Belonging

by Nancy Thayer

  Jake ignored this lapse into despondency. “You say a segment about past and future. How would you work that into the present format?”

  “Oh, I want to change the format,” Joanna told him. “I think the show would be better broken up into segments, past, present, and future. The function of rooms in houses has changed considerably: colonial homes used to have birthing rooms, and Victorian homes had good parlors and daily parlors. Now houses are being built with specific rooms for computers or media or exercise equipment. I’d like to write and produce the shows, and perhaps do the intro and a short segment, but have other hosts for each different segment. Some Alistair Cooke type to talk about historical houses and a slick young thing to talk about contemporary homes and future designs. You know, Gloria actually would be great for that. She’s as shiny as stainless steel and she is knowledgeable. The show needs a new look, not the same leisurely stroll through just one house. I don’t like it, but TV today moves fast.”

  “Right,” Jake agreed. “Clips and segments and bites. Here. Let me take him awhile.”

  He reached out for Christopher, who had been squirming restlessly in Joanna’s arms and Joanna handed him to Jake, who laid him along the length of his thighs. Christopher was at once entranced by Jake’s thick fingers, and clutching one finger tightly with his entire hand, he tried to pull it toward his mouth for a good experimental chew.

  “Sweet,” Joanna said, watching her son, then continued, “I’d like to play around with that format, inserting bits, flashing close-ups on details. Show an antique kitchen and a state-of-the-art kitchen side by side, perhaps have a psychologist discuss how cooking and family life have changed. Or remained the same. Also, there should be a home-decorating segment, with one room showcased each week, say a living room, with eight different styles of chairs shown in the same spot, so the viewers can see which they’d like best in their home. I think we’d get great sponsors for that bit.”

  “Sounds good.” Jake’s voice boomed in his enthusiasm, and Christopher’s eyes widened with surprise.

  “Also, Jake, I want to include in each show a brief bit about alternative homes. Hospices, soup kitchens, AIDS houses, halfway houses for the mentally ill making the transition back to the world, foster homes, communes, shelters, safe places for battered women …”

  “Not quite what your audience is used to,” Jake reminded her.

  “I know. But I’m determined. I’ll stick it in the middle, I won’t go overboard, I won’t scare off the advertisers. But I believe it might be a way for the show to help somehow. To raise public consciousness.”

  Jake considered. “It’s worth trying. We could run an address at the end of each show for charitable donations.”

  “Oh, Jake, that’s good.”

  “When were you planning to start production?”

  “I’ve already decided on several locations, and I’ve laid the groundwork, talked to the people, gotten some verbal commitments. I’ll need some secretarial help for the letters and contracts and logistical arrangements. If we can get the preliminaries done in April, we could start shooting in May. Oh, Jake.” Once again her own thoughts braked her to a full stop, and she looked across at Jake with troubled eyes. “All my notes are gone. All my names and addresses and phone numbers and locations. It’s all gone.” She felt as if she’d just been shoved out of an airplane. All around her, space whirled in a great confusion, and in response her stomach churned and her vision blurred. Sinking back into the cushions of the sofa, she closed her eyes.

  Jake’s voice was reasonable, encouraging. “I’m sure Gloria has duplicates of most of the names and addresses in her files. And once you sit down with the list, you’re bound to remember other contacts, and when you come up with the name, Gloria can dig up the rest.”

  Joanna shook her head. Her eyes were still closed against the dizziness. “I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Well, give it a try,” Jake advised her equably. “I’d hate to see Carter and Gloria get it.”

  Her head cleared. She opened her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  Jake was dandling Christopher on his knee and the baby was bubbling with pleasure. “I mean that Carter and Gloria want to do FH themselves.”

  “Excuse me? It’s my show! I conceived it! I initiated it, I breathed life into it! God, Jake, it’s called Joanna Jones’ Fabulous Homes!”

  Christopher turned his head and gazed at his mother with amazement.

  “I know you did. I’m just telling you what’s going on right now. Carter and Gloria are talking to people at the network. They want to take over the show.”

  “Well, they can’t have it.” Greatly agitated, Joanna rose and paced the room, rubbing the palms of her hands together as if kindling her thoughts. “Look. This is complicated. I can’t come into New York yet, not with everything in such utter chaos here. And I’ve got to spend as much time with Madaket while she’s recovering as I can. You must understand that.”

  “Of course.”

  “Give me two months to get organized. And get me a new secretary. I can’t work with Gloria if she’s going to sabotage me. And get any FH files that are at the network away from Gloria and with my secretary. As soon as you’ve found someone, I’ll tell him what to look for.”

  “I don’t mean to interrupt,” Pat said, sticking her head in from the hallway, “but Bob and I are going to have some dinner now. It’s a casserole, and there’s plenty. Want to join us?”

  Joanna threw a questioning glance at Jake, who rose, Christopher in the crook of his arm. “I’d love to. I’m starving.” He smiled at Joanna. “And I think we’ve accomplished what we needed to, at least for tonight.”

  Over dinner, which tonight Pat and Bob served up in their cozy kitchen, Joanna and Jake conversed amiably with their hosts about babies and children, about television and the future of the entertainment media, the real estate market on Nantucket and the nation’s economy, good new books and movies. In the calm of their company, Joanna relaxed. She’d been roused to a state of indignation that was almost alarm over losing her show. She would not lose her show. She had work to do. But as the evening passed, she felt dropped from the heights of excitement to the depths of exhaustion. She excused herself from the table for a while to rock Christopher and tuck him in for the night. When she returned to the kitchen, she felt as if her limbs and nerves and mind were encroached upon by a melting fatigue until it was all she could do to hold her head up and keep her eyes open.

  “Are you okay, Joanna?”

  Jake’s voice seemed to come from far away, as if funneled toward her by a tube of air.

  “I’m just so tired.” It was all she could say.

  “Of course you are,” Pat exclaimed. Pushing back her chair, she rose. “You need to go to bed, Joanna.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.”

  “You’ve nothing to apologize for,” Pat replied.

  Jake rose when Joanna did, and met her halfway with an avuncular hug and kiss.

  “It was wonderful of you to come, Jake,” Joanna said, hugging him to her. “Thank you for all the presents.”

  “You bet.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to return to New York tomorrow.”

  “So do I. But I’ll be back.”

  “Jake—” She was frustrated. Overwhelmed with fatigue, aware of the Hoovers’ presence, she had no way to ask about his kiss; and how would she phrase her question? It had been only that, one kiss, between colleagues and friends.

  Jake’s dark eyes seemed deep with emotion. “You get some rest, Joanna. I’ll be back soon.”

  Like a cold person suddenly soothed and comforted by warmth, Joanna nodded, went to her room, and fell asleep the moment her head touched the pillow.

  She woke once in the night to feed Christopher, and then they both slept until late in the morning. Jake had gone back to New York. Joanna summoned up her courage and asked Bob to drive her out to Squam. She had to see the r
emains of her house. She had to face it. Pat offered to stay home with Christopher, and in the early afternoon Bob and Joanna set off in Bob’s Mercedes station wagon.

  It was a briskly bright February day with the sort of early spring sunlight that made everything seem excessively vivid. Joanna pulled out her sunglasses to shield her eyes from the glare.

  “It was a little more than a year ago when I first brought you out to look at the place,” Bob mused as they bounced over the dirt road to her property.

  Joanna smiled, remembering. “The moment I stepped inside I knew I wanted it.”

  They turned in her driveway, down the winding lane, and there before them, with the blue sky and the wide ocean as a backdrop, were the remains of the house, a great hideous mound of blackened timber. Two brick chimneys rose alone intact from the debris.

  Joanna’s heart contracted.

  “Sure you want to do this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Bob turned off the engine and they got out. Joanna walked around the great pile of rubble which once had been her home. Bob followed behind her, quietly, at a respectful distance. On one side of the house blackened bits of wood protruded from the heaps of ashes and burned timber. On the other side, piles of sand bordered an area which had been dug out, then hurriedly filled back in, after the bodies of Todd and Doug Snow had been found and removed.

  It was a scene of terrible desolation.

  Joanna turned her back on it and looked out at the ocean, where the water bobbed gaily, tossing up little waves that glinted with light. She walked around the edge of the moorland bordering the cultivated lawn, looking down at the brown and gray, brittle, winter-withered shrubs. Overhead, a gull called and swooped.

  Quietly Joanna declared, “I loved that house, Bob.”

  “Yes. I know you did. Well, you can build a replica, if that’s what you want.”

  “What I want is for the fire never to have happened.”

  “That,” Bob told her, “is one thing you can’t have.”

  Twenty-five

  Joanna could not seem to get enough sleep. Every morning she would awaken to Christopher’s cries, rise and feed him, drink a cup of freshly ground strong coffee in Pat and Bob’s kitchen, enjoy a bite or two of toast and marmalade, dress for the day, call to check on Madaket’s condition, then lie down on the bed with Christopher, instantly falling back asleep. Many days she didn’t leave the Hoovers’ house. Sometimes she didn’t even change out of her green cashmere robe, but shuffled around the guest bedroom, which had become her own snug, safe world. Whenever Pat offered to take Christopher out for a stroll, Joanna accepted, intending to use the free time for the myriad things she needed to accomplish, but, returning to her bedroom for a pen or list or phone number, she’d feel overcome by exhaustion and would collapse on the bed and fall into a heavy sleep until Pat and Christopher returned.

  Partly this was because she didn’t rest well at night, haunted as she was by nightmares of the fire. Every night, before her eyes, her letters or a favorite sweater or one of Christopher’s innocent toys would spontaneously ignite, shooting flames and curling into ashes while she stood helplessly watching. The fire would flare up, a writhing wall surrounding her and her child. Heat would sear her skin. The monstrous roar and crackle filled her ears. She would awaken panting, heart thudding, overwhelmed with terror and grief.

  More than that was the simple sense of hopelessness that weighed on her these days. Sometimes she lay staring at the wall, thinking of the Chorus Girl, and her grand old house, and her dreams of family life, and her belief in Carter’s love, and even her belief in Doug Snow’s interest in her as a woman. All had somehow been torn away from her and consigned to a hazy never-never land.

  She disliked herself for being so maudlin. She chided herself for giving in to self-pity. She’d always been strong, a survivor; she’d always picked up her burdens and tossed back her head and carried on. She urged herself to get on with it, but all she wanted to do was to sleep.

  Jake called to tell her that Fabulous Homes had been bought for syndication with another cable TV network; now five years of old shows ran on a local station every Saturday afternoon at three o’clock. That Saturday Joanna determined to watch it, hoping some architectural style she’d loved a few years ago would catch her eye now and fire her inspiration. Instead, she felt her breath knocked from her lungs. How slender she’d been only a few years ago, how young and sleek and glowing! She didn’t have to look in the mirror to realize how much she’d aged in only a year. Sometimes she found herself exhausted by the sight of how she used to be.

  It was hard to know what to do with her anger. For anger was there, a dark vein twisting around all her other emotions, webbing up her heart in a net of fine and cutting threads. If only the Snows were alive, so she could sue them and berate them and hate them for all the losses they had caused her, for the damage they’d done to Madaket. But the worst damage they had inflicted on themselves, and Joanna could not separate her anger from her deeper pity.

  The officiating minister called Pat Hoover to ask her to let Joanna know, if the question arose, that Helen Snow, Doug’s widow, Todd’s mother, would prefer it if Joanna did not attend the funeral and burial service, and Joanna respected the woman’s wishes.

  The day of the funeral Joanna got out of bed only to care for her baby. Other than that, she lay curled on her side, playing desultorily with Christopher when necessary, and when he slept, closing her own eyes. But she was not sleeping. Nor was she thinking, really. She let her thoughts drift, and it was a kind of dreaming that she did, in which Doug and Todd stood before her, whole and healthy and vigorous with life’s normal greed. They had wanted Farthingale’s treasure. She had wanted Blair’s husband, and then she had wanted Helen’s. She thought of the sandy ground beneath her house. She thought of the sandy ground in which the bodies of Doug and Todd would be put to rest.

  Joanna awoke from violent dreams the day after the funeral and found that while she’d slept, her subconscious had been working furiously, and during the night had woven a new obsession into her thoughts. Joanna left Christopher with Pat and drove by herself to the cemetery and walked across the dry, winter-crisped grass to the plots where the new mounds of earth lay side by side, for father and son.

  The day was bitterly cold and a great flat barricade of clouds walled up the sky, dulling all available light. Joanna knelt to place her offering of spring flowers at the foot of the graves, then stood for a long time, trying to empty herself of all thoughts of anger and retribution and also of lust and insult. So much had gone wrong between her and the Snows. She could not believe it was entirely their fault, and as she stood in the bitter cold, she made a resolution, and before she left the graves, she spoke aloud to Todd and Doug. She made them a promise.

  As soon as she walked into the house from her visit to the cemetery, Joanna called Helen Snow and asked if she could pay a brief visit to her the next afternoon. After a moment’s hesitation, with a voice weary of emotion, Helen agreed.

  The next afternoon Joanna once again left her baby with Pat, and drove out to the western area of the island known as Madaket, to the Snows’ home. To what had been Doug’s home, and Todd’s, and now was only Helen’s.

  The small gray-shingled ranch house sat on a slight slope of land with a sweeping view of the water, and Joanna saw that at this end of the island, all around the sheltered harbor, ice laced the shoreline with a frosty embroidery. The Snows’ driveway and yard were crowded with cars and trucks, including the red pickup, and with boats covered with tarps, waiting for the winter’s end. Shrubs rattled under the windows.

  She knocked on the door. Helen Snow answered it almost at once, and nodding brusquely in greeting, stood back for Joanna to enter. The front door gave immediately onto the living room and Joanna saw that the ranch house was compact but cozy and bright. A multicolored rag rug lay before a fireplace. Pictures of Todd and Doug and others paraded across the mantel. Facing an enormous co
lor TV were a much-used sofa and a scuffed vinyl reclining chair, which probably had been Doug’s. Helen indicated with her hand a rocking chair with a braided rag cushion, and Joanna sat down there, her coat still on, her muffler still wrapped around her neck.

  “Thank you for letting me come,” she said.

  “I don’t know if you’ve met my daughter, Chrissy.” Helen spoke tonelessly as she sank onto the sofa next to a sullen-faced teenager.

  “I haven’t. Hello, Chrissy.”

  Chrissy’s nod was curt. For a moment the three women only looked at each other. Both Helen and Chrissy had Todd’s blond hair and blue eyes and both were quite lovely even now with their eyelids swollen from tears and their faces drawn with grief. Helen had a French delicacy and paleness to her skin and bones, and she was very slender; she had the looks of one who might easily have been called “Princess” by her parents and by her husband.

  Joanna took a deep breath and began. “I want to tell you how terribly sorry I am about Doug and Todd.”

  Helen only stared, and now Joanna understood that Helen’s eyes held the absentminded, faraway gaze of someone on sedatives.

  “I should have realized that the thought of finding more treasure in the house was tempting. I was so afraid of publicity, of a commotion at a time when I needed peace and quiet. And then with the baby—the babies …”

  Chrissy spoke up, her voice cold and shaking with emotion. “They found rubies.”

  “Yes,” Joanna agreed. “But they never found anything else. I let them dig. You must know that. Todd and Madaket spent many nights looking, and they found nothing but sand.”

  Helen spoke. Her voice was high and almost singsong, like a child’s. “In any case, they were wrong to take dynamite to your house. I asked them not to. I told them it was wrong, dangerous. They promised they wouldn’t use it when you and your baby were in the house. They meant only to cause a small explosion, enough to crack through the brick wall.” She was beginning to tremble bodily. “I told Doug. I begged him. You’ve never used dynamite before, I told him, but he said his brother had told him just what to do. It would be short and sweet, he said, you’d never know.”