It was his wife, calling from the mainland—Vermont, to be exact.
“I miss my new husband and I love him and I can’t wait to come home,” Jill said, her voice as soft as the silk of her nightgowns that he loved to feel brush his skin in their bed, that he loved to slide off her to make room for him. He looked down at his jeans, grateful that fifty-three was not too old for the enormous erection his wife could unwittingly produce. His glamorous, second-chance,
seven-years-younger
wife, his friends had teased. Ben had smiled at their envy, but silently was often stumped that a city-savvy, classy lady like her saw anything at all in a common rogue like him.
“I miss you and I love you and I can’t wait for you, too,” he said, and realized that he’d never have talked to his beloved Louise that way, but then, they’d been the same age and had grown more sedate than romantic in the years before her death. He cleared his throat. “Do you know how to build lobster traps?” he asked his new, city-savvy wife.
Her
forefathers, after all, were native islanders. He was merely a transplant from Baltimore, though he’d now lived on the Vineyard more than half of his life.
“I watched my father make them.” The softness in her voice now sounded even softer, a little depressed maybe, a little bit blue.
Lonely, he figured. Like him
.
“I thought he owned the great 1802 Tavern,” he said, trying to lift her mood, trying to pretend that talking on the phone was as good as sitting next to each other, sharing the same air.
“He owned the tavern, and he sold the traps to the tourists. To use as coffee tables.”
Yes, her voice was definitely depressed.
A pretend laugh came from Ben’s throat. “No! Not lobster trap coffee tables! Did he paint on velvet as well?” He unlaced his boots and took them off.
The laugh she returned was too late and out of sync, a laugh with an edge not just of loneliness, but of something … else. He wanted to ask what was wrong, but she said, “You’ll thank me when I show you how the kids can use different colors and patterns to customize their lobster trap ‘trademarks.’ And you’ll be glad when I show you how to load them with bricks so they won’t sink in the water. The traps, not the kids. Oh, and you might want to call them lobster
pots
. It’s more—authentic.”
“Like your father’s?” He pushed aside the pile of sticks with his wool-socked foot. Maybe she was just tired.
“If I didn’t love you,” she said with a feeble attempt at nonchalance, “I would hang up now.”
“Please do,” he replied. “Hang up and come home. I miss the hell out of you.”
Her tender, small moan said more than a million words could have.
“Honey?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”
She paused a moment, then said, “Sure. I’ve lined up the last two interviews for tomorrow. I’ll be home the day after that.”
He nodded as if she were there in the room. He was proud that Jill was an independent producer now, even though it meant she was away too often, putting together “video features,” she called them, then trying to sell them, if not to the networks then to feeder services that passed them on to television stations to use in their news slots. He was proud, yet frustrated for her, because the work was slow going and success had not yet kicked in.
Sort of like with Menemsha House, a dream in the making.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Good,” he said. “Great.” He did not tell her that a busload of paying autumn tourists had canceled their trip to the museum today; he did not tell her that he and Mindy Ashenbach had had a misunderstanding and that
she’d run home in tears; he did not tell her that he’d spent the last two hours reviewing the museum’s pitiful books. He did not tell her these things because he did not want her to worry any more than she already did.
She paused another minute, and Ben was not sure if she was thinking of him or of that something “else” again. Then she asked, “Anything on Sea Grove?”
Sea Grove
. He’d almost forgotten. “Shit,” he said, “this is the first of October. I have to try and get another building permit this week.” Sea Grove was a proposed development of exclusive waterfront homes whose construction could generate local jobs and boost the island economy, including his own. But the town was meagerly doling out the permits, eight per month, on the first Tuesday of each month, first come, first serve. So much for overbuilding on the island. “Hey,” he said, hoping humor would help, “I have an idea. Maybe I should put a lobster trap coffee table in every living room.”
“Get out of that place and go home,” Jill said, her voice once more forcing cheer. “Maybe my daughter has made you a gourmet dinner.”
“Ha!” he responded, knowing that eighteen-year-old Amy was less capable of cooking than Ben was of making lobster traps. Pots. Whatever they were.
“I love you,” they told each other before hanging up. Ben returned to his work. For their dreams to come true, one of them had to have a good grip on life, and he guessed that right now, that one needed to be him.
It would have been easier to have told him, right then on the phone before she went home from Vermont. It would have been easier, but then he would have worried and there might be no need for that, not now or not ever.
There might be no need because she could simply say no.
Then again, Jill thought, moving from the small round
table to the hard hotel bed, saying no to Addie Becker was tantamount to not feeding a pack of hungry lions: you’d have to learn quickly how to get out of the way.
She turned back toward the phone, deciding to listen to the message again.
It had come only thirty minutes ago to Ben’s house in Oak Bluffs, the place he’d converted, in part, to a studio for Jill, a postproduction facility in honor of her new career.
She dialed the number, then the code to retrieve saved messages.
“Jill, it’s Addie. I need a favor.”
Her tone was not acerbic, not like the last time they’d spoken, three years ago, when Jill had been struggling to surgically extricate herself from the agent’s acrylic-fingernailed clutches. At a huge financial expense, she’d finally succeeded.
“The network wants to reformat. Maurice Fischer—remember him?—has asked if you’d consider a temporary slot in February, as a fill-in for Lizette. February,” she repeated. “Sweeps, darling. Remember them?”
Addie paused, and Jill braced herself for what she knew was coming next.
“Before you say no, Jill, think about your flagging career. Then call me. Pronto.”
Addie’s voice stopped, and the machine beeped three times to signify that there were no more messages, no eager requests from networks or feeder services for packages of Jill’s own production, no other offers of fame or fortune.
Once, of course, she could have had it all. But it had been her choice to walk out on
Good Night, USA
, the network “good news” television newsmagazine that had been conceived by her, but had gone on to Emmy-award-winning acclaim without her.
It had been her choice to have Lizette French replace
her as the on-air TV co-anchor to Christopher Edwards—the man dubbed by the media as “the sexiest man alive” and, by Ben, “Mr. Celebrity.”
It had been her choice to bail out on her partnership with Christopher off-air, too, trading in his huge pear-shaped diamond and international renown for Ben’s plain gold band and life on an island.
They were choices she had not once regretted.
Soon after she left the show, Jill spent two years healing, coming to terms with the loss of both of her parents, and helping Ben restore her legacy, the white sea captain’s house in Edgartown that had been in her family for generations. She and Ben turned the widow’s walk into a spectacular Jacuzzi room and added a long back porch for red geraniums and Adirondack chairs and a great view of the harbor. She’d even brought her mother’s gardens back to life, and now blue hydrangea and pale yellow beach roses and tall wonderful wildflowers gently swayed in the breeze that drifted in off the water.
Last summer she’d married Ben, the man she’d probably fallen in love with the first time she’d seen him more than three years ago, when she’d opened the door wearing no makeup and sporting just-rolled-out-of-bed hair. The fact that the bed she’d just rolled out of she’d been sharing with Christopher had not mattered much at the time.
But it had become a huge part of why she had to say no now.
Still, Addie was right. Alone, on her own, Jill was having a difficult time reshaping her career. Even getting good freelancers, shooters and editors, was tough. The one she was using here in Vermont she’d begged out of Boston with a steep one-shot fee.
There was a time she never had to ask if someone wanted in on a job, because success indeed bred success, and everyone wanted to be associated with winners.
But right now she couldn’t get a nibble from a network, let alone a commitment from one story to the next, not from a feeder service, not from someone to shoot it.
Blackballed
, Ben had said. He blamed Addie, of course, saying that the barracuda of an agent must have had more power than they’d once thought.
Life in the limelight, for all its glamour and glitz, was vicious and fleeting and all a big game.
Yet for reasons she did not understand, Jill did not pick up the phone now, return Addie’s call, and simply say “Thanks, but no thanks.”
After hanging up the phone, Ben had attacked the lobster trap with gusto. Some rope webbing for the “door,” some slats for the sides, and suddenly it looked like the picture in the book he’d found at the library, a picture similar to the one Mindy said she’d downloaded from the Internet but that he was too damn stubborn to follow because he didn’t like computers and didn’t trust that dotcom stuff.
So now the coveted trap was complete, and it looked damn fine, and it was only eight-thirty—too early to go home to the empty house in Edgartown: empty, of course, except for Amy. Unlike Jill’s son, Jeff, Amy had not fled for college in England as soon as their mother and Ben announced marriage plans.
He could go to his own daughter’s over in Tisbury. With a husband and two kids, Carol Ann had become a good old-fashioned cook. Maybe she could rustle up some leftovers for her old man.
He supposed what he should do was work on the plans for Sea Grove. Or at least try and determine where he was going to find room for the kids to build these damn lobster traps now that he’d “mastered” the craft.
Maybe some coffee would help.
He stood up and stretched, then headed to the tiny galley kitchen he’d installed for emergencies like this. As he scooped coffee into the old aluminum pot, he thought he heard voices. And leaves rustling outside.
“Hello?” he called out. No answer. He shrugged and put the pot on the two-burner stove, when he heard voices again. “What the hell?” he muttered. He set down the pot and walked to the window.
He peered out the window into the darkness. It was, of course, impossible to see anything because on the Vineyard darkness was darkness, especially once summer had rolled into fall. He snapped off the inside light and hit the switch for the floodlights.
In the small parking lot, parked behind his prized ’47 black Buick, was a police car. One man had already emerged and was leaning against the car, looking toward the museum. Then the driver’s door opened, and a man Ben recognized as Hugh Talbot got out.
Ben squinted, as if squinting would tell him what the hell Hugh, the sheriff of Gay Head, was doing there. If Ben had been home at Edgartown and not at Menemsha, his first thought would have been that the museum had burned down. Again. The mere thought spun his memory back to that ache of a day when he had looked across the ridge of dunes and seen Menemsha House enveloped in red-orange flames, when fire had brought pain and anguish and death to the island.
Instinctively, he backed from the window. Then he noticed another man cut across the lawn and march toward the police car. Even in the darkness, the heavy gait and untrimmed beard made the man recognizable: it was Dave Ashenbach, Ben’s unpleasant museum neighbor, Mindy’s grandfather, the man who had finally stopped grumbling about “trespassing,” or so Ben had thought.
He watched Hugh and Ashenbach exchange what appeared to be sharp, angry words. Then Ben sighed and
walked toward the door. Whatever was going on, he figured it was no coincidence that this small crowd had gathered in his parking lot. Opening the door, he adjusted his Red Sox cap and stepped onto the front steps without his boots, with only his heavy gray socks on his feet.
“Gentlemen,” he called, “what brings you here on this fair night?”
The men stopped talking and looked in his direction. No one said anything.
Scowling, he stepped down and padded toward the men.
Hugh raised a hand, gesturing him to stop. Automatically, Ben did.
Hugh turned to Ashenbach. “Don’t move a fucking muscle,” he said, “or we’ll cuff you, too.” Then the sheriff started toward Ben.
“Ben,” he said slowly, as he approached, “how’re you doin’ tonight?”
Something about Hugh’s words or his walk or the way his face was masked in the shadow from the floodlight sent a sharp surge of warning up Ben’s spine. “I’ll be better once you’ve told me what the hell’s going on.”
Hugh turned again, as if to be certain Ashenbach had not moved. Then he looked at Ben. “Let’s go inside.”
Something had definitely happened.
Jill
. Quickly Ben shook off the thought. He had, after all, just talked to his wife. But Amy? Had something happened to her?
Oh, God
, he thought suddenly, a chilling numbness slithering down his arms to his hands. Maybe it was not about Jill’s daughter, maybe it was about
his
. Maybe something had happened to Carol Ann … or to one of his grandkids.…
He didn’t move. He couldn’t move, as if someone had
poured cement into his socks. “Say what you have to say right here, Hugh.”
The sheriff glanced back to the cruiser, then to Ben. “Inside,” he repeated.
Somehow Ben managed to pick up his feet. Somehow he put one in front of the other in the slow-motion motion of time crawling forward to that unwanted destination known as Bad News.