Reunion Beach

by Elin Hilderbrand

  “Not the freaking show!” Nellie Bee screeches it so loud that a couple of seagulls standing near us lift their wings and take off, squawking in protest. Looking around to make sure no one hears her, Nellie Bee leans toward me and lowers her voice. “I’m talking about Jocasta. She’s the one who wants him back.”

  I blink at her, baffled. “You mean she got the food network to film a special so she’d have a reason to see him again?”

  “Of course not, idiot. Jesus! Use that brilliant mind of yours here. She merely seized the opportunity the network offered. They proposed a big special, Bram Stoker O’Connor on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the launch of his show. It’ll be modeled after the original special they did on him—the young O’Connor family at home on Fripp Island. Then they’ll show viewers where he is now—divorced but remarried, his son grown up with his own family, and everyone—including the ex-wife—getting along beautifully. It’ll be a family reunion to end all family reunions.”

  “I still don’t get why you think Jocasta orchestrated it.”

  “She didn’t! What she orchestrated was Michael’s insistence that either she be a part of it or he wouldn’t come. And I know that because Michael told me himself. His mother begged to be included.”

  “That doesn’t mean she wants to get back with Bram, Nellie Bee. Or that Michael’s complicit. He just wants the grandparents of his daughter to be on good terms. That’s what he told Bram, and Bram agrees.”

  “Bram doesn’t know pea-turkey. Of course he doesn’t see through her scheme. He’s never seen through her.”

  “But . . .” My head’s spinning, either from the mojitos or the craziness of such an idea. “He must’ve eventually come to see her for what she really is. I mean, Jocasta left him for another man and took Michael with her. Losing both his wife and son almost destroyed him.”

  “I hope he told you that he tried to get her back, even after she broke his heart?” When I acknowledge that he did, Nellie Bee goes on. “I’m not sure what his version is, Chris, but I can tell you what I saw. He’d been a fool for that woman, and I’ve never seen anyone so devastated as he was by her betrayal. When she filed for divorce and was awarded full custody of Michael—by claiming, rightfully, I must concede, that Bram traveled too much to take care of a child—my brother fell apart. Then Jocasta remarried and he plunged into despair. That’s when he tried to drown his sorrows with booze. He was barely able to go on with the show.”

  I nod and look out over the ocean, remembering Bram telling me this before we married and observing the pain it still caused him. I’d insisted on complete honesty about our pasts. Both of us had loved before and had our lives shattered by loss, me by the unexpected death of my husband, whom I’d loved dearly, and Bram’s by divorce and estrangement. Bram swore he was over his ex-wife, but hearing the story from Nellie Bee’s point of view makes me wonder. Did he ever truly get over her? “Go on,” I say, bracing myself.

  Nellie Bee’s gaze holds mine. “Here’s the thing, Chris. Because Bram was so well-known by then, their private life became public. You might’ve seen the article People did. Their angle was the one that hurt Bram most, how Michael turned against his dad. He bought his mother’s lie that she only left his father because he ran around with other women and neglected her and their son. Jocasta played Michael’s disillusionment with his dad for all it was worth.”

  “Why do you think that her second marriage didn’t work out?” I ask, though I figure her response will be the same as Bram’s: husband number two wised up quicker than he did.

  Nellie Bee refutes that. “It didn’t work out because the new guy wasn’t Bram. Bram’d become a celebrity chef with a hit TV show, and surprise—Jocasta drops husband number two and decides she wants number one back. Even during her marriage, she wanted him back. He didn’t tell me that—I found the emails she wrote him. I wasn’t snooping; I used Bram’s computer one day when he was gone and I checked on the house. In the emails Jocasta swore she’d never loved anyone else and wouldn’t give up until they were together again. Did he tell you that she turned to him for comfort after her divorce?”

  My look of surprise reveals the answer, and she sighs before saying, “No, I didn’t think he had, or you’d understand why I’m worried. Bram, being a typical man, let himself be taken in again by a damsel in distress—which Jocasta played to the hilt. She claimed the man she’d left Bram for cheated on her. Ha! I’d call that poetic justice. But not Bram. He said the experience had changed her, and made her realize how her leaving had hurt him. He was thinking of giving her another chance. I’m convinced that if my brother hadn’t met you then, he’d be back with that woman now.”

  I try not to let her see how this affects me. Bram had sworn he’d told me everything about his stormy relationship with his ex. But he left out the part of the story where she’d tried to get him back, and he’d considered it. The sin of omission. Or maybe worse, I think with a jolt, remembering. Because he’d asked me, I’d told him that he’d been the only man I’d been with since my husband’s death. It was then he’d admitted to having had a few “flings” since his divorce but nothing serious. He hadn’t been honest with me. He wouldn’t have confided in his sister if he hadn’t been serious about a reconciliation.

  Stunned, I probe Nellie Bee for more. “So that’s why you’re worried.” My voice sounds shaky and confused. “You think Bram’s having second thoughts about our marriage.”

  Nellie Bee’s eyes widen in dismay. “Oh, Chris, no! Of course I don’t think that, honey.” She reaches out to grab my hand and squeezes hard. “Bram loves you, I have no doubt. He’s a different person since you came into his life. I’ve never seen him so content, especially after the hell that woman put him through. It’s her manipulations that worries me, and how cunning she is. Remember, she had Bram under her spell for years. That he finally married someone else is a mere inconvenience to a woman like her. I think you should tell Bram that she can’t come here. Tell him it’s either you or her, but not both.” Seeing my reluctance, she presses on. “I know it’s not your style. You’re the least controlling person I’ve ever met.”

  “But what about Michael?”

  “I’ll make my nephew see reason. He has a wife now, and I can promise you that girl wouldn’t allow an ex of his anywhere near him.”

  “The special’s only a week away,” I cry. “I can’t change things now. The production crew will be here—”

  Nellie Bee flaps her towel as if to swat away my protests. “You can’t stop the special but you can stop her from being a part of it. Trust me, Chris, giving that woman a way back into your husband’s life is a huge mistake, one that you’ll come to regret. Promise me that you’ll tell Bram no way in hell, okay? Please. Before it’s too late.”

  * * *

  It ends with me promising Nellie Bee that I’ll give it a lot of thought. After our good-bye hugs, she heads back to her house in Beaufort and her sweet, amiable husband, while I lug my stuff back to the golf cart. I wish I could as easily pack up my troubled thoughts, tote them somewhere else. The sun’s now low in the sky with the promise of a spectacular sunset, so I pause before backing out of my parking space by the beachfront villas. (One of the villas Jocasta has booked for the filming, I recall.) Maybe I should go back to the beach to quiet my inner turmoil before facing my husband. A sunset walk always calms me. I discovered its healing balm when I moved here right after our marriage. At our house the sunset view’s limited because the house is hidden in the midst of dense foliage: live oaks, palmettos, and oleander bushes. Bram and I have our cocktails on the upstairs porch to watch the sky above the treetops turn pink, then the pink glow deepens and spreads through the leafy branches below. Other people watch the sunset, he and I like to say, while we prefer the sun-glow. But some evenings I go to the beach alone, seeking the setting sun. Occasionally Bram joins me, coming downstairs to find me gone, and we stroll hand-in-hand, bare feet in the rolling waves. Wordless, we stop and stand in reve
rence as the sun lowers itself into the ocean, turning everything—water, sky, sand—into a magic world of red and gold.

  The golf cart ride home serves the same purpose, and I feel myself relaxing. I take deep gulps of the brisk salt air and it fortifies me. It’s the time of day I love most, when Fripp Island’s at its loveliest. A nature preserve, Fripp, named after a hero of the Revolutionary War, is to me a celebration of the wild beauty of the Lowcountry, and I fell in love with it the first time I came here. Funny; what little I, a native Texan, knew of the Lowcountry before then came from Bram’s TV show. I love to cook and was a devoted viewer of Southern Heritage until I was widowed, when food lost its appeal.

  That was before Bram came into my life and everything changed, in a heady rush of excitement and passion unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Although I’d loved my husband Joe Perez dearly, and with great devotion, our love was more like a calm pool of still waters. With Bram, it’s been a roaring waterfall tumbling me from unseen heights. And that feeling hasn’t changed. For Joe, several years gone now, I still feel a deep love and grief. For Bram, my love is fiercer, and I realize that I can’t bear the thought of losing him.

  I met Bram three years after my husband’s death, when I traveled from my home in Houston to attend a conference in New Orleans. In the lobby of the historic hotel where the organization I worked for had booked me, I saw a notice that Bram Stoker O’Connor was filming one of his shows on the patio that evening. Hotel guests could sign up to be a member of a small, select audience. Recalling how much I’d once liked his show, I signed up.

  The show was not only entertaining, but afterward the famed chef invited his audience to enjoy the dishes he’d prepared. I’d been utterly enchanted by Bram and his colorful showmanship—mesmerized, even. He was much better-looking than he appeared on TV, broad-shouldered and muscular with piercing green eyes and soot-black hair streaked silver at the temples. He drew in the audience with the amusing stories he related as he worked, told with the charming lilt of an Irish accent. Since I’d read that his Irish parents had come to South Carolina when he was a toddler, I suspected the accent was a bit of an affectation. Even so, I swooned along with the rest of the women when he came around to see what we thought of the food. For some reason, he singled me out to tell me about the origins of the Lowcountry shrimp dish I tasted. Dazzled, I nodded and smiled and complimented the dish before someone dragged him away. To my surprise, he asked me to wait so we could continue our conversation after he’d made nice with the other guests.

  I was surprised when the crowd began to clear out and Bram showed up with a glass of wine and an invitation to join him at a corner table. “Your observation about the shrimp seasoning was so astute,” he said in a low, confidential voice, “that I’m dying to hear more.” It was something we’d laugh about later, the worst pickup line ever. But at the time he seemed so earnest that I had no reason to think he was coming on to me. And truthfully, it wasn’t just his earnestness. A widow in my mid-forties, I was hardly a femme fatale, certainly not in a city swarming with them. I was a professional woman who looked the part: fit and trim, with light-brown hair pulled back and secured with a barrette at the nape of my neck. I’d been told that my best feature was my sherry-colored eyes that lit up when I smiled, but other than that, I considered myself rather plain.

  At the secluded table Bram selected, partially hidden by a sweet-smelling wisteria vine, he and I shared a bottle of wine and a plate of incredible food as we talked about everything under the sun—except shrimp seasoning. (A ploy, he’d admit, to get to know me.) When he found out that I was in New Orleans for a conference on immigration issues, he wanted to hear about my job. Because he himself was an immigrant, he always sought out the origins of the dishes he prepared and told his listeners their stories, one of the reasons his show was so popular. “We’re all immigrants, aren’t we?” he said, his intense eyes holding mine. “And every family story is also about its food.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way, and grew animated telling him how I could use that idea in my work with my clients. “You’ve inspired me,” I told him with so much excitement that I blushed. He leaned forward and placed a hand on my arm. “No, no. It’s your work that inspires me,” he said softly.

  Looking back, I think I was a goner from that moment on. We stayed until the bar closed around us, which in the Big Easy isn’t till the wee hours. And I had an early-morning meeting. I couldn’t make the breakfast he invited me to, nor lunch either, but we had dinner together. After that we were inseparable the rest of my stay. He even attended the requisite conference get-togethers with me, dazzling the overly serious psychologists with his gregarious magnetism. During my breaks, we took in the sights. He’d been given the hotel’s presidential suite, where we had some of our meals. And our last night together, I stayed with him. I’d never done anything so brazen before, but I was in Sin City, and falling hard for the most fascinating man I’d ever met. The next day, I told myself, I’d be back to my grief-dulled life in Houston. Why not take an erotic memory home with me?

  It’d be a few months before I visited Bram at his home in the South Carolina Lowcountry, though he came to Houston the weekend following my return from New Orleans. After that, I joined him in each of the coastal cities where he was filming: Biloxi, Mobile, Tampa, Miami, Palm Beach. Ours was a heady courtship, exhilarating and exhausting. I’d fallen hard for Bram, and he appeared to feel the same. We’d only been together three months when we confessed our love. There were several organizations in the Lowcountry like the one I worked for in Houston, Bram said. Could I leave Texas to work for one of them? Just in case, he’d made inquiries and found they needed qualified staff. When I’d said maybe one day, Bram pulled me into an intense embrace. His gestures were always like that: dramatic and over the top, but he surprised me by what he said next. “Not one day, Chris—now! I want you to marry me. And I don’t want to wait another minute.” He took my face in his hands and kissed me so intently that it literally took my breath away.

  My deceased husband, Joe Perez, had been a soft-spoken man of Hispanic descent, an immigration lawyer who was the polar opposite of Bram Stoker O’Connor. I had two adult children, a daughter in Manhattan and a son in San Diego, and I had to tell them that their mother had taken leave of her senses and decided to marry someone I’d only known a few months. They handled it better than I dared hope, having seen me submerged in grief for so long. My son, William, so like his father, asked only if I was sure. But my daughter, Victoria, said, “Go for it, Mama!” So I did.

  * * *

  By the time I turn into the partially hidden driveway of our house, I’ve managed to quiet the turmoil that my talk with Nellie Bee stirred. Bless her heart; she only wants what’s best for me and her brother, but I’ve decided that her fears are unwarranted. Bram’s obsession with his former wife is over and has been for several years. I know now what I didn’t know before, that he was on the verge of taking her back when he met me. And knowing something of the pain she’s caused him, I believe his turning to me was an act of self-preservation, whether consciously or not. Something was telling him that he had to move on from the toxic relationship he and his ex had been bogged down in for way too long. So many of his friends have told him that marrying me was the best thing he ever did for himself, which of course I modestly denied. But now I’m thinking they might be right. I love him enough to do anything to keep him from being hurt like that again. I don’t know Michael well, having only been around him a couple of times, but maybe he’ll come to see that, too, being here with us. Now that he has his own child, he’s more likely to understand what his conflict with his father has cost both of them.

  As I steer through the gates to the house, the scent of gardenias is intense. Besides oleander, gardenia is the only flowering plant to grow successfully on Fripp without being consumed by the deer who roam the island like skittish dogs. I close the gates behind me then drive the golf cart along the pebbled drive
way to the parking area underneath the raised house. The house faces a mysterious, murky lagoon, where gators sun on the grassy banks. Snowy egrets nest in the trees surrounding the lagoon, festooning the branches like feathery blossoms. The house is the only truly isolated one on Fripp, situated on a little inlet of land far from the maddening crowd. Once the gates close behind you, you might as well be on your own island. It’s the reason Bram settled here, for the solitude he needs to work. He likes to think of the lagoon as his moat, with the gators standing guard to keep his too-zealous fans at bay.

  The house itself is what’s known as Lowcountry style, two-storied and elevated high off the ground, with double piazzas (we call them porches in Texas), set off by a semi-circular brick stairway in front. Painted a dull gray green, the house blends perfectly into the leafy foliage enclosing it. Carrying the beach tote, my steps are light as I climb the stairway and enter the house. I’m grateful that the leisurely, gardenia-scented drive from the beach gave me time to compose myself. I didn’t relish a showdown with Bram about Jocasta. Nellie Bee was right in what she’d said earlier; my training provided me with conflict-management skills, but that doesn’t mean I relish using them with family. By nature (and ethnicity, I tease) Bram has a fiery, confrontational temperament. Joe had been so even-tempered that I rather enjoy the novelty of my and Bram’s infrequent skirmishes. Even better is the way we make up, when one of us reaches out to the other in the dark of night. A bit of anger can ignite the passion in lovemaking, and in turn, lovemaking can dispel anger. It doesn’t work like that with seething rage or deep-seated resentment, but it can be a healthy way of dissipating the little day-to-day rifts of marriage.

  For the five years we’ve been together, Bram and I have faced only a few of those. He tells me he’s just too damn tired and old to fight, which I laugh at. Neither is true. He has the energy and virility of a much younger man. Following his retirement, he started writing his food memoir, which he’s calling Lowcountry Stew, and has worked tirelessly since. Or as far as I know, he has. When I get home from work, he’s closed away in his office, the same as when I’m home. Despite Bram’s breezy assurances when we were courting, I could only get part-time work after moving here. Three days a week, I drive an hour to Bluffton as the consulting psychologist for a nonprofit that works with the area’s large migrant population. In truth, it’s such intense and challenging work that I’m not sure I could do it full-time. After a ten-hour workday, every time I drive over the bridge to Fripp Island I lower the windows of my car and let the bracing salt breeze carry the troubles of the day out with them, all the way across the Atlantic.