“You may decide to pursue a master’s in history or an MBA, and off you go to Harvard while Rip stays here on Nantucket. You may decide you like Boston—you ride the T, you get takeout Lebanese food, you spend an afternoon at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Then one day in class, a voice offers some brilliant insight, and you turn around to set eyes on some young man. Maybe he’s not even your type. He’s short and dark-skinned, not tall and pale like Rip; he has a mustache and a British accent instead of being clean-shaven and dropping his r’s like Rip, and yet you find yourself drawn to him…”
“I love how you’re writing the novel of how I’ll leave Rip,” Willa said.
“You’re so young, Willie. Twenty-three! Your prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed yet.”
“Mother.”
“It’s the part of the brain responsible for sound decision-making,” Vivi said. “It matures at twenty-five.” This was a factoid Vivi had picked up while researching her novel The Angle of Light. “I just don’t want you to shortchange yourself.” She had split the last of the wine between their glasses. “Have you ever been with anyone else? Sexually?”
“Mother.”
“Because if not…”
“Of course not, Mother. Well, I kissed Ryan Brickley in sixth grade.”
“That doesn’t count,” Vivi said.
“Rip and I are meant to be together.”
“I just worry that you got attached to Rip after Dad and I split, that he became your security blanket, and once you get a little older—”
“I’m not getting divorced,” Willa said.
“Willie…”
“Please, Mom,” Willa said. “Let’s get dessert.”
Vivi hovers so near Rip, she can see a raw, red hangnail on his thumb and hear his watch ticking. Vivi inches even closer. His head pivots in her direction, then he checks behind himself like he’s looking for someone. Does he know she’s here? Does he?
Rip
Willa called Rip as he was walking out of the Field and Oar Club. She was crying so hard, he couldn’t understand a word she was saying. He had instinctively pulled the phone away from his ear, and when he did this, his sister, Pamela, who had just walloped Rip in a brother-sister tennis match, groaned. She probably thought what he thought, that Willa had started bleeding.
But Willa wasn’t calling about the baby. “Mama is dead, she’s dead, she was hit by a car. She’s dead, Rip, she’s dead.” This was followed by a guttural cry, and Rip felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. Vivi was dead? Vivi was dead? She had been hit by a car on her run. Apparently, Leo had called Willa at home, waking her up, then he and Carson had gotten Willa and they all went to the hospital together. The ER doc told them that Vivi had been dead on arrival.
Dead on arrival? Vivi? There had to be a mistake. Things like this just didn’t happen. Though, of course, they did happen—all the time, every day.
Rip had only one thought: he needed to be with his wife.
Pamela dropped Rip off at the hospital, and he was the one who had a substantive conversation with the doctor. There was internal bleeding, head trauma; by the time the paramedics arrived, she was gone. “It would have been nearly instant,” the doc said. “There was no suffering.”
The suffering, Rip thought, had only just begun.
He drove Willa, Carson, and Leo home. (They hadn’t wanted to leave and it fell to Rip to point out that there was no reason to stay at the hospital, nothing left to wait for. Vivi was dead.) It was only a three-minute drive back to Money Pit, but it was three minutes Rip would never forget. Willa, Leo, and Carson all huddled in the back seat; Leo and Carson were bawling, clinging to Willa, and she had risen to the occasion, comforting them both, becoming the new mother figure as Rip watched her in the rearview.
When they got home, Willa led Leo and Carson into the front sitting room—and there, the three of them have stayed.
Dennis shows up wearing cargo shorts, a long-sleeved T-shirt from Cisco Brewers, a bandanna tied around his neck, and sunglasses. His steel-gray hair is standing on end; he’s red-faced, sweating.
He looks at Rip and says, “What the hell happened? What happened?”
Rip blinks. Dennis and Vivi have been dating for a few years; he’s the only guy Vivi has dated since she and JP split. Dennis is a few inches shorter than Rip and built like a fireplug—he’s solid, stocky. When Vivi first started dating him, Rip didn’t quite get it. Dennis is a tradesman who tells dirty jokes; he has a thick Southie accent and a freezer full of venison. He’d gotten drunk at Rip and Willa’s wedding and given a long-winded toast, which everyone at the Field and Oar Club suffered through because they were too polite to tell him to sit down.
Willa once said, “Dennis clearly isn’t Mr. Right, but he’s Mr. Right Now. Mom likes him. She doesn’t need someone complicated; she’s complicated enough all by herself.”
But in the past year, Rip has grown quite fond of Dennis. The insurance office’s furnace went on the fritz in January, and Rip had called Dennis at six o’clock on a Tuesday evening. He’d shown up right away and stayed until almost midnight to get it up and running. Rip and Dennis were alone in the office for those hours and Dennis told great stories about hunting ducks over on Tuckernuck and about the Datsun 240Z he’d restored in high school before he was even old enough to drive.
Rip had gone home and woken Willa up just to tell her with wonderment, “Dennis is actually pretty cool.”
“She got hit by a car at the end of Kingsley while she was running,” Rip says to Dennis now. “I’m so sorry, man. I am just so…sorry.” The words feel wrong in his mouth, like he’s chewing on gristle.
Dennis’s face crumples and he bends over, hands on knees, and starts sucking in air like he’s just finished a dozen wind sprints on the practice field. Rip wants to vaporize. He can’t even add something about how much Vivi cared for Dennis because Willa told Rip that her mother had broken up with Dennis a couple of weeks earlier.
At that second, Willa calls from the other room, “Rip?”
Rip puts a gentle hand on Dennis’s shoulder and goes to his wife.
“Dennis is here,” he says.
“Who else have you told?”
“Just Pamela,” he says. “I told her to call my parents.” The elder Bonhams are on a Mediterranean cruise.
“I need to make a list,” Willa says. “Mom’s agent, her editor, her publicist. There’s going to have to be some kind of formal announcement made by her publishing house. I need to find out if there’s a will and who’s allowed to access her bank accounts.”
“Babe,” Rip says. “There’s time for that later. You’re in shock right now.”
Willa stares at him. Her pretty face is blank; her brown eyes are glazed over. “I am in shock.”
There’s a niggling thought in Rip’s mind. “Have you told your father?”
Willa gasps. “Oh my God.”
She has not told her father.
Willa’s eyes widen and she turns around to look at Carson and Leo, who are sodden heaps on the sofa. “Did either of you text Dad?” Willa asks. “Or call him?”