Alexander went to his room and dialed Janie for the twelfth time that day. When she didn’t answer, he checked on his missed calls and emails. There was a message from the airline where he’d worked for the past ten years. His boss wanted him to call in. Alexander was frightened and decided to put off dealing with that till he got back to Los Angeles.
But when would that be?
A part of him had promised he’d head to his mother’s villa before his time in Italy was through. But another part of him was too frightened, imagining that the gossip surrounding him had filtered through the various channels and found its way to Francesca’s door. What would she say when she heard? He imagined the disappointment darkening her still-beautiful eyes. He imagined the disdain dripping from her lips.
Sometimes he wondered if Francesca regretted having married Benjamin Whitmore back in 1972. He asked if she’d felt that Nantucket Island was her fate.I was wrong, he imagined her saying.I was wrong about so many things.
If only someone were around to tell him what to do. This, he knew, was funny, given how often as a teenager he hated being told what to do. He would have given anything to be older, to have his own life, to be out of the White Oak Lodge. But there was something about being a Whitmore that meant you never really escaped the Lodge. Not really.
Alexander fell asleep watching an old Italian soap opera, still wearing his clothes. Tomorrow or the next day, he’d figure out what to do.
Chapter Five
Afew mornings after that (or was it a whole week? Alexander was losing track of time), Alexander got up and had an espresso at a little café down the road from his hotel. A part of him wondered if he’d ever find the will to leave Italy and face whatever was happening back home. But wasn’t Florence a tiny scrap of paradise? For half an hour, he watched the city streets as they hummed to life. Italian men flew past on motorbikes. Their gorgeous girlfriends clung to them from behind, their exposed shoulders glistening in the sunlight.
Alexander checked his phone for messages from Janie and ignored the airline's calls. Even his children hadn’t reached out, although he guessed Janie had told them not to call.
He knew he needed to get on a plane sooner rather than later to figure out where his life was going and address the problems at hand. He was lucky that the journalists who desperately wanted to interview him hadn’t yet tracked down his private phone number or email. They didn’t know he was in Florence, either. Maybe that wouldn’t last for long.
But that afternoon, as Alexander tried and failed to read a book in a nearby piazza, his phone lit up with a call from Marie, their longtime maid, who’d been cleaning the house inMalibu for the better part of fifteen years. The sight of her name on Alexander’s phone screen frightened him. She’d never dealt with Alexander directly and had always chosen to speak to Janie about matters of the house and what needed to be done. Alexander hadn’t been around enough to know what to say to her. He’d always thought Marie considered him “like all the other husbands in Malibu,” and maybe he was. (Save for the fact that he’d spent a great deal of his childhood and teenage years cleaning a hotel himself. He knew what grit it took.)
But Alexander had had Marie’s phone number this whole time. He couldn’t remember why. Maybe he’d been the one to interview her in the early days, when Janie had been so overwhelmed with parenting responsibilities and being a new mother so far from where she’d grown up, that they’d decided together that they needed help with the house. Marie had been a godsend, bringing light and order to their numerous rooms. “So much space,” Janie had said when they’d first moved in. “And it’s all ours, unlike that Lodge of your family’s. We don’t have to share with anyone. No tourists, complaining. No expectations.” Alexander’s heart felt squeezed.
“Hello,” Alexander answered the call, his voice shaking.
“Mr. Whitmore!” Marie cried, sounding frightened. “Mr. Whitmore, I’m terribly sorry to call you like this. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Immediately, Alexander got to his feet and began pacing next to his little table, his heart pounding. All this time, he’d thought Janie was ignoring him. He hadn’t reached out to the kids, for fear that doing so was manipulative and cruel. But maybe something was really wrong. Perhaps they’d been injured, or maybe they’d been taken. Alexander ran through the possibilities in his mind and nearly found himself in the midst of a panic attack.
“What’s going on?” Alexander demanded.
Marie huffed. “It’s just I can’t find your wife!”
Alexander squeezed his eyes shut. The Italian sun overhead stifled him. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Two weeks ago,” Marie said. “I was away on vacation last week and didn’t come. But your wife knew all about that. And she’d agreed to meet me here today to discuss…” Marie trailed off, sounding frightened.
“What is it, Marie?” Alexander demanded.
“I was going to ask for a raise, Mr. Whitmore.” Marie’s voice was tiny.
Alexander exhaled all the air from his lungs. “Have you called her?”
“I did. Of course I did. She didn’t answer. She isn’t with you?”
“No. I’m out of town,” Alexander said.
“I assumed you were,” Marie said, with a slight point at the end, as though indicating that Alexander was always out of town. “They are saying strange things about you. Have you heard?”
Alexander’s heart was going to explode. He was sure of it. “Can you go upstairs and look in their closets?” he asked, collapsing back in the piazza chair and putting his elbows on the table. “Can you see if they’ve packed anything and left?”
“Oh!” Marie didn’t say anything else and instead hustled up the stairs of the Malibu house. Alexander listened as she opened and closed various doors and checked in closets. “Your wife’s three suitcases are gone,” she said. “And half the closet! It’s really quite a lot. Where did she go?”
Alexander groaned loud enough for everyone on the piazza to hear. Birds flocked overhead, seeming to eye him. Maybe they were after what he hadn’t eaten of his lunch.
“And the kids have taken things, too,” Marie said. “But I’m not as familiar with their wardrobes. They’ve grown up so fast,” she said it gently, touchingly.
Alexander guessed that Janie had packed up their things and taken the kids elsewhere. But where on earth would she go? Xander had that summer job. She wouldn’t have let him quit it, would she? And Conor and Gwen had their friends, their day camps, their activities. It was cruel to rip their children away from the house they called home.
