Silver Girl (19 page)

“I heard about your father,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

This was said with more gravitas than Meredith was used to encountering in her peers. Connie had hugged her and listened to her at home, and her roommate, Gwen, had hugged her and listened to her here, but Meredith could tell they didn’t get it. She felt their pity, but not their empathy. They treated her like she had an illness. And Gwen, who hated her own father, even sounded a little envious.

But when Freddy spoke, Meredith sensed a deeper well.

“Thank you,” she said. “Trina told you?”

“Gwen, actually,” he said. “But when Trina showed up at class, I knew it wasn’t good news. She’s pretty much known as the Grim Reaper around here.”

“Yeah,” Meredith said. She would be only too glad if she never saw Trina again. She remembered back a few weeks when Trina’s clothes and accessories and mannerisms had been of the utmost interest to her—it was amazing how that had changed. Even Meredith’s attraction to Freddy had paled when compared to the real love of Meredith’s life. The steady, unconditional, fortifying love of Meredith’s father was gone forever. It wasn’t fucking fair, it was
not
fucking fair! Meredith, that week, had been alternating between devastated melancholy and door-kicking, hair-pulling anger.

Meredith and Freddy walked together for a while in silence. Meredith didn’t know where Freddy was going, but she was headed to the east side of campus to the Mental Health Services building where students could receive free counseling. Meredith saw a woman named Elise, and did little more than sob through her fifty-minute sessions.

Freddy said, “My brother, David, died last year. He was in the army, and he was shot during training. A total, pointless mistake. Some complete asshole discharged his weapon when he wasn’t supposed to, and my brother is dead.”

“Oh, God,” Meredith said. She had heard dozens of stories of untimely deaths in the weeks since her father died, and she had yet to figure out how to respond. She knew people were trying to create some kind of interpersonal connection by sharing their own losses, but Meredith took self-indulgent pleasure in believing that her loss was unique—and far worse—than anyone else’s. But Freddy’s story did indeed sound both sad and bad. A brother shot accidentally while training to defend our country? Shot by one of his own? Meredith wanted to say the right thing, but she didn’t know what that was. She decided to give him a question he could answer. “How old was he?”

“Twenty-three.”

“That’s really young. Were you close?”

Freddy shrugged. “Not really. But he was, you know, my
brother.
”

“That must have been hard,” Meredith said, then hated herself. She sounded just like Connie, or Gwen Marbury!

Freddy didn’t respond and Meredith didn’t blame him, but he did walk Meredith all the way to the Mental Health Services building. She thought of detouring so he wouldn’t guess where she was headed, but then she decided it didn’t matter if he knew. As soon as her destination became clear, he said, “I came here a lot last year. It helped. Is it helping you?”

“No,” Meredith said.

“It takes a while,” Freddy said. He locked eyes with her, and only then did Meredith remember that he had reached for her hand as she was called from the classroom. And in that moment, she recognized Freddy, much the way she thought the Virgin Mary must have recognized the angel Gabriel; it felt no less mystical. Freddy was a different person from the cool upperclassman she’d had a crush on. He was the person who had been sent to collect her. As Freddy held her gaze outside the dour and depressing Mental Health Services building, Meredith thought,
I’m yours. Take me.

“I’ll come back and pick you up in an hour?” Freddy asked.

“Yes,” she said.

They had been inseparable from that point forward.

For many years, Meredith had believed that Freddy had been sent to her by her father. She had believed this right up until December of last year, when she, with the rest of the world, learned of Freddy’s crimes. Even now, when she thought about Freddy’s betrayal, it took her breath away. Other people had lost money. Meredith had lost faith in the one person she believed had been sent to save her. He, Freddy Delinn, was Dustin Leavitt, a man who would rape a drunk eighteen-year-old girl who had just lost her father. He was the man with the hunting knife. He was not an emissary from her guardian angel–father, but rather an emissary of the devil, come to ruin her life.

Meredith heard a door open down the hall.

Connie said, “Meredith, is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

All right?
She would be all right if she didn’t think, if she didn’t remember. She felt a hand on her shoulder. Connie was there, her long hair tangled and even more beautiful in sleep.

“Meredith?”

“Yes,” Meredith said. And she let Connie lead her back to bed.

Connie spent all morning trying to convince Meredith to come along. It was a brilliant day—sun, blue sky, a touch of a breeze. Days didn’t get any better than this.

“Nothing you can say will change my mind,” Meredith said. “I’m not going.”

“I don’t want to go alone,” Connie said. She gazed at the ocean. “I’m scared.”

“There, you admitted it,” Meredith said. “Do you feel better?”

“No,” Connie said. “I want you to come. If you come, I’ll feel better.”

“How are you going to know how you feel about this guy if you never spend time alone with him?”

“I’m not ready for time alone with him,” Connie said. She thought about the kissing. It had been wonderful, but that, somehow, only added to her fear. “I’m going to cancel.”

“No, you’re not,” Meredith said.

“I’ll tell him we can picnic here, on the deck,” Connie said. “I’ll tell him we can swim here, on this beach, with Harold.”

“No,” Meredith said.

“That way we can all be together.”

“No!” Meredith said.

“Meredith,” Connie said. “I haven’t asked you for anything since we’ve been here.”

“Okay, wait,” Meredith said. “Are you really going to play that card?”

Connie could barely believe it herself. “Yes,” she said.

“Well, then, I can’t say no, can I?” Meredith said. “You saved my life. You brought me here. You’re sheltering me despite physical damage to your house and your car. I’m indebted to you. And so I
have
to go with you on your date.” She put her hands on her hips. She was tiny in stature but imperious. Connie could tell she was trying not to smile.

“Yes,” Connie said. “Thank you.”

Meredith said, “I’ll go put on my wig.”

While Meredith was upstairs, there was a knock at the door. Connie practically ran to open it. She was
so
much more relaxed now that Meredith had agreed to come along, emotional arm twisting notwithstanding. Connie’s fear and anxiety floated away. They were going on Dan’s boat. They were going to have fun!

Connie flung open the door. Dan was holding a bunch of wildflowers that Connie recognized as coming off one of the farm trucks that parked on Main Street.

“For you,” he said, handing her the flowers.

“Thank you!” she said. “That’s sweet.”

He smiled. He was so handsome with his sunglasses perched in his short, ruffled hair. Connie leaned in to kiss him. She meant it to be a quick, thank-you-for-the-flowers kiss, but he closed his eyes and made it a longer kiss. And even as Connie was liking it, loving it, she thought,
No, I can’t do this. I’m not ready for this.

She pulled away. She said, “Meredith has decided to come with us today.”

“Oh,” Dan said. “Terrific.”

“It’s not terrific,” Meredith said, coming down the stairs. She was securing her wig with bobby pins. Connie threw her a warning look. Meredith was coming with them because Connie needed her, but she couldn’t let Dan know she was coming because Connie needed her. This was the logic of high school, Connie knew, but just because they were older didn’t mean they had outgrown the rules.

Meredith said, “I’m an egregious interloper. A third wheel. But the fact is, I don’t feel safe alone in the house all day.” She smiled sheepishly at Dan. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Dan said. “It’s fine.”

“Just fine,” Connie said.

It was one of those days that made you feel lucky to be alive—no matter if you’d lost a spouse to cancer, no matter if your only child no longer acknowledged your existence, no matter if your husband had lost $50 billion in a Ponzi scheme and you were hated by everyone in America. The back of Dan’s red Jeep was loaded with life jackets and fishing poles, and Connie wedged in her cooler, which contained a couple bottles of wine and enough picnic lunch for ten people. Connie sat up front next to Dan, and Meredith stretched out in the backseat and closed her eyes in the sun. Dan played Marshall Tucker’s “Heard It in a Love Song,” and they all belted out the words at the tops of their lungs.

Dan pulled into the parking lot at Children’s Beach. Children’s Beach was a green park with a band shell, a playground, and an ice-cream shack fronted by a small beach right on the harbor. Connie tried to keep her emotions in check. She hadn’t been to Children’s Beach since Ashlyn was a little girl. There had been a few summers when Connie had brought Ashlyn here every day—Ashlyn had gone down the slides, complaining if the metal was too hot on her legs, and Connie had pushed Ashlyn on the swings, back and forth a thousand times. In those days, the ice-cream shack had been a breakfast joint with the best doughnuts on the island. God, it hurt to think about it. Connie had brought Ashlyn here on days that Wolf had been asked to sail, and then they’d walked to the Yacht Club to meet him for lunch, and Connie’s only worry had been that Ashlyn might misbehave.

Dan sprang into action, and Connie and Meredith followed suit. He took the fishing poles, the beach towels, a gas can. Connie took one end of the cooler and Meredith took the other. Meredith, too, had an eye on the action at Children’s Beach—the mothers trying to get their toddlers to eat one more bite of peanut butter and jelly, the kids building sandcastles, the orthopedist’s dream that was a twenty-foot-high cone-shaped climbing structure on the beach—but she snapped out of her reverie. Was she thinking about Leo? Meredith took three life jackets in her free hand. Connie grabbed her beach bag.

Dan’s boat was moored along the dock. They walked down to the boardwalk in front of the White Elephant Hotel and climbed aboard.

It was a beautiful boat, a Boston Whaler Outrage with dual engines off the back. Connie fell in love with it immediately. It had a horseshoe of cushioned seating in the back and up front, and room for two behind the controls under a bimini. Toby was a sailor—a skill learned in summer camp in Cape May and then honed at the College of Charleston—and Wolf had been a sailor as well, but Connie had never warmed to the sport. Sailing was so much work, a combination of physical work and intellectual work, and it required luck. Connie loved being out on the water, but it was much easier to do it Dan’s way—turn a key and inhale those exhaust fumes.

Connie helped Dan gather the rope that tethered them to the slip. He guided the boat out into the harbor. Meredith was sitting up front, waving to the people on other boats. Connie joined her. Meredith was beaming. Beaming! She felt comfortable enough to wave to people.

Connie said, “You’re glad you came, aren’t you?”

“Shut up,” Meredith said. She raised her face to the sun and grinned.

“Where do you want to go?” Dan asked. Connie was sitting next to him behind the controls.

“Anywhere,” Connie said. “Everywhere.” She was happy-giddy, if a teensy bit uncomfortable to be sitting next to him in the girlfriend seat. But it was nice, too, to be able to just go where they wanted as fast as they wanted without worrying about the mainsail or the jib. She had never sat next to Wolf on a boat. When they sailed, he was always moving, always monitoring.

They cruised up harbor, past the huge homes of Monomoy and the huger homes on Shawkemo Point. Dan singled out certain houses and told Connie who owned them—this famous author, that captain of industry. The island looked especially verdant and inviting today. The houses seemed to be stage sets for summer: flags were snapping, beach towels hung from railings. Meredith scanned the land, one hand shielding her eyes, and then lay back in the sun with her glasses off and her eyes closed.

They tooled up to Pocomo Point, where they came across a fleet of Sunfish with white sails—kids learning the basics.

Dan said, “As soon as we’re out of their way, we’ll anchor and go for a swim.”

He stopped the boat in a beautiful, wide-open spot. Great Point Lighthouse was visible to the northwest and the handsome Wauwinet hotel was due north. Without the noise of the engine, the only sound was that of the waves slapping the side of the boat, and Connie suddenly felt anxious.

“Let me pull out the wine,” she said.

“It’s dazzling here,” Meredith said.

“We’ll swim,” Dan said. “And then we can have lunch.” He looked at Meredith. “Do you swim?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Connie pulled the cork from a cold bottle of chardonnay. She felt her blood quicken. She couldn’t pour fast enough. She wasn’t sure what was wrong with her. “Meredith was a champion diver in high school. She came in third at the state finals our senior year.”

“Really?” Dan said. “Well, then, I have a surprise for you.”

Connie filled a red Solo cup with chardonnay and guzzled the top third of it down. A cool burn slid down her throat, and she felt her muscles go slack.

“Wine?” she asked Dan.

He was moving the cooler and rearranging some other things at the stern and he said, “I’ll get a beer, in a minute.”

Typical man with his beer,
Connie thought. Wolf had been a wine drinker. It had been one of the many elegant things about him. Connie took another sip. How often did men like Wolf come along?

“Meredith, wine?” Connie asked.

“No, thank you,” Meredith said.

Dan pulled something out of the back of the boat—a long white springboard. A diving board.