Tides of the Heart

  Driven by curiosity, Jess had opened the envelope at the first red light on Route 1. It had been a mistake.

  Now she sat frozen, staring at the sharply written words meant for her personal attention, meant, surely, to make her palms sweat, her pulse race, and her thoughts whir out of control.

  Jessica Bates Randall it read at the top of a sheet of blue paper that matched the envelope postmarked from the place called Vineyard Haven. The words that followed were few, but their impact was powerful.

  I am your baby—the one you gave up. Isn’t it time we met?

  No name, no signature, nothing else. And no reference to the fact that Jess already knew her baby was dead.

  Behind her a horn blasted. Jess pulled her eyes from the letter: the traffic light was green. She shoved the paper in her purse. Then she stepped on the gas and her car moved forward, steered by this woman who could no longer breathe or see past the pain in her heart and the mist in her eyes.…

  Also by Jean Stone

  Sins of Innocence

  First Loves

  Ivy Secrets

  Places by the Sea

  Birthday Girls

  TIDES OF THE HEART

  A Bantam Book / January 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1999 by Jean Stone

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78531-2

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  To everyone who has loved and lost

  and grieved their grief,

  then found the place to store the good

  and the path to moving on.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Nancy Fitzpatrick for her friendship over the years, and for her courage to leave Manhattan for the other island she so loves; to Nancy’s great friend, Scott True of The Black Dog Tavern, for sharing his stories of the pulse of the Vineyard; to Ann Nelson of Bunch of Grapes Bookstore for directing me to Vineyard Haven and West Chop; to Catherine Mayhew, genealogist and tour guide extraordinaire; and to Joe Mahoney of the Tuckerman House in Vineyard Haven. Thank you all.

  And did I mention those folks at The Outermost Inn? Good grief, we cannot forget them. Carol would never allow that to happen! Thanks, gang. You are all truly special.

  PROLOGUE

  From the tiny window of her attic bedroom at Mayfield House, she looked down over the steeple-topped landscape of Vineyard Haven, across the gray winter water to the land beyond: “the Mainland,” some Vineyarders called it; “America,” others said.

  She turned to the left and studied the dots of the Elizabeth Islands silhouetted against the snow-threatening sky. Then her eyes dropped to the treetops and annoyance inched up her spine: It had always annoyed her that the tall pines blocked her view of West Chop. Of West Chop and the beach and his house. The house she had wasted so much time watching before she’d known the truth.

  “It wasn’t fair,” she said in a whisper, though no one but her father was at the inn now, because it was February and the tourists had gone. No one could hear her lament but her father, and whatever ghosts lurked in the two-hundred-year-old, drafty halls. No one could hear her lament, feel her rage, see her tears.

  She looked down at the papers that lay on the small oak chest and wondered what her father would think when he learned that she knew—that she found what she’d found in the secret compartment of the old rolltop desk; that she’d found out about the lies that he’d told. The lies they’d all told.

  Then, from the pocket of her long black sarong, she extracted a handful of pebbles of smooth sea glass: blue, brown, rich bottle green—misshapen marbles, jewels from the sea. She rolled them between her fingers and wondered what would happen next.

  Click-dicky click-click.

  And if they’d be sorry when they learned what she’d done.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Jessica Bates Randall glanced up the chintz-covered wall to the clock over her sewing machine.

  Damn, she thought. It was nearly six and she’d promised to drop off these draperies at Mrs. Boynton’s in time to be hung for a seven-thirty dinner party. The Boyntons lived across town—in the elitest of the elite side of this southern Connecticut town—where Jess had once lived when she’d thought that it mattered.

  It would take twenty minutes to get there. Longer, if the late February sky decided to storm, decided to actually do what the TV meteorologist had predicted.

  Stomping on the pedal, she returned to her work, guiding the final hem of raw silk through the whirring machine, trying to remember when—before her divorce—this had been her hobby and it had been fun.

  But now it was her business—Designs by Jessica, read the peach-scripted name on the window glass of the front door. It was her business and her responsibility.

  She would not have been late if Maura hadn’t called. But her daughter was plagued with yet another crisis—one in a never-ending, knotty string since going off to Skidmore two years ago. This time, it was about spring break.

  “Mother!” Maura had shrieked. Maura seemed to have taken up shrieking since she’d been in college, as if it were a rite of passage, like keg parties and living off campus. “Liz thinks Costa Rica is cool, but Heather thinks we should go to Lauderdale, that there’s something deeply spiritual about its tradition. But Liz says no way, and I don’t know what to do. They’re leaving it all up to me.…”

  A muscle tightened, then tugged, at the base of Jess’s neck. “What makes you so certain I’m going to allow you to go anywhere?” It was asked half in jest, half in earnest—a wounded reflection of a lingering fantasy that Jess could somehow hold on to the maternal control that weakened with each passing year as her children insisted on growing into adults.

  “Mother! You can’t be serious!”

  “You’re twenty years old, Maura,” Jess replied, feeling more tired than guilty for challenging her daughter in the ongoing battle for her independence. “But I still pay the bills.”

  Silence smoldered over the line. Jess could almost see the pout on Maura’s small face—the much-practiced pout that made the delicate, twenty-year-old face look no more than thirteen.

  Then Maura spoke. “Daddy said he’d pay for it.”

  The lump th
at swelled in Jess’s chest felt like a fur ball, a fur ball named Charles, that familiar, annoying fur ball that, no matter how hard she tried, simply wouldn’t come out, apparently destined to remain forever lodged in her gullet.

  She wanted to say, “It would be nice if he’d been so generous about child support,” but Jess curbed her words, reminding herself to be grateful for her trust fund, for the fact that she’d not needed money from Charles to raise their three children in comfort, that it was only the principle that angered her. The principle, and her pride.

  “Then why don’t you pick somewhere different?” Jess asked. “If Heather wants spirituality and Liz wants to be cool, why don’t you go to Sedona? You can bring back all kinds of stories to enlighten your friends.” Years ago, when New Age was still new, Jess had gone to Sedona with Charles. While she’d marveled at the majesty of the red-rock, sculpted, Arizona mountains and soaked in the peace of the candlelit chapel vista, Charles had busied himself buying trinkets and T-shirts and souvenirs to prove to the country club set that he’d been there, to create the illusion there was a depth in his soul.

  “Sedona!” Maura exclaimed with another shriek. “Très cool, Mom!”

  So Jess had hung up, her daughter appeased for the moment, leaving Jess with an odd taste of lint still lining her throat and the feeling that she’d lost another round, that it was her own fault for spoiling the kids way-past-rotten in the years since the divorce.

  She’d made a cup of tea, drank that, made another—all the while trying to focus on how lucky she was, lucky that Chuck had made it through Princeton, though he now worked alongside his father in the Wall Street firm; lucky that Maura had overcome her past traumas and was funneling them toward a degree in clinical psychology; lucky that Travis, her eighteen-year-old joy, had decided to go to Yale next year, so he would be closer to home. So he would be closer to her.

  Distracted, was what she had been. Distracted from her work, distracted from her responsibilities, oblivious to the ticking clock that now said her assistants had left for the day and she was late with Mrs. Boynton’s antique-rose-colored, ten-thousand-dollars-worth of overpriced drapes.

  Flicking off the machine, she examined the stitches: amazingly, they were fine. She smoothed the lush fabric and moved to the steam table, pressing the edges.

  Finally, she finished. She slid the drapes onto hangers and sleeved them with plastic. Then she grabbed her coat with a quick prayer that the traffic would have thinned and it wouldn’t start snowing.

  As she pulled the blinds to lock up for the night, Jess spotted the stack of mail on her desk—four days’ worth of bills, checks, and God-only-knew-what that she’d not had time to open. She buttoned her coat, slung the draperies over her arm, and gathered up the mail with a sigh. It would never get read if she did not bring it home.

  Walking over to the alarm by the back door, she juggled the draperies to peek at the envelopes. A long blue envelope caught Jess’s eye. Her name and address had been carefully hand-printed; in the lower left corner neat block letters underlined in red spelled out: PERSONAL. No return address appeared on the front or the back. But the postmark was clear: “Vineyard Haven, MA.”

  Vineyard Haven? She had no idea where that was. Was it on Martha’s Vineyard, the island off Cape Cod? Jess knew no one there, knew little about it, aside from the fact that the president favored it for summer vacations and that Barbra Streisand, it was rumored, had once wanted to be married there.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw the red flashing light of the alarm.

  Celia Boynton, she quickly remembered. Damn.

  She finished setting the alarm and hurried out of the shop.

  The note was from neither Clinton nor Streisand, or, at least, neither one was admitting to it.

  Driven by curiosity, Jess had opened the envelope at the first red light on Route 1. It had been a mistake.

  Now she sat frozen, staring at the sharply written words meant for her personal attention, meant, surely, to make her palms sweat, her pulse race, and her thoughts whir out of control.

  Jessica Bates Randall, it read at the top of a sheet of blue paper that matched the envelope postmarked from the place called Vineyard Haven. The words that followed were few, but their impact was powerful.

  I am your baby—the one you gave up. Isn’t it time we met?

  No name, no signature, nothing else. And no reference to the fact that Jess already knew that her baby was dead.

  Behind her a horn blasted. Jess pulled her eyes from the letter: the traffic light was green. She shoved the paper in her purse. Then she stepped on the gas, and her car moved forward, steered by this woman who could no longer breathe or see past the pain in her heart and the mist in her eyes.

  She had no idea how she managed to hang the draperies with Celia Boynton hovering behind her and the blue-paper letter hovering in her thoughts. As she deftly maneuvered pleats and traverse cords, she wondered what kind of sick prankster would do such a thing. There was a knot in her stomach the size of the Boyntons’ dining room table—not unlike the knot that had been there almost five years ago, when she’d been brave enough to try to meet the baby she’d given up, when she’d driven to the neighboring town of Stamford and walked on trembling legs up to a Georgian brick mansion, a mansion marked Hawthorne.

  She’d rung the bell at the white wood door. And she’d waited, determined to find her daughter.

  It had been twenty-five years since the adoption … twenty-five years since these people named Hawthorne had taken the infant she had never seen, never held, but always, always loved.

  It was part of her plan for a reunion. With the help of Miss Taylor, their old housemother, Jess had already located the children of the others: P.J., Susan, and Ginny—“birth mothers,” the world called them today—the girls who had shared their lives and their pain together back in 1968 at the home called Larchwood Hall. Twenty-five years later, Jess hoped that they would reunite and meet the children they had never known. Until the reunion, none of them would know who would have the courage to attend: not the children, not the mothers. It was a choice that had once seemed so important.

  She had saved her own child for last, deciding to find the girl’s parents first, to let them tell their daughter about the reunion. Then, like the others, Jess would not know until the designated day if her own baby would show up. If her own daughter would want to meet her.

  The plan had seemed foolproof. She had not expected the result.

  “May I help you?” The words were spoken by a gray-haired, pleasant woman named Beverly Hawthorne.

  “I’ve come about Amy,” Jess had stammered out. “I am her birth mother.”

  Mrs. Hawthorne put her hands to her face. “Oh, dear,” she said, then began to weep. “Oh, my dear.”

  And then the woman told Jess that Amy was dead. That she had been killed while riding her bike. That she’d only been eleven and the driver had been drunk.

  Jess jammed another pin into the last rose-colored pleat and bit back her tears. It had taken her these past five years to come to terms with her grief, to mourn the daughter she had never known; it had taken every ounce of strength she could find to walk through the anguish, to heal the heartache. And now, some sick prankster was trying to unearth it again.

  She could not let it happen. She would not let it happen.

  If only she did not want so badly to believe that her baby might still be alive. And was trying to reach out to her.

  “Finished,” she announced, climbing down from the stool. It was 7:23, and Celia Boynton was pleased.

  After accepting the check without examining the amount and repeating several “You’re welcomes” to Celia’s many “Thank-yous,” Jess at last returned to her car.

  There was only one place where she could go next.

  “Jess,” the elderly woman said with a warm smile of surprise. Though Jess always remembered to phone them at Christmas and on the anniversary of Amy’s death, she had not seen t
he Hawthornes since they’d first met. “Come in, dear. Come in. It’s so nice to see you.”

  Jess stepped past the woman and into the foyer of the Georgian brick mansion. “Mrs. Hawthorne,” she said, “I wasn’t sure you’d be home.” She took off her gloves and nervously twisted the emerald and diamond ring on her finger—the ring that had once been her mother’s, when her mother had lived and laughed and loved her no matter what. Mrs. Hawthorne, Jess guessed, was nearly as old as her mother would have been. She tried to picture her beautiful mother with white hair and a slight bend to her spine, with eyes from which the color had faded and lips that had grown thin.

  “We got home from Florida last week,” Mrs. Hawthorne was saying. “Please take off your coat. Come and sit down. And tell me what brings you here on such a cold night.”

  Jess followed the woman into a cozy sitting room, with soft easy chairs beside a glowing fireplace and walls lined with books. She remembered that Mrs. Hawthorne had been a history professor, her husband an attorney; she remembered she had been pleased to think her daughter had been raised by intelligent, educated people—people who would not have lied about Amy being dead. Of course they hadn’t lied, Jess scolded herself. Jess had been to the cemetery, she had seen Amy’s grave.…

  She touched a hand to the pulse at her temple.

  “Forgive me for not calling first,” Jess said, settling into a chair across from Mrs. Hawthorne’s. She noticed a young girl’s picture framed in silver that sat on an end table. Amy, she thought, sweet little Amy. An ache of sorrow gnawed at her heart, and she forced her gaze away from the image of the smiling blond child. Clearing her throat, Jess pulled the blue envelope from her purse. “I received this in the mail.” She handed the letter to Mrs. Hawthorne. “I don’t know what to make of it, other than that it’s very upsetting.”

  While the woman was reading, Jess’s eyes drifted back to the picture, to the little girl she’d been told had been hers. She glanced around the room: Amy may have played here; she may have sat in this very chair.