All the Summer Girls

by Meg Donohue

  “Macaroni and cheese,” he says.

  “Of course.” Drew and Vanessa are equally inclined to cook out of boxes.

  He tells her that soon they’ll head up to the building’s rooftop deck to watch the fireworks. In the background, Vanessa can hear Lucy attempting to repeat the word “fireworks.” Lucy has no idea what this word means; she’s excited because her father is excited, and the sound of her little voice, which sounds even smaller over the phone, makes Vanessa’s heart contract. She can picture them sitting side by side at the round white Saarinen table in the kitchen. Drew has surely put too much pasta in Lucy’s bowl—he still has no sense of the portions for a two-year-old—and he’ll finish her dinner after his own. Tomorrow, he’ll run an extra mile on the High Line before work. Vanessa wishes she were at the table with them, both of them. She’s ready, she realizes, to go home.

  “Guess who we saw at the playground this morning,” Drew says.

  Vanessa braces herself, thinking of little Emma’s beautiful mother. She can only imagine how this woman must have smiled at her husband, seeing him at the playground twice in once weekend. Vanessa shakes her head abruptly at the thought. This can’t go on.

  “Who?” she asks.

  “Teri and Nick and little Luke.”

  Vanessa breathes. “They were at the playground with their three-week-old?”

  “I know,” Drew says. “Rookies.”

  They both laugh. On their weekend trips to the playground together, Drew and Vanessa find it hard not to snicker when a couple shows up with a mewling, sticky-eyed newborn. They exchange a look that they have perfected by now, a look that silently recalls the conversation they have had countless times on their walks home from these encounters: Do they think that baby is going to leap out of their arms for a turn on the slide? They should take advantage of their baby being a baby! Do adult things! Go to a museum! Have dinner with friends! Get drunk on martinis and rock the car seat with your foot when the baby gets fussy! Save yourself—for now. Soon enough, you’ll be living at the playground. But the truth is, they’d done the same thing when they were new parents. You feel that mewling, sticky-eyed newborn curl up against your heart and all of a sudden you find yourself doing all kinds of things you never would have thought you would do.

  “How are they?” Vanessa asks. She’s been thinking about Teri, wondering how she—and her gallery—is fairing in these early weeks.

  “Zombies in love,” Drew says. It’s another old joke—their nickname for the sleep-deprived, infatuated parents of newborns. If they ever form a band, they’ve decided, this is what they will call it: Zombies in Love. Drew had made this joke a week after they brought Lucy home from the hospital, and Vanessa remembers how the sound of her own laughter—throaty and strong—had been a relief, as welcome as the first bite of sashimi that she’d had in nearly a year.

  “Teri said that Francine Martin signed with her gallery,” Drew says. “I’m sure you already know that.”

  Weeks before the news became public knowledge, Teri told Vanessa that she had convinced the painter Francine Martin to switch representation from Nocelli to her own gallery. Martin was small potatoes for Nocelli but a coup for Teri’s fledgling gallery, and Teri’s career. The whole thing caused a bit of a scandal. This stuff was better than celebrity gossip to Vanessa. She lapped it up. She hadn’t told Drew because they had not been speaking much by then. She’d put it on her Things I Would Tell Drew If I Didn’t Want to Kill Him list.

  Since Drew and Vanessa first met at Francine Martin’s opening at Nocelli, Vanessa always hoped that he would buy her one of Martin’s pieces as an anniversary present, but this never happened. Drew never really liked Martin’s paintings, and marriage meant they both had to like the artwork that hung on their walls.

  “Anyway,” Drew says, “the opening for her first show with Teri is in a few weeks and Teri invited us. I thought we could go. I know how much you like her work.” He pauses. Vanessa waits and he continues. “And then I thought, why don’t we make a day of it? Ask your mom if she’ll come up and take care of Lucy—you know how happy that would make both of them. We could gallery-hop, go to the party, have a late dinner. . . .”

  Vanessa is quiet, listening, already envisioning this day, seeing herself chatting with Teri about art and babies, babies and art. Drew misses her. She has been distant for months and now he has spent three full days without her and he misses her. The truth is that she misses him too; it’s not, she realizes finally, that she can’t walk away, it’s that she doesn’t want to. And even though she can feel how much Drew misses her, she knows the thrill of the chase as well as anyone, she knows what it’s like to want something because it seems out of reach. She wonders how long she and Drew can play this game, the seesaw of their relationship ever tilting, never still. Maybe forever. She finds that the possibility of this excites her. Then again, right now she is on top.

  “Vanessa?” Drew asks. “Are you there?”

  She spots a pink shell and picks it up for Lucy.

  “Yes,” she says, turning back toward the house. In her mind, she’s already packing. “I’m here.”

  21

  Dani

  Dani wishes she could concentrate on these last hours with Kate and Vanessa—it’s nighttime now and they will leave Avalon in the morning—but she is questioning whether she can really do this, live a sober life in Avalon. She is angry with herself for flushing those pills, still picturing the last one swirl out of sight. Just knowing they were there, if she needed them, helped. Now that they’re gone, she feels a clench of panic. Then again, she’s not a quitter. She said she would do this, so she would. She would try.

  She’s going to scrap her book and start something new. There’s a risk to this. She could spend her entire life writing books she won’t publish. Some old dogs just can’t learn new tricks. But she remembers now that Kate once told her this is a lie: even the oldest dog can learn a new trick, you just need to know what motivates them. Never underestimate an old dog, Kate had said.

  “The fireworks are going to start soon,” Vanessa says. All three of them laugh. Maybe it’s the lazy, bored way she said those words, or maybe it’s the fact that they’ve had their fill of fireworks before the actual show even begins—either way, they laugh together. They’re lying on the chaises on the upper deck. Above them, the sky is midnight blue and darkening. Below, the shadowed dunes whisper.

  “I don’t like fireworks,” Dani says.

  “Of course you don’t,” Vanessa says.

  “What’s not to like?” Kate asks. “They’re pretty.”

  “Art for the people,” Vanessa offers.

  “That’s a stretch,” Dani says.

  “I’m starving,” Kate says, propping herself up on an elbow. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Pizza?” Dani suggests. She turns to Vanessa. “I’ll order if you pay.”

  Vanessa rolls her eyes. “You’re irresistible.”

  Dani calls Circle Pizza from her cell phone. They lie in companionable silence for a while, listening to the Grateful Dead and the occasional pop of distant fireworks. Eventually, Kate swings her feet to rest on the floor. She stands, groaning. “I’m going to take a shower,” she says. “I’ll be out by the time the pizza gets here.” Kate has always had a sixth sense for the timing of food delivery. In high school when Dani and her father would order an early Sunday dinner of Thai food, the doorman would announce Kate’s arrival minutes before their food arrived.

  Vanessa follows Kate downstairs to change out of her bathing suit, leaving Dani alone on the deck. A light breeze is coming off the ocean and a few stars are now visible above. She wonders how many times she has sat on this deck, under this configuration of stars. The Grateful Dead is still spilling out onto the deck from the inside stereo.

  She’s a summer love for spring, fall, and winter.

  It’s her father’s favorite song. Dani picks up her cell phone and when her call goes straight to voice mail, she pi
ctures her father sitting across from Susanna at a table in a restaurant. Suz will be at the table from now on. It is what it is, she thinks, listening to the sound of her father’s recorded voice.

  “Hey, Dad,” she says. “It’s me, Dani, your favorite daughter. I just wanted you to know we found the beach tags. Also, as it happens, I left my congratulations next to the coffeepot as well. I’m sorry I forgot to tell you. Like father, like daughter, I guess. Anyway, call me.” She imagines her father listening to this message at some point and smiling, the strange and funny language of love that will warm the conversation they’ll have whenever they finally get hold of each other.

  Dani is still alone on the upstairs deck when the doorbell rings. She hurries inside and down the stairs, grabbing the cash that Vanessa left on the entryway table. She gives the pizza delivery guy a generous tip; with all of the Fourth of July barbecues taking place on the island tonight, he’s probably not making much money. The screen door slams behind her as she turns, pizza box in hands. Kate, of course, is standing there, looking freshly scrubbed. Her water-darkened hair gives her freckled skin an ethereal quality.

  “Oh, hello there, gooey goodness,” Kate says to the pizza box.

  Dani feels a burst of joy spin and flash inside of her just as, outside, there is the machine-gun crack of fireworks. Kate’s jaw tenses. She turns toward the staircase and cocks her head as though listening for something. When Kate looks at Dani again, her eyes are wide.

  “Where’s Gracie?” she asks.

  A bristly heat wraps around Dani’s neck. “I don’t—” she begins, but Kate is already racing up the stairs.

  Dani is halfway up the steps when she hears footsteps behind her. She looks back, but it’s just Vanessa. In the living room, Kate is staring at the screen door to the deck. It’s open. Dani drops the pizza box onto the kitchen counter and rakes her fingers through her hair, her pulse loud in her ears. She’d left the door open in her hurry to get downstairs when the pizza arrived. She had done this.

  “Gracie!” Kate yells. The house is silent. She runs out to the deck and Dani and Vanessa follow. “Gracie!” The breeze has picked up, and Gracie’s name is lost in it.

  “Gracie!” Dani yells.

  “Gracie!” Vanessa yells.

  Don’t do this, Gracie, Dani thinks, gritting her teeth. Please.

  Kate is hurrying down the outside staircase now. She’s standing in the middle of the street when Dani and Vanessa catch up with her. All three of them are barefoot.

  “Fireworks spook her,” Kate says. She points at Vanessa. “She might be hiding somewhere in the house. Check under the beds. Check everywhere.”

  Vanessa jogs back toward the house.

  “I’m going this way,” Kate says to Dani, pointing toward First Avenue just as a car flies by, surely going faster than the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. Another car flies by in the opposite direction. People drive too damn fast on this island. Dani remembers seeing a dead cat by the side of the road when they’d pulled off the bridge. “You take the beach,” Kate says and then she’s off, running down the block.

  Dani turns and hurries along the winding path through the dunes to the beach, feeling the pavement quickly give way to sand under her bare feet. To the north, fireworks explode in the sky, one burst of color after another, raining sparks down on the ocean. The pier glows with each burst above, disappearing between sets into the inky night. Dani turns to look south. It’s darker this way, so this is the direction she runs, yelling for Gracie.

  As she nears the water, something cuts into her foot. She stumbles, foot throbbing, and keeps running, five, maybe ten blocks of beach. The Wildwood Ferris wheel is in the distance, it’s lights spinning through the air, tracing the same circle over and over.

  “Gracie!” she yells. “Gracie!”

  The look on Kate’s face, the panic and the fear, is replaying in Dani’s mind as she runs. This isn’t worth it, she thinks. It’s not worth loving something that can so easily be lost. Still, she doesn’t stop running. She hasn’t run this fast, or this far, in years. She left that door open. She can’t believe she left that door open. Her mind is racing ahead of her feet, building the story of what will happen if she doesn’t find Gracie.

  And then she sees her.

  Gracie is snout deep in a Tupperware container in the middle of a picnic dinner that has turned into a scene of multigenerational bedlam. An older couple is racing around, trying to catch a flurry of white napkins that are flying in the wind; a younger man is unsuccessfully attempting to yank Gracie away by the collar; a red-haired kid with sunburned arms and a face full of snot and sand is wailing while a woman frantically waves a lollipop in front of his face.

  “Gracie!” Dani calls. Gracie’s ear flicks in recognition as she wolfs down a few final bites.

  The man looks at her. “Is this your dog?” he asks angrily.

  “She knocked our son over!” the woman says. “She ate our potato salad!”

  “I’m so sorry,” Dani says, but she can’t help it, she’s laughing and she can’t seem to stop. She’s never been so happy to see a dog in her whole life. The relief that is coursing through her is like a drug, like that elusive, soaring high of her first hit of Ecstasy with Colin all those years ago. She didn’t think she’d ever feel that way again.

  “Come on,” she says, grasping Gracie’s collar. The potato salad is ancient history now and Gracie comes easily, tail wagging. Tears sting Dani’s eyes, surprising her.

  She hobbles back toward the house with Gracie’s collar gripped tightly in her fist. Her lungs feel hot and raw, her feet cut and bruised. “You’re a bad, bad dog,” she mutters, still smiling, and Gracie wags her tail. “Goddamn fleabag.” She ruffles Gracie’s head.

  The fireworks show is over now. Pun intended, Dani thinks. There is darkness everywhere except for the moon on the ocean and the glow of houses beyond the dunes. They’re nearly back to the Thirty-Eighth Street beach when Dani sees Kate running through the dry sand toward them. Vanessa lags behind her. When Kate reaches them, she drops to her knees and throws her arms around Gracie, who licks the side of her face and then belches loudly.

  Kate snorts a laugh, wiping at her tears. She looks up at Dani. “Thank you.”

  “I was the one who left the door open,” Dani says.

  “It could have been anyone.”

  Dani isn’t sure if this is true. It seems to her that Kate or Vanessa would not have let this happen, that they operate on a more thoughtful level than Dani, even on the days when Dani is really trying. Maybe Kate can read these thoughts, because she pulls Dani down to sit beside her in the sand and puts her arm around her. Vanessa joins them, huffing and puffing as she lowers herself down to Dani’s other side. They sit in a row—Gracie, Kate, Dani, then Vanessa—looking out at the ocean.

  “Someone once told me,” Kate says, “that you have to give yourself permission to be happy. You have to decide you deserve it.”

  Vanessa groans. “You sound like my mother. Please don’t tell me you’re drawing energy from crystals.”

  “I’ve always loved your mother,” Dani says. “She bakes a mean pot brownie.”

  Vanessa asks Kate who gave her these words of wisdom.

  “I can’t remember,” Kate says. The slow way she says this makes Dani think she is not telling the truth. Was it Colin? It doesn’t sound at all like Colin, but that was the thing about Colin—there was always something unknowable about him, even then.

  “Anyway,” Kate says, turning to Dani, “my point is that you deserve it. Happiness.”

  Tomorrow evening, hours after Kate and Vanessa have left, Dani might eye the sunset and crave a drink. But not, she realizes, tonight. Tonight she is with Kate and Vanessa and they know the truth about what she did to Colin and they’re sitting here with her anyway. Her body is still aching and warm and she can imagine her bones finally thawing, and for now, this feeling of warmth is enough.

  O. K. Dani traces these letters on
her thigh, like she used to do back in Friends Meeting at PFS. Even in the dark, Kate and Vanessa know what she is doing and smile. It’s a strange feeling, being aware that she is changing even as it’s happening. She thinks of the bathroom door where her father used to mark her growth from summer to summer with a Sharpie pen, the funny feeling she got when she saw the space between the lines, the shock when there was no longer any space and she realized she was grown.

  “Maybe,” Vanessa says, “none of us did this to Colin.”

  Dani holds her breath.

  “Or maybe we all did,” Kate says.

  Dani looks at Kate. Her words are a small current of air in a room without a window, an impossible thing, a gift.

  “I can’t believe we have to leave tomorrow,” Vanessa says.

  “I know,” Kate says.

  Dani can feel the hum of their excitement—Kate has a job and a city she loves to return to, a baby to plan for, and Vanessa has her own little family, imperfectly in love with one another.

  “But you’ll be back, right?” Dani asks.

  “Sure,” Vanessa says. “Next summer.”

  “Next summer?” Dani asks. “What about this summer? The whole point of the Fourth of July is to whet your appetite for the rest of the season.”

  “That’s the whole point of the Fourth of July?” Vanessa asks. “Are you sure?”

  “Speaking of appetite,” Kate says, standing and wiping the sand from her knees, “should we go eat that pizza?”

  Dani knows Kate has had that pizza on her mind for a while now, probably ever since she saw Gracie was okay. A Kate is a Kate is a Kate. Vanessa rises too and pulls Dani to her feet. For just a beat of time, none of them move, and Dani catches a glimpse of a new novel unfolding—a cast of quirky characters in a beach town in the off-season, a teacher who looks like Hemingway, a lost dog, and maybe even, if Dani can stomach it, a happy ending. Gracie barks and races forward and they all begin to run, not wanting to lose her again.