Is it Joel? Angie softened with relief.
She loved him.
As she crested the stairs, however, she realized the man wasn’t Joel. This guy had a head of shaggy hair and four-day scruff. Angie’s neck tensed. She clenched her fists, although she didn’t have the strength—physical or mental—to fight anyone off.
The man locked eyes with Angie, and in those eyes, Angie saw her father. The face, nearly the same as Deacon’s, made her think: Werewolf, doppelgänger, ghost, reincarnation. Had Deacon returned to her in the form of this junkie off the street?
“Angie?” the man said.
Angie’s eyes widened. “Hayes?” she said. Her brother. Or, technically, her half brother, she supposed, although Deacon had put “half brother” and “half sister” on the Stupid Word List.
Wow, he looked terrible.
Hayes got to his feet and collected Angie in a fierce hug. Then he broke down crying. She envied him that.
“Here,” she said. “Let’s go in.”
She disengaged herself from Hayes’s tight embrace and unlocked the apartment door.
“I completely spaced what time you were getting here,” Angie said. “I was busy thinking about something else. How did you get in the building?”
“I explained who I was,” Hayes said. “Deacon Thorpe’s son, your brother. The lady in Three B knows you.”
“Right,” Angie said, “Mrs. Lopresti.” Hayes really looked god-awful; Angie couldn’t believe it. She and Deacon (she could not separate their personhood, not yet) lived a life of occasional glamour—for fifteen or twenty minutes each night of service, they trooped out to the dining room to greet the VIPs. They also worked a circuit of benefit dinners—events for the James Beard Foundation and for the favorite charities of other elite chefs. But they agreed that their lives did not hold a candle, in allure or sophistication, to Hayes’s life. Hayes crisscrossed the planet in the first-class cabin of Singapore Airlines or Emirates, drinking Dom Pérignon and eating foie gras. When he landed, he was whisked by private chauffeur to the finest hotels in the world. He had his own table at the Tiffin Room at Raffles, and he had once called Angie from a suite at the Burj Al Arab, in Dubai, where he was enjoying the service of four butlers, including a “bath butler,” who provided any one of fifty bath salts from around the world, along with rose petals, a cold glass of vintage Krug, and strawberries.
Are you calling me to brag? Angie had asked him then.
No, Hayes said. I’m calling because I miss you.
He could have been such a prick, Angie and Deacon agreed, but he was a sweet and genuine soul who always let Angie know how much he loved her. There was nothing “half” about their relationship; Hayes had treated Angie like a whole real-deal sister since her earliest memory.
“What happened to you?” Angie said. “You look like a cadaver.”
“Thanks,” Hayes said. He flopped onto Angie’s sofa and sank his shaggy head into her feather pillows. “What happened to me is, I got my ass home from an island off the coast of Bali. I took a longboat to Nusa Dua, then a bus to Denpasar, then a puddle jumper to Jakarta, then another puddle jumper to Singapore, where I had a brief layover. Then I flew to London, and from London I flew here. I haven’t slept in, I don’t know, twenty-four hours?”
“Oh,” Angie said. She was relieved that that was his answer. He was indistinguishable from any tweaker plucked off Ludlow Street, and he was scratching the hell out of his shoulder, which set off alarms in Angie’s mind.
“I’m packed,” Angie said. “Are we ready to go?” She said the words enthusiastically despite her anxiety about Joel—why didn’t he call?—and the fact that all Hayes looked ready to do was take out the trash at the homeless shelter.
“Back to Hoicks Hollow Road,” Hayes said. “Our home away from home.”
“Where we will be living the life on Nantucket,” Angie said.
LAUREL
American Paradise: it was exactly as she remembered it. She wasn’t sure how to deal with the cornucopia of confusing emotions she was experiencing. As she pulled into the driveway in the cherry-red Jeep that she had rented at the airport, she sucked in her breath. This was her house, their house, a house that she and Deacon had picked out together, a house they couldn’t afford, but Deacon had wanted it so badly—Hoicks Hollow Road! he’d cried out. It’s like magic!—that Laurel had made concessions.
They had spent three idyllic summers in the house together, the kind of summers people sang about. Hayes had been young—four, five, six. He’d started out a chubby little boy who by the end of the summer had been as brown as a berry, with a mop of hair so blond, it was practically white. And during their last summer, he had learned how to ride a bike. Laurel could picture him, tires wobbling at first, before he gained confidence and straightened the bike out as he pedaled off down Hoicks Hollow Road.
Had the three of them ever worn shoes? Only to go into town at night to get ice cream cones, and the one or two times per summer that she and Deacon hired little Charity with the braces from down the street to watch Hayes so that they could go to Thirty Acres for drinks. The rest of the time, they had walked over the dune to the beach. They had swum and napped and eaten simple sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, and Laurel had read novels on a blanket while Deacon taught Hayes how to skip rocks at the water’s edge. In later summers, they took Hayes out onto Sesachacha Pond in a canoe. They always stayed at the beach to enjoy the golden hour, that hour when the sun sank low enough to spangle the water and make everything look as if it had been dipped in honey. Then there was a race to the outdoor shower; the last person in received a cold shock halfway through. Most nights, Deacon grilled fish that he had bought from the fishermen on Straight Wharf at sunrise. They ate the fish with boiled sweet corn and field tomatoes from Bartlett’s Farm, a green salad, some fresh herb rolls from Something Natural.
They rode bikes everywhere; Deacon’s bike had had a tagalong seat for Hayes, and Laurel’s bike had a wicker basket so that she could buy wildflowers from the woman who sold bouquets at the Sconset rotary. Once, they were out exploring and found a thatch of blueberry bushes. They ate the fruit until their tongues turned purple.
Their second summer, Deacon had bought a 1946 Willys jeep; it looked like something out of Hogan’s Heroes. It was a close match for the jeep that Deacon had ridden in with his father on their last day together. The jeep was old and bare-bones—more go-cart than car—but somehow, it always started. It didn’t have seat belts, so Laurel clutched Hayes in her lap, and the three of them would putter along, Laurel’s long hair blowing all over the place in the wind.
They had treated the sunset like a Broadway show every night, getting their seats early—on the back deck, with wine and a bottle of beer, Hayes with a box of animal crackers to keep him satiated until dinner. When the sun set over their backyard vista—the golf course, the lighthouse, the moors—they would applaud. And they never missed a thunderstorm. Laurel could remember waking in the middle of the night and racing out onto the deep wraparound porch to watch the rain come down in sheets and the lightning dance across the ocean. Her much-younger, Pollyanna self had marveled at the breathtaking natural beauty of the island. Holding on to the hands of her handsome, talented husband and her adorable son, she would think, I’m the luckiest woman on earth.
She was glad she had gotten to the island a few hours before Buck. Being back in this house again was something she needed to experience on her own.
The inside of the cottage hadn’t changed one bit, not even under the influence of two very strong women. Laurel had assumed that Belinda would hire architects and painters, tile guys to renovate the bathrooms, and Philip Bergeron, her decorator, to pick out carpets and fabrics and add design elements, thereby ruining the simple perfection of the house and blaspheming everything Nantucket stood for.
But miraculously, Deacon had stood his ground: nothing in that house was to change unless deemed necessary for the house’s survival—a new roof, an updated septic system. He was against any “improvements,” a philosophy he had also upheld since Scarlett became the third Mrs. Thorpe. Because of this, the house looked just as down at the heels as it had in 1986, when Laurel first saw it.