by Meg Donohue
“I’m very drunk,” the white-haired one replies.
Dani follows them, stubbing her toe hard against the door as she stumbles onto the sidewalk. The ginger-haired lady looks over her shoulder and makes a tsking noise with her tongue; the white-haired one gives Dani a sympathetic smile and offers a shaky, pale hand. Dani thanks her and hobbles off in the opposite direction, toward the ocean.
She pulls out her cell phone and calls Kate’s office line. She won’t remember what they talk about, or the offer she makes to her oldest friend. But she will eventually recall that a plane flew over the city as they spoke, pulling a long white banner ad through a suddenly blue sky, reminding her of the prop planes that pace the vivid summer sky along Avalon’s coast, advertising ten-dollar beer buckets at Jack’s Place and dollar wings at the Princeton. And she’ll remember the sound of Kate’s voice, ringing with loneliness, familiar and haunting.
Late that afternoon, Dani finds herself sprawled on the couch, her legs dangling over its arm, in nearly the exact position in which she had found Rachel that morning. She wipes at the saliva that has crusted at the corner of her mouth and swings her legs so that she is sitting upright. For a moment, she remembers only the feeling of smoke burning her throat, her chest filling and emptying, and she is confused that she is now on the couch and Rachel has disappeared. Then she realizes that hours have passed; she has wandered the city, sat in a bar. The light that fills the apartment has the still, dust-speckled quality of late-afternoon sun. She detects a low hum of electronics and appliances. Dani is the only one of the four people who live in this apartment who is not working right now.
There is a text message from Kate on her cell phone.
V is in! Avalon instead of Vegas—just the 3 of us. Thanks, D. Exactly what I need. Maybe what we all need?
Dani lowers the cell phone. Avalon? Vanessa? Now she remembers calling Kate—the sound of Kate’s voice, the plane in the sky, the smell of salt carried on the breeze. They must have talked about Peter. Had she suggested that the three of them spend the upcoming Fourth of July weekend that they’d blocked off for Vegas at her father’s house in Avalon instead? Dani winces at the thought. This is the solace she offered her best friend? A trip to the place where her twin brother died; the place where their friendship had been sealed and then fractured?
She can’t imagine sitting on the beach with Kate and Vanessa again. She does not think either of them has been back to Avalon since Colin died. Dani has; Avalon is now a bittersweet place for her—sweet because it is where she soaks in a blend of humidity and sun that does not exist in San Francisco, and sweet too because it is a place where she spends a rare, happily wine-sodden weekend with her father, away from the overtly sexual gaze of his latest girlfriend. Bitter, because it is a place haunted by ghosts—the ghost of Colin, the ghost of her friendship with Vanessa, the ghost of the girl she was, a girl full of fire, a girl who never once doubted that the best was ahead.
Dani reads Kate’s text again. Exactly what I need. Maybe what we all need? What does she mean by that? Had Dani told her that she’d been fired and that she was moving home? As much as Dani is mortified by this thought, she is more concerned by the nagging sense that Kate is referring to something else entirely—something about the friendship between the three of them. The we of them. Kate, ever the peacemaker, wants their friendship to be the way it once was, but Dani knows this can’t happen, not really, because they don’t know the truth about Colin’s death. If they did, they would never speak to her again.
7
Kate
Kate sits on one of the long benches in the central hall of Thirtieth Street Station, a soft pretzel in one hand and an enormous cup of Auntie Anne’s lemonade in the other. The benches remind her of Friends Meeting at PFS, that cruelly silent ritual with the power to bend and stretch time, making your mind fall through trapdoors of fantasy and memory, kneading an hour out to an insufferable length. Kate, a little guiltily, always thought of that hour as the seventh circle of hell. Even now, she can’t sit on a bench without experiencing a shudder of dread. Give her an armchair any day. A nice comfy sofa with a few throw pillows. And someone to talk to, of course.
She looks down at the pretzel in her hand and thinks Howdy, partner. Then she takes a big bite. Peter talks to his food too. G’morning, lovely, he’d said once, early in their relationship, when Kate set an omelet in front of him. She’d spun around, delighted, and then realized he was talking to the eggs. This realization had made her feel even more delighted, so much so that she’d laughed out loud and had to explain it to him. We both talk to our food!
This is her second enormous cup of lemonade—it’s been her one pregnancy craving for weeks. She has taken one trip to the bathroom and can already feel her bladder beginning to pinch again. She arrived at the train terminal at 4:00 PM—an hour earlier than Vanessa’s train was due to arrive—because she was too distracted by thoughts of the upcoming weekend, and the promise of lemonade at the train station, to sit at her desk any longer. Her office was nearly empty anyway. It’s the Friday before a holiday weekend—Monday is the Fourth of July—and everyone has left for the shore.
Kate almost never leaves work early. She loves her job, loves the precision of the law. Sure, the interpretation of many laws could be argued, but most were fairly cut-and-dried—they delineated a right and a wrong, created a road map, laid out a predictable path of action and consequence. Plus, she has a deep-seated respect for rules and hierarchies, which makes her a perfect fit for a big, bureaucratic firm like WebsterPrice. In high school she’d been respectful of students in the upper classes, even the ones who were only six months older than she, and she’d dutifully kissed up to her senior sorority sisters in college. And now she feels a profound satisfaction with the way first-year lawyers nod at her in the halls of WebsterPrice.
If you love your job so much why don’t you marry it? a singsong, little-girl voice trills in her head. Maybe she will. Maybe she’ll be one of those women who is married to her job. Is it possible to have a baby and be married to your job?
If there is anything good to be found in Peter’s breaking up with her, it is that she is not on her way to Las Vegas right now. She had wanted her bachelorette party to be a weekend of pizza and chick flicks with her closest friends, but Vanessa had laughed when she’d suggested this.
“It’s not your twelfth birthday party, Kate,” she’d said. “It’s your bachelorette. We should go to Vegas. We can stay at the Palms. I’ll make us dinner reservations at Nobu. We can go dancing. You love dancing!”
This was true, but before Kate could respond, Dani had groaned. They were on a three-way conference call, an arrangement that Kate had regretted almost immediately. Vanessa and Dani were her matron of honor and maid of honor, respectively, and Kate had felt a responsibility to moderate their conversations. She had forced them back into direct contact, but she knew she could not force them to get along. She did not understood the exact why of their falling out, but she knew the when down to the day. Dani had told her that Vanessa cut her out of her life because of some comment Dani made about not liking her boyfriend at the time, a guy named Jeremy Caldwell. Vanessa told Kate they’d fought about all the clothes Dani had borrowed from Vanessa and had managed to somehow ruin over the course of that summer in Avalon before their final year of college. Kate had never believed these incidents would have been enough to drive her friends apart; she felt sure their fight had had something to do with Colin. As soon as she pieced this together, she stopped hunting for answers, deciding she did not want to know.
“Bachelorette parties aren’t one-size-fits-all, Vanessa,” Dani was saying. “Just because you went to Vegas for yours doesn’t mean Kate should go for hers.”
“What do you know about my bachelorette party?” Vanessa responded. “You weren’t there.”
Kate closed her eyes and leaned back in her office chair. She knew that tone. Vanessa was moments away from falling into aggressive silence. It
was remarkable how she could wield silence like a weapon; if Quakers weren’t opposed to violence, Kate would have sworn Vanessa had honed this skill during her double dose of weekly Meeting in childhood.
“I had to move apartments that weekend, Vanessa,” Dani said. “If I could have been at your bachelorette party, I would have been there. And P.S., your wedding was years ago. I think it’s time to relinquish your bridezilla tiara.”
Kate knew that Vanessa had never believed Dani’s excuse for missing her bachelorette party. Kate herself thought the whole truth was far more complicated than Dani let on. She might have had to move that weekend, but more importantly, Dani could not afford to go to Las Vegas. Dani had grown up the wealthiest of all three of them, living with her father in a penthouse apartment on Rittenhouse Square, but now she was the one who was perpetually strapped for cash. Dani would never admit this was the reason she didn’t go to Vanessa’s party, just like she would never call her father and ask if he would cover the party’s cost—she had too much pride. Dignity, Kate thought, amending her hasty adjudication. Pride was an ungenerous word. Still, she worried about her friend. Dani was the most ambitious person Kate knew and yet she appeared to have no plans—a dangerous combination, it seemed to her.
“I’m not really a big sushi fan,” Kate said, trying to get the conversation back on track. “I know we’re all supposed to love it because it’s so healthy and hip, but I’m just not into it. It’s so—raw. I feel like I’m chewing listeria. And Vegas will be ridiculously hot in July. You know my skin. It would be just my luck to end up with third-degree burns two months before the wedding. Philly is so quiet in July—I’m sure we could get dinner reservations anywhere in the city—”
“Tell the truth: Are you becoming agoraphobic?” Dani asked, cutting her off. “When was the last time you left Philadelphia?”
“Forget Philly, when’s the last time you left your apartment?” Vanessa asked. “Are we going to show up there and find a bunch of rotisserie chickens under your bed—”
“—like Brittany Murphy’s character in Girl, Interrupted?” Dani finished, laughing.
Of course, Kate thought. Dani and Vanessa were finally in agreement and it was at her expense. For a moment, she felt a flash of the out-of-breath feeling that had overcome her once in middle school when she realized Dani and Vanessa had had a sleepover without her. The memory infuriated her. It had taken Kate, who remained gawky and earnest long after Vanessa became beautiful and Dani became cool, years to feel anything other than relieved that they continued to be friends with her in high school. Eventually, though, Kate had come to understand that her friends were the ones who should have felt grateful—she had always been their mediator, the glue that held them together; without Kate, they might not have remained friends as long as they had. Yet, here she was again, struggling to play catch-up even when discussing her own party.
“And,” Kate said loudly then, knowing exactly how what she was about to say would make Dani feel, “Vegas is too expensive for some people.”
They stopped laughing.
“For your lawyer friends? I doubt that very much,” Vanessa said.
“You’re reaching now,” Dani said. Kate heard the edge in her voice—a half-angry, half-panicked tremble that immediately made Kate wish she could take back what she’d said. But she couldn’t take it back; instead, she’d add it to the list of regrets that kept her up at night. This, she reminded herself, was what happened when she lost control: she did things that she regretted. “Vanessa is right. We need to get you out of Philly. Besides, as much as it will kill you to hear this, you’re not allowed to plan your own bachelorette party. We’re going to Vegas.”
Kate felt even worse when Dani called to suggest they not cancel the getaway entirely, but move it to Dani’s father’s house in Avalon, rename it a girls’ weekend, and disinvite “the riffraff,” by which she meant Kate’s college and law school friends.
“We’ll watch movies and eat pizza, just like you wanted in the first place,” Dani said.
Kate couldn’t believe Dani had remembered. She sometimes had the sense that Dani and Vanessa didn’t listen to her as closely as she listened to them, and she felt shamed by Dani’s offer. But she was also surprised that Dani was suggesting they go to Avalon. And she was concerned about the slur in Dani’s voice, the way her sentences meandered and then gave way to silence that Kate hurried to fill. Dani was always the most experimental of the three of them; in high school and in college she had seemed to approach drugs with the mind-set of both a researcher and an adventurer—she was collecting experiences and having fun. This changed after Colin died; her joy dampened. Even from a distance, Kate sensed this, and it filled her with sadness.
When Dani called, Kate had been sitting in her sweats on the floor beside Gracie, flipping through her daily planner, erasing all of her upcoming wedding appointments. There went Dress Fitting and Cake Tasting. Final Caterer Meeting. Dance Lesson. Marriage License Appointment. She was penciling in the baby’s due date—February 9—when her phone rang. Though she wasn’t very religious and she certainly wasn’t New Age-y, it struck Kate that Dani’s call might be a sign. Peter wanted her to confront the past, and maybe he was right. Maybe doing so would prove something to him. She suddenly wished she hadn’t erased all those dates.
“I’d like Vanessa to come,” she said. It was important that they were all there when Kate finally admitted what she’d done to Colin.
Dani was quiet for a moment before agreeing.
“And Gracie,” Kate added.
“Who?”
“Gracie. Grace Kelly.”
Silence.
“You know,” Kate said, suddenly embarrassed. “My dog.”
“Oh, sure,” Dani said, and her strange giggle alarmed Kate. “You, me, Vanessa, and Grace Kelly. It’s a party.”
Kate hung up and immediately called Vanessa. She wasn’t sure how she would convince Vanessa to return to Avalon and was surprised when after just one short beat of time she had agreed, sounding excited. Maybe, Kate thought, she was finally ready to bury the hatchet with Dani. Immediately, Kate had texted Dani to let her know Vanessa was on board, successfully finalizing the plans before Dani’s buzz wore off and she realized what she had done.
Kate attempts to smooth the wrinkles on the blue seersucker sundress she had changed into in the bathroom at her office. She had bought the sundress with Vegas in mind, but now that she is sitting on a bench in Thirtieth Street Station, she realizes that the dress is far more suited to a weekend at the beach than a raucous night in Vegas, and she is relieved to be in a position of feeling appropriately attired instead of the opposite.
She takes a long drink of lemonade. Any minute now, Vanessa will appear at the top of the escalator of Track Three. Soon afterward, they will pick up Dani at the airport. And then they will all drive to Avalon. Kate wipes her hands, damp from the sweating lemonade cup, on a napkin and then folds the napkin again and again until it is a tiny, perfect square. Then she unfolds it and starts over.
She doesn’t like keeping secrets. When she was younger, she would tell her brother about the crushes she had on boys and then beg him not to tell anyone. He never did. As unpredictable as Colin was in nearly every other way, in this he was reassuringly dependable: when Kate told him a secret, he kept it.
On the beach the afternoon before he died, the skin on his shoulders had turned purple in the hot sun. He had never been good at protecting himself. She’d wanted to hand him sunscreen or make him put on a hat, but the look in his eye told her she could not ask him to do anything more. They had walked away from the water’s edge and were now standing in the wide, desolate swath of dry sand that flanked the dunes. Kate could feel Dani and Vanessa’s inquisitive gazes on her back. She tried to make her posture relaxed, but the sand was like smoldering ash below her feet and she shifted from foot to foot, her body tense with anguish and actual pain.
“When is the court date?” she asked.
/> “I don’t know yet.” The flat quality of his voice broke Kate’s heart. The dunes throbbed with the rhythmic song of cicadas. It was as though they were speaking for Colin—his own Greek chorus.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” She was afraid for him. She had no idea what the legal repercussions were for lighting a lifeguard stand on fire. What would another mark on his record do to his life, already a muddled thing, an unclear path?
“I don’t know that either,” he said. “But I’m sure it’s going to be expensive.”
“I’ll help you.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure, but I will.”
Colin shrugged. “I’ll be fine, Kate. Trust me. I’ve done worse.”
Kate felt herself on the verge of tears. She could not face the resignation in his eyes for one more moment. She turned and ran down to the water, her skin burning.
Kate shifts on the train terminal bench and lets her hand rest on her stomach. She worries the pain she feels when she endures these memories is harmful for the baby.
I’m going to be a single mother, she thinks. The knowledge that countless women have raised babies on their own doesn’t make her any less freaked out. This baby will bring chaos to her ordered life. Who will watch the baby while she works? A nanny? Her mother? Kate shakes her head at the thought of telling her parents she is pregnant. It does not matter that she is twenty-nine years old—a grown woman. It does not matter how many seasons of Sixteen and Pregnant have aired or how many unmarried celebrities have babies—the news that Kate is pregnant will shock her parents, her grandparents, her many aunts and uncles and cousins. The entire situation is surreal to Kate, and the fact that she hasn’t told anyone only adds to the sense that it is not really happening.
The train terminal fills with what sounds like a giant bird flapping its wings. The words and numbers on the line of the old-fashioned schedule that displays Vanessa’s Acela train from New York spin loudly and finally settle on the word “Arrived.” Kate stands, runs her hand down her seersucker dress, and waits for her friend. Soon Vanessa will appear at the top of the escalator, turning heads in a patterned headscarf and fuchsia, floor-skimming sundress, and before Kate has a moment to wonder for the umpteenth time if they would even be friends if they had met in their twenties instead of when they were five, she will realize that she and Vanessa now have something in common as adults. She will be filled with the urge to ask Vanessa questions about being pregnant, about what it is like to be a mother.