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Chappaquiddick Island

illustration ©2016 Michael Musser

Split Rock A Novel

Holly Hodder Eger

Conzett Verlag Zurich

Split Rock is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Holly Hodder Eger.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without express written consent. To contact the author, please send an email to info@hollyeger.com.

Published in Zurich, Switzerland, by Conzett Verlag.

ISBN 978-3-03760-041-2 ISBN eBook 978-3-03760-042-9 Printed in Germany: CPI – Ebner & Spiegel, Ulm. Book design by Claudia Neuenschwander, Zurich.

Martha’s Vineyard map illustration copyright © 2016 by Michael Musser.

Cover photo by Joe Mikos.

A portion of the profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Vineyard Conservation Society.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for the following: Extracts from When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne. Text copyright © The Trustees of the Pooh Properties WWWVY 1924, published by Egmont UK Ltd. Used with permission by Egmont and Penguin Random House.

My One And Only Love Words by Robert Mellin Music by Guy Wood © 1952, 1953 (Renewed 1980, 1981) EMI Music Publishing Ltd. and Warock Corp.

All rights for EMI Music Publishing Ltd. Controlled and administered by Colgems-EMI Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Golden Moments (James Taylor) © 1976 Country Road Music Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Disobedience James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree Took great Care of his Mother, Though he was only three.

James James Said to his Mother, “Mother,” he said, said he: “You must never go down to the end of the town, if you don’t go down with me.”

James James Morrison’s Mother Put on a golden gown, James James Morrison’s Mother Drove to the end of the town.

James James Morrison’s Mother Said to herself, said she: “I can get right down to the end of the town and be back in time for tea.”

King John Put up a notice, “LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED! JAMES JAMES MORRISON’S MOTHER SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.

LAST SEEN WANDERING VAGUELY: QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD, SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN TO THE END OF THE TOWN—FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!” James James Morrison Morrison (Commonly known as Jim) Told his Other relations Not to go blaming him.

James James Said to his Mother, “Mother,” he said, said he: “You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me.”

James James Morrison’s Mother Hasn’t been heard of since.

King John Said he was sorry, So did the Queen and Prince.

King John (Somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: “If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?”

—A. A. Milne

1 Sylvan Fell, Maryland, USA!!!

!

Chase was explaining something on the bridge in Paris, but she couldn’t make out his words. She pushed him away and with one step dove over the stone side into the river below, barely making a splash. She started swimming, but she wasn’t in the Seine because she kept getting tangled in seaweed. She swam underwater through a school of silver minnows toward a sunlit coral reef, violet and turquoise and teeming with rainbow and butterfly fish, and there was Aunt Faye in snorkeling gear, pointing. This must be the South China Sea, off the coast of Bali. Hundreds of seahorses floated by and she reached out to touch one, but now she was back in the fast-flowing Seine. Chase was calling down to her from the bridge, his arms outstretched, but she couldn’t fight the current and got sucked under, and all at once she saw herself in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, freezing cold, long hair streaming, hands grasping—

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy …”

Annie pried her sleeping husband’s elbow from its firm lock around her body and sat up. Her eyes slowly registered Meg in the dim light from the hall, rosy in her sleeper and dragging her blanket.

“I want to sleep with you, Mommy. My new bed’s too big.”

Sunlight peeked through the new Sleeping Beauty curtains in Meg’s room, and the long yellow school bus rumbled outside the window. The heavy front door thudded shut, causing the whole house to shake.

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Annie opened her eyes feeling warm and content, until a voice in her brain reminded her that Aunt Faye was dead. She wondered if one day she might actually make it all the way downstairs before she had to remember. Breathing in the sweet vanilla of Meg’s skin, she slid her arm out from under her, somehow managing to get down to the front walk in time to wave to Robbie on the bus.

Gordon was in the kitchen, handsome in his dark blue suit pants and striped silk tie. He was putting Robbie’s cereal bowl in the dishwasher, which he’d just emptied; the counter was clear except for a lone mixing bowl whose place he didn’t know yet.

Slivers of silver glittered in his short-cropped hair in the May morning light.

“Good morning, gorgeous,” he said, kissing her and placing a hot cup of coffee in her hands.

“Nice outfit,” Annie said, stroking his pressed white sleeve and alluding to the day before, when he had deliberately worn his button-down shirt backwards to show the girls, per the suggestion of their daughter Lily’s kindergarten teacher, that little children weren’t the only ones who sometimes got confused getting dressed. Nobody’s perfect—everyone makes mistakes.

Annie watched her husband take a few long strides to open the back door and bring in the gallon-size glass bottles of fresh Maryland milk delivered in the wee hours of the morning.

“I’m meeting with Zhen at eight-thirty. She probably wants me to reprioritize Indonesia, now that their financial system is exploding. Not sure I have the capacity, with all the stuff I have to fix for the Handover in Hong Kong. I knew 1997 was going to be a headache.Would you mind reading these reviews I wrote, before I pass them on to personnel?”

Whether or not she did mind, he handed her three typewritten pages.

“Can you hand me a pen?” she asked, sitting down at the kitchen table, her eyes still bleary.

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He looked at her.

“From the drawer?” She pointed. “On the other side of the sink?”

Gordon grinned and tossed over one of the red fine-point markers, the kind she’d used in her copy-editing days at her cousin Juliet’s publishing house in Boston. With zeal, he began rearranging everything in the refrigerator to make room for the new glass bottles.

“Pretty great to have a milkman. Nothing like this in Asia, that’s for sure.”

He was talking more to himself than to her, continuing his own version of their shared attempt to convince themselves they had made the right decision to move back to the States.

Making little marks on his papers, Annie asked herself for the umpteenth time why he couldn’t get the hang of the semicolon, especially since she’d explained it to him ad nauseam, but caught herself before she said anything out loud. It probably wouldn’t be helpful anyway.

“If I can get home early enough, maybe we can finish raking the backyard and plant some more flowers. And I’d like to move the azalea, which reminds me: I couldn’t find your old gardening gloves in the boxes in the garage, so I got you a new pair. Not that you wore the old ones out.” He kissed the top of her head.

She wrinkled her nose, pretending annoyance at his comment.

He loved to dig up plants and move them around for no apparent reason, at least none as far as she could tell.

“Probably got lost in the move.” He winked at Lily, who was sitting in her little blue chair at her purple table, shading in a Disney coloring book. Like Annie, she was meticulous about coloring within the lines.

Still holding a bottle of milk, Gordon set his strong, square jaw the way he did and gazed out the window at the Bradshaws’ yard, the flowers arranged by color. “Will you look at Gloria’s garden?

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Spectacular.”

“Sometimes when I get up with Meg at three in the morning,” Annie said, feigning sarcasm, “I spy her out there, raking like a whirling dervish in her short shorts just to stay ahead of you and the esteemed Sylvan Fell Garden Club.”

Annie wondered whether Gordon noticed that Gloria was, in fact, not so perfect, and bit her lower lip as she rewrote one of his sentences in her tiny cursive. She could certainly be annoying, asking his opinion on all types of climbing roses for their shared fence and batting her eyelashes as if she didn’t already know everything there was to know about roses and their particular gardening zone. Zephirine Drouhin, Stormy Weather, Morning Magic …

Annie used to help Chase’s mother, Piper St. Clair, with her rose garden on Martha’s Vineyard—watering, fertilizing, trimming—but didn’t feel like getting involved in the current discussion and had elected to keep quiet. Besides, she had a feeling Gloria already had her chosen varieties waiting in buckets in her garage.

Aunt Faye also used to tend roses: not in Chilmark, the name of her (now Annie’s) town on Martha’s Vineyard, but at her other Massachusetts home, near Wellesley College. She used to say they were technically called Long Pole roses, that roses didn’t climb.

They needed a little boost to get started, same as people.

Even if Gloria’s garden was straight out of a magazine, her house wasn’t, and her children always looked a mess. Not to mention she left dirty dishes in the sink overnight, as Annie saw for herself once when she’d walked her old dog back to her kitchen.

“I don’t see why we should spend a lot of money on the garden when we’re not even going to be here this summer,” Annie said, sipping her coffee.“Well, I guess it will be nice for you, during the weeks.” He could spend his evenings endlessly moving plants around.

“I’ll be able to bring you a fresh bouquet on the plane when I come up every Friday night.”

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“I’d like that, although I think they have flowers on Martha’s Vineyard.” She was starting to make so many corrections on his papers he wouldn’t be able to read them all. One of them should probably start over.

“By the way,” Annie said, “can you get those summer weekend flights finalized today? And … what d’you think? Should we put an ad in the Vineyard Gazette for a babysitter? Or just wait till we get there?” She straightened out her shoulders. “Jeez, my back aches today.”

“You’d feel better if you stretched, Annie. Yesterday you just took off on your jog.”

Gordon had been a track star at Georgetown and had managed to fit in six marathons, in the United States and Asia, since Robbie was born, and was always careful to warm up. But if she took as much time as he did, something would inevitably come up and she’d never get out the door. He had no idea how many catastrophes—how many near-death experiences—she intercepted with the kids while he was out stretching and training; how many she intercepted every ordinary day, come to think of it.

This was her job now, after all, so it probably wouldn’t do to complain.

Gordon didn’t mind being left in charge occasionally, but she always worried about the disaster that might await her return. A few Saturdays ago, she’d come home from her first morning off since they’d moved—she swam at the Sylvan Fell YMCA, then got her hair cut—only to find him building a Lego extravaganza with Robbie, oblivious to where the girls were: alone in the upstairs bathroom playing their own game of beauty parlor and taking turns chopping off each other’s hair, the last of Meg’s precious baby curls all over the floor.

Incredible, what damage those little paper scissors could do.

Meg’s bangs were only just now starting to stop spiking up straight.

Annie had hauled them back to her stylist (recommended by

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Gloria Bradshaw) to see if he could repair the damage, which cost a lot more than hiring a real babysitter would have. She felt furious at Gordon but mostly at herself, for assuming he could handle all three of the kids at once.

When they’d had live-in help in Asia, they could go out knowing not only that the kids would be safely looked after, but also that their glass-and-marble apartment would be clean and orderly upon their return. They had time to be a couple, not merely tagteam parenting partners, and went on real dates. It had been romantic. Sometimes, Gordon would even step outside the apartment and ring the doorbell, pretend to be picking her up; once he presented her with lavender orchids tied with a ribbon when she answered the door.

He stopped moving long enough to study the open refrigerator, trying to figure out where in his reorganization to perch a bowl of strawberries so it wouldn’t break.

“I wish I could take Meg for a long bike ride,” Annie said, placing her edits in his briefcase. “But the roads are too narrow around here and everyone drives so fast. I can’t wait for the Vineyard, can you? The bike paths, all that swimming.”

She knew the bike paths by heart from college summers when she and Chase used to ride everywhere, rolling from pavement to dirt roads to rocky trails, and loved to do what they dubbed their West Tisbury triathlon. The wind at their backs, they’d ride from his parents’ house at the top of Indian Hill, over to Manaquayak Road and up to Ice House Pond, swim across, run back through the woods to their bikes, and race home like ten-year-olds. He always let her catch him on the steep part and win at the end.

Gordon pulled out one of the new glass bottles and replaced it with the strawberries.

“Maybe we should get a kayak,” Annie continued. “We could paddle around Chilmark Pond, Squibnocket,Tisbury Great Pond.”

“Or a canoe,” Gordon said. “More stable.”

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“Kind of heavy for the Vineyard,” Annie said. “Incidentally, I had that drowning dream again.” She didn’t mention the part about the bridge and Chase. “Aunt Faye was in it.”

Ever since Annie had inherited Aunt Faye’s Chilmark house, Chase seemed to pop up everywhere. She had thought about him more in the last few months than in the last fifteen years combined. She’d been too busy to think about him much, really, before this.

Gordon reached in for a Tupperware container of leftover spaghetti and meatballs.

“Were you planning to eat this for lunch? Think it will be okay if I leave it on the counter for the morning?” He peered into the back of the refrigerator. “You always have weird dreams when we relocate, sweetheart, I don’t know why you never remember.

Moving is disorienting. Sometimes I wake up on business trips and don’t even know what country I’m in.”

He stood back, satisfied at last with his handiwork. “We should probably find a second-hand fridge for the basement, Annie, or else order less milk.”

She admired his reorganization and wrapped her arms around his waist. “You should have been an engineer, Gordie.You’re wasting your talents toiling in the developing world.” Reaching up to kiss him, she traced her finger along his jaw. She loved the shape of his face.

He laughed, the corners of his warm brown eyes crinkling up in that inviting way. “I guess we might as well wait until we remodel the kitchen, and get a bigger fridge then.”

He closed the refrigerator and nodded toward the honey-do list stuck there with a “Bloom where you’re planted” magnet. “I fixed the cellar window for you this morning, by the way. You can cross that one off.” He charged up the back stairs two at a time to get his suit jacket.

“Don’t forget to hug the little girls before you go,” she called

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after him. “Lily cried for five minutes yesterday because she didn’t get to say goodbye.”

Lily handed her drawing to Annie. It was a picture of a heart shaded in with strips of color in the order of the rainbow. On the bottom it said “I LOVE YOU DADDY.” The “L” and the first “D” were backwards, but otherwise the letters were perfect.

“Wow. How did you know how to write that?”

“Mrs. Balzac.” Lily pronounced her teacher’s name Ballth-thwack.

Mrs. Balzac was endlessly perky and, to herself, Annie sometimes referred to her as Mrs. Ball of Wax. But, well, yes. The teachers and schools here in Maryland were better than the ones they’d left in Asia, and it was smart of them to have moved.

“It’s beautiful, Lily. Run and give it to Daddy.”

Annie poured more coffee for herself, noticing a red cardinal studying her from a tree branch outside again. He had been here the past few days. She opened the window over the sink a crack and, holding her warm cup against her cheek, watched him puff up his chest and prepare to sing for her. Annie had grown up in New England, where northern cardinals are the archetypal songbirds, and in Asia she’d missed their sunny songs. She loved their warbling trills, the way their notes slurred as they swept upward.

They sounded like summer.

It had been nice to see Aunt Faye in her dream, snorkeling.

Faye had loved anything outdoors. For her seventieth birthday, she invited Annie to jump with her off the famous bridge on Martha’s Vineyard where a scene in the movie Jaws had been filmed. On a hot, cloudless day, they’d ridden bikes from Edgartown along the Beach Road wearing bathing suits under their clothes, parked on the sandy shoulder, stripped down heedless of the cars passing by, and climbed onto the rickety wooden bridge.

“This is a crazy Vineyard ritual, isn’t it?”Aunt Faye had grinned, patting the top of the sign that said “No Jumping or Diving from Bridge.” She had placed a slender foot on the first wooden railing

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and remarked over her shoulder, “Never let your life be dictated by someone else’s arbitrary rules, dear.” Faye’s skin, like her hair in those days before she quit coloring it, was the color of caramels and always seemed to have a slightly auburn glow.

Aunt Faye had climbed up the four railings by herself, holding Annie’s hand for only a second, to stand upright on the top. Annie climbed up beside her, and they admired the view of the water and the sailboats, holding hands. “Ready, steady …” Aunt Faye called, until together they stepped off the bridge into the current below, rushing from Nantucket Sound into Lake Sengekontacket.

People lining both sides cheered. Faye and Annie couldn’t stop laughing as they swam to the shore and climbed out over the rocks, got back on their bikes, and rode home.

Annie studied a photo taken of her aunt on her eightieth birthday beaming, holding her new puppy on the back deck of what was Annie’s house now on Martha’s Vineyard; she could see the hammock in the background hanging from the beetlebung trees. Her picture was in the center of the refrigerator door, surrounded by photos of Robbie, Lily, and Meg (sweating in the humidity) atop an elephant at the Singapore Zoo before they moved to Hong Kong last summer; with her parents (sitting up straight) on the Swan Boats in the Boston Public Garden; with Gordon’s father and his third wife (posing awkwardly) in front of the California State Capitol in Sacramento; on a picnic with just the five of them.

Last week, one of Lily’s kindergarten friends had informed her, “Mrs. Tucker, your fridge-a-rator is very messy.” Annie liked it that way. It was a comforting contrast to the pressure she felt to keep her house so tidy.

Among the slew of photographs was an envelope addressed to Annie in Sylvan Fell, Maryland, USA!!! by her mother, Adair, uncharacteristically emotive, showing her relief and enthusiasm that they had moved back “home.”

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Ironic that as soon as the Tuckers settled back in the United States, her parents disappeared to New Zealand to stay with her brother, Percy.

Gordon’s honey-do list, next to Adair’s envelope, was like the one Aunt Faye used to keep for her first and second husbands, both putterers like Gordon. Annie was careful to write Please at the top and Thank you! at the bottom the way Aunt Faye had, so as not to come across as too much of a nag.

Annie hadn’t actually known Gordon was a putterer, because this was the first house they had owned. In San Francisco and Asia they’d lived in rented apartments, and when something needed fixing, all Annie had to do was call the superintendent. Gordon told Annie recently that her list was a lot more superficial than the one he kept running in his head. Hers was for easy tasks—fix Robbie’s window, adjust water heater—while his tended to concern deeper structural issues of which she was apparently unaware, like designing a whole new kitchen.

All her life, Annie had loved to make lists. When she was growing up, she constantly kept one for her own self-improvement: Do math homework first. Lose five pounds. Try harder on serve and volley. No doubt she should create one now, although the thousands of things to work on could probably fall under one simple umbrella ambition: Keep up.

Gordon, carrying Lily piggyback through the kitchen to the foyer, deposited her in the small TV room, originally designed as a parlor in which to greet guests, and opened the front door to gauge the temperature outside.

Annie put down her coffee and followed them.

“I think I’ll install one of those indoor/outdoor thermometers,” he remarked, pulling Annie toward him just as Meg appeared at their feet, grinning and dragging her pink blanket, already sporting the sparkly dress-up tiara she’d taken to wearing lately.

“Good morning, princess,” Gordon said, stepping back to

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scoop her up. “Daddy has to go to work now. You have a fun day and when I come home, I’ll push you on the swing.”

Meg sucked her thumb with her blanket and snuggled into his shoulder. Gordon hugged her until she let go and padded off to find her sister. He always waited for the other person to let go first.

The light was bright and yellow from the azaleas, just blooming, and the air brimmed with birdsong and the smell of fertile, wet earth. The majestic trees lining their street were in full green leaf, and the delicate cherry and dogwood trees blossomed pink and white. Annie had forgotten how exquisite spring mornings were on the East Coast. Energetic housewives marched briskly along the sidewalk, lifting their hand weights up and down.

“Let’s see, where was I?” Gordon wrapped his right arm around her and pulled her close in a quick two-step, humming a few bars of his favorite Frank Sinatra song. He bent down to give her a long kiss goodbye and, pressing her closer, managed to slide a hand through the folds of her robe to cup her bare breasts through her nightgown. Really quite astonishing, after so many years, especially considering she hadn’t even brushed her teeth yet.

This two-step was all the dancing Gordon ever did. It was Chase who had been the dancer, and he and Annie had been known as quite the pair. “What d’you say we cut up this floor and show how it’s done?” Chase would propose, taking her hand.

People would stop to admire them, sometimes backing up in a wide circle to give them more space.

They had loved all kinds of dancing: salsa to the Caribbean steel drums that played sometimes in Menemsha; swing dancing at the starlight party Skip St. Clair threw for Chase’s mother’s fiftieth on their lawn above the Sound; rock and roll at college. Acknowledging Annie’s irrepressible tendency to lead, Chase always kept his right hand, fingers splayed, pressed firmly against her back.

“This way I won’t step on your toes and you’ll know when to

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twirl,” he’d say. Dancing with him had been like dancing in a fairy tale: her feet scarcely touched the ground.

Gordon, on the other hand, invariably had a sore knee or pulled hamstring or some other running ailment that made him want to sit down as soon as possible whenever there was dancing.

Her husband’s sexy goodbye usually made her tingle, but Annie felt self-conscious today, worried the marching housewives might see them and be shocked at this new, racy family from Asia.

Gordon adjusted himself, as he tended to do after even the quickest kiss, and picked up his briefcase.

Annie swung the girls up, one onto each hip, and stood in the wide doorway before the glassed-in porch that ran the length of their new, run-down Victorian. Did Chase still dance?

She watched Gordon square his shoulders toward the driveway, focusing on his day ahead, and back out his car. Waving at them as he pulled down the street, he glanced at Gloria Bradshaw’s blooming rhododendron bushes before reaching for his new car phone on the dashboard.

She wondered how he could stand to leave them.