Elin Hilderbrand - Winter Stroll

“Okay,” Kevin says. “I’ve gotta go. I’m going home. I need to find Isabelle.”

With that, he bursts out of the front doors of the Nantucket Whaling Museum into the cold, still night.

When he gets to the inn, he finds Mr. Bernard snoring loudly on the sofa in front of the fire. Kevin hurries past him into the owner’s quarters. The door to the nursery is closed, which Kevin takes as a good sign. He slows his stride and relaxes a little. Genevieve is asleep; Isabelle is probably in their room. Kevin can’t resist the urge to check on his daughter.

Quietly, he cracks open the door. The night-light is on, just as it should be, but something about the room seems off. He checks the crib-no Genevieve. Also, no blanket and no Monsieur Giraffe. Isabelle must have brought Genevieve into their bedroom to nurse. She would have missed Genevieve after being out. But Isabelle doesn’t believe in babies in the bed. She likes to nurse Genevieve here, in the rocker.

Kevin looks around the room. The diaper bag is gone. He opens the top drawer of Genevieve’s dresser where Isabelle keeps the favorite outfits. The drawer has clothes missing.

Kevin races down the hall to his and Isabelle’s room. It’s dark-and empty. His heart sinks. He can’t call Isabelle. She is, officially, the last person on the planet who doesn’t own a cell phone.

Where did she go?

Kevin bombs through the house. The kitchen-empty. Upstairs at the inn, the doors to the rooms are all closed, the hallway unoccupied. He races back downstairs to the laundry room-empty. She’s not here, he thinks. She left and she took the baby. Where did she go?

Then, Kevin has an idea. He heads back upstairs to the owner’s quarters and runs down the hallway toward the light. Bart’s room. All of them in the family have sought sanctuary in Bart’s room at one time or another, and Kevin realizes that this is where Isabelle has taken Genevieve. He fully expects to find Isabelle sitting on the bed, holding their baby, singing a French lullaby.

But the room is empty.

She’s gone.

She feels responsible for the mess with Kevin and Isabelle. She should have told Kevin that she saw Norah; of course she should have told him! Forewarned is forearmed. Jennifer isn’t quite sure how Kevin allowed himself to get lassoed into a conversation with Norah. She accosted me out of the blue. So, walk away! Jennifer and Isabelle had seen Norah and Kevin kissing . Why on earth had he let Norah kiss him?

Jennifer gets herself another glass of wine. Kevin has gone in search of Isabelle, Kelley is with Mitzi, and Jennifer has no idea where Ava is; she hasn’t seen her all night. Jennifer knows exactly no one else at this party. She should go home and hang out with the boys even if that means watching them play Assassin’s Creed, even if that means dealing with Barrett’s misplaced anger. But Jennifer doesn’t want to go home. She enjoys being out of the house, dressed up, among adults.

She wanders aimlessly, studying the trees people have so cleverly decorated: a tree made from stacked books, a tree made of blond wood stacked like Jenga blocks with clear glass ornaments, an old-fashioned tree strung with popcorn and cranberries, and hung with tiny white lights and gold and burgundy balls.

Suddenly Jennifer feels unbearably sad. She will decorate her clients’ houses for Christmas right after she gets back to Boston-it will mean a week of twelve-hour days-but she’s not going to decorate her own house. Okay, she’ll do a little decorating maybe, but she won’t go whole hog as she has in years past. How can she, with Patrick locked up? People tell her all year long how they anticipate the day her tree goes up; it is, some say, the best tree in all of Beacon Hill. So maybe she’ll decorate the tree after all. It’s good advertising for her interior design business. Plus, the boys will expect a tree. Or will they even notice?

Patrick told her last week that the prison has a sad little artificial tree in the common room with blue and red lights. The tree itself is white. It looks like a Fourth of July tree, Patrick said.

Patrick would want Jennifer to decorate at home and so she will. And then, on December 23rd, she will take it all down before she and the boys fly to San Francisco to spend Christmas in her mother’s showcase Victorian on Nob Hill. Jennifer and Patrick will be three thousand miles apart on Christmas and New Year’s. There aren’t enough pills in all the world to combat this depressing fact.

When Jennifer rounds the corner toward the front of the museum, she sees Margaret and Drake. She loves being with Margaret and Drake, they are the most interesting people in the world, but it looks like they’re in the middle of a very serious, very intimate conversation, and Jennifer decides not to bother them just now. She ducks out the front. She could use some fresh air.

Standing just outside the museum smoking a cigarette by herself is Norah Vale.

Oh come on! Jennifer thinks. Really?

She can’t turn around. Norah has seen her.

“Jennifer,” she says.

“Hey, Norah,” Jennifer says.

“I saw Kevin run after his little girlfriend,” Norah says. “She’s blond? Since when does anyone in the Quinn family date blondes?”

“You need to leave Kevin alone, Norah,” Jennifer says. “He’s happy.”

“Wanna know what I hated more than anything, back in the day?” Norah asks. “It was when you told me what to do. Like when you told me to stop dyeing my hair because it made me look cheap.”

“Did I tell you that?” Jennifer says. “I don’t remember.”

Norah sucks on her cigarette. “I got news for you, sister,” she says in a voice pinched by holding smoke in her lungs. She exhales. “I am cheap.”

“You sound proud of that fact,” Jennifer says.

Norah laughs. “You’re still as stuck-up as ever.”

“Stuck-up?” Jennifer says. “Now there’s a term I haven’t heard since my Molly Ringwald days.”

“ The Breakfast Club ,” Norah says. “My favorite movie.”

“That’s right. You liked Ally Sheedy.”

“Good memory,” Norah says. “So… how are things with you? Patrick is in the slammer?”

In the slammer. Jennifer wonders how someone as decent and kind as Patrick can be in the slammer while a horror show like Norah Vale walks around free. It doesn’t make sense.

“He is,” Jennifer says. “He made some bad decisions. So for the record, it’s kind of hard to be stuck-up when your husband is in jail.”

“Touché,” Norah says. She holds the cigarette out to Jennifer. “You want?”

Jennifer has a clear flashback to a summer day years and years earlier. Jennifer and Patrick were on Nantucket for the weekend, staying at the inn; they were preparing a beach picnic. Jennifer had been in the kitchen making potato salad while Norah smoked outside on the deck. Jennifer had plucked two black olives from the jar and opened the screen door. She held the olives out to show Norah. See these? Jennifer had said. These are what your lungs look like.

No wonder Norah hated her! She had been stuck-up! In the days before she had children and learned how fallible she was, she had thought she was better than Norah.

“No thanks,” Jennifer says. “I have other vices these days.”

“You?” Norah says.

“Yes, me,” Jennifer says. She stares at Norah and wonders… could it hurt to ask? Jennifer’s desperate, but is she desperate enough to ask Norah Vale, Cautionary Tale, for pills? Jennifer is very low on other options. “You don’t, by any chance, know where I can get some oxycodone?”