It was a Wednesday in January, so there was no traffic anywhere as she drove past the Tashmoo Overlook, then through the brief stretch of Tisbury’s commercial zone of auto mechanics, grocery stores, and office buildings. She skirted the archetypal-New-England-small-town Main Street of Vineyard Haven and zipped down through Five Corners onto Beach Road, the causeway between the harbor and the Lagoon. Today was a brisk beauty: bright blue sky, darker blue harbor, the Lagoon a muted mirror of the harbor. The new ferry pushed through the gentle swells, headed back to the mainland, passing a couple of masochistic pleasure boats. She sped over the drawbridge to the brick behemoth.
Martha’s Vineyard Hospital was the largest repository of local artwork on the Island. Its corridors were lined with donations from scores of local artists, both year-rounders and summer people: photographs of life here a hundred years ago; uncountable seascapes and rural landscapes and harbors; abstracts; ancient marine charts. Joanna’s theory was that the hospital had been made as inviting as possible so that people would actually use it. New Englanders did not go in much for admitting they needed help. Celia, on the other hand, posited that since a huge percentage of summer visitors somehow ended up there—usually thanks to Lyme disease or moped accidents—the artwork was to make up for lost opportunities to sightsee.
Two of the nurses looked familiar to her from high school chorus. They both wore wedding bands, and she wondered in passing what the odds were that a local kid could grow up to find both a good year-round job and a good year-round partner here. It had never occurred to her to even aim for that. She felt slightly sucker-punched by her own lack of imagination.
No, she didn’t mean that. She meant she was lucky to have escaped being caught in that trap.
“He just woke up,” said one of the nurses in a firmly cheerful voice, following her into the room. “He’s fine, and he can go home later today.”
Hank looked hideous under the recessed fluorescents, hooked up to various machines that disturbed her too much to look at directly. He’d clearly been in need of a shave before he went up on the roof—there was about five days’ growth of beard. His hair looked styled for a punk rock performance, and his skin tone, where there were no bruises, was sallow. One leg, draped discreetly with a sheet, was elevated on three white pillows and the ankle swaddled in some kind of sheath. It was unnerving to see that tugboat of a man so vulnerable.
“Howdy, cowboy,” Joanna said. “You get bucked off a mustang?”
He took a moment to register that she was not a hallucination. Then his lips twisted toward an almost perfectly straight diagonal slant, as they always did when he was trying to disguise his pleasure with sarcasm. “Oh, God. Who brought you back here?” he asked. His tone was soft. The drip beside the bed had morphine.
“Celia.”
“Damn gossip.”
“Were you planning to keep this a secret?”
“I didn’t want them to make you come running back from New York. Don’t you have a job?”
“Freelance,” she said cheerfully. “I don’t have to punch the clock.”
“Don’t you have a life?” he said.
“Freelance,” she said again, in a more insistent tone because it wasn’t entirely true. “My life fits in my suitcase, and there’s this awesome new thing called the internet that lets me stay in touch with everyone.” She wasn’t sure he knew about Brian. They’d been dating less than a year.
“Don’t you have plants to water?”
“It’s all under control,” she said, although it wasn’t. Celia had called at 3 A.M., so Joanna had assumed it was to report an imminent death. She’d caught a 4 A.M. Greyhound to Boston that was delayed for hours in the death throes of a nor’easter before it transferred her to a bus for the Cape. Before she’d left New York, she’d had the presence of mind to clean the bathroom, chuck the garbage, and make the bed. But she hadn’t thought about her plants or her mail. She wasn’t even sure what she’d packed. “I’m here until you’re back on your feet,” she said.
“That’s going to be at least another week,” he said ruefully.
More like two, she thought, now that she’d seen him, but she said nothing.
He was dopey enough that further conversation was useless, so she waited until a woman hardly older than she was, a doctor in purple scrubs, came in through the open door and asked if Joanna was family, and would she like to know what was going on with him. This was how she came to know of Henry Holmes’s Complete Medical History.
It wasn’t just a low-energy pilon fracture and a slew of bruised organs. He’d been having sundry health crises for years, which she’d never heard about because he was a Yankee Male. High blood pressure, dizzy spells, heart murmur, breathing problems, pneumonia, three bouts of Lyme disease, once with babesiosis, which had hospitalized him . . . That was three years ago and she’d never even heard about it, although she’d seen him since. She managed to keep her surprise from the doctor, lest the doctor stop telling her things.
“Will you be taking him home?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling a fraud because the doctor seemed to think they actually lived together. “You better tell me what I need to know, because he will play down whatever you tell him.”
The doctor nodded. “Of course. We’ll be sending him home with prescriptions for painkillers and blood-clot prevention medication. He’ll need to elevate his leg and ankle for the next five to ten days to minimize swelling. He should just get up for about thirty minutes at a time for meals and to avoid blood clots, and to use the bathroom and have a sponge bath, otherwise he needs to be on the bed, torso flat on the bed, and the right foot raised up on two or three pillows.”
That was far more than she had anticipated for a broken leg, but it was better than planning his funeral. She tried to estimate how many gallons of chowder she’d have time to make while she endured Hank’s ranting about the doctor’s orders when he got home. There would certainly be ranting. Would it be better, or worse, if she hid the rum?
“Make sure he does basic stuff like wiggle his toes now and then,” the doctor was continuing, “that will also help with the edema. You’ll need to drive him to any appointments and help to make sure he doesn’t trip or anything until he gets used to the crutches and the boot.”
“He won’t have a cast?”
The doctor shook her head. “Luckily the surgeon got to him quickly for the ORIF. That means he’s full of plates and screws, and when you take the insult of the injury and add to that the insult of the surgery, you don’t want to put on a cast. The boot is better; he can take it off to shower eventually, and check skin tone and swelling. But he can’t do any weight-bearing for six to twelve weeks.”
“Oh,” Joanna said, sounding more dismayed than she wanted to. “How long before he’s, like, totally back to normal?”
“He should be at ninety percent improvement in six to twelve months,” she said, nodding to make sure Joanna understood how great this news was.
“Oh!” Joanna said, unable to hide her alarm.
The doctor looked confused, then smiled reassuringly. “You don’t have to play nurse for that long,” she said. “He definitely needs someone around for three or four weeks, because he’ll be on prescription pain meds, but he’ll have started physical therapy by then, and after twelve weeks he shouldn’t even need the boot anymore.”
She smiled tightly through a claustrophobic wave of panic. “So I should plan to be around for a while.”
“Well, the first few days, we’ll be sending a visiting nurse to help out, especially with the sponge bath and stuff—you’re not his wife, are you?”
“Ick,” Joanna said without thinking. “Sorry, that was rude,” she added, in response to the doctor’s quizzical expression. “He’s my uncle. He raised me.”
“Right, so you probably don’t want to give him a sponge bath, that’s what the visiting nurse is for. But otherwise, unless there are complications, he won’t need you around by, where are we now
, mid-January? Assuming no complications, then by early March, you should be off-duty.”
There could be no such thing as “no complications” with Hank the patient. Joanna felt edgy: she had left behind her successfully transplanted life on an hour’s notice, and now she was on a rock in the Atlantic Ocean in midwinter, to take care of a vinegary crank who would not want her to tell him what to do. She’d have to find a subletter. She’d have to ask her upstairs neighbor, who kept her spare key, to water the plants and check her mail since generous Brian, even at his most wanderlustful, was never one to cruise the subway out to Queens. Where was her extra mail key? Did she have her research notes for the article she was polishing for Upstate magazine? Was she going to miss her college roommate’s birthday? What should she do about Brian and his invitation and The Talk they had to have?
“I’ll be back later today,” she assured Hank, pretending none of these things were on her mind. She pecked him on his forehead and headed out.
BACK OVER THE drawbridge, under a glaring-pale winter sun. A few seagulls were scoping the rocks along the causeway and skimming over the boatyards and empty docks, their shadows pulling long even in late morning. This stretch of road was dreaded in summer, almost constantly backed up from Five Corners halfway to the bridge; now she was the only car in sight. She turned into a cramped dirt lot near the shipyard. She barely registered the familiar harborside miscellany of her childhood: a clatter of overturned, weathered dinghies, frazzled ends of great hempen lines, battered buoy-floats. A trio of retired marine pilings, still bound by heavy nylon ropes, lay horizontal as a traffic barrier. She parked by these, being careful not to block other cars, and walked through a stiffening breeze that smelled faintly of sea air and diesel fumes. She was headed for the cedar-shingled building of the Journal offices.
This building had housed a health food store once, and a cluster of offices decades before that, but its inner layout had been gutted and inside it now functioned like a barn for scriveners. Low-walled cubicles circled a big open space around a wooden conference table. Up a set of unfinished wooden steps was another worktable in another open space. Off of this were private offices for the publisher and the managing editor. An old family friend, Everett, was that managing editor, although he wore a number of other hats too.
She introduced herself to the smiling young woman seated behind a sanded-pine counter, who gestured Joanna to go on upstairs unescorted. She was thrown by the laissez-faire attitude; in New York she could never go anywhere inside any office unless she showed ID and then let herself be shepherded. Upstairs, two young women sat at the central table working at laptops, with intense expressions on their faces—one looked displeased, the other delighted. Neither of them registered her presence. The muted taps of fingers on keyboards were the only sound besides the soft drone of premillennial heating.
There were two office doors, and only one was open. A man of about seventy years sat behind an old barn door resting on metal trestles. Artisanal office furniture was trendy in New York, and expensive; but this, Joanna knew, was not artisanal, it was probably recycled or donated. The total cost would have been at most twenty dollars for some bracing.
A computer was sitting like a shunned orphan on a smaller table in the corner. Everett—shortish, stocky, and gruffly avuncular, somewhere between a human Yorkshire terrier and the Lorax—sat on an old wooden chair, deep in thought.
She said his name as she walked in, and he perked up.
“Joanna Howes!” he said with mock formality, then stood and crossed the spartan room to hug her. “My favorite New Yorker. How’s things in the city? If you want a break from Hank duty while you’re here, how about some local reporting?”
She’d been expecting this—why else would he ask her to come to his office? Having Everett as her boss again would feel like regression. She was supposed to go home to New York and pitch to The New Yorker. But she’d be here awhile, and hackneyed as it sounded, the rent wouldn’t wait. “Sure,” she said. “Love to. What do you have in mind?”
“It’s freelance,” said Everett, returning to his seat. “Of course. I can’t put you on staff since you’re only here temporarily.”
“I better be here temporarily,” she said. “Have you seen his leg?”
“Not yet, but I heard. That’s what he gets for trying to fix his own roof at seventy.”
“In a storm,” she amended. “He’s lucky he’s alive. I’m sticking around until he’s self-sufficient.”
“He’s an ornery old bastard and he’ll be walking again in a month, Anna.”
“He better not. He’s going to push himself too hard and reinjure it, we both know that.”
“Well, we don’t put people on salary unless they’re staying put. We both know you’re not staying put.”
“This is true.”
“I’ll pay you per piece—and we’re understaffed at the moment so there will be plenty of work while you’re here. I mean, I can put you on half—”
“How can you be understaffed in winter, if all your writers are year-rounders and there’s nothing going on?”
“Now is when they all go on vacation,” said Everett patiently, as if that should have been obvious. Which it should have been, were she thinking like an Islander. “Or get the flu or fly to Cuba for cheap medical care or go into rehab or have their annual nervous breakdown. But there’s still commission meetings and school sports and the Steamship Authority and the housing problem. And the opioid crisis isn’t going away either, but I won’t put you on that since you don’t have a real news background. No offense.”
“Actually I’m glad you realize that.”
“I love your features,” he said, as if in compensation. “That profile you did of Nina Brown—”
“Thanks,” she said. She flashed the weary smile of somebody accustomed to compliments for primarily one thing. The Nina Brown piece had come out five years earlier, for the online mag Impeccable. Brown overdosed five hours after the interview, so the profile was never going to go out of date. Half the planet had read it by now, indifferent to how old it was. It had included a strangely mesmerizing passage on Brown’s opinion of various breakfast cereals, about which she had waxed kinesthetically for ten minutes. That bit went viral for about a week—“rock star’s favorite cereal” meme—and the article had become Joanna’s calling card without her making the effort. Because of it, she’d gotten enough freelance assignments to quit her copyediting job and pay her Outer Boroughs of New York City Lifestyle bills without really feeling like she was doing anything useful.
She was too shy to be a serious investigative reporter. But her quirky upbringing had wired her to adapt, chameleon-like, to other people, so put her in a room alone with almost any willing subject—celebrity, convict, politician, cult leader, activist, billionaire, geek, poet—and she could coax them into showing their most engaging selves. Being in the same room with them was key, though, so that meant she was off the clock as long as she was stuck on Martha’s Vineyard in winter doing Hank Patrol.
“How many stories a week can I file?” she asked Everett now, staring across his desk at him. “How much can I make? I came home too suddenly to find a subletter, so even if I’m staying at Hank’s, I’ve got to make rent in New York for February.”
The door was open and the young women outside, although they weren’t listening, could hear them clearly, so Everett took a moment to think, then pulled a small notepad from his vest pocket and wrote a figure on it. He turned the pad to face her. She read the figure. It wasn’t enough. She made a wry face.
“I can get you some guest posts on the arts blog, and the community blog, if that helps. And I can put you on some of the weekly beats for now, but only until my regulars get back. Do you want me to do that? I could put you on an hourly payroll for that, if you like.”
She almost said yes, then reconsidered. “If I’m freelance, I can write for other papers, right?” she said. “If I need more cash?”
He fr
owned. “Theoretically, I guess. But the Newes won’t hire anyone who’s freelance for us. They have a formal policy against it. I think it’s even posted somewhere in the newsroom.”
“That’s stupid,” she said crossly.
A small shrug. “Well, it fits their zeitgeist. One reason I left there.”
“What if I just don’t mention to them that I’m freelancing here?”
“We read each other’s papers, Anna, they’ll see your byline.”
“How ’bout I just do pieces for you without a byline?”
He gave her an overly patient look. “We don’t do that except for news briefs and editorials, and I’m not going to change policy to accommodate a freelancer trying to game the other paper’s system.” A beat as he considered her grimace. “I promise to give you as much work as possible. I’m glad you’re here, Anna. It will be a treat to work with you again.”
“I feel the same way,” she said quickly, and meant it. Then the afterthought: “And it’s okay that I’m related to almost everyone I’ll be reporting on? Or grew up with them or was their lab partner in school or something?”
He shrugged expansively. “Hazard of a small-town paper. If you ever feel like you’re too close to a subject, let me know and I’ll figure out a way to take you off the story.”
“That probably won’t happen, honestly. I haven’t lived here since high school, and Hank’s not going to get up to anything.”
“Let’s see about that,” said Everett with a chuckle. “I’ve known that guy my whole life and I’ve never seen him not get up to anything. Give him my best, I’ll swing by the hospital to say hi. How much longer is he in for?”
“He’ll be out this afternoon,” she said. “Come by the house tonight and distract him so he doesn’t climb the walls with boredom. Maybe a Scrabble game, you’ll beat him pretty easily while he’s doped up.”
Everett smiled affectionately. “He’ll find something interesting to do. He always does.”
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