Tides of the Heart

by Jean Stone

  And then, from behind her, she heard footsteps descending the stairs. She knew they were his before she turned around. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew. Slowly, Jess turned around.

  It had been thirty years. It had been thirty years, yet she would have known him anywhere. In his jeans and denim shirt, he looked no more like forty-seven than he did eighty-five. He looked so much younger than … Charles. He looked so much more content, and so youthful, as if he’d just delivered towels at the swim club and was coming to bring her a cherry Coke. His face looked as tanned as it always had in summer; his brown hair seemed lighter—thinner, perhaps, but it still had that way of catching the light that had always made Jess envious she’d not been born a brunette. And then there were his eyes. As blue as her own. As steady on hers as hers were on him.

  “Jess,” he said, before she had a chance to say what she’d intended to say. “My God. How long has it been?”

  He knew perfectly well how long it had been. But for some reason, standing here in the reception area of the ancient colonial that housed the Vineyard Gazette, it didn’t seem to matter.

  “I didn’t think you’d recognize me,” she managed to say.

  “Of course I do. I’d know you anywhere.”

  They stood for a moment, staring at one another, the receptionist, Jess sensed, staring at them.

  “My God,” he repeated. “What brings you to the Vineyard?”

  She couldn’t say what she wanted right here in the office, right here in front of this woman she didn’t even know. “Could we go outside?”

  He walked to the door and held it open for her. As she passed by him to the front walk, Jess was keenly aware of his height, his mass, his being. Richard. Her Richard. It really was him.

  When the door closed behind him, Jess looked into his eyes once again. She tried to decide if Melanie looked more like her or like him. Him, perhaps. And perhaps Sarah looked more like Jess.

  “So,” he said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “What brings you to the Vineyard?”

  She wondered if he knew he’d already asked her that. She wondered if he was as nervous as she was. She twisted her ring again and looked off toward the roses. “I’ve seen her,” she blurted out.

  The second he paused was long enough for Jess to know he knew what she meant. “Her?” he asked. “Who?”

  “Melanie.”

  “My sister?”

  “No. Melanie. Our daughter.” There, she thought. She’d said it. She’d admitted it to Richard and to anyone within hearing distance of the sidewalk of the Vineyard Gazette.

  “Maybe we’d better go somewhere and talk,” he said. “Wait here a minute. I’ll let Bertie know I’ll be out.”

  She stood on the walk, half wondering if he’d have the nerve to slip away now, if he would be too afraid to face what he’d done. It was easier, she realized, to think about that, for right now Jess was unsure what she was feeling herself, unable to get past the butterflies to find out.

  He came back.

  “There’s a little park around the corner,” he said, guiding her elbow down the walk. “We can sit there and talk.”

  They walked down the street and turned onto Main, moving slowly through the early-summer people, past the bookstore and toward a small patch of green lawn where a few benches sat. He escorted her to one, and they sat down. They sat down and said nothing.

  Then Jess spoke.

  “I want to know what happened. I want to know everything.”

  In the heartbeats that followed, she sensed he was going to deny it, that he was going to insist Melanie was his sister and that he didn’t know what she was talking about.

  Instead, he said, “I’m the one who should be asking you what happened.”

  So he was going to be defensive. She almost laughed at herself for thinking that Richard was any different from Charles. “Excuse me, Richard,” she said, with even greater conviction, “but my baby has been with you for almost thirty years. I never saw her, did you know that? Did you know they never even let me see her?” Then her throat choked closed, her eyes filled with tears, as she felt the picture of her romantic knight on his stalwart white stallion vanish from her heart, and her life, forever.

  “But you didn’t want to see her,” he said. “You wanted nothing to do with her.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “My father.”

  “Your father? What the hell did he know?”

  Richard crossed one leg over his knee and rubbed the side of his sneaker. He dropped his head and lowered his voice. “Your father paid us a great deal of money.”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars, if I recall,” Jess said.

  “He said you wanted nothing to do with me or with our baby.”

  In the silence that followed, Jess did not hear the murmur of shoppers, the giggles of children, or the sounds of cars passing by on the street. She did not hear these things because in her mind, over and over, she could only hear the harsh echo of Richard’s last words: You wanted nothing to do with me pr with our baby.

  And then she remembered Father on the day that he’d brought her to Larchwood Hall, when he stood in Miss Taylor’s office writing out checks, pretending this was just one more business expense, and that his fifteen-year-old pregnant daughter was not in the room. When the housemother left them alone, Jess wanted to talk to him. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry, that she loved Richard and Richard loved her. And that Richard would make everything work out. She wanted to tell him, but he did not want to listen. He merely fumbled in his pocket for his pipe and tobacco pouch. Then he put the pipe in his mouth, buttoned his Burberry coat, said “Enough has been said,” and left.

  “My father,” Jess said slowly now. “My father lied. I can’t believe you believed him. I can’t believe that the money had nothing to do with it.”

  “Jess, listen to me.”

  She jumped from the bench. “I waited for you, Richard. Night after night, I waited for you. You were supposed to come and get me. You took my father’s money instead. You took my father’s money, and then you took my baby.” She spun on one heel. She noticed a small crowd of people who had gathered, who were looking in shop windows as if they weren’t listening, as if they hadn’t heard every word she’d just said. Without even telling Richard that he could go to hell, she marched through the park, up Main Street and back to her car.

  It wasn’t until she was speeding down the Beach Road back to Vineyard Haven that Jess was aware of what had just happened: Melanie was hers. Richard had confirmed it.

  Chapter 21

  “Ginny, for God’s sake, what happened?” Lisa cried, rushing into Dick Bradley’s bedroom.

  “Among other things, one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.” At least Dick had managed, somehow, to get the bed changed and dress Ginny in one of his long denim shirts before alerting Lisa about her mother’s whereabouts and her unfortunate demise. At least he hadn’t turned out to be a creep more concerned with how things looked for him than with the pain Ginny was in.

  “When did this happen? I was so tired last night I fell right to sleep when we came home. I didn’t hear you come up to the room.…”

  Ginny sighed, a movement that made the muscle go into another spasm. “You didn’t hear me because I wasn’t there.”

  Lisa looked at her a moment. “Oh,” was all she said.

  “I guess I have to take back everything I said out at Gay Head.”

  “About sex?”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  Lisa smiled. “I think what we need to worry about right now is what about your back. Can you move at all?”

  For a kid of hers, Lisa wasn’t half-bad. “Move?” Ginny asked. “I can barely breathe.”

  “Shouldn’t we call a doctor?”

  “Dick’s taking care of it.” She tried to wiggle her toes. The pain stopped her.

  “Well, then,” Lisa said, folding her arms, “I gue
ss we’ll have to extend our vacation.”

  “Try not to let it bother you so much.”

  “It doesn’t,” she said with a shrug. “Who knows? Maybe Phillip will stay, too.”

  Eyeing her daughter, Ginny replied, “And maybe we’ll both have to take back what we said at Gay Head.”

  Lisa laughed. “Maybe not. All I know is he’s meeting me in a while and we’re going up to the school.”

  “To see her?”

  “Hopefully.”

  Hopefully, yes. And hopefully, they’d make better progress than she had. “And then what?”

  “And then, who knows. Maybe Phillip will figure out a way for us to kill Brad after all.”

  At first Jess was too blinded by pain, too ripped by her emotions to notice the Bronco that peeled into the Mayfield House parking lot behind her. But as she crossed the walk and heard a car door slam, instinctively, she turned around.

  She wished she hadn’t.

  “Jess,” Richard called out, rushing up the clamshell walk to her side. “Please. Listen to me.”

  She shook her head. “There’s nothing I need to hear. I’ve heard enough.”

  She began to walk away; he pulled at her arm. “Jess. Please. You don’t know the whole story.”

  Closing her eyes, she let the sun seep into her pores. But the warmth did little to soothe the hurt.

  “I think we owe each other that, don’t you?” Richard asked.

  “I’ve never felt I owed you anything.”

  “I thought you did. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was too young and too stupid to think anything else.”

  “Richard. You’re not making sense.”

  “Please, Jess. You’ve come this far. Please sit down and listen to me.”

  She opened her eyes and looked into his. They were troubled now, their blueness hazed with something Jess recognized. It was pain. It was hurt. And it was thirty not-quite-right years of keeping a secret that they never should have had to have kept. It was thirty years of knowing things were not at all what they seemed.

  “All right,” she said quietly.

  He lead her to a long white swing that hung from a huge maple tree in the backyard. Jess sat down. Richard stood in front of her.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  He ran his hand through his brown, still-shining hair, and began. “We were kids, Jess.”

  She held her stomach where it hurt; it was true. She had only been fifteen, Richard seventeen. But Jess had not felt like a kid. She had felt like a grown woman, old enough to carry a child inside her, old enough to love. She did not answer.

  “You were the rich kid; I was the poor kid,” he continued. “I fell in love with you, but part of me knew it would never work. That our worlds were too different. That your father would never allow us to be together.”

  She pushed her feet against the ground. The swing began to creak. “Please, Richard, don’t patronize me. You’re making it sound very much like a clichéd?movie.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground, ignoring her remark. “When your father contacted my dad, Dad came to me right away. We may have been poor, but we were a close family.”

  Yes, she had known that. Richard’s family was a real family. So like the family she longed to be part of. So unlike her own. She remembered now how that had added to the hurt, that she could not become part of a good, loving family, that he had robbed her of that opportunity, too.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “your father had said you never wanted to see me again, never wanted to hear from me. I was devastated.” His voice faltered. He looked away for a moment, as if stalled by emotion, stopped by a tear. Then he cleared his throat and looked back at her. “He also said you wanted nothing to do with our baby.”

  It took all the strength she could find to stay seated on the swing, to not lunge straight at him and slap him and punch him and kick him until he bled. The only thing that held her back was that she wanted to see how far he would go, how big a tale he would weave to justify what they’d done.

  “I believed it, Jess,” he said. “I believed it because I’d always thought you were too good for me. I believed that you wouldn’t want me, and you wouldn’t want a baby that was half mine. Can you ever understand that?”

  She pushed the swing again. Richard paced the ground.

  “My parents were heartsick that you were pregnant,” he went on. “They thought about the baby as my child, too—their grandchild. That’s when, together, we came up with the plan.”

  “To steal my baby,” she said quickly, spurting the anger she could no longer contain.

  “No, Jess. Not to steal her. To take her and raise her as our own. To raise her as a Bradley. We changed our name; we moved to the island from Connecticut. I was so young we decided it would be best for the baby—for Melanie—if everyone thought she was my parents’ child. If everyone thought she was my kid sister.”

  “And what did Melanie think? What has she thought all these years?”

  He sucked in a small breath. “That she is my sister.”

  “Oh, God, Richard,” was all Jess could say.

  He fell to his knees and took her hands in his. “She’s had a good life, Jess. A happy life. When my mother died, she was only five. But Karin took over the mother role. And she’s been a good mother figure to Mellie. She sacrificed her own chance at happiness for Melanie.”

  “Karin is strange.”

  Again, he lowered his head. “I know. But it hasn’t been easy for her. Mellie told me once that Karin had a boyfriend. But I never met him and I chose to ignore it. I guess I was afraid Karin would want her own life and I would have to take responsibility for … our little girl. So for much of Karin’s unhappiness now, I blame myself.”

  Jess wanted, in that moment, to tell him about the letter, to tell him about the phone call his sister had made. She did not know what stopped her, but she thought it might be because she no longer saw Karin as a villain, but as a victim. A victim of her brother’s sins and her parents’ greed.

  “What about the two hundred thousand dollars? The payoff my father gave you?”

  He stood up and began to pace again. “Your father gave us that money to pay Miss Taylor for Melanie.”

  “As far as I understand, that only cost fifty thousand. What happened to the rest?”

  Richard stood still. “I don’t know where you’ve gotten your information, but the fifty thousand was a down payment. The rest went to her when Mellie was born. Part of the deal was that Miss Taylor arranged for us to come here, and she got Dad a job as a caretaker for Mabel Adams. Your father didn’t ‘pay us off,’ Jess. He gave us the money so we could get the baby that was his grandchild. So she wouldn’t be adopted by strangers.”

  She must have heard him wrong. “Father did what?” she asked.

  “He gave us money so we could get Mellie,” Richard repeated. “When I said that we came up with a plan together … well, it was really between my parents and your father. Other than that only Karin and I knew the truth.

  “And Miss Taylor.”

  “I have no idea how much she did or did not know. I suspect all she cared about was the money.”

  Jess’s head felt light, she was suddenly dizzy. She steadied her feet on the ground, trying to digest all Richard had said, wanting to believe him, yet not being quite able. “But it’s all a lie, Richard. I wanted our baby. I wanted us … Father knew that …”

  “I guess he thought we were too young,” Richard said. “I suppose he only did what he thought was right for you.”

  Father, she thought. How little she’d known him. She raised her chin and looked at Richard. “And now Melanie has a child,” she said. “Our grandchild, Richard. Yours and mine.”

  “Yes. And she’s pregnant again. There’s another baby on the way.”

  Jess clutched her stomach. “Oh, God, Richard. How can you do this? How can you keep pretending?”

  “I have to, Jess. Melanie is, well,
she’s sweet and she’s gentle, and she’s so much like you. But Karin and I made a promise to my mother on the day she died that Melanie would never know the truth about her birth. Melanie can’t find out now, Jess. It’s too late, and it wouldn’t be fair.”

  And in that instant, with those words, Jess knew that Richard was right.

  Phillip walked up the hill with Lisa by his side, headed in the direction of the West Tisbury School. He supposed he should feel guilty about Nicole, but decided there would be time enough to deal with that when he returned to New York, when he went back to the real world where mothers and brothers had expectations of you and where big-time television stars didn’t walk next to you on back streets of the Vineyard.

  “I think we should start by coming right to the point,” Lisa said. “I think we should ask her if she knows she was adopted.”

  Phillip shook his head. “She’s not like us, Lisa. Melanie wasn’t adopted, remember?”

  Lisa frowned, the lightest little wrinkle carving itself across her forehead. “Oh. You’re right. Then what should we say? We can’t just come out and ask if she knows that her brother is really her father.”

  “Maybe we should just introduce ourselves. Then tell her we’re there to talk with her about a baby scam that happened in the sixties. Lead into it a little more gently.”

  Lisa smiled. “I’m not great at being gentle. I guess I get that from my mother.”

  Phillip laughed. “She’s a character, you know that?”

  “Yeah. And right now I’d give anything to fix this mess I’ve made for her with Brad. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

  He did not want to tell her the best idea he’d come up with was to fly to L.A., hunt down the jerk, and push his red Porsche off the side of a cliff. “Well, I know you can’t give Brad any money. Once you start, he’ll never stop asking for more. Can’t you go to the police?”

  “And risk having it leaked to the tabloids?”

  “Oh. Right. What about Ginny? What does she want to do?”

  “Simple. Kill him.”