The crown molding and all the trim in the room is painted green, and the wallpaper is printed with eye-popping green and white vertical stripes. There are layered rugs on the floor—a neutral sisal underneath and a gorgeous silk Persian on top. A Moroccan lantern shaped like a genie’s bottle hangs from the ceiling; it’s polished brass and punctured with tiny holes that cast an intricate lacy pattern of light on the ceiling. This might be—no, it definitely is the coolest, most eclectic room Vivi has ever been in. There’s a long green velvet chaise, two peach silk soufflé chairs, a coffee table that looks like a giant white enamel bean, leather pouf ottomans, two dwarf orange trees in copper pots, and a huge black-and-white photograph on the wall that Vivi identifies as a David Yarrow Western scene.
“This is the boho-chic room of my dreams,” Vivi says.
“Yes, I know,” Martha says. “We scoured your Instagram.”
Vivi laughs. She can’t believe it! This really is heaven! She would have loved a room like this in Money Pit (a velvet chaise! orange trees!), but it just didn’t make sense in a Nantucket house, and Vivi had never saved enough to buy a pied-à-terre in New York or Paris.
There’s a wall of books because every perfect room has a wall of books, at least in Vivi’s opinion. Vivi strides over to check the titles. Cloudstreet, by Tim Winton; Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison; White Fur, by Jardine Libaire; and—oh, baby—Adultery and Other Choices, by Andre Dubus, who might be the writer Vivi loves most.
“My favorites,” Vivi says.
“Naturally.”
Adjacent to the bookshelves is a green door. “Is this Benjamin Moore’s Parsley Snips?” she asks. She’s referring to the paint color.
“It is.”
Gah! Vivi is in love with this room. “Where does the door lead to?”
“For me to know and you to find out,” Martha says. “Don’t be a snoop or I’ll end your viewing window early.” Martha opens the door and slips through before Vivi can peek at what’s behind.
Viewing window, Vivi thinks. She moves to the edge of the room, and it is like standing at a large open window. Vivi can gaze into her old life from here. She can do more than gaze—she swoops right down into the action.
At Money Pit, Vivi finds her three children in the sitting room clinging to one another on the turquoise tweed sofa that they call “the Girv,” short for its product name, Girvin. Willa is in the middle, with Carson and Leo gripping hands across her midsection. Although Vivi might have imagined this moment in spite more than once (“You’ll be sorry once I’m gone”), actually witnessing the raw urgency of her children’s pain is more than she can bear.
I’m right here, you guys! But of course, nobody can hear her.
“We had a fight,” Carson says, her voice staccato, hiccup-y. “I sent her an apology text, but I’m not sure she got to read it.”
Yes! Vivi thinks. Yes, sweetie, I did get it. Please don’t worry about the fight. I had already forgiven you. I was going to make you avocado toast when I got home.
“Where’s her phone?” Leo asks.
“The police have it,” Willa says. “They have her clothes, which they’re sending to forensics, and I guess they might need her phone too, but I can ask Chief Kapenash.”
“Would you call and ask if we can have it back?” Carson asks. “I need to know if she saw my text.”
“Her phone is probably smashed,” Leo says.
“It’s not,” Willa says. “The Chief made a point of telling me the phone was fine.”
“I told her I loved her in the text,” Carson says. She breaks down in fresh tears. “I want to go back and start over and be better. I want to make her laugh.” She squeezes Willa. “I would give anything to hear her laugh right now. I would give anything to have her yell at me—I don’t care, I just want her back. I mean, it’s impossible that she’s dead. It’s impossible that we’re never going to see her again.”
“Don’t say that!” Leo is crying like he used to when he was a little boy. “Seriously, Carson, just please shut up.”
I’m here! I can see you! I can hear you! You aren’t alone! I didn’t leave you alone! Vivi cranes her neck upward, searching for any sign of Martha. This is torture. She needs Martha’s help. How does she let the kids know she’s here?
“We were best friends,” Willa says. “I told her everything and she listened. She didn’t always agree but she listened.”
Vivi notices Willa placing a hand on her belly and—aha!—Vivi can, in fact, detect a teensy-tiny heart beating inside of her.
Vivi glides over to the kitchen, where Willa’s husband, Rip, is sitting at the table, staring at his hands. Vivi wonders what Rip is thinking. He’s a pensive guy. Vivi might have remarked once or twice that he could use “more cowbell,” but she has come to realize that Rip’s strengths are underappreciated. Charles Evan Bonham III is a calm, steady presence, the perfect foil for Willa’s manic desire to achieve. However, when Willa announced that she and Rip were getting married—something they’d been promising to do since the seventh grade—Vivi had thought, It will never last. Willa will outgrow him.
A month or so before Willa and Rip’s wedding, Vivi took Willa out to Le Languedoc for a mother-daughter dinner. Because it was a weeknight in the spring, they were the only ones in the upstairs front room, which overlooked Broad Street and had a view of the charming lit windows of Nantucket Bookworks.
The aesthetics of that dinner had been sheer perfection. The dining room was lit only by candles; there was a bouquet of iris on the table; the restaurant smelled of butter, garlic, veal stock, freshly baked bread. They ordered an expensive bottle of champagne and then an even more extravagant bottle of white burgundy. Willa wasn’t usually all that interested in food—she would eat or drink anything you put in front of her without complaint, but she never really seemed to enjoy it. However, that night, she swooned over the escargot en croûte and the pan-roasted lobster with parmesan polenta, and she allowed herself to get a little tipsy. This gave Vivi a chance to say her piece. Rip was the loveliest of humans, and the Bonhams were as admirable as they were established. Rip seemed content in the family’s insurance business, and Willa would never want for anything materially.
But what about emotionally or intellectually? Vivi wondered. Rip had graduated from Amherst with a liberal arts degree; he was smart, but Vivi wouldn’t call him curious. He’d been groomed to take over the family insurance business, and he would never be willing—or able—to live anywhere but on the island where he was born and raised. Rip had limits.
Vivi leaned across the table and wrapped her fingers around Willa’s forearm. “You may wake up one day and decide you want a bigger world.” Vivi thought about herself in high school riding shotgun in Brett Caspian’s Skylark. What if that had been all she’d ever known? “You may want to move to Istanbul.”
“I’ve been to Istanbul,” Willa said. “During my summer abroad. I got robbed outside the Hagia Sophia, remember? I will never want to move to Istanbul.”