Francesca wanted to say, "But we are home," but she stopped herself. The definition of home felt foggy at best. Memories encircled and threatened to drown her.
Despite her anxiety, Francesca managed to sleep through the night and wake up to a brilliant and sunny morning. She found her two daughters in the kitchen, drinking coffee and watching the ocean through the window as it rolled up and frothed along the beach. When Francesca entered, Allegra stopped talking abruptly, as though she wanted to hide whatever they were talking about. But Francesca had heard them from up the stairs. They didn’t want their mother to see their father, not without them. They said their mother was acting “strangely.” They didn’t know what to think.
Francesca considered telling her daughters that she would do what she pleased, regardless of what they thought. But she wasn’t sure she had the energy for that conversation. So instead of putting up a fight, she ate a light breakfast, drank a cup of American coffee, showered, did her hair and makeup, and set off for Benjamin’s rented house. Allegra and Lorelei were onthe rental's veranda and either didn’t hear the car start or had decided to give their mother free rein. Francesca guessed it was the former.
The house Benjamin was staying in was little more than a mile from the White Oak Lodge and raised on stilts so that part of it hovered precariously over the water. Alexander had mentioned that this was where Nina had stayed when she’d first come to the island. It was where she’d met her new boyfriend, Amos, one of Jack’s friends from the past. Francesca stood before the house, hidden from the world beneath her massive sunglasses, and tried to visualize what her first husband and first love looked like so many years after she’d last seen him. They were both old—she at seventy-three and he at seventy-five—and it was unlikely that the rest of the world regarded them as more than “old people.” That was the secret of most “old people,” she knew: they were so much more than they seemed from the outside. They were a collection of memories. They were facts and skills and urgent desires. But when you got old, society dictated what the world thought of you. She wondered what Benjamin would have to say about that. He’d never taken kindly to anyone telling him who he was or how to act. Neither had Francesca.
Francesca walked up the front steps and peered through the dark window, marveling at how creepy she was acting. She felt like a ghost, haunting her old life. When she raised her knuckles to knock, something told her not to. Something told her to try the door instead. She turned it, unsurprised that it was unlocked, as Benjamin had always been entirely too trusting of other islanders. He’d never wanted to lock the Lodge either, which had driven Francesca crazy. In Italy, pickpockets were capable of stealing your shoes when you were walking around in them. She’d never managed to shake off that lack of trust.
Francesca entered the house and closed the door behind her, taking in a simple and unsophisticated plan with mostly grayfurniture and basic photographs on the walls. It was obviously the kind of place that nobody called “home,” the type of place someone rested for a couple of days or a couple of weeks before they returned to wherever they belonged. She wondered how long Benjamin would live in a place like this. She pondered where he’d lived before this and if that had felt more like “home” to him. A shudder went down her spine.
“Mama?” A voice rang out from Francesca’s left, and she nearly leaped from her skin before realizing it was her daughter Charlotte, wrapped in a blanket on the sofa. Charlotte blinked and blinked at her through the darkness, then stretched her arms into a yawn. She got up and kissed Francesca on the cheek, bringing with her a wave of warmth and the smell of sleep.
Francesca’s heart swelled with love for her fourth-eldest child, the daughter who’d come out of one of the darkest times of her life, the daughter who’d “saved her,” in a sense. “Charlotte, darling,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I should ask you the same thing,” Charlotte said.
Francesca swallowed the lump in her throat. “I came to see him.”
Charlotte yawned again, as though she’d been deeply asleep and only just dragged out of it. “He’s not here. But I can take you to him.”
Francesca bristled. “Is he at the Lodge?”
Charlotte nodded. “He had a meeting with one of the contractors.”
It’s just as it was in the seventies, Francesca thought. Benjamin is happiest when he’s thrown himself into his work for the Lodge. But it didn’t frighten her or sadden her, not so many years after she had been a young, frightened, and sorrowful wife and mother.The more things change, she thought,the more they stay the same. But I’m older, stronger, and wiser.She felt it was the gift time had given her.
When they left Benjamin’s house, Charlotte at once strode toward Francesca’s car. But Francesca stopped her, raising her hand. “I want to walk,” she said. “Please.” She wanted to see the Lodge, or what was left of it, rise over the bluffs and reveal itself. She wanted to inundate herself with both gorgeous and painful memories. She didn’t want to drive, as though it were any old day. Besides, if she drove, she could just as easily run away quickly—and she didn’t want to give herself that option.
Charlotte and Francesca set off down the beach. It was warm for late September, and neither of them wore a coat. Charlotte eyed her mother curiously and seemed on the brink of asking more questions, so Francesca finally offered, “I couldn’t stop thinking about you all after you left Italy.”
“We begged you to come with us,” Charlotte reminded her.
“I remember. I was there,” Francesca said, although to her it felt like eons ago. It was before she’d known the radiation hadn’t worked and that her life was on the brink of being snuffed out.
There was a gust of wind, and Charlotte crossed her arms over her chest to make a kind of shield. “Mama,” she began, the word tumbling out of her mouth, “I want to ask you something.”
Francesca’s adrenaline spiked, but she tried not to show her fear on her face. “What is it, honey?” Had Charlotte discovered Francesca’s secret? Charlotte was different from the other children, after all. She was the only one of them who’d become a filmmaker, like her grandfather before her, and like Francesca had tried to be in a distant past.
“When we were in Italy,” Charlotte began, wetting her lips, “he wasn’t there anymore.”
Francesca’s ears rang with alarm. Charlotte’s “he’ was powerful in that sentence, proof that Charlotte was still just as curious about her real father as she’d been when she’d first discovered the truth. Charlotte had fled Italy after that, moving first to Manhattan and then to God-knew-where, chasing herdreams of being a documentarian. Francesca had hated that she’d gone, had hated that Jefferson Albright’s sudden return to their lives had forced her child out.
“Where did he go?” Charlotte asked, her voice small.
Francesca’s heart pounded with fear. Charlotte was asking her a direct question, one that had a definitive answer. But Francesca wasn’t sure she knew how to speak about Jefferson Albright, even five years after he’d gone. A sudden wave of fatigue crashed through her, and she wobbled on the sand and reached for Charlotte’s arm. Charlotte furrowed her brow. Francesca caught her balance and her breath and couldn’t bring herself to look Charlotte in the eye. Charlotte probably thought she was faking the episode to get out of talking about her father.
But then, Francesca spotted the White Oak Lodge on the horizon.
Francesca gasped with wonder. There it was: sprawling across the bluffs, wings of it spread in all directions, with the blown-out windows of the main family house still lined with black ash. From where she stood, Francesca could see the kitchen entrance. These horse stables had remained untouched, as well as the dilapidated tennis courts, where she’d perfected her stroke and gone on to defeat mega-famous celebrities, all of whom had grown up on the sport. Across the bluffs, she could still picture her children racing, their screams bouncing along the sand and toiling out across the blue ocean. She could practically see herself, standing outside the kitchen, a pot of pasta sauce on the stovetop, her heart in her throat. Be safe! She’d wanted to call out to them, although she’d always known those words were purposeless. Children broke boundaries. They had to see what could be done.
“Mama,” Charlotte tried again, sounding impatient. She needed to know about Jefferson, but she was too frightened tosay his name aloud. Francesca hadn’t raised her children to be afraid.
But before Francesca could answer, before she could pull herself together enough to tell Charlotte about the second-greatest love of her life, the first-greatest love of her life came into view. There he was on the bluff: a man of seventy-five, with broad shoulders and salt-and-pepper hair and a still-powerful look on a face that was more familiar to her, in many respects, than her own. Benjamin Whitmore stood with a construction worker in a hard hat, pointing at something on the White Oak Lodge’s once-towering rooftop, gesturing in a way that spoke of a future they were building together, a future they believed in. Francesca’s eyes filled with tears.
Francesca couldn’t move. For a little while, she and Charlotte watched Benjamin, captivated, until finally Benjamin turned around and spotted them. Immediately, his arms fell to his sides. The construction worker continued to speak, swinging what looked to be a tape measure around, his fingers widening as he described something. But all the while, Benjamin’s eyes were on Francesca’s. All the while, a soft smile began to play across his lips, a smile of hello, a smile of memory. Francesca wasn’t sure she’d be able to walk the rest of the way up the bluffs to meet him. She felt frozen in time.
But then, Benjamin turned to the construction worker, said something probably like, “I’ll be right back,” and bounded down the bluffs to greet them: his wife and the daughter she’d had with another man.
