Edgewater (12 page)

“Good. That's settled. Now, would you like the VIP tour?”

“Yes, please,” I said.

“So, this is the east wing,” Charlie said. He pointed to a model train set running through a model town. “And that's the Copeland and Carrigan Railroad Station.”

“Okay, Copeland I get,” I told him. “But who was Carrigan?”

“My nanny, Mona,” Charlie said. “Until she was unceremoniously fired.”

“Why?”

“She secretly arranged for her photographer boyfriend to get pictures of me in the park that they could sell to put a down payment on a boat. Or something like that.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah, but before that she logged a few hundred hours up here
with me.” He gestured toward a love seat and a pair of matching plush chairs. “Over here is the sitting room that I basically never sat in, though Mona liked it best. Check out the view.”

I looked out the window. A break in the line of trees allowed a direct look onto the Point.

“And now, come with me,” Charlie went on, and I followed him around the tree trunk. “Voilà! My art studio.” Against the far wall was an easel and shelves of colored paper, paints, brushes, and clay. Drawings were tacked up to the tree trunk, a sort of kid's art exhibit of painted spaceships, airplanes, and a few not-so-easily identifiable things.

“What's that one?” I asked him. “A submarine?”

“Nope, a coffin,” he said.

I stepped closer and saw that it did, indeed, look like a coffin. “Wow,” I said. “So it is. Man, all I drew when I was little were horses. I pinned them all over my bedroom walls.”

“Do you still have them?”

“Nah,” I said.

Mom used to draw animals for Susannah and me all the time, pretty good ones, but I hadn't inherited the artist gene. Horses looked like works of art to me. On the page, though, they looked messy and misshapen. At some point I stopped even trying to draw them.

“I guess you think it's pretty immature that I still have these.”

“Not at all,” I said quickly. “Actually, I think a coffin is pretty advanced for a little kid.”

“My school was having its centennial, and they told us to draw ourselves in a hundred years, wherever we thought we'd be. Even at six years old, I knew I wasn't likely to be alive that
long. So, behold—my coffin. When my mom saw it, she said it was totally creepy and I had to redo it. I told her I didn't have any other ideas, and she said I should draw myself as an old man at a desk, writing my memoirs. Naturally she thought I'd have the kind of life other people would want to read about.”

“If you lived to a hundred and six, you'd have a lot to write about,” I said.

“I doubt that's in the cards for me. My grandfather died at seventy-six.”

I didn't tell him, but I remembered watching the funeral on TV in Lennox's den. We were in eighth grade. Charlie had been in a black suit, hands hooked behind his back as he walked beside his dad, behind the casket. He hadn't shed a tear, but Lennox had. “This is a loss for our country,” she'd said, her voice thick with mourning.

“And my other grandfather, my mom's father, died in his fifties,” Charlie went on. “Massive heart attack. So there's my DNA. But I was proud of the coffin. I looked up pictures of real coffins on the Internet so I had something to base it on. I even got the beveling right—see?”

I did see; he'd drawn the lid with rounded edges. I lifted a hand to trace them with my finger.

“I like your watch,” Charlie told me.

“Thanks.”

“My dad gave a speech a couple years ago about how you don't see kids wearing watches these days, because they're just single-function devices, and kids expect more—a timepiece, a camera, a phone, a twelve-piece orchestra—all rolled into one. Guess you proved him wrong.”

I smiled. “It was my mom's,” I explained.

“Was,” he repeated. “Oh, shit.” He looked to the coffin picture and back to me. “I didn't mean to be so insensitive.”

“No, no,” I said. “My mom's fine. She's alive and well.”

“You guys are close?”

“Not exactly.”

Charlie raised an eyebrow.

“My sister can do that,” I told him.

“What?”

“Raise one eyebrow. When I was a kid, I practiced in front of the mirror for about a hundred hours. I couldn't do it.”

“My dad can do it, too,” he said. “It's genetic.”

“I know that now,” I said.

“So, which of your parents can raise an eyebrow, and which can't?”

I shrugged. “I couldn't tell you.”

There went Charlie's eyebrow again.

“My mom and I, well, we have a birthday-card and holiday-card kind of relationship.” That was the line I often gave to explain Mom away. Though at this point the cards had all but disappeared. “And my dad left a long time ago.”

Now Charlie's expression was full of pity. God, why couldn't Lennox finish her call already and get me out of this conversation?

“It's not a big deal,” I assured him. “I don't remember him. I don't even have his last name.”

He'd had a drinking problem, my father. I was fuzzy on the details, on account of being so young when he'd fallen off the wagon and left us behind. Mom had changed our last name
back to her maiden name, because that's how incidental he was.

“So, who do you live with?” Charlie asked.

“During the school year I go to Hillyer, and on vacations I stay here with my aunt.”

“Do you miss your parents?”

I shook my head. “I don't think parents should automatically be the center of their kids' worlds simply because they produced them. I think they need to prove themselves, like in any other job. My mom proved she's not such a good mom, and my dad proved he's not a good dad. Why should I miss them?”

“That's fascinating,” he said. I made a face. “Sorry, that came out wrong. Believe me, I know what it's like when people think your life is fascinating and you just think it's your own shitty life. What I meant was, the way you talk about what happened to you, it's really fascinating.”

“I hate talking about my family,” I admitted.

“Oh, come on. You know all about mine.”

“That's different,” I told him.

“Why? Because everyone does?”

“Well, yes.”

“I like your honesty,” he said. “You're a cool girl, Lorrie. And your parents are crazy for not wanting to be a bigger part of your life.”

“You don't have to say that.”

“I mean it, and I've officially decided to hate them both on your behalf. I hope I never meet them.”

My last memory of my mother was her leaving Edgewater to go to that party at the Copelands', on Gigi's thirtieth birthday, after we'd dropped off the cake. Mom's usually stick-straight
hair was in waves like a Botticelli angel's. She was wearing a new dress, long and white, gauzy and ethereal. I didn't want her to go, and I actually attached myself to her leg in an effort to make her stay. It was as if I'd known in advance that I wasn't ever going to see her again. But of course that's the kind of thing you think in retrospect. It's not as if I really had any sort of premonition. Mom put her watch on my wrist and told me I could stay up an extra half hour and keep track of my bedtime myself. Then she called to the babysitter to take me from her.

Certainly that night was unremarkable for Charlie; his parents always had parties, and he always had both of them back when the parties were over. It was possible Charlie had already met my mom, that night, a random woman in a beautiful dress. But he wouldn't remember, and she wasn't around to ask.

“The thing is,” Charlie went on, “I know practically everything there is to know about my father, and my grandfather, and his grandfather. Hell, anyone with a library card can get all that information if they want. Sometimes I fantasize about knowing a little bit less. I know you said you don't miss your parents, and maybe you mean that. But just in case you have mixed feelings on it, I'm here to tell you, the whole family thing, it can be a bit overrated.”

I had to hand it to Charlie Copeland. He wasn't at all like I expected him to be. “Thanks,” I said.

“So you live with your aunt, huh? She have any kids of her own?”

“Nope, just me and my sister.”

“Your sister who can raise an eyebrow?”

“That's the one,” I said. “Is that fascinating, too?”

“It is for someone who's spent his whole life as an only child. I always wanted a sibling, just to have someone who could roll his eyes along with me whenever my parents did something insufferable. We'd suffer together, you know?”

“Safety in numbers.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“Susannah and I are really different,” I said.

“I guess that happens.” He paused. “Any pets?”

“Just my horse.” As far as I was concerned, Orion was my only pet. If it were up to me, I'd serve every cat and critter making their home at Edgewater their eviction notices.

“You're a horse girl. I should've known.”

“Why do you say that?”

I knew he couldn't smell it on me. I'd only spent twenty minutes at Oceanfront and I hadn't even mounted a horse. Besides, I'd taken a shower after. I was certain I didn't have so much as a single piece of hay on me. I missed it, too. The barn smells, the stray pieces of hay—they were my trademarks. Who was I if I wasn't around horses?

“Your palm,” he said. “I felt the callus. It's from the reins, right? Shelby rides when she's not touring, and her hands feel just like yours.”

Now my hands were being compared to Shelby Rhodes's hands. “Orion's a bit headstrong,” I said, and I pictured my horse nodding his head vigorously. I could practically feel the reins straining in my hands. “He fights the bit.”

“So does Ambassador.”

“Is that Shelby's horse?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Is Shelby coming tonight?”

Please, God, let the answer be no.

Though who was I to keep Shelby Rhodes away from her own boyfriend? I didn't want a boyfriend, and I certainly didn't want to be the girl who got mixed up with someone else's.

“No,” Charlie said. “We're taking a bit of a break this summer. She's filming a movie with Hayden O'Conner. She didn't want to be tied to too many things.”

“I didn't know she was an actress.”

“Now she is.” He paused. “Let's talk about something else.”

Charlie had been the one to bring up Shelby, but I didn't point that out. He pushed the hair from his eyes. Of course his bangs fell right back down again. I had the urge to reach out and sweep them from his forehead myself. My fingers actually tingled at the thought. But I didn't do it. I wasn't his girlfriend or his mother. I wasn't allowed to touch him that way. I turned away to look at the coffin picture again.

“Lorrie?”

“Yeah?” I said, turning back again. And then Charlie's lips were on mine, just barely, as if he wasn't sure he was allowed to press any harder. My whole body was trembling. His lips were soft and dry. I took the smallest of steps closer, to let him know it was all right. I could feel something buzzing between us, as if my body and his body together created an electric charge.

“Hey, guys,” Lennox called right then. Charlie and I broke apart just before she flung the door open. “The view is incredible. Let's eat out here.”

10

I SPY

CHARLIE HAD DUG UP AN OLD PAIR OF BINOCULARS,
and Lennox and I passed them back and forth over the remnants of our dinner. The sun was going down, but tiki lanterns were strung up around the Copelands' lawn, crisscrossing above the guests' heads. The drinks in people's hands glowed red and blue, very patriotic. Somewhere out there a stage must've been set up. I heard snippets of lyrics I recognized from a song by the Jessarae Band, which had been at the top of the charts all spring.

Just like the journalist she aspired to be, Lennox grilled Charlie on everything from what his plans were for the rest of the summer to whether he'd be allowed back at Grosvenor-Baldwin Academy in the fall.

“I think that ship has sailed,” Charlie said to her. His knee bumped accidentally against mine. Or maybe it wasn't accidental, because he made no attempt to move it away. I didn't
move my knee, either, and there was a wave of heat running through me, from my heart thump-thumping in my chest to the place where our bodies touched. I picked up my glass of wine and took a sip—Charlie had produced a bottle from the box of food, explaining that his parents were only strict about the underage-drinking thing when they thought other people might be watching.

“Being a politician is mostly about managing people's perceptions,” Lennox said with authority. Then she went on about Charlie's school choices. “You should check out Hillyer. It's only four hours from here,
Forbes
named it one of the top ten boarding schools in the Northeast, and as a bonus, Lorrie and I go there. He should come, don't you think, Lor?”