Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

“Go back to San Francisco,” Birdie said. “Talk to Chess when you get home.”

“If she doesn’t change her mind, I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do,” he said.

“You’ll survive,” Birdie said, looking at Hank on the sofa, wiping crumbs from his lips with a cocktail napkin. “We all do.”

In the week that followed, there were all sorts of other conversations, conversations upon conversations. Birdie had never had so many conversations. One of the most difficult, predictably, was Birdie’s conversation with Grant, which she chose to undertake at nine o’clock at night when he would be at home in his “loft” rather than at the office.

She said, “Grant, I’m calling to tell you that Chess has broken the engagement. The wedding is off.”

“Off?” he said.

“Off.”

Silence. Birdie had wondered how Grant would meet the news. It was telling that after thirty years of marriage, she had no idea. She figured his main concern would be for Chess’s welfare, and once he realized the murder had come at Chess’s own hand, he would be worried about his money. Birdie waited for his questions, but none came.

“Grant?”

“Yes?”

“What do you think?”

“What am I supposed to think? You want to tell me what the hell happened?”

Of course, she should have guessed that he would not react at all until Birdie told him how he was supposed to feel. She had always done his emotional work for him.

“Chess wanted out. She’s not in love with him.”

“Not in love with him?”

“That’s the gist of it.” It was no longer Birdie’s job to shield Grant from the unpleasant realities about his children. Birdie had to deal with it, and now so did he. “She’s not in love. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him.”

“I don’t get it,” Grant said.

Of course he didn’t get it. This was why Chess had wanted Birdie to call; Birdie was supposed to make him understand. Grant was eight years her senior; he had been thirty-one to her twenty-three when they got married. Grant had just made partner at the firm; he was expected to marry, start procreating, move to the suburbs, join a country club. He had come after Birdie like a bull charging; he had tracked her like a hit man. I want you, you, you. There had been dinners and musicals and weekends skiing in the Poconos, where they kept separate rooms for the sake of appearances. Birdie had an entry-level job at Christie’s, where she showed a proclivity for carpets. She idolized the head of fine carpets, a man named Fergus Reynolds, who was always dashing off to Marrakech or Jordan. He spoke fluent French, Spanish, and Arabic and wore silk scarves in the style of Amelia Earhart. Birdie wanted to be a female incarnation of Fergus. She wanted to smoke clove cigarettes and appraise estates on the French Riviera. But instead, she succumbed to Grant. Within a year of marrying, she had quit her job; within two years, she was pregnant with Chess. The ways in which Grant Cousins had curtailed her potential were too numerous to name.

And then, once they were married and the girls had been born and the household established, Grant vanished. He was still present physically-sitting at the head of the dinner table with his tumbler of scotch and his benevolent, slightly baffled smile-but his mind was elsewhere. He lived in a state of constant distraction. The office, the cases, the clients, the billable hours, his handicap, the Yankees game, the Giants game. Birdie had grown to feel that anything and everything was more important to Grant than she and the girls were. He was kind to them, and generous, but they could never quite capture his full attention.

“I don’t know how else to say it,” Birdie said. “She’s not going to marry him. And rather than beating her up, we should be praising her for calling it off before it was too late. If she’d gone ahead and married him, she’d regret it.”

“The way you regret marrying me?” Grant said.

Birdie inhaled. Honestly!

“I do not regret it,” Birdie said.

“Sure you do.”

“I do not regret raising our children. And for many years, I didn’t regret marrying you.”

“You regretted being hemmed in to a certain life,” Grant said. “You wished your life had contained more than PTA open houses and garden club. I do listen when you talk, Bird.”

Infuriating. He was playacting now, trying to fudge the exam when he hadn’t read the book. “Well, this will come as a surprise to you, I’m sure, but I’m not exactly dead yet. In fact, I’m dating someone.”

“Congratulations,” Grant said.

He was so patronizing. Birdie chastised herself for telling him. Her love life was none of his business, and no reaction-not even one of jealousy, which would have been disingenuous-would have satisfied her. Dating Hank was a source of private delight; to make it public would poison it.

“So anyway,” Birdie said, “there are the matters of the wedding arrangements. I assume you’d like me to try to get your deposits back?”

“Yes, please,” Grant said.

“All I can do is try,” Birdie said. She had half a mind to simply let Grant’s cash sink to the bottom of the ocean, but his money was her money, and wasting it was foolish. “And Grant?”

“Yes?”

“Call your daughter, please.”

“And say what?”

“What do you think?” Birdie said. “Tell her you love her.”

In the days and weeks that followed, Birdie had a hard time reaching Chess. When she called Chess at work, she was stonewalled by Chess’s assistant, Erica, who claimed that Chess was no longer accepting personal calls at work.

“But she’s there, right?” Birdie said. “She’s alive?”

“Affirmative,” Erica said.

When Birdie tried Chess’s cell phone, she was inevitably shuttled to voice mail, where her messages stacked up like newspapers in the driveway of someone who had moved away.

“Call me,” Birdie said. “I’m worried.”

Birdie sought refuge in conversations with her daughter Tate. Birdie didn’t love Tate any more than she loved Chess, but Tate was easier.

“Have you talked to your sister?” Birdie asked.

“A couple of times,” Tate said. “Mostly I just leave messages.”

“Oh, good,” Birdie said. “I thought I was alone in that.”

“You know I’d never leave you alone, Mama,” Tate said.

Tate-Elizabeth Tate Cousins-was, at the age of thirty, a computer genius who was flown in by the biggest companies in America to fix glitches in their systems. She had such specialized knowledge and expertise that she was able to call her own shots: She wore jeans to even the swankiest workplaces, she worked with her iPod blaring Bruce Springsteen at top decibel, she ate lunches of tuna fish sandwiches and creamy tomato-basil soup from Panera and, in cities where there was no Panera, from Cosi. She demanded an astronomical fee.

“Where are you today?” Birdie asked. Technically, Tate lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, a place that Birdie didn’t understand. It was a “new” city, known as a banking capital. Charlotte was the first place Tate had worked on assignment, and she had spontaneously plunked down money on a condo in a complex that had a beautiful swimming pool and a state-of-the-art fitness center.

Why Charlotte? Birdie had asked.

And Tate said, Because it was there.

There had been a period of time in junior high school when Tate had dressed like a boy. She had worn jeans and a boy’s white undershirt and a red bandanna wrapped around her wrist or her ankle; she had cut her hair very short, spiking it some days and slicking it back on others. She even sounded like a teenage boy; she was constantly making flip remarks. She had been caught engraving the lyrics to “Darlington County” into a desk at school, and when asked why, she had shrugged and said, Because it was there. Birdie had wanted Tate to see a therapist, but the guidance counselors at school assured Birdie that Tate was experiencing a phase and it would pass. It had passed, but the teenage boy lived on in Tate. She was still fanatical about Bruce Springsteen, and about computers, and about NFL football. She had bought her first piece of real estate in a city where she knew no one “because it was there.”