Page 39

Chappaquiddick

The Chappy ferry parked at the tiny terminal on the other side of the harbor, Virgie adjusting her thighs as they stuck to the seats with humidity.

She raced off the tiny ferry, the laughter of summer tourists punctuating her thoughts as she said a prayer to Louisa in the front seat.

“Please don’t let her be dead. Please tell me she didn’t find Pamela dead. ”

Louisa licked her pallid lips, her eyes darting about the roadway.

For a second, Virgie couldn’t remember where his house was, her mind whirring with worry.

She blew by the driveway with the hand-painted sign reading, S UNDAY .

Turning the car around with a screeching halt, Virgie pulled down the bumpy dirt driveway, wondering if the children had called an ambulance.

Parking, she sprinted through the front door.

James had his body draped over his mother’s, who was lying on the floor, while Betsy sat on the couch with a brown velour throw blanket around her shoulders, shivering, despite the eighty degrees. “Honey, go to the car,” she said, instructing Louisa and Aggie to usher their baby sister outside.

A quick sweep of the room with her eyes.

The house was still immaculate. The plastic remained on the sofa; the counters wiped clean.

Two empty bottles of wine in the sink, a glass shattered on the floor near Pamela’s fuzzy slippers.

Virgie nudged the boy’s small shoulder. “James, it’s okay.

Sit up, dear. Let me get a look at her.”

The child didn’t move, so Virgie reached under his arms and lifted him. His lips were inflamed, his nose goopy. “Stop,” he roared. “Let me go!”

Virgie checked for a pulse. The woman’s hands were warm and pink, the beds of her fingernails with color, a good sign. In her veiny wrist she felt the ticking of her heart.

“She’s okay, James. She’s okay.”

Virgie felt her own eyes well up at the sight of the boy sitting up on his knees, yelling at his mother’s unmoving form, a slight rise and fall in her marigold sweater, thinning at the seams. “I hate you!” he said.

“You don’t mean that.” But she remembered feeling similarly whenever her mother slipped into a drunken state, wishing her dead each time she woke up with a headache so powerful she’d keep the shades drawn the entire day.

“James, she’s not out of the woods yet. We must get her help. Did you and Betsy call 911?”

He held his mother’s hand, nodding.

Why hadn’t she called Pamela every morning this week? She knew how lonely she was, and she’d done nothing. Why hadn’t she invited her over for tea?

Virgie peeled her eyes from the child. Outside, she found Betsy in the back seat in Louisa’s arms. She kissed her youngest daughter’s smooth forehead. “She’s okay, Betts. She drank too much and passed out, but she’s going to be okay.”

Betsy sniffled into the blanket. “Do you promise?”

A siren blared, getting louder, tires racing along the dirt road.

An officer jumped out of the squad car, and Virgie followed as he pushed open the front door.

She told him the woman had drunk too much, and his face fell when he found the boy, sitting crisscross beside his mother, his face buried in his hands.

The officer checked for a pulse, then pulled a small brown bottle out of his pocket and poured some into a cap, waving the smelling salts under her nose.

Pamela coughed and sat up with a start, coughing again and looking about the room like the lights were much too bright.

“Mommy!” James slammed his entire body into his mother, hugging her, and she pressed all one hundred pounds of herself against his small hands, steadying herself.

“Oh, honey,” Pamela managed, her eyes blinking twice, trying to make sense of the police officer crouched by her kitchen table.

The officer stood, addressing Virgie. “She looks okay to me. Will you keep watch over her for a bit? If anything changes, call Doc Stewart.”

Pamela began to cry into her son’s unbrushed hair.

The officer left immediately, and Virgie returned outside to her daughters, leaning into the window where Louisa was sitting in the passenger seat.

“She’s conscious now but very sleepy. James is saying good night to her, and then he’ll come with us when I take you girls’ home.

Aggie, can you serve the pasta? Betsy, you watch over James, and Louisa, you put Betsy and James to bed at nine.

I need to stay with Pamela for a while.”

Betsy began to cry. “Can we make her stop?”

“I’m sorry you had to see that.” Virgie pulled her youngest daughter out of the car and into her arms, her long legs dangling by her side. “She needs to want to stop. No one can make her.”

At the front door, James kicked at an uneven stone, then trudged toward them with his head low. He got in the back seat, his hands wringing at the corner of a small, tattered blanket. “She’s going to be okay, James. That’s good, right?” Betsy tried to sound upbeat, but he didn’t answer.

After taking the ferry back to Edgartown and dropping the children at the cottage on South Water Street, Virgie just wanted to lose herself in a book and allow her thoughts to make sense of what happened.

But she needed to save Pamela from herself.

Steering the car back onto Chappy, Virgie parked out front of the Sunday house, inhaling the smell of the linden trees.

It’s going to be okay , she told herself.

Lying on the couch and watching the television on silent, Pamela’s eyes looked glazed over.

Virgie covered her with a blanket and pressed a cool compress to her head.

Then she cleaned up the broken glass, wiped out the sink, and hunted the house for bottles of wine, tossing them in the trash.

It was dark when Pamela roused again, and she blinked her eyes open and closed.

“I’m so embarrassed.” Pamela stared at the television. “You don’t have to stay here, Virgie. I know you need to go home.”

Virgie sat at the end of the sofa, the plastic cover crinkling under her. “I sent James and Betsy over on the boat to invite you to dinner tonight. They thought you were dead.”

The woman grimaced. “Dear god. I’m so sorry.”

“James is at my house and he’s going to stay the night. I didn’t want to leave until you were okay.”

Her voice was hoarse, and Pamela played with the corners of the orange printed blanket. “You know when you stare at a piece of chocolate cake and you swear you’re not going to eat it, and then you breeze into the kitchen and take just one bite, then another, and soon you’ve eaten an entire slice?”

Virgie didn’t want to make a statement and disagree with her, so she nodded. “But you must try, Pamela. For James’s sake. There are meetings.”

She sniffled, lowering her chin in shame. “Sunday afternoons at the church.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve driven there and parked out front, but I never go in.” Pamela frowned. “I didn’t drink these last few weeks, not since you came to meet me. I needed that job, and I wanted to be good, for James and you.”

“What changed?”

Pamela glanced at the counter where the two bottles of wine had been.

“And then, when I served dinner to your important husband and that beautiful woman who was so smart, I started to feel useless. Like why was I even in this world when no one seemed to care that I was here?” Pamela pounded the blanket with her fists.

“And I’m not trying to sound like a sour sport here, but… ”

Virgie couldn’t believe that inviting Pamela into her home and giving her a job had somehow made her feel worse. “But what?” Virgie said.

“But I wake up in this house that I grew up in and I think to myself: I’m never going to leave this house. I’m going to die in this house, and sometimes I don’t see the point in living.”

A jabbing sensation spread through Virgie’s chest.

“It’s always worth living,” Virgie said.

This woman needed serious help. If you were this unhappy, it wasn’t enough to find a job or earn a degree or meet the right husband.

You had to dig down deep inside yourself and figure out what the source of your unhappiness was.

It was like a poison that would multiply inside you if you didn’t stop it.

Virgie scooted down the couch, so she was beside Pamela.

She thought of Charlie’s story about the woman at the Beech-Nut factory, how you could see a person’s entire life in their eyes.

“Pamela, you have a reason to live. His name is James.”

The woman raised her pale gray irises to Virgie’s, her expression pained. Pamela smiled faintly at her. “You’re right.”

Virgie wouldn’t kid herself into believing that solving Pamela’s problems would be simple, but it was essential, women giving each other the support they needed to believe that everything would be okay.

That they were in this terrible fight together.

And so she would find this woman a therapist, an AA meeting, a new start.

Virgie walked to the sink, filled a glass of water, and handed it to Pamela. “I want you to be okay.”

“I will be.” Pamela’s face was that of a woman used to convincing her loved ones that she would change.

Virgie’s lids weighed a hundred tons as she drove back to Edgartown at midnight, rolling down her window to keep herself awake during the drive.

When Virgie arrived home, she stepped into the living room, finding James sound asleep on the floor next to the sofa, clutching his baby blanket.

Betsy was on the couch, tucked into her red sleeping bag, her arm reaching over the zipper, her fingers intertwined with the boy’s below.

A simple comfort, holding hands.

Yet it frightened Virgie, how close the boy’s body was to Betsy’s, even if they were children still. She leaned over her sleeping daughter and nudged her gently. “You need to go up to your own bed.”

Maybe Charlie was right. Maybe Betsy should steer clear of this boy, of his troubled family. Pamela felt like a problem that Virgie was stuck with now.

Her daughter rose from the couch, raising her arms up with eyes half-closed, like she wanted to be carried up the crooked staircase. Virgie lifted her, a warmth spreading in her heart. For now, she was still a child, and Virgie could protect her.