Silver Girl (39 page)

Toby made a noise. Bud looked over.

Dan said, “Yes, I did hear about that. Awful stuff.”

Connie’s palms itched. Her shoulders were burning in the sun. She was afraid to turn around to check on Meredith. Toby, she saw, looked stricken. If he’d had three drinks in him, he would have socked Bud Attatash in the jaw.

“Awful is right,” Bud said. “Killing an animal like that.”

“Senseless violence,” Dan said.

Get in the car!
Connie thought. She cleared her throat. Toby read her mind and hopped into the backseat next to Meredith. Dan took a step back with one foot but wasn’t able to make the full commitment to leaving.

Bud said, “They’ll never catch the guys who did it. That woman has too many enemies.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, Bud,” Dan said. “And if you don’t believe me, you should talk to the chief about it.” Even Dan seemed flustered now, and Connie felt a flash of irritation. How had he not been able to keep the conversation off this one topic? Jesus! “Well, we should be shoving off now.”

“A poor, innocent sea creature,” Bud said.

They pulled out onto the sand, leaving Bud Attatash in his khaki uniform staring after them at the gatehouse.

Dan said, “Sorry about that.”

Nobody spoke. Connie checked on Meredith in the side-view mirror. Her expression, under the brim of the hat and behind the dark, saucer-size lenses of her sunglasses, was inscrutable.

“Bud is harmless,” Dan said. “I’ve known him my whole life.”

Again, no one spoke. Connie turned on the radio. It was a commercial, loud and grating. She pushed in the CD, thinking it would be the Beatles, but the music that came blaring out was even worse than the radio. Dan popped the CD back out with a proprietary air that made Connie feel like she shouldn’t have presumed to touch the radio in the first place.

He said, “Sorry. I let Donovan borrow the car. That’s his music.”

Connie feared all the good karma she’d attached to this day was in danger of draining through the floorboards.

But the Jeep bounced over some bumps in the sand, and Toby whooped, and Connie was forced to grab hold of the roll bar. They drove past the last of the summer homes and headed out onto the pure sands of Great Point.

Suddenly, their silence seemed not due to the awkwardness with Bud Attatash back at the gatehouse but, rather, in deference to the stark beauty of the landscape around them. The sand up here was creamy white. The vegetation consisted of low-lying bushes—bayberry and sweet-scented
Rosa rugosa.
The ocean was a deep blue; the waves were gentler than the waves in Tom Nevers. In the distance, Connie saw Great Point Lighthouse. What was breathtaking was the purity of the surroundings. A few men were surf casting along the shore. Crabs scuttled past the seagulls and the oystercatchers.

Why had Connie never come out here before? The real answer, she supposed, was that the Flutes didn’t come to Great Point; it wasn’t in their repertoire of Nantucket excursions. Mrs. Flute, Wolf’s mother, claimed she couldn’t abide the thought of automobiles on the beach, but Wolf told Connie that what this really meant was that his parents—being stingy Yankee folk—didn’t want to fork over the money for a beach sticker. (It had been seventy-five dollars back in the day; now, it was nearly twice that.)

Well, Connie thought, they had missed out. The place was a natural treasure.

Dan drove them through the sand tracks to the tip of the island. “There,” he said. “You can see the riptide.”

Toby stood up in his seat. “Man,” he said. “Amazing.”

Connie could see a demarcation in the water, a roiling, where the riptide was. This was the end of the island, or the beginning of it. The lighthouse was just behind them.

“Can we climb the lighthouse?” Meredith asked. She sounded a little closer to her normal self. Hopefully, she had chalked the encounter with Bud Attatash up to bad luck. More than anything, Connie wanted to keep Meredith happy.

“Yes, can we?” she asked Dan.

“We can,” Dan said. He pulled the car around to the harbor side of the point and parked. There were sailboats scattered across the horizon.

They trudged through the hot sand toward the lighthouse. There was an antechamber with two wooden benches, but the door that led into the lighthouse was shut tight.

“You never used to know if the door would be locked,” Dan said. He turned the knob.

“It’s locked,” Connie said. She was disappointed. She tried the knob herself.

“It’s locked,” Dan said. “But I have a key.”

“You do?” Meredith said.

Dan pulled a key out of his pants pocket. It was the color of an old penny. “I’ve had this key since I was eighteen years old. Back then, the ranger out here was a man named Elton Vicar. And I dated his granddaughter, Dove Vicar.”

“Dove?” Connie said.

“Dove stole this key from Elton and gave it to me, and I was smart enough to hold on to it. Because I knew it would come in handy someday.”

“Are you sure it still works?” Connie said. How could a key that Dan had had for thirty years still work?

Dan slid the key into the knob. He had to wiggle it, but he fit it in and turned the knob and the door opened. “They’ll never change the lock. Too much trouble. Plus, they have no reason to.”

“So are we doing something illegal, then?” Meredith asked. She sounded nervous.

“Relax,” Dan said. “The crime was committed long ago, by Dove Vicar, who is now Dove Somebody Else, living somewhere in New Mexico.”

“But aren’t we breaking and entering?” Meredith said.

“We have a key!” Dan said, and he stepped inside.

Connie had never been inside a lighthouse before, but this one was about what she expected. It was dark and dingy with a sandy concrete floor; it smelled like somebody’s root cellar. In the middle of the room was a wrought-iron spiral staircase and Dan began marching up. Connie followed, thinking,
I am dating the only man on Nantucket with a key to the Great Point Lighthouse.
Meredith was behind Connie, and Toby brought up the rear. Connie watched her step; the only light was filtering down in dusty rays from above.

At the top of the stairs, there was a room of sorts—a floor and windows and a case that held the reflecting light, which was powered by solar panels.

Toby was impressed. “How long ago was this built?”

“Originally in seventeen eighty-five,” Dan said. “Reconstructed in nineteen eighty-six.”

There was a narrow balcony that encircled the top. Connie and Meredith stepped out and walked around the outside. Connie could see all the way across Nantucket Sound to Cape Cod. To the south, the island was spread out before them like a blanket—the houses and trees and ponds, sand dunes and dirt roads. Connie had been coming to Nantucket for twenty years, but today might have been the first day she truly saw it.

Dan parked the Jeep on the harbor side, and they unfolded chairs and laid out towels.

“This,” Connie said, “is a breathtaking spot. Isn’t it breathtaking, Meredith?”

Meredith hummed. “Mmmhmmm.”

Dan opened a beer. “Does anybody want a drink?”

Connie said, “Toby, I brought iced tea.”

Toby held up a hand. “I’m fine right now, thanks.”

Dan said, “Meredith, how about you?”

“I’m all set.”

“Connie?” Dan said. “Can I pour you a glass of wine?”

“I brought iced tea,” she said.

“Really?” he said. “No wine?”

“Really,” Connie said. She put on a wide-brimmed straw hat that she’d bought to keep the sun off her face but that she never bothered to wear. Time to start taking care of herself. Wear a hat, leave the chardonnay at home. “I’ll have an iced tea.”

“Okay,” Dan said. He sounded surprised.

Toby said, “Meredith, do you want to go for a walk?”

Meredith said, “Connie, do you want to go for a walk?”

Connie said, “Not just yet. You two go.”

Meredith didn’t move. She said, “I’ll wait for Connie.”

Toby said in a very adult, very serious voice Connie couldn’t remember ever hearing him use before, “Meredith, come for a walk with me. Please.”

Meredith sat, still as a stone. “No,” she said.

Connie thought,
Is today going to be a total disaster?

Toby walked off in silence. Connie watched him go. Then, a few seconds later, Meredith got to her feet, and Connie thought,
Oh, thank God.
But Meredith took off in the opposite direction.

Dan settled in a chair next to Connie. He had a copy of
The Kite Runner
in his lap. “So, do I dare ask? What’s their deal?”

“Oh, God,” Connie said. “I have no idea.”

“You have no idea?”

When Connie looked at Dan, she was overwhelmed by how little she knew him—and she was overwhelmed by how little he knew her. How did it happen, getting to know someone? It took time. It took days spent together, weeks, months. The thought of all the effort it would take to get to know Dan and to have Dan know her suddenly seemed exhausting. Why had she not just brought the wine? Everything was so much easier with wine.

“Meredith and Toby dated in high school,” Connie said.

“Ah,” Dan said, as if this explained everything. But how could he possibly understand?

“They were madly in love,” Connie said. “It was irritating.”

Dan laughed. “Irritating?”

“Well, you know, he was my brother; she was my best friend…”

“You felt left out?”

“Sort of, yes. At first, I was really bothered by it. I nearly put an end to it—I had the power to do that, I think, at least with Meredith. But I grew used to the idea, and I had boyfriends, too, always…”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Dan said.

“So we used to double date. We went to the movies and to dances at Radnor High School, where Toby went. We went roller skating.” Connie laughed. It
was
funny thinking about her and Meredith and Toby and Matt Klein at the roller rink with the disco ball spinning, creating spots of multicolored light. They skated to Queen and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Earth, Wind & Fire. Connie and Meredith skated backward—they had spent hours practicing this in Meredith’s basement—and Toby and Matt rested their hands on the girls’ hips. Connie and Meredith both had feathered hair; they kept plastic combs in the back pockets of their designer jeans. Between skates, the four of them would sit at the plastic tables in the snack bar and drink suicides and eat bad nachos. “But, I don’t know, my boyfriends were always just guys to pass the time with. Meredith and Toby were different. They were in love. They were very vocal about that, very smug about it.”

“Irritating,” Dan agreed.

“And then once I’d pretty much embraced the fact that they were probably going to get married and have five kids, Toby broke up with her.”

“Did something happen?”

“He was nineteen years old, going off to college, and he wanted his freedom. Meredith was a wreck. I was surprised by that. She was always so tough, you know, so cool, and… impervious, like nothing could affect her. But when Toby broke up with her, she crumbled. She cried all the time, she leaned on her parents a lot, she was very close with her father… I remember right after it happened, I tried to take her mind off him, and it backfired.”

Dan leaned forward. “Really? What happened?”

“I had been invited to this party at Villanova, and I convinced Meredith to go with me. I had to beg her, but she agreed, and once we got there, she started drinking this red punch. Kool-Aid and grain alcohol.”

“Oh, God,” Dan said.

“And the next thing I knew, everyone else in the room was jumping up and down to the Ramones, and Meredith was slumped over on the couch. Passed out. Dead weight.” What Connie didn’t say was that there was a minute or two when Connie had feared Meredith was actually dead. Connie had screamed until someone shut off the music. And then another partygoer, who claimed he was pre-med, determined that Meredith was breathing and had a pulse. Then the music was cranked back up, and it became Connie’s responsibility to get Meredith out of there. “The problem was that we had walked to the party,” Connie said. For the preceding two years, Toby had been their ride everywhere. Connie had failed her driver’s test three times, and Meredith was still learning how to drive from her father, but Meredith spent more time crying than driving. “So my options were to call my parents for a ride, call Meredith’s parents for a ride, or try to get Meredith home on my own.”

“So…?” Dan said.

So, Connie’s parents were always drunk themselves and could offer no assistance. And Connie hadn’t wanted to call the Martins because they truly believed that Meredith hung the moon, and Connie couldn’t stand the thought of being the one to inform them that their daughter was a human being, an eighteen-year-old girl with a broken heart and some pretty typical self-destructive impulses. And she couldn’t call Toby.

“I carried her home,” Connie said. “On my back.”

Dan hooted. “You’re kidding me.”

Yes, it sounded funny—anyone who heard the story always laughed—but it hadn’t been funny at the time. It had been sad—a sad, difficult, poignant night in Connie and Meredith’s shared experience of growing up. Connie had managed to rouse Meredith enough to get her to cleave onto Connie’s back. Connie held Meredith’s legs, and Meredith wrapped her arms around Connie’s neck, and rested the hot weight of her head on Connie’s shoulder. How many times had they stopped so that Meredith could throw up? How long and loudly had Meredith cried because of Toby? And Connie thought,
Why do you need Toby when I’m right here?
But she held her tongue. She rubbed Meredith’s back.

I know, I know it hurts, I know.

Connie knew where the Martins kept their extra key, and she knew the alarm code for the house. She got Meredith upstairs into her own bed without waking up Chick or Deidre. Connie filled the bathroom cup with water and put three Excedrin on Meredith’s nightstand, where, Connie saw, Meredith still kept a picture of herself and Toby from Toby’s prom at Radnor. Connie turned the picture facedown and whispered to Meredith’s sleeping form that everything was going to be fine.