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Charlotte’s heartbeat quickened.
“Finally, he started asking me! Question after question! I think he thought he was flattering me, but I caught on,” Francesca said.
“What did he ask you? What did you tell him?” Charlotte asked.
“About what happened! About Nantucket! About my son! Who I lost!” Francesca cried, sounding passionate and angry. “And of course about my husband. Your father.”
Not my father, Charlotte thought, but didn’t say.
“What did you tell him?” Charlotte asked.
“I told him what I would tell anyone else. I haven’t heard from any of them because they’re very much dead,” Francesca said, her voice breaking. “I want this man out of my life. I want these people to stop sniffing around. I’ve been through enough as it is. Do whatever you need to do, Charlotte. Get these people away from me.”
Charlotte couldn’t speak. For some reason, she felt plagued with a suspicion that her mother wasn’t telling the truth about something. But Charlotte couldn’t fathom what.
Before Charlotte could ask another question, Francesca hung up on her. When Charlotte tried to call her back, Francesca didn’t answer. Charlotte’s heart leaped.
She wondered if—for the first time in years—she had to return to Italy, if only to see who was sniffing around. It reminded her of the past, of what had happened to her. For the rest of the night, her chest was heavy. She didn’t go to bed because she was too frightened that she’d toss and turn and wake Nina up. When Nina did get up, blinking through the bright light of the morning in the kitchen, Charlotte was wide awake at the kitchen table, her finger hovering over the “BUY NOW” button on a flight website. It was certainly nothing she should spend right now, nothing that made logical sense, given her monetary situation. But it felt like the first step of creating that documentary. It felt like fate.
When she described what had happened to Nina, when she hinted that she didn’t have quite enough cash, Nina tightened her jaw and said, “I’ll buy the tickets. The kids are going back to camp in two days. We can leave on Wednesday.” She took a breath. “If that’s what you want.”
Charlotte’s chest heaved. What she wanted felt different from what she needed.
“Let’s go,” she said. With that, it was final.
Chapter Eighteen
Autumn 2004
After the accident, Charlotte’s life unspooled. What had begun as an ecstatic and sun-dappled summer devolved to a series of doctor’s appointments for both Jack and Ralph, fights with everyone from Jack, to Ralph, to Kathy, to her producers and agents, and listless afternoons of wondering why, oh why, everything had gone so desperately wrong. Sometimes, Charlotte cursed the day Jack had returned to her life. Other times, she recognized Jack’s return as the day her life had officially begun.
Ralph’s injuries were far more life-altering than Jack’s, which meant that Charlotte mostly moved in with Ralph to take care of him, to wheel him around the house and help him in and out of the elevator. Ralph could feed himself and take care of his bathroom needs, but he was in a great deal of pain, and he was very angry, and Charlotte often had the sense that something bad would happen if she left him alone for too long. She didn’t want to think about what that might be.
When they’d first gotten engaged in April, they’d discussed autumn or next spring as a potential wedding date. Now that Ralph was injured and unable to walk, they no longer discussed the wedding. Charlotte still wore her engagement ring, but she felt silly, like a child playing dress-up. To pass the time, they watched DVDs that Charlotte rented from the shop down the road. Charlotte hated when Ralph requested documentaries because every one of them reminded her that she wasn’t making anything right now. Her producers and agents were increasingly angry. She was frustrated with herself.
When her mother called to ask for more details about the wedding, Charlotte told her mother there wouldn’t be one, mostly out of annoyance. Francesca met her annoyance head-on and said, “I don’t know why you got my hopes up. I’ve already bought a dress.” She hung up, and the two of them didn’t talk for another three years after that. Charlotte didn’t care.
Charlotte’s hopes and dreams for her wedding, for her life, had burned to a crisp on the day of the accident. She no longer had any fantasies about Jack abandoning the name Seth, nor about her family coming back together again. Once, on a rainy and blustery day in October, she researched Great-aunt Genevieve’s phone number in Michigan and tried to call Nina for the first time since 1998. Nina was seventeen years old, Charlotte knew. She probably had a boyfriend and a pack of friends and very few worries beyond where to go to college. When Nina and Great-aunt Genevieve didn’t answer, Charlotte hung up and resolved never to contact them again. She was a ghost, trying to haunt. It wasn’t fair to Nina.
When Charlotte returned to Ralph’s that night with bags of takeout and another DVD, she found Ralph holed up on the sofa, sallow and weak. He picked an argument about what she ordered, saying, “I’m getting so tired of Chinese. You always get Chinese.”
The reality was that Charlotte hadn’t brought Chinese home in months. But she knew Ralph was angry and needed to pick a fight about something.
“I can go get something else, honey,” Charlotte offered. But they both knew their money was drying up.
Ralph ate quietly and flared his nostrils. When the phone rang, Charlotte nearly jumped out of her skin. She hurried to answer it, thinking it was Ralph’s mother, who called almost daily to check on them. But it was Jack.
“Are you ever coming back?” Jack asked. His voice was like a string.
Charlotte’s heart broke. She hadn’t seen Jack since last weekend, when they’d eaten eggs and lain on the sofa and watched the rain outside.
“I need you, Charlotte,” Jack said. “I know I messed up really bad. I know I’ve always been messing up since we were teenagers. And I know you’ve had to take the fall.”
Charlotte wrapped her finger with the telephone cord until she lost circulation. “I have to stay here tonight. But I can come back tomorrow?” Maybe Jack finally wanted to tell her about the past, about what had happened before the fire. Perhaps he was finally sorrowful enough to share.
“Okay. Please. Come as soon as you can,” Jack urged.
Charlotte felt pulled in two opposite directions. She wanted to sob.
