At first I didn't notice Francine Cooper in the crowd of people waiting for the boat. I was looking for Evan, who kept disappearing behind a gaggle of tall, rail-thin teenage boys wearing backward baseball caps. Francine's auburn hair was pulled back, and I was used to seeing it down around her shoulders. She was waving to people on the upper deck, though it was so dark up there, I don't know how she could make anyone out. "Francine," I said loudly, and she turned around, searching for the face attached to the voice. I could tell she saw me approach but wasn't sure whom she was looking at. Then she was. She was no friend; she was my divorce lawyer. I'd found her through an article in the island newspaper about unusual custody arrangements. She had recently moved here from Boston, another overcharged city girl with island fantasies. The day before, when I'd phoned her office, I was told she'd be back to work on Monday.
She did not know Will was dead, and it took her a moment to recall what had become of the separation agreement I'd signed and Fed Exed her earlier in the week. "It was supposed to go to your husband's lawyer so that he could get your husband's signature on it. My secretary typed up a cover letter and left it for me to sign." Seems it had a glaring and most peculiar error, a little too severe to be called a typo: Enclosed is the signed Separation Disagreement. Francine had scribbled a correction and assumed the new cover letter would be waiting in her office on Monday.
"What does all this mean?" I asked her.
"Number one, you're still married. Number two, I'm the only one who knows you signed the separation agreement."
"Which means?"
"If he died without a will, as his spouse you're entitled to half his estate."
"Unfortunately, he had a will and left me a dollar."
"You may be able to sue the estate."
"I don't want to sue anyone, Francine."
"If it helps, I think the technical term is 'file a claim against the estate.' Come by and see me Monday."
"The funeral's Monday."
"Then Tuesday."
"Sophy!"
The dock was aswarm with bodies, people cascading into one another, people gleeful, giddy, ecstatic finally to be here, the beautiful island at the start of summer. They carried suitcases, knapsacks, shopping bags from Bread and Circus, babies in corduroy Snugglies pressed to their chests, bicycle helmets, anxieties from the mainland, dreams like the ones Francine and I had acted on, that if you stayed all year long, you would always feel the way you did tonight, invigorated, engorged, in love.
"Sophy!"
I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Evan, his other arm loosely around a young woman so strikingly beautiful, I would have noticed her coming off the boat if I hadn't been talking to Francine. She had short, wavy dark hair, olive skin, eyes large and wide apart, movie-star cheekbones; she belonged on Crete. She was a young Isabella Rossellini, but smaller and very nervous.
When Evan introduced us, we nodded and mumbled weak hellos, uncertain, I think, how gracious the circumstances required us to be.
"You'll be all right getting out there?" Evan asked me. "Jenn'll point you in the right direction."
"Sure," I said, though I didn't sound convincing, even to myself. Evan vanished into the crowd; I grew lightheaded as I led Jenn to the car and tried to make sense of the news from Francine. In the eyes of the law, I was married. I was Will's wife. "My car's this way," I heard myself say. Does that change anything, I wondered, anything at all? Change what I am entitled to feel? To fight for? Could I bring myself to sue my stepdaughters? Take to court the closest thing to children I had in the world to assert a claim on behalf of a person I no longer wanted to be?
"Are you here on vacation?" Jenn asked as I turned the key in the ignition. "Or is this your regular summer place?"
"Evan didn't tell you?"
"He just said you were an old friend and very discreet."
The ferry traffic was moving swiftly down the road that led to Ocean Drive, though my thoughts ran in circles, spirals-you could say they ran away with me-and a short time after we turned the corner and started up the hill, I realized I'd said nothing in reply, that I had no idea where to begin the story of what I was doing here and no idea where it would end.
This is not news: women talk. This may not be either: Jenn and I said little on the long, dark drive to the woods. Once we were through the town, she asked whether she could smoke. I said if she opened the window. A few miles later she asked whether she could turn on the radio. I said it didn't work; they'd knocked a few dollars off the cost of the rental because of it. A while later-by this time we were clear on the other side of the island-she asked whether I wanted to stop somewhere and have a drink. I could have said that we were many miles from the nearest bar, which was the truth, but it was more important for me to say "No, thanks," important to decline, though I sounded a little abrupt. I'd been expecting all day to feel a new craving for the stuff, checking to see whether the mugger still lurked in the neighborhood. No signs of him yet, no whispers, no shadows I could not account for. "I'm on the wagon," I explained. "Otherwise I'd-I don't think a bar is the best place for me tonight."
"Sure." Her inflection was not a pat on the back; it had a rough edge. I think it was a euphemism for "whatever."
So we drove in silence, through miles of leafy darkness, past forests of scrub oak, pitch pine, sassafras, in many places the trees overhanging the narrow road as tightly as a tunnel, headlights and brake lights our only illumination. She kept a cigarette going and tipped her head to blow smoke out the window. I knew I could easily break the silence and that it would be the polite thing to do, the decent thing; she was a kid in trouble, after all; the car was older than she was. But I couldn't talk to her about my circumstances, and I wasn't sure how much I wanted to know about hers. If this was going to become a full-blown scandal, I did not want to know enough to be a source or a witness. I aspired to nothing loftier than chauffeur. That's what I was thinking when Jenn pierced the silence with a dagger: "So did you ever fuck him?" she asked.
I laughed a little. It felt good to laugh. "When I was your age. And he was too."
"What was he like then?"
"Sexy and preoccupied. What's he like now?"
I assumed she would echo my answer, but all I heard was her lighting a cigarette. I could see the burst of flame at the edge of my vision, and an animal, maybe a raccoon, dart across the road. "The thing is," Jenn said, "I've been trying to break it off with him for months, and now this comes up. It's sort of embarrassing, but the best times between us were when I threatened to leave. Suddenly he'd become this real emotional guy. It was hard to resist, you know? I'm supposed to start law school in September, and there's actually someone who wants to marry me. By tomorrow night, Barbara Walters is going to want to interview my mother."
"I know this is cold comfort, but I don't think the details of Evan Lambert's sex life will hold the nation's attention for very long. A hotshot lawyer with a beautiful young woman is more of a dog-bites-man story than-"
"He didn't tell you about Mavis?"
"No specifics."
"I'm the specifics."
We had reached the turn in the road where I had to start reading the directions, close eye on the trip odometer, counting off tenths of a mile, and I thought Jenn was about to tell me that she had been Mavis's lover too; maybe that was the other pile of dirty linen that would be aired in the paper tomorrow. I was filled with an overwhelming desire not to know, just as I did not want to know in what position Will's body had been found, or what he had written in his diary, or what had happened to my dog Henry, because by this time I figured none of the news would be good.