by Jean Stone
Nettie took off her glasses as if that would help her think.
“Boy or girl?”
Rita shrugged.
“How did it die?”
“I have no idea. I suppose it was tragic.” Well, of course it was tragic if a child died. “I mean, I don’t know if it was an accident or an illness, but my guess would be an accident.”
“Last name?”
“Don’t know that, either.”
“Why not ask Doc?”
“What?” Rita asked.
“Doc Hastings. If there was some kind of tragedy, I’ll bet that he would know.”
Rita would have kicked herself if she’d had half a brain. Why didn’t she think of that? Of course Doc would remember. The only question was: Could Rita convince him that, as the support group leader, she had a need to know?
ELEVEN
“He didn’t leave his number,” Faye said frantically into the phone. “He said ‘Sorry I missed you.’ How could he not leave a goddamn number?” Faye twirled the phone cord every which way. If she had bought a cordless, she would be pacing now. But this was the Vineyard, where she’d tried to keep life simple. The same. Of all people, Faye should have known that sameness couldn’t last forever.
Suzanne, R.J.’s receptionist, was caring and polite. “Men,” she groaned. “Even the smartest ones can be so stupid.” She then recited R.J.’s cell phone number to Faye. “Good luck, Faye,” she added. “Maybe he has some good news.”
Good news, indeed, Faye thought. She quickly said goodbye and dialed his cell phone number.
A loud, wavy tone assaulted her ear. She had dialed too fast.
She pushed down the button on the receiver, held her breath, counted to three. She hissed with exasperation and dialed again.
A pause.
Another pause.
A ring.
She squeezed the receiver.
Another ring.
And another.
“Answer, goddamnit,” she seethed.
Another ring, then a click. “The Bell-Cell customer you are trying to reach is not available at this time. Please leave a message.” Beep.
She suppressed a scream.
“R.J.,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, “it’s Faye Randolph. I’m at the house now. On the Vineyard. Please call me. I’ll be waiting.”
She repeated her phone number in case he was on the moon. Then she hung up the phone and looked at her watch. It was just after noon. Nine A.M. on the West Coast, if that’s where R.J. was headed, if that’s where Greg still was.
One would think that at noon Doc Hastings would be at the hospital, if not in his office, then in the cafeteria eating a bachelor’s lunch of meatloaf and green beans. He was not.
Rita sighed and checked her watch. It was Friday, the day the twins went to play group while she volunteered at the school, making photocopies and correcting papers and anything to help out because she was a mother and the school needed her.
She’d skipped out to try and find Doc.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she lied to Doc’s assistant, Margie, whose office was across the hall from Doc’s and whose door was open. “I wanted to ask him about the journals for my support group.” It was a lame excuse, but better than nothing, and better than saying, “I’m trying to find out about someone who had a kid that somehow died.”
Margie rumpled the wax paper in which a half-eaten sandwich remained, then tossed it into the basket. She brushed a few crumbs from the front of her polyester smock that was imprinted with pink teddy bears dressed in stethoscopes and old-fashioned nurses’ caps. “Doc’s off-island,” Margie said. “Dentist appointment.”
While there were plenty of good dentists right there on the island, some folks still preferred to travel to the mainland. Rita wondered if it had more to do with a day’s vacation than with crown and bridgework. What if a benefactor came up with a few million dollars to open a comprehensive dental center with every service from orthodontics to implants to plastic take-out teeth? Would Doc still catch a boat?
“Someone in the group suggested that they not only write in their journals, but that they paste things in them, too.”
Margie’s eyebrows rose over the top of her full-framed, round glasses.
“Pictures,” Rita said, because she couldn’t very well mention that Katie had wanted to paste in her mother’s songs. “Photos of their families and friends. Favorite recipes. Memorabilia. To help create a better sense of who they are. A visual record, not just a bunch of words.” Well, at least Rita had not forgotten the fine art of Vineyard bullshit. If Hazel were there right now, she’d be rolling on the floor.
Margie nodded and took a banana from a small brown bag. “Good idea,” she said, peeling back four perfect yellow strips.
“Yeah, well, I just thought I’d mention it to Doc. In case he knows of some psychological reason why they shouldn’t.”
Margie shrugged and bit into her banana.
“Well, you never know,” Rita continued, because she was off and running now, so what the heck. “It might be too hurtful to some of them. I know it would be hard for me to paste a picture of my Kyle into a journal. God, sometimes just saying his name is enough to bring me to tears.” Her voice cracked on that part, and it was not made-up. Seven years later, Kyle’s name could still do that. She said a quick prayer that he’d forgive her for exploiting his name and tragedy as a quick means to her end.
“I suppose there’s no reason not to try,” Margie said.
“Well, I didn’t know if, for instance, someone else in the group lost a child. Maybe had a child who died tragically, the way that Kyle did?” It seemed pretty transparent, her request for information as to whether one of her three “patients” had a child who’d died. But though Margie was pleasant enough, she’d never been known for her intuition or her brains. “Do you know if any of them have?”
Margie shrugged again. “Doc says the group is anonymous. I was in charge of giving you the materials, but I don’t even know who goes.”
Rita would have said “Shit,” but did not want to offend Margie, because you never knew when you might need someone later on. She glanced at her watch again. She should get back to school.
“I’ll tell him you stopped by,” Margie said.
Rita shook her head. “Don’t bother. I’ll catch up with him later.” The last thing she wanted was for Margie to hint that Rita was prying into the life of the woman who might be their benefactor.
Hannah liked Katie’s idea. She decided to decorate her journal with programs from her favorite plays: To Kill a Mockingbird which had starred Riley, and The Belle of Amherst, the one-woman show about Emily Dickinson that Mother Jackson had starred in, and which had captivated every audience for each standing-room-only show.
But when Hannah opened the trapdoor and let down the attic stairs, a rustle from above abruptly stopped her.
Bats? Oh, no. Did they have bats again?
Gingerly, she crept up the stairs and poked her head into the attic. She listened. She did not hear bats flutter, but she did hear breathing.
“Who’s there?” she called, a very brave, bald woman poised on the third rung from the top, her thoughts racing as quickly as her heart was beating. She tried to remind herself that this was the Vineyard, where crime rarely happened because it was so tough for perpetrators to escape.
“I’m going to get my husband now,” she said, “so don’t try anything that you’ll regret.” She lowered herself on the ladder, when a small voice called out.
“Mom? It’s me.” Me, of course, was Riley.
“Riley?” Hannah asked, and hoisted herself again. She climbed into the attic. Riley sat on the floor in front of Mother Jackson’s trunk. The lid was open. Hannah’s heart skipped a beat, then two, then three. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in school?” She did not ask Riley how much digging she’d been doing through the memorabilia.
Riley closed the trunk. “Did Grandma Jackson
know you were going to be a doctor?”
Hannah breathed a long, deep breath, moved to the rocker and sat down. The rocker creaked from age and miles of sleepless nights with Hannah’s own three babies, and Evan before that. “Yes. No. I don’t remember, honey. I don’t know if I told her.” She watched her daughter, who kept her eyes fixed on the trunk.
“Grandma Jackson said I’d be a great actor one day,” Riley said. “She said I have her talent. All I have to do is want it.”
The rocker creaked again. “She was right, Riley. You take after her.”
Running her fingers along the cracked leather strapping, Riley said, “There’s no one to run the theater now. I suppose I’ll end up like you: stuck on the island with nothing but a bunch of old, dead dreams.”
The theater Mother Jackson had begun was dark, that was true. But how could Hannah explain that life was not a “bunch of old, dead dreams”?
“I didn’t give up my dreams, honey. I changed them, that’s all.”
“I don’t want to be anything but an actor,” Riley replied. “I don’t want to be a teacher and I sure don’t want to be a mother and I don’t want to end up decorating flowerpots. You can say what you want, but the way I see it, you gave up, Mom. Maybe I have, too.”
“It’s not your fault the theater closed, Riley. You can act again someday. In school plays. Maybe you’ll go to college in Boston and you can act there. Or maybe you’ll be the one to get Grandma Jackson’s theater up and running once again.” Hannah didn’t know if her words were helping, but it was nice that they were having a real conversation like two adults might have, or at least a mother and a daughter who respected one another.
Riley stood up and tucked her shirt into her low-riding skirt. “Never mind,” she said, then walked past her mother toward the stairs. “I suppose it doesn’t matter.” She went down the ladder before Hannah had a chance to say it did matter, it really did, that everything Riley thought and said and did, mattered a great deal to Hannah because she was her daughter and she loved her very much.
But Riley was gone and Hannah was left sitting in the rocker, staring at the old steamer trunk that once had held great dreams, but whose lid now was closed.
“I’m not going back,” Miguel said to Katie.
They walked along Main Street in Vineyard Haven, toward Owen Park where they’d left Ina.
“You must,” Katie replied. “You must let me do this my way.”
“We have been doing things your way—or your father’s way—for two years. Now it is my turn.”
She hooked her arm through Miguel’s. She had cried most of the time he’d been there. She had not meant to. She had meant for them to make love, but somehow, she could not. She could not let him touch her breast, because surely he would know. He knew the shape and form and every sensation of her breasts: He knew her flesh as if it were his own. She could not let him see the scar of the incised skin.
She could not bring herself to tell him.
He cannot be trusted, according to her father.
And Ina’s words, Your father’s decisions are usually best for you.
Would Katie never escape Cliff Gillette’s influence?
And so Katie could not make love to Miguel. Instead, she had cried. And blamed it on her hormones, on the poor, innocent baby who’d done absolutely nothing wrong.
“No,” she said, because she couldn’t let Miguel stay on the Vineyard any more than she could make love to him. It was as if she needed every ounce of energy to fight off temptation demons, those that were real and those that were simply in her mind.
“He hasn’t canceled Central Park. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Pray that things work out, I guess.”
“If you don’t show up, the press will say you’re as crazy as your mother.”
She wished he hadn’t called her mother crazy.
“They’ll say you’re undependable,” he added quickly.
As if she hadn’t thought of that.
They walked silently a moment, then he said, “I can convince your father to postpone the concert.”
She doubted it but asked him, “How?”
“I’ll say that if he won’t cancel, then we will elope. Then I’ll say that I’ll tell the media we had to elope, because the last time you were pregnant he made you have an abortion.”
She breathed in little, shallow breaths and wondered why she could not get more air. “Miguel,” she said softly, her hand dropping from his arm, “you wouldn’t do that, would you?”
He cannot be trusted. Her father might as well have been there, walking on the other side of Katie, whispering in her other ear.
“I want you, Cara Katie. I’m sick of playing this game.”
A game? If this truly were a game, which of them was winning? “But he’s my father,” Katie said.
“And what am I? A man who only wants you for your money and your name?”
She walked along in silence. She wished he hadn’t said that, either. She wished he hadn’t reminded her of her own lingering doubts.
At Owen Park, Ina was waiting, a book resting in her hands, her brown bag empty and flattened on the bench, a cluster of tiny birds at her feet nibbling on the remnants of a sandwich.
The woman stood up when she saw them approach. “I counted the seagulls,” she said, “but I lost track.”
Katie tried to smile. “There will be more in summer,” she said, “when the tourists come.”
“And you?” Ina asked, her eyes jumping from Miguel to Katie. “Will you be here as well?”
Katie nodded. “I must, Ina. I must stay here until the baby’s born. So my father cannot make me change my mind.”
“He can’t do that now. It is too late.”
She slipped her arm from Miguel’s. She looked at him; she hoped he’d help her respond. But a young couple was walking by. They wore T-shirts and shorts—too early for the season. The girl had high, firm breasts; Miguel’s eyes moved to them. He did not look at Katie.
She turned back to his mother, sensing Miguel’s rebuff, feeling once again his odd manner of detachment when she needed him. “It’s quiet here, Ina,” she said. “The baby will like that.”
“And Miguel?”
Katie did not look after Miguel. From the corner of her eye she knew he had begun to walk toward the dock, toward the boat.
“I don’t know about Miguel,” she said. “I must get through this first.” She was trying to be kind, but with each step he moved away from her, the distance between them grew.
“There is more to this story, is there not, Katie-Kate?”
If only Ina had not called her that. If she’d not used the pet name Katie’s father had made up, the name she’d never liked but never complained to him about. If only Ina had not called her that, she might have confided in her; she might have told her about the breast cancer. But the name only served to smother Katie once again, as if the only thing that mattered was to please her father, as if she were not a person in her own, grown-up right. As if she were not responsible to make her own decisions about her own life.
Katie raised her chin and said, “That’s the whole story, Ina.” She folded her arms across her billowed stomach. “Soon the baby will be born. Life will begin again.”
Ina shook her head. She took one last look at Katie, gave her a sad, lingering hug, then she caught up with her son who had already reached the dock.
And Katie remained standing, hands in her pockets, in the park, watching until the ferry pulled away, making sure Miguel did not get off.
TWELVE
Waiting. If there was one thing Katie was learning from breast cancer, it was the fine art of waiting.
Waiting until the baby was born. Waiting until radiation could begin. Waiting until her checkup Tuesday, when Doc would reassure her that all was still okay.
“No need to worry,” Doc had said the last time.
No need to worry, except about Miguel. And Ka
tie’s father. And her career.
No need to worry about anything but everything.
She strolled up Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs in search of a store that was open for the season. Hannah had called that morning—Saturday—and said she wasn’t feeling well and was not up to shopping, if Katie didn’t mind. Maybe next week?
More waiting, but what did it matter? Katie, after all, was not going anywhere, except downtown Oak Bluffs that was as bleak and deserted as the middle of January, which, on second thought, was good, because no one would harass her. It was odd, however, to be without her shadow, Brady. Odd and lonely. Kind of sad.
She passed the ice cream shop, the fudge shop, the saltwater taffy shop where soon tourists in shorts and T-shirts would line up with their dollars. But right now the shops sat idle, as if they were waiting, too.
She tried to turn her thoughts to how exciting it would be once the baby came and she’d learn if it was a boy or girl. She’d told Hannah she wanted to be surprised, but the truth was that she hadn’t wanted to know in case something awful happened. But now, with only weeks left …
A girl—Michele?
A boy—Miguel?
Miguel.
She turned up the collar of the old denim coat that was easily penetrated by the sharp spring wind that whipped off the ocean, crossed Beach Road, and danced up the hill. She passed Linda Jean’s, which was open, because it always was open, wasn’t it? She considered going in for a cup of hot tea, but she could see too many patrons on the other side of the glass, at the counter and at tables, sharing muffins and coffee and laughter and conversation. She could not risk going in; she could not risk being recognized.
KATIE GILLETTE, PREGNANT AND ALONE ON THE STREETS OF MARTHA’S VINEYARD, the headlines might proclaim.
She shuddered as she thought of one headline, years ago, that she’d seen by mistake: JOLEEN A MESS IN MENTAL HOUSE. Her father had told Katie the press was having a “field day” with her mother. The only thing Katie had known about “field days” was when her class at school went to Central Park to run and jump and compete against one another.
