by Susan Wiggs
“I pray I’ll never have to tell them about...” She nodded toward the medical examiner’s report. “My God, I have no idea how I’d explain that.”
As he watched the anguish on his sister’s face, Alex felt a fresh surge of fury. Their mother had been fully aware of the impact her suicide would have, especially on Maddy and her two kids. Yet she’d done it anyway.
Somehow, they managed to discuss “arrangements.” It seemed surreal to be doing so. Surprisingly, Madison took over. His sister wanted the burden. She was one of the youngest and best hostesses around, and planning events—even her own mother’s funeral—was second nature to her. She had very definite ideas on flowers and music. Alex wondered how she could even begin to think about those things. Maybe it kept her from thinking about the harder stuff.
Their father agreed to everything without discussion. Every time Madison asked if he had a preference, he would simply say, “Whatever you decide is fine.”
Alex felt queasy. At the end of a thirty-six-year marriage, you’d think there would be more to say.
“What should we do with this file?” Madison asked.
“I don’t know. Do we need it?”
“I certainly don’t. Did she have life insurance? I’m sure they’ll reject the claim after the ruling.”
“She never had life insurance,” their father said.
Madison looked intrigued. “She didn’t?”
“She used to say, ‘Dead or alive, I’m worth a fortune, and I can pay my own claim.’”
Madison looked bereft. “I suppose I never really knew her. I wonder if any of us did.”
It was a strange and sadly true thing to say. Alex patted her on the shoulder awkwardly. “Not me. Father?”
“This is not productive. It’s completely speculative.” His cell phone rang, and he looked at the display. “It’s the funeral home. I need to take this.” He strode outside.
“I’m never going to be a mystery to my kids,” Madison declared, dabbing at her face. “I swear that right now. No secrets. No mysteries.”
“Good plan. Now. Can I get a lift with you and Dad back to Providence? I’ll help you with the funeral. Then I need to pick up my car and bring some things back here for the summer.”
She balled up the Kleenex in her hands. “Don’t you have a car here?”
“Friends from Newport drove me.” He didn’t explain that he’d been in no condition to drive.
“And then just left you? Some friends. Isn’t Mother’s old car in the garage?”
“Apparently you haven’t seen the garage.” They walked out back and he showed her the storm damage.
“Oh,” she said, examining the caved-in roof, the crushed window frames and split timbers. “So what are you going to do about this mess? God, the whole place is a project.” She spread her hands and looked around the vast gardens, the plant-choked pond.
“Alexander, I want you to reconsider this move,” their father said in a tone Alex recognized from a hundred childhood lectures. “The house is barely livable. Find a condo in Newport. I can have my secretary find you a place by the end of the day.”
“No, thank you. I’ll be fine here. There’s work to do, and I’ve got a whole summer to do it.”
His father shook his head. “You’re going to need more than a summer.”
“We’ll see.” Alex backed away from a full-blown argument. That was one thing his family was good at, so they didn’t need any practice.
The three of them left the place together, and oddly, Alex felt eager to head for the city, to get through the ordeal of the funeral. Sometimes he thought his plan was as crazy as his father kept telling him it was. Coming back here was insanity. The entire property was haunted by memories.
Now, finally sober for the first time in a couple of days, Alex discovered something. He wanted to explore the ghosts of memory that drifted through the old, empty house, because a large part of who he was still resided here.
twelve
Down at the Galilee docks, the air was thick with the reek of the day’s catch—lobster and bluefish, mussels and quahogs, mounds of striped bass, scrod and tuna. Rosa strolled along with Butch, who marked things on an order sheet attached to a clipboard.
As owner and general manager of the restaurant, she could—and probably should—leave the buying to her employees, but the fact was, she liked coming here. It was a place where nostalgia hung thick in the atmosphere of ice-cooled warehouses. This was her world, and a sense of belonging folded around her felt like a hand-crocheted afghan. She watched the birds congregating on the corrugated rooftops of the icehouses and warehouses, and listened to the chug of ships’ engines.
“I love the smell of seafood in the morning,” Butch said, inhaling dramatically.
“Me, too.” She stepped over a drying net buzzing with flies.
“Come on.”
“It’s true. I used to come here with my mother.” She smiled, picturing her mother in a crisp cotton dress, her pocketbook strap looped over one tanned arm, her shopping bag over the other. “Her cioppino was legendary. Guys here fell all over themselves, trying to wait on her.”
“Hey, my cioppino is legendary,” he said.
Chefs, she thought. The good ones all seemed to be made of equal parts talent and ego.
“As a twenty-seven-dollar menu item, it had better be.”
“It’s the saffron.” He wandered off to place his orders.
Rosa waved to Lenny Carmichael, a second-generation lobsterman she’d known since grade school. In his hip-high yellow boots and Red Sox baseball cap, he looked exactly like his father. She owed a large part of the restaurant’s success to the fishermen of Galilee, who supplied her with the very best of local seafood. According to one of her myriad psychology textbooks, Rosa was trying to use the restaurant to recreate aspects of her late mother. After she read that conclusion, she shook her head. “Well, duh. I know exactly what I’m doing and why. Does that make me a nutcase?”
So she had idealized her mother in her mind. So what? Motherless for twenty years, she felt entitled to declare Celesta Capoletti the most perfect mother a girl had ever had.
She wondered what the self-help books would say about Alex’s return. Most experts seemed to believe in confronting unresolved issues of the past. So did her best friend, Linda. Rosa wasn’t sure she liked the idea of hauling herself through the old hurt and heartbreak.
The sound of Butch tapping his foot in exaggerated fashion brought her back to the present. “I’ll just wait while you collect your thoughts, then.”
“What?” She fell in step with him, passing mounds of chipped ice covered with fish.
“You aren’t even listening to me.”
“I am, too.”
“Bullshit, Rosa.”
“You just said—” She scowled at him. “I’m not ignoring you. I’m just preoccupied.”
“About what?”
“Maybe this summer I’ll hire a general manager.”
“You say that every summer. That’s nothing. You’re thinking about Alex Montgomery.”
“I am not.” They both knew she was lying. She couldn’t get him out of her mind—Alex Montgomery with his haunted blue eyes, who had lost his mother in the worst possible way. Even his facade of cool Montgomery reserve couldn’t mask a terrible, raw anger. He had some serious grieving to do, yet he was resisting it; she could tell. She couldn’t understand that. Why not let it all out?
She pretended to give her full attention to a huge cod laid out on a bed of chipped ice, its mouth open wide, its glassy eyes staring. But that made her think of death, and then she thought of Emily Montgomery and the fact that she had killed herself. Losing a mother was painful enough. Learning it was a suicide added a twist of the knife.
The appear
ance of his father and sister had been singularly uncomfortable; Rosa couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Though she’d known Alex for many years, his family remained a mystery to her. Given what had happened, she wished she’d seen them comfort each other, not bicker. They were supposed to be each other’s safe place to fall. That was what a family was for. She’d never seen the Montgomerys do that. Not even now.
“He’s back from the city, you know,” Butch pointed out.
She tried to act nonchalant, even though her heart skipped a beat. He’d been gone two weeks, three days, an hour and twenty minutes, not that she was counting. “Actually, I didn’t. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“It was in the papers. They buried Mrs. Montgomery in Providence a week and a half, two weeks ago,” Butch persisted, watching her like a hawk.
“Yeah?” she said, elaborately uninterested. “So?”
“Must be freaky, knowing your mother killed herself.”
A cold weight dropped inside Rosa. “What?”
“A suicide. It was in the papers today.”
She stared at him. “Can you finish up here by yourself? I need to go.”
He looked furious. “Where’s your pride, Rosa? Why go crawling back to that guy?”
“I’m not crawling. I’m running.”
A flock of seagulls burst skyward as she rushed to the parking lot and got into her car. She needed to find Alex, and fast.
Cioppino
A lot of people think making homemade tomato sauce is too much of a bother. It’s not, really. You’re ahead in the game if you have some fresh herbs growing in pots on the windowsill. If you get really good seafood, the shells add their flavor to the broth. Just pass around plenty of napkins. Robert and Sal used to get in trouble for practicing ventriloquism with the mussel shells at the dinner table.
Broth:
1/4 cup olive oil
about 6 anchovies, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 bay leaves
1 stalk of celery, diced
1 onion, chopped
1 roasted red bell pepper, chopped
1 cup Chianti + 2 Tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 quart fish or shrimp stock
6-8 diced fresh tomatoes (use canned if you don’t have fresh)
chopped fresh basil
a good pinch of saffron threads
2 Tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley
2-3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
salt to taste
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 tablespoons dried oregano, or twice that amount if using fresh
1 teaspoon fennel seeds, crushed with the flat of a knife
1 sprig of rosemary
Seafood: Use whatever is fresh that day, 1/4 pound or more of each variety: prawns (save the shells for making stock), crab, scallops, mussels, firm fish cut in 1-inch pieces (cod, halibut, scrod, bass), fresh clams, fresh oysters (shucked), calamari for the adventurous.
Warm the olive oil and anchovies in a big pot. Add garlic and stir, then add the bay leaves, onion, celery and bell pepper, plus 1/2 of the herbs. Pour in wine, vinegar and Worcestershire and let half the liquid bubble away. Then add tomatoes, basil and the rest of the herbs. Simmer, then add the fish stock and lemon juice, bringing it all to a boil. Finally, toss in the seafood, cover and cook 7-10 minutes. Remove any mussels and clams that haven’t opened. Ladle the stew into wide, shallow dishes and sprinkle with parsley. Serve with warm bread.
thirteen
Alex wasn’t at the house on Ocean Road, though Rosa knocked long and loud. She left a note wedged in the crack of the front door—Call me, Rosa—along with her cell phone number.
Frustrated, she got back in her car and started the engine. She had a hundred things to do today, but couldn’t concentrate on anything except the fact that Alex was back, and the press had invaded his family’s most private business. She drove past the long string of beaches where candy-colored umbrellas and floppy hats blurred together, creating a colorful lei along the shoreline.
On a hunch, she pulled off the coast road and headed for a part of the beach she rarely visited anymore. Alex knew this place; perhaps he was here.
She clambered past an abandoned stone house whose half-crumbled walls had stood sentinel for years, a silent monument to someone’s foolish notion that it was safe to live this close to the sea. Safe indeed. Perhaps it was in the summer when the weather was fine. Whoever had built the place had probably never seen the way a winter storm skirled in from the Atlantic, its winds toppling stout stone walls and dragging trees out by the roots.
Another hundred yards of the beach led to an estuary overgrown with cattails and reeds. And beyond that was a cove as private now as it had been twenty years ago. Back then, when she was an adventurous tomboy and he a lonely invalid, they had discovered this place together. It held more memories than a sentimental girl’s diary. But no Alex.
Rosa shaded her eyes and scanned from north to south. A ship’s horn sounded in the distance. A group of sea kayakers paddled offshore. Sailboats breezed across the sound.
Suddenly she knew exactly where he’d gone. “Oh, man,” she muttered under her breath as she hurried back to her car. “Why there?”
As she drove down an old, tree-lined avenue and passed through the auspicious stone gates of the Rosemoor Country Club, an ancient, bone-deep lump of discomfort took hold of her. She tried to deny it, but the leaden feeling in her gut didn’t lie. This place was the scene of one of the most humiliating moments of her adolescence, the sort that haunted her at odd moments even twelve years later. She didn’t belong here and never would, no matter how much time passed, no matter how successful she became. This was a bastion of tradition for people whose fortunes had been made many generations ago, preferably by someone who had just stepped off the Mayflower.
Wishing she had on something other than a denim miniskirt and a sunflower-yellow top, she crossed the parking lot. A curious, elegant hush surrounded this place; even the seagulls seemed to mute their cries and the thwok of tennis balls sounded decidedly genteel. The Tudor-style clubhouse, covered with twining old roses, was nestled between the manicured first teebox and the eighteenth green. The private dock in front of it provided moorage for gloriously restored wooden yachts and sleek racing boats. On the deck overlooking the water, attractive people in breezy tennis whites and visors chatted and laughed together.
Wishing she could be anyplace else, she walked past the Members Only sign and stepped inside. Soft music drifted from hidden speakers. At his podium, the host greeted her. He was polite enough, but she could sense him checking her out, categorizing her as an interloper. A nonmember.
“I’m looking for Alexander Montgomery,” she said. “Is he here?”
“I believe Mr. Montgomery is on the deck, Miss...?”
“Capoletti.” She nodded toward a stairway. “Is that the way to the deck?”
“Yes, but—”
“Thanks for your help.” She didn’t have to turn around and look at him to know he was staring after her, that he’d probably send someone up to make sure she behaved herself. Fine, she thought. Let him.
She emerged onto the deck and scanned the lunch crowd there, a sea of golf, tennis and sailing togs. All the umbrella tables were occupied. And there was Marcia Brady, regarding her with cool inquisitiveness.
Rosa offered no more than a tight smile. “I’m here to see Alex.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“What, do I have to make an appointment?”
One of the guys jerked his head toward the end of the deck. “He went to see if he could get the bar to open early.”
Rosa pivoted on her platform sandal and walked away without another word. She hated that she always felt self-conscious around these people. She imagined them regarding her as though she was semiliterate, fresh off the sardine boat. It wasn’t true, of course. People like that simply didn’t think of her at all.
She found Alex leaning against the bar, arms crossed over his chest, jaw set as he contemplated the rows of liquor bottles. The late-morning sun glinted off his hair and picked out the perfectly sinewed muscles of his arms and legs. There was no bartender in sight.
Alex didn’t look at Rosa, but she saw him stiffen at her approach, as though bracing himself.
“Touché, Capoletti,” he said when she was within earshot.
“It wasn’t me,” she said.
He wheeled on her, seeming to grow larger with fury. Lord, but he was something, she thought. Yet when she really looked at his eyes, she saw loneliness and desperation, perhaps a shadow of the boy who had once been her friend.
“You were the only one outside the family who knew,” he stated, his voice low and taut.
“Obviously not.”
“My sister’s got young kids. This is hurting them, too, or didn’t you think of that?”
She felt every ear straining to hear them. “We might not know each other anymore, Alex. But I swear I haven’t become the sort of person who would do such a thing.”
“I have no idea what sort of person you’ve become.”
“Likewise,” she said, holding her temper in check. And whose fault is that? She didn’t say it aloud. Another time, she might, but not now, not when he was ravaged by fury and indignation on his family’s behalf.
“Alex,” she said, slowly and solemnly. “On the soul of my own mother, I never said a word.”
He pushed back from the bar and stared at her for a long moment. The sea breeze rattled through the reeds along the shore and plucked at his hair. Sunlight glinted in his eyes, and she saw the fury subside.
There were things he would always know about her, no matter how much time had passed, no matter the distance between them. He knew she would never, ever swear by her mother unless she had absolute faith in what she was saying.