Heartbroken (37 page)

She was shivering from the cold. The skin on her hands looked blue and was covered with gooseflesh. The dock was hard and splintery beneath her bare feet.

“Okay, kid,” said her father. “Okay.”

On the porch, he knelt down in front of her, moved the wet hair back from her face. “She loves this place. She wants you to love it, too. She wants to know you’ll come here and take care of it when she’s gone.”

Even at ten, Kate knew he was making excuses for things that could not be excused. He wanted to make it all better, to make it seem less awful than it was.

“She loves it more than she loves anything, even us,” Kate said.

“That’s not true,” he said, his tone growing cold. “Now go get yourself dried off and dressed for dinner.” He stood and turned away from her, looked back toward the dock. She felt in that moment, as she so often did in her childhood, that there was no soft place to put her head down and be safe. She had felt that way until she met Sean.

As she was coming around the side of the house, she heard a high-pitched scream. It rocketed through her, and she pressed her body against the shingled wall, feeling her heart start to race, her mouth go dry. When she looked around the corner, all she could see in the dim light shining from the porch were two forms—a man and a woman.

The larger form was clearly the aggressor, with a hold on the other’s neck. The smaller was all flailing limbs, uselessly trying to break free. Her helplessness awoke something within Kate, some powerful desire to protect and defend.

She could see that it was the girl who’d called herself Anne. The woman looked so small; she could have been a child. Kate remembered
how strong he was, how merciless: This was the man who’d attacked her by the boat. Her whole body remembered the crush of his arms around her chest.

Unthinking, Kate found herself hurtling toward them, crashing her body into him with the full force of her fear and anger. They both went tumbling, rolling and coming to a hard stop against a tree. Kate felt a sharp pain in her side, but adrenaline kept it at bay because he was on her again, his weight bearing down like a stone. His face was eerily blank as she flailed at him, trying to get out from under him.

She heard the girl screaming.
Get off of her! Get off of her!
It struck Kate as a powerless and nonsensical demand, as though he might abruptly abandon whatever agenda had brought him here and they’d work everything out. Panic began to crowd out other thoughts as she struggled to take a breath. The girl leaped on top of the attacker, knocking him down. Kate saw the flare gun lying beside her, and she crawled for it. It was beneath her fingers when the monster was on top of her again, landing on her hard, knocking the wind out of her.

She felt her head knock heavily against the rocky ground. For a moment, everything was scattered, a puzzle of sound and motion—a woman screaming, his breath on her face, the smells of sweat and blood and rain. There was a loud pop, a hiss, and a violent flash of orange. Then it all went dark.

chapter thirty

J
oe Burke had stopped loving his wife so many years before that he couldn’t remember what it was like to feel anything but indifference for her. When he looked back on their life, even the night they met, he couldn’t remember ever loving her, not really.

He remembered that when he first saw her there was some spark, some energy, that drew him to her. There was something about her—slim and patrician, practical and smart—that appealed to him. She wasn’t like the other girls he knew, puffs of perfume and makeup and crinoline. When Birdie smiled, there was real depth. She had thoughts, opinions, ideas, and she didn’t hide that fact to make herself pretty, more desirable. Her whole bearing felt like a dare
: Come and try to have me, if you think you can handle it
. And Joe Burke was not a man to back down from a challenge.

She’d been right—right for his parents; she was attractive, came from wealth, stood to inherit. Marrying her was “marrying up,” as his mother liked to say. Birdie and his mother hated each other on sight. Maybe that was right, too. Joe’s mother was a doormat. She’d let her husband beat their children and run around on her and put her in an early grave. No, Joe was not one of those men who wanted to marry his mother. He had wanted an interesting woman, a strong woman, and a woman who would be his match. What he hadn’t realized was that Birdie, who was all of those things, was also cold and withholding. That wasn’t clear to him until long after he’d made his vows. And vows, as far as he was concerned,
were not meant to be broken. Stretched, maybe bent, but not broken.

He hadn’t been able to sleep again after Sean’s call. Birdie was one with the island. Frankly, he pitied the idiots who would breach that boundary—if that was the case. But Kate and Chelsea did not have the same constitution as Birdie. They did not belong to Heart Island in the same way. Chelsea was a reasonable girl; if she said something was wrong, maybe there was.

Sean’s call had been the second unsettling one of the day. Joe had just returned to the blessed noise and bustle of the city after the oppressive quiet of Heart Island. The island always seemed so nice at first. Then it started to weigh on him—the silence, the isolation, Birdie’s endless litany of demands and complaints, her deafening silences.

Even though he hadn’t heard from Martha in years, he recognized her number. It was seared in his memory. He had called it so many times with such breathlessness. The voice on the other line had brought him so much pleasure, so much comfort, and in the end, so much misery. He almost didn’t answer; it couldn’t be anything but bad news. Why else would she call after all these years?

“Joe?” she said. Her voice sounded older, smokier. But he remembered when it had been sweet and young. When she’d been everything that Birdie wasn’t—soft, yielding, eager. He remembered the feel of her lean body, that velvet skin beneath his fingertips. Even now, a lifetime later, he could feel the tickle of arousal.

“Martha,” he said. He used to call her Martie, a sweet diminutive of her name that seemed more in line with who she was then. “Why are you calling?”

He heard her take in a breath. “Emily’s in trouble, terrible trouble.”

He’d thought of Martha’s little girl, too. She was nothing like
his Kate. He always knew Emily wasn’t his, but he played along because it was a game he enjoyed. The game of house with these other two, the two who wanted him so desperately, who needed him. He’d often thought Birdie could replace him with anyone. Not his Katie. The moment Kate was born, he’d looked into her eyes and felt as if he’d always known her. But with Emily—
my little Em
, he used to call her—though he loved her, he knew that she was not his. But he
could
love her, because she loved him so much.

“What kind of trouble?” he asked.

Martha told him, and he could hardly believe it. He felt a rush of sadness, of guilt.

As if she sensed his sorrow, wanted to use it against him, she said, “She needed a father.”

“I’m not her father, Martha.”

“But you could have been.”

He felt the old rise of anger; all the things he’d said a million times lodged in his throat.
You knew I was married. I told you I wouldn’t leave my family. I always knew the baby wasn’t mine. I cared for you both anyway. All these years, I’ve sent you money
.

“I’m sorry,” he said instead. Because really, what else was there to say? He listened to her crying on the other line. She should know not to do that. Tears made him go cold inside; they always had.

“I wanted you to know in case she came to you. In case she called.”

“Why would she?” he asked. “How could she even remember me?”

The silence on the line told him everything.

“She has your last name,” Martha said. “I never had the heart to tell her she wasn’t yours after all.”

He let the words, their implication and meaning, sink in. Somewhere down on the street, he heard a fire engine roar.

“So all these years, she thought I was her father,” he said. “And
what? That I abandoned her, didn’t want her? That’s what you call having a heart?”

“You did abandon her, Joe.” There it was, the cloying, self-dramatizing tone that came out in her when things got ugly.

“And you lied to her, manipulated her—just like you did me.” How quickly old angers rose from the buried depths. You thought you’d forgotten about the ancient hurts and disappointments, but brush back the dirt and there they are, calcified, harder than ever.

“If she calls or comes to me, I’ll let you know.”

“Joe,” she said. “Do you ever think about me?”

“Martha,” he answered. “Do you ever think about anyone but yourself?”

He had hung up the phone, slamming it down hard. Then he’d picked it up and slammed it again. She called back once, twice, three times. And then the phone fell silent. He’d gone to the gym and worked out with his personal trainer for an hour and a half. Then they got in the boxing ring.

“Joe,” the younger man said. He was sweating and breathless. Joe was nauseated from the effort. “Got something on your mind?”

J
oe had taken Martha and Emily to the island twice. Birdie had accused him of doing it purposefully to hurt her. At the time, he denied it. It was circumstance only, a private place where they could be alone and not seen. But that wasn’t true, because the harbormaster
had
seen them. Joe had tipped him handsomely but apparently not enough to keep him from running his mouth off. Heart Island, it seemed, had a history. Another affair had played out there and ended badly. He wasn’t sure how, but it had gotten back to Birdie. And the shit had hit the fan.

But his time there with them was something he visited in his memory more often than he cared to admit. Without Birdie and her rules of order, it was a beautiful place, the island, peaceful and embracing. He could relax with Martie and his little Em. He could breathe, just breathe, and be there in a way he never could with Birdie. She was always taking measure of him, how he spent his time, what he was doing or wasn’t doing to facilitate her endless catalog of chores and activities. Martie didn’t care if there were dishes in the sink, if the bed was unmade. She didn’t care if they ate tuna-fish sandwiches for dinner, a baked potato on the grill, drank beer from the bottle.

He remembered those late-summer sun-soaked days, the air still warm, Birdie back in the city gearing up for the fund-raising season and the holidays. He remembered them with joy, with nostalgia. Heart Island had let him fantasize about being with Martha and Emily, about what he would be if he’d chosen a different life, a different kind of woman. Birdie was fully occupied by that time of the year, didn’t think twice about his golfing clinic, or business trip, or whatever it was he’d told her he was doing. All he had to do was show up in a tux at some appointed date and time, to take her to some endless dinner for Africa or AIDS or inner-city schools. Before then she wouldn’t have thought to look for him.

And there was little Em, who hadn’t needed to be entertained, was happy to color or swim with them or just nap on the blanket. She wasn’t like Theo and Kate, with their endless list of activities, their at-home schedules so packed with tennis and horseback riding and ballet and drama that they didn’t know what free time was. They always needed an activity, something to
do
. It was his fault, he supposed. He could have taught them that, at least. They’d certainly never learn it from Birdie, who’d been in perpetual motion since the minute he married her.
Daddy, will you take me
kayaking? Daddy, will you play hide-and-seek with us? Daddy, will you pitch the tent?
Sometimes he thought they all kept moving so Birdie’s critical eye wouldn’t fall on them and find a reason to complain.

Later, after Martha’s call and after the gym, he met his old friend Alan for dinner. He barely heard his friend rambling on about his stock losses, his new ski gear, his kid finishing medical school but wanting to join Doctors Without Borders after Alan had spent untold amounts of money on his education “so the kid can just run off to the third-fucking-world and take care of the natives.”

Joe was thinking about Emily on her own, out there with some shithead who had trashed her whole life. And about how things could have been different for her if Joe had ever once done what he wanted to do rather than what he felt he should do or
had
to do. If he had ever done anything that was in his heart rather than following the rules that had been clearly set out for him. He wondered if Emily still thought about the island and the time they spent there. But no, he told himself, she wouldn’t remember. She couldn’t. She had been a little girl. She wouldn’t remember Heart Island. It wouldn’t have cast a spell on her like it had on so many. It was just an island in the middle of a lake. It didn’t have that kind of power. It didn’t have any power at all.

From his bedroom window, he could see the Chrysler Building. It was a sight he’d always loved, an art deco reminder of the shimmering beauty of New York City. He got out of bed and stepped into his slippers, padded over to the window. Below him, Park Avenue teemed with traffic even though it was only after three. He always wondered at the throngs of people living inches apart, the full rainbow of experience playing out on every block, stories into the sky. No matter what time of day it was, someone was headed somewhere for some reason. Where were they all going? Didn’t they realize that none of it mattered?

He picked up the phone and dialed the island but got only the fast busy signal that told him the lines were down, as they often were. The sound of a horn drifted up. In the distance, he heard the wail of a siren. Joe Burke just stood there with the phone still in his hand, watching.

chapter thirty-one

H
er mother always told her that her life would boil down to just a few moments, just a few choices. Those choices, usually made in a split second, would change everything that came after. Those moments were blurs, clear only after the consequences had been dealt. As Emily watched the flare shoot into the sky, casting the world in an eerie orange, she wondered if all her moments had passed. She was sure they had. Now there was nothing to do but play out the rest of her terrible hand.