Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
S am agreed to stay with Lillian so Margot could drive to the Regent Hotel to meet Vic Rondell. Margot changed into a paisley dress, did her makeup, and then returned to the back porch to find Sam and her mother in the midst of a beautiful conversation about Lillian’s childhood.
“Mother always used to set me up with the fish my father caught,” Lillian was saying. “I would scrape the scales off the fish and drop the fish in a bucket that she would then slice up and fry. Those were my favorite dinners. My brothers and sisters and parents and I sat around a big table and feasted until our bellies were full. We didn’t have a lot of money back then, and meals like that were scarce. But when my father made time for it, he was a skilled fisherman.”
Sam watched Lillian, captivated. It wasn’t for another full minute that she realized Margot was outside. Sam shot to her feet and wrung her hands. “Are you ready to go?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Margot said.
Lillian turned to look at her daughter. “You look as pretty as a picture, Margaret.”
Margaret. Margot suddenly remembered that Vic Rondell had called her that when they’d first met. It felt likely that he carried within him hundreds of stories from her mother.
He’d only called her Margaret because her mother had referred to her as that. It was her given name, after all—the name of Lillian’s grandmother. Margot suddenly felt even closer to her. She bent to kiss her mother on the cheek and said, “I love you. I’ll be back soon.”
Margot drove to the Regent Hotel with her heart in her throat, imagining all range of possibilities. It was more than likely that Vic wouldn’t be in that he was out exploring the island or meeting up with friends for a cocktail or early dinner. But when she got to the front desk and asked, the receptionist rang up to his room and told her he was there.
“Tell him it’s Margot Earnheart,” she said.
The receptionist did just that. When she hung up, she said to Margot, “He’ll see you now. Room 333.”
Margot was filled with a mix of dread and wonder. Instead of taking the elevator, she took a side staircase and paused at the second-floor landing to text Noah. She knew that afternoon he was back at work, meeting with the parents of an at-risk young man who’d robbed the grocery store last week. Noah took his job incredibly seriously. He wanted to instill hope into young people, help them override their spontaneous urges, and become respectable and loving members of society.
Margot loved how much hope he had for the future.
MARGOT: I’m about to meet Vic Rondell.
Noah wrote back immediately.
NOAH: Call me after. Good luck.
NOAH: I love you.
MARGOT: I love you, too.
They’d started saying “love” again about three weeks into their “new” relationship. It had fallen out of Margot’s lips naturally one day. It felt easy, like breathing. Noah had echoed it, and they’d gone on like that as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
There was still a smile on Margot’s lips when she reached Vic Rondell’s door. To her surprise, he was waiting for her with the door open.
It seemed plain as day. The man before her was like Frank Earnheart’s twin.
Margot’s breath caught in her throat, and she felt her smile melt away. She stopped and crossed her arms over her chest.
“I don’t bite,” he said, beckoning for her to enter. “Would you like a drink?”
Margot crossed the threshold to find a large suite with a balcony that looked out over the water, just as she’d imagined. In a pair of slacks and a V-neck shirt, Vic was far less dressed up than he’d been all the other times she’d seen him, and there were rings around his eyes that suggested he hadn’t been sleeping well.
“Red wine? White wine? Aperol spritz?” he asked.
Margot said she’d like a glass of white wine.
“Sounds wonderful. We’ll sit out on the balcony,” he said.
Margot was quiet as Vic poured their glasses. But when they left the hotel room and sat at the balcony table, she asked, “Where have you been?”
Vic tried to smile. “I was called away on business.”
“My mother really misses you.”
Vic winced and let his gaze drop.
Margot scrutinized his expression. What did it mean? Did it mean he missed Lillian, too?
“When I found you with her diaries that night,” Margot began, “I didn’t know what to think.”
“I can understand that. It must have been alarming,” he said.
Margot raised her shoulders.
“To be honest, it was alarming for me to meet you,” Vic said. “I never imagined Lillian’s children would come back.”
“I never thought I would,” Margot said.
“Why do you think you came back and not the others?” Vic asked. “You were the one in the accident. It was you who Lillian blamed, wasn’t it?”
Margot felt her heart bruise. “How do you know she blamed me?”
“She told me that she chased you away,” Vic said.
Margot closed her eyes and felt the meaning of what he said rush over her like waves.
“I don’t think she remembers telling me,” Vic said. “But something I feel I need to say is this. I didn’t realize she was so sick till very recently. I hadn’t realized…” His voice became scratchy. “I knew she was a very angry older person. I knew she was lonely. But I swear to you, I didn’t know about the Alzheimer’s until right around the time you came back. She was funny and fine with me. I like to think she was more lucid when I was around.”
“How often were you around?” Margot asked, remembering that her mother had suggested she’d known Vic for years. “You said you met her, um, playing cards?”
Vic blushed and looked down. “That’s right.”
Margot couldn’t take the lies anymore. “Vic. Will you please tell me who you are?”
Vic let the silence stretch for what felt like a long time. Margot sipped her wine, waiting. She knew that sometimes the truth needed a bit of time to build upon itself.
She didn’t want to accuse him of being her brother.
She needed him to say it first.
“I was born in Nantucket,” Vic said. “I was born in 1982. Four years before you.”
Margot nodded. She’d guessed that.
“When I was a toddler, my mother moved me out to California,” he said. “She didn’t tell me anything about my father till I was seventeen or eighteen years old. I don’t think she would have told me if it weren’t for the diagnosis.”
Margot’s ears rang.
“She had cancer,” Vic said. “She was thinking about her life, about everything she might leave behind if she died. I think she felt really nostalgic. When I asked her about my dad, she told me his name was Frank Earnheart.”
Vic paused for dramatic effect, but Margot told him with her eyes that she already knew.
Vic touched the back of his neck. “Right. I look just like him. Lillian told me, too, although I don’t think she ever caught on to who I was. Not really.”
“It’s uncanny,” Margot said. “I knew you looked familiar when I first met you. But I don’t think my brain wanted me to know why.”
They looked at one another for a long time: sister and brother.
“My mother survived cancer,” Vic continued. “And life went on. I went to Berkeley and got a really good job, and everything was on the up-and-up. That is until my mother’s cancer came back at the end of 2004. It was fast. She died in March 2005.”
“Oh, Vic.” Margot bowed her head as the timeline clicked into place.
“I went crazy after that,” Vic explained. “I took a month off work and traveled all over the country in my junky little car. I had no destination in mind. And then, very suddenly and without planning it, I was at Hyannis Port. It was April 2005, almost exactly twenty years ago. I traveled by ferry to the island where I’d been born—an island I hadn’t returned to since I’d left as a toddler. I got a crappy hotel and holed up, and thought about how to approach him. My father. I knew his name, but that was all. My mom didn’t have any photos, and the internet then wasn’t what it is today.
“You have to understand how out of my mind I was,” he said. “I was grieving with a capital G. I was drinking too much. I was hanging around that place called Ralph’s. You know it?”
“Really well,” Margot admitted.
“One night, I got to talking to Ralph,” Vic said. “I was pretty drunk, and I mentioned my predicament. I explained that I had no mother and no father and that I needed direction. I think I even said his name, Frank Earnheart. Ralph is a cool confidant and never betrayed anything. But he did say that Frank had a family and a wife. I asked Ralph what he thought I should do, and he said that it wasn’t up to him to say. But when I asked where Frank lived, he wrote down his address. I couldn’t believe it. After all this aimless driving, I had an address.
“I was trying to get up the nerve to go out there. I gave myself a deadline. But it was like three or four days before that so-called deadline that I saw him by chance, out and about,” Vic said. “He was helping a teenage girl carry all this stuff out to a car. Soil and flowers and bulbs.”
Vic couldn’t look at her. He stared directly at his hands on the table.
“I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen him before,” he said. “I panicked and called his name. Frank! He stopped and turned around to look at me. He was so surprised that I think he might have dropped a few things. I saw him say something to you, something about waiting in the car, maybe. He put some stuff down and came over. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. I realized then that I was the ghost he’d been dreading all these years. I was sweating, although it wasn’t cold outside. And he looked at me and said, ‘Why now?’ I’ll never forget that.”
Margot repeated it. “Why now?”
It mystified her.
“I don’t blame him. I would have been freaked out, too.” Vic sipped his wine.
“What else did he say?” Margot asked.
“He looked at me, blinking a lot, like maybe he thought he could make me disappear. And then I told him that my mother had died. That hit him like a ton of bricks. He started crying right there in the parking lot.”
Margot realized that all this time, in Vic’s story, she was waiting in the car, eager to head back to her garden. She’d been clueless.
“He told me he couldn’t talk right then,” Vic said. “But he asked me to meet him at Ralph’s later that night. I agreed. I thought I was going to faint. I think he wanted to hug me, but instead, he backed away through the parking lot and got back in the car with his daughter. With you, I mean.”
Margot put both hands over her mouth.
Vic raised his shoulders.
They both knew what happened next in the story. They both knew that immediately after that, Frank and Margot had been in a car accident that had taken Frank’s life.
“I heard the accident from several blocks away,” Vic said. “I didn’t want to believe it was him. I went to Ralph’s that night to meet him, and everyone at the bar was talking about how Frank Earnheart was dead and how Lillian was out of her mind with grief. They said that she was already blaming her youngest child. Some of them said that she was never kind to her youngest, that she’d only had her youngest to get over ‘what had happened.’ I knew that ‘what had happened’ was me, the baby Frank had fathered with his mistress, my mother. At that moment, I knew I had to get as far away from Nantucket as I could. I stayed awake all night in my hotel and drove to the ferry first thing in the morning.”
In her own life, Margot knew what had happened next. Lillian had fallen apart, and Margot had run away. Twenty years had passed.
“Why did you come back?” she whispered.
Vic rubbed his chest. “I came to Nantucket last summer to visit my friend Marc. He’s getting married out here next week. And he invited me to an engagement party of sorts.”
“I know. I’m doing the flowers for his wedding.”
“Small world,” Vic said, offering the first soft smile Margot had seen in a while. “I went back to Ralph’s, and lo and behold, the guy remembered me.”
“He has a good eye,” Margot said.
“That he does. He told me he was sorry about my father and asked if I’d ever met him. I said I had, but only briefly. I didn’t tell him that I’d met him right before the accident. I asked him about Frank’s family, and he explained that all his children were gone and that Lillian was holed up by herself in that house alone. The thought of that broke my heart. I told him that, and Ralph said, ‘She did it to herself. She was cruel to her children. She was cruel to everyone except Frank. Ironically, Frank cheated on her. That only made her want to be kinder to him.’
“I felt like I owed it to Lillian to meet her and explain myself. But the minute we met, it was like I just couldn’t tell her the truth. She took an immediate liking to me. She invited me out for cards, and then I invited her out to a restaurant, and we started playacting the role of mother and son. I hadn’t seen my mother in almost twenty years at this point, and I’d never had a father. I found myself feeling loved in a way I hadn’t in many, many years.”
Margot’s eyes were heavy with tears.
“Anyway,” he said, “I started reading the journals here and there to get a better sense of who my father was. It’s funny to see him through Lillian’s eyes. She thought he was the sun, the moon, and the stars. He could do no wrong. Not even the affair made her stop loving him.”
“She really did love him like crazy,” Margot whispered.
“I wish I could learn from her,” Vic said.
“What do you mean?”
Vic laughed. “I wish I could love that hard.”
It was the first time Margot realized she’d learned something from her mother.
She’d learned how to love Noah with all her heart.
When Vic finished his story, Margot suggested they walk down to the boardwalk and grab dinner. She was starving after such an immense story. Vic agreed, although when they got to the restaurant, neither of them could focus on their food. They flew through the events of their lives, analyzing how lonely they’d been, talking about how that April day twenty years ago had inextricably altered every event that had followed.
Margot raised her glass of wine and looked her brother in the eye. “I don’t want to let it affect me anymore. I want to move beyond it.”
Vic looked wistful. “Let’s help each other get beyond it. Let’s stay on this gorgeous island and be a family.”
“It’s a deal.”