Summer Island

Part One

"There is only the right to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

-T. S. ELLIOT, FROM “EAST COKER”

Chapter One

An early evening rain had fallen. In the encroaching darkness, the streets of Seattle lay like mirrored strips between the glittering gray high-rises.

The dot-com revolution had changed this once quiet city, and even after the sun had set, the clattering, hammering sounds of construction beat a constant rhythm. Buildings sprouted overnight, it seemed, reaching higher and higher into the soggy sky. Purple-haired kids with nose rings and ragged clothes zipped through downtown in brand-new, bright-red Ferraris.

On a corner lot in the newly fashionable neighborhood of Belltown, there was a squat, wooden-sided structure that used to sit alone. It had been built almost one hundred years earlier, when few people had wanted to live so far from the heart of the city.

The owners of radio station KJZZ didn’t care that they no longer fit in this trendy area. For fifty years they had broadcast from this lot. They had grown from a scrappy local station to Washington’s largest.

Part of the reason for their current wave of success was Nora Bridge, the newest sensation in talk radio.

Although her show, Spiritual Healing with Nora, had been in syndication for less than a year, it was already a bona fide hit. Advertisers and affiliates couldn’t write checks fast enough, and her weekly newspaper advice column, “Nora Knows Best,” had never been more popular. It appeared in more than 2,600 papers nationwide.

Nora had started her career as a household hints adviser for a small-town newspaper, but hard work and a strong vision had moved her up the food chain. The women of Seattle had been the first to discover her unique blend ofpassion and morality; the rest of the country had soon followed.

Reviewers claimed that she could see a way through any emotional conflict; more often than not, they mentioned the purity of her heart.

But they were wrong. It was the impurity in her heart that made her successful. She was an ordinary woman who’d made extraordinary mistakes. She under-stood every nuance of need and loss.

There was never a time in her life, barely even a moment, when she didn’t remember what she’d lost. What she’d thrown away. Each night she brought her own regrets to the microphone, and from that wellspring of sorrow, she found compassion.

She had managed her career with laserlike focus, carefully feeding the press a palatable past. Even the previous week when People magazine had featured her on the cover, there had been no investigative story on her life. She had covered her tracks well. Her fans knew she’d been divorced and that she had grown daughters. The hows and whys of her family’s destruction remained—thankfully—private.

Tonight, Nora was on the air. She scooted her wheeled chair closer to the microphone and adjusted her headphones. A computer screen showed her the list of callers on hold. She pushed line two, which read: Marge/mother–daughter probs.

“Hello and welcome, Marge, you’re on the air with Nora Bridge. What’s on your mind this evening?”

“Hello . . . Nora?” The caller sounded hesitant, a little startled at actually hearing her voice on the air after waiting on hold for nearly an hour.

Nora smiled, although only her producer could see it. Her fans, she’d learned, were often anxious. She lowered her voice, gentled it. “How can I help you, my friend?”

“I’m having a little trouble with my daughter, Suki. ” The caller’s flattened vowels identified her as a midwesterner.

“How old is Suki, Marge?”

“Sixty-seven this November. ”

Nora laughed. “I guess some things never change, eh, Marge?”

Not between mothers and daughters. Suki gave me my first gray hair when I was thirty years old. Now I look like Colonel Sanders. ”

Nora’s laugh was quieter this time. At forty-nine, she no longer found gray hair a laughing matter. “So, Marge, what’s the problem with Suki?”

“Well. ” Marge made a snorting sound. “Last week she went on one of those singles cruises—you know the ones, where they all wear Hawaiian shirts and drink purple cocktails? Anyway, today, she told me she’s getting married again to a man she met on the boat. At her age. ” She snorted again, then paused. “I know she wanted me to be happy for her, but how could I? Suki’s a flibbertigibbet. My Tommy and I were married for seventy years. ”

Nora considered how to answer. Obviously, Marge knew that she and Suki weren’t young anymore, and that time had a way of pulverizing your best intentions. There was no point in being maudlin and mentioning it. Instead, she asked gently, “Do you love your daughter?”