Nantucket Nights (30 page)

“I’m devastated,” Sabrina said. “But another time.”

“Another time,” Lindsey repeated.

Theo cleared his throat. “I have some assignments and stuff to give Lindsey. Okay if we go into my room?”

“Of course,” Sabrina said. She winked at him, and his face grew warm.

Sabrina went back into the kitchen humming, “Try to remember the kind of September…”

So she knew, Theo thought. Knew something was up.

He led Lindsey to his room and shut the door. She sat on his bed, dropped her backpack at her feet. “I love how you ask your grandma if you can bring me in here,” she said. “Like we’re going to make out or something.”

“Shut up,” Theo said.

“Just show me the picture,” Lindsey said. “Because really, I have to get a move on.”

“Okay,” Theo said. He stood at his dresser. He couldn’t believe he was about to share two of
his prized possessions with a virtual stranger. His artifacts of Antoinette. But what choice did he have now? He removed the snapshot and the wrinkled cocktail napkin from
his underwear drawer. He handed the snapshot to Lindsey. “Here she is.”

Lindsey took the picture. “Turn on a light,” she said.

Theo hit the overhead light. Even through the closed door, he heard
his grandmother humming that song. Lindsey stared at the picture. She stared and stared.

“The baby in the picture is me,” Theo said.

Lindsey stared.

“She looks like you, doesn’t she?”

Lindsey didn’t answer. Theo felt awkward standing in the harsh light. He wished Lindsey would finish looking at the picture and leave so that he could have dinner with
his grandmother. He was going to tell Sabrina the whole story as soon as Lindsey left.

“Well?” he said impatiently. “What do you drink?”

Lindsey raised her head. She was crying. Or not crying so much as leaking tears. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “We’re twins.”

“Yeah.”

She wiped her face. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that my whole life I’ve never had anything biological. You know? My parents are wonderful people, but they’re not related to me. The whole reason I started searching for Antoinette in the first place was that I wanted that void filled. I wanted a biological connection.” She held up the picture. “This woman is related to me.”

“She’s your mother.”

More tears fell as Lindsey studied the picture. Theo hurried to the bathroom and brought back a three-foot strip of toilet paper. Lindsey blotted her eyes.

“So I can keep this?” she asked, waving the picture.

His heart flagged. His only picture of Antoinette. The only picture of Antoinette in existence, that he knew of.

“Sure.”

“Thanks,” she said. “And you said there was something else?”

“Oh.” Theo paused. He removed the napkin from
his vest pocket. “Here. This is a note I found on her refrigerator.”

” “L. Cape Air, noon Saturday,’ ” Lindsey read. “L? That’s me.”

“Yeah.”

Lindsey put the picture and the napkin in her backpack. She was taking them. Theo touched the sore spot on
his tongue to his teeth.

“You realize,” Lindsey said, “that if she were planning on picking me up at the airport, then she didn’t disappear intentionally. She drowned, Theo.”

Drowned.

He shrugged. “Whatever. I can think otherwise.”

“I guess you can. But why would you torture yourself? You’re so young. You need to accept that Antoinette is dead and move on. Maybe you should see a therapist.”

“Maybe.” His throat clogged with impending tears. She was right: He
was
young,
his life did have possibilities beyond this. He could marry someone else, father other children. Move on. Heal. But Theo’s future would be colored forever by
his love for Antoinette. This was what he couldn’t explain to Lindsey, or to Sabrina, or to
his parents—the way his love for Antoinette and for his unborn child haunted him. He heard it in the top note of Pachelbel’s Canon, he tasted it in Sabrina’s paella, he saw it in the slender, graceful arms of the ballet dancers at school. His love and
his pain would follow him wherever he went next in life. They were all he had left.

Lindsey stood up. “I have to go.”

“Okay,” Theo said. The polite tiring was to walk her out, which he would do, he would hold himself together until Lindsey left, and then he would shout and scream and cry. Sabrina would feed
him; she would listen without asking questions.

Before she put her hand on the doorknob, Lindsey leaned over and kissed Theo on the lips. The lightest kiss, like a kiss from a ghost, Theo thought. A kiss from Antoinette.

“Thank you,” she said.

Theo smiled. For a second, he felt transformed. For a second, he was just a boy of eighteen, kissed by a pretty girl. “You’re welcome,” he said.

Karla

The first thing Kayla did when she stepped into the San Juan airport was to seek out the bank of pay phones. She lifted the receiver and punched in her calling card number. At home, on Nantucket, the answering machine picked up. Of course: The kids were at school, Raoul at work. “I arrived safely,” Kayla said. “I love you all.” Seven words; that was all she allowed herself. She hung up.

Kayla proceeded down the corridor toward baggage claim. She was wearing a new dress, a turquoise sundress with splashy pink flowers. She’d bought it out of a catalog, as a way to get excited about this trip. Six weeks by herself in sunny Puerto Rico, a new
the Vineyard the first of dress, a wallet full of cash and traveler’s checks—no price was too high for Raoul to get her off Nantucket. She was being banished. Raoul said no phone calls—except for one letting Mm know she’d arrived safely—no postcards even. Just her alone, with too much time to think. This was her penance.

It had been over two weeks, and there was still no sign of Antoinette’s body. Kayla hadn’t ventured out of the house; she hadn’t answered phone calls, although the phone rang constantly. Some people wanted to express their condolences—
We’re sorry you lost your friend
—some people wanted an explanation. Raoul’s name appeared in the police blotter for assaulting a police officer, and that instigated yet more calls. And even visits, concerned neighbors tapping on the sliding glass door. Kayla actually went so far as to lock that door and the front door. She stayed out of the kitchen.

Kayla plucked her suitcase off the carousel, extended the handle, and rolled it over to the rental car desks. Ten minutes later, Kayla stood out in the humid tropical weather as a young Puerto Rican man drove up in her car, a bright red LeBaron convertible.

The young man threw her suitcase into the trunk and helped her decipher her map. She was close to the highway, he said. The drive to Guanica was easy.

Kayla clipped her hair back into a barrette, put on her sunglasses, and
hit the gas. It was liberating, and if she hadn’t been so sad, she might have enjoyed it.

Three days later, she had a routine. She was staying in a pleasant one-bedroom unit at a place called Mary Lee’s by the Sea. Her unit was decorated with tropical fabrics, plants, rattan furniture, and it looked out over the ocean. Kayla started her day with exercise—she walked past a seafood restaurant and a parking lot where a pack of mangy dogs barked at her from the other side of the chain-link fence, past the opulent Copamarina Beach Resort where wealthy Americans played early morning games of tennis, down to the public beach, and back. At her unit, she showered and made herself a papaya smoothie. Then before it grew too hot, she drove the LeBaron into downtown Guanica, a dingy port town. She shopped at the bodega, cashed traveler’s checks at the bank, visited a souvenir shop, and pawed trinkets and held up T-shirts, thinking, despite her best efforts, of her children. In the afternoons, she lounged on her deck. At five o’clock, Kayla showered again, drank some wine, and either cooked for herself or walked to the seafood restaurant. And every night after dark, she sneaked down to the end of the dock in front of the hotel office, slipped off her sundress, and swam in the lagoon. This was the only time that she allowed herself to think.

The entire situation with Antoinette had opened her eyes to several new ideas. One new idea was that she wasn’t a very good mother. Another new idea was that she wasn’t a very good wife. And a third new idea was that she wasn’t a very good friend. Only weeks earlier, these three words—
mother, wife, friend
—would have been the exact three words Kayla would have chosen to identify herself. But not anymore. If she wasn’t a mother, wife, and friend, then who was she? She didn’t know.

The lagoon frightened her—it was bordered by the thick, gnarled roots of mangroves. She was afraid to put her feet on die bottom because there might be crabs, or snakes. And yet, being afraid cleared her mind—she spent the dark hours replaying moments from her children’s early lives, especially Theo’s, replayed them like she was a coach watching a game tape—searching for things that might have been done differently. Theo was her first baby. She hadn’t known what she was doing. Did she breast-feed him too long or wean him too soon? Did she tell
him she loved him too often or too infrequently? What had she done to make him sleep with her best friend? Somehow, she suspected, it was her fault. And how had she not realized what was going on with Antoinette? Now that Kayla looked back, she saw clues: Theo out on mysterious errands all the time, the way his shirts smelled when Kayla collected them for the laundry, the time he was so curious about Antoinette’s past. But Kayla had been too busy, too blind, too naive to see the clues. Antoinette was in one part of her life, and Theo in another. Even now, Kayla had a hard time believing in the affair. She couldn’t bring herself to imagine their intertwining bodies.

Thinking about Raoul was even more painful. In the nineteen years of their marriage, Kayla and Raoul had only spent a handful of nights apart—the nights Kayla had slept on the beach at Great Point for Night Swimmers. Saying good-bye was difficult: Raoul took her to the airport while the kids were at school, so it was just the two of them in the near-empty terminal. Kayla had never said good-bye to Raoul before, and she didn’t know how to act. Raoul tried to make light of her leaving by humming “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and when Kayla grew angry at him for this—saying he couldn’t carry a tune, so please save her ears—Raoul grew angry at her. They’d ended up sitting side by side, arms crossed, staring at the woman who worked the Cape Air counter as she helped another customer with a fouled-up ticket. Then, when Kayla’s plane was called, Raoul took her elbow and walked her to the gate and kissed her as sweetly as he had ever kissed her, and Kayla cried.

Kayla missed the sound of Raoul’s voice, the feel of his scruffy face when he didn’t shave for a day or two, the way he touched her in the middle of the night as if making sure she was still there. She missed hearing him talk to the kids, she missed
his smell of fresh lumber and plaster and paint, she missed pulling crumpled pink receipts from Marine Home Center out of his pockets when she put
his clothes into the hamper at night. But she hadn’t been a good wife. She’d suspected
him of adultery for years—she admitted this now—and so she harbored old anger about being deceived along with this new anger about being deceived. And then Jacob. God, Jacob. Every minute of this vacation was a struggle not to fall into a pit of self-loathing.

While there was a chance that her marriage would survive, Kayla understood that her friendships with Val and Antoinette were over. Val had turned Kayla in to the police, and Kayla slept with Jacob. Both actions were unthinkable. Or rather, what was unthinkable was that after twenty years a friendship as strong as theirs could be so violently destroyed. Tom apart in a matter of twenty-four hours. Kayla had packed up all of Val’s things and sent Theo to drop them off at her house.

At the end of her evening swim, as Kayla climbed out of the water, dried off, and walked back to her unit, she asked the question that became her mantra, her
raison d’etre: What had happened to Antoinette?
Was she alive? Dead? Here, Kayla was flummoxed. She’d asked Raoul to leave a message at the office of Mary Lee’s as soon as a body was found, but she’d heard nothing. And as far as she knew, the police were conducting what they called a limited missing-persons investigation, but again, she’d had no news. Everyone thought, or had grown to accept, that Antoinette drowned during Night Swimmers. She’d been drinking, true; the water was tricky, the riptide fierce and unpredictable. But something nagged at Kayla, and that something was Antoinette herself. She was too capable, too strong, too
clever
to let herself get swept away. It sounded stupid, but it wasn’t Antoinette’s
style.
She was a survivor. So where was she? Hanging out with the Jim Morrison groupies at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, or trekking on the back of an elephant in the teak forests of northern Thailand? Mostly, Kayla thought of Antoinette as vanished. Not alive, not dead, just gone. Meaning, she could turn up again somewhere. Resurface.

Kayla had been dreading this vacation from the beginning, and yet, when the six weeks were over, she panicked at the thought of returning to Nantucket. She thought back to the words she once heard Antoinette say:
“I’m lonely all the time, every day. But there are far worse things than being lonely. Like being betrayed.”

Kayla didn’t want to relinquish her solitude, her simple routine, her ocean view or her solitary night swims. She thought brashly of writing a forbidden postcard,
Decided to stay here for the rest of my life. Love, Kayla.

She returned on the sixth of November, and as her plane flew over the island, Kayla was filled with trepidation. The first landmark she spotted was Great Point lighthouse, which from the plane looked like nothing more than a white stake planted in the ground. A stake marking the site of her sadness. Then Kayla took in the cranberry color of the moors, the dark blue ponds, the amber and green plots of Bartlett’s farm. Autumn had come while she was away.

She didn’t know what to expect when she entered the airport. She almost walked past Raoul—he was sitting on a bench reading the newspaper—but he reached out and caught the skirt of her dress. He looked the same, the most beautiful man she had ever known, but his face had changed, too. He looked sad; he looked scared. Both her fault.