Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
July 2010 - Nantucket Island
T risha’s pregnancy became the only thing Ryan thought about day and night, the funnel through which everything had to pass. As they drove down the coast on their spontaneous road trip, fueled by adrenaline and anxiety and anger at the Suttons for being so cruel, Ryan remembered to drive slowly because of Trisha and the baby. He remembered to stop only at restaurants with nutrient-dense foods. He remembered to get them motels with better beds so Trisha could get a restful eight to ten hours. “Anything for you and the baby!” was Ryan’s constant refrain.
It felt like a miracle that they’d been allowed to hang their future on the concept of a brand-new baby. Just a couple of weeks ago, they’d been married, and Grandpa Jeremy had died, and Trisha and Ryan’s future had suddenly been called into question. But now? Now, they were full speed ahead (going the speed limit or lower), preparing for a future focused on love and love alone.
It hadn’t taken Ryan’s parents long to realize they were gone. On the third or fourth day after their departure, Ryan’s cell had exploded with calls and texts from Jackie, asking about the pregnancy and the baby. “How did they find out?” Ryan asked, his brow furrowed.
“They must have talked to my mom.” Trisha shrugged.
“You told your mom?”
Trisha gaped at him. “Of course I did! She’s my mom! That’s the kind of thing you tell your mom first thing!”
Ryan laughed and laughed. It meant that Jackie and Josh had somehow gotten ahold of Rhonda. They’d been forced to talk to her and learn the truth.
Ryan and Trisha killed hours, talking about how that conversation must have gone.
“I’m sure my mom was crying the entire time,” Trisha said. “And your mom’s face was probably, like, etched in horror.”
Ryan cackled.
Their road trip roamed along the East Coast for a full three weeks. It was the most joyful time of Ryan’s life. Back at home, responsibilities awaited them—Ryan’s job, the search for a new home that could accommodate them and the baby, Trisha’s urgent desire to get a job that could bring in money but didn’t force her to be on her feet all day. They resolved not to let Ryan’s family bother them. They resolved to keep the baby away from the Suttons unless they changed their tune.
Ryan couldn’t stop telling Trisha how much he loved her. It was the first thing he said in the morning and the last thing he said at night.
For hours, they talked about baby names. Trisha mentioned Vincent and Joel, the latter of which Ryan vetoed because of his little cousin Joel, who’d died so young. Trisha asked him questions about that time of his life and what it had been like to lose Joel, Joel, who’d been a brilliant baseball player and a hilarious little kid.
“You must miss your cousins,” Trisha said of Rebecca, Bethany, and Valerie.
“They escaped the Suttons,” Ryan said without thinking about it.
“That’s right,” Trisha affirmed thoughtfully. “It’s like the pain is passed down generation after generation. We can’t pass it down to our baby. Okay?”
Ryan promised he wouldn’t let that happen.
However, when Ryan and Trisha returned to their apartment three weeks after their departure, they found their mailbox stuffed with letters from Jackie. In them, Jackie asked for forgiveness. She promised to make space in her life for Trisha and for Ryan and for their baby. She promised to babysit whenever they needed her. She wrote: “I just want to be in your lives. I want to know and love you all as well as I can.”
Ryan let Trisha read the letters, studying her face as her eyes traced the words. She was difficult to read.
Finally, she said, “Let me think about it.”
But time passed after that. Ryan threw himself into work and into looking for a new home for them, and Trisha found a secretary job down the road that allowed her to spend all day sitting down and typing emails and notes and answering phone calls. She liked it, sort of. She was respected there, sort of. Ryan packed her nutritional lunches and reminded her to drink enough water. She rolled her eyes and said, “What would I do without you?” But really, she meant it. Their love felt like a cloud upon which they floated into the skies.
And then suddenly everything changed.
Trisha was ten weeks along when she started spotting. Panic filled Ryan’s chest. He drove her to the hospital and waited, squeezing her hand, until the doctor told them what he’d already begun to suspect. The baby was dead. Just like that.
The doctor said, “These kinds of things are very common. Really. In just a few months, you’ll be able to try again. There will be no problems.”
Ryan had the sense that the doctor was promising too much.
Trisha was utterly destroyed. All night, Ryan held her as she cried and tried to get her to eat something, anything. But she refused. After Ryan finally fell asleep—on accident—he woke up to a murky gray morning to discover that Trisha was gone. One of her backpacks was missing. Her car wasn’t in the apartment parking lot.
Ryan called Trisha’s cell ten times that morning to no avail. Finally, she shut it off wherever she was so that the ringing ceased, and it went straight to voicemail. Ryan was heartbroken. He felt as though he was walking through lava.
Without fully knowing what he was doing, he called his mother. Jackie could hear the devastation in his voice.
“I’m at your grandmother’s,” she explained. “Come over for lunch.”
It felt like an order that Ryan couldn’t turn down. He needed his family.
He called into work sick.
During his drive to the Sutton Estate, he didn’t once consider what Trisha might think of his running back to his grandmother and mother. He was crying without realizing it. When he reached the front door, Jackie threw it open and hugged him.
“Is it the baby?” she asked.
Ryan nodded and slumped over. “No baby.” That was all he could say.
Jackie led him into the kitchen, where she and his grandmother had made him a smorgasbord of food—sandwiches and muffins and soup and salads. Grandma Dana rubbed his back as he explained what had happened at the hospital.
“And she took off this morning? Just like that?” Jackie asked, appalled.
Ryan was having trouble believing it, too. His mother's expression fueled his anger. How could Trisha do this to him? Didn’t she understand that he’d lost a baby, too?
Years later, Ryan would adjust his opinion on this. Yes, the baby had been his baby. But as a twenty-five-year-old male, he couldn’t possibly fathom what was going on in Trisha’s heart, mind, and body. Losing a baby at ten weeks was excruciating. It forced Trisha to question everything she’d ever understood. She felt like a failure.
But Ryan was too young to understand that.
Toward nightfall, Ryan drove back to the apartment and tried Trisha’s cell again. No answer. He called a few of her friends, but they hadn’t heard from her.
It was beginning to dawn on him where she’d gone. Probably she was back at home with her mother and brothers and father and grandfather. But Ryan knew that was a place she didn’t want him to follow her to. It was a line drawn in the sand.
After Ryan said goodbye to another of Trisha’s friends, his mother called him. “Come back to the Sutton Estate,” she ordered him. “We’re going to have a big dinner and watch a movie. Together.”
Ryan knew how giddy his family was to have him “back.” He didn’t want to wait around in the apartment, eating soup from a can and chips from a bag. He wanted to feel normal again.
Ryan returned to the Sutton Estate with a packed bag and a broken heart. His mother and grandmother were there, eager to fill his plate with helping after helping. His sister came by without her children and opened a bottle of wine, telling him to “get it all out now.” Ryan found himself laughing more than he’d ever thought he would again.
That night, he slept at the Sutton Estate and woke up to a buttercream dawn. Because he had a job to maintain, he drove into the Historic District and worked diligently, checking his phone every few minutes to see if Trisha had called. She still hadn’t. Too frightened to go back to his dark apartment, he retreated to the Sutton Estate for the rest of the week, braving a few calls to Trisha’s cell that didn’t go through. One afternoon, when he was out to buy a fish sandwich from a shack near the harbor, he ran into Trisha’s boss, who gave him a sorrowful look and said, “I’m terribly sorry that Trisha has been so ill. I hope you’ll tell us if you need anything. She’s been a wonderful employee.”
Ryan’s heart seized. What if Trisha really was ill? What if Rhonda had taken her phone and turned it off and blocked Trisha’s access to the outside world? What if Trisha needed saving once again from that horrible, rusted-out world she’d crawled out of to marry him?
Back in the kitchen of the Sutton Estate, he outlined his plan to his mother. “I’m going to go over there.”
Jackie looked fearful. She picked up her mug of tea and put it back down and folded her lips. “Don’t you think she’s staying away because she wants space, honey?”
“She’s my wife,” Ryan reminded her.
“Sometimes,” Jackie said tentatively, “sometimes, love isn’t enough.”
Ryan’s chest was tight with panic. “Love is always enough.” That was what he’d always thought. But what if he was wrong?
Suddenly, his grandmother appeared in the kitchen. As always, she looked formidable, beautiful, and stately. With tiny, beady eyes, she peered down at Ryan and said, “Be reasonable, Ryan. She’s giving you a way out of this. She’s speaking to you by saying nothing at all. Listen.”
Ryan was on his feet. His mother twisted around to glare at Grandma Dana, as though to say, This again? Aren’t we past this?
Ryan didn’t have patience. Not this time. Very suddenly, he saw the error of his ways. Out the door he trotted, back to his car, which he used to drive fifteen miles over the speed limit, all the way to “The Reed Estate,” which was what Trisha jokingly called it years ago, back when they’d first met and she’d thought the Sutton’s Nantucket power was laughable. His mother had called him four times and sent him a text.
JACKIE: Honey, call me back. Don’t be rash.
But Ryan was already out of the car and hurrying to the front porch. Just as it had been when he’d first come out here, the lawn was strewn with rusted lawn mowers, broken bicycles, and cars without engines, waiting to get fixed up. Trisha’s grandfather whittled something with a small knife on the porch swing. Ryan had the sensation that he was entering another century.
“Hi,” Ryan said to the grandfather, feeling breathless. He wanted to seem respectful. “Is Trisha here?”
It had been nearly a week since he’d seen her. What if she wasn’t here? What if she’d slipped through the cracks of his life? What if he never saw her again?
But the grandfather grunted in a way Ryan read as yes, she’s inside . He even tilted his head.
Ryan hesitated, then turned the doorknob to enter the kitchen. Rhonda was stirring a large pot with a big wooden spoon at the stove. Her eyes widened. So did her smile.
“Ryan! Where have you been?” She put down the spoon and wiped her hands on her apron.
Ryan felt stupid. Where had he been? He should have been here with his wife.
“It’s good to see you,” Ryan said softly. It was. He’d always liked Rhonda. She was brash and funny and big-hearted and a mess in all the ways his grandmother and mother weren’t.
“You, too, sugar,” Rhonda said. “Trisha’s out back. Here.” Rhonda opened the fridge to retrieve a pitcher of ice-cold lemonade. “Take some glasses. It’s pretty hot out there. Indian summer.”
Ryan carried two glasses of lemonade onto the back porch, which dipped in the center and seemed on the verge of crumbling into the soil beneath it. Trisha was in a homemade hammock, thumbing through a magazine about celebrity gossip. Her hair was tied in a messy bun on top of her head, and her legs were long and tan, presumably because she spent a lot more time outside here at the Reed Estate than she did when she was home.
Ryan stood on the porch with the lemonade without knowing how to start a conversation with the only woman in the world he loved.
Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Trisha?”
Trisha was too cool for school. She turned to look at him as though she’d been expecting him. Slowly, she closed the magazine and dropped her feet to the porch floor. Curls fell from her bun and swayed gently on her shoulders.
“Are you okay?” Ryan asked finally.
Trisha nodded. “I’m okay.”
Ryan raised the glasses of lemonade. Was it a peace offering?
“Where were you?” Trisha asked finally.
Ryan felt it like a knife in the gut. “What do you mean?”
“I went home a few days ago, and you weren’t there. You never came back.”
“I called you. Many times,” Ryan said hesitantly.
Trisha shrugged. “I didn’t want to talk on the phone. I wanted to talk face-to-face.”
Ryan sat down on the chair nearest the hammock and put the lemonade glasses on a rickety table beside him. His hands were sweaty. “I’m here so we can talk face-to-face.”
“But you were with your family,” Trisha said matter-of-factly.
“So were you.”
Trisha was quiet. She got up and stretched her arms over her head so that her shirt revealed her stomach beneath. Would she ever be pregnant with his baby again? Or was Grandma Dana right? Should they end this now?
Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Ryan spotted something.
Tucked into the line of trees about a football field away from the house was a car. It was bright red and glossy and unlike all the rusted-out and broken cars in the front yard. It looked as though it was hidden there. Ryan stood to get a better view. It felt like a gut punch.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“Trisha? Why is my grandfather’s Cadillac here?”
Trisha gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”
Ryan couldn’t tell if she was playing him or not. He pointed at the car and waved his finger around. “My grandfather’s Cadillac? His pride and joy?”
Trisha snorted. “It’s obviously not your grandfather’s. It’s here. Probably one of my brothers is fixing it up for someone.”
But Ryan was already storming off the porch, edging toward the forest. Trisha chased him barefoot through the grass until they reached the car. Ryan would have recognized his grandfather’s Cadillac anywhere. It was the color of tomatoes and had soft gray-blue leather seats. It had a license plate that said SUTTON on it. It literally couldn’t have been anyone else’s.
Trisha looked just as stunned as Ryan felt.
Together, they stared at the car in silence.
Ryan tried to read Trisha’s expression. He tried to reckon with the fact that she’d come to the Reeds for sanctuary only to learn that they were thieves and liars.
Still, Ryan was pretty sure he knew why they’d stolen it. They were angry with the Suttons for belittling the Reed name. They were angry with Dana for rejecting Trisha. They were angry with Ryan, presumably, because he’d dragged Trisha into that mess.
They were angry with the Suttons for the tremendous amount of money they had. Ryan understood that, too.
Trisha’s eyes glowed with fear and humor, if Ryan wasn’t mistaken.
Finally, she asked, “So, Ryan. What do we do now?”
Ryan let out a strange and sardonic laugh. Trisha joined him. For the first time since they’d lost the baby and lost each other, they stood together, falling all over each other, laughing themselves silly.
Ryan thought, I never want to lose her again.