The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "I have an errand or two, and I'm on the West End, so it may take me a few hours to—"

  "Ginny told me everything," she said softly, "and I want you to know I don't blame you."

  The change in tempo caught me up short, as did the backdoor accusation. "Blame me for what?"

  Henderson appeared at the kitchen door, tapping his index finger against his watch face, mouthing the words, "The cab's here."

  "For what happened to Daddy. Oh, God, I just saw the time. I need to nurse the baby. Mommy rented us the yellow gambrel next to the library on Ames Street. Come as soon as you can."

  When I hung up and went to say goodbye to Evan, I was effusive in my thanks and my apologies.

  "Mavis will survive, and so will Betsy Schmidt," he said, "though Sue Winston may need to be hospitalized." We laughed a little and did not have to mention the real casualty of the evening. "She'll turn up," he said, to be kind, and I nodded, to be kind to myself. "Let me know what happens. And when the funeral is."

  It's a long drive to the other end of the island, and I settled into the taxi and closed my eyes against the sun, against all that remained of my hangover, my shame. If I'd known where to begin looking for Vicki, I would have. But the only missing creature I had a shot at finding—or a clue as to where to begin looking—was the dog Henry. "Let's check into the motel," I said to Henderson, "and go to the newspaper office. I want to take out a big ad to say Henry's missing, run it with the picture I have in my wallet. Then I need to see my stepdaughters."

  "Sounds like a good plan." But Henderson had another stop in mind before those on my agenda, although he didn't tell me until he absolutely had to, until the taxi driver slowed down as we came to the village of Twin Oaks and pulled over to the curb right across from the church. Of course Henderson had told him to do this, and of course I understood why, as soon as I noticed the parked cars lining the side street.

  "Obedience school," I said.

  "It's entirely voluntary, Sophy."

  "I wish you'd said something at Evan's house, instead of—"

  "There were a few too many conversations going on there to conduct an intervention. I intended to, but..." His voice trailed off. The driver kept the engine on but was silent, like a chauffeur who knows to wait for instructions. He must have waited here, or outside some other church on the island, a time or two before now.

  "You think I don't know how badly I fucked up?" Soon the entire island would know, as soon as the driver let us off, here or at the Lighthouse Motel.

  "I'm not sure that's the most useful way to think of it, Soph."

  "Oh, all right, for Christ's sake, don't look so triumphant."

  "I'm not at all—"

  "I know, I'm just pretending to be combative, to conceal my—" But I stopped speaking and started to gather my belongings. My shame, my embarrassment, my headache without end. Henderson paid the driver and we filed out of the cab.

  "I'll meet you inside," he said, and he let me go across the street through the gate of the white picket fence, down the brick path, and around back to the door of the parish house. The church lawn was bright green, shaved as close as a golf course, the sky swept blue in every direction, and fear collected across my forehead in the space not occupied by my hangover. I pushed on a pair of dark glasses as I climbed the four steps to the closed door; the meeting had started five minutes earlier.

  There must have been forty or fifty people in the room, seated on metal folding chairs, or about to be. The room had always reminded me of a suburban 1950s rec room: cheap wood paneling, lights recessed into the acoustic ceiling panels, the ceiling so low that tall men reflexively slumped. The only empty seat was close to where I'd entered, in the back row against the wall. Best seat in the house for hiding, for being nearly not there. Once I was seated, I looked over the crowd, at partial profiles, and didn't recognize anyone.

  The speaker was being introduced, and I gazed at my lap, concentrating on the cuticle of my index finger.

  "Please join me in welcoming someone I first met when she came into the program three months ago. How she's coped with the early days and weeks and months has really been an inspiration to me and, I know, several people who've come in since." A round of applause, and the speaker, who I guess was already sitting at the table in the front, out of my sight, cleared her throat and said, "Hi, my name is Betsy, and I'm an alcoholic."

  "Hi, Betsy," said everyone in the room, in something like unison. Everyone except me. I was speechless.

  "It still makes me pretty nervous to tell my story," said a disembodied Betsy Schmidt, "even though the nervousness ends once I get going, and I always feel a whole lot better when it's over. My sponsor says that's pretty normal. I guess I took my first drink at boarding school when I was fourteen. I had a lot of resentment, because my parents were divorced, which was rare back then, and my mother sent me to boarding school because she was very determined to find herself another rich husband. It was a night the second semester of tenth grade. My roommate, a bright, delicate flower of a thing, had come back from a swell family reunion in Bermuda, and I was green with envy. That was my excuse, anyway, for ending up on the fire escape with two juniors, who were eventually expelled, and a bottle of Thunderbird. I'll never forget the look on my..."

  As quietly as I could, I slid back the metal chair so that I could slip through and slink out of the building. My head was low, my dark glasses still on, and I had momentarily forgotten about Henderson. When I saw him across the street, sitting on the park bench under the weeping willow and reading a newspaper, he looked like a bored husband whose wife is trying on dresses in a fancy shop. It was a dreamy shot, one that shows up in a lot of island photo books: the weeping willow on the lawn of a Gothic Revival bed-and-breakfast, with a quaint park bench beneath it, on which a tourist is invariably sitting and reading, as Henderson was that day. Our few flimsy pieces of luggage were at his feet, and my bad humor had evaporated like cigarette smoke in the pure island air.

  "Why didn't you come in?" I called out.

  "I thought you might want to confess in private. So to speak."

  "You look very Southern under this tree."

  "It's like sitting under a waterfall."

  "Rumor has it it's the only weeping willow on the island. Swansea's the sort of place where people spread gossip even about the flora and fauna." I smiled down at him. "I came out here to escape my past."

  "Someone you'd slept with?"

  Lightness as real as rain washed over me, and I laughed; something funny for the first time in days, laughing not at Henderson's line but at the lines and circles of connection that had led all of us to that meeting room and to this picture-perfect spot by the weeping willow. "Better than that."

  "What could be better than that? He sure seems to have improved your mood."

  "She."

  "All that in five minutes? Miracles don't usually happen so fast. I'll call us another cab. And then you can tell me what happened." Henderson started to reach into his bag for his cell phone.

  "Let's hitch to Cummington. It'll take twenty minutes for a cab to get all the way out here. Did you know that's how Will and I met? I was on Honeysuckle Road with my thumb out, and he picked me up." We each grabbed a piece of luggage and wandered toward the curb, glancing at the traffic heading east. "It was a perfect Swansea summer day, like today, when you know there'll be one of those electric-blue sunsets you see in all the posters. We were young, optimistic, and, as you know, we lived happily ever after."

  Seeing Betsy at the meeting had had a strangely soothing effect on me. It had knocked out some of the venom, made me laugh at my self-righteousness, at the island social scene, the irony of the two of us ending up at the same meeting the morning after we had both behaved badly—Betsy newly sober, and me newly drunk.

  When I stepped into the street and extended my hand to the road and the oncoming cars, I remembered the acute poignance of that distant day with my thumb out and Will stopping to pick me up—sa
me thumb, same island, a woman who resembled me, a man who resembled the corpse on the floor of our house. I felt panicked then about getting to the Sentinel office and placing my ad in the paper—as if it would appear instantaneously and incite the townsfolk to search the beaches and woods for Henry. And when they found him, he would speak and reveal the mystery of Will's death. Which of my chimerical fantasies would I be disabused of first? That Henry held the secret of Will's death, or that Vicki would turn up unharmed?

  An old forest-green Volvo station wagon stopped for us, and I leaned down to the passenger window to see the driver. "Dave Robbins," I said. He had spent three weeks in our kitchen a few years back, building new cabinets and counters and giving impromptu lectures on Beethoven's break with classical structure in the Ninth Symphony and the late string quartets. He and Will would talk about Oriana Fallaci's interviews with Henry Kissinger, General Giap, and Nguyen Van Thieu. In more ways than one, time stands very still on Swansea.

  "Jesus. Sophy. What timing. I just heard about Will. From Ben. Not half an hour ago. I'm sorry. Where you headed?"

  "The Sentinel office."

  "We're going right past it. Hop in. Girls"—there were two teenagers in the back seat—"squeeze over." Dave was a single dad whose wife had left the island years before with his business partner. Henderson slid in with the girls; I took the front seat.

  "Starting Monday," Dave said, "we're renting out Toad Hall for the summer and living in the cabin. It's a little tight, but there's no other way to pay the damn property taxes. We just finished cleaning the place up for the renters and stopped at Ben's filling station. Poor guy looked as white as a sheet. I thought he'd been sick. Then he told me."

  We drove across the island discussing Will, although Dave had spoken to him only a few times since I'd left, and about nothing personal. Then it occurred to me that he and his girls might know one of the missing on my list, the woman with the funny name Will had written to, asking for a date. "Crystal Sparrow," I said. "Does that name mean anything to you?"

  "Her name used to be Brenda," said a voice in the backseat. "It was Brenda when she babysat for us. Brenda Barnes. That was ages ago. We were like maybe five."

  "How old was she?"

  "Eighteen, twenty?" Dave said.

  "Is she still around?"

  "I haven't seen her," one girl said.

  "Me neither," said the other.

  "Dave?"

  "Crazy Crystal," he said softly, a little too knowingly. It was a tone that made me understand that I shouldn't ask more in front of his daughters; that Crystal was someone known to men on the island whose wives had left them. And then I didn't have to say anything, because we were at the top end of Cummington, at an intersection of three busy streets. A ferry had just come in, and traffic was stalled. Cars from faraway places were filled with children and golden retrievers and Boogie Boards and all the bright promise of summer on the island. "Henderson, it'll be quicker if we walk. It's only two blocks down Main."

  I managed, in the next forty minutes, to place an ad in the paper for Henry, check into the Lighthouse Motel, which was miles from the nearest lighthouse, and get an old VW Bug from the Rent-A-Wreck office down between the shipyard and Swansea Bagels & Buns, and did it all without running into anyone I knew.

  Ginny was on her way out the door when we arrived at the yellow gambrel on Ames Street, its freshly painted, sunny exterior a shiny Necco-wafer pale yellow, much too chipper for the hard business of grief. "I'm picking my mother up at the airport," she said after I introduced her to Henderson, "and we've got a meeting with Father Kelly in an hour about the funeral."

  It was unclear whether they meant to invite me to this gathering, but before I had a chance to ask, another voice rang out from inside the house. "Sophy, is that you?"

  The voice was identical with Ginny's, but when the door swung open, the woman on the other side was no one I knew. "I should have warned you," Susanna said, and she held open her arms for me. "It's harder to get rid of than a tattoo." This girl who had always been model-thin was now severely plump, buxom as the town tart in an old Western, wearing a blousy Indian wraparound top, loosely tied, that revealed the upper edge of a nursing bra. "Andy says there's more of me to love, but I—" the last words lost or abandoned somewhere in our embrace. She didn't cry, as Ginny had yesterday, but when we separated I saw that her gray-blue eyes, one of the only features she still shared with her twin, and the two of them with their father, were puffy and ringed with red. "Come see the baby. I just fed her." She took my arm, and we had not walked eight feet to the end of the foyer when her husband, Andy, with his mop of curly red hair and lumberjack build, appeared with a bundle swaddled in a flannel blanket with pink polka dots. He leaned down to kiss me, and the baby's sweet scent took me by surprise.

  "Isn't she beautiful?" Susanna said. "Say hello to Sophy, little Rose."

  There were too many feelings colliding in this room, all the ones you can imagine—the baby I never had, the role this baby had had in my decision to leave my marriage, Susanna's sadness that Will had never seen her—and another, private anguish that I could speak about to no one in the family. I knew that Will had had a raft of reasons for not liking Andy, not trusting him, and not the least was Andy's Svengalian hold on his daughter. Or so Will thought—that Susanna was there on the mountain without a telephone because Andy had brainwashed her, and because she was susceptible to being brainwashed on account of his own failings as a father. Will could go off about Andy: Andy's big ideas about being self-sufficient, living off the land, building a root cellar to store food for the winter, even starting a school for college kids to stay in the summer and learn concepts of interdependence, family farming, appropriate technology. It was, to Will, as if Susanna had sworn allegiance to Dr. Kevorkian.

  "Do you want to hold her?" Andy said. He started to hand her to me, but he must have seen something on my face that looked like alarm. It was only an immense sadness. Sadness that Will had misread Andy and Susanna and that they had always felt his disapproval. Sadness that the edges of love are so jagged. Holding the baby would have taken Will's breath away. As Andy reached out to hand her to me, I could feel her about to take mine. "Next week she'll be five months old."

  I know I said that Ginny had announced she was leaving to pick up her mother at the airport, so the scene in the foyer I am describing may have lasted only fifteen or twenty seconds, because the next thing I remember hearing was Ginny's voice, sounding as if it were right behind me. "Sophy, I forgot to tell you something." I turned and saw that Ginny had come back into the house, leaving the front door ajar. "I listened to the messages on Daddy's answering machine this morning. One of them was for you. A girl named Vicki."

  "What?"

  Henderson, who had been dutifully hanging back, and who was more or less unflappable, lurched toward Ginny so boldly, I was afraid he would grab her by the collar. "Today? She called today?"

  "I think so. There were an awful lot of messages. I'm—"

  "What did she say?" I handed the baby back to Andy in case I dropped her in astonishment.

  "She was looking for you. She said she'd heard someone was sick. Something like that."

  "Was she here? Did she say she'd call back?"

  "I listened to twenty-three messages. I'm not sure."

  "Did you erase it?"

  "No."

  "Did she sound scared?"

  "Not particularly."

  "Panicked?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Is the machine here?"

  "It's at Daddy's."

  "We need to listen to it. She's missing. The police are looking for her."

  "Here, call her father," Henderson said, handing me his cell phone, not much bigger than the baby's foot, "and then call the police."

  Both Daniel and the detective demanded that I go to the one place I did not want to go, Will's house, and plant myself there in case Vicki called again. In the meantime, the cop would put a tracer on the phon
e line, and Daniel would close his eyes and sleep for the first time in thirty-six hours.

  I handed Henderson back his phone. "How do you think she got your number?" he asked.

  "I must still be listed in the Swansea directory."

  "What's going on?" Susanna said.

  "A friend's child in New York took off. We had no idea what direction she went, but it's a relief that at least she knows I'm here."

  "Could she be on the island?" Susanna said.

  "That hadn't occurred to me," I said.

  "Let's go," Henderson said.

  "It's downstairs in the kitchen," Ginny said, about the answering machine, "not upstairs where he died."

  Susanna must have seen the dread on my face. "It won't be that bad," she said, though she knew it would be, because she had fled from there that morning.

  "Thank you, sweetie," I said.

  "At least we'll know where to find you."

  My reluctance to go back to the house should come as no surprise. What will surprise you, as it surprised Henderson and me, were some of the voices we heard on Will's answering machine as we waited for Vicki's message.

  There was a call from a man named John Watts, who said he had just received Will's letter and was sorry Will did not want to talk to him, even off the record, about some of his experiences in the CIA for the book he was writing, but that if Will ever changed his mind, he should get in touch.