Dabney fainted on Main Street in Sconset. Box hadn’t even noticed that she was missing; he had been too busy pouring a glass of Montrachet and fixing a ham sandwich. Nina Mobley had come looking for Dabney; the judging of the tailgate picnics was about to begin, and they couldn’t start without Dabney. Box had waved a casual hand at the mayhem around him. “I’m sure she’s here somewhere.” Dabney was the most popular woman on the island. She knew everyone and everyone knew her. She was probably off talking to Mr. So-and-So about the window boxes of his house on Fair Street, or she’d bumped into Peter Genevra from the water company and was feeding him marshmallow-and-Easter-egg sandwiches.
But fifteen minutes later, Dabney still hadn’t turned up. Nina was antsy. Should she start the judging without her?
“Judge without Dabney?” Box said. “Is that even an option?”
“Not really,” Nina admitted. “I need her.”
Box nodded. Dabney and Nina were best friends, but Dabney was the dominant one of the pair. She was Mary Tyler Moore to Nina’s Rhoda, the Lucy to her Ethel.
An instant later, the son of the fire chief—Box recognized the youth but couldn’t recall his name—approached to tell Box that Dabney had fainted in the street, and the paramedics were tending to her now.
It was as Box threaded his way through the crowd on Main Street that he saw the man on the bicycle.
Box took a stutter step; his right knee had been replaced the year before and still wasn’t 100 percent reliable. Box hated himself for looking again, but something about the man struck Box. Big guy, bearded like a lumberjack, one arm.
The man raised his good arm, not in greeting, Box thought, but as an acknowledgment. I’m here.
Clendenin Hughes? Was that possible? Box was terrible with names but far better with faces. He had looked up Hughes several times on the Internet and had even read a few of his pieces, including the series on Myanmar, which had won him the Pulitzer. Furthermore, the man looked just like Agnes; it was uncanny. That was him, Box was almost certain.
Had Dabney seen Hughes, then? Was that why she’d fainted? Her old lover. Agnes’s father. It had been more than twenty-five years since Hughes had left Nantucket. He lived overseas, in Southeast Asia somewhere. As Box understood it, Clendenin Hughes was a man who needed political unrest and foreign women and espionage plots to keep his gears turning.
As Box understood it, Hughes no longer had any connection to the island.
And yet, there he was.
Clendenin turned the bike around—skillfully, considering he had only one arm—and pedaled away.
One arm?
Box hurried to the rotary. He was sixty-two years old, way past the point in his life where he should feel threatened or jealous. But something gnawed at him. He quickened his step, to tend to Dabney.
Box took Dabney home and put her to bed with three aspirin and a glass of water. Daffodil Weekend had gotten the best of her this year. She had allowed herself to stress out over a pagan celebration.
As her eyes fluttered closed, he thought to ask her about Clendenin Hughes. But he didn’t want to upset her—or himself—any further.
Box had met Dabney twenty-four years earlier at the Sankaty Head Golf Club during a Harvard alumni event. Box was attending at the request of the development office; they liked certain faculty members to show up at such events and glad-hand. Box had been to Nantucket once before, in the late seventies, when he and a few buddies from Harvard had hiked out the slender, sandy arm of Coatue and slept on the beach in tents. He had hardly been to the beach since then.
The event at Sankaty consisted mostly of captains of industry with golfing tans and their Nantucket Lightship basket–toting wives drinking scotch and eating pigs in a blanket, but suddenly Box found himself talking to a girl who had graduated from Radcliffe only four years earlier, a girl born and raised on Nantucket named Dabney Kimball. She had studied art history, but her roommate had taken Econ 10, so Dabney knew who Box was. Soon she was offering to take him on a tour of the island the following day.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” he said. She was wearing a madras headband in her brown hair and her face had a fresh-scrubbed look. Box would never have called himself an insightful person even back then, but he had been able to tell that underneath Dabney’s simple, pretty package lay hidden treasure.
She said, “Oh, please? It would be such an honor. I love showing the island off. I’m an ambassador of sorts.”
“But surely you have other plans?” he said. She was young enough to spend her Sundays playing boccie on the beach, or sailing around the harbor while lying across the front of her boyfriend’s sloop.
“I have a two-year-old daughter,” she said. “But my grandmother watches her on Sundays, so I’m free all day.”
A two-year-old? Box thought. If she had graduated four years earlier, she would have been twenty-six. If she had a two-year-old, she would have gotten pregnant at twenty-three. Very few Radcliffe women had children right out of college. They all went to law school now, business school, medical school—or, in the case of art-history majors, they spent years doing graduate studies in Florence or Vienna. Box checked Dabney’s hand for a ring, but her fingers were bare. She wore no jewelry except for a strand of pearls and matching pearl earrings.
“Okay,” Box said. He was agreeing to the tour without even wanting one. “Thank you. I’d like that.”
Agnes stayed home with Dabney on Sunday morning while Box and CJ golfed at Miacomet. When Box got home, Agnes said, “I’m worried about her, Daddy. What if I called in to work this week and stayed here with her?”
“You know your mother won’t let you do that,” Box said. “She’s not going to stay home from work, and she wouldn’t want you to either. Think about the kids.”
Agnes was the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club in Morningside Heights, a job that paid next to nothing but that gave her enormous satisfaction. It was a job that, quite frankly, scared Box and Dabney. Their daughter sometimes stayed at the club until eight or nine at night with a handful of kids who had no one at home to feed them or put them to bed. Box wrote Agnes a sizable check each month to pay for her rent on the Upper West Side and a car service home whenever she left the club after dark. He suspected, however, that Agnes was too modest to use the car service regularly. He suspected that Agnes took the subway.
While they were golfing, CJ had admitted that Agnes’s job unnerved him as well, and said that after they were married he was going to encourage her to work for a different nonprofit, preferably one in midtown. Box had agreed that this was a good idea.
“The kids aren’t more important to me than my own mother,” Agnes said.
“Your mother will be fine,” Box said.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Box said. “She has an appointment with Dr. Field in the morning. It’s probably just Lyme disease. Three weeks of antibiotics, she’ll be as good as new.”
“Okay,” Agnes said. “CJ has a client negotiation in the morning, so we’ll leave tonight.”
“I’ll take care of your mother,” Box said. “I promise.”
On their tour of the island nearly a quarter of century earlier, Dabney had driven Box to Quaise and Quidnet, to Madaket and Madequecham, to Shimmo and Shawkemo in her battered 1972 Chevy Nova. It wasn’t the car he’d expected a young lady like her to drive; she seemed like someone who would be more comfortable in a Saab convertible or a Volkswagen Jetta, but then she explained that she had been raised by her father—a Vietnam vet and a Nantucket policeman—and he had turned her into a motorhead. This term, coming out of Dabney’s wholesome mouth, made Box throw back his head and laugh. But Dabney was dead serious. She had purchased the Nova with her own money, and she wanted to trade it in for a Camaro. Her dream was to someday own a Corvette Stingray split-window with matching numbers in Bermuda blue. She was a devoted Chevy girl, she said.
She was sorry that the Nova didn’t have four-wheel drive only because that meant she couldn’t take him up the beach to her favorite spot, Great Point.
“That’s okay,” Box had said. He didn’t tell her that the tour had already run so far over his time limit that he’d missed the ferry he had booked back to the mainland.
She said, “I’ll take you to my second-favorite spot. And we can eat. I made lunch.”
Her second-favorite spot was Polpis Harbor, where she parked overlooking the sparkling water and the scattering of sails. Dabney pulled a wicker basket out of the Nova’s trunk. She had made fried chicken, macaroni salad, and strawberry pie. She handed Box an icy cold root beer, which was the most delicious thing he could remember tasting in his forty years.
Up until that point, Box had been a confirmed bachelor. He had dated dozens of women—most of them very smart, some of them very pretty, and one or two who were both. But Box had always imagined love as a musical note, and so far nobody had struck the right one. But the note resonated loud and clear that afternoon at Polpis Harbor with Dabney. It was a sweet, thrumming sound that nearly knocked him off his feet. He, who had never really given a thought to anyone’s feelings but his own, wanted to know her. She seemed ripe for the picking; he loved her pert, freckled nose. But he also knew he should proceed cautiously.
“Tell me about your daughter,” he said.
By Tuesday afternoon, Box had a phone call from Ted Field.
He said, “The tick panel was clean. It’s not Lyme, not babesiosis, not tularemia, thank God. Her symptoms are pretty wide-ranging and not inconsistent with a tick-borne disease, so I put her on a course of antibiotics anyway, just to be safe.”
“Okay,” Box said. “Thank you.”
“Her white blood cell count was high,” the doctor said. “She might want to go to Boston to get that checked out.”
“You know my wife,” Box said. “What are the chances she’ll go to Boston?”
“Slim to none. I know because I suggested it to her. I just don’t want to miss anything more serious.”
“Do you think it’s something more serious?” Box asked.
“Possibly?” Ted Field said. “Or it may be as simple as a wheat allergy. Gluten is the new bogeyman.”
Box hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment. Something more serious? Dabney never got sick. In his heart, Box believed that Dabney was suffering from stress. Anyone watching her work would have thought she was in charge of running a ten-billion-dollar multinational company: she took her job that seriously. And then there was the specter of the man on the bicycle. Clendenin Hughes—or maybe not. Maybe Box had been mistaken.
He picked up the phone to call Dabney at the Chamber. It had been so long since he’d called her at work that he had forgotten the number. Oh—3543, of course. There had been years and years when he had phoned Dabney at work every single day—to check in, to ask about the weather, to find out the score of Agnes’s field hockey game, to tell her he loved her. But possibly just as many years had passed since he’d grown too busy to call every day. He had classes, students, office hours, graduate assistants and department meetings to manage, his textbook to write and revise, articles to critique and publish, associate professors to advise, the crumbling markets in Europe to analyze and comment on (he appeared as a guest on CNBC two or three times a year). He’d also been receiving phone calls from the Department of the Treasury, which, although flattering, required intricate, time-consuming problem solving. He routinely complained that he needed four extra hours in each day. He started secretly to resent having to travel to Nantucket every weekend, and so he’d recently asked Dabney how she would feel if he spent one weekend a month immersed in work in Cambridge.
She had said, “Oh. That would be fine. I guess.”
She had said this with equanimity, but Box—although not gifted when it came to reading minds—figured out that it would not be fine. Or maybe it would be fine? Dabney was as self-sufficient and independent a woman as Box had ever known, and over the years, their union had settled into a comfortable arrangement. They were like a Venn diagram. She lived her life and he didn’t interfere—and vice versa. The space where they overlapped had grown more and more slender over the years. He assumed that this was normal, as was his waning sex drive. His nonexistent sex drive. He had considered going to a doctor and getting a pill, but that struck him as embarrassing, and beneath him. Dabney wasn’t complaining, anyway. Box figured that he and his wife had simply settled into the well-feathered nest of middle age.
Nina Mobley answered on the first ring. “Nantucket Chamber of Commerce.”
“Hello, Nina, it’s Box,” he said. “Is my wife there?”
“I’m sorry,” Nina said. “Who is this?”
“Box,” he said, feeling mildly annoyed. Though it had been aeons since he’d called. “John Boxmiller Beech. Dabney’s husband.”
“Box?” she said. “Is everything all right?”
“Nina,” Box said. “Is my wife there, please?”
Dabney came on the phone. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes, yes,” Box said. “ I just had a call from Ted Field, who told me you passed the tick test but that he put you on antibiotics anyway.”
“He did. But I’m not taking them. I feel much better.”
“If he prescribed them,” Box said, “then you’d better take them.”
“I feel much better,” Dabney repeated. “Why did he call you anyway? I’m the patient. You’re not my father. He shouldn’t have called you.”
Box was tempted to agree with her, patient confidentiality and whatnot. But he and Ted Field had rowed together at Harvard a million years earlier; they were friends. Box wondered if Ted had called because there really might be something more serious going on.
“He said your white blood count was high, and that you should probably go to Boston to get it checked out.”
“Not going to happen,” Dabney said.
“Or it might be a wheat allergy. Perhaps you should stop eating bread?”
“Box,” Dabney said. “I feel much better.”
He had been married to the woman for twenty-four years; he realized that no one told her what to do—but he did not like being dismissed.
“You’ll never guess who I saw at the Daffodil Parade when I was headed to find you. Can you guess?”
“Who?” Dabney said.
“I saw Clendenin Hughes!” The mock joy in his voice was grating even to his ears. “He was riding a bicycle!”
Dabney laughed without sounding at all amused. Maybe she thought he was kidding around, or maybe she thought he was being cruel.
“I have to go, darling,” she said. “I have work to do.”
Box had spent a year courting Dabney before they slept together. She had been keen about giving him the tour of the island and making the picnic—but as soon as he’d kissed her, after taking his first bite of her strawberry pie, she’d inched backward.
He’d said, “I’m sorry, is this not what you want?”
She had welled up with tears and that had made her even more fetching—her big brown eyes shining. “I want to want it,” she said.
At the time, he had not understood what that meant. He was an economist: he dealt in absolutes. But her inscrutable answer doubled his ardor. He decided he would do whatever it took to capture Dabney Kimball’s heart.
What he eventually learned was that Dabney Kimball’s heart was missing. It had been pillaged by Clendenin Hughes, a boy she had loved since she was a teenager. Hughes was Agnes’s father, although by the time Hughes found out that a child existed, he had already embarked on a new life overseas. Hughes had wanted Dabney to move to Thailand, but she couldn’t, because of the confines of her psyche. Instead, she decided to raise Agnes without one word or dollar from Hughes. Dabney convinced herself that she would be better off if she never heard from Clendenin Hughes again. And she hadn’t. But the fact of the matter was that Hughes had taken the tender, beating center of Dabney with him.
For most of that year, Box spent his weekends on Nantucket at the Brass Lantern Inn. He paid a month at a time for a room with a queen canopied bed and a chintz armchair, where he graded student papers. He grew accustomed to the smells of cinnamon-scented candles and the cheddar scones served at breakfast. The proprietor of the inn, Mrs. Annapale, discovered that Box was on the island in pursuit of Dabney Kimball. Mrs. Annapale had known Dabney since she was born and believed her to be a lost cause—not because of Clendenin Hughes but because the girl’s mother had abandoned her in a fancy hotel room when she was only eight years old.
“And you know,” Mrs. Annapale said, “people are never quite right after something like that happens.”
Box had triumphed solely because of his persistence. He showed up in the bitter cold of January and in the windy gray of March. He brought peonies and potted orchids for Dabney and stuffed animals and storybooks for Agnes. He read to Agnes, despite having no experience with children. He brought bottles of single-malt scotch for Officer Kimball and cannoli from the North End of Boston for Dabney’s grandmother, who soon allowed him to call her Grammie instead of “Mrs. Kimball.” He had won over the daughter, the father, and the grandmother, but Dabney remained just out of reach.
Then, in June, Box left to teach for the first time at the London School of Economics, and he missed three consecutive weekends on Nantucket. When he finally returned to the Brass Lantern, he found Dabney waiting for him in his room, sitting on his queen canopied bed.
She said, “I was afraid you’d never come back.”
They made love for the first time that night. Box knew it had been a long while since Dabney had been with a man, and he knew the only man she had ever been with was Clendenin Hughes. Clendenin Hughes was sex to Dabney, and as much as Box wanted to set out to change her mind in a swift, masterful conquering, he proceeded slowly and gently. And she didn’t shy away. She cried out in pleasure, and then she asked him to do it all again the next morning.
He proposed over cheddar scones.
That had been twenty-five years earlier. John Boxmiller Beech was an economist, his area of expertise was guns and butter, supply and demand. He was the first to admit, he knew nothing about the mysteries of the human heart.
I am negative proof. I am the one Dabney tried to warn. But did I listen?
I had been working at the Chamber of Commerce as Dabney’s assistant for two years when I started dating George Mobley. I had lived on Nantucket my entire life and I had known George forever. He was five years ahead of me in school, but his sister was only a year ahead of me, and his father was a scalloper who also ran the island’s most popular fish market, where my mother was a faithful patron. (Like all good, old-school Catholics, we ate baked scrod every Friday.) I knew the Mobleys, everyone knew the Mobleys, but I never gave George a thought. I knew he had gone to Plymouth State, and studied statistics, but then he headed down to Islamorada to work on a fishing charter. He had ended up a fisherman like his father, but a far more glamorous kind—sailfish, marlin, fish you hang on the wall.
Then George’s father died in spectacularly tragic fashion—he was thrown off the bow of his boat during a storm, his leg caught in the ropes, and he drowned. George came back to the island for the funeral, which I attended with my mother, and at the reception afterward I started talking to George. It was the deep freeze of January, but George was a golden tan color from his year of fishing on blue water. He had a kind of celebrity, being the bereaved. I was honored that George would talk to me.
I never asked for Dabney’s opinion of George Mobley, and she didn’t offer it. George would stop by the office on Friday afternoons to take me to the Anglers’ Club for appetizers. He had moved back to Nantucket to take care of his mother and sister. Dabney was always her friendly self, saying, “Don’t you two look cute! Have fun now!”
But when George proposed, Dabney chewed on her pearls for a long time, instead of jumping up to congratulate me. And I thought, Oh boy, I know what that means.
Dabney spent the next six months hinting that I should cancel the wedding. But I was in love. I told Dabney that I didn’t care about the green fog. I would not be talked out of marrying George.
At the Methodist church, as Dabney, who was serving as my maid of honor, arranged the hem of my dress, she said, “Nina, my darling, I’m going to tell you this now while I still can. I don’t think George is the man for you. I think you should run out the back door. In fact, I’ll go with you. We can go to Murray’s for a bottle of rum and get drunk instead. We can go dancing at the Chicken Box.”
I looked down at Dabney and laughed nervously. I knew Dabney was right—and not because Dabney had been blessed with a sixth sense, but because I felt it inside myself.
“Well,” I said. “It’s too late now.”
George and I bought a house on Hooper Farm Road. In a span of seven years, I had five children: two sons, then a daughter, then twin sons. George’s mother and unmarried sister lived down the street, so I was able to continue working at the Chamber. I had to work—we needed the money and I needed the time out of the house for my sanity. Things were crazy but I was happy enough, and I was tickled to prove Dabney wrong. The green haze had been an illusion, caused by Dabney’s own prejudice.
But then things went south with our finances. After doing a little digging, I discovered that George was a regular at Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, he had a bookie in Vegas, he had gambled away all our savings, and the kids’ college funds. He had taken out a line of credit on our house and after three missed payments, the bank repossessed it. George and I and the kids were forced to move in with George’s mother and sister. I lasted for fourteen months, then I found a year-round rental and left George.
“You were right,” I said to Dabney. “I never should have married him.”
“You have the kids,” Dabney said.
I hid my face in my hands.
It was amazing to me that I could know someone my whole life, I could live with him for nine years, sleep next to him in bed every night, give birth to five of his progeny, hold his hand during the Lord’s Prayer at Mass, high-five him when our eldest son got his first base hit, believe every word that came out of his mouth—including the made-up reasons for his trips off-island every Sunday—and still not know him at all. The only thing being married to George Mobley had taught me was that other people are a mystery. And the people who lie and keep secrets are always the people you’d least expect.