Chapter 3
The next three weeks were a whirlwind. Candice watched it all as though it were happening to someone else.
Throughout, she waited for the story to end.
She waited for the climax, but everything just kept going and going.
Such was life, she knew. Or at least, as a novelist, she’d always thought she knew.
After a wild taxi ride to the hospital the night of her mother’s heart attack, Candice was told by the doctor that it was too late.
Stella Vanberg had died in the ambulance on the way there.
They hadn’t been able to revive her. Candice gaped at the doctor, waiting for him to tell her it was some kind of joke.
But doctors didn’t joke this late at night in Manhattan hospitals. They had other things to do.
Candice called her sister after that. Lindsey didn’t answer, and Candice couldn’t reach her until the following morning.
Their brother, Henry, made arrangements to fly to Manhattan immediately, but when he arrived, he stayed with old friends and hardly saw Lindsey and Candice at all.
They hugged at the funeral. They attended the wake and said all the right things to all the people who’d come to pay their respects.
But just like that, it was over. Their mother was gone.
Of course, there was still the will to consider.
Their mother had been a very wealthy woman who owned three properties: an apartment in Manhattan, a house in Florida, and an estate on Martha’s Vineyard.
There was an enormous fortune to dole out, Candice knew.
And it remained to be seen what would happen to the properties.
It was Candice’s idea to go to the Harbor Estate for the reading of the will.
Lindsey agreed that this was practical, as their mother’s lawyer, Ralph Conner, lived on the Vineyard during the summertime.
Henry put up a little fight, if only because he’d had a business meeting planned in LA that week in June.
But eventually, he rescheduled, and the three Vanberg siblings made their way to Martha’s Vineyard.
Candice was in the car when Nathan called to check in. She answered it via the in-car speaker system, brightening her voice. “Hi! How are things?”
“Just wanted to see where you were,” Nathan said.
“About two hours outside the city,” she said. “Thinking about stopping for food soon, although maybe I should wait for something delicious on the Vineyard.”
She could feel the strain between them, the hesitation.
On the night of her mother’s heart attack, Candice had learned about Nathan’s affair with Janie, the MFA student.
More than that, Nathan knew that Candice knew about it.
He’d realized she was mere feet away when he and Janie had been talking about when they could be together—dreaming about making their future work.
But in the wake of her mother’s death, in the wake of the funeral and everything that needed to be taken care of, and in the wake of their children’s sorrow about losing their grandmother (a grandmother they hadn’t known very well, of course), Nathan and Candice hadn’t found a way to talk about Nathan’s affair.
Mercifully, The Human Agenda was no longer at the top of the bestsellers’ lists, and copies of it no longer filled every bookstore window.
A part of Candice wondered if Nathan had decided to put his affair with Janie to rest. Maybe losing Stella had reminded him of how little time we have on earth.
Maybe it had reminded him to cherish Candice and their kids.
“What’s on the docket today?” Candice asked.
“I’m outlining a new book,” Nathan said, a tinge of pride in his voice.
Candice bit her tongue to keep from asking, “Is it about cheating on your wife while she leaves to take care of her mother’s will and estate?”
“Wow,” Candice said. “It’s so good that you can take the summer to write.”
“Yeah. I’ve been meaning to say, I don’t want to go back to teaching,” Nathan confessed.
“I guess you don’t have to!” Candice said. The money he was bringing in from book sales was far more than she earned as a professor at NYU. He could spend long hours alone in his head, rewriting the same few sentences, if he wanted to.
Nathan went on, explaining that his editor was “really excited” about his notes. “I’ll let you read some of it, if you want,” Nathan offered tentatively.
Candice remembered how Janie had given Nathan notes on The Human Agenda, and he hadn’t even bothered to ask Candice. Was this a peace offering?
“I’m sure you’ll be busy in the Vineyard,” he hurried to add.
“I’d love to read any and everything you write,” she said. “I fell in love with your writing before I fell in love with you, remember?”
Nathan was quiet for a moment. It felt as though they both dipped into the past, seeing themselves as twentysomething grad students, each with writerly dreams. They’d seen something magical in one another and had built a gorgeous future.
Maybe that still mattered, despite Janie.
Maybe they wouldn’t have to talk about the affair.
Soon after, Candice said she had to go. “Love you, Nathan,” she said, her voice shaking.
“I love you, too.”
They hung up. But Candice’s head rang with the chaos of it all.
Am I the pathetic woman who goes back to her husband despite his affair?
Am I pathetic because I haven’t even talked to him about it at all?
She didn’t have the will to answer either question.
She reached Martha’s Vineyard at five thirty that afternoon.
The last time she’d been at the Harbor Estate was Christmas, the last time she’d seen her mother, when the ocean had been a slate gray, and the sky above had spit snow and rain.
Now, the waters were turquoise, and tourists and those who summered here yearly wore all white, their hair styled beautifully, their tanned legs slipping into boat shoes.
In her all-black city outfit, Candice felt like an outsider, which was ironic.
After all, Candice and her siblings had been raised here on the Vineyard.
Candice drove from the ferry and out to the Harbor Estate with the windows down so that the salty breeze swept through her dark hair.
At the gate, she leaned out of the car to press the code into the touchpad so that the iron bars unlatched and let her in.
She drove to a little lot beside the garage, then got out and stood in front of the gorgeous mansion, a place that seemed to live in a different century.
Rather than going in first, she walked around to the other side of the house to put her feet in the water.
It was cold and exhilarating. With her eyes closed, she could almost imagine she was ten or eleven, and her mother was watching from the veranda, making sure she, Lindsey, and Henry were all right.
“Candice!” Lindsey called from that same veranda now, and Candice yanked around to see her pretty younger sister, sweeping down the stairs and coming toward her.
“When did you get here?” Candice asked.
Lindsey gave her a strange half hug. “I drove up right as the gates were closing behind you. It took me forever to remember the code. I was calling your name for help, but you ran around the house before you heard.”
Candice groaned. This was not an especially good start. “Sorry. I’m lost in my head right now.”
Lindsey raised her shoulders, as though to say, I get it. But Candice wasn’t sure if she and Lindsey had ever seen eye to eye. They’d always squabbled as teenagers and had never purposely hung around each other as adults. Save for now, of course.
“Henry will be here in like an hour,” Lindsey said. “What are we doing about dinner?”
“I think we should go out,” Candice suggested.
“Now you’re talking.”
Lindsey and Candice entered the house and walked the empty halls to the kitchen, where they found a bottle of white wine chilling in the fridge.
“It’s almost like she invited us here to spend time together,” Lindsey said, uncorking the bottle and pouring two glasses.
But they knew their mother had probably been chilling the bottle for future times with Vineyard friends.
Probably, she’d had her schedule packed all summer long.
She’d usually come to the Vineyard in early May and refused to leave before the end of the year, unless she had commitments in the city.
They went out onto the veranda to watch the light play over the waves and the seagulls swoop overhead. Candice asked Lindsey when she’d last been to the Vineyard. Lindsey puffed her cheeks and said, “Maybe last summer? I can’t remember. But you were here for Christmas?”
Candice nodded, dropping her face into one of her hands. “I hate thinking about it.”
Lindsey was quiet. Maybe a normal sister would have touched Candice’s shoulder or said a kind word about her feelings, but Lindsey didn’t seem to have access to those words. Maybe she never felt for Candice at all.
Not long after that, their little brother, Henry, arrived. He was wearing an expensive-looking suit, but his hair was mussed from the plane. His eyes were distant, as though he didn’t want to investigate Candice’s and Lindsey’s faces too much.
After he dropped his bags in the room that had once been his, they went out to dinner at a seaside restaurant they remembered their mother had loved.
A hostess they didn’t recognize seated them near the window, where they looked at the menu without speaking to one another.
It was only after they put in their orders that one of the staff members came over to say hello.
“We were just so sorry to hear about Stella,” the woman said, sliding her hands in and out of her apron. “We loved her, you know? Oh, but we’re excited to hear about her plans for the Harbor Estate.”
Candice tilted her head with surprise. “Her plans?”
The woman laughed. “You’re here to read the will, aren’t you? Sorry. A place like the Vineyard doesn’t have many secrets. Or you could say we run on secrets like cars run on gasoline, but we don’t know how to keep them very well.”
After the woman left the table, Henry, Lindsey, and Candice exchanged nervous smiles.
“You don’t think she knows something we don’t?” Henry asked.
“How could she?” Lindsey pulled her hair into a bun and sipped her wine. After a hesitation, she continued, “What do we want to do with the Harbor Estate? I mean, regardless of which of us Mom passes it down to. I don’t mind sharing. It’s a big property.”
“You think she gave it to you?” Henry asked, his eyes glinting.
“I don’t know! Mom was always so secretive. But the thing is, I wouldn’t mind a bit of a reset. I’ve had a difficult few months, and yeah. I want to relax at the house. I want to swim in the sea and eat seafood and, you know, grieve Mom.” She let her shoulders drop forward.
Candice realized that she’d been thinking something similar about herself, about her summer.
Sarah was already taking summer classes at NYU, and Peter had about eight different types of sports camps to attend in the city, so it wasn’t like they needed her around.
Nathan had his writing (and his affair, if that was still going on).
What if Candice spent some time at the Harbor Estate?
What if she finally, finally managed to write again after years off?
They’d arranged for their mother’s attorney, Ralph Conner, to come to the Harbor Estate that evening to read the will.
For this, they returned home by eight and did everything they could to make the living room comfortable for him.
They set out the drink tray, upon which sat their mother’s selection of spirits and mixers, and they played light classical music, wanting to project to him an air of “togetherness.” Candice imagined that their mother had told Ralph that her children didn’t keep in touch with her or with each other.
Maybe they wanted him to think that the time of their lives was over?
Although once they left the Harbor Estate, they would obviously go back to not speaking. That was the way it had always been.
Ralph Conner was only slightly younger than their mother (their mother, who’d only been sixty-eight when she’d died, which was entirely too young!). He came in, took off his shoes, then put them back on when he realized everyone else was still wearing shoes.
“Apologies. Your mother always wanted shoes off.” He chuckled.
Candice was mortified. Somehow, she’d forgotten. She felt as though they’d broken an integral rule, as though they’d failed their mother’s final test. But it was too late. They kept their shoes on and sat in the living room, where they offered Ralph a drink, and he declined.
Candice was both fascinated and terrified by what came next.
She’d never been to an official reading of a will, and she wanted to memorize what happened, in case she needed it for one of her books.
But the minute Ralph Conner began to read, Candice lost all sense of reality.
Bit by bit, Ralph Conner passed out their mother’s life.
He passed out antiques and money and gave the three siblings full ownership of the Manhattan apartment and the Florida house.
And then he came to the topic of the Harbor Estate.
“Your mother was quite nervous about this next section of the will,” Ralph said, wearing a smile that told them that he was not nervous in the slightest. “I know she assumed she would be around a lot longer. She saw herself taking on this next project, rather than leaving it to those left behind. I know she could have done some real good here. But alas.” He cleared his throat and began to read.
“The Harbor Estate will be transformed from its current status as a private home to a transitional home for women in crisis. The project for this transformation will be helmed by my assistant, Gwen Harper, who will be generously compensated. See attached contract. My children, Candice, Lindsey, and Henry, will have three months to go through the items within the estate and claim what they wish before vacating the premises for good.”
For a moment, Candice, Lindsey, and Henry sat, shocked, and stared at the lawyer. And then, Lindsey blurted, “I beg your pardon? She’s doing what to our house?”