Chapter 5
Blackmailed. It was the first word that came to Arietta’s mind when she woke up alone in bed and the last word that she lingered on as she tried and usually failed to fall asleep.
The word followed her around all day, every day, as she performed her tasks of feeding Fred, washing Fred, cleaning Fred’s room, and making sure he got all his medication, all of which were administered via a tube.
“What could they be blackmailing us about, honey?” she asked her husband as she sat beside him late one night, sipping wine and watching the sunset. “We never did anything wrong.”
Even as she said it, Arietta was aware of how naive she sounded. But genuinely, she didn’t know what the blackmailer could be talking about.
Arietta was embarrassed that she’d reached out to her daughters and asked them to come to the island to visit her.
Even before the big move, Shannon had told Arietta that she would be lonely on the island, away from her friends in Boston, all of whom had vacation houses on other islands and probably wouldn’t be visiting.
More than that, she was aware that their old friends didn’t like to see Fred and Arietta together, now that Fred was what he was.
They didn’t want to be reminded of all that could go wrong in a marriage and in a life.
Arietta wasn’t ready to admit that Shannon was right. Then again, Arietta hadn’t counted on being blackmailed while here on the island. It added a darkness to the loneliness. It added something sinister to her long days of caretaking.
Was it possible that someone was messing with her head? Maybe they’d heard about Fred’s stroke and had decided that Arietta was an easy target, a lonely widow who could be taken advantage of.
Arietta considered going to the police, but something stopped her. She hated to admit that it was fear that something was really wrong and there were secrets beneath the surface of her marriage that she didn’t want to know.
What if Fred was hiding something?
But there were things to do to prepare for Shannon, Felicity, and Isabelle’s arrival.
Arietta threw herself into getting the house ready, making beds and vacuuming the rooms they’d usually taken during their previous stays.
When she was in Fred’s room, she talked endlessly about the girls, about how great it would be to have everyone together again.
“I’m sure Shannon’s running herself ragged at Yale to finish up the semester,” she said.
“And Felicity and Isabelle have each other, thank goodness, but I worry about them, too. Do you think Felicity really wants to get into business?”
Fred, of course, had no answers for her. Had he been fully conscious, fully himself, he might have said, Of course she wants to get into the family business! It’s been nothing but fruitful, sweetie, and Felicity has always loved success. She’s always loved prestige. You know that.
It was true. Felicity was more like her father than Arietta. Arietta wanted to celebrate all of her children, their differences and similarities, even the ones she couldn’t really understand.
Shannon was the first to arrive. She’d driven down in a crappy car that she’d purchased for herself with her own money. She’d made a deal with her father that he would only pay her rent and nothing more. “After that, it’s over,” Shannon had told him. “I want to stand on my own.”
Isabelle and Felicity weren’t like that, Arietta knew. They were happy to let their father pay for anything, as was their right, she supposed.
Arietta flung herself out the front door and hugged her eldest daughter tighter than she’d planned for. Shannon squeezed back, as though she’d needed a hug just as much. They stood in the driveway, listening to the waves lap on the nearby shore.
“You look good, sweetheart,” Arietta said, pulling back to look at her daughter, who, in fact, did not look good. She looked worn out and skinny. “Come on. Your sisters will be here in about two hours. Let’s eat some snacks and catch up.”
Arietta led Shannon to the veranda that stretched along the white beach, where she’d already set out a cheese board and some fresh bread and a bottle of red wine. It was a chillier day, in the upper sixties and overcast, so they wrapped blankets around their shoulders as they sipped their wine.
“Mom, are you all right?” Shannon asked. Her eyes were narrow and focused.
“I’m okay, honey.” Arietta tried to smile, but it didn’t feel natural.
“It’s just that on the phone the other night, you didn’t sound like yourself,” Shannon stated.
Arietta laughed. “I guess I won’t sound like myself for a while.”
“Yeah. That makes sense.” Shannon sipped her wine. “I’m glad you invited us to the island. We, um, we have to be there for each other. Especially now.”
“I agree.” Arietta knew it would be stupid to tell her daughters about the blackmail letter. She didn’t want them to go to the police and make a big fuss. She didn’t want to worry them.
“I guess I should tell you something.” Shannon sighed. “Cole and I broke up.”
Arietta’s shoulders dropped. Shannon and Cole had been an item since they were nineteen years old, and Arietta had assumed they were going to get married. She’d assumed that Shannon’s love life and therefore emotional life was taken care of.
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry. When did it happen?”
“A few weeks ago,” Shannon said. “It’s for the best, probably. He met someone else.”
Arietta’s eyes widened. She couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Met someone else? People meet other people all the time. But they don’t let themselves…” She trailed off, suddenly horrified. Shannon didn’t need to hear this from her.
“He didn’t love me anymore, I guess,” Shannon said simply. “It doesn’t really matter. Not in the grand scheme of things.”
“It matters, honey,” Arietta said. “But you’ll meet someone else. You’ll meet someone who knows how to treat you. How to respect you.”
Shannon couldn’t look at Arietta, not then. Arietta reached for a piece of cheese and placed it on her tongue, closing her eyes against the ripeness, the bitterness, the salt.
She wondered, had she and Fred had a good marriage? Had their marriage been a good model for their daughters?
This wasn’t something she felt comfortable asking, so she kept quiet.
When Felicity and Isabelle came, things livened up a little bit. Her happy, more frivolous daughters had brought bouquets and bottles of wine and an entire chocolate-cherry cheesecake, which they broke into right away.
“My favorite,” Arietta said, her mouth full of melting chocolate.
“We know!” Isabella sang, smiling.
After the cake, the three sisters went to the guest room to visit their father.
Arietta stood in the doorway, watching and listening as Isabelle and Felicity told their father stories of their previous few weeks.
Isabella set up flowers on the windowsill, and Felicity combed her father’s hair.
All the while, Shannon sat in silence at the foot of Fred’s bed, watching him.
Arietta knew that Shannon knew just as much about the brain as she did, if not more. She was a scientist, after all. Shannon saw no reason to speak to Fred, not even for her own emotional health.
“Oh, Isabelle, tell Daddy about your new boyfriend,” Felicity said, her voice wavering.
Isabella blushed, then turned her eyes to Arietta in the doorway. “It’s sort of new. I mean, he isn’t really my boyfriend yet.”
“Tell the truth, Izzy,” Felicity teased her. “He asked you to be his girlfriend, and you said…”
“I said I’d think about it,” Isabelle said, laughing.
Throughout the conversation, Arietta watched Shannon, wondering if her sisters’ happiness exacerbated her breakup sorrows.
But Shannon wasn’t the type to make anyone pay for her feelings, not like her father.
Slowly, she got up and swept past Arietta, heading back toward the kitchen.
Isabelle and Felicity kept laughing and telling stories.
Arietta hurried after Shannon. She found her in the kitchen, scrubbing plates and looking out the window.
From behind, her back was stooped, and her clothes were so worn that she looked much older.
Arietta tried to help Shannon clean the kitchen, but Shannon ordered her back to the veranda and told her to pour herself another glass of wine.
“I want to take care of you,” Shannon said. “You’ve put too much of this on yourself.”
Arietta took a step back. She searched Shannon’s face, then returned to the veranda, where she sat and watched the night fall gently through the gray clouds.
When her daughters were younger, they’d been just like this: Isabelle the girlish, artistic one; Felicity the funny but headstrong one; and Shannon the serious one, the academic one, the one who took it all on.
Shannon felt the weight of the world more than her sisters.
Arietta had tried and failed to lighten her daughter up over the years.
She’d tried to teach her how to have fun, how to rejoice in music and movies and jokes.
Sometimes that worked, and sometimes it really didn’t.
When Shannon finished cleaning the kitchen, she returned to the veranda and sat down.
By the sounds of things, Isabelle and Felicity were hot on her heels, coming back from their visit with their father.
Right before they sat down, Shannon looked Arietta dead in the eye and said, “You’re still alive, Mom.
I’m so glad you’re still alive. But you have to think about yourself. You have to think about your heart.”
Arietta was taken aback. “I am thinking about my heart,” she said.
But all at once, Isabelle and Felicity were there, talking more about Isabelle’s boyfriend and Felicity’s new dating habits and Felicity’s college graduation, which Arietta hadn’t been able to attend, as she’d been in Greece, waiting to see if her husband was going to die.
Arietta couldn’t believe she’d missed her daughter’s college graduation. More than that, she couldn’t believe that she’d forgotten about it till now. Had the girls texted her any photographs?
She asked them now, and they said they hadn’t wanted to bother her. But they showed her a bunch of photographs of the three of them, all in a row, her darling daughters, Felicity in her cap and gown, and Shannon and Isabelle in pretty summer dresses.
Their smiles were strangled in the photographs, obviously. But they hadn’t known if their father was going to die, either.
In looking at the photos, Arietta had the strangest feeling that she was looking at her daughters’ lives long after she and Fred had passed away. “You look so beautiful, my girls,” she said.
They’ll never talk to me again if they learn what’s behind this blackmail, she thought suddenly, throwing herself into a moment of panic. When they figure out what Fred and I did, they’ll end our relationship. Fred won’t have to know the girls hate us, but I will.
She didn’t know where these thoughts were coming from. She didn’t know what to fear.
“Mom?” Shannon called her back to reality.
Arietta handed back the phone filled with graduation photos and wiped tears from her eyes. “I just hate that I missed it. I should have been there. I was supposed to be,” she said.
“We can reenact it tonight,” Felicity suggested.
“That’s a great idea!” Isabelle said. “I can be that awful guy who gave the speech about the future of artificial intelligence.”
“I don’t need to live through that again.” Shannon laughed.
Slowly, the three Peters girls and Arietta drifted into better conversations.
They found ways to laugh, tell stories, play good music, and eat to their hearts’ content.
But all the while, Arietta felt the darkness of all she didn’t know about her husband and her blackmailers.
She prayed that that darkness wouldn’t swallow them all whole.