by Meg Donohue
“Well, that was embarrassing,” Dani says as she drops down into her beach chair. They had found their old chairs hanging from hooks in the back of the garage as though they had hung them there the day before and not eight years earlier. Rainbow stripes for Dani, pastel stripes for Kate, and solid turquoise for Vanessa.
“It happens,” Vanessa says. She doesn’t feel so hot herself.
“I’m never going to drink that much again,” Dani says. Vanessa and Kate both laugh. “No, seriously. I’m over feeling like shit.”
Vanessa and Kate exchange a glance. “Okay,” Kate says. “Good for you.”
“And I’m going to the library later. To write. I know we’re supposed to be on vacation, but I need to get some work done so I feel like less of a waste of life.”
“That’s fine,” Kate says. “Vanessa and I will shop for dinner.”
“Or take a nap,” Vanessa says and closes her eyes. It’s generous of Kate to pretend she believes Dani when she says she’s not going to drink that much again, but they all know the truth.
When it gets so hot their bodies shimmer with sweat, they move their beach chairs to the water’s edge and sink their feet into the chill of the ocean. Vanessa is relieved to realize that she still loves Avalon despite its being the place where Colin died. She has been to more beautiful places—Paris, Bali, her honeymoon in Greece—but no place makes her feel the way she does here. The ocean sparkles below the high sun, and the lull of tumbling waves makes her sleepy. She is overtaken by languid happiness.
“Kate?” a guy says, approaching barefoot. His trunks are slung low on his narrow hips. “We met last night, remember? I’m Gabe.”
“Gabe!” Kate leaps to her feet. Once she is standing she seems to immediately regret the decision and looks around awkwardly.
“Hey,” Vanessa says, saving her.
“Hey,” Kate echoes, remembering herself. “What are you doing here, Gabe?”
Repeating someone’s name isn’t the worst flirting strategy, but Kate has always overdone it. Vanessa wishes she would push her shoulders back. Kate is so much prettier than she gives herself credit for. Vanessa would kill for her long legs, her lovely collarbones—she’d know just how to show them off.
“I’m sitting down on Thirtieth Street with my friends,” Gabe says. “I thought I’d try to find you. I remembered you said you were staying on this beach.”
“She did, did she?” Dani says.
“This is Dani and Vanessa,” Kate says.
“Hey,” Gabe says again. Vanessa lifts her hand in a tepid wave. He might be only five or six years younger than they are, but he somehow seems like an entirely different species. He probably passed out fully clothed on the couch of a rental house the night before and had a beer with breakfast. Age aside, he’s tall and thin and has a kind, pensive face and he’s probably just Kate’s type. He makes Vanessa itchy with boredom.
Gabe looks at Kate, shielding his eyes even though he’s wearing sunglasses. “Want to go for a walk?”
“Sure.” Kate grabs her shorts off the back of her chair and pulls them on. “See you guys later,” she says. From the back, with her bikini straps dangling down her back and her hair up in a ponytail, she could be any teenager on the beach. She has the most identifiable walk Vanessa has ever seen—a flat-footed, rolling, slightly turned-out walk, her arms loose at her sides. A skinny-girl walk. A tomboy walk. Vanessa could spot her a mile away.
“Go, Kate, go,” Dani says, finally laughing.
“She’s not really interested in him, is she?”
“Who cares? If it gets her mind off Peter, it’s a good thing.”
Vanessa isn’t so sure about this, but before she has time to respond, a woman comes traipsing down the beach toward them, waving. It takes Vanessa a moment to realize it is Ginny Kimble, a girl they first met playing skeeball in the arcade, one of three small businesses that made up Avalon’s rinky-dink boardwalk, when they were twelve. A summer friend—Vanessa can’t even remember where she was from. She hasn’t seen her since the last time she was in Avalon. This is the problem with sitting by the water’s edge—everyone you know will see you. The thought that Jeremy is somewhere on this island, that he might show up at any moment, makes her feel unsettled. She wonders how she should respond to his text, how long this will go on, where it’s headed. Maybe she won’t write him back at all; she’ll end this all right now, using silence as her response. Even as she has this thought, she knows it is not what she is going to do.
“I thought it was you two!” Ginny says, bending over to kiss them on the cheeks before sitting in the sand next to Vanessa’s chair. She looks as if she’s walked out of a John Currin painting, all red hair and boobs and creamy skin that must be slathered with a thick layer of invisible sunscreen. “I just saw Kate making googly eyes with some college kid. Scandalous! I haven’t seen you guys in ages. What’s going on?”
They catch one another up on where they are living and with whom. Dani says she works in a bookstore, and Vanessa says she stays home with her two-year-old. It’s clear that both answers disappoint Ginny and it bothers Vanessa that this stings. Then Ginny brightens. She looks at Vanessa, a smile on her full lips.
“You know what’s so funny?”
Vanessa looks at her, knowing whatever she is about to say won’t be funny at all. “What?”
“Remember that guy you used to date? Jeremy Caldwell? I dated him after you did. We went out a few times in Philly.”
Vanessa feels her throat tighten.
“That’s hilarious,” Dani says.
Ginny waves her hand in front of her. “Oh, you know how Philly is—everyone dates everyone. I swear, it’s the worst city in America for singles. I kind of hate it. Anyway,” she says, “the funny part is Jeremy. That guy is a terrible kisser! He’s such a stud that you think he’d be, like, the best kisser ever, but he’s the worst! I mean, the worst! I always wanted to track you down, Vanessa, so we could laugh about it.”
It is clear to Vanessa that Jeremy broke Ginny’s heart. Still, she’s pissed. Jeremy is a great kisser. Just the thought of their kisses makes her mind go a little fuzzy.
“Jeremy is a great kisser,” she says.
Ginny and Dani are both silent. Maybe it was the cool tone of her voice. Or maybe it was the fact that she used the present tense—Jeremy is a great kisser. So Drew kissed Lenora and Jeremy kissed Ginny. The two incidents are not remotely connected, but still Vanessa feels enraged. She’s dying for a glass of water. Why didn’t they bring water?
“I don’t trust people who hate their hometowns,” Dani states after Ginny finally gets the hint and saunters off. “How can they not be even the teensiest bit nostalgic? They’re just one therapy session away from being diagnosed bat-shit crazy.”
“You’re so judgmental,” Vanessa snaps, and then immediately regrets it. Dani isn’t the one she is frustrated with right now. And after the things she accused Dani of eight years ago, she has no grounds to call anyone else judgmental. She holds her breath, waiting for Dani to bring up that fight, realizing she’s basically chummed the waters.
But Dani just shrugs. “Show me someone who isn’t judgmental, and I’ll show you someone without a pulse.”
Vanessa laughs, relieved. “It’s good to see you’re the same ray of sunshine you’ve always been.”
“Haven’t changed a bit,” Dani says. She begins to absently flick the top of a tube of sunscreen open and shut.
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Vanessa says. “Sometimes I don’t even recognize myself.”
Dani stops flicking the sunscreen top and looks at her. “I recognize you,” she says. “You’re in there.”
Vanessa is unnerved by how much Dani’s small kindness affects her.
“So,” Dani says. “Jeremy is a great kisser, huh?”
“He was. Years ago.” She pushes her sunglasses up onto her head and Dani does the same with hers. They squint at each other. Until this moment, Vanessa hadn�
�t known if Dani remembered what she had told them about Drew’s infidelity the night before—she herself barely remembers telling them. “I saw him a couple of weeks ago for the first time since we broke up,” she says. “Nothing happened. We just talked.”
Dani drops her sunglasses back over her eyes and begins to rub suntan lotion onto her legs. “What do you want to happen?”
Vanessa thinks of Jeremy’s hand cupping her face, of Drew and Lenora’s kiss. “I honestly don’t know,” she says.
“Well, is this a revenge thing or is this a real-feelings thing?” Dani asks.
“I’m not sure it’s an either-or situation.”
“I think it probably is,” Dani says. “But what do I know?” She snaps the top back on the lotion and tosses it into her beach bag. “So when did Drew kiss that woman?”
“At a holiday party in December.” She thinks Dani might say something about the many men Vanessa should not have kissed but had anyway. She looks down the beach for Kate, hoping she’ll be back soon.
Dani says, “What a fucking asshole.”
Vanessa releases her breath and laughs. Still, it seems to her that Dani is going easy on her, and something about this makes her sad. Dani has turned her face up to the sun now; her eyes are closed. When Vanessa’s phone buzzes, she pulls it from her bag and sees that Jeremy is calling. Dani stirs and Vanessa drops the phone back into her bag, unanswered, as Dani moans, “It feels so good to be warm for once.”
She sounds so genuinely satisfied with the weather that Vanessa isn’t sure if she should resent her or feel sorry for her. What must it be like to be Dani, with no one to think about but herself?
“This,” Dani intones, “is the summer of our discontent.”
Vanessa scoops wet sand on her big toe and flicks it toward Dani. It lands on the side of her leg with a thwap. “You’re not allowed to quote Dickens on the beach.”
“It’s Shakespeare. And I was misquoting so it’s okay.”
“Nothing is okay,” Vanessa says.
Dani turns her head to look at Vanessa. “Crunch crack,” she says after a moment, but softly.
12
Dani
The Avalon Public Library is sun washed and silent. The building is only six years old, and its presence still surprises Dani every time she drives by; she expects the island to look exactly the same year after year despite being confronted every summer by the huge new homes that have sprung up over the winter and the increasingly chic boutiques and restaurants multiplying along Dune Drive. It irritates her that these changes always surprise her, that she never learns, never sufficiently braces herself for the passage of time.
She can’t remember when she was last in a library. She walks around the hushed space until she spots an electrical outlet near a table in a relatively dark corner. Her laptop’s whir fills the corner she has staked, its sickly drone satisfying for once. If you build it, she thinks, I will bring my crappy laptop.
The air conditioning makes the blond hairs on her bare forearms stand up. She takes a sip of the hot coffee she smuggled in behind her laptop bag and looks at the librarian standing by the rack of paperbacks near the library’s entrance. Her heavy arms are deeply tanned, speckled with age, and her hair is a bubble of white, a scoop of vanilla atop a brown waffle cone. A year-round resident, Dani thinks, and then: This is my rock bottom. It’s an optimistic thought. Things cannot get worse. She is unemployed, adrift, unaccomplished, miserably hungover, and now, she thinks, allowing herself a bit more melodrama—orphaned. First her mother started over with a new family, and now her father is doing the same. She is not the only woman with staying power in her father’s life. She has to make room for Suz.
That morning, as she was hunched over a toilet, puking, she was relieved to be alone in the house. She would never have such privacy in her father’s condo. It was one thing to feel this way—to be this way—when she was thousands of miles away from anyone she had known longer than a year or two and another thing entirely to be this way in front of Kate and Vanessa in Avalon and possibly her father and Suz in Philadelphia. She’d decided, as she’d pressed her forehead to the white marble bathroom floor, that she was done with drinking that much. And that if she ever wants to look herself in the mirror again, she’d better finish her damn novel.
There is nothing new about either declaration.
Still, she has surprised herself by not taking even one of the Oxycontin pills from the tin that Rachel gave her as a send-off present. Which isn’t to say she isn’t thinking about them. Being high gives her a warm, sleepy peace, a sense that everything is okay, or at least that nothing matters. Without pills or alcohol, there is no guarantee she’ll ever feel that way again.
Case in point: on her walk to the library, her father had called and she’d suddenly felt so upset she could not bring herself to answer the call. Now, sitting in front of her open laptop, she listens to his voice mail. Dani, her father says. I forgot to tell you the beach tags are by the coffeepot. I’m sorry. Call when you have a second.
The beach tags are always by the coffeepot; the beach tags are not why he called. Suz might be behind this oblique apology, but she might not. Directness has never been Dani’s father’s strong suit. The summer after her parents divorced, he bought the house in Avalon. He never mentioned his ex-wife. On the rare occasions when Dani brought her up, the word “Mom” sounded strange to her; it was an odd bubble of a word, more like a sound effect than the name for the woman who had birthed her. Kapow! Bam! Mom!
The first time Dani returned to Avalon after Colin died was early in June of the following summer. Her father brought down a bottle of cabernet sauvignon that Dani knew he’d been saving for years. He could not give her a mother, but he could give her a beach house. He could not bring back Colin, but he could bring her a hundred-dollar bottle of wine. He did the best he could. This is what Dani always told herself.
That first night, they sat on the deck and drank the cabernet with grilled tuna steaks and a salad. Her father did not say anything as he clinked his glass against hers at the start of the meal. Dani had just graduated from Brown and would move to Boston in ten days.
“You could clean boats,” her father said as the meal wound down. They were discussing what else, besides writing, she would do in Boston.
“Or birds,” Dani responded. “Nobody likes a dirty bird.”
Her father refilled their wineglasses. “Or you could teach Chinese.”
“I don’t know Chinese.”
“Didn’t you take Chinese at Brown?”
Dani thought for a moment. “I ate cheese at Brown. Is that what you’re thinking of?”
“Yes,” her father said, unable to keep a straight face. “It must be. Unfortunately, Boston’s once-strong cheese industry is now floundering.”
“Still, I could be a cheesemonger. I’m sure Boston has mongers. It’s a very Colonial word.”
“Mongering is sales. Do you consider yourself a people person?”
“I don’t mind people who share my interests.”
“Cheese?”
“Cheese.”
“Well, then, you could always work with mice.”
“For the last time, Dad, I’m not going to be a scientist.”
Her father sighed, feigning exasperation. “My daughter, the writer. If only you had an imagination.”
They could go on like this for hours, and they did, working their way through another bottle of less expensive wine. When the sky turned pink, the bugs descended; by the time the sky darkened to a sheet of bedazzled navy, the bugs were gone. The cicadas sang and the ocean tumbled and somewhere down the street a screen door slammed. Sometime before midnight, her father stood, steady as ever on his feet, and, bowing to an imaginary crowd, said, “And that, folks, is that. Don’t forget to have your ticket validated on the way out.” Colin was dead and still, somehow, another summer had begun. After her father went to bed, Dani sat by herself and cried, and then she didn’t again for a very lon
g time.
It’s risky to try to write while surrounded by books. Her propensity is to pull one from the shelf and drop herself into someone else’s story.
A man enters the library. “Hi, Joyce,” he says, waving to the librarian. “Hello there, Sam,” Joyce says back. She tucks her vanilla hair behind her ear and smiles at him like a woman half her age. Sam heads in Dani’s direction, but his step falters when he sees her.
“Did I take your spot?” Dani calls out. The librarian and the only other two patrons in the library all stop what they are doing to look over at her.
Sam shakes his head. “No,” he says, and smiles. He turns and settles at a table in the center of the room, pulling a laptop and a few books from his bag. Dani can’t read their spines.
If she were Kate, Vanessa, even, this is when she would start daydreaming. This man named Sam is attractive—if you like that sort of thing. He is wearing cargo shorts and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt in a faded blue shade that perfectly matches the slice of sky Dani can see through the library windows. He has sensitive eyes and a clean-cut, old-fashioned face that reminds her of the poster of Hemingway that had hung in her high school English teacher’s classroom. That poster was Tiger Beat Hemingway—young, rosy-cheeked, Paris Hemingway, years before the ladies’ man mustache or swarthy, mountain-man beard entered the equation. Happy Hemingway. Hemingway Lite.
The writer’s job is to tell the truth. Ms. Dougherty’s solemn intonation had made even Hemingway quotes sound like lines from fortune cookies. She’d taken the poster down after Dani raised her hand one day and asked if it was prudent to idolize, in a roomful of hormonal, angst-ridden teenagers, an alcoholic who had committed suicide. Ms. Dougherty had probably rehung the poster above her bed.