Leo’s father shows up; he’s normally an even-keeled, glass-half-full kind of guy but now he looks the way that Leo feels—like his heart has been firebombed, his spirit razed. JP starts out with a statement that he must have composed in his head on the ride over. “We’re going to figure this out, you aren’t alone, I’m here for all of you,” JP says.
“I’m not your mother, of course,” he adds, and then he starts to cry so hard that Willa leads him over to the sofa.
He loved her, Leo thinks. He really loved her despite hating her also, which Leo understands a little better after last night.
Last night. Marissa. Cruz. Leo was so drunk that there are blank spots, but there are also indelible images, things he wishes were from a dream but that he knows really happened. Leo isn’t sure how he got home, but he does remember pulling his mother’s bottle of tequila off the shelf and doing a couple of shots once he was safely in his own kitchen. He wanted what happened at Fortieth Pole to go away. He wanted the tequila to erase it.
For the rest of his life, he will be haunted by the pounding on his door this morning and Cruz shouting, “Wake up, man! Wake up!” Leo had thought Cruz wanted to talk about the night before. It took him whole seconds to process what Cruz was saying: “Your mom went to the hospital. She’s hurt, man. Hurt bad.”
Leo called Willa right away, thinking she would know what to do; she was their mother’s second in command. Leo’s call woke her up; she didn’t know anything about an accident. Cruz was insistent, damn near bawling. He saw Vivi lying on Kingsley, he’d called the paramedics, Vivi was taken away in an ambulance, and they all had to get to the hospital now. Right now! Leo woke up Carson, and they’d picked up Willa on the way.
Cruz drove his own car, and Leo was glad about that.
At the hospital, an unfamiliar doctor told them that Vivi hadn’t made it. She didn’t make it was too gentle a phrase because it sounded like Vivi hadn’t made it this time but could maybe try again.
“She didn’t make it?” Willa said.
“She was dead on arrival,” the doctor said. Who was this doctor? Someone from off-island, a traveler. This doctor had no idea who Vivi was, so how could he pronounce her dead? Lots of times people from off-island didn’t understand the way things were done on Nantucket. Leo wanted to hear from someone he knew. Like Dr. Fields.
“Where’s Dr. Fields?” Leo asked.
“Dr. Fields retired last year, I was told,” the doctor said. “Would you like me to get the social worker?”
Rip showed up and drove Leo and his sisters home. Cruz went to the station to talk to the police because he had been the one to find Vivi on the ground.
Leo closes his eyes and when he opens them again, his father is gone and his mother’s best friend, Savannah Hamilton, is walking into the front room. Savannah takes in Leo and his sisters—they haven’t moved in what feels like hours; Leo has no idea what time it is—then she kneels in front of them, opening her arms. They fall into her. Savannah has a history so broad and so deep with their mother that hugging her and inhaling her familiar perfume is like getting Vivi back for a second. Savannah is single and sophisticated; she has no children and is the founder of Rise, an international children’s charity. She owns a town house on Marlborough Street in Boston, a place so big that the three Quinboro children have their own bedrooms there. She is the godmother of all three of them.
Whenever the kids asked her why they all had the same godmother, she’d tell them, “Because I’m your mother’s only friend.”
And then, on cue, their mother would say, “When you have a friend like Savannah Hamilton, you don’t need anyone else.”
Everyone knew that Vivi put a version of Savannah in each of her books, the only differences being that the friend was named something like Samantha or Hannah and ran a PR firm or an advertising agency instead of a nonprofit. The best friend in Vivi’s books was always tall and blond, like Savannah, and stylish, wearing only neutral colors. She was fiercely loyal and able to drop everything at any moment to drink coffee or tequila and talk through the protagonist’s dramas.
The real Savannah was like that, especially the “fiercely loyal” part, though there were three people Savannah championed above Vivi—and those people were Willa, Carson, and Leo. Savannah had made it clear all through their growing up that she would always take their side, even against their mother. “I want to be the adult in your life that I never had,” she said.
When their crying subsides now, Savannah wipes at her eyes then pulls a packet of tissues out of her clutch. “Let’s blow our noses and try to focus for one minute.”
Leo likes being given instructions.
Savannah says, “I will take care of everything. That way we don’t have to get into the messy business of your father or Dennis doing it. Where is your mother’s phone?”
“The police have it,” Willa says.
“Why is that?” Savannah says.
“They have to check it out in case she took a picture or recording or something as she was hit,” Willa says. “It’s a long shot but they said they’ve solved hit-and-runs that way. They’ll return the phone when they’re finished with it.”
“Bring it straight to me, please,” Savannah says.
“I need to check it,” Carson says. “We had a fight this morning and I sent her an apology text and I want to make sure she read it.”
“Oh, Angel Bear,” Savannah says. She calls all three of them Angel Bear, which started embarrassing Leo in the fifth grade, so she calls him just Bear. “Your mom knows you’re sorry. Your mom was one of the most forgiving women I have ever met.” Savannah lowers her voice. “Did you happen to notice how lovely and gracious she was with Amy at Leo’s graduation party? And throwing it back even further, you do know I had to kick your mother out of my parents’ house with nowhere to go her first summer here and she still stayed my best friend for”—Savannah’s voice breaks—“thirty years.”
“I want to make sure, though,” Carson says.
“We will make sure, baby, I promise,” Savannah says. “I’m going to contact Vivi’s publisher. Her book comes out July thirteenth—that will likely go on ahead but we have to make a formal announcement by Monday, I think. And I will arrange for the funeral at St. Mary’s followed by a reception at the Field and Oar.” She pauses. “On my family’s membership.”
“Oh, man,” Carson whispers, and she actually kind of smiles. “Mom would love that.”
She would love it, Leo thinks. When his parents split, the Field and Oar Club membership went to Leo’s dad, and the board of governors decided not to let Vivi rejoin on her own. When Willa and Rip got married at the club, Vivi had pretended like everything was just fine but right before the dancing started, Leo’s girlfriend, Marissa, reported that she’d seen Vivi crying in the ladies’ room.
“I wish she knew it,” Willa says. “I wish we could tell her.”
“She knows,” Savannah says. “I’m not sure about you guys, but I feel her here.”
Leo takes in the room—the fireplace that Vivi had repointed, the new hearth, the bookshelves built on the diagonal that Vivi insisted on because she’d seen them on Kelly Wearstler’s Instagram feed, the giant clock made from salvaged barn boards, the turquoise tweed midcentury sofa that they all called the Girv. This room reflected Vivi’s eclectic taste—as did every room on the first floor of Money Pit. She hadn’t renovated the upstairs yet; she was waiting for “an unexpected windfall.” She’d died without ever getting the walk-in closet of her dreams.