Folly Cove (28 page)

“Desire for a woman.” He had calmed down now, his breathing more regular, though again he had to rub his hands on his jeans. “I met Anthony at that conference I went to in Las Vegas, the weekend Anne came to take care of the horses for Laura. He was a blackjack dealer in one of the casinos. I don't know if it's because I was so out of my element or what, but things got complicated. Fast.”

“So you came home and decided to bait yourself with Anne, is that it?” Elly didn't want to understand, but somehow she did. She could see it all: Jake's dogged and hopeless determination to turn himself into something he was not—a straight man—as he had probably been trying to do all his life.

“Yes,” he said. “Anne happened to be there. I needed to tempt myself with someone who wasn't my wife. Part of me still hoped, I guess, that it was marriage that had robbed me of desire. Not the fact that I wanted to be with a man instead of a woman.”

Elly considered this. Jake had grown up in a conservative Catholic family. Played lacrosse in college, joined a fraternity. What torture it must have been to be gay yet afraid to explore his sexuality. He'd made himself miserable trying to do the right things for his family. As Laura had. What a sad mess.

“So what really happened?” she asked.

“I went into the guest room while Anne was asleep and pulled the covers down to look at her. I touched myself. But that's all that happened. I swear! I never meant for her to wake up.” He pressed a hand to his face, covering his eyes for a moment, then dropped it. “I told Laura about it so she wouldn't know what I'd done with Anthony in Las Vegas or guess what I really was.
What I am
. It's the same reason I kissed Anne at that Christmas party. I wanted to tell Anne the truth. That's why I went looking for her at the pub. I was hoping she'd understand. Forgive me, maybe.”

“That's pretty twisted, Jake.”

“I know. I know. But I didn't want to be gay! I'd been with only one man and a couple of women in college. I wasn't sure of anything for years.” Jake was talking fast now, his words slamming into one another. “I fell in love with Laura. With who she is! Laura's everything I've always admired in a person: brave and honest. Smart. True to herself.”

“She is,” Elly said.

“I thought I could control my feelings for men. When Laura got pregnant in college, I took that as a sign that I was on the right path. I always wanted to be a father. I thought, all right, I'm attracted to men sometimes, but I knew I could control my feelings. And I did, until Anthony.”

“But Laura miscarried. Didn't you take that as a sign, too?”

Jake shook his head. “No. Anyway, I couldn't leave her. Laura was so down. She'd stopped riding competitively because of me. And I knew she'd be a wonderful wife and mother.” He sat back against the couch, his eyes bright, his jaw clenched. “But I've been a shit husband.”

He looked so pained that Elly wanted to comfort him. Jake was right: her sister loved him. Thought he was good and kind and hardworking. And he was, in most ways.

On the other hand, she wanted to kill Jake for lying. For hurting Laura. Even though Laura didn't know where he was right now, or where her husband had presumably been spending most of his evenings and probably some weekends, Laura was in pain. She already knew that Jake didn't love her in the way she needed to be loved.

That was not necessarily unforgivable. But it had to be remedied.

The door opened and Anthony appeared, holding a box of pizza. Brad was at his side, pink-cheeked and excited. “We got it, Daddy!” he yelled. “We got the pizza guy, pizza pie!” Then he ran straight into Jake's arms.

“What am I going to do?” Jake asked, raising his eyes to Elly above the little boy's head.

“What we're going to do right now is eat some pizza,” Anthony said, hurrying over to set the box on the table in front of them. “Then we'll figure it all out together. Right, Elly?”

She sat stunned on the couch, all three of them looking at her now, and nodded.

•   •   •

Lucy went to sleep just after six. Anne settled on the couch to read her e-mail.

She'd had two responses from teaching jobs, but now that her mother had offered her a job in the kitchen, she wondered whether she should stay in Flossie's place and work here. That would make the most financial sense.

Flossie had made it clear that she'd be happy to watch Lucy if Anne wanted to work at the inn. This would give her a chance to try cooking full-time. Rodrigo could teach her a lot. And, frankly, any other option seemed too exhausting. Other jobs she'd found would require her to commute long distances or pay an astonishing amount of rent.

Then there was the daunting matter of day care. Anne didn't even know where to begin with that. She hated the idea. She wanted Lucy to be with family while she was still so small.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. She answered it and was surprised to see Sebastian. “You and your dog are off the hook,” she'd told him as they'd said good-bye the last time she'd cooked for him. “I'm completely healed! No more guilt. No more stopping by with pity meals or wine, thank you.”

She hadn't seen him since, and that was four days ago. Now Sebastian held a bottle of white wine in one hand and a bag from the local Chinese place in the other. “I hope I'm not intruding.”

Anne smiled. “Are you kidding? Lucy fell asleep early, so I didn't bother cooking. I was about to forage for crackers.”

He laughed. “This is only from the local place, but I think it can compete with crackers.” Sebastian followed her into the living room and made himself at home in the galley kitchen, heating the food in the microwave and opening the wine while she took down a pair of plates and laid silverware on the counter.

Anne ate hungrily and asked what he'd been working on today. He was excited, Sebastian said, because he'd gotten permission from the city to continue the research he'd started in Dogtown for another year.

“You know Dogtown's haunted, right?” she said.

“Of course. Don't forget I grew up around here, too,” he said.

“I was always spooked by that one story about James Merry,” she said.

“Who?”

“That guy who raised a bull in Dogtown so he could wrestle it every year, until it eventually killed him in 1892 when he tried it the third year in a row.”

“Not that you can blame the bull for that, I guess.”

“Right. The guy was asking for it,” Anne said. “The creepiest bit is that there's a rock with Merry's name and the date of his death-by-bull written in red paint to look like blood.”

Suddenly they were both laughing so hard at the absurdity of the story that Anne had to put down her wine before she spilled it. “So why are you so excited to keep working here?” she asked. “I mean, you've traveled all over the world. Why stay in Massachusetts?”

“I realized that no matter how far away you go, sometimes you have to go home to figure things out,” he said. “Besides, for a tree guy like me who's interested in the intersection between climate change and natural resources, Cape Ann has a fascinating history. Think about it: just twenty thousand years ago, New England was covered by a huge glacier. Then the glacier melted and exposed all sorts of rocks and boulders in this area.”

They discussed the history, then, of people who'd been landing on Cape Ann for eleven thousand years, starting with the Vikings and the
French. “They were followed by John Smith and the European settlers who fished and farmed and cut lumber,” Sebastian said.

Then came the granite quarries, he added: paving stones made from Cape Ann granite were used in New York, Boston, and other cities. He grinned. “Obviously, I could talk history all night. Sorry. But the point is, you and I are just the tiniest blip in our history. Working in Dogtown reminds me of that every day.”

“That certainly puts our petty problems in perspective,” Anne said. When Sebastian fell silent and started poking at the food on his plate, she nudged him with her elbow. “Why are you really here tonight? You look like you have something on your mind.”

Sebastian ran a hand through his auburn hair, streaked with lighter copper strands from spending so much time outdoors. “I do. My sister Paige saw Elly today.”

“Really? That's good. Elly hasn't seen any of her old friends. She's feeling a little lost, I think,” Anne said. “I haven't been much good to her because I can't go out at night. Also, she's doing all this shopping for Mom's birthday celebration, which is turning into a circus. Elly thinks we're all going to sing and dance to songs from
An American in Paris
because that movie was made the year Mom was born.”

Sebastian was looking at her with one eyebrow raised, obviously waiting for her to finish. “I'm babbling. Sorry,” she said. “What does Paige seeing Elly have to do with you coming here tonight?”

“Paige told Elly that I've been seeing you.”

Immediately, Anne wanted to lodge protests: he was coming around to check on her, no other reason. By the way Sebastian cleared his throat and then hurriedly stood up to scrape the plates, though, Anne knew he had more to say.

God. She hoped this wouldn't turn into a conversation about Jake. What if Laura had told Paige the same awful story, and Paige had repeated it to her brother? Sebastian had witnessed that horrible confrontation with Jake and Laura in the bar. What if he believed Laura's version of things?

Now he suggested they move to the couch. “I always feel like I'm
on an interrogation stool here at the counter,” he said, pointing to the low-hanging light.

She'd never noticed it before, but Sebastian was much taller than she was. So tall that when she sat on the couch, Anne curled her legs beneath her to avoid touching him, because his body seemed to fill the room.

How did they have sex in that car? They were almost twenty years younger then, of course. More flexible. Sebastian probably had no idea he was her first lover.

Thoughts of that night flooded Anne's memory, unbidden, causing her face to burn so hot that she put her palm to one cheek to cool it.

“You okay?” Sebastian drew his dark brows into a frown.

“I'm fine. Just nervous. You're acting very strange,” Anne said, though she supposed he could say the same of her.

“Sorry. I don't mean to act strange. Sometimes I can't help it.”

“Join the club,” Anne said, and tried to smile, but felt her lower lip quiver and bit it instead.

Sebastian watched her mouth as he said carefully, “Paige didn't know you had a baby. She was surprised to hear that from Elly.”

This was unexpected. “Why didn't Paige know? You never told her?”

He shook his head. “I figured that was your business.”

“Does Paige mind that you and I are starting to be friends?”

He smiled. “No. I think she's glad, actually.”

“Oh. That's a relief.” Anne felt her shoulders relax a little.

Sebastian leaned forward and clasped his hands around his knees, his hair falling over his eyes. “Paige wants me to tell you about my wife. I'm just struggling to find the right way to start.”

“There's no need,” she said. “I mean, talk, if you want. Otherwise, it's okay if you never tell me.”

“My sister's right. I need to tell you,” he said.

Sebastian began hesitantly at first, the words coming two or three sentences at a time, with long pauses as he felt his way through his history with Jenny: how they'd met in El Salvador, where he'd fallen ill with typhoid fever and nearly died. Might have, if Jenny hadn't cared for him. His decision that theirs was a partnership where each could make the other a better person and the world a better place.

“I'm speaking in clichés—I know,” he said. “But we were young and unbelievably idealistic.”

When they returned to the States, Jenny had trouble adjusting, he continued. Depression took root. She wore the same clothes day after day. Dishes piled up in the sink until Sebastian came home from work to clean the house and see that she ate something. She saw one therapist after another, and was institutionalized for a few weeks after they'd been married five years. Medication seemed to help.

Then, when Jenny got pregnant, she stopped taking the pills, he said, because she was afraid of hurting the baby. “I'd come home from work and she'd be curled on the bed, as if she were literally trying to hold herself together,” he said.

“The poor thing,” Anne said. “It sounds like she was in hell. You, too.” She felt tension in her own shoulders, watching him.

“Yes,” he said. “‘Hell.' That's the right word for it.”

Once, when Jenny was about seven months pregnant, Sebastian arrived home to find her on the kitchen floor, a carving knife in one hand. She'd made several cuts along her wrists, though nothing deep. “At that point I called 911,” he said. “She hated me for that, but I was terrified.”

The EMTs convinced Jenny to check herself into the psych ward of the local hospital, but it was a pointless exercise, Sebastian said. “Jenny managed to check herself out and disappear.”

When he fell silent, staring across the room with a bleak expression, Anne finally touched his hand. It was cool, rough from his work outdoors. “Where did she go?”

He shrugged. “I still don't know. She came back three days later, wearing the same clothes she'd had on when she left. She was probably on the street somewhere.”

That night, Sebastian had talked to Paige on the phone. They'd discussed having Jenny committed; he was worried not only for her safety, but for the baby's. Jenny, who never left the house, took his car keys after they went to bed and drove off.

“She left me a note. I found it when I woke up and she wasn't in bed with me.”