Chapter 3
Chapter Three
G ale’s mother’s health was declining. Gale knew this despite Evelyn’s secrecy. Evelyn almost never mentioned if she spent time in the hospital, had an accident, or got bad news from the doctor. Gale often only learned what had gone wrong when she found a hospital bill at Evelyn’s place. That, and the often-sickly nature of Evelyn’s face when Gale brought her daughters to the island to visit. Mom, you have to let me in. You have to let me help you. Evelyn always said, “Gale, you need to mind your own business. You’ve always been such a Nosy Nellie.”
A week or so after news of the affair dropped, Gale had told Evelyn she was coming to Nantucket. She hadn’t said why or for how long. She’d also made sure not to hint that she was worried about Evelyn or wanted to check on her. Evelyn was a formidable woman who often told everyone how little she needed anyone. “I raised my daughter all on my own. I didn’t need anything.”
Gale often wondered how that mentality had affected her growing up.
“I am an island, like Nantucket. I am alone,” Evelyn had said of herself. And so it had been. But what was Gale, if she was raised by a blustery, lonely island? Was she an island, too? Was that why she’d been so willing to leave Peter the moment she’d learned everything about her marriage was a lie? Would a stronger and more practical woman have gone to therapy and learned how to stay?
Gale woke up early on the morning she planned to leave Providence and depart the life she’d built. She was tucked away in Anna’s old bedroom, listening to the rain patter through the gray light and draw lines across the panes. Old photographs of Anna at various stages of her teenage years were hung across the wall, illustrating a girl who was whip-smart and unaware that one day her parents would separate and obliterate her sense of stability in the world. Gale turned over and burrowed her face in her hands. I’m doing this for myself. I’m doing this to save my own life.
Gale retreated to the kitchen to find Peter already awake. He’d made a pot of coffee and filled her favorite mustard-yellow mug with a perfectly mixed ratio of three-fourths coffee and one-fourth almond milk. Her heart shattered at the edges. Will anyone ever know me as well as Peter does? Will anyone else make me coffee?
“I don’t want you to go,” Peter told her. “But I understand why you have to.” He paused and licked his lips. “And I know that I pushed you there.”
Gale’s heart thudded with recognition. It was a rare thing to get Peter to admit he was wrong about anything. He fought tooth and nail for his answers in Trivial Pursuit and had once called in to Jeopardy to tell them they’d gotten something wrong.
“Thank you, Peter.”
“Will you call me when you get to Nantucket?”
Gale swallowed the lump in her throat. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
Peter raised his shoulders. Gale understood. Peter was accustomed to bad ideas. He was also accustomed to following those bad ideas to their conclusions. Nothing held him back from cheating on his wife or calling his ex-wife if he felt like it after she’d decided she’d had enough. Gale remembered something Anna and Piper had explained to her years ago. It was possible—and recommendable—to block people’s phone numbers so they didn’t contact you and you couldn’t contact them. “It protects you from them and yourself,” Anna had said sternly.
At the time, Gale had thought, I don’t need to protect myself. I just need to protect my girls.
How bizarre to think she needed to protect herself from her husband.
The drive to Hyannis Port took a little more than an hour. Gale felt it should have been longer as though it should have taken her twenty-four hours to drive away from her husband, the bay window in which she’d read novels, and the tree-lined trail where she’d run nearly every morning since the girls were born. At first, it had been to knock off the baby weight, and then it had turned into a habit, a ritual to bring herself from her dream world to the real one. Peter had gotten into weightlifting later in life, and she’d never fully understood it. It had seemed so unromantic. He stood in rooms, lifting iron bars, huffing. He never saw anything beautiful save for his reflection in the gym mirrors. That’s the man I chose to marry.
Gale parked her car in the belly of the ferry, cut the engine, and walked to the top deck so she could feel the rushing wind through her hair and watch the island grow bigger and bigger, a rock in the distance that, close-up, offered nuance and streets lined with Victorian houses and ancient history in its sandy soil. In the little shop on board, she bought a cup of coffee and a blueberry scone, then ate it at the very edge as the ferry rumbled off the dock. Gale’s heart skipped a beat.
Next came two text messages: one from Anna and another from Piper. It meant they were together.
ANNA: We love you. We already miss you.
PIPER: Good luck. Tell Grandma we love her. We love you, too. SO MUCH.
Gale knew they were resentful of her for leaving their father. But she suspected they were suspicious. They knew Gale couldn’t tell them everything. And she’d raised them well enough to respect her privacy.
One day, we will sit together on a Nantucket beach, and I will tell them everything. I won’t hold anything back.
Gale took a bite of scone, chased it with a sip of coffee, and reckoned that Evelyn had never sat with Gale and told her the whole truth about her life. Gale didn’t know who her father was. Gale didn’t know why Evelyn had never tried again with anyone else. Gale didn’t know why Evelyn purposely made herself miserable. “ She’s a masochist, ” Peter always said. But Gale thought that was too simplistic. Peter always allowed himself to have far more nuance than he allowed other people.
Nantucket appeared on the horizon and surged forward. Gale thought to herself, I hope this part lasts a long time. The time before I arrive. This is the very last moment before the rest of my life begins, which means right now, everything is possible. What kind of person do I want to be next? Where do I really want to live? Will I ever want to date again?
But before she knew it, the ferry operators announced that everyone needed to return to their vehicles and prepare for landing.
Gale drove from Nantucket Harbor to the family beach house in a cloud of memories. Everything was illuminated with late-May sunlight, reflecting off windows of Victorian houses, shimmering on ice cream cones of early-season tourists. She stopped for too long at a stop sign and watched as a family of four—two girls and their parents, just like her little nuclear family had been—walked hand in hand to the opposite side. She didn’t press the gas until the car behind her blared its horn.
This was her summertime ritual. This was her home away from home.
What if it was her home for the rest of her life?
Maybe it would give her time to understand her mother better. Perhaps it would give her time to understand herself better. She’d read somewhere that only people who didn’t fully understand themselves ended up in unhappy marriages. She wasn’t sure if she agreed with that or not. Plenty of strong, passionate people got divorced. Then again—maybe the partners of those strong people were the ones who didn’t know themselves.
Peter was the strong one. What did that mean for Gale?
Gale pulled up to the family beach house on the edge of Siasconset—the most luxurious area of Nantucket. By comparison to the mansions a half-mile down the beach on either side, Evelyn’s place was a bungalow, a four-bedroom, two-bathroom place with a fireplace that spoke of cozy afternoons lounging around, reading and dreaming. Just as Gale had discussed with Peter, it needed a bit of a repair: perhaps a new roof, different shutters, a paint job. But it more or less stood as a formidable symbol of the family who’d gone before Evelyn and Gale.
There was no car in the driveway. Gale cut the engine and got out, heading up to the front door. It wasn’t unlike her mother not to be here when she said she would be. Evelyn liked to fly by the seat of her pants. She liked to surprise people—even if surprising them meant disappointing them.
Here I go, from Peter to Evelyn. I’m breaking my own heart.
Gale knocked on the door and shifted her weight. She was more exhausted from the hour's drive and brief ferry ride than she should have been. She wanted to seal herself in the bedroom she always stayed in, burrow her face in a pillow, and cry. Perhaps the Nantucket winds would disguise her misery. Maybe her mother would pour a glass of wine and say, “ We can get through this. I’ll help you. ”
But Evelyn didn’t come to the door.
Gale let all the air out of her lungs and flipped the mat but found no hidden key. That was where it had always been, waiting for her. Had Evelyn moved it? Gale tried the door, just in case, but it was locked.
“Mom?” she called, but her voice was lost in a swift spring breeze.
Gale hurried around the opposite side of the bungalow, where a wooden veranda stretched out beneath a sky of whirring clouds. A porch swing, a table, and a few sun chairs were back there. The glass door was locked, too. In a moment of insanity, Gale pictured herself heaving one of the chairs through the glass door and breaking in. My husband had five affairs. It’s my right to destroy something! But she laughed and sat down to watch the waves instead.
She could feel the family history stretching long back before her. She could still hear her mother’s voice when she was a child, calling her in from the waves. Gale? Time for lunch!
Always just the two of them here.
Gale’s grandparents had passed away in a boating accident off the coast of Nantucket when Evelyn was twenty-one years old, just three years before Gale’s birth, and because they were the last owners of the beach house, the gorgeous place went to Evelyn and Evelyn alone. It wasn’t clear to Gale why Evelyn had decided to raise Gale in Providence rather than Nantucket, especially because the house was right there and paid for. But she guessed it was a matter of Evelyn’s memories. She wanted to be able to visit her parents’ graves with Gale by her side. Gale remembered countless afternoons in which they’d hand-selected bouquets or picked wildflowers to put in the cemetery. Obviously, Gale had no memories of them, but Evelyn spoke warmly of her father’s big laugh and her mother’s intellectualism.
This afternoon, Gale would wait for her mother to return from wherever she was. She was in no hurry. She got her laptop out, connected to the Wi-Fi, and sent off a few emails for work. It was pleasant to live like this. Nobody needed her. Peter wasn’t waiting for her at home.
She tried not to think of how empty it was. Maybe that feeling would pass.