Agnes

When she pulled out of the driveway of 436 Polpis Road, she was a different person.

Her mother’s secret revealed: Clendenin Hughes, her father.

Agnes had to tell someone. She couldn’t bear this revelation alone. When she emerged from Clendenin’s cottage, she found four voice mails from CJ on her phone. The first message was curious (“Where is my best girl?”); the second message terse (“Um…hello?” Click.) The third message, annoyed (“Jesus Christ, Agnes, answer the goddamned phone, would you, please?”). It was the fourth message that took Agnes’s breath away. CJ screamed with unbridled fury, “Where the fuck are you?”

She thought of Manny Partida: I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t tell you…hair pulling, arm twisting, some not-so-nice stuff…just please, Agnes, be careful. She recalled CJ’s facial expression as he watched Agnes’s hair being cut. He had been smug with his power over her.

Agnes deleted all the messages except for the last one. She couldn’t talk to CJ about meeting Clendenin. She couldn’t talk to CJ about anything, she realized, except for CJ.

She figured she was expected home for dinner—she hadn’t told Dabney otherwise—but she couldn’t sit at a table with Box and Dabney and eat and make chitchat.

Clendenin had asked Agnes not to say anything. He had begged her, even while realizing that he had no place to ask and even less reason for her to agree.

He said, “This is adult stuff.”

She stiffened. “I am an adult.”

“It’s between your mom and me. And it’s between your mother and the professor. You are an adult, and so I’m asking you to give your mother the time and space to figure her situation out.”

“Do you think she will?” Agnes asked.

“I do,” he said.

She had not expected the summer to be like this. There were secrets everywhere she looked.

  

Agnes called Riley and got his voice mail; she felt a wave of irrational anger overtake her. She needed Riley! There was no one else she could talk to! Except, possibly, Nina Mobley. Should Agnes call Nina Mobley? As Agnes was considering this, her phone rang. It was Riley.

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry, I just got done surfing.”

“Where are you?” Agnes asked.

“Antenna Beach,” he said.

“Stay there,” she said. “I’m going to grab a couple of sandwiches. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“I’m supposed to meet Celerie at the movies,” he said. “It’s Diablo Cody week at the Dreamland and they’re showing Juno tonight. Celerie said it’s her favorite movie. She’s been calling me ‘Bleek’ for the past three days.”

“Is there any way you can cancel her?” Agnes said. She felt like a big jerk for asking, but this was an emergency like none Agnes could have dreamed of. “I really need to talk.”

“I’ll cancel her,” Riley said.

  

Less than an hour later, Agnes and Riley were drinking beer, eating lobster rolls, and watching the sun go down. They were sitting in the open air of Riley’s Jeep on the lip of the beach. Riley was still in his wet suit, although he had peeled off the top half, so Agnes had a fine view of his shoulders, chest, and abs. She felt ashamed for even looking. There were two new voice mails from CJ on Agnes’s phone, but she hadn’t listened to them yet.

“Was Celerie upset you canceled?” Agnes asked.

“Devastated,” Riley said. “But she didn’t cry. She said she would make her roommate go. She said she hoped the friend I needed to talk to knew how lucky she was.”

“You didn’t tell her it was me, did you?”

“I did not tell her it was you,” Riley said. “But who else would it be?”

Agnes sighed. She couldn’t have Celerie getting wind of this situation. No no no.

Riley said, “So what’s up?”

Agnes said, “I followed your tip and went to 436 Polpis Road.”

Riley said, “And what did you find?”

Agnes said, “My father. My biological father, whom I’ve never met. Until today.”

Riley sipped his beer and stared out at the wild, churning ocean. “What did I tell you the first time I met you? What was my exact phrase, Agnes? Tip of the iceberg.”

“Yes,” Agnes said. “You were right about that.” And then she explained: Clendenin Hughes, whom Agnes had never met, who had led a life on the other side of the world, who had won a Pulitzer Prize, who had lost his left arm in pursuit of a story, who had returned to Nantucket three months earlier, was Dabney’s secret. He was her lover.

“So,” Riley said. “What is he like?”

What was Clendenin Hughes like? Agnes hadn’t spent enough time with him to know, really. The word that first came to mind was complex. She had looked at him and seen a funnel of swirling thoughts and emotions. Clendenin had not come back to the United States and lived a life as Dabney’s husband and Agnes’s father. Your mother didn’t want that, he said. She wanted to go it alone. But he knew that, deep down, Dabney had wanted him. A stronger man, a better man, would have done the right thing and come home. Clendenin could claim no honor. He had been consumed with shame and regret, he’d told her, and for days and months and years, that shame had been the most powerful thing in his life. He’d made it clear that he was not in a position to ask for Agnes’s forgiveness. But Clendenin also said that the only reason he had come back to Nantucket was because Dabney was there.

I realized something when I lost my arm, he had said. And that was, my arm wasn’t the only thing I was missing. I was missing my heart. It lies with your mother. Always has.

Returning to the island had been his only option. It felt like it was written somewhere; it felt like he had been moved to do so by the hand of God.

Do you believe in God? Agnes had asked him.

I believe in something bigger, higher, and more important than ourselves that it is beyond human beings to comprehend, Clendenin said. Yes, I do.

  

Agnes grabbed Riley’s arm. “I can’t believe this happened. I met my father today. Half my blood, half my genes, half my biology.”

“It’s big,” Riley said. “It’s huge. Are you going to tell her?”

“Maybe,” Agnes said. “But not yet.”

“Are you going to see him again?”

“Thursday,” Agnes said. “Thursday after work. He wants to know about me, he said.”

“How does this make you feel about your other father?” Riley asked. “The professor?”

“Box,” Agnes said. “He’s my real father. Clendenin is…well, I don’t know what he is to me other than my DNA. But I want to find out. The question is, in finding out am I betraying Box?” She drank some more of her beer. “I don’t know. I’m so confused.”

“My two cents?” Riley said.

“Please.”

“Your mother is an extraordinary woman who has two men in her life. Probably, she loves them both.”

“Probably she does,” Agnes said.

“I bet it happens more than we think,” Riley said. “Although I am strictly a one-woman-at-a-time guy. But my parents always told me to be open to what they called the ‘wide spectrum of human experience.’ They were in the Peace Corps in Malawi before I was born, so they embrace tolerance, kindness, acceptance.” Riley put his hand on top of Agnes’s hand, which was still holding his arm, “I think it’s okay if you love them both, too, Agnes.”

Agnes looked at his arm, her hand, his hand, and then she started to cry. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said. “You’re being so understanding and you canceled Celerie for me and it is so easy to confide in you, and this situation is so screwed up and yet you’re making me feel like it’s not screwed up, you’re making me feel like I’m on a reasonable part of the spectrum of human experience and everything might end up okay.”

“And that’s why you’re crying?” he said. He pulled a box of tissues out of his center console and plucked one for Agnes.

What she didn’t say was that she knew that CJ, the man she was engaged to marry, wouldn’t have been this understanding. Because it was Dabney, he would have judged. He would have judged not only Dabney but Agnes as well. Her mother was a liar and a cheater and a slut—and therefore, so was Agnes. Agnes pictured CJ pulling Annabelle Pippin’s hair, twisting her arm. If CJ could see her now, sitting in Riley’s Jeep, he might hurt her. He just might. Agnes knew that the bad green gunk Dabney saw floating in the air around her and CJ wasn’t made up. CJ ridiculed Dabney’s matchmaking, but her mother was never wrong. And, Agnes feared, Manny Partida wasn’t wrong either. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t tell you.

Agnes also didn’t say that she was jealous of Riley’s future dental patients, all of whom would think he was the greatest dentist in the world. Riley would glide through his office like he was on roller skates. He would look at a recalcitrant seven-year-old patient and say, “Kissing girls yet, Sam?” And when that didn’t get Sam to open his mouth, he would say, “Hey, guess what I got for Christmas? Snowman poop!” And Sam would laugh and Riley would deftly move in with his instruments to count Sam’s teeth.

Agnes was also jealous of the young women in the audiences who would hear Riley play the guitar and sing Jack Johnson so beautifully that Jack Johnson himself would want Riley to serve as his best man or be godfather to his children. And Agnes was most jealous of the woman who would someday be Riley’s wife, the woman who would get to wake up next to him every morning and be the consistent recipient of his generous spirit.

Agnes didn’t say any of this, however. She carefully removed her hand from his arm, dabbed the tissue at her eyes, and took a deep, cleansing breath. The sky was streaked with the hot pink of the setting sun and Agnes wondered if this was the color Dabney saw when two people were a perfect match.

  

When Agnes got home, she listened to the fourth voice mail CJ had left on her phone. Where the fuck are you? And then, fearfully, she listened to the two later voice mails, which had no words, just the sound of CJ’s breathing. These, somehow, were even scarier. Agnes picked up the velvet box from her dresser and gazed at her engagement ring.

Tomorrow, she would send it back.