Winter Solstice

by Elin Hilderbrand

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Bart asks. Here he is, all but proposing to the girl, and he hasn’t even checked if she’s available. Girls as pretty as Allegra always have boyfriends, he reasons. But then again, if she had a boyfriend, would she have agreed to come outside with him?

  “Had,” she says. “Until recently. Hunter Bloch. You know him?”

  “Ugh,” Bart says. “Yes.” Hunter Bloch was two years ahead of Bart in high school. He was a hockey player and his father had money, two factors that made Bart steer clear of the guy. “Until how recently?”

  “We dated for four months,” Allegra says. “I found out a couple of days ago that he was cheating on me.”

  Bart whistles. “Idiot.”

  Allegra executes her cute little bow again.

  “Maybe his stupid mistake is my good fortune?” Bart says.

  Allegra tilts her head. “Maybe.”

  Is it the tequila taking control of his brain, or is she actually the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on? “I haven’t dated anyone since high school,” he says. “I mean, before I deployed, there were girls… one-night stands.”

  Allegra says, “I would expect nothing less.”

  “Then I was held prisoner for two years,” Bart says. “I watched half of my buddies…”

  “Bart,” she says. She steps closer to him and takes his hand.

  Kiss her, he thinks. Does he remember how? He leans in. His lips meet hers, softly, so softly.

  Yes, he remembers how.

  KELLEY

  Mitzi is a social butterfly. A papillon. Kelley watches her from his wheelchair. He and Lara are stationed at one of the central tables, where he can feel like part of the action without having to do much. Mitzi gave up her fanciful notion of wearing the gold roller-disco jumpsuit—thank heavens, as it no longer exists—and instead chose a flowing purple gown with diaphanous sleeves that look like wings. Her wild, curly hair frames her face. Her cheeks are pink with excitement. She flits from group to group, grasping hands, leaning in to ask questions about this person’s new job, that person’s aging mother. How does she keep track of it all? Kelley wonders. One of the things that has come to him with age is a narrowing of the periscope; he cares, now, only about his family. But Mitzi, of course, is young and healthy, she thrives on interaction, and since they closed the inn, her world has shrunken considerably.

  Kelley wonders if, perhaps, she is anxious for him to hurry up and depart already, so she can get on with her life.

  What a maudlin thought! And unfounded! Whenever Mitzi moves from group to group, she seeks out Kelley’s eyes, waves, and blows a kiss.

  Kelley tries to take inventory of the rest of his family. The band has started playing, and Kevin and Isabelle are the first ones out to dance. They’re good, too, fluid and elegant, like the dancers in one of those movies Kelley’s mother used to love. Frances Quinn was a sucker for Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and for the large-scale productions of Show Boat and Silk Stockings. She loved a man in a white dinner jacket. When Kelley got married to Margaret, Kelley and his brother, Avery, and all the groomsmen wore white dinner jackets to the rehearsal dinner as a surprise for Frances. The photographer took a picture of all of them surrounding Frances. If Kelley is remembering correctly, that was the happiest Frances had ever looked.

  Frances Quinn would have loved Isabelle, Kelley is certain. She is classing up the Quinn bloodline. Even at two years old, Genevieve babbles in French; she can count to ten and recite the days of the week. She calls Kelley Grand-père and Mitzi Grand-mère. Margaret is Mimi.

  Where is Margaret? Kelley wonders. He doesn’t see her.

  Ava is standing at the bar talking to Mrs. Gabler, Bart’s kindergarten teacher. Ava is a saint.

  Paddy and Jennifer are sitting and eating, although Paddy is on his phone and Jennifer has a faraway, distracted look on her face. Are they okay? Kelley wonders. They have weathered a couple of big storms recently—Patrick’s incarceration, Jennifer’s addiction to pills—but Kelley thought the ship had righted itself. They don’t look miserable, just not as happy and carefree as Kevin and Isabelle.

  Where is Bart, the guest of honor? Come to think of it, Kelley hasn’t seen Bart all night. But since Mitzi doesn’t seem to be worried, Kelley isn’t worried. Although it must be nearly time to cut the cake—ice cream cake from the Juice Bar, a tradition—so Bart had better turn up. Just as Kelley thinks this, the side door opens and Bart walks into the party, holding hands with a Japanese geisha girl.

  Dear Lord, Kelley thinks. Is this girl a…? Did Mitzi arrange for a…? Did Kevin and Patrick, maybe, as a joke, hire a… stripper dressed as a geisha?

  Mitzi sees Bart and the geisha, swoops them up in her purple wings, and ushers them toward Kelley. No, not toward Kelley, toward the round table that holds the ice cream cake festooned with twenty-two candles, plus eighteen extra candles, one for each of the soldiers in Bart’s platoon who perished. That was at Bart’s request, his insistence.

  Lara turns Kelley in his chair so he has a good view of the cake. Jennifer and Patrick stand up, Ava breaks away from Mrs. Gabler, and the band finishes its song. Kevin leads Isabelle off the dance floor. Mitzi lights the candles, and Ava clinks a spoon against a glass. The crowd quiets and people gather around the table in a loose ring.

  Bart is still holding hands with the geisha. Kelley is confused. Who is it?

  “Who is that?” Kelley asks Lara, but his voice is drowned out when the band launches into “Happy Birthday,” and Lara wouldn’t know anyway, would she? Lara lays a hand on Kelley’s shoulder as everyone starts to sing.

  “Happy birthday to you.”

  It’s the worst song ever written, in Kelley’s opinion. Nobody sings it well. One person, maybe, in history. The woman in the white dress. What was her name?

  “Happy birthday to you.”

  Kelley will not live until his next birthday, which means he will not have to sit like a dumb mute while people sing to him terribly off-key. Another small point of gratitude. He cried when he was small and his assembled friends sang to him in Perrysburg, Ohio. Frances snapped a picture of little Kelley in tears with the white cake from Wixey Bakery; she relished showing this photo to the girls Kelley brought home. She showed it to Margaret.

  Where is Margaret? Kelley wonders again. Then he remembers that she declined the invite. She is retiring from broadcasting next month, so there are no more vacation days. He will see her at Thanksgiving. Hopefully.

  “Happy birthday, dear Bart.”

  Bartholomew James Quinn, born at 4:30 a.m., October 31, 1995, weighing eight pounds eleven ounces, measuring twenty-three inches long. Mitzi had pushed for ninety minutes without drugs. Without any drugs! She wanted to be present for every instant of the experience, and Kelley remembers the expression on her face when Bart was out, whole and healthy, wailing on her chest. She was radiant, exhilarated.

  “Happy birthday to you!”

  Bart takes a deep breath, then he turns his gaze to the geisha and blows the candles—all forty of them—out in one breath. The crowd erupts in applause and whistles.

  Kelley closes his eyes. Let the kid have his wish, he prays. Please, whatever it is, let that wish come true.

  AVA

  Potter offers to cancel his Tuesday-afternoon seminar on the nautical novel and come with Ava to Nantucket, but she tells him she thinks it will be best if she goes alone. Potter is hurt, she can tell, and every sentence she utters as an explanation—“My whole family will be there,” “My father is sick,” “It will be an emotionally fraught time”—serves to make things worse.

  “Isn’t that why you have a partner?” Potter asks. “So there’s someone to share the emotionally fraught times? So you have support? I like your family, and if you’ll forgive my hubris, I think they like me, too.”

  “They do like you,” Ava says. And it’s true: they do. They like Potter so much that Potter could go to the party and Ava could stay in New York and everyone would b
e just as happy, if not more so.

  “So why don’t you tell me what’s really going on?” Potter says.

  Because she can’t, that’s why!

  She has felt a shift since PJ’s visit. Maybe it’s a blip or maybe it’s something more substantial; Ava can’t tell. She feels like she failed. PJ hated her. What’s harder to admit is that Ava also feels that Potter failed. His parenting was rusty, she knows that, but he came across as weak and ineffectual, two words she never dreamed she would pin to his name.

  Ava had thought—and not unreasonably—that Potter was the real thing. The man she would marry. Meeting PJ was, in essence, the last frontier to conquer before they moved the relationship forward into lifelong commitment.

  But it all went so horribly, horribly wrong. The only bright spot was Ava’s unexpected rapprochement with Harrison, Trish’s boyfriend, an unlikely ally if ever there was one. Ava was too shy to tell Potter about her conversation with Harrison. After Harrison and Trish left with PJ, Ava went back upstairs to see Potter, who seemed relieved that PJ was gone. Relieved that his only child, whom he never saw, had been unceremoniously removed from his care. He squeezed Ava and said, “I don’t want you to dwell on what happened. None of this was your fault.”

  Of course it wasn’t Ava’s fault! She had barely interacted with the kid. PJ had seemed turned against Ava from the get-go. Maybe Trish had spoken ill of Ava, which hardly seemed fair, as the two had never met. Maybe PJ harbors hurt or angry feelings because Potter is never around. But he seems a little young to resent that. Trish took him to California when he was two, so he would have no memory of Potter and Trish together—and he seems to have bonded wonderfully with Harrison.

  You need to spend more time with PJ, Ava wants to tell Potter. Visit him more. Get to know him one-on-one. Forge a father-son relationship. Potter acted like an incompetent babysitter.

  And as for Ava, a concrete step she can take is to have a candid one-on-one conversation with the person she believes will best understand her predicament: Mitzi. The conversation is Ava’s main motivation for traveling all the way to Nantucket for Bart’s party.

  Once she has arrived at home, she realizes there are other benefits. She gets to spend time with her siblings, and she gets to see her father—who looks a little better than Ava expected. She gets to hug Bart after he blows out the candles and meet the girl suddenly attached to Bart’s side. The girl has come dressed in an exquisite geisha costume. Ava so admires it that she makes a mental note to find a similar one for herself for next year.

  Imagine her surprise when she discovers the girl at Bart’s side is Allegra Pancik, her former student. Ava had Allegra and her twin sister, Hope, in her first year of teaching; they were in the fifth grade. Allegra was unremarkable, but Hope showed enormous promise as a musician and went on to play the flute all through high school.

  “Hi, Miss Quinn,” Allegra says. She offers Ava her hand.

  “Allegra, good to see you!” Ava says. “How old are you now?”

  “Nineteen,” Allegra says.

  Nineteen. Ava can’t believe her students are now old enough for Bart to date.

  The real payoff for Ava happens after the party. She stays until the end because Mitzi stays until the end, even though Kelley leaves with his hospice nurse, Patrick, and Jennifer shortly after cake is served. Isabelle and Kevin head home to relieve their babysitter, and Bart disappears with Allegra Pancik. Hence, it’s just Mitzi, Ava, and the last few party stragglers.

  “Do you need me to help you clean up?” Ava asks Mitzi.

  “The caterers will do it,” Mitzi says. “Come on outside. I want to have a cigarette while we wait for the cab.”

  “Ohhh… kay,” Ava says. She knows Mitzi started smoking when she left Kelley to live with George the Santa Claus, but she thought she’d quit. Now, apparently, she’s back at it. Ava can’t really blame her, can she? Watching Kelley’s health deteriorate must be tough.

  They stand out in front of the VFW in the crisp fall air, and Mitzi lights up.

  “Only late at night,” she tells Ava. “After your father is asleep. Or after I’ve been drinking.”

  Ava holds up her hands. “No judgment here.”

  “Thank you,” Mitzi says with a relieved smile. “It’s too bad Potter couldn’t get away.”

  “He could get away,” Ava says. “He wanted to come, but I asked him not to.”

  “Oh no!” Mitzi says. “Trouble in paradise?” She laughs. “Forgive me for saying that. I’m too old to believe that anyone’s relationship is paradise.”

  “We had a challenging weekend,” Ava says. “His ex-wife and her boyfriend were in New York for a Shakespeare conference, and they left PJ, Potter’s son, with us. Well, with Potter. And Potter wanted to introduce PJ to me.”

  “Naturally,” Mitzi says. “How’d it go?”

  “On a scale of one to ten it was a negative thirty,” Ava says. She tells Mitzi about PJ screaming Friday night, about the video game on Saturday at the Museum of Natural History, about PJ texting his mother to say that Ava had touched him inappropriately.

  “Good heavens,” Mitzi says. “What a nightmare!”

  “Nightmare,” Ava concurs. She takes a deep breath and inhales some of Mitzi’s secondhand smoke, which isn’t unpleasant or unwelcome. “How did you do it, handling the three of us?”

  “Ha!” Mitzi says. “The worst year of my life was my first year married to Kelley. Do you not remember?”

  “Not really,” Ava says. “Bits and pieces.” She tries to hearken back. She was ten when they moved to Nantucket with Kelley. The boys were teenagers. Patrick was fine in Ava’s memory, Kevin less so—until he met Norah Vale. But what memories does Ava have of herself?

  “You were afraid of the dark, do you remember that?” Mitzi asks. “You were fine going to sleep on your own, but then during the night you would come into our room and demand to sleep with your father. I had to go to sleep in your room. You wouldn’t sleep in the bed with me, you hated me, and Kelley never said no to you because he felt so guilty.”

  Guilty, Ava thinks. Kelley felt guilty because he’d gotten divorced, then met someone new, then quit his high-paying job as a trader and moved the kids out of New York all the way up to Nantucket, which had been a favorite place of theirs in the summer. But living year-round on the island was another story entirely. Does Ava remember being scared of the dark? Not really. She remembers missing her mother. She remembers Kelley taking her to South Station in Boston and putting her on the train to New York by herself. She remembers crying when Margaret took her back to the train to send her home. She remembers coloring books, paper dolls, and then finally an electric keyboard with headphones to pass the four-hour ride.

  What does she remember about Mitzi? A standoff over a brown rice casserole. Ava’s refusal to let Mitzi take her shopping for her first bra. You’re not my mother. Ava said that a lot.

  “I was awful to you,” Ava says. “How did you deal with it?”

  “I cried,” Mitzi says. “I even called Margaret.”

  “You did?”

  “I called her without telling your father. I asked her what I could do to make you like me. To make you acknowledge me.”

  “And what did Mom say?” Ava says.

  “She wasn’t quite the wonderful woman she is today,” Mitzi says. “I can see now that your mother felt guilty as well. She had chosen her career, and Kelley had taken her children away, which she had fought at first, then reluctantly agreed to. She didn’t want you to like me or acknowledge me, but she did tell me to hold my ground, to be myself, not to spoil you or flatter you or ingratiate myself to you. She said you’d come around.”

  “And I did,” Ava says. “Right?”

  “You were always the hardest on me,” Mitzi says. “You were enamored with Bart, so I had that in my favor, but I always felt like you resented my presence in your life, in the family. And now look! You’re in a similar situation and you’ve come to me for advice.
I have to say, I find poetic justice in that.”

  “I’m sure,” Ava says. “And you have my wholehearted apology.”

  “I don’t need an apology,” Mitzi says. “You were a child.”

  “You also have my gratitude,” Ava says. “For sticking it out. Not only when we were kids, but two years ago. Thank you for coming back to Dad.”

  Mitzi takes a long drag of her cigarette. “When Bart was lost, I was lost,” she says. “Thank you for forgiving me.”

  “I love you, Mitzi,” Ava says. A lump presents in her throat. Has she ever told Mitzi this before? “You’re our… well, you’re not our biological mother, but you’ve been another mother, one we didn’t always appreciate like we should have.”

  “That’s nice to hear,” Mitzi says. “I love you and your brothers. I always have. Even when we were battling, I always loved you like you were my own.”

  Ava sees headlights coming down New South Road; the taxi is approaching. “So what should I do about PJ?”

  “In the words of Bob Dylan,” Mitzi says, “‘Keep on keepin’ on.’ Be yourself. Don’t spoil him or flatter him. Just treat him with love and respect and kindness. Let him feel that he can trust you. Let him understand that you’re not going anywhere, that you’re his ally even when he treats you like an enemy. You have a great advantage.”

  “I do?” Ava says.

  “Yes,” Mitzi says. “You’re the adult.” She smiles as the taxi pulls up. “And who knows, maybe twenty or twenty-five years from now, PJ will be asking your advice.”

  “Maybe,” Ava says. The idea of twenty-seven-year-old PJ coming to Ava for advice is preposterous—but not impossible. Mitzi holds the door to the taxi open, and Ava slides in.

  She smiles at the taxi driver. She feels much better. She is the adult! She, like Mitzi, will keep on keepin’ on.

  “Winter Street, please,” she says.

  PART TWO

  NOVEMBER