On the Same Page

by N. D. Galland

  “Christopher?” Everett asked one of the older male reporters, and she felt all the eyes in the room shift to her left. She reached for her phone.

  I’m not going up in the helicopter, she typed.

  >Did I invite you?

  Bet you were going to.<

  >Now you’ll never know. See you at 5:30.

  SHE WAS DISTRACTED all day. She left the office after the edit meeting and went home, and managed to write up a more detailed report on the forum than the graphs she’d already given Everett. But somehow that took five hours without being worth five hours of her time. She tried to convince herself she didn’t need lipstick but in the end she put on some tinted lip balm.

  When she walked out of her bedroom, she found Hank in the living room standing upright, leaning on his metal crutches.

  “Not putting any weight on it, are you?” she asked.

  He startled slightly, and jerked his head around to stare at her. “What are you doing there?” he said sharply. “I didn’t know you were home. I have such a goddamned headache, and your surprising me like that makes it worse.”

  “I’ve been in my room all day,” she said. “Writing.”

  “You need to tell me when you’re doing something like that.”

  She shrugged. “I got nothing to hide, Hank,” she said. That wasn’t true. She was hiding the reason for wearing tinted lip balm. Not that Hank would notice this detail. He looked pallid and tired.

  “I won’t need supper until late tonight,” he said. “Helen’s coming over and we’re going for a little spin.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “Where to?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, just around,” he said, shifting his weight uncomfortably on his crutches. “Gotta get out of here now and then or I’ll really go nuts.”

  “I can take you out sometime, you know,” she said, reflexively conscience-stricken.

  “I’m going out with Helen,” he said, sharply, still staring down at his boot. “If I wanted to go with you, I’d have asked you.”

  “Whatever works for you,” she said, pacifying. “I think you’re handling this whole thing really well.”

  “Nice that it looks like that,” he muttered. She walked past him toward the door, reaching for her coat on the wall hook. “And where are you going?”

  “I’m going to tail you and Helen,” she said immediately, “make sure you don’t start makin’ out with her or I’ll have to rat you out to her hubby.”

  He grinned, and then chuckled, and then laughed, and she was off the hook.

  At 4:45, she drove to her favorite bakery and bought coffee. She also bought a chocolate chip biscotti—baked by Celia at dawn—and shoved the wax-paper bag in the smallest pocket of her backpack. In case Orion had bought something, she didn’t want to be tempted to eat it. Like Persephone in Hades, one bite of food from the man she was resisting might somehow bind her to him for eternity.

  North Road was exquisitely peaceful, brushing along the northwest line of the Island. Even in winter, its leafless canopy and lichen-dappled stone walls welled with Old New England rustic charm. This time of year, there were almost no other cars, and certainly no fool day-trippers on mopeds wandering all over the road with illegal pillion passengers. In the summer these up-Island roads were so lusciously green it was impossible to remember or believe they ever looked otherwise—now, in winter, it was equally hard to believe they had ever been or could ever be anything but this dull gray.

  Open fields lay fallow or were grazed by livestock. There were few homes off this part of North Road, and especially few to the north side and Vineyard Sound. They were generally owned by people who were wealthy but not interested in showing it. These were Islanders’ preferred sort of wealthy people. Some lived there year-round, put their kids through the school system, ran for office. The sandy soil grew more clay-heavy farther up-Island, so these homes were uniformly accessed by potholed dirt driveways, often very long. Most folks here drove SUVs or pickups. Because they actually needed to.

  Orion Smith lived at the end of such a road. Here the Island was hilly, and there were shallow pockets of mud, and corners that would become blind turns when the scrub finally leafed out in late May. This dirt road was so long that Joanna knew, even before she arrived, that it would have a view of Vineyard Sound and the Elizabeth Islands, even the mainland. As kids, Celia and she had trespassed in this area on their bikes before they understood the concept “trespassing.” A stone wall to one side of the road was splattered with sage-green lichen, and to either side of the drive were a mix of tall scrubby oaks and scraggly pines, with an occasional beech stretching its branches out like a dancer, last fall’s pale copper leaves still fluttering.

  He had said in a text that it was about half a mile in. There were turns and twists but she finally veered to the left and the woods opened out to a broad field. Settled in the field was a large house whose backdrop was a bluff overlooking Vineyard Sound.

  The house was a colonial-era manse of sorts. She knew there were a few of these in this part of the Island, since back in the day people in such remote settings tended to live in clumps with extended family and servants. This one had all the original lines but had been given such a thorough overhaul that it could almost pass as new. She was expecting something grander, gaudier, more custom-made. Something that would “offend her nicely,” as promised.

  On the other hand, the landscaping struck her as a bit over-the-top, even in winter. It was a prissy English cottage look, writ too large for a real English cottage. It didn’t seem like a bachelor’s aesthetic . . . was he married? Google had said nothing about a wife.

  She parked in the clay-top parking area a hundred feet from the side of the house and walked toward it, appreciating it. The view from the upstairs windows must be amazing. The front door faced south, toward her, the English cottage busyness spilling out like an apron. To the left was a little stone terrace and to the right a screened-in porch, both designed to blend with the original aesthetic.

  Orion, in a hunter-green cashmere sweater, had opened the front door and was waiting for her. He raised a hand in welcome, and gestured her inside before disappearing in himself.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” he called out cheerily as she crossed the threshold. “Feel free to look around! Take your coat off and stay awhile.”

  Joanna had never been a house craver, but this was a house worth craving. Stepping inside through the front door—ancient oaken slats nailed together by ancient crossbeams with ancient nails—she was in a tiny vestibule. It smelled of Antique Home: as if mothballs were tucked away in every corner and decades of steam heat had left an invisible haze of ozone in the air. A winding staircase directly before her led upstairs, and to either side were thumb-latch doors, both ajar. She knew the basic layout of these old houses well enough to guess what to expect through both doors: each led to a public space, perhaps a living room and a study; at their far ends, they would both open into the great room with its large fireplace, which centuries ago had been the kitchen; beyond that would likely be an extension added later with a modern kitchen. Upstairs, of course, would be a warren of bedrooms.

  But she had never seen any house this old so well maintained. She couldn’t tell how he had insulated it effectively, but it seemed to have both the original internal plaster walls, adulterated with Victorian wallpaper, as well as the original exterior ones. So he must have blown some kind of space-age insulation into the narrow plaster-and-lathed space between them, to keep out the wet New England chill.

  Joanna walked into the right-hand room, sparsely furnished with colonial farmhouse furniture lit by a patinated Tiffany torchiere. The grandfatherly smell of old wood overpowered the mothball-and-ozone. She crossed through to the great room—even more sparsely furnished, just a wrought-iron daybed near the hearth and another torchiere. She went through to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was in sharp distinction to everything else, modern and high-tech. It smelled like fresh gingerbread
. Damn you, Smith, she thought, as she set down her backpack on a high stool, and opened the smaller pocket.

  “Hello,” he said. “A little sweet is about to come out of the oven, want some?”

  “Nice try,” Joanna said. She brandished her cookie bag with insolence. “Brought my own.”

  “Is it still warm? You can use the microwave to heat it up.”

  She hesitated, trying to determine if this was a violation of ethics.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” he said, intuiting her thoughts.

  “A journalist I know accepted a bluefish from a fisherman he was writing about during the Derby. The journalist brought it as smoked bluefish pâté to a potluck dinner at someone’s house that both the fisherman and the editor were also at, and long story short, the editor learned the provenance of the fish and the journalist got a tongue-lashing the next day in the office for accepting a favor from someone he was writing about.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” he said confidingly.

  “I’m just going to dunk it into my coffee anyhow,” she said, and pulled out the thermos.

  He seemed tickled by her having brought her own snacks. “As you like. I can at least offer you a real mug for your coffee. Help yourself.” He nodded toward the smaller of two walk-in pantries. It was painted grayish-blue inside, very old-school even though lit by modern pin lights, which glanced off rows of dinnerware that looked like it might have come with the original house. There was an NPR mug in the midst of all the teacups, and Joanna plucked it off the rack, along with a small plate for her biscotti. She came back out and sat at the granite counter. The small rows of recessed lights made the kitchen look like it belonged in an ad for interior decorating. They made the owner look pretty good too.

  “All right then,” she said, pouring her coffee into the mug and setting her cookie on the plate . . . and then she watched him pull the gingerbread out of the oven. That bastard had timed his baking (his baking?) to torment her when she arrived.

  “Take your coat off,” he said with a cordial smile, setting the gingerbread directly in front of her on a trivet.

  “Do you do a lot of baking?”

  “Only when I’m trying to impress girls.”

  “How often is that?”

  “More often since I got divorced. So, a few years now.” He turned back to the stove, made sure the oven was off.

  Good, there was an ex-wife. Google hadn’t mentioned her, but there were other search engines specializing in such things.

  “Too bad you won’t have any,” he continued. “Hard to impress you if you won’t even try it.”

  “Another time,” she said.

  He grinned. “Just got here and already committing to another date? That’s great!” He smoothly pulled off the oven mitt, dropping it into a linen-lined wooden basket with other mitts. He did it with the casual grace that comes of performing a familiar ritual: he genuinely did bake.

  Noticing where her eyes had gone: “My grandmother wanted a granddaughter. The least I could do is let her teach me to cook.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said.

  He nodded, dwelling on some pleasing remembrance. “It was sweet. We had our seasonal projects—Thanksgiving, Easter, Fourth of July. I especially miss her on the Fourth.” He looked almost choked up. “The Fourth of July was a special day in my family.” He seemed about to say more, but then stopped himself. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the Fourth of July.”

  “Was your family from Edgartown?” Joanna asked with dry humor. Different towns claimed different annual rites—West Tisbury had the Fair, Oak Bluffs had Illumination Night, Aquinnah had the Wampanoag Cranberry Day, but Edgartown owned the Fourth of July.

  She could imagine his family—evenly tanned father in the preppy uniform of green and pink Izod clothing, mother in khaki slacks with an athletic haircut that could withstand the breeze of a morning sail, sitting on the porch of a Whaling Captain’s house (the grandmother with perfectly coiffed, very white hair, and thick pink lipstick that stained her teeth), watching the parade pass directly in front of their house while sipping grasshoppers or Pimm’s.

  Her question seemed to startle him. Rather than acknowledging her astute assumptions, instead he asked, “Do you cook?”

  “Enough to survive,” she said.

  He grabbed a tailored wool jacket from a peg and slid one arm into it with the same smoothness he’d discarded the mitt. “Since you won’t take your coat off, why don’t I give you a quick tour while the gingerbread is cooling,” he said, pulling the jacket the rest of the way on. “If your coffee gets cold we’ll just reheat it.” And before she could disagree, he was nodding toward the kitchen door.

  This opened directly onto a broad expanse of scruffy grass and scraggly bushes—unreconstructed Vineyard Meadow. About two hundred feet distant, a bluff dropped away to the steel-blue water of Vineyard Sound. The chain of the Elizabeth Islands—Nashawena, Gosnold, Naushon—rested on the horizon, rocky and bare. The sky above them was a watery lavender, accented with orange cirrus clouds. The contrast made the world look enormous.

  Just to either side of the door was a kitchen garden, now dormant, with herbs within reach of the threshold and raised beds radiating out in a fan pattern.

  “My chef’s passion project,” he said, a statement that sharply reminded her this man was not one of her people. “I have a brown thumb.”

  “That’s an impressive garden up front,” she said. “Even in winter.”

  He nodded, disinterested. “My ex designed that, and I have the landscapers come in to keep it shaped. It’s based on a Renaissance garden or something. Down there”—he gestured toward a very large wooden building she hadn’t seen from the drive—“that’s the barn. This used to be a working farm like everything else around here, but now that’s my home theater and there’s a couple of pools, inside and outside. And a sauna and hot tub and all that. Want to see it?”

  “Oh, why not, sure,” she said, making certain not to sound impressed. What was wrong with her that she had not yet amassed the dough to buy a house, let alone smarten one up as he had done? To which of her many bad choices should she attribute that failing? “Actually, can I see the helipad?” she asked. “That’s really why I’m here.”

  He shrugged. “Not much to see, but sure.” He led her around the side of the house—an outdoor shower with elaborate stonework built against the western wall, behind the screened porch—and then pointed down a slope that spilled away from the extensive front yard. “There it is,” he said.

  She looked. There it sat, a huge mechanical dragonfly resting in a field where Celia and Joanna used to play Little House on the Prairie nearly a quarter-century ago. It was almost precisely where they had, absurdly, tried to build a log cabin one spring, out of foraged oak branches.

  “There are no markings,” she said.

  “Not yet,” he agreed. “That’s not where it will stay, I want to clear a section of trees and move it about five hundred yards that way”—he gestured into the woods from which Joanna had once foraged the failed logs—“so it’s not an eyesore. But for now when I use it, I just land it right there. It’s convenient.” He nudged her shoulder with his—she felt a pleasant shock from the intimacy of it—and began walking toward the front door.

  “It must be awfully loud,” she said, following him.

  “It’s not like I’d ever use it to run errands,” he said. “I just want to get to and from Manhattan. And sure, once last summer, I chartered a pilot to bring guests because their timing didn’t match mine. But even then, I avoid the traffic, and—you’d think this would matter to people—I don’t add to the traffic, even at the airport—”

  “Yes, I remember that polemic from the meeting.”

  “I come in by copter and then I barely ever leave this place. Can you blame me? In the summer I have a housekeeper and chef, but they time their errands so they’re in town when everyone else is at the beach.” He shrugged. “So, you know, it’s u
ltimately a boon. Without the copter I’d be one more rich asshole adding to the traffic. I use it maybe twice a week in summer and it’s only in earshot briefly, usually when most of the chartered jets are making a ruckus anyhow. It seems like a no-brainer to me. I don’t see why the ZBA was so stubborn about it. It couldn’t be any worse if Henry Holmes was still on the board. C’mon, let’s go back in before your coffee gets cold.”

  For a moment she couldn’t breathe. “Henry Holmes?”

  “Sure, you know him, he’s an old-timer,” he said easily, as he unlatched the front door. “The jerk with the broken leg heckling me at the meeting. He gave me such grief about a storage shed—seriously, a storage shed!—that I wanted down by the boat launch, when he was on the ZBA, but apparently he’s got his nose in all kinds of town business. You know him? You must know him.”

  She nodded, averting her gaze as she crossed past him into the house. “Yep, I know Henry Holmes.”

  “He has a huge chip on his shoulder toward anyone with money.”

  With a terse laugh, she said, “It’s not that exactly. But he is known as the town contrarian.” She felt some depraved pride about that.

  “I totally get that,” he said, closing the door behind himself and gesturing her through the Colonial-Furniture-room back toward the kitchen. “If he handled his own prejudices with some kind of integrity, I could respect that. But he’s one of those windbags who just, I don’t know, his moral compass lacks a true north. He seems to be defined by what makes him personally comfortable or uncomfortable.”

  Now she felt herself bristle. “Is that so strange? How do you set your moral compass?”

  “I think my values are pretty consistent,” he said. “But for instance, here’s a story about Henry Holmes I heard at a cocktail party. He’s always going on about how the government should have no right to limit people’s freedoms, right? He’s famous for that. Early on—I have heard—everyone loved how he chaired the Zoning Board because he didn’t even believe in zoning. He believed everyone should have the right to do whatever they wanted on their own property.”