Home Fires Read online

  “You call that lucky?” Maggie asked in a stage whisper that made Anne smile in spite of herself.

  “That’s enough, Maggie! Anyway, Anne, Thomas is a good man. He raised a very nice boy all by himself, so he must be decent, and I’ve never heard otherwise. But look what you’ve been through! All you’ve lost this year.”

  “That’s why I’m with Thomas,” Anne said, feeling steady and secure and missing him.

  “What about Matt? You are still married to him.”

  “Yes, but so what?”

  “Don’t you have feelings for him?”

  Feelings? Anne couldn’t begin to explain to Gabrielle the complicated swirl of emotions she felt for Matt. She had loved him with all her heart. She had borne his child. Together they had stood at the grave while that child was lowered into the ground.

  “He left you, yes,” Gabrielle said. “We all know that. But isn’t it time to forgive and forget? Can’t you give him another chance?”

  Anne couldn’t help it: rage boiled up from deep inside, and she lashed out, slamming the dashboard with the heel of her hand.

  “Gabrielle, I lost my baby,” Anne said, tears spilling out of her eyes. “I don’t give a shit about Matt’s feelings.”

  “But—” Gabrielle said.

  “No. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” But she took a deep breath and forced the words out. “Matt and I have been apart since … since Karen fell. It’s been hell for him, I don’t doubt that. But we’ve gone our separate ways, so we’ve been in separate hells. There’s no going back now. Don’t you see how impossible it would be?”

  Maggie reached forward to clutch Anne’s shoulder. When Anne reached for Maggie’s hand, she found that it was wet. As if Maggie had been wiping away tears. Now she looked at Gabrielle and saw her crying.

  “I’m so sorry,” Gabrielle said, sniffling. “I can’t imagine how it’s been for you.”

  “Look,” Anne said, composing herself. “I love you both. We all lost her, not just me.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” Gabrielle wept. “That little monkey. As pretty and smart as her mother. Sometimes I just can’t believe it. I can’t get it through my head. Here we are, the girls on a shopping trip, and she should be with us.”

  “I’m going to get her a present,” Maggie whispered. When Anne turned, she saw Maggie staring at the back of her mother’s head, tears streaming down her face. Anne had meant to tell Maggie to save her money, to say that Karen would want her to spend it on something for herself. But the sight of Maggie’s face made her hold her tongue.

  “Oh, honey,” Gabrielle said, glancing over at Anne. She snuffled, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. Anne reached into the glove compartment and pulled out tissues. She passed them around.

  “Thank you,” Gabrielle said. “Listen. If Thomas Devlin makes you happy, you have my blessing. Just …”

  Anne waited, sensing that Gabrielle was getting up her nerve to deliver her older-sisterly last word.

  “Just don’t move too fast. And don’t count Matt out yet. No matter what you say now, when Steve and I walked you down the aisle, we knew we were giving you to the right man. We knew it was going to be forever.”

  “You don’t just give someone to a man,” Maggie said, so scoffingly that Anne knew that the moment of grief had abated.

  “Never mind,” Gabrielle said. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see the look in Matt’s eye when he took your aunt’s hand. And I happen to believe that the look is still there.”

  Anne wondered what Gabrielle meant by that, but she didn’t ask. She had to admit to herself that she didn’t really want to know.

  BROWSING through a toy store in Back Bay, Maggie felt depressed. She had thought toy shopping would cheer her up, but she couldn’t stop thinking of Kurt. She hated herself for getting high. For breaking her promise to herself. After having sex with him at the lighthouse, she hadn’t heard any more words about love. It was back to the same old thing.

  She almost wondered whether he had reeled her back in just to prove he could catch her. That she wasn’t as good as she thought. It didn’t matter. Vanessa and Kurt and Eugene were her friends, and that was that. After skipping school with Kurt, it seemed stupid to keep avoiding them. So everything was pretty much back to normal.

  It wasn’t as if her parents had even noticed her trying to change. She could get pregnant and become a crack addict or run for president or become a famous movie star: would it all be the same to her father? He’d walk Maggie down the aisle and just as happily give her away to Kurt as to anyone else. So who cared?

  Suddenly Maggie saw the perfect toy. God, it was too cute to resist: a tiny white baby seal with coal-black eyes and a pink nose. It reminded her of the one she had once wanted to buy on the island, but it was nicer. The fur felt real.

  Maggie had the awful thought that maybe it was made of real baby-seal fur. Back Bay was full of fancy fur stores and ladies wearing minks and sables, and she wouldn’t put it past some store owner to stock the shelves with baby-seal toys made of fur from real baby seals who’d been clubbed to death on ice floes by poachers.

  “Excuse me?” Maggie asked the salesclerk. “Is this, um, made of real seal fur?”

  The salesclerk, who was twenty-two or so, gave Maggie a completely grossed-out you-are-garbage-look and said as snootily as possible, “Taking seal fur is against the law. A percentage of the proceeds from every single toy we kill goes to Save the Seals Foundation.”

  “Um, you said ‘kill,’” Maggie said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think you meant to say ‘sell,’ but you said ‘kill.’”

  The salesclerk just shook her blond hair in bored disbelief and asked Maggie if she wanted the toy.

  “Yes, please,” Maggie said. “Wrapped.”

  She enjoyed watching the clerk, dressed to perfection in her Laura Ashley flowered dress, her pink Sam & Libbys, and gold charm bracelet, perform the menial task.

  “Thank you,” Maggie said, handing over her $24.50, smiling brilliantly, wishing she had worn full dress today: all her earrings, her nose ring, her Harley-Davidson belt buckle, and anything leather. Girls like the clerk gave her cramps.

  She stuck the package in her knapsack. She was glad she’d bought the toy for Karen, but she wished she hadn’t announced the idea to her mother and Anne. It called attention to herself in a way she hated. It reminded her of what a waif would do: embrace the tragic, waste away to nothing, and go around making people say poor-whatever-the-waif’s name is.

  That’s not why Maggie had gotten Karen a present. She’d done it because buying the toy made Karen feel not so dead. Just the way that looking at Karen’s drawing made Anne feel close to her. Maggie didn’t really know what she was going to do with the seal toy. Keep it for a while. Maybe unwrap it and put it on her bed. Maybe leave it at Karen’s grave the next time they visited it. Maybe throw it off the ferry.

  She did know one thing. Somehow she was going to get her hands on the picture Anne called Paradise and have it framed. Maybe when she did, she’d get up the nerve to explain the white boxes.

  Maggie had spent the morning shopping with her mother and Anne. They’d gone into every boutique on Newbury Street, trying on clothes they would never buy. Maggie had completely fallen in love with Betsey Johnson, but the price tags were a little out of her reach.

  They’d had lunch at a pizza place that her mother kept calling a trattoria, just to remind Maggie and Anne that she’d once gone to Italy. Maggie could see right through the woman. She loved her, but sometimes she wondered whether she should point little pretensions like that out. She didn’t want her mother to look like a fool to Anne.

  Now Maggie walked up and down the streets of Back Bay, waiting until she met her mother and Anne at the parking lot, in time to make the boat. Maggie saw a lot of cool-looking kids. She wondered how many of them went to college in Boston. Wasn’t Boston supposed to be College Town, USA?

  A
very cute guy was sitting alone on the curb, reading a book. Jean jacket, straggly brown hair, a soul patch and semigoatee. Maggie glanced over his shoulders. Poetry in some foreign language. Irritated, he looked up at her. “May I help you?” he asked.

  “Can I bum a cigarette?” she asked, noticing that he was smoking.

  He shook a Camel out of his pack, and she took it.

  “Do you have a light?” she asked.

  He handed her his own lit cigarette, and she touched it to the tip of hers, and she couldn’t help thinking how weirdly intimate the whole thing was, like having sex with a total stranger.

  “You go to school around here?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” Maggie said, incredibly flattered that he would mistake her for a Boston kid.

  “You look familiar. Did I meet you at a party at Emerson?”

  “I don’t think so,” Maggie said, blushing like crazy. Emerson College! God, he thought she was a Boston college kid!

  “Hmmm. I could swear.” He went back to reading his book.

  Maggie wanted to keep things going, but she didn’t know how. She couldn’t exactly make small talk about poetry or foreign languages. The Beantown Trolley rattled past, groaning under the weight of about a hundred fat tourists taking videos. When they showed the movies to their relatives, everyone would think the cute guy was Maggie’s boyfriend.

  “Well, see ya,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, not looking up.

  He’d already forgotten about her. He’d probably figured out that she was a dumb loser. Not college material.

  NED Devlin had never felt so ready for spring vacation. His roommate’s parents dropped him off at the mainland ferry terminal, and he boarded the late-afternoon boat feeling exultant, as if he were a conquering explorer returning home after a long, successful crusade.

  He’d been accepted by Dartmouth.

  The envelope, beautifully thick, had arrived in his mailbox last week. All the other colleges had said yes, too, but Dartmouth was the one that mattered. They’d offer him a partial scholarship and a work-study program, a starting spot on the freshman hockey team, and Ned was on top of the world. He was Hannibal crossing the Alps.

  Standing on the ferry’s top deck, he breathed the sea air. He’d told his father over the phone, but he couldn’t wait to see him in person. His father always acted so proud of everything Ned did. Ned knew his father would want to celebrate about Dartmouth as much as he did.

  As the ferry steamed into deeper water Ned started recognizing lobster buoys, and he knew he was getting closer to home. There were Marty Cole’s buoys, painted neon pink and yellow, Mr. Hunter’s, painted red and white. Once he started seeing island lobster buoys, he always relaxed. He felt the pressures of school blow away. This part of the ferry ride made him feel exhilarated, comfortable, slightly loose, the way two beers made him feel.

  He’d been alone on the top deck, but now he heard voices. Women’s voices. He felt too shy to turn. The air was cool. On dry land, the temperature had shot up to sixty-two or so, but out here, with the wind blowing, he needed his warm jacket. He could feel that his nose and the rims of his ears were red. When the voices receded, he glanced over.

  Maggie Vincent and her mother and another woman stood across the deck. They were laughing, talking animatedly, not looking his way. He tried to hear, but the wind stole their words.

  Maggie didn’t look as tough as usual. When they were little, she and Ned had played together at Park and Rec. Ned had had a big crush on her. She was the second girl he had asked to dance; she would have been the first, but he’d had to get over his nervousness, practicing on Vanessa Adamson. In the last few years Maggie had been hanging out with idiots. Bored island kids who broke into summer houses to smoke too much pot, kids Ned didn’t like.

  Watching her now, Ned wondered what she was like away from her mother. She was joking around, making her mother and the other woman laugh about something. He could see they all liked each other a lot. But he wondered whether she was different with her school friends.

  She glanced over, looked back at her mother, then glanced back at Ned. He had the feeling she was trying to place him. It had been over three years since they’d said two words to each other, and he knew he’d changed a lot in that time. He’d grown about a foot, started shaving, kept his hair shorter for hockey. But then it was obvious she recognized him. She waved and spoke to the others.

  He waved back. Everyone was staring at him. For a second he thought they would cross the deck to talk to him. But Maggie pulled them into a huddle. They stayed where they were.

  She’d probably told them what a jerk he was.

  ON the ferry home, a few hours earlier, Gabrielle had watched carefully for Anne’s reaction when Maggie pointed out Ned Devlin.

  “He’s tall, like his father,” Anne had said noncommittally. But suddenly she stopped talking and watched Ned—surreptitiously, Gabrielle would grant—for the rest of the trip.

  Anne’s mind had been going, that was for sure. Gabrielle had seen the little thinking frown on her face, the one that always gave her away. Gabrielle had learned to recognize it long ago. Whenever Anne had a problem to solve, whenever she wanted something badly, whenever she was just plain trying to figure someone out, she would get an intense look in her eyes and a barely visible frown on her lips.

  If Gabrielle had to translate Anne’s frown on the ferry, she would have to say Anne was wondering how it would feel to have Ned Devlin as a stepson.

  “Oh, stop it!” Gabrielle said to herself. She was alone in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner.

  “Stop what?” Maggie called from the dining room, where she was doing her homework.

  “I’m just talking to myself,” Gabrielle called back.

  “Keep it together, Mom.”

  “I will, sweetheart.”

  Gabrielle put the coffee cups and dessert plates in the dishwasher, wiped the counters dry, and went into the dining room. They had added this room on two years earlier, and Steve had done a beautiful job. A red oak floor, a bay window for Gabrielle’s plants, and a chair rail. Gabrielle had chosen two different wallpapers: a colonial floral above the rail and a muted stripe below. All in shades of Williamsburg green and gold.

  Maggie was leaning over her homework, making marks in a workbook.

  “What’s that?” Gabrielle asked.

  “My SAT practice book.”

  “Oh.” Gabrielle knew she shouldn’t interrupt. Maggie doing schoolwork was a sight for sore eyes. You never knew how long the trend would last. Still, she had to talk to someone or she’d go crazy.

  “What did you think of Anne today?” she asked.

  “She’s great.”

  “I mean about the Thomas Devlin thing.”

  “Like you said, whatever makes her happy.”

  “It won’t make her happy. She just thinks it will.”

  “Mom, do you mind? The test’s next weekend.”

  “I know, I know. I’ll leave you alone in a minute. Did you notice how quiet she got after you pointed out Ned?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she did. I have a bad feeling about this. She’s not ready to be getting serious about anyone.”

  “Just leave her alone, okay, Mom?”

  “I care, that’s all.”

  “Where’s Dad? I’m sure he’d like to help with this,” Maggie said with a snort.

  “He went back to the big house. With daylight savings, he says they’ll be done in two weeks.”

  “What a hero.”

  “Maggie, I wish you’d show your father the respect …”

  Maggie put down her pencil and arched her back. She tapped her fingers, as if she had something else to say.

  “What?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Do you think I’m smart?”

  “Yes. I do. It’s nice to see you concentrating on your schoolwork.”

  “Smart enough to go to college?”

  “College is an enor
mous commitment, Maggie. It’s four years of hard work, and a lot of money. If you prove you can get your grades up and keep them up, then I’d say you’ve earned the right to go to college.”

  “I’m trying,” Maggie said, in a scared voice that reminded Gabrielle that in many ways, Maggie was still a little girl. Gabrielle gave her a warm hug.

  “I know you are. I can see that. I’m very proud of you, and I’m even prouder that you’ve stopped seeing that troublemaker Kurt. He’s a very bad influence.”

  “Mmmm,” Maggie said, looking down.

  Gabrielle didn’t know what Maggie was thinking, but she could see that something was bothering her. Maybe she was afraid of disappointing Gabrielle by not getting good grades, by not getting into college.

  “You know, not everyone has to go to college,” Gabrielle said. “Many successful people go far with just a high-school diploma. I didn’t go to college, you know.”

  “I know,” Maggie said, still looking down.

  “And I have a business that makes me happy and puts food on our table when things are slow for your father.”

  “Like nine months out of the year,” Maggie said.

  “Stop that.” Gabrielle stood, her hands on her hips, regarding her puzzling daughter. As a child, Maggie had adored Steve. He took her everywhere, treated her the way other island fathers treated their sons. He taught her the right way to drive a nail, shingle a house, pour a foundation. To this day, he worshiped her. Gabrielle just didn’t understand how Maggie could fail to realize that.

  “Thanks for today,” Maggie said. “Boston was fun.”

  “Wasn’t it wonderful to get off the island? All those terrific shops, and that sweet little trattoria. I barely had room for dinner tonight. My quattro stagione was out of this world.”

  Maggie gave her a long, thoughtful gaze, and Gabrielle thought for a minute that she was going to say something. Instead, she closed her workbook and stood. She kissed Gabrielle on the cheek.

  “I’ll be in my room,” Maggie said. “Thanks again for Boston.”

  “You’re welcome, honey,” Gabrielle said. She returned to the kitchen, but it was too tidy to pretend it needed any more cleaning. Standing on her toes, she reached for her current favorite cookbook, The Mediterranean Table. Summer was coming, and her business would start getting busy again. She’d look for recipe ideas and make some notes, to pass the time. Besides, who knew? Maybe Matt would call.