Then he’s in motion. He’s at the closet, pulling clothes from hangers, he’s at his dresser, emptying drawers. He’s stuffing his gym bag.
She wants to let out a scream, but her voice is too devastated for sound. Okay? He’s not even putting up a fight. He’s not apologizing or begging for forgiveness. Okay? He’s not asking her to work on this with him, to let him stay.
He wants to go.
She wants to hit him, shake him, hurt him. She wants to throw something hard and heavy at him. She considers her iron bedside lamp. She wants to hate him. But to her shame and confusion, she also wants to hug him, soothe him, stop him. She wants to tell him that everything will be okay. She wants to go to him and kiss him the way they used to kiss. Those deep, long kisses that melted her.
Now he’s kissing some woman named Angie and melting her.
He’s banging around in the bathroom now, probably gathering his things from the medicine cabinet. She looks over to the indent where he was just sleeping. Was he with Angie last night before coming home to sleep and snore here?
She can’t sit on this bed, their bed, for one second longer. She gets up and begins stripping it. Still crying, she tugs the comforter, the blanket, and each sheet off the mattress and whips them into a heaping, defeated pile on the floor. As she’s peeling the pillowcases off the pillows, she notices Jimmy’s socks lying on the floor, lazy and careless, waiting for her to pick them up and put them in the hamper. She’s always picking up his stinky socks. His stinky socks, his dirty underwear, his coat, his shoes, his crumbs all over the floor from the pastrami sandwiches and chips he eats without using a plate, the gobs of dried toothpaste spit he leaves in the sink, the sand he always tracks throughout the house. She’s picking up his stinky socks and wiping up his crumbs and sand and spit and doing his laundry while he’s out having an affair.
Jimmy appears at the foot of the bed, carrying his gym bag and their big red suitcase, the one they bought at Kmart in Hyannis for their road trip to Disney World back in October. Back in October, when he was cheating on her with Angie Melo.
“I’ll call you,” he says, sounding reluctant.
“Uh-huh,” she says, holding all of their bedding and his dirty socks in her arms, trying not to look at him.
He stands there, struggling to say something more, possibly hoping for her to say something more, for her to stop him. She can’t be sure. She sneaks a quick glance at him. His face is pained, tears pooled in his eyes. She looks away. He doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t either. He turns and walks down the stairs. She doesn’t move an inch until she hears the sound of the front door closing behind him.
In the laundry room, she carefully measures out the detergent. The engine of Jimmy’s truck turns. She pours the liquid fabric softener into the dispenser. He backs out of the driveway. She turns the dial to SHEETS and presses START. His truck shifts into first gear and rumbles down their street. She watches the hot water pour onto their bedding. Steam fills the barrel of the washing machine. Everything begins to spin.
He’s gone.
She walks into the kitchen, stands at the sink, stares out the window, and does nothing. She doesn’t know what to do. With determined effort, she directs her thoughts over to her routine, hoping the comfort and safety of her daily schedule might counter the wild panic rising mightily within her.
She still needs to vacuum the house. And she can get dinner started in the Crock-Pot soon. She’s making chicken-noodle soup. And she’ll bake brownies for dessert. The girls get out of school at two. Sophie has drama club, Jessica has basketball, and Gracie has a playdate.
She won’t tell them, of course. Not today. They won’t notice. Jimmy’s hardly ever home for dinner or bedtime.
She stands at the sink, motionless. The wind screams. The radiator hisses.
Jimmy is gone.
She takes a deep breath and releases it through her mouth. Okay, time to vacuum. But first, before she does anything, she’s calling Petra.
CHAPTER 4
It’s predawn and still dark out. Not pitch-black the way it is on Nantucket nights that are moonless and starless, when she can’t see her hand in front of her nose. The world around her is colored like a photographic blueprint, an anticipation-of-morning shade of blue-gray. But it’s also foggy, which is typical at this early hour, especially near the shore, and the lack of visibility makes it seem darker than it really is. Even with the headlights of her Jeep on and the windshield wipers flapping as fast as they can, Olivia is having a hard time seeing where she’s going. She drives slowly, carefully. She’s in no hurry.
The Wauwinet Gatehouse is empty. She parks the Jeep, gets out, and releases air from all four tires to 12 psi. She climbs back in and continues, the road changing now from pavement to sand. The sand turns soft, and her Jeep dips, bounces, and sways as she inches along. The fog is even thicker here. She can see nothing to either side and only a few feet in front of her.
Maybe a little over four miles into this drive—she can’t be sure, not having seen any landmarks along the way—the path is blocked by fencing. Vehicles are restricted from further progress down the beach, an effort to protect the endangered piping plovers who might unwittingly nest in the tire tracks. She parks her Jeep at the fence and gets out.
She hikes through deep, smooth, wind-caressed sand along the ocean that she can hear and smell but not see, the fog still obscuring everything. It can’t be far now. She pulls a flashlight from her coat pocket and aims it in front of her, but the beam of light scatters, diffusing among the water molecules suspended in the air, proving useless. She presses on. She knows where she’s going.
When the soft give of the sand changes to firm ground, wet from an earlier high tide, she exhales with relief. Each step is finally easy to take. Despite the cold, she’s sweating, and her leg muscles burn. She licks her lips, enjoying the taste of sea salt. Still unable to see the water, she knows it’s directly in front of her now and is disappointed that she can’t see the lighthouse, which must be only a few feet from her path, hidden behind the wall of fog.
Great Point Light has been destroyed twice, once by fire and once by storm, rebuilt both times. A seventy-foot, cylindrical tower of white stone, it stands resilient and majestic on this fragile pile of sand, where the Atlantic Ocean meets Nantucket Sound, its existence continually threatened by erosion and gale-force winds. Surviving.
Aside from the gulls and maybe a few piping plovers, she expects to be alone here. From May to September, she imagines this seven-mile stretch of beach is probably crawling with four-wheel-drive vehicles, hikers, families led on natural-history tours, people on vacation. But on March seventeenth, no one is here. She’s alone, thirty miles of water separating her from Cape Cod to the north and about thirty-five hundred miles of ocean between where she stands and Spain to the east. It’s the closest place to nowhere that she can think of. And nowhere is exactly where she wants to be today.
In the past, not that long ago, being this far away from anyone or anything else would not have been appealing to her. More than that, it would’ve scared her. A woman alone on a secluded beach, miles from anyone who might hear her if she needed help—like most girls, she’d been taught to avoid this kind of situation. But now, she’s not only unafraid, she prefers it. She’s not worried for a second about being raped or murdered out here alone on Great Point. Walking through safe, suburban Hingham, surrounded by ordinary people doing everyday things—that was what had been killing her.
The chips-and-snacks aisle in the grocery store. A Little League baseball game in progress. St. Christopher’s Church. Escalators at the mall. Her old friends blessed with typical children, one innocently bragging about her daughter in the school play, another unassumingly complaining that third-grade math isn’t challenging enough for her son. She avoids them all.
All of those places and people and things are charged, filled with memories of Anthony or the Anthony she prayed for or the Anthony that might have been. And they
all have the potential to turn her inside out in an instant, to make her cry, hide, scream, curse God, stop breathing, go insane. Any and sometimes all of the above.
She would drive many blocks out of her way to the bank or the gas station so she wouldn’t have to lay eyes on her church. She stopped answering the phone. Last summer at the grocery store, she noticed a boy she guessed was about Anthony’s age walking alongside his mother. Olivia was fine until the chips-and-snacks aisle, when the boy asked, Mom, can we get these? He was holding up a can of salt-and-vinegar Pringles, Anthony’s favorite. Without warning, all of the oxygen vanished from the store. She was paralyzed, gulping for air, drowning in panic. As soon as she could move, she ran from the store, abandoning her cart full of food, and cried in her car for almost an hour before she could collect herself enough to drive home. She hasn’t stepped foot in the chips-and-snacks aisle since. It isn’t safe there.
The world is littered with traps like salt-and-vinegar Pringles that swallow her whole, which would be fine with her except that they eventually spit her back out and say, Carry on, now. Everyone wants her to carry on now. Carry on. Move on. She doesn’t want to. She wants to be here, alone on Great Point, far away from all the traps. Standing still, moving nowhere.
She squats down and writes Happy Birthday Anthony with her index finger in the wet sand. He would’ve been ten today.
She remembers the day he was born. His birth was uncomplicated but long. She’d wanted a natural childbirth, but after twenty hours of painful and unproductive labor, she surrendered and asked for an epidural. Two hours, a hint of Pitocin, and six pushes later, Anthony was born. Pinkish purple, the color of petunias, calm and wide-eyed. She loved him instantly. He was beautiful and full of promise, her baby boy who would someday play Little League baseball, star in the school play, and be good at math. She didn’t know then that she should’ve had much simpler dreams for her beautiful son, that she should’ve looked upon her newborn baby boy and thought, I hope you learn to talk and use the bathroom by the time you’re seven.
His first couple of birthdays were normal—cakes she chose and bought at the bakery, candles that Olivia blew out, presents that she and David opened and acted overly delighted and animated about. But he was only one and two years old, so this was to be expected. After two, birthdays began deviating further and further away from normal.
Anthony stopped getting invited to other kids’ birthday parties when he was four, and when he turned five, she and David followed in turn, hosting private celebrations, family only. It was easier this way. Anthony didn’t participate in the party games or pay attention to the birthday clown anyway. It still broke her heart.
And while the maturing interests of other little boys his age were reflected in the party themes with each passing year—from Elmo to Bob the Builder to Spider-Man to Star Wars—Anthony had and was perfectly pleased with a Barney birthday year after year. Sure, she could’ve gone with another character. But there was no point in pretending that he loved superheroes or robots or ninjas. He loved Barney, and there wouldn’t be any other little boys at his parties to tease him for loving a purple dinosaur.
So each year, Olivia and David lit the candles on his Barney cake and sang “Happy Birthday.” Then she’d say, Come on, Anthony! Make a wish and blow out your candles! And then he wouldn’t, so she’d blow them out for him. She always made a wish, the same one every year.
Please don’t get older. You have to talk before you get any older. You have to say “Mom” and “Dad” and “I’m six years old” and “I want to go to the playground today” and “I love you, Mom” before we put another damn Barney cake on the kitchen table. Please stop getting older. We’re running out of time.
She never stopped wishing.
They went through the motions every year, but his birthday was not a fun day for her or David. Instead of celebrating like other parents whom she imagined and so passionately envied and sometimes hated, instead of marveling over the past year and how much her child had changed and grown, she and David felt only unspoken dread and desperation on Anthony’s birthday. March seventeenth was the one day each year when they were forced to stare the severity of Anthony’s autism straight in the eye, to be fully cognizant of how much progress he hadn’t made. When she shopped for his present and considered toys for age five-plus or ages five and up, she would be forced to admit to herself that these toys would hold no interest for him, that he couldn’t possibly play with any of them. There it was, printed on too many Fisher-Price boxes—Anthony was impossibly behind for his age.
So she would buy him an educational toy recommended by Carlin, his applied-behavioral-analysis therapist, or a new Barney video, or one year she wrapped a can of salt-and-vinegar Pringles. Pringles always made him happy. But the gift he loved the most each year was the card.
When he was four, she bought him the first of countless musical greeting cards. This one was a Hoops & Yoyo. She showed him first. He watched, pretending not to look. She opened the card. A song played and the characters sang. She shut the card. The music and the singing stopped.
To this day, she remembers his face, wondrous and joyful with the unexpected discovery of a new fascination, like when he found light switches. He opened the card. Music. He shut it. No music. Open. Music. Shut. No music. These cards were heaven to Anthony. The same song every time it’s opened, the same music; everything the card did was predictable and entirely under his control.
He’d spend the rest of the day smiling and squealing and flapping his hands as he opened, shut, opened, shut, opened, shut. That’s all he wanted every year. Unlimited time alone with his card. So this is what she and David gave to him.
She wonders how David is doing, if he’s awake yet, realizing the date, thinking about Anthony. She hopes he finds comfort today. Her heart aches thinking this, wishing she could be this to him. But she can’t. Comfort doesn’t exist within her, and she can’t offer what she doesn’t have. He doesn’t have it either. They know this.
Olivia sits on the beach, waiting for sunrise, listening to a gull squawking above her, sounding like laughter. The tide is coming in. With each pulse of waves, she watches as a little more of Happy Birthday Anthony washes away, until it’s pulled into the sea entirely. Wiped clean, as if it never existed. If she still believed in God, she would ask Him to send her birthday note written in sand to her son in heaven. But she doesn’t ask for this. These are only words scratched in sand with her finger, swallowed by the ocean.
In front of her feet, she writes I love you and waits. The water comes, steady and sure, pooling and bubbling into each letter. The words wash away, reaching no one.
The fog has started to lift, and the day begins to lighten. The metallic-gray ocean tumbles out in front of her. The lighthouse materializes to her left. The next wave crashes, dissolving into a bed of fizzing foam, and deposits a single white, round rock at her feet. Her heart stalls, then quickens. She squats down, picks up the beautiful, smooth stone, and rolls it inside her hand.
Anthony.
I miss you, my sweet boy.
The sun rises, glowing pink on the horizon over the ocean, the color of petunias, beautiful and full of promise.
CHAPTER 5
Beth and Petra are sitting in Jill’s living room, waiting for Courtney and Georgia. It’s book club night, but Courtney teaches yoga on Thursday evenings, and her class doesn’t get over until six thirty, so they know she’ll be running a bit late. And Georgia is always late. Jill knows this, but she’s still irritated. She’s holding them in the living room until everyone arrives because she wants the entire group to see the dining room at the same time. She’s imagining a grand entrance.
Beth is growing antsy, too. Petra’s planning on outing her tonight, and Beth is feeling less and less certain about this decision each time Jill sighs. It’s not that she doesn’t want her girlfriends to know that Jimmy’s having an affair and has moved out. She doesn’t want the whole island to know. And they will?
??Len, the school principal; Patty, the checkout woman at Stop & Shop; Lisa, Beth’s hairdresser; Jessica’s basketball coach.
But Petra’s right. Beth needs to stand tall in her truth, draw strength from the collective love of her friends, and something else. Another platitude from Petra’s pep talk earlier today sounded good at the time. Beth can’t remember it now. Petra reads a lot of inspirational books. She also reads tarot cards and sees a shaman once a month instead of a regular therapist. A lot of people on the island think Petra’s a little cuckoo. While Beth agrees that Petra can lean a bit eccentric, she also believes Petra possesses an inner wisdom that most people never know, a spiritual center that Beth admires and is drawn to and is certain that she herself lacks.
Plus, honesty, friendship, and New Age mumbo jumbo aside, it’s nothing short of a miracle that Jimmy’s affair isn’t public knowledge already anyway. Beth knows. Petra knows. Jimmy and Angela know that Beth knows, so they’re probably less careful now. Someone from the restaurant must know. And that someone will sooner or later tell someone who will tell Jill or Courtney or Jessica’s basketball coach.
And the girls now know that he’s moved out. Sophie was the first to notice that Dad wasn’t inhabiting any of his usual spots—the bed, the couch, his cigar chair. Where’s Dad? turned out to be a harder question to answer than What’s sex? or Have you ever smoked pot? Beth teetered her way through her answer, purposefully keeping the explanation short and vague (and honest—she doesn’t know exactly where he is either), a vain attempt to protect them from having the kind of father who would cheat on their mother. So the girls know that he’s not living at home, but they don’t know the ugly reason. Yet. Sadly, their father is, in fact, cheating on their mother, and it’s only a matter of time before everyone on Nantucket, including his three beautiful daughters, knows it.
Beth picks up the copy of Nantucket Life from Jill’s coffee table and thumbs through it, hoping for distraction while Jill frets about how late it’s getting. Beth agrees. It’s taking too long to get started. She feels like she’s in the waiting room at her dentist’s office, knowing that she needs to get her teeth cleaned and that they’ll look and feel great when she’s done, but the waiting around gives her anxiety and her memory too much time to play together. She’ll begin to fixate on the anticipated sound of the metal instruments scraping against her teeth, the throbbing soreness in her gums, the shame she feels when the hygienist scolds her for not flossing enough, the taste of latex and blood in her mouth. If she has to wait more than ten minutes for the hygienist to call out her name, it takes every ounce of self-control she possesses not to leave for another six months.