I’d imagined the end of the world so many times—its vacated streets and deserted homes—that wandering through this empty grand hotel felt strangely familiar. Without Skye to direct us we settled on room 6, in honor of John Paul’s soccer jersey. It was a nicely decorated room, completely lacking personal effects. The bed seemed about three miles wide. John Paul opened a window so we could hear the ocean. I climbed onto the bed and sat cross-legged. He waited for me to answer and, when I didn’t say anything else, sat down in front of me. In the room’s muted bed-and-breakfast light, I could see tiny pimples smattered across his forehead. I felt an irrational fondness for that barely perceptible acne. It seemed his one mortal—and therefore best—feature.
My heart beat too fast from the drugs. The past two months, I had lived and breathed Skye. Now, as she paddled farther out to sea, my closeness to her felt increasingly foreign. I worried it had left some kind of mark on me, then cringed at my own disloyalty.
That night in Pennsylvania with John Paul had been a strange and insulated reprieve. On the way to the Cape I had anticipated his presence with great relief, partly because I knew he wouldn’t burden me with confidences. We would just coexist, quietly and companionably as ever. I didn’t like this new line of conversation, this instant plunge into matters of the heart, as if he’d lost the ability to read my mind.
“Different how?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” John Paul said. He pulled off his sweater and threw it across the room. It floated heavily, then landed on an embroidered armchair. “Like you love me less?”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. His insecurity seemed so unlikely. He smiled, but not happily, and his sadness slowed my coke-induced giddiness. The year before, any separation from John Paul had felt like death. I remembered waiting for my parents’ car before Christmas vacation, clinging to his shirt, feeling like a piece of my skin was about to be pulled away. But since the day we’d been caught in bed together and my father had taken me out of Waverly, I’d learned how to live without him. This never mitigated the happiness I felt when in his presence. Instead, it seemed a sort of elevation. I didn’t need him anymore, but still I wanted him.
“I don’t love you less,” I said, wishing I knew how to explain in a more complete way. “How could I?”
He shrugged and put his hand on my knee, more aware than I of the various ways love could be withheld. John Paul’s parents and mine shared the same age difference: eighteen years. But his father was married to another woman. He’d met John Paul’s mother when she was just a teenager, with a summer job in the same Essex restaurant where she still waited tables. Like my mother, John Paul’s father was French, and when summer ended so did the affair. He had gone back to his family in Lyons when John Paul’s mother sent a letter to his office, announcing the arrival of her baby. Since then he’d sent checks, but not regularly or often. John Paul sometimes spent summers in Lyons, posing as the son of a business associate, living in a downstairs guest room and calling his father Monsieur Filage.
I picked up his hand and brought it to my lips. He smiled, because we usually left that sort of gesture to him.
We were worldly enough, John Paul and I, to know that despite everything we felt for each other our relationship would not continue. College applications had begun arriving for me in the mail, from good schools that would accept me because they had equestrian teams: Dartmouth, Amherst, Cornell. John Paul was a fifth-former, but like Skye a brilliant student, and certain he’d be headed to Harvard, Stanford, or Yale. We’d never broached the idea of coordinating. We knew that at college there would be other people, other interests, and our connection to each other would become thinner and thinner.
“But right now we’re here together,” John Paul said, uncannily.
His skin smelled like the kind of soap men used—sharp and drying. His hands—under my shirt now, just above my hips—felt cool and chapped. The shared mourning of our inevitable separation felt profound and unbearably sexy. John Paul was handsome enough to get away with being a brigand, a ravisher. But he always moved with amazing caution, every touch a tentative request for permission.
Our kiss was interrupted by Susannah’s knock on the door. For a split second I felt furious, not caring what happened to Drew or Skye as long as nobody bothered me with it till morning.
THE BUTTERFIELD KITCHEN, once professional, was easily the size of White Cottage. The three of us stood around a long marble island. The industrial clock above the eight-burner stove read four thirty, but the windows didn’t betray any signs of dawn. Just black night filled with the seaside movement of wind, shore, eel grass—and still no sign of Drew or Skye.
“Do you think a flashlight would help?” Susannah said, digging through utility drawers. She found two in the pantry—huge, square, and professional looking. She handed one to John Paul and one to me. I noticed, walking through the living room, that the mirror was clean. Susannah must have finished the three lines that had been left there when John Paul and I headed upstairs.
And it showed when we reached the water. Two days away from Halloween, she stood at the edge of the tide wearing wispy baby-doll pajamas, the cold water lapping over her bare feet. Her slim arms beat in a jerking motion as she paced up and down along the shore.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
John Paul shined his light across the water. I lifted mine, its cylindrical beacon meager and ineffective against the vastness of the jetty, the huge rocks emerging at low tide, the vague white caps on what had been—earlier in the evening—a completely calm sea.
“Should we call the coast guard?” I asked.
“That seems a little premature,” John Paul said. “It’s not like there’s a storm or anything.”
“And that’s exactly what she wants us to do,” Susannah said. “She wants us to freak out and call the coast guard, and get her back on the evening news.”
“No she doesn’t,” I said.
Susannah wheeled around and pointed a delicate, tapered finger at me. She weighed exactly ninety-eight pounds, and I marveled again at how much space she could take up through sheer force of will.
“You can’t see it,” she said. “You’re too dazzled. But that’s exactly what she wants. She’s using you, Catherine.”
“She’s not,” I said. “She’s my friend.”
“Right. Your best friend.”
“I never said that.”
I would have added something more, some sort of assurance. Of course she’s not, I might have said. You are my best friend. You always will be. But I’d never known how to make those sorts of statements, definite and emotional. Susannah always made them for me. Luckily, this ability did not leave her now.
“I am your best friend, Catherine.”
I looked into her dark, freckled face, certain but unable to articulate: that one friendship did not contradict the other.
“Why is this Skye’s fault?” I said instead. “Drew’s out there, too.”
“Look,” John Paul said.
Susannah snatched his flashlight and held it up next to her face, as if it would enlarge her vision as well as illuminate it. In a minute we could hear the lapping of an oar as a single kayak rowed into the thin shaft of light. Until that moment, despite our upset, I don’t think we actually believed anything bad might happen. We had simply been going through the motions of distress and worry, confident that any moment they would both appear, apologetic and shivering.
A tiny reddening of the horizon, and a sudden widening of light. We saw Drew get out of his kayak. Susannah ran through the water as he pulled the boat toward shore. His shoulders sagged with exhaustion as he returned her violent embrace.
“Where’s Skye?” I said, as Drew scraped the kayak onto the sand.
“She wouldn’t come back,” he said. He unbent himself away from the boat and brushed sand off his soaking wet jeans. “She’s kind of crazy,” he said.
Susannah raised her eyebrows at me, victorious.<
br />
“What were you guys doing out there?” John Paul said.
“Paddling. We went out to this sandbar and walked around. I wasn’t sure it was smart to paddle out so deep, but she kept saying the water was calm and the sky was good, and it would be a shame to row back so early.”
I felt slightly relieved: no accidents, no tidal waves, no sharks. Only a triumph of romance over sagacity, which I understood far better than disaster.
Drew shivered. The morning had grown distinctly lighter, and I could see huge goose bumps on his bare arms.
“You better get a hot shower,” John Paul said. “How’d you get so wet?”
“We went swimming.”
“Swimming.” Susannah shook her head in disgust.
“Now what do we do?” I said. “Call the police?”
John Paul looked out at the water. “Well,” he said. “We’ve got a fair amount of coke here. And we’re not supposed to be in this house in the first place. And her father is a senator. Campaigning for reelection.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” Susannah said. “I’m going back to school.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“We should all go. We should all get into John Paul’s car and drive away. So when Skye paddles up, instead of a television news crew and coast guard helicopters, there’s just this big empty house.”
We didn’t say anything. I stared back at the water, willing Skye’s kayak to appear.
“Let’s just wait a little longer,” John Paul said, coming to my defense. “Let’s say give it till it’s totally light out, and then we’ll call someone.”
“You can do what you want,” Susannah said. “I’m going home.”
SHE BUNDLED BACK into her clothes and called a cab while Drew took a shower.
“There’s still time to cancel the taxi,” Susannah said, when she hung up. “John Paul can drive us all back to Waverly. Catherine can go back to Esther Percy on Sunday.”
“I can’t leave Skye,” I said.
John Paul put his arm around me. “I can’t leave Catherine,” he said.
Susannah frowned. Drew appeared, damp and chagrined. “Put on your coat,” she said, plucking Skye’s hundred-dollar bill from the mirror and sliding it into her pocket. “We’ll wait at the end of the driveway. Do you want to walk down with us?”
“We better not,” I said. “We better wait for Skye.”
“God,” Susannah said. “I really hate that girl.”
“I don’t know why you’re so angry,” I said. “She could be in trouble. It’s not like you to be so heartless.”
“Heartless,” Susannah said. “That’s the last thing I am. I just know that Skye’s not in trouble at all. She wants to get in trouble, and she wants to drag us down with her. If I really wanted to be heartless, I’d play along with her pathetic scheme. But I’ve got better things to do. You should, too.”
For some reason I thought of Susannah’s father—how he’d feel if he knew Susannah planned to visit Venezuela without contacting him. And I felt a sudden sinking fear, that I’d drawn the same kind of ire on myself.
“Please don’t be mad,” I said.
“I’m not mad at you, Catherine, I’m worried about you.” Which sounded so much like something a parent would say we both started to laugh. She stepped forward and hugged me.
“Come with?” she said.
“I can’t.”
She touched my cheek with her fingertips, then she and Drew trudged out the door and down the long driveway to wait for the taxi.
John Paul and I went upstairs to our room. He rolled a joint while I pulled the down comforter off the bed; then he stuffed the rest of the pot—easier to come by at Waverly—into my backpack.
We walked back down to the shore and sat down on the sand, smoking the joint and staring dutifully out at the horizon. His arm linked through mine in silent and comradely sentry. Till finally the cocaine ebbed and morning arrived—the light and marijuana acting on us like phenobarb, and we both fell asleep in the sand.
I WOKE UP SHIVERING from a stark apocalyptic nightmare. An urgent but shaky relief—opening my eyes to so much color after the burnt gray of my dream, its obliterating mushroom cloud. Low tide had painted an entirely new landscape of sand, rocks, and tide pools, and the sun shone alarmingly central in the sky. Everything muted, green and orange, the clean brushed lines of an Andrew Wyeth painting.
John Paul was gone, nothing but a neat indentation in the sand. Drew’s boat lay where he had abandoned it, resting on its side like a beached seal. Out on the horizon, no boats—just a calm sea and a sudden drop, the route to falling off the edge of the earth.
I hoisted a comforter around my shoulders. In daylight, from the beach, Skye’s house looked grotesque. Most of the shoreline was sparsely dotted with cedar-shingled cottages, dark and lonesome, their windows boarded. But the Butterfield house—with its convoy of additions—rode the bluff like a cruise ship. I walked toward it with a sour taste in my mouth.
John Paul had cleaned up the glasses and bottles and was spraying the mirror with Windex. “You’ll have to help me put this back,” he said.
“Did Skye come home?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
An abyss opened up around me, terrible and unreal. Skye, so alive and shimmering. I remembered her palm underneath the razor blade, and along with dread for her safety I felt a rising and newly familiar panic: like she were a patient in my care, and I had just realized my lack of credentials.
We balanced the mirror and heaved it onto the wall. John Paul stood back, directing my realignment.
“I think we have to call the police,” John Paul said, when it was straight.
“At least the drugs are gone,” I said.
John Paul nodded. Of all of us, he was the only one with anything real to lose. Susannah, Drew, me—everyone’s parents could provide high-priced lawyers, and new schools, and endless bank accounts to pad every fall till the end of our days. But if John Paul lost his scholarships, that would be the end of his private education—perhaps any education at all. I never asked him why he was willing to risk everything he’d worked for. As opposed to my father, who liked to broadcast the differences between himself and the naturally wealthy, John Paul preferred pretending they didn’t exist. Not that he ever misrepresented himself; he just refused to acknowledge that his background mattered.
Still, in this instance, I had to say something. “You can go, if you want,” I said. “And I’ll do this myself.”
“No,” he said. “I want to stay with you.”
I knew I should have protested more and briefly hated myself for making the offer while knowing absolutely he’d refuse it. Even in that moment, I felt that instead of just admiring John Paul’s courage I should have tried to emulate it. We stood there together, in the midst of the Butterfield riches. Every floorboard and tile and piece of art radiated staggering wealth, and it shouldn’t have been difficult for me to insist on bearing this burden myself. But of course it wasn’t only difficult, it was impossible. The thought of facing the authorities alone terrified me, and I could no more send John Paul away than I could swim through the icy Atlantic and find Skye. I reached out and grabbed his hand, thinking how funny it was that my father objected to John Paul, who embodied so many of the qualities he approved of most. Never mind the drugs and the unauthorized forays from school. I believed in John Paul completely. Not only in his intrinsic goodness and his sense of ethics: but his gallantry.
I picked up the phone and just as I knew he would, John Paul eased it out of my hand. Put it to his ear and started to dial.
“Who are you calling?” a voice said from the doorway.
And there, of course, was Skye. Wearing a thick terry-cloth robe, her freshly shampooed hair spilling over its lapels. Looking like she’d materialized from air, completely new. Comprising everything in the world that was wholesome, uncomplicated, and lovely. I didn’
t know if the intake of breath belonged to me, or John Paul, or both of us. I didn’t know if it originated from anger, or relief, or admiration. I only understood that soon John Paul would leave this house, too, and that none of my friends would ever come back—to anywhere near Skye.
And I had the oddest vision, a three-second dream in the middle of the day. Skye and me, walking across the night on a rope made from stars. Our arms held out like circus performers, fair heads bent and focused on our precarious paths. The moon full and silver, shimmering down on us.
The vision burst, leaving only three teenagers and the ocean view. The rafters and fine leather. The silk upholstery and the good antiques and hundred-dollar bills hiding in drawers. All amounting to the exorbitant hush of safety.
7
THAT AFTERNOON, SKYE and I picked our way across the rocky bluff to collect her kayak. I stopped breathing when we came across the carcass of a seal—half rotted, the fetid scent of blubber and brine.
“This bluff is its own little graveyard,” Skye said. “We find dead gulls, gannets, porpoise fish. Seals. Last summer we even found a dead coyote.”
She brought me up to the bank where she and her father had dragged the coyote corpse—safe from the high tide, so they could track its decomposition. Young and slight, its glassy eyes open and staring. Astonishing white teeth.
“Probably it drowned,” Skye said. “That’s what the Audubon people said, when we called them.”
We walked on with bent heads, to keep track of our footing. “In the winter, we find half-dead sea turtles,” Skye said. “They wait too long to migrate because the bay’s so warm, and then when they hit the ocean they get cold-stunned and wash up on shore. The year before last my dad carried one all the way back to the house. It weighed almost fifty pounds.” Her voice was a strange combination of boastful and mourning.
We scaled a vast array of rocks and boulders, slippery with salt water. I looked around, wondering how anyone could spot a turtle shell amid this primitive expanse of gray and green.
Gossip of the Starlings Page 6