Chapter Twenty-two
Windermere is absolutely still at night, quiet and at peace, yet listen a little more carefully and you will hear the sounds of tossing and turning, of people struggling with dilemmas, of an inner turmoil that is anything but peaceful.
Michael is still numb with fear. A baby. Jordana is pregnant with his baby, just as he’s met a woman with whom he feels, for perhaps the first time, a real connection. There is no way in the world he can see this ending well.
He has never had strong feelings about abortion, has never had to think about it, other than knowing various women who have had one, has always felt that it is a woman’s right to choose.
But what about the man? Where is his choice? Michael can’t think straight, can’t think of anything worse than bringing a baby into the world under these circumstances. He has never thought of himself as a father in anything other than the abstract, but a parent with Jordana? He would laugh if it wasn’t so unthinkable as to be almost painful.
Terminate, he wants to shout. Get rid of it. But this is not his body, he cannot say anything, and now he is terrified he will pay for his mistake for the rest of his life.
Tomorrow he will go and see her. Talk to her about it. See if he can convince her. See if he can prove to Jordana that this won’t be good for anyone, that this isn’t, cannot possibly be, the right thing to do.
For Michael is ill-equipped to be a father, his own father having died when he was only six. He has no concept of what a father is, of the joy that comes from seeing your child, a life you created, being brought into the world.
And he has never thought of himself as having responsibility for another life. A responsibility so huge the mere idea of it is utterly overwhelming to him. He has always taken care of his girlfriends, his mother, but that’s different. However childlike some of them have acted in their time, they are still adults, capable of taking care of themselves.
Michael was never prepared for this; never prepared for having to suddenly grow up.
On the other side of the house, Daff sits in the window seat, staring out at the blackness, the odd blinking light from one of the boats bobbing on the water. She sips slowly from a cup of sweet, warm tea, trying to soothe her jangled nerves, hoping it will send her back to sleep.
There is so much to think about. Jess, her darling Jess, shop-lifting. How can her little girl have been caught shoplifting? It doesn’t seem to make any sense, but Richard was perfectly clear. It wasn’t a mistake, he and Carrie went to pick her up and he was shown the contents of her bag.
Even when he was shown the evidence, Richard wanted to believe that there was an alternative explanation, but there wasn’t, and Jess’s initial denial swiftly turned to hysteria as she became a little girl, hoping that Daddy would make it all better, would make all the bad stuff go away.
They wouldn’t press charges, they said, after Richard had explained their situation, said she was struggling with her parents being newly divorced. Given that it was, as far as they were concerned, her first offense, next time she would not get off so lightly, they said sternly, showing them out of the store.
Jess ran straight up to her room, slamming the door, after Richard told her the consequences of her behavior. He was taking her computer away, and she would be grounded for a month.
“I hate you,” she screamed at him from behind the door. “I hate it here! I wish I’d never been born!”
Carrie and Richard sat at the kitchen table discussing what to do in low voices.
“Do you think maybe she should see someone?” Carrie offered tentatively, sure that this would help, but unsure how Richard would feel about it.
“See someone? Like who? A shrink?”
“Maybe not a shrink, but a therapist perhaps. Someone she could feel safe with, someone she could talk to.”
Richard sighed. “I just think it’s ridiculous. Sending a thirteen-year -old girl to a therapist. I know this shop-lifting thing is bad, but Jess is not a bad kid, she’s just a kid going through a rough time. Carrie, you were a thirteen-year-old girl, and you said it wasn’t easy for you either. Surely you know how this is.”
“I do know,” Carrie said. “But I didn’t steal. And I never ever would have dared speak to my parents the way she speaks to you.”
“Well, times are different now. And she doesn’t do it often, and she doesn’t mean it.”
“Richard, whenever she doesn’t get her own way she screams that she hates you, or hates me, that we’ve ruined her life, not to mention other unspeakable things, and you let her.”
“I’d rather she were able to express herself,” Richard said quietly.
“But it’s not appropriate,” Carrie said. “I’m not saying she’s not allowed to feel those things—she should be able to feel everything—but it’s not appropriate to vomit those feelings out whenever she finds them overwhelming.”
“I disagree,” Richard said. “I think it’s far better to let them out than to suppress them. I was never allowed to be angry, never allowed to be anything other than happy and pleasant when I was a child, and for years I struggled with this repressed anger. I never want Jess to go through that.”
“Why not? In case the repressed anger leads to something terrible like . . . shoplifting?”
“That’s not fair.” Richard was stern.
“Maybe not, but I see a child here who is struggling and who will do anything for attention, including shoplifting. Don’t you see that’s what this is about?”
“She gets attention. I give her tons of attention.”
“I know, but she always wants more. It’s never enough, and this stealing is a cry for help. Richard, we wouldn’t be responsible if we didn’t get her some help.”
There was a long silence as Richard tried to digest what she was saying, for some of it made sense. He adored his daughter, loved her more than anything in the world, but it was true that sometimes he didn’t understand her. He tried so hard to listen to her, to validate her, to allow her to be herself without judging her—all the things that he never had when he was a child—and yet she still seemed to be in such pain, and at moments like this he felt like a terrible parent, utterly helpless.
“I’ll think about it,” he said finally, looking up and meeting Carrie’s eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, and she reached across the table and squeezed his hand.
Sometimes it’s enough, she realized, just to be heard.
Jess was crouched outside the kitchen door, listening to every word. She hated Carrie at that moment, hated her father, wished she could turn the clock back to when her mother and father were married and everything made sense.
She quietly went back upstairs into the master bedroom and called her mother, and, as she dialed, the tears started to fall. Living here wasn’t what she’d expected, not now that Carrie had ruined it, and for the first time in a long while she wanted to be away from her father.
If he and Carrie were going to reject her, she was going to reject them first.
“Mommy?” Her tears were genuine when she heard her mother’s voice. “I want to be with you.”
Richard agreed to send Jessica to Nantucket. Perhaps it would do her good, he thought; get her away from the bad influences here. Jessica must have been influenced by a friend to steal, would never have thought of this herself, despite what Carrie thinks.
And a girl needs her mother, he had realized. He had thought this might be an ideal opportunity for Jess and Carrie to bond, and even though there were times when they seemed to get on amazingly, when Jess truly wanted to be with Carrie, ultimately she wasn’t her mother and never would be. Richard was almost grateful that Jessica asked to leave. He felt like he’d been on an emotional roller coaster ever since Jess had moved in. He needed a break, needed to think about something other than his troubled teenage daughter for a change. Let Daff deal with it for now.
Daff is ready for Jess, but worried about what’s going on in her daughter’s life. She has missed her, of course, but hasn’t pined for her in the way that other women she knows talk about pining for their children on the rare occasions they have some time off.
It is a fallacy, she thinks, that all mothers ache for their children when they are not with them. It is guilt that makes them say that, a fear that they are not good enough mothers if they are not thinking about their children twenty-four hours a day.
Daff thinks about Jess. Often. But she has also loved being seen as a woman, as an individual, as something other than a mother. She has loved that she has got to know new people, created a world out here in Nantucket where she is someone other than a dowdy suburban housewife and mom.
This evening she was a temptress, for God’s sake! Remember that kiss! She shivers, wishing it had led to more, but the spell was broken with Jess’s phone call. Even though she stayed, once she had finished talking to Richard, and asked Michael what was the matter, wanting to check he was okay, her mind was focused on Jess, and they had decided to call it a night, to talk about it another time.
There was also Mark Stephenson to think about and his strange offer. She didn’t want to consider it, knew it was underhanded, deceitful; she could never do that to Nan, or Michael. But it was such a lot of money—it would set her up for life, would afford her a freedom she has only been able to dream about since her divorce.
For working in real estate these days is hard. And getting harder. It wasn’t like the good old days when everything was overpriced and running out through the door, bidding wars were commonplace, realtors making a fortune.
Almost every middle-aged woman she knows in town, who decided to go back to work after raising her children, is a realtor. Every week it seems yet another one has joined the fray, got her license, turned up at one of the hundreds of open houses, each one of which now offers bigger and better lunches in a bid to attract the realtors.
There is so much inventory. The builders who thought the boom was going to last forever are still building the huge new houses, only now the houses are sitting for months, sometimes years, their prices dropping dramatically until the builders either go into foreclosure, or sell them at a loss.
It is getting harder and harder to survive as a realtor in her town. Even the people who are supposed to be the best—Marie Hathaway and her team, four stunning blondes who regularly take the back page of the local paper and are known for having the highest-end houses in town—aren’t doing so well. Once she has paid all her marketing expenses—those full-page ads and monthly flyers may be good for exposure but don’t come cheap— and paid her team, Daff has heard that what’s left in the pot isn’t nearly as much as Marie leads everyone to believe.
When Daff and Richard were married, she never worried about money. She did the odd job here and there—she was a professional organizer for a while, painted Christmas cards and had house sales—and what little money she earned was bonus money, a little extra to enable her to buy a cute pair of boots she saw, stay in a better class of hotel when they went away, buy Jess the latest pair of Uggs that she absolutely had to have because everyone in her class had them.
If she had a quiet period while she was married, it was just a quiet period. It didn’t hold the weight it holds now. For while Richard pays both alimony and child support, she has been left with the mortgage and the bills, and the little that Richard pays isn’t nearly enough to assuage her fears about her future.
Her dream is to have enough money to put some away every month, build up a nest egg so she knows she can relax, knows that she will always be okay.
She dreads being in a position where she may have to sell her house. This is the house Jess was born in, and where else would she go? To some extent she understands Nan, why she won’t leave Windermere, and yet it is worth millions. Nan may worry on a day-to-day basis, but she has a choice, and selling this house would make her a very wealthy woman.
Not to mention what it would do to Daff. Millions for Nan, and maybe a couple of hundred thousand for Daff, enough to set up the nest egg, enough to feel that she could breathe.
What if she talked to Nan, showed her perhaps just a different way of looking at things? Daff couldn’t, obviously, make Nan do something she doesn’t want to do, but she could perhaps steer Nan in a different direction, and would it really be so terrible to make Nan a wealthy woman?
She wouldn’t have to deal with drafty windows and disappearing shingles anymore. She could have a beautiful cottage on the beach, with more than enough money so she would never have to worry about anything ever again.
Daff continues to sip her tea, trying to convince herself that persuading Nan to sell the house would not be so awful after all.
Nan wakes up, cold and shivery. She pads out of bed and goes to the closet, dropping her wet nightgown in a puddle around her feet and pulling on a fresh, dry gown, instantly feeling warm.
She pushes the covers back on the other side of the bed, the side she still thinks of as Everett’s side, and as she climbs in her dream suddenly comes back to her.
How strange, she realizes. She had dreamed of Everett. When he died, she had dreamed of him often at first, the dreams so vivid, so real, she remained convinced he was somehow watching her from above, able to visit her only when she was asleep, to reassure her that both of them would be okay.
She hasn’t dreamed of him in years, but now she remembers the dream she had of him tonight. She had been visiting the Nantucket Lightship, curious to see it since it had been turned into, first, a luxury home, and now a luxury hotel.
In truth, Nan has read magazine articles about the lightship, has seen how beautifully it has been decorated, the wood paneling, the understated elegance of the formal living and dining rooms, but in her dream it was garish, with loud colors, nothing matching, bright oranges and greens, colors designed to agitate.
She wound her way through the bedrooms in her dream, knowing she was about to find something, just not sure what it would be, when she came across a smiling man, lying on a top bunk.
“Hello, Everett,” she said, feeling at once calm, safe, and not the slightest bit surprised to see him, even though this Everett looked nothing like her Everett. Despite that, she knew it was him.
“Hello, Nan,” he said, and he threw back the covers, inviting her to join him in the bunk, except it wasn’t lascivious, it wasn’t sexual, it was inviting her home, and she climbed in, surprised only that the sheets were not warm and dry, but grateful to have found Everett again. And then she woke up, in a cold sweat.
Now she finds she cannot go back to sleep. The dream has unsettled her and Jordana’s appearance has unsettled her, not because she knows anything about Jordana, but because she saw Michael out on the terrace, and senses that something big has happened, that changes are afoot and they are not necessarily good.
Isn’t it ironic, she thinks, just when you think your life is smooth and everything is exactly as you want it, a wrench is thrown in the works and everything changes again. Bee will be back with her father soon, those delicious little girls will be leaving, and in their place Daff’s daughter will be here.
And this Jordana, who is so clearly in love with Michael, is so clearly wrong for him. What is she doing here, and why is she here just as Daff and Michael seem to be getting so close?
It feels as if an ill wind has suddenly started to blow through the house. Try as she might, Nan can’t still herself enough to go back to sleep.
She lies in bed, thinking, until the sky starts to lighten outside her window, then she gets up, makes herself some tea, and walks down to the beach, breathing in the salty air and, finally, down there, starting to feel a sense of peace.