“Sure. Of course. I always have,” Nathan said. He didn’t skip a beat.
After they got off the phone, Candice put back on that Dolly Parton record and told herself not to cry. Nathan was coming, and he wanted to fix things. He wanted to pretend that nothing was broken. That was beautiful, wasn’t it? Or it was a version of beauty that she had to understand was real.
Families were complicated. Marriages were complex. She needed to celebrate that. That was what writers always did.
12
Candice’s children were terribly pleased to learn that their father was really on his way. “He’s just wrapping things up in the city,” Candice explained later that morning, when the three of them were out on the sailboat, wind flitting through their hair. “He misses you guys.”
Sarah’s smile was so beautiful and naive. It reminded Candice of her own when she was a teenager, back when she’d first run around with Frank Delaware and the others. She wondered what Frank had seen when they’d hung out last week. She wondered if he’d taken a look at her smile and realized that she wasn’t the naive and hopeful girl of years ago. He’s probably thought,oh, what happened to her?She’s not only older, but she’s also weaker. Something is wrong.
Candice dropped the anchor and unpacked the lunches she’d made for them: sandwiches with lunch meat and cheese, plenty of berries, bags of salt and vinegar chips, and sodas. Sarah was talking about the book she was reading,Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrowby Gabrielle Zevin, and, although Candice had never read it, she was captivated by the insightful way her daughter spoke about it. Two writers had raised Sarah—that was clear—but Candice had never known her to be so precise and artful with language. She wondered if she wanted to go into Creative Writing as well, but decided not to pry. She didn’t want to push Sarah one direction or another, not when she was so impressionable.
To her credit, Stella Vanberg had never pushed her children to do anything they didn’t want to do. All she’d ever said was, “You need to go to college. You need to figure out what you want to do with your talents and your time. No one can decide that for you.” Candice wanted to model this.
Late afternoon, after a long and languorous swim around the boat, Candice sailed her kids back to the house, where they tied up and joined Lindsey and Henry on the veranda. Henry was, as ever, talking angrily about Gwen and about contesting the will, but Lindsey looked as though she was growing bored and trying to find a way to sneak out, maybe to hang out with her Vineyard friends.
Sarah and Peter went upstairs to shower, but Candice held back, pouring herself a glass of wine and watching as the sun slid deeper toward the horizon. When there was a lull in conversation, Lindsey pegged her with her eyes and said, “Frank was asking where you were the other night.”
Candice’s eyes fluttered. “I don’t know why he would do a thing like that.”
Lindsey laughed. “Why wouldn’t he? He always liked you.” She waved her hand. “Don’t say you’re married again. Maybe it’s not like that. But he told me he really liked talking to you the other night. He said you talked about his mom?”
“It’s so sad, what happened to her,” Candice offered, remembering the Alzheimer’s. “Oh, but apparently she was singing some country song, one Frank had never heard before. When he asked her about it, she said to ‘ask Stella.’”
Lindsey jerked her head back with surprise. “Huh.”
But again, Candice thought about her mother’s secretive music life, about how little she ever sang in front of anyone. “Maybe she let Frank’s mom see that side of her,” she offered now.
“Remember when she put us in all those music classes?” Henry asked.
Lindsey and Candice turned to look at him, surprised. But it was true that they’d all taken a wide array of music lessons: piano and guitar; singing and composition. Their father hadn’t taken music as seriously as their mother, and when they’d begged him to let them quit, he’d talked with Stella and ended things. They’d been young and maybe stupid. They couldn’t have known that quitting music then meant abandoning it forever.
You had to learn skills like that early in order to be good at them, Candice knew.
“We never had the voice she did,” Lindsey said gently.
“Are you kidding? I kill it at karaoke,” Henry said, opening his arms wide and belting a song from REM toward the sun. It wasn’t the most gorgeous voice, but there was something unique and beautiful about it. Candice and Lindsey laughed, then joined in.
For a few seconds, they were a trio of Vanberg singers. And then, Peter and Sarah hurried back onto the veranda, demanding to know what was going on. The spell was broken. Dinner needed to be made.
That night,Candice returned to her mother’s records. She’d showered and scrubbed her hair, and she’d tried to call Nathan only to listen to the ring blaring out across the ocean forever, so she felt morose and unable to sleep. Rather than reach for theDolly Parton album, she flicked back through to the unlabeled album she’d found on that first day in the study. Something about it tugged at her curiosity. She guessed there was nothing on it. Maybe it was dangerous to play an empty record on a record player. What did she know?
She put the vinyl on, placed the needle gently in the groove, then stepped back as the sound crackled from the speaker. There was something on there. Next came the song of a banjo, then a guitar. It sounded classically country western, although it wasn’t a song that Candice had ever heard before.
And then, a woman began to sing.
At first, Candice was struck by how sincere and aching the voice was. It took more than twenty seconds for her to realize that the woman singing was her mother. It could only be Stella Vanberg! By then, another voice had joined hers. That voice wasn’t as strong as Stella’s. But it was feminine and sweet, contrasting beautifully with Stella’s thicker, more emotional sound. Throughout the song, Stella and this other girl sang about heartache in the mountains. They sang about mountain streams and mountain promises and mountain dreams. If Candice had to guess, she’d say the title of the song was “Mountain Dreams.” Although how could she ever know?
When the song ended, another song started, sung by the same two girls. Candice’s heartbeat quickened. Was this an entire album of songs recorded by her mother? It sounded wonderfully professional. She imagined a much younger version of her mother in a recording studio, singing into an old-fashioned microphone with her eyes closed. She imagined Stella doing take after take till her voice broke.
“Mom,” Candice whispered, hardly loud enough to be heard over the music. “Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you want us to know?”
Stella couldn’t resist. She ran upstairs to Lindsey’s bedroom, where she was grateful to find her in her pajamas, talking on the phone. Candice gestured, asking her to follow her.
“I gotta go,” Lindsey said to her friend, then hung up and gave Candice a bug-eyed look.
“You won’t regret this,” Candice said.
