“I’ll be back next week,” Belinda said, trying to sound like the most influential woman in all of antiquity. “Mrs. Greene can handle the girls.”
“Whatever,” Bob said. And he hung up.
Belinda took the red-eye to Boston first class, on United. She put on her Dodgers cap and her Tom Ford sunglasses, although it was impossible to disguise her strawberry-blond mane and her milky skin. When she took her seat, the flight attendant gave her a sad smile and squeezed her forearm.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the flight attendant whispered. “We all cried when we heard the news.”
My loss? Belinda thought. Was it possible that this flight attendant hadn’t read People magazine in ten years? Everyone in America knew that Deacon had divorced Belinda and married their nanny, Scarlett Oliver.
The two of them had carried on all through the final years of Belinda and Deacon’s marriage. He had taken her on a trip to the Virgin Islands while he and Belinda were still married! Belinda shuddered when she thought of all the times Deacon and Scarlett had traveled together under the auspices of “visiting Belinda on location.”
Belinda’s next question to Buck had been, Will Scarlett be coming to Nantucket? Laurel was one thing… but Scarlett was completely another. Belinda could not spend one second in the same house as Scarlett.
No, Buck had said. She refused my invitation. She’s staying in Savannah.
Of course she is, Belinda thought. Scarlett would be holed up in the decaying family manse with Mummy and a quartet of her fellow debutantes, who would provide Scarlett with freshly pressed handkerchiefs. And the old boyfriend would be there—what was his name? Belinda couldn’t remember. She had tried to banish everything she had once known about Scarlett from her mind. Scarlett was a genteel Southern girl through and through, although she’d lost all her wide-eyed innocence. No one who fell in love with Deacon Thorpe remained innocent for long.
At Logan, Belinda transferred to a Cape Air flight, a nine-seater Cessna with dual props. In the fifteen years she had gone to Nantucket, this was always her least favorite part of the trip. How many times had she accused Deacon of wanting her dead? Belinda was terrified of small planes, despite growing up around them. Her grandfather had been a barnstormer outside Iowa City, and her father had delivered the air mail for all of eastern Iowa; he had met his fiery death one frigid January night—ice on the wings. The only reason Belinda had ever agreed to fly was that she couldn’t abide arriving by boat. Belinda was more terrified of the water than she was of fire and earth.
Bob didn’t understand why she was choosing to spend a weekend in Nantucket (with those people, in that place) when she was afraid of the water. She might have replied that in her first adult relationship, with director James Brinegar, she had traveled to Aspen, Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, Telluride, Whistler, Vail, Breckenridge, Alta, Snowbird, and Tahoe, all so that Jaime could ski higher and more challenging mountains. She, Belinda, had sat in the lodge, dressed in snug snow pants, a Fair Isle sweater, and fur-lined boots, drinking hot toddies and reading in front of the fire, looking the part. She also might have replied that for the past ten years, she had lived on a horse farm without ever once mounting up for a ride. Belinda had been brought up without any skills except the ability to pretend that she had skills. She was an actress!
Belinda boarded the plane with eight other souls, none of whom seemed concerned in the slightest about catching wind shear and crashing. Belinda buckled herself in and listened to the (female) pilot’s spiel about emergency exits and what to do in the event of a water landing.
In the event of a water landing, Belinda would drown. She had never learned to swim.
Never learned to swim, Deacon said so many years ago, as though she had said she had never learned to play the zither.
She had shrugged. I grew up in the heartland.
Planes don’t crash anymore, Belinda thought. Unless they were hijacked or tampered with by terrorists. Belinda looked around. She saw a man in Nantucket Red shorts, a blue and white striped oxford, and loafers; a severe-looking blond in naughty-librarian glasses; a couple in their eighties whose skin was as brown and wrinkled as tobacco. Everyone seemed appropriately Waspy and East Coast. They could probably all tie ten nautical knots and make a mean gin and tonic. No terrorists here.
Belinda dry-mouthed an Ativan, plucked discreetly from her bag. None of the other passengers had overtly seemed to recognize her, but she figured at least half did and were simply too well bred to gawk. But if, say, Naughty Librarian had seen Belinda take the Ativan, she might very well find herself outed on the front page of the National Enquirer as a pill popper.
Belinda took some comfort in the fact that the pilot was a woman. She imagined it was Mrs. Greene flying the plane. Mrs. Greene was far too competent a human being to ever let it crash.
The engine revved. The plane careered forward, gaining speed, gaining speed, and then… they took off.
Saturday, June 18
ANGIE
She had kept her phone on all night expecting to hear from Joel—he had said he was going to tell Dory the second he walked in the door—but he hadn’t called. He might have punted, she thought, and simply gone to bed, then decided to tell Dory when they woke up. But by ten thirty, when she hadn’t heard a word—not one call, not one text—she went down to the corner deli for cigarettes. The city streets were a cauldron. Summer had arrived like a panting dog.
What was happening in New Canaan?
Angie stared at her phone, willing it to ring. She hated feeling so powerless. She imagined Joel and Dory screaming at each other, she imagined Dory vomiting in the hatbox toilet of their master bedroom (Joel had confided that Dory had an eating disorder, which was why she was such a stick figure). She imagined Dory demanding to know the real reason why Joel was leaving her. Would Angie’s name be mentioned? Would Dory call Belinda? No, not Belinda. Belinda was too famous to bother, even over a question of the egregious behavior of her daughter.
Angie couldn’t call Joel; she couldn’t text Joel. He said Dory had been acting “funny,” as though maybe she already knew. What if she did already know? What if Joel had tried to leave and Dory had begged him to stay? What if she had apologized for being distant, for being preoccupied with work, for placing him below the family dog in order of importance? What if Dory wanted to start over? Once the boys left for camp, she and Joel could take a vacation, just the two of them—to Yellowstone, to Bar Harbor. Joel and Dory would start seeing a therapist; they would patch things up. Joel would have to forsake Angie. Joel and Dory would start going to church regularly—St. Mark’s Episcopal—and Joel would volunteer to serve as a reader. He would stand in the pulpit, erect and righteous.
Angie finally succumbed to her hunger and walked down the block to the Burmese place to get some momos. She sat down at one of the sticky tables, inhaled two orders, then felt sick. She hated acting like such a girl.
Her head was alternately aswirl—Joel, Deacon, Dory, Belinda, Deacon, Deacon, Deacon—and empty. She had too many thoughts; she had no thoughts at all. She felt herself about to fall into a big pool of Feeling Sorry for Herself. Her father was dead.
She had a few daddy’s-little-girl memories: Deacon holding her hand as they crossed Broadway to get to Zabar’s, where, inevitably, Angie would ask for a black and white cookie and Deacon would make her taste olives. Or Angie riding on Deacon’s shoulders at the San Diego Zoo—a day trip they had taken from L.A., where her mother was working—so that she could better see the giraffes. But mostly, Angie remembered herself older, thirteen or fourteen, not Deacon’s little girl anymore but his sidekick, his apprentice. He always called her Buddy except when they were in the kitchen, when he called her, simply, Thorpe—and then, after she graduated from the Culinary Institute, Chef Thorpe. Deacon was the one who had taught Angie how to cook an omelet (no brown spots, or they threw it away), how to make a soufflé that wouldn’t fall, how to roast a chicken until it was golden and juicy. She had loved nowhere better than the kitchen with Deacon.
As she climbed the stairs to her apartment, her vision started to splotch. She was roasting in her jeans. When she attacked the fifth flight of stairs, she thought she saw a man’s feet in flip-flops sticking out in front of her apartment door. She hated this building! Indigents walked in off the street every day with the mailman, or they pressed each buzzer button on the chance that someone would succumb to indifference and let them in. But few made it up to the sixth floor.