Her eyes blinked. Her breathing felt like it stopped. Then her phone slipped through her hand as her body toppled to the ground.
The next thing Maddie knew, Brandon was bent down beside her, helping her up. He snatched her phone out of the grass.
“Kevin?” he shouted as he opened Maddie’s car door and nudged her to sit down, leaving the door ajar. “Are you there?”
Maddie didn’t hear anything else. She sat, shaking, watching Brandon’s every move, trying to interpret his expression as he listened to Kevin.
Later, she had no recollection of Brandon having driven her home. She remembered nothing until she and Brandon and Grandma were sitting in the living room at the cottage—the same room where, only three nights earlier, Maddie had kissed Rex good-bye.
“The strap of his helmet broke when he landed on the rocks,” Brandon was telling Grandma now. “He and Kevin were riding motorcycles in the San Gabriel Mountains. Kevin’sfine, but Rex … Rex broke his neck in two places. He’s in surgery now.”
Rex broke his neck but is alive?
Then Maddie remembered that Brandon already had told her that. She set both elbows on her lap and pressed her hands over her face.
“I told Kevin I’ll go to Chappy and check on Taylor. He called her before he called Maddie. Taylor might not want company, but, still, he’s the only family she’s got. And Kevin, of course.”
Maddie wondered if she should offer to go and sit with Taylor. She couldn’t do that. She wasn’t sure she could stand up, let alone drive to theOn Timeferry, the little raft-like boat that provided the ninety-second link from Edgartown to Chappaquiddick. Besides, Maddie was not family. She wasn’t even an official half-a-couple.
“I already contacted Joe,” Brandon added. “He’ll pick up Maddie’s keys and have someone take him to the Black Dog. Then he’ll drive her car back here.”
See?she thought.I can’t go to Taylor’s. I don’t have my car. She was ashamed she was glad to have a solid excuse.
Then Brandon said, “It’s going to be a while until they know the extent of his injuries or his prognosis. Until then, the doctor said we’ll need to be patient. For a while.”
Grandma let out a sound, a kind of whimper.
Maddie found a way to stand up and make her way to the front door. Then she opened it, went out onto the hateful granite steps, leaned over, and threw up on the ground.
Chapter 16
January–February
When Maddie was a little girl her favorite toy was her mother’s jack-in-the-box. Maddie loved sitting cross-legged in the middle of her small bed in her room in Green Hills and winding the crank over and over. “All around the mulberry bush”—her little shoulders tensing, tensing—“the monkey chased the weasel.” Then, as if hypnotized, she slowed the pace of the cranking, slower, slower, her anticipation building with the lyrics until “pop!”—the lid snapped open and Jack shot up—“goes the weasel!” And Maddie burst into peals of laughter. Jack wasn’t a weasel after all, but a funny clown in a polka-dot shirt.
She’d thought of that toy many times since Rex’s accident, not the music or the verse or the laughter, but the way she’d been submerged in a dazed state. She also pretended to pay attention to conversations around her and to the responsibilities of starting a new business. But in truth, Maddie was lost in her own space, anticipating the next pop of surprise.
Her father came back to the Vineyard soon after Brandon called him. So did Rafe, who flew back from Barbados, whereOwen and the stepfamily were cruising. Joe came to the cottage every day; after all, Grandma had always thought of Rex as one of her own, and Joe had come to feel that way, too.
Maddie’s relationship with Rex went unmentioned, though everyone’s support suggested they knew about it. It was, after all, tough to hide the fact that she was upset, worried, afraid for Rex and sad for herself—a casserole of emotions that only Rex, the chef, could have created.
Joe set up a space at his house for Grandma and Rafe to work on their baskets during the day, away from the commotion at the cottage—the bookshop planning discussions, the updates on the building renovations, the weeding through piles of construction and decorating samples. And, of course, distanced from the stacks of books that would soon start to arrive. For the time being, Stephen was keeping them in Hannah’s old bedroom—where, next to the bed he was using, he’d set up a small office for himself—so Maddie wouldn’t have to be faced with them yet.
At first, she hadn’t known if she should fly to California, if Rex would want her at his bedside. But she hadn’t known if anyone would expect her to go, including him, if he wasn’t in a medically induced coma and had a say in the matter. Then Kevin said Taylor was going. And that ended Maddie’s dilemma, because, fear of flying aside, Taylor was Rex’s next of kin.
Besides, Annie Sutton was there, however she fit into the mix.
All Maddie knew for certain was on the day they’d learned about the accident, she’d put on the wampum bracelet he’d given her and hadn’t removed it.
Like Kevin, Francine and her family returned to the Vineyard. Maddie vaguely recalled that Francine stopped by one afternoon and said she was going to supervise Rex’s restaurant staff for the annual deep cleaning and touch-ups inside theLord James, and to make sure all was shipshape for the reopening on Valentine’s Day weekend. She said that Rex—in addition to wanting the place looking good—never wanted his workers to lose their paychecks, especially in winter. Because Francine ran the Vineyard Inn and its food service on Chappy, she’d already passed the exam for the food handlers’ license needed to run a commercial kitchen, which would also allow her to step in and do that at the Lord James if needed.
Staying busy on Rex’s behalf seemed important to everyone. Maddie, however, often woke up drenched in a sweaty, scared panic that she’d committed to opening a business she now struggled to care about. She considered asking Grandma to sell one of the land parcels in Aquinnah in order to pay off the lease. Once that was done, she could have her father take her home to Green Hills so she could climb into her familiar, comfortable bed—alone—the way she’d been most of her life. For weeks, the only positive step she’d taken was to phone Dan Jarvis at the college, and leave a message saying she couldn’t teach this semester, and to please scrub her name from the roster for good. No matter what happened—or didn’t—in the days and weeks ahead, she no longer cared about teaching, either.
People came and went from the cottage, some bringing meals and cookies or cakes, which Maddie mindlessly ate. Many of the kindhearted contributors hung out for a while and spoke in quiet voices as if someone had died, which no one had. As far as they knew.
On a not-too-cold last-week-of-January day, the day before Rafe had to go back to Amherst, Joe arranged for a Fireball ceremony, a traditional Wampanoag healing ritual. He and Rafe rolled up bedsheets, encased them in chicken wire, then shaped them to look like soccer balls. Next, they soaked the balls in kerosene. A group gathered on the beach at dusk;they chanted and prayed and drummed a little, then Joe and Rafe lit the soccer ball shapes on fire and kicked them from one person to another. The traditional belief was that when the participants came in contact with the flames, the pain they felt would help heal Rex, their brother not by origin, but a White man who had helped the tribe in many ways for many years.
Maddie participated because she did not want to say no.
