Kelli swallowed the lump in her throat. Without pause, listening only to the instincts in her heart, she rushed across the space between them and pressed her lips against his. She wanted to be the woman he kissed in his high-rise apartment building. She wanted to be there in the silence of the afternoon, so far above the swirling chaos of the city, feeling all these things for this beautiful, intelligent man.
Kelli helped Xander with his various house duties. He explained that he had a young sister-brother duo stopping by most afternoons to water his plants and check on his fish, but that he wanted to ensure everything was going smoothly himself. It was a funny thing to watch him in his element, to fall into rhythm with him as they watered and fed and fixed everything up. At one point, Xander even put on an old Mazzy Star record from the nineties, and the two of them lay back on Xander’s enormous bed and blinked at the ceiling and felt the immensity of the lyrics in their soul.
“I think it’s time to head over and face the music,” Xander suggested about an hour after their arrival. “Charlie’s expecting us.”
Kelli whistled. “My almost father.”
Xander laughed. “Is that how genealogy works?”
“I believe it is,” Kelli replied with a wink. She then headed for the elevator, which opened up within his apartment, like in movies. She pressed the DOWN button and crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s time to face the music. I’m terrified.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Charlie Peterson was older than Kerry Montgomery by three years, which made him the same age as Mark Van Tress— seventy-five. He stood at six foot, four inches, proof of what Kelli knew from the old photographs: that James had been a very tall, very dominant, and very formidable character. Probably, Marilyn had been frightened of him in some respects, a fear she’d had to overcome in leaving him.
Charlie’s hair was a stark white. Despite the July heat, he wore a sweater vest and a pair of corduroys, along with a pair of circular glasses, which made him look incredibly literary. This sense matched the walls of books, which stretched out on either side of him. Kelli and Xander remained in the foyer, blocked off by this much taller, much older man.
“Good evening,” Charlie greeted them. “I suppose this is about as strange for you as it is for me.”
Kelli’s lips quivered ever so slightly; she yearned to laugh but sensed it wasn’t the appropriate time. Xander, ever the gentleman, stuck his hand out for Charlie to shake.
“Thank you for meeting us this evening,” he said. “My name is Xander Van Tress. And this is Kelli Montgomery.”
Charlie lifted Kelli’s hand as though he planned to kiss the top, like a very old gentleman might. At the last second, he released it, then dropped his chin toward his chest.
“Please, come in. I’ve prepared drinks for us all. I hope you like whiskey.”
Kelli and Xander sat on a leather couch which faced a matching leather chair, upon which Charlie now sat. He crossed his legs, which were altogether too thin, then gestured up toward a large photograph, which hung in a gold frame between bookshelves off to the right.
“I suppose you will recognize the man in that photograph,” Charlie pointed.
Kelli lifted her chin to find James Peterson himself. In the photograph, he wore a wedding tuxedo. His hand was latched around a small, doll-sized hand, which belonged to a beautiful blonde woman, whose smile was as bright as the sun, almost as iconic as Marilyn Monroe’s. She looked different to Kelli’s Grandmother Marilyn in nearly every way, as though, once Marilyn Sheridan had left him, James had required himself to find the complete opposite in a wife.
“That is my mother,” Charlie said sadly. “Rita.”
“She’s beautiful,” Kelli offered. “As is he.”
Charlie nodded. “That was the year 1945. I suppose two years after your grandmother left him.”
“You can’t see it on his face at all,” Kelli breathed. “None of the pain of that first marriage.”
“He really loved my mother,” Charlie affirmed. “And perhaps against what you immediately think, he treated her wonderfully. They had a beautiful and compassionate marriage. I was born the following year, in 1946, and throughout my childhood, I remember them being a portrait of love and gratitude. My friends were mesmerized as their parents fought themselves to smithereens. Of course, as a child, I didn’t know about my father’s harried past, nor about Marilyn.”
Kelli’s throat tightened. “When did you eventually learn about her?”
Charlie’s face twitched. “When I was a young man myself— I know, quite difficult to picture at this point— I fell in love with a woman named Mildred. She longed to get married on Martha’s Vineyard. I told my father our plans, and he was obstinate, stating that he never would allow such an event on Martha’s Vineyard. It got my head spinning in circles. I couldn’t understand why my father, who had always been such a wonderful and balanced man, had created this very strict rule. Several months after this fight, Mildred left me for another man, and I fell into one of the deepest depressions of my life. This was when my father took me aside, poured me a glass of whiskey, and told me the story of Marilyn.”
Kelli and Xander exchanged glances, mesmerized.
“His face was different than I’d ever seen it,” Charlie continued. “It was shadowed and strange. He recounted the story, how his parents had introduced him to Marilyn and informed him that he would marry her. How she’d seemed so beautiful to him, so kind and gentle. But that he’d been a far different man back then. I couldn’t understand it. He tried to explain. He said he’d been rash and arrogant. That he’d belittled her in ways, he now couldn’t comprehend. After Marilyn left him, he took a very hard look at his own behavior and corrected himself. The man my mother met was not the man your grandmother married and then left. That is for sure.
“But that said, just a mere mention of Martha’s Vineyard had brought out this other side of my father. He was irate with himself and, over the next several years, waged war on himself about whether or not to reach out to Marilyn and ask for some sort of forgiveness. It came up only once every few months, usually if he poured me a drink and wanted to talk it out with me. I was proud of the fact that my father wanted me to be a confidant. And eventually, after I was married myself, I urged him to write Marilyn a letter. Perhaps it would calm his inner demons. He received a blessing from my mother to do it, as well, as she recognized all the pain behind my father’s eyes when he thought about this portion of his life.
“But when he finally reached out, the letter received no answer. He finally called a newspaper office on Martha’s Vineyard and learned that both Marilyn and her husband, Robert, had passed away. My father was devastated with this news. He took to his bed for an entire day. When he finally rose to speak with me about it, he said it simply wasn’t fair— that he had been allowed this long and happy life, with his four children and his beautiful wife, and Marilyn had been taken from the world so soon.”
Kelli’s eyes filled with tears. How was it possible that this man had found compassion in the wake of the horror of his first marriage? Was it true that people could change so quickly?
“I believe he really loved her, in a way,” Charlie continued finally. “He always said my mother was the love of his life and I believe she was. But Marilyn represented a love that he’d lost due to his own youthfulness and idiocy. And I don’t believe he ever really got over it.”
Kelli and Xander held the silence for a long moment. Out the window of the high-rise, a bird swooped past, dark and pointed, its wings straight and true. Xander reached for Kelli’s hand as a way to ground her to this reality.
“I can’t believe it,” Kelli finally breathed.
Charlie’s eyes had filled with tears, too. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m something of a sentimentalist in my old age— always wearing my heart on my sleeve. I suppose when you get to a certain age, you want everything to feel big, enormous, and worthwhile. I am so grateful for all the events and all
of the emotions in my life, just as I know my father was grateful for Marilyn.”
Xander squeezed Kelli’s hand still harder. Several tears trickled down her cheek.
“And what about the hotel?” Kelli whispered. “What did your father say about that?”
Charlie laughed at that. The motion was so abrupt that his eyes released tears.
“He never told me about the hotel,” he finally admitted. “All that information he gave me, and never once did he mention it. But I suppose he told his lawyer. I received a call saying that someone was attempting to steal an old property of my father’s out from under us. He showed me the deed and explained the circumstances. I told him, of course, to take legal action. And then— I did something I’d never done before. I opened my father’s diary.”
Kelli thought about the both of them: opening up the wild and secret thoughts of these long-dead family members, attempting to unravel the truth. It was a dramatic and emotional time for both of them.
“Which is how I figured out he’d planned to alter his will toward the end of his life,” Charlie continued. He reached for the small dark blue book on the side table, cleared his throat, and began to read.
January 13, 1997
It is with a heavy heart that I remember the forties. I was overzealous in all things, a drunken fool with far too much money to throw around. I remember my brazen actions with closed eyes and a pounding heart— even as I know, very soon, this pounding heart will cease to pound, that soon, my eyes will not see. I think of Marilyn, who went off into the darkness far too soon. I hope I see her on the other side if only so I can apologize to her.
Money matters very little to me now, especially in my old age. It’s a funny thing. I look at my children— at Charlie, Angela, Penelope, and Rick and I feel that they’ve been my life’s blessing, what it’s all been for. My wife passed away two years ago, and I feel what it probably was that Robert felt when Marilyn left the world. I must follow after her. I cannot sleep in this bed without her.
But I’ve decided to alter my will. That old property on the cliffside has haunted my dreams since the hurricane threatened to take our lives back in 1943. I’ve felt the weight of that property since that day— daring myself to go back and do something with it, yet feeling that I could not set foot back on that island without having to reckon with the old version of myself. Sometimes, you really can’t go backward in this life.
I’ve decided to leave the old property to Marilyn’s family. She had two children, Wesley and Kerry, who’ve gone on to have families of their own. The property belongs to them, as their hearts beat with a singular love for Martha’s Vineyard, a love I wanted to but can never truly understand.
Charlie stopped reading and turned his eyes back toward Kelli’s. “I suppose he never managed to translate this to his lawyer, as the lawyer was still under the impression that the property belongs to us, to the Peterson estate. But I’m the only one left. And I feel the passion behind my father’s words. The property belongs to you now, Kelli, along with the rest of your family. Do with it what you will. I know it would make my father— and, God willing, Marilyn, incredibly happy. I hope they’ve found a way to mend their differences up in heaven.”
In the silence that followed, Charlie shifted the book on his lap. The pages fluttered and released a very old photograph, which had been tucked tightly away in the back.
“Huh.” He reached down and gripped the edge of the photograph, then flipped it to find the wedding photograph of Marilyn and James Peterson. “Wow. I’ve never seen this before.”
He passed it toward Kelli and Xander, who gazed at it in disbelief.
“They are so young,” Kelli breathed. “It’s funny to see this now. As a forty-six-year-old woman, beyond so many of my life’s mistakes, it’s funny to see these people, these beautiful, beautiful people, mere months before they made some of the biggest, life-altering mistakes of their own life.”
Charlie nodded. “They changed one another’s lives. That’s for certain. And in that way— they changed our lives. Without those two people in that photograph meeting and marrying, we wouldn’t be here together.”
“It’s funny how life works, isn’t it?” Kelli whispered.
“And it’s funny how life doesn’t work sometimes, too,” Charlie returned with a wink. “I’m entirely grateful for that.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
1949
Marilyn’s stomach swelled beneath her dress; the baby performed a little dance, shifting her feet percussively on the other side of her skin. Marilyn was reminded of once when she and Robert had been out on the sailboat and a whale had lifted toward the water, beckoning and waving beneath the surface. She’d felt the enormity of the ferocious ocean below, the suggestion that there was so much lurking beneath the surface that she nor anyone living above ground could possibly comprehend.
Marilyn’s hand-stretched over her stomach in response, as though the two of them could wave hello to one another. “Do you hear me, my little peanut?” she whispered, there at the front desk of the Sunrise Cove. “Everything will be so much better when you come out here and join us. Your father and I are waiting.”
It had been six years since Marilyn had arrived on the Vineyard. In those six years, it seemed that everything in her life had flipped on its head. She now felt like a full-scale islander, as she’d married into one of the most important families on the island, with roots all the way back to the 1600s. Her family back in upstate New York was well taken care of; Robert had seen to that. There had even been discussion of their coming to the island eventually, although Marilyn felt hesitant. There was a freedom in the life she and Robert had built with one another; she no longer had to answer to the way things had been beforehand.
This wasn’t to say the previous few years hadn’t had their share of hardships. Both of Robert’s parents had passed away unexpectedly, which had led to Marilyn and Robert taking over the Sunrise Cove Inn in their wake. Robert’s eyes had grown shadowed with each death and the heaviness of the burden they’d left behind. It was difficult sometimes for Marilyn to draw up the image of that long-ago man, that man who’d caught her attention as she’d been latched alongside James, trapped in a prison of high-society wealth and his volatility.
She hadn’t heard from James since his departure. Sometimes, she still awoke in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat as fear permeated through her. Her mind told her she was still trapped in that loveless marriage, that James awaited her downstairs and required her to be finely dressed with her hair done just perfect. When she awoke from these dreams, she found Robert’s powerful arms wrapped around her; he whispered to her that he was there, that everything was all right. She never described the dreams to him. Often, the dreams slipped away from her as she calmed and fell against Robert, so grateful for the warmth of his body and his masculine scent and the scratchiness of his flannel pajamas.
Robert appeared now in the doorway of the Sunrise Cove. He’d been out back, chopping wood, and now he marched toward her, dropped his mouth over hers, and closed his eyes. He smelled like the woods, like the ocean, and she placed her hand over his chest and felt the thump-thump of his beating heart. How alive they were that they could bring another life into this world! It was beyond her wildest dreams.
“We’re fully booked tonight,” she told him when their kiss broke.
Robert beamed. “I think we’ll have a little bonfire along the beach. Me and Rod plan to play guitar, do a few songs for the guests.”
“The guests love when you perform.” Marilyn beamed at her husband as her heart swelled. “And you know, I always had a thing for musicians.”
Robert chuckled. His hand found hers, stretched over her stomach, and he pressed lightly against it, uniting the three of them.
“This is the last summer of just us, you know?” Robert breathed.
“We’ve had our fun,” Marilyn returned. “Six years of it.”
“Are you suggesting it’s time
to grow up?”
“Never,” Marilyn returned. “In fact, I think we’ll only grow backward. Appreciate this world the way children do. Relish in the sunset and the sunrise and the ocean and the breeze and the trees and the flowers. I never want to dismiss any of it.”
Robert’s eyes glowed. He lifted his hand and pressed it against her cheek. “What did I do to deserve you, Marilyn? I ask God above every day.”
“I ask him that, too, my love.”
MARILYN AND ROBERT were in the midst of building a house about a mile away from the Sunrise Cove. For now, they stayed in a little cabin on the Sunrise Cove property, one so small that it reminded Marilyn of old books she’d read about families out on the prairie, running across the United States and taking claim of land along the way. She teased Robert about this often, pretending that they were on the Oregon Trail, headed west to seek their fortune.
“I’ll have you in a good house one of these days,” Robert said. He stood shirtless in their kitchen, with his suspenders wrapped around his broad shoulders.
Marilyn lay back against the kitchen counter so that her pregnant belly bulged between them.
“I have been meaning to tell you, Marilyn. Perhaps you don’t know,” Robert said, mocking a serious face. “You really need to tend to your figure. People have begun to talk.”
Marilyn stuck out her tongue in response then laughed as Robert rushed toward her and kissed her cheek, her forehead, her lips, and her neck. She marveled at the enormity of their happiness— knowing only that when the baby came, that same happiness would balloon perhaps twenty times its size.
“The only talking they did was about why we waited so long to have a baby,” Marilyn said mischievously.
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