The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  At exactly that moment the waitress returned with three plates balanced on her arm. Cassie’s face assumed a smooth mask, and all traces of suffering and distress vanished. Cassie never showed vulnerability in public. She smiled at the waitress. “Max!” she called. “Honey, come and eat! Come and eat!”

  A boat sailed past, heading to the estuary that would take it to the Sound. The woman in the blue bikini jumped once again off the deck of the boat, landing beautifully, with scarcely a splash.

  Chapter 51

  Lu

  “Abigail Knowles,” said Anthony, when he came over, at Lu’s request. He told her that his almost-ex-wife Cassie had taken Max to stay with her at The 1661 Inn the night before, so it was a good time to make the phone call. “Why does the name Abigail Knowles sound so familiar?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Lu. She was hoping to get Abigail’s voice mail. She had written everything Anthony was supposed to say on a yellow legal pad. “She’s part of a bigger agency. She represents mainly nonfiction. The New New Feminism? Ever heard of that book?”

  Anthony shook his head.

  “Me either,” said Lu. “Anyway, she says she’s the low man on the totem pole. The head of the agency is some guy named Huxley.”

  Anthony blanched. “Huxley?”

  “I know,” said Lu. “It’s a wacky name. Only in New York, right?” She felt a buzz of excitement. She had an agent! In New York! She was going to publish a cookbook! It all seemed unreal.

  “Is his full name, by any chance, Huxley Wilder?”

  “Yes! I think that’s it. He’s the head of the agency. WLA, Wilder Literary Agency.”

  “Oh, boy,” said Anthony.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. He studied the paper. She watched his lips move as he went over the words, like he was an actor running some very important lines.

  They had an agreement that if Abigail did answer her phone Anthony would put the phone on speaker and Lu would scribble down answers to any questions he couldn’t answer. It would be like Cyrano de Bergerac, food-blogger-style, and hopefully without the tragic ending. Anthony assured Lu that the agency would have an assistant taking calls, so if the assistant didn’t offer Abigail’s voice mail but instead transferred the call directly to Abigail they’d have a few extra seconds to prepare.

  Lu pictured a sleek Manhattan office, sleek Manhattan assistant—a brave, single young woman in a summer dress and the knockoff version of expensive wedges, a young woman who was beginning to make her way in the world. Of course, maybe the assistant would be a frazzled mother of three who took the train in from Jersey City every day, but in her mind, Lu whispered, You go, girl, you do your thing. You figure out your path.

  “Okay,” said Anthony finally. “Okay, I think I’m ready.”

  “You sure?” said Lu.

  “I’m sure. Ready.”

  And then, all of a sudden, he didn’t look ready at all. Something in his face shifted. “Anthony?” Lu asked. “Is everything okay?”

  Anthony sat down at the kitchen island and tapped his fingers on the granite. “I’m not sure we should do this. The phone call.”

  Lu’s pulse started to race. “Why not? You don’t want to? I’m sorry, Anthony. I didn’t mean to put you in an uncomfortable situation.”

  “No, no, it’s not that. I don’t mind making one phone call for you. That’s not the issue.” He laughed glumly. “I mean, I’m not standing on some moral high ground, we all know that.”

  “So what is it?” Everything had felt so within her reach . . . but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was slipping away.

  “It’s that . . .” He hesitated. Lu poured Anthony a glass of water and set it in front of him. He nodded to thank her. “I want to be careful to put this the right way. It’s that . . . I think you need a real plan here. I’m not sure how long you can kick this can down the street, even if we make one phone call today and that works out. Then what?”

  Then what? It was a fair question. Lu hadn’t let herself think too far ahead.

  “There are lots of things I wish I’d done differently, but the main one is I wish I’d never started deceiving anyone,” said Anthony.

  “Anthony,” said Lu. “At some point you have to stop beating yourself up over this.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t have to stop yet, because I never really started. I made a huge mistake, and I didn’t own it, and then I got swept up in this whole mess, and it ended up taking me down. I still haven’t owned it, not really. I’ve just been hiding from it.”

  Lu considered this. Maybe Anthony was right. But wasn’t her situation different? Was it different?

  “I think you need to find out sooner rather than later if you can do this book as Lu Trusdale, the former Dinner by Dad. Or, I don’t know, Lu Trusdale writing as Dinner by Dad. Or something.” He drank the water and watched her over the rim of the glass.

  She sat for several seconds with what Anthony had said, letting it settle into her.

  “I don’t want you to be right,” she said slowly, “because I’m scared. But I do think you’re right. I do. I do think I need to think carefully about what to do next.”

  Impulsively, Lu hugged Anthony. She was just so grateful to have someone on her side—someone who listened without judging, someone who understood the complications of her situation and who was genuinely looking out for her, counseling her away from her worst instincts. She whispered, “Thank you!” into his soft gray T-shirt, and she took a deep breath, and she got ready to think.

  Just then there came a sharp, bossy rapping on the cottage door. Lu pulled away from the hug and looked at Anthony, and Anthony looked at Lu.

  “Who could that be?” asked Anthony.

  The rapping came again. The door to the cottage opened, and into the room, like a hunk of seaweed flung upon the sand by a wave, came Lu’s mother-in-law.

  “Nancy!” Lu said. “What are you doing here? The boys are at day camp!”

  “I know perfectly well where the boys are,” snapped Nancy. “And here’s what else. I know what you’re up to too. And you are sorely mistaken if you think you’re going to get away with it.”

  The three of them stood as if at opposite points of a triangle, staring at each other.

  “With all due respect,” said Lu (though privately she didn’t think any respect was due), “you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t I?” said Nancy. She pointed a finger at Anthony. “Do you think I don’t know that you’ve been sleeping with him? I saw him sneaking home the other morning. This has been going on all summer, probably. In the house that Henry and I are paying for. Leaving your boys unattended, probably hooked up to screens.” (Lu did not point out to Nancy that the boys weren’t “hooked up to screens,” whatever that meant, you didn’t hook up to screens these days, you just tapped on them.) “Sneaking around behind Jeremy’s back while he works his fingers to the bone to support you all?”

  “I’m not sleeping with anybody!” cried Lu. (She was scarcely sleeping with her own husband.) “Anthony was just helping me with something.”

  “I bet he was,” said Nancy. “I’m going to get in touch with Jeremy to let him know.”

  “To let him know what?” said Lu, starting to laugh. It was so wildly improbable, all of it.

  “To let him know that something untoward was going on. He’s on his way home right now.”

  Lu stopped laughing.

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “Because he told me.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” Lu looked to Anthony, confused.

  “Maybe he couldn’t get hold of you. Maybe you were . . . otherwise engaged.”

  Lu’s stomach flipped and dropped. This was it, then, the end of her charade. If she didn’t want Jeremy to think the very worst thing, the thing that would end her marriage, she was going to have to come out with the rest of it. She was going to have to tell him about the blog, the b
ook deal, the blogging conference, the imaginary family. She was going to have to tell him all of it.

  Chapter 52

  Anthony

  Cassie had asked if she could take Max to a late breakfast alone, and Anthony had agreed. Now that he’d left Lu with her tyrant of a mother-in-law (he hadn’t wanted to, but Lu and Nancy had each, in their own way, suggested that he leave), he was trying hard not to think about the fact that his father had a reading scheduled that afternoon at Island Bound Books. Even so, he knew his mind would keep going there all day: Now my father is getting off the plane. Now he’s on his way to his hotel. Now he’s eating lunch.

  “What do you want to do now, Mom?” he asked, to distract himself. Dorothy was sitting on the small deck, frowning at her iPad. There was a mug of coffee in front of her. “What is it? Mom? What are you looking at?”

  “Just reading the weather,” she said. “It looks like we’re getting some really heavy rain.”

  “When?”

  “Today. Later this afternoon.” She peered at the screen. “Goodness, this looks serious.”

  “What kind of serious?”

  “Very heavy winds. Lots of rain.”

  He remembered what Cassie had said the day before about the weather at home.

  “I hope your father gets in safely. I’ll just send him a text to let us know when he’s arrived.” She tapped at the screen and then looked up at Anthony. “Anthony? I was thinking we could talk. Maybe inside?” She carried her coffee into the living room and took a seat on the couch.

  Anthony followed her, confused. His mother had been in his cottage for nearly a week now. They had exhausted nearly every one of Block Island’s sights, and most of their topics of conversation, to boot.

  “Talk?” he said.

  “About your father,” she added. “We haven’t really talked about your father.”

  What was there to say? He took a comb to his mind. His father hadn’t spoken to him since the Times article. His father was so disappointed in Anthony that he couldn’t even stomach a short conversation with his only son. Then he thought of one thing he hadn’t told his mother. He said, “Shelly Salazar thinks I could get my career back on track if I did a photo shoot with Dad.”

  Dorothy picked at a thread in the worn-out sofa. “Who on earth is Shelly Salazar?”

  “That publicist Cassie hired. Before—before all of the rest of it. She wants me to do a photo shoot with Dad, something big and splashy. She’s talking about getting Annie Leibovitz to do it!” For the first time since Shelly Salazar had mentioned Annie Leibovitz, Anthony added an exclamation point to the thought.

  “Heavens.” Dorothy bit her lip. “Don’t you think we should ask your father if he’s interested? Do you think it would help you?”

  “Probably. But he won’t be interested, Mom. He wants nothing to do with me. I think he might hate me.”

  “Nonsense! Of course he doesn’t hate you.”

  “Then why hasn’t he talked to me since February? Why hasn’t he tried to get in touch at all? You called me. You checked up on me. You answered if I called. But he never did.”

  Dorothy waited a long time before answering. When she spoke, her voice was clear and steady, authoritative, as though she were speaking to a roomful of Anthonys and not just one.

  “It was more complicated for your father than it was for me.”

  “Why?”

  “He was envious of you, Anthony. He has been, ever since he first read your writing. I don’t think he liked that part of him, the part that could envy his own flesh and blood, but it was there, and it was tenacious.”

  “No—”

  “Yes, Anthony. Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Well, I think it started when you brought that story home from Dartmouth.” She nodded. “Yes, it started there for certain. He was really taken aback by how good that story was.”

  “But he encouraged me . . .”

  “He did. Of course he did. But he was always conflicted about your career. Always.”

  Anthony sat for a long time with that knowledge. Lu had been right. Anthony had been Katherine Mansfield to Leonard Puckett’s Virginia Woolf.

  “Did you talk about . . . what happened?” He lowered his voice like he was about to utter a curse in front of a child. “The plagiarism?”

  “Only once. We had a big fight.” Dorothy paused, and in that pause Anthony thought he felt the very earth reverse its rotation. “We’re none of us exactly who we say we are,” Dorothy said finally.

  That seemed like a non sequitur. Anthony considered his mother: his dear, familiar mother, with her stylish bob, and her lipstick, and her beautiful posture. Look at her even now, her legs crossed at the ankles. “You are,” he said. “You’re just exactly who you say you are.”

  Dorothy sipped her coffee. There was something almost aggressive about her sipping, something combative. “There’s something I want to tell you,” she said. “I’ve been trying to tell you this all summer.” She stood and crossed the living room. She examined the crystal decanter, ran her finger along the rim of one of the glasses. “Really, in some ways, I’ve been trying to tell you your whole adult life. But I never could quite get up the nerve.” She turned back to Anthony, and there was something about the way she was looking at him—there was a shrewdness in her gaze, a clarity that made him take notice.

  “What?”

  “I always thought you’d figure it out on your own,” she said. She sat back down. She sat with her hands folded together, very politely, like a theatergoer waiting for the curtain to go up. Softly she said, “Think about it, Anthony. I know you’re not a thriller writer, but there’ve been clues all around you, all of the time, about your father, and about me.”

  Anthony gasped. “Am I adopted?” It didn’t seem likely. He had his mother’s small ears, and his father’s nose.

  “No,” she said. “But keep thinking.” She nodded encouragingly. It was the same way he’d seen her nod at Max when she was helping him sound out a word in one of his picture books. (They both particularly liked the one about the bear and the mouse who visited the library together.) “Where was your father, when he was writing?”

  “In his study.”

  “And where was I?”

  Kitchen. Garden. Car. “A lot of different places.”

  “Where was I when I wasn’t a lot of different places?”

  Dorothy brought Leonard Puckett a scotch every day at five o’clock. Sometimes she put it on the desk and went back to the kitchen to make dinner, but sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she brought a glass of white wine in and closed the door. There was that stretch when he was in high school and she’d taken up knitting. She’d knit fifteen different blankets to donate to a homeless shelter; she’d knit baby hats to give to the hospital; she’d knit a sweater for Anthony that he’d never worn (he’d been in high school! Who wore a hand-knit sweater in high school?) and one for Leonard, which he did wear, though not in public. Where did she do the knitting? Not in the living room or in the easy chair in her bedroom or on the cushioned bench in the breakfast nook in the kitchen. No, she sat on the leather sofa in his father’s study.

  “You were in the study,” he said.

  Vacations, which they always took to locales where Leonard was setting a book. A Wolf’s Cry (Manitoba). We Are Berlin (Germany). Rats in the Cellar (Nassau). The Bearded Lady (Romania).

  When Anthony was old enough he went off on his own to roam the hotel, to swim in the pool, to peruse the shops. His mother stayed with his father more often than not. Doing . . . what?

  “You’re getting warmer,” she said. “I can tell.”

  “You—” he breathed.

  “Yes,” she said.

  The sound was almost audible, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place. “You wrote the books,” he said. “You’re Leonard Puckett. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  She tipped her head forward just a fraction of an inch. A concession. “Not all of th
em,” she said. “But it’s been a partnership for a long time. That’s why we fought, Anthony. Your father was so upset about what you did. Beyond upset. And I told him he was making too much of it. I told him that in the end it wasn’t so different from what he was doing, putting his name on our work. My work.”

  “I can’t believe this,” said Anthony. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “There’s one more thing, Anthony—”

  “Just a second,” Anthony said. “I need some air.” He went through the kitchen and opened the back door and stood on the cottage’s small deck, then he followed the path to the beach.

  There was a figure walking along the sand, a figure in blue scrubs.

  Jeremy. He looked out of place, walking on the beach in his scrubs; he looked like a jungle animal wandering a glacier.

  “Jeremy,” Anthony called. He walked down the steps of the deck and toward the beach. He couldn’t believe his voice could sound normal. Nothing was normal.

  Had Nancy already gotten to Jeremy? He had the idea that he could save Lu if he could get to Jeremy first.

  “Hey!” said Jeremy, waving. The wave was innocent, neighborly—Nancy couldn’t have gotten to him already.

  “Where you headed?” He tried to make his voice sound normal, even though his mind was spinning.

  “On my way home,” said Jeremy. “Didn’t you hear? Ferries stopped running. There’s a storm coming.” His mother’s storm, thought Anthony. From her iPad. And the storm Cassie had mentioned, the one that was supposed to hit Massachusetts. “The purple flag is up!” said Jeremy.

  The purple flag was up? Anthony had thought the purple flag was mythical, like a unicorn. He’d never heard of it actually going up. He’d never seen the purple flag. The water was so flat. Then again, storms could be like that. They could sneak up on you. That’s why there were so many metaphors surrounding them. The eye of the storm. The calm before the storm. Maybe only two metaphors: he couldn’t think of any more. Maybe Dorothy Puckett could think of more. Dorothy Puckett the writer.