Chance Harbor (9 page)

Russell stood up slowly from the couch, eyeing her warily as he moved toward the front door. “I still love you,” he muttered. “I wish you weren’t being like this, Catherine. It’s not like you at all.”

Her husband looked so miserable that, just for a second, Catherine remembered how he’d come home two years ago and said his father had died, looking bewildered and lost. She’d cradled his head on her shoulder while he cried.

The problem with life, she thought, was that the past was always with you.

She crossed her arms and backed away from the door, giving Russell and his suitcase plenty of room to leave. “Well, this is the new me,” she said. “Get used to it.”

•   •   •

Hand tinting photographs was easier than Willow had thought it would be. She’d used colored pencils first—that’s what one of the artists she’d found online did—trying them out on a picture of a boy on a skateboard. The kid was mid-flip beneath some low-hanging branches of a tree.

Willow put the picture on the table in front of her and sat back to study it. Outlining the sweatshirt with the red pencil had made it really pop. She was just wondering whether to color the leaves, too, when a couple of senior girls showed up. Art was one of her few classes with seniors, and these girls were always late.

Geneva and Joy: two lumpy, friendly girls. Virtually identical, especially when they were wearing field hockey uniforms and ponytails and those mouth guards that made them look like angry gorillas. One girl had a dad who worked at the State House, but Willow couldn’t remember which.

To her surprise, the seniors plopped down at her table instead of taking their usual seats in the back of the room. “So,” Geneva said. “Is it true?”

“Is what true?” Willow picked up the yellow pencil, her eyes on the leaves in the photograph. These two girls weren’t mean, so she felt no sense of alarm. Just rich kids whose conversations mostly circled around clubbing and college boys, now that they had fake IDs.

“About your dad and Nola!” Joy had leaned forward to whisper, but her whisper was a hiss so loud that everyone in class, including Mrs. Lagrasso, turned to look at them.

“Girls!” she snapped. “Stop bothering Willow and do something productive.”

Joy and Geneva pretended not to hear. They pressed closer.

“‘Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth,’” Willow said, cornered enough to repeat a quote by Marcus Aurelius that Russell had scrawled on their kitchen chalkboard. Thanks to Russell, she knew more than she’d ever need to know about Roman emperors.

“Yeah, well, the opinion around school is that Nola’s your dad’s—”

“Girls!” Mrs. Lagrasso was standing next to them, her eyes aiming like light sabers at the seniors. “Go to your seats immediately and start working, or I’m docking your midterm grade.”

“Yes, ma’am. We apologize for interrupting, ma’am.” Joy flashed her whitened teeth at Willow before moving off with Geneva to their usual table, where the two of them pulled out drawing paper and charcoal but did their usual nothing.

“That’s a nice effect,” Mrs. Lagrasso said to Willow, looking at the photograph. “You might want to let it dry until tomorrow, then go over it again with the pencils to emphasize details.”

“Thanks,” Willow mumbled, ducking her head. She was trying to hear what Geneva and Joy were saying. Something about a “baby daddy.”

Suddenly, it was as if the room went dark and a single thought lit up in her brain: Nola was pregnant.

Willow fixed her eyes on the box of colored pencils, trying to anchor her body in the chair. It was no use. Now she was floating above her body while her mind trotted down a scary black tunnel to the truth: Russell was the father of Nola’s baby. That’s why Nola had gone to him on Friday afternoon; why Russell didn’t come home last night; and why Catherine was acting like a zombie, moving around the house like her soul had been sucked out of her body.

And everybody at school already knew. Except her.

Mrs. Lagrasso called to Willow from the front of the room, her voice like a faint foghorn across the ocean. The other students flowed toward the door and shot curious glances in Willow’s direction. “I’d like to speak with you for a moment after class,” Mrs. Lagrasso was saying.

Willow ignored the teacher and shouldered through the door. Once she broke free, she escaped down the narrow back stairs that smelled like moldy towels. She had to leave through the secret exit Kendrick had shown her in the music room before anyone else could tell her truths she didn’t want to know.

•   •   •

Andrew had died in May, four months ago. Throughout the summer, Eve had seen dogs in the neighborhood sleeping outside on driveways and porches and lawns, lying on their sides, wet tongues loose in their mouths, sides twitching with forbidden dreams, and wanted to join them, taking refuge in sleep.

For weeks after her husband was gone, Eve couldn’t even answer the phone. She closed herself in the bathroom and ran the faucet whenever it rang so she wouldn’t have to hear it. But her friends had gathered around, steadily pulling her out of the house. Out of herself. And Catherine had somehow managed to persuade her to go up to Chance Harbor and open the house, at least for part of August, saying, “It’ll only be worse if you wait, Mom.”

Today she was at the mercy of steadfast Melinda, her best friend, hurtling south on Route 1 toward Ipswich. Melinda blew through two yellow lights as if there weren’t a canoe attached to the roof of her car with nothing more than twine they’d found in Eve’s garage.

Melinda was determined to take her canoeing, despite knowing even less about canoes than Eve, who had found Andrew’s canoe two months ago, buried beneath all of the other rubble in the garage. Melinda was also laboring under the illusion that they were going to train for a triathlon; after they went canoeing, she said they would go running. Five miles. God save her.

She and Melinda put the canoe in on the Ipswich River beneath a row of tall hemlocks, where the ground was soft with needles. Eve used to bring the girls here on fall weekends to collect owl pellets, which they’d bring home and dissect; in the summers they’d jump off the rope swing tied to one of the tallest trees leaning over the river.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been here when there weren’t kids jumping off that rope swing,” Melinda said. “Thank God it’s off-season. There’s a place that rents canoes upriver, and it’s like a traffic jam here some weekends, with all of those know-nothings ramming their boats into one another.”

“Ha. Like you and I aren’t know-nothings.” Eve pulled the canoe into the water and steadied it while Melinda stepped into the prow.

“We aren’t know-nothings,” Melinda said. “We’re risk takers. Movers and shakers.”

“Though not in the canoe, I hope,” Eve said. “I’m in no mood to swim.”

“Relax. The water’s so low right now, you’d probably be able to wade to shore.”

The September sky was a soft, uncertain blue. The purple loosestrife looked bright against the green cattails and the river was dotted with white lilies. Eve was suddenly content, putting her muscle into paddling with Melinda.

Soon they were moving at a good clip along the river, startling painted turtles lined up on logs into plopping into the water. They admired the metallic-looking green dragonflies and a beaver’s dam, lifting their paddles to glide soundlessly by a great blue heron on the bank. As they passed, the bird lifted into flight, its wings and body huge and prehistoric above them.

She thought of Andrew, of him not able to see this glorious autumn, this river, the heron’s silvery blue silhouette. Zoe wouldn’t see it, either. Impossible to believe they were both gone, while here she sat beneath this tender sky on a river that stretched before her, uncaring and serene, peaceful.

Everything Eve was not.

Afterward, they tied the canoe back onto the car and went running. Even now, after several months of consistent training with Melinda prodding her along, Eve found that it was still hard going. It took her a mile or so before she fell into the right rhythm. Running was all about breathing, no matter how far you ran.

She was drenched in sweat by the time they returned to the parking lot and began stretching. Melinda was a powerfully built woman, short and stocky, half Italian, her black hair streaked with silver. Andrew used to call them “Mutt and Jeff” because Melinda was Eve’s physical opposite; Eve was lanky and tall, had cut her curly light brown hair to chin length in her forties and had kept it that way since. Less bother. Occasionally she thought about coloring it, now that she had a few streaks of gray, but honestly, what would be the point?

Andrew had teased her about looking like Amelia Earhart. When Eve was let go from her job at the hospital, he’d given her a brown leather bomber jacket and a plaid scarf to celebrate “your new era of Amelia Earhart exploration.”

“You do remember that Earhart’s plane took a nosedive, right?” Eve had reminded him. “Is that the kind of ending you have in mind for me?”

After a moment of red-faced embarrassment, Andrew had recovered and said, “At least she was doing what she loved. Now it’s your turn.”

Melinda brought Eve back to the present, saying, as she always did after a run, “Well, we won’t set any world records, but we got off our duffs and broke a sweat. Good job.”

“No small feat for old mares like us,” Eve agreed. This was her standard line, too. But Melinda heard the off note in her voice.

“You okay?” Melinda asked.

It would be a long time before Eve would be okay again. But at least today she could give a more concrete answer: “I’m worried about Catherine.”

“Wow. That’s different,” Melinda said. “I always think of Catherine as a beacon of sanity in our crazy world. Why?”

“She just told me that she and Russell are getting divorced.”

“You’re kidding!” Melinda stopped stretching and stared at Eve. “Those two always seemed joined at the hip. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. It’s all very sudden and mysterious.” Eve recounted the weekend’s events. “All Catherine said when she asked me to stay with Willow for the rest of the weekend was that she needed time away. A part of me even wondered if Catherine was asking me to hang out with Willow for my sake, not hers. She knows how down I get on weekends, because Andrew and I always used to do something together on Sundays.”

Eve had to pause and swallow the lump in her throat, ambushed suddenly by fragmented memories of Sunday brunches and movies. Andrew had been the sort to plan out every day. She had loved that about him. “But then Catherine came home Sunday night and dropped this bomb with no explanation at all.”

“Bizarre.” Melinda bent over and grabbed her ankles. Her voice was slightly muffled against her knees. “Have you talked to her since?”

“Twice. Monday morning before she went to work and again last night.” Eve leaned against the car and did faux push-ups, struggling a little to breathe and talk at the same time. “Both times she said the marriage is over. ‘A flatliner,’ she told me.”

“And you haven’t spoken to her again?”

Eve shook her head. “I tried calling several times, but she hasn’t picked up my calls. She’s not responding to my texts and e-mails either. At this point it feels like I’m harassing her.”

“Maybe Catherine’s avoiding you because she’s afraid you’re going to try to change her mind.”

“She’d be right,” Eve said. “I can’t stand the thought of her marriage going up in flames. Catherine and Russell have worked through so much already. I hate what a divorce could do to Willow, too, after what that poor child has been through. Catherine should definitely not be making such a sudden move.”

“It could be less sudden than you think,” Melinda suggested.

“No. I would have picked up on something.”

Melinda frowned. “It could be an untenable situation. Russell could have done something unforgivable.”

“I can’t see it. Russell has always been rock-solid. Pretty much the most reliable man on the planet.”

“On the outside, sure,” Melinda said. “But there are always things inside a marriage that we can’t possibly know. One of them could be having an affair.”

“Maybe. I just don’t know.” Eve bent down to hide her expression, retying a shoelace that was perfectly tied already. She knew it was possible to feel like you were falling in love even if you were married. She had nearly demolished her own marriage in a few short, turbulent, painful weeks with another man. She’d never told any of her friends about her affair. Or about Andrew’s.

“How’s Willow handling all this?” Melinda asked. “Have you talked to her since the weekend?”

“No. She’s not answering her phone or replying to my texts, either. I’m worried.”

“That
is
worrying.” They reached for their water bottles and drank. “So what are you going to do?”

“I was considering driving down there tonight,” Eve said. “Bad idea, right?”

“Terrible,” Melinda agreed. “What time are you leaving?”

“Right after rush hour.”

At home, Eve showered and ate a light supper of salad and half a tuna sandwich. By eight o’clock she was on the road to Cambridge and imagining what excuse she could use to explain her sudden appearance on Catherine’s doorstep. The most plausible one was that she’d gone to a movie with her friend Bea, who lived in Brookline.

No. Catherine would probably see through any excuse, and why bother to lie?

Eve pulled up in front of Catherine’s small white two-story house less than an hour later. Built in the 1850s, it looked like a doll’s cottage, sandwiched between a brick prewar apartment building and a massive pink Victorian with a wraparound porch. That was the wonderful thing about Cambridge: there were architectural surprises around every corner.

Catherine’s car was parked in the driveway and lights blazed in every room. Eve locked the car and felt her way up the dark front walk. She hesitated on the front porch—should she knock? Ring the bell?—then opened the door the way she always did, calling Catherine’s name.

Willow greeted her, running down the stairs with a finger to her lips. For a moment, silhouetted against the hall light, with her new curves and her straight, pale blond hair spread like a shawl across the shoulders of her blue hoodie, Willow looked so much like Zoe that Eve couldn’t breathe.