JOANNA NEEDED A ROUTINE TO FEND OFF THE ENCROACHING sense of limbo. Not exactly limbo, though. It was more a dual desire to evade and yet to claim everything around her all the time, a hybrid of claustrophobia and covetousness. It was hard to simply be, when half the time she was anxious to get back to New York and figure out her future, and the other half wondered what would make her most homesick for the Vineyard once she got back to New York. She determined to spend one afternoon per week cooking easy-to-reheat dishes—stews, casseroles, lasagnas—that she could feed Hank on short notice. His narcotically enhanced boredom both fueled and suppressed his appetite in turn, and she required a quick-fire defense against Hangry Man. This meant he would be eating the same two or three dishes for lunch and dinner all week, something he was happy to complain about.
“You don’t have to insult my clam chowder [seafood stew, tuna casserole, turkey lasagna],” she would say, to which he would reply, the diagonal smirk on his face, “Oh, but I insist! It’s no trouble at all.” And then he’d bust out with an affectionate chortle.
But most days found him in pain, sometimes too wobbly from the painkillers to get around safely, even for his allotted thirty minutes. Then he would sag against her as she helped him toward the bathroom or his bedroom. This is our dress rehearsal, she would think. Someday we’ll be doing this for real. She’d be filled with tenderness, and she’d see in his eyes that it was mutual.
Then he’d make a fart joke, and things were back to normal.
(He also managed, infuriatingly, to win every game of Scrabble they played, although it was usually because of one extraordinarily lucky play, such as “jinx” on a triple-word score.)
She tried to talk with Brian every evening, but the unspoken question of their future weighed down the silence between their words. Especially when he asked how she would feel if he saw other people, casually, until they finally had The Talk. Both relieved and annoyed, is how she felt. “You should do what works for you,” is what she said. She tried to walk with Celia and her dog every other afternoon, weather permitting. “Weather permitting” was a subjective phrase, it turned out. It meant one thing to hardened New Englanders and something else to former New Englanders.
“But kiddo, this is the best time of year for walking the beach!” Celia would insist. “No tourists! No summer people! We get all the sea glass to ourselves!” And so Joanna would bundle herself in Aunt Jen’s shapeless down coat—not the one with the duct tape—and join Celia and her yellow Lab, Hops, on Lambert’s Cove Beach. Depending upon the mood of the weather gods, the beach was either soft, smooth sand, or else tumbled with stones. The water and wind displaced tons of sand, and then deposited it all hither and yon with a capriciousness even seasoned beach walkers could never predict. The sand was finer here than on the long straight stretch of the south shore, and the water marginally warmer, since it was Vineyard Sound and not the Atlantic Ocean. Not that anyone went into the water this time of year. Not even Hops. It was soothing to walk the mile stretch up to Split Rock and back, listening to Celia’s entertaining patter about the personalities she worked with at the bakery, and the unsurprising melodrama of the early morning customers: tradesmen, mostly; caretakers about to make their rounds; ER nurses getting off duty; teachers up early for a morning run before school started. Everyone’s life touched everyone else’s, usually through some liquid conduit: blood ties, or sex, or drink. This one was the brother of that one’s ex. That other one had once been this one’s landlord, or perhaps they’d tried to start a business together and wanted to gossip to the bakery girls about why their former partner was the one to blame for the failure. As a written narrative it would have been tedious and predictable, but colored with Celia’s buoyant expressions it was good distraction as they pushed against the frosty wind, leaving boot prints in the damp sand.
“Until you’re ready to come back to New York and test-drive my new bedroom, I don’t see much point in chatting,” Brian said pleasantly one day. “I love hearing your voice, but let’s not pretend things are normal. I’ll spring for your plane fare. Come home as soon as you can, even for an overnight. Until then, have a nice February.”
EVENINGS WEREN’T GOOD for Celia. She was a baker, and up hours before dawn. But she braced herself one week, and came to dinner. She brought a nice bottle of red wine, even though she knew Hank, a self-described Cheap Yankee Bastard, only drank beer and rum these days.
So she also brought some beer her boyfriend Ted had just made. “Here y’go,” she said, grinning, placing an unmarked brown bottle in front of him. “This is better than cheap, it’s free.”
Hank, sitting upright at the table, looked tickled by the gift. “And what’s this called?” he asked. He pushed the cat off the table and twisted the bottle cap off with callused hands. “Is it another Game of Thrones drug like the valerian?” He sniffed it. “Mm, smells hoppy.”
“We call it Takemmy Brew,” said Celia, watching him take his first slug of it. “Cuz we brewed it right here in Takemmy.”
“Isn’t that cultural appropriation?” asked Hank, mischievous. “Are you even allowed to say ‘Takemmy’ for ‘West Tisbury’ if you’re not a member of the Wampanoag tribe?”
“Hank, you’re absolutely right,” said Celia. “That’s why white people never call it Massachusetts. Instead we say Wicked-Pissah Red Sox Nation of Asshole Drivers. Speaking of the valerian, how’d you like it?”
He swallowed, set the bottle down, grimaced. “Haven’t tried it yet,” he confessed. “It looked murky.”
“That’s what happens when you soak fibrous roots in vodka for a month,” Joanna said.
His eyes widened. “Vodka? Celia, honey, you didn’t tell me it was vodka. That changes everything. Dear Celia,” he said briskly, as if dictating a letter, “I would like to order a fifth of valerian tincture, please.”
“We have to find you something productive to do,” Joanna said, trying not to sound exasperated.
“You mean other than drink?” He said it with a defiant but self-conscious grin. “Can’t imagine why I’m doing that. There’s such an embarrassment of riches to do while I am stuck on my ass on the couch, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of winter. Oh, look,” he said, with exaggerated glee, and picked up the remote control. “I can argue with Sanjay Gupta!”
“I think,” said Celia, “that it is finally time for you to host a poker game.”
Hank burst out laughing. “I’m a dreadful poker player,” he confessed proudly. “What I can do—you know what I can do? I play a mean game of Scrabble.”
“That’s true. Let’s invite some people over for Scrabble,” Joanna said immediately.
He gave her an incredulous look. “You don’t invite people over for Scrabble. You invite people over for dinner, and then after dinner, you play Scrabble. Maybe. If everyone else has had enough to drink.” And then conspiratorially to Celia, “That’s the best way to win.”
She nodded. “Thank you, Hank,” she said. “I will remember that tip and use it to beat you at Scrabble sometime soon. Meanwhile, maybe you need to improve your poker game. Ted can come teach you. Show you a few tricks. He’s kind of a shark, but he’ll take good care of you.”
“Well,” said Hank, shooting a glance in Joanna’s direction, “I’m glad somebody will.”
“Hey,” Joanna said, more sharply than she should have. “I’ve been feeding you, doing your laundry, helping you in and out of bed—”
“But you’re not entertaining me, Anna,” he said. “Right now, more than anything else—even more than valerian tincture—I need some fucking entertainment! Gah!” He said this to the ceiling. “There is nothing more boring! Than this! Just existing! It’s enough to make me get back into politics.”
“God forbid,” laughed Celia.
God forbid, thought Joanna.
* * *
Realizing Joanna would never rally as a sportswriter, Everett took her off basketball patrol. Now she wrote about the state Scholastic Awards. This mostly meant taking the press release from the high school and beefing it up with brief personal interviews of all the happy student winners. It was strange, almost eerie, to wander the hallways of her youth and see that some of the teachers were younger than she was.
Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School existed in the midst of a few hundred acres that would never be featured on postcards or coffee table books: a flat expanse of fields, scrub oak, and lanky pines, straddling one of the dullest roads on the island, a narrow inland highway from Vineyard Haven to Edgartown (called, imaginatively, the Vineyard Haven–Edgartown Road by most, and the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road by others). Across the street was Community Services, the ice rink, the YMCA, a cement skateboard park. The youth of the island could, and many did, spend most of their waking hours in this self-contained enclave, enjoying each other and their shared activities, but indifferent to all the things that made Martha’s Vineyard the Martha’s Vineyard of the off-Island imagination. No wonder so many were so ready to fledge to America, where they’d stare dumbly at the off-Islanders who waxed rhapsodic about how lucky they were to have grown up on such a picturesque island. Having become a summer person over the years, she’d wiped all this from her memory, but it crept back in as soon as she’d parked the truck in the high school lot.
Everett also sent her to report on a “merger” between Our Vineyard Bank and ABB, a massive off-Island financial institution. (That would be the Vineyard description of ABB. Most other humans would describe ABB as a massive international financial institution.) She interviewed old friends whose families had had accounts at Our Vineyard Bank for generations. It seemed to her that Everett skewed his editing to highlight the people who were happy about the buyout and underreport the ones who were disgruntled.
“I’m not doing that,” he assured her with his terrier zest, when she brought this complaint to him at his unfurnished desk. “I’m not saying we don’t have a bias here, but that’s not an example of it. You don’t like the idea of the buyout, but you can’t say that in the article. You want to quote people who share your perception but are free to speak it in a way you aren’t. My allowing you to write such a piece—that would show a bias.”
“I’m used to my perception being a valued part of what I write,” she said. “That’s how I pay my bills.”
“Maybe we’ll keep you away from business reporting, then,” he said. “I hate to think of you starting a local recession accidentally.”
That was also Joanna’s first week writing up the news briefs. She liked these because her name was not attached to them, so if she got something wrong she didn’t have to worry about being scolded at the post office or the grocery store. Writing profiles of litigiously narcissistic celebrities wasn’t stressful. Misrepresenting the neighbor’s opinion on feral turkeys while misspelling his name—that was stressful.
And as for the news on charming, picturesque Martha’s Vineyard, that bleak fortnight in February: A public forum was called by state wildlife rangers to discuss the merits of extending the deer-hunting season by an extra two weeks in an attempt to cull the herds, which would hopefully, in turn, rein in Lyme disease. The Vineyard had a Lyme infection rate twelve times the national average. Everyone knew deer ticks relied more on white-footed field mice than on deer, but Bambi always took the rap on this topic, possibly because Bambi was tastier than white-footed field mice.
Also in the news:
The hospital and Community Services were celebrating the one-year anniversary of partnership with Falmouth Halfway House, on the Cape. Everybody always wanted to see addicts getting help—as long as it wasn’t in their neighborhood.
A new affordable-housing project was coming up for review at the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. Everybody always wanted to see affordable housing get a green light—as long as it wasn’t in their neighborhood.
(The exception to this had been Henry Holmes, who’d cannily donated several acres to the town for such a development, with the agreement that he retain timber rights.)
There were also a couple of updates on trials related to domestic violence, and in one case, sexual assault of a minor.
Finally, the Possible Dreams Auction was getting a new home. This annual fund-raiser was an authentic intersection of the Vineyard’s wealthy summer population, its famous summer population, and its actual population. The celebrities offered themselves, or perks only they could provide, to the wealthy people. The wealthy people paid extravagant amounts to have cocktails, or a sunset sail, or a walk-on role, or a view from the owner’s box, or a serenade, or a painting, or a portrait, or a peanut butter sandwich, with the celebrities. All of the profit went to Community Services, the nonprofit that strove to keep the year-round working-class population from going off the rails.
She dutifully read the competition’s news briefs. The “Newes in Brief” covered the Possible Dreams Auction, of course, for who would not enjoy reading about such gracious generosity on the part of our very own celebrities and benefactors?
Oh, God, Joanna thought, cringing. Sometimes my inner Hank is such an asshole.
The Newes did not mention any of the other things the Journal found worth reporting on. On the other hand, it offered updated info on the monthly poetry slam in Oak Bluffs and discussed several well-known historic buildings that would be getting face-lifts before summer. It also had an entertaining little paragraph titled “Stealing Heritage,” about nouveau-riche seasonal types pilfering the gray lichen-covered boulders from their neighbors’ ancient stone walls to create the illusion that their walls were ancient too. Newly quarried local rocks had a telltale orange hue to them, from so much iron in the soil. A reddish wall meant a newcomer’s wall. Nobody wanted to be known as a Johnny-come-lately.
She wished Everett would send her to poetry slams.
BY THE FOLLOWING week, Joanna had finally achieved something like a routine. Regular work hours. The regular Hank-chores of shopping, cooking, laundry, driving to PT appointments. Her childhood onus of filling the humidifiers in the rooms too dry from heating and emptying the dehumidifiers in the rooms too damp from lack of heating. Regular Scrabble games with Hank, which he kept winning. Regular Celia-coffees (or in Joanna’s case, tea) and Celia-walks on the windy, sometimes rocky North Shore beaches, wrapped in layers of wool and flannel. Regular affectionate-but-insubstantial texts to Brian, who responded with equally affectionate, equally insubstantial texts, and never with phone calls, which was both sad and relieving.
EVERETT TRUSTED HER with news briefs for a second week, and of course, she went to the next ZBA. This time, she felt slightly less like a deer in headlights.
The room had only a handful of people in it this time, mostly the usual suspects in the usual plaid and flannel. The cloudy gray day was darkening, as gray trees and gray-shingled houses began to fade from sight out the window in the gray dusk.
James Sherman was there again, lanky and bespectacled. His surprised pleasure from their previous meeting had shifted, though: now he eyed her almost suspiciously.
“Hey, James,” she said, settling into the chair beside him, grateful to feel, if not his peer, at least competent to be there beside him.
“You’re still doing this?” he asked, at his leisurely rate of speech. “I thought last time was just a one-off.”
That felt a little like a slap. “Well, I’m here for a while,” she said, unzipping her heavy coat and shrugging out of it. “Hank is going to need me around for a few more weeks at least, maybe longer. And, you know, it’s work, it’s income.” Seeing his expression unchanged, she added, with false heartiness, “Plus not a bad way to pad a résumé, since every off-Island outlet assumes anything associated with the Vineyard is glam.”
“You should be padding your résumé with real journalism. Why don’t you come work for the Newes? I’m sure Lewis and Laurie would be thrilled to have you there.”
“I couldn’t do that to Everett,” she said. She thought James would understand that, but she’d misjudged, for he made a face as if he smelled something terrible. She scrambled to undo whatever faux pas she’d just made: “I guess my loyalty to Everett doesn’t make sense to you since he abandoned the Newes for the Journal—”
He looked even more disgusted. “Oh, it’s not that. I get the whole changing camps thing, not everyone has the right sensibility for the Newes. I meant what I said before, about the Journal being an advertising rag. But it’s doing well because people like Everett are in their element there. And, sure, everyone has a right to thrive, and okay, yes, local businesses need more of a friend than maybe the Newes is willing to be.”
“So . . . ?” she prompted.
“He supported the YMCA.”
A pause. Joanna waited for the rest of his explanation.
But that was it, apparently. That was the crime.
“And?” she asked.
He shook his head. “If the whole point of the Journal is to be a pro-business paper for the Island, how can they justify supporting a mainland incursion like that?”
“James, it’s a nonprofit,” she said. “It’s independent from any other Y. That’s how the YMCA works.”
“It’s a huge ugly building that takes business away from the local health clubs.”
“It is a local health club.”
He shook his head. “It’s as much of a franchise as McDonald’s. It’s an incursion. I lost all respect for him when he made the editorial choice to be pro-Y.”
She hadn’t been here for the hoopla around the YMCA getting built, but she recalled there had been hoopla. Not having read anything either paper had published about it, she channeled her inner Hank now, possibly even reciting something he’d said to her in an email from years back:
“Speaking as a kid who grew up here, I gotta say maybe Everett was thinking that if the youth of the Vineyard are bored and drunk and high and heroin looks attractive, but then again so does aikido, and aikido is right across the road from the high school, then who cares if it’s a big ugly building? It’s keeping them functional.”
He gave her a look. “I don’t think this is worth getting into a tizzy about. Let’s drop it. Anyhow, they’re about to start.”
Irritably she turned her attention to the agenda. An artist wanted a variance on the setback for his studio. A small affordable housing project sought a comprehensive permit. Joanna’s boyfriend from second grade, now shockingly thinning on top, wanted to add a guest cottage; a proposal to expand the bike path up-Island was referred to the Commission. Once the board had addressed all the new business, it was time for old business, and the first of these was correspondence. The Minion Lawyer of Mr. Orion Smith wrote to announce he intended to go to superior court to institute a lawsuit under Chapter 240, section 14A, challenging the legality of the town bylaw forbidding helicopter use. The ZBA and the selectmen would be kept abreast of any legal developments if they did not choose to annul their vote on the helipad.
“He’s suing us,” said one of the board members, staring truculently at the email.
“He’s trying to scare us,” corrected Helen, and said very deliberately to James Sherman and Joanna: “This is not a legal document. He is not suing us.”
“He’s not suing us yet,” said the first board member.
“We get these kinds of threats all the time, these days,” said Helen. “It doesn’t mean a thing.” But she did not look happy.
“. . . AND THEN HE totally froze me out,” she said, as Hank howled with approving amusement from his recliner. “When the meeting was over he got up and left without even a nod goodbye. I mean he said goodbye to Helen and the others but walked right past me!”
“You bitch-slapped the Newes reporter!” he chortled, saluting her with a beer can. Raising his eyebrows hopefully, he asked, “Did Helen see? Did she hear what you said?”
“I doubt it, Hank. She was trying to start the meeting, she didn’t have time for the two reporters sitting in the corner getting hissy with each other.”
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Now just write up the ZBA report making it clear Orion Smith is a dick, and you’ve really earned that honey I gave you.”
JOANNA EDITED THE Valentines. Some of them were very Vineyard (“I love cuddling with you when the fish aren’t running”). Others were more generic, and led her to feel unpleasantly single. Singlehood was dreaded in winter on the Vineyard. Some excruciatingly unfortunate unions occurred in attempts to lower heating bills. Joanna had cousins enough that she had seen this in action over the years. She would not fall into that trap. She hoped.
On the thirteenth of February, as she sat in bed staring out her bedroom window at the hard, cold black of an up-Island winter night, Brian texted her: Will you be my Valentine? And a moment later added: In Manhattan?
She gathered the comforter around her, turned the space heater down so that she could hear better, and called him.
“Are you calling to say yes?” he answered, sounding happy.
“If I was closer I would,” she said. “But there’s no direct flights in winter, Hank won’t let me take the truck off-Island, and the bus takes seven hours if you include the ferry.” No wonder Orion Smith likes his helicopter, she thought. For a brief, shameful moment she wondered how she could meet Orion Smith, charm him into taking a fatherly interest in her, and then hitch a ride to Manhattan with him, to finally have The Talk with Brian. A moment later, she was very glad this couldn’t happen, as she still did not know what she’d actually want to say.
“You can get a lot of reading done in seven hours,” Brian was meanwhile suggesting, in his reasonable tone.
“Good point,” she said. “And I know you like to read, so why don’t you come here?”
There was a pause long enough to measure in heartbeats.
“Um,” he said. “I have no reason to go there. I mean except to see you, of course—but you have lots of reasons to come back here for a few days. This is where you live.”
It is? she almost asked aloud. Instead, after a steadying breath, she said, “It’s a big schlep for just a short visit, this time of year when the weather is so crappy. But I promise I’ll get back as soon as I can.”
“Here’s hoping ‘soon’ turns out to be one of those words we have the same definition for,” he said.
“I understand if you’re tired of waiting for me—”
“Joanna, sweetheart, no, you don’t get to do that,” he said. “I’ve given you an invitation. Reject it if you want to, but don’t try to make it look like I’ve rescinded it.”
She nodded, alone in the chilled bedroom. “All right,” she said, enervated. “Thanks for being patient. I’ll be back in town for sure by mid-March at the latest.”
“And then we can finally have The Talk,” he said, a shade too eagerly.
THAT WAS THE closest thing she had to nightlife. There really was no place to casually wander to up-Island. So much of the Vineyard was shuttered in February. There were only two places on the hundred square miles of island to buy a bag of potato chips after 9 P.M. And when she wanted something more than potato chips, well . . . Celia had an early night and everyone else her age had kids. She had never been one for bars. Sporadically—for amusement only—she would cruise local online dating sites. There were very few available men on the Vineyard, and most of them had photos of dogs, pickups, or fish in place of their profile photo. She did catch herself wondering about the availability of decent-looking men under forty whose path she crossed—in the feed store getting grain for the chickens; the propane-delivery man at the Journal; motorists waiting to be served at the gas station across the street from the paper, when she went there for cheap coffee. After a few days of idle contemplation, Brian in comparison seemed exactly right for her. But every time she’d pick up the phone to call him and tell him so, some part of her did not want to admit it.
* * *
The following week, Joanna did a feature on a new hardware store opening up-Island. She also covered the West Tisbury selectmen’s meeting, at which they decided to call a public forum to discuss the increasingly unfriendly situation with Mr. Orion Smith, infamous helicopter owner, who had used his helicopter at least once again. And there were news briefs, including a court date for the domestic violence case she’d mentioned, without going into details, the week before. It was Everett’s position as editor to keep the “ugly bits of life,” as he called them, on readers’ radars. In his childhood—which was also Hank’s childhood—nobody ever talked about anything tawdry or unpleasant, and so wives and children suffered in silence, for the sake of appearances, while their parents or husbands behaved atrociously and everyone just looked the other way. Everett had survived such an upbringing and now was adamant about never looking the other way, something Joanna had her own reasons to appreciate. Names were kept out of the paper, and sensationalistic details omitted, but every issue of the Journal had at least one article intended to rob readers of complacency. This week it was the domestic violence case.
But the big news, that final week of February, was Hank’s health.
Joanna had thought she’d soon be New York–bound. That she’d be returning to finally have The Talk with Brian. His texts (they had stopped speaking on the phone, again) made it clear he was very aware of her anticipated return date.
Hank had started physical therapy, but he hadn’t weaned off the prescription pain meds, and couldn’t put any weight at all on the broken foot, not even to test how much weight he could put on the broken foot. So it was no surprise to learn that he wasn’t healing right.
Joanna took him in for the X-ray that they thought would be the precursor to his getting the boot removed. But the same doctor who had spoken to her back in January called them both in to the overbright lab room to stare at the icy, backlit negative of Hank’s leg.
“You’re not laying down enough calcium here,” she said, pointing with a pencil eraser at what was obviously the fracture. “Which means the bone is not rebuilding.”
“What does that mean?” Hank demanded, as if she were accusing him of something.
She sat up straighter in her cushioned swivel chair. “Just that it’s going to take a little longer,” she said, briskly comforting. “Just means we keep on keeping on, maybe even dial it back a little, okay? No weight-bearing at all, use the crutches one hundred percent of the time, and keep it elevated. Come back in two weeks for another X-ray.”
“Oh, great,” Hank muttered.
“And I’ll renew the scrip for the pain meds,” she added.
“Oh, great,” Joanna muttered.
BACK HOME, SHE emailed Everett, Celia, Helen Javier and her husband, Paul, and a few others with an update. Then she fed the cats, slipped a couple pieces of eggplant parmigiana in the oven to reheat, went into her room, and called Brian to tell him her return would be delayed.
It went to voice mail. She considered just asking him to call her, but then it felt less exhausting to simply leave a message now. So she did. Three hours later, he sent a text saying, OK. Sorry to hear it.
SHE COULD HAVE gone to New York for a check-in, a weekend, a few days. Objectively she certainly could have done that. But Island Psychology seized up her brain, perhaps because it was always in control of Hank’s and she was trying to calibrate to him. According to Island Psychology, off-Island was very far away. It could have been Boston or Taiwan, there was just a few hours in the difference. The obstacle—also the buffer, also the safety net—was Vineyard Sound. This band of water, traversable in fifteen minutes if you happened to own a motorboat, made a trip to New York feel five times more time-consuming and exhausting than it really was, especially now that she was so out of the habit of making the trip. Hank claimed he didn’t care if she went, but he said it with enough petulance in his tone that she knew he’d consider her going back to New York even for a weekend tantamount to abandoning him permanently. Could she have simply bought a bus ticket? Objectively speaking, yes, of course. But it was out of the question. Especially given her increasing discomfort and confusion about The Talk With Brian that awaited her.
So a friend in New York vetted a subletter for her, but they needed a place for a year. She went with it. This took some pressure off financially. But it added a different class of pressure because now she would have nowhere to live in New York when she finally returned—unless she moved in with Brian. She could barely remember what Brian looked like. Sometimes she thought she was inventing him.
She was still stressed about money, and the only time the Vineyard was as quiet as February was March. At least April had Annual Town Meetings to get upset about, and by May everyone was bracing themselves for summer.
On the plus side, March was three days longer than February. But that wasn’t enough to amend her take-home pay.
So she called Mr. C.
SHE STILL THOUGHT of Paolo Croce as Mr. C even though she’d graduated from his Advanced Algebra years ago and had the right to address him as a grown-up. Her class had called him Mr. C; the name stuck and now some parents weren’t even clear what his whole name was. In addition to teaching math at the high school, he’d also moonlighted doing payroll for the Newes.
He’d been a fan of her writing on the school newspaper, and introduced her to the Newes’ editor-back-then, who had offered her the cushy internship of restaurant reviewing. Mr. C had retired from teaching by now, but last she’d heard he was still doing the Newes books.
The historic district in Edgartown was a close-nested neighborhood, with brick sidewalks and the morning aroma of baked bread wafting down narrow streets. The houses were old, in a tidy, grandmotherly way. Unlike the other towns, the empty streets did not feel abandoned in February, but simply quaint and quiet. In Oak Bluffs it was easy to imagine horse-drawn vehicles on main streets, and in Vineyard Haven one could imagine Model Ts. Edgartown evoked chiefly the foot traffic of past centuries.
The Newes offices were housed in a building nearly as stately as the paper’s masthead. Growing up, Joanna had known these as Whaling Captains’ houses, but when she went off to college and took an elective in architectural history, she realized most were Greek Revival and had been built by plenty of people, all over America, with no relationship to whaling. Broad whitewashed clapboard, dark louvered shutters framing the windows. Regal, but understated. A stoic Yankee retort to the southern plantation manor. The Whaling Captains’ houses mostly clustered here, at the eastern end of the Island. The grandest ones looked out over Edgartown Harbor toward the islet of Chappaquiddick. Edgartown, the first place white settlers had put down roots, had grown to be one of the great whaling ports of the Eastern Seaboard. Its sense of maritime exceptionalism never deserted it; a hundred years after whaling died out, it still boasted the “yachtingest of all yacht clubs” in New England.
The Newes building lived on a neat little one-way Edgartown street, where all the yards had thigh-high whitewashed fences with bare-branched bushes, over which roses and hydrangeas would later gush in time for the Fourth of July parade. Unlike most of its neighbors, the Newes building had given up its white clapboard sheath. Now it boasted simple cedar shingles, long aged to a velvety gray. Inside was an eccentrically intoxicating blend of architectural reserve and knuckle-down work environment. The receptionist, in her restricted little booth that had once been the coat closet, smiled politely, not remembering Joanna from fifteen or eighteen years ago, and asked what she was there for.
“I’m here to see Paolo Croce,” she said. The receptionist nodded, informed her desk console—freakishly out of place in a nineteenth-century house—and then smiled politely up at her. “He’s down the hall to the right,” she said. “Do you know it?”
“I can get myself there, thanks,” Joanna said, and passed by. The bare floorboards—wide, painted a steely blue-gray that matched the sky on a sulky winter day—croaked in tired protest under her step. The ceiling was lower than modern buildings, and as she traveled deeper back into the house, it gradually inched even lower. She passed by two narrow thumb-latch doors, then turned right through another thumb-latch door that stood ajar, to find a slender, dark-eyed man hunched behind a desk overflowing with files. Mr. C smiled when he saw her and sat up, more resembling the lithe figure she remembered from her youth. “Joey!” he said, and got up from his creaky wooden chair.
Until the name came out of his mouth, she’d nearly forgotten about her high school nickname. And until the name came out of his mouth, she’d also forgotten that she wrote those restaurant reviews under that name. Anna Howes had never had a byline in the Newes. Due to an ephemeral obsession with her Azorean middle name, she had insisted on publishing as Joey Dias that long-ago summer.
“How are you, Joey?” Mr. C asked, patting her on the back. “What are you doing back on the rock?” His voice was wispier than it had been when he was teaching. His pomaded hair was wispier too. With his Boston accent he could have passed as a genteel barber for the mafia.
“My uncle had a spill,” she said. “Helping him to get back on his feet.”
“Oh . . . I think I heard about that.”
Of course he’d heard about it, his wife worked at the hospital.
“It could have been worse,” she said.
He nodded sagely. “Glad it wasn’t. So how long you here for?”
She shrugged. “I dunno, maybe another month, month and a half? Depends on Hank’s health. Are they looking for freelancers here?”
“You want to write for the Newes? Man, Joey, they’d be lucky to have you, go talk to Lewis . . . Oh, do you know Lewis? I don’t think he was here yet when you were here.”
“Pamela was the editor,” she said.
“Yeah, Lewis is great, he came a couple years ago,” said Mr. C. “Want me to introduce you?”
“I’d really appreciate that, but there’s just one thing . . .” She hesitated. “Have you heard about how you can’t write for both papers?”
He smirked. “Yeah, the Journal apparently has some kind of policy about that.”
“The Journal, are you sure?” she asked. “The Journal thinks the Newes is the one with the policy.”
He jutted his lower lip out thoughtfully, shook his head. “I’ve never heard that. I mean it doesn’t really affect me down here, but everyone here thinks it’s the Journal. Why? Oh!” He gave her a conspiring look. “You’re writing for the Journal? Everett hired you?”
“Just as a freelancer. Y’know, for this short time I’m here.”
“Yeah, that guy loved you,” said Mr. C with a chuckle. “We used to debate which of us would adopt you. Nothing against Jen and Hank, but we never felt like they were worthy of you.”
“That’s sweet, but I don’t need to be adopted anymore. What I need is more work.”
“I’ll get you upstairs with Lewis. Let me see if he’s free now. It’s Friday but I think the edit meeting just ended, so he might still be around.” He punched something into his phone. An indicator light went red, then green, and a soft baritone voice said, “Lewis Worthington.”
“Hi, Lewis, it’s Paolo, downstairs. There’s a young woman here, an Islander—” And he quickly explained who she was. He didn’t use her name, whether by design or accident she couldn’t tell. Lewis was willing to see her, so Mr. C brought her up the steep old stairs that had once led to the servants’ quarters, and into the room that she remembered from years earlier as the editor’s office. It was a converted bedroom—not the master bedroom, which was reserved for the publisher—and overlooked the narrow, quiet street outside. The walls were lined with bookcases, with Banks’ History of Martha’s Vineyard being given pride of place, close at hand to the desk. The shelves not filled with distinguished-looking hardcovers had duck decoys nestled on them. Resting on the mantel above the decommissioned fireplace was a framed collection of Wampanoag arrowheads.
Lewis himself was precisely what Joanna would have expected for a Newes editor: oxford shirt (over a turtleneck, as it was winter), expensive wire spectacles, well-behaved yellow Lab lying on the braided rug.
“Lewis, this is Joey,” said Mr. C, before she could introduce herself. Joey. Not Joanna.
Lewis stood. He was very tall, with the slight apologetic stoop that some tall people have. He reached across his broad oak desk to shake her hand. His hand, she saw, had the mild calluses and short nails of a day sailor’s. The dog, happy to have visitors, rose and dawdled across the rug to press its damp nose into her other hand.
“Hi, pooch,” she said.
“That’s Nevin,” said Lewis.
“Hi, Nevin.” Then, because she couldn’t help herself: “I’m a Nevin, on my mom’s side. Who’s he named for?”
“The former owners of our house were Nevins,” said Lewis.
“I thought you were a Dias on your mom’s side,” said Mr. C.
“I am,” she said. “But on my mother’s mother’s side, I’m a Nevin.”
Both men chuckled, exchanging the look that wash-ashores gave the native-born when they grew precious about family connections. She ignored this. “That house on Pease’s Point way? The little Cape? That was my great-uncle’s.”
“Yes, that’s the one,” said Lewis, looking pleased. “Okay, so you’re a real Islander.” A glance to Mr. C. “And she used to write for us?”
“She worked under Everett when he was here,” Mr. C said unhelpfully.
“High school, summers,” she said. “It’s been a while.”
“What have you been doing since then?”
“Oh, um, writing. Under various names,” she said awkwardly, trying to think if she had ever published anything else under the name Joey Dias. Nope.
“Newspapers? Magazines?”
“Both,” she said, trying not to sound jittery. If he asked for links to her work, he’d see she was actually Anna Howes. Anna Howes worked for the enemy paper.
“She wrote that article about Nina Brown,” said Mr. C proudly. “You know, that one somebody had hanging by the coffee station for—”
“Oh, boy, I do remember that,” Lewis said, and smiled with respect. “The rock-star’s-favorite-cereal thing, right? Everyone was so proud that a former intern had hit the big time, even though you wrote it under some other name, didn’t you? For some reason?”
She made a dismissive gesture. “Yeah, I got a lot of work out of that piece. Grateful for it.”
“Okay, well, that sounds good to me,” said Lewis. “You’re in.”
Good Lord, she thought, that was easy. Small-town newspapers! Where else would a bookkeeper’s recommendation score you a position as a reporter? “We’re understaffed. Let me look at some of what you wrote for us, and we’ll take it from there. Did you go to J-school?”
“No. I took some journalism classes, but I was an English major, and I’d be much more comfortable doing features,” she said. “Or, y’know, reports. I have too much respect for investigative journalists to try to pass myself off as one.”
“Can you cover town government?” he asked, and turned his attention through his reading glasses to something on his computer screen. “Have you ever reported on, say, a committee meeting?”
“Yes, actually, I have.” Thank you, Everett.
“That’s great, we’re short next week because James Sherman just became a grandfather for the first time so he’s in Connecticut for a while—”
“She can absolutely cover James’s beat,” said Mr. C heartily.
She knew there was a problem with that. She just couldn’t rearrange the pieces in her mind to figure out what it was.
“Okay, introduce her to Laurie and see if she’s still in the system.” He gave her a patrician smile. “Thanks for stepping in. Glad we’re the ones to get you, instead of Everett and his salacious little coupon-delivery system of a paper.” He said this in such a gracious tone she almost didn’t register the meaning. “Looking forward to working with you.”
“Thanks,” she said, a little wide-eyed. “Mmm, how will I get my assignments?”
“I’ll call you directly, or else Laurie will handle it. Do you know her?” She shook her head. Her brain was trying to identify what the problem was with her taking over James Sherman’s beat.
“She’s sorta new,” said Mr. C to her. And then, almost apologetically, to Lewis: “By Joey’s standards, I mean.” He winked at her. “I’ll introduce you. Thanks, Lewis.”
“Thank you,” said Lewis. To Joanna: “And thank you.”
They let themselves out. Mr. C walked her toward the back of the building, down a narrow corridor with more thumb-latch doors along the length of it, and occasional small skylights to redeem the corridor from total darkness.
The Newes offices were spread between the antique house and its barn, connected by a breezeway with a little break room. The barn having been in disrepair, its innards had been torn apart decades ago leaving a capacious cavity—newsroom above, printing press below.
In the open newsroom, full of cubicles and whimsical found objects hanging from the walls, Mr. C directed her to an attractive blond woman in her forties named Laurie. As Joanna dutifully stared around the room, distracted by all the changes wrought over the last twenty years (spiffier computers, ergonomic chairs, a paint job), he explained—in a rapid, casual tone—who she was and what Lewis wanted of her. Laurie shook Joanna’s hand, welcomed her aboard, and got her contact information.
“So you’ll be covering James Sherman’s beat this coming week,” Laurie said. “Can you turn things around quickly? There’s a big ZBA meeting in West Tisbury on Tuesday and we need a write-up by Wednesday, early afternoon, so we can revise it if we need to. It’s the helicopter thing.”
“No problem,” Joanna said, finally grasping what the problem was. When filling in for Susan Grant on the Journal’s beat of the ZBA, she had sat with James. Now Joanna would be James, but the Journal’s usual reporter—Susan Grant—was back, so she would recognize Joanna (they’d never met, but Helen always greeted the reporters by name), and the jig would be up. Susan would out her as a two-timing journalist.
“No problem,” she said again, mechanically, now that she realized it was a problem.
Mr. C took her back down to his office. When they were alone, he grinned, winked, and chucked her on the shoulder.
“You told them I was Joey Dias, not Anna Howes. I thought it didn’t matter to the Newes.”
“It doesn’t. But since you’re already Joey Dias here, why do something that will get you in trouble with the Journal? Don’t you need both gigs? You’re on the books each place with two different names. Just simplify it and keep it that way. I want to help you out, Joey. I know you’re not in an easy situation.”
“Thank you, Mr. C,” she said.
“Hey, you’re a good kid,” he said. “One of my favorite students. Too bad you didn’t stick with math.”
“I hated math.”
“I know!” he said. “Broke my heart. So tell you what: go forth and prosper, and don’t hate math quite so much.”
* * *
It’s a bad sign when you ask for something and then cringe upon getting it. When the only thing that is going to save your butt is something that could actually just get your butt in deeper trouble.
Joanna asked Everett if she could cover the ZBA meeting on the grounds that she had covered the last two ZBA meetings. Everett was pleased. He was pleased for two reasons: Susan Grant, whose beat it was, was off-Island again, researching the regional heroin crisis; she had a reservation to come back on the 3:45 ferry, but there was a winter gale expected that would keep the boats from running, so she’d already asked to have somebody on backup. More than that, though, Everett liked the notion that Joanna was invested enough in something that she wanted to make it hers.
She almost told him the truth: if she was covering it for the Newes, she had to also cover it for the Journal, so that the regular Journal reporter couldn’t see she was working for the Newes. Perhaps she could have sat in the back of the audience and just not spoken to anyone, but most meetings had sparse attendance and everyone seemed to know her.
But now she had a new challenge: although only a single human being, she had to appear as two different individuals, because both papers would be sending a reporter. And those reporters would be nearly the only people in attendance, so neither would be getting lost in the crowd.
So she called Celia, of course.
Celia was both mortified and amused. “You want me to impersonate you while I’m with you?” she echoed, with an uncertain laugh.
“Sort of. Not really. I mean you don’t have to impersonate me exactly. I just need to be with somebody who kind of looks like me from the back. If either of my editors ever looked at the video for some reason, I can’t be the only reporter in the room—there has to be somebody else, but the somebody else has to be nondescript so that they don’t stand out—”
“I’ve been called a lot of things, kiddo, but never nondescript.”
“—and the best way for them to not stand out is to look kind of like me. So you know, wear a hat, wear loose clothes, we can dress similarly. Okay?”
“And this will accomplish what, exactly?”
“It lets me cover the meeting for both papers without drawing attention to the fact that both papers have hired the same person. There’s no reason for anyone to know that.”
“So which paper are you fleecing?” Celia asked, getting invested now.
“Neither! I get paid by the piece, not by the time it takes me to write it. I’m going to write a different article for each paper, so they will each get what they’re paying for—but it’s just simpler not to try to explain it to my bosses.”
“Yeah, those damn bosses,” Celia said. “Always keeping people from gaming the system.”
“I will pay you for your time.”
“You don’t have to pay me if I do it. But I’m not sure I want to do it.”
“Please. You’re the perfect person—you’re about my height, you don’t live in West Tisbury, and you’re the only person I can be totally honest with about this.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Celia said, and sighed heavily. “I guess I can’t turn you down.”
“Thank you! The meeting starts at five. Come over an hour before and we can figure out what to wear together.”
Celia laughed. “The last time either of us said that, we were in high school,” she said. “So let’s do it like we did it in high school. All you have are some city clothes you threw in a bag a month ago in the middle of the night, I have my entire wardrobe. You come over here. Also I don’t know that I’d fit in your stuff. You have that tight little city-gym-club butt.”
“Do I?” Joanna said incredulously.
“Come over at four,” said Celia. “And if the meeting goes late, I’ll have to leave because I’m up at three thirty in the morning.”
Celia and her boyfriend Ted rented a house in Tisbury (which is a different town from West Tisbury, but the same town as Vineyard Haven . . . never mind why. Really. You’ll never get that quarter-hour of your life back.). Like so very many houses on the island, this one was built quickly from prefab plans in the 1980s or early ’90s, without the soul of earlier houses or the style of later ones. Whoever built it and sold it made a buck; whoever flipped it made more; whoever owned it now and rented it out was also doing just fine. Celia and Ted were waiting on a lottery to buy an affordable building lot near the Tisbury School. Meanwhile, they were growing some of their own food, and other things, in an extra bedroom that they’d converted to a greenhouse, and brewing some of their own beer in the garage, which was otherwise filled with the discarded playground toys of the landlord’s now-grown children. Ted worked maintenance for the hospital and moonlighted as a private chef in summer. His clients found him exquisitely quaint and prided themselves on the street cred they got for inviting him to an occasional cocktail party. All the pants he owned were Levi’s and most of them had indelible tomato sauce stains on them. This may have been part of the reason people wanted him at their parties. Authentic culture!
But Ted wasn’t home. So once Joanna had hazarded the sleety winds of February and warmed up in the kitchen, the two women stood in front of Celia’s open winter closet in their underwear, shivering and giggling, sampling dresses and skirts and leggings and yoga pants and sweaters until they came up with two costumes that didn’t look deliberately twinnish, and yet were almost indistinguishable at a passing glance. Wrapped in inelegant but warm padded winter raincoats, they carpooled into West Tisbury, past the shuttered farmstands and empty fairgrounds, to the Town Hall, running in through the worsening wind just in time for the ZBA meeting to start.
And just in time for Joanna to realize the flaw in her plan: Helen Javier.
As they entered the nearly empty room, pulling their hoods back, red-cheeked from the cold rain, Helen pleasantly called out, “Hello there, Celia!” to someone she had known casually for thirty years. “What gives us the pleasure?”
Celia looked at Helen as if she’d been caught stealing something. She glanced at the MOCC camera operator; he was futzing with something, and the camera wasn’t on yet.
“She’s keeping me company,” Joanna said, somehow sounding offhand. She tried to think through the ramifications of this: Helen, as the chair, surely read both papers’ write-ups of ZBA meetings regularly. Not only would she notice that Celia Hendricks hadn’t written either of the ones about to appear, but she might also notice that both of them were written by people with names that belonged, at different times over the years, to Joanna D. Howes.
For the MV Journal, by Anna Howes:
The West Tisbury ZBA voted this week to grant a comprehensive permit for an affordable housing project, described as “desperately needed” by the Selectmen, off State Road near Ghost Island Farm. The project, called Onkokemmy Fields, has been held up for the past two years due to spirited disagreements about the architectural style of the solar-powered residences. “We are all very grateful that the board has chosen to prioritize the urgent need for year-round housing over aesthetic issues,” said Roger Patz, the developer. Abutters to the property had argued against it, which ZBA Chair Helen Javier described at the meeting as “ironic” since several of them are part owners of the solar power company that would be supplying solar for the project. “Are you so allergic to being in proximity to people from a different socioeconomic class that you will argue against your own business interests?” she asked.
In other news, the ZBA will hold a public forum March 1 at 7:30 p.m. at the West Tisbury Public Library. The forum is to discuss the unfolding situation with seasonal resident Orion Smith, who has threatened to sue the town for the right to land and operate a private helicopter on his North Road property. Mr. Smith could not be reached for comment.
THE GODS OF typography were kind to Joanna that week: somehow, despite two editors and a proofreader looking it over, the Newes accidentally used the name “James Sherman” as the writer of the ZBA report. So most of the Island thought he wrote the following:
In West Tisbury last week, the Zoning Board of Appeals moved swiftly through item after item on the docket. Chief among these was a comprehensive permit for the affordable housing project Onkokemmy Fields, named after a small freshwater pond to the north of the development. Onkokemmy Fields will offer solar-powered, year-round rental housing to five local families in a townhouse.
THE MOCC TAPES of various meetings were sometimes viewed after the fact by an overextended reporter who hadn’t been able to get to a meeting in person. So even Helen Javier might be excused for thinking James Sherman had written this, despite his absence at the meeting.
But of course there was one person who would know James Sherman hadn’t written it: James Sherman.
And as soon as he brought this error to the attention of Lewis Worthington, Joanna knew, they would have a talk that went something like this.
JAMES S: Hey, who actually wrote that piece?
LEWIS W: Joey Dias.
JS: Joey . . . Hang on, that’s the name Joanna Howes wrote under when she was an intern here . . . and Joanna Howes is actually writing for the Journal under the name Anna Howes, and she defended that no-good hypocrite Everett. She is definitely not somebody you want writing for our hallowed gazette, and furthermore, to pay her back for her scheming duplicity, you should rat her out to the Journal as well, and let Everett know of her perfidy! With no means of income available to her, she will slither back, starving, to the off-Island world that is all she now deserves!
And so, when her phone rang on Friday evening and she saw it was an Edgartown number, she braced herself. She did some dexterous calculations—Mr. C would have been proud of her, no doubt—and determined that she could afford to stay on the island without an income until Hank was better, provided she was prepared to then immediately move in with Brian once she went home to New York. It was not even a matter of whether or not she wanted to, as the choice was about to be taken away from her due to finances.
And in that moment, she realized she did not want to move in with Brian, at least not now. He was a good man and deserved honesty from her, which meant she would have to tell him the truth, which would leave her with nowhere at all to go. Without the social safety net of a place like the Vineyard, she would end up sleeping somewhere in Central Park and living off whatever pigeons she was able to catch and kill, like Hemingway in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
With all of that clear, she answered the phone.
“Hello, is this Joey?” said Lewis, gentlemanly and a little tired.
“It is,” she said, not letting on that she knew who it was, in order to postpone the inevitable another seven seconds.
“Joey, it’s Lewis Worthington. I’m sorry to be calling you on a Friday night but I got an urgent call from James Sherman.”
Of course you did, she thought.
“No problem,” she said as casually as she could. “What is it?”
“Well, first of all I want to thank you for covering for James on such short notice, you did a great job, really—”
“Thank you,” she said, willing to accept a head pat before her head rolled.
“Here’s the thing—”
Oh, God. He was hesitating. Just say it, she thought, just get it over with.
“Well, his daughter just had a baby and he’s in Minnesota with her right now, but the baby was a preemie, and things seem a little hectic out there, and I’m not sure when he’ll be back.”
“Oh!” she said, with inappropriate relief.
“Yes, exactly. He’s very preoccupied, it’s his first grandchild, and since there really isn’t anything much going on with West Tisbury these days, I’d love to be able to give him a long leash in terms of family time off.”
She was going to point out that West Tisbury was probably about to be sued, but reconsidered and said nothing. Apparently that wasn’t news the Newes found interesting.
“So, my question is, would you be able to fill in for him on the West Tisbury beat until he gets back?”
“Oh,” she said, unraveling her calculations about being homeless in Central Park. “Um. If you think I’m up to it. Sure.”
“That’s great, thanks so much, Joey. I’m sure Laurie can find somebody to fill in any knowledge gaps you might have since you’ve been away for so long—”
“I’ve got people I can talk to,” she said.
“And I haven’t forgotten that your strength is writing profiles and features,” he said. “I’m looking for some good matches for you.”
“Looking forward to that as well,” she said. “So, this public forum on March first at the West Tisbury library, about the helipad lawsuit—do you want me to cover that?”
“Oh . . .” He clearly hadn’t considered this. “No. It’s not actually news, it’s just a town huddle over a topic that isn’t even very interesting. It won’t impact anything. So, no, don’t bother. Next selectmen’s meeting, though, you should go to that. I’ll have Laurie send you the schedule.”
“Thanks, Lewis,” she said. “I appreciate your reaching out to me. I don’t take it for granted.”
She would never take anyone’s trust in her for granted ever again. Because she no longer deserved it.