“I’m sorry! I can go through these myself. I didn’t realize…I’m really sorry.”
Amelia smiled sadly, her eyes tearing. “You have absolutely nothing to apologize for, dear girl.” She hesitated, then opened the top album. “I brought two. One is from his childhood, when he was about ten or so. This one is from the last summer he spent in this house, between his junior and senior years of college.”
“So he was almost my age.”
“Yes.”
Rachel hugged herself. Now that the moment was here, the moment she had longed for her entire life, she was afraid. Gingerly, she reached out and touched the page. It was covered in plastic, so the surface was shiny, catching the glare of the sun. Rachel tilted her head, leaning close to get a clear view of the photos.
She sat back against the wicker headboard and took the album gingerly from Amelia. Her eyes fell on the photo on the upper right corner of the page. A young man in weedy grass pulling at a tennis ball clenched between the teeth of a large golden Lab. He was tall and lanky, with dark hair falling into his eyes and a smile on his face.
“That’s him?” she breathed, a question, even though she knew it was.
“Yes. That’s Nick behind this house. Before we had the communal table.”
Wow. No way around it—her dad was a hottie. He reminded her of that Spanish actor, Gael García Bernal.
The photo below was a shot from the beach on an overcast day. Nick, in long bathing trunks and a Boston University T-shirt, was bending over a cooler. A dark-haired young woman, tan and slender, stood beside him, her facial expression suggesting they were midconversation.
“Who’s that?”
“My daughter. Nadine.”
“You have a daughter?”
Amelia nodded, tight-lipped.
“Does she live around here too?”
“No. She lives in Italy.”
“Did you…does she know about Marin and me?”
“I sent her a letter.”
A letter? Did she mean an e-mail? And wouldn’t the existence of two previously unknown family members merit a phone call? Maybe this was some sort of old-fashioned thing Rachel just didn’t understand.
She turned back to the photos. Mentally, she said the word Dad over and over, but it was hard to reconcile that hot guy with a paternal role. What would he look like today?
Amelia’s phone rang, and she answered it while Rachel continued to slowly page through the album. A few pictures were of Nick and an older man, tan with silver hair, not terribly tall but broad-shouldered and handsome. Her grandfather?
“What do you mean, she canceled? The party is this afternoon!” Amelia made a tsking sound and stood up to pace around the room. “She is so unprofessional. I don’t know how she is still in business. Only in this town.” Silence, then: “I’ll do what I can, but you know I can’t just whip something up for dozens of people in two hours.”
Amelia set her phone on the bed.
“Is everything okay?” Rachel said, closing the album with her hand still inside, holding her spot.
“It’s our friend Thomas’s fifty-fifth birthday, and the party is this afternoon,” Amelia said. “And the caterer just canceled. Just now! I’m going to head over there and help figure out what to do about the food.”
“I’ll go with you,” Rachel said.
“Oh, hon, you don’t have to do that. I’ll be fine. You’re here for only a few days. You should go to the beach.”
“No. I want to help. I didn’t come here for the beach, I came for family, and that’s what family’s for, right?”
“Well, when you put it that way.” Amelia smiled.
Chapter Seventeen
Where had everyone gone? Blythe couldn’t find Marin or Amelia or anyone, for that matter. She passed by Rachel’s empty room and looked inside.
The photo albums were just sitting there. On the bed.
Just sitting there.
She never would have sought them out. Every instinct told her to ignore them.
Blythe glanced down the hallway in either direction and then went in and closed Rachel’s bedroom door.
This was madness.
She sat on Rachel’s bed. The album was navy blue with gold piping along the edges. The spine was worn. When she opened it, the book crackled. It smelled musty and like old glue. Blythe’s pulse raced.
There he was, the face that had existed only in her mind for thirty years. Achingly beautiful and alive. She gingerly touched his image: Nick on the beach, at the water’s edge. She had not known this Nick—carefree. Sun-kissed. Happy.
“Oh, Nick,” she whispered.
By the time she’d met him, he’d abandoned this town built on sand. He’d sworn off Boston, the place where he’d been born and raised. He would barely speak of his mother, the woman whose roof Blythe was now sleeping under.
Nick Cabral had been, ultimately, not knowable.
That first day, leaving the art museum, Blythe had lied to herself—unconvincingly—that they were just going to talk. And yet, walking the few blocks to his apartment on Green Street, they barely exchanged a word. Had it been a longer trip, one involving a bus or a cab, she might have changed her mind. But the sun, the heat, the fluttering pulse of the city in the first rush of summer, ushered her along like a hand on her back.
His studio apartment was cluttered. A guitar rested against the wall next to a bike with chipped blue paint. Half-unpacked boxes of clothes served as the only bedroom furniture. Near the small kitchenette, a round wood table was covered with sketch pads, pencils, and boxes of art charcoal.
Blythe couldn’t help but mentally compare it to the first time she’d stepped into Kip’s pristine, sprawling apartment on Rittenhouse Square.
Stop. Just one hour of not being Mrs. Kipton Bishop. That was all she wanted.
Nick opened his small refrigerator. “I have beer and white wine. It’s been open a week or maybe more but it might still be okay.”
It was eleven in the morning.
“Oh, no. I’m fine. Thanks.”
He popped open two beers and handed her one. Okay, she’d have a beer. Why not? They sat at the table. She touched one of the sketchbooks. “Can I look?”
“You can look. There’s nothing in it.”
She flipped through the pages. All blank.
He told her he hadn’t been able to draw since leaving Provincetown, where he used to spend his summers.
“Why not?” she said.
He didn’t answer.
She sipped her beer. Blythe was not a beer drinker. Liquid bread. But that didn’t matter anymore. If this man saw her naked, he would not know that he was bearing witness to a new, rounder, fuller version of her body, the one she had since she’d stopped dancing. A body her husband had not touched in months. She wondered if, no longer a wispy pixie girl, she was somehow less attractive to Kip. Or was it really just work? Or was marriage itself to blame?