Chance Harbor (20 page)

Catherine hung back in the shadows, standing outside the pool of light cast by the streetlamp on the corner, as Willow unlatched the gate and walked up the steps to the front porch, whistling softly for the dog when the puppy stopped to nose around the hydrangeas.

The sidewalk was now empty of pedestrians, as if some invisible vacuum had hoovered them all up. Even the blind woman was gone. Maybe she wasn’t a beggar after all and lived in one of the apartments around here.

Catherine deliberately made noise on the stairs and jangled her keys before inserting them into the lock. She didn’t want to spook Willow by making her think there was an intruder.

Inside, she dropped her purse on the mission bench in the hallway and hung up her coat. The puppy ran up to greet her, tail wagging, squashed face grinning up at her.

“Hello, Mr. Mike,” Catherine said, patting the little dog’s head and smiling down at him despite her rotten mood. “How was your day?”

Mike rubbed his face against her black pants in response. Great. More dog hair to remove.

She poked her head into the living room, then went to the kitchen, her boots echoing on the hardwood floor. Catherine stopped for a minute, listening, and heard the toilet flush upstairs.

She went to the bottom of the stairs. “Willow?”

Her irritation with Russell was building like an allergic reaction, beginning with an itch in her throat and making it increasingly difficult to breathe. Had he even picked Willow up today? Did Willow eat dinner with him or not? Had she done her homework?

A door opened upstairs. “Hey, Mom,” Willow called down. “I’ll be right there.”

Catherine went into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of tortilla chips out of the bag on top of the fridge. She wasn’t hungry, but she needed to gnash her teeth on something.

Willow came downstairs wearing flannel pajama pants and slippers. She was carrying the puppy, nuzzling its head with her chin. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said. “Did you just get here?”

Catherine eyed her daughter’s sweet but wary expression; Willow’s shoulders were folded forward with tension beneath the white-blond curls. She looked so much like Zoe right now that Catherine couldn’t help but feel angry, remembering Zoe’s willful misbehavior at this age.

Where had Willow been tonight?

With a sinking sensation, Catherine knew there would be days, even years, of this kind of uncertainty now that Willow was pinging between two houses. Times when she would have absolutely no idea where Willow was or what she’d been doing.

“I just got home,” Catherine said. “Have you been here long?”

“No. I’m surprised I didn’t see you on the street.”

Catherine nearly said,
Ah, but I saw you
. “Yes, well, it’s getting dark earlier now.” She turned her back and rustled around in the bag of chips for another handful of tension tamers. “How was your day?”

“Pretty good. School’s okay, I guess.” Willow sat at the kitchen table, the puppy on her lap and gnawing on the string of her pajama pants. “Today I had photography for the first time. It’s only twice a week, but the teacher seems pretty cool.”

“How about dinner?” Catherine sat down across the table from her. “What did you have?”

Willow shrugged. “Some crap thing. I didn’t really eat much. I’m going to have some cereal before bed.” She put the puppy down and went to the cupboard, fished out a box, then got a bowl and poured the cereal and milk into it.

Catherine waited until Willow was back at the table before asking, “Did Dad cook, or did you go out?”

“Out,” Willow said, chewing with her eyes fixed on the cereal box in front of her. “We had burritos from Fernando’s.”

This was plausible, but unlikely. Russell had always hated burritos. Who hated burritos? Catherine should have known better than to marry him based on that alone.

“Sounds fun,” she said. “Is Dad’s place close to Harvard Square?”

“No.”

Catherine waited, but Willow kept shoveling cereal into her mouth. Finally, she said, “So where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“Dad’s new place.”

“Why? You planning to visit?” Willow picked up the bowl and drank the milk from it noisily.

“Don’t be mouthy with me. And we do not drink out of bowls. Put that down,” Catherine said.

“Fine. I’m done anyway.” Willow took the bowl to the sink and dropped it there with a noisy clatter, then stomped upstairs, the puppy at her heels.

Catherine was so shocked by this—Willow had never been the tantrum-throwing sort of kid—that it took her a minute to process what had happened. Once she did, she bolted up the stairs two at a time, but it was too late: Willow’s door was closed. Catherine turned the handle, but it was locked.

“Open this door,” she said. “Immediately.”

Her command was met by silence. Catherine stood in the hallway, feeling chilly now in her bare feet, torn between wanting to pound on the door and longing to press her head against it and cry. Just then the doorbell rang downstairs. What the hell?

She galloped down the stairs, ready to tear into whoever would dare solicit at this hour. Just last week she’d had visits from Jehovah’s Witnesses, high school athletes selling coupon books, and a reedy-voiced kid soliciting for some do-gooder environmental cause. She peered through the keyhole. Russell stood there, his face heavily lined beneath the bright porch light. Catherine opened the door, almost relieved. Maybe he could yell at Willow about her behavior. Then she remembered: Russell was the reason
behind
Willow’s behavior. That made her furious all over again.

“What?” she said.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late. I need to see Willow. I texted her and she said she was here.”

“You just saw her.”

“No. I didn’t.” Russell looked tired but put together. He was dressed in his usual tweed jacket and tie and a white shirt, his khakis falling tidily around his expensive shoes. Why was he dressed like this?

A job interview, she guessed, and said, “Why not? What happened?” She opened the door wider and nodded for him to come in. “Willow got home just before I did. Like, twenty minutes ago. If she wasn’t with you, where was she?”

“Oh, she was at my house. Just not with me.” Russell stepped inside and stood in the hallway, gazing anxiously up the stairs. “Is she in her room?”

“Yes. Look, what’s all this about?”

Russell started up the stairs. “It’s between Willow and me. Sorry.”

“Hey! You can’t just waltz into my house and . . .”

Russell spun around on the stairs. At that height, he looked magnificent. And very angry. “As of now, this house belongs to me, too,” he said. “But, more to the point, do you or do you not want me to have an ongoing relationship with our daughter?”

“I do.” She felt her shoulders slump in defeat.

“Good. Now, is it all right with you if I go upstairs?” He waited, fingers drumming on the railing, until she nodded.

“Good luck getting her to open the door,” she said.

So much for feeling proud about having had only one glass of wine at dinner. Catherine went to the kitchen and poured herself a generous glass of cabernet, then sat at the table pretending to read the newspaper. Eventually Russell came down.

“Willow’s all right.” He hovered by the table until she told him to sit.

“No, she’s not. Willow’s upset,” Catherine said. “What’s going on? How did she end up at your house but not with you?”

“You won’t like the answer.” He loosened his tie and took it off, tossed it on the table. When Catherine saw him looking at the wine, she got up and filled a glass for him.

“Try me,” she said.

“I had a job interview, so I asked Nola to pick her up from school.”

Catherine stared at him. “How is it Nola’s job to take care of your child? And why on earth would you think that would fly with Willow?”

Russell held up a hand. “Look, I was desperate, okay? I knew you were working, and obviously I don’t know any of the parents at Willow’s school yet. I didn’t know what else to do. I could have texted her and told her to come here, but I wanted to see her. Besides, that was our agreement. I wanted to honor it.”

He drank some more wine, then went on. “I had no idea the job interview would take so long. It was in New Hampshire, at a prep school in Concord. Tim Bankhead, a friend of mine from high school, is the headmaster there now, and they’re looking for a history teacher to replace someone who just became ill. I had to meet with a committee and explain why I was let go from Beacon Hill. Imagine how much fun that was. Then I ran into more traffic than I expected going home. By the time I got back, Willow had left and Nola was in tears.”

That did sound like a terrible day, but Catherine wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily. And she didn’t give a flying damn about Nola. “Couldn’t you have scheduled a job interview for a day when you didn’t have to pick up Willow? You only have her one day a week, for Christ’s sake.”

He stared at her. “Can you hear yourself, Catherine? Get off your high horse! I am not ten years old. I know my responsibilities and I uphold them. But this was the only day they could do the interview, and I jumped at the opportunity. It’s not that easy to find a job in this economy. Certainly not at my age.”

“And certainly not after what you’ve done.” Catherine tipped her wineglass toward her. It was empty. She wanted to refill it but wouldn’t let herself. “Remind me. You uphold your responsibilities how, exactly? By doing something so
egregiously wrong
that you throw away your entire career, and our daughter loses her school, her friends, her whole life? Never mind me! God, forget about me. Oh, wait. You already have!” Catherine realized she was shouting, but she didn’t care. It felt good to shout.

“Look, I never pretended to be perfect,” Russell said. “You’re the one who always pretended I was perfect. That
we
were perfect. So organized. So together. Our little house, our little life. Our little marriage.”

“Little?”
she spat out.

“Yes!” Now he was shouting, too. “Little! Small! Pathetic! Who are we, really? Nobody. And what have we done? Nothing much that matters. We gave Willow a stable home. Good for us. But we’re just ordinary humans, Catherine. Flawed by definition. Remember Socrates: ‘Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.’ Nobody’s perfect. We tried to make our marriage work, and it did, for a long time. Who knows? Even now, if I weren’t about to be a father, and if we both decided we wanted to work on our marriage, we might be able to put this thing behind us and keep going.”

“That’s what my mother says,” Catherine said. “She keeps telling me that even though their marriage was rocky at times, and that Dad cheated on her, it was worth it for them to stay together. She and Dad were happy.” She felt that knot of grief for her father, the sorrow that was always there, not diminished at all, only partly swallowed.

“Well, maybe that’s because they were even.”

“What do you mean?”

Russell scooped his tie off the table and stuffed it into his pocket. “Look, I don’t know anything about your dad cheating on your mom. That’s news to me. But your mother told me she had an affair. She fell in love with another guy, yet she had the nerve to call me pathetic! Your father could have thrown her out of the house. They decided to hang in there because of you and Zoe”

Catherine stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about? You’re delusional. My father’s the one who had an affair, not my mother. And it was brief and unimportant. A blip in their marriage, Mom told me. They
loved
each other! I’ve never seen two people closer than they were.”

“Except when your mother was busy cheating on Andrew.” Russell was looking down at her with something like pity. “You really didn’t know?”

“Mom wouldn’t do that. She would have told me!” Catherine tried to shout at him again, because that was the one thing that seemed to make her feel better, but her voice came out as a croak.

“Ask her, if you don’t believe me,” Russell said. “Maybe then you’ll forgive me. Or at least not bite my head off. Remember, I still love you and Willow. Probably more than anyone else does. Or will.” He left then, opening and closing the front door behind him with a rush of cold air.

Catherine put her face down on the table and closed her eyes, trying to make the chaos go away. Her whole imperfect life.

T
he dog showed up again while Eve was walking around the house with Red Allen, the painter that Cousin Jane had suggested.

“He’s all the way in St. Peter’s, mind,” Jane had said as she’d written the painter’s number on a scrap of paper for Eve. “And he’s been known to indulge himself. You know what I’m saying.” She made a tippling motion, as if tossing back a shot. “He did my son Bobby’s house last year, and Bobby came home one day to find Red passed out on the lawn. Right under his own sign, if you please!”

“Why should I call him, then? Can I trust him?” Eve asked.

Jane nodded vigorously without dislodging a single strand in her tight gray cap of hair. “Oh, don’t you worry. He’ll get the job done. I’ll come by every day, keep a close eye on him. And Red won’t charge an arm and a leg because the man is family. A MacLeish through and through. Our second cousin, mine and Andrew’s. You give him a call and say Jane told him to give you a fair deal.”

Jane had brought her snowflake rolls; Eve stuck them in the freezer after she left. There was barely any room in there. Andrew’s relatives had continued dropping by with biscuits, snowflake rolls, pecan tarts, and pies, all made with island butter and cream. She hoped it would all fit into the cooler for the ride home.

When Red showed up this morning, damp hair slicked back and smelling of cologne, she’d seen the MacLeish blood in him right away. He looked, at first glance, so much like Andrew and Malcolm that her breath caught in her throat as the painter climbed out of his battered blue truck. He had removed his cap to greet her with a funny little bow, revealing the familiar MacLeish blond hair and ruddy color, the nose turned up at the tip like a stubborn elf’s.

“Whoa,” Red said now, as Bear lumbered across the lawn, fanning the air with his tail. “That’s some horse you got yourself there.”

“Oh, he’s a good pony, all right.” Eve scanned the road for Darcy’s truck as she rubbed the dog’s head. Bear pressed himself against her thigh, blissful, nearly knocking her over. “I call him Bear, but his real name’s Sparrow.”

“Yeah, that dog’s definitely no Sparrow,” Red said. “Whose is it?”

“He belongs to a guy staying in North Lake. It’s his son’s, actually.”

“Huh. He’s a fair piece from home. Lucky that dog hasn’t been hit.”

“Or stolen.”

Red scratched his head. “Doubt anybody could lift that animal.”

She laughed, and they went back to discussing the work. There were clapboards to replace, most of which Red said he could do. He promised to call her with a quote by that night and suggested a couple of places to buy paint in Charlottetown. “You keeping it yellow?” he asked, one foot in the truck as he prepared to leave.

“I guess so. Andrew’s family would kill me if I changed the color.”

“Well, now, they’re not the ones living here,” Red said. “You want to change the color, you go ahead.”

“We’ll see,” she said, not wanting to explain that she knew yellow or white were the colors that would probably appeal most to would-be buyers. Only people from away would be interested in buying this house. People looking for an Anne of Green Gables experience or a beachfront property they could tear down and replace with a glassy McMansion. Islanders were more likely to build new houses on family plots of land than fix up the old places. They were too practical to want a leaky old house like this one in winter.

Eve spent the rest of the morning pruning bushes around the deck and clearing fallen leaves out of the perennial gardens. Any other autumn, she’d be digging up the dahlias and storing the bulbs in the basement for winter; this year she’d have to leave them. Customs wouldn’t let her bring them across the border. Or maybe Jane would want them?

Oh, it was all too much to think about.

For lunch she made a sandwich of cheddar cheese sliced onto a snowflake roll, sharing the food with Bear. Her shoulders and back ached from the yard work. The dog drooled as he ate, then flopped onto the wooden floor, lying on his side and stretching his legs out. She had to step around him to bring her dishes to the sink. She didn’t mind; she was glad of the company.

Eve had just completed her next round of phone calls—to the plumber to drain the pipes for winter, to a roofer who could come tomorrow to inspect the shingles, and to a contractor who might be able to finish weatherproofing the basement—when she heard Darcy’s truck rumble into the yard. Bear wagged his tail but didn’t bother getting up.

“You sure are one lazy pony,” Eve said as she stepped over the dog to open the kitchen door. “In here, Darcy,” she called from the deck. “I promise I didn’t kidnap your dog. He came of his own volition.”

“Don’t lie to me, now,” Darcy said. “You picked up that beast and carried him into the house kicking and struggling.”

She laughed, then gave him a serious look. “If you can’t watch that dog more carefully, you might want to tie him up so he doesn’t wander and get hit. Islanders drive this road like it’s the autobahn.”

Darcy shrugged his broad shoulders, which were clad in the same battered green jacket he’d had on the first time she met him. “I actually thought I
had
shut him inside before I went to the university this morning, but this dog can open doors.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nope. Watch. Come outside.”

Eve stepped onto the deck next to Darcy, who closed the kitchen door tightly behind her before calling the dog. “Sparrow! Hey, Sparrow! Let’s go to the beach!”

To her astonishment, the knob turned and the dog stepped outside. He came over to Darcy and pushed his nose into the man’s big palm.

“Not bad,” Eve said, patting the dog’s silky back. “There’s only one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Now you’ve made him a promise. And this doesn’t seem like the kind of dog that would forget.”

“I suppose you’re right. I could use a walk anyway. Want to join us?”

“Sure. Let me grab a jacket.” Eve went into the house and plucked her blue Windbreaker off the hook, then pulled the door closed and started toward the steps leading down the cliff to the beach.

“Wait,” Darcy said. “How about if I show you a secret cove?”

Eve turned to look at him. “You forget that I’ve been coming here for forty-five years.”

“I promise you haven’t been to this place.”

She hesitated as she thought about the work still ahead of her: phone calls, linens to pack and ship, clearing out the basement and the rest of the barn. The barn was taking forever because it had a second floor, and nearly everything she touched brought back fresh memories of Andrew and the girls. Plus, she kept having to make runs to the Waste Watch Drop-Off Center at Dingwells Mills twenty minutes away to dispose of things.

Darcy cleared his throat noisily, startling her. “You coming?”

She watched him cross the yard to the truck with his long loping walk. He let down the truck’s gate, and the dog jumped in, surprising Eve with his agility. She followed. Was there really a beach on this eastern end of the island that she hadn’t explored?

Darcy pulled onto the road and headed toward North Lake. As they passed the fields next to her house, Eve noticed that the potato harvesters were out, churning up the rich red soil, uprooting potatoes to be collected by the trucks that followed the diggers.

Potatoes were big business on PEI. Eve had always admired the beauty of the rolling fields, the deep green leaves dotted with white flowers interspersed with golden fields of wheat and the hypnotic, dizzying bright yellow squares of the canola crops.

But she also felt tense and vaguely guilty whenever she watched her neighbors work their fields. Many relied on farming for a living. They were laboring from sunrise until after dark, even on weekends, while most of her time on the island had been spent hiking, biking, swimming, or going out on a boat with one of Andrew’s cousins.

Such long, lovely days in this place, and now those were coming to an end. Eve swallowed hard, reminding herself that this was Andrew’s island, not hers. His family’s home. Her own “home place,” as the islanders called the houses where they were born, was actually a brick house in sensible, academic Madison, Wisconsin. Another place she’d stopped going. After her parents died, and her brother, too, of colon cancer just before his sixtieth birthday, there didn’t seem to be much point. Not when her sister was such a hermit.

You got old enough, and the losses kept piling up. Eve studied her hands in her lap, the fingers still slender but the knuckles enlarged now, arthritis settling into her joints. Her hands were sixty-six years old, just like the rest of her. Her body was wonderfully functional. She was lucky, but she didn’t always feel that way, too mired in grief to count her blessings.

“Penny for ’em,” Darcy said, glancing at her.

“I was thinking those must be your windmills over there,” Eve said to distract him—and herself. She pointed to the tall white turbines. She’d never paid much attention to them before; only noticed with a start, one day, that the windmills had gone up while she’d been away. The horizon had been drastically altered by their presence, yet somehow she didn’t mind. The windmills were beautiful as well as practical.

“Not exactly mine,” Darcy said. “But I’m proud to have played a small part in getting them to this part of the island.”

“How?”

“I helped my PEI University colleague, Ed, write a grant proposal to fund them. I used to come up to the island with my parents to camp, and when I started studying wind energy in college, I always said PEI would be the perfect place for wind farms, with so few trees and all that water around us. I was one of the engineers overseeing the first big wind-power project in Vermont,” he added. “Did you know the city of Burlington is now powered entirely by renewable energy? Wind power, wood chips, and hydroelectric.”

“Brag much?” she said, but grinned. Darcy’s enthusiasm was refreshing.

They were traveling along the north side of the island, the land flatter and emptier here than on the southern shore, feeling almost desolate. She asked Darcy more about his work—he was overseeing another wind farm being installed in southern Vermont—and about his children.

Eve felt relaxed for the first time on the island since Andrew’s death. Maybe it was because someone else was planning her afternoon. Eve had always been independent—she’d had to be, given how much Andrew traveled for work and having had to juggle her career with children—but sometimes it was good not to have to be in charge.

Unfortunately, though, Darcy’s next question was one she’d been dreading. “How about you?” he asked. “Any kids?”

Here was the point where she always had to choose how honest to be. She and Andrew had argued about this. Andrew’s view was that people typically didn’t want to hear about a dead or missing child. It made them uncomfortable, he said, because who knew what to say in response? And it made him sad as well, so why go there?

For Eve, though, it seemed dishonest to talk about only one of her daughters. Mentioning Zoe kept her daughter’s memory alive, even if she really was gone for good, a thought that made Eve twist her hands more tightly in her lap. She would never accept that idea. Not without proof.

To Darcy, she said, “I have two daughters, Catherine and Zoe. Catherine is a nurse practitioner in Cambridge. Zoe has been missing for a while.”

He glanced at her. “What do you mean? How long has she been gone?”

“Five years now. She ran off. Took a bus to D.C. and then, well . . . We don’t know what happened.” The problem with bringing up Zoe, of course, was that it often provoked questions she couldn’t answer; she tried to head them off. “Zoe was struggling for years. Drinking, drugs, poor choices in men. We worked with the police and with private investigators, too, but nothing came of it. Catherine is raising Zoe’s daughter. Zoe is presumed dead by the police.”

Darcy gave her a sharp glance, steering with one hand on the wheel, the other propped on the window. “But you don’t believe it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’d feel her absence.” Eve kept her gaze fixed on the road ahead of them. “There would be some sign.”

“From the universe?”

“Yes. For lack of a better word. That’s exactly it.”

To her surprise, Darcy nodded. “I’d feel that way if one of my kids were gone, too.”

Relieved, Eve fell silent for a time and watched the horizon scroll by, the sky gleaming a fierce bright blue, free of the usual hazy clouds. She hadn’t talked about her certainty that Zoe was alive with anyone in ages. Years. People were tired of the subject.

“I kept searching for her,” she said. “I visited every place Zoe ever loved. I was so sure I’d find her. I even tried taking the same bus to D.C. she’d taken, and interviewed people myself. Nobody remembered her.”

“I’m sure she was trying to fall between the cracks,” Darcy said. “She must have been distressed. Depressed.”

“Or scared and running from something. Or someone.” Eve had uncovered more about Zoe’s life than she’d ever expected—or wanted—to know: the arrests for shoplifting, the homeless shelters Zoe had lived in with Willow, the abandoned building in Worcester where Zoe had squatted for a week. But all of that was from before she ever got on the bus in Boston. After that, nothing. It was as if her daughter had never existed.