The Love Season (31 page)

She flipped the phone open. It was a Nokia, sleek and cool in her palm. And—would wonders never cease?—she got a signal.

Action felt a flash of guilt.
Hypocrite!
she screamed at herself in her mind. She hadn’t even let twelve-year-old Tanya, who was the youngest and best-behaved child at the camp, call her mother on her mother’s fortieth birthday. However, Action’s presiding sentiment was that enough was enough and she had had enough of West Virginia unplugged. If she had to sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” one more time, she would have a Tourette’s-like outburst. “
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
.” No, sorry.

One call
, she thought.
I’ll only make one call
. The call should rightly go to her brother, Major. Action received a letter from him every single day,
written out in Miss Engel’s neat block script. He wrote about how he went to Strawberry Fields, ate ice cream, watched some kid fly a kite that looked like a parrot. It was hot, he wanted to go on vacation to the ocean the way they did when Action was at home, but Mom had work and Dad had work.
I miss you, Action. I love you miss you love you
. He always signed his own name, and this was what hurt Action the worst. His name in wobbly capitals, a smiley face drawn into the
O
. Action had never gone eight weeks without seeing him, and what she missed the most was him needing her. Of course, she had twelve needy cases evading sleep inside the cabin, but it wasn’t the same.

Action should have called Major—woken him up if he was asleep—but she didn’t. She’d had a Doomsday instinct about Renata all day long in the front of her mind. Action was worried that something terrible had happened—she’d gotten hurt, or she died. The girl never looked both ways before she crossed the street; she was constantly getting her foot stuck in the gap between the subway car and the station platform; in nearly every way, Renata Knox acted like a person who didn’t have a mother. However, that was one of many things that Action loved about her. Renata was her best friend, the sister she never had; she was special. Their friendship couldn’t be explained any easier than one could explain peanut butter and jelly. Why? Just because.

Action dialed Renata’s cell phone number, praying she wasn’t sleeping over at Watch Boy’s new apartment on Seventy-third Street. The phone rang. Action stepped away from her cabin and closer to the bordering woods, despite the hoots of owls. She didn’t want her girls to hear. The phone rang four, five, six times; then Renata’s voice mail picked up.
Hi! You’ve reached the voice mail of Renata Knox
. Action grinned stupidly. Voice mail was still the old girl’s voice, which Action hadn’t heard in eight weeks.
I can’t answer my phone right now—

Because I’m being held up at gunpoint
, Action thought. But suddenly that didn’t feel right.
Because I’m cuddling up with Watch Boy
. Yep, that was probably more like it.

Action cleared her throat; then after the beep, she whispered, “Hi, it’s me.” Action had never had a friend whom she could say those three words to. Before she met Renata, Action had never imagined having a
Hi, it’s me
, friend; she never realized how important it was—to be recognized by another person, known instinctively, whether she was calling from down the street or the Tibetan Himalayas, whether she was calling from the woods of West Virginia or the D train. Action hoped that for the rest of their lives they would be each other’s
Hi, it’s me
. “I found a cell phone in the grass and I decided to break the first commandment of Camp Stoneface and call. I’ve been thinking of you all day. I hope you’re all right. I have a funny vibe, like something is happening. Maybe you joined the circus today, maybe you found religion, but something is happening; I can feel it. Don’t call me back. I’m about to turn this phone over to the authorities where it rightly belongs. So…write me a letter. Tell me you’re all right. I’ll be wait—” Action was cut off by the second beep. Renata always accused her of leaving the world’s longest messages. Action thought to call back, to finish, but she had promised herself only one phone call.

I love you
, she thought.
Love you like rocks
.

10:10 P.M.

In Room 477 of the Trauma Unit of Massachusetts General Hospital, Sallie Myers opened her eyes.

Ohhhkay
, she thought.
Very strange
.

She registered
hospital
, herself pinned to a bed, stuck in both arms and attached to machines that blinked and beeped; she noted a white curtain to her right, shielding her from someone else, or someone else from her. She tried not to panic, though she had no idea why she might be in a hospital.
Think back
, she told herself.
Slowly. Carefully
. But there was nothing.

She was afraid to move; she was afraid she would try and find herself unable. So she remained still, except for her eyes, which roamed the room, and thus it was that she discovered a figure huddled in a chair off to the left, at the edge of her field of vision. She turned her head. Her neck was stiff, but it worked. It was
… Miles
in the chair. He was asleep, snoring.

Ohhhhhkay
, she thought. What did she do to deserve waking up in a hospital room with Miles? Miles, Miles. She was still drawing a blank.

A minute passed, or maybe not a full minute but fifty or sixty beeps of the machine, which might have been counting the beats of her heart. Her heart was beating. Sallie figured she might as well try her arms. She turned her wrist. The right one moved just fine, but her left side felt fuzzy and not quite attached, like it was a prosthetic arm. Sallie gazed down. It was her arm. She touched it with her right hand. She could feel her own touch but she couldn’t make the arm move.

At that second, some people walked in. There was a gasp from one of the people—a woman, Sallie’s mother. Sallie’s father followed right behind, and then a dark person, who towered over Sallie’s parents like they were little children. Pierre. Pierre was here? Sallie couldn’t recall ever seeing Pierre anywhere but at the bar.

Sallie’s mother rushed to the side of the bed and took hold of Sallie’s leaden arm. “You’re awake!” she said. “The nurses told us it sounded like you were awake. They can tell from the way they monitor the machines out there.”

Sallie’s father clapped his hands in a rallying way. He was the head football coach at the University of Rhode Island. “I knew you’d snap out of it.”

Pierre approached next, timidly. He was out of his element, away from the noise and the beer and the grime of the bar, away from his back office with the black leather couches and his computer where he played Tetris while the kids out front got smashed and slam-danced. “Hello, gorgeous,” he said.

Sallie turned her attention back to her mother, her beautiful mother, who taught classical music at Moses Brown, who wore bifocals when she read a grocery list, who had fretted and worried so much over Sallie’s three older brothers that she had been content to just let Sallie be. Bartending?
Fine
. Surfing?
Good for you
. A pontoon boat down the Amazon River?
You only live once
. Sallie’s eyes filled with tears. She’d had a dream that her mother had died. In the dream, Sallie was driving down a dusty road and she spotted a white cross in the brush. She stopped, checked it out. The cross was for her mother. Sallie had screamed when she saw the cross,
Wait! Mom, wait! I’m getting married!

“Honey?” Sallie’s mother said. “How do you feel?”

“Confused,” Sallie said. The cross hadn’t been a dream. It was real. But how? Sallie’s mother stood right in front of her. “What am I doing here?”

“You had a surfing accident on Nantucket,” her father said. “You hit your head. They say you were underwater for a while.”

“Just a little while,” her mother said.

“And where am I now?”

“At Mass General. In Boston,” her mother said. “Pierre called us. And your friend…” She nodded at the chair where Miles slept. “…was here when we arrived.”

“Miles,” Sallie said. It all came back to her like something that fell from the sky and landed in her lap. Miles picking her up at the house with the girl, Renata, who was the cutest, sweetest thing Sallie had ever seen. So innocent, so young, so clean. It was
her
mother the cross was for. She had knelt before it. Kissed it.

“The doctors say they expect you to be fine,” Sallie’s mother said. “You may feel stiff and numb for a while, but there’s been no brain damage.”

“Thank God for that!” Sallie’s father said.

“You’re going to be fine, doll,” Pierre said.

“Did Renata come?” Sallie asked. “Did she come to the hospital with Miles?”

“Who?” Sallie’s mother asked.

Sallie watched Miles snoring in the chair.
Wake him up!
she wanted to say.
Ask him if Renata came!
But Sallie knew the answer was no. After all, why would she?

10:25 P.M.

Ethan Arcain couldn’t sleep. His wife, Emily, was dozing heavily beside him, her breathing deep and regular. His boys were asleep in their respective rooms; the house Ethan had built himself was solid and quiet. Out their open bedroom window Ethan could hear the occasional bleat of one of the goats. He and Emily had eaten grilled steaks for dinner with a fresh corn salsa and heirloom tomatoes drizzled with pesto. Such were the feasts when one lived on a vegetable farm. Ethan had drunk too much—he and Emily split a bottle of Shiraz from the Barossa Valley—and then
he’d opened a second bottle to drink alone, despite Emily’s warning eyebrows.

He hadn’t been able to tell Emily about Marguerite coming to the farm that afternoon, despite Brandon announcing, “Dad introduced me to an old friend of his today.”

Emily had been pulsing basil and garlic and pine nuts in the Cuisinart. “Oh yeah, who was it?”

Brandon conveniently chose that moment to leave the kitchen. “Nobody,” Ethan said. “Someone who used to come to the farm back in Dolores’s day, when I was just a kid.”

“Someone you had a crush on?” Emily said.

“Oh God, no,” Ethan said. “Nothing like that.”

He hadn’t been able to tell Emily, and then he drank too much and now both things weighed on his mind. He had lived on Nantucket his whole life; lots of people knew his history: his parents’ brutal split, his father’s drinking. And yet no one brought home the guilt and the shame of being Walter Arcain’s son like Marguerite.

You never had to carry his load
. Marguerite said. But he did. Despite the fact that he had worked hard to create a decent, peaceful, productive life, he did.

It had happened during the first week of February. Ethan had graduated the year before from Penn State with a degree in agriculture; he had confessed to his mother that he was in love with her new husband’s oldest daughter, Emily; he was working as a waiter at the Jared Coffin House to make money. He had a deal all worked out with Dolores Kimball; he was going to buy the farm from her when she retired. Everything was moving forward—not quickly, maybe, but in the right direction. And then, just
before service for the weekly Rotary luncheon, Ethan’s mother came into the dining room to say that Walter had killed someone and not just someone but Candace Harris Knox. She was jogging out in Madequecham; Walter was driving the company truck, drunk out of his mind.

To a young man who had helped put vegetables and flowers on the table at Les Parapluies since he was ten years old, Candace Harris Knox was a living legend. She was much older than Ethan but captivating nonetheless. The blond hair, the way she could run for miles without ever looking tired, the successful husband, the adorable young daughter. Candace was royalty on the island; she was a goddess among women, Ethan knew it just from the way she carried herself, just from the genuine ring of her laugh. And Walter Arcain, Ethan’s father, had run her down like she was a frightened rabbit.

Ethan pulled the quilt up under his chin. He was freezing, and a headache was starting from the wine. When he rolled over, he checked the red numbers of the digital clock. Ten thirty. He figured Marguerite’s dinner with Renata must be nearly over.

10:41 P.M.

Cade Driscoll was nothing if not disciplined. He was nothing if not obedient. And so, in the end, he suffered through the world’s longest dinner—through lobster cracking, corn munching, and people talking just to cover up the obvious awkwardness of Renata’s desertion. Then he endured dessert—blueberry pie with ice cream, coffee, and port. He sent mental pleas to his mother:
Let the Robinsons go home! Set them free!
But his mother seemed to feel that the longer the Robinsons stayed, the less
likely it was that they would remember the night as a disaster. Finally, finally, at nearly eleven o’clock, Kent Robinson stood up and offered to get his wife’s wrap. Good-byes were said. Claire kissed Cade on the mouth and said, “She wasn’t good enough for you, anyway.” As if she knew something Cade didn’t.

As soon as the Robinsons’ car pulled out of the driveway, Joe Driscoll excused himself for bed. When he shook Daniel Knox’s hand he said, “Any chance you’ll be up for sailing tomorrow?”

“Let’s see how things go.”

“Yes, yes,” Joe said. “Let’s.” He grabbed Cade’s elbow before going up, but he said nothing. Suzanne, in a moment of mercy, set her wineglass on the lowboy and said, “I’ll worry about cleaning up in the morning. Good night, all.” And she followed Joe up the stairs.

Once his parents were gone, Cade turned to Daniel Knox. “How about you?”

“I’m a night owl,” Daniel said. “I may sit on the deck for a while.”

“Okay,” Cade said. “Good night, then.” He marched up the stairs, as if dutifully going to bed.

He had sneaked out of dinner, just for a minute, pretending to use the bathroom, and he’d called Marguerite’s house, but he got no answer—the phone rang and rang. Then he called Renata’s cell phone. Voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message. He wanted to believe Renata’s disappearance had nothing to do with
him
per se. It was just a nineteen-year-old girl doing as she wished without thinking her actions through. She was upset with Cade for making her cancel dinner, and the whole thought of her father showing up freaked her out. So she bolted.