There’d be a pause as the friend asked more questions.
Oh yes. I fired her last week, Malabar would continue earnestly. But honestly, who knows the extent of the damage?
And then more back-and-forth.
It’s been a nightmare not knowing who else she has written to and who might believe her lies. Clearly, she wants to destroy my reputation, although it’s also conceivable that she’s just plain crazy.
Finally, with the chitchat over, Malabar would be in a good position to ask for the big favor. Claiming to be overwhelmed by all the damage control she was undertaking—canceling credit cards, reviewing bank statements, fielding all these phone calls—she would ask the friend if she’d mind calling Lily and telling her what had happened, professing concern that Lily might have gotten a letter too. Malabar knew that it would take only a couple such calls for Lily to conclude that if she heard anything from Hazel, it had to be a hoax.
With each phone call, I imagined, my mother would become more and more in her element, exuding confidence and charisma.
It would be funny if only poor Charles weren’t so mortified. When I checked her references, no one mentioned that Hazel was as mad as a hatter! Malabar might be laughing. A dozen lovers, all these dinners and trips . . . how did I manage it all and still produce a weekly column?
Each of these friends would likely have the same thought: Who but poised and elegant Malabar could handle this disastrous situation with such grace and humor? I imagined they all wanted to be her closest friend, but that coveted position was already mine.
Twelve
With Hazel vanquished and Lily none the wiser about her husband’s affair, the chaotic storm that had been kicked up quickly dissipated, and Ben and my mother’s relationship slipped back into a state of quasi-equilibrium.
This was not the case with me.
If previously I’d had a supporting role in my mother’s extramarital activities, by masterminding this false-letter-writing campaign, I’d put myself in the director’s chair, presiding over the players. The experience had been heady, for sure, risky and thrilling, and it had resulted in raves from the small audience of my mother and Ben, who were floored by my plan and exhilarated by its perfect outcome.
“You were brilliant,” my mother told me over drinks at the InterContinental.
“Yes,” Ben agreed, toasting the success of my scheme. “A chip off the old block!”
Initially, each dollop of praise chemically rewarded my adolescent brain like a hit of dopamine, but I came down from the high quickly. This lie pressed on my conscience differently than the others. I wrote long diatribes full of self-loathing in my journal and took to staring at my reflection in the mirror until I stopped recognizing myself, like when you say a one-syllable word over and over again and it gradually morphs into a meaningless sound. Lying had become a reflex.
I wondered about what might have resulted from all of our false infidelity accusations. Even though the families involved had responded as we’d hoped—sympathetic to Malabar’s unenviable situation with a vindictive employee—we’d thrown no small dash of poison into those marital wells. And this latest falsehood was more than merely slanderous; it expanded and complicated the already complex web of people who were tangled in my mother’s affair, forcing me to be even more spider-like in my vigilance as I attempted to detect vibrations and disturbances. I had always felt complicit in my mother and Ben’s transgression, but now I was an accessory to a more serious crime.
Plus, I had the uneasy feeling that I didn’t know the whole story. Could Hazel’s motivation really have been as simple as greed? I wanted to know what had happened to her, how it had all gone down, but my mother refused to tell me. I had no idea if the woman had simply slunk off, tail between her legs, and gotten on with her life. I felt sure my mother had exacted some kind of revenge.
When I pressed my mother for details, she refused. “All you need to know is that Hazel is gone from our lives, Rennie. I don’t ever want to think about that miserable woman again,” she said. “Trust me, it’s best that you don’t know. Curiosity killed the cat, my curious girl.”
I knew all about curiosity’s dangers—Icarus and the sun, Pandora’s box, Eve and her lust for knowledge. I hated that Malabar was withholding facts and that she had suddenly chosen to exercise her parental authority to protect me now that I was almost twenty. She’d given up that right long ago. We were friends, equals. I had earned my place at the table and deserved to know everything that happened. I had solved this enormous problem for her, after all. But the more insistent and demanding I became, the more adamant Malabar was in her refusal. She wouldn’t budge, and, ironically, the biggest fallout from Hazel’s extortion attempt turned out to be a yawning rift between us.
A few days went by, followed by a week, then two. The weeks stacked up to form a month, with another close on its heels, and we found ourselves careering toward the brick wall of the holidays. She rarely called me and I rarely called her. When we did speak, our conversations—exceedingly polite and formal—were more painful than our silences.
I opted to stay in New York City for Christmas, a gauntlet I threw down and immediately wished to retrieve but did not. Early into the new year, my mother’s friend Brenda invited me over for tea and a catch-up, telling me she had important news from Malabar. Now that Brenda and I lived in the same city, we’d formed a friendship independent of my mother, and I found myself wondering what Brenda thought of my involvement in my mother and Ben’s affair. This wasn’t the time to bring it up, however; our meeting was the olive branch from Malabar that I’d been waiting for. Missing my mother felt physical, a steady tug on an invisible umbilical cord. Genes were genes and blood was blood, after all. Silence couldn’t alter those facts.
“Call your mother immediately,” Brenda told me simply when she saw me. “This nonsense has gone on long enough. Malabar needs you.”
On the fifteen-block walk from Brenda’s apartment back to John Jay Hall, I scanned my brain for what could possibly be going on, worry rising in my chest. It was early February, just a few days past the anniversary of Christopher’s death. It was not a date my parents had ever mentioned or one that we acknowledged as a family, but I had memorized it as a child from Christopher’s frayed, canvas-covered photo album. Its last page held a single dried red rose and the words The End—February 2, 1964. With all our hearts, always.
Whenever I touched that brittle rose—the color long drained from its stem and flower, shards of leaves and petals gathered in the crease of the album—I felt a liminal contact with a woman I hadn’t known, the woman who had lived for thirty-four years before I existed. Somewhere during that lifetime, she had written those words, laid that rose on the final page of her dead son’s album, and closed the book.
I had touched that rose at least a hundred times and every time, my reaction had been the same: a pricking sensation behind my eyes, a gathering in my throat, a sudden hollowing of my chest that threatened my ability to breathe. As a child, I used to believe that my physical reaction had to do with an otherworldly connection I had with Christopher. We shared a birthday, after all, and I loved to imagine that we were able to cross the divide between the living and the dead through the secret portal of his rose. But now I understood that the connection I had always felt had been with my mother, not Christopher. I regretted my emotional stinginess of the past few months and I told her that immediately when I called her from my dorm room. A détente was reached straightaway, and apologies flowed from both sides. It seemed incomprehensible that we hadn’t spoken—really spoken—since October.
Then: “It’s Charles,” my mother said quietly.
“What about him?” I asked.
Charles’s most recent angiogram—a test that involved injecting dye into blood vessels and using x-rays to evaluate blood flow—revealed that the aneurysm in his brain had grown to a critical point. The cardiologist informed my mother that with Charles’s weak heart, the necessary surgery
was extremely risky, information we already knew. He now gave Charles a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the surgery. Without the operation, the aneurysm would eventually rupture and Charles would die within minutes. Of this, the doctor was 100 percent certain.
“What does Charles think?” I asked after my mother told me this.
“He still doesn’t know. The doctors advise strongly against telling him,” she said. “And I’ve decided that they’re right. What good would come of it? He wouldn’t be able to enjoy his life. He’d be terrified that each and every day might be his last.”
I wondered about the wisdom of not telling him. What about giving him a last opportunity to make amends and say goodbye? I would want to know if I were in Charles’s situation. Besides, some part of him must already know, I concluded, and I wondered if he was upset by the deception.
“The surgery is scheduled for the fall,” she said, sighing deeply. “The hope is that Charles is not in immediate danger and can enjoy a beautiful summer.”
“And you’ll tell him about this . . . when?”
“In the fall. Please come home as soon as school ends. It might be our last summer with him.”
Thirteen
Charles had reason to feel happy that summer of 1985. His belief that one day the remains of the Whydah would be found—a possibility that our family collectively dismissed—had recently been validated when the archaeologist Barry Clifford discovered the wreck not twenty miles from our house and not far from where Charles had long suspected was its final grave. Now there were regular reports of its spoils: sword handles, pieces of eight from the eighteenth century, a whole cannon. All summer long, my stepfather combed the local papers for news, awaiting confirmation of the vessel’s identity, which, if found, would make it the first and only pirate shipwreck ever authenticated. With the delight of the vindicated, Charles read aloud articles listing the plunder discovered—rings, spoons, silver and gold coins—and hammered us with Whydah facts we already knew: The ship had been on its maiden voyage in 1717 when it was hijacked by pirates after departing Jamaica. The leader was Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy. The vessel was more than a hundred feet long. It carried African captives in the cargo hold.
“Think of how much treasure the Whydah must have had when she went down,” my stepfather mused one gorgeous July morning, sipping from a mug of Sanka I’d made. Malabar was not yet awake. “Think about all the vessels she must have ransacked between the Bahamas and here.”
I was more curious about the human cargo. “What happened to the slaves when the pirates took over?” I was on the kitchen side of the counter, looking at the lobster boats streaming past as they made their way to the cut.
Charles told me that it was typical for pirates to free a ship’s prisoners, some of whom—having nothing to lose—would join their liberators in raising the Jolly Roger. The irony that outlaw buccaneers, presumably morally bankrupt individuals, treated freed slaves as equals on their crew was not lost on me.
But it was the treasure that fascinated Charles. “Just two months after the Whydah’s capture, they grounded her on a sandbar and she broke apart in the surf. It was one of those ferocious storms, seventy-mile-an-hour winds. The pirates were probably all drunk.” Charles shook his head at their folly. “If Barry Clifford has this right, there might be plunder from over fifty other ships in the vicinity. Think of all that loot—lead shots, doubloons, silver spoons . . .”
“Why do you think the pirate captain sailed all the way up here?” I asked.
“Black Sam?” My stepfather smiled at my naiveté. “Why does any man do something foolish or dangerous? For a woman. For love. Old Samuel Bellamy had a girl waiting for him in Wellfleet.”
For the duration of that summer, Charles managed never to utter the phrase I told you so. Instead, he let the facts speak for themselves. Whydah -laden confetti in the form of articles torn from newspapers littered every end table and armchair in our living room, reminders of what might have been ours had we only listened.
* * *
I returned to the job I’d held the previous summer, waitressing at Sally’s Clam Bar, serving up ice-cold beers alongside fried clams and steamed lobsters. The food was cooked to order and expensive, and the waitstaff hustled customers in and out quickly, our blue aprons bulging with tips. It was at Sally’s that I met Kyra, who would become a lifelong friend.
On Kyra’s first day, she pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot on a moped and engaged the kickstand with a quick smack of her heel. She shook out her short brown hair, which had a bold streak of silver-gray down the front, and sauntered toward the hostess stand. Kyra looked one part badass and two parts girl-next-door, and her presence struck me as if I were a divining rod and she were water. I felt some internal movement, a shift toward her, and the overwhelming feeling of wanting to be her friend, an emotion the likes of which I hadn’t experienced as an adult.
Over the course of the summer, Kyra and I spent our days off on the outer beach, sitting in the dunes and discussing the tangle of our families while watching long blades of grass arch over in the ocean breeze and drawing circles in the sand. To Kyra, I admitted my wildly inappropriate crush on Hank, the boyfriend of our boss, Sally. I told her about how, earlier in the summer, he’d caught me red-handed sneaking a piece of cheesecake in the downstairs walk-in freezer. When Hank ordered me out of the freezer, our arms had brushed, causing an unexpectedly electric response. What followed was one of those strange slow-motion moments, like the kind that allows a parachutist to leap from the hatch. A kiss had been all but inevitable, I told Kyra.
“Don’t do it,” she warned, as if the decision still lay ahead of me.
“We didn’t,” I confessed, recalling how Sally’s voice had drifted down the stairs and brought us to our senses.
Kyra was the first person I’d known whose complicated family situation rivaled my own; divorced parents, mother living abroad, father absorbed by a new family. I told Kyra everything about myself—all of my lies and duplicities—and, unlike Adam, she listened without judgment. For the first time, I felt heard, understood, less alone.
Toward the end of the summer, Kyra came over to our house for dinner. It was rare for Malabar to include one of Peter’s or my friends, and I was nervous. My mother always had an easier time finding fault than strengths in our friends. But Kyra managed to hold her own in every way—with the booze (a power pack to start, of course) and my mother’s exotic cooking (mussels, kale, and chorizo in a garlicky broth, delicious but not necessarily to everyone’s taste). Kyra made a near-fatal slip early on when she suggested that bitters might improve the cocktail—this was how her father preferred his Manhattans—but recovered quickly, salvaging the moment by turning her attention to my mother’s still-life collection. She studied one painting in particular, a recent yard-sale acquisition, of a pint of fresh strawberries tipped over in a patch.
“I love this one, Malabar,” Kyra said. “You can practically taste how sweet and succulent those berries are.”
I mouthed, Suck-up.
Kyra smiled and laid it on even thicker with talk of brushstrokes and reflected light. She was an attentive listener and a captivating conversationalist who felt comfortable enough to talk art and food with Malabar. She regaled my mother with stories of her own culinary specialty, Southern fare—fiddlehead ferns, fried green tomatoes, grits, and other regional delicacies. To my shock, as Kyra got ready to leave, my mother invited her back—a first—and made my new best friend promise to bring a homemade peach and blueberry cobbler.
I walked Kyra to her car, a borrowed VW bug that required hot-wiring to start, awed by how she had charmed Malabar.
“Piece of cake,” she said. “Your mother’s just lonely.”
I was dumbfounded. Malabar had dinner parties almost every weekend; she had been juggling two men for years. “My mother’s not lonely,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” said Kyra. “Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It
’s about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you’re able to be yourself.”
I was at a loss for words. Was Malabar not being herself when she was being Malabar?
“You know what I mean,” Kyra said, breaking it down for me. “The lonely feeling comes from not feeling known.”
* * *
As the long days of summer constricted and the afternoon light grew slanted, announcing that autumn was on the horizon, I felt stricken at the thought of leaving Cape Cod, unsure when I would see Kyra again, scared about Charles’s impending procedure, and worried that my mother would fall apart under the stress.
I made a single trip back to Boston that fall, a long weekend in October, with the dual purpose of celebrating my birthday and wishing Charles good luck with his operation. My mother had finally told my stepfather about his condition, though she’d downplayed the gravity of his upcoming surgery. Charles was not brave when it came to facing his illness. He hated to be alone and was openly anxious about the discomfort of hospitals. His fears were justified. We all knew what he’d been through after his strokes, how hard he’d had to fight for months and months.
On the morning I was to return to New York City, my stepfather and I made a pact: We promised each other that we would scour the beaches together the following summer. We were determined to find at least one Whydah doubloon or other relic. I hugged him goodbye and told him how much I loved him.
* * *
I held my breath the day of the surgery, waiting for a call from my mother, which finally came in the afternoon.
“He made it,” she said, relief palpable in her voice. “The doctor repaired the aneurysm.”
I wept with happiness. “Can I say hello?”
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