by Susan Conley
“You just left him?” Sam says. “Jesus, Mom.”
“I think this is called oversharing,” Charlie says. “We need to call Dad. Does Dad even know this stuff? Why are you telling us this?”
“It’s life, Charlie,” I say. “It’s real life. It is what drugs can do to you. It’s what we call cautionary. It’s about not always trusting the people who you think love you.”
“Cautionary? It’s freaky,” Sam says.
“I knew I’d find love with your father. I knew it.”
“Earth to Dad,” Sam says. “Come in, please. Mom’s totally losing it.”
Charlie stares at me in the rearview as if he entirely disapproves. As if these new facts have physically changed who I am to him. But I’m the same person, driving them back to our island.
I TAKE CHARLIE TO Lucy’s house. Because even though I’m kind of delirious from driving, I promised him I would. I believe you have to live up to at least half your promises if you want to have any credibility left with teenagers.
Lucy lives on one of the side streets near Tugboat Pizza. Charlie runs toward her front door with his backpack and doesn’t turn around once to wave at us. I drive away, and my thoughts go to depressing, dead-end places. Charlie leaving me. Charlie growing up. Who will I be without Charlie?
I imagine a different life and a different marriage. Maybe Austin, Texas. A bakery with some sun.
“Please tell me you’re not crying,” Sam says. “Please say you’re not.”
I wipe my tears with my hand.
He says, “I need to get away from this family and all the crying soon. I need to get the band to Vermont.”
I take a left onto the bridge. “It will be good of you to wait until your father gets home.” I do not even try to hold back on my sarcasm.
Sam has no facial expression while we cross the bridge. It feels like he’s shutting down. When we’ve made it to the other side, he says he’s so hungry he’s going to faint.
I stop at Dairy Queen because there’s nowhere else to go. He devours a hamburger and a large fry in the car, and the food seems to restore his anger. He says he can’t believe how far Sewall is from Nova Scotia. Then he stops talking to me.
* * *
—
IT’S FREEZING IN THE house, even after I light the woodstove. We can’t stay on the island anymore. It’s been a mistake to try to stay. I make us cheese omelets, and we eat them on the rug in front of the stove in silence.
Everything I do in the house feels unnatural now. Everything I say to Sam feels portentous. Like he knows that Kit left his shirt in Marsh’s apartment and that our lives have been thrown into disbelief, but he’s not saying.
Then I remember Sam doesn’t know anything and that Kit and I are the adults and Sam’s counting on us.
The moon is full and blue, and the water and trees are also a little blue. Sam still won’t talk to me. It’s like being in the house by myself, except for his passive aggression, which feels like another person because his passive aggression is that big.
He finally goes upstairs.
But I have to wait for Charlie, who doesn’t come back until almost nine. I’m beside myself by then.
I watch from the window while he ties the rowboat up at the dock.
“Where have you been?” I ask when he comes in.
He looks confused by the question. “You know where I’ve been.”
He sits on the rug by the stove and takes his sneakers off. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Because it’s late and cold and dark out. I never thought you’d be so late.”
“We had studying to do. When did nine become late?”
“On Sunday nights on the island in November, nine is late. You have school tomorrow.” I can’t understand it.
Lara keeps reminding me how great it is that Charlie’s in a relationship, and that it’s much better for his soul than hooking up so I’m meant to encourage the relationship. She keeps threatening to explain what hooking up really means, but I don’t want to know.
PART FIVE
DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU?
A STORM HITS IN the night, and the ocean sounds like thousands of pieces of glass breaking on the rocks. The trees bend over on themselves, and the windows bang on the casings. They’ll shatter, or the patched roof will fly off, but I feel very little about any of it. My husband appears to have been sleeping with a woman who wears a Pretenders T-shirt similar to the one I used to wear circa 1995.
Storms used to be something that Kit and I made it through together. We’d climb in bed after the boys had gone to sleep and look out at the night sky through the window and pray the boats didn’t break away. There was nothing else we could do at that hour. We just held hands and waited. Sometimes we made love. I liked it so much when Kit was in our bed with me during the storms and not at sea.
* * *
—
CHARLIE GETS UP AT six and says he can’t stop worrying about the boats. He looks thin and muscular, like a younger version of Jimmy. We stand together in the window and watch while the float gets sucked in on the swells. Then pulled back again. Over and over.
The water is higher than I’ve ever seen it. I don’t think the chains on the float will hold. But if the float breaks off, it will take the boats and maybe the ramp with it.
Charlie finally goes back up to bed, because there’s nothing we can do but wait. It’s a completely helpless feeling. You want to do something. You want to go outside and physically do something, anything, but you can’t stop the weather.
I sit on the couch and listen to the wind. We could never make it back across the channel now in any kind of boat. We might as well be on Kit’s trawler riding the storm out to sea.
Kit’s shirt is in a bathroom in Nova Scotia, and this has broken through something for me. I’d thought of marriage as two people who know each other entirely and will always know each other. But what if they’re just two people who share an idea of what life could be, and then one of them changes their idea.
* * *
—
WHEN I WAKE UP the next time, I’m facedown on the couch, freezing. The storm has passed, and there’s a pale, pinkish light under the torn clouds.
Sam is in my face. “It’s gone, Mom! The float is gone!”
“Oh God.” I open my eyes. “I knew it.”
The float has never broken off before, because the water has never come so far up.
We all walk outside in our boots and coats and stand at the top of the ramp. The island’s covered in snow, and a layer of silvery ice has formed along the shore. The float is gone, and it’s not possible to say that everything will be okay. My longing for Kit is sharp and clear.
The boys walk back up to the house and pull the canoe out from under the pine trees and carry it down to the rocks. The water’s flat and inky black—the kind of cold you can’t survive in for longer than a minute. I watch them paddle out into the channel until I can’t see the outlines of their shoulders anymore.
“Come back safely,” I say out loud. “Please come back safe.” My breath condenses around my face. It will be colder today than yesterday. I can already tell. I turn back toward the house and go begin packing. We need to leave the island before it becomes a prison.
THEY FIND THE FLOAT down in Miller Cove, wedged into an opening in the rocks. Jimmy comes and tows it in front of the house and anchors it. Then he and the boys drill new holes in it and secure it to the rocks with more bolts and chains and ropes.
It takes hours. They walk up to the house afterward. At first Jimmy won’t accept anything I offer him. He finally agrees to a coffee with me at the table. He’s wearing the blue flannel shirt and dark Wranglers I think he has worn every day I’ve known him, and he tells us that it is the wrong season to be on the island.
“B
ut we’re fine, Jimmy,” Sam says. He’s changed back into his pajamas and is sitting in front of the woodstove, shivering. “We can’t just leave. Dad won’t want us to do that.”
“We’re not fine.” I look over at Jimmy.
“You’re so not fine, Sam,” Charlie says from underneath both of the Patriots blankets on the couch.
It’s thrown me off to have Jimmy in here. He stops down at the dock to grab Kit or one of the boys, or to loan us some piece of equipment, but he never comes inside. It was Martha’s favorite place, and Candy says it makes Jimmy too sad to be in here.
“We’re lucky,” I tell Sam, “that school got canceled today, but we need to get to the mainland. Even Dad doesn’t want us out here anymore, honey.”
“Mom, please, please don’t call me honey. Just call me Sam.”
I smile a fake smile. I don’t have any more fight left in me.
Charlie says, “We’re freezing our butts off here, Sam.”
“Why can’t we have a house like Robbie does?” Sam says. “Why can’t we have an electronic gate and a sauna?”
“We can’t have a sauna because we can’t afford a sauna.” I finish my coffee and glare at Sam. It’s embarrassing when he acts like this. Jimmy’s the last person you want to be bratty around. It’s almost like Sam does it on purpose. I’m sure he does it on purpose.
Charlie looks hard at his brother. “Did you really just need her to explain that to you?”
“Go pack your things, boys.” Jimmy stands and pulls his Wranglers up. “I’m taking you all home in my boat.”
THE HOUSE IS A wooden A-frame at the top of the hill. It smells like mothballs and old Marlboros, and it’s the house that Kit’s mother died in. Jimmy could have sold it and bought other, bigger houses in the village during the best lobster years but he didn’t. I sleep in Candy’s old room with the queen-sized waterbed, left over from Jimmy’s last girlfriend, who decided Maine was too cold. Lara and I are watching Dirty Dancing on Netflix.
It’s late on Thursday afternoon, and she has the laptop balanced on her stomach. I know she’s trying to trick me with the movie, so that later I’ll agree to get out of bed and go to Sam’s basketball team dinner. I’ve been lying in here most of the week.
When Lara and I were waitresses at the lodge that summer, she dated a lifeguard named Luke Hennessy, who got a scholarship to an acting school in North Carolina. It was almost a cliché, he was so good-looking. So we called him Patrick Swayze.
I blow my nose into a tissue and say he’s unrecognizable.
“Who is?” Lara’s wearing Sam’s blue Avery High sweatshirt because it’s so cold in here. I’m not sure Jimmy believes in heat. She takes another potato chip from the bag and points at the screen. “Patrick Swayze?”
“No. The man known formerly as my husband.”
“Kit is the same person, Jill. He just left a shirt in a bathroom. Big deal.” She thinks I’m overdoing it about the shirt.
“Please.” I put my hand out for more chips. She gives me three, which seems stingy. “It is a big deal.”
I don’t want to get in another argument with her about how it matters when you’re married to someone. She never understands. Or she understands, but she doesn’t agree and doesn’t think the state should have anything to do with the people you love.
“He’s a good person,” Lara says. “He just left his shirt.”
“You can’t do that.” I stare at the movie. “You can’t go over to a woman’s house and leave a shirt.”
“But you can. Of course you can. And you can be forgiven, because you have a wife and two teenagers. You need to get over it. I don’t see what the big flipping deal is.”
“It’s a deal, Lara. If you lecture me about marriage again, I’ll dump that bag of potato chips on your head. He slept with her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“But I do. And you do too. He wouldn’t answer me when I asked. He couldn’t answer.”
My phone rings again.
“You have to pick it up.” She grabs my phone off the blanket, before I can, and the computer falls off her lap.
“I don’t have to do anything.”
“No, you have to. He’s in a hospital. Just answer it. I’m trying to save your marriage.” She hands me the phone and climbs out of the bed and goes out into the hall. This isn’t a joke. Why is she laughing?
Kit asks me about the storm, and if the ramp broke off when the float did.
I think he already knows the answers to these questions.
Then he says, “Why didn’t you call me?”
“I didn’t need to call you. Your father’s been helpful.” I stare at the old poster of Linda Ronstadt on the wall above Candy’s white bureau and decide to make this as hard for him as possible.
“Where are the boys?”
“Sam’s down with Shorty, helping fix up a boat. Charlie’s with Candy, stocking shelves.”
“Are you going to really talk to me or not?”
“I’m talking to you. This is me talking to you.”
“Jilly, don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” I refuse to make this about me.
Does Lara ever feel this lonely? Or maybe only married people feel this way.
“God, you’re stubborn. I’ve never met anyone who can hold a grudge the way you do.”
“You think this is about holding a grudge? Marriage is trust, Kit. That’s what it is.”
“I realize I have choices, and I chose poorly, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“So you slept with her?” My stomach turns over and then it does it again.
There’s a silence after this.
“I didn’t sleep with her. I went over to help with the dog. It was late. I was tired. It’s not what you think. She’s a friend. I needed one. It’s not easy up here.”
But why didn’t he need me?
The sky is a punishing, gorgeous blue, and the sun looks like a golden flower.
“I thought I was your friend. I wouldn’t lie down with someone in a bed because I was tired. I would never do that to you.”
Then I hang up on him.
Lara opens the door. “Did you really just hang up? I can’t believe you did that.”
She looks kind of possessed, standing by the side of the bed in Sam’s sweatshirt with her pale, wavy hair falling down her shoulders.
“I can’t believe you were listening.”
“Of course I was listening.”
“I hung up because he slept with her.”
“He slept next to her.”
“It’s like having sex without the sex.” I close my eyes.
“It’s not like that at all.”
“It’s like sex of the mind or something.”
“Oh my God, Jill, there’s no such thing.”
I try to sit up fully in the bed, but it’s hard with all the water moving around.
“He’s either had an affair or almost had an affair. And you know that, Lara.”
It’s the thing I think about the most. You say the word affair, and it’s supposed to hold everything. Like one word can ever explain someone’s desperation, when there are hundreds of thousands of molecules spinning inside that word. This is what Charlie taught me. Molecules. Moving at rapid speeds.
Kit either had an affair or almost had one. Lara doesn’t talk about how much this hurts. There’s no need to. But I can’t get distance on it, which is what scares me. It feels out of my control.
“It’s not really about the shirt in the end,” I say. “I mean, it is. But it’s really not. It’s that he cares about her.”
“We all care about people.” She reaches out her arm to me. “We all need different people. It’s only normal. It’s what people do.”
“It would have be
en his secret.” I do not take her hand. “He would have kept it to himself if I hadn’t gone to her apartment. That’s what I can’t forget.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what Kit would have done. Maybe we don’t need to know all of each other’s secrets. I mean, he loves you. A lot of people are looking for connection and not finding it. Please don’t ruin everything. Please.” She sits down on the side of the bed.
“My husband may be in love with a woman who wears a Pretenders T-shirt and has the largest silver belt buckle I’ve ever seen.”
“He’s not in love.”
“But how would you know, Lara? How would you really know?”
“Because he’s in love with you. I’ve seen it. You married people don’t understand how you give yourselves away. You pretend it’s private to be in your marriage, but we can all see. Get up. We’re going to get you dressed. You have a basketball team potluck to go to.”
THE ONLY THING SAM says to me on the drive to the gym is to please get Dad home. “Please. Please.”
I end up cornered by the food table with the mother of Derrick, who plays shooting guard. I can’t recall her name, but I should know it. She’s just come from the Avery hospital where she’s an ER nurse.
I tell her that I’m looking forward to the first game.
She says, “Yeah, IDK.”
I think IDK means “I don’t know,” but I’m not completely sure.
I say, “It’s going to be a fun season. LOL.” I smile and hope what I said was okay.
Then Sam materializes next to me. “Mom, can I talk to you for a minute?” He takes my arm and leads me back out to the hall where the two bathrooms are. “You can’t talk like that.”
“Like what?”
“In text.”
He looks older and handsome with the hair pushed out of his eyes. He likes this team so much, and it’s good for him. The running around and the bonding.