Elin Hilderbrand - Nantucket Nights

“I have to meet someone,” Lindsey said.

“This won’t take long,” Theo said. He unlocked Antoinette’s bike, and even considered telling Lindsey that it was Antoinette’s bike, but he didn’t want her to claim it as her own or anything. “I’ll give you the picture and you can go. I promise.” He walked the bike with confidence, checking twice out of the comer of his eye to make sure she was following him.

“I’m not staying long,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We eat at six, anyway.”

“And don’t introduce me to your grandmother as Antoinette’s birth daughter or anything. Just tell her I’m a friend from school.”

“You bet.” He slowed down a little so she could walk alongside him. “Was it you who turned my mother in to the police?”

“I didn’t turn her in,” Lindsey said. “I just told them what I knew about you and Antoinette. About Antoinette being pregnant. Those seemed like relevant facts, and your mother certainly wasn’t going to come forth with them. That guy, John? He told most of it, anyway. He had it in for his wife and your mom.”

“My mom didn’t do anything to Antoinette.”

“Prove it.”

“I can’t prove it,” he said. “But they haven’t found a body, have they? I’m telling you, Antoinette is alive somewhere.”

“You can hold on to that fantasy if you want,” she said. “But I’m not going to.”

“My mother didn’t do anything wrong,” Theo said. “If you need someone to blame, blame me.”

“I do blame you,” Lindsey said. “High school. God, I can’t believe it.”

They approached his grandmother’s apartment. He had his own keys now. Lindsey regarded the building. “Nice place,” she said. “I’d hate to imagine the rent.”

“Two thou,” Theo said, though he had no idea if this was true or not. He locked Antoinette’s bike up at the bottom of the stairs. “Where do you live?”

“None of your business,” Lindsey said. He turned to look at her as they climbed the stairs, and she glared at him. “I don’t want you stalking me.”

“You are like your mother,” Theo said. He took a deep breath outside his grandmother’s door; then he unlocked it. “Sabrina?” He smelled roasting chicken, and Sabrina emerged from the kitchen wearing a flowing orange dress and a gold lame head scarf. She shimmered like a flame. Sabrina on fire. Theo watched Lindsey’s eyes widen; she was expecting another kind of grandmother, maybe.

“Well, helllooo,” Sabrina said. “Hello, hello. I’m Sabrina Montero.” She smiled and offered Lindsey her hand.

“Lindsey Allerton.” Lindsey transformed immediately into the kind of woman that one would want to introduce to one’s grandmother. Charm lifted off her like perfume. “It’s lovely to meet you. I’m a friend of Theo’s from school.”

Sabrina blinked. She looked between Lindsey and Theo. “Really?” she said. “How divine. Theo hasn’t brought any of his school friends up to meet me yet. Ashamed of me, probably. Will you stay for dinner? We’re having Cornish game hens-and you won’t believe this, but I put three of those little yummies in the oven. I had a feeling company was coming.”

Lindsey hugged her backpack close to her body. “Thank you for asking, but I’m meeting someone in a short while, so I’ll have to pass. Too bad-it smells delicious.”

“I’m devastated,” Sabrina said. “But another time.”

“Another time,” Lindsey repeated.

Theo cleared his throat. “I have some assignments and stuff to give Lindsey. Okay if we go into my room?”

“Of course,” Sabrina said. She winked at him, and his face grew warm.

Sabrina went back into the kitchen humming, “Try to remember the kind of September…”

So she knew, Theo thought. Knew something was up.

He led Lindsey to his room and shut the door. She sat on his bed, dropped her backpack at her feet. “I love how you ask your grandma if you can bring me in here,” she said. “Like we’re going to make out or something.”

“Shut up,” Theo said.

“Just show me the picture,” Lindsey said. “Because really, I have to get a move on.”

“Okay,” Theo said. He stood at his dresser. He couldn’t believe he was about to share two of his prized possessions with a virtual stranger. His artifacts of Antoinette. But what choice did he have now? He removed the snapshot and the wrinkled cocktail napkin from his underwear drawer. He handed the snapshot to Lindsey. “Here she is.”

Lindsey took the picture. “Turn on a light,” she said.

Theo hit the overhead light. Even through the closed door, he heard his grandmother humming that song. Lindsey stared at the picture. She stared and stared.

“The baby in the picture is me,” Theo said.

Lindsey stared.

“She looks like you, doesn’t she?”

Lindsey didn’t answer. Theo felt awkward standing in the harsh light. He wished Lindsey would finish looking at the picture and leave so that he could have dinner with his grandmother. He was going to tell Sabrina the whole story as soon as Lindsey left.

“Well?” he said impatiently. “What do you drink?”

Lindsey raised her head. She was crying. Or not crying so much as leaking tears. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “We’re twins.”

“Yeah.”

She wiped her face. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that my whole life I’ve never had anything biological. You know? My parents are wonderful people, but they’re not related to me. The whole reason I started searching for Antoinette in the first place was that I wanted that void filled. I wanted a biological connection.” She held up the picture. “This woman is related to me.”

“She’s your mother.”

More tears fell as Lindsey studied the picture. Theo hurried to the bathroom and brought back a three-foot strip of toilet paper. Lindsey blotted her eyes.

“So I can keep this?” she asked, waving the picture.

His heart flagged. His only picture of Antoinette. The only picture of Antoinette in existence, that he knew of.

“Sure.”

“Thanks,” she said. “And you said there was something else?”

“Oh.” Theo paused. He removed the napkin from his vest pocket. “Here. This is a note I found on her refrigerator.”

” “L. Cape Air, noon Saturday,’ ” Lindsey read. “L? That’s me.”

“Yeah.”

Lindsey put the picture and the napkin in her backpack. She was taking them. Theo touched the sore spot on his tongue to his teeth.

“You realize,” Lindsey said, “that if she were planning on picking me up at the airport, then she didn’t disappear intentionally. She drowned, Theo.”

Drowned.

He shrugged. “Whatever. I can think otherwise.”

“I guess you can. But why would you torture yourself? You’re so young. You need to accept that Antoinette is dead and move on. Maybe you should see a therapist.”

“Maybe.” His throat clogged with impending tears. She was right: He was young, his life did have possibilities beyond this. He could marry someone else, father other children. Move on. Heal. But Theo’s future would be colored forever by his love for Antoinette. This was what he couldn’t explain to Lindsey, or to Sabrina, or to his parents-the way his love for Antoinette and for his unborn child haunted him. He heard it in the top note of Pachelbel’s Canon, he tasted it in Sabrina’s paella, he saw it in the slender, graceful arms of the ballet dancers at school. His love and his pain would follow him wherever he went next in life. They were all he had left.

Lindsey stood up. “I have to go.”

“Okay,” Theo said. The polite tiring was to walk her out, which he would do, he would hold himself together until Lindsey left, and then he would shout and scream and cry. Sabrina would feed him; she would listen without asking questions.

Before she put her hand on the doorknob, Lindsey leaned over and kissed Theo on the lips. The lightest kiss, like a kiss from a ghost, Theo thought. A kiss from Antoinette.

“Thank you,” she said.

Theo smiled. For a second, he felt transformed. For a second, he was just a boy of eighteen, kissed by a pretty girl. “You’re welcome,” he said.

The first thing Kayla did when she stepped into the San Juan airport was to seek out the bank of pay phones. She lifted the receiver and punched in her calling card number. At home, on Nantucket, the answering machine picked up. Of course: The kids were at school, Raoul at work. “I arrived safely,” Kayla said. “I love you all.” Seven words; that was all she allowed herself. She hung up.

Kayla proceeded down the corridor toward baggage claim. She was wearing a new dress, a turquoise sundress with splashy pink flowers. She’d bought it out of a catalog, as a way to get excited about this trip. Six weeks by herself in sunny Puerto Rico, a new the Vineyard the first of dress, a wallet full of cash and traveler’s checks-no price was too high for Raoul to get her off Nantucket. She was being banished. Raoul said no phone calls-except for one letting Mm know she’d arrived safely-no postcards even. Just her alone, with too much time to think. This was her penance.

It had been over two weeks, and there was still no sign of Antoinette’s body. Kayla hadn’t ventured out of the house; she hadn’t answered phone calls, although the phone rang constantly. Some people wanted to express their condolences-We’re sorry you lost your friend-some people wanted an explanation. Raoul’s name appeared in the police blotter for assaulting a police officer, and that instigated yet more calls. And even visits, concerned neighbors tapping on the sliding glass door. Kayla actually went so far as to lock that door and the front door. She stayed out of the kitchen.

Kayla plucked her suitcase off the carousel, extended the handle, and rolled it over to the rental car desks. Ten minutes later, Kayla stood out in the humid tropical weather as a young Puerto Rican man drove up in her car, a bright red LeBaron convertible.

The young man threw her suitcase into the trunk and helped her decipher her map. She was close to the highway, he said. The drive to Guanica was easy.

Kayla clipped her hair back into a barrette, put on her sunglasses, and hit the gas. It was liberating, and if she hadn’t been so sad, she might have enjoyed it.

Three days later, she had a routine. She was staying in a pleasant one-bedroom unit at a place called Mary Lee’s by the Sea. Her unit was decorated with tropical fabrics, plants, rattan furniture, and it looked out over the ocean. Kayla started her day with exercise-she walked past a seafood restaurant and a parking lot where a pack of mangy dogs barked at her from the other side of the chain-link fence, past the opulent Copamarina Beach Resort where wealthy Americans played early morning games of tennis, down to the public beach, and back. At her unit, she showered and made herself a papaya smoothie. Then before it grew too hot, she drove the LeBaron into downtown Guanica, a dingy port town. She shopped at the bodega, cashed traveler’s checks at the bank, visited a souvenir shop, and pawed trinkets and held up T-shirts, thinking, despite her best efforts, of her children. In the afternoons, she lounged on her deck. At five o’clock, Kayla showered again, drank some wine, and either cooked for herself or walked to the seafood restaurant. And every night after dark, she sneaked down to the end of the dock in front of the hotel office, slipped off her sundress, and swam in the lagoon. This was the only time that she allowed herself to think.

The entire situation with Antoinette had opened her eyes to several new ideas. One new idea was that she wasn’t a very good mother. Another new idea was that she wasn’t a very good wife. And a third new idea was that she wasn’t a very good friend. Only weeks earlier, these three words- mother, wife, friend-would have been the exact three words Kayla would have chosen to identify herself. But not anymore. If she wasn’t a mother, wife, and friend, then who was she? She didn’t know.

The lagoon frightened her-it was bordered by the thick, gnarled roots of mangroves. She was afraid to put her feet on die bottom because there might be crabs, or snakes. And yet, being afraid cleared her mind-she spent the dark hours replaying moments from her children’s early lives, especially Theo’s, replayed them like she was a coach watching a game tape-searching for things that might have been done differently. Theo was her first baby. She hadn’t known what she was doing. Did she breast-feed him too long or wean him too soon? Did she tell him she loved him too often or too infrequently? What had she done to make him sleep with her best friend? Somehow, she suspected, it was her fault. And how had she not realized what was going on with Antoinette? Now that Kayla looked back, she saw clues: Theo out on mysterious errands all the time, the way his shirts smelled when Kayla collected them for the laundry, the time he was so curious about Antoinette’s past. But Kayla had been too busy, too blind, too naive to see the clues. Antoinette was in one part of her life, and Theo in another. Even now, Kayla had a hard time believing in the affair. She couldn’t bring herself to imagine their intertwining bodies.