Slow Dancing on Price's Pier (5 page)

At some point during the summer before his freshman year, Garret had found himself beginning to use Thea as the butt of his jokes—especially when he wanted to embarrass his older brother. He'd discovered Jonathan had a fear of anything remotely sexual, and Garret wasn't afraid to use his big brother's discomfort with the same practicality that he might use a lever or a wedge.

“You want to make out with Thea, don't you?”

“Eww. Shut up.”

“You pervert. You want to put your tongue right down Thea's throat.”

“I said, shut up!”

There was no faster way to get on Jonathan's nerves than to accuse him of wanting to mess around with Thea, who—in all ways but one—was just one of the guys. If Jonathan wouldn't leave Garret alone while he was watching television, Garret would threaten to tell their parents that Jonathan and Thea were having sex. If Jonathan wouldn't agree to go to the movies instead of to mini golf, Garret would say, “That's because you want to do Thea behind the waterfall.” Sometimes Jonathan would fight him, viciously. Black eyes and bruised ribs and mangled egos would end with them both being grounded for days.

But Garret's taunting had an unexpected consequence as well.

His mother pulled him aside one day, leaving Garret to watch as Jonathan and Thea went tripping out the door, as fast as their legs would carry them toward their bicycles. Garret twisted out of his mother's grip.

“You've got to be careful with her, Garret.”

“With who?”

“You know who,” his mother said, her voice dark with warning. “And you know exactly what I mean.”

Garret's skin had prickled. How had his mother known?

That evening as the three of them sat on the big rocks along the water's edge, Garret had been relentless, unmerciful in his teasing. Jonathan deserved to be embarrassed—for ratting him out. For being a coward. For making it look like Thea was the one who was uncomfortable when, as far as Garret could tell, she didn't care.

With the waves crashing against the jagged rocks and a buoy bobbing in the rough surf, Garret pulled out all the stops: he thought of every nasty thing he'd ever heard of people doing. He used every dirty word in his vocabulary. Jonathan pelted him in the head with a stone and broke the skin above his eyebrow, but still, Garret couldn't stop being angry. Wildly, powerfully angry. The taunts just kept coming, each worse than the one before. He hardly noticed Thea at all—not until she stood up from the rock where she sat, marched up to him, and said, “That's enough.”

She stood before him, the last summer she was an inch taller, in her boxy gray T-shirt, her wind-mussed ponytail, her dorky white tennis shoes. He'd seen her walk up to the meanest teacher in school and insist he'd graded her test unfairly. He'd seen her split open her knee on the pavement and refuse to cry. But that night, her eyes had gone red, filled up with tears, and her lips pulled into a frown.

“Thea . . .”

She turned away and ran as quickly as she could toward the road, where their bikes were kicked over on their sides in the dust. He saw her hair, caught in a long black ponytail, wagging at him as she ran away.

“Nice job, dilhole,” Jonathan said. And he punched him hard in the chest, almost knocking the wind out of him.

Garret rubbed the spot absentmindedly, his own eyes beginning to water. Shame and guilt warred. “It's not my fault you're a couple of prudes. I was just joking around . . .”

“Real funny,” Jonathan said. “Don't follow us. We don't want to see you.”

And Garret realized that Thea was at the top of the hill, a silhouette in the fading light, waiting, but not for him.

 

 

Thea stumbled through the darkness of the kitchen to the door, and when she opened it, Garret was there. Behind him, the street was quiet and still, holding its breath. The streetlight cast his shadow in blurry orange on the ground. Irina was settled against his chest, her arms around his neck, her back folded gently forward.

“Garret.”

He held a finger up to his lips. “Shhh.”

He turned sideways as he slid through the doorway, past her, and Thea saw her daughter's face—splotchy from crying but peaceful too, as if sleep had been hard-won. An hour ago, Garret had texted Thea to tell her he was bringing Irina home. He didn't say why.

“Where's her bedroom?” Garret mouthed.

Instead of answering, Thea led him through the house with its very tiny square rooms, low ceilings, and narrow doorways. Nestled in the heart of Newport, not far from Price's Pier, the downstairs level of the house had been built before the Revolutionary War, and Thea had done what she could to keep its colonial feel: folk art, antiques, original flooring, few embellishments. She wondered: Did her house look like what Garret expected? Had he expected anything at all?

She was too conscious of him as he trailed her on the stairs in the dark—to have him following, so close, gave her a strange sense of vulnerability and made her want to turn around and walk backward. His hair was glossy, neat, and as blond as when he was a kid, and his skin was so perfect that she wondered if he'd started tanning. He was taller than she remembered. Bigger across the shoulders. All traces of the heart-on-his-sleeve boy she'd fallen so desperately in love with had been usurped by this harder, more unreadable man.

She, on the other hand, hadn't seen the inside of a gym in years. What did she look like to him? Childbirth had changed her body, had taken her young woman's angles and swollen them into more sloping, softened curves. Her skin was older too, she knew. In bad light, there were traces of lines around her mouth and eyes. She'd found her first gray hair this past spring—a shock of white like a lightning bolt against a black sky—and now it seemed they were coming on like armies. She hated that he made her so very conscious of herself, and it wasn't until they got to the top of the stairs that she realized she'd been holding her breath.

She bent to turn on the night-light in Irina's little room. In the soft pink glow, she watched Garret pull back the light quilt on the bed and then bend over carefully to settle Irina down. His hand cradled the back of her head, and though she groaned a little and her eyes fluttered open long enough to see where she was, she didn't seem interested in waking. She turned her back to them in the semidarkness and curled deeper into the bed.

Thea pulled the door closed behind them, leaving it open half an inch. She didn't speak until they were in the kitchen, standing beside the simple wooden table in the center of the small room. And even then, a whisper was the most she dared. “What happened?” she asked. “Is she sick?”

He shook his head. “She's been crying for hours.”

“Why?”

Garret shifted uncomfortably. “She wanted her and Jonathan to come here. But that's obviously not an option. Anyway, she finally fell asleep on the ride home. And by that point, I figured she'd rather wake up here than in my condo.”

“Why didn't Jonathan bring her?”

“He doesn't want to see you,” Garret said.

Thea stood quietly a moment, not sure what was to come next. Everything had been said—the facts exchanged—and now there was nothing more.

But Garret made no move to leave. He just stood, looking at her. His eyes were the exact steel blue of the harbor on a fall day.

Thea felt some shadow of her old feeling for him rising up. Longing. Regret. A wish deeper and bigger than she could name.
Don't hate me anymore,
she thought. The Sorensen family believed that Garret had been avoiding her since her marriage to Jonathan. What they hadn't realized was that she had been avoiding him too.

“Was she good otherwise?” Thea asked.

“Fine. I didn't know she plays soccer.”

Thea nodded, again at a loss. She wanted him to stay. To talk. To tell her everything that had happened since she saw him last.
Let me make you a cup of coffee,
she thought. And yet, the vast bulk of missing years was wedged between them, and there was nothing to say.

“She seems to trust you,” Thea said.

His lips curled into a sneer. “She didn't get it from her mother.”

She took a step back—and just like that, he'd smacked her in the face with the past, the blunt force of it knocking her composure down. “Garret, we should talk—”

He held up his hand: stop. Then he pushed open the screen door and went outside. She followed him to the doorway, watching him for a moment as he shoved his hands into his pockets and walked with his shoulders back and straight. Her heart cried out—traitor that it was. She hadn't seen him in so long.

“Garret!”

She pushed open the door, one foot inside her house, the other on the sidewalk. The street was narrow, old, more alleyway than thoroughfare. He stopped and turned to look at her, the streetlamp just above his head, orange light falling down.

All at once, shyness overtook her. With one word she felt as if she'd thrown herself at him. She pulled herself up straighter and tried to be cool.

“Thanks for doing this,” she said.

“This was for Jonathan,” he said.

And then he turned, whistling, and walked away.

Jonathan hadn't gone looking for trouble. He'd never liked to make waves. But one night, when he was on a business trip meeting with a potential new client for the firm, there she was, at a hotel bar in Boston. She was not some femme fatale in a backless dress, not a wallflower either, but she was there, cliché as any stranger seems on first glance, so that later Jonathan felt that she might have been waiting—if not for him, then for someone like him. He—and she—could have been anyone.

She was a graduate student passing through town to visit a friend. Her hair was highlighted blond and her laugh was easy. They'd struck up a conversation about Boston, and soon they were talking about baseball and then cooking and then politics, and then they were ordering another round of beers.

He hadn't made the decision to sleep with her lightly. Instead, he'd felt what had happened was a thing that he had let happen—as opposed to a thing he had done. He simply had to accept, to receive her, and not say no. In the musty elevator she'd pressed against him, her hips circling, and his body had responded with quick desperation. He was still vital. Alive, after all.

In a hotel room that could have been any hotel room, she'd left him with bruises and bites. Jonathan was sure Thea would see the dark shadows her mouth had made on his chest—she would notice them at night when he took off his shirt. Or when he toweled off after a shower. Or when he climbed into their bed. He couldn't separate his fear of the moment from his anticipation of it. Thea would see. She would yell and scream, and he would know they had a chance.