A PLACE OF REFUGE

PROLOGUE

September 19, 1970

She remembers nothing about the accident. Not the rain-slicked road that sent the oncoming car into a skid. Not The Boston Globe delivery truck driver who pulled her from the wreckage. Not the nurse on her way to work who stayed with her until the ambulance came.

She only remembers dying.

1971

Izzy

CHAPTER ONE

February 15

Caleb’s birth pushed her over the edge.

It had been an occasion of great joy for her family—the first grandchild—after a year of both challenge and hope. First, the recurrence of her mother’s lung cancer, the search for a bone marrow donor that resulted in a match with Josiah and a successful transplant, and then Izzy’s accident.

She had been back on Chappaquiddick Island at her parents’ home in Cove Meadow for nearly three months, her spirit crushed as thoroughly as the mangled roof of the Mustang that had fractured her skull. Izzy was dismayed that she could not share in the happiness filling the house. She felt a profound isolation that with shame she also recognized as selfishness. She envied her brother, Josiah, and his wife, Grace, and their experience of becoming parents. She believed that parenthood would now be something she’d never know.

The depression that had engulfed her since waking to life after the accident had been tolerable until Caleb’s birth. But now she found herself in almost physical pain whenever she spent time in the presence of the baby. She was afraid to hold him. She spent her days walking the beach when the weather was anything less than a gale. Even in the rain or snow, she paced up and down below the house, thrusting her cane into the hard-packed sand at the water’s edge.

In the past, of course, winter weather would have found her holed up by the stove, a thick pair of socks covering her always frozen feet, a mug of hot chocolate in her hand, and a book in her lap.

But she hadn’t picked up a book since the day in the hospital when Jo had brought her a stack of nineteenth-century novels to read. She had reached for them eagerly and opened the first one, Melville’s Typee. But within minutes, she realized that she couldn’t remember the sentence she’d just read.

At first she thought it was fatigue. After all, she’d fractured her skull; she had constant headaches. Reading had always soothed her, taken her away. But not anymore.

She tried to ignore her fears, to deny them. But it soon became apparent that it wasn’t only the words she read that she couldn’t remember.

It was Josiah who had noticed the change in her first: the blank expression, the confusion, the dismay that even a brief conversation was beyond her ability to remember.

The neurologist had explained it succinctly. When she had died, however briefly after the accident, a part of her brain had died as well.

There was no point in returning to Harvard to finish the doctorate she had begun with such promise the year before. She couldn’t even manage the paperwork to withdraw and had to depend on Josiah to fill out the form for her.

She was released from the hospital after a week, and Josiah and her father brought her home to Cove Meadow, where her mother was recuperating from the bone marrow transplant. Izzy spent the next three months reaching what she thought was a reluctant acceptance of her limitations—until Caleb had been born, just before Christmas.

Now, she recognized how fragile her acceptance had been and how she’d worn it as a mask, trying not to inflict the rest of the family with her despair.

It was while on one of her solitary walks below the Wampanoag Burial Ground that she was interrupted by a whirlwind in a sheepskin coat with dark curls flying around her face in the wind. Maria Belli, her college and then grad school roommate, was calling her name as she approached along the shore. Maria had been out of the country since August, doing a semester in Germany at the Bundestag as part of her masters in government at Harvard’s JFK School of Government. She hadn’t seen Izzy since before the accident, although she’d sent first a telegram and then postcards every week. Izzy hadn’t answered any of them.

Izzy stood frozen, unable to move toward Maria and afraid of what Maria would see as soon as she got close. The scar on Izzy’s forehead was no longer raw and covered almost entirely by her own curls. That had been one of the things that had bonded Izzy and Maria when they’d been freshmen at Smith, their naturally curly, impossible-to-control hair. But it wasn’t the scar that Izzy wanted to hide. It was the emptiness. The sense of not being Izzy anymore that pervaded her.

Maria reached her with open arms and embraced her. Izzy stiffened, unable to hug Maria back. Maria took a step away and looked at her.

“I’m here, Izzy. I’m not letting go, and I’m not going to be pushed away. Now, we can walk some more on the beach or we can go into Edgartown for some coffee, but I want to know what’s going on.”

Izzy finally found her voice. “Did my parents ask you to come?”

Maria tucked her arm into Izzy’s and started to walk.

“I’d like to tell you that it was the ability I inherited from my Strega Nonna—my great-grandmother, the witch—that enlightened me about your need for me. But, in fact, it was Grace.”

“I’ve been trying so hard not to burden them with my sadness, but I guess I’ve failed.”

“They don’t see you as a burden, Izzy. They love you, but they don’t know how to help you. I don’t know how to help you either, but I can listen. And you know how opinionated I can be. If I think you are wallowing in self-pity, I have no qualms about reading you the riot act.”

A small smile crossed Izzy’s lips. “Oh, yes, I’m well aware that you’ll tell me exactly what you think. My family has been tiptoeing around me.”

“That’s not what you need, Izzy. You can’t spend the rest of your life hiding in your parents’ house. I will not allow you to become another Emily Dickinson.”

“At least Emily wrote poems. I can only write lists, to remind me of what I cannot hold onto in my memory. I don’t know what to do, Maria. I don’t know who I am anymore. All the dreams I had of earning my doctorate, of teaching, and of ultimately writing the Great American Novel—they all disappeared that morning on the road when I died.”

“But you came back, Izzy. You came back. There’s a reason you came back.”

“If there is, I don’t know it.”

“You simply haven’t discovered it yet. And you’re not going to discover it hiding on Chappy.”

“I’m not capable of being anywhere else. I’m brain-damaged, Maria. As much as you would like to wave your nonna’s magic wand—or whatever Italian godmothers used—I can’t remember. How can I take care of myself away from here?”

“Well, since you asked, I have a suggestion. You need to get away, but you need to go somewhere safe, somewhere you won’t be entirely on your own but you also won’t be smothered by your family’s worries.”

“And where might this mythical place be?”

“My grandfather’s farm.”

“Your grandfather Raffaello? The dapper Italian archaeologist who always took us out to dinner at Anthony’s Pier 4 when he was in Boston? The same farm outside Siena where you and I spent spring break, how many years ago?” Izzy’s brain was still able to retrieve some, although not all, of her old memories.

“He’s the only grandfather I have, so yes, Raffaello, and yes, his same farm, Portarello.”

“You want me to go to the farm? What would I do there?”

“The farm still brings in students as interns to learn and work on the land and in the hotel my cousin Linda established in the old villa. You can work in the garden, you can cook, you can explore Tuscany. And my family will watch over you but from a distance. It’s easier when it’s not your mother or your sister. What do you think?”

“I think it sounds like a fairy tale, not reality.”

“I think you’re afraid.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Maria.”

“I’m not going away until we do talk about it. I agree, you are not the Izzy I know and love. But not because you’ve lost your short-term memory. The person I know is curious and passionate and open to new experiences. What I see before me is someone who has closed herself off to life, who is numb and unwilling to risk the possibility of failure or pain, when she knows that is the only way to rediscover who she is.”

“Stop it, Maria! You have no idea how much I have lost and how much it hurts.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t. But I do know that you have the capacity to imagine a new Izzy, even if you can’t remember.”

“What if I don’t want to reinvent myself?”

“I don’t believe you, Izzy. I don’t believe that you are willing to accept this half-life. I don’t believe you want to remain in this limbo of an existence.”

Izzy pulled away from Maria and paced closer to the water’s edge. She stood for a while looking at the bay.

“You know, there have been moments when I have longed for the peace I experienced in those moments when I died. Coming back has meant nothing but pain and the chaos of my brain. You’re right. I don’t want to stay like this.”

“Then take the risk. Go to my grandfather’s farm. At least give it the summer.”

Izzy turned away from the water.

“Let me think about it. I can talk to Jo. I think he’ll understand.”

Together, they trudged back up the beach to the house.

Later that day, Izzy found Josiah at the construction site where the house he and Grace were building was starting to take shape.

“Can you spare a few minutes to talk?”

He put down his hammer. “What is it, Bird, in addition to the state of unrelieved sadness that seems to have overtaken you since the accident?” Josiah still called her by the shortened version of the nickname her father had given her, Hummingbird, because of how she had flitted from one absorption to another, drinking in the world around her.

“I’m thinking of leaving the island. My sadness, my despair, are hurting everyone. Especially Mom. Here she is, in the midst of the miracle your bone marrow offered her, and I’m like another cancer, stealing breath from her.”

Josiah was silent. He didn’t offer platitudes or deny the truth of what Izzy had described.

“Where will you go?”

Izzy was grateful that he hadn’t immediately tried to dissuade her. She had turned to Josiah because he was no stranger to the need to leave. His reasons for going ten years earlier had been different, but he had also set out to redefine himself, much as she was hoping to do. They were biracial, the children of a Wampanoag sachem and an Irish-American, bound to the ancestral land of Chappaquiddick, where the tribe had originated, but driven to understand what lay beyond the water.

“Maria’s grandfather has a farm. I can work there for room and board. One doesn’t need a lot of brain power to hoe vegetables and muck out pig pens.”

“It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”

She winced. “As much as this unfamiliar brain of mine can. I’ve started writing everything down to hold onto important stuff.” She slapped the back pocket of her jeans, where the top of a small spiral-bound notebook protruded.

“Have you told Mom and Dad?”

“Not yet. There’s more. The farm is in Italy.”

He stopped. “They’ll worry.”

“Not any more than they worry now. I see how it’s affecting Mom. At least if I’m away, she won’t be confronted every day with my bleakness. I’m dragging you all down. If I go to the farm, I’ll be with people who don’t know who I was before, who won’t be lamenting how much I’ve lost.”

“You’ll know.”

“Maybe I’ll forget that too.”

“What can I do to help you? You didn’t come out here just to give me advance notice.”

“I wanted to gauge your reaction and ask you for advice. You left without their approval. I guess I’m looking for some of your courage.”

“I not only left without their approval, I left without their knowledge. And I wasn’t courageous. I was a sullen, smoldering teenager who was pissed at his parents and resentful of you. I’m the last person you should choose as a role model.”

“But you faced their pain—and my sense of abandonment—and held fast to what you needed to do.”

“And caused a lot of agony in the process. I’m not proud of that episode in my life.”

“Do you think I’m being selfish?”

“Bird, I can’t imagine what you are going through right now. But I can understand your feeling that if you stay, you’ll drift into some limbo where you’ll neither regain your former self nor find another Izzy who is different but whole. You’re not selfish. You’re actually showing signs of rejoining the living. You’ve been in some space inaccessible to the rest of us—halfway between the girl who died that day on Route 2 and us. Making the decision to go is a first step back to whoever is waiting inside you.”

She gently punched his arm. “Thanks, big brother. That’s exactly what I needed.”

In the evening at the dinner table with everyone present, Izzy decided to announce her plans. She was afraid that if she waited, she’d waver in her decision and retreat back into her isolation.

Tobias glowered. Mae stiffened. Grace, nursing Caleb, turned to Josiah with raised eyebrows, silently questioning if he knew. Maria held her hand under the table and squeezed.

“Oh, Izzy. Italy? It’s wonderful that you feel well enough to try something new. But so far away! What if …?”

“Why can’t you work on a farm here on the island? I’m sure if I asked around we’d find someone who needs an extra hand.”

“Thanks, Dad. But if I stay on the island, stay here with you, I’m afraid I’ll slip into complacency and accept this limited and constrained existence.”

“Have we ever limited you in the past?”

Izzy had contracted polio as a child. Throughout her early years, especially during multiple corrective surgeries, her parents had encouraged her not to be limited by the disease.

“Of course not! You taught me ways to see my crippled leg as a challenge, not an impediment. Why can’t you understand that I now need to find a way out of my crippled brain?”

Izzy knew it was going to take more than one dinner table conversation, but she had reached the limit of her own ability to argue. She tossed her napkin on the table and left the house, afraid that if she stayed they would hammer away at her fragile courage. She shook her head when Maria got up to join her. She needed to be alone.

 

Mae found her on the dock and slipped down beside her. She had had more than one important conversation with her children sitting in this spot, legs dangling over the side and the Milky Way overhead. 

“Hummingbird, please forgive my initial reaction to your plan. I’ve almost lost you twice now, and I’ll admit I’m afraid for you and for me. But I was more afraid of losing you in these last few months than at any other time, as you receded further and further away—not only from us but from yourself.”

“I know, Mom. I sense how worried you are, how much my withdrawal is hurting you. I don’t know any other way to remove that pain except to go away. We all seem trapped by my state of nonexistence. I can’t bear dragging you all down with me. It’s like a weight. Not the weight of a child carried with love and anticipation but the burden of my own fears. If I don’t go, I’m afraid I’ll never cast them off.”

“I know that you need to go. I understand it not only with my head but with my heart. Remember, I left my own family when I was even younger than you are. The circumstances were very different. I was more like Josiah in running away without a word.”

“I’m not running away!”

“No. But like my own mother, I want to keep you safe, pull you back from the wave I see gathering strength behind you. If you are in Italy, I am powerless to protect you.”

“Mom, when I was only as far as Shear Pen Pond, you couldn’t protect me. You can’t protect me even now, under your roof, sitting at your table every day. I’m the only one who can do battle with the monster that stole my memory.”

“When will you go?” The words were said with resignation, sadness, acceptance. 

 

Six weeks later, after exchanging letters with Maria’s grandfather and obtaining her passport, Izzy left Cove Meadow.