A very inconvenient scan.., p.29
A Very Inconvenient Scandal, page 29
“A practice that’s been around since the Stone Age.”
“What’s the matter with you? You’re acting all...disaffected.” She added, “Aren’t you even a little bit curious about all this?”
“That’s the problem,” Ellabella said. “I am curious. But I don’t have any real right to be. I’m feeling like a tabloid reporter right now. Digging through her things. After all, she hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s just made some weird choices. Tons of people have made even weirder choices.”
“She’s so selfish,” Frankie said.
“Which is not a crime.”
“But why’s she doing all this?”
“She’s a rolling stone, like Sailor said. If Ariel’s okay with it, we should be okay with it.”
“Ariel’s only okay with it because she doesn’t have my mom anymore.”
“Maybe you’re not okay with it because you don’t have your mom anymore.”
“I would like to think I’m not that ungenerous.”
Ellabella reached out and briefly hugged Frankie’s shoulder. “You’re not even a little ungenerous. But you’ve lost your mom and your best friend and even your dad, kind of, in a year and a half. You’ve become a mom and a wife. It would be just strange if you weren’t shook.”
Frankie looked away and studied the fireplace, above which were mounted two of the underwater nude photos Frankie had taken of Ellabella all those months ago.
“Why aren’t these down in the main foyer?” Frankie asked. “Right by the opulent tiled entry with the gilded cove ceiling?”
“That would be so Kitty Ballenger, wouldn’t it?” said Ellabella. “Trust me, they’ll be in the foyer in my own house someday. And like I told you, when my son’s friends come over, I promise you I will say, You know, that’s a picture of me, lads!”
“You can’t really see anything. Whoever took that must be a very taste-full photographer!”
“Veddy, veddy taste-full,” Ellabella said.
“So you’ll come over, right?”
Ellabella sighed.
Frankie said, “After this, I’ll withdraw from their business. I know what you mean. Gil says the same thing. He thinks I’m just trying to cook up a storm because I’m so used to being an action hero.”
Ariel, Frankie knew, was not a big fan of Frankie’s friendship with the reformed Ellabella, but she still wanted Ellabella’s reaction. She also hoped that if Ellabella and Gil were there, it might tamp down any fireworks.
That was a bold hope, which quickly turned faint.
Gil announced that he was having dinner with Penn at a taco place in Hyannis, but given the events, wished that the taco place was in Newfoundland. He did helpfully haul out one of the frozen confections left behind by his mother, an almond pound cake for which she’d also concocted a raspberry syrup.
“I was going to make a cake,” Frankie said as she bathed Atty, who was fetchingly making bubbles to attract her attention.
“This meeting will be hard enough without you making a cake,” Gil said.
“Not nice! I’m getting better,” Frankie protested. “At cooking.”
“Frankie, I’m a terrible cook! I never expected you to be a great cook because you’re a woman or something. All we have to do is survive on the food we make, right? A cake would be extraneous. We have to use up all these frozen bakery things anyhow, they get kind of strange after a few months.” He added, “I wasn’t talking about cooking. I was talking about the fact that I married into a domestic soap opera.”
“All families have drama.”
“Mine doesn’t. Not like this.”
“We’re Americans, Saint Gil!” Frankie said. “You caught us sort of at an odd moment.”
“I gather. Don’t you think that you’re sort of setting them both up?”
“Carlotta asked me to help persuade Ariel. I’m not going to do that. But it’s possible that Ari will feel like she can tell the truth if I’m here. I guess that’s what I think. Maybe I just want to tune in to The Real Fishwives of Cape Cod.”
They both laughed.
Just before the others arrived, Sailor came to take Atty over to the big house for a while. All over again, Frankie was moved by his capability and kindness with the baby. She caught herself in the wistful wish that Sailor were her father too, as well as Ariel’s. Indeed, she thought, he very nearly was.
When Ariel showed up, it was without Ben. “He’s home with Mack,” Ariel said, as if this was a matter of no consequence. “All he has to do is feed him and get him ready for bed.” To Frankie’s ears, she might as well have said, all he has to do is build a nuclear reactor. Her father had never, not once, read a bedtime story to her or Penn, although he had, she admitted, taught her to swim and to dive, to ski on snow and water, to see every secret thing that the natural world was hiding. Tonight in the house where she had grown up, in her mother’s peaceable kingdom by the sea, two old men were taking care of two little baby boys. Life was a hall of mirrors.
Thawed and slightly reheated, the cake was still dense and delicate and gone within half an hour. Frankie made coffee with cream and offered Frangelico for those who would, even taking a drop for herself. Everyone complimented Giselle in absentia. Ellabella, confounding Frankie anew with her ability to eat like a stevedore and look like a supermodel, consumed three slices and asked if she could take the last piece home.
And then Carlotta began.
“Ariel, I want to talk to you. I think it’s time we sold that condominium in Orleans. All that was possible after my mother died, and I’m sure it’s been nice for you to have the rental income all these years. And I need to find a place for myself, but I really don’t need three bedrooms and beach access—”
“No,” said Ariel.
“No,” Carlotta repeated. Her green gaze hardened, to something primordial. Frankie thought of the jellyfish that long-ago day in Hawaii, beautiful, ephemeral, deadly. “What? I really don’t need as much space as that, Ariel.”
“No, I am not signing anything. I am not selling the condominium.”
“That doesn’t really seem fair.”
Rage was a scent in the room, like the aftermath of a fireworks display. Frankie thought, here it comes.
“It doesn’t matter that you don’t think it’s fair. It is entirely my choice. That place is mine. I bought it after Grandma Sherry died, and I’ve taken care of it all these years. With help from Sailor, I now know, and yes, I know about everything he did for me, and I know that he is my real father, not some mythological Princeton asshole, and let me say this. I do know you’ve changed. I do want you in my life. But he has been a much better father to me than you have been a mother.”
“He told you about that?”
Ariel said, “Yes. He did. It was about time. I want him to be part of my life and part of Ben’s life. I already let the renters know that it’s their lucky day and they can stay in the condominium for the foreseeable future.”
“Ariel, I need a place for myself. And it was my mother’s money that bought that condo.”
“That may be, but it came to me. I assume you don’t want me to talk about this here, but if you need money, at least until you get a job, I can help you out. I’m sure Mack won’t mind.”
“Ariel, listen—”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“We need to work this out, Ariel.”
Ariel said, “Okay. Let’s work it out. Let’s start with why you left me here and took off for a dozen years?”
“The short answer is I didn’t know where I was going, didn’t know if it would be the best place for a child. I just couldn’t take you with me.”
“Well, let’s have the long answer, then. Was it too dangerous? Did you work for a drug cartel? Did you smuggle diamonds? Did you steal intellectual property? What were you actually doing all those years?”
Carlotta said, “I was thinking of you, not me.”
“The way I see it, you were thinking of you, not me. The way it seems, until the last couple of months, everything in your world came before me.”
Carlotta got up fast, her hip nudging the table. All the delicate coffee cups, which had been Beatrice’s, shuddered like acorns on an autumnal tree. “I don’t have to listen to this,” she said.
“Just this one part,” Ariel said. “I told Frankie off. I yelled at Frankie, who has always been the one person on earth—well, her mother too—who was good and kind to me, who cared about me the way you can only care about somebody who’s your own.” Ariel turned to Frankie. “It’s true. I was cold to you, and I should never have been that way. I owe you and Beatrice my whole life, Frankie. And Mack too, now, and I’m sorry I hurt you. Because I love you, Frankie.”
Carlotta, feeling the shift in the air said, “Should I leave? Do you even want me here?”
“I don’t want you to leave, Mother. I want us to save whatever kind of family we have left. But on my terms. One thing for sure, I’m not giving Sailor up. He’s Ben’s grandfather. He’s a good man. As for whatever else we talk about—and there’s a lot to talk about—maybe this isn’t the time or the place.”
Frankie thought, please oh please, let’s not talk about the dead husbands or the hippie vegetable farm. But then, just at that moment, Carlotta burst out crying. She cried so hard and so genuinely, she was nearly bent double.
“Ari, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for being an awful mother and an awful person. I am so sorry I lost you. I just... I was so afraid. It was always Beatrice, Beatrice, Beatrice. She was so much better than me, and she had everything that I wanted and I was so jealous and so afraid. I wanted to be something. I wanted to be somebody, away from this place. I was afraid I’d end up alone and...crazy, like my own mother. Sherry was a waste of oxygen. Who—whatever set that cabin on fire, it was... She was probably better-off. Please, Ariel, give me another chance. Give me a chance to make it up to you. Please.”
After a few seconds that seemed to waver in space like wire stretched across a canyon, Ariel put her arms around Carlotta. “You have time, Mother. You have time to be the person you want to be. We all do. And yes, I loved Beatrice with all my heart. I will always miss her. But Beatrice was Frankie’s mother. You’re my mother. Life sometimes give you a second try.”
Frankie thought of Mack then. For an instant, she longed for her dad. No, she thought. She would stand firm. So would he. Until...until someone blinked. Or until it was too late. She was her father’s daughter.
Ellabella caught Frankie’s eye. Her look said plainly, You go, Ariel girl, but not for nothing was this Kitty Ballenger’s only daughter. “So,” Ellabella said. “Anybody going somewhere fabulous this summer?”
* * *
Life for the next few weeks rolled out an extravagant carpet of daffodils and tulips. Magnolias burst into bloom, their champagne sazzle scenting the air. No Cape Cod spring was ever too drizzly or cloudy for Beatrice, Frankie recalled. She always said the very morning air was like a fancy hydration treatment for your skin.
In due course, Frankie helped Penn and Ariel bring the few things Carlotta needed back into the big house. Most of the rest she left in the Ballengers’ garage. She had a line on one of the new studio apartments above the Salty Gal clothing store in Chatham, where she also found a job silk-screening prints of humpback whales and octopus onto seventy-five-dollar hoodies and thirty-dollar baby onesies, but those places wouldn’t be ready for tenants for a few more weeks. Frankie noticed that the wine box that contained all of Carlotta’s herbs and oils was no longer there. Why hadn’t she given some of that stuff to Simon for testing while she had the chance? A fair number of boxes were missing too. Carlotta had apparently showed up at the Ballengers’ door one day and told Kitty that she hoped it was okay to go into the garage and fill a few big construction-type trash bags with what she called the junk of a lifetime, stowing the bags in the trunk of her maroon Lexus and gaily waving goodbye. Several nights a week, Carlotta went back to tending bar at the beach club. She was a skillful, quick and personable barkeep, and they welcomed her. She told Frankie that some of the same guys there were sitting in the same seats as when she’d left. On her days off, Carlotta stayed with Ben so that Ariel could make belated headway with the mailings for the Saltwater Foundation. The Lexus was gone, replaced by a ten-year-old Toyota Corolla.
Frankie finished all of her prints for the paper-arts show and made ready for two new assignments—yet another underwater-face portrait of a sea otter and a close-up shot of a bottlenose dolphin. She needed to finish the seal triptychs as well.
Looking back, she would think of this time as the end of innocence—a shock, since she had imagined that innocence had ended the previous fall, when she learned that her widowed dad was marrying her best friend. Instead, her restored life was about to be eclipsed with a darkness unlike anything she ever could have predicted—although she would one day tell her children that she had never really asked herself about the metrics of what people fantasized about doing, what they planned to do and what they actually did, and how vast the gap was between them. Since everyone sometimes yearned to do things that conscience would never permit, Frankie would define this gap as morality.
* * *
Just before summer began in earnest, Ben got sick for what would turn out to be the last time.
In the translucent dawn of a Saturday morning, Penn called Frankie. He told her that Mack and Carlotta were with Ariel but wanted Frankie. Ben had had two seizures: he was much sicker than he’d ever been before. Frankie was already out in the boat with her helper from Woods Hole, not more than an hour away from finishing every angle of the seal triptychs. She hurried in, and her pilot explained that he would clean the boat but could not return later on that particular day. That was fine, Frankie told him. The project was well overdue, weeks overdue, but it would have to be more overdue than this. Frankie shrugged into clothes and set off for the hospital, only to turn the car around after a few miles. She went back into her house and extracted the two containers of homemade baby food from her freezer. Back in the car, she rushed through the blush summer light to the hospital, with an eerie sense that all of this had happened before, in just this way, and that the outcome was already ordained. If Ben was mortally ill, no matter what Simon Land said, it would be in part because of her evil envy, the cruel thoughts that flew about like hornets, punishing the innocent as well as the guilty. She called Sailor and left a message on his phone.
When she passed through the doors into Pediatric Intensive Care (without asking permission of anyone at all, since she didn’t feel like providing a complex family tree), she could hear a loud and sustained moaning, like a woman in labor. It was Carlotta, whom Frankie found sitting on the floor of Ben’s room, surrounded by nurses who offered her ice in a cup because she had fainted. Ariel saw Frankie and held up her arms like a child: Frankie enfolded her. They huddled together in the chair. Doctors were working over Ben in another part of the hospital. The seizures had not been life-threatening, but all seizures were serious, especially when they happened to a baby. Apparently, Ben’s fever was now normal, but neurological tests as well as the usual blood and stomach contents tests would follow. Mack, Ariel said, was filling out paperwork and making phone calls.
After murmuring reassuring noises to Ari, Frankie went to the nurses’ station and gave the containers to the nurse in charge, informing her that the doctors had asked her to bring these, for them and for the police if necessary. “Please hand these to the doctors, not to Mrs. Attleboro or her mother.”
When she returned to the room, she overheard Carlotta telling the nurses, “She nearly died from this same thing when she was little. I can’t go through this again...”
Frankie told Ariel, “What should I do? I’ll do anything you want.”
Ariel’s face was sculpted downward by despair. She asked Frankie to follow her into the hall. Only her clear green eyes moved as she said softly, “Please, please get my mother out of here. At least for a while. She’s driving me nuts. She’s driving everyone nuts. Make her stay back at Tall Trees. Just you come back.”
“But are you sure you want me to come back? You’ll tell me when to come back?”
Ariel said, “Of course.”
“So just...maybe call Gil. He’ll get in touch with me right away.”
“That’s good,” Ariel said.
They went back into Ben’s room.
“Carlotta, can you do me a favor? Come with me, just for an hour,” Frankie said. “I need your help taking the boat out. Remember you said you’d help me? I just need to be out for a few minutes, out by the seal nursery, for a project that has to be finished.” She added, “Mack and Ari are both here. You don’t have to worry.”
Carlotta scanned the room, gazing for a long time at a space just above Ariel’s head. Later, Frankie thought it seemed as though she’d been adding up a column of figures, and the answer was as close to correct as she could get it. “Okay,” she finally said quietly and to Ariel, “Will you be all right?” Ariel nodded, her eyes signaling Frankie.
This would work.
Simply depositing Carlotta at the big house wouldn’t work. There would be an argument. Carlotta might call Ariel or call the hospital, both distinctly bad options. No, she would pretend that she was actually so obsessed with finishing her shoot that she would leave Ariel’s side with Ben in intensive care. She was betting on the fact that someone so single-minded about her own desires as Carlotta wouldn’t find this choice unspeakably callous. And indeed, in the car, Carlotta seemed to recover her customary chipper, chatty demeanor. She told Frankie that she would be fine piloting the boat. Frankie decided that for such a short, shallow dive, she would use the Aqua Spiritus. She explained to Carlotta what it was and how it worked and asked her if she could monitor the compressor once the boat was anchored. It was simply a matter of turning the device on and if it started to sound funny, Frankie said, turning it off. The battery was charged, she was sure of that. Carlotta said, sure, that would work.
