by Susan Wiggs
Besides, by that point, his thoughts had been consumed by Rosa Capoletti. He’d actually believed the sight of her would make the old feelings go away. Fuzzy logic at best, but it had made perfect sense after partying with his friends all evening.
He should have known it wouldn’t work like that. Rosa was special to him in ways he didn’t even understand, and seeing her again only confirmed it. The moment he’d laid eyes on her, he’d known. The sight of the nautilus shell, in a place of honor and with its own special lighting behind the bar, underscored his certainty. The shell was the first gift he’d ever given her, and discovering she’d kept it gave him food for thought.
He took another swig of beer and peeled the towel from around his neck. The day was already hot, but here on the shady veranda, the temperature felt perfect. Through stinging eyes, he surveyed the ancient property, once a place of family gatherings and elegant parties, a place where he used to run free with the best person he knew.
Even though the grass was cut and the hedges pruned, the garden had a neglected air. Lilypads choked the pond, probably fertilized by carcasses of koi.
On the far edge of the property was a huge stump, freshly cut and partially uprooted like a giant compound fracture. In a recent windstorm, the fallen tree had crushed the front section of the carriage house, crashing through the single-story garage while leaving the living quarters intact. Live electrical wires were involved, so the local authorities had ordered the tree removed. Power company workers had sectioned and stacked the logs and fed the branches to the chipper.
Other than structural damage to the building, which would be covered by insurance, the only casualty was his mother’s old car, a blue Ford that hadn’t been driven in twelve years or more. Each year his mother claimed she’d send someone to clean out the shed and have the old furniture, tools and car hauled away, and each year, she never got around to it.
Mother Nature put an end to the procrastination, and the local sheriff took care of having the car towed to the junkyard.
It was strange, being here at the beach house, a place haunted by cobwebs and memories. As he sat drinking and looking out over the yard toward the sea, he could hear echoes of his mother’s voice as she talked on the phone to this designer or that decorator, to his doctors and women she called “school chums” no matter how old they got. He could feel her hand stroking his forehead at night when he was sick, which was pretty much every night.
And there, where the property sloped down toward the beach, was the place he’d first seen Rosa Capoletti. The friendship they’d started that day had been touched by the bright, ephemeral magic of summer. In time their friendship had flared briefly, painfully, to passion and then finally disintegrated in an eruption of tears and recriminations.
He hadn’t thought it would hurt so much to see her again. He wasn’t prepared for that. He should have realized that what was between them had never died. It just lay dormant until the sunshine of Rosa’s smile and the moisture of old tears brought it back to life.
The beer imparted a faint buzz in his head. The need to sort out everything that had happened pulsed hard inside him, insistent, unexpected.
Unfortunately, if last night was any indication, she didn’t feel the same way at all. She’d regarded him like an uninvited wedding guest. Too damn bad. He was back, this was a small town and it was long past time that they figured things out between them. Of course, he could and maybe should simply deal with the property and take off again, but that didn’t feel right. His mother’s passing had shaken him in ways he hadn’t expected. There was something so achingly tragic about her death, because she’d never really lived.
It was probably a mistake to move back here, Alex reflected, yet it didn’t seem wrong. He’d made the decision impulsively, walking away from an apartment, friends, a whole life in New York City. In addition to leaving the city, he had committed to taking the summer off for the first time in his professional career. His assistant, Gina Colombo, would manage things for a few months. He only hoped he could do so without going stir-crazy.
His decision was fast morphing into something crazy and real. He’d come to a point in his life where he didn’t much like himself. He’d neglected the invisible, essential things, favoring a lifestyle over a life. He needed to figure out who he was when he wasn’t in the company of air-kissing friends and the strangers he called family. He needed the vibrance and fulfillment he’d found only once before—with Rosa.
A seagull circled and then hung suspended above the shallows as though tethered by an invisible kite string. The first time he’d ever flown a kite, he had been with Rosa. She was there for a lot of firsts: the first time he caught a striped bass, fishing in the surf. The first time he’d sailed a Laser all by himself, skimming like a guillemot over the waves at a speed that stole his breath away. She was the first girl he’d ever kissed.
He could only wish she’d been the first woman he’d made love to, that he’d come to her as pure and full of joy and apprehension as she’d come to him, but it wasn’t so. Even then, when he was gathering her into the deepest reaches of his heart, another part of him was running from her.
After leaving Rosa, he’d spent a few years trying to forget her. He did a good job of it, drinking and partying his way through college and business school, pretending he didn’t notice when a small, dark-haired woman walked past or when he heard a certain kind of laugh or a distinctive Rhode Island accent. Now, seeing her again, he understood that even after all these years, she still lived inside him the way no other person ever had. She was part of his blood and bone. From the first day they met, it had been that way for him.
Leaving her, when all his heart wanted him to do was love her, was the hardest thing he’d ever done—harder than understanding the mysteries of his family, harder than growing an investment fund when the market sank, harder than convincing his father he had his own path to follow.
A lobster boat, with bony arms extended out over the hull, chugged past, and then a small sailboat skimmed by in the other direction. It was a funny thing about this place by the sea. From this perspective, it seemed as though time stood still and nothing changed. With the exception of the ruined carriage house, everything here was exactly the same as it had been when he left, awash in pain and rage, vowing never to return.
Now a new kind of pain forced him to come back, against his will.
A decade had passed since he’d seen this view, felt this breeze, tasted the tang of salt in the air. Two years after the accident, once Pete recovered, Alex came back to explain everything, but by then it was too late. He hadn’t expected Rosa to wait for him and she hadn’t. She’d made a life for herself, and that included a boyfriend who happened to be a sheriff’s deputy.
From that point onward, Alex welcomed all the myriad distractions of his chosen profession, even cultivated them to pretend his busy life was fulfilling. With dogged determination, he avoided making a fool of himself over a woman he couldn’t have.
He cultivated a God-given talent in finance and joined the family firm, becoming a player in the great American investment game. As it turned out, he excelled at it. Clients who signed over their capital were rewarded with returns that exceeded all expectations. Within two years of joining the family firm, Alex earned his reputation of rainmaker.
And it was funny, really, when he thought about it. All he did was put two and two together. He might hear that adding a certain protein to baby formula had been proven to make babies smarter. The rest of the world would be surprised when the stock shot off the charts, but not Alex. He did his research and trusted his gut. He remembered arguing with his father about the IPO of an obscure little internet start-up called Amazon.com. No one had heard of it. Three years later, when that and similar equities soared 3800%, his father gave him his own fund to manage.
Some in the business believed Alex had an uncanny knack
for timing. He knew it wasn’t so. He read obsessively and knew how to interpret the signs of a company’s rise or fall. He didn’t do anything special. He just made sure he did it better than anyone else.
Among the funds he managed now was his life’s work—The Medical Assistance Private Trust. Its revenues were used to fund health care for the indigent. He’d argued long and hard with his father to found the trust, and only when he threatened to leave the firm did his father agree to it. Alex didn’t explain why the fund was so important. It was the one area of his life in which he was unequivocally doing good in addition to doing well, but of course, his father would argue with that.
Even more important was the Access Fund, another he’d created. It was consistently the least productive of the firm’s products because he had deliberately created it for people who rarely had money to spare. Unlike all other Montgomery funds, this one had no minimum investment. Some of his clients had given him twenty dollars to start with. His father and colleagues thought he was nuts, that he was wasting his time and the firm’s resources. Alex didn’t see it that way. He saw it as giving a chance to people who deserved a shot.
His head throbbed.
He dug into the pocket of his cutoffs and fished out the baby aspirin. He shook the tiny pills into the palm of his hand. How much bigger was he than a baby? It didn’t matter, he decided. The pills were so old, they had probably lost their kick. He tossed them into his mouth, tasting Sweet TARTS with a slightly bitter edge. He washed them down with a slug of beer. After a few minutes, his headache dulled to an aching thud. The hard blue lines of sea and sky gently melded and blurred. Nothing like a little beer and aspirin to buzz away annoying reality. Hell, in his family, it was a time-honored tradition.
He heard the crunch of tires on gravel. The slam of a car door made him wince. Maybe the expired aspirin wasn’t working so well after all.
He stood up too quickly, and images flipped in front of his eyes like a shuffled deck of cards. Then he set down his beer and went to see who it was.
He came around to the front of the house just as Rosa Capoletti raised her fist to knock at the door.
Before she noticed him, he took a moment to savor the sight of her. He half-hoped that last night’s attack of lust and longing had been caused by his drunken state. But no. In the stark light of day, she still had the power to stir his blood. She was earthy and colorful. She wore her dark, curly hair caught back in a ponytail. Even without makeup, her face was a study in vivid color—red lips and large brown eyes, darkly lashed, olive-toned skin that looked soft to the touch.
I suppose she’s pretty enough, his roommate at Phillips Exeter used to say as he studied the photograph Alex always kept with him, in a grape-stomping Old-World sort of way. Alex couldn’t remember whether or not he’d hit him for that remark. He hoped he had.
“Hey, Rosa,” he said as she raised her fist to knock again.
She turned quickly. “Alex. You startled me.”
He motioned behind him. “I was around back,” he said. “Join me?”
She eyed his bare chest, and her stare was so dubious, he thought she might walk away. But then she nodded once and headed for the porch steps. When she grasped the railing, the rotting finial broke off. She lost her balance and pitched forward.
Alex moved swiftly, in spite of his hangover, and grabbed her arm to steady her. “Hey,” he said, getting high on the smell of her hair, “are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Flustered, she disengaged herself from him and stepped back. “You ought to do something about that railing.”
“I intend to.” He half expected her to flee. Instead she followed him around to the veranda. He couldn’t get over how good she looked to him. She wasn’t just beautiful, but mature and confident in a way that made him wonder about the lost years between them. Even as a child, a motherless child, she had never been needy. But as an adult, she seemed completely self-possessed. She had transformed herself into an A-list restaurateur whose reputation for fun, food and fashion was unparalleled.
He caught himself checking out her tits. Her smooth skin deepened to shadowy cleavage where a tiny gold cross lay nestled.
“Would you like something to drink?”
Her glance flicked to the beer can parked on the arm of the wicker chair. “No, thanks.”
“I couldn’t find any coffee in the house.” Like that explained it. “I just got here and haven’t had time to stock up.”
She lowered herself cautiously to the bottom step, clearly hoping it wouldn’t collapse. When she turned to look up at him, there was a moment—maybe caused by the slant of light that fell across her face, or perhaps it was the beer and aspirin. But in that moment he saw Rosa as he had always known her. She was a laughing tomboy leading him on wild adventures, a shy teenager looking for her first kiss, a young woman glowing with the power of her big dreams.
Then the moment shifted, and she was a complete stranger again. A stranger who had a hot car, expensive clothes and a look of distrust in her eyes.
You made this happen, he told himself. You have only yourself to blame.
The thought prodded his temper. He was mad at himself, mostly, for being here in a place filled with ghosts and no coffee or food. He was supposed to be a respected businessman, established in his field. He didn’t like finding himself at a disadvantage.
He sat on the opposite side of the steps from her. Long ago, complete silence used to be comfortable between them. But that wasn’t the case now. He watched her fold her hands, open them, fold them again. She didn’t feel safe in his world. Maybe she never had.
“I heard about your mother this morning,” she said. “Alex, I’m so sorry.”
Ah, a sympathy call. He balanced his wrists on his knees and stared out to sea. “So now you know why I’m here.”
“Last night, you let me think it was because of me.”
“Last night, I had too much to drink.”
“Do you do that often?” she asked.
“If I did, I’d be better at it.”
“Don’t ever get good at something like that.”
He looked over at her, searching her face for some hint that she knew more than she was saying. Because, of course, there was so much more to the story than the papers reported. So much more to his magnificent, miserable mother’s life. And to her death.
Rosa’s expression gave no hint that she knew anything more than she’d read in the papers. “So do you have plans?” she asked.
Last night, before he’d seen her again, he would have sworn he was staying in the big old house for practical reasons. He planned to sell his apartment in New York City and open a branch office of the Montgomery Financial Group just across the Newport/Pell bridge. For now, he needed a place to live. But the moment he laid eyes on Rosa again, he knew his need to be here was much more complicated than that.
However, in his present condition, he was in no shape to explain himself. “The place needs fixing up,” he said.
She looked over at the carriage house. “Storm damage?”
“That’s right. The house could use some work, too.”
“Maybe it’s none of my business, but why aren’t you with your father?”
She hadn’t changed. She’d always been a family-first type of girl, which was one of many reasons they’d been such a mismatch. “I’ll be going up to Providence this afternoon to...help with the arrangements.” He knew he hadn’t answered her question, but that was all he had in him at the moment.
“I take it the two of you never grew any closer,” she said, reading between the lines.
Alex’s headache kept trying to come back. “I wasn’t the kind of son a man like my father knew what to do with.” He knew she understood that. She had seen him at his worst with his father.
She held him in that soft, ste
ady regard, the way she used to look at him long ago, never taking his measure, never judging him. And in that moment, she wasn’t a stranger at all. She was Rosa, the best part of his boyhood summers.
As a kid, Rosa Capoletti had been more fun than a Ferris wheel ride. As a teenager, she’d set his hormones on fire. Now, as an adult woman, she was lethally attractive.
Alex supposed he’d known women who were more beautiful than Rosa, women who were smarter and more cultured. But none of them—not runway models, Rhodes scholars or concert pianists—affected him the way Rosa did.
“Alex,” she said, “you still haven’t explained your plans.”
His true reasons for coming back to Winslow were rapidly emerging. It was nuts, completely nuts, but she’d nailed him. Again. Always. He had it worse than ever.
Maybe he was wrong about reconnecting with her. Maybe it was a mistake. Except that it wasn’t. It was rare that he knew the truth in his heart; he hadn’t felt the rightness of something in a long time but he felt it now. It was time. Events converged as though the universe was telling him to go for it.
“I’m opening an office in Newport.” It sounded so sensible, spoken aloud. But the fact was, he would not have come near this place if his mother had lived.
He flashed a grin to hide his pain. “Enough about me. Let’s talk about you,” he said.
“Alex, you just lost your mother.”
“All the more reason to avoid the extremely depressing topic of me.” He didn’t want to talk about his plans, his problems. He was sick of himself. He leaned back and gave her a long look. “So you’re Rhode Island’s premier restaurateur. That’s what they say in the papers.”
She smiled, and her whole being glowed with pride. Most people were too reserved to show the world who they really were, but not Rosa. If she felt it, she wore it on her sleeve without apology. She was living, breathing proof that the hard things of life didn’t have to defeat you—or even define you.
“You’re really something, Rosa,” he said. And before he could censor himself, he added, “You always were.”