“He’s hardly changed,” I said, nodding to the photo. “Of course, you’ve known him forever, too. What was he like at Reardon?”
Brady laughed. “You were there.”
“Right, but six years younger. The first time Mom dropped us off together, he made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone that we were related.”
“Sounds like your brother.”
“But you were friends back then, right?”
Brady hesitated, choosing his words. “Not friends, per se. But we were in the same class. He was more...”
“More what?”
“More everything. More confident. More outgoing. He always had at least one girlfriend, and you know how it is. There were always stories, rumors.”
“Rumors?”
Brady ran a hand through his hair. “I mean, we were teenagers. It was just—”
“Do not say ‘locker room talk,’” I warned.
He gave me a sheepish smile. “None of it was true, I’m sure. Everyone made up stories. No one wanted to be known as a virgin. That would have been the kiss of death at Reardon.”
I began stacking the photos, lining up the corners this way and that. Maybe this winter, after we were back from our vacation, I would go through the boxes and weed out the ones that didn’t mean so much anymore. There was no point in keeping them if they just sat around gathering dust. “What rumors?” I repeated.
Brady ran a hand through his hair, and some of the curly ends stayed upright, like little flags. “I haven’t thought about this in years.”
I waited, watching him.
“It was probably nothing. Just—I had this roommate one semester, Steven, and he said he walked in on your brother and some girl after a dance—”
I waved a hand to indicate he could skip the details.
“Well, Steven said it didn’t seem like she was enjoying herself too much.”
I fitted the lid back onto the box and got to my feet. “What are you saying? He raped her?” My voice rose with the last question, and I clapped a hand over my own mouth, thinking of the girls downstairs, the little pitchers with big ears and social media accounts.
“I’m not saying anything. It was just a story, and I never even heard who the girl was. So it was probably just...” He shook his head. “Shit. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. But now I’m a dad with these two adorable girls...”
The indignation was stinging. “You never told me.”
“I’m not saying it’s true.”
“But you never said anything.”
Brady was incredulous. “What did you want me to say? Hey, Lauren, there was this rumor at Reardon that your brother might have raped a girl. Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” I said, stunned by the words. “No, I—”
“You see? I’m sorry, but there was no way I could have that conversation.”
I pushed past him, heading for the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Brady asked, right behind me.
“Anna Kovics,” I whispered. “It’s true.”
Downstairs, I hurried through the house. The girls were still in the den; they turned toward me with stunned faces as I passed.
“Mommy?” Emma called.
My laptop was on the kitchen island, the browser still open to a recipe for taco soup. With shaking hands, I typed in the name of the community college in Massachusetts, navigating my way again to the staff contacts. There she was: Megan Mazeros. I copied the email address and opened my Gmail account. I would do it this time. I would send the message. I would ask the question and I would accept the answer, whatever it was.
But there was no need to email Megan Mazeros. There, in my inbox, her name was staring back at me.
SUMMER
2002
Megan
I’d been hearing about it for so long, The Island had taken on mythical proportions in my imagination, fueled by the family photos I’d seen scattered around Holmes House with younger versions of Katherine and Michael and Lauren on sailboats, orange life vests strapped around their skinny chests, and younger versions of Senator and Mrs. Mabrey, their arms around each other like newlyweds, a gray sea in the background, foamy whiteheads kicked up in the surf.
I felt like calling everyone I knew back in Woodstock and mentioning, casually, where I was spending the summer. With my friend, the senator’s daughter. That’s right, on a private island off the coast of Maine. At the beginning of the summer, that excitement overshadowed everything else—all Lauren’s lies, all the hurt that had been bubbling inside me since that night when I’d found her photos. To be in the presence of the Mabreys’ generosity, on the receiving end of clean linens and plates of tiny cucumber sandwiches and handmade pastries, was enough to let me push all that hurt to the side. When Lauren and I sat side by side in the den at night, sharing the same blanket, watching one of the gazillion Disney movies her family had stored in the towering white cabinets that lined the room, I wondered if it really mattered at all. What was a lie or two between friends?
And then a moment later, I’d remember the way my mom always said that dealing with things right away was better than putting them on the back burner, where things had a way of simmering away, forgotten, until they suddenly boiled over.
Lauren and I, in one way or another, were headed toward a giant explosion.
* * *
For the first few weeks, it was like floating through a dream. We slept in late each morning, waking to whatever breakfast the cook, Jordana, had left for us: freshly squeezed orange juice, grapefruit halves, yogurt, scones, covered platters of bacon and eggs. Then Lauren and I would wander down to the beach together for a morning swim, the water so brisk and cold, our legs went instantly numb. Afterward, we might shower or not; the day didn’t require much of us. There was lunch and a nap and halfhearted studying for me and sometimes a trip back to Yarmouth, with Lauren operating the outboard motor like my chauffeur.
On those days, it felt like everything was fine between us, that there was no Joe and there were no lies, just ice cream on the pier and shopping in the overpriced boutiques along the water. Lauren always bought something—visors or sunglasses or tank tops with touristy slogans—more out of idleness than anything else, since she didn’t seem to need them, and most of her purchases only piled up on her dresser in plastic shopping bags.
Other times, the silence stretched deep between us, an immeasurable gulf. Lauren’s room on the second floor was sunny and lined with shoulder-high wainscoting, the knotty pine floors covered here and there with colorful rugs. She slept on a queen-size bed next to a window that faced the Atlantic, toward thousands of miles of nothing and then an entirely different continent. I had the daybed tucked under a sloping alcove, the ceiling so close to my head, I might have been in a top bunk. At night, with each of us in our beds and only the striped rug and the piles of Lauren’s discarded clothing between us, it felt like we should have something real to say to each other—I’ve been seeing someone, she might say, or I know about you and Joe, I might say, but mostly we joked and laughed until Lauren stopped responding to my comments and I knew she was asleep. Then I snapped on the bedside lamp and read late into the night.
I was presumably on The Island to help take care of Mrs. Mabrey, but it was clear from the first day that Mrs. Mabrey intended to take care of herself. She seemed in every way weaker than she had been the previous winter at Holmes House, although she went about business as usual—phone calls and emails in the morning; reading on the deck each afternoon, shielded by a giant umbrella. Lauren and I checked on her regularly, bringing water or tea, fetching something from another part of the house or delivering the mail that came each afternoon on the water taxi. But mostly Mrs. Mabrey waved us off, seeming annoyed by the attention. Any resemblance to my dad’s illness was only fleeting: Mrs. Mabrey wasn’t confined to a dingy, low-
ceilinged living room, the gloom only mitigated by the canned laughter from a television in the corner. She had ocean breezes and catered meals, a view that changed from minute to minute, as if an artist were wielding a giant paintbrush on the horizon. A nurse came from Yarmouth every few days to check on her, noting vital statistics and asking intrusive questions Mrs. Mabrey wouldn’t answer if anyone else was in the room.
“I’m fine, thank you,” she said, as if on cue when I hovered in the doorway, one of the texts for my seminar tucked under my arm. “Go—read, do whatever it is you need to do.”
Other times she might say crisply, “Send Jordana in,” as if whatever she wanted was a task too important to be entrusted to me. Feeling sheepish, I would interrupt Jordana in the middle of chopping vegetables or marinating chicken, and she would wipe her hands on the apron tied around her waist and regard me with a silent fury.
“I’m so sorry,” I would say. “She asked for you specifically. Otherwise of course I would—”
Lauren laughed when I told her that I felt bad about the extra work for Jordana. “Why should you feel bad? She’s just doing her job.”
“I’m not used to it,” I admitted. “I feel guilty.” Up to this point in my life, the only people I knew who had household help were characters in Jane Austen novels.
“Well, don’t,” Lauren ordered, giving me one of her bone-shaking shoulder knocks. “Just relax a bit, okay? This is your vacation, too.”
* * *
In the second week of June, the rest of the Mabreys began to arrive. Kat, five months pregnant and noticeably sluggish, came when Lizzie’s preschool finished for the summer. Dark circles ringed her eyes like bruises, and other than her rounded belly, she was pin thin, arms and legs emerging like sticks from her babydoll dresses. The nausea caught her suddenly, morning and afternoon, and she was never more than a few feet from a bucket, just in case. “I didn’t have it this bad the first time,” she moaned. “After nine weeks, I could eat anything. But now...”
We began to refer to the south deck, where Kat and Mrs. Mabrey lounged silently side by side, magazines unopened on their laps, as the Sick Bay.
“Look at them,” Lauren said, gesturing through the open window. “This whole place is practically an infirmary.”
“Invalid Island,” I said, relishing the alliteration.
“Yes! Invalid Island. That’s exactly what this is.”
Since Kat clearly wasn’t up to the task, and Jordana’s hands were full, I offered to watch Lizzie in the mornings. This was a more difficult task than it had been at Holmes House, since The Island had a series of walkways and steps leading from one deck to another, and the entire east side faced treacherous, tumbledown cliffs. Only the west side of The Island had an actual beach, twenty yards or so of sand ringed with sharp shells in the morning along the rack line. The boat was docked there, tethered to the end of a somewhat rickety pier with Lauren’s expertly tied knots. We spent our mornings there, collecting shells and strange severed crustacean limbs, occasionally splashing with Lizzie in the cold shallow water while her arms were held aloft by giant pink floaties. “Watch me, watch me!” she shrieked, stamping her feet in the gentle waves. We burned and peeled and developed dark, sun-kissed tans. Lauren documented it all, the shutter on her Leica clicking away.
“I should pay you for your help,” Kat said more than once, but I always shrugged this off. At least, in one small way, I was earning my keep.
* * *
Time moved so slowly on The Island, where the day might hold only a single, meaningful task, that it was surprising to realize that I’d already been there for three weeks, then a month, then five weeks. Every day I woke up to sunlight streaming through the window in Lauren’s room was one less day of paradise. Lauren, of course, would stay until the end of summer, living out the same blissfully uncomplicated hours, day after day, week after week. There was no reason to think she wouldn’t be back here summer after summer, taking work vacations, bringing her children one day, continuing traditions like Saturday night crab feeds and motoring to shore in search of ice cream on the hottest afternoons.
Sometimes, I had to remind myself of my place—the guest who would be heading out soon and not returning, the girl from Nowheresville, Kansas, who had once looked forward to a weeklong vacation on a lake so small, we could see inside the windows of the cabins on the other side. Sometimes, I had to remind myself that I didn’t have a claim to anything on The Island, not the house, not the shady spot in the gazebo where I often retreated with my books, not the edge of the pier where I liked to sit with my toes skimming the surface of the water. I was only a guest in this life, an actor pulled in for a bit role. I was supporting actress to the golden girl, the one who sometimes spent the entire day in her bathing suit, a sarong tied low on her hips, her wet hair drying in crunchy waves. By being born at the right time and to the right people, she belonged to this place, and this place belonged to her.
At Keale, I’d noticed Lauren’s looks in an offhand, taken-for-granted kind of way—she was attractive enough in her jeans and ponytails, even with the thick cream she slathered on her face after a shower. But here, she was beautiful. There was no other word for it. She was beautiful when she started a fire, cupping her hands over the weak flame and blowing it to life. She was beautiful in the boat, one hand controlling the motor, seaspray stinging her face. She was beautiful when she fell asleep in the lounge chair, the edges of her sarong fluttering in a light breeze.
I could see why Joe had pursued her after that night in the gallery, when he had been so quick to discard me. Lauren had everything, but most of all she had the knowledge that no matter what, her life was going to turn out okay. She had more than a safety net from a life insurance policy; she was protected from things turning out wrong. I needed this summer program at Harvard to propel myself forward, but Lauren didn’t need anyone or anything to validate her existence. She didn’t need a poor, funny Midwest sidekick or a boyfriend who worked in a machine shop, but those were things she could easily have.
Sometimes at night, we snuck a bottle of wine down to the beach and split it between us, the alcohol making her silly and wild, and making me serious and contemplative, lost in dark thoughts. I wondered if we would still be friends five years into the future, or ten, or fifteen, if we would bump into each other at a Keale reunion and spend the night laughing over some long-ago memory, each of us getting the important details wrong. Or would we stay in touch, living in the same city, talking on the phone every day, meeting for lunches where she would tell me about her latest vacation, the most recent accomplishments of her famous family. Even in the unwritten future, I still imagined myself as the tagalong friend, with nothing of my own to contribute.
Once, in her silliness, she laughed so hard she pissed herself, then laughed even harder at the dark stain spreading down her shorts. Megan Mazeros of Woodstock, Kansas, would never have lived this down; she would rather have died of shame. Lauren Mabrey, who had everything she could ever want, waded into the ocean and emerged, pronouncing herself clean.
“Nothing that can’t be fixed.” She grinned, and I smiled back, but inside I was wondering if there wasn’t a part of me—a small, bitter, jealous, horrible part—that didn’t like Lauren Mabrey at all.
Lauren
I meant to tell Megan about Joe—I really did. Every day presented dozens of opportunities, and every night ended with us chatting in the darkened shell of my bedroom, the moon hanging like a pendant outside the window. Somehow, the moment never seemed exactly right, or maybe the moments were right, but something about me was all wrong.
And then all of a sudden it was the end of June and the beginning of Megan’s last week before leaving for Cambridge. Following tradition, everyone began arriving on The Island, as if summoned by some sort of magnetic pull—first Dad and MK, then Peter, then some of Mom’s cousins with their kids.
Megan had ov
erheard Mom refer to them as the “Brewster Holmeses,” a phrase that fascinated her. “Will the Brewster-Holmeses be joining us for dinner?” she asked in a bad imitation of a British accent, something she must have picked up from PBS.
“Their last names is Holmes, and they’re from Brewster,” I explained, but that wasn’t enough to stop her.
“The Brewster-Holmeses are in for a treat,” she remarked when she overheard my mother discussing the weekend menu with Jordana. And another time: “Will the Brewster-Holmeses be able to land their jet on The Island, do you think?”
It was best, maybe, to ignore her.
* * *
We took the boat to meet Dad and MK in Yarmouth, and it wasn’t until I spotted them waiting on the wharf that I realized how good it would be to have other people around. As much as I loved Megan, it had begun to feel claustrophobic with her in my bedroom, with her damp towels already looped over the rack before I got out of the shower. Together, we’d watched enough TV and told enough stories and worked enough jigsaw puzzles on the circular table in the den, and it was time for something new.
Megan half stood, waving, and on the wharf, MK raised a hand in acknowledgment. Dad was on his phone, briefcase clenched in one hand like he was on his way to the Capitol. Between them were two small suitcases. I killed the engine and the boat drifted over shallow water toward them.
“Ahoy, there,” MK called, reaching out with a skiff to pull us the rest of the way.
I caught the end of Dad’s conversation, something about not making any promises, about having others to consult before he could make a decision. Then he snapped his phone shut and looked from me to Megan. “Well, if it isn’t my girls.”
I stood, angling my cheek for a kiss. “Hey, Dad.”
MK handed one bag down to Megan, then the other, before taking an uneasy step onto the boat.
“How are things?” he asked.
Here We Lie Page 23