by Meg Donohue
“Jeremy is the reason you came here this weekend, isn’t he?” Dani asks. It’s as though she hasn’t heard a word Vanessa has said. “You came here to see him.”
“Dani,” Vanessa says. She doesn’t know how to answer. “There are so many reasons I came.”
Dani shakes her head. She is so disgusted she looks physically ill. She turns and climbs the stairs without another word.
Alone, Vanessa sinks down into an Adirondack chair. She wipes her face. In the silence, the hard chair neither comfortable nor uncomfortable beneath her, she tries to slow her breathing. Her thoughts twist and expand.
She and Kate and Dani used to do gymnastics down here in their bathing suits after a day on the beach. They would try to pace their cartwheels perfectly down the length of the deck—if their hands hit the far edge of the deck halfway through the final cartwheel, they could spring off it and land on the small patch of grass that separated the deck from the hydrangea bed. Vanessa remembers spinning through the air, hoping her hands would land in the right place, that surprising swell of momentum over the edge of the deck, the squishy thud when her feet landed in the grass. They could do this for hours—the spinning, the landing, the laughing. Eventually Dr. Lowenstein would call them upstairs to shuck corn or to sprinkle salt on thick slices of tomato or to set the table. They’d eat out on the deck, lighting citronella candles to deter the bugs, and sometimes Dr. Lowenstein would surprise them with a key lime pie from the produce market on Ocean or bowls of strawberries set on mounds of Cool Whip—a strange and delightful confection that Vanessa’s own mother would never have kept in the house and that Vanessa was sure her childhood would not have been complete without.
Vanessa had bought Cool Whip on a whim after spotting it at the market near their New York apartment a few weeks earlier. She and Drew and Lucy had sat out on the balcony and dunked strawberries right into the tub again and again until they’d worked their way through half of it. Lucy, perched on a chair in her little yellow dress, had smacked her lips after each bite, hopped up on happiness and sugar. Drew had propped open the door to the condo, and the Desmond Dekker song playing on the stereo had poured outside. Because they were in front of Lucy, Vanessa had let Drew spin her around the small balcony, making her dizzy, transporting her through time.
At least Drew had told her what happened with Lenora. Vanessa had never had the courage to tell Kate what she did to Colin. Kate had to overhear the news. Her friendship with Kate was a kind of covenant too, and Vanessa had broken it. Though these betrayals are not linked, she asks herself if forgiveness might be one act providing the momentum for another, the possibility, but not the promise, of a soft landing at the end.
18
Dani
Dani hopes a walk on the beach will soothe her pounding head. She wears her dark sunglasses and Susanna’s ridiculous pink hat and a long black T-shirt over her bikini and jogs barefoot over the hot sand until her feet sink into the wet sand at the water’s edge. She has a book in her hand, not because she thinks she’ll actually read it, but because just carrying it might make her feel better. She has never felt so raw in her entire life; she feels as if all of the nerve endings in her body are exposed, crackling at the slightest hint of contact. Her mind is rife with metaphors, searching for a way to give words to what is happening to her. One drink would be enough to calm her. Just one tiny pill would be plenty. When she tries to summon the hope she felt when she was talking with Sam yesterday, she cannot. It’s the Fourth of July and the library is closed. She walks until she is shin-deep in the ocean and then turns and keeps walking along the coast, the cold water slapping at her skin.
Even from the water, she can hear laughter hanging in the air. Some of the older beach-goers have stuck small American flags into the sand beside their raised beach chairs. A group of guys are drinking cans of Bud Light and shielding their Wawa hoagies from the huge seagulls that hover above and peer down with aggressive glints in their beady eyes. She knows how those seagulls feel. Her mouth is so dry. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.
She’d always known there was a spark between Colin and Vanessa, a different version of the one that existed between Colin and herself, the one she smothered into platonic submission. Those sparks were only natural. No matter how long or how well you knew a boy, no matter if he was the brother of your best friend, if you were a heterosexual teenage girl, you were going to feel a spark with a rebellious, good-looking boy. The question was only what you did with that spark. Did you fan it, letting it grow and gather heat? Or did you extinguish it, knowing just how it all would end if you did not?
Now that Dani understands the timing of Vanessa’s relationship with Colin, she is furious. She knows how Vanessa operated back then, making a boy the center of her universe right up until the moment someone else caught her eye. Dani is a little ashamed to realize this trait is something she used to admire in Vanessa, before she realized Vanessa had set her hooks into the heart of someone who actually mattered to her.
She sits in the shade under the pier for a long time trying to read her book, but her mind won’t allow her to slip away.
It’s clear now that this weekend is a disaster. This doesn’t feel like much of a shock. Maybe these years of wandering the country, losing herself in anything and everything, have been building to this—the final disintegration of a friendship that had been wavering on the point of collapse all that time. Kate had set that fire and let Colin take the blame. Vanessa had broken Colin’s heart and left him alone in the bay, in a drugged-out stupor, in the middle of the night. Dani is surprised and confused by these revelations—all these years, she’d thought she was alone in her guilt. It’s hard for her to process this news, to reframe the story she has told herself about that weekend. Their confessions don’t make her feel any better about what she did—if anything, on top of everything else, she now feels to blame for the guilt that has weighed on her friends all these years. Their confessions are small compared to the truth she has been carrying.
From the moment she enters the house hours later, Dani senses that something is wrong. Her feet are still wet from rinsing them in the outside shower and she nearly slips when she pulls open the sliding door to the living room. She steps inside and stops short.
Kate is standing in the middle of the room as if she’s been waiting. Gracie sits beside her, her tail wagging slowly; she looks as confused as Dani feels by the energy in the room. Then Dani sees. Kate is holding her manuscript, the one Dani printed out at the library yesterday. Dani tries to remain calm as her mind races.
“You gave him the drugs,” Kate says.
“It’s fiction, Kate,” she says, knotting her hands together. “It’s a novel.”
“It is not! These people have different names but they are us.”
Vanessa appears at the top of the stairs. “What are you talking about?” she asks, looking back and forth between them.
“Dani gave Colin the drugs he took the night he died,” Kate says without taking her eyes off Dani. “It’s in her book.”
Vanessa looks at Dani. “So I was right?” she asks, her eyes wide.
Dani’s head hurts so badly that she feels herself wincing. She remembers the afternoon she and Colin spent drinking at the Princeton as if it were yesterday. It was when they’d biked back to the bungalow that Dani showed him the pills. A guy she’d met in one of her creative writing classes at Brown had sent them to her a week earlier; apparently she gave off the vibe that alprazolam was the way to her heart. She and Colin each took one, swallowing them right on the steps of the bungalow. Dani looked at the bag and then at Colin. “Why don’t you take them home?” she’d told him, handing him the bag. There were at least ten pills left. “You and your buddies in Philly will get more use out of them than I will here with Kate and Vanessa.” Colin had shoved the bag into his pocket, and Dani didn’t think about it again—not even when she woke up on the bungalow’s couch much later and realized the television was still
on but Colin was no longer beside her. She thought he must have gone out to meet friends. It was only the next morning when the police showed up on the doorstep and held out Colin’s soggy citation that she remembered giving him those pills. Handing over that bag had felt like such a small, uncomplicated act; as it turned out, it was the defining moment of her life, the moment when everything changed.
She never told anyone about those pills. Somehow, Vanessa was the only one who had guessed the truth. Even the therapist she’d seen briefly when she got back to Brown had never put the pieces together, handing Dani her first prescription as though she were giving her blessing.
“You were right,” Dani tells Vanessa. She crosses her arms and presses her fingers hard into the hollow spaces between her ribs. The pain centers her a little, but not much.
Kate’s face twists.
“Kate—” Dani begins, but Kate shakes her head sharply and Dani falls silent.
Kate turns to face Vanessa. “You knew?” The words hang in the air for a moment.
“No,” Vanessa says. “But I thought, maybe. It’s what we fought about after Colin died. She denied it and made me feel horrible.” She looks at Dani, her face tight with anger. “All these years, I’ve felt guilty for accusing you of something so terrible. You’ve been acting pissed off at me for eight years, and the whole time I was right. You made me feel awful, as if I didn’t deserve your friendship.”
“I was in shock,” Dani says. Her eyes are so dry they sting. “And I was afraid. I gave him those drugs—”
“How could you?” Kate asks. Her voice trembles with grief. “You were supposed to look out for him. You were supposed to be his friend!”
“I didn’t know he was going to take them all. I didn’t know he was going to go swimming in the middle of the night,” Dani says. Her excuses are halfhearted. She doesn’t believe in her innocence any more than they do. “I thought he was mad at himself for setting that fire. I thought I understood him. I thought I could help cheer him up.”
“With a truckload of pills?” Vanessa asks. “That was your remedy?”
It was idiotic. Dani knows this. She’d thought she was so much older than her twenty-one years; she’d thought they were all invincible. The word “sorry” is like a penny dropped into a fountain; it’s far too small to represent her wish. “I will regret that day for the rest of my life.” she says, and “I’m so sorry,” because she needs to say the words—needs her friends to hear them—even if they are inadequate. “I wish I could go back and do that whole weekend over.” When neither Kate nor Vanessa will meet her gaze, she closes her eyes.
“Kate, you have to know that Dani loved Colin,” Vanessa says, and Dani opens her eyes to look at her. “But she would never act on it. She’s a better friend than I am. She’s loyal. You and Colin were her family.”
You were my family too, Dani thinks, but the look in Vanessa’s eyes tells her she’s too angry to hear these words. She is not absolving Dani; she is trying to make Kate feel better.
Is Vanessa right? Was she in love with Colin? She felt differently about him than she has about any other guy before or since. Was that love? How do you know what love is? Is it the way she feels for her father, the emotion she is careful to keep in check in case it pushes him away? Is it the way she still occasionally longs for her mother, a woman who clearly does not long for her, whose daily silence is daily rejection? The solid, unchangeable feeling she has for Kate and Vanessa? She wishes there were a test—a love breathalyzer. She wishes she could explain that she writes about her friends so that she can remember what it is to know someone in the huge, encompassing way she once knew them—and what it is to be known and loved in return. She has been punishing herself with this story, but maybe she has also been saving herself with it. She has been holding her friends and this place in her heart all this time, even when she has been far away and alone.
None of this matters. Kate will never forgive her. Dani gave Colin the drugs that made him lose consciousness and drown when he was twenty-one years old. Dani won’t ever forgive herself either.
She hates herself for feeling a wave of self-pity, but there it is, crushing her. She looks at Kate, wishing she would say something, but Kate has sunk down into the couch and is cradling her head in her hands. Vanessa still stands at the top of stairs. Dani can tell she wants to comfort Kate, but there is tension between all of them, the room hums with it. No one is trying to comfort Dani. Of course they’re not. If their friendship was fractured before, now Dani has delivered the final blow. A clean break.
Kate has felt guilty about that fire for years, and yet she still managed to create a life for herself—she has a job, a best friend, and, soon, a baby. Vanessa, too, who has clearly never forgiven herself for leaving Colin alone in the bay, has a family, a life. Soon they’ll both be mothers, adults, and Dani will still be Dani—fucked up and fancy-free. She’s losing her father to a woman named Suz. She doesn’t have a home, or a job, or friends. She doesn’t even have her health, which she has pushed to its limit.
Those pills. Her heart hits a bump and then picks up speed.
She walks over to the couch and puts her hand on Kate’s shoulder. She’s embarrassed by how frail it looks there, before Kate shakes it away.
Dani turns. She stops next to Vanessa for a moment at the top of the stairs. Vanessa looks pale, as though she is holding her breath until Dani passes. Dani heads down the stairs.
In her room, she pauses for a moment. It’s still light outside, but there are a few pops of firecrackers, practice rounds for the evening’s celebrations. The sound sends a jolt through Dani. She hears Gracie’s nails scrabbling against the hardwood upstairs. All over the island, people are celebrating. She can’t remember the last time she felt truly lighthearted; it’s the ghost of a feeling now, flitting through her thoughts, slipping through her grasp, the memory of a dream not even from yesterday, but from years ago.
She crosses the room and digs through her duffel bag until she finds what she is looking for. The pills are weightless in her hand. This feeling, the weight of pills in her hand, she remembers.
19
Kate
Gracie has wedged herself under the coffee table. She looks up at Kate with a furrowed brow. She hates loud noises. Thunderstorms make her curl into a tight ball. In Philly, a motorcycle once backfired beside them and Gracie had been so frightened that she’d reared back out of her collar and taken off in a blind, hunted sprint. Kate had chased her down the sidewalk, watching her dart around strangers and barrel toward the busy intersection ahead. At the last moment, a man in a suit had reached out and grabbed Gracie by the scruff of her neck, making her yelp.
Why hadn’t any of them reached out a hand to stop Colin?
“Do you want to be alone?” Vanessa asks.
Kate shrugs but the answer to this question has always been the same and Vanessa knows it. She sinks into the couch beside Kate.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I need you to know that I love you and I never meant to hurt you. Colin and I . . .” Vanessa trails off and sighs. “I should have told you. And I was an idiot for not realizing he could get hurt out in the bay that night.”
Kate rests her head on the couch cushion and stares at the ceiling. Dani gave Colin the drugs he took the night he died; Vanessa went swimming with Colin that night and left him there. She is enraged, devastated, heartbroken. A part of her doesn’t even want to try to stop these feelings from building; she wants to take the lid off and let the foamy, furious heat of her emotions spill out over everything. But another part of her is already feeling it dissipate. In the end, what is it worth, being so angry about the mistakes they’ve all made? A day that goes by without letting the people she loves know that she loves them feels like a waste to her, a gross and dangerous game. She does not understand how her friends do not already know this about her, how they could have kept these secrets from her for so many years.
“What happened to us?” she asks, turn
ing her head toward Vanessa. “We used to be there for each other.”
Vanessa’s face softens. “It’s not too late,” she says.
Kate shivers. There is a prickling sensation traveling up her spine. She straightens, glancing over her shoulder at the staircase. “Do you think Dani is okay?” she asks.
“No,” Vanessa says. Then she looks more closely at Kate’s face and seems to understand what she is asking. She leaps to her feet at the same moment Kate does and in an instant they are rushing down the stairs, Gracie scrambling to catch up behind them.
Downstairs, the doors of all three bedrooms are ajar, but the bathroom door is shut. Kate flings it open.
Dani is standing by the sink. She spins around. Her face is pale and taut. “Holy fuck,” she says. “You scared me.”
“What are you doing?” Kate demands. Dani’s hands are balled into fists at her sides and before Kate even realizes what she is doing, she grabs them, wrenching Dani toward her. Dani spreads her fingers wide. Her hands are empty; her fingers tremble. Dani squeezes them back into fists and Kate releases her.
“Dani,” Vanessa says, her voice strangled. “You have to tell us. What did you do? Did you take something?”
“No,” Dani says. She gestures toward the toilet. Green pills are floating on the surface of the water. While they watch, Dani flushes the toilet and they are gone.