The High Season

by Judy Blundell

  “Send him away.”

  “I can do that, too.” Adeline nodded. “It’s time. We’ve come to the end of the road.”

  “And buy this house.”

  Adeline lifted her head, startled. “What does that have to do with Lucas?”

  “It has to do with Jem. I think it will be good for her to still have this place to come to.”

  “I have an accepted bid on another house.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I can still get out of it. Ruthie, are you sure? I mean about all of it.”

  “Very sure.”

  “All right, then. That’s what we’ll do.” Adeline looked at her hard. “Why are you doing this? You’re protecting Jem, but you’re protecting me, too. I thought you hated me.”

  “I just want the best outcome,” Ruthie said.

  Adeline only grimaced. “I don’t know what that is, in the middle of all this mess.”

  She thought of Mike and Adeline glimpsed through a window, his hand on her head. “I don’t want to sound like a complete cheeseball,” Ruthie said. “But it’s when love wins.”

  Adeline’s gaze traveled back to the painting. “Joe told me to buy the painting from Lucas. But not actually buy it, give him an advance on his inheritance. Personally I never want to see it again. I know he wants to move to LA.”

  “That’s good.”

  Ruthie heard the kitchen door shut, and Mike and Joe walked in.

  Mike immediately saw the sign of distress on Adeline’s face. “Roberta?”

  “No, I haven’t heard anything.” She turned to Ruthie and Joe. “I’m waiting for a call. Roberta…hasn’t been well. She’s been in the city for tests.” Adeline’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s just that…she’s my person, you know?”

  Penny, Ruthie thought. “I know.”

  The cellphone on the table rang, and Adeline jumped. She grabbed it and walked quickly out of the room. Mike started after her.

  Joe inclined his head toward Ruthie. “I think we should go.”

  As they moved to the front door Ruthie saw Mike reach Adeline. He put his hands on her shoulders. He bent his head close to hers. Adeline leaned back against him and gripped his hand while she pressed the phone tightly to her ear.

  They walked out, quietly shutting the door, out onto the lawn.

  Ruthie opened her mouth to speak, but Joe started talking.

  “Adeline will never show the painting,” he said. He looked over her head, over at a bush, anywhere but at her face. “Some paintings have bad karma. This one was designed to hurt someone.”

  Shamed. She was shamed. He knew she’d painted it and he despised her for it.

  Except she had this need to confess.

  “This is best for everyone,” Joe said. “Sometimes the right thing happens if we let it.”

  He was talking fast, filling up the silence, because he didn’t want her to confess. If she did, she would implicate him as well. That was clear. She would have to take a reprieve she didn’t deserve. Just like Lucas.

  It would always be between her and Joe. Any future, closed.

  She had already done that, the first time she’d laid down a brushstroke of blue.

  “People mourn the end of summer, but I’m happy,” Joe said, his tone shifting. “Business slows down but the oysters just get better. What about you? Fall plans?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “It’s all up in the air.”

  Up in the air. Ruthie stopped, aghast. The words echoed, the way they do when you say the worst thing at the worst possible time. If there was sympathy between the two of you, you acknowledged it. Ruefully, the near-miss of the accident still fresh, you smiled, maybe you even laughed. Someone would maybe say, “Too soon?” And the remark became part of your history together, the anecdote you started and the other person finished. Remember that time…

  “Goodbye, Ruthie,” Joe said.

  65

  DOE STOPPED FOR sandwiches for dinner. They would pack tonight, and take the early ferry tomorrow. They would drive through Connecticut, they would drive through New York, they would cross the Hudson, they would find New Jersey. They would drive through states they’d never been to, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, unfashionable states where a farmhouse with a porch didn’t cost a million dollars. She would have to hear Shari cry with joy at every charming town, every vista, “Maybe we should live here!”

  A miracle, people were saying about her landing. Who would have thought you’d land in a pool, on top of an oversized inflatable pool toy?

  Unlike some other unlucky person, a kid, for example, who wanted to show his sister that he could swim, and didn’t have an inflatable mutant to land on. Why would one drown, and not the other? There was no answer to that question, and yet you still had to go on living.

  When she pulled up there was a Porsche in her driveway and Daniel was sitting on her lawn, cross-legged. His hoodie was up.

  She got out slowly. It saved time if you were willing for a scene to play out. She sat next to him, grunting with pain as she lowered herself down. He didn’t even open his eyes. What an arrogant bastard. She tried not to wonder what Daniel wanted, because what was the good of that.

  At last she heard him exhale, and he swept off the hood. She expected him to ask how she was, but of course he didn’t.

  “I’ve been on the phone with lawyers all morning,” he said. “Lark is dealing with the Belfry board. Dodge is threatening to sue us for negligence and for harming his reputation.”

  “And then there’s me,” Doe said.

  “I’m prepared to make you an offer,” he said.

  Well, of course. How could it be that she had gone through almost an entire day without realizing this moment would happen? How could it be that the girl who looked for the big chance had missed the one staring her in the face and blowing a horn?

  “It’s predicated on a couple of things,” he said. “First, our friendship. That’s why I’m here, talking to you—you’re hard to find, by the way—instead of my lawyers.”

  “Yeah, thanks for all the feels,” Doe said. “I’m doing fine. Contusions, a ligament tear, every muscle hurts. No worries.”

  “Second, you were present at the studio visit in which Dodge explained the weather parameters of the sculptures—”

  “I was there as a friend only,” Doe said.

  “—and witnesses report that instead of trying to secure the castle or locate the crew you climbed inside it. Lastly, Lark, before leaving for the night, told you, as an employee of the museum, to alert the crew to take down the sculptures immediately.”

  “She didn’t!”

  “The settlement is one point five million,” Daniel said. “Considering that your MRI was clear and you have a couple of bruised ribs, I find that generous.”

  Doe said nothing.

  “You did not graduate nor attend Reed College,” Daniel said. “That’s about the extent of my investigation into your background, but I’m sure there’s more. You, Doe, are a girl on the make, and girls on the make always have things to hide.”

  Was that what she was, a girl on the make? Quite the little operator?

  In the movies, the girl walks away from the money. The decent girl.

  “All medical expenses will be covered in addition, of course,” Daniel said.

  The question pressed against her teeth, it came from someplace that was almost like a howl. Is Lark a part of this?

  Shari popped out of the house, the wind whipping her hair. She held up a plastic bin full of toiletries. All those shampoos and conditioners and body oils and shower gels she had brought into the house, crowding the bathtub ledges. Fortune favors the moisturized! In another life, Shari and Lark would have bonded over lemongrass.

  Shari didn’t recognize Daniel, sitting in his hoodie, looking l
ike a neighbor. You couldn’t spot summer-weight cashmere from that far away.

  “What should I do with these?” she shouted.

  “Toss them!”

  “Are you crazy? It’s L’Oréal! We should start packing the car!”

  Daniel gave her a sharp glance. “You’re moving?”

  Shari laughed as the breeze blew back her hair. She leaned forward against the wind, frozen in position.

  “Look at me, I’m a mime!” she yelled.

  Doe laughed.

  It felt strange.

  It didn’t mean that anything lightened—not leaving, not being trapped in a car for two days with her mother, not heading to odious Belinda—but it was good to remember that Shari could make her laugh occasionally.

  The screen door banged behind Shari. The sound drove her crazy. Doe was used to the door, she always stopped and caught it with the sole of her foot and eased it closed, an action that was by now involuntary. Shari let it bang. It was one of a thousand irritants that made up her mother.

  One of the thousand irritants that made up love.

  “How’s Lark?” she asked.

  “She’s fine. She’ll deal with this and move on.”

  “She’s a mess,” Doe said. “Her first big curatorial gig, her first big event at the museum, and it goes so far wrong you can’t even imagine. I was just at the market, everyone is talking about her. A hyena ended up on Sally Jameson’s roof. A wolf in the electrical wires. Someone almost died. That would be me. Criminal negligence, I think you’d call it.”

  Doe stood—she tried not to grunt, but she did, the movement catching her breath—and continued, “So I’m supposed to say that I’m the one who was negligent, and I guess I can’t sue myself, so, good solution. This is what you do, right? You goad her and push her, she fails, you cover it up.”

  “Your point?”

  “I don’t have one, really. I’m just sad about it.”

  “Take the deal, Doe.”

  Doe hesitated.

  “Well? It goes off the table as soon as I get in the car.”

  The Porsche door opened. Lark got out. How had Doe missed her? The sight of her made her weak in the knees. No internal injuries. What a laugh.

  “Get back in the car!” Daniel roared as she walked up.

  “Oh, Daddy, be quiet.” Lark stood in front of Doe. She looked at her a long time, and reached to touch the bruise on her chin. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “I’m not okay,” Doe said.

  “They said nothing was broken—”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “You really hurt me,” Lark said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s the first time you said that, you know? It shouldn’t have been so hard to say.”

  “Whole songs have been written about how hard that is to say.”

  “Shut up,” Lark said, crying. “You look so awful.”

  Behind Lark, Doe could see Shari on the lawn, holding a suitcase, standing still, as though by not moving she could make it happen.

  Or Doe could make it happen, maybe.

  She carefully put her arms around Lark. She leaned in. She smelled…nothing. No lavender, no grapefruit, no essential oil of anything except Lark’s real scent, the scent she had come to know in the dark, in the places she’d been the most real with another person. Lark had not perfumed herself this morning. By the smell of her hair, she hadn’t even showered.

  She felt Lark’s arms encircle her. She touched a sore place, and Doe tried not to wince.

  “Did I ruin it?” Doe asked, whispering.

  “Do I really fall for everything? Because it kind of devalues what I’m falling for, here. If you follow it to its logical concl—”

  “Shut up,” Doe said, and kissed her.

  “Okay, I think we need to reevaluate our next step,” Daniel said, and Shari clapped her hands in applause while Daniel winced, and so, a new dysfunctional family was born.

  66

  ON TUESDAY THE machinery of the world began to turn again. School bells rang, buses flatulated their way along the roads. Ruthie walked through the rooms of her own house.

  There were tiny differences: a vase moved a few inches, a spatula in the wrong drawer. Some very nice French wine had been left in the laundry room. A new vinegar in the pantry. Crackers still in a wicker basket from Locavoracious. A puzzling abundance of tissue boxes. A tiny splat of blood on the wall in the guest room, perhaps a residue of a squashed mosquito. An echo of other lives. In no other year had Ruthie felt the imprint of summer tenants. This year she did.

  * * *

  —

  RUTHIE WALKED THE Manhattan streets like a native, even though she knew she would be taken as a tourist. She looked like what she was, a suburban mom visiting the city for the day, searching for a restaurant picked by a more sophisticated friend.

  Daydreaming, she got on the subway at Penn Station but forgot to get off at 42nd to transfer to the shuttle, so she decided she had time to exit at 59th and cut across the park to the East Side. She hadn’t reckoned on the heat slowing her steps. The sun still blazed in early September. A new skyscraper—a needle poking the sky—was under construction. She’d read about these new buildings in Midtown, how the penthouses would be ninety-plus stories up, looking down on clouds. How the buildings had to be calibrated to offset a human’s normal instinct for danger, the elevators at precise speeds to forestall unsettling g-forces, gigantic dampers that acted as shock absorbers so that the sway could be controlled. It wasn’t that the buildings were unsafe, it was that humans did not feel safe in them without unseen assurances settling their equilibrium.

  Life did not offer the same assurances. There were no cosmic engineers. Equilibrium was a matter of trust as well as balance.

  She was going to be late, or sweaty. She had to choose one. She chose sweat. When she reached Madison every article of clothing was damp, from her underwear to her shoes. She couldn’t find the restaurant and placed a finger on her phone to unlock it, but her finger was too wet to register her identity.

  She realized she was in fact standing in front of the restaurant. She pushed open the door, ready for anything—iced tea, salad, consequence, jail.

  She spotted Carole along the wall, looking cool and polished. She bent to kiss her cheeks, one, other, back in for another.

  They commiserated about the heat while they perused their menus.

  “Isn’t this marvelous?” Carole said. “I want everything. I’m so dying for a real American meal. Can you believe I’ve gone a whole summer without a lobster roll? I’m tempted by the cheeseburger.”

  After they ordered—Ruthie got the lobster roll, Carole ordered a salad—Carole leaned over the table. “So how are you, really? I heard about what happened at the Belfry. So distressing!”

  “Yes,” Ruthie said. “Someone could have been killed.”

  Carole shuddered. “Thank God. Can you imagine how awful? The publicity has been bad enough.”

  “How was Paris?” Ruthie asked.

  “Glorious. Isn’t it always? And we went to the Île de Ré in August. You must go someday. These French children have such beautiful manners in restaurants. You just want to start the whole parenting thing all over. Now Dash wants to go to the Lycée Français. I say, do you know how many hoops I had to go through to get you into Dalton? No bread, please,” she said sweetly to the server, who was hovering over them with tongs. “Oh, God, we’re off the track. I’m here to find out about you. How’s the job search?”

  “Picking up. It was slow in the summer.”

  “You know you have me as a reference. I’ll sing your praises. You were the best director the Belfry ever had.”

  “So why did I lose my job, Carole?”

  “Those people are so awful. I sat in those meeti
ngs, and I wanted to just run out of the room.”

  “So why didn’t you, Carole?”

  “Helen is so upset. Now she thinks Mindy is crazy. She canceled her end-of-year party, you know. The invitations had already gone out!”

  “No, I didn’t know. I wasn’t invited. So why didn’t you stop her?”

  “Oh, who can stop Helen?”

  “No, Mindy. Catha, too. You knew she was after my job.”

  The lobster roll arrived in an explosion of chive. Ruthie stared down at it, a glossy pink lump. She could not imagine eating it. She took a sip of her iced tea. Carole picked a sliced roasted pepper out of her salad.

  “I hate roasted peppers,” she said. “Why do they put them on salads without telling you?” She scraped them onto her bread plate.

  Ruthie pushed a box across the table.

  “It’s a texture problem,” Carole said. “Slimy.” Then she noticed the box. “What’s this? Did you get me a present? And I didn’t bring you back anything from Paris! You know how the city closes down in August!”

  “It’s not a present,” Ruthie said. “And it comes with a story.”

  Carole opened the box and took out the watch. “Oh, my God! You found it! Why didn’t you tell me? I looked everywhere in the city this weekend. Lewis is ready to divorce me.”

  “I found it in Verity’s dress-up box,” Ruthie said.

  Carole sat back. “That’s amazing. That little thief! I should have known! But when?”

  “Right before Spork. I wore it with the pink shirt and the white pants.”

  Carole went very still. “You wore Lewis’s watch?”

  “I didn’t know it was Lewis’s watch. I thought it was a knockoff. Along with all the other junk in Verity’s box.”

  “But I called you…”

  “By then I had misplaced it.”

  Carole’s face! Such confusion! “But…I looked in every pocket, every purse, every shoe! I almost ripped open the linings of our suitcases! I’ve never been so desperate!”

  Ruthie gripped her hands under the table and told her the story. How panicked she was, how she just wanted time to find it. That she was sorry.