by Lisa Unger
“If she calls or comes to me, I’ll let you know.”
“Joe,” she said. “Do you ever think about me?”
“Martha,” he answered. “Do you ever think about anyone but yourself?”
He had hung up the phone, slamming it down hard. Then he’d picked it up and slammed it again. She called back once, twice, three times. And then the phone fell silent. He’d gone to the gym and worked out with his personal trainer for an hour and a half. Then they got in the boxing ring.
“Joe,” the younger man said. He was sweating and breathless. Joe was nauseated from the effort. “Got something on your mind?”
Joe had taken Martha and Emily to the island twice. Birdie had accused him of doing it purposefully to hurt her. At the time, he denied it. It was circumstance only, a private place where they could be alone and not seen. But that wasn’t true, because the harbormaster had seen them. Joe had tipped him handsomely but apparently not enough to keep him from running his mouth off. Heart Island, it seemed, had a history. Another affair had played out there and ended badly. He wasn’t sure how, but it had gotten back to Birdie. And the shit had hit the fan.
But his time there with them was something he visited in his memory more often than he cared to admit. Without Birdie and her rules of order, it was a beautiful place, the island, peaceful and embracing. He could relax with Martie and his little Em. He could breathe, just breathe, and be there in a way he never could with Birdie. She was always taking measure of him, how he spent his time, what he was doing or wasn’t doing to facilitate her endless catalog of chores and activities. Martie didn’t care if there were dishes in the sink, if the bed was unmade. She didn’t care if they ate tuna-fish sandwiches for dinner, a baked potato on the grill, drank beer from the bottle.
He remembered those late-summer sun-soaked days, the air still warm, Birdie back in the city gearing up for the fund-raising season and the holidays. He remembered them with joy, with nostalgia. Heart Island had let him fantasize about being with Martha and Emily, about what he would be if he’d chosen a different life, a different kind of woman. Birdie was fully occupied by that time of the year, didn’t think twice about his golfing clinic, or business trip, or whatever it was he’d told her he was doing. All he had to do was show up in a tux at some appointed date and time, to take her to some endless dinner for Africa or AIDS or inner-city schools. Before then she wouldn’t have thought to look for him.
And there was little Em, who hadn’t needed to be entertained, was happy to color or swim with them or just nap on the blanket. She wasn’t like Theo and Kate, with their endless list of activities, their at-home schedules so packed with tennis and horseback riding and ballet and drama that they didn’t know what free time was. They always needed an activity, something to do. It was his fault, he supposed. He could have taught them that, at least. They’d certainly never learn it from Birdie, who’d been in perpetual motion since the minute he married her. Daddy, will you take me kayaking? Daddy, will you play hide-and-seek with us? Daddy, will you pitch the tent? Sometimes he thought they all kept moving so Birdie’s critical eye wouldn’t fall on them and find a reason to complain.
Later, after Martha’s call and after the gym, he met his old friend Alan for dinner. He barely heard his friend rambling on about his stock losses, his new ski gear, his kid finishing medical school but wanting to join Doctors Without Borders after Alan had spent untold amounts of money on his education “so the kid can just run off to the third-fucking-world and take care of the natives.”
Joe was thinking about Emily on her own, out there with some shithead who had trashed her whole life. And about how things could have been different for her if Joe had ever once done what he wanted to do rather than what he felt he should do or had to do. If he had ever done anything that was in his heart rather than following the rules that had been clearly set out for him. He wondered if Emily still thought about the island and the time they spent there. But no, he told himself, she wouldn’t remember. She couldn’t. She had been a little girl. She wouldn’t remember Heart Island. It wouldn’t have cast a spell on her like it had on so many. It was just an island in the middle of a lake. It didn’t have that kind of power. It didn’t have any power at all.
From his bedroom window, he could see the Chrysler Building. It was a sight he’d always loved, an art deco reminder of the shimmering beauty of New York City. He got out of bed and stepped into his slippers, padded over to the window. Below him, Park Avenue teemed with traffic even though it was only after three. He always wondered at the throngs of people living inches apart, the full rainbow of experience playing out on every block, stories into the sky. No matter what time of day it was, someone was headed somewhere for some reason. Where were they all going? Didn’t they realize that none of it mattered?
He picked up the phone and dialed the island but got only the fast busy signal that told him the lines were down, as they often were. The sound of a horn drifted up. In the distance, he heard the wail of a siren. Joe Burke just stood there with the phone still in his hand, watching.
chapter thirty-one
Her mother always told her that her life would boil down to just a few moments, just a few choices. Those choices, usually made in a split second, would change everything that came after. Those moments were blurs, clear only after the consequences had been dealt. As Emily watched the flare shoot into the sky, casting the world in an eerie orange, she wondered if all her moments had passed. She was sure they had. Now there was nothing to do but play out the rest of her terrible hand.
Brad disappeared into the dark like a frightened animal. He’d had the gun once. Where was it and why hadn’t he used it in the struggle? She tried to think of how many rounds he’d fired at the Blue Hen. Four, she thought. Or maybe five. Which meant he had maybe one or two left in the chamber. Had he used the gun again? Was he out of bullets? And where was Dean?
Kate lay motionless on the ground. Emily felt the cool rain on her face, the painful ache where Brad’s hands had squeezed her neck. She been losing strength when Kate came from nowhere and knocked Brad down, breaking his grasp. Why had she done it, risked her life to save Emily’s?
“Put your hands where I can see them.” It was the old woman. Emily dropped the flare gun and turned around. The other woman had a gun, a real one. Emily held her hands up and stood staring. She had no words; she was spent, stunned.
Birdie said something to Emily as she rushed past. But Emily didn’t hear; she was listening to the trees whispering and feeling the rain wash over her. It was dark, and the island was nothing like she remembered it. But she recognized its song, the sound it made when everything else was silent.
Emily watched Birdie kneel beside her daughter and put a hand to her throat, push back her hair. “Katherine,” she said. “You stay with me.” When she looked back at Emily, the old woman’s face was a scowl. “Help me get her back into the house,” Birdie snapped.
It was an order from the lady of the house to an errant servant, full of anger and disdain. Emily obeyed. But she was on autopilot. Again she wondered where Dean was. She could use his help right now. With effort, they managed to lift Kate and bring her up the stairs.
A wound on the side of Kate’s head gushed blood; it was on Birdie’s clothes—Emily’s too, she noticed. Big drops had fallen to the floor, leaving a smearing trail from the door over the carpet. Someone, thought Emily, would need to clean that up.
Kate issued a low groan but didn’t open her eyes. Birdie rushed off and then came back with a first-aid kit. She was calm and purposeful, not at all a woman looking at her possibly badly injured child. She removed a role of gauze, a jar of antiseptic.
“Katherine Elizabeth,” she said. In the sound of that name, Emily heard all of Birdie’s fear and regret. “Open your eyes.”
Kate was still and silent, so very, very pale. Emily kept a careful eye on the door. Birdie placed the gun on the table beside Kate. Emily could take it and go after Brad and maybe f
ind Dean. Instead, she sank against the wall, the terrible fatigue weighing her down again. More than anything, she wished she’d come back to find the house as she remembered. Not this place that was so different from anything else.
“You know, we never realize how bad they are until it’s too late,” said Lana.
They sat where Kate and Birdie had sat earlier that afternoon, the same tea set between them. But the room wasn’t the same; it was some dream hybrid of the old house Kate remembered from her childhood and from old photographs, and the new one her father had built. But she felt utterly relaxed and at home.
“When you’re young,” Lana went on, “it’s easy to confuse passion for love.”
Lana’s beauty was musical, with her clear, dark eyes and the same milky skin Birdie had inherited. The delicate line from her neck to her shoulder, the sheen of her hair, the elegance of her fingers were an exquisite combination of grace and innocence. Kate was mesmerized by her grandmother.
“I know,” said Kate. “I thought I loved Sebastian. You couldn’t have convinced me otherwise.”
Lana put her hand on Kate’s. It was a warm, loving gesture, and Kate felt Lana’s compassion move through her. “You think you’re swimming at first,” said Lana. “And then you realize it’s the undertow pulling you out to sea.”
“Yes,” said Kate. “It was just like that.”
The light from the windows was so unnaturally bright that Kate had to close her eyes against it, and even then it seemed to burn through her lids. In her head was a searing pain that had achieved what felt like a dangerous decibel. Kate had a growing sense of unease, the vague idea that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
“When I tried to give him up,” said Lana, “he just wouldn’t let me go.”
Kate couldn’t answer. The pain was so distracting.
“It wasn’t that he loved me so much. It was that he needed something from me that no one else could give. I filled something empty in him; isn’t that what we all do in love?”
Yes, it had been true with Kate and Sebastian, too. He had wanted everything from Kate. The very size of his soul demanded a sacrifice like an angry god. Maybe it was like that for Lana and Richard. Kate didn’t say this.
“I’m not sure if I could tell you what the thing was, precisely,” said her grandmother. “I needed what he offered as well. But I needed Jack and the children more. It was Birdie who made me choose, though she never knew it. And she was right to demand that.”
Why was Lana telling her this? Kate knew; she’d lived Lana’s journal. But more than that, she knew it in her own heart. Because it was Kate’s love for Chelsea that had forced her to leave Sebastian. Even though Chelsea was Sebastian’s daughter, Kate needed to get the girl away from his tortured instability, his rages, his addiction. Only true love could rescue you from the masquerade of love. She knew. And her heart’s knowledge was the reason why she’d connected to Lana’s story, why, when she wrote it, it was as if she were telling her own.
“I didn’t mean to kill him, Katie.” She was crying now. “It was an accident.”
“It was self-defense, Grandma. You were fighting for your life. It wasn’t your fault.”
The gratitude on her grandmother’s face brought Kate to tears. “Make her understand it, darling,” said Lana. “Please, Kate, make her understand all of it.”
“I will,” she said. “I promise.”
But honestly, Kate wasn’t sure she could make Birdie do anything she didn’t want to do. She rested her head in her grandmother’s lap, and it felt so soft and warm. She felt herself drifting, the pain easing. A long sleep, that’s just what she needed. But no. She shouldn’t. There were things that needed her attention. What were they?
“Katherine Elizabeth Burke, you open your eyes this second.”
Lana was gone, and Birdie was standing in the doorway with her usual scowl. Kate pulled herself to a sitting position as her dream began to fade and the real world started to leak back in. Did Birdie always have to be so goddamn bossy?
“Katherine, I am your mother. You do what I say.”
And like the good girl she had always been, she obeyed.
chapter thirty-two
“Chelsea,” said Kate.
She sat up suddenly, a look of fear on her face, and then sank her head into her hands with a groan.
Emily moved away from them and stood by the door. She felt distant from this scene and the people in it, including herself. Where was Dean? Dread had settled in her center, was spreading through her like poison in her blood. Outside, it was still dark. Would the sun ever come up? She felt as if, when it did, everything would seem better.
“Chelsea’s in the bunkhouse with Lulu,” said Kate. “I sent them to use the radio. I need to go get them.”
The bunkhouse—wasn’t that where Dean had said the safe was? Emily wanted to tell them that was where Brad might go next, but she stayed silent.
“Who was that man?” said Birdie. “He wasn’t the man you came here with.”
It took Emily a second to realize that Birdie was talking to her. “Where is he?” Emily spoke to Kate. Kate and Dean had left together, and she had come back without him. What had Dean told them his name was? “My f-f-fiancé? Where is he?”
Birdie walked over to Emily quickly, holding the gun in her hand. “You need to tell us right now what in God’s name is happening here. We are all in danger, including you. Who was that man?”
“Whoever he is, he shot your boyfriend,” said Kate. She was standing, supporting herself on one of the tall chairs by the bar. She was pale and shaky, with a dark swath of blood down the front of her shirt. “What does he want?”
The words didn’t sink in right away, that Brad had shot Dean. “He wants the money,” Emily said. “He thinks there’s a safe here on this island, in the bunkhouse.”
“The bunkhouse,” said Kate. She looked at Emily with something like horror. Emily wanted to tell them the whole awful story. She wanted to make them understand. But she knew she couldn’t do that.
“Why did you do this?” asked Birdie. She sounded desperately sad. “Why did you bring this nightmare here?”
Emily couldn’t answer that. It hadn’t been her intention to bring anything here. All she’d wanted to do was to come to the place, maybe the only place, where she’d ever been happy and safe, where she’d ever felt loved. She’d wanted to come to the pretty house with the wind chimes, where the air was so clean it had a scent like a perfume, and the sky was a blue that she’d never seen anyplace else. Why was she being punished for that?
Rather than trying to answer, she turned and ran out into the night. She wasn’t afraid of the storm or Brad or what he might do. She heard the door slam behind her, felt the wood and then the stone beneath her feet. She was going back to the boat. That’s where Dean would be, waiting for her. She didn’t remember that Kate said he’d been shot. She’d pushed it from her mind.
But as she approached the boat, she saw someone on the ground. Her whole being rejected the sight of Dean lying still in the rain. Then she knelt beside him. He was already cold, his face white and motionless. He had his arms folded over his bloody middle, but his face was slack and peaceful. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and somewhere she heard the sound of a boat.
“Dean,” she said. “Dean, honey, don’t do this.”
She pulled at his jacket. The weight of his body seemed immense, as though the earth had already claimed him and was pulling him down, down inside itself.
“I think it’s a boy,” she whispered to him. “I really do.”
When she pulled her hands away from his chest, they were slick and wet with blood. In the night, it looked as black as tar. She realized that she was kneeling in a pool of it that had flowed from him—a pool where all his life had drained. Somewhere from deep inside, a terrible wail, a cry of pain and sorrow and unfathomable regret, escaped her like vomit. She couldn’t stop it, nor did she want to.
She stood and s
tumbled away from him, back to the main house. Dazed but in the grip of a terrible rage, Emily moved through the trees unseeing. She had no thought for the child inside her. She climbed the stairs to the porch and entered.
The place was empty; both women were gone. How long had she been out there with Dean? She looked around and hated everything she saw, everything that was not as she remembered it. What a terrible trick this place had played on her, living all this time in her memory as a shining beacon of what her life could have been. It was just another lie, like the one her mother had told her about who she was. She was fatherless now in a whole new way. She didn’t even have the fantasy of Joe Burke.
She was sobbing. Great heaving moans escaped her frame; her face was hot and wet with tears. She started frantically opening cabinets and drawers in the kitchen. In the drawer by the stove, she found what she was looking for—a large box of matches. Under the sink, she found a small tin of lighter fluid.
She looked around at the plush sofas, the walls covered with tasteful art and professionally shot family photos, the embroidered pillows, the coffee-table books. All pieces of a life that had been dangled before her and cruelly snatched away. She wanted it all to turn to ashes.
Chelsea remembered how, only a couple of days ago, she’d been arguing with her mother about the sweater she was going to wear. She’d wondered then how one event linked to the other to create the life you had. Now, as she and Lulu crossed the threshold into the bunkhouse, she wondered how things could go so wrong, how dark things could creep in and change the whole world as you knew it. She tried not to worry about her mom, whom she’d watched disappear into the rain. She couldn’t think about her grandmother, either. Only the idea of the gun made her feel better. Her mom would get it, and they would all be safe.
She found the radio on the desk toward the back of the room and led Lulu there. Lulu was crying, had not once let go of Chelsea’s hand. Her friend was afraid. Chelsea was surprised to note that even though she was angry beyond measure, she still loved Lulu. It was comforting to know that.
