Chapter 5
Present Day: Martha’s Vineyard
Within a half hour of the attorney Ralph Conner leaving the Harbor Estate, Candice and her siblings had Gwen Harper on the phone.
The speakerphone was on, so that the three of them could stand around the living room coffee table and glare down at the phone as though the phone were Gwen herself.
When she answered, Gwen sounded meek and very tired, as though she’d been trying to gain the strength to talk to the Vanberg siblings.
“Good to hear from you,” Gwen said. “Are you all together?”
Lindsey spoke first, as she was the loudest and the brashest and always had been. “We’re all here at the Harbor Estate, yep. We’ve just listened to the reading of the will.”
Gwen didn’t say anything at first, before muttering, “I want to say…”
“You knew about this,” Lindsey spoke over her. “You knew that she was planning something like this, and you wanted to take advantage of the situation and make sure that you had a beautiful place to live—and a job.”
Gwen sighed. “Your mother wasn’t sick. I had no way of knowing this would happen.” Her voice shook, as though she were on the brink of tears.
Candice didn’t know whether to believe those tears.
“But you knew this was a possibility,” Lindsey continued. “And you didn’t say anything? You didn’t mention this at the funeral?”
“Honestly, I’m just as surprised as you are,” Gwen offered.
“The lawyer just called me earlier today. In fact, I was planning on leaving your mother this year. I hadn’t told her, but I’d already begun interviewing for a few other jobs.
Things that would push me, you know? But I loved working with your mother!
She was probably the person I was closest to for the past five years, as crazy as that sounds. She …”
But this time, Henry cut her off. “We’re going to contest the will, Gwen.”
Gwen was quiet.
“We have to, honey,” Lindsey said, belittling her in a way that made Candice immediately uncomfortable.
“The Harbor Estate is our home. You wouldn’t get it.
We have thousands of memories here. And as much as I believe in my mother’s philanthropic efforts, I can’t watch this place be transformed like that. ”
Now, there was a sharper edge to Gwen’s voice. “How much time have you spent at the Harbor Estate over the past few years?”
Candice, Lindsey, and Henry searched one another’s faces. They probably should have rehearsed how they wanted to speak to Gwen before calling her.
“She was our mother, Gwen,” Candice said in a small voice, a voice she hoped would prove to Gwen that she did still care about their mother despite everything. “We loved her.”
“I loved her, too,” Gwen said. And then, she started crying loud enough for the three Vanberg siblings to hear her.
“She was like a mother to me. My own mother died when I was young, and she really took me in, you know? She saw something in me. She wanted me to overcome everything that I went through. It was only because of her that I started therapy! It was only because of her that I felt mentally healthy enough to meet my fiancé!”
Candice didn’t know what to say. She shoved her hands into her pockets and looked at Lindsey, who looked slightly stunned but mostly annoyed.
“And because I loved her so much, I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure her vision comes to life,” Gwen stammered. “I suggest that you work hard to clear out the estate and get it ready for its next iteration. It’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to change so many women’s lives.”
After Gwen hung up on them, Candice, Lindsey, and Henry sat sprawled on the sofas and fine chairs of the living room, drinking wine and stirring in their own anxious thoughts.
Finally, after more than an hour, Henry said, “I feel like it’s her way of saying screw you after, you know, all the animosity between us.”
“I guess it’s possible that she also wants to help women in need,” Candice said softly.
But both Lindsey and Henry looked at her like she was nuts, so she didn’t push it. She got up and looked out the window to see a clear moon over the water. She fetched a light jacket, then stepped out onto the veranda to calm down. Soon, Lindsey and Henry were there, leaning over the railing.
“I just can’t believe we might have to say goodbye to this place forever,” Lindsey murmured. “It’s true that we haven’t been here often the past few years. But I’ve always missed it.”
“When you were saying you wanted to spend time here,” Henry said, “I started to reorganize my calendar in my head. I started thinking maybe we could be together. For a little while.”
Candice’s heart shifted. “We still can.”
Lindsey and Henry turned to look at her.
“For one last summer,” Candace said. “We can go through Mom’s things. We can try to figure her out. And I don’t know. If we contest the will and lose, we can always use Mom’s money to buy another property here on the Vineyard. I wouldn’t mind spending a little more time here.”
Her siblings looked at her as though she were crazy.
“Move? Somewhere down the road?” Lindsey asked.
Candice shrugged. “It was just an idea.”
They remained in the dark, quiet, listening to the rolling waves over the beach.
When Candice did finally go up to her room, she sat at the mahogany desk and opened her journal for the first time in weeks.
In it, she usually doodled, considering ways to approach short stories and potential novels (novels she rarely got around to writing).
But now, she watched herself write: Mom still wants more than any of us do, even in death.
I wonder if we terribly disappointed her.
When Candice first enrolled at NYU as an undergrad to study creative writing, her mother was pleased.
For Stella, sending her children to college was essential, something she spoke of endlessly in the lead-up to high school graduation.
“You have to nourish your mind. You have to push yourself beyond the boundaries you’ve created within yourself! ”
Candice still remembered being in this very room, the room of her teenage years, a suitcase thrown over the bed as she tried to pack up her life for the first semester.
She’d been a moody teenager, not unlike most teenagers, she supposed, and when her mother had sat on the bed, mid-packing session, and asked her what kinds of stories she wanted to write at university, what inspired her the most, Candice had snapped at her, saying, “Nothing has happened in my life yet. How am I supposed to write about anything if nothing has happened?”
Her mother had given her a quizzical look. “That’s not what writers are necessarily supposed to do,” she said finally. “They’re not supposed to record exactly what happens. Unless I’ve gotten something wrong? But I thought writers were supposed to be pretty liars.” She’d let out a wry laugh.
Candice had huffed, hating how correct her mother sounded.
It was true that many of her favorite writers hadn’t written memoirs, but it was also true that they’d been inspired by incredible events, internships in the big city, sweeping love affairs, and so on.
Candice had hardly even had a teenage love affair.
She’d kissed someone a few times, sure. But mostly, she’d lived her life from within the confines of her head.
“Honey,” Stella had said so long ago, when Candice was eighteen, with a dark and pulpy heart and a thousand questions in her soul, “remember to always stay inquisitive. Remember to keep yourself open to the stories swirling around you.”
Candice had wanted to say something like, That’s the point of going to college!
But at that moment, her mother had said something that had stayed with Candice forever. “When I was your age, I didn’t have the same opportunities. I didn’t even know those opportunities existed.”
Candice had been taken aback. Her mother, Stella Vanberg, had been raised in this very house at the Harbor Estate, a woman of opportunities if there ever had been one.
What on earth was she talking about? Sure, she’d been a woman of another era—born in the 1950s, during a time when women didn’t necessarily go to college.
They weren’t legally allowed to have bank accounts till the seventies.
They still often weren’t paid a living wage.
But the glint in Stella’s eyes urged Candice to ask more.
To give in to such a glint would have meant dismissing her own teenage needs, her own teenage moods, her own teenage annoyances.
She turned away from her mother, away from her mother’s invitation for conversation, and put her hands on her hips, surveying her kingdom of bedsheets and black turtlenecks and toiletries.
Eventually, her mother sighed and got out of bed, leaving her room and the conversation behind forever.
But now, so many years after that till-now-forgotten night, Candice wrote it in her journal. When I was your age, I didn’t have the same opportunities. I didn’t even know those opportunities existed.
What on earth had her mother meant?