Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
I t was Margot’s first night at home with Lillian and her first official night as caretaker. Due to Lillian's stubbornness and Margot’s fatigue after a particularly frightening day, things didn’t go very well. At one point, when Lillian was in her bedroom, changing into a nightgown, she burst into tears, and Margot hurried in to ask what was wrong. But Lillian was still wearing only a bra and her pants, and she shrieked at Margot to get out of her room.
“Your father will be home any minute!” her mother cried.
Margot felt it like a smack. But she took a breath and steeled herself. “Do you need help, Mom?”
She didn’t want her mother to feel embarrassed. This was the natural course of things: a daughter coming home to help her mother during her time of need. After all, hadn’t Lillian raised Margot—long after Lillian had wanted to raise children any longer? Lillian had prided herself on this, telling Margot frequently through her adolescence: I was done mothering, and then you came along to teach me a lesson. This had never sat right with Margot, but she’d never protested.
Margot backed up to the doorway and turned around. “I’ll be right here if you need anything,” she said coaxingly to her mother.
Lillian took several shuddering breaths. She muttered under her breath, too, but Margot couldn’t understand what she said. Margot heard the swishy sounds of clothes being changed. Finally, she heard the creak of the mattress springs. When she turned around, she found that Lillian had tucked herself in, pulling the sheets all the way to her chin as though she were a child.
Margot felt a rush of tenderness. It took all her willpower not to cry.
“Can I get you anything, Mom?”
Her mother blinked several times. She was fixated on the painting on the far side of the room—one Margot’s father’s aunt had painted and gifted them for their wedding. In the painting was a bright red cardinal on a branch laden with snow.
A split second later, Margot realized that her mother was asleep. It was as though the painting had calmed her.
Margot closed the door to a crack and tiptoed downstairs. Her legs were shaking. She went through the cabinets and finally discovered a very old bottle of wine—something forgotten ten years ago at least—and poured herself a glass. Standing up at the kitchen counter, drinking, she watched the snow swirling outside and wondered if Sam had called Noah already and told him about Avery. That poor teenager! She’d lost her mother. She’d lost everything. But what was she doing in Margot’s mother’s boathouse?
What had Noah told her about Margot?
Margot reminded herself that she hadn’t come to Nantucket for Noah-related reasons. She’d left Noah deeply entrenched in the past. She’d moved on—to Boston and the flower shop. She’d resolved that romance wasn’t anything she wanted to build into her life.
For the first time in a while, Margot tried to unpack why she’d turned her back on romance. She drank more wine. Suddenly, a vision of her parents in this very kitchen came to mind—Lillian digging into her father, demanding he do something or reminding him that he hadn’t done something he’d said he’d do. “You know, I could have married Charlie Oleander?” Lillian had been fond of saying. “He would have mowed the lawn by now. He would have picked up the meat for dinner.” Margot’s father had mostly taken this in stride. Sometimes, he’d said, “The door’s right there, Lillian. Leave whenever you want to.”
That kind of talk had stuck with Margot. It had made her feel like she never wanted to be in a position like that—where someone showed you the door and said leave me if you want to, I don’t care.
Her relationship with Noah hadn’t been like that. At least, that wasn’t how she remembered it. She remembered sunset walks on the beach. She remembered kisses beneath a velvet and star-studded sky. She remembered whispered promises and talk of children and his assurance that he would take her away from Lillian, from all the pain of her life. “I love my mother,” she’d always told him, her voice filled with reticence.
“She loves you, too,” Noah had affirmed. “She just doesn’t know how to show it.”
A few years ago, Margot encountered the term “narcissistic parent” and read all about the dynamic that forms between the child and parent as a result. It had rung every bell. But she’d also thought, What good does knowing this do for me? All it did was remind Margot of how messed up her childhood had been. All it did was remind Margot of how broken she was.
She wondered what her father might have done about Lillian’s diagnosis. Would he have taken her to her doctor’s appointments? Would he have sat with her and watched The Cooking Channel? Would he have reminded her of everything she’d forgotten?
Margot suddenly remembered Vic Rondell—the forty-something man who’d supposedly met her mother playing cards downtown and had taken her shopping today. Even more than that, he was going to pick her up tomorrow to play cards. Around five, he’d said.
Margot googled Vic Rondell and learned from various social media and business profiles that he was a jack-of-all-trades, so to speak. He owned a few businesses, had had a brief stint selling real estate, and had spent most of his childhood and adulthood on the West Coast, but he was originally from the East Coast. He hadn’t been raised in Nantucket, which made sense since neither she nor Sam had ever heard of him. But it was clear he wanted to make his mark on the island.
Why was he spending time with her mother?
Margot decided to corner him tomorrow and demand answers.
Then again, she didn’t want to seem crazy. Maybe Vic Rondell was a Good Samaritan, a man who’d met her aging mother and realized none of her children were around. Margot stewed with shame. Despite everything that had happened, she should have visited. She should have called.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda.
Margot returned to the living room but found she couldn’t focus on television. After ten minutes of flicking through channels, she turned it off and walked through the house like a ghost. Before long, she found herself on the other side of her father’s office, her heart pounding. She wondered if, like the rest of the house, her mother had kept the office the same as it once had been. Margot was suddenly terrified that the old mahogany desk and all her father’s books would be layered with dust.
She knew her mother didn’t want anyone going in there. But her mother was fast asleep. Margot took a breath and opened the door.
To Margot’s surprise, it looked as though someone had been using the study lately. There were pens and notebooks on the desk, and a few books had been removed from the shelves and were scattered here and there as though someone was reading from them and taking notes. There was an air of studiousness. Margot walked up to the desk, keeping the door open so she could hear Lillian if she came downstairs. Thank goodness for that creaky staircase.
To Margot’s surprise, many of the books scattered across the desk were diaries.
They were Lillian’s. The shock hit her like a bus. She’d never known her mother to keep a diary. So surprised was she that she collapsed in the swivel chair and forced herself to take ten deep breaths.
Here they were: her mother’s thoughts, her mother’s inner world, dated between the early eighties to 2021. Forty years of Lillian Earnheart. Forty years of secrets.
But Margot didn’t know if she had the strength to approach Lillian’s inner world. She guessed that within the diaries, her mother had spent many, many pages hating motherhood, hating Margot, and hating what she was so sure Margot had done. She guessed each book could be labeled I Hate My Youngest Child and Here’s Why I’m Right . Margot shivered.
At the same time, Margot was at the end of her rope. As the terrifying wind crashed against the house, she returned to the kitchen to refill her wine and prepare herself.
She told herself to read a diary entry from a happier year: a time of her mother’s life before her father died and she fully hated Margot, before everything had fallen to pieces.
Maybe, she reasoned, through the early diaries, she could figure out who her mother had been. Perhaps she could find a way to love her mother better.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I’ve built my life on “maybes,” Margot thought.
Margot returned to the study and sat down with a diary from 1984, two years before she was born.
This was what she read:
April 22, 1984
Frank spent all morning begging for another baby.
Margot stopped reading abruptly. Her head rang with surprise. She’d understood herself to be a mistake—a terrible error in an otherwise fully planned life.
Was it possible her father had really wanted her?
It was incredible what this single sentence did to Margot’s psyche. Suddenly, it was as though everything she’d ever known was flipped on its head.
She forced herself to read on.
I told him I’m tired. I told him that three children are enough. But I have to admit that Daniel, Henry, and Melissa are getting older. They spend time with each other and alone, fleeing the house in the morning to run along the beach and spread their wings. It’s hard, as a parent, to admit that one day, you might be obsolete to them.
Sometimes I worry that Frank would leave if I don’t want another child. Is that reason to have another one? I don’t know. I’ve struggled the past year. There have been entire days of darkness, days during which I’ve locked myself in the bedroom, and Frank has had to deal with the children and their needs. For some reason, Frank never makes me feel bad about it. He kisses me and says, “It’ll be sunnier tomorrow.”
God has blessed me with the most wonderful of men. He has cursed me with a horrible mind.
Margot couldn’t breathe again. She closed the diary and put both hands over her heart.
This was the “narcissistic parent” she’d known all her life. But it was hard to believe. The woman who wrote about her life in these pages seemed genuinely and terrifyingly aware of her depressive spells. She seemed aware that she wasn’t always the best mother.
More than that, she seemed genuinely and wonderfully loving. She loved Frank more than she loved the world and all the people in it.
Of course, Lillian’s love for Frank was reason enough for her to hate Margot later on.
Margot decided she couldn’t read another diary entry, not tonight. She was too exhausted. She put the diary back where she’d found it and tiptoed upstairs to the guest bedroom, where she made up her bed and texted Sam an additional thank-you.
She was surprised when Sam wrote back right away.
SAM: It is a blessing to have you back on the island. Please let me know if I can help you with anything at all. I regret terribly that Daniel refuses to help you with all of this. His selfishness has been a fact of my life. I suppose it’s been a fact of yours, too.
MARGOT: You’re so wonderful, Sam. I love you. You’re so strong.
Margot meant what she said.
But as Margot drifted off to sleep, she couldn’t help but think about Daniel’s selfishness and how it must have been passed down from their mother. At the same time, she guessed that Daniel had an inner life, inner intelligence that understood how selfish and awful he was. Margot wondered if Daniel regretted it. She wondered if there was any way to come back from all the terror he’d wrought.
Was there a way for Lillian to do that? Even from within the throes of Alzheimer’s?
Margot wasn’t sure. But she promised herself to offer Lillian as much compassion as she could. And she resolved to read more of the diaries—if only to fill in the gaps of her mother’s life.
But Margot knew she would never read the diary entries from twenty years ago. She couldn’t face them. She couldn’t open her heart to such tremendous pain.