Silver Girl (12 page)

Toby said, “What are you, a hundred years old?”

It was true that the people remaining at the party were all older, friends of Bill and Veronica O’Brien.

“My parents are dancing,” Meredith said. “Let’s stay.”

“I don’t want to stay and dance with your parents,” Toby said. “I’m getting kind of sick of your parents.”

Meredith was aghast at this statement. She felt her cheeks grow hot.

“I’m nineteen,” Toby said. “And you’re eighteen. Let’s go act our age.”

Meredith glanced back at the dance floor. Her mother and father were jitterbugging.

“That looks like so much fun,” Meredith said.

“It does not look like fun,” Toby said.

Just then, a man approached Meredith. His name was Dustin Leavitt, and he worked with Bill O’Brien at Philco. Dustin Leavitt was a bachelor; he was tall and handsome and polished and charming—he was an
adult—
but he seemed to especially enjoy talking to Meredith. Over the winter, he’d seen her dive against Lower Merion—Dustin’s niece swam the butterfly for Lower Merion—and that had been Meredith’s best meet. She’d gotten 9’s on her reverse one and a half pike and broken the pool record.
You’re quite the shooting star,
Dustin Leavitt had said to her in the hallway of the school after the meet.

Since she’d arrived at the party, Meredith had felt Dustin Leavitt looking at her. Even Connie had noticed it. She’d said, “I think Dustin Leavitt has a thing for you.”

And Meredith said, “Please shut up.”

Connie said, “I’m serious. He’s hot. And he’s a
man.”

Meredith knew he was fifteen years her senior. Thirty-three. It seemed impossibly old.

“Hey there, Toby,” Dustin Leavitt said. “I’d love to take your girlfriend for a spin. Do you mind?”

Meredith was certain Toby would object, but he just shrugged. “Go for it.”

“Meredith?” Dustin Leavitt held out his arms.

Meredith was uncertain. She was flattered by the gesture, certainly, but she didn’t want to upset Toby. But she wanted to dance, and Toby was drinking and he was being mean. She let Dustin Leavitt lead her to the dance floor, and it was only when the song was over and Meredith and Dustin were flushed and perspiring, clapping for the band, that Meredith realized that Toby had left the party without her.

Meredith went home with her parents a while later, panicked and heartsick about Toby. She was afraid he’d left because he was mad or upset about her dancing with Dustin Leavitt. But when Meredith finally talked to him—she walked over to the O’Briens’ house first thing the next morning, ostensibly to help clean up—he told her that he didn’t care about her dancing with Dustin Leavitt. In fact, he said, it had come as kind of a relief.

“What does
that
mean?” Meredith asked. They were in the backyard under the tent. Toby was stacking the folding chairs, and Meredith was picking crumpled cocktail napkins out of the grass.

“I think we should break up,” Toby said.

“Break up?” Meredith said. “You’re breaking up with me?”

“I think I am,” he said. He nodded once, definitively. “I am.”

Meredith had sat down in the grass and cried. Toby stretched out beside her and leaned back on his hands. It was like he had changed overnight. He was distant and cool. He was leaving for Cape May in a few days, he said, to work as first mate on a sailboat; he would be gone all summer, she knew that. Yes, she said, but she was supposed to visit him. Every weekend!

He said, “Right. But I think it would be better if I was free.”

“Better for whom?”

“Better for me,” he said. He went on to mention that, although he really liked Meredith’s parents, he didn’t want to
become
Meredith’s parents. Not yet, anyway, and maybe not ever. “Besides,” he said, “you’re going to Princeton in the fall. You’ll have so many amazing opportunities in front of you…”

“Jesus Christ!” Meredith screamed. She thought of the stories she had heard about Divinity Michaels locking herself in the janitor’s closet and threatening to drink the ammonia. Now Meredith understood. “Don’t patronize me!”

“Okay,” Toby said. His expression was one of concern, but probably only because Meredith had taken the Lord’s name in vain—which she never did—and he feared she was becoming a psycho like his other ex-girlfriends. “Geez, Meredith, I’m sorry. I can’t change how I feel.”

Meredith cried in her bedroom, she cried on the phone with Connie (who, if Meredith wasn’t mistaken, sounded almost happy about the breakup), she skipped meals and her parents worried. Chick Martin took Meredith to the Villanova parking lot to practice for her driving test, but this turned into hour-long sessions of Meredith crying and Chick attempting to console her.

“I can’t stand to see you hurt like this,” Chick said. “Your mother and I feel so helpless. Do you want me to talk to Toby?”

“No,” Meredith said. Her father could do many magical things, but he couldn’t make Toby love her.

It took two days for Meredith’s glasses to be ready, and when they were, the transformation was complete. She put on the dark wig with the pigtails and slipped on the new glasses, which had wireless rims. The lenses seemed to float before Meredith’s eyes. They offered no definition the way her signature horn-rimmed glasses had.

“That’s what you want,” Connie said. “Trust me.”

It was true that with the wig and the glasses, Meredith looked nothing like herself. From a distance, even Freddy wouldn’t recognize her.

On Saturday morning, Connie suggested that they go shopping in town. Meredith declined. “Town” meant other people and she couldn’t do other people.

“But you haven’t even seen town,” Connie said.

“I’ll see it another time,” Meredith said.

“Like when?” Connie said.

“When it’s less populated,” Meredith said. She was thinking of midnight in the middle of March. “When there’s less chance of being recognized.”

Connie argued that the more people were around, the less likely someone would notice Meredith. Plus, she and Wolf had always gone into town shopping on Saturday morning; it was what they did.

“Someone out there is watching me,” Meredith said.

“The police checked the area. It’s not like someone is watching you twenty-four, seven.”

“It feels like it.”

“It was a scare tactic, Meredith. That’s how they want you to feel. But we’re not going to let them win. We’re going to live our lives. And if they’re watching you today, then they’re watching you shop in town.”

Meredith had little room to argue, and she was desperate to get out of the house. Once they got to town, Meredith realized Connie was right: There was such a happy buzz on Main Street that no one had time to take notice of her. There were people everywhere—parents with children in strollers, couples holding hands, older men in pink polo shirts walking golden retrievers, women wearing Lilly Pulitzer skirts and carrying shopping bags from Gypsy and Eye of the Needle. Meredith used to be one of those women. Now, of course, she couldn’t afford to buy a thing. But it was fun to be part of the crowd. She and Connie stopped at the Bartlett’s Farm truck, and Meredith let her eyes feast on the fresh, organic produce nestled into sixteen square boxes on the tilted truck bed. It was a patchwork quilt of color—the purple cabbages, the green zucchini and cucumbers, the red hothouse tomatoes, the yellow summer squash. Connie bought some beautiful, tender lettuce and an armload of bright gladiolus that Meredith offered to carry. She felt lucky to be carrying flowers and shopping at farm trucks. She wondered what the boys were doing. She hoped Leo was with Anais, mountain biking or playing golf, momentarily free from anxiety. Poor Freddy had finished the first week of his one hundred and fifty year sentence. He was staring down an eternity of barbed wire and desolation. For all Meredith knew, this time next year, she would be in prison herself.

But she couldn’t let herself think about that.

Connie led her around the corner and down the cobblestone streets to Nantucket Bookworks, where they browsed for a luxurious stretch of time. Meredith stayed away from the nonfiction shelves; already there were books about the evil empire of Delinn Enterprises. These books had been written quickly and must have contained hundreds of inaccuracies and suppositions. Meredith assumed at least one of the books contained background information about Freddy and possibly about her as well. But would they have gotten it right? Would they have written about Meredith’s idyllic upbringing on the Main Line? Would they have written about how she adored her father? Would they have written about her good grades, her excellent test scores, her near-perfect reverse one and a half pike? Would they have wondered how a girl with so much on the ball had allowed herself to get mixed up with Freddy Delinn?

Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did. She browsed Atwood and Morrison, Kingsolver, Russo. She picked up a novel by Laura Kasischke that she’d seen written up in
Town & Country
months before. There was a shelf of classics, too: she could pick up the one Austen she hadn’t read yet or
Pale Fire
by Nabokov. There were holes in her canon. One couldn’t read everything, though Meredith could try. Now, she had the time. For one second on a sunny Saturday morning in a bookstore in Nantucket, her life seemed good, at least in that one aspect.

Then, she looked up. Connie had bought the new Barefoot Contessa cookbook and was waiting patiently, browsing at the travel section. Meredith had to make a decision. Would she buy anything? Yes, she would buy the Kasischke and
Persuasion.
She put the other books back where they belonged—Meredith wanted to follow the rules in even the smallest things now—and when she turned to the register, she saw Amy Rivers. Amy was holding a copy of Nathaniel Philbrick’s
Mayflower,
asking the woman behind the counter if she could get it autographed by the author. Her voice was so familiar that Meredith panicked to the point of absolute stillness. Connie was waiting, they had other places to go, but Meredith couldn’t move. Her disguise of wig and glasses wouldn’t be enough. If Amy Rivers saw her, she would know her.

Amy Rivers sensed something, perhaps. She turned toward Meredith. Meredith bowed her head. Amy Rivers had left a message on the answering machine in the Delinns’ Park Avenue apartment, a screaming, hysterical message in which she’d used the word “fuck” as every part of speech. She could not fucking believe it. Freddy was a lying, criminal bastard, an inexcusable fuck of a human fucking being. Then Amy lit into Meredith. Meredith had fucked her, fucking betrayed her.
And I thought we were fucking friends. What the fuck?
Meredith wanted to call Amy back, to remind Amy that it was
she
who had begged Meredith to get her in with Freddy. Meredith had given Freddy Amy’s business card as a favor. Meredith had no idea Freddy was running a Ponzi scheme. She had no clue she was setting Amy up to lose all her money. Amy said herself that the returns were “unbelievable.” Things that seemed unbelievable usually were. Amy was smart enough to know that. Where was Amy’s due diligence? Why was this
Meredith’s
fault?

Meredith felt Amy’s eyes on her. She could see Amy’s feet and legs. She was wearing her white Tretorns with the pink stripe, the same shoes she’d played tennis in at the Everglades Club. Meredith closed her eyes and counted to twenty. She felt a hand on her arm.

Connie said. “Hey, are you okay?”

Meredith looked up. Amy was gone.

“Yes,” she said. And she went to the counter to buy her books.

That run-in was enough to send Meredith back to the refuge of Tom Nevers, but Connie was hot to keep going. They went into Stephanie’s gift shop, and Connie read aloud all the funny sayings on the cocktail napkins, and Meredith faked a smile. She had let her guard down in the bookstore, and she’d nearly been assassinated. She had to remain aware at all times; she would never be safe.

They moved on: down the street, they gazed in the window of Patina at the tall, incredibly elegant Ted Muehling candlesticks.

“They’re, like, eight hundred dollars apiece,” Connie said.

Meredith didn’t mention that in her life before, she would have waltzed right in and bought four or six of the candlesticks in different sizes. She would have filled them with the hand-milled beeswax candles that she bought at Printemps in Paris; she would have looked fondly on the candlesticks a dozen times over the next several days, feeling the buzz that buying fine, expensive things gave her. But by the end of the week, the buzz would be gone; the candlesticks would be just one more thing for Louisa to dust, and Meredith would have moved on to wanting something else—buying it, then forgetting it. It had been a shameful way to live, even when she’d believed the money she was spending was her own. She wondered if she would ever buy anything as frivolous as candlesticks again.

On to Vanessa Noel shoes. The shoes were glorious—suede and snakeskin, patent leather and sequined. There were sandals and slides and slingbacks and peep toes. Connie tried on a pair of pink slides decorated across the vamp with striped grosgrain ribbon. They fit perfectly; they made her legs look amazing. She was so tall, so slender. Meredith felt fifty stabs of jealousy, but she was used to feeling jealous about Connie’s looks.

Meredith said, “They’re fabulous. You should get them.”

Connie said, “I think I will. But where will I ever wear them?”

Meredith said, “How about on a date with Dan Flynn?”

Connie looked at Meredith in shock, alarm, anger perhaps. Had Meredith overstepped her bounds? Connie was still singularly devoted to mourning Wolf. Meredith had noticed that Connie had been sleeping each night on the sofa under a blanket, and when Meredith asked her why, she said, “I can’t sleep in the bed without him.” Meredith found this a little strange. It had been two and a half years! But she’d said nothing. Now, she’d stuck her foot in her mouth.

But then Connie said slyly, “I
am
going to get them!”

While Connie was paying, Meredith picked up a pair of silver heels decorated with milky blue stones. Gorgeous, original—they would have matched a blue silk shutter-pleat dress that Meredith had left in her closet in Cap d’Antibes. These were shoes for a dress she no longer owned. They were on sale for $495.