“It does! You think I’ve had some kind of... I don’t know. You think that I’m hung up on Darla, but it’s not true. Not in the least. For the past several years that I’ve known you, Christine, you’ve been hung up on one thing.”
“Yeah? And was that one thing the fact that you ruined our restaurant and ran it into the ground?” Christine demanded.
Frank smashed his fist against the antique table, something they had already discussed selling to get another month’s rent. It shook.
“Don’t make me spell it out for you, Christine,” Frank said. He then stomped toward the living area, where they had built up a well-stocked liquor cabinet over the previous years, lined with old-world liquor, scotch from Scotland, ouzo from Greece, and Raki from Turkey.
As he poured himself a scotch, Christine tugged her heels off and walked across the thick rug, which they’d bought from a seller in India. When Frank turned around, he glowered at her from behind his glass.
“I’m not the young and beautiful, lively thing you want to play with anymore. I get that,” Christine blurted.
“Christine, you are beautiful. Stunning. Everyone knows it. When I walk in anywhere across Manhattan with you on my arm, I hear whispers from all corners. People can’t believe that I get to have you,” Frank stated. His eyes looked they were pleading with her to believe him.
“That’s such bull—”
“It’s not,” Frank bellowed with frustration. “But all you can think about, all you know is that you can’t have children. You will never have a daughter to call your own. It has been eating you alive the past several years, Christine, and I can’t take it anymore. You’re always looking at me for reasons for your unhappiness. You want me to have an affair so that you can leave me. But if anything, now that I’ve run the restaurant into the ground, you have your out. You can hate me as much as you want. You can go off and live the rest of your days just like this.”
“It’s just like you to take something that’s your fault and turn it around on my emotional problems! Talk about gaslighting 101!” Christine cried.
Throughout her entire life, she had always known she was a fighter, apt to scream and quake and blast her opinions, regardless of who was in front of her. Maybe because they were both drinkers, maybe because they’d kept up similar lifestyles over the years, Frank was Christine’s match in this respect.
They tore at one another over the next little while. Frank rose and poured drink after drink for them, dipping them deeper into their alcoholic anger. At some point, their conversation found compassion.
“I thought you were the one, Christine,” Frank said, on the verge of caving. “I lived recklessly because that’s what we did together! We never thought about the day after. We never considered important and rational things.”
Christine fell to the floor and placed her chin on the antique coffee table, which they had purchased at an auction in Brooklyn several months before for an obscene amount of cash. She gripped the edge of the coffee table, felt the grains of the wood, and marveled that this little piece of furniture had ever mattered to them at all.
“I don’t know why I came back to New York,” Christine whispered.
Frank placed his hand across his sweaty forehead and rubbed it. It was the 5th of July, and fireworks rattled out from who-knew-where. Christine had always loved the mania of the city in the middle of the summer, but now, she detested it. She wanted to rush into the waves of the Nantucket Sound and just let herself float.
“You told me you wanted to try again,” Frank suddenly said. “You told me that it didn’t matter. That our past didn’t have to catch up to us.”
“But it’s always going to be there,” Christine whispered.
At this point, Christine knew she didn’t refer to the past she shared with Frank. It had been wonderful, at least for a while, but it had also been a distraction from what Christine actually needed to focus on, which was her inner-self, and her family back on the Vineyard.
“I’ve just been floating from man to man and job to job for as long as I can remember,” she said. She rubbed her eyes. Outside the window, the first light of dawn crept up in flourishes of pink and yellow hues. It had been a long time since she’d stayed up all night. The previous times felt like another life.
They had previously made a habit of it: staying up all night to make love, sleeping until just after three when they had to return to the restaurant and start-up shop again.
Ultimately, Frank collapsed on the couch with his head in Christine’s lap. Christine sipped slowly from a glass of wine and watched as the New York morning, crested up and flourished into yet another steaming summer day. Frank, who ordinarily snored, kept quiet, his eyes closed tenderly. As Christine gazed down at him, she felt only a vague memory of once having loved him. Now, that all seemed so distant and long ago.
But if I don’t love Frank Bolton, who will I love?
Will I die without knowing what it means to totally and completely love another human?
When Christine had lost one of her ovaries, a surgery that had nearly eliminated her chances of getting pregnant, she had spent much of the following year waking up with tears splattered across her cheeks. She always laughed at herself. She cried over people that didn’t exist, rather than all the people who suffered in the world. Wasn’t this terribly selfish?
As Frank slept on, she lifted her phone and realized that both Lola and Susan had texted her several more times. Sitting there in an apartment that would soon belong to someone else, she ached for the childhood home there on the Sound. She ached to hear her father’s voice again. She wanted to laugh with her sisters on the porch and listen to the creak of the porch swing beneath her.
She had returned to New York with what had seemed like a resolution: to make her previous life enough. But now, she knew that it was merely bones, the skin and guts of it molding out. Frank had to find his own way and she had to find hers.
Christine jabbed Susan’s number into her phone. As it rang, Christine marveled at all the resentment she had felt toward Susan over the years. Before their mother’s death, Susan had been the goody-two-shoes, the one all the boys had been after non-stop—the one who Mom had loved the most, the one who could make Dad laugh.
Christine had always been the wild child, the middle one—the black sheep of the family.
And then Susan had just left Christine and Lola on the island and never looked back. Christine had thought she would never fully forgive Susan for that, for being so selfish. It had left Lola, Christine and their father, Wesley, in an impossible situation, unable to gaze one another in the eye.
Yet here she was, calling Susan for help again.
“Christine! You’re up early,” Susan said.
“Actually, I haven’t slept yet,” Christine replied.
Susan paused. “Is everything all right? How was the party?”
Christine swallowed the lump in her throat. Outside, a terrible car horn blared.
“Do you mind if I come back to the Vineyard? I just can’t stay here anymore.”
Chapter Three
Gingerly, Christine drew herself out from beneath Frank’s large, handsome head. Before she rushed off, she made sure he was comfortable, that he had a large pillow beneath him and that the fan air buzzed across his face. She wanted to kiss him goodbye, but it seemed too dramatic—a final kiss to sleeping beauty. Christine wasn’t the type to lean into such nostalgia.
Christine walked to the bedroom they had shared. On one side of the room was her bathroom, while the other side held his. After sharing her bathroom with her parents and her two sisters in her younger years and roommates after that, she had loved the luxury of having her own mirror, her own time and space to experiment with skincare and eyeshadow and lipstick colors. Now, she blinked at it in its newfound state of disarray. After all, they’d had to fire the maid due to finances and she hadn’t kicked her depressive state after her return from Martha’s Vineyard. Trying to pretend to live l
ike a normal person with no issues was a difficult thing, something she had never mastered.
She had always assumed that she would find that ability when she gave birth.
Christine packed as quickly as she could: her makeup bag, her swimsuit, her summer dresses and her sandals and her hiking boots. She loaded up first one suitcase, then another, then heard a vibrant “meow” from the corner, where her cat, Felix, had apparently been conked out throughout her and Frank’s bickering.
“Felix!” Christine cried. She dropped to her knees and beckoned to the little orange tabby. He’d been such a relief to her after her surgery about four years before and had traveled with her from shoddy apartment to shoddy apartment, all the way to this Upper Manhattan masterpiece. The cat curled into her arms and then dotted little kisses across her chin with his nose. While Christine had been on the Vineyard, Frank had taken care of him, but there was no way she would leave him this time.
This added a level of permanence to it all.
Christine gathered her suitcases and Felix’s cat carrier at the front door. Frank slept on. Her heart beat at a million miles an hour, it seemed like as her eyes swept over the apartment. She had left boyfriends before dramatically, in the middle of the night. It had always been something, so she would just pick up and leave, pretending not to care.
This time, however, she wasn’t just leaving Frank. She was leaving New York City, where she had lived for the majority of the past twenty years.
Before she left, she changed into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and swept a brush through her hair. She added a dab of lipstick and a bit of eyeliner and blinked at herself a final time in the hallway mirror. She was forty-one years old, forty-one years old, and on the brink of yet another shift in her life.
When she reached the foyer downstairs, the doorman hailed her a taxi. She slipped a ten-dollar bill in his hand and said, “Make sure Frank is okay,” just as the taxi door slammed between them. The doorman gave her a confused look but nodded through the window as the taxi merged with the traffic.
Christine tried her best to eat up every single sight en route to the train station. The taxi cut past the park, her beautiful Central Park, where she had run herself silly in an attempt to keep her slender girlish frame. She and Frank had eaten several picnics there, drank countless drinks, and gotten into endless fights. She wondered how she would feel about it in a few years when, or if, she ever returned. Would it hold the same sentimental feelings for her?
The journey to Falmouth was a long one. Christine shook with apprehension when she appeared at the ferry port in the bright sunlight. Only now had the hangover caught up to her. Her throat was parched and her mind felt glued to the side of her skull. She scrunched her nose and ordered a ticket and a glass of wine from the ferry stand. As they poured it, the sunlight glittered across the white wine, illuminating it.
The ferry left just after four in the afternoon. She sat with Felix’s cat carrier on the chair beside her, while the breeze lifted through her dark hair. As her eyes scanned the glowing water, someone hissed, “That must be her! Meg Ryan!”
“Oh, my God. Yes, she does have a house, doesn’t she?” another guest returned.
“She looks good after her divorce,” the other said.
Both craned their necks toward the lower deck, where, apparently, Meg Ryan lurked. Christine smirked inwardly. Throughout her life, famous people had made Martha’s Vineyard their playground. They owned countless houses and had immaculate parties, some of which, truth be told, she snuck into as a teenager. At the time, getting into something like that had been quite simple for her. Age seventeen, with long legs, wide cautious eyes and dark hair, made it a little easier, of course. Plus, being friends with some of the people who normally staffed those bigger parties had given her a shoe-in. Lola had gone with her to some of the later ones and then gotten into her own madness after Christine had left the Vineyard.
“You should go get a picture,” one of the tourists whispered to the other.
“I’m too scared,” the other replied.
Christine rolled her eyes and sipped her glass of wine. Inside his little carrier, Felix let out a mighty meow, enough to make a few people near the front of the ferry cackle. One of those people, a dark-blonde guy, turned his head and clicked his eyes toward hers.
Immediately, her heart sank.
It was Zach. Zach Walters.
Her old nemesis from high school, and the current chef at the bistro attached to the Sunrise Cove Inn.
Shoot.
Zach turned back and said something to the people he sat with, then stood and walked toward her. She ducked her eyes back toward the water as quickly as she could, but couldn’t help but notice how good he looked. Great, she thought to herself. His dark blonde curls wafted around in the ocean breeze; his blue eyes reflected the water; and he was broad-shouldered and very muscular, definitely not dipping into the cliché of the local chef being overweight.
He stopped right at her line of seats and peered down at her. His eyes felt like lasers. Still, she refused to turn her head. It wasn’t like he had ever earned her respect or her friendship or anything that might have captivated her interest at that moment.
Finally, he clucked his tongue and said, “Christine Sheridan? Is that you?”
Christine whipped her head around and flared her nostrils. “We only just saw each other a few weeks ago. I should hope I haven’t changed that much in that short amount of time.”
Of course, it was possible. She had been through enough since then. Plus, there was the potential issue of her hangover, making her look a little run down something that had crept up on her in recent years, tugging grey shadows beneath her eyes.
“Always so happy to see me,” Zach said with a laugh.
“I didn’t expect to see anyone on the ferry that I knew,” Christine said, arching her brow.
“Yeah? Well, did you expect to see Meg Ryan? Because everyone else on this boat is losing their mind,” he said, looking out at the crowd.
Christine gave him a slight chuckle, surprising herself. “After growing up here and then living in the city for so long, I just don’t have it in me to care about anything like that.”
“Speak for yourself. You’ll be jealous when I’m the one with the autograph,” Zach said.
Christine rolled her eyes. Zach held her gaze for a second after that. It seemed obvious he wasn’t willing to step back to his friends; he wanted a proper conversation.
“Remember when the Kennedys frequented this place?” he finally said. One of his large hands reached up behind his neck, as though he wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“Sure,” Christine replied. “I heard a story about John Kennedy Jr. Apparently, he flirted with my mom so outrageously in the late ‘80s that my dad wanted to kick him out of the bistro.”
Zach guffawed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Christine’s heart dipped a little. “Well, my mom was something of a flirt, I guess.” That was putting it lightly, although nobody knew the full story. At least, she hoped nobody knew.
Zach sat casually in the line of seats ahead of her and then turned back so that he faced her and the cat carrier. “What brings you back here so soon, then? I figured you had to get back to that restaurant of yours on the Upper West Side. Chez Frank, right?”
Christine had had the sneaking suspicion last time she had seen him that Zach knew all about the restaurant’s failing and wanted to rub her nose in the muck. She gave him a stony look and said, “Don’t play with me.”
Zach’s lips fell and he tilted his head slightly. “What are you talking about?”
“You know the restaurant went under. It’s been all over the message boards. Bon Appetit even did a write-up about how we lost our shirt—a kind of obituary to Chez Frank.”
Zach shook his head, vehemently. “I can tell you this for sure, Christine; I didn’t know. I really had no idea at all.”
“Then you should have thought before y
ou spoke and considered it,” Christine blared.
“All I do every day is keep your dad’s bistro afloat. I don’t have time to check any message boards,” Zach stated.
“You’re just the same as you always were back in high school,” Christine retorted. “Always so arrogant and brash and willing to throw anyone else under the bus for your own selfish gain. It’s disgusting.”
Zach’s lips formed a round o. “I get it,” he muttered slowly.
“Get what?” Christine demanded.
“You’re still mad about what happened,” he said, looking at her squarely.
Christine smashed her arms across her chest and glowered at him. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.” Zach’s eyes glowed bright blue with the memory. “We had both entered that cooking competition for charity.”
Christine wanted to thrust the stupid memory away as quickly as she could.
“And, you must remember what happened before.” Again, Zach’s eyes seemed to reflect the severity of the sun.
“I don’t know if this surprises you, but I left the island over twenty years ago. My memories are like a pool of dust that I can’t see through. Whatever high school drama you’re bringing up now might as well have happened to someone else,” Christine returned.
Zach clucked his tongue. “Right.” He then smashed his hand on the back of his chair and turned his head back toward the guys he had sat with before. “Well, Christine, it’s been a unique pleasure catching up with you. I hope to run into you soon so you can tell me more about the things you think you’re too good to remember.”
“I’m not too good for anything,” Christine insisted. “It’s only that some dumb cooking competition from age sixteen doesn’t exactly live up to my idea of something to hang onto.”
“So the fact that your clam chowder recipe literally failed less than one day after you dramatically kissed me at the—” Zach began.
Suddenly, Christine popped up from the ferry chair, grabbed her cat carrier, and whipped down the aisle. Her throat felt tight with passion, with anger. When she reached the far end of the ferry, she heard Zach’s laughter rollicking through the air. She didn’t give him the satisfaction of turning around to acknowledge it.
Firefly Nights Page 2