by Meg Donohue
The cracks in their relationship revealed themselves when Colin began talking about moving to New York. As he started devising plans to work at a friend’s construction company in Brooklyn, Vanessa realized she could not picture him in her New York life. He walked too slowly for New York sidewalks. His favorite sound was a bottle of beer being opened; he had told her this. When she thought about Colin, she thought about the huge crush she’d had on him in high school, back when all the girls were chasing him and the fact that they could not be together made her pulse quicken every time they locked eyes. When he began to talk about moving to New York, she realized that she saw Colin in her past, but not her future.
“I want to be in a relationship I can tell my best friends about,” she said by way of answering his question. She was already itching for the conversation to be over. She wanted to run back to the bungalow and press her body against Jeremy’s. She’d told Jeremy that Colin was a troubled ex-boyfriend (a secret one at that—Kate and Dani did not know they had dated), and that they had to be sensitive of his feelings and tone down their affection for each other when he was visiting. She and Colin had never talked about being in an exclusive relationship; still, she knew what she was doing with Jeremy was unfair to him, that the fact that their relationship was a secret put him at a disadvantage because he could not be openly jealous or angry.
“So let’s tell them about us,” Colin said.
“Kate would never forgive me.”
“Sure she would. Forgiveness is what she does best.”
“Colin.” Her teeth had begun to chatter. She was tiring of treading water in the cold bay. The small slapping noises they made as they swam disturbed the dark, tranquil air around them, echoing and carrying across the water.
“Are you sleeping with him?”
She was not really surprised by this question; still, she did not realize how she was going to respond until the words were already out of her mouth. “I think I might love him,” she said.
Colin pushed at the water between them, sending it rippling toward her. “You barely know him,” he muttered. He released a vague smile that made Vanessa look away, angry. He was stoned. She realized they were having two different conversations—her sober one, and his high one. Her parents liked to smoke pot too and so the drug had never held any allure for her—it seemed to paint a glaze over people she loved, making them unreachable. Nothing about the act seemed rebellious or fun or potentially enlightening to her; it seemed cowardly. She felt sorry for Colin. He’d found the thing that defined him, the thing that allowed him to snag the spotlight from his sister, and it was fucking up.
“I love him,” she said. She realized now that the best thing for Colin would be a clean break. She’d tried to protect his pride by letting their relationship slowly fade into memory, but this plan had not worked. He had to understand it was really, truly over between them. “Jeremy is a grown-up.”
“A grown-up dating a college girl. That’s not creepy at all.”
“At least one of us is in college, Colin. This is life! We’re not kids anymore. Jeremy knows that. He’s not running around setting fire to lifeguard stands.”
He stared at her. “And I am?”
Despite warning her to run at the beach party on Friday, Colin had been caught by the police and was held in Avalon’s makeshift jail cell until he was sober. It had taken all night. Vanessa pieced together that he had seen her sneak off to the dunes with Jeremy and in anger had set fire to the lifeguard stand. What she didn’t understand was why he had allowed himself to be caught. He had been the fastest boy on the lacrosse field at PFS; he should have easily outrun the police. She thought he was sabotaging himself, yet another of his habits that used to seem complicated and endearing and now seemed cowardly.
“What were you thinking?” Vanessa asked. She was trying to keep her toes from skimming the bay’s spongy floor. “It’s not funny, you know. Setting a fire? That’s serious. What if someone had been hurt? You could go to jail.”
Vanessa felt as if she were the only one who saw how serious Colin’s drinking and drug use had become. Kate was either in denial or truly could not tell when he was high. Dani thought it was no big deal; she would invoke the Youth Clause, saying there was no other time in their lives when there was practically a societal mandate to party. Vanessa suspected the real reason Dani didn’t want to intervene was that her own house contained too much glass for stone throwing.
Colin sank slowly below the water, watching her even as the salty bay met his open eyes. Vanessa winced.
“Colin . . .” she said, but he was already under. She felt the water churning around her legs as he swam away. When he resurfaced, he was fifteen feet away in the middle of the channel.
“So go,” he said.
And she had, just like that, feeling—it pained her to remember this—relieved.
When she had lain back down beside Jeremy, the bed creaked beneath her. She had felt sure that at any moment Jeremy would reach over and pull her toward him, his fingers moving over her body until they sank into her wet hair and he opened his eyes, startled, wondering where, and with whom, she had been. But this never happened. Jeremy had just kept sleeping while Vanessa lay beside him, her greatest concern whether her long hair would dry in the thick, humid air.
“Really,” Kate says as they drive toward the airport, “how are you feeling about seeing Dani?” When she looks out of the corner of her eye at Vanessa, the car tires crunch loudly over the line of ridged pavement along the side of the highway. Kate jerks the wheel to bring the car back into the lane, glancing in the rearview mirror as Gracie fumbles to regain her footing in the backseat. They’d picked up Kate’s dog before heading to the airport and almost immediately the car had begun smelling, bizarrely, like a fish tank.
Kate is a truly terrible driver. You would think someone as responsible as Kate would be a good driver, but she is the worst. Driving and love seem to be the two areas in which she is incapable of gaining any sort of competency. How can someone be so smart and so successful and so incapable of finding love? It seems like a horrible cliché to Vanessa that she has a husband and no career, and her friend has a career and no husband. Of course, neither of them is particularly happy these days. Maybe that, too, is a cliché.
“We’ll probably try to kill each other,” Vanessa says without thinking. “But what’s a girls’ weekend without a little homicide?” She stares at the road, dismayed by what she has just said, but Kate releases one of her horsey, snorting laughs and the car shudders. Dani and Vanessa used to insist on sitting in the backseat when Kate drove—which was often, because they usually roped her into being the designated driver. They’d gasp and bite their hands, exaggerating their terror every time Kate hit the brake or pulled the wheel. Kate once crashed her car pulling into a repair shop where she had an appointment to fix the bumper she’d dented in a previous accident. The new damage cost thousands more than the old. Neither of those Harrington kids should have been allowed behind the wheel, ever.
Adele’s “Someone Like You” is playing on the radio. Vanessa can’t seem to escape this song, though she knows she shouldn’t take it personally—the song is playing everywhere, whether she’s listening or not.
We were born and raised in a summer haze,
bound by the surprise of our glory days.
“Just what you need,” Vanessa says, wincing. “A breakup song.”
Kate grins and turns up the volume. Vanessa holds her breath, willing Kate to keep both hands on the wheel. They take the exit for the airport. Vanessa decides that she will hug Dani and then get back into the front seat of the car and leave Dani to share the backseat with the dog.
I’ll be in Avalon over Fourth of July weekend, Jeremy had posted to Facebook a few days after they’d met for drinks. Who else is going?
As though by fate, Kate had called Vanessa to relay Dani’s invitation only hours later. Vanessa had not thought that going to Avalon was a good idea; she doubted t
hat it would help mend her friend’s broken heart to be in the place where her brother died. But since Jeremy was going to be there—and because she has the impression that seeing him again might finally give her some clarity about what she should do—she had said yes. Now that she sees Dani standing on the sidewalk outside of baggage claim, her stomach twists. Dani is a ferreter of truth, an anecdote collector, a relentless observer. Vanessa tightens the knot on her headscarf, preparing herself as best she can.
9
Dani
“The actual Jersey Shore should sue the Jersey Shore television show for slander,” Dani says as she pulls the door of Kate’s car shut behind her. “As though we weren’t already fighting an uphill publicity battle, now my roommates in San Francisco are convinced I’m going to spend the long weekend clubbing with beefy guys in tank tops.”
“Your roommates watch Jersey Shore?” Vanessa asks, turning around from the front passenger seat. They’d hugged on the airport sidewalk, Kate’s gaze as subtle as a high beam. Vanessa is undoubtedly now envisioning Dani and her slacker roommates sitting around watching Jersey Shore marathons. Dani is sure she doesn’t let Lucy watch TV—they probably spend their afternoons wandering the Met and organizing fundraisers for a fancy preschool that serves organic kale as a snack and has uniforms made by some hip designer. Despite this image, she reluctantly admits to herself that Vanessa doesn’t look much like a MomBot. She looks like Vanessa, crazily patterned headscarf, gorgeous bone structure, and all. That knowing look in her eye, both intelligent and sensual—has Dani captured that in her book? Vanessa’s face seems a little drawn, but this could be age—she is, after all, three years and one baby older than the last time Dani saw her—or, more likely, wariness. Dani doesn’t blame her for being guarded. The fight they had after Colin died feels both like ancient history and as if it happened yesterday.
“It doesn’t matter if they actually watch it. The show is pervasive,” Dani says. “That’s the problem.”
“Who cares,” Kate says, shrugging. “We know the truth about our Jersey Shore so who cares what the rest of the world thinks? More sand for us.”
If the car didn’t smell like Grace Kelly—“Howdy, Princess,” Dani had said when she hopped in beside the wildly panting dog—and if Dani didn’t already know that Kate had had this car forever, she might have thought Kate had just driven it off the lot. The pale gray floor mats are stain-free, the pockets on the backs of the front seats empty. The windshield is so clear Dani can barely see it. No one is really this painstakingly tidy without being on medication for obsessive compulsive disorder, and Dani is certain the only pills Kate takes are Vitamin C and birth control. She has long suspected that Kate is outwardly neat but secretly messy. She has a theory that everyone has at least three out-of-character quirks—for Kate, bad driving is one of them, and Dani is sure she harbors a couple other surprising tendencies. (Kate and Vanessa would probably never guess that Dani, for example, who loathes shopping, collects drinking glasses from garage sales. She likes the feel of a new glass in her hand. She just does. Also, she has a soft spot for the various singing and dance competitions that dominate primetime programming. All of those untalented, semi-talented, and extremely talented people sharing the same supersized dream? They pluck like crazy on Dani’s stiff old heartstrings.) Dani wonders if somewhere in Kate’s tidy apartment there is a closet filled to the brim with decades-old hotel toiletries and assorted polyester jumpsuits, capes, and thigh-high stockings from the unfortunately themed costume parties of yesteryear. All of the detritus that evades organization.
The Walt Whitman Bridge looms suddenly large, an inch or two shy of the side of the car.
“Holy shit, Kate,” Dani cries. “I can’t believe we’re letting you drive. Pull. Over. Right. Now.”
“You should have been in the car when she was driving through the city. It was terrifying,” Vanessa says. Her eyes are glued to the road.
“Pipe down, you two. It’s my car and I’m driving. Besides,” Kate says as they exit the bridge, “look at that! We made it to New Jersey.”
The trees in New Jersey are lush in a showgirl way that makes every tree in San Francisco seem pale and sickly by comparison. The back windows of the car are cracked for Gracie and the air that seeps in is so warm and sweet that Dani wishes she could swallow it.
Warmth. Finally. When she had walked out of the airport in Philadelphia, the air had immediately draped itself around her, producing within her a feeling that these days she most often equates with a drink. She used to make rules for herself: drinking only after 4:00 PM; drugs only on the weekend. But it was so easy to find exceptions—drinking before four was okay on the weekend; drugs were okay on weekdays when she didn’t work because those were basically her weekend—that eventually she no longer saw the point in having rules. Only luck and maybe something in her DNA has kept her habits casual for so long. Lately, Dani has begun to feel a stronger pull—desire becoming need. Her luck, it seems, is running out.
There is an Altoids tin of Oxycontin in her bag that Rachel gave her as a good-bye present. When Dani’s plane had hit turbulence over the middle of the country and her throat had gone dry and her skin had begun pricking uncomfortably, she’d managed to stop herself from reaching inside her bag for those pills by focusing on the book she was reading—Faithful Place by Tana French. She’d just kept reading, turning page after page until she was no longer sitting on that surely doomed plane and had instead disappeared entirely into someone else’s world.
But now that she’s thinking of those pills again, it’s hard to stop. She looks out the car window. They’re moving slowly thanks to holiday-weekend traffic. She still has little memory of suggesting this trip to Kate, but she finds that she’s not unhappy to be on these familiar roads, headed to Avalon. When people ask her where she is from, she says Philadelphia, but when she thinks of the word “home,” she thinks of Avalon. That much has not changed.
Kate seems to be talking even more than usual—she’s been discussing her mother’s new obsession with some exercise called Zumba for most of the time they’ve been on the Garden State Parkway—and Dani suspects this is due to the weirdness between Vanessa and herself. Kate has always quivered like a tuning fork at the slightest hint of tension. Vanessa occasionally makes a noise to indicate she’s listening, but she’s gazing out the side window, and it’s clear she isn’t really engaged. How does Vanessa’s husband handle her silences? Hopefully, he prods at her until she snaps open like a clam. If he doesn’t, Dani thinks, they’re in trouble.
She has a flash of déjà vu. It happens to her a lot—the sudden sense that what is happening has already happened. How many times have the three of us driven down this stretch of road together?
“How’s writing, Dani?” Kate asks.
“Horrendous,” she answers. She’s never been anything but forthright about how hard, and necessary, writing is for her. “There hasn’t been a book this bad since the last one I tried to write.”
Kate laughs. “I don’t believe you for a second. You’re a great writer.”
“Just own it,” Vanessa says, sounding distracted. “Be authoritative.”
The retort on the tip of Dani’s tongue is that she despises advice, but it occurs to her that this Vanessa is a diminished version of the Vanessa who was once her friend. It’s possible that Vanessa is no longer a capable adversary, and nobody likes a bully. “I don’t like authoritative people,” she says instead. “I don’t buy what they’re selling.”
“You’re so San Francisco,” Kate says.
“We should have known you’d end up there,” Vanessa says.
“Exit Thirteen,” Dani says, looking out the window. “We’re here.”
Kate shuts off the music when they turn onto the causeway that cuts through the wetlands, connecting the mainland to Avalon. They lower their windows all the way, and the car fills with thick, salty air. Gracie sticks her quivering brown nose out the window, her eyes narrowed to content
ed, contemplative slits. The sky still holds the Technicolor streaks of sunset, and the bay glows pink where it snakes between patches of bright green marsh grass. Vanessa points to a heron, dark and hunchbacked, perched at the top of a pole in the middle of a wide channel.
“Summer,” Dani says, mostly to herself. She sticks her arm out of the window and lets her hand rise and fall on the wind.
She doesn’t have to direct Kate despite the fact that Kate hasn’t been here in eight years. They turn right off Dune Drive at Thirty-Eighth Street and head toward the beach. The house is the closest one to the dunes, a handsome, white shingled rectangle of a house with two layers of decks running the length of its longer, beach-facing side. Something within Dani flutters when she sees it. The lower deck is in near-constant shade, blocked from the sun by the deck above and the wild tangle of shrubs and grasses and low trees that make up the stretch of dunes that separates the house from the beach. The upper deck looks out over the dunes to an expansive view of the beach and the ocean. On a clear night you can see the lights of the Wildwood Ferris wheel, ten miles down the coast and on another island entirely. The bedrooms upstairs are the best place to get a cool ocean breeze when the air conditioner is off. The bedrooms downstairs are the ones that are easiest to sneak out of without anyone upstairs hearing a thing.
The tires crunch over sand-blown pavement as Kate slows the car to a stop. Dani’s father’s Mercedes is parked in the driveway.
“What’s he doing here?” Dani wonders aloud.
“You told him we were coming, didn’t you?” Vanessa asks.
“Of course,” Dani says. “Just park in the street.”
Grace Kelly scrambles out of the car and takes a piss so long you would have thought she’d been cooped up all day instead of less than two hours. They pull their luggage from the trunk and pile it on the sidewalk. Kate has brought an incredibly large bag of expensive-looking dog food. Either Gracie somehow shares her owner’s remarkable metabolism—doubtful, given the rolls of pudge around the dog’s shoulders—or Kate is doing her usual disaster planning. The night is darkening; the sound of the ocean is distant even though it’s close. As they’re shutting the trunk, the light beside the front door of the house turns on, adding a glow to the gray street. Dani glances toward the light, and the door opens.