Summer People (29 page)

“I managed.”

“You looked good swimming.”

“Thanks.”

“Did you miss me?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I had other things to worry about.”

“I want you to forgive me.”

“What do you care if I forgive you or not?”

“I came here tonight because I want you to know how I feel.” She stood up and held her arms out like she was handing him something very heavy. “I feel like I’m in love with you. I’m in love with you, Marcus.”

It wasn’t until that moment that Marcus noticed the thunder was growing fainter, and so Winnie’s words seemed very loud to Marcus, so loud he felt the entire world could hear. His throat ached in the same place where Garrett had kicked him, and he realized he might cry.

“You’re in love with me?”

“Yes,” Winnie said.

“I don’t see why I should believe you,” he said.

“I guess you should believe me because it’s true,” Winnie said, nodding at the bed. “I want to be with you. Really
with
you. We’ve been waiting all summer for this. You know it as well as I do.”

Did he know it? He was too aware of Winnie in her pink nightie to answer. What would happen if he got his ass off this fragile heirloom dresser and went to her? Winnie pulled him across the room and pushed him into the bed, her skinny arms surprisingly strong from so much swim practice. He wondered again if this were some kind of trap, the big trap, the one that would get him sent away. Winnie ran her hand up the inside of his T-shirt and suddenly Marcus didn’t care who came barging in. He felt vulnerable, but the swirling tornado of anger inside of him was stilled, just from having her in his arms. He had missed her, this blond girl from Manhattan with all her quirks and flaws and rays of light.

“All right,” he said, thinking that the best life would be one where they could exist in an alternate universe, without their families.

She kissed him very softly on the lips, and slid out of her nightgown. Marcus remembered again of all those swim meets where he’d held himself back. Now, Winnie had given him the green light; she was waving him on toward the finish. Tonight, he was going to win.

Beth couldn’t believe she’d been so dumb, so blind, so naive. For nearly two weeks the twins’ behavior had been so inexplicable that she’d called Kara Schau’s office twice, only to learn that Kara was on vacation in the Hamptons. It was by chance that Beth went to the liquor cabinet for vermouth for a recipe and found the nearly empty bottle of Malibu rum. She knew for certain that neither she nor Arch had touched the rum in years, and so the culprits had to be the kids. They were drinking! Beth was chagrined that she hadn’t guessed the problem sooner and yet relieved that the answer might be so simple. They were raiding the liquor cabinet. She decided not to say anything about the Malibu until she figured out exactly what was going on. She wanted to check the twins’ rooms, which she did under the auspices of dusting one incredibly hot and muggy August morning. If they were going to be sneaky, well, then, so was she.

Winnie’s room was an organized mess. She’d started wearing clothes again, instead of just the Princeton sweatshirt. Beth wondered at this development but didn’t dare question it. She found the sweatshirt folded neatly on a chair in Winnie’s room. There were other clothes on the floor, some books, a journal. A glass of brown liquid on the night table. Beth sniffed it, then took a sip: warm, flat Coke. Okay. She made a few cursory swipes over the dresser and mirror, over the bedposts, and over the win-dowsill with her soft yellow cloth. Her spirit balked at the thought that in three short weeks, she’d be dusting this room for real—the final clean before closing the house for the winter. Although it had been a difficult summer, Beth hated the idea of leaving. The only way she’d made it through the spring was by thinking of Nantucket. New York was beautiful in autumn, and crackling with excitement—new theater, new restaurants, getting the kids back to school, the leaves changing in Central Park— but this year none of it held any appeal. New York was funereal, depressing, the site of tragedy. Beth understood that after the kids graduated from Danforth, she may have to sell their apartment and move somewhere less painful.

She walked down the hallway to Garrett’s room, wiping the frames of the watercolors that hung on the walls. Garrett was out with Piper, and Marcus and Winnie were at the beach. Beth was relieved to see that Marcus and Winnie had worked things out, although neither of the twins had spoken to Beth in a normal way in almost two weeks. She confronted them several times, but this only made things worse, and so Beth forced herself to let it go—it was just some awful, weird phase—but now there was the alcohol to explain it, and possibly worse things: marijuana, ecstasy, LSD.

Beth poked around Garrett’s room until she found a box of Trojans in his nightstand drawer. This stopped her cold, and she sat on his bed with the box—a huge box—in her lap. Well, it wasn’t exactly shocking, and she supposed she should be relieved he was using protection, but it made her sick-hearted to be holding physical evidence of her son’s sexual life. She returned the box to the drawer and checked in the closet and under the bed. There she found the trunk of her uncle Burton’s traveling artifacts. No six-packs, no baggies of weed.

Beth dusted the bedposts and the top of Garrett’s dresser. The urn of Arch’s ashes was sitting on the dresser and Beth spoke to him in her mind.
I’m in way over my head here, babe. Sex, alcohol— God knows what else. You’re supposed to be here to help me. This is the heavy lifting. I can’t do it on my own.
It didn’t help that it was now August, the part of the summer when Beth would begin to anticipate Arch’s two-week vacation. He didn’t love Nantucket the way she did, but she adored having him on the island for those two weeks, even if he did spend too much time at the dining room table working.

Last year, on the night he’d arrived, he was the most relaxed she had ever seen him. He’d come off the plane wearing his Nantucket red shorts and his Yankees cap backward, his white polo shirt untucked. He convinced Beth to take a walk on the beach with him after the kids went to bed. There was a half-moon hanging low and phosphorescence in the water. They held hands and caught up on what had happened the previous week— this time last year Arch was defending a major magazine conglomerate against charges of lifestyle discrimination, a case he eventually won. They talked about what they wanted to do with the kids over the next two weeks—picnics and outings and lobster night. Amid all this happy chatter, Arch stopped and presented her with a velvet box—but shyly, nervously, like he was about to propose. Beth took the box, knowing that whatever was inside of it was way too expensive and absolutely unnecessary, but marveling, too, at the butterflies in her stomach—even after twenty years. Romance!

The diamond ring. The “We Made It” ring. Because it was a moonlit August night on the beach below their Nantucket cottage. Because Garrett and Winnie were healthy, bright, well-adjusted kids. Because Arch had a successful career. Because after twenty years they were still in love.

“We made it,” Arch said as he slipped the ring on her finger. “It’s easy sailing from here.”

Beth wondered if she was remembering wrong. She didn’t think so. Everything had been that perfect, momentarily. It would be two months later that Arch took Connie’s case. It would be seven months later that his plane crashed.

Tears blurred Beth’s eyes as she lifted the urn off the dresser. It was lighter than she remembered; it was light enough to make her pry off the top and check inside.

The ashes were gone, and in their place was a piece of paper. Beth set the urn down on Garrett’s dresser and unfolded the paper. It took her a minute to realize what she was looking at, but then the names and dates, typed in their little boxes, came together. It was a marriage certificate. Hers and David’s.

The room was very hot and close and Beth felt like she was going to faint. She flung open the door to Garrett’s small balcony and stepped outside, sucking in the fresh air and the sight of the ocean. Beth considered hurling the urn off the balcony onto the deck below. But instead she clung to the empty urn, the urn that once contained the remains of her husband, and she carried it downstairs. A glass vase of zinnias sat on the kitchen table, and Beth removed the flowers and carried the vase outside to the deck. It wasn’t a particularly good vase, but it had been in the house for as long as Beth could remember. It was a vase that Beth’s grandmother used for her favorite New Dawn roses, which had climbed up the north side of Horizon until Gran died and the roses withered from lack of care. It was a vase that Beth’s mother used for the flowers Beth’s father always brought on weekends from their garden in New Jersey. Beth lifted the vase over her head and flung it against the deck. It was satisfying, the honest sound of breaking glass.

Let them cut their feet to ribbons, she thought. She then filled the urn with water and arranged the zinnias inside, placed the urn on the kitchen table, where they couldn’t miss it. She thought about ripping the marriage certificate to shreds and leaving that on the table, too, but instead she just crumpled it up and threw it in the kitchen trash with the coffee grounds and eggshells.

They knew about David and they had scattered the ashes without her.

Her instincts told her to get out of the house. She couldn’t see the twins; she would kill them. Strike them, at the very least. Garrett had the Rover, and so Beth changed quickly into running clothes, tucked two bottles of water into her fanny pack, and took off down the dirt road.

It was hot, and before Beth even reached the end of Miacomet Pond, she stopped to drink. How dare they—that was all she could think. How dare they delve into her past, how dare they unearth her secret, and how dare they punish her for it. They never thought what it might be like for her. They never considered how difficult each day was, each night alone.

She had visualized scattering the ashes at sunrise on the morning of their last day—out in front of Horizon, into the sand and the dune grass. She had planned to say something meaningful; she had wanted to write a prayer. Well, it hardly mattered now. The twins had stolen Arch from her.

Beth reached a section of dense woods on Hummock Pond Road. She wanted to disappear among the cool trees. Let the kids raise themselves since they thought living was so easy. Let them get from age seventeen to middle age without making any mistakes. Then Beth heard Arch’s voice in her head:
Your mistake isn’t the problem, honey. It’s that you concealed it.
She had hidden the truth from him, too, her own husband, dead now. On the ride home from the Ronans’ cocktail party six years ago, she had almost told him. Her joints were loose from too much wine, and just the fact that they’d spent three hours in the same house with David made Beth want to confess.

There’s something I want to tell you about David,
Beth had said to Arch, as they sped through the night toward home.
Something you should know.

Arch chuckled.
I liked the guy well enough. You’d better not say anything or you might change my mind.

Even though she was drunk, those words registered. There was no reason for Beth to bring up the unfortunate, unchangeable past. There was no reason to upset Arch or herself. For years, she had felt her brief marriage to David Ronan was too private to share, and that was how it would stay. Her private history.