Chapter 2
Of all the hard things I had to do after Arnaud died, the hardest was to explain to our daughter what had happened.
I remember sitting on the edge of her small starter bed that morning, watching her sleep.
How round and tender and innocent her cheeks were, how unbearable to know that I was watching the last innocent minutes of her life.
I remember wanting to sit there forever and never do this awful thing—the worst thing you could do to a four-year-old girl.
I remember thinking that maybe I didn’t have to do it.
Maybe I could tell her that her father had gone away, that he was sick, that he was working.
Anything but the truth. The truth is such a terrible thing to give to a child. To anybody.
But eventually the dawn muscled its way through the crack between the curtains. It’s remarkable how the sun can exploit such a narrow weakness to fill the room with light. Punkin’s eyelashes fluttered like the wings of a pair of butterflies and opened wide.
“Why are you sad, Mama?” she said.
And I knew that I couldn’t lie to her. Once you lie to someone about something so important, you can’t ever get back to the truth between you. So I smoothed back her hair from her face and said, “I’m sad because something bad happened to your father last night.”
—
For some reason, this scene returns to me as I shake all the hands at the reception in the parish house.
You worry and worry about what it does to a kid, losing her father when she’s practically a baby, and there she stands next to you at your own father’s funeral.
Shaking each hand in turn, serene as a queen.
Sedge Peabody offers me a big dry palm and draws me in for a kiss on one cheek, which I awkwardly screw up by going for two and ending up on his lips. I hope the girlfriend isn’t watching.
“Sorry! Still in French mode,” I say.
He laughs once. “No worries. I’m sorry for your loss, though, Lucy. Truly.”
“Thanks. Thank you. I appreciate your coming.”
He keeps hold of my hand between both of his.
He wears his hot preppy vibe with the same ease as ever—dark curling hair, sturdy sailor shoulders beneath a navy suit jacket.
“I ran into your dad at the Mo just a couple of weeks ago,” he says.
“He told me how you were coming to stay with him for the winter. Picking up Emily’s maternity leave at the school, right?
He was so excited about it. I mean, beaming.
This is just crazy we’re standing here right now.
So…inexplicable. I can’t imagine how devastating this must be for you. ”
“And me,” says Punkin. “I’m his granddaughter, and I never even got to meet him!”
Sedge looks down and holds out his hand. “You must be Elise. I’m deeply sorry for your loss too.”
Punkin places her palm in his and says, “Enchantée, Mr. Peabody. You may call me Punkin.”
“Punkin.” He kisses her knuckles. “Honored. What did you think of the service? I thought your mom gave a great speech.”
“Honestly, I liked the other one better.” Punkin’s still wearing her Jackie O sunglasses, which make her look like an enormous talking housefly. “He was funny.”
“That was my uncle,” says Sedge. “He does like to make people laugh.”
“How’s Laura?” I blurt out.
Sedge straightens and turns to me. “Laura. Laura is great, thank you for asking. She’s sorry she couldn’t make it. She’s out of the country right now.”
“Out of the country. Wow. A work trip?”
He smiles. “No. She’s a math teacher, believe it or not.
Or was. But she decided to give herself a gap year.
Take a sabbatical. Quit her job, flew to South America.
Rio, the Andes. Working her way down to Patagonia, she says.
Then I think she’s signed up for one of those Antarctic expedition penguin things. ”
“Amazing,” I say. “Good for her.”
He meets my gaze. “But she told me to pass on her condolences.”
“That’s nice of her. Please tell her hello from me.”
“I sure will.” Sedge’s face lights up. “Audrey! There you are. Lucy—my girlfriend, Audrey.”
The blonde steps into view, sporting a pair of snatched cheekbones and an expression of wary goodwill. “Lucy,” she says. “Audrey Fisher. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
—
On the way back home, up West Cliff Road toward Dad’s house at the private end of the island, Punkin wants to talk about all the people we saw.
“Mr. Peabody was nice. I like him. Did you used to be friends with him?”
“Kind of,” I tell her. “I was best friends with his sister Laura.”
“Are you friends with her now?”
“No, honey. We lost touch a long time ago.”
“Why did you break up?” she asks seriously.
We pass the guardhouse that marks the border of the Winthrop Island Association.
I wave hello to Gary, on duty. He’s about seventy years old and has occupied that guard shack since the year Reagan was first elected.
He waves back. I don’t know if it’s me he recognizes or my dad’s thirty-year-old Volvo station wagon.
“Oh, you know,” I say. “Friend stuff. We had a fight, I guess, and then I never went back for the summer after that.”
“How old were you?”
“I had just turned eighteen.”
“What was the fight about?” she asks.
“It was about some boy,” I tell her. “We liked the same boy. Kinda stupid, really.”
Punkin sighs. “I don’t want to be a teenager.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s pretty much the worst thing other than never being a teenager.”
—
When Punkin and I arrived at Windward late yesterday evening, I was a little surprised at the mess.
Dad was always a little accumulative in his habits, a little addicted to clutter, but this was excessive.
Piles of papers spilling out of caramelized manila folders.
Ancient copies of Town serious and whimsical; road atlases and walking guides; maps of the land and maps of the sea, all jumbled together in no particular order.
I remember Dad showing me how to fold a map exactly the way you found it, with due regard for the creases.
A map is like a crystal ball, Lucy, he said.
A window into another world. Treat it with care to make sure that others can find their way after you.
Apparently, he had lost his touch.
“Tell you what,” I said to Punkin. “Let’s go upstairs and see if we can find a pair of clean beds. We’ll tackle this mess in the morning.”
The stairs creaked in their familiar way as I led her up to the second floor.
The staircase had been missing part of a banister since an altercation between my parents ended in Dad heaving the marital bed over the landing—the literal bombshell, you might say, that tore through the house when my mother announced she was leaving him for a French count.
For whatever reason, my father never did replace that section of banister.
My room was exactly as I left it twelve years ago, except coated in sedimentary layers of dust and dead bugs.
I hadn’t had time to tidy up on that final morning in late July.
I’d thrown a summer’s worth of clothes and toiletries in a suitcase and carry-on and rushed out the door, and everything else remained in place like one of those photographs of houses abandoned in wartime.
The towel I’d taken to the beach that morning still hung from the back of the chair, speckled with mildew.
The canvas tote with the sunscreen. On the little brown desk sat the stack of books I’d checked out of the Winthrop Island Library in July 2012 for my summer reading.
Punkin wrinkled her nose. “Is this where I’m going to sleep?”
“I think it’s going to need a good cleaning first, honey,” I told her. “We’ll sleep in the guest room tonight.”
—
But that was yesterday. Now it’s time to excavate the mess my dad left behind.
I shower swiftly in the scary bathroom, so stained and unlit you expect a psycho knife to part the curtain at any point, and pull on a pair of old, soft yoga pants and a sweatshirt.
The washing machine still works, thank God, and so does the hot water. I find a bottle of Tide that bears a peeling price sticker from the Winthrop General Store and an expiration date three and a half years ago. I strip all the beds and run the linens on a hot cycle.
While the machine’s running, I rummage out a bottle of vinegar and a bucket and rags to purge twelve years’ worth of grime from the surfaces of my old bedroom while Punkin kneels beside me, scrubbing earnestly.
“Why does Grandad have so much stuff?” she asks. “I thought he was broke, like us.”
“We’re not broke, exactly. And Grandad—well, I don’t know. He has this house. That’s worth a lot of money. The land it’s on, anyway.”
“Where did he get the house if he’s broke?”
“From his parents. His parents had a lot of money that they got from their parents, who built this house to begin with, about a hundred years ago. And the thing about Grandad, he’s very smart, but he’s not good with money.
He’s not—well, it’s kind of hard to explain, honey.
He didn’t want to work at a bank, like Uncle Sadiq”—this is Pandora and Cecily and Calliope’s father, who refuses to be called Dad or Grandad by his stepfamily, so we settled on Uncle Sadiq—“and he didn’t want to be a lawyer or a doctor or a businessman or anything like that.
He just wanted to read books and write about things. ”
Punkin thinks about this. “But he got money from his parents.”
“Well, he spent that. Not all at once. But he used to have a boat, and he belonged to the Club, and all these things cost money. Then you need to eat and drive and repair your house. And he was married to Grandmère, and she likes nice things. Plus taxes. Taxes are a lot. So he ran out of money, and he wasn’t making any money, so… yeah.”
“Is that why he decided to die? Right before we came? Because he was embarrassed about being broke?”
“We don’t know for sure he decided to die, honey. It might have been an accident.”
“But you said he didn’t like to swim.”
“I don’t know, honey. It doesn’t make much sense to me, to be honest. He seemed so excited about us coming.
” I sit up on my knees and take in a deep, slow breath.
“I should have taken you to meet him sooner, honey. He knew a lot about a lot of things, and he had interesting ideas, and I wish…I wish he…”
Punkin sits up and pats me on the knee. “It’s okay, Mama. You can be sad.”
“Thank you, honey. I am sad.”
She puts her small arms around my shoulders. “Now we both don’t have dads.”
—
The kitchen, as you might imagine, has not been updated in some time.
The same white Frigidaire murmurs in the corner; the Magic Chef range hulks along one wall like an enamel beast, scarred with burnt grease.
She would’ve been a beaut in her day, I told Punkin last night, while we were unloading the groceries we’d brought over from the mainland.
Now Punkin calls every old thing a beaut—the Volvo station wagon, the Hotpoint washing machine.
By five o’clock, I’m too exhausted to cook dinner. I make peanut butter sandwiches and sit with Punkin at the same square chrome-rimmed table where I used to sit with Dad, eating peanut butter sandwiches.
The fridge lets out a giant gurgling sigh.
“She’s a beaut,” says Punkin.
A book sits next to her plate. Punkin always has a book with her.
“Whatcha reading?” I ask.
She holds it up for me.
Thick old clothbound volume. Library sticker on the spine.
A True History of the Career and Murderous Crimes of the Dread Pirate Ned Ramsay, Including a Detailed Account of His Fatal Final Voyage, by a Member of His Crew.
On the spine is a peeling Dewey Decimal sticker, covered and recovered with Scotch tape.
“Are you serious? You’re reading this?”
“It’s interesting,” she says, a little defensive.
“That’s all I need. Another pirate nerd in the family.”
“What’s wrong with that? Pirates are cool.”
“Pirates are not cool,” I tell her. “Pirates were murderers and thieves. They did awful things. They hurt people and killed people for the fun of it. And the worst thing they did was make people think they were heroes. Gullible people like you.” I wriggle her earlobe. “And your grandfather.”
“Why did he like pirates so much?” she asks.
“Oh, honey. Because he thought there was treasure buried here. Left behind by a long-ago pirate. This guy.” I touch the cover of the book. “According to Grandad, anyway. He was sure it was going to make us rich.”
“But he never found it.”
I roll my eyes around the shabby, cluttered room. “What makes you think that?”
She hugs the book to her chest. “Still. Wouldn’t it be fun if we found it, Mama? Then we’d be rich.”
I cover my face with my hands. “Not you too.”
A knock snaps through the room—once, twice. I startle in my chair and turn to the front hall.
“Now why didn’t they just use the doorbell?” Punkin says.
“Probably because it’s one of his friends, honey. Someone who knows that the doorbell hasn’t worked in twenty years.”
But when I crack open the door to check out the visitor, it’s not one of my dad’s old friends, come to offer his condolences.
It’s an enormous man in a plaid shirt and a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, bearing a squirming mutt in a pair of arms that could tear off the front door of the Volvo, just by accident.
And then—as I take in his eyes, the fringe of hair under his cap, the shape of his face beneath the unfamiliar beard—Oh, shit.
Ben.