All the Best People

by Sonja Yoerg

  “Perfect.”

  When they parted the next day, Osborn lingered in his embrace. Solange thought of Caleb’s broad hand on her back and blushed. Osborn smiled, thinking he was the cause, and she knew she was right to leave.

  • • •

  Rain greeted them at the cottage and continued for days. The heavy sky weighed on Solange. She played endless games of rummy with Carole and helped her identify the birds they spied from the window seat. In the long afternoons they read side by side on the settee, but Solange could not remain fastened to the page. Vertigo overtook her, as if she were balanced on a point and could only steady herself by looking into the distance. The same feeling came over her when she lay down, and she resorted to sleeping with several pillows stacked behind her, nearly upright. She’d never been seasick but guessed this was how it felt.

  She did not think of Caleb often, nor did she examine the state of her marriage. Instead, Solange wondered how it was possible that the girl setting tables at the Hotel Vermont, full of expectation and wonder and courage, had become the woman she was now: flailing inside a cage, unable to account for how she had arrived there or why, unable to express what she wanted. Like a dog chasing its own tail round and round and round, she was dizzy with her own impotence.

  When the weather brightened, she and Carole returned to the beach. Carole made friends with a younger girl staying nearby, and Solange was pulled into conversation with the family, which she welcomed as a distraction. If she stared out to sea for more than a moment, she felt untethered. There should be mountains. Something solid, not simply water and sky.

  Six days passed. In the late afternoon, Solange sat on the veranda fashioning an elaborate braid in Carole’s hair. A car clattered down the lane.

  “Papa!” Carole sprang up to meet him at the gate, her blonde tendrils slipping through Solange’s fingers.

  Solange waited, arranging the brush and ribbons in the empty seat beside her.

  “There you are, darling!” He came around the house, Carole attached to one arm.

  “Hello, Osborn.” She took the hand he offered and stood. His face was so bright, as if he’d been the one away at the shore for a week. He pulled her closer, his scent familiar, his touch secure. He kissed her cheek, and she drew away and fingered the crown of her hat as if keeping it in place, but there was no wind. “Did you have a good trip?”

  “Yes. And it’s wonderful to be here. To see you.”

  Carole stared up at them expectantly.

  Solange smiled at her husband. “You must be thirsty. Carole, is there any iced tea left?”

  The few hours left in the day were occupied with their daughter, who had many things to show her father and many stories to tell. They ate an early supper. Carole fell asleep on the settee, her browned legs folded so her shins rested against her father’s leg. He reached for a blanket and gently tucked it around her. Solange left the sitting room, wandered into the kitchen and joined Osborn a few moments later, pacing the room.

  He motioned to her. “Sit with me, darling.”

  She chose a chair not quite across from him, perched on the edge and regarded their sleeping daughter.

  “Carole was unusually talkative this evening,” he said.

  “Until she made a friend the other day, she’s only had me to speak to.”

  “Have you been lonely? I’ve missed you.”

  “It is quiet.” It wasn’t the response he’d wanted, but what could she do?

  Osborn blinked at her, then continued. “I wanted to discuss something with you, something I thought about on the drive down. Chatham seems to suit both you and Carole so well. Why don’t we look at property here?”

  “For holidays?”

  “No, to live. I’m certain I could find a position nearby, or in Boston. We’d be far from all that . . . business.”

  Her fingers stilled on the silver bangle she’d been toying with. He couldn’t mean what he’d said. “Move here? Permanently?”

  “Yes. That was my thought.”

  “But what about our families?”

  “I’d sacrifice that.” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He pulled away from Solange’s gaze and stared at Carole. “For us. For you.”

  A silence as dense and static as the bottom of the ocean filled the room. Carole turned onto her shoulder, sighing in her sleep.

  Solange uncrossed her legs and placed her feet on the floor. “I should put her to bed.”

  “But what about my proposal?”

  “I won’t leave my family.”

  He swept his arm to encircle her and their daughter. “But we are your family. You can visit Burlington as often as you please. You and Carole and I can be happy here. Nothing else matters, don’t you see?”

  “And what would I do here all day?”

  “What you have been doing. Be Carole’s mother. Be my wife.”

  He meant to sequester her here, make her forget her parents, her work, the desperate needs of others, and return her to her throne as his Scarlet Queen. The artlessness of his proposal moved her, but only a little. She had no clear vision of how their relationship would play out in the future, but it was far too late to go back to the naive place where they had begun. They were different people now; at least she was.

  “I don’t want to live here, Osborn. I won’t leave my family. Nor the lake.”

  He jerked as if she’d struck him. “The lake? I’ve never understood your obsession with it. Why do you need a lake when you can have the ocean?”

  “My obsession? It’s my home.”

  His face darkened. “We’re married, Solange. Your home is with me.” He waited for her to agree, but she could not. “Perhaps Carole and I will look at houses tomorrow. She’d enjoy it.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. “Osborn, you wouldn’t.”

  “If you force my hand.”

  “I’m her mother. You wouldn’t.” Her throat closed. “You can’t.”

  “A mother thinks of herself last, not first.” He stood and gathered Carole into his arms. “To bed, little one.”

  Solange rose to stand in front of him, her pulse quickening. She’d never seen him so closed off. “Osborn . . .”

  He edged around her.

  She followed them to foot of the stairs. “Please don’t. Please.” She felt her knees give way and clasped the doorframe.

  He started up, ducking under the low ceiling. “I’m only taking her to bed. You needn’t fuss.”

  She waited for Osborn in the living room, expecting him to apologize for the threat, but when he returned he picked up the newspaper and retired to the patio to read in the failing light. Solange imagined he was already reshaping her staunch refusal into a change of heart that would require time. She didn’t want to argue with him yet again, and she certainly didn’t want to hear him say he would take Carole from her, not even if it meant allowing him to believe something other than the truth, so she let it go.

  It was simple to release her grasp here. The salty worn air seeping in through the open windows and the angled, diluted light conspired to soften her. Time washed in and out with the tide, traveling backward as well as forward, engulfing the beach and giving it up again. She listened to the waves beyond the dunes slap the sand and shrink away, again and again, and pictured her desires moving into and out of her outstretched arms, hers for a moment and then stolen by another power. She pretended to be water, yielding to the pull.

  That night and in the days and nights that followed, Solange and Osborn inhabited a twilight space, lit by the laughter of their daughter and shaped by the waxing moon. It was a fantasy of a life, not unlike the one they’d had when she believed their souls were twinned. This fantasy, weak and easy, also would not last. Nothing, she would realize, lasts longer than the truth of who we really are.

  • • •

 
One day in mid-July, they wandered the streets of Chatham, arriving at a block of half-timbered buildings with steep, dormered roofs. Osborn ducked into the post office to collect the mail.

  “We’ll be in the general store,” Solange called after him.

  She and Carole tried on hats, laughing and admiring each other. Osborn rejoined them, holding an envelope, his face solemn. Solange’s mouth went dry and she carefully placed the sunhat she’d been considering onto its stand. Osborn led her outside to a nearby bench, Carole at their heels.

  Carole said, “What is it, Papa?”

  “A telegram for your mother.”

  He sat beside Solange. She opened the envelope with trembling hands and unfolded the paper. She scanned the letter and turned to Osborn, his face blurred through her tears.

  “My father has died.”

  Osborn pulled her into his arms.

  Solange was unaware of the passage of time. Stunned into helplessness, she looked on as Osborn composed a reply to her mother, saying they would leave in the morning. There wasn’t time to drive today, he explained. Solange was dimly aware of Carole clinging to her arm, whispering questions that her father may have answered. Solange said nothing.

  They returned to the cottage. It seemed so unfamiliar; she was bewildered to find her belongings there. Osborn settled her in the living room, asked her what she needed. She shook her head. He left, spinning in and out of her view—into the kitchen, up and down the stairs, back and forth to the car—Carole trailing along. They brought her water, tea, supper, a blanket. She waited for night, for the crushing stillness.

  Osborn knelt before her. “Please come to bed. You need to rest.”

  “I’ll just stay here.”

  He lingered a moment, then was gone.

  Solange rose and shut the windows to mute the sea. It was invisible, hidden behind the reflection of the lamp in the glass. Good.

  She stood at the window, clutching the blanket around her shoulders. No one could have foreseen the sudden death of Jean-Claude Bouchard, but she was nevertheless nauseous with guilt for having been here when he collapsed on his boat and slipped into the lake like an anchor. She could have spent the last several weeks with him. She could have been with her mother, at her side as she bore the news. Instead, she had agreed to escape here with Osborn, an act she regarded now as spurred by cowardice, not hope.

  But those lost weeks were nothing when added to the eleven years she’d lived on the hill, high above the lake, stumbling around in an oversized house, in a life that didn’t fit her, bound by marriage to a man who did not understand or accept her nature, and whose conscience was muffled by his ambition, whose faults were disguised by breeding and success. Solange stared at her ghostly reflection and opened her mouth, afraid she would suffocate under the weight of her regret. She’d been blown off course and was lost. This was her true grief, and it had first entered her like a sickness after her niece’s wedding. Her grief for the self she had betrayed, crystallized by her father’s death, was so large she could not contain it. It lived beside her, another being, and her guilt gave it a beating heart.

  They left Chatham early the next morning under a vermilion sky. Solange dozed, half dreaming about what she might have been doing when her father had fallen from his boat. Rubbing sand from Carole’s feet, perhaps, or listening to Osborn comment on the beauty of the ocean. Her thoughts drifted to the telegram, the staccato message like final heartbeats. Come home STOP. She was unbearably tired. Her skin felt abraded, her nerves too close to the surface. Deep inside, she was numb.

  When they arrived home, Solange left Carole with Osborn and, against his protestations, descended on foot to the waterfront. She found her way to the family houseboat and boarded it. Her brother was slumped against the wheel as if asleep, but his eyes were open, his face hard with pain and anger.

  “They’re saying it was probably his heart. It was, you know, but not in the way they mean. Too much trouble and too little money for too long.”

  She reached for him. “David—”

  He looked away, pulled a tin from his pocket and began to roll a smoke. “Go see Mama. She’s below.”

  She descended, gripping the rail, and felt her way in the dim light to where her mother lay.

  “Mama.”

  Her mother stretched out her arms and Solange collapsed into them, sobbing. Her mother’s embrace was warmer and stronger than ever, so many years of love now strengthened by loss. Solange felt small and brittle.

  At the funeral the next day, Jean-Claude Bouchard’s favorite objects (his pipe, his compass and his slicker) were burned and cast into the lake. Solange slept in her childhood berth that night and the next. On the third night, she leaned against the deck railing, stars bright overhead, bats skimming the water, wheeling into the moist midsummer air, black against black.

  Solange descended the companionway and found her mother at the sturdy oak table holding a tin cup of steaming coffee. Dressed in black, her face was pale but resolute.

  “There’s more, if you’d like.”

  “No, thank you, Mama.” Solange lowered herself onto a chair. “I’ve made a mistake.”

  Her mother nodded, but said nothing.

  “I’ve loved him. I truly have.”

  “I know you did. It’s all right.”

  “How can it be all right? Osborn wants to move us to the Cape, to Chatham. When I objected, he threatened to take Carole from me.”

  Rosemarie raised her eyebrows. “He said that?”

  “In so many words. What am I to do? He’ll never divorce me. I’ll be stuck with him, playing the part of his wife, his supporter. Osborn is headed for public office, I’m certain of it. What will I do then?” She paused, allowing the truth to surface. “He’s not the man I thought he was.”

  Her mother rose from the table and disappeared into the sleeping quarters at the bow. A few moments later, she placed a square box in front of Solange, made of blue glass and as long as her thumb.

  “What’s this?”

  “My mother gave it to me when I was eighteen. I’d fallen for a young man who’d come to our island looking for healing for his younger sister.”

  “Not Papa?” Solange had never considered that her mother could have been in love with anyone else.

  “No, not your father. This fellow, a logger, was from Essex.”

  “Not from the lake.”

  “Definitely not, and Protestant besides. When my mother found out about us and our plans to be together, to leave the lake, she sat me down and gave me this box. I asked her why. ‘Blue for the water,’ she said. ‘To bring you back to us.’”

  “And that’s what happened?”

  Rosemarie cast her eyes down. “In time. That October, he had an accident. A tree fell the wrong way. He died the next day.”

  The air in the hold grew oppressive. Solange swept damp hair from her forehead. Her throat was dry and cinched. “And then you met Papa.”

  Her mother smiled. “That’s right. Less than a year later.”

  Solange placed a finger on the box and traced the bead of lead along the rim. “I don’t love Osborn anymore, Mama, but I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

  “Logging’s a dangerous job. It could’ve happened anyway. And I’m not saying I wasn’t torn apart. When he died, seemed like I died, too.” She paused, remembering. “But the box reminded me of where I belonged, that I could go back and my life would still be mine. And it was.” She fixed her gaze on Solange and laid her words out straight. “You can’t know how things will turn out. That’s not in our power—or anyone’s. But you can know where you belong.”

  Solange nodded, her throat too clogged to speak. She ached for the years she’d squandered, and for losing Osborn, the man she’d loved. She wasn’t sure what to hope for. So much depended on luck, good and bad. A tarot card is reversed o
r it isn’t. A child is born on a boat or in a mansion. A daughter is like her mother or her father.

  She picked up the blue box and cradled it in her hands. It was heavier than it appeared.

  That night, Solange stashed the blue box in her bag and waited for her mother to fall asleep. She thought about the fortune-teller at the party, about the Wheel of Fortune card and the turning point it had signaled, on which she was now poised, and the Fool, whose significance had, until this moment, escaped her. She would not be ensnared.

  She climbed off the boat, her bag slung over her shoulder. The moon had risen above the island hills. She nodded to several shadowed figures huddled drinking and smoking, then made her way down the dock, water lapping against the piers, the air rich with the smell of diesel, wet wood and barnacles. She knew where to find him, which boat, assuming he’d stuck around. He’d mentioned his place in passing and she’d fixed it in her mind without knowing she had.

  A pulse quickened through her, up from the water below the rough boards. Her fingertips tingled and a longing like hunger moaned deep in her belly. Her anxiety about who she was and in what she believed was torn from her mind in shreds, leaving clear, cold space.

  She arrived at her future and abandoned herself. She was foolish, and reckless—and free.

  18

  Carole

  Carole couldn’t think of anything she wanted more than a baby brother or sister. She’d prefer a sister—they would have so much in common—but either would be wonderful. She was tired of dolls and, at ten, too old for them, really. Her parents wouldn’t allow her to have a dog or a cat, so a baby to hold and dress and sing to and, later, to play with, would be the best.

  When her parents announced a baby was coming, Carole was too happy to speak. The baby would arrive in the spring, so she thought right away that next summer they could all go to the beach house in Chatham. It was a better there than in Vermont, because her parents argued less, maybe because her father wasn’t working all the time. Her mother told her she missed her family and the lake when they were at the Cape, but she was calmer there, especially when it was just the two of them, with no plans, one day drifting slowly into the next. Sometimes when Carole was reading or drawing, she’d look over at her mother and find her staring out at the sea. Carole asked her once if she was looking for whales, which made her mother laugh. A baby would distract her mother from whatever she was searching for across the water, and Carole would never be lonely again.