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The three Sheridan sisters walked into the house together: Susan first, Christine second, and Lola third. A stooped and older version of their father awaited them at the kitchen counter: no longer the dominant and loud and powerful man who’d screamed at them as young children and teenagers. He placed the Inn keys on the countertop with a clank. His eyes seemed absolutely glued to Lola. Again, Susan was struck with the knowledge that Lola was the spitting image of their mother, Anna.
And now—she remembered: Lola was the same exact age Anna had been when she had died. She was thirty-eight years old.
Lola could sense what this had done to their father. She took a small step forward and said probably to save herself from his assertion that she was Anna, his Anna, “Hi, Dad. It’s me. Lorraine. Lola.”
Their father’s eyes weathered a few moments of confusion before coming into the present. “Lola. Wow. You came! I didn’t think you would.”
Susan breathed a sigh of relief. Tentatively, Lola stepped forward with her arms on either side of her and fell into a hug. Wes closed his eyes and inhaled slowly. When Lola drew back again, Wes marveled, “I can’t believe it. All my girls are in the house.”
It was decided that they would order pizza. There wasn’t time to cook, not with all the catching up the four of them had to do. Susan dialed and ordered three pizza pies, going a little overboard and adding some breadsticks and melted cheese to the list. The driver recognized her address as the Sheridan place and said he would bring it as soon as possible. “My dad told me what’s going on over there. All you girls back with your dad. You guys don’t deserve to wait around for your pizza.”
The Sheridan sisters and their father sat out on the picnic table, as another of the classic Vineyard sunsets drew itself over the horizon line and blurred the air with pinks and purple. Christine made sure everyone had a glass of wine, such was her way, and then sat and leaned against her hand and drew her eyes from their dad to Lola and back to Susan.
“When did you get in?” Wes finally asked his youngest, his hands flitting around on the top of the picnic table.
“Just this afternoon,” Lola admitted. “It was surreal getting on the ferry again at Falmouth. It was like no time had passed. I was still eighteen years old, getting off the island for the first time. On my own.”
“I remember that day really well,” Wes affirmed, his voice several notches lower than it had been. “I remember thinking that that was the last day I ever had to be a father.”
“Had to be a father,” Christine chimed in. “You make it sound like it was this horrible thing that happened to you.”
Wes’s eyes looked troubled and far away for a moment. Susan swallowed, searching her mind for something to resolve the awkwardness. Finally, Wes gave a shrug and said, “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry.”
There was a strange pause. Finally, Susan uttered, “It’s okay, Dad. Really.”
There was a knock at the door. Christine ambled up to go fetch the pizzas. Susan breathed a sigh of relief. They fell into easy conversation about pizzas: the toppings they liked, the places they frequented in their various cities. Lola insisted that the best pizza in the world came from Boston, and Christine scoffed at her and said, “Really? Because I think New Yorkers would fight you on that one. And they wouldn’t be very nice about it!”
“You’re all so worldly,” Wes said, his smile wide and his lips heavy with grease. “I can’t imagine the lives you’ve all had. All the experiences you’ve had. Susan, a criminal lawyer! You must have interacted with some of the strangest people. And Christine, working in all those restaurants! Lola, you must tell us—who have you interviewed with recently?”
Lola glowed with excitement. “I just had a big interview with an up and coming musician out of Boston. Very handsome. I think he’s going to be famous, although it’s always difficult to tell.”
“And Lola. Your daughter. She must be what, ten now?” Wes said, scratching his head.
Lola’s eyes darkened. Again, Susan felt the air shift. She sipped her wine a bit too quickly, waiting. This was Lola’s fight to wage.
“Actually, Audrey is nineteen now,” Lola said.
“Audrey is nineteen? You have got to be kidding me,” he said.
“Nope. She’s off at Penn State studying journalism.”
“That must have been tough. Your first year with no kid at home, huh?” Susan said. “I remember when Amanda went away. I looked around our big house and wondered what it was all for.”
“Luckily for me, I guess, I never had such a big place. It was just me and Audrey for so long,” Lola said.
Again, Wes looked confused. He clucked his tongue and then pressed a napkin against his lips.
“Do you have something to say, Dad?” Lola asked.
“I just. That man. Audrey’s father.”
“Yeah?” Lola said.
Wes shifted. “Where did he go? I mean, did you... did you split up?”
Lola’s face grew tense. Obviously, they’d gotten to the core of her issues much too quickly. Christine matched Susan with her wine-drinking.
“That is just like you, Dad,” Lola blurted.
Wes furrowed his brow. Obviously, he was confused and tilted his head to the side. “I’m sorry. Have I said something wrong again?”
“You just want to point out to me that I don’t have the perfect little family that you had. Isn’t that right?” Lola blurted out as she held his stare.
She shot up from the picnic table and wound her hair into a ponytail. She looked frantic. “Timothy and I broke up fifteen years ago. I called you and told you when it happened. And don’t you remember what you told me?”
Wes shook his head. He looked like a child who’d just gotten into a great deal of trouble at school.
“I told you that he was abusive. I told you that I couldn’t stay with him, no matter how hard I tried. And you told me that I should really work for it. You told me marriage takes work. You told me that I needed to think of Audrey before I kicked him out,” Lola sputtered. She looked on the verge of tears.
Wes dropped his chin to his chest and closed his eyes.
“He doesn’t remember, Lola. Can you just please sit back down?” Susan murmured. She pressed her palm on Lola’s arm to try and calm her, but it was no use.
“No. I can’t just sit down, Susan,” Lola said. She shot up and barreled down the porch steps and ambled toward the Sound. All three members of the Sheridan family looked down at her as she raced across the rocks.
“Shoot,” Christine murmured. She, too, shot up and raced toward Lola.
Susan remained at the table, unsure of what to do. She felt she couldn’t leave her dad, not like this. The pain of the past twenty-five years lurked in a cloud over the top of all of them.
“Dad. Are you okay?” She finally asked. She looked up at him to see—not the man Lola and Christine thought he was, but an older man with regrets.
“Yes. I’m okay,” Wes said sadly. “I might head up to bed if that’s okay.”
“Of course. I know you must be tired after your long day.”
Wes disappeared. Susan watched him creep up the steps. When the light turned out, she moved toward the steps of the porch and walked slowly toward her sisters. Lola stood up near the water, her arms flailing as she had some kind of tantrum, in conversation with Christine. When Susan reached them, Lola whirled around, her eyes bloodshot.
“Why did you bring us here, Susan?” Lola demanded. She smashed her palms on her thighs and balked. “You must think we’re all just so willing to forgive and forget, like you, but we’re not.”
Susan collapsed on the rock next to Christine. Suddenly, overwhelmed with everything, she burst into tears herself. Since she was the older sister, the one meant to keep it all together, both Christine and Lola huddled around her and held her close.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Lola murmured into her ear. “I really didn’t mean to be so harsh.”
“No. I understand why you are. It’s weird being here. I can feel her in everything. And Lola, you look...” Susan began.
“I know. I look just like her. It’s horrible.”
“And wonderful at the same time,” Christine said. “It’s like I’m seeing her again after so long. I only have a few photographs. I curse myself every single day because I don’t have any more photographs.”
The girls held one another there on the rocks for a long time, watching as the waves crashed into the shore. Susan heaved a sigh.
“Family drama, huh?” Christine said with a laugh. “I think that’s our forte.”
“I don’t know anyone with more,” Lola said, wiping a tear from her cheek.
“Susan, maybe it’s about time you pulled out that weed pen,” Christine said.
“What?” Lola asked, incredulous.
Susan shook her head. “No. I don’t. I mean.” She fumbled over her words. It couldn’t be now.
After another moment of silence, Lola said, “I still think about that night all the time. When Dad came home drenched to his bones, he was screaming and crying at all of us to get out of the way and then he just collapsed in a heap on the porch. Right where the picnic table is.”
“I remember,” Susan whispered.
“Susie, you tried to calm him down. You were only seventeen, and you acted like you were so much older. Ordering us to brew coffee and call Aunt Kerry. When Aunt Kerry got there, she had also been crying! That’s when we knew something was really off,” Christine said.
“A stupid boat accident,” Lola mumbled.
“How could he have been so careless? He was always so safe on the water,” Christine said. She said it like a plea, as though she needed to know why this reality was still their reality. “And the lights were off?”
“He would never talk about it,” Susan said as she rubbed her hands together.
It was just what they’d heard from other people on the island. A tourist family had rammed themselves into their mother and father in the Nantucket Sound just after sunset. Their mother had drowned.
“They tell you about the finality of death, but they don’t tell you that you have to keep going afterward,” Lola murmured. “Now that I’m thirty-eight, I think about it all the time. I want to make sure Audrey still has me. I look three or four times before I cross the street. I hardly drink.”
“You had to live here with him for years and years after it happened,” Susan said suddenly. She pressed her lips together. “I should have done something about that.”
“You were raising kids of your own,” Lola said. “And you wanted to go to law school. You wanted to create a whole different world.”
“We were all each other’s baggage,” Christine stated to her sisters.
It was harsh, but it reeked of truth. Susan shuddered and held her sisters closer to her. They wept over the next hour: for the mother they had lost, for the father they weren’t sure they could ever forgive, for all the time they’d lost with one another. It hadn’t been their fault, but they hadn’t handled it the way any of them might have wanted. This was the nature of gut-wrenching events in your life, Susan supposed. They happened like a bomb, and then the debris was cast into all other areas of your existence. You thought you’d escaped it until you stood up and found another shard of glass in your leg.
“I thought maybe I wanted to leave,” Lola said finally, sniffling. “But if Dad is as confused as you say, I can’t really be so harsh with him.”
“He’s struggling for sure, and it’s only going to get worse,” Susan admitted. “And I could really use your help cleaning up the house and the Inn if you’re willing to help out.”
“I don’t have another assignment for a few weeks,” Lola admitted. “And Audrey is away at an internship in Chicago. Like you, I guess, I don’t have anything else to return to—for now. Plus, I can work remotely.”
Slowly, the three sisters returned to their house. Like in the old days, Susan slept in her bedroom, while Lola and Christine shared the other, with its two twin beds. Susan closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself back into that summer before her mother had died.
The days they’d gone swimming and boating as a family.
The long sun-drenched day when they had shared a strawberry shortcake at Felix Neck.
The laughter, the love, the endless mother-kisses.
Then, there was the screaming, the yelling, the seemingly endless abuse from their father. She and her sisters had listened to him tear at their mother throughout many nights as they’d quivered in their beds, wondering what would happen next.
Divorce had never been a possibility, not in their minds. It was the nineties, sure—a very pro-divorce era—but nobody in their family had divorced; neither had their friends.
And then, the accident happened.
The screaming hadn’t stopped, though. It had barreled at them, the Sheridan sisters—a dirty secret they couldn’t share with the rest of the island.
They had run. They had run as fast as they could away from this place.
And now, they were back.
And maybe it had all been a mistake.