Page 50 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

“But I wake up in this house that I grew up in and I think to myself: I’m never going to leave this house. I’m going to die in this house, and sometimes I don’t see the point in living.”

A jabbing sensation spread through Virgie’s chest.

“It’s always worth living,” Virgie said. This woman needed serious help. If you were this unhappy, it wasn’t enough to find a job or earn a degree or meet the right husband. You had to dig down deep inside yourself and figure out what the source of your unhappiness was. It was like a poison that would multiply inside you if you didn’t stop it. Virgie scooted down the couch, so she was beside Pamela. She thought of Charlie’s story about the woman at the Beech-Nut factory, how you could see a person’s entire life in their eyes.

“Pamela, you have a reason to live. His name is James.”

The woman raised her pale gray irises to Virgie’s, her expression pained. Pamela smiled faintly at her. “You’re right.”

Virgie wouldn’t kid herself into believing that solving Pamela’s problems would be simple, but it was essential, women giving each other the support they needed to believe that everything would be okay. That they were in this terrible fight together. And so she would find this woman a therapist, an AA meeting, a new start.

Virgie walked to the sink, filled a glass of water, and handed it to Pamela. “I want you to be okay.”

“I will be.” Pamela’s face was that of a woman used to convincing her loved ones that she would change.

Virgie’s lids weighed a hundred tons as she drove back to Edgartown at midnight, rolling down her window to keep herself awake during the drive. When Virgie arrived home, she stepped into the living room, finding James sound asleep on the floor next to the sofa, clutching his baby blanket. Betsy was on the couch, tucked into her red sleeping bag, her arm reaching over the zipper, her fingers intertwined with the boy’s below.

A simple comfort, holding hands.

Yet it frightened Virgie, how close the boy’s body was to Betsy’s, even if they were children still. She leaned over her sleeping daughter and nudged her gently. “You need to go up to your own bed.”

Maybe Charlie was right. Maybe Betsy should steer clear of this boy, of his troubled family. Pamela felt like a problem that Virgie was stuck with now.

Her daughter rose from the couch, raising her arms up with eyes half-closed, like she wanted to be carried up the crooked staircase. Virgie lifted her, a warmth spreading in her heart. For now, she was still a child, and Virgie could protect her.

CHAPTER TWENTYBetsy

1978

Betsy’s mind couldn’t focus on anything productive as she dragged herself out of her pale-yellow cotton sheets, brushed her teeth, and dressed in denim cutoffs. Over the last few days, the sisters had whispered updates about the possibility of saving the house as they passed each other in the kitchen; nothing concrete, just small missives, but they hadn’t been able to find a solution yet. Without money, they were out of options.

I can’t have this baby.

Betsy’s mind jumped like a television changing channels. A lima bean was growing inside her, a complicated tangle of membranes tethering her to a future she hadn’t planned for, let alone considered. She’d forgotten to make breakfast today, sleeping later than normal. On her way into the kitchen now, she bumped hard into the side of the navy overstuffed armchair, the perch where her father had worn an indent from reading in the nubby fabric seat. She imagined him sitting there with a newspaper stacked beside him, waggling his thick eyebrows over his tortoiseshell-style reading glasses: “You’re on your own, kid,” he’d say.

Don’t you think I know that, Dad?

Betsy carried the large, wired laundry basket outside and down the cellar steps to the makeshift laundry room. It smelled dank with its partial dirt floor and windowless walls, but the washer and dryer worked fine. There was a laundry line in the backyard, but today’s winds were gusty, too hazardous for the children to safely learn to sail. The yacht club had canceled lessons, so she’d be home all day.

You should be ashamed of yourself.This is all your fault.She envisioned her father storming off down the dock, refusing to look at her. Her mother would stick up for Betsy, saying that she was exercising her sexual freedom—until she realized it was her daughter she was talking about. Then her mother would curl into herself in her study chair, her heart turning to steel, glaring at Betsy:How could you be so stupid?

While waiting for the sheets to finish in the washer, Betsy brought a large box into the living room so she could begin to organize the bookshelf—a stack of her father’s biographies aligned on the top shelf, her mother’s row of pop culture titles in the middle one, everything from Erica Jong’sFear of FlyingtoValley of the Dollsby Jacqueline Susann. A potential buyer didn’t need to see all her parents’ political opinions displayed, she’d decided, and a part of her agreed with her father’s paranoia—what if someone snuck in a camera and snapped a photo of their personal belongings, their identities defined in a Smithsonian someday by that one photograph? Instead, Betsy dusted each book, wondering how the words between the covers had shaped her parents’ thinking, before stacking several into the box. Then she went about wrapping family photographs into newsprint and tucking them in a second, smaller box.

Everyone had scattered after breakfast that morning. Her mother went up to the study to work on whatever nonsense she was writing, while Louisa and Aggie, desperate to get the kids out on a rainy day, took the children to a singalong at the public library. They returned home a few minutes ago, Aggie racing upstairs to get the baby down for a nap. Now Tabby worked her Play-Doh while singing a nursery rhyme at the dining room table.

“Hey, Betts?” Aggie called from the next room after coming downstairs. “You probably shouldn’t pack up all the books. They look nice on the shelf.”

From her spot on the faded Oriental rug, Betsy looked up from a stack of photos: her father holding a giant fish on a boat somewhere in Vineyard Sound; her mother, shading her eyes in a lounge chair and wearing a modest one-piece, with baby Aggie clapping on her lap, toddler Louisa digging a sandcastle beside her. It had been quiet since Louisa went back to Washington early this week; she was due to return on Friday, just after the house went on the market.

“I’m not, just some of the more progressive ones.” Betsy adjusted the navy-blue bandana she’d tied around her head like a headband. Housework was like a salve. It kept her mind calm. “You know what I’ve been thinking? Mom used to make us read all those feminist books as teenagers, and I never felt like I could really express a true opinion. Maybe we should read them again now. Start a book club and talk about what we really think of them.”

You could have the baby, you know.

Betsy shook the thought off, then waited for her sister’s response.

“I think we should do the Ouija board again and ask about our futures.”

“God no.” Betsy rolled her eyes. Inside, a flash of panic about the lima bean. Imagine the Ouija board suggested that she was pregnant, and she had to explain over a midnight snack why she’d been carrying crackers into bed at night. “I have to go and get the sheets.”

---