The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "He was different after Jesse died," Susanna said.

  "We all were."

  "Daddy was more different," Susanna said. "I read a story in the paper a few years ago about a hunter who accidentally shot his son. As soon as he saw what he'd done, he shot himself dead. That's how Daddy must have felt after Jesse died, like a man who wanted to turn the gun on himself."

  "But he didn't do that," I said. "We don't know he killed himself. He didn't in any obvious way, so until we hear otherwise, we—"

  "Daddy was ingenious," Susanna said. "Maybe he thought that if he killed himself, we wouldn't get the insurance money, so he found a way that didn't seem like suicide."

  "There aren't too many of those," Henderson said. "But if he did, it'll turn up in the autopsy."

  Did I need to remind them that there was a chance it wouldn't? Did I need to tell them everything I knew, felt, and feared? Isn't it a parent's prerogative, to withhold information? Isn't it everyone's?

  "How was he the last time you saw him?" Susanna asked Ginny, who was arranging a slice of salmon on a piece of bread. I hoped she would not ask me that question.

  "I was here for Christmas," Ginny said quietly, "just before I met Mark." The new boyfriend in Maine who was expected on Swansea later that night, on the last ferry. "I didn't know there was anything wrong between Daddy and Sophy. They seemed the same to me. But it was wicked gloomy here, the way it is in winter. I never understood how you could take it."

  "I couldn't very well," I said. "Your dad didn't mind the isolation the way I did."

  "After you guys split up, I called him every few weeks from the TV station. He didn't say a lot. I didn't either. He wasn't the easiest person to talk to if you were related to him. I spoke to him a few weeks ago about my coming here next month with Mark. I guess I knew he was having a hard time, but he'd had them before and always pulled through."

  Then she looked at me. I understood it was my turn, and I remembered the famous short story by Shirley Jackson, about the quaint New England village where every year there'd be a town lottery on the village green, and the loser would be stoned to death. But that was a parable, wasn't it?

  The next voice we heard, an exuberant waitress's trill, was Clare's, calling from the cracked-open kitchen door. "Does everyone want decaf?"

  I should have been relieved by her interruption, but it was the screechy off-note she often struck. Almost everyone nodded. She planted herself at the door and counted us with her forefinger, like the teacher on "Romper Room." When she retreated, I still didn't know how much of the story, of all of the stories I knew about Will's last days, I was going to tell.

  "The last time I saw him was the day I left the island in March. We were in the driveway, my rented car was packed, the wind was blowing hard. Will looked like a dog who knew it was going to be left. I'd known for weeks that I was going, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it when the time came. He walked me to the car, and when I opened the door, a map flew out and blew across the yard. He ran after it, reflexively, and then was very sheepish when he handed it to me. The map was the evidence that I was leaving, that I was really going away without him. He closed his eyes, because he was starting to cry."

  To his daughters, I said, "I hope you don't think it was easy for me to leave."

  "We don't," one of them answered, though I didn't know who, because I'd closed my eyes the way Will had. "We knew it wasn't," the voice said softly, whoever was speaking in the royal we, as twins often do, certain each speaks for the other.

  "The last time we talked was a few days before he died. He owed me some money from our health insurance. That's what we talked about. He didn't want to give it to me because he was mad about the divorce. It wasn't exactly a fight." It was less wrenching to talk about the money, or wrenching in a different way: how I wish those had not been our last words. "At the end of the call, he agreed to send me the money. When it didn't come, I called and left messages on the answering machine. I thought he'd changed his mind."

  "I saw an envelope addressed to you on Daddy's desk," Susanna said. "That must have been what it was. There was nothing inside. I checked."

  "It was awful every time I spoke to him. I didn't know what to say, how to be decent and concerned without making him think that I wanted to get back together."

  "He hoped you'd change your mind after the divorce," Susanna said. "He told me that once."

  "He told me that, too," Ginny said.

  "But we didn't think you would," Susanna said, "even though we were sad for him and wished you'd wanted to stay."

  I could see that the power of what she'd said was a surprise even to her, like a mouse darting into the room. That was what it came down to, what it always comes down to, a choice as stark as death, even when you dress it up with psychology and history and evolutionary biology: you want to stay or you don't. And what I mean about the mouse was that the three of us went silent and our eyes teared up almost in unison, because Susanna had spoken so plainly—about all of us. We had retreated from Will, had kept our distance, had taken for granted that there would be time another time to apologize or reminisce or be friendly and maybe even be friends.

  "There's another time," I said. "It wasn't the last time I saw Will, but it was the last time he saw me." I could see bewilderment on everyone's face except Henderson's, who merely looked surprised that I had begun down this path. I knew I didn't have to tell this story, but there were so many things I'd kept to myself, I had to make a clean breast of this, to err on the side of the truth this time. I didn't need to introduce Crystal here, but I believed I owed them a little more of myself.

  "After he died," I began, "his friend Diane told me that he had gone to New York at the end of May to see me. He had told me on the phone that he wanted to come, and I'd discouraged him. It seems he came anyway, a day or two after we talked about the money he owed me, and he saw me on the street with a man I know. I didn't see him. Apparently he left the city right after he saw me and drove his motorcycle to Cambridge to tell Diane what he'd seen. He came back to Swansea the next day. Probably died a day or two after that."

  When neither of them said anything, I feared I had made the wrong decision, said too much. "Was the man your boyfriend?" Susanna said finally. "The father of the little girl who was missing?"

  "How did you know?"

  "I heard her message on the answering machine," Ginny said. "I didn't realize it at first, but when you called the police and her father from here, we guessed."

  "I didn't think you'd want to know."

  "It wasn't the biggest surprise in the world," Ginny said, though I was sure I heard their disapproval in the silence that followed, the sting of betrayal, picking up where their father left off. But when I looked from one to the other, I saw them trading a look I'd call a shrugging of the eyes: Well, why not? "We talked to Daddy's lawyer this morning," Susanna said in a serious tone, with an air of confession about it. "He knew Daddy hadn't signed the final separation agreement, which means you're still married. He told us that means you can file a claim against the estate. And you'd probably get something."

  "What did the lawyer advise you to do?" I asked my stepdaughters. If they were as old as I, they would have known not to answer; they would have known not to mention any of this, not to reveal their hand. But now their nonchalance about my love life made more sense. They couldn't afford to be openly outraged, even if what I'd done had led to Will's death, because they didn't want to alienate me, not if they believed I could make a claim on the estate.

  "He advised us to give you a gift."

  "Like the house for the summer?" So it was a bribe, not a present, letting me spend the summer in the house in which my husband had died, maybe killed himself.

  "That was Mom's idea. She thought two months on Swansea would be enough of a gift to—" Ginny paused, maybe coming up against a word she did not want to admit, or not knowing the word.

  "Placate me?"

  "Would someone give me a hand
here?" Clare called out, pushing her shoulder into the swinging door, bringing forth a wooden tray of filled coffee cups and a pie whose crusty top was seared with a Zorro-like Z.

  "Here's Mom and apple pie," Ginny said and stood to take the tray from her and place it on the table.

  " Warmed, apple pie," Clare boasted. "That's what I've been doing in there: stoking the fire. Why was I so sure this house came with a microwave? I could've sworn the rental agent told me it did. Just as well. I couldn't have used it with the aluminum pie tin." Now I saw all her manipulations through the most piercing lens, including her collapsing in my arms at the door and putting on this lavish spread.

  Henderson, I was certain, did, too. "Clare, you've gone to such trouble to heat it up," he said. "The least I can do is run to the deli down the street and get some vanilla ice cream. It'll be three minutes. You all start. Just save me a piece."

  "It's not necessary," Clare said. "I'd hate to—"

  "In my family it's sacrilege to eat naked apple pie. Besides, I'm going on a serious diet as soon as I finish this meal, and I want to go out with a bang." And he was gone from the room and through the foyer, leaving me to ride these rough seas alone. I heard the front door click shut. Andy returned to the table, Susanna held out her arms to her child, and the rest of us poured milk and sugar into our coffee. Clare, the mother superior, was the only one who didn't know which confidences had been breached.

  "Sophy, will you wait for ice cream or—"

  "I'll have a piece now," I said.

  "Me too," Ginny said, coming to an awkward full stop, aware that she and her sister might have said too much.

  "I'll wait," Susanna said, with that same nervous full stop after her order.

  "I'll have a piece now and a piece with ice cream," affable Andy said, and pasted on a showy smile for Clare.

  "Sophy, while the pie was heating up," Clare said, cutting seven neat pieces, "I was remembering the first time I met Will, and I wondered what your first memory of him was."

  "Honeysuckle Road, out on the West End of the island. In Blueberry Parfait. I was hitchhiking, and he picked me up in the old Bug. What's yours?"

  "Mom, we told Sophy what Daddy's lawyer said this morning," Ginny said, "that we should give her a gift. That you came up with the idea about the house."

  All we heard for a while was two or three people sipping coffee, noisily rearranging spoons on saucers. I could have made the silence vanish by telling them what my lawyer had told me—that my winning wasn't certain—or even that I was not inclined to file a claim, but I enjoyed seeing Clare squirm. Her smile had turned to stone, her nostalgia to dust, and her apple pie had been ruined by unsavory revelations. Worst of all, her daughters were wavering in their loyalty. Or so it must have seemed. She gaped at Ginny and would not meet my eye. I figured Ginny was getting back at Clare for her earlier rudeness. Maybe Ginny and Susanna really did want to lay everything on the table and do what was right by me. Or maybe they wanted to do everything they could to avoid a struggle over the estate.

  "Mom, don't make a production out of it," Ginny said. "We're not fighting over the future of Microsoft."

  But the gravity of the next silence made it feel as if we were.

  "Maybe the best thing," Andy said finally, Andy who cared nothing for money and things, who had no use for phones or electricity, whose love of nature wasn't a matter of seasonal good taste, a vase of wildflowers on the dining room table, and a copy of Thoreau's Cape Cod in the bathroom, Andy, who had said almost nothing for the last two days and now piped up at the most awkward moment. "Maybe the best thing would be to ask Sophy what she thinks is fair, instead of playing some fucked-up chess game with her that she doesn't even know she's playing. She was the one still married to him."

  The fucked-up chess game was a particularly nice touch; I wished Henderson was there to hear it and to see Clare wince, her lips pucker as if she'd sucked a lemon. But I hoped she wouldn't ask me right away, because I had no idea what would be fair.

  "For God's sake, Mom, lighten up," said Ginny, herself not always as light as meringue.

  "Maybe Sophy hasn't thought about the legal stuff yet," Susanna said. "Have you, Soph?" Dear, sweet, guileless Susanna, who lived like Goldilocks in the woods without a microwave or a modem.

  "I'm in the middle of a divorce," I said, but not unkindly, "and some of this has crossed my mind. And my lawyer's mind." Clare was staring at me as if I held a dagger in my hand, instead of a forkful of apple pie. "She's doing some research, and I'll talk to her in the next few days."

  "That makes a world of sense to me," Clare said. I knew she didn't mean it; I knew she'd rather hear that I was as naive as Susanna and content with no more than the house for the summer.

  "To me too," I said.

  All of us were still, so when we heard the front door open and Henderson call out, "The Good Humor Man is back," the dining room filled with relief, with oxygen, with another subject than this. "They were all out of vanilla," Henderson said at the entranceway, "so I ended up with Chunky Monkey and Wavy Gravy."

  "I'm afraid I've lost my appetite," Clare announced and got up from the table with a sigh, a baroque display of regret, Clinton rising from the table at which Barak and Arafat had failed to make peace, and brushed past Henderson toward the foyer. We said nothing as we listened to hear where she was going next. Up the stairs, down the hallway. A door clicked shut somewhere.

  "What did I miss?" Henderson said.

  "We sent her to her room for some 'time out,'" Andy said, and we laughed and then tried to stifle our laughter and then quit trying. It was a great relief to give in to it, after days of pent-up grief and guilt and reasonably good behavior. It felt delicious, this sudden chorus of hilarity, laughing before long at our laughing. I was afraid the raucousness would bring Clare downstairs and we would have to explain what was so funny.

  But she did not appear. We settled down and ate most of the pie and all the ice cream, and I told the girls what I had not wanted to say in front of Clare. "I'd like to stay in the house."

  "Good."

  "The more difficult subject—" I stopped and began again, properly this time. "You'd have no way of knowing this, but I agreed to leave the marriage with nothing, because I didn't want to make the separation any more painful for your father than it already was. But I never imagined we'd end up in permanent legal limbo, almost married and almost divorced. I'm not eager to file a claim against the estate, but I can't walk away from this with my dollar and"—I started to say "let bygones be bygones"—when Ginny interrupted.

  "We didn't know any of this," she said, "but we were planning to give you some of the insurance money when it comes. Mommy wanted us to start with the house for the summer and see how you felt about that."

  I was too surprised to say anything, surprised by the stand I'd taken, by the rush of words that had come out of my mouth on my behalf. And surprised that my stepdaughters were going to defy their father's will—and probably their mother's—and give me a share of their inheritance.

  This was not exactly a happy ending, but it soothed me as nothing had before. Not the money, mind you—I didn't care how much it was—but the thought. The thought that I hadn't been dismissed, discarded, nullified by all of them.

  I said thank you too many times, but only because I didn't want to say more and end up sounding sappy, too Tuesday Mornings with Morrie, because I knew their good will and their consideration would help me get through tomorrow. I would need everything I could summon of myself to wake up tomorrow and go to Will's funeral, and, when it was over, to my lawyer, and later in the week, to see Daniel and his children without the comfort of my old costumes. Then I knew I had to sit down and write the story I have just told you, and I was growing more certain that the best place to begin it, and the only place it made sense for me to dwell right now, was the house I had fled three months before.

  That night, when Henderson and I returned to the Lighthouse Motel and adjourned to our adjoi
ning rooms, I sat at the Formica table and turned on Will's tangerine laptop, a simple gesture, though it felt like opening a coffin lid. The diary contained no suicide plan. I knew I didn't need to fear finding that. Then why subject myself to more of it? Because I intended to give the computer to his daughters the following day and had to decide how candid to be about the diary; I was the one who knew the password, after all. I wanted to know what else was there before I let them have it; whether he had written anything upsetting about the two of them.

  The file opened to a one-sentence entry dated December 8, when Will and I were still together, when he had no idea of the depth of my unhappiness. I don't know why the file opened to that entry, but I had not seen it before, and I turned my head the instant I finished reading it: I would have killed myself ten years ago if it had not been for Sophy's love.

  The Garden

  August is one of the quietest months in the garden, matched in some ways only by the deepest winter months. But whereas in those months Nature seems bound in a deep sleep, in August she appears to be merely in a daydream, or perhaps a gentle doze.

  —Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd,

  A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons

  in a Vermont Garden

  15. A Happy Ending

  IT IS NOT a manicured English garden nor the rambunctious, wild place in The Secret Garden that meant so much to Vicki. It is a garden that purists would frown on, because I did not plant it myself. I did not design it. What I like to do best is look at it, either from the kitchen, through the sliding glass doors, or in the yard, where the children and I spent much of the last week, or from the nursery upstairs—I still think of it as the nursery—where I set up my desk with a view of it, and where I write now. The bee balm, the asters, the marigolds. The heirloom roses and snapdragons. A garden at last.

  With Ginny and Susanna's blessing, and a bit of the money they gave me from the life insurance, I hired an imaginative landscaper from Island Design to do everything. Since it was late in the summer by the time he started, mid-July, I had him plant flowers already in bloom. I know that is cheating at a very high level. It may as well be a stage set, a shopping mall, my own Potemkin Village. Why didn't I just stick plastic flowers into the ground like birthday candles on a cake, you're probably wondering, and plan instead for next year? I thought about it.