Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
James was seated at the quaint Italian restaurant four blocks from his place and five from Carmen and Elena’s, nursing a glass of wine and staring at his phone.
That morning, he’d dared to ask Elena out on a date (finally, he’d thought, finally I feel brave enough to do it), and she’d agreed in a way that had made him think she was ready for this.
Ready for him. But now, it was ten minutes after their agreed-upon date time, and he was beginning to think he was being stood up. His palms were sweaty.
James Murphy had never been stood up before.
Then again, he’d hardly dated in his life.
He’d had a girlfriend in high school, but they’d broken up when they’d gone to different colleges.
Very soon after arriving at college, he’d met his college sweetheart, but they’d broken up when she’d moved to Paris after graduation.
Shortly after that, he’d met Bethany at work, and they’d married about eighteen months after that.
Everything, dating-wise, had come easily to James.
But he got the sense that Elena was much more experienced than he was.
I’m utterly monogamous, he thought. I wonder if that makes me a loser in today’s dating age.
Since Bethany left him, James had considered all manner of next steps.
Being a bachelor forever, allowing himself more time to devote to his grief therapy sessions and his crisis management career, had seemed just fine to him until Elena entered his life.
Now that Bethany had someone new (Sam Ellison!), he felt a fire in his belly that he hoped wasn’t competition.
Shouldn’t he be glad that Bethany was happy?
Now, Elena was fifteen minutes late, and the server was giving him strange looks and asking him if he was ready to order.
James wanted to melt to the ground. He wanted to disappear.
But right when he was prepared to get up, to pay for his wine discreetly and run back home (to his streaming channels and his beer), Elena burst through the door, filled with apologies.
Her cheeks were bright red, as though she’d been sitting in the cold. She took his hands, still standing, and said, “I’m so sorry! I really am. I’ve been so distracted with work. I lost track of the time.”
James wanted to retain his anger. He tried to tell her how disrespected he felt. But within seconds of her coming into the restaurant, he was overcome with joy.
“You look freezing!” he said. He put both of her small hands between his massive ones and rubbed them gently till they were warm and pink. “Sit down. Here.” He poured her a glass of wine from the bottle he’d ordered and instructed her to drink. He knew it would warm her up from the inside.
Elena took a sip and let her shoulders relax. “You don’t know how glad I am that you’re still here.”
James laughed. “I would have waited forever.”
“That’s a lie, but it’s a sweet lie.” Elena drank again from her glass.
Suddenly, the server approached, clearly frustrated. “Can I get your order?”
James wanted to brush him aside, to tell him that they’d only just begun. But Elena was ready to go. “I’ll have the carbonara,” she said.
“I’ll have the same,” James said, passing his menu over.
The server left snootily, leaving Elena and James to burst into laughter.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“Don’t say it again,” James ordered. “Just tell me what you were up to. You have a much more exciting life than I do.”
Elena laughed, then immediately burst into tears.
James was on his feet again. Everyone in the restaurant eyed them curiously, probably assuming that Elena had come late only to break up with James.
Maybe that was so. But James knelt beside her and whispered, “It’s all right. Hey. Come on. Tell me. What’s up?”
“I can’t,” Elena breathed. “I’m too scared to say it aloud. I don’t know who’s listening. I don’t know what I’ve just uncovered.”
“Text me,” James said, raising his phone. At least it isn’t about me, he thought.
Elena sniffed with laughter. “It’s ridiculous. It’s insane.”
“I can handle ridiculous. I can handle insane.” James returned to his seat and stared expectantly at his phone, waiting. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Elena typing what had happened. And then, his phone buzzed.
ELENA: I think my grandmother faked her own death.
James could hardly believe it. Over the course of the subsequent messages, Elena outlined what she’d just seen.
There was a photograph of Rosa Tompkins at a Cranberry Cove mansion, taken in the seventies or eighties, long after she was meant to have died.
As she typed, Elena jumped up and down in her chair, shaking her head.
When the server returned with their food, he found two adults poring over their phones and hardly looking at one another. James could hardly fathom what the twenty-something thought of them. The server snapped the plates onto their table and sauntered away, leaving Elena and James laughing again.
“I don’t know what to say,” James offered.
Elena twirled pasta around and around her fork.
“I mean, she hated them. She wrote about corruption and greed throughout most of the end of the fifties. To me, it looks like she was the only person eager to tell the truth about them.” She mouthed, “The cove,” when she finished.
She didn’t want to say it aloud for fear of who was listening.
The mystery swelled between them. Elena put down her fork and admitted she couldn’t eat very much.
“I can’t help but wonder what my mother knows, or what she suspects.
I mean, she always, always, always told me my grandmother was a hero, that she died in 1960, and that the community sorely missed her.
But what if she was just a few miles north? ”
When the server didn’t return to their table for ten minutes, James chased him down, paid the bill, and asked for to-go boxes so they could return to Elena’s house and keep digging.
As they walked through the frigid night, James found himself telling Elena about his ex-wife and her current relationship with Sam Ellison, which had floored him mere days ago.
Elena gripped his hand and walked faster.
“You said your ex was living in Connersville?” she asked.
“That’s where Natalie uncovered all that corruption earlier this year. It must be related?”
“How deep does this go?” he whispered. He imagined his wife, knee-deep in a cagey operation. But that was impossible. Bethany had given birth to their son. She’d made him sandwiches. She’d driven him to swim practice.
He was certain that Bethany didn’t know the extent of this corruption. She was too kind. Too good.
Then again, plenty of people had assumed Rosa Tompkins was “too kind and too good” back in the fifties.
How can we ever know anyone?
Right before Elena opened the front door of her home, James said, “I want you to know that I don’t want to get back with my ex-wife.”
Elena paused with her hand on the doorknob. She didn’t seem to know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I needed to say it. Maybe I needed to hear myself say it.”
Elena raised on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips for the first time.
It was a brief yet powerful moment, charged with all the stars in the sky.
And then, she opened the door and led him into the dark foyer, where they could see Carmen, still awake, watching a movie with her friend Jemma.
There was a bowl of popcorn between them. They were giggling.
“Hi, Mom!” Elena called. “I have a friend over.”
James had to laugh. It sounded like they were teenagers, trying and failing to sneak in without notice.
He waved at Carmen and Jemma, his cheeks inflamed, then followed Elena to the top floor, where they gathered at her mother’s old desk and opened another bottle of wine.
James was eager for more kissing, more cuddling, but he knew that Elena’s fiery eyes meant they would be hunting for information about her grandmother for a good deal longer.
“Why would your grandmother do this?” he asked.
Elena clutched his shoulders and widened her eyes.
“I don’t know! But I keep coming back to something.
Judge Baxter Drury told me I looked just like my grandmother.
He knew her. He knew her really well.” Elena turned, opened her mother’s laptop, and began to type furiously: Rosa Tompkins, Cranberry Cove, journalist, car accident.
But James saw as clear as anything that there was no proof of Rosa Tompkins’s supposed car accident.
In fact, it took ages for them to find any record of Rosa’s death.
Rosa Jethrow Tompkins: 1935-1989. After a brief battle with cancer, the writer Rosa Tompkins passed away in her home in Providence, Rhode Island.
Elena blinked and blinked. “Do you see what I’m seeing?”
James couldn’t believe it either. She’d been alive for years after her supposed death.
They were quiet for a moment, trying to fathom what had gotten into the mind of this brilliant journalist. Elena brought up Rosa’s most recent articles about Cranberry Cove, all from the late fifties and early sixties.
“It means she left my mother when she was two years old,” Elena whispered.
“It means she left my grandfather with a toddler to take care of. Who in Millbrook knew this had happened? I mean, I can’t believe the gossip channels didn’t find me. ”
“Does your mother know?” James asked.
Elena looked stricken. “If she knew about this and always lied to me about the car accident story, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. Then again, it’s hard to believe that she didn’t know. Carmen Vasquez knew everything.” The “knew” hung in the air, purposely past tense.
James and Elena gazed at each other in sturdy silence.
“I hate this,” Elena breathed finally. “I hate that Rosa did this. She’s been a sort of hero for me for decades. I modeled my life after her in a way. I never knew.”
Suddenly, the door burst open, and Carmen stood before them, breathing rapidly, her eyes searching. James remembered that this was what she’d been like the night she’d collapsed. She’d been this harried. This confused. James hurried over and supported her. “Carmen? Are you feeling okay?”
Carmen glared down at Elena, not comprehending. “What are you doing at my desk?” she demanded. “Are you digging through my things?” Her voice was hard-edged. It was as though Elena were eight years old and messing around.
Elena got to her feet and reached for her mother. “I’m just working on articles for the paper,” she lied gently. “I’m trying to get everything done in time for Christmas. Like we talked about.”
But something was very wrong with Carmen. She shifted out of James’s grip and came toward her daughter, practically spitting with rage. It was like she’d forgotten all of the goodwill she and Elena had built up over the past few weeks.
James reminded himself that it was probably too early for the medication to start working.
“You think you’re too good for the Gazette,” she sputtered. “You’re going to leave, and you’re going to leave me with a great big mess, with so many edits to make, so many articles to rewrite. You hate Millbrook, almost as much as you hate me.”
Elena’s eyes glowed with sorrow. Slowly, she shifted forward and wrapped her confused mother in a hug. Carmen continued to sputter with rage, but together, James and Elena tried to comfort her, telling her to take breaths and calm down.
And as the minutes ticked past, as Carmen slowly became gentle and tired again, it struck James that Carmen’s behavior made sense.
If Carmen had always known that her mother had abandoned her, if she’d always been aware of her mother’s betrayal, it stood to reason that she’d expect everyone else to betray her, or run away from her as well.
When Elena had run off to the Middle East, when she hadn’t called for weeks or months at a time, Carmen had probably thought, It’s happening again. Why do the people I love run as far as they can away from me? But she’d found a way through it. She’d had her career until her mind had failed her.
James helped Elena take her mother to bed. Standing with his back turned in the doorway, he waited, just in case, as Elena tucked her mother in and told her, again, that everything would be all right.
“I can’t remember what happened,” Carmen repeated over and over. There was a sob in her voice. “I can’t remember, but I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry, Mom,” Elena said. “I love you. Get some rest. We’ll see each other in the morning.”
Right when Elena turned to leave, Carmen cried out a final time. “I’m glad you came back, Elena. I didn’t think you ever would.”