Love Anthony (2 page)

She studies his smile in the photo. He has a slight overbite, and his eyeteeth jut forward a touch. When she met him, she thought his imperfect teeth added to his charm, lending just enough to his rugged good looks without making him look like a hillbilly. He has a self-assured, mischievous, full-out grin for a smile, the kind that makes people—women—put forth considerable effort to be the reason for it.

But his teeth have started to bug her. The way he picks at them with his tongue after he eats. The way he chews his food with his mouth open. The way his eyeteeth stick out. She sometimes finds herself staring at them while he talks, wishing he’d shut his mouth. They’re pearly white in this wedding photograph, but now they’re more caramel- than cream-colored, abused by years of daily coffee and those smelly cigars.

His once beautiful teeth. Her once beautiful skin. His annoying habits. She has them, too. She knows her nagging drives him crazy. This is what happens when people get older, when they’re married for fourteen years. She smiles at Jimmy’s smile in the picture, then replaces it on the mantel a little to the left of where it was before. She takes a step back. She purses her lips and eyes the length of the mantel.

Their fireplace mantel is a six-foot-long, single piece of driftwood hung over the hearth. They found it washed up on the shore one night on Surfside Beach during that first summer. Jimmy picked it up and said,
We’re hanging this over the fireplace in our house someday
. Then he kissed her, and she believed him. They’d only known each other for a few weeks.

Three pictures are on the mantel, all in matching weathered, white frames—one of Grover when he was six weeks old on the left, Beth and Jimmy in the middle, and a beach portrait of Sophie, Jessica, and Gracie in white shirts and floral, pink peasant skirts on the right. It was taken just after Gracie’s second birthday, eight years ago.

“Where does the time go?” she says aloud to Grover.

A huge, peach starfish that Sophie found out by Sankaty Lighthouse flanks the Beth-and-Jimmy picture on the left, and a perfect nautilus shell, also huge and without a single chip or crack, flanks the Beth-and-Jimmy picture on the right. Beth found the nautilus shell out on Great Point the year she married Jimmy, and she protected it vigilantly through three moves. She’s picked up hundreds of nautilus shells since and has yet to find another one without a flaw. This is always the arrangement on the mantel. Nothing else is allowed there.

She adjusts her wedding picture again, slightly to the right, and steps back. There. That’s better. Perfectly centered. Everything as it should be.

Now what?
She’s on her feet, feeling energized.

“Come on, Grover. Let’s go get the mail.”

Outside, she immediately regrets the idea. The wind whips through her heartiest “windproof” winter coat as if it were a sieve. Chills tumble down her spine, and the cold feels like it’s worming its way deep into her bones. The rain is coming at her sideways, slapping her in the face, making it difficult to keep her eyes open enough to see where they’re going. Poor Grover, who was warm and happy and asleep a few moments ago, whimpers.

“Sorry, Grove. We’ll be home in a minute.”

The mailboxes are about a half mile away. Beth’s neighborhood is inhabited by a smattering of year-rounders and summer residents, but mostly summer people live on her route to the mail. So this time of year, the houses are empty and dark. There
are no lights on in the windows, no smoke billowing from the chimneys, no cars parked in the driveways. Everything is lifeless. And gray. The sky, the earth, the weathered cedar shingles on every empty, dark house, the ocean, which she can’t see now but can smell. It’s all gray. She never gets used to this. The tedious grayness of winter on Nantucket is enough to unravel the most unshakable sanity. Even the proudest natives, the people who love this island the most, question themselves in March.

Why the hell do we live on this godforsaken spit of gray sand?

Spring, summer, and fall are different. Spring brings the yellow daffodils, summer brings the Mykonos-blue sky, fall brings the rusty-red cranberry bogs. And they all bring the tourists. Sure, the tourists come with their downsides. But they come. Life! After Christmas Stroll in December, they all leave. They return to mainland America and beyond, to places that have such things as McDonald’s and Staples and BJ’s and businesses that are open past January. And color. They have color.

COLD, WET, AND
miserable, she arrives at the row of gray mailboxes lining the side of the road, opens the door to her box, pulls out three pieces of mail, and quickly shoves them inside her coat to protect them from the rain.

“C’mon, Grover. Home!”

They turn around and begin retracing their route. With the rain and wind pushing behind her now, she’s able to look up to see where she’s going instead of mostly down at her feet. Ahead of them in the distance, someone is walking toward them. She wonders who it could be.

As they get closer, she figures out that the person is a woman. Most of Beth’s friends live mid-island. Jill lives in Cisco, which isn’t too far from here, but in the other direction, toward the ocean, and this woman is too short to be Jill. She’s
wearing a hat, a scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth, a parka, and boots. It would be hard to recognize anyone in that getup in this weather, but surely, Beth must know who it is. There are only so many people who would be out walking in this neighborhood in this weather on a Thursday in March. There are no weekenders or day-trippers out for a stroll on Nantucket today.

They’re a few yards apart now, but Beth still can’t identify her. She can only see that the woman’s hair is long and black. Beth prepares to say
Hello,
and she’s already smiling when the woman is directly in front of her, but the woman is fixated on the ground, refusing eye contact. So Beth doesn’t say
Hello,
and she feels sheepish for smiling. Grover wanders over for a sniff, but the woman skirts by too quickly and is then behind them before Beth or Grover can learn anything more about her.

Still curious after a few steps, Beth looks back over her shoulder and sees the woman at the row of mailboxes, toward the far end.

“Probably a New Yorker,” she mutters as she turns around and presses on toward home.

Safe inside, Grover shakes himself, sending water everywhere. She’d normally scold him for doing this, but it doesn’t matter. Just opening the door splashed a bucket’s worth of water into the mudroom. She removes her hat and coat, and the mail falls to the ground. She kicks off her boots. She’s soaked through.

She peels off her wet socks and jeans, tosses them into the laundry room, and slips into a pair of fleece pajama bottoms and a pair of slippers. Feeling warmer and drier and immediately happier, she returns to the front door to collect the mail from the floor, then walks back to the couch. Grover has returned to the braided rug.

The first piece of mail is the heating bill, which will probably
be more than their monthly mortgage payment. She decides to open it later. The next is a Victoria’s Secret catalog. She ordered one push-up bra three Christmases ago, and they still keep sending her catalogs. She’ll toss it into the fire. The last piece of mail is an envelope hand-addressed to her. She opens it. It’s a card with a birthday cake pictured on the front.

May all your wishes come true.

Huh, that’s strange,
she thinks. Her birthday isn’t until October.

Inside, the words
Happy Birthday
have been crossed out with a single, confident ballpoint blue line. Below it, someone has written:

I’m sleeping with Jimmy.

PS. He loves me.

It takes her a few seconds to reread it, to make sure she’s comprehending the words. She’s aware of her heart pounding as she picks up the envelope again.
Who sent this?
There’s no return address, but the postmark is stamped from Nantucket. She doesn’t recognize the handwriting. The penmanship is neat and loopy, a woman’s. Another woman’s.

Holding the envelope in one hand and the card in the other, she looks up at the fireplace mantel, at her perfectly centered wedding picture, and swallows. Her mouth has gone dry.

She gets up and walks to the fireplace. She slides the iron screen aside. She tosses the Victoria’s Secret catalog onto the fire and watches the edges curl and blacken as it burns and turns to gray ash. Gone. Her hands are shaking. She clenches the envelope and card. If she burns them now, she can pretend she never saw them. This never existed.

A swirl of unexpected emotion courses through her. She feels fear and fury, panic and humiliation. She feels nauseous, like she’s going to be sick. But what she doesn’t feel is surprised.

She closes the gate. With the card and envelope squeezed in her fist, she marches up the stairs, emphasizing each loud step as she heads toward Jimmy’s snoring.

CHAPTER 2

O
livia strips down to her underwear and changes into sweatpants, socks, and her oldest, favorite Boston College sweatshirt. Drier but still freezing, she hurries downstairs to the living room and presses the button on the remote to the fireplace. She stands in front of the instant blaze and waits and waits, but it doesn’t throw off any noticeable heat. She touches the glass with the palm of her hand. It’s barely warm. It was David’s idea to convert the fireplace to gas. Better for the tenants. More convenient and less messy.

Although they’ve owned the cottage for eleven years, she and David have never actually lived here. They bought it as an investment just before the housing market boomed and prices skyrocketed. David, a business major who reluctantly stepped into his family’s real estate business after college, is always keeping his eye on properties with potential. He’s all about location, location, location. He looks for a fixer-upper in the right neighborhood, buys it, hires contractors to renovate the kitchen and baths and to paint the interior and the exterior, then he sells it. The goal is always to flip it fast, a
SOLD
sign on the front lawn and a tidy profit sitting fat and pretty in his pocket.

But Nantucket was different for David. With almost 50 percent of the island designated as conservation and “forever wild,” leaving only half of the almost fifty square miles buildable, David wasn’t interested in flipping this house. He assured Olivia that the property value would never dip below what they paid for it. The house is nothing special, a modest three-bedroom cottage with little remarkable about any of the rooms or layout. But situated less than a mile from Fat Ladies Beach, it’s a highly desirable vacation property, and David correctly guessed that they would always more than cover their annual mortgage payments with summer rentals.

It’s a smart investment for our future,
he’d said, back when they could so blissfully imagine a future.

They stayed in the house for a week or two each year in the shoulder seasons, usually in October, but stopped coming altogether after Anthony turned three. Pretty much everything stopped after Anthony turned three.

A violent gust of wind screams in the distance, sounding to Olivia like a small child crying out in pain. The windows rattle, and a cold breeze dances along the skin of her bare neck. She shivers. Nantucket in winter. This is going to take some getting used to.

She rubs the palms of her hands together, trying to create some friction to warm them. Dissatisfied, she wonders where she might find a blanket. She’s only been here nine days, and she’s still learning where everything is, still feeling like a guest in someone else’s home. A stranger at the inn. She searches the linen closet, finds a gray, woolen blanket she vaguely remembers buying, wraps it around her shoulders, and snuggles into the living-room chair with the mail.

The bills are still sent to their house in Hingham, a small, suburban town on Boston’s South Shore, so she hasn’t yet received anything but home-repair-service advertisements, local
election postcards, and coupon flyers, but today she knows she has some real mail.

Before even opening the first, she knows it’s a book from her old boss, Louise, a senior editor at Taylor Krepps. The envelope has a yellow forwarding-address sticker on it. Louise doesn’t know that Olivia has moved to Nantucket. She doesn’t know about Anthony either.

She doesn’t know anything.

Olivia hasn’t worked as a junior editor to Louise in self-help books at Taylor Krepps Publishing for five years now, but Louise still sends her advance reader copies. Maybe it’s Louise’s way of keeping the door open, of trying to entice Olivia back to work. Olivia suspects Louise has simply never gotten around to taking her off the mailing list. Olivia’s never hinted to Louise that she’d ever come back; it’s been a couple of years since she’s sent a note thanking her or commenting on a book, and even longer since she’s read any of them. But they keep coming.

She doesn’t have the heart or stomach to read anybody’s self-help anymore. She’s no longer interested in anyone’s advice or wisdom. What do they know? What does it matter? It’s all bunk.