Return to Me

by Katie Winters

  “But if we opened it up, it could maybe heal all of us.”

  “Not just the women who seek us out,” Carmella whispered.

  “It could be difficult to get Nancy to agree to it,” Janine said after a pause.

  Carmella arched an eyebrow again at the first-name use. “Nancy. Huh. Yeah, you guys aren’t close, are you?”

  Janine shrugged. “Maybe we could be. I don’t know. I don’t know if our relationship is a house that needs fixing or if the house has already burned down.”

  “Well. I think my father would say something here like: you can always rebuild,” Carmella returned with a smile.

  “I should say the same to you, maybe,” Janine said.

  “Not so simple,” Carmella offered.

  “Mine, neither.”

  “Right. Well. Okay.” Carmella slapped her palms together as her upcoming client entered the foyer. “Let’s meet to discuss this with Nancy and Elsa. Ease them into it. Maybe you could outline all your plans and what your role would be.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Janine’s heart swelled with excitement.

  Carmella’s eyes turned over the foyer again as she clucked her tongue. “I would love to have this place bustling again.”

  “Maybe we can make it happen. Maybe it’s not too late.”

  ––––––––Chapter Fifteen

  Henry’s text message arrived on another beautiful morning that Tuesday after the Oak Bluffs festival. Janine was on a jog, and when she glanced at her phone to switch the music, she spotted an unknown number, along with a message:

  UNKNOWN: Hello. Would you like to meet me at the Edgartown Lighthouse this afternoon around three?

  UNKNOWN: It’s Henry, by the way.

  UNKNOWN: (The man’s whose life you’ve been trying to ruin.)

  She stopped short on her jogging path in total shock. Her stomach immediately cramped, and she held onto her side, her nose scrunched, as she tried to focus her breathing. Even though she was in pretty good shape, she wasn’t twenty-five anymore. It was sometimes difficult for her to remember that.

  As though God himself wanted to remind her of this, a twenty-something male runner whipped past her just then, his tanned skin glistening with sweat and sunlight.

  “All right,” Janine said. “I get it.”

  She stepped to the side and sat at the edge of a rock, her hands cupping her phone. In the distance, children scampered through the waves and splashed one another while their mothers sat nearby on a picnic blanket. Janine remembered those long-ago days when she’d had the girls at the park, and she’d had conversations with other young mothers, all of whom had grown up in Manhattan and knew her to be young, just starting out and the one who’d married Jack Potter somehow.

  Janine took a deep breath and then reread Henry’s texts.

  Finally, she responded.

  JANINE: Hey! I promise—no more life-ruining. Three sounds good. See you there.

  She scrunched her nose at the response. It seemed flat, with no emotion and not very personable; then again, she had no idea who this guy was, really. She respected him as an artist and resented that he’d once been kind of chummy with Jack. Still, her curiosity surrounding him was heavy, something she couldn’t ignore, like that itch that just won’t go away.

  Janine wore a light yellow dress, one she had borrowed from Elsa, and slipped a cardigan in her purse, just in case the weather shifted. It was seventy-five degrees, an actual perfect day, and as she stepped out from Nancy’s house, the sea breeze fluttered through her dark hair beautifully.

  Elsa stood out near her car and waved a hand. She’d agreed to drive Janine over to the Edgartown Lighthouse, as it wasn’t exactly in walking distance. When Janine thanked her again, Elsa just said, “Don’t mention it. I have a few errands I want to run in town, and then I told Mallory I would babysit Zachery.”

  “That’s kind of you,” Janine said.

  “You know, I love that little boy,” Elsa said as she slipped into the front seat and buckled up. “It was a hard time when he was born. My husband died exactly one week after.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “He got to hold him, though. Before he passed away,” Elsa offered. “It was a blessing.”

  Janine marveled at the sort of woman Elsa was: so good, so wholesome that she considered her husband’s status as one of the living for only a week after their grandson’s birth to be a “blessing.” Janine wished she could see things in such a light of positivity.

  Maybe she could learn from her.

  “Who did you say you were meeting?” Elsa asked as they snaked through the country roads, northeast, toward the lighthouse.

  “I ran into an old friend,” Janine began. “I knew him in Manhattan. I had no idea he’d be on the island.”

  “Wow. Funny where life takes us, isn’t it?”

  Janine wanted to say, you have no idea, but she kept the sentiment to herself. She didn’t want to point too specifically at how strange the next hour or so was about to be. She was already nervous enough as it was.

  HENRY WAS ALREADY AT the lighthouse. Janine watched him from the sidewalk as he took a number of shots, holding the camera steady as he stepped leftward, trying to circle the old building. After five minutes, Janine stepped toward him, and he whipped the camera around to film her instead. She blushed and waved her hands.

  “I told you. No paparazzi,” she teased.

  He chuckled and dropped the camera down. His dark locks were every which way, and they snuck around his ears and toward the nape of his neck. His eyes glowed with good humor, and he’d developed even more of a tan than before. Janine wondered what he’d been up to. Hiking. Swimming. Boating.

  She supposed she had something of a tan, too.

  “Hey there,” he said. “I’m glad you came.”

  Janine blushed at how upfront he was. She glanced toward the lighthouse, which was enormous and white, with a wrap-around railing at the top, beneath the black pillar.

  “I’ve always thought lighthouses were really romantic,” she said finally, as she stepped closer to him. “Something about the idea of having to live in them and keep the light going and make sure sailors could get home. It’s all so dramatic.”

  “It really is,” Henry agreed. “But this one, in particular, holds a lot of sentiment for me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Henry heaved a sigh. “Well, this lighthouse. It used to have a family in it. Years and years and years ago and the head of that family was my great-great-grandfather.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.” A slight smile hovered at the edge of his lips.

  “Wow.” Janine studied his face contemplatively, no longer interested in the lighthouse. She tried to imagine a rugged-looking man, artistic and powerful, like Henry, operating the lighthouse, day-in and day-out and all through the night. “So you’re from the island.”

  “Yes, I am. A true islander, I suppose,” Henry said. “But come on. Let’s go in. I want to get some shots from the interior.”

  Janine followed Henry up toward the lighthouse, which now operated as a museum. Henry had apparently cleared it with the council to get two passes that allowed them up a steep ladder, straight to the top. Henry allowed Janine to go up ahead of him, and Janine grabbed each rung gingerly, terrified she would make one wrong move and fall below. Beyond that, of course, she wore a simple little yellow dress that she now regretted, and she prayed that Henry wouldn’t lift his chin to catch sight of her satin panties. How embarrassing.

  But once they arrived at the top, Henry set up his camera to take a beautiful shot of the bay just beyond the lighthouse. The air inside the windmill itself was stuffy, and it reeked of old, moldy wood.

  “This old lighthouse isn’t the official lighthouse, though,” Henry explained as he continued to take his shot. “The original was built in 1828. It was built due to the whaling boom of the late 1700s and early 1800s.”

  “Whaling boom. Wow,” Janine breath
ed. “I’m such a city girl. Everything you’re saying is foreign to my ears.”

  Henry chuckled. “I understand perfectly well. Back then, the lighthouse keeper—”

  “Someone you’re related to, I guess?”

  “I think so. I think it was passed down, father to son until it closed. But the keeper lived a distance from the lighthouse and had to row to the lighthouse. Very soon after, they built a wooden causeway. And here’s the saddest part.”

  “Oh no.”

  “The causeway was known around here as the Bridge of Sighs,” he continued. “Because the wives and daughters of the whalers would come out and stand on the causeway to watch them depart. Sometimes, their voyages would last up to five years.”

  Janine gazed out across the waters with her heart in her throat. Five years was an incredible amount of time. She couldn’t imagine it — having such enormous love for someone who headed out on an adventure without assurance of their return.

  “Why did your great-great-grandfather leave the lighthouse?”

  “It was destroyed,” Henry said with a sad smile. “The Hurricane of 1938 was a real doozy, apparently. They brought the lighthouse we’re currently standing in from Ipswich.”

  “Huh. I wonder what Ipswich feels about Edgartown stealing their history.”

  “At least it’s something pretty to look at,” Henry said with an ironic laugh. “And my documentary about my family and the history of the island wouldn’t look right without several lighthouse shots.”

  “So that’s your documentary,” Janine said.

  Henry removed his camera from his eyes and gave a light shrug. “It’s difficult to explain, maybe. If I had to write up a synopsis for the purpose of funding, I might not be able to put it into words.”

  Just then, one of the workers down below hollered that they’d run out of time. Slowly, Henry and Janine stepped down the ladder. When Janine’s feet found solid ground again, she breathed a sigh of relief. Yet again, she was reminded of just how not-twenty-five she was.

  Back outside, they began to wander down the boardwalk, back toward the center of Edgartown. Janine had hardly explored the little town, as she’d generally kept to the southern part of the island. When she looked at her time on Martha’s Vineyard, it was difficult to comprehend that nearly two weeks had passed since her departure from New York. She’d begun to let go of bits and pieces of her anger without realizing it. When she looked at her heart, it still ached with sadness — but it was no longer as black.

  It was almost too easy to walk alongside Henry. Janine had the strangest sensation that he understood when she needed to be quiet, as though their souls spoke to one another beneath the surface of verbal understanding.

  Probably, that was all in her head, though.

  After a long, comfortable silence, Janine said, “I would really love to hear more about your documentary.”

  “Of course.” Henry stopped short at the end of the dock and turned out again toward the water so that a sea breeze fluttered through his thick, black curls. “I grew up on this island— specifically Edgartown. And I always knew this held such an amazing history, that my great-great-grandfather was the lighthouse keeper, and that my family went through a bit of turmoil during the twentieth century. There was some illness, some death, and some accidents. Run of the mill, maybe, but you can feel the cracks in our history. You can still feel the sadness that accompanies all those stories.”

  Janine felt she understood that, too. She still felt the rifts within her and her mother’s relationship, twenty-five years after the fact. Probably, there were echoes of Nancy’s relationship with her own mother, who had died when she’d been fourteen — something that had probably led to her pregnancy at the young age of sixteen.

  “Sometimes, I think we’re slaves to our past,” Janine whispered.

  Henry nodded. “I think that, sometimes, too. But this is why I want to make this documentary. I want to own the past in a way and understand my family and this island better. I want to know why I wanted so badly to leave this place. On paper, it’s so perfect, isn’t it?”

  “And in real life, too,” Janine added.

  “I just can’t help but feel that so far, what I’ve made is pretty flat,” Henry said. “My mother just died. And I thought that would kick-start all these feelings around the island. But instead, I just have a lot of long shots of boats and that lighthouse and the occasional festival. I don’t know. Maybe it’s impossible to really see something that’s so much a part of you.”

  Janine thought for a long moment. She considered what she’d seen in her two weeks on the island — the community she had witnessed at Katama Lodge and Wellness Spa and the festival along the Oak Bluffs harbor. Already, it seemed she’d heard so many stories and witnessed so many ways in which the people of Martha’s Vineyard held one another’s stories close and helped them through their personal pain or illness.

  “Out of curiosity, why haven’t you interviewed people on the island yet?” Janine asked. “I mean, if you want to get a full picture of the place, that is.”

  Henry tilted his head. “I have considered it. But to me, these people are just the people I grew up alongside. I don’t really know what to ask them because I feel like I already know what’s in their heads.”

  Janine smiled. “I think everyone can surprise you. Especially the ones you think won’t.”

  Suddenly, with some kind of power she’d never known she had, Janine grabbed Henry’s elbow and led him toward a bench, which overlooked the water. There, she found an older gentleman who gazed contemplatively out across the Bay.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Janine said brightly. “This is Henry. My name is Janine. And we’re making a documentary about the history of the island.”

  The man gave no sign of being afraid or annoyed. In fact, his ears perked up slightly. “You don’t say.”

  “We were curious if we could ask you a few questions,” Janine said. “Only if you’re comfortable.”

  The man agreed. Henry gave a slight shrug and then set up his camera from behind the bench so that the man turned around the bench to gaze into the camera, with a view of the sailboats in front of him. Even Janine had to admit that it was a perfect shot.

  “Maybe first, you could introduce yourself?” Janine said as Henry pressed play.

  “Sure,” the man said. “My name is Stan Ellis.”

  “Stan, hello,” Janine said. “Were you born on the island?”

  “I wasn’t, no,” Stan replied. “Came here in my thirties and was completely blown away by it all. It’s a unique place.”

  “We’re similar, I guess,” Janine said. “I just arrived here for the first time, age forty-three.”

  “Then you must feel it,” Stan said. He gripped the top of the bench with bright white fingers. “There’s a magic in the air here. And the people you meet genuinely care about everyone else’s well-being. I’ve had a hard road of it — a damn strange path. But right now, just because of this island and the way the islanders know how to forgive, I’m in the happiest mental state of my life. I have a stepson who recently decided to move to the island and he keeps me busy and makes sure I go to all my doctor’s appointments. If you had told me a year ago that anybody would ever demand I go to the doctor to keep in good health, I would have told you that you’re a damn liar.”

  Stan chuckled as Janine’s heart swelled. She glanced back toward Henry, whose eyes were enormous. It was really like they’d struck gold with this man. Before, he’d just been a stranger sitting on a bench. Now, they were collecting his story.

  And the afternoon continued on in a similar fashion. Janine and Henry approached a number of walkers and restaurant owners and service staff members and innkeepers, and they asked them what they loved most about the island and if they wanted to share any stories. When they entered the Frosted Delights bakery, Jennifer, the red-headed owner whom Janine had met previously, told a sorrowful tale about her twin sister, who had drowned at age seventee
n.

  “Since then, I’ve done my best to think of her as much throughout the day as I can,” Jennifer said somberly. “She’s in the air, the water, the sun and the sky. She’s rooted within this island and will be forever. And I can feel her love everywhere.”

  At seven-thirty, Henry and Janine grabbed ice cream cones and headed back out to the boardwalk. Janine couldn’t remember the last time she had allowed herself to give in to the allure of a strawberry-flavored cone, and she reveled in it, even as it dripped down the sides and onto her fingers.

  “That was quite a day, Janine,” Henry finally said.

  “I could have listened to people telling their stories for the next several hours, I think.”

  “I don’t even know if I can use all of them for the documentary, but it definitely gave me a better understanding of this place,” Henry continued. “It’s not very creative of me to think that everyone around here is boring.”

  Janine grinned. “Well. Not everyone can be as exciting as you.”

  Henry scoffed. “I don’t know about that. I used to think that about myself. But right now, I’m just here in the place I grew up. And I don’t even know if I want to go back to the city, really. I’m forty-five years old, and I feel rootless.”

  “That makes two of us. I’m pretty rootless, too,” Janine admitted. “And sometimes, late at night, it fills me with shame.”

  “What do you feel in the morning?”

  Janine gave a light shrug. “I try to tell myself that everything happens for a reason. But I don’t even know if that’s true.”

  Henry held her gaze for a long time, so long that she felt another droplet of pink ice cream across her knuckles.

  “I have to believe that’s true,” he finally admitted. “It’s the reason we tell stories. It’s the reason I make documentaries. We have to make sense of our past and how it brought us here. It’s all purposeful. It really is.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Janine whispered. “I hope all that pain was for a reason.”