Heartbroken (27 page)

Kate couldn’t stand it to see how Caroline’s rich and beautiful inner life had been reduced to piles of paper in a box. So the box sat waiting. Every time she went into the office closet, it sat there—an invitation, a recrimination, and a plea all at once. Until finally, one afternoon when she was alone, she opened the box.

The journals were sealed inside another box within the larger one. The box was buried, as though hidden, at the very bottom beneath the predicted piles of letters (tied, of course, with red ribbon), chapbooks of poetry, envelopes of old photos. There was Kate’s christening gown wrapped in white tissue and Theo’s baby shoes. Written across the top of the smaller box, in Caroline’s scrawling cursive:
For the eyes of Katherine Burke only
.

Upon retrieving it, Kate felt a flood of guilt. It had the essence of urgency; it was something Caroline had wanted her to see. And Kate had let it sit there unopened. Yet even when she had it in her hands, feeling how much her aunt wanted her to read what was inside, it still took another few months for her to break the seal. Why? She didn’t know except that she had a kind of dread in her heart when she looked at that box.

Kate couldn’t have known that within it were all sorts of secret things, little and big. That when she opened Caroline’s and Lana’s journals and started to read, she would see her family, her mother,
her history in a whole new way. She would learn things about her grandparents’ marriage that Kate was sure even Birdie never knew. She would learn, in Lana’s own words, about her affair with Richard Cameron. There was no way to know any of that at the time, and still, she shrank from whatever was inside.

Clothbound and stained, pages covered margin to margin with almost identical handwriting, the journals opened doorways in Kate’s perception she didn’t even know were closed. They answered questions Kate had about her mother and introduced more. Kate had only the vaguest memory of her grandparents. But through Lana’s journals, they both came to life, full-bodied, flawed, and fascinating. Caroline painted a vivid picture of her childhood memories of Heart Island, and Kate saw Birdie through fresh eyes. The middle child, Kate’s mother was always crushed between Caroline’s beauty and sweetness and Gene’s expansive, athletic golden-boy personality. In all her life, Kate had never thought of her mother as a little girl and how she might have been formed.

In important ways, the histories she’d uncovered were Kate’s own, even though most of the players were long gone. Because it was her story, she felt she had a right, even a compulsion, to tell it. Kate wondered whether Caroline knew that the journals she’d left to her niece would cause her to reconnect to her heart’s first desire, to write. Kate suspected that Caroline
had
known, all too well.

“Are you feeling better, Mom?” Kate asked. She sat in the small sitting area off to the side of her parents’ king-size wood-framed bed.

They’d barely extracted themselves from John Cross, who had wanted to escort them back to the island. Birdie, once she came to, had been a bit sharp with him.
We’d like our privacy, please, Mr. Cross
, she said when he tried to help her down to the boat. They’d left him looking somewhat miffed on the path down to his dock.
I’m sorry
, Kate said.
Don’t apologize for me
, whispered Birdie.

Birdie’s eyes were open now; she was lying on her back, arms folded over her middle, gaze fixed on the ceiling. “I’m fine,” she said.
“I haven’t been feeling well since yesterday. Since I saw him. Maybe before. Then my sciatica.”

“So there
was
someone here?”

“Yes,” Birdie said. “No.” The wrinkle of a frown, an annoyed exhale. “I don’t know. I really don’t know what I saw.”

“Tell me what happened.”

Kate wanted to reach for Birdie’s hand, pale and delicate, palm turned up on the sheet. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t touch her mother that way; there was no precedent for physical closeness. She knew only how to kiss her mother quickly on the cheek, perhaps squeeze her bony shoulders. Kate’s own children draped themselves over her at every opportunity—even now, when Kate’s friends were complaining of adolescent and teen children who couldn’t stand to be in the same room with their parents. Kate still kissed them both on the mouth, pulled them into long body-connecting hugs. Birdie was ice; if you held on too long, it hurt.

She didn’t expect Birdie to talk. She expected Birdie to say that she wanted to be alone. But her mother told her about the events of yesterday: a man near the shore, then disappearing into the house. It did sound frightening, unsettling.

Still, none of that was enough to get to Birdie like this. If it was some problem with her vision, or even if there had been an actual intruder, it didn’t seem like any match for the formidable Birdie Heart-Burke. There was something else.

“Did they ruin the ham?” Birdie asked.

“No,” said Kate. She didn’t know if they had or not. “Dinner’s fine. Maybe you’ll feel better if you eat.”

Birdie turned to look at Kate, her expression unreadable. Kate was silent, wondering if her mother would say more. Birdie went back to staring at the ceiling.

Kate thought she heard something, the way her children’s voices carried through the walls at home. She listened, but she didn’t hear anything more. She walked to the window and looked down toward
the dock. All she could see was black. A thick cloud cover blocked the stars.

“It feels like rain again,” said Birdie.

As if on cue, a few drops tapped on the windows, just a drizzle. Hopefully nothing more. Kate hated the island in a storm, especially with Sean and Brendan someplace else. When it stormed, she felt cut off, trapped.

“If you’re all right,” said Kate, “I’ll see to getting dinner on the table.”

“Do you think there was someone here?” asked Birdie. She sounded anxious. “Or am I losing my mind?”

Everything in the room was made from wood—the walls, the dresser, the bed on which Birdie lay. It was rustic, lodgy, not what her mother would have chosen but just as her father liked it. He fancied himself an outdoorsman, though he seemed to wilt outside of Manhattan. He called himself a chef, though most nights at home, they had a cook or ate out. He liked to think of himself as an opera aficionado, but more often than not, he was soundly asleep before intermission. Of course he’d want a big log house for the island, something perfectly befitting his idea of who he was here—even though he could never seem to get off the island fast enough. Birdie looked somehow out of place in the room, sunken and small.

“I’m sure you’re not losing your mind,” said Kate. “But that doesn’t mean there was someone here, either.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Birdie. She issued a disdainful snort. “You believe in Caroline’s ghosts.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Kate. She was trying to be patient, to remember that her mother wasn’t feeling well. “I just meant that there are more than two possibilities.”

“John Cross thought I was batty,” said her mother. “You should have seen the way he looked at me.”

“I’m not sure I like that guy,” said Kate.

Birdie raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I don’t like him one bit,” she said. “New money annoys me. Where did he get that money, anyway? Certainly not from publishing. The wife must come from wealth.”

Kate had to laugh. No matter what, Birdie was always Birdie. There was thunder. No. It was the girls storming up the steps, heavy and fast. Kate walked out of the room to greet them.

“Those girls sound like a herd of rhinos,” Birdie mumbled as Kate closed the door behind her.

“What is it?” she asked. They were both pale and breathless, as if they’d sprinted from the dock. They exchanged a look. Lulu shot a worried glance out the window behind her.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Kate was trying to be funny, but the girls didn’t laugh. She glanced around the room; she hadn’t noticed as she brought Birdie in, but they’d set the table. The ham was wrapped on top of the stove, the salad sat waiting on the counter. She was proud of them.

“Maybe we did,” whispered Chelsea. She cast an anxious eye toward Birdie’s room. “On the dock.”

Chelsea told Kate what she’d seen, someone on the dock—a man, tall and thin. Then there was no one there at all. It was an encounter just like what Birdie had described. Was there really someone on the island? It was hard to imagine. The island was so small, the terrain rocky and somewhat inhospitable. Other than the clearing around the buildings, and the lighted path that led between them, the land was wild, heavily wooded, and rocky. There was no place even to pitch a tent comfortably. But still, there had been three different sightings by two different people in different areas at different times of the day.

Lulu was shivering—from nerves or the cold, Kate couldn’t tell. She moved to put her arms around Lulu, and the girl sank into her and clung. Kate couldn’t believe how small she felt in her arms.

“Okay,” said Kate. “That’s it. I’m calling the police.”

Lulu shook her head. “You can’t. I had cell service for like one minute. Now it’s gone again.”

“We’ll use the radio,” said Kate. She moved toward the door.

“Mom,” said Chelsea. She lifted her palms in a gesture that reminded Kate so much of Sean. Her husband and daughter both had a dread of unnecessary drama. “I’m not even sure what I saw.”

Though Kate wouldn’t have dreamed of calling the authorities under normal circumstances, she told the girls about Birdie’s experiences the day before, keeping her voice low and her eye on the door to her mother’s room. Birdie wouldn’t want them to know. The girls watched her with wide eyes.

“There’s no one on this island,” said Lulu. “It’s a rock in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t see what Chelsea saw.” Her voice sounded shaky; she kept her eyes on the door. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

“We were all over today,” said Chelsea. “We didn’t see anything unusual … until just now.”

Kate pulled her phone from her pocket and saw that Lulu was right about the cell service. She thought about walking the perimeter of the island with a flashlight and checking things out for herself. But she didn’t want to leave the girls alone. Tamping down a rising sense of dread, she walked over to the door and shut and locked it. Then she leaned against it for good measure. The door felt flimsy and insubstantial, as were the knob and the lock. She couldn’t remember ever locking it, or any other door on the island, until they were ready to leave for the summer. There had never been any need.

Chelsea went to the back door beyond the long dining table and locked that as well. Both the girls were watching Kate as if she should know what to do. Ghosts, intruders, her mother going senile, the girls hallucinating—not a comforting list of possibilities.
I am breathing in. I am breathing out
.

Or maybe none of those things. The island had a way of making
problems seem worse, more dire, than they actually were. With the sudden and violent storms, myriad strange noises, and the play of light and shadows, it was easy to get spooked here. And Kate, as the adult, had to be the one to keep her cool.

It’s a crucible
, Caroline had written.
Everything is broken down there to its essential nature. And it’s not always pretty
.

“Look,” said Kate. “Let’s just eat. We’ll keep checking our cells. And the second there’s a signal, we’ll get someone out here.”

“Okay,” said Chelsea. She didn’t look convinced that it was the best plan. “I mean, maybe I didn’t see what I thought I saw.”

“Exactly,” said Kate. “Exactly.”

Birdie opted out of dinner, so the three of them ate quietly on the back porch, which was roofed and screened in. The trees were black, wild, and whispering against the sky. Before Kate served the ice cream, the rain was pouring down so hard that it sounded like a hundred people dancing on the roof.

chapter twenty-one

E
mily’s mother had been beautiful. Martha did some catalog modeling in the sixties. She was thin, like Emily, but tall and regal. She had big feline eyes, a long wide mouth, jutting cheekbones. Emily used to stare at the pictures from her mother’s modeling book. She often wondered what had happened to that girl in the pictures, so gorgeous and self-assured, so elegant and worldly. Where had she gone?

It was more than just faded beauty. It was as if a light had drained from her, as if disappointment had sucked her dry. The woman Emily knew bore no resemblance whatsoever to that girl. The skin on her face had grown loose and dry. There were deep lines around her mouth. There wasn’t a shade or shadow left of Martha the stunning model, Martha who loved Joe Burke, Martha with everything ahead of her. That girl was Holly Golightly, a fiction. She was someone who only wished she existed, and could survive only in memories.

Thyroid problems wrecked Martha’s figure. Smoking drew her face long and etched valleys in her skin. Drinking made her angry and depressed. But Emily loved her. None of that mattered to a daughter. If only Martha hadn’t been so mean. The stinging slap of her words still rang in Emily’s ears.
You’re useless
, Martha would complain when Emily hadn’t done something right.
You have delusions of grandeur
, she might say if Emily told her of a dream to be a ballerina, or a scientist, or a movie star. Then there were the days
when her mother stayed in bed, barking orders from her darkened room.

When Emily was little, she used to wish that she could know the young woman in the pictures. That girl was happy and kind, laughing and light. The girl with a champagne glass on a picnic blanket, the one holding a bouquet of roses, the one on Santa’s lap smiling in a way that said sometimes naughty
is
nice. Right now
that
was the woman Emily wanted to call. “Mama,” she wanted to say. “I’ve done awful things, and I’m in terrible trouble.” And her mother would say, “Come home, baby. I’ll take care of everything.”

No, that wasn’t how it would go. Her mother would say, “You idiot. What have you done? I told you he’d ruin your life.” The worst part was that she’d be right.