Chapter 38
Phillip waited, sitting on the front porch and watching for his wife’s approach on the boardwalk. His neck hurt from craning it again and again, thinking he heard her footstep. The boating magazine he’d been attempting to read fell off of his lap onto the floor. He reached down for it and the muscles of his back screamed with tension and stiffness from sitting too long.
“Ow! Damn it!” He grabbed at the magazine and then slapped it down on the table next to the chair where he had been keeping his vigil. “Where is she?”
He stood up slowly. It was getting late. The sun had slid down the sky until it hovered over the marshes behind the island. Yesterday, it had been about three when she had returned from another of her solitary walks. Her face had been a mess with her eye makeup on her cheeks, clear tracks where tears had run down outlined in black mascara. Between the fading pink stripes on her cheeks from her nails and the black ragged tracks of mascara running in the opposite direction, she looked like some crazy kind of tiger. Yet, she’d been smiling and humming as she walked and her gait had been the lazy relaxed one of a summer’s afternoon.
Her open expression hardened when she saw him waiting on the porch. Actually, there was a brief minute or two where Phil could swear that Rose didn’t know him. She looked that puzzled. Then her eyes narrowed, her steps speeded up and she brushed past him, opening the door and heading inside.
“That was quite a walk,” he said to her receding back. It had been four hours since she left and the island took no more than forty-five minutes to walk from end to end, even when strolling.
Rose made an exasperated gasping sound and kept walking, going straight upstairs. She’d spent the rest of the night holed up in their bedroom. She locked the door and wouldn’t answer when he called to her through it. Finally, he’d eaten dinner by himself and gone to sleep in the guest bedroom, vowing to confront her in the morning.
But when he’d woken the next day, he found the door to their bedroom open, the bed neatly made. Downstairs, everything had been tidied up and the dishes left in the drying rack last night put away. He wandered out to the porch, expecting to find her ensconced with her fashion magazines and her cell phone, but the porch was empty. The magazines were filed away in the wicker magazine holder rather than splayed on the porch furniture as they had been for weeks.
As he turned back, he saw her note on the coffee table in the living room. It sat propped up against a glass bowl of water-smoothed stones they had collected, a crisp white note-card with her neat printing on it.
“Phil, gone walking. Back soon. Love, R.”
Normal enough straightforward note – one like any of the hundreds of others left for him over the course of their twelve years together. Even “love” was there, the way it used to be. Why, then, did the note seem to be a part of a stage setting: artificial, creating an illusion rather than reflecting a reality? Or was it that he had gotten so used to things going wrong on this vacation that he could only see wrong, even when everything was all right? He wanted to be naïve again, the way he had been a few weeks ago when he had thought that a month’s vacation on Captain’s would solve everything.
There was nothing in the note that indicated how long she’d be gone, but he knew he couldn’t simply sit around and wait, so he left too. He placed a note of his own beside hers and took the boat to go get supplies. Instead of going to Buddy’s Qwik Stop, a nearby dockside mini-grocery and boat gas station where they usually shopped, he tied up at the island’s community dock and took the car to the large Stop & Shop in Babylon. He wanted a real grocery store, the enormous kind with every brand of cereal and salad dressing and, better still, something illegal and non-Rose-approved for lunch from their deli. Something greasy and meaty and terrible for him. Buddy’s only carried pre-made sandwiches wrapped in plastic, the bread soggy, the fillings limp and tired-tasting.
The shopping trip was also necessary. They had two more weeks planned and they needed almost everything. Before loading his cart, he went directly to the grocery’s deli and gleefully ordered a big Italian sub sandwich piled high with meat and cheese with a desultory sprinkling of shredded lettuce and sliced tomatoes and soaked in oil and vinegar. It was wonderful and he couldn’t believe how quickly it disappeared, eaten while sitting at one of the small plastic tables set up in the store’s small café area.
When he got back to their house, the boat loaded with bags, he wasn’t concerned that she hadn’t returned yet. It had been hours yesterday, but she had come home. And when she did finally arrive today, he would confront her, not allow her to brush past him so easily this time. The locked door last night had been the last straw. His patience with this new Rose was gone. He would get her to talk, explain herself, come out in the open with this craziness.
After he put away the groceries, he found her cell phone sitting on the bedside table in their room and hid it in the guest bedroom’s bureau. No more Jackie and Dr. Omin. He wished he could get rid of the fashion magazines as well, but knew that was too much. Hiding the cell phone was pushing it, but necessary if he wanted to have her undivided attention.
Then he waited, busying himself with cleaning out his fishing tackle box and sponging down the boat after he unloaded it and put away the groceries. As he washed the boat, he found himself repeatedly glancing at the boardwalk that stretched down-island, watching for her approach. It was the only direction she could have gone, their house too close to the north end of the island to take a walk northward unless all you wanted was a five minute stroll.
The waiting eventually became just that, and he graduated from tasks completed with an eye out to simply sitting on the porch and watching for her. Now it was nearly dusk. For the last hour he had been fighting the urge to head down-island and search for her, the only barrier being his fear of running into Hannah O’Brien. Whether or not that guy they had seen her with on the dock was still with her, if Rose saw Phil talking to Hannah, it would just make things worse than they already were. As well, he was more certain than ever that the girl was in some sort of trouble, and he wanted nothing to do with it. He had plenty of trouble right here at home.
But he couldn’t wait any longer. Maybe Rose had fallen down or gotten hurt somehow. Maybe she wasn’t able to walk back. He would have to take his chances regarding Hannah and go out in search of his wife. He put on a jacket, grabbed a flashlight, and set off down the boardwalk. The sun was an orange ball that hid behind each house as he passed it, popping out to hang low over the tall grasses between them. As he passed each house, he looked around it for Rose, checking weedy areas for her in case she was gathering wildflowers and glancing down each dock even though he knew he hadn’t seen a figure on it.
As he approached the mid-island area, he heard a sound different from the island’s usual symphony of bird-calls, steady lapping of water against the docks, and the drone of an occasional cruising boat or passing car on the nearby causeway. Humming, that’s what it sounded like. He slowed his steps and listened. It stopped. He moved forward again, slower this time, looking carefully at the houses.
The next house was the Ferguson’s old house, tall and narrow and gray-shingled. The Ferguson’s had taken better care of it though. Under its new ownership, the house had shed some of its shingles, the dock sagged in the middle, and the beach was cluttered with junk and mounds of seaweed created by a season of tides. So few of these new people understood how much work was involved with keeping a house on Captain’s. They thought it was all cocktail-hours and sailboat races and quaint water-pumps at the sink. When their house fell this far into disrepair, they usually sold it, unwilling to do all the work necessary to resuscitate it. If anyone was around to bet, he’d wager that this house would be put on the market in early March, when dreams of summers spent on a quaint little island glowed brightly in winter-numbed imaginations.
There! He heard the humming again, a tune he didn’t recognize. But it was Rose, he could tell. She appeared, coming from the back of the house, and she was walking in that slow lazy way she had walked yesterday, looking at her feet as she walked, still humming. She was wearing pale yellow Capri pants and a sleeveless white blouse that was knotted at her waist, an outfit suitable for a hot day. She had to be freezing in it, but the relaxed way she was moving was as if it was actually warm, one of those sultry days of August on Captain’s instead of a cool autumn evening. It would all be fine, strange but fine, but Rose was always cold, the one that turned the heat up high in the winter when he wasn’t looking, the one who complained at the slightest chill.
“Rose?”
She jolted to a stop and looked up at him, standing on the boardwalk. She swallowed the last note of tune she’d been humming as if it was peanut butter and hard to get down. “Yes?” She said this reluctantly, looking at him strangely.
“What are you doing? You’ve been gone for hours, all day. I was worried about you.”
“Gone all day? What?” She squinted at him as if he’d asked a crazy question.
“All day! You left a note, but I thought you’d be back by…I don’t know, noon at the latest. I mean, how much walking can you do on this island?” He couldn’t keep the irritation out of his voice; it burst out with the last sentence.
She blinked and shook her head a little, her eyes darting back and forth. Her arms jerked up and she grabbed her elbows, cuddling her arms against her sides. As if she was suddenly cold.
Phil stared at her. “Well, come on. Let’s go home,” he said reluctantly. He put his hand out to her.
She looked back over her shoulder at the rear of the house, as if expecting to see someone appear there.
“What? Is someone there?” His throat clicked, suddenly dry. Was someone else, other than Hannah, on the island? Was something going on that he didn’t know about? In his mind’s eye, he saw the starry-eyed look she’d been wearing when she’d returned yesterday. A lover?
Then he was moving forward, not waiting for her answer. He dropped the flashlight he’d been carrying, leapt off of the boardwalk and strode across the weedy yard, heading toward the back deck where she’d been looking.
“No!” Rose yelped and spun around after him.
But he was too fast, and he was standing and looking at the back porch. One of their flags was hanging from the porch’s flagpole, the 1775 “Don’t Tread on Me” flag they had paid far too much for at an auction in Boston some years back. Their rarely-used Fourth of July bunting was wrapped all around the edges of the porch, and the table on the porch had one of their best linen tablecloths on it and was littered with what looked like their entire china and silver collection from the house.
He stared. There, in the center of the clutter on the table, was a framed photo of Michael Ferguson, the boy who had dated Keeley O’Brien once upon a time, the one that had died in that tragic car wreck. Rose hadn’t dated Michael; he would have heard about it. She had been the belle of the ball, though. He remembered how popular she’d been when they met in their twenties, all the men vying for her attention. He had watched the whole scene and doggedly waited for her all those years, enduring being ignored, hoping his patience would be rewarded. What the hell was this, Michael Ferguson’s framed photo? And what the hell was all of their stuff doing here?
He turned around to confront her and was surprised to find her right next to him, her hand flying up and slapping him, hard, across the face.
“Get away! That’s mine!” Then she slapped him again with the other side of her hand, her rings dragging painfully across his chin.
He grabbed her by the arms. “Stop that. What is wrong with you?”
She fought him, wriggling, but he held her fast. She shrieked, “Let go!”
“Not until you tell what is going on. What is this?”
She continued wriggling for a moment and then stopped, panting a little before lifting her chin in her usual haughty way. “It’s mine. Mine and Michael’s.”
“Michael? Are you talking about Michael Ferguson?” He looked at her, trying to catch her eye, but her eyes were downcast. If he hadn’t seen the photo, he wouldn’t have even guessed what “Michael” she could be referring to.
“Yes, Michael Ferguson. Of course,” she said, finally looking at him, her eyes flashing with challenge.
“Of course. Sure. That makes no sense,” he said and then looked deeply in her eyes, searching them. “Rose, what’s wrong? What’s happening to you?”
Taking advantage of his relaxed grip on her arms, Rose tore away and ran toward the boardwalk. He chased after her. She was just about to leap up onto the boardwalk when he grabbed her again. She screamed when his hands wrapped around her from behind.
“Stop screaming right now and talk to me.”
“No! Go away! I don’t want you here,” she said, twisting in his arms. Then she stopped and stood very still, facing away from him. Her words floated up to him, her voice quiet and lilting. “You know what you are, Phil? Third best. Not even second best. I should have never settled. But you were there that time, right after John left me to chase after Keeley the summer I turned thirty. Left for Keeley again and I was getting old and scared I’d never have babies. You knew the right words and you said them. And now, I’ve thrown it all away. Nothing worked out the way it was supposed to. Keeley stole my life. She has everything, everything I was supposed to have. You couldn’t help. You’re useless, Phil. I don’t want you here anymore. I mean it. Go and don’t come back.”
He let go of her, burned, and stepped away from her. She turned and looked up at him, her chin jutting out, her lips pressed together in a thin line. But it was her eyes that told him, her dark cold eyes.
“There it is then,” he said finally, looking at the woman he used to love more than anyone. He was amazed at the dearth of pain.
“Yes.” She nodded slowly.
There was nothing else to say. He turned away, both tired and oddly exhilarated, and leapt onto the boardwalk in one stride. The light of the day had been extinguished completely and all the colors of the island had become varying shades of gray. He scooped up the flashlight from where it had fallen on the boardwalk and walked away.