The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Francine, there's someone at my door. I'll come see you Tuesday."

  There was no one at the door, and seconds after I hung up, the phone rang again. It was Ginny, telling me that she and her mother were on their way to the house to pick up some photographs of Will to display at the funeral. "Did the little girl ever call?" she asked.

  "Her father called me in the middle of the night. She's fine."

  "You must be relieved."

  It took me a moment to answer, to know what I felt. Relieved, of course; a little numb, a little adrift, and alone, in a way I hadn't been when Vicki was still missing, still expected to call or show up here. Alone in this house I had fled three months ago because it felt like the tomb it had become. But I couldn't tell any of that to Ginny. Nor that my lawyer wanted me to sue her and her sister. "I certainly am relieved," I said. "Now all I have to get through is your father's funeral."

  "Me too."

  "Will his body be there?"

  "My mother's arranging everything." It was turning out to be Clare's funeral after all, and now that I wasn't consumed with Vicki's disappearance, word of her control angered me anew. "Have you decided whether you'll read anything?" Ginny asked.

  "I'll read something," I said, with barely suppressed scorn. It was shorthand for "I'll read something, all right, just you wait and see." His diary, I thought, or the letter he'd sent to the writer who wanted to interview him about the CIA, about the nature of his regrets.

  "I'm reading something from Corinthians," Ginny said, "and Susanna has Emily Dickinson."

  "Thanks." There were so many ways to say that word, so many intonations, I hoped Ginny was sufficiently numb not to have heard the sarcastic shadings in mine.

  "Come over for lunch later," Ginny said. "Is your friend still here? Bring him with you."

  Why was her kindness, her decency, such a surprise? Because I imagined that she was as angry with me as I was with her. And her father and mother. It was as if Will was on their team; as if they had the votes, the standing, the history, to declare him theirs. According to the letter of the law, he was my husband. But of course he belonged to no one, to none of us, which is why there was so much to fight over: he was ether, he was air. We could feint and flail forever. We could quarrel over his remains, what remained of them, as if he were Voltaire, whose brain ended up in a jam pot and his heart in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

  "My friend's still here," I said, "and we'll come around later, but I'm about to leave the house. I'll be gone by the time you and your mom get here."

  "If he killed himself," Ginny said, suddenly intimate, suddenly needy, her voice dropping a few decibels, "how do you think he did it?"

  My eyes fell on his computer, sitting on the kitchen table, and I knew I had to read the diary; I couldn't rely on Henderson's skimming. And then I'd give the computer to the girls or leave it in the house for them to find. It wasn't mine to keep. "Why don't we wait until we hear from the coroner? We don't need to torture ourselves."

  "Did he ever talk about it with you?"

  "Only about how he felt after Jesse died. Nothing more recent." No need to tell her that when we were first together, Will used to say to me, "If anything ever happened to you, I'd kill myself." No need to tell her that back then I was happy to be needed that way. It made me feel important, and, yes, I know it had everything to do with my father's disappearing when I was nine. I figured a man who needed me as badly as Will did would never leave me, and I was right. But two or three years ago, when our life seemed stable and secure, when we were trying to have a baby, Will said on a lovely night as we were going to sleep, "I told you a long time ago that I'd die if something took you away from me, but I don't think I would anymore. I'm feeling sturdier now. Sturdy enough to be a father again." No point passing any of this on to poor Ginny.

  "What about you?" I said. "Did your dad ever talk to you about it?"

  "Not since Jesse died."

  "What does your mother think?"

  "She hadn't spoken to him in ages. A year or two."

  I hardly knew how to answer. Clare's audacity, taking over the funeral, was breathtaking, but apparently I was the only one who found it objectionable. "Henderson and I will come by later. You'll be in the yellow house all day?"

  "As far as I know."

  As far as I knew, I would leave Will's immediately, with his laptop, and head to the Lighthouse Motel, where I could read the diary in Henderson's presence, because even though I was determined, even though I knew I had to do this, dread coursed through me and mixed with the feeling of disbelief that filled me since the police first called. He was not dead. He could not be dead. Here I was in his house. There were eggs in the refrigerator and a block of cheddar cheese cut at an angle, slices shaved off, and half a container of yogurt and a bottle of Jamaican hot sauce we'd bought a year ago in Boston. He was almost here, wasn't he? Almost home?

  I closed the laptop, hoping that the diary would exonerate me. If it didn't, would I hand it over anyway? If it didn't, would I edit it before returning it? I didn't think I had the nerve—or the bad character—to delete or doctor Will's words, even though I could make changes without leaving fingerprints. Maybe I could call that ghost-writing. But if I did, who would I be then? Surely not the same woman who'd bought the bird feeder and the happy flags.

  On my way out, I took the flags down from their hooks on the front porch and tossed them into the backseat of my rented car—the nylon sunburst, the rainbow, the engorged purple tulip. How could he have kept them flying after I'd left, when he'd removed every other sign of me from the house? Then I understood. To him the flags might as well have been dish towels, because I had never told him the real reason I had bought them in the first place.

  I drove the long way to the motel to avoid going past the yellow gambrel. Another absurdly beautiful morning, the sun blaring with a trumpeter's insistence, the green of every leaf on every tree saturated with color, with light. Roses, snapdragons, and peonies were in full bloom in Karen Griffin's garden on the corner of Pine and Schoolhouse Road, Karen herself in a pale blue sunbonnet bending to cut a few stems and toss them into the wicker basket hanging from the V of her bent elbow. She is the great-great-granddaughter of a whaling captain, and the sixty-year-old daughter of the revered, recently deceased journalist and preservationist who edited the local paper for decades and wrote twenty books, most of them, in one way or another, odes to the fragile natural beauty of the island and its eccentric inhabitants. By whom he did not mean Evan and Mavis. Or Will and me. He meant old-timers like himself, to whom the island is truly home, those who care about the play of sunlight against the leaves, the quality of the shade, the welfare of the fish and the fishermen. I don't mean to say we don't care, only that our caring is somewhat seasonal, contingent, driven a little too strongly by what's in it for us. Even I, who had been a year-rounder for four years, am a city dweller at heart, an urbanite who doesn't mind the country as long as there are plenty of people like myself, and the daily New York Times, nearby.

  A temporary reprieve. Henderson was not at the motel, and I had made a deal with myself that I didn't have to read the diary without him. I put the laptop at the foot of the bed I had not slept in and picked up This Week on Swansea! from the dresser. It was mostly advertisements. Seaplane rides, a store called Hats in the Belfry, the only movie theater on the island, sunset sailing trips with wine, hors d'oeuvres, and chamber music. I lay down on the bed with it and skimmed the calendar of events for the last few days, imagined myself a tourist reading this for the first time, how charmed I'd be, how impressed with the mix of island quaintness and imported Boston high culture.

  A kite-flying competition, pony rides for charity, a strawberry-shortcake social on the lawn of the Episcopal church, the showing of a documentary about Noam Chomsky, a chamber music concert at Town Hall (Mozart, Sibelius, Dvorak), a walking tour of nineteenth-century houses, lobster rolls and clam chowder at the Quaker Meeting House ($7.50, $3.95, brownies extra
), and a recital of songs at the Historic Society (Schubert, Debussy, Webern, Lili Boulanger). Her name stood out the way my own would have, tilted me into a specific moment in my history with a force I had not expected. My abandoned Lili, whom I had first read about in a music encyclopedia more than a year before, when all of her heartbreaking might-have-beens had made me painfully aware of my own.

  Thoughts of her fused with thoughts of my abandoned Will, whom I had left here to die, left because I was dying, left because if I had stayed, it would only have been to make him happy, to be the bright, sunny bulb, the happy flags in his life of fear and regret and secrets. One night not many months before, as I tried to sleep next to him in that room where he died, kept awake by the howling of the winter wind and my own unhappiness, I startled myself with the question that came to me and the answer that followed: But what about me? If I stay, I will wither away like the plants in my sorry garden, the yellow tomato vines, the drooping irises, the tulips that never open.

  At breakfast the next morning, Will asked how I'd slept. We were at the kitchen table, eating granola and halves of grapefruit, drinking coffee. The wind was still blowing, and it looked like rain. "Fine," I lied. I was making a list of friends to invite the next summer—because even after that awful night, I could not imagine a way out—when Will said something that made me wince. He said he loved me. I love you. The basic uniform, no frills. Subject, verb, object. I looked up and tried to smile, although I was close to tears. Then, thinking, perhaps, that I was moved by what he had said, he went on. He said he loved me more than he ever had, and that even though he was depressed about his estrangement from his girls, the granddaughter whom he could not yet go to visit, and of course the death of his son, our love was the bedrock of his life.

  He reached for my face to wipe away the tears that had come. There were not many; I was wound very tight. "Thank you," I managed to say, knowing, as he knew, that that was not the proper response.

  "Let me make another pot of coffee." That's what I said next, as I stood up. It was in that instant of rising that I understood I was going to leave.

  On the knotty chenille bedspread of the Lighthouse Motel, my entire body flinched at the memory of that breakfast, that peculiar, private declaration: Let me make another pot of coffee.

  Will did not challenge me, did not ask what I meant by "Thank you." He did what people do when confronted with evidence that their love is not returned; he ignored it as long as he could. He drank the fresh pot of coffee and hoped for a better day, more sunshine, less wind. He made plans for spring and for summer and said "we," as he had for the ten years of our marriage.

  When I left him a month later, I knew I was not Nora leaving the doll's house, not Nora fleeing a man who had wanted to infantalize and diminish her. A different sort of woman leaving a different sort of man, another time, another place. But I may as well have been Nora: it took everything I had to walk out the door, drive my rented car onto the ferry, and abandon my life and this paradise too.

  As I put down the magazine and closed my eyes, I could tell I had been holding my breath. I inhaled. I exhaled. I told myself that the choice had been whether to live his life or mine. I was so still, so intent on stillness, that when the phone rang, I clenched. Then sighed in relief. It's Henderson, I thought. Thank God it's Henderson.

  "Is this Sophy Chase?"

  "It is."

  "Hi, I'm Bree Solomon." It was a breathy, high-voiced girl—I couldn't tell if she was twelve or twenty—who sounded as if she was talking from inside a tunnel. "I'm an intern at the Swansea Humane Society. Someone told me you're looking for your dog?"

  I was too stunned to speak. And when I did say yes, I must have whispered.

  "Can you hear me? I'm on a cell phone. In a car."

  "I can hear you fine." But I could tell that she did not have good news. If she had, she would have given it to me by now. People do. They call and say, I had a car accident, but don't worry, I'm fine. "How did you know about my dog?"

  "My roommate Danis, Danis Judd, she works at the newspaper? She said you came in yesterday and took out an ad about a missing dog? This one turned up. Danis got me your number."

  She stopped talking, which confirmed my suspicions. I considered hanging up before she mustered the nerve to tell me. If I hung up, I could do what everyone else had done: write off the dog as a witness, a clue, a piece of evidence, a piece of my heart.

  "He might not be your dog," Bree said. "It's kind of hard to tell. Can you still hear me?"

  "Yeah." There was a lot of time between what I said and what she said, like a satellite delay, because she didn't want to come right out and tell me the truth.

  "Some people found him on the beach late yesterday. They called us."

  "What beach?"

  "A private beach on the ocean side of the island."

  "You don't mean he was walking down the beach, do you?" He wasn't a beach kind of dog. Short legs, couldn't swim. Will had found him at the island shelter and told me he was persuaded to bring him home because of his droopy hound-dog eyes. You wanted someone to take care of, he said, and this little fellow sure needs a hand. Will's presumption infuriated me, and his sentimentality, though by that time, a year before, when I had decided to quit trying to get pregnant, I was easily infuriated—but so lonely that I did not do the right thing and return the poor creature to the shelter, where he might have been taken to a more stable home than ours.

  "No," Bree said finally. "He was washed up. Beached. That's why it's hard to tell. But from what Danis said—from the photograph she described—"

  "You hear about beached whales, but I've never heard of a beached dog. Does that mean he was on a boat and fell overboard?"

  "I'm only an intern, only been working for like ten days, and there was this coincidence with my roommate, so I—"

  "Where is he now?"

  "At the Humane Society on Old Settlers Road. There's this little morgue."

  Jesus.

  "Yeah, I know, it's really terrible when your dog dies. I'm like totally sorry."

  I smiled when she said that, the way her kind words and college-kid delivery bore so little relation to what was going on. I was totally sorry, too. "Thanks," I said.

  "It might help to identify the body, you know, so you can work on closure. And if it's not your dog, then it won't be so bad. Someone will be in our office till six o'clock tonight. Tomorrow they'll take him to the mainland to be cremated, unless you want to like bury him in your backyard or something."

  "I'll get there before six." But I would have to wait for Henderson; I could not face this on my own.

  When I hung up, I tried to call Daniel, who had turned on his answering machine. Then I called my friend Annabelle, whose message said she was in East Hampton for the weekend and gave a phone number so fast that I got only the first three digits. I started to call her machine again when I felt something swirling beneath my left breast, a sudden, fluttery sensation. Maybe just gas, but when it passed, I understood I had to see the dog now, without delay, and if Henderson wasn't back in five minutes, I would go without him. I had to see the dog's body, because I had not seen my husband's body; and I had to see the dog's body now, because it might not be Henry after all, and if it wasn't, I had to keep looking for him.

  Had he been left on the beach and tried to swim, gotten caught at high tide? Had Will given him to someone with a boat, such an unseaworthy dog, and had he fallen overboard? Or had Will done something sinister to Henry as a way to punish me for not taking him to New York?

  I flipped on the TV for company, for distraction, and started to change my clothes. There was a Sunday news show about the election, an analysis of a candidate's gaffe during the past week that had cost him a few popularity points with women and blacks between thirty and forty-five years old. I idly pressed the channel changer on the remote and saw a tagline flashing in the corner of the screen— BREAKING NEWS —and a balding, smartly suited baby boomer at a Marriott podium, a crop
of microphones, like the butt of a porcupine, jutting into his face: "The main thing my client wants to convey to the media and the public at this juncture is that her interests are better served with this change in representation."

  The next shot was an alabaster-skinned newscaster with a shoe-polish-black bouffant bobbing her head as she read from the teleprompter: "That was an impromptu press conference with attorney Rodney Burns, who has just been hired by Greta Kohl, the former nanny accused of shaking the Back Bay Baby to death. Until just a few hours ago, Ms. Kohl's attorney was man-about-town Evan Lambert. After revelations in this morning's Herald concerning Lambert's youthful mistress and his wife's alleged affair with this same woman when she was a student at Harvard, Kohl decided she would fare better in court with a lawyer whose private life wasn't as newsworthy. Mr. and Mrs. Lambert, in seclusion at their Swansea summer compound, are not answering questions. And the official word from Harvard on the matter? 'No comment.' We'll be bringing you developments on this story throughout the day. In the meantime, residents of the Boston area are bracing for the arrival of Wanda the Baby Whale at the city's aquarium tomorrow morning. We'll bring you live coverage of the historic convoy leading her into Boston Harbor..."

  How clever: to juxtapose the Lamberts and Wanda the Whale. Two feel-good stories back to back. We're supposed to feel good that the privileged in their summer compounds can lose their privileges, or at least not enjoy them as much as they used to. And feel good that we can see a wild creature in captivity and forget that it isn't free. Neither, at the moment, were Evan and Mavis. I could picture helicopters circling over their house and TV news trucks competing for parking spaces that didn't exist on the narrow blacktop that led to their property. It hadn't been my choice to leave their house, but as I looked around the motel room for a piece of paper on which to write Henderson a note, I was grateful to be gone from there.

  I wrote, "The dog is dead, long live the dog. Should be back by one. Favorite novel with dog as narrator? The Call of the Wild," and left it for Henderson at the front desk.