“Mom? Are you all right?” Olivia asked, her voice a squeak. It was rare to frighten Olivia, who was fearless.
Hannah disappeared and returned with a glass of water. “Drink this,” she said.
Ada did as she was told, knowing that her children thought she was panicking about her mother and her mother only. It was better this way.
An orthodontist conference! How stupid did he think she was?
Ada forced herself to her feet and hugged her children goodbye. They watched from the driveway as she drove down the road, headed for the ferry. After a shot of rage, she called Peter, eager to tell him everything she already knew. But just as she was about to dial him, her mother called, and she was crying.
“I’m on my way, Mom!” Ada said. “I’ll be there in two hours.”
That evening, Ada and Kathy bundled up in blankets and sat on the back porch of Kathy’s place, watching the fireflies as they glowed across the lawn. Kathy was crying out, drinking tea, her eyes tinged pink and red. Neither of them had touched much of their meal.
“You know, I keep thinking about your father,” Kathy said quietly. “The first few weeks we were married, I was terrified of losing him. I had this idea that I’d found the love of my life, and that anything, or anyone, a car or a murderer or something like that, could kill him and take him away from me. I pictured myself as a widow and imagined that nobody would ever want to see me, for fear that my bad luck would rub off on them.”
Ada could picture her mother, a twenty-something and frightened, peering over at her father’s sleeping form, worried that he wouldn’t wake up.
“But after a little while, I got used to the idea that we were going to get old together,” Kathy continued. “Days passed so quickly, especially when you were little. There were always bills to pay, grocery runs, and church functions, among other things. Your father got older before my eyes, and I got older before his eyes. But I thought that was part of the arrangement.”
Ada guessed that her mother was saying all this because she wished someone—a life partner—would be at the hospital on Tuesday. But it would only be Ada, waiting.
“You’re lucky,” Kathy said after a while, her voice losing its steam. “You and Peter have always had one another. You respect each other. You aren’t afraid of a few wrinkles or of the passageof time. I remember thinking he loved you more when you were overweight from pregnancy than ever before!”
Ada’s eyes stung with tears. It was true that Peter had been everyone’s favorite after each of the babies were born. They’d called him “Super Dad” and said they were jealous of Ada’s marriage, which was more like a partnership. Back then, Ada had still been reeling after the ending of her opera career, and she hadn’t even been able to sing her babies to sleep at night. She’d thought,How will my babies ever know me if they can’t hear me sing?But she hadn’t told Peter any of this, for fear that he’d think she was complaining about the brand-new life they’d built in Nantucket. And she’d been so very grateful for it.
“Who knows?” Kathy said, pulling her fingers through her hair. “Maybe when I get out of this rough spell, I’ll try to date again. Maybe I’ll find a man who’ll be there when I have another surgery. Maybe…” She trailed off.
Ada took a breath. She considered asking,Do you think people are only happy if they have romantic relationships?But she didn’t want to let her mother in on her own heartache. Her mother’s heart was quite literally broken. There wasn’t space for any other talk.
That night, Ada fell asleep in the bed she’d grown up in. The mattress was stiff, causing her spine to ache. A little after midnight, she got up and checked social media to see that Hannah had posted a few photographs from after sunset. Hannah and Quintin on a beach somewhere, cozied up. Ada’s heart fluttered.Don’t you dare break her heart, she wanted to tell Quintin. But she knew that was what people did.
Maybe because she couldn’t stop herself, Ada found herself typing “Katrina Petri” into the search bar. Katrina came up immediately: mostly photographs of her and the other Salt Sisters, out to dinner, drinking wine, walking in the sand—female friendship, on blast. There were no photographs ofKatrina’s love life, thank goodness. But when Ada scrolled further back, she found pictures of Katrina and her husband, performing all the rituals one was meant to as a husband and wife.
In the photographs, Katrina’s smile seemed plastic-like, and her husband looked stern. But maybe Ada was only thinking those things because she knew the whole story. She closed her phone and fell back on the bed.
Throughout the weekend, Ada kept Kathy’s stress to a minimum. She cooked dinners, took her for very short walks, and played movies via the various streaming services Peter had put on Kathy’s television a few years back. Kathy liked anything from the old times—films from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—and Ada had to admit there was a certain magic behind them. In an even older film,Casablanca, she held her mother’s hand and watched her face, captivated by the depth of emotion her mother was experiencing.
But, as Ada watched the woman in the film leave her great love in Morocco and return to the husband she’d thought had died, Ada wondered,Am I the husband she’s returning to?Would Peter leave Katrina, maybe his one true love, in a metaphorical Morocco to honor his commitment to Ada?
Was that how she wanted her story to go?
Tuesday morning, Ada drove Kathy to the hospital, where there were several hours of prep before Kathy’s surgery. During their downtime, Ada tried to cheer her mother up by telling her old stories from her life in the opera, hoping they’d distract her. Kathy said twice, “You’re making that up! That can’t be real!” and she laughed a lot, her eyes glazed.
And then Kathy said, “Music made you happy. I never found anything like that.”
Throughout that afternoon, as Ada waited for the heart surgery to be completed, Kathy’s words rang through Ada’shead. Her happiness from music had been so simple, so easy. And when music had been taken away from her, she’d been devastated and fallen immediately into Peter’s arms, as though sure that he was the answer to everything. She imagined watching Hannah give up her life for some guy and shuddered. But Ada hadn’t really “given up” on opera for Peter. She’d been forced out.
Peter called twice during the surgery, explaining what his doctor-friend had told him about Kathy’s condition. “It sounds like there’s a really high success rate,” Peter said, his voice gentle. “I hope you know that myself and the kids are just a couple of hours away. We can come down whenever you need us.”
Ada’s breathing felt shallow. “Thanks,” she said. But she got off the phone quickly because Peter’s voice made her more upset than she wanted to be.
When they announced that her mother was out of surgery and resting comfortably, Ada burst into tears. “It was a success,” the doctor told her, his eyes gentle. “She’s going to be all right.”
But Ada refused to go back to her mother’s place that night and insisted on sleeping in a little cot next to Kathy’s bed. When sunlight spilled through the hospital windows the following morning, her mother was looking at her with a quizzical smile and saying, “Did you pack my hairspray? I need to do my hair!”
Chapter Fifteen
Logistically, given Ada’s therapy patients and the children, as well as everything that tied her to Peter’s home island of Nantucket, it was easier to bring Kathy back to the house later that week. Ada refused Peter’s help in getting there, no matter how often he texted to suggest ways he could assist. Ada was sure he was doing everything in his power to make himself think he was still a good husband and father, to show himself that what he was doing with Katrina wasn’t “that bad.” As a therapist, she’d seen that kind of behavior a thousand times before.
