Places by the Sea Page 3

  Chapter 3

  Amy hadn’t spoken to her since last night.

  The strong summer wind whipped Jill’s hair in front of her face now, blocking the view of the coastline of Cape Cod diminishing against the horizon. She reached up and pulled back her hair, her hand catching a light spray of seawater as the ferry arched its way across the choppy sound. Though the sun shined brightly, the crossing felt surprisingly rough. Jill wasn’t sure if it was because of the wind or the waves of trepidation that rumbled inside her.

  “Wouldn’t you think her father had enough sense to know Amy is too young for a skirt like that?” Jill asked Christopher as they leaned against the upper deck rail.

  He spoke softly, his words floating in the wind. “Forget it, Jill. You told her she can’t wear it. It’s done.”

  Jill sighed. “Sometimes I hate being a mother.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “Well, all right. It’s not being a mother I hate. It’s not knowing how.”

  “Really, Jill. I think you’re overreacting.”

  She gripped the rail more tightly. A gull soared in the sky, swooped, then landed on the sonar mast. “Am I also overreacting when I tell you I’m upset about the Lifestyles spread? That you agreed with Addie before asking me?”

  Christopher lay his hand on her shoulder. “Look, I told Addie it was fine with me. I said she’d have to talk with you.”

  “She did.”

  “And?”

  “And, I don’t know.” She turned her face from him and looked across the harbor. As Vineyard Haven grew larger, pressure began to build in her head. In the years since she and Richard had divorced, Jill had grown accustomed to making her own decisions. Accustomed to it, and tired of it. Still, it was difficult to change.

  She glanced across the deck at Jeff and Amy. Jeff was leaning into the breeze, stretching to see all that he could see. Amy stood beside him wearing gray grunge and a pout. Jill wondered why the nineties had to be so complicated.

  “Passengers return to your vehicles,” came a voice from the loudspeaker.

  “I’m going below for the car,” Christopher said. “Why don’t you get the kids and meet me on the dock?”

  Jill nodded to Christopher as he left, and wished he would be more understanding. But he’d never had kids—he simply didn’t know the balancing act it entailed. She threaded her way through the pastel-clothed, straw-hatted tourists, cameras slung around the pale indoor skin of their necks, toward Jeff and Amy—her kids, her problem, no matter what. And they were good kids, had always been good kids. It wasn’t their fault they were teenagers.

  Watching them now, it amazed Jill that she had produced such healthy, good-looking, intelligent children, with an easy sophistication that showed in their confident postures and private-school polish. She knew she needed to remember that they were city kids, with global interests and worldly self-assuredness, with a mother who captivated New England TV viewers, and a father with whom they spent time at his impressive London flat. Jeff and Amy would never have to fight for what they wanted in life; they would never have to wonder what they had missed. After all, Jeff and Amy were not island kids. Jill had made sure of that.

  “Thought we’d see a whale or two,” Jeff shouted over the noise of the engines to his mother.

  She followed his gaze to the water. “Sorry, no whales. A few scallops, maybe.”

  Amy turned her head away.

  “Wasn’t your father a fisherman?” Jeff asked.

  Jill stared at the fast-approaching buildings: the Steamship Authority terminal, the Black Dog Tavern, the August-packed parking lot. She tried to ignore the nudge of guilt as she heard Jeff refer to “your father.” She’d always meant to bring the children to the Vineyard. She’d always meant to have them get to know their grandparents. But something more important had always come up. Now, her father had been dead a decade, and her mother … Well, Jill thought, now it’s simply too late.

  “Your grandfather ran the 1802 Tavern,” she said slowly, “named for the year it was opened by his family, six generations before him. He fished during scallop season. Like everyone else on the damn island.”

  Her last line drew a flash from Amy’s dark eyes—the dark eyes that were eerily identical to Jill’s mother’s—the grandmother Amy had never known.

  “Do we own the tavern now?” Jeff asked.

  Jill wrapped her sand-washed silk jacket close against her as the ferry bumped the pier. “No,” she answered, and let it go at that.

  The ride from Vineyard Haven was little more than a blur. Stalled by the stop-and-go traffic of summer people, by the shifting rental tides of a Friday afternoon, the oversized Range Rover that Christopher had leased was a dinosaur crawling along the road. Though she’d first balked at the hugeness of the vehicle she’d be stuck driving for a month, one look at the suitcases made Jill shut up. There were six for her alone: five for her wardrobe and one for makeup, sable brushes, hot rollers—necessary essentials for Jill to achieve the “natural,” viewer-pleasing look that she dared not be seen in public without.

  As they wove along the narrow streets, she tried to tune out the comments that drifted from the backseat: “Wow, neat,” Jeff said as they passed the gingerbread-style houses that hugged the road in Oak Bluffs; “Cool,” he whispered when a couple of teenage girls crossed the road toward the beach, their youthful bodies tightly packed into string bikinis. Amy, of course, was not talking.

  Through it all, Jill felt disoriented. Everything around her seemed so much smaller than she remembered: the houses were smaller, the dunes were smaller, the tourists, more plentiful. Heading into Edgartown, her head began to ache. She loosened the collar of her shirt.

  “Tell me where to turn,” Christopher said suddenly.

  She sat up straight and stared ahead. “Stay to the left,” she said in a voice that sounded like someone else’s, someone with a headache, someone in pain. “When you get to Water Street, go left again.”

  The houses were the same: close to the road, white colonial structures, trimmed in black or dark green, all looking freshly painted, all bordered by neat white picket fences. The stores were the same, too. Different names, perhaps, but the same small, quaint shops, the same open doors, welcoming tourists and their MasterCards. Here, too, everything looked dwarfed.

  At Water Street, Christopher turned left.

  They drove a block. Then two. And then Jill saw it: the sea captain’s house with the widow’s walk on the roof, the small paned windows, the narrow brick walk. It was her house, the house of her father and grandfather and generations before them. It was the house on Water Street; the house, and the life, she had once escaped. Now she was home.

  Slowly the ache in her head began to dull, replaced by the soft thumping of her heart in her throat.

  The key trembled in Jill’s hand. While Christopher and the kids stood impatiently behind her, she blinked her eyes quickly and rattled the lock. Finally, the brass handle turned. She pushed open the door and stepped inside. Stale air in the hallway crushed against her chest. She fought for breath.

  “Should the bags go upstairs?” Christopher asked.

  Jill nodded, unable to speak.

  The hallway was dark, darker than she remembered. A layer of dust had settled over the mahogany staircase. She stood, staring up the steep stairs, at the veiled light that filtered through the white eyelet curtains hanging from the window at the top. She half expected to see her father come down the steps, a pipe in his mouth, a newspaper in his hand; she half expected to smell the sickish odor of lavender hankies mixed with the pungent aroma of quahog chowder, and to hear the strains of Benny Goodman droning from the sewing room. But as she stood motionless, Jill saw only the gray diffused light, smelled only a thick scent of must, and heard nothing at all.

  “Which room?” Christopher asked as they bustled past her with suitcases and canvas bags.

  “Amy, take the back bedroom on the right,” Jill said q
uickly. The back bedroom had been her room. Once. Long ago. “Jeff, you can have the front one.”

  “And us?” Christopher asked, halfway up the stairs now.

  There was no sense pretending they didn’t sleep together. “Upstairs. To the left,” Jill said quietly. The bedroom to the left. The spacious room with a view of the street, a view of the harbor, and a tall fireplace across from the canopied bed. Her parents’ bed.

  She shook off her thoughts. “I’ll get the groceries.” She turned back to the open door, stepped outside, and breathed deeply, not feeling at all like the new TV royalty, but like a little girl again, that same little girl, trapped in the middle of the sea.

  Kyle wasn’t home from work yet. Rita went into the living room of the low-ceilinged, warped-floored saltbox where she’d lived all her forty-three years, except, of course, for twenty-six years ago, when she’d gone to live with her aunt in Worcester, first hiding out with a pregnant belly, then hiding the baby she’d decided to keep. The baby, Kyle. The four-year-old boy she’d returned to the Vineyard with and had told everyone he was three. Big for his age. Advanced. With the help of some Wite-Out and one of those new plain paper copiers they had at her typist’s job in the city, Rita had doctored Kyle’s birth certificate, and made it “official”-looking enough to enroll him in kindergarten two years later and keep tongues from wagging from Oak Bluffs to Gay Head.

  She flopped on the threadbare sofa now and rested her face in her hands. Those were the years she’d long ago chosen to forget. Those few people who knew the truth were, thank God, dead, except for Rita’s mother who would never tell a soul. But Rita had never been sure if Jill had known. And now Jill was coming back to the island.…

  “Shit,” Rita said. She stood up again and pulled off her SurfSide Real Estate blazer. Kyle was nearly twenty-five … twenty-six … years old now. Did it really matter what anyone thought? Did it really matter if anyone cared?

  She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw. If Kyle found out, what would he think of his mother? She had told him his father was a GI she’d married in Worcester, a soldier off to Vietnam. She’d said his name was William Smith, and that he’d been killed over there. After his death, the pain was too great for Rita, so she took back her maiden name and gave it to Kyle when he was born.

  At least, that’s what she’d said. It had seemed like such a simple lie at the time, a protective lie, an okay lie.

  Kyle had never doubted his mother. And he never pursued more knowledge of his father. Now, it all seemed so long ago, so long that Rita herself had come to believe the lie.

  The last thing she’d expected was that Jill would return.

  She went into the kitchen, plucked two ice cubes from the freezer, and dropped them into a glass. From beneath the sink she took a half-full bottle of scotch, not caring that she had to change into her waitress uniform and be at the tavern in an hour and a half, not caring how many cottages she had to clean tomorrow. She poured in two inches, then turned on the faucet. It coughed and choked, then finally spit out a dribble of water. Damn, Rita thought as she let the water drizzle into her glass. If only she could sell the house on County Road, the farm in Tisbury, or the B & B in Gay Head, if only she could sell something, anything—never mind Joe’s house—maybe she could afford to have the damn plumbing fixed. And the roof. And buy a new car.

  “Fat chance,” she said aloud as she took a deep swig from her drink. For even if she did come into a sum of money, a summer windfall, even if Joe decided to sell, Rita knew she could not risk spending the cash. Winter wasn’t far off and she knew only too well that winters could be expensive, with far more outgo than income.

  Two years ago, she could have sold her own house. It was hers free and clear, a parting gift from her mother. But when Rita’s boss, Franklin, was diagnosed with cancer and decided to sell the real estate agency, Rita had bought into the American dream. She’d mortgaged her house to the max, paid off Franklin, and become the sole proprietor of SurfSide Realty, complete with two secretaries and a downtown office.

  How was she supposed to have known the business wasn’t that great? How was she supposed to have known that within a year she’d have to let one, then the other secretary go, and that last month she’d be kicked out of her office as well?

  Plopping back on the sofa, Rita put her feet on the magazine-strewn coffee table and knew that if the market didn’t turn around soon, she’d be forced into living the way she’d been raised: renting out the house in summer, bunking in with her mother’s friends.

  As a kid, she’d pretended it was fun, bouncing from house to house, her bed often consisting of a sleeping bag on the floor of a cramped Cape, in a room filled with smoke and laughter and a boozy smell wafting from the crowd of adults huddled around the card table, playing pitch until dawn.

  She’d pretended it was fun, but in truth, it was humiliating—an annual reinforcement of the fact that Rita was poor, that she was not quite as good as her best friend, Jill, who had a big bedroom all to herself, twelve months a year. The last thing Rita wanted now was to feel those feelings again, to beg for somewhere to live, to admit that her struggle was no different than her mother’s had been.

  Kyle, of course, was her saving grace. He had turned into a hard worker, had used his woodworking classes in high school to learn carpentry, and this summer had landed a good job with Ben Niles, the well-respected restorer of Cape and Island homes—classy Cape and Island homes, the kind that could bring in a year’s salary with one commission. Hell, Ben even took Kyle on a couple of jobs to Nantucket this spring, and to Hyannis last month. Paid all his expenses in a nice hotel, bought all his food.

  Yeah, she thought as she took another sip of scotch, Kyle had a good job. And if she sold a hefty property soon, she could manage to keep the house for him, summers included.

  Rita swirled the ice cubes in her glass, knowing that Kyle had a good life ahead of him. As long as Jill McPhearson didn’t screw it up.

  “Jesus Christ, Jill,” Christopher said as he stood beside her at the tiny window in the kitchen. “Is that the Chappaquiddick ferry?”

  She finished unpacking the coffee maker with mechanical precision, a robot without emotion. “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe you never told me it was in your backyard.”

  The milk came next, then the orange juice.

  “This house is worth more than I ever imagined.”

  “Why? Does it give it some twisted sort of added historic significance?” As soon as her words were out, she wished she had clipped them. The sarcasm had not been intentional: Christopher, of course, was right. The location of the house did give it some kind of notoriety, warped though it may be.

  She ran her hand through her hair. “Why don’t you go look at the ferry while I finish in here?” she asked in her nicest tone. It had been a tedious day; her headache had not yet eased.

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all.” The kids had already dumped their suitcases in their rooms and taken off for the center of town. Jill wanted some peace right now, some time to herself.

  “Great.” He went out the back door, its screen slapping shut, the way it always had, the way Jill herself had made it slap so many times, so long ago, when she dashed off to school, ran off to meet Rita, or simply wanted to escape from the house.

  She went to the window and watched him walk briskly toward the ferry, his long legs trundling toward excitement, as though if he didn’t hurry, surely it would leave without him. She wondered how much restraint he would need to stop from swimming the channel to determine for himself if Ted Kennedy had done it so long ago, or was said to have done it.

  Then she leaned against the sink and realized that if it hadn’t been for Chappaquiddick, she might never be standing here now, with a hugely successful career, two wonderful—well, sometimes wonderful—children, and nowhere to go but up.

  It all began that Saturday morning in July, 1969. Her father was in the front room, scanning
the newspaper. Jill was upstairs in her bedroom, making her four-poster bed the way Mother insisted, the right way, with rigid square corners and no space for air.

  Then, Mother came in from shopping, bearing more news than the Vineyard Gazette.

  “A girl was killed last night,” Florence announced in a voice so loud Jill heard it upstairs. “In Ted Kennedy’s car.”

  She ran to the top of the stairs and listened.

  “Over on Chappy. The car went off Dyke Bridge.”

  Jill heard her father groan. “Oh, God. Why here?” The paper rustled. “I’d better get down to the tavern. All hell’s going to break loose.”

  Her father was right. Within hours, the peaceful island was invaded by police and investigators, a tidal wave of gawkers, and, worst of all, by the media. The peaceful island, whose inhabitants always protected the privacy of others, U.S. senators included, and gave them a haven from the microscope of the world.

  The people came, and for the first time the economy of the island flourished long past Labor Day, right through the January inquest. And though no one on the island enjoyed their usual post-tourist sigh that year, all reveled in the extra dollars they fed into their bank accounts.

  Florence Randall wanted no part of it. She would not allow the “incident” to be mentioned at the dinner table. She would not allow George to bring home any gossip that the mainlanders shared in the tavern. And, had she known, she would never have allowed Jill to cut school with Rita that cold winter day of the inquest, park her bicycle across from Duke’s County Courthouse, and watch, with stunned fascination, the army of outsiders clustered there.

  Rita was enthralled with the men. But Jill was distracted by something else: the women who had come in from Washington to testify. They were miniskirted and teased-haired, and they smiled with somber graciousness when faced with the cameras. And then there were the female reporters. Even they held a sophistication Jill had only witnessed among the wealthy summer tourists. But these were not tourists. They were working women with careers, with a place in this life and a sense of themselves that they could call their own, free from the confines of island life or the watchful eyes of hovering mothers.