That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  He shook his head. “She isn’t going to do anything. She just wants to scare us. I promise. You’re worrying about nothing. This is going to blow over, and everything’s going to be fine.” Which was what he’d believed, with all his heart, until that night, when he had come home and found Daisy and Beatrice gone.

  “Honey?” he called, hearing the house echo. None of the familiar sounds that said “home” came to his ears; nor could he catch a whiff of any of the smells. No chicken roasting in the oven; no green pork chili, made with tomatillos specially purchased from one of the markets on Ninth Street, simmering on the stove. The countertops were bare; the table was empty; the dog did not come running to greet him. He checked his phone for recent texts or calls from his daughter or his wife, but there were none. When he called Daisy’s number, it just rang and rang. He texted the words CALL ME, then put his phone away, trying to ignore the voice in his head that was speaking up, more and more insistently: she knows.

  He went to the bedroom, taking the stairs two at a time. His plan was to check for missing luggage or clothes, but he quickly realized that he had no idea where Daisy kept their suitcases, or if he’d be able to discern if any of her clothes or toiletries had been moved or taken. Everything seemed to be in order. The perfume he liked, that he’d bought to replace the perfume he didn’t, was still in its spot on the dresser. Her good earrings and her pearl necklace were still in the jewelry box… but if she’d packed some clothes and a toothbrush, he wouldn’t necessarily notice they were gone. He didn’t even try looking in Beatrice’s room, knowing that would be futile.

  Instead, he stood in the center of their bedroom, forcing his mind to go blank. Ladybug, ladybug, he thought. Daisy had flown off, somewhere. His little songbird, out of her cage. Where had she gone? Was she alone, or was she with Diana, to soak up more of her new friend’s poison?

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. Hal jumped, pressed his lips together, and looked down to see his wife’s face flashing on the screen.

  “Daisy?”

  “Hello, Hal.” Her voice sounded different. Cool, and faraway.

  “Where are you, sweetheart? Where’s Beatrice? What’s going on?”

  Instead of answering, Daisy said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  A lesser man, a non-lawyer, might have fallen into that trap. Hal knew better. “Where are you?” he asked again. When she didn’t answer, he bit back the words that wanted to escape: Tell me where you went! Tell me where you took my car and my daughter! Struggling for calm, he said, “If there’s anything we need to discuss, we can do it face-to-face. But I need to know where you are. I just want to make sure you’re all right.”

  He heard Daisy sigh. It was a familiar sound and, in it, Hal heard what he wanted to hear—capitulation. That’s my girl, he thought.

  “Beatrice and I are on the Cape.”

  Hal forced himself to smile. Making that shape with his mouth would change the sound of his voice. He would sound calm, and Daisy would hear that, and she wouldn’t panic, or do anything rash. That was how it was with women. You could fool them; you could lead them. It was what they required. Without someone to impose order, some man to run the show, it would just be twittering hysteria all the time, flocks of chirping birds flapping their wings pointlessly, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing. “Stay right there,” he told his wife.

  “Meet me tomorrow morning at Diana’s house. I’ll text you the address. I think that we should talk. The three of us.”

  “Fine,” said Hal. “I look forward to it.” Even if the other Diana had gotten hold of his wife, filled her head with lies and exaggerations, ensorcelled her, somehow, Hal would find the words to break the spell. He’d plead his case, he’d tell Daisy his side of things, and he’d win, because he was, in the end, a winner. “Tell Beatrice I love her, and that I’m on my way.”

  34

  Daisy

  At six in the morning, as the sun was coming up, Daisy steered her car up the driveway and parked it beside the small, cedar-shingled cottage that stood on the edge of the dune. Diana was sitting on the edge of a wooden deck. A short-legged, chunky dog with shaggy brown fur frolicked around her legs.

  “That’s Pedro,” said Diana, as she got to her feet. “Pedro, behave.”

  Daisy walked toward the deck. The air was thick with the promise of rain, weighty with humidity. She could see rafts of gray clouds rolling in from Provincetown. She felt unreality nagging at her, like the ground beneath her feet was going to crumble, like the cottage would slide into the sea, and everything she’d known or seen or believed in would disappear.

  “Do you want some coffee?” Diana asked.

  Daisy stared at her. Of all the things she’d been expecting, nothing as prosaic as coffee had made the list. She imagined sitting, her hands wrapped around a warm mug, the simple comfort of it. “Sure.”

  Diana led her into the cottage. Daisy took it in: the white-painted walls, the ledge lined with brightly patterned decoupaged seashells and dried starfish, framed postcards hung from bright bits of ribbon, paintings of flowers and landscapes in frames made from driftwood. She saw the piles of books, the white voile curtains, and the narrow refectory table with the easel and the guitar in the corner. “God,” she said, “Beatrice would love it here.”

  “She’s always welcome,” said Diana, and led Daisy to the galley kitchen, which was separated from the living space by a half-height wall. Daisy looked around at the well-worn utensils in their ceramic container, the copper pots, the rows of spices in glass jars, the blue ceramic bowl full of clementines.

  Daisy went back to the living space. She let her hand brush Pedro’s leash, hanging on a peg by the door. She touched the rocking chair, then the white chenille throw, and went straight to the framed wedding photograph of Diana and Michael that stood on her bedside table.

  “This is your husband?”

  Diana nodded. Daisy picked up the photograph and studied it in the light. Diana wore a simple white dress, and there were white blossoms in her hair. The man by her side was big and burly, with rounded shoulders and tree-trunk thighs and a broad chest. Diana looked radiant, and the man looked ecstatic, almost delirious with joy, his eyes barely slits above his cheeks, his smile as wide as his face.

  Diana sounded almost shy. “He was the caretaker for the cottage, when I moved in.”

  “Do you have children?”

  Diana shook her head.

  “I don’t know anything about you. Not one true thing,” Daisy said as she watched the other woman moving in the kitchen, her hands deft and her movements economical as she measured coffee and poured water into her machine. “Jesus, did you even need cooking lessons?”

  Diana looked rueful. “Well, I can’t cook like you do, but I’m not quite as pathetic as I pretended to be. I own a restaurant in Provincetown. The Abbey?”

  “Oh my God,” said Daisy. “We’ve been there.”

  “I own it now, but I was a waitress there, for a long time. For the first few years I lived here I would go back to Boston in the summertime. I couldn’t stand to be here in July or August. Everything I saw, or heard, or smelled, it all reminded me of what happened.” Diana poured coffee into a mug, adding sugar and cream, because by then she knew how Daisy took her coffee.

  “Is Beatrice here?” Diana asked.

  “She’s back at the house. Vernon’s house. The one where you found our picture.”

  Diana nodded. “And Hal?”

  Daisy swallowed. It felt like her heart had taken up residence in her throat and was sitting there, quivering. “On his way. I told him that we needed to talk to him. I left him a note, so he’d know where to come.”

  Diana nodded again. After she’d poured a cup of coffee for herself, she held the door, and Daisy followed her back outside, out to the beach stairs at the top of the dune. A pair of wooden benches were built into the platform at the top of the six flights, a comfortable spot for people to sit and catch their breath and brush t
he sand off their shoes, with views of the bay to both sides.

  “Careful,” Diana said, as Daisy grasped the lintel on the top of the post, which wobbled alarmingly under her hand. “That post is loose. Michael’s been meaning to fix that forever,” she said. “It’s like the joke about the cobbler’s children with no shoes, right? Nothing around here gets fixed as fast as it should.”

  They sat on the benches, facing each other, as more clouds rolled in and the wind picked up, blowing the patchy grass almost flat. Daisy waited for Diana to say something, to offer an apology or an explanation. When Diana didn’t speak, Daisy decided to begin.

  “I told you how when I met Hal, he was an older man. A lawyer. A partner in a big firm, with a big house. And I was twenty years old. My dad had died, my mom had no money, I was thirty thousand dollars in debt, and… well.” She looked down at the water. “I was dazzled by him. For a lot of reasons. He swept me off my feet. He was everything I thought I’d ever wanted, and would never get. You know? The answer to all my prayers.”

  “I can imagine how appealing that must have been.” Diana’s voice was dry. “A man who comes along and looks like he can give you anything you want.”

  Daisy sighed. “Back then, I thought I was fat. Hideous. I wasn’t—not really. Sometimes I look at pictures of myself, back then, and I get angry that I ever felt bad about myself. But, at the time, it felt like my friends, my roommates, they were always the ones guys paid attention to. So I had no self-esteem, and a dead father, and a mother who was falling apart…” She swallowed, realizing that it still hurt to talk about that part of her life. Realizing, too, how self-indulgent and whiny she must sound, to someone who’d survived what Diana had survived. “Hal wanted me. More than that. He needed me. He made that clear. And I liked being needed. I liked feeling important to someone.” She sipped her coffee, then set her mug down. “I think he tried to be honest with me, in his way. He said that he’d been wild when he was younger. That he used to drink. He gave me the idea that there were things that he’d done, things he wasn’t proud of.”

  “But he didn’t say what they were?”

  Daisy shook her head. “He never said. And I never asked. But I understood the deal. I would… I don’t know. I’d be a civilizing influence, and I wouldn’t ask questions. I’d make a home for him. Have babies. Well,” she said, and smiled sadly. “That was the plan, anyhow, even though it ended up being baby, singular. I would cook…” She looked up, meeting Diana’s eyes. “I was happy. You know?” Diana nodded. Daisy sniffled, and swiped at her cheeks with her sleeve. “That’s the shitty part. I’m trying to help Beatrice to grow up and be a strong woman. I’m trying to be a role model. And I thought—I mean, I had a business, and I volunteered, and I thought…” Her voice trailed off. “I thought that I was doing fine. That I was happy, and that I had the kind of life I wanted. That I wasn’t dependent, the way my mother was. And sure, there were things that happened that I don’t think about, or didn’t, until all of this stuff in the news…” Daisy waved her hands, a gesture she hoped encompassed her history, and current events, the damage that had been done to her; the same kind of damage it seemed like every woman who’d ever drawn breath had endured. “And now all I see is what he did to me—to us. That I was dependent. That I could have been more, and done more. That Hal hurt people. He hurt you. And he kept my world very small.”

  “Hey.” Gently, Diana put her hand on Daisy’s forearm. “Beatrice is great. You’ve done a good job with her.”

  Daisy was crying in earnest by then, tears rolling off her chin to plop on her lap. She waved away the compliment. “Please. You hardly know her.”

  “I can tell. She’s confident and curious and smart. Smart enough to figure out what I was doing, anyhow. I think she’s terrific.”

  “She makes clothes for dead mice.” Now Daisy was crying and laughing at the same time.

  “She does. And she’s got blue hair, and old-lady clothes. It’s fine. She’s one hundred percent herself. And she wouldn’t be that strong, she wouldn’t have the courage of her convictions, if she didn’t have a mom like you.”

  Daisy made herself breathe deeply, and sat up straight, squaring her shoulders, feeling the wind coming off the water. “Are you going to tell the police?”

  Diana shook her head. “If that had been my plan, I would have had to tell a long time ago.”

  “So what, then? Do you want him to say he’s sorry?” As soon as Daisy spoke the words she heard how insipid they sounded, how meaningless, and she wished she could take them back. “No. Never mind. Do you think—if he actually did something to make it right…”

  Diana was looking at her curiously. “What would that be?”

  “I don’t know,” Daisy said. “Like, if he took a leave from his job and went back to Emlen. If he volunteered there, and told the boys there what he’d done, and worked with them, and the teachers, so none of them would ever do a thing like that?”

  Diana cocked her head. “Would he do it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Daisy. She was remembering what Hal had said, at the dinner party, that rainy night; about how there had to be a way back for the transgressors; about how famous broadcasters and athletes couldn’t just be canceled forever. She thought about Danny, who at least had been trying to do better, as opposed to her husband, who, she thought, simply wanted to put the events of that summer behind him, to stick them in a folder labeled CHILDHOOD and never think of them again. “I don’t know what atonement looks like. I don’t know how a man makes this right. Or even if it’s possible.” She bent her head and cleared her throat. Staring down at her hands, she said, “I’m not much of an adult, I think. I never finished college, and I barely have any friends.”

  Diana looked at her, waiting.

  “I always thought that it was me. That I was selfish, or self-involved, or boring, or stupid, or silly.” Daisy heard Hal’s voice in her head. My little songbird Happy in her cage. “I thought people didn’t like me, or that I wasn’t as smart as they were, or at least, not as educated. And maybe I am unlikable. I’m not discounting that possibility, but Hal…” She touched her lips. “I think that Hal wanted me all to himself, so he kept other people away. I could sense some of that, at least some of the time. But I thought…” She looked down. Her heart was so heavy. The world seemed bleak and gray and sunless, and like it would be that way forever. “It felt like love,” she said.

  Diana nodded. For a moment they sat in silence, before the rumble of distant thunder made Diana cast a practiced glance upward.

  “Looks like we’re going to get a thunderstorm.”

  “This was always my favorite thing about being on the Cape,” said Daisy. “Sitting in the living room, in front of the windows, and watching the storms roll in.” If Diana noted Daisy’s use of the past tense, she didn’t say anything. Daisy took a deep breath and made herself ask the question.

  “So tell me,” said Daisy. “Tell me what happened.”

  Diana looked out toward the water. The wind blew her hair away from her face. “I was fifteen,” she began. “It was the summer after my sophomore year in high school. I played soccer, and I loved reading. My parents and my older sisters and I lived in South Boston. My mom was a secretary for the English department at Boston University, and that’s where she met Dr. Levy.”

  Diana told Daisy everything. She told Daisy about convincing her father to let her take the job and how happy her parents had been when Dr. Levy had offered her the job. She told her what happened that summer, and about the lost years that followed, and how Dr. Levy had given her the cottage and Diana had come to live in it, alone. She talked about getting her job at the Abbey, and all the people she’d met there; she talked about adopting Willa, and meeting Michael Carmody, her caretaker. She told her about her marriage, her happy years painting and crafting and working at the Abbey. She told her about finding Daisy’s wedding picture, about creating the email address and the fake profile page as a way of getting
close to Daisy.

  “I just couldn’t believe that he’d married someone else named Diana. It was so weird. It felt like he was rubbing it in, somehow.” She smoothed back her hair. “Like, you were the Diana he married, and I was the Diana that he… well. You know.”

  Daisy’s face burned, and she had to force the words out of her mouth. “After our first date, he told me he’d known another Diana. That’s when he started calling me Daisy.” She shook her head, thinking of the girl she’d been then, trusting and hopeful and naive. “I should have known that something was wrong.”

  “No,” said Diana. “Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have known something like that.”

  Daisy nodded reluctantly. Then, with every muscle tensed, she asked, “What happens now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Diana. “I thought I knew. I thought that I just wanted to look him in the eye and let him see me, and tell him that he’d hurt me.”

  “Do you think that’s going to be enough?” Diana’s expression was hard to read, and Daisy felt herself shudder. He’s still Beatrice’s father, she heard her mother saying. What would it do to her daughter if Hal was put on trial, if he was convicted and sent to jail? And then she asked herself the same question she’d asked her brother, and her mom: What if this had happened to Beatrice? What would justice look like then?

  She knew that there had to be more to it than just mouthing an apology; there had to be deeds, in addition to words. Maybe Hal could go take a leave of absence from the law firm, and go to Emlen and talk to the boys there. Maybe he could work with a therapist, and he could figure out why he’d done what he’d done, and what to say to other rich, privileged young men to keep them from inflicting similar harm. That would be something, but Daisy knew that it still wouldn’t be enough. And part of her, a cool, removed part whose existence she’d never previously suspected, was saying, Not my problem. Because, no matter what happened, it seemed like a part of her had decided that Hal wasn’t going to be her problem for much longer.