Heartbroken (44 page)

chapter thirty-nine

A
fter Birdie saw us, I knew things had to change. Jack and I had a terrible fight that night. We kept up appearances during the day, for the sake of the children, but while they slept, we walked to Lookout Rock. It was no less bitter for the fact that we had to keep our voices to whispers. He delivered an ultimatum for me to give up Richard or give up our family. During the summers, Jack would come and go from the island for work. Richard and I had our evenings after the children went to sleep. He’d wait for me near the trees on the north shore. There was no choice to be made, really. I told Richard the next night that we were through, and he seemed to accept my decision
.

The letters he sent all through the following autumn were so desperate; I had to go to him. I told Jack that I needed to visit my sister because she was ill and none of us was sure how much time she had. That was true without being the whole truth. I spent a day and a night with my family, and on the way back to the city, I stopped at the marina and took the boat to Richard’s island. It was cold, too cold by then to be up there. I didn’t like it; it felt wrong to be there when the water was gray and the air was biting. Even as I headed out, there were flurries, a light coating of snow on the dock. It filled me with sadness. Heart Island was a summer dream. In my mind, it was never winter there
.

We passed a day in the house. It was too cold otherwise—I couldn’t stay in his tent, huddled by the fire. I’ve always hated the cold. I urged him to come back with me. I didn’t want to leave him there, depressed and alone, slipping into that dark place he always tended toward. That
was the problem with Richard, he always chose that sinking blackness over life. It was why I chose to be with Jack. Poor Jack. He deserved so much better than me. He was such a good man, and I was a terrible wife
.

Everything was fine until it was time for me to leave. That was when Richard told me that he couldn’t let me go. He said he couldn’t live without me. I told him that he had to learn to, that I could no longer betray us all every summer. Even though I knew it was the worst possible thing I could do, I told him I didn’t love him anymore
.

That is my deepest regret. What I should have done was played along and taken him home to his family. They were accustomed to getting him the help that he needed, helping him across those dark spaces, keeping him writing—which was the place he exorcised all his terrible demons. Honestly, I just didn’t have it in me. Birdie had almost discovered us this summer. And the children all needed me a lot—Gene was struggling in school, Caroline was going through a very emotional stage, and Birdie, well, Birdie was just an angry little girl. She’d been angry since that night, as though she knew I’d lied and made a fool of her. Poor Birdie, she was always too old, too smart, for her years. She’d never even allowed herself to believe in Santa Claus. In her eyes, I saw all the judgment I deserved
.

The irony there is that I have always suspected that Birdie might be Richard’s child. She’s so different from the other children, so hard and unyielding sometimes, so prone to anger and despair. Sometimes I see him in her long, thin fingers, her pale skin, and the line of her mouth
.

Jack had been away a lot while I was at the lake with the children that summer. Richard and I were together almost every night while they slept. And Birdie by far has the greatest attachment to the island, as if she belongs to it and it to her. In a way, since she was conceived there, it’s true. But this is not a thing that I dwell on too much. If Jack suspected, he never said. We were so good at that, turning away from the ugly and unpleasant and carrying on as if nothing were the matter. It wouldn’t have done anybody any good to know the truth
.

Richard’s death was an accident. Or maybe it was self-defense. There had been horrible rows before that one, before I even knew Jack. There was something about us, what we were together, that ignited this passion. What was lovemaking one moment could easily shift to violence. I wanted to leave, wanted him to come with me. But he grabbed my arm and begged me to stay. Then he became angry, claimed I never loved him. He told me that I was every whore and nightmare bitch who populated his novels. I’ll never forget the things he said. He said: You’ve taken everything from me and left me empty, always yearning, always alone. I’ve had to face over the years that it was true
.

I ran from him and he gave chase. I found myself climbing the rocks to Lookout Rock. Why didn’t I run for the boat? I have asked myself this a hundred times. The rocks were slick in a way I wasn’t used to, and I fell several times on the climb. And then when I was up there, I had no place to go
.

“What now?” he asked at the top
.

The water was black and still beneath us. Over us was a high white moon, thin wisps of dark gray clouds
.

“Let me take you home,” I said. “You need help.”

Something about my words enraged him, and he was on me. Had it been just me, I’d have let him take me. But there were Jack, Caroline, Birdie, and Gene. They needed me, and I needed them. Richard was everything dark inside me, and they were everything good and light. I had to choose and I did. I fought for my life. In doing so, I caused Richard to lose his footing and fall from Lookout Rock into the water below. Should I have dived in after him, tried to find him in that cold black water? I should have, and I didn’t
.

I screamed for him, my voice a knife slicing the night with all sorrow. How long did I stay there? I don’t know. But after a while, I heard a boat. And then Jack was there, miraculously. I told him. I told him everything. And then we left Heart Island, left Richard. We agreed to never speak of it, to forget it all. In the spring, they found his body. Poor Richard, everyone knew what a terrible wreck he was, how he wrestled
the demons of alcoholism and depression. The end he found surprised no one
.

If anyone saw us go to and return from the island that day, no one said so. Suspicion never once turned to us. And one might have thought the guilt would haunt us, but I have to be honest that it didn’t. I can only speak for myself when I say that I felt as if I had been afflicted with a terrible illness in my love for Richard, and that night on Heart Island, I was cured. It’s an awful way to feel, but that’s the truth. I can’t be honest anywhere else in my life, but I can be honest here. We’d met on the islands a lifetime earlier, when we were children. Our love for each other was born there. And it was only right that it should have died there, too
.

“What is the difference between fiction and memoir, really? I mean, isn’t there a bit of autobiography in every novel? And isn’t there a bit of fiction in every memoir? Memory is elastic, and no two people have the same version of any given event. Our versions of our own lives are necessarily fictional to some degree, wouldn’t you agree?”

The radio interviewer’s face was partially obscured behind a huge gray microphone. The control panel beneath her hands was a light show of red and green, a million tiny levers and dials.

“Well,” said Kate. She’d learned to take her time in answering questions. “I think the difference is in what you claim it is. How honest are you being with yourself, with others, about what you’ve written? Are you hiding behind a fictional account of a real event to avoid the consequences of telling your truth? Or are you claiming that an idealized version of your life is the truth? I think it’s an important distinction.”

The interviewer offered a thin smile. “So, then, your novel? Is it fiction based on truth? Or is it truth hiding in fiction?”

Kate breathed deeply. She’d answered this question so many times that the answer she was about to give felt scripted and practiced before she even opened her mouth.

“In reality, my grandmother had an affair with Richard Cameron. In her journals, and in the journals of my aunt, I learned about her version of what transpired between them. The story I tell was inspired by that affair and by those journals. But it is not a true account of what happened between Lana Heart and Richard Cameron. Nobody really knows that story.”

This wasn’t the whole truth. But it wasn’t a lie, either. That was the thing about fiction: The real and the unreal worlds mingled to become something altogether different. It didn’t stand against judgment in either place.

“The family of Richard Cameron thinks they do.”

Now it was Kate’s turn to offer a wry smile. “They’re entitled to that. But with both parties long dead and no one living who was close enough to them to bear witness, I hold that it’s impossible to know the truth now.”

“And what about those journals?”

“Sadly, they were incinerated in the fire that destroyed the house on Heart Island, my family’s vacation home. I’d brought those journals with me to share them finally with my mother. I never had the chance to give them to her.”

The interviewer, a striking woman with alabaster skin and shockingly red hair, kept her sea-green eyes on Kate, and Kate held her gaze. So far, she’d been pretty impartial, though her questions were straight to the point.

“Some people find that to be a convenient coincidence.”

“And I find it to be a personal tragedy.”

The other woman looked down at her notes. “What do you think happened to Richard Cameron?” she said.

“I think he was a very unhappy man who struggled against the two-headed monster of depression and alcoholism, and that in losing my grandmother, he was overcome. He lost whatever war he was fighting within himself.”

“You think he committed suicide.”

In a sense, hadn’t he? He’d attacked Lana, and she’d fought for her life. In the struggle, he’d fallen. Or at least that was Lana’s account. One had to believe that if he wanted to overpower her physically, he could have done so easily. But in Kate’s novel, the character who loosely represented Richard Cameron ended his own life. In the struggle at the highest point on the island, he realized what he was doing—hurting, trying to kill, the only woman he’d ever loved. In realizing what he’d become, he threw himself onto the rocks below. Kate’s fiction had become a kind of truth for her. It was the only truth she had a right to tell. Both Lana and Caroline had, in a sense, confided in her. She wouldn’t betray them by telling their stories. She could only tell her own.

“I
imagine
he did, one way or another,” said Kate. “Either intentionally or by accident.”

There was a moment of silence. Kate could see all the lights on the phone between them blinking furiously.

“The Cameron family holds that your grandmother and grandfather were seen visiting the island the winter before his body was discovered,” said the interviewer. “They believe he was murdered and that your grandparents had something to do with that.”

“There is absolutely no evidence to support that theory,” said Kate. Again, it was a phrase she’d uttered so many times that it rolled off her tongue, some kind of boilerplate statement. “It’s an unsubstantiated rumor.”

“So it is. Well, Kate Burke, that’s all the time we have today. Thank you for speaking to us about your new novel,
The Island
. I enjoyed it, and I know many other people are enjoying it as well. Ms. Burke will be signing tonight at Powell’s here in Portland at eight
P.M
. Come on out and see her. This is KXL Radio’s Beth Grayson, and this has been
Book Talk
.”

A
car waited for Kate as she exited the radio studio into a cold and rainy day. She felt a peculiar kind of exhaustion that came from being on the road too long. She remembered how Sebastian used to complain about a kind of brain fry that occurred after you’d talked about yourself and your creative output too much. You started to feel like a facsimile of yourself, something diminished in quality by too much reproduction.

Then there were the late nights, the endless flights, and the rich foods she would never eat at home. Luckily, on this leg, she had Sean with her; the kids were staying with Sean’s mother. On the other stops, she’d been alone, and she’d felt like an astronaut on a line, floating out in space.

She hadn’t expected any attention for the book, really. But the incident on the island, along with her relationship to Sebastian, had led to a bit of a media feeding frenzy. The book was climbing up the best-seller lists. She wondered what would have become of it if not for the factors that had nothing to do with her writing. She suspected not very much.

She hadn’t expected to do so much talking about Lana and Jack. She had expected that it would be a matter known to no one except her own family. It was John Cross who turned the whole thing into the huge mess that it had become. He claimed that the photo Birdie inexplicably had shown him proved that Lana Heart at least had visited the island the winter Richard Cameron disappeared. But that photo, too, was missing. Kate had no idea what Birdie had done with it, and Birdie wasn’t telling.