The entire situation with Antoinette had opened her eyes to several new ideas. One new idea was that she wasn’t a very good mother. Another new idea was that she wasn’t a very good wife. And a third new idea was that she wasn’t a very good friend. Only weeks earlier, these three words- mother, wife, friend-would have been the exact three words Kayla would have chosen to identify herself. But not anymore. If she wasn’t a mother, wife, and friend, then who was she? She didn’t know.
The lagoon frightened her-it was bordered by the thick, gnarled roots of mangroves. She was afraid to put her feet on die bottom because there might be crabs, or snakes. And yet, being afraid cleared her mind-she spent the dark hours replaying moments from her children’s early lives, especially Theo’s, replayed them like she was a coach watching a game tape-searching for things that might have been done differently. Theo was her first baby. She hadn’t known what she was doing. Did she breast-feed him too long or wean him too soon? Did she tell him she loved him too often or too infrequently? What had she done to make him sleep with her best friend? Somehow, she suspected, it was her fault. And how had she not realized what was going on with Antoinette? Now that Kayla looked back, she saw clues: Theo out on mysterious errands all the time, the way his shirts smelled when Kayla collected them for the laundry, the time he was so curious about Antoinette’s past. But Kayla had been too busy, too blind, too naive to see the clues. Antoinette was in one part of her life, and Theo in another. Even now, Kayla had a hard time believing in the affair. She couldn’t bring herself to imagine their intertwining bodies.
Thinking about Raoul was even more painful. In the nineteen years of their marriage, Kayla and Raoul had only spent a handful of nights apart-the nights Kayla had slept on the beach at Great Point for Night Swimmers. Saying good-bye was difficult: Raoul took her to the airport while the kids were at school, so it was just the two of them in the near-empty terminal. Kayla had never said good-bye to Raoul before, and she didn’t know how to act. Raoul tried to make light of her leaving by humming “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and when Kayla grew angry at him for this-saying he couldn’t carry a tune, so please save her ears-Raoul grew angry at her. They’d ended up sitting side by side, arms crossed, staring at the woman who worked the Cape Air counter as she helped another customer with a fouled-up ticket. Then, when Kayla’s plane was called, Raoul took her elbow and walked her to the gate and kissed her as sweetly as he had ever kissed her, and Kayla cried.
Kayla missed the sound of Raoul’s voice, the feel of his scruffy face when he didn’t shave for a day or two, the way he touched her in the middle of the night as if making sure she was still there. She missed hearing him talk to the kids, she missed his smell of fresh lumber and plaster and paint, she missed pulling crumpled pink receipts from Marine Home Center out of his pockets when she put his clothes into the hamper at night. But she hadn’t been a good wife. She’d suspected him of adultery for years-she admitted this now-and so she harbored old anger about being deceived along with this new anger about being deceived. And then Jacob. God, Jacob. Every minute of this vacation was a struggle not to fall into a pit of self-loathing.
While there was a chance that her marriage would survive, Kayla understood that her friendships with Val and Antoinette were over. Val had turned Kayla in to the police, and Kayla slept with Jacob. Both actions were unthinkable. Or rather, what was unthinkable was that after twenty years a friendship as strong as theirs could be so violently destroyed. Tom apart in a matter of twenty-four hours. Kayla had packed up all of Val’s things and sent Theo to drop them off at her house.
At the end of her evening swim, as Kayla climbed out of the water, dried off, and walked back to her unit, she asked the question that became her mantra, her raison d’etre: What had happened to Antoinette?Was she alive? Dead? Here, Kayla was flummoxed. She’d asked Raoul to leave a message at the office of Mary Lee’s as soon as a body was found, but she’d heard nothing. And as far as she knew, the police were conducting what they called a limited missing-persons investigation, but again, she’d had no news. Everyone thought, or had grown to accept, that Antoinette drowned during Night Swimmers. She’d been drinking, true; the water was tricky, the riptide fierce and unpredictable. But something nagged at Kayla, and that something was Antoinette herself. She was too capable, too strong, too clever to let herself get swept away. It sounded stupid, but it wasn’t Antoinette’s style. She was a survivor. So where was she? Hanging out with the Jim Morrison groupies at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, or trekking on the back of an elephant in the teak forests of northern Thailand? Mostly, Kayla thought of Antoinette as vanished. Not alive, not dead, just gone. Meaning, she could turn up again somewhere. Resurface.
Kayla had been dreading this vacation from the beginning, and yet, when the six weeks were over, she panicked at the thought of returning to Nantucket. She thought back to the words she once heard Antoinette say: “I’m lonely all the time, every day. But there are far worse things than being lonely. Like being betrayed.”
Kayla didn’t want to relinquish her solitude, her simple routine, her ocean view or her solitary night swims. She thought brashly of writing a forbidden postcard, Decided to stay here for the rest of my life. Love, Kayla.
She returned on the sixth of November, and as her plane flew over the island, Kayla was filled with trepidation. The first landmark she spotted was Great Point lighthouse, which from the plane looked like nothing more than a white stake planted in the ground. A stake marking the site of her sadness. Then Kayla took in the cranberry color of the moors, the dark blue ponds, the amber and green plots of Bartlett’s farm. Autumn had come while she was away.
She didn’t know what to expect when she entered the airport. She almost walked past Raoul-he was sitting on a bench reading the newspaper-but he reached out and caught the skirt of her dress. He looked the same, the most beautiful man she had ever known, but his face had changed, too. He looked sad; he looked scared. Both her fault.
She didn’t cry. She just stood and ate him up with her eyes, and when he said, “Do you need help with your bags?” she let him come to her rescue.
Kayla stifled all the questions that had been running through her mind for the previous six weeks: Do you still love me, can we make this work, will you ever trust me again? She reminded herself that Raoul was a builder; he believed in process. The relationship would have to be restored one brick at a time. There was no quick fix, and there were no easy answers.
Still, she felt she had to be the first to say something. As they stood at the baggage claim waiting for her suitcase, she spoke up. “I missed you.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said.
She swallowed. “Yeah. Did you miss me?”
He turned and took her in his arms, and she pressed her face into the side of his neck and wondered how she’d made it through six weeks without him.
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
By Thanksgiving, things appeared, on the outside, to be back to normal. Kayla ventured out of the house again, although she spoke to no one about what had happened Labor Day weekend. When people asked about Theo, she told them he was attending Boston Hill to improve his chances of getting into a good college.