by Grace Palmer
Sick and tired of being tired and sick, indeed.
And then there was Pete.
What could one even say about Pete? The obvious, she supposed. You could say that he was handsome, and you’d be mostly right. He was tall enough, and muscular enough, and kind enough to qualify. He had a nice smile and soft hands and he was a very good kisser, when he worked up the spirit.
But something just was off lately. He’d been working a lot, and by a lot, Holly meant a lot. She had known he was going into it that corporate law was a tough job if ever there was one. And, as the new guy at the firm, Pete got the crappy end of the stick more often than not. Not that thirty-three was that young, but Pete had gotten a little bit of a late jump on his law career, and he was already an old soul as it was, so to see him lumped in with all the twenty-four and twenty-five-year-olds in the firm’s associate class was a little blow to his and Holly’s egos—not that she’d ever admit that to him.
She was proud of her husband, of course. It had taken a massive stroke of willpower for him to wrench his life on track. He wasn’t an especially bad student at Nantucket High School, but neither was he a particularly good one. Utterly forgettable, unless you happened to be young Holly Benson, a late bloomer in her sophomore year, walking past big bad senior Pete and his friends playing hacky-sack in the school hallway after lunch, in which case you didn’t forget him at all. As a matter of fact, you fell so hard for him that you literally fell, and he came over to help you pick up your spilled lunch and mop the blood from your busted lip. You were so embarrassed that you wished you could die or disappear or just compress yourself into a tiny little mote of dust and float away on the wind. But Pete—well, Pete never got too embarrassed about anything at all, and he really truly didn’t think any less of you for tripping—everybody trips sometimes, that’s just how life goes, doesn’t it?—so he didn’t think you needed to be blushing quite so much, but he did think it was awfully cute, and he’d seen you around school before, and did you maybe want to go see a movie or something sometime?
It had been the start of the first truly significant thing to ever happen to Holly Marie Benson—the first thing that really felt like it was hers and hers alone. She was a middle child in mind, body, and soul, and God, it felt so good to have something that she didn’t have to share with her siblings. She could look up at Pete and think, Mine mine mine, you’re all mine, and she knew with absolute certainty that Pete, if he heard the train of thoughts running through her head, would’ve just smiled that soft smile at her and said, Yup.
Pete was great like that.
But corporate law as practiced at Zucker, Schultz, & Schultz was sucking the soul out of her husband. He still said and did all his Pete Things, the little peccadilloes about him that she loved because they made Pete Pete. He ate chocolate pudding first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. He read newspaper articles about local politicians out loud to himself under his breath and exclaimed at the end, Holly, can you believe this shmuck?! and made her come read for herself. He called her his “beautiful, never-ending Hollyday” whenever the mood struck. She loved the Pete Things. But lately, they felt like empty rituals; calorie-free traditions. Like he was leaving the better part of himself in the basement cubicle he slaved away in each day.
And when it came to the kids, it felt like Pete was always a day late and a dollar short. He loved his kids—no one in Pete’s orbit had even the slightest ounce of reason to doubt that. He had the fastest trigger finger in Plymouth County when it came to whipping out his phone and showing photos of Alice and Grady in all their splendor. Soccer practice, ballet recital, swim lessons—you name it, Pete had the picture to prove it, and no qualms about shoving it in your face so you could see just how great his kids were. It was cute. It was a Pete Thing. She loved it.
But the actual child care part of having children seemed to fall more and more on Holly these days.
To a large extent, that was fair and expected and totally fine, no worries at all. She’d chosen to be a stay-at-home mom, after all, hadn’t she? She’d been fine with it. Hadn’t her own mother been a stay-at-home mom? Hadn’t Mae given up a catering business that really seemed to be getting some buzz around town—so the stories went—in order to raise the four Benson children? Hadn’t they all turned out mostly fine? Yes, yes, and mostly yes. The point was that Holly had charged into stay-at-home-motherhood with fire in her heart and sanitizer in her hands, ready to take on all comers.
But didn’t all mothers do that, to some extent or another? It was like being young and never believing you’re going to get old. Every expectant mom hears the horror stories that come with the position—sleepless nights, thankless days, endless chores, then wake up and do it all again—and everyone fears it, of course. But there’s also always that little inkling in the back of your head, like, That won’t happen to me. She used to think, I’ll be more organized, and I’ll have them help me with chores, and If I just stay on top of x, y, and z, then it won’t pile up and it’ll never become an issue. That won’t happen to me.
That wouldn’t happen to her? Oh, how wrong she had been. She’d underestimated how hard it was to operate with no sleep, and she’d overestimated the ability of toddlers to do—well, anything for themselves. That wouldn’t happen to her? Of course it had, and it’d been just a little bit worse for her having had the audacity to think that it wouldn’t.
She loved her life. But it was tiring.
And this latest catastrophe was doing little to salvage her mood. They’d piled in the car that morning at eleven a.m. for the trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s, all packed and ready to go. Up to that point, it had been relatively smooth sailing. Then, twenty minutes down the road, Grady revealed that he hadn’t brought any shoes at all. Reverse course, grab shoes, try again. They made it thirty minutes this time before Pete remembered he didn’t have his laptop, which he’d need in case anyone from his firm requested something from him. Reverse course, grab laptop, try again. Forty-five minutes down the road on take number three. The signs for Hyannis Port were in sight. Holly could taste the freedom. A weekend at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Let them spoil the kids rotten. Let me sleep. She couldn’t freaking wait. But, 1.3 miles from the port, Alice decided she had to pee, RIGHT NOW. Reverse course, find a gas station, help the five-year-old navigate one of the most revolting bathrooms Holly had ever encountered. Then and only then did they make it to the port, park, wrangle their luggage onto the heaving ferry, and settle in for the boat ride to Nantucket.
Then it started raining.
Now, they were standing huddled under cover at the ferry station, waiting for Grandma Mae to come pick them up. Nobody was happy, Holly least of all.
“Mom?” Grady whined, tugging on her hand. “I’m hungry. Can I get a snack?”
“No, baby,” Holly replied. She was doing her best to mask her own irritation. “We’re going to have dinner at Grandma’s house as soon as we get there.” She couldn’t blame Grady too much for being hungry and whiny. She was pretty hungry and whiny herself. She checked her watch. It read 5:37. Her mother—the promptest individual ever to grace the face of Nantucket—was late. She said she was going to be at the ferry station at five sharp, and when Mae Benson said something like that, she followed through.
Except, not this time.
“Where do you think she is, hon?” Pete murmured.
Holly sighed and rubbed her temples. She had a massive migraine coming on, and the only thing that could forestall it was 3600 ccs of Chardonnay, stat. She knew her mom would have a bottle chilled and waiting for her at the house. Unpacking could wait. Holly needed that drink as soon as they walked in the door. “I don’t know, Pete,” she said.
“Have you tried calling her?”
Yes, of course she had tried calling her mom. Several times. Her dad, too, and Brent, but either the cell towers on the island were out or her whole family had decided to leave them stranded at the ferry station. “I’ll try again.”
/> She fished her phone out of her purse once more and dialed her mom’s number.
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Her annoyance grew with every ring. She made a silent agreement with herself to wait for five more rings. Four more. Three more. Two more. One more—
“Hello?”
Hallelujah, Holly thought gratefully. “Mom, where are you? We’ve been waiting—”
“Sis, listen.” It was Brent, not her mom. Why was Brent answering Mom’s phone? “Something’s happened.”
As Brent explained, the color drained from Holly’s face. Her mouth fell open. The shushing noise of waves against the docks behind them faded away. All she could hear was her brother’s voice, saying something that couldn’t possibly be true.
The phone slipped from her hand and hit the concrete floor with a thud. Grady went scrambling for it like it was a game. Pete and Alice looked at Holly in confusion.
“Babe?” Pete said. His eyebrows were wrinkled in concern. “Babe, what happened?”
Holly turned to face him. She was still holding Alice’s hand. Pete’s brown eyes were warm and worried.
“We need to get to the hospital,” Holly said. “Right now.”
13
Brent
The call he was about to make was not going to be easy. He’d been staring at the phone in his hand for damn near twenty minutes now. Eliza’s number was cued up already. He was about to press “Dial” when he noticed a little red notification bubble in the top bar of his phone screen. Frowning, he thumbed over to it. It was a text message. He must have missed it earlier in the day.
When he opened it, his heart sank.
Good day to be alive and on the water, ain’t it, son? —Pops
Brent put his head in his hands and cried like a baby in the waiting room of the hospital.
His mother came out sometime later. Brent wasn’t sure how long it had been. When he’d pulled himself together and stopped crying, he’d fallen into a weird and restless sleep, the kind of uncomfortable, pins-and-needles half sleep that seemed uniquely specific to hospital waiting rooms. It had been full of fleeting dreams that he didn’t remember and didn’t want to relive.
Mae had been in a small conference room down the hall with the Coast Guard crew who’d found Pour Decisions capsized. They’d been debriefing her on everything, and then the doctors had come in to deliver their final report and confirm what everyone already knew. Brent had stepped out of the meeting room to call his sister, but he’d utterly failed at that simple task. He’d failed his sisters, his mother, his father. It was a day of failure.
Brent woke up at the sound of his mother’s footsteps. He straightened up in his chair and wiped the salty tear tracks from his face. He was shivering in the crisp air conditioning. His clothes were still damp to the touch from when he’d gotten soaked by the rain. It was night outside, now, and the downpour had ceased. All he could hear was the insect-like buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead and the soft chirping of machines up and down the hospital hallway. That, and his mother’s footsteps.
She was standing at the mouth of the hall. Standing still now, standing proud, standing dry-eyed. She was a strong woman. Brent knew that—he had been a handful. Between that and the way she butted heads with Sara constantly, Brent was aware that raising the Benson children had not been a task for the fainthearted. It took heart; it took a steel will. Mae had both in spades.
“Mom,” Brent mumbled. He stood unsteadily.
She didn’t say anything. She just strode over and took her youngest son into her arms. They held each other. Weirdly enough, neither of them cried. Brent had been sure, in the short seconds between her emerging from the conference room followed by the Coast Guard captain and the chief doctor, that he was going to bawl again as soon as his mother embraced him. He’d been dreading it. But to his surprise, he didn’t cry anymore. And she didn’t, either. He just hugged his mom, and she just hugged him, and that was that.
“I couldn’t do it, Ma,” he said when they finally pulled apart. “I couldn’t call her.”
She held him at arm’s length and looked somberly into his face. “Brent Evan Benson,” she said with a wavering voice, “you can and you will. You need your siblings here, and I need my children. Take a breath, get a cup of coffee, and call her.”
She knew him inside and out. He’d never been the most complex of creatures, which was fine with him. Who had time for all the multifaceted layers of emotions that Holly and Sara both seemed to revel in? Brent took after Eliza and his father in that regard. Simple guy; an A-to-Z, soup-to-nuts kind of man. Straight-line fella. He took pride in that fact, or at least, he once did. He’d been wondering over the last couple hours, though, whether he was actually not stoic but emotionally stunted. Something less than the John Wayne-type gunslinger he’d spent his whole life picturing himself as. Maybe he just didn’t have enough practice painting with the full set of emotional colors. Black and white worked great until you tried to paint a sunset.
He wondered, not for the first time, how his father would handle this situation if their roles had been reversed. The funny thing about people like Henry—people of strong and unique character—is that, even when they’re not around, the people who know and love them know what they’d say and do if they did happen to be in the neighborhood. Brent could hear his dad’s voice in his ear, as clear as if the man himself were standing just behind him out of sight.
“What’s with the waterworks, kiddo?” he’d say. “That sure ain’t gonna help much.” Henry had been Nantucket-born and bred, but he’d picked up a Southern twang like he spent his whole life below the Mason-Dixon Line. Some folks around town used to call him the Nantucket Cowboy. Brent and Sara had chipped in to get him a pair of rattlesnake skin boots one Christmas—the flashiest, most ridiculous pair they could find online—and Mae had been straight-up mortified when Henry took to wearing them around the island. Brent could still close his eyes and picture his dad stepping out of his beat-to-hell old pickup truck, the one with tools rattling around the bed and the radio permanently dialed in to 98.1 WCTK—the country music station. He could picture him hitting the ground, one rattlesnake skin boot at a time. He was pretty sure that Mae had thrown the boots out when Henry wasn’t looking.
Should’ve never let you go to the Garden, Pops, Brent thought. He wondered if he was losing his mind. Maybe this whole imaginary conversation with a ghost was trauma-induced delirium. Maybe he oughta check himself into one of these hospital beds and hang out for a little while. Get the demons upstairs all sorted out. Lord knows they were flocking to the forefront of his mind right now, with the volume on their babbling cranked to ten.
You let him go.
You could’ve stopped him.
Why didn’t you try harder?
Your fault.
Your fault.
Your fault.
“Brent?” Mae said, interrupting the chorus in his head. “I need you here with me right now, baby.”
His mom was right. He didn’t have time for this guilt trip. That would come later, probably, in his apartment with the lights off and the window blinds drawn. It would’ve been an awfully good time to have a drink on hand. This was a rainy-day emergency in every sense of the word.
“I’m gonna call Eliza now,” he mumbled.
She nodded, studied his face one more time, then pulled him into another hug and raised herself up on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. “I love you, honey,” she whispered in his ear.
“Love you too, Mom.”
They let each other go again, and this time, when Brent went back to his rickety, uncomfortable little seat in the waiting room, he pulled up his phone screen, and dialed Eliza’s number before he could think of an excuse not to.
14
Eliza
The subway was chaotic. But that was how Eliza felt on the inside, so it was weirdly calming to see the outside world reflect her emotional state. It actually made her feel calmer. Like she was the center of the storm, holding
the world together.
She rode the 2 train to the 96th Street station on the Upper West Side and walked the remaining four blocks home. On the subway and in the crowd that flowed off it, she felt like one little droplet in a big river. Her problems didn’t seem so big or so pressing when she was surrounded by hundreds of people who had problems of their own. The people on her left and her right had bills to pay, sick parents, aching backs. They’d just gotten fired or married or caught the flu. They had leaking roofs and broken radiators and holes in the bottoms of their shoes. There were as many problems as there were people. So, in the midst of all that, a baby didn’t seem like quite such a problem at all. In fact, it seemed like a blessing in comparison. A little baby for her to love, who would love her in return. Eliza wouldn’t exactly say she was all of a sudden excited about the prospect of motherhood, but as she looked around and saw people begging and sweating and looking glum about life, she definitely felt a degree or two better than she had during her panic attack in the bathroom at work.
A sudden memory popped into her head. She’d been in the backyard one summer with her dad. She was eleven, maybe twelve years old. They were practicing for the upcoming softball season. Tryouts were a few weeks away. Eliza had begged her dad to come hit grounders to her. He’d pretended to protest when she asked, then laughed and got up from his reading armchair to rescue his old leather outfielder’s glove from the junk closet. They’d played catch for a bit to warm up. It was evening, early enough for the sun to still be setting, but late enough for the fireflies to start exploring.
When she was ready, Dad had picked up the bat and started hitting grounders to her. Slow and easy at first. “Hit them harder, Dad!” she’d said. “Rachel McGregor hits grounders really hard every year. I want to be ready.” Her dad had flashed a grin and acquiesced. Harder they came. And harder. And harder.