Island Girls (8 page)

By July, the atmosphere in the house was radioactive. Arguments erupted. Doors were slammed.

Since Justine cooked for all five in the family, she insisted that the three girls take turns cleaning the kitchen after dinner. One night Arden wandered into the house shortly after seven, when the others had just finished their evening meal and were still sitting around the dining room table.

“Where have you been?” Rory demanded.

“Walking.” Arden shrugged, reaching over to pick up a carrot from Meg’s plate.

Justine said, “We’ve finished dinner.”

Arden tossed her head. “Fine. I’m not hungry.”

“It’s your night to do the dishes,” Jenny reminded her.

“Since I didn’t eat, I shouldn’t have to do the dishes,” Arden countered.

A silence fell, the calm before the storm.

“I cooked enough food for you. I set a place for you. It is your turn to do the dishes.” Justine spoke calmly, but anger made her voice tremble.

“I don’t agree,” Arden responded, cool as ice.

Justine made a small gasp. She shot Rory a black look. When he didn’t speak, Justine shoved back her chair, rose from the table, and approached Arden. “While you’re living in this house, you’ll do as you’re told.”

Meg rushed to intervene. “I’ll do the dishes tonight. Really, I don’t mind.”

Arden gave a fake bitter snorting laugh. “Oh, Christ, Meg, you’re such a pussy!”

Justine slapped Arden’s face. “Don’t you use that language in my house.”

Arden went white, tears shimmering at the edges of her eyes, lips trembling. Meg jumped up from the table and rushed to put her arms around her.

“Don’t you hit my sister!” she spat at Justine.

Eventually, Rory had resolved the argument by laying down the law: Whether or not Arden ate with them, she had to do the dishes on her night.

From then on, Arden’s presence in the house created tension. Meg went to the library more or hid in her room, reading. She began to sneak candy bars into her room to nibble. She felt a void deep inside she couldn’t seem to fill.

Meg lay on the beach in the sunshine, a grown woman shaken to her core by memories. She warned herself:
Stop right there
.

Years had passed since that horrible summer. At boarding school and college, Meg had met girls whose families made her own look enviable. World literature had shown her families who killed one another for land, money, or power. What she’d gone through was nothing to cry about. It was only complicated and it had been unfair, but life was complicated and unfair.
God
, she said to herself,
stop whining
.

Suddenly the sun was too hot, and her back hurt from lying in the sand. She began to gather up her stuff.

As she did, a blonde woman, fortyish, spread out her towel next to Meg and slathered sunblock on her arms.

“Hi,” she chirped pleasantly to Meg.

Preoccupied, Meg replied briefly, “Hello.”

“Oh, am I disturbing you?” the blonde asked.

“What? Oh no, not at all. I just remembered something I’ve got to do.”

Meg rose, picked up her beach bag, and tracked up through the hot sand, wondering why the other woman had seemed disappointed at her departure.

Justine had always been a beauty. She’d nurtured this quality with careful nutrition, yoga, exercise, spa treatments, manicures, pedicures, and, in the past five or so years, weekly visits to the hairdresser. Clothes shopping had been a serious occupation for her, and she’d utilized great taste, not to mention money, in decorating their large, historic Belmont house to perfection.

Now she wandered around the perfect house in a stained robe, her hair lank, tipped with split ends. Makeup hadn’t touched her face since she returned from Rory’s funeral, and as far as nutrition—well, she was getting most of that from wine.

How would she get through the rest of her life without Rory?

How was she going to get through the next
hour
without Rory? He was the love of her life.

They’d met at the perfume counter in the Natick Mall Lord & Taylor. Rory was looking for a present for a client, he told her, an older woman who had just purchased a posh town house. He
wanted something classy, and his glance at her let her understand he knew she was all about classy.

Tall, wide-shouldered, blue-eyed, and red-haired, Rory exuded confidence, joie de vivre, and sexuality. He laughed easily, his eyes twinkled, and when they touched—so Justine could spray perfume on his wrist—angels sang.

He took a long time selecting his gift—Chanel No. 5—and returned the next day saying he needed to buy perfume for his secretary’s birthday.

The third time he came, he told her with an honest nervousness that he was buying a present for his wife. Perhaps they could talk? He’d like to talk. Rory took her to lunch.

She was thirty. She’d had a child out of wedlock, little Jenny, who was now nine and had never had a father. Nothing tragic, Justine confessed, only foolish. She’d made a mistake when she was in college and became a single mother at twenty. She’d married once when she was twenty-five. Her husband had been not exactly mean to his stepdaughter but cold. Cold to five-year-old Jenny. That marriage hadn’t lasted a year. After that, Justine had sworn she’d never marry again.

Rory told Justine he was thirty-nine, a successful real estate broker, and husband to a nice woman named Cyndi. Together they had a little girl, Meg, just nine years old.

“We each have a daughter nine years old,” they said to each other in a kind of awe, as if this formed an unbreakable bond between them.

Rory had been married once before, briefly, to a woman named Nora, and they had a daughter, too, twelve-year-old Arden. “Classy name,” Justine told him.

“She’s a classy kid. Smart as a whip, too. I don’t see her as often as I’d like, but every other week and most of the summer Arden stays with Cyndi, Meg, and me.”

“You all get along?” Justine asked.

“As well as any family, I suppose.” Rory had hesitated, then sat back in his chair and regarded her helplessly. “What are we going to do?”

Heart aching, Justine aimed for lightheartedness. “We’re going to finish our lunch and go our separate ways. You’ll start buying your perfume elsewhere.”

They were married a year later, after Rory’s no-fault divorce from Meg’s mother, during which he agreed to let Cyndi have the Boston house, her Lexus, and a whopping pile of money. He kept the Nantucket house, the house he’d first bought with Cyndi.

They introduced the three girls to one another gradually, starting off on fun social occasions where their attention was sidetracked and they could perceive the reality in a kind of sideways fashion. Movies, theme parks, museums, aquariums were all visited before they brought the three girls into their Nantucket house for the first sleepover.

Although, of course, Jenny was already in the house.

A quiet, shy little girl, Jenny was considered something of a puzzle by her caregivers and teachers. At day care, she ignored the other children, finding a corner for herself where she built tiny intricate worlds out of all the broken bits of toys the other children ignored. When she started kindergarten, she was assessed and deemed to be quite intelligent. She could talk; she just didn’t. She learned to read and do math early. She colored between the lines. She never acted out. She wasn’t a problem, so she was overlooked at school. While Justine didn’t ignore her daughter, by the time she returned home from standing on her feet behind a counter all day, she was too exhausted to do much more than microwave Kraft mac and cheese for Jenny and collapse on the sofa with a glass of wine.

Rory Randall was like the sun shining on a plant that had lived struggling in the shade. With his booming voice, easy laugh, and entertaining manner, he lit up their lives. He was a generous, loving, intuitive man. The first year of their marriage, he took much of the summer off so he could stay at his Nantucket house and help Jenny learn to swim and sail. Jenny blossomed like a rose in June.

Justine had never known that people could be so happy. Jenny was smiling, laughing, making friends at school, getting invited to birthday parties, bringing girls home! Justine realized her own heart had been trapped in a cage of anxiety and caution: She had hardly done anything for fear of doing something wrong. Justine
adored
Rory. He was her hero, her champion, her prince.

In her happiness, Justine secretly vowed to be loving to Rory’s other two daughters, even if Arden, the older, bratty one, was a challenge. The first summer on Nantucket, they invited Arden and Meg to come stay for most of the summer. This length of time would give them a chance to know one another, Rory decided, and Justine wanted to make Rory happy.

The first year wasn’t so bad. Rory kept them on a madcap schedule of swimming, sailing, and tennis lessons. He enrolled them in art and science courses. He set up jigsaw puzzles on the dining room table. He brought home videos and took them to movies at the Gaslight. The girls squabbled sometimes, but they laughed together, too. Rory was happy, and Justine was happy for him even though she was overwhelmed with buying groceries at the crowded stores and feeding all five of them three meals a day.

Then it all changed. During the school year, Arden transformed from a sullen girl into a rebellious slut.

Every time Arden came over to spend the night with Meg and Jenny, who still played with their American Girl dolls and took riding lessons, the difference increased. Arden’s skirts got shorter.
Her shirts plunged lower. Suddenly her auburn hair had purple streaks in it. She tossed around curse words like confetti in spite of Justine’s admonitions. She made jokes about condoms and blow jobs.

Justine was horrified. She’d been a rather racy little teenager herself, back in the day, but nothing like this, and she hadn’t even had sex until she was nineteen, at which point she got herself knocked up. She tried having private counseling sessions with Arden, talking with her about the pressures of adolescence, but Arden only stared at Justine with shark eyes.

During the school term, it was tolerable. Arden ignored the younger girls to tap away on her computer or watch videos while Jenny and Meg hung out together, and when Rory came home from the real estate office, they all sat together at the table, eating dinner like the books said to, one big happy blended family. Justine talked to Rory about Arden, but he dismissed what Justine interpreted as serious signs of a personality disorder as the normal teenage desire to be different.

Then came the second summer on Nantucket.

Justine thought that perhaps she’d made a mistake, back then, when she did what she did. Certainly it had driven a stake into the possibility of Jenny having a close relationship with her stepsisters. Justine had been younger in those days, and caught up in a family happiness she’d never dreamed she’d have and was terrified of losing.

Now, with her precious Rory gone, she kept revisiting those early days. She could only hope this summer would provide an opportunity for Rory’s daughters to become friends—and, more than friends, sisters. Then perhaps Justine’s guilt would not lie so heavily on her spirit.

Palmer White was as good as his word. He escorted Arden to the Forbeses’ black-tie party and introduced her to dozens of the glittering wealthy and chic, some of whom were quite pleased at the idea of being on her show.

“Call me, darling. We’ll have lunch.” Three women had said that to her, and Arden had their phone numbers punched into her cell. Score! It actually made her feel, if not fond of Jenny, less resentful of her. They were all in their thirties now, the past was over and done, here they were on the island, so why not have a wonderful summer?

Thursday was her night to cook, and buoyed by her high spirits, she decided to serve lobster for dinner. Lobsters, Bartlett’s tomatoes, corn on the cob, and tiny new red-skinned potatoes. A chocolate cake from the Bake Shop. A tart white wine. She bought daisies for the center of the table.

“What’s all this?” Meg came into the house through the kitchen door, her arms full of books.

“Oh, I’m feeling hungry for lobster,” Arden told her blithely. “I mean, what’s summer on Nantucket without an occasional lobster dinner?”

“Gosh, Arden, this is fabulous. Can I help you do anything?”

“No, thanks. As soon as Jenny shows up, I’ll drop the lobsters and the corn in their pots. Until then, let’s have some wine.”

Meg’s eyes narrowed. “Arden. Tell the truth. Something happened.”

“Nothing happened. I’m just in a generous mood. Don’t worry, I’m sure it will all balance out over the summer. Some nights I’ll give you bologna sandwiches.”

Meg laughed. “I’ll get rid of these books.” When she came back down, she’d brushed her glorious hair and put on dangling shimmery earrings. Blushing, she explained, “I thought I should look nice for the lobsters.”

“Oh, wow!” Jenny stood in the doorway, surprised. “What happened?”

“Arden’s in a good mood for once,” Meg jested, grinning at Arden as she spoke.

“That’s true,” Arden agreed. “I felt like making a perfect Nantucket summer meal. I haven’t had a lobster dinner in ages.”

Jenny’s countenance softened from suspicious to hopeful. “I haven’t, either. Lobster’s so expensive.”

It was the perfect thing to hear. Arden shrugged carelessly. “I can afford it.”

Jenny accepted a glass of wine and joined Meg at the kitchen table while Arden lifted the lids on the pots to see if the water was ready.

“A few more minutes,” she said, and sat down with them at the table. “To be honest, Jenny, I’m kind of celebrating because Palmer White introduced me to some people I can use on my show. Ariadne Silverstone, for one.”

“Very cool,” Jenny said.

“I wouldn’t have met Palmer if you hadn’t taken me to that party. So, thank you.” She lifted her glass to Jenny.

Jenny blinked shyly. “I’m glad it’s working out for you.”

Meg, not wanting to be left out, chimed in. “Plus, Arden met Tim Robinson at the party.”

Arden looked smug. “That’s true. So thanks again, Jenny.”