Chapter 14
Present Day
In the days that followed the discovery of “Stella and Sally McGee,” Candice and her siblings didn’t know what to do with themselves.
Henry scoured the internet for clues about what had happened to them and discovered, only, that their album had been wildly successful, that their fans had wanted more from them, but that they’d disappeared without a trace.
Not a single article in any newspaper online could give them a clue as to what had happened, nor where they’d come from, nor where Sally McGee now was.
They were at a loss.
But Candice still had an additional clue to dig into.
It had to do with Frank and what he’d said about his mother.
She discussed it with Lindsey at the breakfast table, sipping her coffee and watching the light flicker through the leaves of the tree outside.
“Maybe his mother knows something,” she offered.
“Remember? She couldn’t stop singing a country song.
Maybe it was our mother’s song. Maybe she knows. ”
Lindsey wrinkled her nose. “She has Alzheimer’s, right?”
“But music’s supposed to be one of the biggest ways of taking Alzheimer’s patients back through time,” Candice said, parroting an article she’d read online. Apparently, sounds and scents were the last to leave your memory.
Lindsey considered this. “You can ask Frank about it. I’m sure he’d be happy to help.” She paused, then smiled teasingly. “He wouldn’t help me, though. Just you.”
Candice rolled her eyes. “It isn’t like that.”
“Your secret’s safe with me,” Lindsey said.
Upstairs in her bedroom, Candice paced and considered her reason for calling Frank.
Was she really as innocent as she felt she was?
Or was she using “Stella McGee” as an excuse to get back in touch with an old flame?
Throughout her long and storied marriage, she’d never so much as flirted with another man.
She’d never wanted to give anyone the impression that she wasn’t happily in love with Nathan Lerner.
But this strange and exhilarating black hole of her mother’s past could not be ignored. The internet had nothing for them. Before getting in the car and driving all the way to Nashville, they had to exhaust every option. She took a breath and dialed.
Frank answered on the second ring. “Candice?”
“Hi! Um. Sorry to call like this?”
“No apologies necessary. Happy to hear from you!” She could hear that he was smiling. “Lindsey said you’ve been busy with your kids.”
“It’s been a busy time,” Candice lied. “Listen. I have a really strange request.”
Frank listened without question for a very long time as Candice fleshed out what she and her siblings had learned about their mother’s country-western background.
“I remembered what your mother said,” she offered.
“And I wondered if, maybe, your mother remembered anything. Maybe we could play her the songs? Perhaps she could shed some light?”
“It’s tricky,” Frank explained. “Sometimes if she can’t remember something, she gets really irritated. Angry, rather. I don’t want to stress her out too much.”
“I know. I know,” Candice hurried to say. “It was a stupid idea.”
“Maybe not,” Frank said finally. She could see his furrowed, thoughtful brow in her mind’s eye. She could see him weighing up the request. “She still loves listening to music. We could put on your mother’s old record and see what happens. I can’t promise anything.”
“Of course not,” Candice said. “I have no expectations.”
Candice and Frank agreed to meet the following afternoon outside of his mother’s memory care clinic.
Frank was wearing a black button-down shirt and dark jeans, and he looked handsome and artistic, like a man who still lived in the city.
Candice wore a dark red dress that buttoned to her neck but showed her sculpted shoulders.
She carried the vinyl in her arms, as though to protect it.
She was grateful they had the other copy back at home.
“That’s it, huh?” Frank nodded at the unlabeled record case.
“It is,” she said.
“I can’t believe you stumbled into your mother’s secret country music career,” he said, laughing as he opened the door. “I wonder what secret lives my parents had before I was born.”
“Maybe they were circus performers,” Candice suggested.
“Acrobats, maybe,” Frank declared. “Or fire dancers.”
Candice laughed, surprised at how her chest opened up despite her nerves.
The woman at the front desk greeted Frank by name and told him that his mother was in good spirits today. “She keeps asking me when you’re coming in,” she said.
“That’s a good sign,” Frank told Candice as they walked the halls, saying hello to the other residents. Some of them watched television, while others did arts and crafts or played cards. Their ages ranged from the early sixties to one hundred.
Candice didn’t like to think about Alzheimer’s. She didn’t like to think about a disease ravaging her mind but leaving her body alone. Oh, but it happened to so many people. It was one of the great tragedies of life.
When they entered Frank’s mother’s room, they found her watching television.
It was an old 1970s sitcom, Three’s Company.
Candice thought this was a good sign as she prepared to ask his mother about the late seventies and early eighties.
When they entered, his mother threw her head back in laughter, then paused and blinked at Frank and Candice, as though she were trying to place them.
“Frank,” she said after a pause.
Frank went over to kiss his mother on the cheek. “Good afternoon! How are you doing today?”
“Just fine.” But his mother continued to look at Candice like she didn’t trust her. “Who is this? Is this a new nurse? I told you, I liked the other one.”
Candice tried to maintain her smile, but she was nervous. Had she already given Frank’s mother the impression that she wasn’t trustworthy?
“This is my friend, Mom,” Frank said, dropping into the chair beside his mother’s. “I went to high school with her. You were really good friends with her mother. Her name is Candice. Candice Vanberg.”
In the course of a minute, Frank’s mother’s face transformed several times. For a little while, she furrowed her brow so hard that deep wrinkles formed across her face. But then, the furrow melted, and she gave Candice a look of profound emptiness.
“My mother was Stella,” Candice offered meekly.
“Stella,” Frank’s mother muttered. “Of course. Stella.”
But Candice wasn’t sure if she remembered Stella just then.
“Candice wants to play you some music,” Frank said brightly. He seemed to be used to his mother being like this.
Frank gestured for Candice to put the record in the record player. She did, focusing on her breathing as she set everything up. When she finally put the needle down, she hurried to the chair in the corner and waited. The crackling began, and then Stella and Sally began to sing.
For a few seconds, Frank’s mother frowned, listening. “It’s country western,” she said.
“You love country western,” Frank said.
Candice wondered if this first song about Mountain Dreams was the same song his mother had been singing a couple of weeks back. But Frank made no indication of that.
“I recognize it,” his mother said then.
Candice’s heart shot into her throat. Her instincts told her to let Frank handle this.
“Do you? Do you know the singer?”
“Know her?” His mother’s eyes widened. “She was the talk of the island when she got here. Nobody knew what to make of her. She was such a little ragamuffin. And that voice! She sounded like she’d crawled out of some honky-tonk in Alabama or something like that.”
Candice squeezed her hands together. Was she talking about Stella? Stella Vanberg? It didn’t make sense. Stella Vanberg was a renowned philanthropist and millionaire. She was the sort of woman who knew about fine dining and haute couture. How could both versions of Stella ever have existed?
The first song ended, and the next began. Frank’s mother started tapping her feet happily. She mouthed a few of the words, as though she’d heard this one many times.
“Mom, what did you say about Stella coming to the island?” Frank asked, pushing things. “I thought she was born on the island. I thought she was from here.”
His mother threw her head back. “That’s what she wanted everyone to believe. She didn’t let anyone say a thing about her past. Well, that idea might have come from someone else.”
“What idea?” Candice asked.
Frank’s mother answered, “The idea to hide it all away. To change her story. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Frank and Candice locked eyes. Candice couldn’t fathom this.
“Someone else might have told her to keep it hushed?” Frank asked. “Maybe her husband? Wasn’t his name Ben? Ben Winthrop?”
Again, his mother laughed. “No, no. The woman who owned the Harbor House. It was her idea. I’m almost sure of it.” She tapped her foot more exuberantly, as though very pleased.
Candice’s shoulders fell forward. Clearly, his mother was still confused. Stella had owned the Harbor House.
Frank filled this in for her. “Stella Vanberg owned the Harbor House, right?”
“What? No,” his mother said. “She took over afterward. After she took the name. Vanberg, Vanberg. It was always a Vanberg house. Everybody knows that. But Stella was no Vanberg.”
Candice couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Was she a McGee?”
“I don’t know a thing about it. Like I said, we were told to drop it,” Frank’s mother said. “That was made very clear to all of us!” She laughed.
Candice’s thoughts raced. It was impossible to know how these pieces fit together or to know if his mother had told herself a story that didn’t exist. But one thing was clear: his mother knew these songs.
They took her deep into the past. They made her smile, too, so much so that they decided to leave the album with her that evening so that she could listen to it again and again.
“I love this one, Frank!” His mother cried as they said goodbye.
Frank stopped a nurse on the way out to make sure someone could flip the record over again and again for as long as she wanted. “I’m worried she’ll forget how,” he explained.
The nurse said she’d take care of it. “But I imagine with a gadget that old, like a record player, she’ll remember. She’ll always remember. It’s strange the way those older things come back to them.”
Frank gave the nurse a quizzical look, then thanked her and led Candice into the late afternoon. For a while, they stood in the sunlight, gazing out at the water. Candice felt as though they’d just witnessed something incredible. It was as though they’d watched his mother go back through time.
“I think I need a drink,” Frank said.
“Me too,” Candice agreed.
They drove to downtown Oak Bluffs, where they grabbed seats in the sunshine at a craft beer brewery.
Candice ordered a cider, while Frank opted for an IPA.
They could hardly speak till they’d had their first sips.
Candice was incredibly aware of Frank’s body, of the way he smelled, of the way his muscles surged out of his shirt.
Abstractly, she wondered if her marriage was over.
She wondered who would say it was over first.
“I don’t know what to make of this,” he said. “I can’t imagine what you’re feeling.”
Candice sipped her cider. “I’m feeling like my mother’s a mystery to me.”
“It’s strange how little our parents tell us about their past,” Frank said. “But this seems extreme.”
“Your mother said mine crawled out of a honky-tonk,” Candice remembered, then laughed. “Imagine my mother—Stella Vanberg—anywhere near a honky-tonk!”
“I can’t imagine it,” Frank admitted. “Your mother was always so grand and sophisticated.”
“But she sometimes had this accent,” Candice remembered, thinking of what Henry had said. “She always dismissed it, but she had her reasons for it. But Lindsey, Henry, and I remember it.”
“She couldn’t drop the accent entirely,” Frank said. “She couldn’t abandon her past completely.”
Candice sighed. “I hope we didn’t put your mother through something awful just now.”
“Are you kidding? I think she had the time of her life,” he said. “I should have been listening to music with her the entire time. It gets her going.”
“It really does.”
Candice and Frank sat in silence for a moment, regarding one another. Candice had a flashing image of what had to have been their first date—decades ago—when they’d drunk milkshakes and giggled. They’d been so nervous. What had they been nervous about? They’d had nothing to lose.
“I hope you can find out about your mother’s past,” Frank said.
“I hope your mother can keep more of her past,” Candice offered.
“It’s terrifying,” Frank said. “The idea of losing your memories.”
Candice nodded. “Truly, it is.”
“But I can’t stop thinking about how your mother wanted to get rid of her memories. She wanted to get rid of her past. She built an entirely different narrative,” Frank said.
“It was more possible back then, I guess,” Candice said.
“No internet histories. No data centers,” Frank agreed.
They laughed.
“Who would you rebrand as right now?” Candice asked.
Frank considered this. “New name? New identity? New career?”
“Everything has to be different,” Candice said.
Frank thought for a moment. “Maybe I’d be a Frenchman named Pierre who baked bread all day.”
“Oh! That’s wonderful,” Candice said. “Maybe I’d be an Italian sommelier.”
“Name?”
Candice considered this. “Do you have one in mind?”
“You look like Candice Vanberg to me,” Frank said, smiling. “It’s hard for me to play along, because I want you to stay the way you are.”
Candice felt a blush crawl up her neck.
She could sense it, now that they were really flirting with one another.
She knew it was inappropriate, and she had to get out of there.
She changed the subject to something inane, something they could talk about over this one drink before leaving.
She could see he was disappointed, but he also understood.
When they finished, he paid for her drink, and they went their separate ways—Candice back to the Harbor House, and Frank back into his life.
When Candice pulled through the gates of the Harbor House, she was buzzing from the day.
She couldn’t wait to share with Henry and Lindsey what she’d learned.
But that was when she spotted them: Sarah and Peter, down by the water, glistening in the moonlight.
Beside them was a man she might have recognized anywhere.
It was their father. It was Nathan. He raised a hand and smiled at her, as though he’d been here, waiting for her for hours.
All thoughts of Stella McGee or Stella Vanberg fell away. Candice got out of the car and walked down to the beach, where she fell into the arms of her husband. He’d come back for her. He’d come back for his kids. And nothing else could really matter just then.