by Meg Donohue
Outside, the heat envelops her. Delicate filaments of cloud thread the cerulean sky along the coast. She heads down the sandy path that cuts through the dunes and scans the beach for Kate and Dani. She remembers how she used to look for Colin too—the thrill she would get when she finally spotted him.
In the weeks and months following Colin’s death, no one questioned Vanessa about her relationship with him. She broke up with Jeremy and returned to New York, ignoring Jeremy’s calls and e-mails. She never told him that she’d been swimming with Colin the night he died, or that the reason she broke up with him was that she was sure Colin’s death would cast a shadow over their relationship. She never told anyone else that she’d dated Colin; Jeremy was the only one who knew.
The fact that Colin is no longer alive still throws Vanessa off balance, like the time she was bodysurfing in sixth grade and was pulled into the tumbling curl of a wave and for long, panicky seconds could not figure out which way was up and which way was down. She feels certain that had she not fallen in love with Jeremy, Colin would never have set fire to that lifeguard stand. He would never have been distraught and heartbroken and taken all those drugs. He would be, if not here in Avalon with them right now, then somewhere in the world. Alive.
Vanessa watches a pair of beach taggers scan the beach for their next target. They are every beach tag girl in the history of Avalon: tan, bored, unsmiling blondes in tiny shorts. The taggers sit at the entrances to the busier beach blocks and wander through the sand of the less crowded ones. Beach tagging had been a popular summer job, but it had always sounded terrible to Vanessa and her friends. It turned sitting on the beach into a requirement—by the end of the summer, those girls inevitably looked like they wanted to be anywhere but Avalon.
“Did you talk to Drew?” Kate asks as Vanessa unfolds her beach chair. “You must miss Lucy.”
Vanessa is about to say something about how nice it is to carry a bag filled with her own things, instead of one brimming with diapers and sippy cups, how nice it is to move at her own pace rather than that of a toddler, but she stops herself. Who wants to hear a mother vent about the trials and tribulations of being a parent? Certainly not the pregnant and the childless. Part of the problem with becoming a mother is that Vanessa feels she has lost what little voice she had; mommy talk is welcome only in such small, specific venues. “I miss Lucy, but I think it’s good that I’m getting a little space from Drew,” she says, thinking of the anger that had flared within her when Drew implied during their phone conversation that it only takes nine months to adjust to being a mother.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Kate asks.
No, she thinks. But she does. She tells them that Drew and Lenora kissed at the holiday party after months of what Drew referred to as “mild flirtation.” She tells them that she has gone to nearly every work function Drew has invited her to since. That she feels if she stays with Drew, she is going to spend the rest of her life trailing him, peering around corners for Lenora Haysbach and the women with the potential to be the next Lenora Haysbach. That she cannot see herself doing this, but she also cannot see how she could not.
“No wonder you had a drink with Jeremy Caldwell,” Dani says.
Vanessa considers telling them that Jeremy is here now, somewhere on the island, but decides against it.
“How was seeing him again?” Kate asks.
“He’s still really good looking.”
“So, what?” Kate asks. “You want to kiss him? Even the playing field?”
“I’m not sure,” Vanessa says. “That’s the problem, I guess.”
“Maybe the biggest problem isn’t whether or not you want to kiss Jeremy,” Kate says, studying her, “but that you’re still madly in love with Drew.”
Vanessa rolls her eyes at Kate’s use of the idiom “madly in love,” but she has to admit her choice of words hits close to home. She used to be “in love” and now she’s “madly in love.” This, it seems to her, is a downgrade.
“That’s not a problem,” Dani says. “If she loves Drew, problem solved. All he did was kiss someone else. They didn’t sleep together.”
“Stop saying that,” Kate says. “She trusted him. She put her faith in him. It doesn’t make her situation any better if she still loves him.”
“Do you?” Dani asks, turning to her. “Do you still love him?”
Vanessa thinks about how nervous she had been to introduce Drew to her parents when she first started dating him. Drew bought his shirts from a boutique in Nolita; Vanessa’s father had worn the same two suits for twenty years. How would Drew respond if her mother offered him one of the pot brownies she indulged in to ease the pain in her (allegedly) arthritic knee? When Vanessa finally worked up the courage to bring Drew home, she had looked around the rooms where she’d spent so much of her childhood and felt embarrassed by the clutter, the lack of restraint, the way the smell of strange, sharp spices—or, really, who knew what?—lingered in the air. She spent several long minutes in the bathroom trying to catch her breath. When she returned to the living room, she found Drew cheerfully sipping her father’s bitter home-brewed beer as if it were Dom Perignon and regaling her parents with a story about how, as a kid, he’d not only dug up but had named the worms for the compost bin at his parents’ house in Connecticut—a story Vanessa was sure she had never heard before. Her father—accustomed to a house full of girls—had looked so pleased that Vanessa had feared he was on the verge of mussing Drew’s hair.
“He’s still the person I married,” Vanessa says. The problem might be, she realizes, that she is not sure he would say the same about her.
Kate falls asleep reclining in her beach chair, her mouth hanging open. Vanessa envies her. She has not slept that easily, without an ounce of wine in her, since she was pregnant with Lucy. Her own eyelids feel heavy, but she’s never been a napper. It is probably for the best. You only feel groggier after napping on the beach, with newly tender, crisped skin below your eyes or behind your knees or on the thin skin of your chest.
A toddler sitting in the sand near them begins to shriek. He throws his body around and stomps his feet, such quintessential toddler moves that they seem like an imitation, or performance art.
The little boy’s mother stands next to him with her hands on her hips, frustration pouring off her in waves. “If you cry one more minute, we are going home,” she snaps. “The beach is supposed to be fun!”
Vanessa and Dani look at each other and laugh. The mother shoots them a dirty look.
“Sorry,” Vanessa says quickly, “it’s just—”
“Words to live by!” Dani says.
Vanessa laughs again and the mother turns away. She considers telling the woman that she has her own tantrum-prone toddler at home, she’s been in her shoes, but then decides she doesn’t feel like it.
“I’m going to head to the library,” Dani says.
It occurs to Vanessa that Dani did not have a single glass of wine the previous night. What is it about being in Avalon with Vanessa and Kate that is making her stick to a resolution that Vanessa can only imagine she has broken countless times over the course of her twenties?
“Say hello to Hemingway,” she says, and wonders if Dr. Lowenstein’s engagement might open Dani to the possibility of love.
It is nearing one o’clock, and Kate is still sleeping. Vanessa rises from her chair, pulls on her green tunic, slings her beach bag over her shoulder, and begins to walk toward the pier. Shells crunch below her feet on the hard, wet sand. Admitting that she still loves Drew makes her feel defeated. The thought of forgiving him feels akin to resigning herself to a life of jealousy, of not being loved, but not forgiving him seems equally unbearable. If Lucy weren’t in the picture, this would be less complicated, but she does not even want to linger on the thought of Lucy not being in the picture—a life without Lucy is not a life at all. If she and Drew were to divorce, her daughter would spend some time with her father, away from her, and the fact of this—no
t being able to read Lucy her bedtime story, to comfort her when she is sad—is unfathomable.
She wishes she knew whether kissing Jeremy Caldwell would help heal her, or break her heart anew.
At the pier, there are a few surfers in the water but the waves are small and round, rolling more than curling. One of the surfers is lying on his back on his board; he might be asleep. It’s quiet in the shade under the pier and the sand is cool and damp under her feet; the air smells briny; barnacles dot the pylons like thorns on rose stems. Eight years earlier, Jeremy kissed her under this pier. She can still feel his lips against hers, the way he used to trace her jawline with his thumb.
She pulls her phone from her bag. How about tomorrow night? she texts Jeremy and then stands in the shade another minute before walking back toward Kate. She wonders what might have happened between her and Jeremy if that summer had ended differently. If Colin hadn’t died and Vanessa hadn’t broken up with Jeremy out of guilt and fear, would Avalon have become their place? The place where Jeremy proposed? The place where they watched their children and grandchildren experience summer, jumping the waves and playing skeeball and wearing bathing suits from the moment they rolled out of bed until the moment they rolled back in, glowing with happy, sunbaked exhaustion?
She can see this life, and she can see Jeremy, but she still can’t, no matter how hard she tries, see herself.
15
Dani
Dani decides to walk to the library. She’s not one for exercise, but the chill of San Francisco still hasn’t melted entirely and her body craves warmth. She can feel her fingers quivering in the pockets of her shorts. One or two of those Oxycontin pills hidden in her luggage would steady her, but she is trying not to think about them. She’s amazed by how hard it is to not think of them once she starts—she feels as if one is lodged in her throat, a phantom pill.
Ironically, it was Colin who had given her her first taste of prescription drugs. Ritalin. They had crushed a few pills and snorted them before Friends Meeting during their senior year at PFS. It was a terrible idea, snorting a stimulant before enforced sedentary silence. They had sat side by side, their fingers drumming the cushion on the long wood meeting bench until Dani couldn’t stand the silence any more and rushed out of the auditorium, pushing aside the knees of her seated classmates. She’s never much cared about making a scene.
It does not even cross your mind to say no to the drugs people offer you when you are young and the future seems limitless. It is still easy to say yes when you are no longer young but you do not care about your job and you are not in a relationship and you are nowhere near your father or closest friends. A part of her has known that she has been running away from home, hoping the farther she gets, the less she will think about Colin and the opportunities she has wasted. But it’s only now, walking to the Avalon library with her fingers trembling in the pockets of her shorts, that it occurs to her she might also have been running toward addiction. Without anyone who cares about her around, she has been free to destroy herself.
I’m too smart for this, she thinks. And: I used to be fearless.
Vanessa used to be fearless too—with her bold outfits and that way she walked the halls of PFS as if she owned the place, that quiet way she had of looking around as if she were sizing everything up and finding it all lacking. She was catnip for boys. They couldn’t resist her and she crushed them, one by one, a trail of broken hearts through high school and college. Something important seems missing in Vanessa now; the old Vanessa would not have had such a tough time deciding whether to break away from or forge ahead with her marriage. Then again, the old Vanessa would have been the one doing the inappropriate hallway groping.
Kate was never fearless, not really. That summer before their senior year of college, when Seth, a meathead lifeguard who had flirted lazily with Kate for weeks, teasing her in a way that had never sat right with Dani, ended up hooking up with another girl right in front of her, Kate had slipped out of the party and run back to the bungalow without saying a word to anyone. Dani and Vanessa had found her sobbing on her bed. If it were up to Kate, she would have cried herself to sleep and that would have been the end of it, but Vanessa was hell-bent on revenge, and Dani liked nothing more than strategic mischief. The next day, they went to Sylvester’s Fish Market and convinced Kate to buy the biggest, stinkiest fish there. They left Pepé, as Dani had dubbed the fish, on the bungalow’s sunny front stoop all day where, as intended, he became significantly more pungent. Later, under the cover of darkness, the three of them sneaked up to Seth’s Jeep Wrangler. “Go ahead,” Dani whispered. Kate’s eyes had widened. “Me? I can’t!” “Yes, you can!” Dani and Vanessa had said together, but Kate’s fingers were trembling too much to even remove the fish wrapper. She’d looked relieved when Dani had grabbed the package from her, swiftly unwrapped the fish, and wedged him under the backseat of Seth’s car. With Pepé ensconced in his new resting place, they all took off in a sprint, so close on one another’s heels that when they burst into the bungalow they fell into a pile on the floor, gasping for breath, laughing so hard that tears streamed down their faces.
Now it seems to Dani that Kate has probably turned out to be the bravest of the bunch.
Dani recognizes that her friends are going through difficult times, and she sees that they’re each going through these difficulties alone. She wants to help them, but would they want her support if they knew the truth? She has stayed away for years, not wanting to know the answer.
When she gets to the library, she opens her laptop but is immediately stuck.
She has been trying to write this scene—the scene between the party on the beach and the boy floating in the bay—since college. She presses her laptop shut and asks the librarian—Joyce again, as purse lipped and scoop haired as the day before—to keep an eye on it while she steps outside. A sweating can of Diet Coke is anchoring her hands when Sam cruises into the parking lot.
“Nice bike,” she says as he leans over to lock it to the rack near the handicap ramp.
“Thanks,” he says. “My students tease me about it, but what’s the point of living on an island if you’re going to drive a car everywhere?”
“You must freeze in the winter.”
“I make exceptions,” he says, stretching out his hand. “I’m Sam.”
“I know. You’re Joyce’s boyfriend.”
He laughs. “I don’t usually fall for septuagenarians, but—”
“You make exceptions,” Dani finishes. He is not her type, but he is the sort of handsome that transcends type. It disappoints her to learn that she, like the rest of the world, is attracted to a symmetrical face. No wonder passion fizzles, she thinks, foreseeing their end before they even begin.
“I’m Dani,” she says.
“Nice to meet you, Dani.”
Vanessa once told her that when a man repeats your name, it’s because he likes you. Notably, in college Vanessa had a string of boyfriends that she referred to only by names like Mr. Vanilla Latte and Trader Joe and Sports Jacket Guy. Dani had finally told her to knock it off; just because she lived in New York didn’t mean she was, or should aspire to become, a character on Sex and the City.
“Are you headed in or out?” Sam asks, pulling open the door to the library.
She looks up at him, squinting, trying to determine if her fingers have stopped trembling enough to release the can of soda. “In,” she says, deciding, and passes through the open door.
Sam sets his laptop across from hers. At this close range, he looks nothing like Happy Hemingway; he looks like a Sam. She asks him what it is like to live in Avalon year-round, and he tells her it’s quiet but beautiful—the island returns more to its island-ness with each passing month. She knows exactly what he means. Dani can tell there is a reason Sam is here; he is running away from something or toward something and she wonders if it is a woman.
“What about you?” he asks. “Where are you from?”
She tells him she i
s from Philly but lived in San Francisco until she lost her job a month earlier and was forced to give up her apartment. This news is incredibly easy to tell a stranger. She thinks of her own parents meeting, envisioning for the first time how simple it must have been for them to fall in love, to believe that the few things they had in common were enough to last a lifetime. She wonders when she and Sam will have sex, and when they will stop being able to stand each other’s company. These two events seem as linked as bookends—the only thing that is unclear is the length of space between them.
“Where did you work?” Sam asks.
“In a bookstore.”
He spreads his arms wide and holds up his palms as if he is about to make a great pronouncement. “I love books,” he says in a funny booming voice that causes Joyce to stare at them and frown.
Dani laughs. This sudden glint of Sam’s inner weirdness intrigues her. “That makes two of us,” she says. “But, let’s be honest, books are easy to love. They don’t hog the bed or bug you for Valentine’s Day presents or buy the most expensive thing on the menu.”
“Or complain about your taste in music.”
“Oh, Sam. Were you a little too country for an ex-girlfriend?”
He grins. “A little too rock and roll.”
“With so much crossover music these days, it’s a shame you couldn’t make it work.”
“Well, moving to Avalon didn’t help.” Sam shuts his laptop, and with it any pretense of working. “Are you just here for the weekend?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” she says. She has been wondering the same thing. Can she really see herself living with her father and Suz? Even if she can, she realizes he might not give her the option. “I was planning on staying with my dad in Philly, but he just told me he’s getting married to some woman he’d never even mentioned before. Now I don’t know what I’ll do.” She surprises herself with this admission. Is it Sam or her aching head that is making her behave like this? She looks down at her hands. They have, for the moment, stopped trembling. Still, she does not feel like herself.