Chapter 14
Three days after Roberto, Pino, and Nadia had returned to Italy, Lorelei woke up in the middle of the night, her heart racing and her pillow heavy with sweat.
She reached for her phone, thinking there was some kind of emergency happening.
Before she knew what she was doing, she dialed Roberto’s number.
As it rang out across the ocean, Lorelei slowly came back to earth.
She thought about the previous few days, about working at the Lodge, about finding her father, crying alone on the veranda about something he didn’t want to talk about.
“I discovered something about my father’s brother,” he’d said simply, unable to look her in the eye.
When she asked him what it was, he shook his head and said he couldn’t get into it.
Secrets. More secrets. Was there any end to the secrecy in this family? Would they ever get over it?
And then, here on the phone, Roberto answered. “It’s early there, isn’t it?”
Lorelei wasn’t entirely sure what time it was. She checked her phone screen and saw it was four in the morning. It was disconcerting. “I couldn’t sleep,” she explained. “I was thinking about you.”
Roberto sounded distracted. “I’m between meetings,” he said.
“How did the other ones go?” she asked. “How’s it been in Rome since you got back?”
“Fine,” Roberto said. “Busy. I need to get out to the Sardinia restaurant tomorrow. Everything over there is a bigger mess than before we went to the United States. I can’t believe I left Italy at all.
Someone should have been here, monitoring everything.
” He groaned. “Aurora had better graduate from business school at the end of this year. She had better save this place.”
It seemed to be all that Roberto could think about: his fixation that Aurora was meant to save them all.
Lorelei closed her eyes. She could picture Roberto in his office at their restaurant in Rome, his face shadowed, his eyes dark.
She remembered when they’d first signed the lease for that restaurant, how sure they’d been about their shared future.
Everything they’d done together had felt like a fresh start.
Now, she willed herself to ask Roberto about their marriage.
She desperately needed to know if he was cheating on her and had fled the United States to rush into someone else’s arms. Maybe even more than that, she needed to know if he still loved her.
She was driving herself insane with questions and unable to sleep most nights. Clearly.
“I think we need to talk, Roberto,” she said delicately.
Roberto sighed deeply. “Do you mind if we talk later? I have to get ready for this meeting, and I need to check on the chef. He’s relatively new and out of his element. I can’t have another disaster on my hands during the dinner rush.”
Lorelei was crushed with the realization that her husband wanted to keep his secrets to himself. He wanted them to continue growing apart, moving along on their separate paths. Oh, her heart ached over it.
“I understand,” she said. “I’d better get back to bed.”
But of course, Lorelei couldn’t sleep for the rest of the early morning.
When it hit five thirty, she decided to give up and head to the kitchen, where she made a big pot of coffee and checked over the to-do list for the Lodge.
Before Allegra and Charlotte joined her at the front desk, she’d already swept and mopped the lobby, organized various bills and other paperwork, checked out and said goodbye to three groups of guests, and drank her weight in coffee.
By the time ten thirty came around, Lorelei was so jittery that Allegra told her to take a break. “Go for a swim or something!” Allegra said. “You’re going to freak out the guests.” Lorelei knew she said it with love.
Knowing better than to argue with Allegra, Lorelei put on her swimsuit and walked down to the beach.
From where she stood, with the warm winds whipping around her, she could see Aurora’s friends Kenny and Oren, saddling the horses and getting them ready to be ridden by various guests.
Lorelei wondered where Aurora was. She wondered if Aurora was lonely, or if Aurora liked either one of those boys, or if Aurora still spent time thinking about Sebastian and all that had happened to her.
She wondered if Aurora would ever open her heart to love again.
Lorelei wondered if she and Roberto had been a bad model of love.
Suddenly, her thoughts returned to Roberto and his secrets.
Lorelei was overwhelmed with the desire to know what was going on.
Rather than call her husband, which seemed never to give her what she needed, she decided to text him.
Maybe he could be more honest with her through the buttons on his stupid screen.
LORELEI: Please, tell me, Roberto. Tell me the truth.
LORELEI: Are you being honest with me about everything?
She couldn’t bring herself to ask anything specifically. She couldn’t bring herself to write the word “affair.”
Roberto wrote back right away.
ROBERTO: I can’t be honest about everything.
ROBERTO: I’m sorry. I just can’t.
Lorelei’s guts twisted. She thought she was going to throw up. She considered tossing her phone into the ocean. She considered calling Roberto and asking him for a divorce.
Rather than that, she left her belongings on the sand and rushed headlong into the water, where she dove in, closing her eyes as she swam out as far as she dared.
When she’d nearly run out of oxygen, she burst to the surface and tried to cry.
Somehow, she was too panicked to cry. She was too overwhelmed to do anything but stare at the clouds above.
That evening, Carter called Lorelei to ask if she wanted to practice music again. “A friend wants live music at his party, and he suggested that we perform,” he said. “He saw a recording of our little gig at the Lodge. It seems like people want more of it.” He laughed.
Lorelei was sitting alone on the veranda with a glass of rosé and a feeling in her gut that told her she had to say yes. “They want more of us, huh?”
“It’s just like old times,” Carter said.
Lorelei closed her eyes. She couldn’t gauge her own emotions. “I don’t see why not,” she said finally.
“Great. Should I come to the Lodge to practice?” Carter asked. It was what they’d always done when they were teenagers, as Carter’s parents’ place hadn’t had a piano, and Carter’s guitar was more portable.
“You’re welcome any time,” she said. “You know that!”
That night, the dining room was empty, as the weather was so good that everyone wanted to be outside.
Lorelei sat at the piano for a while, warming up her fingers while she waited for Carter.
She was reminded of being a teenager, her heart pounding as she waited to hear his footsteps in the hallway.
Usually, they’d practiced for an hour or two before escaping somewhere in the Lodge to make out, hiding from her brothers and sisters and parents.
Life had felt so magical back then. Before the pregnancy. Before the miscarriage.
Oh, but Lorelei didn’t like to think about that.
When at last she heard Carter, Lorelei stood to greet him. She flinched, knowing that he wanted to hug hello, and knowing that she didn’t want that. Sometimes it was difficult not to give people what they wanted from you. She knew that especially from her brief days of piano fame.
Carter removed his guitar from its case and strummed it gently.
Without saying much, they began to warm up before diving into a few of the songs they’d performed the other day, including “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” After the devastation of Roberto’s text message, and as the intensity of the practice filled the air around them, Lorelei felt her voice go wobbly.
Carter stopped abruptly and narrowed his eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Lorelei faked a smile. The last thing she wanted was for Carter to sense how uneasy she was, how brokenhearted. “Oh yes. I’m fine. I’m just under-practiced, is all.”
Carter removed his guitar from his shoulder. “Why don’t we take a break? It’s a beautiful night.”
Lorelei followed Carter out to the veranda, where they grabbed a table and ordered a glass of wine each.
It was surreal to sit at a table with her ex-boyfriend from so long ago.
She wondered what they were meant to say to one another.
She wondered if he had children or if he’d been married.
He wore no wedding ring, which was something she’d noticed earlier, of course.
“How is the music camp going?” she asked, remembering that he was here to work a music camp for children.
Carter laughed. “Well, it’s sometimes more like a glorified babysitting center.
Nantucket parents want to take their kids somewhere so they can go sailing all day, which I get.
But sometimes there’s a glint in the kids’ eyes that says they’re really getting it.
I like bringing music into their lives. Hopefully, some of it sticks. ”
Lorelei smiled, remembering how desperate she’d been to get her kids excited about music. Nothing had stuck.
“What made you fall in love with music? In the beginning, I mean,” Carter asked her.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Lorelei tried to peer back, back, back to the beginning of her life. “It felt like a language I’d always known how to speak. It was strange to learn that so many people didn’t know how to speak it too.”
“I remember, when we first played together, it felt like we’d been playing all our lives,” Carter said. “I still feel like that now.”
Lorelei blushed and sipped her wine. She didn’t know how to respond to something like that, something so romantic, something that touched on her heart in a way that it reminded her of how lonely she currently felt. Roberto can’t be honest with me, she thought now.
“Can I ask you something?” Carter asked.
“Okay.”
“Why did you stop playing, Lorelei? You were at the beginning of a brilliant career. I was excited to watch you shoot into the stratosphere of fame,” Carter said, his eyes buggy with disbelief.
Lorelei let her shoulders drop forward. “Oh, it’s not such a dramatic story,” she said. But she truly didn’t want to get into it. She truly didn’t want to share the biggest devastation of her life with the likes of Carter—not when he’d abandoned her during her time of need, so many years ago.
Carter laughed. “You’re not going to tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Lorelei assured him.
And as their conversation gently shifted to other topics, topics about Carter’s ex-wife and his daughter, who lived in Seattle, topics that firmly planted them as different people in different universes, Lorelei considered the weight she’d once felt in her womb.
She considered the morning sickness that had taken her from class to the bathroom and back again so many times during the final months of her senior year.
She considered the age their baby would have been, if only he or she had lived.
The baby would have been born in the early months of 1997—a year and a half before the fire that had engulfed the White Oak Lodge. She shivered.
“Let’s get another glass of wine,” Carter said, beckoning for the server to return. “I’m having a great time catching up.”