Nantucket Sisters (25 page)

As for Cameron, she simply doesn’t think about him much. She trained herself not to. She doesn’t want to think unpleasant thoughts when her growing child is curled inside her body. With each passing day, Maggie’s pregnancy works like an opiate. This is something Ben can’t share.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

One early September afternoon Maggie decides to drive out to Thaddeus’s farm to walk the paths she remembers from childhood. The farm is officially Ben’s now, but he won’t mind.

“Mom? Clarice? I’m going out to visit the farm. Want to come along?”

“No, thank you, dear.” Clarice looks up from her armchair in the living room. “I’m in the middle of a good book.”

“I’ll come,” Frances decides. She hasn’t been there since Thaddeus’s death six months ago. “I’d like to see it again.”

Frances is quiet as they drive out of town and along the Polpis Road. She puts her hands to her heart when they drive onto the land and park in front of the house where she lived with her beloved husband.

“You okay, Mom?” Maggie asks.

“I’m fine, dear. Give me a moment. Such memories.”

They leave the car and walk up the steps. The door isn’t locked; most people on the island never lock their doors.

They knock anyway, and call out, “Ben?” His car isn’t in the drive, so they know he’s not there. They step inside.

The kitchen is as messy as it was before Thaddeus married Frances. The dog, an adopted mutt, sleeps under the table. She opens only one eye when they enter, but doesn’t move to greet them.

Frances murmurs. “It doesn’t look like Ben spends much time with the dog, but of course she probably sleeps all the time …”

“Mom.” Maggie points to the kitchen table. “Look at this.”

Spread across the wooden surface, pinned down with salt and pepper shakers, a sugar bowl, and a coffee cup, lies a large map printed with the words:
Thaddeus Ramsdale Property
. The boundary line is outlined in dark black. The land has been divided several ways in different colors of pencil. In darker pencil, two roads cut through from Polpis Road to the harbor, winding around, and on each bulge of each curve a house is sketched in.

It’s a plan for a development.

Frances collapses into a chair. Her skin has gone gray. “No,” she whispers. “He wouldn’t.”

Maggie takes out her cell phone and punches in Ben’s number. She hasn’t called him in weeks.

When he answers, she says bluntly, “We’re at the farm. You have to come here now.”

“I don’t have to do anything. And it’s not
the
farm. It’s
my
farm.”

Maggie holds her anger in and tempers her voice. “Ben, Mom’s here. She saw your map. And no, of course you don’t
have
to do anything. But you should. Please. I don’t think you ought to make Mom wait now that she knows.”

“I’m coming.” He clicks off.

“He’s coming,” Maggie tells her mother. “I’ll make some tea.” In a gentle voice, she suggests, “Why don’t you go up to your room and gather some of your cold weather clothing to take back to Orange
Street with you? The other day you were wishing you had your blue cotton sweater.”

Frances nods numbly and leaves the room like an obedient child.

Maggie busies herself around the kitchen, making tea, washing cups and dishes, wiping off surfaces. She sees Ben’s truck pull into the drive.

“Mom? Ben’s here.”

Frances comes into the kitchen, her arms full of clothing. “Is there a plastic garbage bag here I could put these in?” She seems surprisingly calm.

Maggie’s holding the bag open while Frances drops in the garments when Ben opens the door and steps inside. For a moment the trio stare at each other in silence. He’s lost weight, looks lean and rather startlingly grown-up in his striped button-down shirt, khakis, and tie.

Ben says, “I didn’t mean for you to find out this way.”

“When were you going to tell us?” Maggie asks.

“Is that tea?” Ben acts pleasant, totally fake, and pulls out a chair. “Mom? Want to sit down?”

Frances sits.

Maggie sets tea before them and joins her mother and brother at the table. “What’s going on?” she asks Ben.

He doesn’t flinch, back down, or appear apologetic. He doesn’t hesitate. In his gorgeous blue eyes a kind of darkness gleams that frightens Maggie.

Ben says, “I’m working with Sedgwick Realty. I’m going to subdivide this property. I’m going to work with a contractor and architect to develop the land. We’ll build a few extremely fine houses here. The best one, Mom, will be yours. You can have a harbor view if you’d like. Or—”

“Stop.” Frances lifts a hand. “Ben, you can’t subdivide Thaddeus’s land.”

“I can, you know, Mom.”

“But why?” The words seem torn from her heart.

“So I can be rich. So we can all be rich.”

“Oh, honey, don’t talk like that. You love this land. You love it like Thaddeus loved it. Why, what would Thaddeus think?”

“Thaddeus is dead.”

After a beat of silence, Frances says, “You’re still indebted to him, Ben. You still must behave honorably.”

Ben shrugs. “I think I am behaving honorably. I’m doing what I need to do to secure a prosperous future for all of us.”

“A prosperous future?” Frances puts her hands to her head, as if it hurts. “What the hell does that mean? We’re all right, Ben! If I need more money, I can work. That’s what people do!”

“You’re too old—”

“I’m fifty-three, for God’s sake, I’m hardly decrepit! Don’t sell this land because you think you need to take care of me!”

“But I do want to take care of you, Mom!” The little boy’s longing rings in the man’s cry. “I want you to be safe. I want you to be secure. I don’t want you to have to sew other women’s clothes—”

“There’s nothing wrong with work, Ben!” Frances’s eyes blaze.

“I’m not saying that, I’m saying that this house is a sty about to collapse, it’s a fire trap. I want to give you a beautiful new house, with new appliances, and a cathedral ceiling! I want to hire people to help you clean and maintain it. Landscape it. Give you a water feature. When you grow older, I want to be able to afford more people to assist you if you’re ill so you don’t end up in some old folks’ home. I want to live
well
. Jesus Christ, Mom, I want to have some
power
! I’m sick of sucking up to rich people, I want to be rich! If I make enough money, I can control what happens to the future of the island!”

Maggie snorts. “Yeah,
develop
it—”

Frances rises majestically to glower down at her son. “
Control the future of the island
? Good God, Ben, if you develop this land, you’ll kill it, and you’ll kill part of your soul, you know that.”

“No, Mom. I’ll be rich.”

“Rich.”
Frances spits the word. Softening, she leans her hands on the table, pleading. “Ben, I don’t understand why you’re changed like this, although I can guess. I think you’ve been badly hurt, I think you’re feeling alone, and I’m afraid you’ve lost your way. You need to take some time to reflect, Ben, before you do anything as crucial as developing this land. Could you do that? Could you take some time, the winter, let’s say, to consider your actions?”

“I’m sorry, Mom.” Ben’s jaw clenches. His eyes are hot with emotion but his voice is cool when he speaks. “I’ve made up my mind. I need to start this as soon as possible, while the market’s good. You and Maggie are already living happily with Clarice. You’ll want to be together when Maggie has her baby. Mom, I’m going to build a house for you and one for Maggie, near the harbor—”

“Stop right there.” Frances stands up. Her voice is cold. “Just because you’ve made a pact with the devil doesn’t mean the rest of us have. If you develop this land, Ben McIntyre, don’t think for a second that I’ll have anything to do with it or with the profit from it.” Frances blazes with anger. “If you develop this land, you’ll betray every value I’ve ever tried to teach you. You’ll betray me, you’ll betray Thaddeus, you’ll betray the land. And I won’t be part of it. If you do this, I will cut you out of my life!”

Maggie thinks her mother’s magnificent. Expectantly she looks toward Ben, assuming he’ll relent, not all the way, but certainly a little.

“Fine,” Ben says. His eyes have gone cold. Blank.

“Oh,
Ben
.” Frances is trembling. “Maggie. Let’s go.” She walks toward the door.

Maggie picks up the bag with her mother’s fall clothing. “We’ll have to come back,” she says to Ben. “To pick up our things.”

“Fine,” Ben repeats. “Whenever.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

In September, at Mount Sinai, after a long labor concluding with a C-section, Emily gives birth to a baby girl. Her parents are over the moon to have a grandchild.

When Cameron sees the infant’s thick black hair, he’s not so thrilled.

“Now, how is it,” he asks, in the hospital room, with the nurse right there, “that I have blond hair, and you have blond hair, Emily, and our child has black hair?”

Emily’s heart thumps heavily. She’s woozy from the medications and scarcely has the energy to speak. What can she say? Her parents are in the room, too, both blond, although her father’s hair has gone silver. Perhaps, she wonders foggily, one of her grandparents once had black hair.

Fortunately, the nurse chuckles knowingly. “That’s newborn hair,” she informs them. “It will fall out and then the blond hair will probably come in. Or who knows, perhaps red hair—our genes are complicated, and Mother Nature does love to spin the roulette
wheel. I’ve seen babies with blue eyes born to parents with dark brown eyes. My, that caused a fuss!” She continues to chatter as she bustles around the room, checking mother and baby’s vital signs, scribbling on charts. Emily wants to grab the woman and kiss her.

A hurricane is forecast for the northeast coast the day Maggie goes into labor. Strong winds whip the ocean into a froth of white. The trees, still laden with green leaves, flail drunkenly, limbs cracking off, twigs littering the streets.

Maggie’s friend Darcie, a midwife, stays with Maggie at the Orange Street house, trying to allay her fears, which do have a foundation in logic. If something should go wrong—there’s no reason anything should, but
if
some dire emergency takes place—the helicopters that come from Mass General Hospital to pick up Nantucket patients won’t be able to fly in this wind.

Usually Maggie finds hurricanes exhilarating. She likes to walk on the beach, listening to the ocean roar. But today she wants to be safe. It doesn’t help that the old house is creaking around her or that Clarice reminds her it has stood for one hundred eighty years in all kinds of weather. Maggie had assumed that since she was healthy and active, the birth would be relatively quick and easy, but after fourteen hours of labor, she’s weak with exhaustion and pain. She wanted to have a home birth; she felt she’d be letting her baby down somehow if she didn’t, but at three in the morning she begs her mother to drive her to the hospital. A doctor is summoned. He turns the baby’s head, which was caught on her cervix, and in minutes, Maggie’s daughter is born.

Over the next week, Maggie’s friends, Frances’s friends, and Clarice’s friends come by with casseroles and infant clothing and flowers. Maggie names the baby Heather, because she loves the heather on the moors. Heather is small, pale, and dainty, with glimmers of
blond hair on her pink scalp. Maggie is completely in love with her baby, and she’s grateful for the support of her mother and step-grandmother, happy to be celebrated by her friends. Yet in the small hours of the morning when Heather wakes with her creaking cry, Maggie weeps as she nurses her child. She knows what it’s like to be a girl with no father. She can’t believe she brought this upon her own daughter. The thought that her baby has no man to love her is a spear of grief in Maggie’s heart.

Ten days after Serena’s birth, Emily dozes on the living room sofa, her baby in a wicker basket next to her. When she hears the apartment door open, she snaps awake, sits up, adjusts the neckline of her robe, and runs her hands over her hair. The baby nurse they hired for a week has gone. Her parents have made their daily visit and left. Emily’s put on lipstick, blush, and eyeliner for the first time since she returned from the hospital, and as Cameron enters the room, she arranges her face in a welcoming smile.

“You’ve been working terribly hard,” she coos. “Did you get dinner?”

“We had it sent in.” Cameron goes to the drinks table and pours himself a scotch. “What are you doing up this late?”

“I’d like to chat. I haven’t seen you for days, it seems. And look, we have all these lovely baby presents to open.” She doesn’t mention the fact that he hasn’t come over to peer down at his child or to kiss his wife.

Cameron sinks into a wing chair by the cold fireplace. He rubs his forehead. “I don’t have the energy to deal with those tonight.”

“Cameron, are you all right?” Emily leans toward him, genuinely concerned.

His smile is rueful. “I’m fine, Emily. But with every day that passes, I feel more like a fool.”

“What do you mean?”

“Emily. No one in the Chadwick family has ever had black hair. You played me, didn’t you?”

“No!” Emily’s maternal defenses ignite. “Cameron—what …” She begins again. “If you’re talking about Serena, then no, I absolutely did not play you. She is your child. She’s only ten days old, give her some time.” Cameron’s face is blank, unresponsive. Rising, she moves across the room, sinking onto the floor next to his chair, putting her hands on his knee. She knows her robe has fallen open, exposing her lovely, large milk-filled breasts. “Cameron. You and I scarcely know one another, it’s true. This has all happened in such a rush. I remember quite clearly that you don’t love me, but every day I love you more. We can create a wonderful life for ourselves and our daughter. We can be happy.” She feels him relaxing. Emily moves closer. “I want to make you happy.”

Cameron shakes his head but smiles at the same time. “Oh, Emily.”

She moves her hand up his leg. “I could make you happy now,” she whispers, moving between his legs. “Let me try.”