Golden Girl(40)

This is the life Willa wants.

It feels a long way off from the life Willa presently has, the one where she’s heartbroken and lost. Her mother is gone. Five years from now, even if Willa has attained the kind of perfection she dreams of, Vivi will still be gone. She’s gone forever. Willa will never see her again. It seems impossible. Someone snuffed out her life and then, in an act so unconscionable Willa can’t even imagine it, drove away.

Someone on this island got away with murder.

Willa wants justice. There was a rumor going around that Cruz DeSantis had been the one to hit Vivi and was just pretending that he’d found her—but Willa refuses to entertain this possibility.

“People are just gossiping,” Willa says. “They don’t know Cruz like we do.”

Rip isn’t so sure. “I heard there are some funny things about his story. Even your brother thinks it might be him.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Willa says.

“I think he does,” Rip says. “I guess Cruz and Leo had a fight the night before, so maybe Cruz came over so early because he was upset, and he turned onto Kingsley going too fast without paying attention, and…boom.”

“Don’t say boom.” Willa closes her eyes. She can’t let herself imagine the moment of impact but she can’t block it out either. “It wasn’t Cruz. It was someone else. Just keep checking with the police, please. I want them to get this guy behind bars.”



Willa is eight weeks pregnant, and although she has by now trained herself not to get her hopes up, she cannot lose this pregnancy. This is the last pregnancy Vivi knew about; this baby and Willa’s mother were alive at the same time. This pregnancy must continue; it must thrive.

Willa doesn’t feel sick, or tired, or dizzy. Her breasts might be a bit tender, but that could be because she’s constantly pressing and pinching them to see if they feel tender.

I cannot lose this baby. I cannot lose this baby. Willa knows she’s obsessing and that obsessing is bad for her. She obsesses about obsessing.

Moving into Wee Bit is a good distraction. Willa does her favorite thing: she makes a list. She writes down all the essentials they need to bring and checks them off as she packs them up. Five linen dresses for work; T-shirts; her short overalls; five bathing suits; her straw hat; her Lululemon shorts; and tanks for exercising, which she is going to do more often. And a cotton open-weave sweater because it gets chilly at night by the ocean.

Wee Bit has a sandy front yard separated from the entrance to Smith’s Point by a split-rail fence. Up over the rise is the prettiest stretch of beach on Nantucket—a wide swath of golden sand as far as the eye can see, blue-green water, gentle waves.

On her first afternoon at Wee Bit, Willa goes for a barefoot walk at the waterline. She’s the only person on the beach; it feels like she has the entire island to herself. Because she works at the Nantucket Historical Association, she can’t help but think of all the lives and stories that have played out on this island. She’s a native; this land, in some sense, belongs to her.

She picks up her pace until her heart rate increases. Blood flow is good for the baby; so is fresh air, sunshine. Can these things combat her indescribable grief?

Mom, she thinks. Where are you? Where did you go?

The waves encroach and recede over and over again, just as they did hundreds of years ago when the Wampanoag tribe swam in these waters, in the 1860s during the height of the whaling industry, in the 1920s when artists and actors from New York came to Nantucket to escape the heat of the city. The waves will keep rolling in and out for all eternity, long after Willa is gone, after her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are gone.

Willa feels dizzy.



When she heads back to Wee Bit, it’s six thirty, and despite her fantasy of a life where everything is made from scratch, she can’t manage anything more complicated than peanut butter crackers. Millie’s, a Mexican restaurant, is a short bike ride away and Willa is craving their guacamole. This is a good sign, she thinks. She has lost four pounds since her mother died.

As she comes up over the rise, she blinks. There’s a red Range Rover parked alongside the split-rail fence. Pamela’s car.

What is she doing here? Willa wonders.

Pamela and Zach made a bet about how long Willa and Rip would last out in Smith’s Point. “Zach gives it a week,” Pamela said. “I give it two days.”

Is she here to check?

The only downside to marrying Rip Bonham is having Pamela Bonham Bridgeman—she likes to refer to herself by all three names—as a sister-in-law. Willa despises her. Willa has always despised her. Pamela is sixteen years older than Rip. Mrs. Bonham, Tink, suffered three miscarriages, which is the number Willa rests at presently. But Tink was “bound and determined” to give birth to “an heir.” Wasn’t Pamela an heir? Yes, technically, but male primogeniture reigned supreme in the Bonham household. As Willa had learned from studying so many of Nantucket’s family trees, if Tink hadn’t given birth to Rip, the Bonham name would have splintered off into a distaff Bridgeman line.

But Tink had, at last, been successful, and on March 11, 1997, she gave birth to a ten-pound baby boy. Pamela, at the time a sophomore in boarding school, had both doted on and greatly resented Rip, and she has vacillated between love and bitterness ever since. She probably sensed that her own presence in the family wasn’t enough and this left a permanent chip on her shoulder.