Nantucket Nights (12 page)

“What was she like before she went into the water? Was she okay? Was she upset about seeing me? Did she want to see me?” Lindsey’s neck splotched. “I can’t shake the feeling that it’s my fault. That Antoinette, you know, chickened out.”

Kayla touched Lindsey’s arm. “It wasn’t you, Lindsey. It was me.
I said something that upset her. And after I said it, I thought she was going to take the car and drive away. But instead she held her arms in a circle, like she was holding a ball, and she danced into the water.” In fact, something about the dancing bugged Kayla. It had seemed so, well... so staged. Like she’d been planning it.

“You
said something to upset her?” Lindsey asked.

“She was upset because I... “
This
felt reckless— confiding the truth in someone she barely knew. It was like stripping off all her clothes and letting Lindsey see her naked. But the poor girl deserved as much of the truth as Kayla could give her. “I accused her of sleeping with my husband.”

Lindsey fingered the hollow at her throat. “Oh, God,” she said. “So you’re telling me that you upset my mother, and then she went swimming in this dangerous water.” She let her window all the way down, and they both watched the waves sweep up onto the beach. The water didn’t look dangerous at all—it was blue-green, crystal clear.

“The fact is, Lindsey, your mother was hiding something.”

“Oh, really?”

They passed other cars that had made camp— beer, sandwiches from Henry’s, boom boxes playing Kayla’s station (Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Free Bird”), umbrellas, shrieking children. Before Ting, Kayla and Raoul had enjoyed days at the beach just like this with their kids.

“Yes.” The news of Antoinette’s pregnancy coated Kayla’s mouth. The test was in her purse.

“What do you think she was hiding? Do you really think she was having an affair with your husband? Is that something she would do?”

“She was having a relationship with
someone,”
Kayla said. “That much I know.”

“Because she told you?”

“No,” Kayla said. “She was about to tell me. Before she went in the water. But she never got the chance.”

“So you’re assuming she was having a relationship, then,” Lindsey said. “I mean, if Antoinette didn’t tell you.”

“I have evidence,” Kayla said.

“Oh, please,” Lindsey said.
“Please.
You’re being very melodramatic, Kayla, you know that? I appreciate that you’re my mother’s friend and everything, but
really.
You come off as a bit of a drama queen.”

Kayla hit the brakes and reached for her purse, dug through it like a smoker hunting down her last cigarette. Then she found it—the sandwich bag containing the pregnancy test. She held it up before Lindsey’s face.

“This,” Kayla said, “is a positive pregnancy test. I found it at your mother’s house last night. Believe me, there is
no way
it belongs to someone else. This is Antoinette’s. There is no way someone else’s positive pregnancy test was going to be lying around your mother’s house.”

Lindsey stared at the bag like it was a severed head. Okay, fine. Melodrama. Kayla hit the gas, and panic washed over her. They were getting closer to the spot where they’d been swimming. Two orange pylons marked off a section of beach, and a man in a black fireman’s uniform held the end of a rope that led into the water. He walked with the rope between the two pylons. About twenty yards out, a diver surfaced, lifted his mask, shook his head. They were dragging the bottom. Kayla was so spooked by this that it took her a moment to notice a Jeep sitting alongside the fire department’s Suburban. Kayla blinked, confused. The Jeep. And then she saw him, sitting on the front bumper, his face hidden in his hands, his shoulders heaving.

Her baby crying.

It was Theo.

Theo

“Baby. Oh, baby, oh, baby, baby.”

Like his worst nightmare, or maybe as an answer to his prayers, he felt arms around him and over the arms he saw Antoinette’s face, or almost. The arms and the voice belonged to his mother, that much he knew instinctively. He wanted to throw the arms off, lash out:
What the fuck are you doing? Leave me alone!
But instead he let himself get pulled in. His mother’s arms. She loved him. She must know about everything by now, and yet she loved him. His whole life she’d told him that she was a safe place to go, that no matter what he did she would forgive him, and that he never had any reason to be afraid. And yet the last eight, nine hours he’d been very afraid as he watched the diver sweep the bottom of the ocean floor looking for Antoinette’s body. He’d cried and watched and prayed to the God he wasn’t even sure existed. Thinking that if they did find her dead he would drown himself, too. Because how could he live without her? Now he was in his mother’s arms looking through tears at a face that was almost Antoinette’s, but not. He let himself cry.

“I love her,” he said. “We’re going to have a baby.”

“Ssshhh. Ssshhh.” His mother’s hand ran through his hair. She knew, and she wasn’t angry. He had been sure his mother would be angry; he was sure the news would devastate and scandalize everyone— his mother, the rest of his family, the island of Nantucket. Antoinette had thought so, too, and that was why she had wanted to get an abortion—because of what his mother would say. And so, he despised his mother and he loved her. His emotions were tangled, knotted like a fishing net. It was too much for a kid of eighteen. Too fucking much.

Theo had known Antoinette his entire life. In the green vinyl photo album there was a snapshot of Antoinette holding him as a baby. She was twenty-seven years old and a complete fox in a black leotard and a black leather miniskirt. In the photo she looked strangely sad, a little like the
Mona Lisa,
he thought. Theo removed the snapshot from the family album— it was the only photograph of her in existence, she said. Theo placed it on Antoinette’s nightstand. He sometimes looked at it when they made love.

“That picture makes me feel old,” she said. “Elderly.”

But he liked it. It proved they had a shared past.

Theo had known Antoinette his entire life. And so there was nothing to hide. She baby-sat once when he was thirteen and certainly old enough to baby-sit his sisters and brother himself. Except that his parents were going off-island, to Boston for a long weekend. Antoinette slept on the sofa under an afghan that Theo’s grandmother crocheted, and she slept in the nude. Theo got up in the middle of the night to pee, and he sneaked down to the living room, and there was Antoinette asleep on the couch, covered with the afghan, her clothes in a pile on the floor. It was dark, but his parents kept a light on over the kitchen sink at night and so Theo saw part of her shoulder, a slice of her ass, and what he thought was a
nipple
poking through one of the holes in the afghan. His penis grew so hard it actually hurt, and he hurried back to his bedroom and stroked himself until he came. Antoinette was his fantasy for a long time after that.

But it wasn’t an obsession or anything. Because before this past April, Theo had been a normal kid. He did well in school, he played third base on the varsity baseball team, he had friends and girlfriends. The summer between his sophomore and junior years, he’d had sex with two girls—Gillian Bergey from his class, and a summer girl named Ashland. He’d told his dad about both girls. His dad asked if Theo had used a Trojan, and Theo said,
Of course.
(Though a couple of times with the summer girl he’d forgotten, but she’d sent him three perfumed letters the following fall, and there was no mention of any problem.) His dad had said,
“Sex is healthy and highly enjoyable, but I always want you to be smart. And considerate. Do you hear me?”

Theo had known Antoinette his entire life, but she didn’t
enter
his life until the April evening when he bumped into her at the Islander Liquor Store.

Nearly every night after baseball practice, Theo shuttled his teammates Brett and Aaron (catcher and left field) to the Islander to get Cokes and chips and Slim Jims, and Theo—the only one of them who was eighteen—bought scratch tickets and a tin of Skoal for Brett, who was addicted to the stuff. They sat on the curb outside the store and opened the Cokes and the bags of Doritos and pork rinds, they scratched the silver film off their scratch tickets with quarters, and when nobody won anything, they flipped the tickets into the trash bin near the front door. Theo was well-deserving of this hour and its pleasures: the hot shower in the locker room, the blaring radio in his Jeep, the soda, the chips, the cold curb under his rump as he turned his baseball hat backwards and shot the breeze with his friends.

The night Theo saw Antoinette, he gnawed a Slim Jim, and Brett spat nasty brown loogies into the parking lot. Aaron talked about his job that upcoming summer as a beach boy at the Cliffside Beach Club and how he would date all the hot nannies.

“Nanny,” Theo said. “There’s something twisted about that word, man. It’s like something you would call your
grandmother.”

“I call my grandmother Gramma,” Aaron said.

“I call my grandmother Mimi,” Brett said.

“What about Granny?” Theo said. “Rhymes with
nanny.”

“You know, the foreign chicks aren’t technically nannies,” Aaron said. “They’re
au pairs.”

“You need to find an
au pair
who’s got a pair,” Brett said.

Antoinette rode her bike into the parking lot while they were laughing about that. It was getting dark, but there was no mistaking Antoinette—curly hair, wearing a black leotard and leggings and black Chuck Taylors. Brett let out a low whistle. Theo bowed his head. Because he wasn’t exactly elated to see one of his
mother’s friends
as he sat on the curb outside a liquor store. Antoinette didn’t see him. She leaned her bike next to the trash bin and went into the Islander, the bells on the door jingling.

“That woman is fine looking,” Brett said.

“I love black women,” Aaron said. “Like Naomi Campbell? I would definitely do it with Naomi.”

“Fuck you guys,” Theo said. “I know that woman.”

“You do not,” Brett said. He spat.

“She’s a friend of my mother’s,” Theo said.

“You’re
kidding,”
Aaron said. “I wish my mother had friends like that.”

The bells jingled again a few minutes later, and Antoinette came out. She pulled three bottles of wine from a paper bag, tossed the bag into the trash bin, and slid the bottles into the black leather backpack she was carrying. Theo watched her, trying to decide whether or not to say hello. Antoinette didn’t look their way; she wasn’t the kind of person to pay attention to teenagers. She threw one graceful leg over her bike. Then Brett spat and Antoinette glanced over. She locked eyes with Theo, but in a way that let him know she wouldn’t say anything unless he did. Aaron knocked Theo with his knee.

“Hey, Antoinette.”

“Theo.”

That was all she said, just his name, but it brought back a host of tucked-away feelings. Her voice was deep and throaty.

“Do you want a ride?” he said. “I have a car.”

She laughed. Immediately, he felt like an ass. “No thanks,” she said. “You guys just keep on keeping on.”

“Bob Dylan,” Aaron whispered.

Brett spat again—he claimed the urge to spit with tobacco was uncontrollable—but it was disgusting. Theo reddened.

“Antoinette,” he said. “These are friends of mine from the baseball team. Maybe you want to come see one of our games sometime?”

She laughed again and pedaled away.

“Damn,” Aaron said.

That very night, the phone rang. Almost always the phone was for Theo or Jennifer, but this time when his mother answered, she kept talking. Theo was upstairs in his room with the door cracked, half reading
The Scarlet Letter,
half listening to his mother’s voice. When she hung up, she said to Theo’s father, “That was Antoinette. She wants to come with me to Theo’s next game.”

And so, truth be told, it wasn’t Theo who did the pursuing. Had Antoinette not called, he probably would have forgotten all about her.

“You wanted me, didn’t you?” he asked her, months later. “You wanted my ass.”

She shrugged, said nothing.

Antoinette came to the game against Nauset High School. She stood out in her black T-shirt, black jeans, Chuck Taylors; she looked like she belonged on a street corner in New York City asking for change. Theo’s mom on the other hand looked like the other moms: blue jeans, white turtleneck, lilac fleece vest. Antoinette was her eccentric friend in tow. Everyone stared at her, including Brett and Aaron, who whispered something about
your mom’s hot friend, smoking hot
as they sat on the bench waiting to bat. Theo felt the need to impress just as he did when some chick was there to watch him play. When his turn came at the plate, he tapped the bat against the insides of his cleats, knocking off clumps of dirt. His mother clapped and said, “Come on, Theo!” Antoinette said nothing as far as he could tell. (He was too self-conscious to look her way.) Theo stood for four balls in a row and then trotted to first base, where he got stranded.

Theo kept his attention resolutely on the game, although as a rule he hated when guys on the team acted too absorbed in the game to say hello to their own mothers. He knew his mother had three other children and better things to do with her time than sit on a wooden plank on a chilly afternoon watching him play baseball, and yet, because Antoinette was there, he didn’t go over to say hello. He was nervous, embarrassed; he had
butterflies.
His second time at bat, he popped up to Nauset’s first baseman. Theo did make one great play on defense—catching a line drive and then nailing the runner on second. Everyone clapped and his mother yelled, but Theo, who occasionally took a bow after making a good play, didn’t even smile. His third time at bat, he walked again.

His team won, 1-0.

After the game, Theo listened to Coach Buford’s speech about who needed to work on what at practice the next day (
“the whole team, batting... the batting in this game left something to be desired...
“). Then he put on his letter jacket, tucked his glove under his arm, and trudged over to where his mom and Antoinette were waiting for him. Antoinette had goose bumps on her arms, and she wore no bra. Her nipples poked out like hard little pellets.