by Grace Palmer
But his father was already standing and climbing up the ladder to the captain’s seat. “No worries, Brent!” he called over his shoulder as he hauled himself up and took his place behind the wheel. “The Garden of Eden will have fish aplenty! We’ll bring some home for your mama, and I’ll even let you take partial credit for catching tonight’s dinner.”
Brent sighed for the umpteenth time that day. Fine. So be it. If his dad wanted to suffer through bone-chilling rain and a nausea-inducing ride out and back just to still come home empty-handed, that wasn’t Brent’s problem. Lord knows he had done similarly foolish things before and would do more in the future. And nobody on this planet could stop him when he had an idea like that in his head. Brent might be stubborn as a mule, but he’d learned everything he knew from his dad. He’d be better off saving his breath.
“You sure, Dad?” he asked. Might as well try one last time. If nothing else, he could say he gave it an honest effort.
But his father was already firing up the motors and didn’t hear him.
Jenny Lee was washed down, loaded up on the trailer, and Brent had gone into the marina to chat with Roger. But Pour Decisions still hadn’t returned home. Brent frowned. The storm in the distance wasn’t so distant anymore. Up close and personal, it looked to be a particularly gruesome one, one of the fierce thunderstorms that sometimes came swooping down on Nantucket every now and then during the spring to drop four inches of rain and then disappear like a bad ex. It was rough enough being caught outdoors on the road during one of those suckers. Brent didn’t like the idea of being caught on a boat during one of them.
He tried his dad’s cell phone. He knew it was a long shot; cell service out at the fishing spot his dad had wanted to try, the Garden of Eden, was sketchy at best. Even if the call did go through, Henry wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest at keeping his cell on hand.
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
“Hello, this is Henry Benson. Leave a message, and I’ll—”
Brent hung up. He resolved to give it one more try. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
“Hello, this is—”
Brent turned to the counter. Roger, the marina owner, was lounging behind it, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke out through a cracked window. He was in his mid-forties, with light brown hair, though balding enough to be the butt of jokes from some of the old-timers who came through the marina each day. A big anchor tattoo poked out from under his right shirtsleeve, like a Popeye caricature.
“Roger, when my dad gets back in, tell him to give me a call, will you?”
“No problem,” Roger said. “He might need you to bring him a towel, at the rate that thing’s cooking.” He jutted his cigarette out through the window at the dark storm clouds.
“That he might,” Brent replied, laughing.
8
Eliza
When she’d pulled herself together, Eliza rinsed out her mouth in the bathroom sink and washed her hands. She was breathing fine now, but the sharp tang of fear that the panic attack left behind had not gone away. Maybe it never would.
She looked herself in the mirror and took stock of what she saw. Her hair was blonde, like everyone else in her family, though hers was a little thicker and more golden-hued than the others. She had some natural waves and curls in it. Most days, she wore it pinned up or pulled back in a bun. She’d decided to wear it down today, just in time to puke her guts out at work. Perfect timing. Back up it went. Her eyes were almond-shaped and a light greenish gray, set a little too narrow around a nose that she’d always thought went on just slightly too long. Below that, her lips were drawn in a thin line. If she didn’t insist on the vanity of regular spray-tans, she’d be pale-skinned.
She looked like what she was: serious, driven, cold. Had her eyes always looked so frigid? she wondered. Truth be told, it had been some time since she’d really stared at herself in a mirror quite like this. She wasn’t sure she liked it. In fact, she decided that she did not.
She took a deep breath and strode out of the bathroom, back towards the conference room where her team was assembled, cranking away on spreadsheets. The smell of fajitas was as nauseating as it was before. Eliza held her breath as best she could while she delivered her news.
“Something came up. I have to go. Send me the draft by midnight.” She didn’t stay to answer questions. Just pivoted on her Louboutin heel and went back out the way she’d come. She walked confidently, head held high, through the foyer and into the elevator. Down, out, through the atrium towards the big glass doors.
Only when she hit the street did she start to run.
There was a CVS situated a few blocks away. She got there as fast as she could, doing her best to ignore the pounding of her heart. Bursting through the doors of the pharmacy, she went straight back to the family planning section.
“Where, where, where …” she muttered under her breath as she scanned the shelves. There. She grabbed three of the most expensive pregnancy tests and went immediately to the checkout counter. The kid behind the counter, a pimply teenager with unruly curls, asked her if she wanted to join the CVS Rewards program. She did not. She wanted to pay for these tests, confirm ASAP that her worst nightmare had come to life, and then figure out what on earth she was going to do about it.
Clay was not going to like this. Clay was going to hate this, actually. She knew that with a certainty that surprised her. After all, they hadn’t talked about it much. They hadn’t talked about anything much. They talked about work, of course, and they gossiped about the city, just like every New Yorker does. They swore up and down that they were going to leave just as soon as they made enough money. Each knew that the other was lying. They were bound to this city, by profession and temperament. Nowhere else gave the same adrenaline rush. Nowhere else was as fruitlessly addicting. They weren’t going anywhere.
Good luck to her with the little rug rats.
She shivered. This was bad.
When she had swiped her credit card and snatched the plastic bag from the cashier’s hands, she asked, “Bathroom?” The kid pointed towards the back. She nodded and strode off in that direction.
It took a lot of effort to make herself walk. But for some reason, she didn’t want to embarrass herself any further in the eyes of the CVS employee. It was a silly thought—she was a powerful finance executive on Wall Street; why did she need the approval of an acne-scarred seventeen-year-old working a menial part-time job after school? The kid had enough to worry about trying to get a date to prom, and—she stopped herself. That was a rude thought. And unnecessary. Her own child might one day have pimples or messy hair. It was certainly plausible enough. What would she think if some stone-cold ice queen marched up on her child and made him or her feel small for no good reason at all? What gave her the right to be so condescending to this teenager? He’d done nothing wrong.
Her thoughts were pinwheeling all over the place as she barged into the single-occupancy bathroom and locked the door behind her. Ripping the first pregnancy test out of the box, she did her thing and set it on the counter. Then, the next. And the next. She closed her eyes and counted up to one hundred and then back down. Then she looked.
Positive.
Positive.
Positive.
This did not work for her. This did not serve her.
She decided to take the subway home. She normally took a black car service to and from work, since Goldman Sachs paid for it. But right now, she didn’t want to be alone in that cold, sterile environment. She needed people around her. Sweaty people, bored people, weird people, normal people—just people of any variety. Living. Breathing. Doing normal people things.
Her life felt suddenly very much not normal. Why was that? Having a baby was a perfectly normal thing. Normal people got engaged to other normal people and procreated. They raised normal families and lived long, normal lives. Happy lives. Or something close enough to happy lives to pass the smell test.
So why did this feel like a death sentence?
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Eliza laughed under her breath. It wasn’t a happy laugh. More of a sarcastic, woe-is-me laugh. A gallows laugh. Of course this would happen to her. If birth control was 99.99 percent effective, then of course she would be the 0.01 percent exception to that rule.
She’d had a lucky enough life so far, that was for sure. She’d been born on Nantucket to parents who loved her. She was naturally good at softball and volleyball. She’d excelled academically. UPenn had given her a spot on the team to play softball, and she’d excelled there, too. Then, Goldman interviewed Eliza her senior year, and, as everyone in her universe expected, she excelled. She got the job. Moved to the city. She’d been the second-youngest female ever promoted to her position. Her fiancé was handsome and rich. That was a lot of blessings for one person.
Maybe now was just her turn to get screwed.
9
Sara
The elevator ride up to the room was as awkward as Sara could possibly have imagined. She didn’t look at Gavin, not even once, for fear that he’d be able to see the battle raging in her eyes or the pounding of her heart against her rib cage. She was pretty sure that she could hear it herself. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. Like a warning signal that this was all one no-good, very bad, terrible idea from the get-go. What had she been thinking? Gavin was taken. The Melissa Question wasn’t a question at all. It was a firm “Stay away.” A no-fly zone if ever there was one.
And she’d ignored it.
When the bell dinged to let them know they’d arrived at their floor—the top one, naturally; Gavin never did anything halfway or substandard—she hustled off before he could.
“Sara.”
She froze in place. She was already a half-dozen steps down the hallway ahead of him. But his voice halted her in her tracks. She was powerless to resist. Therein lay the problem.
“Yes?” she said, as innocently as she could muster.
“What’s going on with you?”
She turned her head slightly, just enough to see his booted feet on the intricately woven carpet. She raked her gaze up, past the dark-stained jeans tucked into the boots, past the hem of his plaid shirt, past the arms crossed over his chest. She steeled herself and made eye contact. Gavin was looking at her, head tilted to one side like a curious puppy. His eyes were swimming with something unreadable.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a little drowsy from the flight and the drink.”
“BS,” he said right away. “Something’s up. Talk to me.”
Could it really be that easy? Could she just ask him the Melissa Question? No freaking way, right? That would be crossing so many lines as to be unthinkable. It would be like shoving all her chips into the middle of the table and laying her hand face-up for the world to see. It would be tantamount to saying, I’m obsessed with you and I can’t make it stop.
Curse her genes. She blamed her dad. The inveterate whittler, the can’t-stop-won’t-stop man who raised her. Henry was like a dog with a bone when he found something he liked. He’d eaten Bill & Ted’s Excellent Cereal every single morning she could remember, ever since that awful Hollywood-branded gruel had come out in the wake of the movie. When they stopped making it, he went around to every grocery store within a hundred-mile radius to buy up their surplus, and when that well went dry, he’d gone on eBay and hounded every seller he could find into giving up their stash to him, too. They used to have a closet full of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Cereal at their house on Nantucket. She remembered asking him what was so good about it. He’d just shrugged and said, “It suits me.”
Maybe that was part of the problem. Gavin suited her perfectly. He smelled like heaven and he was so funny when he chose to be. He was kind—she’d personally witnessed him peeling hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet when he’d overheard a dishwasher talking about being too broke to buy dinner for himself and the kid brother he was raising. He was bold and creative. The awards ceremony that evening in his honor was testament to that. It was like some mad scientist had gone digging through Sara’s brain and picked out all the pieces that she’d liked in every boyfriend she’d ever had, and concocted the man who was standing behind her right now and—
Wait, no, he was coming around in front of her. He was circling to stand toe-to-toe with Sara, and then—what in the world?—he was pulling her towards him with a hand on each hip and kissing her.
Seeing how this was the culmination of over six months of near-daily fantasies, Sara expected to have a lot of thoughts running through her head at that moment. She guessed that she’d be thinking Finally! or Oh no! or something along those lines. But instead, her mind went completely and utterly blank. All she could think about was that he was every bit as good of a kisser as she anticipated. She could smell him filling her nostrils. The scruff of his five-o’clock shadow rasped against her own cheeks and lips as they kissed in the middle of the hotel hallway.
Didn’t she deserve to be happy? Screw the rules. Screw the gossip. She did deserve this. She’d worked hard, hadn’t she, over the years, to get in a position to—well, not to do this, exactly, but maybe something along these lines? She’d done everything Gavin had asked of her and more. She’d built up the kitchen into a team of all-stars. She’d served food that wowed critics and patrons alike. She’d arrived early and stayed late and done all the nitty-gritty dirty work in between. So yes, she deserved this. She’d finally found something worth really striving for, and now that that something was holding her in his arms and kissing her like a Disney prince come to life, she was going to let all her worries boil away and just enjoy it.
Until—
“What the hell?”
Gavin and Sara broke apart. Neither of them had heard the elevator ding or heard the footsteps of the person who exited it. And it was safe to say that neither of them expected Melissa to walk in at that moment.
Sara spun around. She’d never properly faced Melissa before. Seeing her in the past had always meant peering around a corner while she and Gavin sat together at a corner table or in his office or taking subtle glances at the framed pictures in Gavin’s office. So, in this moment, looking at her face-to-face for the first time, was like seeing a movie star in person. A little smaller than she’d expected, a little less glamorous. The most notable thing about this moment was how non-notable it actually was. In all her dreaming about the various roads that might’ve led to a moment like this—kissing Gavin—she’d never pictured it unfolding in quite this way. Melissa hadn’t ever been involved in those daydreams, except in an “I left her for you” sort of scenario.
She was just about Sara’s height. She had dark brown hair with a little wave and volume to it. She was wearing it down right now. The ringlets at the very end lay on her collarbone, which was pale and adorned with a nice pearl necklace. She was wearing a navy blue dress that was flattering to her frame, along with a pair of nude pumps. It was clear as day to Sara that Melissa had dressed up for Gavin specifically.
“Babe!” gasped the man in question. Perhaps realizing how pathetic he sounded, he cleared his throat and tried again. “Melissa. What are you doing here?”
Melissa looked back and forth between Sara and Gavin. “I came to surprise you. The real question is, what is she doing here?”
“It’s not what it looks like,” Gavin said at once. “She came on to me. I was trying to push her off, but she wouldn’t stop.”
Sara’s jaw dropped.
She whirled to face him. “I what?” she yelped.
Gavin’s eyes never left Melissa’s as he held up a hand in Sara’s face to silence her. It made her so mad that she actually lost track of everything for a moment.
She had a bizarre flashback to a memory from—jeez, that must’ve been at least fifteen years ago, maybe more. Another fight with Mom, neither the first nor the worst nor the last. She couldn’t even recall what this one was about. Probably something related to her bedtime curfew, or grades in school, or neglecting one or another of the various chores she was supposed to take care of around
the house. She’d probably said some cruel things to her mother, because that’s what Sara did at that point in her life. She and Mae had been standing at either end of the upstairs hallway. Sara had been screaming, she was pretty sure; her mom, on the other hand, had never been much of a screamer. Even when Sara got most worked up, Mae didn’t really scream all that much. She was just too mellow by nature. Too kind. It had taken Sara a long time to realize that about Mae.
Eventually, after the worst of the screaming had passed them by, both women retreated to their respective corners to cry. Sara’s father had knocked on her door.
“Sara,” he’d said. She looked up at once because there was something in his voice that she didn’t hear very often. Happy Henry was what her mom called him most mornings, as in, “Hello there, Happy Henry! Nice of you to join us!” But he didn’t sound all that happy in that moment. He sounded somewhere north of serious and west of sad. Somber might be a good word for it. Melancholy might work, too.
“Come walk with me,” he’d said then. Under 99.9 percent of normal circumstances, young Sara would’ve told him to stick his walk where the sun don’t shine. She was feisty to a fault. It would take her a long time to learn how to temper her temper. But on this occasion, she didn’t protest. She got silently to her feet from the beanbag in her bedroom and followed her dad out of the house.
They hadn’t talked for a long time as they walked. She realized soon that he was headed for the beach. It had been cool but not cold outside. Must’ve been early fall—mid-September, or thereabouts. She’d just walked alongside him, head down, thoughts still swirling around whatever it was that her mom had fussed at her about.
Dad had walked her down to the water’s edge and stopped there. He picked up a shell and skipped it across the moonlit waves. Then she did the same. They stayed there and threw shells for a while. There wasn’t anybody else on the beach that night, so it was just the sound of the breeze in the dunes, the shush-shush-shush of the ebbing waves, and the tinny plink of the shells hitting the water when they threw them. It felt like she was throwing away little shards of her anger, piece by piece. She wasn’t sure how many she threw or how long she stood there, but after a while, she realized she wasn’t mad anymore.
