during his college years. Was I exiled from the main house? The single room was perhaps twenty square feet and might have felt cozy were it not for the mounted heads, antlers, and horns that covered every inch of the walls.
“Mom gives Dad a ten-trophy limit in the house,” Jack said. “The rest go here.”
I unpacked, kicked off my shoes, and stretched out on the sofa bed, which had been turned down. When I looked up, I found myself staring into the nostrils of an elk whose giant chin extended out over the pillows. Not so many years ago, I’d helped my mother grind the meat of an elk Ben had killed, dropping raw chunks of it into the top of her old-fashioned crank, which extruded them out the side in spaghetti-like strands. She used the meat to make a lasagna, adding extra ricotta to mitigate the gaminess. Now it occurred to me that the wild-game cookbook, our ruse to give Ben and Malabar time together, might never see the light of day. Jack lay down on his side, facing me.
“Am I crazy or did you once tell me that your father smooshed a bloody duck into your face?” I asked, vaguely recalling a disturbing story Jack had recounted when we were first dating.
“Affirmative,” Jack said.
Unlike his father, Jack had never been much of a hunter or fisherman. He didn’t like the cold and didn’t have the patience those activities required. Nonetheless, when Jack was a kid, Ben would once in a while succeed in cajoling him into a predawn duck hunt with Tor and Tap. On one of these outings, when Jack was around ten, he finally managed to shoot a duck. His father was overjoyed at Jack’s first kill and whooped and hollered when Tor retrieved the bird and dropped it at his feet. Ben picked up the duck, spread its feathers apart to reveal the wound, and excitedly beckoned Jack over. When Jack bent down for a closer look, Ben grabbed his son by the scruff of the neck and ground the bird’s bloody backside into his face, part of some hunting rite of passage.
I rolled onto my side so that Jack and I faced each other. Jack was not adept in the language of emotion, but his expression was full of love. “Ready?” he asked.
Who could ever be ready for this, I wondered.
“Ready,” I answered.
* * *
When we walked into the kitchen, everything looked more or less as it always had, and yet there was a disturbing quiet in the room. We were on high alert, our ears up and our noses twitching like rabbits’. There was Lily, leaning against the countertop. She was as thin and brittle as I’d ever seen her, but there was a new fierceness about her too. Her wiry arms were crossed. This was her kitchen, her home, her family. I was on her turf now and there were new rules. When she saw Jack, her face softened and she smiled, opening her arms. Jack walked past me to embrace his mother as Lily regarded me over his shoulder. It was not an unkind look, but it made me understand that Jack had been hers before he was mine and that she’d been waiting for me, for this encounter. It would be, perhaps, the closest she’d ever get to confronting her adversary, perhaps her only opportunity to say her piece.
In this moment, it was as if a new circuit in my brain’s fuse box had been flipped, suddenly illuminating Lily as a whole person. Until then I’d seen her only through Malabar’s eyes: an ordinary woman who was holding back an extraordinary man, keeping him from the life he should have been living. Growing up, I had viewed Lily as the character created by my mother, bookish, plain, practical to the point of boring. But she was before me now, looking as formidable as hell. Here was a woman who’d survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma, infertility, and now infidelity. I had been wrong on Harbour Island; Lily was not the Melanie Wilkes in this story. She was Scarlett O’Hara. And she wasn’t going down without a fight.
When Lily’s husband of forty-five years had explained to her that he’d been carrying on an affair with my mother—a woman she considered a friend—and wished to continue doing so, Lily disabused him of that notion at warp speed, jerking his chain so violently that he heeled immediately. Ben had grown up in this town of Plymouth,