Frankie
“Richard?”
My heartbeat slowly resumes its normal rhythm as I recognize my ex sitting in the dark on my porch swing.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Not the kind of greeting I was hoping for,” Richard says mildly, leaning forward to stub out his cigarette in the empty flowerpot
he’s been using as an ashtray.
That’s when I finally smell it. It’s not a cigarette. The smoke from the fire hid the dank odor of his joint.
“Are you sitting out here on my front porch getting stoned?” I demand.
“Well,” Richard says, resignedly. “I couldn’t get inside. You changed the locks. And you moved the spare key from the bottom
of the flowerpot.”
“Of course I moved the spare key and changed the locks.”
I can’t believe this. I really can’t. First Ash proves himself to be a complete head case, and then my ex proves himself to be another, all in the span of about two minutes.
But then, I always knew Richard was a head case.
“Get out of here, Richard,” I say. “I’m not in the mood for whatever this is.”
“No, I imagine not.”
He hasn’t moved from the porch swing, where he appears to be happy to sit indefinitely in the dark and cold. Fortunately he’s
dressed for it, in a thick, waterproof sailing jacket and matching pants. Yes, he’s wearing waterproof pants. This, along
with the full beard he’s grown and overlong, curly blond hair sticking out from beneath a black watch cap, makes him look
like the salty old fisherman on the Gorton’s fish sticks box.
“Is it my imagination,” Richard asks, “or are you and that plebeian from next door having some sort of dalliance? Because
that’s what it sounded—and looked—like just now. I couldn’t hear all the details, but I did see you allow him to carry you—”
“He isn’t a plebeian.” If only it were that simple. “He went to Penn, and Le Rosey in Switzerland before that.” Which are
exactly the kind of schools I’d expect a child of the gods to attend.
Richard snorts. “That figures. I had him pegged as an entitled nepo baby from the day he moved in.”
Richard has no idea how much of a nepo baby Ash really is. That is, if a word of what he’s just told me is true, which it
can’t be. But I ignore the insult for now.
“Richard, I really don’t have time for this.
” I glance across the yard toward Ash’s house.
He’s gone inside. I can see lights turning on in first one window, and then another.
He’s gathering what he needs to make his trip to Center Island.
Should I call Jackie in addition to my own therapist?
I wonder. Should I have Ash put on a psychiatric hold for his own safety? Or would that only make things worse?
It’s hard to imagine things getting worse.
“Why are you here, Richard?” I demand as I pull out my phone.
“I’m here,” he says, in his usual pretentious tone, “because I’ve realized I made a horrible mistake.”
“Oh, Richard.” I’m suddenly so exhausted, I can’t stand up anymore, so I sink down onto the porch steps. “I’m sorry about
your boat,” I say. “But this is just a temporary setback. You’ll get it fixed and be back on the water in no—”
“I don’t care about the boat.” Richard stands up, and the porch swing creaks crazily. “That’s what I learned from all of this.”
“All of what?” From where I’m sitting, I can see everything that’s happening over at Ash’s house.
Well, almost everything. Not what’s happening down at his dock. Another marine layer is moving in, this one even thicker than
the last, and rising up from the lake. I can feel its cool tendrils beginning to soak my hair and skin. It mingles with the
smoke from the fire and limits my visibility, though I can still see the lights in Ash’s windows—and the ominous orange glow
from Center Island.
I’m surprised at how large the fire has grown, given how wet everything is from the fog and all the rain the other day. There’s
never been a wildfire on Center Island before, which is surprising considering how much illegal camping goes on there. I’m
not sure how the fire department would even get there to put out a wildfire. It’s not like they have boats—
“After what happened that night at the courthouse,” Richard is saying as he sinks down onto the porch step beside me, “I was so broken. Everything I’d worked for, everything I believed—destroyed in a few seconds.”
“Richard, everything in your life was not destroyed that night,” I say. “I was there for you, remember? And you wouldn’t let me in.”
“Not that night.” Richard’s voice is sad. “You’re always there for everyone—your family, your patients, your friends. But you weren’t there for me that night. You didn’t see what
I saw.”
I blink at him. “Really? You want to do this now? Tonight? Because this is a conversation we should have had a year ago when I asked you what you saw out there. Remember
when I suggested we go to couples counseling and you said—”
Richard shakes his head. In what little light from the moon that is managing to get through the smoke and fog, I can see that
he’s smiling.
“I know what I said. And I want you to know that, however I might sound now, I’m not blaming you. I just want to explain to
you what happened, now that I finally have the words.”
Great. Exactly what I don’t need at this particular moment.
“Look, Richard,” I say. “You’re tired. You’ve had a hard few weeks. Do you have a place to stay?” I remember how Debi had
said she’d been having trouble getting her old place back. But if Richard thinks I’m taking him in, he’s even more delusional
than Ash. “Because I’m a little busy right now. I think you should go get some sleep, and then maybe we can talk about this
later—”
“No, Frankie,” he says, in his rich, professorial voice that I used to find so sexy. “We need to talk about this now. I’m
sorry I treated you the way I did—that was cruel of me. But I didn’t know then that I was being cruel. I only know what I
saw—and what I was told. That’s why I’m here. You need to hear this, Frankie.”
I look around, thinking I hear voices. But it must only be the wind—which is picking up—since all I can see is smoke, mingled with fog.
“Okay, fine. But make it quick. I need to go inside and make some phone calls.” I really am going to call Jackie. Not because
Ash told me to, or because I want to get him on a temporary psychiatric hold, but because of the fire. Maybe there’s no need
to worry about it spreading to the homes around the lake since the water makes a natural fire wall. But what if the wind picks
up a stray ember? “What exactly did you see that night?”
“A witch,” Richard says simply.
I tear my gaze away from Ash’s house to look at him. “Excuse me?”
“I said I saw a witch.”
“Richard, everyone saw witches that night. The press called it a witch riot, remember?”
“But I saw one particular witch that no one else seems to have seen. The queen of witches.”
“Was her name Debi, by any chance?”
“You see!” Richard cries, pushing himself up from the porch steps, indignant. “This is why I couldn’t tell you back then. You can be so judgmental!”
“Richard.” I’m scrolling my phone for Jackie’s number. I know it’s rude, but I’ve got multiple crises occurring at the same
time. I have no choice but to multitask. “I don’t know what you want me to say. You claim you saw a witch at the courthouse
that night. That’s great. But this is West Harbor. To quote my brother, you can’t swing a dead cat in West Harbor without
hitting a—”
“But that’s just it!” Richard hurries back toward the steps to sit beside me again. “The witch I saw wasn’t like any of the others. It was . . . well, there’s no other word for it. She was a queen . . . no, a deity.”
“A deity?”
“That’s right. The reason I couldn’t find a scientific explanation for what happened to me that night, Frankie, is that there
is no scientific explanation. Only a theological one. Because what happened to me was a theophany.”
“You had a waking vision of God at the West Harbor tricentennial celebration?”
“Not God as your mother sees God, Frankie. This was no man in a long white beard with a staff and a halo. This was a goddess.
She came to me. She surrounded me with love and filled me with the truth.”
My phone sits forgotten in my hands because Richard has a rapturous expression on his face. He really does look like a man
who saw . . . something.
“And what did this goddess look like?”
“Well, she was very small—surprisingly so, for such a powerful witch. She had short dark hair cut in a sort of bob, and brown
skin, and she was dressed all in purple. She told me to follow my dreams—and she knew, Frankie. She knew my dream was to sail around the world. She told me to do it. She told me to abandon everything else, buy a boat, and go.”
“Uh-huh.” I point to his front jacket pocket, where I saw him stash his joint after stubbing it out. “Did you happen to be
smoking that at the time by any chance?”
“Of course not! I’m not talking about drug-induced euphoria. This was something else. I tried to resist. I tried to resist
for so long, because I knew what my leaving would do to us. I loved our comfortable little life together.”
Comfortable little life. Yes, that’s what we’d had back then, a comfortable little life, without fun, without intimacy, without any of the things I have with Ash—
Had with Ash.
“But in the end,” he goes on, “this witch’s voice was too strong. And that’s why I had to go.”
Ash is right. Richard is a dick.
“Gosh,” I say. “Have you mentioned any of this to your therapist, Richard? Because I may not have a ton of experience with
hallucinations, but it sure sounds like—”
“It was no hallucination, Frankie.” Richard looks annoyed at the suggestion he might have suffered a mental health crisis.
“I really saw her. I saw a witch who told me to follow my dreams.”
“And did she know that dream also included sticking your dick in our twenty-five-year-old yoga instructor?”
“That is really unfair,” Richard says, looking wounded. “Devorah has never done anything but support me.”
“Good. I hear her parents turned her old room into a home gym, but there’s still space for a futon, so maybe she’ll let you