Chapter Nineteen Lily
It’s midnight and the fireworks are exploding.
Thomas is standing alone on the dance floor, looking like he was just robbed in broad daylight.
His hands are still slightly outstretched, holding nothing but air.
He looks dazed and lost, a little kid abandoned in a grocery store with no idea where to go next.
I’ve been sitting at an empty table with his sister, Rachel, showing her on my phone some of the sketches I’ve been working on recently.
I still haven’t shown them to Rose, but sometimes, it’s easier to confide in a stranger.
So far, we get along great. Rachel has the stoicism and composure of her brother, but she’s also quick to laugh and effusively warm.
When we spot Thomas, we lock eyes and immediately stand to approach him. By the time we arrive by his side, he is thawing.
“What just happened?” Rachel asks, concerned.
Thomas shakes his head, as if to shake the events into order. “I don’t know. We were talking and then the fireworks started and William grabbed her.”
“What were you talking about?”
I curse myself silently. After the three of us went to the bar, Rachel and I started talking and we forgot to keep William distracted. This whole elaborate matchmaking scheme is new to me, and for just a second, I let my attention slip.
“She asked me why I came to the island.” Thomas still looks stricken.
Rachel and I exchange a look. Back at the table, she told me she’s been playing a matchmaking game of her own, hoping Thomas would come here and rekindle with Rose.
“Did she say it like, ‘Why did you come here?’ ” Rachel bats her eyelashes in a wistful, flirtatious voice. “Or, was it more like, ‘Why did you come here?’ ” This time, she says the phrase in an angry, aggressive tone.
Thomas looks at her like she’s speaking a foreign language. “I don’t know?”
“You don’t know? It’s a pretty big difference,” says Rachel.
Thomas shakes his head again. “I guess it was in between? I don’t know. I can’t read her. Maybe I’ve never understood her.”
I anticipate his next move before he makes it. Thomas starts to walk away. I grab him by the jacket. “Come on,” I say. “Tell us more. What happened? Why are you freaking out?”
He keeps walking toward the exit, politely disengaging himself. We follow him, trying to keep up. Even in his frustration, he walks with a determined, steady pace.
“This is a bad idea,” he says, exiting the tent.
On the other side, facing the ocean, we hear the pop of fireworks and the pleased applause of the gathered group.
The exit where we stand is empty of guests.
Everyone is outside in a large clump. Out of the corner of my eye, I think I see the red-shawled psychic, but when I look back, it’s just a guest in a long, red gown.
“Why is it a bad idea? Tell us what happened,” Rachel pleads as Thomas is beginning to walk toward the sandy parking lot.
My heels are sinking in the sand, and it’s hard to keep pace with him.
“Because I can’t do this!” erupts Thomas, losing his composure.
“Because I’m tired of it. I’ve been through too much to put up with these mind games.
If she wanted me around, she would reach out to me.
We could have morning coffee. We could go for a walk.
We could do a hundred things easier than this.
We share a wall, for Christ’s sake! What’s the point of all this back-and-forth?
I loved her, even proposed to her once, and she rejected me.
I reached out again, and she rejected me.
All she’s done is reject me, and I’m exhausted.
The last couple of years have been hard.
I lost my wife just five years ago, and before that, I watched her get sicker and sicker with every passing day, unable to help.
” His voice breaks. “I can’t keep putting myself through this. ”
Rachel and I watch his impassioned speech in a sort of awed silence, neither of us seeming to know what to say next, because he’s right. We’ve been unfair to him, forcing him into this uncomfortable, vulnerable situation with no guarantees of a positive outcome.
“I’m sorry,” I say in a small voice, barely perceptible over the fireworks.
Thomas’s face softens. “I’m sorry, too,” he says. “But I have to move on.”
With that, he walks away toward his car. Rachel trails after him, turning only once to say goodbye.
“We tried,” she says with a sad smile. “It was really nice meeting you.”
I watch them leave until I can no longer make out their figures fading into the dark night.
On the ride home, Rose doesn’t speak. We sit in a companionable silence, lost in our own thoughts. Before us, the beach road is bumpy. It looks ominous without the illumination of the bright sun, all those rolling dunes rocking the car up and down.
I feel terrible for putting Thomas in an uncomfortable position, and even worse for Rose. All I want is for her to be happy—it’s what I want most in the whole world—and I thought Thomas was special enough to make it happen. What if I was wrong?
I let my mind drift to thoughts of Henry, about the wedding he’s planning, one not unlike the party we crashed tonight.
Before him, I never gave much thought to what kind of wedding I’d like to have someday, or whether or not I even wanted one. After witnessing my parents’ failed relationship, I didn’t allow myself to envision a future that involved a white dress.
Henry was different. He treated life as if the universe was conspiring on behalf of his every happiness.
He took what I thought of as extraordinary blessings—financial stability, a happy home, a loving partner, healthy children—and assumed them guarantees.
A happy life was his destiny, and he stretched toward it effortlessly and eagerly.
He once told me that my problem was a matter of mindset.
“If you expect good things to happen to you, they will,” he said. “But you always expect the sky to fall.”
What I wanted to retort is: “If you expect bad things to happen to you, you won’t be as devastated when they do.”
Henry with his big family could never understand. Henry with his fifteen cousins, his over-the-top family reunions, the weddings with their own hashtags, his protective shell of money and familial loyalty. He was shepherded through life by a million gracious, outstretched hands.
For a while, I let myself slide into this vision. It was as simple as letting the tide take you.
Lottie was sort of like Henry in that sense. A widow herself, she certainly wasn’t ignorant to life’s challenges, but she was forcefully optimistic. When I worried about something bad happening, she would offer the opposite perspective.
“What if it all works out?” she’d say. “What if the future is even better than you imagined?”
Even throughout her diagnosis and the subsequent treatments, she remained positive. I guess I thought if we completed her bucket list, if we lived like we were her, this mindset would magically soak into us, too.
But in the end, Lottie’s positivity wasn’t enough to save her. We still lost her. Maybe, in the end, relentless positivity is never enough.
“Are you okay?” I break the silence.
“I’m okay,” is all my mom says. “Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ll be fine.”
We’re silent again for several seconds until Rose suddenly says, “Did I ever tell you that I had a creek cat?”
The question is so absurd, I momentarily forget where we are and why we’re here. “What on God’s green earth is a ‘creek cat’?”
Mom laughs, gripping the steering wheel a little too tight, the perpetually nervous driver. “It’s just a cat I found in a creek when I was a teen.”
Outside the window, the sandy road is gradually hardening, turning solid. I try to process what my mom is saying and why she has decided to bring it up now.
“What were you doing in a creek?”
“I was down at Hither Creek in Madaket. With Tommy,” she says simply, eyes still on the road.
“When I first found him, he was tiny. Smaller than the kittens you see up for adoption. He was this scrawny, coal-black, helpless little thing. Hardly distinguishable from the mud and plants caked around him.”
I have a hard time picturing this, too. This is not the mom I know.
The woman I know hates outdoor activities like hiking or camping.
She played pickleball with jewelry on the other day and didn’t break a sweat.
The Rose I know wears uniform outfits of matching sweaters and tailored jackets.
Even her pajamas are silk sets that never look rumpled or worn.
She is a therapist, a professional people go to in times of crisis.
Rose Gardner is not a woman you can easily imagine wading in a creek, searching for stray cats.
“I thought you hated cats? And creeks for that matter.”
“I never said I hated cats, Lily,” corrects Mom. “They usually hate me.”
It’s true that cats are not a particular friend to her.
One Christmas at my grandfather’s house, I witnessed as their family cat, Mrs. Clay, launched itself from the top of the staircase and landed—paws first—on the front of my mom’s new sweater.
It seemed nothing short of a targeted act of aggression, a declaration of war.
I know a long-lost cat might seem a small thing, but it unnerves me. This confession, while relatively small and innocuous, seems incongruous with absolutely everything I know to be true about my mom.
“Did you really have a cat?” I ask again. “And why did you mention it now?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Seeing Tommy reminded me of him.”
“Tommy also had a cat?”
“Tommy’s sister, Rachel, adopted the cat after we nursed it back to health. I wanted him to go to a good home.” Rose pauses. “I should’ve asked her about him. I never heard when he died.”
For a moment, I wonder if the cat might still be alive, over thirty years later. The entire story seems so illogical as to make anything possible.
“I can’t believe you never told me this,” I say.
Mom looks at me across the car. Another vehicle is passing at that moment, and the high beams cast a strange glow over her face. “It’s really not a big deal.”
“How can I know you for twenty-five years and you’ve never mentioned you had a cat?”
She shrugs. “We only kept him for a few weeks. Lottie was allergic.”
I think about why this secret is so hurtful.
The first word I ever spoke was “Dada.” Mom likes to tease me about this, but I once read that babies are more likely to say their fathers’ names first because for the first few months of life, our mothers are indistinguishable from ourselves.
We do not cry out to them, because we do not think them separate beings.
Maybe that’s the problem. I can’t imagine a version of Rose that I don’t have access to.
The rest of the ride home, I try to imagine this younger version of Rose.
I picture her with muddy hands, her hair loose and untamed, scooping that cat from the water.
I imagine her before she became the tidy, self-contained woman I know, before motherhood and the pressures of adulthood and societal expectations bent her into her final form.
I like thinking of Rose like that: free, unencumbered, as wild as the island surrounding her.
“Do you think we’d be friends if we met at the same age?” I ask her when we pull into the driveway. The garden is aglow with the solar lights Lottie planted around the edges of the fence.
“What do you mean? I’d be lucky to have a friend like you,” is all she says.
For some reason, the answer doesn’t satisfy.
There are questions I wish I could ask: what she and Thomas talked about, how she really feels about the situation.
But that would mean admitting that I talked to Thomas first. And I’m not sure how Rose might react if she uncovered the ways I’ve been interfering in her love life.
When I asked Thomas to agree to this plan tonight, I assumed I knew what was best for her, but what if I don’t?
As Rose gets out of the car and steps into the dim light of the garden, I watch her pink dress billow around her ankles, blending into the dark greenery, and wonder how much I still don’t know.