“What did you think of her?”
“I’m sorry, what?” I try to transition from being defensive to having a chat about his ex-wife. “She was … nice, I guess. Of course, she seemed to think we were sleeping with each other. Hard to blame her, considering. Pretty embarrassing for me.”
“Wow,” Ness says. “That must be awful, having people think something about you that isn’t true. I can’t imagine.”
I start to ask him to elaborate, when I see him staring past my shoulder. I turn to find Holly standing at the end of the breezeway.
“You guys aren’t in love with each other,” she says.
“I’m a reporter,” I tell Holly. “I told you, I’m here to do a story on your father.”
Her lip quivers. I can see the joy from earlier in the day drain from her face. Without a word, she turns and runs down the hall, and I hear Ness curse under his breath. I start to follow Holly to her room, but Ness tells me I’m better off leaving her alone.
“She was bound to find out,” he says. “Don’t make it worse for her.”
I have no idea what this means. And I don’t see Holly again as I gather my things down at the guest house—using an oversized rain jacket and umbrella this time. I bring my solitary bag up to the house, and Ness leads me to the front door.
There’s a helicopter outside. The pilot tells Ness that we should go before the next squall hits. And maybe it’s the rain, maybe it’s not getting to shell that day, maybe it’s the lingering soreness from seeing Holly so upset at us, but the week has taken a turn. The joy is no longer on Ness’s face. And I remember what Victoria said about that smile being his shell, that he is not a happy man, and perhaps this is my first glimpse of the true Ness Wilde. Either way, the week threatens to become one of those bright, half-buried horse conchs that you reach for only to discover that the rest of the shell is missing, that there was nothing priceless about that find after all.
27
I’m glad I amended Ness’s packing list and brought a book. My phone doesn’t work for much of the helicopter ride, and then we land at a small airport and transfer to a private jet. Once we break above the rain clouds, I can tell by the setting sun to our right that we are flying south. Ness is pensive and quiet. I attribute this to conflicts with his ex or his daughter, but it also occurs to me that he left in a hurry that morning to tend to an emergency. Perhaps it’s something else entirely.
Rebelling against my reporter DNA, I decide to let it go and to lose myself in the book I brought along. Treasure Island was losing me, felt more like a romp a young boy might like, so I picked out Moby Dick instead, which I vaguely remember not-reading in college and instead using online notes to squeak out a B or a C on some paper. Little did I know all those years of bullshitting my way through coursework would nicely prepare me for a career in journalism. As it turns out, it pays pretty well to make up entire stories on slivers of fact.
I read for a few hours, and then the copilot comes back to serve us a meal. After the trays are taken away, I rejoin Ishmael on his whaling adventures, but I’m only half present in the book. My mind flits. The article I’ve written about Ness bends and sways like a tree in a shifting breeze. Somehow, two years of work now feels … unimportant. Trivial. I remind myself that vacation does this to priorities, and the past few days have been like a vacation. When I get back to New York—among the symphony of sirens and car alarms and shrieking subway rails—I will remember what’s important. That’s when the story will coalesce and take shape. It’ll be easier to update my piece about Ness when he’s not sitting across from me, staring at his laptop, scrolling but not typing, reading something with a frown. It’ll be easier when I’m not thinking about Holly, and the way she looked at me, both in joy that morning, and in anger the last time I’m likely to ever see her.