Chapter 10
It was hours after the group therapy session, nearly nine at night, and Taylor was packed up and ready to leave.
Her finger was poised over the screen, prepared to call a taxi to pick her up and take her away from here.
She’d decided that she’d get a hotel in town, then take a ferry to the mainland.
Maybe she’d spend a little time in New York City.
Maybe she’d fly across the Atlantic after that—head to Spain or something.
It wasn’t that Jason and his new girlfriend owned Spain.
She could go there. She could go anywhere!
But she couldn’t stay at the Harbor House a moment more.
She’d been stupid to think she could come here.
For the first couple of days, she’d hidden herself away, trying and failing to draw up the strength to join the others.
She’d taken her meals in her room. She’d written line after line in a journal that Gwen had given her.
Mostly, she’d written: It’s all my fault.
It’s all my fault. But she didn’t know what she meant by that.
Finally, when she’d entered that group therapy session and sat down, she’d found herself falling gently into the other women’s stories. She’d found herself relearning to breathe. She’d actually thought, Maybe there is something to this group therapy thing. Maybe it’ll heal me.
Until Casey had looked at her and said, “That one over there, that famous one, she could never understand.”
Taylor had felt it like a terrible smack.
Already this evening, Gwen had come to her room to beg her to stay. But Taylor had told her there was no use. She needed to leave, to fix herself elsewhere. Gwen had apologized, telling her, “I wanted the Harbor House to be different. Stella wanted it to be a place of comfort. A safe place.”
“It is. Probably, for most women, this will work,” Taylor had told her.
But it couldn’t be that for Taylor.
Suddenly, right before she called the taxi, right before she exited the Harbor House forever, there was a knock on the door.
Taylor sighed, sensing it was Gwen, back with another reason for her to stay.
She cracked the door, ready to tell Gwen she was heading out.
She would put on her bravest and best actress face and move on.
But instead, standing in the hallway shadows was Winona, one of the women from the group.
“Can I come in?” Winona asked, her eyes big and soulful in the dark.
Taylor was so taken aback that she just looked at her. Was she dreaming this?
“I want to say something,” Winona said, raising her chin.
Her voice wavered. Taylor remembered that Winona had spoken at group therapy.
She’d described, briefly, the devastation of losing her entire family to a house fire.
Did she want to tell Taylor that her grief was nothing compared to Winona’s?
Maybe she was right, Taylor thought. Taylor couldn’t fathom it.
“I want to say that it wasn’t right, what Casey said,” Winona offered. “You have every right to be here. Stella’s team selected us for a reason.”
Winona’s eyes flickered, and Taylor realized that she’d seen the suitcases, packed up and lined in front of the bed. “Oh, no,” Winona said, shaking her head. “You can’t go.”
“It’s for the best,” Taylor said.
Winona cupped her elbows. “Can I come in?”
Taylor didn’t know what else to do. She stepped back, allowing Winona into her space.
Exhaustion took hold of her, and she collapsed on the edge of the bed.
Winona sat, too. They studied the suitcases and listened to the spring winds across the white sands outside.
Taylor couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat in silence like this with another woman.
“Can I ask?” Winona began. “Why did you come here?”
Taylor closed her eyes. “I had a terrible winter,” she said.
“A terrible year. I hid myself away. I thought only about all the things I’d done wrong.
I thought the Harbor House would give me a new backdrop, a place to start over.
But I should have known better than that. Someone like me can’t start over.”
Winona nodded. “I think the idea of ‘starting over’ is a fiction anyway. It’s not like I want to start over, really. I don’t want to forget what happened. I don’t want to forget my children or my husband. But I want to find a way to live with my memories while making new ones.”
“You want new memories?” Taylor asked, sounding naive.
Winona looked at her. “If we’re going to live, we have to live. You know what I mean? We have to eat well. We have to celebrate the little things.”
Taylor was mystified at this woman’s strength. “Maybe I’m not ready. Maybe I’m not strong enough,” she said.
“You have to be,” Winona said, clenching her jaw.
Taylor let her gaze drop. She thought of her empty, dark future, the future that awaited her. It felt better to charge into that rather than ever seeing Casey again.
“Casey feels bad about it,” Winona said finally, as though she’d read her mind. “I heard her talking to Michelle about it. She says that she always struggles with this. She always speaks out of turn.” Winona raised her shoulders. “Nobody wants you to go, Taylor. We’re in this together.”
Suddenly, Taylor was overwhelmed by this woman’s generosity. She couldn’t imagine where Winona had found such tenderness, especially after all she’d been through. But Taylor decided to take it as a sign to stay where she was, for now. To give the Harbor House another chance.
“Let’s go for a hike tomorrow,” Winona suggested, surprising Taylor again.
“A hike?”
“Or a walk or something,” Winona backtracked. “We don’t have to talk about anything. We don’t have to ‘do the work’ that Gwen wants us to do. But we can see the island. We can put our feet in the frigid water. We can feel what it means to be outside of these walls.”
Taylor couldn’t help but think this was all foolish, that no good could come of any of this. But rather than push the kind woman off, she said, “Oh, all right. What could it hurt?”
The following morning at eight thirty, Taylor met Winona downstairs.
It was a brilliantly sunny day, without a cloud in the sky, and they set off in their tennis shoes, sweatshirts, and athletic shorts, moving rapidly, as if they both worked out regularly.
Taylor, of course, was faking it. Although she’d always kept herself trim and healthy, she hadn’t cared a lick about her health since Jason’s affair had come out, and she soon felt her breathing becoming ragged. Sweat poured down the back of her neck.
Come on, Taylor Charron. You once did a twenty-four-hour fast to drop weight for a movie role. You once trained for a marathon and ran it faster than your husband. You once lifted nearly one hundred pounds over your head! You can do a silly hike on a flat island!
But within forty-five minutes, her breathing was so rapid and erratic that she needed to stop.
She collapsed on a bench, draining her water bottle and apologizing profusely.
For some reason, she expected Winona to make fun of her or pity her in some way.
But Winona sat on the bench and drank all her water, too.
When they finally looked at one another, they burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” Winona said. “I was racing hard, trying to keep up with you.”
Taylor cackled. “I was trying to keep up with you!”
They smiled gently. Taylor felt as though she were in elementary school, making a friend.
“I don’t know why I do that,” Taylor said finally. “I don’t know why I make everything into a competition.”
“I used to do that,” Winona said. “Especially when my husband was alive. We used to fight like crazy, and I always wanted to win.”
Taylor swallowed the lump in her throat, imagining the guilt this woman carried with her everywhere she went. Her husband had died, and she’d spent so much of their time together competing with him. But it couldn’t be taken back. It couldn’t be helped.
“You’re brave to say that out loud,” Taylor offered finally.
Winona shook her head. “I don’t feel brave. You should have seen more before I got to the Harbor House. I wouldn’t see any of my friends. I wouldn’t take calls. I can’t believe I applied to the Harbor House in the first place. I barely remember filling out the form.”
“Same.” Taylor rubbed her chest. She was thinking about Casey, how Casey had wanted to “win” against Taylor’s grief. This form of competition wasn’t unfamiliar to Taylor, obviously. Maybe she could understand where it came from.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” Taylor offered finally.
“Me too. It’s quite a view, isn’t it?”
Winona and Taylor watched as a flock of gulls swooped over the colossal ocean. Along the beach, walkers traipsed, none of them glancing over at Taylor. None of them knew she was famous. None of them cared, not out here beneath the sun.
“Maybe it would be nice to lose my fame,” Taylor said for the first time, although the idea of it had been brewing in her stomach for what felt like ages.
“I always wondered. Does it feel empty? Fame?” Winona asked.
“It feels like a machine that you have to keep feeding,” Taylor said. “The strange thing is, I’ve been feeding the machine for so much of my life that I don’t know how not to anymore.”
Winona nodded. “I think here at the Harbor House, we have to recontextualize how we’ve always thought about our lives. We have to think about ourselves differently. Something like that.”
“Yeah.” Taylor felt the weight on her chest loosening. She reached for her water bottle, then remembered it was already empty, although they weren’t very far along on their hike yet. She felt both pathetic and rejuvenated. She felt happy, sort of.
And then, she made one of the biggest mistakes of her life. She looked at her phone.
In all the years that followed this moment—a moment that seemed so innocuous, so slight against everything else that had befallen Taylor—Taylor would remember it as a dramatic shift.
One moment, she was brokenhearted, divorced, a lonely woman who’d made a series of decisions that had led her here, to Nantucket Island, to this bench beside Winona. The next moment, she was different.
The text message was from her father, saying her mother died last night.
Immediately, Taylor began to shake uncontrollably, so much so that she dropped her phone. Winona’s face scrunched with worry. “What’s up? What’s going on?”
But Taylor wasn’t sure how to answer. Her mind was filled with flashing images of her mother, Veronica Charron, the woman who’d pulled her out of Ohio and ordered her to work herself to the bone, the woman she hadn’t spoken to for years and years.
She was dead and gone. And the way her father had said it—so flatly, as though it didn’t matter at all, or as if it couldn’t possibly matter to Taylor—made her feel even more alone.
Winona was on her feet, trying to get Taylor’s attention.
Taylor realized she was crying. Sobs made her shoulders shake.
But she couldn’t explain herself. She pressed her phone to her chest, ashamed at what this text message had done to her.
It was as though all the devastation of the previous few years was now fully crushing her.
She was a daughter without a mother. She was a wife without a husband. She was a woman without a dream, or a home, or a life.
“I’m going to get help,” Winona said, which proved just how bad Taylor looked. The woman who’d lost her entire family was worried about Taylor. Taylor wanted to tell herself to pull it together. But the shards of her psyche were scattered and lost.
As soon as Winona disappeared on the other side of the bluffs, another text came through Taylor’s phone. It read: Funeral next week. Let me know if you can make it.
Again, its flatness made Taylor feel as though she’d never known Veronica and Greg Charron, as though the mansion in which her mother had lived the past few years of her life hadn’t been purchased by Taylor, a result of Taylor’s efforts and Taylor’s talent.
Taylor’s hands shook. She had half a mind to call her father and demand answers. How had her mother died? Was it sudden? Did he need her help? But she was frozen.
Suddenly, she heard her name, here on Nantucket Island.
“Taylor, hey!”
Taylor turned to find one of Stella Vanberg’s daughters running toward her.
A pair of binoculars bounced on her chest. Behind her was a curly-haired man she didn’t recognize, and behind them was Winona, panting and red-faced, having run all the way back to fetch help.
Taylor told herself to feel embarrassed.
She told herself to stew in shame. But she found that she couldn’t feel anything but tremendous loss.
Stella Vanberg’s daughter—the one called Lindsey, Taylor was pretty sure—sat beside her on the bench. The curly-haired man handed her a large bottle of water, and Lindsey urged her to drink. Winona hovered off to the side, her hands on her hips.
For a moment, everything was still. Taylor sensed that they were trying not to stare at her. They were waiting for her to pull it together enough to go back to the Harbor House.
Finally, her lips wet from more water, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m making such a scene.”
“You aren’t,” Lindsey said. “Nobody is around.”
Taylor blinked around at the barren beach, the bluffs of sand and grass, the blue sky above. She was dazed.
“Can we take you somewhere? Maybe to get something to eat?” Lindsey suggested.
“No,” Taylor said. She didn’t want to be recognized, not now.
“My car’s right over there,” the curly-haired man said, gesturing off to the left.
“They pulled up right before I left the trail,” Winona said. It meant she hadn’t had to go all the way back to the Harbor House. It meant nobody knew, which Taylor was grateful for.
“We can drive you somewhere,” the curly-haired man said. “You can rest in the car while we grab food for you. What do you think?”
Taylor raised her eyes to look at this man, this stranger. There was something about him that made her breathe easier, something that made him different from most people she’d encountered.
It occurred to her, then, to ask, “Do you know who I am?” But she didn’t ask it arrogantly.
The curly-haired man shook his head. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. My name is Jake. I’m a bird-watcher. Winona mentioned you’re both staying at the Harbor House?”
Taylor blinked and blinked at him, mesmerized. She realized it was the first time she’d met someone who didn’t know who she was, maybe in decades. He looked at her as though she were a stranger. It was the most delicious feeling she’d ever known.