The Identicals(88)

TABITHA


When Franklin gets home from his parents’ house, it’s late, and he’s drunk.

“How was it?” Tabitha asks carefully. She expected him hours ago: she finished the first coat of paint in the powder room by seven thirty, then decided to see what all the hype was about, so she drove to Menemsha and waited forty minutes for a lobster roll from Larsen’s Fish Market. She couldn’t get over how mobbed Menemsha was with people waiting for the sunset. It was like a day plucked from the 1970s—happy people with sandy feet lining the wall overlooking the water, drinking wine from waxy paper cups. A guy with a guitar played “Hotel California,” then segued into “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” then transitioned into “Beth” by Kiss while people sang along. Nantucket didn’t have a nightly community gathering like this. The best place to watch the sunset on Nantucket was at Galley Beach restaurant. When the sun set, the patrons clapped, then they got back to their vintage Veuve Clicquot and forty-three-dollar Dover sole. And that, Tabitha supposed, was the difference between the two islands.

Well, one of the differences.

The lobster roll was delicious, although Tabitha was so hungry by the time she finally got it that she stuffed it unceremoniously into her face, then wished she’d gotten two of them.

She expected Franklin to be home by the time she got back, but he wasn’t. She tamped down the anger and resentment that arose. They had been together such a short time; she hardly owned him.

Now here he is, smelling like he dove into a swimming pool filled with Jameson.

“It was…” Franklin says. “It was…”

Tabitha waits.

“I stopped by the Wharf on my way home,” he says. “Wharf Pub.”

“Okay,” Tabitha says. She tries to keep her voice neutral. Something is bothering him. Or maybe he just needed to blow off steam. Maybe he had friends to see. Maybe going to the Wharf Pub is something he always does after having dinner at his parents’ house.

“You said something earlier that made me wonder,” he says. “You said Wyatt was your children’s father. But I’ve only heard you talk about Ainsley. Do you… do you have a child I don’t know about?”

Tabitha grows rigid. Here it is, then. It’s her chance. And yet she doesn’t like having it forced upon her. Her first instinct is to deflect the question, or even lie. Then she can backpedal later. She doesn’t want to lie to Franklin; she takes a deep breath. It’s dark and late, and Franklin is drunk; somehow this all serves to make saying the words easier.

“Had,” she says. “I had a son named Julian.”

“Tabitha.”

“He died,” Tabitha says. Incredibly, she remains dry-eyed. She speaks like she’s reading words off a page. “He was born at twenty-eight weeks. That’s very premature. His lungs… well, it’s always the lungs with preemies. He stayed in the NICU for ten weeks, up in Boston, and I stayed with him. And then, finally, they let him come home. He still wasn’t completely healthy, we knew that, so we rented a cottage across the street from the hospital here.” Tabitha swallows. “It was hell. I didn’t sleep. It’s probably fair to say I didn’t sleep the entire time he was alive.”

“That must have been so…” But his voice trails off as if he doesn’t know what word to choose, as if he doesn’t know what it must have been like, and he’s right. He doesn’t know.

“I was half out of my mind,” Tabitha says. “That’s an expression, but in my case, it was true. I was certifiably insane. All that mattered was my baby. I wanted him back in the hospital, but our insurance had run out, and Wyatt refused to let me take money from Eleanor. Plus, I mean, the baby was fine—not thriving, maybe, not fat or bouncing, but he was fine.” The tears start as Tabitha remembers Julian focusing his eyes and holding up his head. He had grabbed her finger. He never cried, not in the robust way of a newborn, anyway, and that had bothered Tabitha. He made a weak bleating noise when he was hungry or wet; that was all his little lungs—the size of eggs—could produce.

But the doctors had said he was out of the woods. How many times had that phrase been uttered? Out of the woods, like a child in a fairy tale, safe from bears, snakes, evil witches living in crooked houses. The doctors had also made it clear that there were no guarantees; every premature baby was at risk. And Julian had been slow to gain weight. At times he had been listless and difficult to feed. Tabitha had pumped breast milk night and day, believing that would keep him alive, even though Wyatt pointed out that he ate more when they gave him formula.

Wyatt had tried; Tabitha had to admit that. He had wanted to help both Julian and Tabitha. That was why, in the second week of August, when Julian seemed better and Tabitha was most definitely showing signs of a frayed psyche—crying all the time, dropping dishes, pulling her hair out in clumps—Wyatt had called Harper on the Vineyard, finally taking her up on her offer to help.

Wildflowers, champagne on the edge of the dock, their feet skimming the top of the water, dancing at the Chicken Box. I can’t live… with or without you.

Tabitha can’t go any further.

“He died,” she says. “August fifteenth, 2003. He was two months, two weeks, and five days old.”