“Yes, you’ve told me.”
I had told her, several times. Still, I knew she wasn’t prepared for what had become of her ex-husband. He had always had quirks and phobias. He was scared of the dark, scared of crossing city streets, scared of sitting in the backseats of cars. It was hard to understand, because he was also a man who had zero fear of speaking in front of large audiences, a man who would sneak out of his wife’s bedroom after she had fallen asleep, and let his mistress into the house, and have sex with her on the living room couch, a man who had climbed halfway up the outside of the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown on a bet. But that side of my father, the reckless side, had disappeared after what had happened with Gemma, his second wife. He’d met her after the divorce with my mother had been finalized; he’d been living at a hotel on the Old Brompton Road in London. Gemma Daniels was an aspiring novelist, one year younger than me, who had probably come to my father’s favorite pub for the sole reason of meeting him. They became inseparable, marrying only six months after they’d met. One of the drawbacks to living in London for my father was that the English tabloids cared about the bad behavior of writers almost as much as they cared about the bad behavior of footballers and pop stars. My father and Gemma were photographed having screaming matches on the street; they were chided in headlines such as “Dirty Davie and His Child Bride.” This was all before the accident, before my father plowed his 1986 Jaguar into a tree after drunkenly leaving a weekend house party late on a Saturday night. Gemma was in the passenger seat and broke her neck when she went through the windshield. My father, who always wore a seat belt, was uninjured. He managed to call for an emergency vehicle, but he didn’t manage to exit the Jaguar to check on Gemma. It wouldn’t have made a difference. She had died instantly. Still, word got out that he had been found cowering in his vehicle, his wife sprawled across the roadside hedge. It was deemed manslaughter by gross negligence, and my father was sent to prison for two years. The sentence was cut to one year on appeal, and he’d been released in early September. I visited him where he’d been staying at a friend’s house in the Cotswolds and asked him to come back to America, to live with my mother. David still had substantial money, and my mother, after leaving her teaching because of a disagreement with her department head, had been struggling to pay the bills. Monk’s House was in a reverse mortgage. My father, tears in his eyes, had agreed to move back to Connecticut. “And you’re not far away, Lil. You’ll come and visit all the time, won’t you?” My father, who was sixty-eight years old, had sounded like a small boy speaking to his mother before being sent to boarding school.
“This is pretty,” my mother said as I wound her Volvo toward Kennewick Cove. It was still light out, but the sun was low in the west, casting long shadows across the road. The sky was a deep electric blue.
I pulled into the parking lot of the Admiral’s Inn, where I’d left my car less than twenty-four hours earlier. It was still there. Before driving back to Winslow, my mother and I stretched our legs, walking down to the edge of the beach, looking out at the slate-colored ocean. “I always loved the ocean, but your father hated it.”
“Yes, he does,” I said, and laughed. “He said it was like looking at death.”
“‘It’s like looking at death and everyone saying how lovely it is,’” my mother said in an English accent, mimicking my father.
“Right. That’s what he always said. What was the other one? ‘I love the beach, everything except the fucking sand, the fucking sun, and the fucking water.’”