Belonging (28 page)

A movement caught her eye. She turned slightly to look, and her body pressed more tightly against Doug’s arm. Todd was standing in the hallway. Something sparked between the three of them, a small shock of discomfort and even alarm. The scent of guilt drifted around them.

“Dad.”

Doug didn’t release his hold on Joanna. “I’ll be right down.”

Todd thundered down the stairs, his large feet in their heavy work boots making a
clomp, clomp, clomp
noise on the wood. Joanna had had them pull the stained, shaggy runner off days ago, and now she had to decide whether to buy a new runner for the stairs or to have them sanded and stained.

“I guess I’ll have to have a new carpet put on the stairs to muffle the noise so people won’t wake the babies,” Joanna murmured, partly thinking aloud and also trying to hide the pleasure she felt as she stood pressed against Doug’s body.

“I’ll help you into your bedroom,” Doug said.

“Thanks.”

She leaned against him as he led her into her bedroom and gently lowered her into
a sitting position on the bed.

“I’m as big as a walrus and I find it about as easy to navigate,” Joanna remarked, trying to dull the intensity of the moment, trying to say in code: I’m pregnant, I’m unattractive, therefore don’t think I’m having sexual feelings about you.

“I’ll get back to work,” Doug replied, and nodding curtly, he left the room and clomped down the stairs.

Joanna sat on the edge of her bed, letting her thoughts settle. Something else was stirring within her—no, not lust, not grateful surprise at the footstool, either. Something …

The sounds of the footsteps down the stairs.

Why hadn’t she heard Todd coming up the stairs?

What were the men doing here on the second floor today?

She had been coming up the stairs, and Doug had come out of her bedroom. His appearance had startled her, but his approach, his arm around her, his nearness, had driven all questions out of her mind. Now they buzzed around her.

What had Doug Snow been doing in her bedroom?

She looked around her room. Madaket kept it clean. She vacuumed, dusted, straightened, polished the windows and mirrors to a sparkling sheen. But Joanna kept it messy. Piles of books, magazines, notes to herself, pens, catalogs, were scattered on every surface. On her bureau stood a large velvet-lined jewelry box, open now, exposing a tangle of costume jewelry.

Rising, Joanna crossed the room and, leaning against her open closet door, looked around from this perspective. She’d had Todd and Doug build a cabinet for her small metal safe into the wall of drawers and cabinets in her study and she’d told them, casually, without even thinking about it, that she kept all her real jewelry in there rather than in her bedroom. They wouldn’t come in here to steal costume jewelry.

Her clothes hung in an orderly row along the rod in the closet.

But when she turned on the overhead light, she saw, at the far end, several boxes of shoes tumbled over each other, spilling out a high-heeled black silk pump and a rhinestoned red sandal.

They’d been in her closet. They’d been in her closet because they thought she’d be out all afternoon, and when they heard her coming up the stairs, Doug had rushed out to stall her while Todd had tried to put things back in place.

But why would they be in her closet?

She had to know.

With her heart beating a rapid tattoo against her chest, Joanna descended the stairs. She found Doug and Todd and Madaket gathered around the rough, jagged opening broken between the kitchen and the screened-in porch. The largest bits of debris had been picked up and two giant rubber trash barrels stood next to the kitchen wall, overflowing with torn wallpaper and bits of splintered wood and plaster.

“—not in your way,” Todd was saying to Madaket, who was staring at him, entranced. Todd stopped in midsentence and all three turned to look at Joanna as she entered the room.

“Joanna! Are you all right?” Madaket asked.

“I’m fine, Madaket. Doug, please tell me: what were you and Todd doing in my room? In my closet?” She kept her voice low and reasonable.

Madaket gasped. Todd looked at his father. Doug’s face slowly turned a deep red, but when he spoke, his voice was steady, and he seemed more angry than embarrassed.

“Todd and I were checking the wall between your bedroom and the front bedroom. Sometimes people build hiding places into walls. We can usually tell by knocking on the walls how deep and solid they are.”

“I see. You were looking for the treasure.” Joanna looked straight at Doug, who did not look away. He wasn’t uncomfortable as he coolly stared at her. If anything, he was enjoying himself.

“Sometimes things are hidden behind walls,” he told her, and he seemed to be making a double entendre. He was not quite insolent. His dark blue eyes glittered.

“And you found—?”

“Nothing. The wall’s regular. Solid. Nothing unusual.”

“So you won’t be needing to go into my bedroom again.”

“Right.”

Still he stared at her. She waited one beat, two, for him to apologize, but he said nothing else and finally she simply turned, left the room, walked through the hall, climbed the stairs. She was glad she’d long ago learned the tactical value of silence. It often did more than a million of the best-chosen words to intimidate or discompose. But Doug obviously knew this himself.

Back in her bedroom she sank onto her bed without taking off her clothes. Her
heart was calming now, but the adrenaline which had rushed through her as she confronted Doug and Todd was still in her system. Her hands shook, and her breathing was irregular.

It made sense that they were looking for the treasure, she decided. She believed him. But it was clear to her that now she’d have to make some rules about her house, and about the treasure—whose it was, who had the right to search for it. Her thoughts raced from Doug to Tory to Carter, all of whom, she felt, in a welling up of self-pity, had betrayed her in their various ways. Finally, exhausted, she fell asleep.

She awoke several hours later, refreshed, and went downstairs to find everyone gone. Madaket had left a cold pasta and vegetable salad in the refrigerator for her, along with a rhubarb-strawberry pie. Joanna sat on her back steps, eating, looking out at the water, wishing the deck were built. The wind was rising, skipping waves across the ocean’s surface, teasing the hem of her dress and tugging at her hair. Her thoughts skipped and tumbled. Finally she went back inside, put her dishes in the sink, then walked from room to room, turning lights on as she entered, standing quietly in each room, looking around, opening herself to any and all sensations. The past remained here in the long cracks running through the plaster like a trail of years, in the scarred wood of the stairs or the bubbles in the glass in the windows, in the way the worn floors rolled. But she felt no ghost here, no animus, no lingering spirit. She felt safe in all these rooms, and only slightly lonely. Languidly, frivolously, she tapped on an attic wall. Of all the walls in the house, these had been the least changed over the years. Many of them were still unstained rough wood. Tapping as she went along, she listened for some slight change that would draw her attention, but she couldn’t perceive any difference in sound.

Which was fine. She didn’t need any treasure, any jewels or gold. Leaning on a windowsill, she looked down over her property—three acres, she’d been told, but the boundary lines were not defined by a fence or hedge, and so from this vantage point it seemed the world was hers: lawn and moors and beach and ocean, all cast in velvety amethyst shadows by the falling night. Her babies languorously kicked inside her.
She
was a house hiding treasures, and that was all that mattered.

Turning off lights as she went, she returned to the second floor and prepared for bed. The wind played around the house with a high, girlish, breathless chatter, and as Joanna stretched out in bed, she decided it was a Monet wind tonight, lily pads fluttering
on the surface of a bright pond. She put her hands on her belly and felt her children move within her. Easily, once again she fell asleep.

The next night she and Tory went to a Neil Simon play at Bennett Hall, a small theater in a modest building attached to the grand old white Congregational Church. The theater was small, seating only about a hundred people, and theatergoers had to be seated off the main central aisle, so that those being escorted to their seats became a kind of preshow entertainment.

Joanna took an aisle seat because of her bulk. She and Tory had just settled into their chairs and were opening their programs when Tory nudged Joanna’s arm.

“Would you look at that!” Tory whispered sotto voce.

Joanna swept her eyes around the room and saw Gardner Adams enter with a woman who clung to him with long magenta fingernails.

“She doesn’t seem his type at all,” Joanna told Tory.

She sensed someone’s gaze on her and, looking up, saw Pat Hoover, who sat with Bob on the other side of the aisle and a few rows up. Their eyes met, they smiled, their eyebrows raised, very slightly they shook their heads in mutual wonder. Of all the women in the world whom the handsome physician could have chosen, this was the one?

Gardner and his date sat down, or rather Gardner sat, and his date arranged herself ostentatiously around him, encompassing as much of his body as she could while at the same time positioning her hand so that she could enjoy the flashes of her brilliant engagement ring.

“I just can’t believe it,” Tory whispered, pretending to study her program. “I’ve met him at a few parties and functions, and he’s adorable, a real sweetie. How in the world did he get hooked up with her?”

Gardner’s date—his fiancée, it seemed—could not have been any less an island type if she’d landed directly from the moon. Her bleached blond hair was styled and sprayed and backcombed; her dress dripped great clots of rhinestone, and her earrings were as big as teacups.

The theater filled. Murmurs rose in the air like a kind of humming, the lights dimmed, and the curtain was raised. The show on the stage began.

At intermission most of the crowd strolled out for the light refreshments sold in the lobby or into the mild misty night for fresh air. Tory and Joanna joined the throng.

“Oh!” Tory exclaimed. “That’s it!”

“That’s what?” Joanna asked.

“Sssh. Don’t look. Come over here under the tree.”

Puzzled, Joanna followed Tory out onto the brick walk and across the lawn so that they stood in shadow looking back at the people illuminated by the light from the lobby windows.

“Don’t look now,” Tory whispered, “but the reason Gardner is with that horror has just become crystal clear. She must be Dr. Sandler’s daughter.”

“Dr. Sandler?”

“Horatio Sandler, our old obstetrician and gynecologist. He’s practiced on the island for about a hundred years. Everyone loves him. Worships him. That one, the tall one with the white hair.”

As Tory spoke, Joanna scanned the crowd until her eyes caught on the figure of a stunningly attractive man standing with Gardner Adams and the blonde. At least six feet six inches tall, and all bones, garbed in expensive, old, perfectly fitted tweed worn down to a silky suppleness, the old man hunched forward, absorbed in his daughter’s chatter. He had a head of hair as full and dazzlingly white as a snowdrift, and a smile that sparkled in the night. Joanna could see how much the dreadful blonde resembled her father: she was tall and slender and gorgeous, in her rather electrifying way. But while Dr. Sandler seemed to radiate warmth—particles of light really did seem to glimmer around his body—his daughter seemed to crackle with darkness.

Pat and Bob Hoover crossed the lawn to join Tory and Joanna.

“Who’d have thunk it?” Pat said. “Gardner Adams and Tiffany Sandler.”

“Tiffany?”

“Tiffany. Horatio is without a doubt the most wonderful, lovely, gifted man on the planet. He’s saved so many lives, and so many babies’ lives, and his hands are magic. But his daughter is a stupid bitch.”

Joanna laughed in surprise. “Does she live on Nantucket?”

“Oh, no. She’s in New York.”

“But if she’s planning to marry Gardner—”

“—then either she’ll have to move here or Gardner will have to move there. And I’ve always heard that Gardner wanted to take over Horatio’s practice. Be the island’s family doctor. I don’t know where Blondie fits in. What a mystery.”

“Gardner is going to deliver my babies,” Joanna said. “He’s awfully nice, and calm, and intelligent. I
thought
he was intuitive.”

“Love makes even the smartest man blind,” Bob said.

“He can’t love her!” Pat protested. “It’s her father he loves. And the daydream of marrying the king’s daughter and inheriting the throne.”

Another couple, an architect and a schoolteacher, joined their small group. Now they all formed a small circle, leaning in toward the middle to talk with one another, and as they spoke, Joanna flashed back on her days as a girl standing alone on the playground of one of the many schools she found herself moved to throughout her childhood. How she’d envied groups like this, friends gathered together, leaning just slightly forward into a circle of easy fellowship. She’d dreamed of belonging, just like this. Here, under the stars on an early summer night, she felt that she belonged, felt she was part of a group she could call her own.

Fifteen

Monday afternoon Joanna lay on the long white couch in her living room while Gardner Adams took her pulse and blood pressure. She was cranky. Her sleep was troubled by the August humidity, which coated everything with a slimy dampness. Her sheets stuck to her skin. Her body was enormous and heavy and cumbersome. When she awoke, she showered, then rested on her bed, feeling like some wallowing great sea mammal as she lifted the heavy globes of her breasts in order to pat talcum powder against her sweating midriff. A dark line divided the mound of her belly in half; her thighs were swollen with the weight of her body.

But her children were coming alive to her. They were becoming individuals. The twin on the right was rowdy, strong, and active, kicking, hiccuping, and punching. One tiny heel continually jabbed Joanna in the rib cage, under her right breast, as if trying to make more room. The twin on the left was more sedate. His movements were blunt and rolling; he seemed to stretch his body and arch his back. Joanna thought of the twin on the left as the Swimmer, content and introspective; the twin on the right she called the Chorus Girl, bored with her small space, eager to get out and start dancing.