Off Season (19 page)

Then, without drawing her glance from the screen, Jill stopped wondering. If she were going to save either Ben or herself, she knew she had to take some action of the positive kind.

Slowly, deliberately, she reached for the phone. Then she dialed the number that she still remembered.

They were a motley group, or at least that was what Rita called them. Ben didn’t care what label she gave them: he was glad that he’d not returned to the house to suffer in silence. He was grateful that Amy had made dinner for Rita and for him at her new apartment; even though it
was ham and scalloped potatoes and was pretty well dried out.

Feeling grateful and glad, he was damned if he was going to think about
it
this evening. For just one evening he was going to set his mind free.

“Here’s to the last of the Vineyard singles,” Rita declared, raising a cup of too-strong coffee.

“Excuse me,” Ben said, “but I believe I’m married.” He’d helped himself to half a bottle of wine from Charlie’s private stash and was feeling quite good for a guy whose life was in grave question.

“Oh,” Rita said. “I forgot. Your wife’s away so much.”

“Ouch,” he responded, but he didn’t mind the barb. “Rita, you won’t be alone for long. Before you know it, you’ll be a family of three.”

Amy looked at him queerly. Rita did, too.

“Someone forgot to tell you that a mother and a baby do not always make three,” Rita said.

“Well, there’s always your mother,” he replied. “Three generations. That’s a family, isn’t it?”

Rita threw a packet of sugar at him.

Amy stood up and cut another slice of apple pie that Rita’s mother had made just before she went to the senior center tonight.

“When are you due, anyway, Rita?” Ben asked. Since Jill had told him she was pregnant, he hadn’t thought much about it, except to miss Kyle.

“April,” she said. “And it can’t get here fast enough.”

April
.

As in April the ninth.

Suddenly the wine and the ham and the apples did not agree on being in his stomach. He glanced at his watch and wondered how soon he could politely excuse himself and take his motley body home.

•   •   •

“I heard you were coming.” Christopher’s voice was exactly as Jill remembered, a touch softer than it was on TV, less in control, more like a man with feelings. She’d often wondered what exactly he’d done that day after she returned the ring, after she’d left the studio to start her new life.

Had he cried?

Or had he run to Maurice Fischer and told the RueCom boss it would be fine and they’d be better off with Lizette?

The tone of his voice now gave nothing away.

Jill twisted the cord. “I thought we should bury the hatchet before we meet for the publicity shots.”

He paused. “What? And miss out on huge ratings we’d get by doing it on the air?” He did not say there was no hatchet to bury, or that he was grateful she’d left him because he’d met someone new. “Speaking of which,” he continued, as if she called every evening, as if they spoke every day, “have you talked with Addie? The network decided to do the shots in New York.”

She had been looking forward to a few days of sunshine and relaxation in L.A., not Manhattan’s stark city landscape of pollution and high-rises. She had been looking forward to being on the opposite coast. “Why New York?”

“It could have something to do with the fact our old viewers were used to seeing us in the snow and cold.”

“Then why not Boston?”

“Because New York is bigger? Better? Who knows.” Unlike Jill, Christopher never questioned the whats and the whys of those behind the scenes. Which could also be why his career was so much further ahead. “I only know it’s going to be the week after Thanksgiving. And we’re booked at the Plaza.”

Jill laughed. “The week after Thanksgiving? Well, maybe that explains it. Addie’s from the city. She gets to be there for the holidays.”

“Oh,” Christopher replied without further comment.

In the silence that followed Jill tried to picture them at the Plaza—shooting public relations promos in Central Park perhaps, in a hansom cab with a white horse, decked out in red velvet and evergreen boughs. Would she be in fur, or would that upset too many animal-rights viewers? And why was she wondering these things when she was there on the phone with the man she’d once thought she loved?

“Is this okay with you, Christopher?” she asked. “Having me fill in for Lizette?”

“Jill,” he said, his voice soft once again, “we’re professionals, aren’t we?”

She didn’t know what she’d expected, but she didn’t think it was that. Something more personal, perhaps. Something that said he cared. Or that he didn’t.

“Besides,” he added, “I’ve done a lot of things in my day, but chasing a married woman has never been high on my list.”

A married woman. Yes, she reminded herself, that’s just what she was. And despite how she felt, that would not change. At least not for the moment. At least not until she’d given it her very best shot.

Which meant getting off the phone with her ex-lover right now and returning to her senses—or what was left of them.

“Well, then I’ll see you in New York,” she said, and quickly rung off before he—or she—misconstrued why she’d phoned at all.

“Did you go trick-or-treating?” Laura Reynolds asked Mindy when she came back, a long time after Grandpa had yelled at her to leave. During that time she must have forgotten that Mindy was ten, not five.

Mindy used her tongue inside her mouth to search for the back molar that she’d been playing with all day. It was loose and ready to pop out. She wished the doctor would leave so she could put her fingers inside and see if she could pull it.

“No trick-or-treating?” Dr. Reynolds persisted. “Don’t they have a party at your school?”

Mindy sighed. “I’m in the fifth grade. Only the little kids do that.” She looked past the doctor out into the yard that was quiet and gray now that most of the leaves had fallen.

Mindy didn’t like November much: with all the tourists gone, there wasn’t much to do. And it meant the holidays were coming, which were a joke.

Thanksgiving was a day like any other, though last year Grandpa bought an already-roasted turkey from the supermarket, and she pretended her mother had come home from Timbuktu and cooked it.

As for Christmas, well, Mindy promised herself that this year she would positively not go to the community center party for the island kids. When she first came to live here, it made her feel special to get all those presents. But last year she realized it was mostly for the poor kids and the kids without anybody, which practically meant her.

If she didn’t go this year, maybe no one would know she was poor and that she was without anybody except Grandpa, who never knew what to give her so he settled on a twenty-dollar bill. Maybe he wouldn’t even do that this year. Maybe he was too upset about this problem with Ben. He sure seemed to be avoiding her lately, as if she’d done something wrong.

A lack of positive parental attention can lead to much unhappiness, Dr. Laura had said. Difficulty making friends. Overachieving. Lying
.

Mindy rocked in the rocking chair in her room. “I thought my grandfather told you not to come back here.”

The doctor smiled. “The court prefers that I do. They want me to help you handle the trauma before it has a chance to get too big.”

“I don’t have no—
any
—trauma.”

The doctor frowned. “No? What Mr. Niles did to you must have been very upsetting.”

She pushed at her tooth again. She remembered when Brianna Edson had spat one out one day in reading class. Brianna had plopped her bloody tooth onto her open book and watched it stain the page red. Mindy had written
Gross Out
on her notebook and showed Mark Goudreau, who sat next to her.

“Mindy,” the doctor prodded again, as if Mindy had forgotten she was in the room, as if she possibly could. “You seem distracted today. Is it because they’ve set a trial date? Does that upset you?”

Mindy knew the doctor would have loved her to say it
did. She would have loved her to say that something—anything—upset her. Then the doctor would have something to do. “It’s not until April,” she said, because that’s what Grandpa had told her. “I’ll be eleven by then.” She looked off toward Menemsha House, which had not been opened since that day. She wondered if it would ever open again, and if it was her fault if it didn’t.

Difficulty making friends … Lying
.

Dr. Reynolds had stopped talking. Mindy hated when she did that, as if it were up to her to fill in the blank space, the dead air that sat between them. She wiggled her tooth with her tongue again.

“Mindy,” the doctor said after about two hundred minutes, which might have been more like two, “what’s on your mind?”

“If you must know, I was thinking about you. Do you have a boyfriend? Do you let him touch you in ‘inappropriate places’?”

The doctor hesitated a moment. Mindy sucked at her tooth.

“Adults are different from children,” Dr. Laura replied. “But even when you’re an adult, if someone touches you without consent, it’s wrong. Do you understand that?”

Mindy opened her mouth, plucked the bloody tooth, and held it out to her. “This is my twelve-year molar. Does it mean I’m mature for my age?”

Dr. Reynolds sighed and picked up her bag. “Our time’s up for today, Mindy. But I’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe you’ll be in a better mood.”

Mindy watched her leave and felt a little sad but did not know why. Maybe it was that lack of positive parental attention showing up again.

•   •   •

Ben got out of his car in the parking lot of the school. He’d come to see his grandkids in the play whether John liked it or not, whether the world liked it or not. He had, however, waited until the performance was about to start: no sense running into people he should not and did not want to see.

Walking into the long corridor where he’d not walked since Carol Ann had been a student, he noticed the construction paper turkeys that lined the walls. It was, of course, almost Thanksgiving. The time had passed so quickly, as if the days and weeks were racing toward April, hell-bent on getting to the trial.

Jill had come home from Sturbridge but soon would be gone again, this time to New York for press photos with Mr. Celebrity. But Ben figured it didn’t much matter where his wife was these days; the conversations they had were more on edge than not, and he sadly felt more at peace when she was away.

Guilt, he supposed, was causing that. Guilt for putting her through this nightmare, which would soon be over one way or another if the calendar had its way.

The auditorium lights had already been dimmed. Metal folding chairs sat in neat rows from the stage to the back, about three-quarters of them occupied by parents and grandparents and siblings of all ages. Even in the darkness, Ben spotted Carol Ann and John sitting near the front. He scanned the room: he saw the editor of the newspaper, the head of the fish cooperative, and even Sheriff Talbot. But did not see a silhouette that resembled Dave Ashenbach’s.

He took a seat by the door, in case he decided to go home.

From behind the stage, someone worked the pulley, and the old maroon curtain slowly jerked open. The audience hushed, as if this were a high-priced Broadway
performance. It occurred to Ben that to most of the people there, it was just as important, perhaps more. Families—
children
—were the Vineyard way of life. He moved uncomfortably on the chair and remembered that that was why he’d built Menemsha House: for the children, to help their young minds work and play and grow into the best that they could be.

The teacher in charge stepped forward on the stage. Ben recognized her: Melanie Galloway, daughter of Dick Bradley, who owned the Mayfield House in Vineyard Haven. Like Ben, Bradley was a transplant from the mainland. Like Ben—hell, like most of them on the island—he’d had his share of struggles. Ben had not heard that being accused of child molestation had been one of them.

He quickly glanced around and wondered if the Galloways, the Bradleys, or anyone in the audience had heard what Mindy Ashenbach had done. If any of the parents, or any of the kids …

The collar of his corduroy shirt suddenly felt too tight. He opened the top two buttons and rubbed his throat.

Melanie Galloway introduced the first scene, the Indians alone without the Pilgrims, before the
Mayflower
arrived. A group of kids were crouched, sorting sheaves of corn. A small boy in a long feathered headdress marched onto the stage. One of the Indians looked up at him. “Chief Running Rain!” he exclaimed. “Look at the bountiful harvest we have this year!”
Bountiful
sounded a lot like
bound-full
, but Ben got the idea.

Chief Running Rain—Ben smiled as he realized it was John, Jr.—nodded. “It’s enough for a big feast,” the chief proclaimed, turning to the audience and waving his arms with overdrama. “Let’s invite everyone we know to come and watch the football games.” His too-large headdress slipped a little.