Chapter 10
July 2004 - Nantucket Island
It wasn’t until week two of Hilary’s time on Nantucket that she fully realized Rodrick had been right. She was lonely. But she couldn’t admit it to anyone. There was no one around to tell.
It was three o’clock in the morning, and she was up and pacing the living room that still smelled, impossibly, like her mother. Her mother hadn’t been to Nantucket in years. It felt like some kind of cruel trick. A storm raged outside, the winds ripping against the big house, and a fire roared in the fireplace, its vitriol matching hers.
Rodrick had begun filming the Shakespeare retelling in San Francisco just last week. If she were there, rather than here, she would be surrounded by actors and actresses, makeup artists, and designers. She would be having conversations about plot and character, about scenes, about costumes. She would be hemming a pair of trousers or fighting with an actress about what she needed her to wear. Ultimately, she would think about other things besides herself, her mother, and her broken heart.
That was the thing about marriage, wasn’t it? You had to learn to admit when you were wrong. Hilary and Rodrick had been married fifteen years already. But there were always new kinks to work out. New dramas. That was life.
It was only midnight in San Francisco, so Hilary took a chance and called Rodrick’s hotel. It rang and rang and rang, but nobody answered. This wasn’t entirely a surprise. Rodrick often stayed out late with the other producers or the director, hanging around San Francisco, drinking and eating exquisite Asian food. That was another thing: Hilary had no appetite, and she wasn’t sure when she’d find it again. Everything tasted like sand, even the freshest fish she purchased from the fish market. She was painfully jealous of what she imagined to be Rodrick’s ravenous appetite. She could picture his platters of food.
By morning, Hilary convinced herself to fly back to California and stay with Rodrick in San Francisco. What else could she do? She would apologize to him for being so cold, for not accepting his love, and for blocking him out. She packed her suitcases and called the airline to book herself an immediate flight, watching the seagulls purr through the ocean winds as the phone rang. This was the right thing. Rodrick was her family. He loved her. And she loved him.
“Good morning. This is San Francisco Airlines. Isabelle speaking. How may I help you?”
Hilary froze. She was speechless.
“Excuse me? Is anyone there?”
What were the chances that the woman’s name was Isabelle?
Hilary stuttered. She felt like she’d been punched.
“Would you like to book a flight? Do you have a question?” Isabelle, the airline operator, asked. She didn’t show a shred of annoyance, which was proof she wasn’t in any way related to the real Isabella. The woman who still had a death grip on Hilary’s life.
She suddenly heard her mother’s voice in her head. You really think Rodrick will take you back after this? He thinks you’re pathetic.
Hilary hung up the phone and let out a primal scream. She imagined that the windows rattled, that the house shivered in its foundation. But the reality was far different. Not a single person heard her. She didn’t affect the world at all.
She now allowed herself to imagine a different reality awaiting her in San Francisco. She pictured herself locked away in Rodrick’s hotel room while he gallivanted across the city. She imagined trying to work in the costuming department even though another head costumer had been hired.
She was too late.
Hilary brought her suitcases back to her mother’s bedroom and removed a pair of shorts, a tank top, and her tennis shoes. It was a clear, warm day. She felt doomed to mummify in that house if she didn’t feel the sunshine on her skin.
Hilary started walking down the beach. She had a water bottle and a book in her backpack, but she was underfed and underslept, and she was very aware that she wouldn’t make it long. Still, she strode on, the muscles in her legs screaming for fuel. She remembered that when her mother was trying to lose weight for a role in the early eighties, her doctor had prescribed her speed. Speed! Times had changed so much. Hilary let out a sob and collapsed onto a long log facing the ocean. It was a different breed than the Pacific, angrier and colder. She loved its darkness. It suited her.
As tears striped her cheeks, Hilary considered what she could do with herself. How could she spend her days? How could she heal? She’d once craved days by herself, days of thinking and reading. Now, they felt torturous.
From far down the beach came the sound of a barking dog. Hilary stiffened and gazed out over the sands as a golden retriever swept toward her. The dog leaped into the air just in the nick of time to nab a red Frisbee, then cut around to return it to the owner. The woman who took the Frisbee back was dressed in a sports bra and running shorts, and her blond hair whipped out behind her like a flag.
Having been around film and stories for so long, Hilary immediately imagined what her backstory could be. Maybe she was a professional dog trainer. Perhaps she was a surfer. She certainly had the hair for it. Maybe she was on the run from the law and had built a little beach shelter for herself on the other side of this bluff. Probably not. But anything was possible if you imagined it.
Not long afterward, the woman was close enough for Hilary to see the strain on her face. Just like Hilary, she was crying. Hilary stood with surprise. It had been so long since she’d seen someone who echoed her own sorrow. It was like seeing a moose in the wild.
The woman stopped walking, too. The dog whipped around her in circles, eyes on the Frisbee, aching for her to throw it again. But the woman just looked at Hilary, just as awestruck as Hilary felt.
Hilary asked, “Are you all right?” Her voice nearly disappeared in the wind.
The other woman laughed through her tears. “Are you?”
“That’s a complicated question.”
“Same,” the woman said.
The woman took a step toward Hilary, and Hilary surprised herself by gesturing toward her log. “Do you want to sit down for a second?”
The woman walked barefoot through the sand and planted herself on the log beside Hilary. The dog hurried forward, pink tongue lolling, and collapsed in front of them, facing the ocean. Hilary petted the dog’s head, then stroked it all the way down its back.
“Beautiful,” she breathed, a frog still in her throat.
“His name is Jasper,” the woman said.
“Handsome,” Hilary corrected.
The woman smiled. Hilary guessed she was a little bit younger than Hilary, maybe thirty. You were not too young to understand the weight of the world and the ways in which it disappointed you.
For a minute or two, Hilary and the stranger cried quietly and watched the water. The pressure on Hilary’s chest dissipated just a bit. For the moment, her loneliness was gone.
It was her first opportunity to speak to someone who wasn’t the woman who worked at the grocery store or the maid her mother had hired to clean the Nantucket house. She told herself to take advantage of it.
“Where are you walking to?” Hilary asked.
“I don’t know. I’m walking aimlessly. You?”
“Same. But I’ve never come this far down the beach. It feels like I’ve been walking for hours.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Siasconset,” Hilary said.
Her eyes widened. She clearly knew that Siasconset was where the ultra-rich of the island lived. Hilary wondered if she recognized her for having Isabella Helin’s face. But right now, it was blotchy and tear-soaked. She probably looked like Isabella”s very distant cousin at best.
“And you?” Hilary asked.
“I live back there,” the woman said, gesturing vaguely behind her. “In a little house. It’s enough for Jasper and me.”
“Are you an islander?”
“I am,” the woman said. “Born and raised.”
“It must have been paradise,” Hilary said.
“It was. Until it wasn’t.” The woman shrugged.
Hilary’s heart pounded. She resisted the urge to pull out her trauma and compare it to the stranger’s.
“My name is Stella,” the woman said, stretching her hand to shake Hilary’s.
“Hilary.”
Stella smiled serenely. Her tears had dried into salty streaks. “I haven’t spoken to anyone in a week or two. I feel like an alien.”
Hilary laughed. “I was thinking the same thing about myself.”
“What? You look like a movie star,” Stella said. “Not like an alien at all.”
“Movie stars probably feel like aliens a lot of the time,” Hilary said, from experience.
“I guess you’re right.” Stella chewed her lower lip for a moment and dug her toes into the sand.
“You can tell me,” Hilary said suddenly, surprising herself. “Whatever’s on your mind. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. Maybe we could help each other.”
Stella’s eyes sparkled. “You don’t live around here, do you?”
“I sometimes spend summers here. That’s it.” Hilary shrugged. She didn’t explain that she might stick around this time. She felt her life in Los Angeles drying up.
“You’re the perfect person to talk to,” Stella said. “You’d probably forget all my secrets immediately.”
“Do you want me to forget them?”
Stella considered this. “I want to return to how things were five years ago. I don’t want to have so many secrets. I want to be carefree and twenty-four again.”
“But do you really think you were carefree when you were twenty-four?” Hilary asked.
Stella raised her shoulders. “I wasn’t so alone back then.”
Hilary understood what she meant. Although she felt her mother’s angry shadow behind every year of her life, she’d had someone to come home to up till now. She’d had someone to eat dinner with. She’d listened to someone breathing through the night.
“Where are you from?” Stella asked, situating them back in the realm of “normal conversations between strangers.”
“Los Angeles,” Hilary said.
“Wow. Exotic.”
“Not if you’re from there.”
Jasper jumped up from the sand and pointed his nose toward the ocean, sniffing frantically. Hilary and Stella watched him until he dropped back down and panted. It was a false alarm.
“So you weren’t carefree at twenty-four?” Stella asked.
“I still expected something magical to happen in my life,” Hilary said. “But now, I’m thirty-five, and I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed. Normal things have happened. Devastating things have happened. I find it harder and harder to face every morning as myself. I wonder, sometimes, if I should start over with a new name. Maybe I could get enough plastic surgery to make a brand-new face.”
Stella punched Hilary lightly on the arm. “Don’t change your face. It’s the most gorgeous thing I’ve seen in weeks.”
Hilary’s chest was warm. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a heart-to-heart with another woman. It felt like discovering gravity.