The next morning, she woke up dry-mouthed and sluggish—and so she decided to take an oxy, just to get her day kick-started.
Does she need to explain how easy it was to fall prey to the magic power of pills? It was easy. Megan had given her forty oxycodone—forty!—and thirty Ativan. At the time, it had seemed like enough to last the rest of Jennifer’s life, but her supply steadily dwindled. Jennifer was able to have the Ativan prescribed by her own doctor “for anxiety,” but Jennifer had to go back to Megan and ask for more oxycodone. Megan gave her twelve more pills without any words of judgment, but Jennifer can’t go back to her friend again, and she only has seven pills left.
When they’re gone, she tells herself, they’re gone, and she’ll have to do without.
Her pharmaceutical addiction presently tops her list of concerns. She’s doing okay financially. Despite the cost of lawyers and Patrick losing his job at Everlast, there is still plenty of money in the bank to live on, for a while at least, and Jennifer’s two design projects will bring in a nice six-figure salary.
Jennifer’s other problem is that she’s lonely. She misses Patrick’s physical presence, his weight and warmth in bed at night, his keen intellect, his fire and enthusiasm, his smile, his voice, his every-second-of-every-day friendship. She misses not being free to call him or text him; it’s as if she is in prison as well.
Right now, Jennifer would like to call Patrick to ask if he thinks Norah Vale has been back on Nantucket for a while, or if he thinks she just arrived. Maybe Norah got here days or weeks ago and Kevin already knows and has dealt with it. Maybe Kevin and Norah have had a détente; maybe they’re friends.
But Jennifer doesn’t think so. The withering look Norah gave her, and the sniff, suggested warfare.
If Kevin knew Norah was back on Nantucket, he would have told Ava and Ava would have told Jennifer. Unless they didn’t want to bother Jennifer with it. Since Patrick has gone to jail, the Quinns have tried to shield Jennifer from bad news. She was the last one to hear about the terrorist group they think has captured Bart.
Jennifer calls Ava’s cell phone. No answer. Ava is probably still out caroling, and Jennifer is not going to ruin her fun time by bringing up the poisonous topic of Norah Vale. Jennifer doesn’t want Ava to worry when she sees a missed call, however, so she leaves a message.
“Hey, it’s Jen. Nothing major, just wanted to ask you about something, but it can wait until morning. The caroling was fun. Thanks for including me!”
Jennifer pockets her phone and hurries up the street toward the inn with the wine. She thinks of how nice it will be to relax with a cold glass of chardonnay. And then, she will take an Ativan and go to sleep.
DRAKE
He’s never done anything like this in his life. He has many admirable qualities, but spontaneity isn’t one of them.
The only person who knows he’s decided to come to Nantucket this weekend is Kelley, and Kelley has been more agreeable about Drake showing up than Drake expected. Drake hopes this is because Kelley has finally realized that he and Margaret do not have a romantic future. Margaret admits that she was torn for a while; she told Drake about what happened between her and Kelley last Christmas.
But it won’t happen ever again, she told Drake. I don’t love him the right way and we don’t want the same things.
Drake was relieved to hear this. It took him a while to drum up the courage, but he finally said to Margaret over a romantic dinner at Eleven Madison Park: You know what? I think we want the same things.
Margaret had given him a skeptical look. She said, “Yes. We want to work eighteen hours a day, sleep for five and a half, take a twenty-minute shower, and have sex in the remaining ten.”
Am I that bad? he wondered. He knew she was kidding, but some of her assessment felt true. For a long time, Drake had considered himself too busy for love. He was a pediatric brain surgeon at Sloan Kettering, which meant that day in, day out, he removed tumors and inserted shunts and clipped aneurysms in patients aged three months to sixteen years. He performed up to twelve surgeries a week and saw patients for consultations or follow-ups an additional twenty-five to thirty hours a week, then there was endless paperwork, his team of three residents to oversee, and he presented papers at conferences twice a year. He was also a runner—ten miles every Saturday and Sunday, and three miles on Wednesday evenings when he could squeeze it in.
He’d never been married and never had any children of his own. He loved kids; nine times out of ten, he would rather deal with a sick child than a sick child’s parents. It was because of the parents that Drake had never wanted children himself. He’d been witness to way too much heartbreaking emotional pain. When he was doing his surgical residency at CHOP in Philadelphia, he’d attended on an eight-year-old patient named Christopher Rapp who had a malignant growth in the thalamus that most surgeons wouldn’t have bothered trying to resect. It was too deep, and the danger of dying on the table too great, but the alternative was to let the tumor metastasize and watch near-immediate debilitation—the kid would be blind in two months and unable to eat or speak in four. The child’s father, a man named Jack Rapp, had pushed for the surgery, despite the risks. Jack Rapp was a single parent—the mother hadn’t been heard from since Christopher was an infant—and Christopher was an only child. Jack Rapp was as tough a man as Drake had ever encountered. He’d been a marine in Vietnam, stationed in Da Nang for thirty-nine months, and he now owned asphalt plants that provided material for half the highways in Pennsylvania—but he was destroyed by Christopher’s illness.
You’ve got to save him, man, Jack Rapp said. He’s all I’ve got.
Christopher had died on the table, and Drake, pulling the short straw, had been the one to inform Jack Rapp. The man had crumpled. That was the only word for it. And then, four hours later, Jack Rapp was found dead himself in his car in the parking garage. Gunshot to the head.
Drake knows that love of one’s child is the most powerful love there is, and he’s always been terrified of it. Ditto romantic love, which always seemed to result in a lack of control that has no place in his life.
Until now. He recently forced himself to face the startling fact that he is in love with Margaret Quinn—and not the Margaret Quinn everyone in America watches on TV each night, with her bright smile and her soothing, melodious voice. (Time magazine once said that Margaret could deliver news of genocide or an assassination and make it sound like a bedtime story.) Drake is in love with the Margaret Quinn who snorts when she laughs, and who knows all her doormen by first and last name. Drake is in love with the Margaret who douses her oysters with Tabasco, then lets out a “Whoo!” after she sucks one down. He is in love with the Margaret of the soft, pale skin with freckles on the backs of her knees who reads The Economist to put herself to sleep. That she has reported from sixty-two countries and has dined with the last four presidents does impress him, but it’s not why he loves her. Drake loves Margaret because she is smart—possibly even smarter than the incredibly brilliant female surgeons and medical oncologists Drake works with—and she is fun, irreverent, and incredibly kind. She adores her children and her grandchildren, and her greatest wish is that she might be cloned so that she can always be in two places at once.
It is only in this past year that she’s gone to Lee Kramer, the studio president, for time off so she could come to Nantucket to help Kevin and Isabelle with the baby, and lend her star power to lure more paying guests to Kelley’s inn.
Margaret invited Drake to join her a handful of times, but twice in a row he had conflicts, and he feared she would stop asking.
Margaret had invited him this weekend, which is significant not only because it’s Christmas Stroll weekend but also because the baby, Genevieve, is being baptized on Sunday. Initially, however, Drake declined. He had surgery scheduled late Friday afternoon and early Monday morning, a backlog of paperwork rivaling that of most state governments, and quite frankly, the thought of dealing with all of Margaret’s family intimidated him.
Margaret accepted his excuses with her usual grace, but he could tell she was disappointed, and in the days following, he didn’t hear from her at all. His calls went straight to her voicemail. Drake took it in stride the first few times, then he grew miffed. Was she freezing him out? She always said she realized that he had a big job and was very, very busy. Then, after four days, he started to worry. Had he just blown it with Margaret Quinn?