“I’m so sorry,” says Jason. “I kept thinking they would figure it out.”
“I don’t think Cara has it in her to figure things out. Some people battle with jealousy. I think she couldn’t ever deal with you having other women in your life. Me, your daughter. It would have been hell for the rest of your life.”
He nods, pensive. “Yes. I think that’s probably true, and I think I had realized that. I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier.”
“Me too.”
And then we hear Annie from upstairs. “Mum? Dad? Hello?”
“I’ll go.” I turn to go upstairs, knowing that the time has come for Annie and me to talk, that she is healed enough. “Won’t be long.”
* * *
I push open the door, heart melting at how vulnerable my daughter looks, in bed, bandaged, like a wounded duckling.
“Hi, darling, how are you feeling?”
“Good. Okay. Better. You know what I really want?” She sits up, pushing the covers back. “I’ve got a huge craving for ice cream.”
I lean over and kiss her on the top of her head, then sit down on her bed. “We can get you ice cream. But first I think we do need to have a talk.”
Her face falls.
“Annie, now that you’re better, I need you to know that I love you, and I am so relieved that you are fine, but I am also so angry and disappointed that you got into this mess.” I am careful to keep my voice flat. In the old days, the drinking days, I would have shouted, screamed, ranted and raved. I wouldn’t have waited until Annie got better, would have been a reactive mess.
“You are thirteen. I don’t know what to say about you even being on a scooter, let alone stealing one. The lying, Annie. The dishonesty. How am I supposed to trust you?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” she grumbles, picking at the bedspread, refusing to meet my eyes.
“It was Trudy’s idea?”
“No!” She is quick to defend her cousin. “It just … I don’t even remember how it happened. It was the other girls, not Trudy. They dared us to do it. I knew it was stupid and I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to be the annoying bratty little cousin. Mum, I really didn’t want to.” Now she looks at me, eyes swimming with tears. “Neither of us did, but we didn’t know how to say no.”
“Okay.” I nod. I understand this, understand what this feels like, when you are thirteen, and desperate to fit in, and terrified it might be discovered that you aren’t as cool or as fun as everyone else. I don’t know that Trudy felt the same way, am quite certain, in fact, that she was an instigator, but I know my daughter. “Okay.”
She looks up at me. “What about Trudy?”
“What about her?”
“Can I still see her?” Her voice is tentative, nervous.
I look at my daughter’s face. I know Trudy was an influence on her. Not necessarily a bad one, but one who is older, more experienced, who I’m quite certain has seen far more of life than my sweet young daughter.
I want to say no. I want to tell her that there is a consequence imposed for stealing scooters and lying about what you are doing and where you are. I want to be absolutely sure this doesn’t happen again.
But this is her cousin, and Ellie has now said it is okay. How can I separate them? How can I get in the way of a family, when I know just how much my daughter craves a connection with this girl, her own age, and her blood relative?
How can I say no?
“Supervised.” I give her a stern look, although of course it will be supervised. Poor Trudy is still bandaged up. It is doubtful Ellie will let her go anywhere for a while.
“I love you, Mum!” My daughter flings her arms around me before pulling back. “Now. About that ice cream…”
* * *
Jason and I take Annie to town. She swears she is up to it, but her arm is in a sling, and we are careful to move slowly, not to tire her out. She wants to look in the stores, sees a pair of sandals she wants, which Jason buys for her.
In the window of another store, I pause, seeing a beautiful silvery grey scarf.
“That would look great on you, Mum,” says Annie, seeing what I’m looking at.
“It would,” Jason agrees. “Shall we go in?”
We do, and the sales assistant brings me the scarf, and it is quite the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.
“It’s pure cashmere,” she says as I wind it around my neck, “but so fine it’s almost like silk.”
In the mirror, I see Jason standing behind me, looking at me. I meet his eyes, and he grins. “It does look beautiful on you,” he says. “You should buy it.”
I search for the price tag, and see it is $395, and there is no way in hell I have $395 to spend on a scarf, cashmere or otherwise, and I do not let my face register my shock at the price, slowly unwinding the scarf, telling the sales assistant I will think about it.
“Sure!” she says. “We have a few of them. How long are you here for?”
“Another week,” I say.
“You’re an adorable family,” she says, looking from me to Annie to Jason, and I just smile and thank her, not wanting to catch Jason’s eye, not wanting him to see the need in my face, the longing, the wishing that we were still an intact family.
“Why didn’t you buy it?” he asks as we leave the store. “It really did look wonderful.”
“Because it was a fortune,” I say, not adding that I’m a single mother who has to watch pretty much every penny, who can’t afford to waste hundreds of dollars on frivolities, no matter how beautiful.
We walk down to get ice cream, both of us flanking our daughter, who chatters away, looking from one to the other, and I see how happy she is to have her family complete, to have her mother and father together.
I remember how good we always were when things were good. How good we always were when I wasn’t drinking. I remember how good we were on holiday, how well we got on, how much fun we had.
Jason always liked doing the same things I was doing. I had friends who were married to men who hated lying around on a beach doing nothing. When they go on holiday my girlfriends spend all day by themselves while their husbands furiously run from tennis lessons to fishing or sailing, or hike around deserted parts of a Greek island for hours on end.
I have other friends who love walking around cities, spontaneously going into wherever takes their fancy, be it a museum, a gallery, a café, or a shoe shop. Obviously the shoe shop is the most important, but they’re married to husbands who refuse to stop, who march from A to B, sullenly waiting outside should their wives give in to the urge to browse, which makes those wives feel guilty, even as they slip their feet into exquisite heels that they would never find at home, and the whole holiday turns into one big stress fest.
Jason and I always seemed to be on the same wavelength on holiday. We would fly over to Paris for long weekends with nothing booked, nothing planned, staying in a tiny little boutique hotel in Le Marais, le Bourg Tibourg, spending all day every day just walking. We would go to the Rodin Museum if we felt like it, or the Musée d’Orsay, and we would walk. We would wander up and down the banks of the Seine, stopping for café au lait and chocolat chaud, entering the tiny boutiques, where Jason practiced his school French on the chic sales assistants.
We would go to the Greek islands, staying in stark white beautiful villas on Mykonos, spend all day lying on the beach, plunging into the Mediterranean, happy to read a book, play backgammon, be with each other. We’d wander back to the villa after lunch, make love, fall asleep with a fan whirring above our heads, wake up in time for showers and dinner.
Then Annie came along, and our holidays changed, but we were still good together.
We were so good together.
Walking along these cobbled streets, Annie chattering away, from time to time both of us smiling at each other across the top of Annie’s head, it is absolutely clear to me that we are still good together. That our divorce was a terrible mistake.
I do
n’t get an ice cream. Annie does, and Jason does. I abstain, deciding that my jeans may be skinny, but my thighs definitely aren’t, and if I want to continue being able to get into them, I have to stop with the ice cream.
Jason holds his ice cream out to me, and I lick it, making the mistake of looking up just as my tongue touches the swirl. I meet his eyes, and the intimacy in this look, in my tongue being out, in a flood of desire washing over me, turns my cheeks bright red, and we both look away.
Why is this happening to me now? How has all this time gone by, during which I have been able to accept that my old life is over, that Jason no longer wants me, that I screwed things up and we have now both moved on, only for me to feel like this here?
Where the hell has this desire come from, and what am I supposed to do with it now?
Thirty-two
It has been a perfect few days. We have managed to spend time together and time doing our own thing. Even though three adults and a teenager should be overcrowded in a house as small as this, somehow it works.
Yesterday, a letter was pushed through the door. I took it into the kitchen and leaned against the counter to read it. It brought me to tears.
Cat, writes Ellie, I wanted you to know that I am sorry. For how unfriendly and unwelcoming I have always been toward you; for how I never gave you a chance.
I had no idea the girls were seeing each other before I ran into you at the Galley, and then I wanted to keep the girls apart to punish you. But seeing Annie and Trudy together, the instinctive connection they have, it’s quite clear to me that they are family; that you and I are family, however much I didn’t want to accept it. And despite my trying to keep them apart, there is an extraordinary bond between them. A bond I never allowed us to have. It isn’t easy to admit this, but I was wrong. And I am sorry. It took a lot of changes in my life, a lot of humbling experiences, for me to realize that.
I have learned many things recently, not least that nothing is as important as kindness. I have lost everything I thought was important in my life, only to realize that none of it was important; that the kindness of people is the only thing that has allowed me to get through. I know you’re going home, but I would like us to try to have a relationship. I would like us to try to get past this, maybe even find a sisterly friendship in there. God knows at this time in my life I need family more than I ever have before.
I am sending you my gratitude, and thanks, Cat. I would like to see you before you leave. Perhaps we can go for a walk? Ellie.
I exhaled as I put the letter down, overwhelmed by these words of warmth, of something even possibly akin to love; words I would never have expected to hear from Ellie.
This morning, I called her. We went for that walk. We met at the Hub and walked around the harbor, coffees in hand. It was easier to walk side by side, to talk about things, without having to look each other in the eye. She wasn’t warm, particularly, but nor was she cold. I think she was mostly embarrassed. She was honest enough to admit her bitterness toward me, that she had always felt she never got enough of her father, had to fight for any attention, and my appearance was one more thing to take her father further away from her.
I understood, and told her a little bit about my own father. She had never been interested in hearing my story all those years ago, had never been interested in me. Today she listened, not saying much, but nodding in the right places.
I made my amends. We didn’t fall into each other’s arms as long-lost sisters, but we agreed to see how it goes. More important, Ellie agreed to foster this precious relationship between our daughters, this bond that is already so clear to both of us.
“I’m sorry for how I treated you,” says Ellie when we are about to leave, and even though I’m still not experiencing waves of warmth, I go to put my arms around her, and she hugs me back.
“I’m sorry for how I treated all of you,” I say. And I know that even if we will never be friends, we can now be friendly. And the girls can be the cousins they are so desperate to be.
These past afternoons Jason has been taking Annie to see Trudy at Ellie’s house. The girls spend several hours together every day, and when Trudy starts to get tired, Jason picks Annie up and brings her to wherever we are, usually at the beach.
Eddie joins us from time to time, while Brad Pitt frolics in the water, and yes, I will admit it, I still salivate over Eddie’s extraordinary body. Of course he’s gay, I think to myself drolly. What straight men do I know with bodies like that? I know I’m never going to have him, but what a delightful sight to brighten up a girl’s day, particularly when her loins have been reawakened after the desert of the last few years.
I go to my meetings every morning, and Jason goes to his own, later in the day at the First Congregational Church. Abigail and I meet for tea, and I tell her that her son is adorable but there’s no chemistry between us, so although I am thankful for her introduction, a romance between us is not on the cards.
“Pffft,” she says. “Who needs chemistry? Well, it’s nice to see he’s made a new friend in your friend Sam.”
Indeed.
* * *
Suddenly, unbearably, we are two days from the end, and I realize I don’t have nearly enough information about Nantucket for my piece. I leave Annie in the care of Jason and Sam and whirl around the island going to the lighthouse at Sankaty, the whaling museum, the Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum, in order to fill my article with things to do on this island.
Although frankly, I’m sure the Daily Gazette readers would be just as happy doing what we have done, exploring the restaurants and spending all day on the beach.
Tomorrow is our last night, and I have booked Corazon del Mar, thinking that tonight I will cook a family dinner here at home. I have lobsters in the fridge, their claws surrounded by rubber bands. Although I love lobster, I’ve never cooked them before. I didn’t know, London girl that I have become, I didn’t know until I went to buy lobsters, that you have to plunge them into boiling water while they’re still alive. It is too late to change my mind, even though I’m not at all sure I’m going to be able to go through with it.
I have made potato salad, and coleslaw, and shrimp cakes to start, with a cilantro lime mayonnaise. I made a simple peach tarte tatin and have a tub of homemade (not by me) vanilla ice cream in the freezer, and a vase stuffed with blue hydrangeas, clipped from our own garden, in the middle of the table.
The table has been set for four, with Sam’s hurricanes lit in the center. It looks beautiful. I’m excited we’re going to be home, not least because this, more than anything, is what it used to be like. At least when things were good. Me cooking, setting the table, Jason, Annie, and me sitting down to something homemade. Jason loved my cooking, even though he was no slouch when it came to the kitchen, but he said being cooked for, by me, always made him feel taken care of, made him feel safe. He always said he could taste the love in my food.
Obviously there’s no love in the lobsters, but I poured my heart and soul into the shrimp cakes, into the cilantro and garlic, lovingly minced by hand and a very sharp knife before being stirred into the mayonnaise. There was love in the tarte tatin, which has always been Jason’s most favorite dessert, served, as it will be tonight, with ice cream fragrant with dozens of tiny black vanilla pods.
I am in the shower when I hear Jason come home, and surprised when, a few moments later, there is a knock on the bathroom door.
“Hang on,” I yell, grabbing a towel and opening the door to find Jason there, embarrassed to be exposing quite so much skin, for the towel really doesn’t meet properly and I’m clutching it closed, even though it’s not like he hasn’t seen it all before.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I just see that you’ll be cooking dinner, and I’m about to go and pick up Annie from Trudy’s. I thought it might be nice to invite Trudy tonight. She and Annie are so close, I don’t know what they’re going to do without each other.”
“Of course. That’s a great idea. If Trud
y is up to going out. Absolutely. Why not invite Ellie as well?” I am about to say Julia, but the memory of Jason and Julia laughing over their iced tea still feels uncomfortable to me, even though we are leaving, even though I am probably being ridiculous.
“Sure. What about Julia?”
I look at him sharply, but there is nothing in his voice, nothing in his face, that would indicate that he particularly wants Julia there.
How do I say no? How could I be childish enough to not invite my own half sibling because I think my ex-husband may find her attractive? How sixteen-year-old. How puerile. I am better than this. “Of course invite Julia. Great idea,” I say, turning so he doesn’t see the lie in my eyes. “Pick up another three lobsters, though, okay?”
He leans forward and kisses me on the cheek, and I stand there long after he’s gone back down the stairs, wondering why he suggested we have her here, and whether, despite his protestations the other day, despite denying he finds her attractive, how could he not? She looks exactly like me.
And what the hell could all this possibly mean?
Thirty-three
Ellie can’t come. She has a long-standing charity commitment that she cannot get out of, but Julia comes. She brings me flowers and a bottle of sparkling cider.
“I didn’t know what to get,” she says, walking through the door and giving me a stiff hug. “I was going to bring a bottle of wine but then I remembered, obviously, so I stood in the store for ages before deciding on this. I hope you like the flowers, I got some in town but cut a few from my neighbor’s garden to add to the bunch, and thank you so much for inviting us, Cat, this is incredibly kind.” She is chattering nineteen to the dozen, which makes me realize how nervous she must be, and that, in turn, seems to help me relax. I am the one in control.
I watch Jason carefully to see how he greets her, whether he hugs her, whether she hugs him, but they just say hello with polite smiles. I can’t detect anything at all between them. Perhaps I was imagining it after all.