Finally, after more than an hour, Henry said, “I feel like it’s her way of saying screw you after, you know, all the animosity between us.”
“I guess it’s possible that she also wants to help women in need,” Candice said softly.
But both Lindsey and Henry looked at her like she was nuts, so she didn’t push it. She got up and looked out the window to see a clear moon over the water. She fetched a light jacket, then stepped out onto the veranda to calm down. Soon, Lindsey and Henry were there, leaning over the railing.
“I just can’t believe we might have to say goodbye to this place forever,” Lindsey murmured. “It’s true that we haven’t been here often the past few years. But I’ve always missed it.”
“When you were saying you wanted to spend time here,” Henry said, “I started to reorganize my calendar in my head. I started thinking maybe we could be together. For a little while.”
Candice’s heart shifted. “We still can.”
Lindsey and Henry turned to look at her.
“For one last summer,” Candace said. “We can go through Mom’s things. We can try to figure her out. And I don’t know. If we contest the will and lose, we can always use Mom’s money to buy another property here on the Vineyard. I wouldn’t mind spending a little more time here.”
Her siblings looked at her as though she were crazy.
“Move? Somewhere down the road?” Lindsey asked.
Candice shrugged. “It was just an idea.”
They remained in the dark, quiet, listening to the rolling waves over the beach. When Candice did finally go up to her room, she sat at the mahogany desk and opened her journal for the first time in weeks. In it, she usually doodled, considering ways to approach short stories and potential novels (novels she rarely got around to writing). But now, she watched herself write:Mom still wants more than any of us do, even in death. I wonder if we terribly disappointed her.
When Candice first enrolled at NYU as an undergrad to study creative writing, her mother was pleased. For Stella, sending her children to college was essential, something she spoke of endlessly in the lead-up to high school graduation. “You have to nourish your mind. You have to push yourself beyond the boundaries you’ve created within yourself!”
Candice still remembered being in this very room, the room of her teenage years, a suitcase thrown over the bed as she tried to pack up her life for the first semester. She’d been a moodyteenager, not unlike most teenagers, she supposed, and when her mother had sat on the bed, mid-packing session, and asked her what kinds of stories she wanted to write at university, what inspired her the most, Candice had snapped at her, saying, “Nothing has happened in my life yet. How am I supposed to write about anything if nothing has happened?”
Her mother had given her a quizzical look. “That’s not what writers are necessarily supposed to do,” she said finally. “They’re not supposed to record exactly what happens. Unless I’ve gotten something wrong? But I thought writers were supposed to be pretty liars.” She’d let out a wry laugh.
Candice had huffed, hating how correct her mother sounded. It was true that many of her favorite writers hadn’t written memoirs, but it was also true that they’d been inspired by incredible events, internships in the big city, sweeping love affairs, and so on. Candice had hardly even had a teenage love affair. She’d kissed someone a few times, sure. But mostly, she’d lived her life from within the confines of her head.
“Honey,” Stella had said so long ago, when Candice was eighteen, with a dark and pulpy heart and a thousand questions in her soul, “remember to always stay inquisitive. Remember to keep yourself open to the stories swirling around you.”
Candice had wanted to say something like,That’s the point of going to college!
But at that moment, her mother had said something that had stayed with Candice forever. “When I was your age, I didn’t have the same opportunities. I didn’t even know those opportunities existed.”
Candice had been taken aback. Her mother, Stella Vanberg, had been raised in this very house at the Harbor Estate, a woman of opportunities if there ever had been one. What on earth was she talking about? Sure, she’d been a woman of another era—born in the 1950s, during a time when womendidn’t necessarily go to college. They weren’t legally allowed to have bank accounts till the seventies. They still often weren’t paid a living wage.
But the glint in Stella’s eyes urged Candice to ask more. To give in to such a glint would have meant dismissing her own teenage needs, her own teenage moods, her own teenage annoyances. She turned away from her mother, away from her mother’s invitation for conversation, and put her hands on her hips, surveying her kingdom of bedsheets and black turtlenecks and toiletries. Eventually, her mother sighed and got out of bed, leaving her room and the conversation behind forever.
But now, so many years after that till-now-forgotten night, Candice wrote it in her journal.When I was your age, I didn’t have the same opportunities. I didn’t even know those opportunities existed.
What on earth had her mother meant?
6
The first four years of Candice’s college career at NYU were messy and strange and funny, the foundation of a story about a young woman in the big city. Candice lived in one tiny room after another, with a string of funny and artistic girls from the Midwest and California, and she read all the great Russian, American, and British literature. She wrote many, many short stories—most of them bad, but some of them okay—and she bonded with her professors, some of whom suggested that she was good enough at creative writing to pursue it at a master's level.
Candice was twenty-two when she graduated from NYU and learned that she’d gotten into NYU’s MFA program. Shrieking, she ran into her roommate Stacy’s bedroom and jumped up and down on her bed. She genuinely felt that her life was beginning, that finally, she was going to become what she’d always wanted to become. Stacy got up and took them out to breakfast, where they drank mimosas and ate stacks of pancakes and eggs and bacon. Stacy was thrilled for Candice, but Candice could see that she was sad, too. Stacy was leaving the city to attend physicaltherapy school in Cleveland. For her, the dreams of the city were over.
That summer, Candice and her siblings went back to Martha’s Vineyard for the Fourth of July. Stella and their father, Ben Winthrop, were both there, waiting for them, the kitchen stocked and the sailboat waiting. Candice threw herself into her father’s arms and exclaimed that she’d gotten into the master’s program of her dreams, that she was going to stay in the city for at least another three years. Her father called for champagne, and Stella approached, pain and intrigue in her eyes. Candice knew that she should have called ahead. She should have told her parents her news at the same time. Now, her mother was hurt.
But Candice had always found her father, Ben, a much easier person, a funnier and livelier person, a person whose every question didn’t feel like an attack. Lindsey and Henry felt the same way. Already that first night, they gathered on the veranda, sharing wine and talking about their lives, while Stella sat silently, wrapped in a shawl, looking at the four of them as though she didn’t fully recognize them. Stella could get secretive, as though there was an entire universe inside her that she didn’t want anyone to see.
When Lindsey, Henry, and Candice traveled back to the city after the Fourth of July, Lindsey asked, “Why do you think Dad fell in love with Mom?”
Candice and Henry were at a loss, at first. They knew that Lindsey was reeling after a recent breakup and that she was thinking about love, breakups, and why people stayed together at all. But Candice had asked herself this very question before.
