The Summer Wives_A Novel Read online

  “I can’t tell anyone but you, Father. Not my husband, not my son.”

  “But Joseph—”

  “He will never understand. Only God understands.”

  I found the chair again. My mouth was dry; I reached for the pitcher with my right hand—Mrs. Vargas still clutched my left—and poured a glass of water. A little of it splashed over the edge, because my hand was unsteady. I drank a sip or two, and when I looked back at Mrs. Vargas, she had sunk back on her pillow. Her eyelids were drifting shut.

  “Why would God understand?” I asked.

  “He knows how I suffered.”

  I picked up the glass and drank again. My heart thumped so hard in my chest, I was almost afraid of my own fear. I wiped a trickle of water from the corner of my mouth. “How did you suffer, my child?”

  “You know. You remember how they hated me. My aunt and my cousins. Then when Francisca was killed, and they blamed me for that, too—”

  “But Francisca was your sister.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me with suspicion. “Francisca was my cousin. I am an orphan, Father, don’t you remember? An orphan who belongs to nobody.”

  “Of course. Of course. But Francisca. What did Francisca do?”

  “Father, please. You remember all this.”

  “I—it’s been so long. She died so long ago. Right? It was when—when—”

  “When the baby came, Father, when the baby came and she got in the boat to visit, to kill me probably, and then God sent the storm to drown her so she could not reach me and my son.”

  “Why—why would Francisca want to kill you?”

  “Because I took her husband from her. She would not forgive me because I married her Pascoal to give my baby a name. But you know this already, Father.”

  “It was so long ago. It was—it was many years ago. Why would you do—why would you commit such a sin, Mrs. Vargas?”

  “I had no choice, Father! I was so young. I was in love with him. I thought we were married. I thought we became man and wife, when I lay with him.”

  “With whom?” I bent closer. “With whom? With Joseph’s father?”

  “Don’t you know,” she whispered. “Don’t you know, his soul contains a piece of mine, and mine contains a piece of his. We have a son.”

  “Joseph.”

  “Our son, a gift from God. She gave him a daughter. But a man wants a son, don’t you think? A man needs a son to carry his blood into eternity. I gave him his son.”

  Now I rose from the chair and walked to the door and then to the window. I stared at the shore beyond, the tiny light in the bedroom at Greyfriars, where my mother lay awake.

  “Father?” said Mrs. Vargas.

  “Yes, my child?”

  “I am already absolved of these sins. You have already absolved me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tia Maria has not forgiven me. My cousin Laura has not. But I am innocent before God. He’s forgiven me.”

  “Holy Mary,” I muttered, gripping the windowsill. “Holy Mary, mother of God—”

  “He has made me suffer for these sins. He has made me do penance. When I gave birth to my son, I nearly died.”

  I turned my head over my shoulder—not quite looking at her—and said, “What about Mr. Fisher? He sinned too. He—he did this to you. What was his penance?”

  “To die,” she said simply.

  I couldn’t hold myself upright any longer. There was nowhere to sit except the bed or the chair, so I went to the chair. Mrs. Vargas had stopped talking. For a moment, I thought she had stopped breathing, but her fingers still made spasms around the edge of the blanket, and I perceived a slight movement at her chest, by the shift of the shadows cast by the lamp. Her mouth had fallen open. I wondered what else might come out of it. What new horror. I wanted to know, and I didn’t. I couldn’t even quite encompass what she had already said.

  She had killed Hugh Fisher, she said. Or had she?

  Of course she hadn’t. What mother would allow her son to go to prison for a crime she herself had committed? What woman would kill the father of her son? It was impossible.

  But I had known, I had always known in my heart that Joseph couldn’t kill anybody. Could never, ever kill his own father. I hadn’t mentioned that fact—the vital clue of Joseph’s paternity—to the detectives, because I knew without being told that this fact was not mine to disclose. But I had told the detectives that Joseph was innocent. Over and over I’d insisted that Joseph couldn’t kill any man. No, I hadn’t seen it happen. No, I hadn’t heard anything. No, I had no idea how Hugh Fisher ended up on Fleet Rock that night. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa with Joseph Vargas, and when I woke, Hugh Fisher was mortally wounded. But Joseph could not have inflicted that blow, not willingly. If he had killed Hugh Fisher, it was an accident.

  I don’t know how I long I sat there, staring at Mrs. Vargas. She seemed to be asleep, but restless. Her hands kept twitching. She thrashed her head from side to side, as if trying to avoid the blows of a persistent opponent. I went to touch her, to soothe her—God knows why, because I had promised Joseph, I suppose—but she batted me away with peculiar strength. At last I rose and went back to the casement window. I took hold of the handle and forced it open, and the gust of fresh, salty air surprised me. The tide had turned and was rushing fast, a fearsome current. Ahead, Mama’s light was still on; I tried to look to the northeast, in the direction of Horseshoe Beach, but even when I stuck my head around the glass and into the open air, the angle was wrong, and all I saw was a faint, blazing glow. The party in full swing. I thought I could smell smoke from the torches, from the bonfires, but maybe that was just my imagination.

  I heard a noise behind me. I pulled myself in and turned back to the bed. Mrs. Vargas’s eyes were open, her eyelids quivering. “It hurts,” she said.

  “What hurts?”

  “Everything. I need my pills.”

  “Where are your pills?”

  “Joseph has them.”

  “Joseph will be back soon.”

  “No,” she moaned, “no. You need to absolve me, Father. You need to hear my confession. Why won’t you hear me?”

  “Because I’m not him. I’m not the priest.”

  I had drawn closer to the bed, and she lifted herself up, groaning in pain, and reached for me. “Father, please. Are my sins too terrible?”

  “I can’t hear them, that’s all.”

  “I’m dying, Father. You must give me the sacrament.”

  I cast another desperate glance out the window. Mrs. Vargas’s fingers raked my palm, the back of my hand.

  “Bless me, Father. I have sinned, I have sinned. I have not been to confession for many years.”

  “Why not, Mrs. Vargas? For God’s sake, why not? Why haven’t you confessed?”

  “Because of my son. What if my son heard of it? He would never forgive me.”

  “But he does know! Don’t you realize? He went to prison for you.”

  How bewildered, her face. Her rheumy eyes. “To prison? You’re crazy, Father. He’s not in prison. He’s right here, he’s staying with me. How can he know the truth? I never told him, my God, how could I tell him that I killed his father? Father, listen. Kneel with me.”

  Her hand was insistent. I thought, she’s dying, for God’s sake. Give her what she wants. She’s dying. She’s Joseph’s mother, and she’s dying.

  I went down on my knees, on the soft rug underneath the bed.

  “Father, I have killed a man, the father of my son. I killed him with a knife, which I held in my two hands.”

  “God have mercy,” I said. “God have mercy.”

  “He had broken his vow to me. We had made a vow together, and he broke it.”

  “What vow?”

  “He married her. He married her and started a baby in her.”

  “But he didn’t know. He didn’t know you were going to have a baby, too.”

  “No, no. Not the first one,” she said. “His new wife. Fr
ancine. She seduced him, I don’t know how, she took him away from me. They went to Europe on his boat. For two months they were gone. For the summer, like me, a summer wife. I heard her daughter telling Joseph—”

  “Her daughter. Miranda.”

  Mrs. Vargas nodded. “Her. The movie star. She said to Joseph that her mother was going to have a baby. So I knew what I must do.”

  “God have mercy,” I whispered.

  “Then God sent me a sign. Father, it was a sign. I went to my bedroom and looked out the window and saw Hugh Fisher in his boat, rowing to me, rowing to this house. He came inside the back way, the cave, the way he used to visit me, and he went right upstairs to Joseph’s bedroom. So I waited for him there with my knife from the kitchen.”

  “God have mercy. God have mercy.”

  “Joseph heard the noise and went upstairs, but it was too late. I said to him, There was a fight, Mr. Fisher tried to kill me, and somehow the knife—a terrible accident—but how could I tell him his mother had done murder? It would kill him.”

  “God have mercy.”

  “Will you absolve me, Father?”

  “I can’t, I can’t.”

  She made a noise of agony and fell back on the pillow. Her lips moved, she was muttering something. I climbed to my feet, trying not to touch the bed itself, and stumbled to the window and the pure, salted air. Outside, a purring noise stretched across the water. I braced my hands on the window frame and searched the black water until I saw it, an old, handsome speedboat, lights ablaze at bow and stern, louder and louder, making a foamy arc through the current toward the Fleet Rock dock.

  12.

  By the time I ran down the stairs and out the door, the boat’s engine had already slowed to a putter as it eased into place against the dock. In the darkness, I couldn’t see who was aboard. I called out, and Isobel answered.

  “Here comes the rope!”

  The white line snaked through the beam of the bow light. I caught it at the last instant and hauled it tight around one of the rotting bollards. There was a clatter of feet and Isobel’s voice again.

  “Come on, Father. I’ll help you out.”

  I didn’t dare ask about Joseph. I moved forward and reached out my arm, while the priest grabbed hold of us both, Isobel on the left and me on the right, and heaved himself out of the boat, dragging a thick, unmistakable atmosphere of Scotch whisky in his wake.

  “Whose boat?” I asked.

  “Donnelly’s. He let us borrow it.”

  “What about—”

  “Not now,” she snapped. “Where is she?”

  “Upstairs, in her room. I’ll show you.”

  The priest said, “How is the poor girl?”

  “Not well, I’m afraid.” We were already starting down the dock, Isobel and I, half-running. The priest made some noise of protest. I turned and saw his white hair, his large frame unrecognizable in a Hawaiian shirt and secular trousers, like any other fellow enjoying himself at Horseshoe Beach that evening. Tom Donnelly’s end-of-the-year bash, his gift to the Island. I went back and took the priest’s arm. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

  “McManus,” he said.

  “She’s been asking for you. She has—she has something she needs to confess.”

  He spoke with remarkable precision—remarkable, I mean, when you considered his state of inebriation. “I imagine she does. It’s been eighteen years since I last took that poor girl’s confession.”

  “You know, she’s hardly a girl anymore.”

  “She was. We were all young, Miss Schuyler.”

  I didn’t ask how he knew my name. I didn’t know if this was the same man who had blessed the fishing boats eighteen years ago, now older and fatter and drunker, or somebody else. Mrs. Vargas spoke of him as if she’d known him forever, but Mrs. Vargas was dying, she’d said a lot of things that made no sense, and how could you pick out what was truth and what was confusion?

  Ahead of us, Isobel held open the door. The lights in the living room were dark; all the lights were off except for the upstairs hallway and the lamp in Mrs. Vargas’s bedroom, and I couldn’t see her face. But I felt her impatience. I felt my own, boiling beneath my skin. But you can’t hurry an elderly, portly priest, a man of God, thoroughly drunk. You can only hold his arm firmly and help him along the rickety wooden boards and up the stone steps, wondering how the hell he managed to keep himself from falling out of Tom Donnelly’s speedboat for the entirety of the half-mile run between Horseshoe Beach and Fleet Rock.

  We reached the door. Isobel allowed us past and closed the door behind us. The bang made me jump. I didn’t look at the furniture as we hurried across the living room to the stairs. I didn’t see the sofa, or the table with the photographs. I stepped off the rug and over the place where Mrs. Vargas had dropped her tray full of porcelain. Where those drops of blood had fallen to the stone. We climbed the stairs, one by one, Isobel trailing behind in case Father McManus missed a step or lost his balance altogether. Already my shoulder strained, my arm strained under his weight. When we found the landing, I panicked. I thought maybe she was already dead, I had left Mrs. Vargas to die alone when I had promised Joseph to stay with her. I hauled poor Father McManus down the short hall and through the doorway, into the lamplit bedroom, Mrs. Vargas’s deathbed, her confessional, Greyfriars framed neatly in the window with its single light burning.

  “Here she is.” I dragged Father McManus to the chair. “Mrs. Vargas, he’s here. The priest is here.”

  To my relief, she turned her head. “Father? Where did you go?”

  “I was at the beach, my child.”

  “I was waiting—was waiting—”

  “Yes, my child?”

  “For the blessing. For my absolution.”

  I backed away from the chair. I could see Father McManus’s bemusement as he tilted his head—or maybe that was drunkenness, who knew—and reached for her hand.

  “My dear, let’s start from the beginning,” he said, because of course he knew how to deal with a dying soul, with people who bemused him. He was a trained professional, a man of God, howsoever soused with whisky, whereas I was a mere, imperfect human who judged and railed. I stared at Mrs. Vargas’s withered face on the pillow, her hands both clutching the single palm of Father McManus. The reek of whisky overcame the sourness of death, and it was good.

  Isobel’s hand clamped around my elbow. She hissed into my ear.

  “Come with me.”

  13.

  I followed my stepsister back down the hall and the stairs. Instead of turning right, into the living room, she turned left, toward the lighthouse tower itself, moving so swiftly on her long, athletic legs I had to run to keep up.

  “What’s going on?” I called. “Where’s Joseph? Is he safe?”

  She didn’t answer, just kept hurrying down the corridor. She knew where she was going. She found the ladder and climbed the rungs in a series of lithe, easy movements, the way I remembered her. Her legs disappeared, her feet. I made a noise of frustration and followed her.

  When I emerged into the warm, shifting space, she had turned her attention to the walls beneath the windows. She was pacing along, looking for something. The air was heavy with the scent of human coition. I wondered if she noticed that. I crossed my arms and asked her what the hell she was doing, but by the time I finished the question, she had reached the bed. She came up short and stared at the wet, crumpled sheets, the discarded quilt. The light streaked across the top of her head. She spun around.

  “You fucked him,” she said. “My God, you fucked my brother.”

  “What’s going on? Where’s Joseph? For God’s sake, tell me!”

  Isobel resumed her pacing. “I’m trying to find the damned switch. Where’s the switch?”

  “What do you mean, the switch? The switch to the light?”

  “Of course, the switch to the light. What else?” She turned to the mechanism in the middle of the room and fell to h
er hands and knees. “Don’t just stand there, help me!”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Can’t remember, can’t remember. He showed me once. Christ! The floor!” She crawled around the base of the light like an overgrown baby, and somewhere on the other side she made a noise of triumph. I sprang after her. She was opening a panel in the floorboards. She reached inside. An enormous screech of metal came from within the light’s mechanism, gears grinding against gears, and the light snapped out. The darkness dropped over us like a blanket.

  “What have you done?” I cried.

  “If they can’t see the light, they can’t find Horseshoe Beach.”

  “Who?”

  “The Coast Guard! Those damned marshals, they called in the Coast Guard.”

  “Oh God! They caught him?”

  “Yes, Sherlock. They caught him. Just when he was about to get into Donnelly’s boat and head out here himself with Father McManus. You’ll never guess who ratted him out.”

  “I can’t—who—I thought the Islanders were—”

  “Not an Islander, you nitwit. Your husband.”

  “Carroll!”

  “A real prize, that ball and chain of yours. A twenty-four carat rat. The only sober man on the beach.” Her voice had moved to my right. I thought she was looking out the window, and I followed the sound, followed my sense of her, the smell of her, until I bumped right into her shoulder. “Watch it,” she said.

  “We have to go. We have to take the speedboat back to Horseshoe Beach, before the Coast Guard can land there.”

  “And do what? They have guns, those two. You can’t just snatch a man away from a United States Marshal. We’ll all end up in prison.”

  “I don’t give a damn! He’s innocent, don’t you know that? He didn’t kill his father!”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No. His—” I bit off the sentence, because I didn’t know, didn’t know if I could say this thing that had been told to me within the sacrament of confession. Didn’t know if I could even believe it. “Damn it, Isobel, you’re here, aren’t you? Why are you here if you don’t want to save him?”