Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Nora was invited on another sailing trip at the beginning of August. The babysitter, Stacy, was back at her post, leaving Nora’s days without the kids sun-bleached and formless.
She couldn’t very well tell her uncle that she didn’t want to spend an entire day with him and his wealthy, awful friends.
She couldn’t show how little she’d begun to care about their wealth and their connections.
Besides, she wasn’t always sure how she felt.
A big part of her still wanted to go to Harvard one day.
She still wanted to have an illustrious career in magazines.
She hated that she wanted so much. Of this, she never spoke to Max. She knew he wouldn’t understand it.
Since she’d revealed the fact of Mona’s parentage to Max, things between them had been strained again. Max was often in his head, asking for more and more time to himself.
On the morning of the sailing trip, Nora met Uncle Everett aboard his sailboat. Because she’d been sailing a few more times with Max and his friends, she impressed Uncle Everett with her skills, remembering what ropes to pull and how to manipulate the sails to get them where they wanted to go.
“You’ve got sea legs, my niece!” Uncle Everett called, smiling.
Nora flashed him a smile. With just the two of them on board, she searched her gut for some sense that she was frightened of him. But the truth was, she didn’t think he’d do anything to hurt her. She wasn’t a threat to his way of life.
When they reached Nantucket Harbor, they met Uncle Everett’s friends, including Ollie and several others who’d been on the boat last time.
Their girlfriends were largely different.
Nora guessed that they’d broken up with them weeks ago, swapping them out for other models.
As Nora watched them pop champagne, she wondered if being an adult meant being this nihilistic.
She hoped not. When Ollie greeted her, she smiled at him and thanked him again for the internship.
He grinned. “You’re a perfect new member of the crew! ”
It was then that she saw the last person to come aboard.
It was Hank, white-toothed Hank, who’d driven off with Aunt Cynthia that night so many weeks ago.
Uncle Everett came over to shake Hank’s hand.
“Welcome to the crew, my man,” Everett said.
“Everyone, this is Hank! Hank, this is everyone.” Someone handed Hank a glass of bubbly champagne.
Nora suddenly felt sick to her stomach. As Hank settled in, chatting up one of the girlfriends, she wondered if she’d found herself in the midst of a deathtrap for Hank.
It reminded her of the situation with Max’s father—how he’d been taken out on the boat and they’d been able to fake his drowning.
She wondered why Uncle Everett had invited her out today.
Would having a minor aboard make the accident seem more legitimate?
With an awful jolt in her gut, she realized her uncle thought she was stupid. He was using her as a pawn.
“Are you seasick?” Ollie asked her. “You’re green!”
Nora shook her head. She gazed longingly at the shore, which was already two football fields away. She wished she could beam her thoughts out to Max. She wished she could tell him that she was in trouble and needed him here.
She wasn’t sure if she could save Hank’s life. She wasn’t sure if she was strong enough.
For the next hour, Nora remained in a state of perpetual shock.
She tried her best to feign having a good time.
She felt her fake, awful smile. She felt her laughter bubbling through her.
She drank a glass of champagne followed by another, then felt so woozy that she thought she really might throw up.
She wasn’t cut out for this world! One of the girlfriends, who introduced herself as Rhonda, guided her to the bathroom below deck and asked her if she was dating one of the men on deck.
Nora shook her head and said Everett was her uncle.
She asked Rhonda, “Are these guys dangerous?”
Rhonda raised her eyebrows. “Dangerous? All rich men are dangerous, honey.” She got her some water and demanded she drink it. Nora did, then felt a little bit better. She felt clear.
Rhonda led her back to the deck, where Nora blinked through the astonishing sunlight to find her Uncle Everett, standing far too close to Hank.
Everett’s palm was flat on Hank’s chest, and he seemed to be talking to him in a low, menacing way.
Nora’s heart shattered. She was sure she knew what would happen next.
Her uncle would throw Hank overboard and leave him for dead. She couldn’t let that happen.
Crying out, like a heroine in a film, Nora sped toward Hank.
“Don’t do this, Uncle Everett!” She was going to stop another murder from happening.
And when they got back to the mainland, she’d tell the police what her uncle was up to.
She’d tell them that he needed to be persecuted for the murder of Max’s father as well.
As she shot across the deck, she imagined herself on the news, being interviewed about her involvement in cornering her uncle.
Just because her uncle was rich didn’t mean he could get away with whatever he wanted.
But before Nora made it to where Hank and Uncle Everett stood, she tripped on a cooler filled with champagne and ice.
Dramatically, horribly, she flipped to the side, smashed her spine against the railing, then flipped overboard.
She landed in the ocean with an awful splash.
Panic came over her. She could do nothing but float.
There was a tingling in her arms and legs.
Something told her that she couldn’t swim.
Slowly, she sank into the water, her heart pounding. The light above her dimmed.
Vaguely, she heard cries of alarm. Next came a crash into the water.
A man swam toward her, a man she recognized as Hank.
Gently, supporting her neck and back, he swam her to the surface, where he supported her, talking to her in a soft voice.
“It’s going to be okay,” he told her. “Keep breathing for me, will you? Keep your eyes to the sky.”
Things were foggy after that. Nora remembered there was a speedboat, EMT workers bobbing in the water beside her, and a stretcher.
Everything was bright blue, red, and yellow.
She flitted in and out of consciousness, which felt like only a blessing.
She didn’t want to think about how much she’d embarrassed herself.
But a part of her wondered if she’d saved Hank’s life by going into the water instead? She wasn’t sure if she’d ever know.
When Nora came to, she was in a hospital bed, a private and swanky one with a beautiful view of the Nantucket Sound.
She was so hopped up on painkillers that she struggled to put together the pieces of what had happened.
She couldn’t move her head to look at anything but the window and the end of her feet.
“She’s awake,” her aunt said. Her tone was strained, as though she’d been crying. She went to the end of Nora’s bed and waved. “Hi, honey. How do you feel?”
Nora ached with the horror of all this. She willed herself to go back to the beginning, back to spring, when she’d been living in New Hampshire, and her parents were alive.
“Honey, your back is broken,” her aunt said gently. “The doctors think you’ll make a full recovery, but things are very delicate right now. You’ll have to be in bed for a long time.”
Maybe because a “long time” to a sixteen-year-old felt like forever, Nora began to cry.
She remembered the version of herself who’d run around Nantucket with Max and realized that that version was now dead, how she ached to see him!
What if Max didn’t know where to find her? What if he thought she’d abandoned him?
She couldn’t tell her aunt to reach out to Max, either, because of what had happened to her ex-lover, his father. Her chest heaved, but her aunt told her to calm down. She couldn’t hurt her back anymore with heavy weeping.
“Where’s Uncle Everett?” Nora asked when she got up the energy to speak.
“He’s at home,” Aunt Cynthia explained. “He was here before, but he had to tend to some things. He feels awful about what happened. He says you tripped? That you were nauseous?”
Nora remembered that she’d been sick because of Hank, because of how sure she’d been that he would die.
“I hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened,” Aunt Cynthia said. “Accidents happen.”
Nora was surprised at how tender her aunt was, just now. It almost reminded her of her mother. Almost.
For more than a week, Nora was trapped in that hospital bed.
Her only visitor was her aunt, as her health was very important, and the kids were deemed “too chaotic” to enter the hospital room.
Nora spent all day and all night like a horizontal statue.
She couldn’t read. Eventually, her aunt and uncle brought in a television, and she watched whatever was on and whatever the nurses selected for her.
Nora thought she would go insane with boredom.
A part of her wondered if she’d invented Max in her head, if he’d never existed. Maybe everything from her past was just a dream she’d had after her injury.
Who was she? What would happen to her next?
She was sure that Nantucket High School was about to start the year. When she asked her aunt about school, her aunt laughed and said, “We’ll get to that when you can sit back up in bed again. You should take it as a win! No algebra for you. Nothing boring. You’re free.”
But freedom was not what Nora was.
It wasn’t till midway through August that Nora realized something else was wrong. It had been a few days since Aunt Cynthia had visited her, which felt bizarre. She and Aunt Cynthia had never had the best relationship, but Aunt Cynthia had made a habit of showing up for her.
Toward the end of visiting hours on August 14, Max appeared at the end of her bed. Nora was so panicked, so surprised, that she nearly forgot herself and tried to reach out for him.
“Don’t move,” Max said gently, wrapping his hand around one of her ankles. Love and fear and tenderness echoed from his eyes. “Oh, Nora.”
Nora began to cry. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen him since before the accident. She couldn’t believe that she’d made up her mind that he wasn’t real.
“Shh,” Max whispered. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” He came over beside her and kissed her cheek, sweeping her hair behind her ear. She felt disgusting and ugly. But he kissed her, as though she was beautiful and could still walk.
“Oh, Max,” she sobbed. “Max, I thought he was going to kill him. I panicked and went overboard. I’m an idiot. I don’t know what to do with myself.”
Max held her for a long time, letting her cry it out. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “You’re going to be okay.” She knew that he didn’t know this to be true. But he had to say it.
She had to find a way to believe it, she guessed. However, she wasn’t sure how.
“I didn’t know where you were at first,” Max said.
“I was sick about it. I’d heard about the accident, and I didn’t know if you were alive or what had happened.
Finally, I came to the hospital to see you, but they wouldn’t let me come up.
They told me only two people were allowed: your aunt and uncle.
I freaked out and yelled. This obviously didn’t help. ”
Nora frowned. “Did you sneak in today?”
“No. Things have changed.” Max’s voice was somber, shadowed.
Nora pulsated with fear. “What happened?”
Max hesitated. “Your uncle died. Two days ago.”
Nora had to remind herself not to move. She wanted to leap out of bed. “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.”
“Shh,” Max said. “Calm down.”
But how could Nora be calm?
Max explained what he knew. Uncle Everett had been out sailing with a friend.
There had been a freak accident, and he’d died instantly.
The friend had sailed the boat back to the harbor.
“Nobody really understands how the accident happened,” Max said.
“But there are rumors about who the friend was.”
Nora couldn’t breathe. She knew the answer before Max said it.
“It was Hank,” she said. It had to be.
Max nodded. “I think he knew Everett was out to get him and wanted to take him out first. But there’s no way to prove it, obviously. It’s all been an enormous scandal. Nobody on the island knows what to do.”
“And my aunt? Have you seen my aunt?” Nora asked. She wondered how the children were taking this, if they were brokenhearted about the loss of a man they hadn’t really known.
But suddenly, there was movement, a shuffling. Nora couldn’t see what was going on.
“You aren’t supposed to be up here.” Aunt Cynthia’s voice was tense.
Max moved away from Nora, clearly panicked. “Hello, Mrs. Greenaway. I’m terribly sorry. Nora’s a friend of mine. I wanted to make sure she was all right.”
“She’s fine,” Aunt Cynthia shot back. “You need to get out of here. Family only.”
Max was quiet and unmoving. It was only when Cynthia threatened him with security that he touched Nora’s hand, muttered that he’d see her soon, and got out of there.
Nora hated to see him go. But she was even more frightened to see her Aunt Cynthia scowling down at her from the end of her feet.
She looked unwashed and underslept and terribly angry, as though whatever plan she and Uncle Everett had put into place had soured. Had she wanted Hank dead instead?
Nora felt sick with these awful games.
“I assume you’ve heard about your uncle,” Aunt Cynthia said sternly.
Nora tried the first tactic she thought of. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. What a tragedy.”
Aunt Cynthia didn’t soften in the slightest. “I came to tell you that your circumstances will be changing,” she said.
“I can’t very well handle whatever it is you’re going through.
Just as soon as you’re able to be moved, I’ll be sending you to a physical rehab facility.
The nurses there will take care of you as you relearn how to walk and all that.
Afterward, you’ll be sent to a boarding school.
All expenses taken care of. Everything at your fingertips.
But I want to make this clear. I have no interest in building a relationship with you. You will not know my children.”
Nora blinked and blinked at her. “You’re sending me away?”
“This was only supposed to be temporary,” Aunt Cynthia cried. “I didn’t ask for any of this!” With that, she stomped out of the hospital room, leaving Nora alone once more, feeling as though a hurricane had just ripped over her.