Chance Harbor (17 page)

Catherine started piecing together the border of Nova Scotia. She and Zoe had fought about jigsaw strategies. Zoe liked to pick out the most interesting parts of the picture to work on, while Catherine did things in logical order: corners and borders first, then working from top to bottom.

They’d been fighting over nothing, of course. The puzzles got done. Neither strategy was faster than the other, though Zoe was careless and often dropped pieces, sometimes losing them under a chair or a table. Catherine had to help her scour the floor for them so Dad wouldn’t yell.

She turned a blue puzzle piece between her fingers, glanced at the box, and noticed the section marked “Cape Breton Island.” “Hey, I remembered something today, Mom,” she said, fitting the piece into the top border with a flash of satisfaction.

“What’s that?” Her mother smiled at her over the sweater, the needles still moving steadily in and out of the yarn, as if they were automated.

“Going to Cape Breton Island with you back when I was really little. Before Zoe was born.”

Her mother raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Her voice was neutral, but something vibrated in the air between them. Wariness? Anxiety? “Yes.” Catherine watched her mother’s face closely now, looking for clues to her mood. “You and I went alone on the ferry to Nova Scotia, to Cape Breton. I was afraid of the ferry horn and all that black diesel smoke.”

“I’m surprised you remember. I’d forgotten all about it.” Her mother bent her head, counted stitches.

By her knotted shoulders, Catherine knew with certainty that her mother was lying. “No, you didn’t,” she said, wondering why she was bothering to challenge her mother on this, of all things. “You and I talked about that trip a few summers ago. We were on the beach with Willow, and she asked us what that land was we could see across the water. She asked if we’d ever been to Cape Breton and I said no. Then you reminded me of our trip. And that’s when I remembered how Dad cried when he waved to us from the dock as the ferry left.”

Her mother snorted. “You’re delusional. Dad was never a crier.”

“No, Mom. He cried. I remember because it scared me. It made me think we weren’t ever going to see him again.”

Her mother set the needles down. “Well, obviously you were wrong.”

“Yes, but why did we go without him? We always did everything together as a family in the summers.”

Her mother shrugged. “I don’t remember. I suppose your father wanted to stay here to work on the house. You know how he was. He’d been to Cape Breton, but I never had, not in all the years we’d been coming to Prince Edward Island. Seemed stupid not to go. I was tired of just viewing the outline of Cape Breton Island from Chance Harbor. I wanted to see the place in person. But once your father got here, he never wanted to leave.”

“Well, he did travel a lot for work. That’s understandable.”

Her mother picked up her knitting again, her usually generous mouth pressed into a thin line. “Of course.”

Catherine fit another piece of sky into the border. She couldn’t remember her parents ever fighting, other than their noisy disagreements about Zoe, but they must have. “So, what? You went off in a huff? To prove a point?”

“Oh, who knows now? I suppose.”

“Were you arguing about more than that?”

“More than what?”

“More than about Dad wanting to stay home and you wanting to travel to Nova Scotia?”

Her mother wrapped the yarn around her needles and jammed the rubber stoppers onto the tips. “Catherine, why all these questions? What’s this about? Are you asking if your father and I ever fought? Of course we did. What couple doesn’t?”

“Did Dad ever cheat on you?” Catherine hadn’t meant to ask, but the question had been nagging at her. She wanted to ask every wife in the world this question.

There was a long silence, broken only by the ticking of the pipes as the heat came on. Then her mother sighed. “Yes,” she said.

The jigsaw pieces blurred on the table beneath Catherine’s hands. She put both hands on her knees to steady herself. She hadn’t really expected this answer. Dad? He had adored her mother. How was this possible?

“But you took him back, after.”

“Yes, I did.”

“So that’s why you think I should work on things with Russell.”

“I never said that.”

“You did!” Catherine said. “You seem to think I can just overlook the fact that he fucked another woman—a student! a girl!—and got her pregnant. That I can just forget about Russell being a father to someone else’s child, when he couldn’t be a father to mine.”

“Russell is a father to your child,” her mother said. “You and he have Willow.”

Catherine stared at her, eyes burning. “That’s not the same and you know it.”

Her mother stood up, walked slowly over to the couch, and sat down. She picked up one of the puzzle pieces—the tip of a lighthouse—and tucked it into another white piece. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have any doubt that you’re in pain right now. But I can tell you from experience that things will get better with time.”

“What happened with Dad? When did he cheat on you? Can you tell me?”

“If you really must know. If you think it would help you.” Her mother studied the puzzle for a moment, then began fitting together pieces of a lobster trap.

Zoe must have inherited her jigsaw strategy from Mom, Catherine realized. “I do,” she said.

“All right.” Her mother leaned back against the couch. There were fine lines around her eyes, but otherwise, with her curly light brown hair and sharp profile, her long limbs and fluid grace, her mother could have been forty-six instead of sixty-six. She’d always been a youthful-looking woman, but in the past few years she had acquired the sort of elegance that had nothing to do with money or what she wore. “What is it you want to know, exactly?”

“How many times did Dad cheat on you? When did it happen? Was it with one woman, or more?”

Her mother flinched. They had never talked openly about personal relationships.

“I don’t know,” her mother said finally. “The first time, we’d been married about two years. You were just a baby. I found out about it in the usual way: credit card receipts for a hotel in New York that Dad forgot to remove from the pocket of a suit I was taking to the cleaners. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except there were room service charges that were obviously dinners for two with some very pricey wine. And breakfasts for two as well.”

“My God. You must have been so shocked. And angry.”

“Of course.”

“Did Dad deny it?”

“No. He cried, said he was sorry. And I believed him.”

“Did you find out who it was?”

Her mother nodded, pushed aside a stray curl. “He’d been seeing a woman he’d known long before he and I were married. Marta. She was German, the CEO of one of the European software companies your father’s company had acquired.”

“So how did you forgive him?” Catherine asked, though really what she wanted to know was
Why did you
?

“I felt I had no choice at the time. I wasn’t working, and you were still a baby. Besides, he seemed genuinely distressed by the prospect of losing me. He promised to never cheat again.”

“Did he keep his word?”

Her mother averted her eyes, picked up another puzzle piece and examined it. “Not always. But his affair was only a blip in a long, productive marriage.”

Catherine picked up another piece of sky and set it in place. She and her mother worked silently for a few minutes, but it was more tense than companionable. She should drop the subject. Wasn’t it hard enough that her mother had to deal with Dad dying? But she was too shocked by this revelation to stop herself from saying, “I don’t understand how you could stay with him if you couldn’t trust him.”

Her mother sighed, put down the puzzle piece she’d been holding. “Your dad and I battled on and off. You saw how we bickered. Over Zoe, especially. But I trusted him in the big things. Marriage—a long marriage like ours, especially—is about a lot more than just being faithful physically. Your father was my dearest friend. I trusted him with my life, and with the lives of you girls, too. Yes, it was difficult at times. But we got through it. And you will survive this, whether you stay with Russell or not.”

“Even if I could convince Russell not to marry Nola, to stay with me instead, I wouldn’t want that,” Catherine declared. “I hear what you’re saying, and I wish I could be that forgiving. Especially because I know our divorce will be another big emotional hurdle for Willow. But I can’t be that generous. Not when that girl is carrying his child.”

“Well. That’s the way it is, then,” her mother said, and leaned over to kiss Catherine’s cheek. “You can only stay in a marriage until you can’t stay anymore.”

“That helps a little, knowing you understand.” Catherine frowned at the puzzle. She’d put one of the pieces in wrong. She wiggled it out again, looked at her mother. “Were you happy with Dad? I mean, would you say you had a happy marriage, overall?”

Her mother hesitated only a fraction of a second before saying, “Yes. It was a good, solid marriage. A true partnership.” Then she stood up and stretched, said she was going to bed. “This is a hard time for you,” she added, “but you’ll be fine. You’ve always been strong and resourceful.”

“Thanks.” Catherine watched her mother’s narrow silhouette making its way up the stairs, one delicate, pale hand moving up the railing like a starfish, wondering why she felt oddly dismissed instead of comforted, and why she was so sure her mother hadn’t been completely honest with her after all.

•   •   •

“I’m going into town,” Catherine said as she came into the kitchen the next morning. “Coming?” she asked Willow.

Willow looked up from the book she’d been reading while she was eating oatmeal. “No. I’ll stay here.”

Catherine plucked her car keys off the hook. “Really? There could be doughnuts involved.”

“No,” Willow repeated. “You go.” She had no intention of getting trapped in a car with Catherine, who would probably either yell or cry. She didn’t need to hear any more about how their lives were going to be different from now on. She knew that already.

Catherine shrugged. “Okay. Suit yourself. Have fun.”

Once she’d gone, it felt like Catherine had sucked an entire black cloud out the door with her. The kitchen filled with sunshine, and Willow was aware of the sound of the waves shushing against the cliffs below the house.

Nana had been making tea, but she must have caught Willow staring out the window, because she smiled. “Go down to the beach. Our chores can wait.”

“Will you come with me?”

Nana shook her head. “I need to make some calls. But I command you to have fun.”

Willow practically ran down the wooden steps, moving so fast that the rope railing burned her hand. The sparkling beach was empty and the tide was out, leaving long, shallow tide pools glinting silver under the morning sky. White clouds moved like scarves above her head. Mike followed at her heels, barking.

She raced up and down the sand with the dog, laughing and spinning like a maniac because there was nobody to see her, no adults to tell her to be quiet or slow down or stand in line or learn this or forget that. Maybe moving to the island was the answer. Forget school and Cambridge; Russell and stupid, slutty Nola.

Finally, Willow was tired enough to go back to the house. She rinsed her sandy feet and arms at the hose outside, shivering as the icy water hit her skin, then dried off with one of the rough towels Nana kept hanging from the pegs on the sunporch. Yesterday she’d volunteered to clean out the upstairs closets. Her grandmother was down in the basement when she got back to the house, so Willow brought a trash bag and a box up to the room that Nana said used to be her mom’s.

Like all of the bedrooms, this one had a slanted ceiling and flowered wallpaper; the flowers were tiny pink roses with long green stems against an ivory background. The wood floor was painted light green. The only furniture, other than a double bed with a white embroidered bedspread, was a green nightstand and a white bureau. Maybe this really was the way to live, Willow thought: nothing to clutter your house, so your mind stayed free, too.

She began pulling stuff out of the closet. Everything was so dusty that she kept coughing. She pulled out all kinds of cool things, though, so she didn’t mind the dust. Some of them, like the long fur coat in plastic, had probably belonged to her great-grandmother, Nana said when she came upstairs to see how Willow was doing.

“I’ll give these old clothes to Cousin Jane, I guess,” Nana said. “She’ll know who they belonged to, and they might mean something to her.”

“Except the gold hat with the peacock feather,” Willow said. “You have to keep that, Nana! It looks awesome on you.”

“Oh, Willow. Where would I ever wear it?” Nana said, but she smiled and set that box aside. “Want a snack?”

Willow shook her head. “No, I’m good.”

“All right. I’m going down to make another cup of coffee. Shout if you need me.”

She was almost done. Not much else in the guest room closet after Willow had dug through the clothing and shoes. Just a box of books, their pages so old and yellow and curly they looked like leaves, and a radio half-covered in the same pale pink paint that was on the trim in this room.

Only two of the bedrooms had closets, since people back in the old days just hung their clothing on pegs, Nana had told her. Nobody who lived back when this house was built could afford more than maybe two or three outfits. “They had their farm clothes and their church clothes,” Nana said.

In the fourth and smallest bedroom, however, the one with the stained and peeling blue striped wallpaper, which Willow slept in, there was a blue wooden trunk. Inside it, Willow found blankets and a shoe box of photographs. She stacked the blankets in a neat pile and carried them downstairs, the box on top of it.

“What do I do with these?” she asked Nana, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and making a list on the back of an envelope.

Nana glanced up. “Oh, those are the wool blankets your grandfather and I bought from that sheep farm in Scotland on our honeymoon. I should bring them home. Just put them in the corner of the porch.”