Chapter 12
Candice’s children were terribly pleased to learn that their father was really on his way. “He’s just wrapping things up in the city,” Candice explained later that morning, when the three of them were out on the sailboat, wind flitting through their hair. “He misses you guys.”
Sarah’s smile was so beautiful and naive.
It reminded Candice of her own when she was a teenager, back when she’d first run around with Frank Delaware and the others.
She wondered what Frank had seen when they’d hung out last week.
She wondered if he’d taken a look at her smile and realized that she wasn’t the naive and hopeful girl of years ago.
He’s probably thought, oh, what happened to her?
She’s not only older, but she’s also weaker. Something is wrong.
Candice dropped the anchor and unpacked the lunches she’d made for them: sandwiches with lunch meat and cheese, plenty of berries, bags of salt and vinegar chips, and sodas.
Sarah was talking about the book she was reading, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and, although Candice had never read it, she was captivated by the insightful way her daughter spoke about it.
Two writers had raised Sarah—that was clear—but Candice had never known her to be so precise and artful with language.
She wondered if she wanted to go into Creative Writing as well, but decided not to pry.
She didn’t want to push Sarah one direction or another, not when she was so impressionable.
To her credit, Stella Vanberg had never pushed her children to do anything they didn’t want to do. All she’d ever said was, “You need to go to college. You need to figure out what you want to do with your talents and your time. No one can decide that for you.” Candice wanted to model this.
Late afternoon, after a long and languorous swim around the boat, Candice sailed her kids back to the house, where they tied up and joined Lindsey and Henry on the veranda.
Henry was, as ever, talking angrily about Gwen and about contesting the will, but Lindsey looked as though she was growing bored and trying to find a way to sneak out, maybe to hang out with her Vineyard friends.
Sarah and Peter went upstairs to shower, but Candice held back, pouring herself a glass of wine and watching as the sun slid deeper toward the horizon. When there was a lull in conversation, Lindsey pegged her with her eyes and said, “Frank was asking where you were the other night.”
Candice’s eyes fluttered. “I don’t know why he would do a thing like that.”
Lindsey laughed. “Why wouldn’t he? He always liked you.” She waved her hand. “Don’t say you’re married again. Maybe it’s not like that. But he told me he really liked talking to you the other night. He said you talked about his mom?”
“It’s so sad, what happened to her,” Candice offered, remembering the Alzheimer’s. “Oh, but apparently she was singing some country song, one Frank had never heard before. When he asked her about it, she said to ‘ask Stella.’”
Lindsey jerked her head back with surprise. “Huh.”
But again, Candice thought about her mother’s secretive music life, about how little she ever sang in front of anyone. “Maybe she let Frank’s mom see that side of her,” she offered now.
“Remember when she put us in all those music classes?” Henry asked.
Lindsey and Candice turned to look at him, surprised.
But it was true that they’d all taken a wide array of music lessons: piano and guitar; singing and composition.
Their father hadn’t taken music as seriously as their mother, and when they’d begged him to let them quit, he’d talked with Stella and ended things.
They’d been young and maybe stupid. They couldn’t have known that quitting music then meant abandoning it forever.
You had to learn skills like that early in order to be good at them, Candice knew.
“We never had the voice she did,” Lindsey said gently.
“Are you kidding? I kill it at karaoke,” Henry said, opening his arms wide and belting a song from REM toward the sun. It wasn’t the most gorgeous voice, but there was something unique and beautiful about it. Candice and Lindsey laughed, then joined in.
For a few seconds, they were a trio of Vanberg singers. And then, Peter and Sarah hurried back onto the veranda, demanding to know what was going on. The spell was broken. Dinner needed to be made.
That night, Candice returned to her mother’s records.
She’d showered and scrubbed her hair, and she’d tried to call Nathan only to listen to the ring blaring out across the ocean forever, so she felt morose and unable to sleep.
Rather than reach for the Dolly Parton album, she flicked back through to the unlabeled album she’d found on that first day in the study.
Something about it tugged at her curiosity.
She guessed there was nothing on it. Maybe it was dangerous to play an empty record on a record player. What did she know?
She put the vinyl on, placed the needle gently in the groove, then stepped back as the sound crackled from the speaker. There was something on there. Next came the song of a banjo, then a guitar. It sounded classically country western, although it wasn’t a song that Candice had ever heard before.
And then, a woman began to sing.
At first, Candice was struck by how sincere and aching the voice was.
It took more than twenty seconds for her to realize that the woman singing was her mother.
It could only be Stella Vanberg! By then, another voice had joined hers.
That voice wasn’t as strong as Stella’s.
But it was feminine and sweet, contrasting beautifully with Stella’s thicker, more emotional sound.
Throughout the song, Stella and this other girl sang about heartache in the mountains.
They sang about mountain streams and mountain promises and mountain dreams. If Candice had to guess, she’d say the title of the song was “Mountain Dreams.” Although how could she ever know?
When the song ended, another song started, sung by the same two girls.
Candice’s heartbeat quickened. Was this an entire album of songs recorded by her mother?
It sounded wonderfully professional. She imagined a much younger version of her mother in a recording studio, singing into an old-fashioned microphone with her eyes closed.
She imagined Stella doing take after take till her voice broke.
“Mom,” Candice whispered, hardly loud enough to be heard over the music. “Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you want us to know?”
Stella couldn’t resist. She ran upstairs to Lindsey’s bedroom, where she was grateful to find her in her pajamas, talking on the phone. Candice gestured, asking her to follow her.
“I gotta go,” Lindsey said to her friend, then hung up and gave Candice a bug-eyed look.
“You won’t regret this,” Candice said.
They went past Henry’s room, too, then dragged him down to their mother’s study.
Henry and Lindsey bickered lightly until they stood in front of the record player and watched Candice drop the needle into its spot.
A moment later, their mother’s singing voice filled the room, melancholic and gorgeous.
Lindsey was so stunned that she fell into the chair behind her. Henry’s eyes glinted with tears.
“What is this?” Henry demanded.
They listened, awestruck, to the entire first song before Lindsey demanded, “And who’s singing with her?”
“I don’t know,” Candice finally admitted. She showed them the empty vinyl case.
“Did you play it because of what Frank’s mom said?” Lindsey asked.
“I don’t know. It got me thinking,” Candice said. “But I was just curious. I thought maybe it was blank.”
“It’s professional,” Henry whispered. “She should have been a star.”
“Maybe she was,” Lindsey said.
“We would have known, surely,” Henry said. “Stella Vanberg would have been a household name.”
Suddenly, Lindsey got to her feet and shot to the shelves of vinyl. She began to sift through them, searching. “There has to be something else around here,” she said. “Some kind of proof of that other life.”
“I can’t believe how Southern she sounds,” Henry offered thoughtfully. “But you remember how sometimes Mom had a little bit of an accent? A little bit of a Southern accent?”
Candice and Lindsey nodded, remembering.
Their mother hadn’t sounded like other New Englanders.
She hadn’t sounded like anyone else on the Vineyard, nor anyone else in Manhattan.
Her accent had been flatter than that. But she’d always told them that that was because she’d traveled extensively before settling down with their father.
She’d told them that she’d fought against her typical “New England” accent because she’d wanted to seem like she belonged everywhere.
“I called her out on the accent once,” Henry remembered. “I told her she sounded like a Southern Belle, and she laughed and said that she liked to put on that accent. That it was like a character to her.”
“Did you believe her?” Candice asked.
“I didn’t know anyone who actually had a Southern accent back then,” Henry admitted. “So I figured she was telling the truth.”
Lindsey continued to search through the rest of the albums, looking for any clue to Stella’s music career, while Candice and Henry sat through the next song, wordless.
“Maybe she was pretending to be southern for her music career?” Candice offered.
“Or what if she was hiding her southern accent from us?” Lindsey whispered.
“An entire life of hiding an accent?” Henry tried to laugh. It really did sound absurd.
“I don’t understand how that’s possible,” Candice said.
But the sheer number of things they didn’t know about their mother seemed to multiply. Candice shivered. She felt as though the spirit of their mother was in that record player, speaking to them from a distant past.
Henry pulled out his phone and googled “Stella Vanberg - country singer.” When nothing came up, he googled “Stella Vanberg - country singer - Mountain Dream,” using the oft-heard lyrics from that first song. Again, nothing came up.
Nothing was making sense.
And then, Lindsey let out a yelp. “Here! I got something!”
Henry and Candice got to their feet and joined Lindsey at the shelf, where she tugged out a slender, worn vinyl cover. It had been tucked away with other albums from the seventies, some of them so worn at the edges that you couldn’t read the names anymore.
On the cover of the album were two women so young that they might even still be teenagers.
Both of them, incredibly, looked like Sarah, so much so that Candice nearly had to sit down.
They were beautiful, smiling, wearing outfits that Dolly Parton herself might have put on back then.
Cowboy boots and mini skirts and cute cowboy hats.
Above their heads, in lime-green font, it read: Introducing Stella and Sally McGee!
“Stella and Sally McGee,” Henry read aloud.
Nobody knew what to say. Lindsey slid the album out of its case and put it on, only to discover that this record was the same as the one in the unlabeled case.
It felt strange that their mother had had two copies of the same album.
Then again, Candice thought that she probably would have hung on to as many pieces of her abandoned musical past as she could.
This time, as their mother and a woman—maybe their Aunt Sally? —sang, Henry googled “Stella and Sally McGee, country singers.” Up popped a few old articles from Nashville, Tennessee. The articles were written in 1978, 1979, and 1980.
Henry read bits and pieces of the articles aloud, “Up-and-coming country stars Stella and Sally McGee took the stage at The Blue Cats the other night and brought down the house! Sisters Stella and Sally McGee say the secret to songwriting is ‘knowing your own voice and staying true to it.’ Singers Stella and Sally call Nashville, Tennessee, ‘the greatest paradise we’ve ever known.’” Henry shook his head before reading aloud that, in 1979, Stella was twenty-one, and Sally was eighteen.
“Eighteen!” Lindsey and Candice said in unison. The same age as Sarah.
The articles stopped abruptly midway through 1980.
“I don’t get it,” Candice said. “They had wonderful voices. They had real talent. And by the sounds of things, people really liked them. They came out to see them. Why didn’t they have the same careers as Dolly Parton?”
Henry and Lindsey were quiet for a moment. But then, Henry clicked his finger against that date—1980—and looked back up at Candice.
“Candice, how old are you again?”
Candice did a quick round of math, then sat back down in her chair. Candice was forty-five. She was born in 1981, the year after Stella and Sally’s career had apparently gone belly-up.
It stood to reason that pregnancy and marriage had gotten in the way of Stella’s career, they guessed.
But why had they never heard about it? Why didn’t they know about their Aunt Sally?
And were Sally and Stella really from the north, from the Vineyard, from where Stella had always said she was from?
Or were they actually country darlings, their voices filled with twang?