Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
L ucas owed Rhonda a house call. The following late afternoon after work, he picked up a baguette from the local bakery and whistled as he walked through the sun-dappled streets, through cobblestone alleyways, through the shadows beneath sturdy maples and oaks. There was a skip to his step that reminded him of when he’d first met Monica at Yale; it reminded him of their first date—a day she’d called “just a friend hang-out” that had ended with a gorgeous kiss beneath the willow outside of Monica’s dormitory. Three women had walked by and eyed them with jealousy. I’ve already found the one, he remembered thinking. And it’s only the first semester.
I wanted to find the one. I wanted to settle down as soon as possible.
Rhonda opened the door just a crack and gave him a generous smile. “There he is.”
Lucas sliced the baguette at Rhonda’s kitchen counter as Rhonda made a pot of tea and told him about the new flowers growing in her garden. Lucas’s heart swelled. There was something gorgeously optimistic about an older person caring for their space. It meant they wanted to make things beautiful despite not knowing how much time they had left on earth. He hoped he would be like that later on.
“I have some news,” Lucas said now, following her into the living room with her tea, baguette, and fresh cheese. “The festival for one hundred years of the Whaling Museum is a go!”
Rhonda’s reaction was gorgeous. She splayed her hands over her cheeks and sat at the edge of her favorite chair gingerly. Tears shone in her eyes. “You’re kidding me. Just like that?”
“It was nothing,” Lucas told her. “You know how important the Whaling Museum is to this island. Your father had everything to do with that.”
Rhonda’s cheeks were pink. “Your mother would be so proud of you, Lucas. I hope you know that.”
Lucas felt a stab of sorrow. How he missed his mother! But he maintained a smile and raised his cup of tea. “To you and your father and the Whaling Museum!”
Rhonda raised her glass and breathed a sigh.
“It wouldn’t have been possible without Tina Steiner,” Lucas explained. “Do you know her?”
“I knew her mother a long time ago,” Rhonda said. “Sweet lady.”
“Tina takes no prisoners,” Lucas explained. “She’s quick-thinking. Has a to-do list a mile long and is prepared to get it all done in just a few weeks. She also recruited a friend. Gale Dobbs? Do you know her? That is her maiden name, she never took Peter’s lastname.”
He couldn’t resist mentioning Gale, even though he knew Gale had been mostly raised in Providence and therefore didn’t have as much standing in Nantucket.
Rhonda set down her mug of tea with a clack. Her face changed.
Lucas hesitated. What was going on?
“Gale Dobbs, you said? Not the daughter of Evelyn Dobbs, is she?” Her brow was furrowed.
Had Gale said that was her mother’s name?
“Gale said she was born here,” Lucas continued, “and spent summers here.”
“At the Dobbs house on the edge of Siasconset,” Rhonda said. Her tone was strange. Dark. She sounded like she knew all about the Dobbs family and didn’t like what she knew.
Lucas decided to play dumb. It suddenly occurred to him that Rhonda might be his ticket to discovering what had happened to Gale’s twin sister. Rhonda had certainly been alive in 1978. She’d been in her thirties—younger than Lucas was now but still very much an adult.
“But Gale said she grew up in Providence,” he said. His tone remained easy. Light.
“I heard Evelyn moved to the beach house full-time,” Rhonda said. “I can’t imagine how she stands being there after everything that happened.”
Lucas tilted his head. He was surprised at how indelicate Rhonda was with this story—hinting at a monster beneath the surface. Had Lilian actually died? Had there been an accident?
“Evelyn was always so standoffish,” Rhonda continued. “She hardly ever said hello to you if you ran into her at the grocery store or on the beach. And she kept that little girl away from everyone during the summers they spent here. That must have been Gale.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows. “Why would she have kept Gale away from Nantucketers?”
“Oh, she never trusted anyone,” Rhonda said.
“Because of what happened?”
Rhonda raised her shoulders as though that covered it. But Lucas needed to dig deeper. Rhonda’s eyes glinted with all the knowledge she kept. She was a perfect historian; she kept a record of the past.
“One time, your mother found little Gale on the beach by herself,” Rhonda explained. “Gale must have been five or six at the time. So little. Underfed, we all thought. She was sobbing. She thought her mother had abandoned her. Your mother did what she thought was best. She brought her home and made her a grilled cheese sandwich. She made up a bed for her and let her sleep.”
This took Lucas aback. He searched his memories for some image of a little, weeping Gale. He tried to remember a time his mother had taken a strange girl in. Where had he been? He imagined himself just outside Gale’s window, kicking a soccer ball and pretending to play in the World Cup Championship. Maybe his mother had told him to quiet down so the little girl could rest.
Was it possible that his and Gale’s story had begun long ago?
You’re such a romantic soul, Monica had told him so many times. Sometimes she’d meant it in a nice way. Sometimes she hadn’t.
A cold chill went through Lucas’s chest. He set down his tea, folded his hands over his lap, and decided to come right out with the facts—just to see how Rhonda reacted. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt he owed it to Gale. Already.
“Do you know what happened to Gale’s twin sister, Lilian?”
Rhonda’s jaw dropped. She looked at him as though he were a ghost. “What did you just say?”
Lucas waited. His hands were clenched into fists.
Rhonda asked, “Gale knows about her sister?”
Lucas nodded. “She doesn’t know what happened to her. She assumed she was dead.”
“She remembers that far back?” Rhonda rasped. “She was such a little thing. Two? Three?”
“She remembers.” This was a lie, but Lucas decided not to go into the whole story. “But her mother won’t tell her what happened.”
“I’ve heard of people discovering old memories when they’re older,” Rhonda said darkly. “Memories just come up from the darkness inside us. We don’t know how to make sense of them.”
“Exactly.” Lucas was not a stranger to dark memories he couldn’t make sense of.
Rhonda folded her lips and considered this. “I shouldn’t tell. It’s the kind of story that isn’t fun to gossip about.”
“This is Gale’s life,” Lucas explained. “She deserves to know the truth.”
Rhonda nodded. “I tend to agree with you.” She hesitated. “Did Gale tell you about her grandparents’ deaths?”
“She didn’t.”
“They died in a boating accident off the coast of Nantucket when Evelyn was twenty or twenty-one years old,” Rhonda explained. “It was devastating. I just adored the Dobbs, as did your mother. Hannah Dobbs was whip-smart and drop-dead funny, and her husband Bill had a laugh that lit up every room. After Bill sold his business in Providence, they moved into that beach house passed through Bill’s family. They were more or less full-time Nantucketers at that point. They became loyal friends to the rest of us. We counted them among us, which you know is rare on this island. We can be insular.”
Lucas felt like he couldn’t breathe. He was peering so deeply into the past.
“After they died, there was an outpouring of love for Evelyn here on the island,” Rhonda said, rolling her eyes ever so slightly. “People wanted to give her money and time and food and desserts. People wanted to fix up the bungalow for her so that she could sell it for extra cash. The funeral was held in Providence, and we all drove over there and stood in that little cemetery and prayed for them. Gosh, it was awful. They were in their forties with the second half of their lives in front of them. I remember talking to Evelyn at the funeral. She looked so lost. Big eyes that seemed to peer into nothing. I asked her if she wanted to sell the bungalow, and she said no. She said she planned to move in there full-time. I was happy to hear that. I thought we could all pitch in for her. How naive I was!
“Once she moved in, we hardly saw anything of her. It wasn’t clear what she was up to in that house all by herself. People gossiped. During one horrible winter a year or two after the Dobbses’ deaths, we got buckets of snow, and my husband went out to check on her. He couldn’t even get close to the house! The snow was halfway up the door and over the windows. The lights were on, and I was terrified she would freeze in there. But when we sent the fire department, Evelyn was so angry. She told us to leave her alone.”
To Lucas, it sounded like Evelyn had been a truly damaged young woman. A young woman who hadn’t known how to be alone with herself nor how to be with other people. A young woman who’d been so angry with the world that she’d rejected it.
“But around then was when she met Johnny,” Rhonda went on darkly.
Lucas’s curiosity was piqued. “Johnny?”
“Johnny Samson was a Nantucket favorite around here,” Rhonda said. “A golden boy. He was the son of a fisherman and the great-grandson of a whaler. He played football, basketball, and baseball and was a lifeguard at Fisherman’s Beach. He saved seven tourists’ lives one summer! It beats me how he met Evelyn. But one evening, I was walking on the boardwalk with your mother, and we spotted them together. A glowing Evelyn was practically floating off the boardwalk. Totally in love with Johnny Samson. Every girl on the island was jealous of Evelyn. How had she gotten him? But he seemed to be in love with her, too. Your mother and I just looked at each other and laughed. But I remember thinking there was a darkness to this story. Something bothered me about it. I prayed I was wrong.
“For a little while, Evelyn returned to Nantucket parties with Johnny. She chatted with people and baked cookies. I knew she wouldn’t apologize for her years of rudeness, but the rest of us were willing to forgive her. We would have forgiven anyone Johnny Samson was in love with. It felt like Johnny was the island’s son! That meant that Johnny and Evelyn’s child would be the island’s grandchild, and so on.”
Rhonda leaned over her thighs and stared at Lucas. “The fact that Evelyn got pregnant out of wedlock was a source of gossip around here. You have to understand. People just didn’t do that back in 1978. And certainly not around here.” She wrinkled her nose. “And you have to remember that Johnny and Evelyn were still quite young. Johnny couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. You think you know everything at twenty-five. But you really don’t know anything.”
Lucas could attest to that truth. At twenty-five, he’d been married to Monica and pursuing a PhD in history at Yale University. He’d known everything there was to know about the French Revolution, the Renaissance, and the Civil War. But what had he really known about love?
Rhonda’s voice got very low. She furrowed her brow and bent toward him. “When Evelyn was eight months pregnant, a horrible hurricane ripped over the island. We had all boarded up our homes and were hidden away as the wind howled and the rain splattered and flooded. That’s when Evelyn discovered what Johnny was up to.”
Lucas’s eyes widened. Eight months pregnant. A hurricane. It sounded like a nightmare.
“Johnny had been Nantucket’s golden boy, but he’d gotten a woman pregnant out of wedlock and people weren’t looking at him so kindly anymore. He got dirty looks. He wasn’t applauded the way he had been as a high schooler and a lifeguard. And I think he took a hit to his ego. He started sleeping around here and there. Your mother and I spotted him at Fisherman’s Beach one afternoon with Tricia Simms; maybe you know her as Tricia Mane. She married the second Mane boy later on. But that wasn’t the only woman he courted. He got drunk and told anyone who would listen that he’d made a mistake when it came to Evelyn. That she was crazy.”
Rhonda wrinkled her nose. “I hadn’t been so keen on Evelyn, but even I was displeased to hear he talked about her like that. The minute a man calls a woman crazy, it’s over. Besides, she was pregnant. Your hormones get so out of whack. It’s hard to know what’s real.”
Lucas nodded. He remembered that well.
“Evelyn kicked him out of the house in the middle of the hurricane,” Rhonda said. “He was half drunk and out of his mind, and he drove his truck through a wild-weathered Nantucket and crashed it into a tree.”
Lucas’s jaw hung open. More tragedy.
“He was in a coma for a couple of weeks,” Rhonda said. “When he woke up, Bethany Cicero was by his side, waiting for him. She was one of his on-the-side girlfriends.” Rhonda laughed nervously. “They went away somewhere together. Florida, maybe. Your mother found him on Facebook a few years back. He looked hardened like leather, and his wife wasn’t Bethany anymore. We couldn’t find her anywhere.”
Rhonda leaned back in her chair. She looked exhausted, as though she’d traveled a great distance to impart this story to Lucas. In a way, she had.
How will I explain all of this to Gale?
“What happened to Evelyn after that?” Lucas asked. “And the girls?” They still hadn’t reached the part of the story that involved Gale and Lilian.
Rhonda’s eyes brightened like two lighthouses in the distance. “Didn’t I mention? Bethany couldn’t conceive.”