Chapter 13 #2
Rex once admitted that his sister, who had been a curious, fun kid, had turned into a tough adult, and he had no idea how Kevin had pulled her down off her high horse and got her to marry him.
Or why he had. Though Maddie had only been in Taylor’s company a few times, she knew that chitchat wasn’t one of her strong suits.
“Actually, yes, I do need something,” Maddie asked her now. “It’s time I got hooked into the medical services here. Can you recommend a good primary care, a dentist, and maybe a gynecologist?” She figured she might as well go for a trifecta.
“Dr. Gagnon for a primary; Dr. Naylor for a dentist. I have no idea about a gynecologist. I had a hysterectomy when I was thirty. And that was up in Boston, not here.”
Maddie scribbled the names Taylor gave her, but stopped, pen in air, after the word hysterectomy. She didn’t know if she should say she was sorry or if Taylor would rebuke her for trying to be kind.
She decided it would be safest to say, “Oh. Well, thanks for these. And how about a good hairdresser?”
“Patti in West Tisbury. I’ll text you her number.”
“Thanks.”
“Anything else?”
“Only to say we missed you at the party the other night. It was a good time.”
No response.
“Are you feeling better?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Good. And thanks again.”
Taylor hung up without saying good-bye.
Maddie slipped her phone into her pocket and wondered which of the parents Taylor took after. Definitely it wasn’t the one that Rex did, because the siblings’ personalities were polar opposites—the Arctic and Antarctica of Chappaquiddick.
Returning to her laptop, Maddie googled gynecologists, Martha’s Vineyard: four names popped up.
Rather than picking one based on the number of stars after their names, she jotted them down.
Maybe she should ask Grandma about someone from the tribe.
The Wampanoags had lived on the island over ten thousand years; maybe the methods of the tribal women would be more to Maddie’s liking—more natural, with herbal remedies instead of prescriptions.
Glancing at the clock, she noticed it was nearly five, long past sunset. She decided to wake up her grandmother, or the woman would not sleep well later. But first, Maddie put the kettle on again so they could have tea together.
Surveying the containers of Grandma’s herbs, she selected lavender; when the water was ready, she poured two mugs.
While the herbs steeped, their soft aroma filtering through the kitchen, Maddie smiled, thinking that the scent could gently waft throughout the bookshop.
With that happy thought, she picked up both mugs and began to carry them down the hall toward Grandma’s bedroom.
Until, back in the living room, her phone rang.
She stopped.
It rang again.
A million things sped through her mind: it was Rafe; it was Rex; it was …
To maintain her sanity, Maddie ignored it. “If it’s important, they’ll call back,” her father always said when the phone rang during dinner.
With that reasoning, she continued on her wake-up mission.
But when she arrived in the doorway of the bedroom, Grandma wasn’t sleeping.
Instead, still clad in her coat, she was sitting on the edge of the old bed, clutching a pen and a small book.
Her eyebrows were pinched, the lines of her brow more crinkled than usual.
She looked like she was thinking about something unpleasant. Or painful.
The longer you live, the more you have to put up with.
Some stuff, you have no choice. Like I didn’t choose for Butchie to drown at sea, though if he’d had his druthers, he’d of preferred that to being stuck in a hospital bed, hooked up to tubes, or tied to a wheelchair, drooling from one corner of his mouth when he got to be old.
I know for sure that he woulda begged not to have been forced to learn those nasty things like computers and the internet and the damn mobile phones.
No, Butchie was a fisherman through and through.
A full-blooded Wampanoag who lived by the land and the sea our Creator provided.
He was a man who hadn’t minded that his hometown of Aquinnah was the last town in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to get electricity, which didn’t happen until 1951, not long before Hannah was born.
The only thing he really missed out on was that he would have loved to watch her grow up.
I often wondered what he would have done the night Hannah was killed. But all the wondering in the world wouldn’t change what happened, or so I’ve been telling myself these past forty years.
One thing I do know is that he wouldn’t have let anyone bully him into living in a house he didn’t like, especially if it was fancy, the way the cottage is now. No. Butchie would rather have lived under the sky and the sun and slept under the stars, his boat rocking gently beneath him.
Oh, how I loved that about him.
I wish I had the courage to write all this down in a notebook so my granddaughter, Madelyn, would know these things after I am gone. Sadly, I learned too late that our stories should be told. Or maybe I was too afraid of being judged.
After all, I had good reason for that.