Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

She’s going to want children, India, she heard Bill’s benevolent ghost say.

Oh, shut up! India said back to him. But she smiled in spite of herself.

She and Grant woke up in the morning to mellow sunshine. Birdie loved nothing more than Indian summer. But today, for Chess’s sake, she had been hoping for rain.

Grant repaired to the kitchen and came back, moments later, with two cups of café au lait. It had become his custom to bring Birdie her coffee in bed, even on mornings when he went in to the office. She loved the gesture, the attention, and the coffee Grant made-he warmed the milk on the stove-tasted better than any coffee she had had in her life.

He sat on the bed next to her.

She said, “Beautiful day for a wedding.”

He said, “That it is.”

They had planned things to keep themselves busy. Brunch at Blue Hill, which was positively exquisite, and then a long drive to look at the emerging foliage. They happened across a few antique stores, where they stopped to putter. Grant used to loathe puttering, but now he meandered through the shops with ease, holding up one thing and then another, wondering what Birdie thought.

She thought, I can’t believe this is the same man I married. He hadn’t mentioned golf once all day. And the Yankees were in the playoffs and were playing later that afternoon, and he hadn’t mentioned that either.

She thought, He has pretty good taste.

They pulled back into their driveway at quarter to five. The sun was behind the trees already; the long days of summer were over. Birdie couldn’t help thinking… the ceremony was to have been at four, and at quarter to five they might have been standing in the receiving line or posing for the photographer. If she was feeling so bereft, how must Evelyn Morgan be feeling?

Birdie said, “I’m going to call Chess.”

“In a minute,” Grant said. “Right now I have a surprise.”

A surprise? Grant?

He led her to the backyard. It was so beautiful, it hurt. The elms were half-green, half-yellow, and the Bradford pears were starting to turn. Grant stopped at the wrought iron table, and there was a portable CD player, which Birdie recognized as something Grant had purchased for his “loft” apartment in South Norwalk. He pressed a button and Gordon Lightfoot started singing “If You Could Read My Mind.” This had been their wedding song.

Grant led Birdie to the pond, and they crossed, single file, over the bridge the landscape architects had built to reach the floating island. The floating island was a perfect circle in the middle of the pond, covered with lush grass that had grown in while Birdie was away on Tuckernuck. Grant took his shoes off and Birdie followed suit.

“You promised me a dance,” he said.

She had considered taking the day off from work and visiting Michael’s grave at the cemetery in New Jersey, but after giving it some thought, Chess decided that would be too painful and, if she got right down to it, disingenuous. She didn’t need to go to Michael’s grave to honor her memory of him. She would honor Michael’s memory by continuing to forge ahead in her new life, such as it was. She would honor herself by being direct and honest: this might have been her wedding day, but it hadn’t worked out. So… she could sit on Michael’s grave and cry, or she could make herself useful.

She had agreed to work a double shift, lunch and dinner, which entailed arriving at the restaurant at eight in the morning, checking that the correct orders had been delivered, and getting the rest of the kitchen staff started on their mise en place. She took the worst job: artichokes.

When Electa came in at ten, she placed a hand on Chess’s lower back. “Thanks for getting things rolling,” she said. “How are you doing?”

Electa knew what day it was. Chess had confided in her one night after service, over an impossible-to-come-by bottle of Screaming Eagle cabernet.

“I’m okay,” Chess said, and she was surprised to find this was true. Her job didn’t allow time for thinking. The orders came in one on top of another like balls she was expected to juggle. Because it was Saturday, the restaurant was packed-full house with a wait-and the kitchen was moving at an amphetamine pace. Chess prepped and plated crab and mango summer rolls and the roasted beet salad with ginger vinaigrette. Then Nina, a very tall and lean Lithuanian cook who worked the sauté station, reached for a pan on the stove without a side towel, and she burned her palm. Chess slid over to cover Nina’s station and man her own station. Under normal circumstances, this would have sent Chess into a tailspin, but today, she was grateful.

There were a couple of lulls in the midafternoon, where thoughts drifted in like fog under a door. It was her fault, all of it. She had hurt Michael. But was she responsible for his reaction? Climbing without a harness. Without a harness! Why were you so reckless? You wanted to break some rules? Act out? You didn’t care what happened to you? Chess no longer believed that Michael wanted to die. Michael loved his life too much, he was good at life, he was a leader, he met challenges, he succeeded. If Nick was going to steal his fiancée, Michael would find another fiancée, a better fiancée, a supermodel who was also a Rhodes Scholar, a beach volleyball champion who was a member of Mensa. There were all kinds of beautiful, wonderful women out in the world, waiting. Michael would never, ever have fallen intentionally. If he had gone climbing without a harness, it was because he believed he was invincible.

Chess was crying now, over her smoking pan of fluke in lemongrass broth.

What happened wasn’t Michael’s fault. It was an accident; he fell. What happened wasn’t Chess’s fault. She had liked Michael enormously and she had grown to love him as a person. She had wanted to be a woman who was in love with him, who could marry him and have children and be happy. She hadn’t been that woman, but she had tried.

She had tried.

She finished her shift at ten thirty that night. The other cooks had knocked off nearly an hour earlier, but Chess had stayed on to clean the stations, mop the floor, get everything ready for brunch service the next day. Electa appeared and asked Chess if she wanted to sit at the bar and have a drink.

“No Screaming Eagle tonight,” Electa said apologetically. “But we can have lychee martinis?”

Chess shook her head. “I’m going home.”

“You sure?” Electa said. “Well, you’ve had a long day.”

Long day, yes. Chess removed her apron and threw it in the laundry bin. She ran her hands through her hair. It had grown back in, spiky at first, then softer. She’d decided to keep it short, which was convenient for kitchen work. In the very front now was a tuft of pure white. White hair at age thirty-two: it was either a punishment or a badge of honor.

Chess arrived in the lobby of her building at quarter past eleven. She was bone tired-too tired to paint her toenails, iron her clothes, or think. This was a good thing. She grabbed a week’s worth of mail from her box and headed up to her apartment.

Chess turned on a light, collapsed on the sofa, dropped the mail on the coffee table. Now what? she wondered. She was as limp as a dishrag and yet she feared she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She thought of Aunt India, and then her mother and Tate, the four of them on Tuckernuck together. Her eyes burned with tears. She might as well admit it to herself: she was lonely.

Then she saw it. A postcard, resting on the top of the pile of mail. A postcard of Central Park in autumn, the trees ablaze with color. In white script across the top, it said, New York City.