by Jean Stone
“Had a little slip into the pond.”
“A little slip?” She stepped forward and held out her arms. “Off with your clothes. I’ll throw them right in the wash.”
He unbuttoned his shirt and stepped out of his jeans.
“What are you doing by the pond, anyway? It’s after dark.”
“It wasn’t when we started.”
“God, Travis,” came Maura’s voice from the doorway. “Do you have to walk around in your underwear? Eddie’s on his way over.”
Jess scooped up her son’s muddy clothes and headed for the laundry room. “He had an accident,” she said in his defense. “Leave him alone.”
She opened the lid of the washing machine and dropped in the clothes. Since Maura had arrived home for summer vacation, the tension between them had remained thick. So far Jess had refrained from confronting her daughter about spilling the beans to Charles. However, Jess thought as she dumped in the soap powder and snapped on the machine, maybe it would be better to just talk to Maura and get it over with. Talk to her, listen to her shouting, get it out in the open once and for all.
She returned to the kitchen where Maura stood, the refrigerator door open, looking inside. Travis was nowhere to be seen. He must have, as usual, deferred to his big sister’s wishes.
“Maura,” Jess said softly, “Can we talk for a minute?”
“Don’t we have anything good to eat? What am I supposed to feed Eddie?”
Jess did not ask why Eddie was not capable of bringing his own food. He had decided to stay at Yale for the summer, and it appeared as though Jess was going to be expected to keep him in nourishment. “There’s chicken in there. Make him a sandwich.”
Maura shut the refrigerator door. “In the Caribbean there was snapper and mahi-mahi and conch chowder every night.”
“And in Connecticut there is chicken,” Jess replied, rubbing the back of her neck.
Maura gazed around the room as if conch chowder would suddenly materialize on the stove. “He’ll be here any minute.”
“Order pizza,” Jess said. “Or Chinese.”
“Gross.”
“It didn’t used to be.” She did not add that a lot of things seemed gross to Maura lately, including her brother, including her mother. There was no doubt how she would react if Jess tried to talk with her once again about the baby, about her renewed search.
“What did you want to talk to me about?” Maura asked, opening the refrigerator door again just as the doorbell rang. “Oh, God, there’s Eddie,” she said, slamming the door and racing to the front hall.
“Nothing important,” Jess said under her breath. “You’d think it was gross, anyway.”
Two days later, as Phillip sat in his new chair at his new desk, his new receptionist buzzed him from the waiting room. “There’s a Marsha Brown on the phone.”
He grabbed the receiver, “Yes, Marsha?”
“I’ve found them,” she said.
“Them?”
“Father and son. Both named Richard. But their last name is different now. It’s no longer Bryant. It’s Bradley.”
“Bradley?” Phillip asked, quickly jotting it down on a pad.
“The son lives in a town called Edgartown.”
Edgartown, he wrote beside Bradley. “Is that in New York?”
“No,” Marsha replied. “In Massachusetts. On Martha’s Vineyard.”
Martha’s Vineyard? The air he sucked in whistled through his teeth. He jumped from his chair and started to pace as far as the phone cord could take him, then back again. “Martha’s Vineyard,” he said. “Unbelievable.”
“The father lives in Vineyard Haven,” Marsha continued. “He owns an inn there, from what I can gather. A place called Mayfield House.”
“Well,” Phillip said, writing down Vineyard Haven, then underlining the name of the postmark on the note Jess received, “nice place to retire.”
“Oh, I doubt that’s what he’s done,” Marsha said. “The family moved to the island when they changed their name. Back in 1968.”
1968. The year it all had happened. The year his world began and so many others’ changed.
Phillip closed his eyes and hated to think what this information implied … and what it would do to Jess.
“So Richard’s family changed their name, took the money my father gave them, and moved to Martha’s Vineyard,” Jess said quietly, a little too quietly.
“That’s how it seems,” Phillip said. They were standing on the deck of Jess’s condo, overlooking the lazy water of Long Island Sound, out of earshot of Maura and Travis.
“How nice for them.”
“There’s something else,” Phillip continued. “Before I came out here I checked with the registry of deeds in Dukes County on the Vineyard. The Bryants—or the Bradleys—didn’t buy Mayfield House right away. Richard’s father apparently went to work there.”
“As what? A caretaker? With two hundred thousand dollars?”
Phillip shook his head. “I don’t know. I only know the inn was owned by a woman named Mabel Adams. When she died, the deed was transferred to Richard’s father. She left it to him in her will.”
Jess nodded. “So he turned out to be a frugal Yankee and socked his money under his mattress. None of this explains why I received that phone call or that letter. None of it explains …” She abruptly spun around and stared at Phillip. “Oh, my God,” she cried. “Who did you say owned the inn?”
“Someone named Mabel Adams.”
The trembling began inside her heart and quickly spread throughout her limbs. “Phillip,” she said. “Mabel Adams knew Miss Taylor.”
He blinked. “Shit. I knew someone paid her off to get your baby.”
“Was it Mabel Adams?”
“Maybe,” Phillip said slowly, “or it could have been Richard’s family.”
“Richard’s family? What are you saying?”
“That I think Richard’s parents took some of the money your father gave them and paid Miss Taylor for your baby.”
Jess stood silent. “What?” she repeated.
“I think you have to be prepared, Jess. I think if your baby’s not on Martha’s Vineyard, then someone there knows where she is.”
A seagull flapped its wings near the shore. “Richard’s family,” Jess said aloud. “My God.”
The gull cried out then flew away. She watched as it grew small and distant, then disappeared from sight.
“What do you want to do, Jess?”
“They have my baby,” she said, her eyes fixed across the water. “They have my baby and I’m going to find her.”
She had phoned the Steamship Authority and secured passage for her car the next day. Now Jess sat on the edge of her bed and placed a call to the one person who might care about what she was doing.
Surprisingly, Ginny answered the phone. Jess quickly told her what had happened.
“So you’re going to the Vineyard,” Ginny said slowly. “Is Phillip going along?”
“No. He offered. But he has a business to run.”
“Where are you going to stay?”
Jess took a deep breath. “I made reservations at the Mayfield House.”
“Are you nuts?”
“Probably.”
“Did you use your real name?”
“Of course. If anyone there sent me the letter, I want them to know I’m coming.” “Even if it’s some crackpot?”
“Yes.” Silence hung over the line. “Ginny, I have to do this.”
“I know you do, kid. And I think you’re insane. Which is why I’m going to meet you there.”
“What?”
“Call back those folks at the Mayfield House and reserve me a room. There’s no way I can let you do this alone. You’re far too nice. Besides,” she added with an odd-sounding chuckle, “I need to get the hell out of L.A., and I was thinking it might be fun to head east.”
Chapter 13
She called him Brit and he called her Yank and she fell i
n love with him the first time she saw him at Mayfield House, when he’d come to the Vineyard looking for a summer place and ended up renting one in West Chop.
He was older than she was—quite a bit, actually—but it was, after all, 1969, and she reasoned that if we could put a man on the moon, for God’s sake, a few years’ age difference shouldn’t matter.
For twelve years, it didn’t.
The Brit/Yank thing began the day she went out to West Chop because he needed a girl to keep the house—cook his meals when he was there, do his laundry, dust, and vacuum when he wasn’t. He said he’d been given her name by someone in town. He said his name was Harold. Harold Dixon.
“Oh,” she said with surprise when he first spoke to her. “I thought you’d have an English accent.” He wore a navy blazer with brass buttons, light gray flannels, and an ascot loosely tucked inside his open-necked white shirt. Leaning against the white railing of the wide veranda that over-looked the sea, holding a carved teak pipe that smelled like cherries simmering, he looked a bit like Gary Grant.
He laughed. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
She shrugged and flipped her long dark hair over her shoulder. “What do I know? I’m just a Yankee who lives on an island in New England.”
“A Brit and a Yank,” he said. “Well, Yank, do you think you can take care of things around here without creating a revolution?”
She smiled, glad that Harold Dixon wasn’t nearly as proper as he looked, not like so many rich people who came each summer to rent the houses on the beach and act as if they owned the island. “I’ll do my best, Brit,” she replied, setting off to start her chores, the fantasy of the nineteen-year-old island girl being swept away by the handsome tourist beginning to root itself inside her heart.
That first summer, though, she saw little of him. She spent her mornings at Mayfield House, changing beds and cleaning guest rooms, and helping Mabel Adams check new faces in and others out. After lunch she rode her bicycle to West Chop to start this second job—grateful for the extra money that her parents would need this winter when the tourists weren’t around.
In the afternoons when she was there he went down to the beach; she did her job in the quiet of the sea breeze that danced in through the big screened windows of this huge house that this man lived in all season by himself.
“Hey, Yank,” he said, startling her one afternoon, coming into the kitchen, dragging sand in on his shoes.
She stirred the chowder in the pot that cooked slowly on the stove and tried not to shout that she’d just vacuumed and could he please wipe his feet outside.
“Look at this, Yank,” he said, holding out his hand to her. “I do believe I’ve found a sapphire.”
She looked at the nickel-sized deep blue stone that rested on his uncallused city palm. “Sea glass,” she said. “Did you find it on the beach?”
He looked a little disappointed. “Glass?”
“Special glass,” she said, attempting to cheer him up. “Shards and chunks from ancient bottles—remnants off ships that capsized in the strong currents that swirl around this corner of the island. West Chop’s the best place for sea glass.” She looked more closely at it. “Cobalt,” she said. “A beautiful specimen. That piece has been smoothed and smoothed for generations by the tides.”
“And finally tossed onto the shore,” he said, and for a moment, one brief moment, their eyes met, the Brit and the Yank.
She turned off the flame under the gas burner and stirred the chowder. “It would make a lovely pendant,” she said.
He closed his hand and slipped it into the pocket of his neatly pressed chinos. “Yes, well,” he replied, “I think I’ll go into the study and do some paperwork. Are you almost finished for the day?”
“Yes,” she answered, “I only need to take the rolls out of the oven.”
He nodded and left the kitchen.
She did not know what he did with so much time alone: he seemed to have no friends or family—no one came to visit, not even long-forgotten relatives who seemed to have a way of finding out when so-and-so had rented an island summer house, especially one as big as this.
Sometimes, though, in the evening, she saw him walking.
She’d be sitting on the porch of their weathered Cape Cod house just past the center of Vineyard Haven, playing with Mellie, her baby sister. It was just the two of them—she and Mellie—while Mom cleaned the kitchen after supper, and Dad was napping from another long day keeping the grounds at Mayfield House, and Richard was off working as he did every day and every night at the ferry docks earning money to go to college.
“Evening, Yank,” Brit would say as he strolled along the sidewalk that cut through their small front yard. He’d often stop and say a few words of idle chitchat, playing a moment with the baby, never staying long enough for lemonade or iced tea, or to meet Mom or Dad or Richard. As quickly as he’d come, he’d be off again, bidding Mellie and her good night and continuing his walk, leaving her to fantasize that when summer ended, he would take her with him.
But when summer ended, he, of course, did not.
The following year he came back. Again, he was alone. She decided he must be a writer—one of those independent, solitary types who could not stand interruption while he was hard at work. He wrote in the summer; perhaps in the winter he went to cocktail parties in the city where important people talked about his books and he told them that all his inspiration came while he was away on Martha’s Vineyard.
“I brought you something, Yank,” he said one day while she sat in an Adirondack chair on the porch, snapping green beans to go with his dinner.
She brushed the long hair from her eyes and looked up from her work.
He handed her a small white box.
Setting down the old tin colander, she crossed her bare feet and wiped her hands on the apron that covered her blue-flowered sarong. She looked into his eyes—for another brief moment, they locked on hers. Then she took the box and slowly lifted the lid. Inside was the beautiful cobalt piece of sea glass, rimmed with a pure silver border and strung from a fine silver chain. “Oh,” she said, because she did not know what else to say, because she did not know if this was meant for her or if he was showing it to her to see if she thought it was good enough for someone else.
“It’s yours,” Brit said. “I had it made for you.”
“Oh,” she repeated.
The next day he asked if she played tennis. Well, of course, she hadn’t since they’d moved here to the island; there was no time for tennis in the summer and no place to play in winter. But here in West Chop private tennis courts were set among the pine trees, exclusively tended for the summer people, for people who had nothing else to do unless you counted playing golf.
“Can you have dinner with me tonight?” he asked while she was folding linens. “After dinner we can play a game or two. I’ve come across some old racquets in the closet in the hall.”
For the next few weeks, they played tennis nearly every evening before the sun went down. She darted around the court, her dark hair flying, the sea glass pendant bouncing lightly between her breasts. When they finished they said good night and she rode off on her bicycle, back to Mom and Dad and Richard and Mellie and the life she really led, not the one in West Chop in the big house on the beach.
Then one night there was a thunderstorm that crept up unexpectedly, the way island storms so often did. He urged her to stay until the rain and lightning stopped, and before she knew what or how or why, the thing that she’d been craving finally happened.
He said he didn’t know she was a virgin. And yet he took her clothes off with all the tenderness she needed; he caressed her breasts and kissed her throat and grazed his hands there and there and there with all the patience she had ever imagined a lover would—should—have.
And in the fall Harold left again, hinting that, perhaps next year when she was twenty-one, she might go with him.
He gave her his address, a post office box in New Yo
rk City, where she could write and send him pictures, and say how much she missed him, which was exactly what she did. She had not expected that in one of those letters, she’d be telling him that her mother had a sudden aneurysm and died on New Year’s Eve.
• • •
When he returned that summer it was clear that she would not go with him.
“I can’t leave Mellie with my father,” she tried to explain. “He would not know how to raise a little girl.”
But then he took her in his arms and told her that he loved her. He said he would be hers for every summer, if that was how it had to be, that they would have their summers until Mellie was a little older, until she could be on her own.
And that was how it was. For twelve summers they played tennis and had picnics with Mellie. They combed the beach for sea glass, but none they found was as beautiful as the one set in the pendant that hung from her neck. And with each autumn he was gone again, leaving her with memories and hopes and dreams and fantasies of the life they would have someday.
The day, however, never happened.
In the year that she turned thirty-one, and Mellie just thirteen, he did not come back to Martha’s Vineyard. He did not call, he did not come. And her letters to Harold Dixon at his post office box were returned to her unopened. She’d wanted to track him down, but she didn’t know how to find someone with only a post office box number. She supposed she could trace him through the people he rented the West Chop house from, but in the end she did not, for she was too embarrassed: the island girl used by the tourist man—a tired, old story that had been told too many times.
She’d cried a million tears since then; she’d walked a million miles back and forth to West Chop, hoping he’d come back to her.