed from room to room, as she took inventory of each rug and curtain and stick of furniture, inhaling deeply each closet and hallway, checking the smell against the unarticulated but remarkably specific memory deep in her limbic brain, there was one person in the world who'd predicted what emotion would flush her cheeks and tremble her hands, one person who'd prefigured her steps precisely from front door to kitchen to Cook's Corner, up the staircase to Fanny's Room and the Whistling Room and finally the sleeping porch of her girlhood, where she would drop to her knees beside a bed and kneel there a long while as if praying.

This premonition—immediate, acute, dead accurate and profoundly discomfiting—had gripped Billy the moment his mother invited him to Truro. He'd felt ill-equipped to assist at Paulette's upcoming nervous breakdown. He was barely managing his own.

The house had changed.

Paulette had expected this, of course. Before the sale her brother had plundered anything he imagined valuable: an antique spittoon in the entryway, a couple of amateurish watercolors (Roy had no eye for art) hanging in the stairwell. Everything else he'd sold along with the house. The place had always been furnished with odds and ends, comfortable castoffs: worn sofas, low and square, in the sitting room; faded canvas rugs terminally encrusted with sand. Naturally the new owners, a Portuguese couple from Rhode Island, would make adjustments. Still, she was shocked by the new furniture, overstuffed sofas and chairs in a bright nautical stripe. They seemed much too large for the room.

Upstairs the situation was more dire. In all four bedrooms—the Captain's Quarters, the Lilac Room, the Whistling Room, and Fanny's—the wood floors had been covered with carpet, the sturdy synthetic kind found in public buildings and roadside motels, chosen by people who wouldn't have to live with it. Paulette knelt in the corner of the Lilac Room and examined the edge of the carpet, firmly tacked to the floor. Professionally installed: the Medeiroses had gone to some expense.

It was there, kneeling in the corner of the Lilac Room, that she made a more troubling discovery. The sign had been removed from the door.

She crossed the hall to Fanny's Room. Its door had been repainted, the nail hole filled. The same had been done to the Captain's Quarters, the Sleeping Porch, and the Whistling Room.

All the signs were gone.

Paulette stretched out on the bed in the Whistling Room and cried as she hadn't in years, not even during her divorce. She had forgotten how pleasurable crying could be. She cried for Roy and Martine, and poor Anne; for her dead parents; for Grandmother Drew and Aunt Grace and Tess and Doro; for Fanny Porter, whose room had been decommissioned and poorly carpeted and now resembled an overdecorated suite at a grubby bed-and-breakfast. She cried for generations of Drews and their summer friends, the sandaled guests who'd watched the sunset from their terrace. The lumpen tribe who'd surrendered the Cape to all takers, who had themselves scattered to unfortunate places like Taos and Tucson. Foolishly, carelessly, they'd let go of everything that mattered, including each other. They'd forgotten the life that had been.

Paulette cried this way for several minutes, until she began to feel rather silly. She had never known Fanny Porter, after all; the woman wasn't a relative, just a schoolmate who'd latched on to Grandmother Drew at Wellesley and come to the Cape summer after summer until the whole family had doubtless gotten sick of her.

It was a bit shameless, when you thought about it.

So forget Fanny Porter. And—it came to her in a wave—forget Roy and Martine. Her brother was the bandit who'd sold the house in the first place. And Martine—why pretend otherwise?—had always been a pill. The others Paulette could legitimately cry over. She'd been fond of her aunts and grandmother, and of course her poor parents.

Though her father, if he were alive, would be ninety-seven years old, hardly in any shape to climb the stairs to the Captain's Quarters.

He would be moldering in a nursing home somewhere.

Which would probably have similar carpeting.

Paulette laughed at this thought, long enough that laughter too began to feel strange. It wasn't good to be left alone too long with one's own emotions; it wasn't healthy or attractive. She wished Gwen would arrive.

At that moment she heard a car turn down the lane, its tires crunching the gravel.

She rose, smoothed her hair, examined her face in the small wood-framed mirror. Here was another reason adults shouldn't indulge in tears. Her children had looked beautiful after crying, their soft cheeks rinsed clean and hopeful, their delicate skins flushed like fruit. On adults, especially aged adults, the effects were less fetching.

She looked as though she'd been taking chemotherapy.

There was a knock at the front door. A male voice called, "Hello!"

She hurried downstairs. The rooms had grown dark; someone less familiar with the layout would have taken a nasty fall on the stairs.

She flicked on a light.

"Frank," she said.

He stood on the front step, a bouquet of daisies—
daisies?
—in one hand.

"Honey, what's the matter?" He looked alarmed, which puzzled her. Then she remembered that her eyelids were swollen like blisters.

What are you doing here?
she could have said.
Who told you we'd be here?

"They took down the signs," she said instead.

He threw open the door and took her in his arms.

It wasn't precisely what she wanted. Her years of wanting him—his touch, his presence, his sorrow for the pain he'd caused—were long past. Even as a young man, strong and vital, he'd been unable to give her what she needed. Now he seemed tired and diminished, while her needs had only expanded, grown dense and gnarled, like the roots of an ancient tree. Yet here he was, as large and vividly out of place as the new striped sofas. The screen door was open, insects swarming the overhead light. But she had learned this much: you took life where you met it, even in an open doorway. You took it, and held on.

They were clutching each other like this, rather embarrassingly, when another car rolled into the driveway and crunched to a halt.

"Who on earth is that?" Paulette murmured, stepping back from him, thinking of a time her mother had caught them kissing in this very spot. Of course Frank wouldn't remember such a thing. For this she was grateful.

"Dad?" Scott got out of the car."What are you doing here?"

"Hello, dear!" Paulette approached the car. Her granddaughter was sitting in the passenger seat. Penny and Ian were nowhere to be seen.

"Where is everybody?" she asked.

"That's a long story," said Scott.

They ate dinner on the terrace, the four of them. The refrigerator was full of breakfast food, the ingredients for a frittata. Sabrina proved surprisingly helpful in the kitchen. She seemed delighted when Paulette showed her how to mix a simple vinaigrette."I didn't know you could
make
this," she said, rather cryptically. Her hair was honey colored, neatly braided; she didn't slouch the way so many girls seemed to. Both Scott and Penny had terrible posture. Who had taught Sabrina to stand up straight?

Paulette glanced out the window. Scott and Frank were sitting on the porch, deep in conversation. Scott was speaking, his father nodding in agreement. This surprised her. With Frank it was usually the other way around.

How very strange, to see him sitting on the terrace as though he'd never left, as though it were his rightful place. Why on earth had he come? Last month on the phone she had sensed his loneliness, his hunger for information about the children. He hadn't spoken to any of them since Christmas.

Who, then, had told him about the trip to the Cape?