Chapter 36 Greta
Greta
Greta was tired of keeping secrets. She was tired of taking the blame.
But she would take the blame for this, for Lindy’s giant lie, because Greta, after all, had been the one to show Lindy that the way to deal with intolerable things
was to shove them down, ignore them, keep them secret, make them your own problem to deal with, and never ask for help.
Now, in the living room at Innisfree, Hailey, too, had evidently had enough. “I will try to understand why you lied, Mom,”
she was telling Lindy. The handsome young Jack Westfield sat nearby listening as if he was part of the family now, too, which
made Greta fume. He would no doubt share everything he heard with his grandmother, Marjorie, who would spread it like a wind-fueled
wildfire around the entire Cove, the way she’d been doing with gossip for seventy years. “But everybody has to tell the truth
about everything now.” Hailey turned to Greta, surprising her. “Starting with what you meant yesterday, Grandma, when Mom
asked if you were planning to hurt yourself, and you said you weren’t Dad.”
Greta glanced at Lindy, feeling as if a silent grenade had just been detonated in the room; feeling on the defensive, suddenly.
At the same time, though, it didn’t seem right to tell what had happened long ago without David here to explain, and if this was the first time Greta understood that David had been a son to her all along, then that was to her shame.
She sat up straighter. “I shouldn’t have said that about your dad,” she told Hailey. “I’m sorry.”
“But you did say it, Mom,” Lindy snapped, before her tone softened. “I think Hailey’s right, though. No more secrets. Maybe if everybody
knows everything, and we all put our heads together . . .”
Greta shuddered. Would she have to reveal her own old, terrible secret, too? She was tired of keeping it, yes—but what did
it have to do with anything? It was nearly as old as she was; older than dirt, as the saying went.
Lindy turned to Hailey and spoke gently. “Honey, your dad, when he was young . . . well, he had some trouble with depression,
and he . . . had to be hospitalized. We were all very worried about him, for a time.”
Greta squeezed her hands together, remembering. She, of course, had been mostly worried about Lindy back then. She’d had so
little sympathy for anyone outside her immediate circle. Her primary feeling about David had been suspicion, rather than hope
that he might love her daughter in the way Lindy had wanted him to. Greta was ashamed of that now, too.
“Dad was hospitalized?” Hailey said, rubbing at her temple, her face flushing. “Like, you mean, he tried to . . .”
“He did try to hurt himself one time, when he was seventeen,” Lindy said, and Greta, though proud of the unflinching way she
spoke, wished the story of her daughter’s first (and, yes, enduring) love could’ve been different; that Lindy wouldn’t have
had to be so strong. “Another time, later, he just . . . was thinking about it, I guess.”
“Oh my God. So, do you think . . . now? That Dad might have . . .” Hailey’s voice trailed off, and she covered her mouth with her hand.
Jack was sitting up straight, looking at her with concern, and Greta found herself thinking better of him than she would’ve expected.
Odd, too, that he didn’t seem to know about David’s past. Greta would’ve put money on Marjorie Westfield’s having told him all about it.
“No, no, I don’t!” Lindy said. “See, honey, from the minute he found out he was going to be a father, he really just . . .
just decided. He wasn’t going to let anything get the better of him anymore. Those old demons, you know? You saved him, you see? Just
by being born! I’ve always thought so.”
Hailey’s eyes were wide. “I did?”
“Yes,” Lindy said, and Greta wanted to believe it could be true that David had not wrestled with those demons again, that
he hadn’t been secretly wrestling with them all these years. But she wasn’t sure. Did demons ever truly vanish—or, after twenty-five
years, did they come back angrier than ever, furious they’d been stifled for so long?
Greta ought to know the answer to that, and unfortunately, she thought it was the latter. It wasn’t as if her aversion to
the attic had lessened, not in sixty-nine years.
Lindy continued. “He didn’t seem to be struggling recently . . . I mean, to me, he didn’t. And Gina and Tiffany both said he’d seemed normal at work. They
said there’d been a lot of stress, though, and then—well, there’s some money missing. A hundred thousand dollars.”
Greta drew in a breath. Hailey said, “Oh my God.”
“That’s why I thought he’d run off with Tiffany,” Lindy said. “Because the money is gone. And he applied to get a mortgage.”
Greta had heard nothing about any missing money, a mortgage application. She felt caught out. Was everything her fault, after
all?
Suddenly, she wished she’d made different decisions all along. When her father had died and left Innisfree to her, she’d wanted
to sell it then. She’d told Tom and Lindy they could use the proceeds to buy another, possibly grander, place, possibly closer
to the city—in Ogunquit or Kennebunkport, maybe! They wouldn’t have to lose out on anything. Life could be easier, and probably
more fun!
But the two of them had claimed heartbreak at the thought of giving up The Cove. (Lindy, eleven at the time, had sworn she would die without her best summer friend, Kate.) And Greta had succumbed. She’d swallowed her own feelings and kept coming here, summer
after summer, half hating it, always wishing it could be different, how being here invariably made her want to rewind to back
before the war, when her father and brothers had benevolently ruled the world. And yet, time just kept marching on, while,
infuriatingly, the pain you wished would recede with the passing of it never seemed to.
Lindy went on. “And Gina said Tiffany had a ‘glow,’ so I thought—”
“Oh my God,” Hailey said again.
Greta broke in. “David knew about Innisfree! I told him I needed to sell it. He was trying to figure out how to buy it, last
I heard.”
Lindy and Hailey turned to her, astonished. Greta stewed under their gazes, knowing she should have told Lindy about this
when David had first gone missing.
And honestly, she should’ve sold the place in 1974 when she’d wanted to, and all of life would be different now! Lindy never
would’ve married David; Lindy wouldn’t even have known him. She would’ve had a career, maybe stayed in New York City, kept up with her music, her art, or all the other things she’d
sacrificed to the cause of loving David and having a family with him. And Greta did not—oh, she did not—want to wish her grandchildren away, but just for a moment she thought, If only! If only she could’ve been free!
Lindy spoke first. “But, if he was putting together money to buy Innisfree, where did the money go? I mean, it seems to be
totally gone. He hasn’t given you any money, has he, Mom?”
Greta shook her head. The truth was, she did not want David to be gone.
She loved David. She wanted Lindy and David and their children to have Innisfree and The Cove for decades and decades more.
For all of them to spend the rest of the summers of their lives here, just as Greta and Tom, and Greta’s parents before them, had done.
That they might be able to do so was the whole reason Greta had plowed through all these years, despite her memories, her anxieties, her grief.
Despite how she’d hated that returning here year after year had made it impossible to escape the past.
Oh, she wished that David had given her the money, that he’d been able to buy the place and secure his family’s future, as she and Tom had
been trying for so long to do. “Not a cent,” she said.
Just then, a knock came at the door.