Chapter 26
Eight Years Later
Arietta went to the kitchen, where she brewed a cup of coffee and immediately fielded a call from Tina, one of the Salt Sisters.
“You’re up early,” Arietta said, smiling.
“You know I can hardly sleep!” Tina cried.
Arietta knew how Tina could get, especially when it came to planning a complicated event. For the thousandth time, Arietta ran through the to-do list aloud, and Tina said, “Yes, I’ve done that. Yes, that too.”
Arietta could do nothing but slap her thigh and say, “I think we’re ready to roll. You’re going to make yourself sick from worrying this much.”
Tina’s voice was small. “I just want her to know how much we care about her.”
“I know. Me too,” Arietta said.
Later that afternoon, they were throwing a surprise party for Hilary Salt. It wasn’t her birthday, and it wasn’t her wedding or work anniversary. Rather, it was the thirtieth anniversary of the Salt Sisters’ founding.
The Salt Sisters had been instrumental in helping Arietta through the most difficult period of her life.
Back then, she’d felt alone and strangled with grief.
But all she’d had to do was look around at a table filled with other Salt Sisters to recognize that these women had been through similar heartaches.
They knew the language of grief and were there for her.
They’d been there for her ever since.
After Tina got off the phone to take a shower and try to relax a bit before the party, Jasper came into the kitchen and kissed Arietta good morning.
“How did you sleep?” she asked, reaching for the coffee to pour him a mug.
“I had the craziest dream,” Jasper said. “You were there, but we were somewhere else. Japan, maybe? And you told me that someone was trying to kidnap you.”
It was typical of Jasper to tell Arietta the wildest dreams, most of which involved her. In his dream worlds, they’d been on countless adventures. They were always side by side.
Arietta couldn’t remember Fred ever having such an active imagination. In her first marriage, they’d never told one another their dreams.
A little after noon, Arietta said goodbye to Jasper and drove over to Hilary Salt’s place.
Stella was waiting at the gate and let her in with a funny wave.
Hilary was coming back from visiting her daughter and grandchildren in Los Angeles.
Hilary’s husband had agreed to let them have the house for the party that night.
“I know you girls need your space,” he’d said.
Each of their romantic partners knew how nourishing and essential the Salt Sisters were for one another. They understood that their wives would have fallen apart long ago without them.
Most of the Salt Sisters were already on the veranda, setting up for the party.
Although they’d added members through the years, there were no more than sixteen of them.
Arietta was fifty-seven years old, but most of them were in their sixties or nearing seventy.
Sweet Sylvie was the youngest at age fifty-one.
Arietta busied herself with making a stupendous cheese-and-meat platter.
She sliced and diced and spread out olives that caught the sunlight of the gorgeous June afternoon.
Ada and Nora passed by and plopped a few olives into their mouths.
Gale appeared with an enormous cake, which she’d had made at a fabulous Nantucket bakery.
Rose kept bursting into tears, shaking her head, and saying, “Thirty years? How is it possible?”
Although Arietta was a newer member of the Salt Sisters, she could see how thirty years made sense to this particular group of women. They were aging.
As they waited for Hilary to arrive, they sat around the veranda table and considered the previous thirty years of their lives.
Everything had changed. Back in 2004, Arietta was twenty-seven.
She’d been married to Fred, writing about scientific discoveries and trying to figure out how to balance parenthood with a career and love.
When she said this, Stella reached across the table and squeezed her hand.
Arietta didn’t often mention Fred any longer, although everyone knew her story.
After two years in the care facility, Fred had passed away in his sleep.
Arietta and her daughters had given him a beautiful send-off.
By that time, Dina and Arietta had developed a sort of friendship—something that still boggled Arietta’s mind.
Dina had never tried to explain her love for Fred.
She’d never tried to diminish it, either.
But she’d once told Arietta, “I hate that I disrespected you. I learned something in that, I think, that I’ll carry with me forever. ”
“Whatever happened to Dina?” Stella asked now.
Arietta explained that Dina had graduated with her master’s from Yale and moved to California, where she’d married another scientist and had two children. “She sends me a Christmas card every year,” she said. “She looks happy.”
Arietta had never told the Salt Sisters that, after the cops got her twenty grand back from Mikey, the criminal ex-boyfriend of Dina’s, she had sent the money to Dina instead.
She knew that Dina was hurting for cash and didn’t have the resources that Arietta and her daughters did.
In a letter, Arietta had written, “This is not charity. I genuinely believe that this is what Fred would have wanted.”
Arietta stood by that choice, even now.
When Hilary got home from her trip to Los Angeles, the Salt Sisters sprang out from beneath the veranda table and the various decorative flowers and cried, “Happy Thirty Years!”
Hilary shrieked and fell into embraces with all of them.
“My girls! I can’t believe this. It’s perfect!
” She squeezed Arietta hard, then whispered in her ear, “I don’t know what I would do without you.
” Arietta imagined that she’d said the same to all of the Salt Sisters, but that didn’t make it any less true.
Still plagued with worries about the party, Tina looked on the brink of insanity. But soon, Hilary pulled her to the veranda table and poured her a huge glass of wine. “I know it’s hard for you to lighten up, my darling,” Hilary said. “But this party is already your best one yet.”
Tina blushed, then burst into tears. Everyone laughed and told her it was so.
“You’ve outdone yourself!” Arietta cried.
For a little while, they exchanged stories about their years together. Rose couldn’t stop bringing up the months when she’d lived here at Hilary Salt’s place, and how lost she’d been back then. “You must have thought I was such a rascal,” she said.
“Nonsense. I thought of you like family immediately,” Hilary said.
Rose smiled, and for a moment, Arietta could see the young woman she’d once been.
This happened to Arietta often. She could peel back the layers of time on someone’s face and see them through all the different stages of their lives.
She wondered if people could do the same for her.
Could they see her the way Fred once had?
Could they see her the way her mother—God rest her soul—had?
“I remember when Arietta came on the scene,” Stella interjected. “You were such a mystery to us!”
“Oh, that blackmailing story,” Nora said, closing her eyes. “That was scary.”
“Not as scary as it could have been,” Robby interjected.
Everyone looked at her, remembering her terrifying story of betrayals and dubious medical experiments and things that her husband never told her.
“It’s incredible to remember all your stories,” Hilary gushed.
“It’s been the privilege of my life to know you—some of you for thirty years, some of you for less than that.
But I’m still young, sort of. And Tina can still throw a heck of a party.
I picture us celebrating life and love and beauty for another thirty years! ”
At this, the Salt Sisters laughed. Another thirty years was a mighty proposal.
But who knew? Arietta still wrote about fields of scientific research.
She was often astounded at what was possible, at the genetic repair that was now possible, and at the dramatic leaps forward in understanding Alzheimer’s and cancer.
Maybe, just maybe, they could live for another thirty years.
She was ready for all that sisterhood, all that joy.
After the party, which wound down around midnight, Arietta took a cab home and found Jasper asleep in front of the television.
She kissed him awake, then watched as he ascended the staircase, yawning and begging her to join him.
But Arietta was too wired from the party.
She got on her phone for a while, looking at photographs from the night.
And then, Shannon called.
Arietta answered on the first ring. “Hi, honey!”
Shannon’s voice was meek, like a string. “You’re still up?”
“I am. What’s wrong?” Arietta got up and paced in front of the television.
“It’s Felix,” Shannon breathed. “I can’t get him to fall asleep.”
Shannon and Russell had recently had their first child, a son named Felix.
They lived in London, working tirelessly on that same Alzheimer’s research that fascinated Arietta and helped her believe in a new kind of future.
But Shannon and Russell were on maternity and paternity leave, respectively, and both were struggling with the most difficult scientific experiment of all: raising a child.
“I’ve tried everything,” Shannon said. There were tears in her voice. “I’ve fed him and sang to him and taken him for a walk. It’s five thirty in the morning here in London, and I think he’s been crying since midnight.”
Arietta could picture her dear daughter, her eyes red from lack of sleep, her expression panicked.
She thought back to her own early days with baby Shannon, when she’d had no experience with a baby, when Fred had told her he’d needed his own sleep “for work” and left her and Shannon alone.
What had worked for Arietta and Shannon?
How had she gotten her to sleep? Those days were so hazy in Arietta’s memory. But she’d lived them. Shannon had, too.
“I tried everything, too,” Arietta remembered.
“I’ll try anything else,” Shannon breathed. “Any tip. Any hint.”
Arietta remembered closing her eyes and singing to Shannon.
It was a song her own mother, Regina, had sung to her—a Joni Mitchell classic called “River.” Arietta remembered how, when Regina had lost herself to Alzheimer’s, when there had been so little of herself left, Arietta had had only to sing “River,” and her mother had looked at her as though she’d known who she was.
“Maybe try ‘River’ by Joni Mitchell,” Arietta said. “You always liked that one. Your grandmother, too.”
Arietta could hear her daughter’s smile in her voice. “It sounds like it runs in the family.”
“It really does, honey.” Arietta squeezed her eyes shut and thought about time and memory, about everything that was retained through the stories we pass from mother to child.
She heard her grandson Felix in the background, screaming and wailing.
It made sense that he was frightened; life was terrifying. But it was beautiful, too.
Arietta knew that, with parents like Russell and Shannon, Felix would learn soon enough.
All at once, the screaming stopped. Shannon gasped, then whispered to her mother, “He stopped. I didn’t even start singing yet.”
Arietta laughed gently and lay exhausted on the sofa. She could hear the Nantucket Sound, wave after wave, rushing up onto the beach. She could feel her daughter’s heartbeat from across the ocean. “I love you, honey,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be all right.”