The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  There were two calls from a friend who wanted to know if Will would sail with him in the Around the Island Race on the Fourth of July.

  One of our neighbors down the street had invited Will to dinner on a Saturday night that passed a few weeks ago.

  But one of the first calls on the tape, which meant that it came close to the day Will died, was from Crystal Sparrow. "Hi, Will, it's Crystal. I just wanted to say that I'm really sorry about what happened the other night. Maybe I'll see you around." Click.

  And of course there was the call from Vicki, which we listened to, gaping at the machine, as if it had powers beyond making a record of her voice. "Hi, I'm looking for Sophy. This is, um, Vicki, and I, um, thought you might be there because your husband is very sick but I guess you're not. I hope it's not serious, like AIDS or a coma or anything. That's the main thing I wanted to say but I didn't want to bother you if you're like in a hospital or a nursing home."

  Then the machine's electronic voice took over and told us she had called on Saturday at ten twenty-seven A.M. Four hours ago.

  "Your husband was sick?" Henderson said.

  "Maybe Daniel told her that to explain why I'd left the city in such a hurry. She asked me a few times if I'd ever been married, so she knew there was a husband in my past."

  When the phone rang an instant later, both of us sprang back from it, as if it were a sleeping turtle that had suddenly started snapping. I lifted the receiver and said nothing for two or three seconds, hoping to locate the geography in the silence. But there was only stillness and then a woman's voice. "Is this where I can reach Will?"

  It was.

  "Do you have his new number?"

  "He doesn't have a new number. He's dead. This is his wife. Who's calling?"

  No answer.

  "Is there something I can help you—"

  "I'm so sorry. No, never mind," and she hung up, as if wanting to bolt from the news. Was it Crystal again? It didn't sound like the woman on the tape. No, this new woman was older, more businesslike. I remembered the personal ad he'd started to answer on his laptop. There may have been another that he had answered.

  "Who was it?" Henderson asked.

  "She didn't say."

  "They turn up, these mystery callers, after people die, if you're lucky. My friend Claudia was married for ten years, and when her husband died, she didn't discover one surprising thing about him. No one from his past showed up. He hadn't scribbled a revealing line in any of his files or books; hadn't even saved a love letter. She was terribly disappointed."

  "No danger of that with Will. I think we're due for a few more surprises."

  The next one arrived later that afternoon. Henderson had gone back to the Lighthouse Motel to take a nap and found a telegram for me. He called and read it over the phone.

  SHOCKING NEWS. MY SINCEREST CONDOLENCES TO YOU

  AND WILL'S CHILDREN. HE WILL BE MISSED.

  ARTHUR GLASS. US EMBASSY. MANILA. THE PHILIPPINES

  Will had never mentioned an Arthur Glass but had referred to an "Arty" he'd known in Vietnam. Nothing strange about the missing last naine: Welcome to the CIA, where name recognition costs people their lives. Maybe Arthur Glass was Arty and maybe he wasn't. The mystery was how he had learned of Will's death when none of the obituaries had yet come out; how he knew my name and that I was staying at the Lighthouse Motel. The most obvious scenario, I told Henderson, was that someone at the Swansea Sentinel knew Glass and ran Will's name by him when confronted with the obituary I had sent there. If Will were alive, he would have spun out two or three other possibilities, reluctant spy though he was.

  But Will was dead, and he did not speak to me that day or that night, though I sat in his kitchen, beneath the room where he had died. Nor did I hear from any of the other voices that sometimes take up residence in my head. I can only think these rooms were so silent because the people who did speak to me had such urgent statements to make that there was no room for anything softer, gentler, more imaginative. And the house—you're probably wondering what it was like for me to be in this house that had been mine until a few months before. I had stage fright, which is to say that most of my terror disappeared once I got there and walked through the first floor, showing Henderson around. Before long, I even got used to the changes Will had made since my departure, removing all signs of me, taking down photographs and posters we had bought together, placing my favorite coffee mugs in the back of the kitchen cabinets, and a stack of my gardening books on the floor of the front hall closet, behind his winter boots. Once Henderson left, I looked through some of those books as if they were old yearbooks, scrapbooks, souvenirs of past lives. I kept to the first floor, and when I passed the staircase, I tried not to look at it. When the phone rang, I jumped. And when Henderson returned at seven o'clock that evening with a bag of groceries to cook me dinner, I cried, because I knew it meant that Will was dead, because that is what happens when someone dies: your friends come to your house with food.

  There were five phone calls. One was from Daniel, asking if Vicki had called again. One was from the detective in New York, asking the same question. One was from Susanna, telling me they had met with Father Kelly at our Lady of Perpetual Something or Other, and Will's funeral would be Monday afternoon at one o'clock. If I would like to say a few words or read a poem, they could schedule that into the program, but I had to let them know by Sunday noon. I did not ask what would happen if I let them know Sunday at sunset, because I was afraid that my anger at being reduced to a slot on the schedule would flare and combust. Susanna asked whether the little girl had called again and I needed a place to stay for the night, and her consideration skimmed away the top layer of my anger. I said I didn't think so but would let her know.

  But it was the last phone call, at nine o'clock, as Henderson and I were eating dinner, that I least expected. It was Evan, saying he needed a favor. Urgently. Could he come by in fifteen minutes and explain?

  Of course I said yes.

  11. The Chicken Coop

  THERE WAS a chatty article in the Times about the recent celebrity auction on Swansea, held the third Saturday of every August. It raises money for the social service agency where year-rounders go for drug and alcohol counseling, domestic violence awareness classes, and assistance in applying for welfare and food stamps. Once the summer people leave, scores of shops, restaurants, and hotels shut down for eight or nine months, which earns Swansea the unexpected distinction of being the poorest community in the state; hence the need for an agency so at odds with the island's affluent image.

  According to the Times, the auction raised $150,000, with star-struck summer people paying thousands of dollars for an afternoon sail with a certain movie star, a kayak-and-lunch trip with a famous nature writer, a private ballet lesson with a Russian whose gnarled, arthritic feet have been photographed by Richard Avedon—and lunch at "21" with Evan Lambert, which went for $11,500. The Times reporter got someone who would not speak for attribution to say that the scandal Evan and his wife were involved in earlier in the summer may even have increased Evan's auction value. It certainly did not hurt it.

  I'd had a taste of Evan and Mavis's troubles the night he removed me from the Winstons' clambake. The story behind the strife was about to become extremely public soon after Evan called me the night I kept vigil at Will's house, hoping Vicki would phone again. Though Evan's and my fortunes were closely linked during those few days, though he was a major player in my life that weekend, I had only a minor and very private role in the dramas that were about to be played out.

  Henderson and I were eating the classic island dinner he'd prepared for me when Evan called: grilled swordfish, local corn on the cob, and roasted baby potatoes brushed with olive oil and rosemary, the first full meal I had eaten in three days. It seemed too splendid for the circumstances, but Henderson explained that that was the point: to be reminded that there were also miracles in the world, swordfish and fresh corn on the cob chief among them. The food and
its preparation took my mind off images of Will on the floor upstairs, scenarios of what could have happened to him. If he had had a heart attack, was it as he slept, and could it have propelled him off the bed and onto the floor, where Ben found him? Or had he been felled as he crossed the room on his way to the toilet? I could ask Ben which way his body lay, but I shuddered at the thought. A prurient question, ghoulish and irrelevant, something the National Enquirer would want to know. And if I asked, Ben might tell me the truth, and the truth might be that he had found Will sprawled on his stomach, arm groping futilely for the phone on the bedside table.

  I was on the verge of telling some of this to Henderson, as we ate and waited for Evan to arrive, when the phone rang again.

  Like children in a game of Statue, we froze, as we had every time it emitted an electronic bleat. Like adults in crisis and in love, we felt our pulses quicken. Narratives coursed through our veins.

  My fingers tingled as I reached for the phone. But it was not Vicki. It was a computer voice selling subscriptions to The Soap Opera Digest.

  I mention it—I remember it—because it was a moment of comic relief for us, because it inspired the light-hearted turn our conversation took, and we ended up joking about what favor Evan could possibly want from me. "Probably not money," Henderson said, "or the baby-blue polyester curtains in your room at the Lighthouse Motel or your prewar Volkswagen with original upholstery." At that exact moment, like a period at the end of the sentence, the doorbell rang.

  Turned out it was the car Evan needed, and me to drive it, a sort of getaway job. "I'm about to pick up my brother and his family on the nine-thirty ferry. The young woman I told you about, Jenn—"

  "Twenty-five?"

  He nodded. "She's also going to be on that boat. I need you to take her to the chicken coop, the place I offered you. She had to leave Boston unexpectedly."

  "Can't she get a cab?" Henderson asked. "Sophy ought to be here in case Vicki calls again. I'd offer to drive, but I never learned how."

  Evan turned to me, and when he saw that his weighted silence could not persuade me, he said, "I know this is a difficult time for you, and under ordinary circumstances you know I wouldn't—"

  "Is she in trouble?" I asked.

  After a moment, he said, "We're all in a bit of a jam."

  Then there was another silence, with Henderson and me waiting for an explanation, and Evan mulling over whether he should give us one.

  "This is the young woman you used to be..." I said driftily, thinking it might loosen his tongue.

  "I want her to be seen by as few people as possible. You know what it's like here. I wouldn't impose on you if there were anyone else I could trust with this—" He went silent again and looked at me hard, as if I were a juror he had to bring around, someone stony-faced, unreadable, mute. I was divided, not in two, but in three: I wanted to sit by the phone for Vicki; to help Evan out because he had gone out of his way to help me; and to help him out, not to repay his favors but because I was, after all this time, and in spite of everything, flattered that he needed me, even to be his chauffeur.

  Henderson must have seen the way Evan was looking at me, a little needy and off-kilter, the usual suaveness squashed, and he—Henderson—must have done some calculations of his own. "If Vicki calls," he said, "I suppose I can do what's necessary"

  It wasn't until Evan and I were outside, standing between our two cars, that he explained. "I didn't want to say much in front of Henderson. I just got word there'll be a nasty story in the Boston Herald tomorrow morning. There's a guy with a vendetta against Mavis for her work on the sexual harassment committee at Harvard. When he was investigated for two or three complaints and his contract wasn't renewed, he did enough snooping to learn something about Mavis that's going to force her to resign from the committee. That pile of dirty linen led to another—Jenn and me. A scandal-mongering reporter who's been out to get me for years because he doesn't approve of my clients was handed a sex scandal with my name on it. The whole mess'll be on page one. In the midst of all this, Mavis and I are having a cocktail party tomorrow night for tout le monde to honor my law school pal Judge Tucker, who was just nominated to the Second Circuit."

  "But what about Jenn? Why is she coming here now?"

  "Jesus," Evan said, looking at his watch, "the boats about to dock. I'll point her out to you and vice versa. She knows a friend of mine will take her to the chicken coop, where she'll hide out for a few days. That's all you need to know. And this." He reached into his back pocket and handed me an index card, filled front and back with his blocky print. "Directions to the house."

  "Is she delusional, thinking she can hide here?"

  "She's a kid. She panicked. I'll go the back way to the ferry. Follow me." A moment later, Evan's headlights flared, and he was out of the driveway and most of the way down Longfellow by the time I got the Rent-A-Wreck into first gear. He meant "follow me" in a general way—more like "catch me if you can." I caught him at the end of the next block. For a few minutes, the soupy rattle of the old VW engine and the logistics of our route—a series of right turns onto narrow one-way streets, then left into the alley beyond the old Swansea Bank & Trust—obscured the news Evan had handed me. Then the news obscured everything else.

  From the parking lot, I could see that the ferry was not in its slip yet. I killed my headlights and looked out to the harbor, in the direction of Chillum's Point. A familiar brushstroke of bright light moved across the darkness. Funny, the things you learn to interpret; from the position of this particular speck, I knew it would be six or seven minutes before the boat would make landfall. I spotted Evan in a growing cluster of people assembled on the landing where passengers without cars would disembark, coming off a ramp that rose to meet a door on the second level of the ferry. Something about trying to keep track of him as he drifted through the crowd gave me the idea that Vicki might turn up on the boat, too; I might find her if I looked hard enough. She's a kid, she panicked. Hadn't we all, beginning with me and my mad dash from New York, racing here as if Will were on his death bed, Vicki following me, as if I were on mine?

  Do you wonder whether I was besieged with thoughts of what might have happened to her, the horrors, the headlines? I was and I wasn't. When the thoughts came to me, they arrived like stones pitched through a window—unexpected, scaring me out of my wits. Without them, I felt a steady thrum of anxiety, my pulse racing, heart working much too hard.

  Next time I looked toward the water, I saw the ferry a few hundred feet off shore, its giant garage-like door halfway up, weirdly ajar and about to disgorge fifty cars. My spirits lifted suddenly, incrementally: Hello, Pavlov. My years of living here made the sight of the ferry a tonic. Someone was coming to visit. The possibility of comfort, of company. Or was some part of me energized by Evan and Mavis's undoing, the spectacle of the mighty falling? Of Mavis, the shrill moralist, being unmasked? Was it schadenfreude or was it relief at the distraction from my own troubles? All, I'm afraid, of the above. I read the directions to the chicken coop before I got out to join Evan on the receiving line.

  From ferry:

  West on Ocean Dr. 8.2 mi. R. on Gulley's Creek .6 mi. to stone pillars. L. onto dirt road. Go 1.3 mi. to 3-way fork; take middle fork .7 mi. to tree on R with 4 signs nailed to it ("Green House" "Randolphs" "Baxters" "Coop"). Take R and go .8 mi to tree on left with sign that says "Coop." Turn left immediately after the tree, even though path looks too narrow for cars. Go 1.7 mi. Yr headlights should be shining directly on coop.

  Crawford Cove on your right, 200 paces.

  I had been given directions as eccentric as these to plenty of places on Swansea. I loved the poetry in them and dreaded the prose: one wrong turn at one unmarked tree, and you're as lost as Hansel and Gretel. That had happened to me one night coming back alone from a friend's house at Indian Pass, in the heart of the old forest. Round and round I'd gone, a rat in a maze, while my gas gage slipped toward empty. I kept looking for the middle path by the tree t
hat had her name on it, then for someplace wide enough to turn around in, then for any house with lights on, then for any house at all. Just when I'd started to panic, the dirt road gave way to pavement.

  At first I didn't notice Francine Cooper in the crowd of people waiting for the boat. I was looking for Evan, who kept disappearing behind a gaggle of tall, rail-thin teenage boys wearing backward baseball caps. Francine's auburn hair was pulled back, and I was used to seeing it down around her shoulders. She was waving to people on the upper deck, though it was so dark up there, I don't know how she could make anyone out. "Francine," I said loudly, and she turned around, searching for the face attached to the voice. I could tell she saw me approach but wasn't sure whom she was looking at. Then she was. She was no friend; she was my divorce lawyer. I'd found her through an article in the island newspaper about unusual custody arrangements. She had recently moved here from Boston, another overcharged city girl with island fantasies. The day before, when I'd phoned her office, I was told she'd be back to work on Monday.

  She did not know Will was dead, and it took her a moment to recall what had become of the separation agreement I'd signed and Fed Exed her earlier in the week. "It was supposed to go to your husband's lawyer so that he could get your husband's signature on it. My secretary typed up a cover letter and left it for me to sign." Seems it had a glaring and most peculiar error, a little too severe to be called a typo: Enclosed is the signed Separation Disagreement. Francine had scribbled a correction and assumed the new cover letter would be waiting in her office on Monday.

  "What does all this mean?" I asked her.

  "Number one, you're still married. Number two, I'm the only one who knows you signed the separation agreement."

  "Which means?"

  "If he died without a will, as his spouse you're entitled to half his estate."