“I think that’s part of the reason I wanted to be a fisherman,” Daniel said thoughtfully. “I wanted to spend more time on the water. I wanted to see if there was anything out there, if I could prove any kind of magic really existed. And you know what?”
Ivy frowned, waiting.
“I’ve never seen anything,” Daniel said, leaning forward, his eyes urgent. “I’ve been looking and looking for years. But no. We invent magic. We need the idea of magic because our lives have so little enchantment to them.”
Ivy crossed her arms over her chest. For some reason, she thought of Lily earlier, scrambling up to sit beside her father on the sofa. She thought of how sure Lily had been that she wanted to see what her father saw and experience her father’s life. She considered that only a few years ago, Lily had been merely an idea—nothing but the concept of “having children.” And now she was here, ready to love them as well as she could.
Wasn’t that a version of magic? Wasn’t that enough?
But Ivy didn’t know how to express any of this to Daniel. He got up, shaking his head, and returned to the television, where he drank the rest of his beer before he went to bed.
All night, as she tried and failed to sleep beside him, Daniel’s words rang through her head. She turned to look at him in the moonlight. A strange feeling of long-lost love rattled through her. “Daniel,” she whispered through the darkness, but he turned away from her and kept sleeping. By the time she woke up the following morning, he was gone.
The next day, Ivy performed her ordinary rituals. She finished work, picked up the kids from the sitters, stopped by Bluebell Cove to help out, then returned home to make dinner. She’d more or less knocked Daniel’s questions about sea monsters and magic out of her head, although she still felt them like a strange shadow at the back of her mind.
Usually, Daniel slumped into the house by four thirty or five. By the time Ivy fed her babies and prepared them for bed, she still hadn’t heard his truck in the driveway or his key in the door. She knew this wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm. The man had had a long-standing affair and was known to go drinking with the other fishermen. It wasn’t like he was very good about contacting her or telling her his plans.
Ivy poured herself a glass of wine and put on a movie she liked for a change. It was called How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days, and it made her guffaw. She watched it all, pouring more wine and snacking on cheese and crackers. It wasn’t till it was finished and the sky was jet-black outside that she realized Daniel still wasn’t home.
Next, Ivy performed the task that every wronged wife eventually does. She called Daniel’s cell. She imagined it ringing on a hotel bed somewhere while Daniel and that girl who’d come into the flower shop watched it and laughed. She imagined Daniel telling that girl that she was “magical,” that his wife never had been and never would be. But the phone cut straight to voicemail, which felt even worse. It meant that he’d turned it off.
The night was strange. Storm clouds brewed across the Cove and made the cedar trees along the edge of the property quake and shiver. She turned up the heat and put on a bigger sweater, then caught herself wishing that Wren was still around. Like the rest of the Harper sisters, Wren had left Bluebell Cove and had decided that communicating her whereabouts was beneath her.
If Wren were here, she would know how to make tonight more fun and less chaotic. She’d know how to tell Ivy to forget about that guy! Maybe Ivy would finally find a way to open up to her sister. Perhaps Ivy would finally say, “I need to get out of this.”
She refilled her glass of wine and selected another DVD from the pile: Ever After starring Drew Barrymore. As soon as she’d placed the disk in the drive, there was a terrible knock at the door. She bolted upright and hurried to answer it. Her thoughts were so scattered that she couldn’t make sense of them, save for one: Daniel left me.
But of course it was far less complicated than that.
On the front stoop were a police officer, a Coast Guard officer, and her father, James Harper. It felt like a joke. They looked at her with stoic, awful expressions. Their skin was gray.
Ivy knew without being told. But she asked it anyway because that was what she was supposed to do.
“What happened?”
“We need to come in, honey,” her father said, sounding more gentle and loving than she’d ever heard him.
“I’ll make tea,” she said, because she didn’t know how to have people over without giving them something.
“No need, Mrs. Elbert,” the police officer said.
Ivy led them into the living room, where they stood in front of the television. The DVD player's mouth was still open, revealing the Ever After disk. Ivy had a ridiculous thought that they would all sit and watch it together. Her dad could say what he always did when she appeared: Anjelica Huston dated Jack Nicholson for sixteen years!
Instead, she supposed, they were going to stand around and talk about how and why her husband had died.
They told her that the storm had come out of nowhere. Daniel had taken his boat too far from shore, away from the necessary channels, where it had capsized and sent him over.
“He didn’t suffer,” the police officer told her, his hat in his hands.
But Ivy wanted to know how on earth the police officer could know that. It wasn’t like he knew what it was like to drown. It wasn’t like he’d been at the scene.
Or perhaps—and here was a heinous thought—they all knew that Daniel had been drunk at the time of the incident. Maybe that was why he’d taken his boat too far from shore. He’d been too out of his mind to realize what he was doing before it was too late.
“You can tell me the truth,” Ivy said, raising her chin. “I can take it.”
The officers exchanged glances that told her they had no interest in telling her the truth. They didn’t think they owed her that.
“That’s all we know at this time, ma’am,” the police officer said. “We are so very sorry for your loss.”
