Elin Hilderbrand - Nantucket Nights

“Yes, we just want to look,” Kayla said.

She and Lindsey stepped onto the deck, and Kayla ushered her toward the bedroom window. “Go ahead,” she said.

Lindsey cupped her beautiful hand around her eyes and peered in. “Ransacked,” she said. “As reported.” She straightened up and looked at Kayla. “Okay, so now what do we do?”

“What would you like to do?”

Lindsey turned toward the woods and took a deep breath. Her shoulder blades protruded through her pink T-shirt. “I’d like to know what’s going on here. I prepped myself for a lot of shit, you know, but not this.”

“I understand,” Kayla said.

“No,” Lindsey said, “I don’t think you do. I have a space, you see, right here-” she tapped her breastbone “-and that space needs to be filled. I need to see my mother. Only now I’m beginning to think this dream isn’t going to come true for me. Not today, maybe not ever.” She pronounced ever “evah,” and this small bit of street accent caught Kayla’s interest. She studied the girl. Lindsey was trying hard to keep it together-makeup, hair, clothes. Until now, she’d been acting like seeing Antoinette was simply a choice she’d made, rather than a burning desire. A way to fill a weekend, rather than a life-defining moment. But Kayla recognized her desire-no, her need-to see Antoinette. Just to meet her for a moment, to stand face-to-face, say hello, and touch-God, touch-the person who had given birth to her.

“You’re right,” Kayla said. “I don’t understand. I’m sorry.”

“Can we go to Great Point?” Lindsey said.

“That’s what you’d like to do?”

Lindsey pulled a clump of hair into her fist and held it so that it strained the skin of her forehead. “Yes,” she said. “Take me to the place where she disappeared.”

And so, fourteen hours later, Kayla made the same trip she’d made the night before: first to Antoinette’s, then to Great Point. It wasn’t a bad idea- the police might have missed something in the dark that would be clear now that it was two in the afternoon.

Because it was Labor Day weekend, the parking lot by the Wauwinet was crowded with happy beachgoers: rental Jeeps and trucks crammed with children. Someone else was playing her radio station loudly; Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.” Kayla wanted to separate herself from their frivolity, but she had to let the tires down. She jumped out of the Trooper with the gauge. She saw the tires were plenty low-they hadn’t been refilled from the night before. One good thing. But then the gatehouse attendant motioned for her to stop.

“I have a sticker,” Kayla said. “And my tires are already low.”

Another teenager, with a brown ponytail and bangs, serious looking in her dun-colored uniform with her clipboard. “I need to advise you that the fire department is conducting a recovery mission off the end of the Point,” she said. “We lost someone last night.”

Lost someone.

“We know,” Kayla said. “Thank you.”

Even under the circumstances, it was impossible to find the ride out to Great Point anything but beautiful. The white sandy beach, the Rosa rugosa in its final bright pink bloom, the harbor on one side dotted with sailboats, and the ocean on the other, the seagulls, and the distant figure of the lighthouse. Kayla wasn’t surprised when Lindsey caught her breath and said, “Wow.”

“There’s a map in the glove compartment,” Kayla said. “I’ll show you where we’re going.”

Lindsey pulled out the map, and Kayla pointed to the spit of land sticking out into the sea. It was daunting to see how isolated Great Point was-surrounded by water.

“Why did you go swimming out here?” Lindsey asked. “It seems kind of reckless.”

“It was your mother’s idea,” Kayla said defensively. “A long time ago. Twenty years ago. We drove out here in the middle of the night, and it’s been a tradition ever since. It’s not reckless because we’re careful. We’re good swimmers and we understand the water. And Antoinette is the best swimmer of the three of us. How she got swept away, if she got swept away, is a mystery to me.”

“What was she like before she went into the water? Was she okay? Was she upset about seeing me? Did she want to see me?” Lindsey’s neck splotched. “I can’t shake the feeling that it’s my fault. That Antoinette, you know, chickened out.”

Kayla touched Lindsey’s arm. “It wasn’t you, Lindsey. It was me. I said something that upset her. And after I said it, I thought she was going to take the car and drive away. But instead she held her arms in a circle, like she was holding a ball, and she danced into the water.” In fact, something about the dancing bugged Kayla. It had seemed so, well… so staged. Like she’d been planning it.

“You said something to upset her?” Lindsey asked.

“She was upset because I… “ This felt reckless- confiding the truth in someone she barely knew. It was like stripping off all her clothes and letting Lindsey see her naked. But the poor girl deserved as much of the truth as Kayla could give her. “I accused her of sleeping with my husband.”

Lindsey fingered the hollow at her throat. “Oh, God,” she said. “So you’re telling me that you upset my mother, and then she went swimming in this dangerous water.” She let her window all the way down, and they both watched the waves sweep up onto the beach. The water didn’t look dangerous at all-it was blue-green, crystal clear.

“The fact is, Lindsey, your mother was hiding something.”

“Oh, really?”

They passed other cars that had made camp- beer, sandwiches from Henry’s, boom boxes playing Kayla’s station (Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Free Bird”), umbrellas, shrieking children. Before Ting, Kayla and Raoul had enjoyed days at the beach just like this with their kids.

“Yes.” The news of Antoinette’s pregnancy coated Kayla’s mouth. The test was in her purse.

“What do you think she was hiding? Do you really think she was having an affair with your husband? Is that something she would do?”

“She was having a relationship with someone,”Kayla said. “That much I know.”

“Because she told you?”

“No,” Kayla said. “She was about to tell me. Before she went in the water. But she never got the chance.”

“So you’re assuming she was having a relationship, then,” Lindsey said. “I mean, if Antoinette didn’t tell you.”

“I have evidence,” Kayla said.

“Oh, please,” Lindsey said. “Please. You’re being very melodramatic, Kayla, you know that? I appreciate that you’re my mother’s friend and everything, but really. You come off as a bit of a drama queen.”

Kayla hit the brakes and reached for her purse, dug through it like a smoker hunting down her last cigarette. Then she found it-the sandwich bag containing the pregnancy test. She held it up before Lindsey’s face.

“This,” Kayla said, “is a positive pregnancy test. I found it at your mother’s house last night. Believe me, there is no way it belongs to someone else. This is Antoinette’s. There is no way someone else’s positive pregnancy test was going to be lying around your mother’s house.”

Lindsey stared at the bag like it was a severed head. Okay, fine. Melodrama. Kayla hit the gas, and panic washed over her. They were getting closer to the spot where they’d been swimming. Two orange pylons marked off a section of beach, and a man in a black fireman’s uniform held the end of a rope that led into the water. He walked with the rope between the two pylons. About twenty yards out, a diver surfaced, lifted his mask, shook his head. They were dragging the bottom. Kayla was so spooked by this that it took her a moment to notice a Jeep sitting alongside the fire department’s Suburban. Kayla blinked, confused. The Jeep. And then she saw him, sitting on the front bumper, his face hidden in his hands, his shoulders heaving.

Her baby crying.

It was Theo.

“Baby. Oh, baby, oh, baby, baby.”

Like his worst nightmare, or maybe as an answer to his prayers, he felt arms around him and over the arms he saw Antoinette’s face, or almost. The arms and the voice belonged to his mother, that much he knew instinctively. He wanted to throw the arms off, lash out: What the fuck are you doing? Leave me alone! But instead he let himself get pulled in. His mother’s arms. She loved him. She must know about everything by now, and yet she loved him. His whole life she’d told him that she was a safe place to go, that no matter what he did she would forgive him, and that he never had any reason to be afraid. And yet the last eight, nine hours he’d been very afraid as he watched the diver sweep the bottom of the ocean floor looking for Antoinette’s body. He’d cried and watched and prayed to the God he wasn’t even sure existed. Thinking that if they did find her dead he would drown himself, too. Because how could he live without her? Now he was in his mother’s arms looking through tears at a face that was almost Antoinette’s, but not. He let himself cry.

“I love her,” he said. “We’re going to have a baby.”

“Ssshhh. Ssshhh.” His mother’s hand ran through his hair. She knew, and she wasn’t angry. He had been sure his mother would be angry; he was sure the news would devastate and scandalize everyone- his mother, the rest of his family, the island of Nantucket. Antoinette had thought so, too, and that was why she had wanted to get an abortion-because of what his mother would say. And so, he despised his mother and he loved her. His emotions were tangled, knotted like a fishing net. It was too much for a kid of eighteen. Too fucking much.

Theo had known Antoinette his entire life. In the green vinyl photo album there was a snapshot of Antoinette holding him as a baby. She was twenty-seven years old and a complete fox in a black leotard and a black leather miniskirt. In the photo she looked strangely sad, a little like the Mona Lisa, he thought. Theo removed the snapshot from the family album- it was the only photograph of her in existence, she said. Theo placed it on Antoinette’s nightstand. He sometimes looked at it when they made love.