by Grace Palmer
Winter hadn’t stopped wailing. As soon as Oliver was gone, Eliza started crying alongside with her.
Neither of them stopped until dawn.
25
Mae
Saturday morning.
“To where is your attention called this evening, Mae?” Dominic asked quietly.
It took Mae one embarrassingly long, slow sip of coffee to decipher what Dominic meant. “Oh, I don’t think I have any plans in particular,” she replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps a walk if the weather stays this nice.”
“Ah,” he said.
Mae eyed him suspiciously over her steaming mug. “Ah?” she echoed. “Just ‘ah’?”
Dominic grinned. “I wondered if perhaps you’d like to join me in a small excursion.”
“Tempting,” Mae teased. “What kind of excursion did you have in mind?”
“I met a fellow in town who has a lovely sailboat. He takes folks for sunset sails about the harbor and such. It sounded quite nice, though terribly lonely if one were to go alone.”
“And that’s where I come in,” she inferred. She was smiling at him. He looked a little nervous, actually. It was cute.
“If you were available, your company would be most welcome. But of course, I can certainly understand if you would prefer not to be trapped on a sailing vessel with only yours truly. That would be a nightmare for some, I imagine.”
“Oh stop it, Dominic. You’ve got such a low opinion of yourself sometimes.”
“Rather too high is the problem, I’m afraid.”
Mae chuckled. “Nonsense. You’re as humble as they come. And besides, you’re nice to be around.”
He smiled softly and took a sip of his coffee. The steam fogged up his glasses, so he took them off and polished them. Before them, the dawn was unfolding beautifully on the horizon. Soft indigo was giving way to a hazy orange. It seemed that summer had decided to make itself felt sooner rather than later. Mae didn’t mind so much. She preferred the heat to the cold, and though it had been a warm spring, she was rather looking forward to a hot May.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Dominic demurred with a sheepish grin. “But I don’t intend to pressure you into anything. It simply sounded like a fine way to pass an evening by.”
“It does indeed. Let me just check in with Sara. If I’m out this evening, I’ll just want her to keep an eye on things around the inn.”
He nodded soberly. “Excellent. In Sara we trust.”
“You trust, maybe,” Mae joked.
Dominic smiled again. His salt-and-pepper beard was looking especially salty today. Perhaps the Nantucket ocean air was starting to make itself felt on him. A year here could do that to a man. It was hardly a bad thing, in Mae’s opinion. “Indeed I do,” he said. “Therein lies the rub.”
“He’s in love with you.”
Sara always had such a way of just blurting things that ought not be blurted. Try as she might, Mae hadn’t been able to iron out that little wrinkle in her daughter’s personality, despite nearly thirty years of effort towards doing so.
Mae sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. There was, however, perhaps a glimmer of truth to what her most impetuous daughter was saying. Debra and Lola had echoed nearly the exact same words. If there were signs that Dominic was in fact in love with Mae—or at least heading in that direction—Mae herself had chosen to overlook them. At her age, love was such a fleeting, fragile thing. Romantic love, at least. She loved her children and her friends and the island she called home. But the love of a man? The love of a new man? She had left that possibility in the mirror a long time ago. Discarded it like clothes that didn’t fit anymore. She hadn’t missed it once, nor did she really miss it now. So why did the world seem so insistent on dressing her up in it again?
“I don’t think so,” she muttered eventually. The two of them were walking down Howard Street. The sun was nearly at its peak overhead. Birds were chirping, the breeze was blowing. It was a fine Nantucket morning in May.
“Wrong,” Sara answered at once. “Dead wrong. It’s not like anyone is making a big deal out of it though, Mom.”
“It feels a bit like you might be, dear.”
Sara wrinkled her nose. “I’m just pointing it out. Big difference between pointing something out and making a big deal out of it.”
“And yet the line seems so fine, sometimes.”
“You’re being silly. He’s nice! He’s handsome! You guys like each other! Just go on a boat, drink some champagne, have a little fun.” Sara halted in her tracks and pivoted to face her mom. Placing both hands on Mae’s shoulders, she looked at her seriously in the eyes and said, “You deserve happiness, Mom. You of all people deserve happiness.”
Mae sighed once more and softened. Maybe Sara was right; maybe she was being silly. Say Dominic did love her, or liked her in a romantic fashion. Who did that hurt? Not a soul, she supposed. She’d made her peace with where Henry sat in her heart. But a woman like Mae had so much heart left to give. She was in the back half of her life, certainly, but that by no means meant that she ought to be put out to pasture. She had energy aplenty, love aplenty, life aplenty. She wanted to share it with everyone she could.
And yet, there was the tingling feeling that remained. It was the fear that Dominic wanted something she wasn’t sure she could give. As much heart as she might or might not have left, what if he wanted too much of it? He was a soulful man, the kind of man who would never think to offer her anything less than all of himself. That was what she loved about him, wasn’t it? The simple beauty of his words during a quiet morning together. He didn’t want much, and yet he wanted everything at the same time. She feared hurting him. Disappointing him. Starting him down a path that she could not follow.
“I don’t want to hurt his feelings, love,” she murmured finally. The admission took her by surprise, as innocuous as it may have seemed. The fact that she was saying it to Sara was shocking enough. The two of them had never had a mother-daughter relationship quite like that. Sara, as everyone who met her knew, needed to figure things out on her own. She had never come running home to Mommy for help when her heart was broken. That was more Holly’s domain.
But perhaps it was just a testament to how fair their relationship had come—albeit in a two steps forward, one step backward fashion—that she could say something as honest as that to her youngest daughter. Surely that was a good thing. Progress, in a way.
“Just go with him,” Sara said finally, searching her mother’s face. Mae blushed. Sara could have a very piercing gaze at times, like a lighthouse beam sweeping across her and exposing everything. “It’s a sunset sail. It’ll be fun.”
“You’re right,” Mae admitted. “It will be. Just fun. That’s all.”
They had circled back around and were standing in front of the house at Howard Street. Mae picked up her bicycle where she had set it, kissed her daughter goodbye on the cheek, and then headed back to the inn.
It had felt like the right thing to do, saying yes to Dominic. But now, standing in the small innkeeper’s bedroom at the Sweet Island Inn with just under an hour until they were due to leave for the dock, Mae felt less sure.
Mostly because she had no earthly idea what to wear!
Was this a date? A friendly outing? Something more, something less, something different altogether? Who knew!
When she was younger, back in her college days, she had all sorts of movies and magazines and posters to guide her. Plenty of resources existed to tell her what lipstick to wear, what dress to choose. How to act, what to say.
But no one ever thought to consider that sixty-two-year-old women might want a little guidance, too.
She looked through her closet, unsatisfied with all the options. She rifled through her makeup bag, agonizing back and forth between different possibilities. Too formal, too flirtatious, too young, too old. Nothing felt right. Perhaps it was just a sign of the uncertainty swirling in her own head. She didn’t know where to place the upcoming evening in the ca
nvas of her life. Dominic was still that abstract brushstroke. He hadn’t yet taken shape. More to the point, she hadn’t yet given him a shape to take—mostly on purpose.
It felt like this evening would be the beginning of that process: deciding what Dominic was to her. And that was very, very frightening.
In the end, she settled on a blue cotton dress that swung just above her knees. Tan leather shoes, backless, and a simple gold necklace that went nicely with her hair, which she wore long for the first time in quite a while. She looked in the full-length mirror and stopped to examine herself. She bit her lip as she gazed from head to toe and back up.
What did she want this to say? “Maybe”? That was a horrible answer to the question Dominic seemed to be implying. He was saying, “Can you? Will you?”
And she was saying, “I don’t know.”
Try as she might, she felt afraid of the gap between them. It felt as though he was standing on the other side of a ledge and saying, “Jump. Have no fear; I will catch you.” So much of her wanted badly to jump.
But there was a part of her still that couldn’t do it.
He would just have to live with that.
26
Eliza
When Eliza woke up again, she saw that Oliver wasn’t there. His side of the bed was cold.
So everything that had happened last night was real. It wasn’t some grotesque nightmare. Her swollen eyes were in fact from tears she’d shed for hours in the wake of his departure.
She felt crushed. Like Wile E. Coyote getting flattened by a steamroller. Another broken relationship. Her life had taken such a left turn over the last year. From lost to found, and now here she was, lost again. Just when she thought she might be getting back on course—back on a course she never expected to find herself on, as a matter of fact—there it went veering off once more into an ugly gray world of harsh words and lonely tears.
She wanted to cry again. But she’d done enough of that already.
What would her father say? Usually, she knew exactly what he would say. This time, though, when she closed her eyes and tried to drum up some words of advice from the man who raised her, she found nothing.
She felt utterly and completely alone.
Winter was sleeping on her chest. Eliza’s skin was drenched in sweat from a long night of cuddling. Her baby’s face looked a little less flushed than it had the night before, though. Perhaps the fever was breaking. It might’ve been an ear infection or just another bug, the kind little girls are prone to.
Something about her little angel turning the corner struck a different note in her heart. When she held her breath for a moment and craned her neck to look into Winter’s sleeping face, she felt something different slicing through the haze of depression that threatened to consume her.
She felt hope.
So what if another relationship had failed? The last one had given her this beautiful gift and a new lease on life. This one would have something equally good to offer. She felt that with a resounding certainty.
Not that any of that stopped her from still feeling miserable.
Oliver wasn’t here. If he had been here when she woke up, maybe she would feel like they could just work this out. Move past it, together. But something about his absence spoke volumes. If he wanted to be here, he would’ve been here. He wasn’t. He was out pursuing another life. Maybe he regretted bringing her and Winter along. Maybe they were holding him back from the life he’d always wanted for himself.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. So many maybes were spiraling through her head, each uglier than the last.
She needed help.
She reached out and grabbed her phone from the nightstand. She might not be able to call her father for advice, but maybe a breakup—or at least, what felt like a breakup—called for a mother’s love anyhow.
She dialed Mom.
Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.
No answer.
Fine. If not Mom, then Holly.
No answer.
Sara.
No answer.
Brent.
Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.
“Hello?” His voice was sleepy. Eliza felt bad immediately.
“I’m sorry, it’s early. I shouldn’t have called. I didn’t mean to wake you up.” She started to hang up the phone.
“Eliza?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m sorry. I’ll go now.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” he said. She could hear the sounds of him struggling upright, the rustle of sheets in the background. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled.
“You know, I always thought I was better than everyone else at telling when you were lying,” he remarked with a low chuckle.
She had to laugh at that too, though bitterly. “Maybe I’m lying a little bit.”
“Talk to me then,” he said. “I’m here.”
Eliza bit her lip. Brent was … well, he was Brent. He was the same, always, like a Rubik’s cube with only four squares per side instead of nine. Simple to solve, you know? Only a few possible combinations. That wasn’t an insult by any means. Eliza loved her brother dearly. But he wasn’t exactly her first choice for delving into the intricacies of romantic relationships. Brent’s two responses to emotions were usually drink about it or don’t think about it. Since he was sober again, the first was no longer an option.
But she needed to say something to someone. Those maybes were still swirling around in her head like a swarm of bats. If she didn’t spill her heart out loud to someone who she knew would listen, then they might consume her.
Brent could be that someone.
“Oliver and I had a fight.” She quickly explained what happened. When she finished, she waited with bated breath for his response. She wasn’t sure why she was so nervous, exactly. All she knew was that what he said next, for one reason or another, mattered a lot.
Silence.
“Brent?”
“Hold on, I’m thinking,” he said sternly.
She had to laugh at that. That was a Dad move if ever there was one. A steady, patient thinker. Brent was more like their father than either of them had realized.
“So what do you think?” She couldn’t wait anymore. God, since when was she such a fragile, emotional, needy woman? Her time on Nantucket had transformed her, mostly for the better. But there were certainly consequences to learning to relax the kung-fu grip she’d held on her heart.
“He’s scared,” Brent said finally, with an air of certainty.
“Scared?”
“Scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“Scared of you.”
Winter rolled back and forth a little bit but stayed asleep.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It is what it is.”
“That’s just about the worst expression I’ve ever heard in my life. ‘It is what it is.’ I hate that one. It means nothing.”
“Yeah, well …”
“Don’t you dare say it again,” she laughed, though she was more than half serious.
Brent chuckled along with her. “Look, Liza, I’m telling you: he’s scared.”
“I’m five-three and my daughter is three months old. We’re not exactly a threat.” Her tone was dry, sarcastic.
She could practically hear Brent roll his eyes through the phone. “Don’t play dumb,” he said. “He’s scared of what you mean to him. That’s a scary thing for a man.”
“What do we mean to him?”
“Everything. That’s the problem.”
Eliza could sense the kernel of truth behind what Brent was saying. “You men are way more complex than women, you know. The whole ‘hysterical woman’ stereotype is male-sponsored propaganda.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said. “Best smear campaign in history.”
They talked for a little while longer. Not about Oliver, specifically, but just about life in general. Brent told her about Ally. She told him about watching Winter sleep.
It f
elt like they were both giving each other something way more important than the words they were exchanging. Eliza couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but there was just something passing back and forth between them that mattered a lot to each of them. She wondered if Brent noticed it, too. What could it be? Love, maybe. Just the simple act of a soul attending to your own. The power of listening. Any of the above, or none. Who could say for sure? It didn’t matter in the end, really. What mattered was just that, by the time they said their goodbyes and hung up the phone, Eliza didn’t feel quite so alone anymore.
She’d always have her family.
Scarcely fifteen minutes after she’d gotten off the call with Brent, Eliza heard the hotel door open again.
“Sorry, still in here!” she called from bed. “No housekeeping, please!”
Oliver rounded the corner.
He stopped about ten feet away from her—six steps exactly, she remembered from last night’s pacing back and forth with a crying Winter. His hands were folded behind his back and he was looking down at his feet sheepishly. “I was going to say, ’Not housekeeping, but I do have a mess to clean up.’” He risked a glance up at her, saw she wasn’t laughing at his lame joke, and looked back down. “I brought bagels.” He pulled a brown paper bag out from behind his back. “And coffee.”
She said nothing. Just looked at him.
She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say, really. Did she need to forgive him? Did it matter?
Was what they had broken? It hadn’t been the most dramatic fight in the world, after all. Maybe it just felt so painful because they never, ever fought. But Eliza just couldn’t shake the feeling that something irreparable had been shattered between them. She had a vivid flashback to a fight between Sara and Mom, when Sara had purposefully destroyed one of Mom’s favorite pieces of china just to lash back out at her. This felt like that, like there was no piecing this back together. Even if they did somehow fix it, the cracks would always be there, barely held together by dollar-store glue. Was that the kind of life she wanted to live? Was that the kind of home in which she wanted to raise her daughter? No. She had run from New York to escape a life built on lies, with the cracks papered over. She had no intention of starting that process anew.