Beach Plum Island Read online

  Ava ran after her, but Elaine was through the gate before she got there, then spinning away in her red BMW, charging straight across the lawn, her car tires carving deep grooves in the grass. Ava heard the scrape of the car’s underbelly as her sister hurtled over the sidewalk and down the curb, then a screech of tires as she sped away.

  “Was that Aunt Elaine?” Sam and Evan had followed and were standing on either side of her again. It occurred to Ava that her sons had been following her around all day and trying to protect her like a pair of loyal guard dogs, bless them.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m afraid so.”

  “Wow. That was so fucking cool,” Sam said. “She almost took out that bush.”

  “And did you hear those tires?” Evan said. “She must have been doing, like, sixty miles an hour when she hit the street. That was fucking epic!”

  “Don’t say ‘like,’” Ava said automatically. “And please don’t swear around your mother.”

  “So are we staying here or going after her?” Evan asked.

  “I don’t think there’s much point in going after her now,” Ava said. “Do you?”

  Sam shook his head. “No. We’d never catch her.”

  “Right. And I’d better go apologize to Katy.”

  “Good luck with that, Mom,” the boys said nearly in unison, then turned to escort her back into the yard, where they made a sudden sharp turn toward the food.

  The party was buzzing. More people had arrived and Elaine’s performance had electrified the crowd. People turned their heads to stare as Ava threaded her way through the knots of people.

  She found Katy in the gazebo, sitting with her mother. Katy’s veil was lifted and her face was puffy, nearly unrecognizable, her gray eyes as flat as cement.

  “Katy, I’m so sorry,” Ava said. “Elaine’s not herself.”

  Dawn, stone-faced, took her daughter’s hand. Katy twisted a white lace handkerchief between her delicate fingers. “Oh, I think Elaine was being very much herself,” Dawn said.

  She was right, of course. Ava touched Katy’s cool, bony shoulder. “I am sorry,” she repeated, then turned away, humiliated and furious, her churning emotions nearly blinding her as she prepared to leave.

  The boys were nowhere in sight. Ava entered the kitchen. It, too, was newly renovated, a chef’s dream with stainless steel appliances and enough counter space to skate on. The caterers milled around, barking orders and filling trays. Ava passed through them unnoticed and stopped in the front hall, wondering where to look next for the boys.

  A soft rustling sound caused her to glance into the room to her left, now a formal parlor done up in flowered Victorian furniture and hunting scenes framed in gold. Hats and purses were piled on one of the sofas; the noise was coming from a figure hunched over them.

  As the figure straightened, Ava recognized Gigi’s blue hair. The girl was dressed in jeans and a tank top now, rather than the black dress she’d worn to the service, and she had her hand deep in someone’s pocketbook.

  “Hey,” Ava said. “What are you doing? That’s not your purse!”

  Gigi glanced up, startled, her blue hair standing straight up like the feathers of some exotic bird. “How the fuck do you know?”

  Inwardly, Ava sighed. She couldn’t blame the girl for being hostile, especially now. “Because it doesn’t match your shoes.”

  Gigi glanced down at her filthy bare feet, then back up at Ava, locking eyes. To Ava’s relief, the girl started laughing, making Ava laugh, too, until tears were running down both their faces.

  “Shit,” Gigi said. “I wasn’t stealing. I was only looking for a smoke.”

  “Why? Because our dad died of lung cancer and that was so cool?”

  “Oh, shut up,” Gigi said, and fled the room.

  Ava headed for the front door, hoping the boys would miraculously meet her by the car so she could avoid taking another Walk of Shame through the crowd to find them, but she didn’t see them anywhere in the house. They must still be in the yard. She ducked into her father’s office and dug the phone out of her purse.

  Where are you? she texted Sam, who never went anywhere without his phone, even sleeping with it under his pillow, a fact he probably thought Ava had missed. Meet me at the front door in 5 min.

  She slipped the phone back into her purse and glanced up, longing for one last look at her father’s life. She’d probably never be invited back into this house again after Elaine’s little spectacle.

  Dad’s office looked exactly the same as it always had: cream walls, a tan carpet topped by a beautiful blue Oriental rug, a massive cherry desk, a leather sofa, Audubon bird prints framed in black. A neat stack of papers was centered on the desk, the pens arranged in two leather containers that resembled small whiskey barrels.

  Then Ava spotted one of her own pots on the far corner of his desk, holding Dad’s favorite gold fountain pen. It was a small green stoneware vase, one of her very first pieces. She’d given it to him the Christmas before he met Katy and moved out.

  Her knees buckled. She found her way to the leather couch across the room and collapsed onto it, undone by the memory of her father sitting here in his office, his silver head gleaming in the lamplight, absorbed in paperwork but always looking up to smile when he saw her.

  She was crying now, the tears dripping off her chin and cheeks. She was searching frantically in her purse for a tissue when someone pressed a handkerchief into her hand.

  “Here,” he said. “Keep it.”

  Ava pressed the cloth to her face, smelling mint and something musky, then looked up at the man standing in front of her. He was blond and blue-eyed, probably in his early forties. The man was tall and rangy; he wore a charcoal suit with a white shirt and a narrow tie in a surprising deep gold. His eyes were so sympathetic that she started sobbing again, all of her grief leaking out, a profound damp sadness rising out of her very pores. Even the skin on her bare arms and legs felt damp.

  The man went away, then returned with a whiskey. He put the crystal glass in her hand. “This should help.”

  “After that scene in the garden, I’d think you’d be afraid to give any woman alcohol,” Ava said.

  “You’re not your sister. Drink.”

  God, so he knew who she was. This was awful. She needed to leave, the sooner the better. Ava tossed the drink into her mouth and was immediately sorry. The whiskey made her throat burn and her eyes tear. She started coughing.

  The stranger sat down beside her and rubbed her back, but that only made things worse. His touch set her off again. She wept into the damp handkerchief, wishing it were a blanket she could throw over her head. Her grief felt enormous, like the chilly shadow of a cliff too big to go around.

  The man put an arm around her shoulders and drew her close. Ava leaned into him as the grief continued to come in waves, buffeting her like a storm she couldn’t control. She missed her mother and father, this house and being a child in it with Elaine. Most of all, she missed being young enough to think that life wouldn’t come with such terrible losses as you grew up.

  Finally, she sniffed and pulled away, embarrassed now by the fact that, on top of Elaine making a scene in the garden, she was making one here and drenching this man’s suit in the process.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “This is all very hard. I’m afraid I’m not coping very well.”

  “Don’t apologize,” the man said, smoothing a damp lock of hair out of her eyes. “Of course it’s hard. You’ll have plenty of time to cope later. Right now, you need to grieve. You and my sister get to be the queens of grief today. Nobody should tell you what to do or how to feel.”

  My sister. “Oh, God,” Ava moaned.

  The man narrowed his eyes in concern. “What is it? Do you need water? Another whiskey?”

  Ava managed a shaky laugh. “Definitely not another whiskey. No,
it’s just that I’ve only now realized you’re Katy’s brother. Have we met before?”

  “No. I was overseas for the past five years, working in Hong Kong. I’m Simon Talbot.” He stood up, giving her shoulder an awkward pat. “See? No need to be apologetic. We’re all family here, and families should help each other through hard times like these.”

  She stood up and straightened her skirt. “How is Katy doing, really? I feel guilty that I didn’t do more to help her take care of Dad. I tried, but she never seemed to want me there until the very end.”

  “Katy’s an extremely private person,” Simon said. “She didn’t let any of us help, either. You were generous to offer. Now, are these gentlemen with you?” He gestured toward the doorway.

  Ava turned and saw Evan and Sam, hovering uncertainly. “Mom? Are you okay?” They looked, amazingly, like they were ready to take on even this tall, confident man in a suit on her behalf.

  “I’m fine now. I think it’s probably time to go, though, don’t you?”

  She turned back to Simon, who pressed her hand between his, warming it. When he released her, Ava felt instantly bereft again.

  “Thank you, Simon. You’re very kind,” she said, then went to her waiting sons.

  • • •

  There was a quick and dirty cure to fix the way Elaine was feeling after an afternoon as horrible as this one: a hookup.

  She sped back to her condo from her father’s house, playing a discordant jazz track on Pandora and pounding the horn a couple of times at people who insisted on driving the speed limit in the fast lane, pulling out her phone to check her e-mails at the lights. No matter what she did, though, she couldn’t shake the image of her stepmother lifting her veil and putting a hand to her mouth, defeated and helpless looking.

  All right. Fine. Maybe Ava was right and Katy had loved her father. So what? That didn’t change the fact that when Dad left them for Katy, he’d shattered their mother.

  Back in her condo, Elaine showered and slipped into a clingy sleeveless dress in a pleasing deep plum color. She blew her glossy chestnut hair straight and painted on a shout of red lipstick, trying to avoid looking at the photograph of her mother tucked into the corner of her mirror, the last one Elaine had taken of her. She had forced her mother to get dressed and stand in the yard in front of a hydrangea bush in full bloom, the flowers like lacy blue handkerchiefs. Mom hadn’t even noticed the flowers. She just stood there blinking in the sun like some tunneling frightened rodent, obeying Elaine only because Elaine had hidden her pills and wouldn’t give them back until she was outside for twenty minutes.

  Elaine shuddered and spun away from the mirror to grab her favorite wedge sandals out of the closet. When her father left, she’d been a senior at Tufts, twenty-two years old, and living at home, doing an internship in the local courthouse. She’d assumed that she and her mother would stay in the Newburyport house after Dad went to live with Katy, but her mother lasted only a month.

  “These halls might as well be haunted,” Mom said. “I see your father everywhere. I need to go home.”

  “Home” was a small town in northwestern Maine two hours from any highway, a place with moose in the woods and loons on the lake. Elaine hoped to never hear another loon again. That strange cry was the sound of a loneliness so ancient and terrible, you would sooner die than suffer it yourself.

  She didn’t think much of moose, either. The tourists paid big bucks to be taken on moose safaris, but all you had to do was drive along one particular road the townies called “Moose Alley” to see the animals grazing in swamps. Moose were about as magnificent as donkeys, with their hairy chins and knobby knees.

  The town itself was nothing more than a cluster of rickety stores on a deep lake where floatplanes landed to carry people even deeper into the wilderness. The year-round residents wore hunting camouflage and, depending on the season, rode ATVs or snowmobiles to the bars because gas prices were high and the roads were mostly dirt.

  Elaine found work as a waitress in the only year-round restaurant. The tips weren’t bad. She was cute, she had good legs, and she was smart enough to read the bartender’s handbook and mix drinks in a pinch if the bartender was too smashed. She took online college classes and contemplated buying a rifle but never did.

  Pills and alcohol were even more of a problem for Suzanne in Maine than they’d been at home. The only person they ever saw was her mother’s aunt Finley, a thickset, mannish woman with three cats and a passion for mystery novels too gory for Elaine to read. The rest of the family had either died or sensibly stayed in Canada.

  Elaine had lived with her mother on this forgotten edge of the world for nine months. Then, when the owner of the cabin said he wanted to rent it to summer people, Suzanne had insisted on moving into Aunt Finley’s upstairs apartment and banished Elaine back to Boston. She was dead of a heart attack a year later. Elaine knew there was no such thing as dying of a broken heart, but that’s exactly how it had seemed.

  Elaine strapped on her shoes and jammed a handful of condoms into her purse. She had to get out of here right now.

  She hurtled across the Charles River on the BU Bridge. After years of trial and error, she had learned where to go for safe, pleasurable hookups. She steered clear of the pounding downtown clubs—too many swingers in their twenties ready to blow their wallets up their noses—and headed instead to Cambridge. The bars around MIT were tricky; she needed someone older and more experienced than a graduate student. But there was one particular jazz club in Kendall Square that suited her needs. It was frequented by foreign scientists and engineers easily enticed by American women who they correctly perceived were leading freer lifestyles than women from their own countries.

  She was lucky it was a Saturday night. There was a live jazz band and the place was packed. Elaine liked to think she gave as much as she got out of these encounters. She even, occasionally, bought men drinks to get things going.

  Tonight, she stuck with seltzer water and cranberry juice, asking for a lime so it would look like she was enjoying a cocktail instead of sobering up from a disastrous afternoon. She moved slowly through the crowded bar, focusing on the throbbing bass line of the music to stop feeling like she was at the wrong end of a telescope.

  Whenever anyone at work asked Elaine how she was feeling about her father’s death, she said, “Numb.” People assumed she meant numb with grief, but Elaine wasn’t sure that was accurate. She was just numb. Ava had confessed that the day after Dad died, she had gone to a midday movie and wept silently in the empty theater, nauseated by the stink of bad popcorn and her own grief.

  Elaine envied Ava’s easy relationship with her emotions. Ava laughed and cried easily, at the least provocation: movies, a friend weeping in front of her, even certain television commercials. Elaine was always on guard against her own emotions, keeping them stoppered tightly because they were such a nuisance. However, this meant her feelings sometimes came to a boil under the surface and then exploded out of control, typically beyond whatever a particular moment warranted. It made her furious that she’d erupted at Dad’s funeral.

  Everyone in the bar seemed to be with someone but her. Never mind. She was probably more contented with her life overall than most of the couples in here. A lot of them were probably together despite already having realized they’d made bad choices. Elaine took a sip of her drink and tried not to sneeze as the fizz went up her nose.

  Finally, after one more tour of the room, she selected her prey: a man considerably younger than she was. He had olive skin, sleek black hair, and fine features. He wore his button-down plaid shirt tucked into his blue jeans, a look that he doubtless thought made him seem more American.

  She made a point of standing directly in front of his table. He was seated with three other men in similar outfits. They were clearly friends; she imagined them working long hours in adjoining cubicles, probably in one of those mazelik
e Cambridge industrial complexes. She swayed to the music with her back to the man, almost close enough to touch, knowing he and his companions would be admiring her shining dark hair, tiny belted waist, and long legs. Then she summoned the waiter over and bought the man a drink.

  His companions hooted, urging him to speak to her. Elaine could hear this going on behind her but didn’t rush things. She didn’t even turn around as he approached.

  Standing next to him at last, Elaine was pleased to see that the man was half a head taller than she was despite her heels. He smelled of cinnamon and had eyes like melting chocolates in the flickering light.

  He asked her to dance and guided her to the crowded floor with one hand touching the small of her back, making her shiver in anticipation. When the band broke between sets, she suggested going somewhere quiet to talk. Elaine would have preferred leaving for his place right away, but she had learned through the years that the stereotype was true: men desired you more if you pretended to be hard to get. You didn’t want to spook them.

  They went to the bar upstairs, where the man told her about his job as a software engineer and his family in India. Elaine mentioned only that she worked in marketing. She never let anyone know the name of her company or that she was its vice president. She didn’t have a Facebook page and her Twitter account was under a different name; she made quite sure to be impossible to track.

  As the bartender announced closing time, the man invited her to his place for a brandy. He offered to drive her there, but she said she preferred to take her own car: “I’m sure you understand. It’s a new BMW, and I hate leaving it unattended in this part of Cambridge. Besides, this way you won’t have to drive me home.”

  These statements had the desired effect. The man was clearly impressed by her new car and now he was acting nervous, probably worrying that she wouldn’t be as easy as he’d thought.

  His condo was exactly what she had expected, a tidy one-bedroom, third-floor walk-up in Cambridge with Ikea furniture. This told her that the man was probably a newly minted PhD, spent most of his waking hours at work, and most likely sent half his earnings home to India, where his mother was tirelessly, devotedly scouring the countryside for a suitable bride to join him.