After a pause, Nancy drew her hands together and said, “I thought we could perhaps order some pizza? Maybe have Cole over? It doesn’t seem like it’ll be the nicest night to be out here on the porch. We could even rent a movie if that’s something you girls were interested in.”
“Sounds like the type of relaxing night I need,” Janine affirmed.
“Did something happen at the Lodge?” Elsa asked. She felt entirely disconnected from the place and had basically missed a whole rotation of women.
“This one woman had a meltdown today,” Janine told her. “I couldn’t calm her down. Nothing worked until she finally went to her suite to sleep. I’m doing everything I can. I’ve even changed her diet and prescribed medication. She has an acupuncture appointment with Carmella tomorrow, so we’ll see if that changes anything.”
“It can happen from time-to-time, that we get women in that we can’t help very well,” Nancy said somberly. “It breaks me up inside, especially when they decide to go. I always want the Lodge to be an answer to all their problems. But the truth of it is, the answers have to come from within. And if we can’t guide her to those answers, well...”
This dismal talk seemed a little too on-the-nose for what had happened with Mallory that day. When Nancy said she would head inside and order the pizza, Elsa followed her in and traced her steps to the kitchen. Once there, Nancy peered down at the take-away paper menu, which had appeared in the mailbox and gotten a lot of use since.
“Hey. Nancy?”
Nancy lifted her eyes from the menu. “What’s up, honey?”
“I think Mallory might be staying with us for a little while. Just so you know.”
Nancy’s smile fell; her lips formed a straight line as her eyes took in the brevity of the information.
“That horrible man,” she replied without even knowing the details.
Elsa nodded. “I don’t know everything that happened. I just know that I don’t feel good about having my girl and my grandson around him right now.”
“Of course. You have to protect your own,” Nancy affirmed.
“I hope it’s not too much trouble for you? Having so many people here?”
“Honey, you know how I feel about that. The more, the merrier. Besides this house is huge. Your father would have wanted them here, too. And your husband wouldn’t have hesitated a single day. If he’d seen Lucas acting out, he would have picked up Mallory and Zachery himself.”
Elsa’s heart lifted at the mention of the goodness of Aiden’s heart.
“He really was a remarkable man, wasn’t he?”
Nancy studied her for a long moment. “Neal and Aiden both were, honey. We were so blessed. And now, we have to pass on those blessings to others. Don’t you think?”
Chapter Twelve
NANCY AND ELSA PREPARED one of the guest bedrooms for Mallory’s stay. Up there on the second floor, they worked in silence while making the bed, shoving the duvet into the duvet cover, putting out towels as Janine and Mallory fluttered through conversation downstairs. In a sense, it warmed Elsa’s heart to hear her daughter find her way through conversation; it was true what they said about heartache. You had to fake “being okay” until suddenly, well, you actually were. This wasn’t something Elsa had fully been able to do since Aiden and Neal’s passing. She supposed that would come with time (although she dreaded this statement, as well).
“You’re kidding. You know Alec Baldwin?” Mallory exclaimed downstairs as Nancy and Elsa eyed one another, grinning.
“Only through my ex-husband.” Janine’s voice echoed through the staircase. “He ran with a pretty wild crowd. I had to pretend I wasn’t just this girl from Brooklyn — that I belonged. To be honest with you, it was exhausting.”
“Still, you must have so many crazy stories,” Mallory said.
Elsa caught Nancy’s eye again as Nancy drew a pillowcase over a large pillow.
“Did that bother you?” Elsa asked softly.
Nancy furrowed her brow. “What?”
“You know she lived this whole other life without you in Manhattan. After you left.”
Nancy’s face darkened. “Everything about our time apart bothered me. But more than anything, I bothered myself. I just couldn’t get my mental health together enough for her. And so, Janine went out and conquered the world— for a little while, at least. And now, she’s back. I couldn’t be happier about it. Sometimes, late at night, I wake up, and all these memories rush through me about our earlier days. It’s like I can practically hear the angry homeless people outside, or like I know our landlord is about to come pounding on the door, demanding rent. I feel terrified, and then I have to walk myself through the many, many years since then. I relive everything. And I’m just so grateful we’re here in your father’s house. We’re safe and now, Mallory and Zachery are safe, too.”
Elsa blinked back tears. She perched at the edge of the bed and peered into space, her hands folded. “I can’t even tell you how awful that apartment looked.”
“They probably feel like kids with all these adult responsibilities,” Nancy returned. “That’s how I felt as a young mother.”
“Yes, but you were sixteen when you had Janine.”
Nancy shrugged. “You never really grow up, do you? Sometimes, I feel just as young and stupid as I did back then. Sometimes, I feel even dumber.”
“Stop that.” Elsa’s lips formed the slightest of smiles.
“It’s true. But I think it’s good to acknowledge our own stupidity sometimes. Nice to remember that no matter how high we get, we can always come crashing down.”
The doorbell rang. Downstairs, there was the sound of Janine and Mallory greeting the pizza delivery man. Elsa tilted her head toward the door and said, “Let’s go eat our weight in pizza, shall we?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Nancy hovered in the doorway to do a last once-over of the guest room. “You think Mallory will have everything she needs? We’ll move the crib up here, of course.”
“I think they’ll be more than happy here,” Elsa assured her as she placed her hand on Nancy’s shoulder. “And thank you again for letting us all invade your space. First, you allow me, then Janine, and now Mallory and Zachery.”
Nancy waved her hand again as tears sprung to her eyes. “You’re the only one of all of us who grew up in this house. Your father left it to both of us.”
It was true — with one caveat. He’d, of course, left a portion of the house and the grounds and the horses and his fortune to Carmella, despite the fact that their relationship had never flourished, especially not after the accident that happened so long ago.
But increasingly, Carmella had molded herself into something that none of them had recognized any longer. She was like a stranger to all of them.
As though Nancy could read her mind, she furrowed her brow and said, “You haven’t spoken with Carmella this week, have you?”
Elsa shook her head as her eyes dropped toward the ground. “I’ve hardly managed to keep myself above water. I can’t imagine what it would mean to have a normal, everyday conversation with Carmella. It always goes south, anyway.”
Elsa’s stomach filled with stones as she realized, yet again, that she hadn’t spoken to Nancy at all about the letter she had received or about the potential lawsuit against Aiden’s estate — her estate. Just now, she wanted bright laughter; she wanted bad reality television; she wanted to bicker with her new step-sister and her daughter and her son and her step-mother about which movie to watch to pass the time together. The pizza was terrifically gooey, heaping with toppings, and the light from the windows morphed from post-storm buttermilk to orange as time ticked them ever-more toward evening.
It was a remarkable night, if only because, for a little while, there was so much love to go around that Elsa was allowed to forget about all the other stuff on her plate.
Maybe they’d all be able to.
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Elsa stepped out of the office and into the bl
inding light of yet another smoldering July sun. After the calm of the evening, another storm had rolled over their rock of the island and torn several branches from beach-side trees. Even now, some of the Lodge gardeners continued to clean up the wreckage. Probably, in a few days’ time, they would have a bonfire out near the sand.
Frequently, they had their Lodge guests attend bonfires, where they wrote out various things they wanted to “let go of” onto slips of paper and tossed them in the flickering flames. Sometimes, the women told one another what they wrote — about their ex-husband who had left them in a lurch, or the sorrow over their loss of a friendship, or some other hurdle that made their insides tie up in knots.
Elsa had never performed the ritual with them. She had never felt that she’d wanted anything in her life to depart. Even as a child, she had longed to hold each and every one of her stuffed animals in her arms as she’d fallen asleep. She hadn’t wanted one of them to think she thought less of them or even considered giving them away to some charity. She had even tried to make sure she played with each of them equally — a trying task and one that made her an increasingly anxious child. “Your stuffed animals know you love them,” her mother, Tina, had told her once as she had fallen asleep. “You don’t have to feel guilty about your love for each of them.”
Carmella sauntered from the parking lot. She wore thick Chanel black sunglasses and carried a sloshing iced coffee. She looked fit; as her long, lean legs showed from halfway down her dress. She gave no smile to Elsa and Elsa lent nothing in return.
“Hey, there.” Elsa stopped before she got into her own car.
“Are you heading out?”
“Yep.”
“It’s pretty early. I haven’t seen you around very often.”
Elsa gave a lackluster shrug. How could she possibly explain everything that had happened to this creature before her; the woman was essentially a stranger.
“I hired Jennifer Conrad to do a lot of the social media for the time being, and I’ve managed to fit in all relevant meetings between other things,” Elsa told her. Immediately afterward, Elsa cursed herself. She didn’t have to prove anything to Carmella.
“Huh. Well. It’s a beautiful day out here. Enjoy it. I have another four hours of clients till I can pack it in.” Carmella then slurped up her coffee and rushed back toward the door, where she ducked into the air-conditioned room.
Elsa seethed with resentment as she popped her car door open and slid into the front seat. All the way back to the house, her heart performed a tap dance across her diaphragm. “She has some kind of nerve,” she muttered to herself.
Neal had always known what to say when Elsa’s anger toward Carmella had taken new heights. No, he hadn’t always agreed with Carmella and often had grown red-faced with similar rage, which he never verbally expressed to either of them.
“You girls just have very different ways of looking at the world,” he’d said frequently. “And you’re both incredibly empathetic to everyone, except one another. It’s a sad thing to watch. But isn’t that what sisters do? You wage war on one another without seeing your similarities. Try to see them, Elsa. Try to see the good in her, too.”
Just as she had long ago in conversation with her father, Elsa tried to drum up a list of all the things she liked or, better, loved about her sister.
“She is so clever,” she tried as she clutched the steering wheel harder. “She was in the top ten of her class and much braver than I ever was. She was always clambering up to the tallest branch of that tree by the water. I hated when she did that. What else? What else?” Elsa scrunched her nose as she stabbed the fob to open the garage door. “She doesn’t need people the way I do. She’s self-sufficient. How wonderful would it be to live life like that? To go to sleep and wake up without this heavy loneliness?”
But then, her psyche piped up with its own opinion: that just because Elsa didn’t think Carmella got lonely didn’t mean she sometimes didn’t. Everyone did, didn’t they?
And it was especially true if what their father had said was really correct, that they were more alike than either of them knew.
Elsa stepped upstairs. Mallory had the day off, and the sound of her soothing, sweet singing voice eased beneath the crack in the guest bedroom. It seemed that since Zachery’s arrival to the old homestead the previous day, he had hardly cried at all.
She was just so glad they were both out of that place. Maybe, Lucas and Mallory would find a way to make amends for the sake of their baby and all the love they had together. Elsa had to at least hope for it.
But already, Mallory had texted her mother to say that she planned to tell Lucas it was over between them. She wasn’t sure how much to trust it.
MALLORY: I’m ready for a new start. I don’t know why, but I feel it in my gut. It’s time for something else.
Elsa paused at her closet door and thought back to what Mallory had said. This concept of “new start” was certainly alluring, if not intoxicating. It seemed that everywhere she looked; others were on the verge of their own. Mallory had jumped ship; Janine had run away from Manhattan; Nancy had thrown herself totally back into the Lodge. Only Elsa dragged her feet.
Operating on some kind of strange reflex, Elsa swept through her various outfits, her long skirts, her slacks, her work suits until she finally found, toward the back, her riding uniform. She stripped down to her bra and panties and then donned the outfit. In the mirror, she shifted this way, then that, and gave herself a pointed smile. She looked slender, her muscles toned and powerful — the direct antithesis of everything she felt. How was it possible that you could exude something you didn’t feel? She supposed that was a kind of magic or maybe just an illusion.
Once outside, she donned her riding cap and headed straight for the stables. They’d kept horses since she had been a little girl, and in the years leading up to the accident that had changed everything, she’d been quite the rider. She had won several competitions as a youth and then as a young teen, and she’d even taught lessons for a time. In her adult years, she hadn’t been particularly keen to allow her children to ride, as she’d been terrified something might happen, although both Alexie and Mallory loved it.
“I just can’t get the image out of my head,” she’d told Aiden as tears had streamed down her cheeks.
Of course, this image had everything to do with her little brother. With Colton — the inspiration behind Cole’s name.
He’d been gone so long that she hardly remembered his face.
Only some amount of love and a whole lot of fear remained.
Nancy still rode frequently. Elsa had often seen her as she’d rushed out across the beach; her horse’s hooves kicked out sand behind them as his mane rushed freely with the ocean winds. To Elsa, the view of Nancy on horseback was one of absolute freedom.
Yet, for whatever reason, she hadn’t been able to grasp her own version of that. Not until now, that is.
The chestnut-colored beauty toward the far end of the stables dipped his nose over the wooden stall as though he had known all along Elsa would come — as though he’d never doubted it for a second.
Chapter Thirteen
ELSA’S FATHER HAD PURCHASED the grounds on which he’d built his moderately-sized mansion a few years prior to his eldest child’s birth. This meant that, since Elsa had first wobbled forward on her first step, or swam in the sea, or ridden on a horse — this land had been her world, her universe. It had seemed incredible that there had even been any property outside of what they owned there at the house. The rolling hills, which dipped into the surrounding forest, which then filtered out across the blissfully white, sandy beaches — it all belonged to her. And as her horse stretched its legs out toward the trails beyond, she felt a powerful force. It was as though Neal raced on horseback directly behind her. It was as though his soul rushed through the waters and swept through the sea breezes.
She didn’t feel so alone when she was riding.
The property on which Neal h
ad built the house was seventy-five acres, and it stretched all the way eastward, toward the Katama Lodge itself. Elsa lifted the reins of her horse, a light suggestion to the animal to pause, and together they gazed out across the rolling greens and the flash of white sands. In the distance, out across the Atlantic Ocean, a sailboat coasted across the waves. Elsa marveled at it all. How many afternoons of the previous year had she spent inside, feeling the tremendous weight of her own life?
Nothing felt as heavy out there on horseback— not time nor memory nor the fear of what would come next.
Elsa’s horse trotted and then clopped across the sands. Elsa found herself rolling through thoughts easily. For the first time, she recognized that she was separate from those thoughts — that they came and went as they willed and that in their wake, she remained there on horseback. She was okay.
What is it about Carmella that irritates me so much? Is it really because of everything that happened with Karen? Or is it rooted in what happened with Colton?
Or did it begin much earlier? I remember once, when I was maybe six or seven, I came into my room, and she’d yanked the head off of one of my dolls. I told Dad she was a little monster, and he said that she was probably just jealous that all my toys took up my time when I should have been playing with Carmella.
I suppose, in a way, we always mess one another up — no matter how much we try not to.
Still, the past thirty years haven’t been easy for her. I wonder if I should give her some kind of slack?
Then again, she hardly looks at me when I’m around. I can’t even imagine what that conversation would look like. “Hey, Carmella! Why don’t we grab lunch? Just the two of us?” She would probably scoff, or have me committed to an insane asylum, or say something so ridiculously cruel that I would begin to question every single thing about myself — from the wrinkles around my eyes to the way I dress, to...
Elsa’s thoughts stirred lightly. She was surprised to find herself so hyper-focused on Carmella, especially with everything currently swirling around Aiden’s case and Mallory and Lucas’s breakup. For the previous year, Nancy had suggested that Elsa find a therapist to deal with some of the trauma in her life. Still, Elsa hadn’t found the words to even speak to herself about it. She had imagined herself on the therapist couch, twiddling her thumbs until the clock ran out. “Can I go? I have so much to do.” Probably, it would have been like that.
Healing Tides Page 8
