“Mom?” Jenna’s voice floated up the stairs.
“Up here.” Nancy cleared her throat and pulled herself together. If the girls had bad memories, then she’d find a way to put new ones there.
She heard the clatter of their feet on the stairs and they appeared in the loft room, so alike and yet so different.
Her girls.
For years she’d bracketed them with Tom. Because the three of them had spent so much time together, she’d been unable to separate them in her head. She’d allowed that feeling of being excluded to persist when they’d reached adulthood, but she saw now that if there had been a rift then, she’d been the cause of it. She’d been afraid that confessing the truth would drive them further apart, but it had brought them closer.
“You were supposed to wait so we could do this together,” Jenna said as Lauren put her bag down on the floor.
“You shouldn’t have done this on your own.” And then she noticed Alice. “Oh, you had Alice with you. That’s good.”
It was good, Nancy thought. Bringing Alice had been the right decision.
“There’s still plenty to do,” she said. “Getting this place habitable isn’t going to be easy. And that’s before we get started on The Captain’s House.” The thought of it should have exhausted her, but she felt energized. Instead of feeling defeated, she felt hopeful.
She felt like flinging open the upstairs windows and yelling, Do you see me, Tom? You didn’t crush me.
Lauren pulled out a sketchbook. “You’ve done a wonderful job of clearing out downstairs. It makes it easier to visualize everything. If three of us are going to live here we are going to need closet space, but I don’t want to overcrowd the rooms.”
“If it’s carpentry you need, then we should ask Scott.” Jenna strolled over to the canvases stacked against the wall. “He did a great job on the house.”
Lauren said nothing.
Nancy studied her daughter, noticing the shadows under her eyes.
It was still early days, of course, but they needed to do what they could to reduce those shadows. “I can’t ask Scott for any more favors.”
“You mean because Lauren told him you’re no longer selling the house?” Jenna glanced up from the paintings. “House sales fall through all the time, Mom. Fact of life. I’m sure he understood.”
“Not because of that. Because I owe him enough already.”
Lauren grabbed a bag and started clearing out the old coffee jar and other detritus that had been sitting gathering dust for years. “What exactly do you owe him, Mom?”
Nancy hesitated. She could have brushed it away. Scott wouldn’t say anything, she was sure of that, but it was as if her first confession had opened a door she couldn’t easily close.
Might as well empty the closets of all the skeletons, she thought.
Did it matter that Alice would hear?
No. It would probably be a good thing if she knew the truth.
“I owe Scott,” she said, “because he was there the night your father died. He helped me. Risked his life.”
Jenna paused with her hand on one of the canvases. “Risked his life how?”
“There was a hurricane—”
“We know. That was why the tree came down on his car.”
Nancy stared out the window, surprised by how vivid a memory could be. “The call came late afternoon. By then no one was on the water. Houses and business were boarded up. The ferry had stopped running hours before, and the airport was closed. There was no way to get to the mainland. I asked a couple of people if they’d take me, but they refused.” She remembered walking past the harbor and feeling the force of the wind tearing at her. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced. “Then I saw Scott. I knew him by sight. We’d never spoken. But everyone knew he was the best sailor around. I asked him if he’d take me to the mainland and he agreed.”
Lauren looked stunned. “In a hurricane?”
“I expected him to refuse. I wasn’t sure which of us was most crazy. I’ll never forget that crossing.”
“I remember that night.” Jenna said. “It was terrifying. When I called to check on you, you told me you were safe. I assumed that meant you were home. So Scott dropped you off and then came back to Martha’s Vineyard?”