by Edwin Hill
She woke with a start. Her phone had beeped. It was a text from Wendy See you for brunch! Twig’s coming. Right after yoga.
Brunch? With awful Twig? On the day of the Crocus Party? The last thing Felicia needed was to have three hours of her day eaten up. It was 6:11, and time to get going.
*
Wendy sat in the back corner of the restaurant, tucked into a booth. As Felicia watched, two women at a nearby table whispered till one of them walked up to Wendy, and the next thing Felicia knew, Wendy had pressed her cheeks between the women’s faces as a waiter took a snapshot. That would wind up on Instagram in a matter of seconds. Felicia didn’t get the appeal Wendy held—she didn’t do much beyond post photos and opine on healthy living and take credit for other people’s recipes—but the society pages loved her, the Internet loved her, and so did these two women, apparently.
Felicia waited till the fuss was over before joining. “Your fifteen minutes keep ticking away,” she said. “Going national soon?”
Wendy ignored her, tapping away on her phone while Felicia ordered a Bloody Mary from the first waiter who rushed past, and then made sure he’d heard by repeating the order to the next waiter she saw. “Extra spicy,” she shouted after him.
“They know what you like,” Wendy said.
“I want it to be right.”
“They know that too.” Wendy checked her phone one more time. “Twig’s running late. She’ll meet us in a bit.”
Twig was always running late.
When the Bloody Mary arrived, Felicia felt the vodka flow into her bloodstream. She ordered another one, along with a mushroom omelet and a side of sausage. Wendy ordered a Cobb salad, no cheese, no bacon, dressing on the side.
“Virtuous,” Felicia said.
“I try,” Wendy said. “You look like you could use a Xanax,” she added, in a way that made Felicia wonder if Wendy had any idea what went into planning events like the one tonight.
“Or about two years on vacation.”
“My parents are taking you with them to South Africa in January.”
Keeping Pearly and Elise on schedule and entertained was hardly much of a vacation.
Their food arrived. Unlike Felicia, Wendy barely noticed food. She picked at a tomato from her salad, checking to be sure it was free of bleu cheese. “Why not take a real vacation?” she asked. “You’ve earned it.”
“And do what?”
“Go to Yosemite. Isn’t that on one of your lists?”
“It’s December,” Felicia said. “Maybe this summer.”
“That’s what you always say.”
Felicia had already managed to inhale most of her omelet. “What did you do last night?” she asked.
Wendy glanced off across the dining room, looking anywhere but at Felicia. “Not much.”
“Did you hang out with Aaron?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just curious,” Felicia said, signaling the waiter for the check.
After breakfast, Wendy managed to cajole Felicia onto the narrow streets of the South End and over to the open market, even though it was so cold out it hurt to breathe. “We’re meeting Twig there,” Wendy said when Felicia tried to bow out.
At the market, vendors and antique dealers and food trucks had taken up residence outside an abandoned factory. Crowds of people streamed through the winter farmer’s market, where Wendy dropped fifteen dollars on a bunch of organic beets and had Felicia take a photo, where Wendy looked charming and effortless. Like usual. Wendy sniffed a sample of clover blossom honey, and Felicia took a photo of that too. Later, she’d have to dig up some recipe that used both ingredients and write an essay to post. Wendy seemed to know everyone they saw. Half of them were coming to the party tonight. Inside the brick factory, they visited a booth filled with overpriced vintage furniture. Behind a mid-century modern sofa sat a vase covered in purple flowers. Crocuses. It sent Felicia straight to her to-do list.
“What’s wrong?” Wendy asked.
“Nothing,” Felicia said.
“Oh, stop,” Wendy said. “I know that look. The edges of your mouth have nearly hit the floor.”
It was the party. It was. And for a moment, Felicia contemplated running through every item on her list so that Wendy might finally understand. Instead, she said, “What’s going on with Aaron?”
“Aaron?” Wendy said. “Nothing.”
She said it emphatically. Too emphatically.
“Who is he?” Felicia asked.
“I don’t really know,” Wendy said. “You’re the one who found him.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that you don’t know anything about him? That he doesn’t have friends or family? I didn’t find anything about him online. Nothing. And here he is in your life.”
“Now you sound like my father,” Wendy said. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone could hear, and then whispered. “Why don’t you hire a detective? Have him dig up dirt. Honestly, I like the mystery. At least for now. We’ve known the guy for two weeks. He told me he knows Brennan Wigglesworth. They rowed crew together at Columbia. If you’re really curious, see what Brennan can tell you.”
Wendy looked up. Her face changed as she took on her public persona, a broad, welcoming smile, while a gaggle of women, all wearing nearly identical yoga outfits and carrying bouquets of sunflowers that couldn’t possibly be local, surrounded her and kissed her and exclaimed about her beets. The women filtered away till only one of them was left, Twig. Felicia hadn’t even noticed her there. Twig had an outdoorsy charm topped by a carefully colored blond ponytail.
“You know Felicia,” Wendy said.
“Of course,” Twig said, holding out a hand. Her fingers were cold and her hand bony. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
Twig had lived two halls over from Felicia and Wendy at Boston College, and had gone to prep school with Wendy. By now, she’d met Felicia for the first time at least a hundred times.
“Felicia’s helping with the party tonight!” Wendy said. “You’ll be there, right?”
“I wouldn’t miss it!” Twig said. “I helped plan it.”
Twig had a way of making Felicia feel invisible, which usually enraged her. But today, she took advantage of it. She left Wendy and Twig to their own “plans” and hurried off toward Beacon Hill. The list called!
*
Sam stomped his feet free of ice. He passed by Gabe’s room, where he heard the clack of a keyboard behind the closed door and smelled pot smoke. He didn’t belong here. He belonged somewhere beautiful, somewhere special. He envisioned the party later on, filled with girls in cocktail dresses and boys with square jaws. He imagined Wendy standing by his side, all eyes turned to them as they raised their glasses to toast their guests. He saw himself truly belonging.
In his own room, he took a new postcard from his bag. It was a photo of a pot of crocuses. On it, he wrote, I just want to go back to my room, a quote from The Shining, and addressed the card to Lila. Later, he’d drop it in the mail on his way to the benefit. He wished he’d chosen a movie with more hope to represent Boston, but then he suspected that the notes to Lila would end soon. He’d told himself that when he finally finished his journey, that he’d fade out of Lila’s life for good, and away from everything that had come before. Besides, with Wendy at his side, New Hampshire and Little Comfort wouldn’t matter anymore.
He’d started sending the cards when he’d first moved to San Francisco. He’d felt out of place in that city and in his new life there, and then he saw Alien at the Castro Theatre, and he met Ellen, who he thought might take him places, so he’d sent off the first card with a quote from the movie. A part of him had wanted to remind his sister that he was still out there, that in a way everything that had happened on the lake had been her fault. Gabe had told Lila about the motel, but she didn’t want to believe him. Sam had tried to picture the look on her face when the card arrived, and had wondered if she’d shown it to anyone. No one had ever come looking for Sam in
San Francisco, and in the end, Lila, he suspected, had been as glad to be rid of him as he’d been to escape New Hampshire.
Sam’s phone beeped. Felicia Nakazawa’s round face popped up on the screen beneath a message asking when he planned to arrive at the benefit tonight. She’d been texting all day. See you there! he texted back.
But WHEN??? Felicia texted an instant later. I don’t want to be alone.
Sam turned the phone off. The last thing he wanted was to have Felicia hanging on him all night long. He needed to meet the right people and prove to Wendy that he could hold his own. He slipped into the silk shirt and slim-cut pants Wendy had bought for him at Drinkwater’s. He put on cuff links and made sure they peeked out from his jacket sleeves. He slicked his freshly cut hair into a classic part and donned a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that showed off his cheekbones.
Out in the hallway, Gabe stood in his bedroom doorway wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Sam could have landed a helicopter on his pupils.
“The party’s tonight,” Sam said.
“You look like a movie star.”
Even after all these years of living together, it still surprised Sam that Gabe found him so attractive. They’d never hooked up, not once, but Sam often wondered what would have happened if he’d initiated it. Sex was powerful, especially with someone impressionable like Gabe, and it could have shifted Sam’s sense of control, the idea that he could count on Gabe for anything at any time.
He remembered watching Gabe at school that first year, before that easy summer, before Gabe had begun spending more and more nights with him and Lila. He heard other kids whispering, calling Gabe a freak. But he always felt Gabe’s presence, felt his eyes boring into him from across the room, and it made Sam want to know what Gabe wanted.
Once spring came, Sam noticed that Gabe disappeared into the hills around the school after classes ended, so one day in early June he followed him up one of the hiking paths. The day was unseasonably hot, and he hadn’t gone a hundred yards when a trickle of sweat ran down his back and gnats swarmed his head. He turned a bend and came to a halt when he found Gabe splayed on a discarded blue-and-white-striped mattress.
“Gabe DiPursio,” Sam said, as if they’d met there a hundred times before.
Gabe seemed so surprised that Sam had remembered his name that he checked over each shoulder as though another Gabe DiPursio might be there.
“Yeah, you,” Sam said, taking out a joint and lighting it up, and then handing it to Gabe, who looked as though he’d never seen anything like it before. “This is where you come to get high, right?” Sam asked. Why else would someone have an old mattress behind the school?
“Where’d you get that?” Gabe asked.
“Old Man Twombly. The janitor. Hands ’em out like candy if you know how to ask.”
“How do you ask?”
“You don’t. He just sort of knows.”
Sam jumped onto the mattress next to Gabe. Sam had always been the type who didn’t have to ask. He had a girlfriend when he wanted one (which was almost never) and enraged teachers by getting A’s without studying. He ran a finger along a yellow stain on the mattress. “These yours?” he asked, licking his fingers, which made Gabe blush.
“Playing with you, Gabby,” Sam said, passing him the joint again. “Take a chill pill.”
Gabe inhaled ineptly, but Sam could see the mellow go through him in a wave.
Sam closed his eyes and lifted his freckled face to the sun. “Word is you’re a serial killer. That’s what they say about you at school, at least. True?”
And when he looked at Gabe again, he could see that he’d replaced mellow with paranoia.
“Don’t worry about it, Gabby,” Sam said, with a wave of his hand. “Secret’s safe with me. I’ve got one too. Want to know what it is?
“Why would I?” Gabe managed to ask.
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “You tell me.”
And he waited. He suspected that Gabe had plenty of secrets. Plenty of dreams. He suspected that more than anything in the world, Gabe wanted someone to remember his name.
“Tell me,” Gabe finally said.
“Patience,” Sam said, pulling himself up from the mattress and ambling toward the path. “Meet me tonight. On the lake. Midnight. I’ll show you then.”
Later, the two of them crept down to Little Comfort, where they took the canoe and paddled to a camp Sam knew would be empty. “My sister and I clean these houses,” Sam said. It felt dirty to even admit that. “I always know when they’ll be empty.”
The camp was enormous. Hardly a camp at all, and inside, Sam raided the pantry and found two boxes of Chips Ahoy. In the great room, he mixed a concoction of gin, vodka, peach Schnapps, white crème de menthe, Kahlúa, cognac, Bailey’s, Frangelico, port, sherry, vermouth, and, finally, Chartreuse. A bit off the top of each bottle. He poured some for Gabe, who gagged on the first sip.
“Scrabble?” Sam asked as he dug through a stack of damp board games.
Six moves in, Sam slid AQUILINE onto a triple word score. “If you want to be one of these people,” he said, leaning back on the wicker settee, “you have to understand how they live. They drive beat-up Volvos and crow over ambrosia salad and know inherently that Exeter trumps Groton. Do you even know what Exeter is?”
It was obvious that Gabe didn’t have a clue. But he said, “Please,” with a roll of the eyes, and then laid CAT on the board, for a total of four points.
That whole first night together, Gabe never once said he wanted to leave, or protested at breaking the law. Sam didn’t learn about the motel till later in the summer, but deep down he sensed that Gabe hid a secret, and he suspected that for Gabe, finding a way to matter, a place to belong, trumped all reason. Gabe began staying for dinner, and when it was obvious he didn’t want to go home, staying the night as well. Lila didn’t seem to mind. After school ended for the summer, during the day the three of them would clean houses, and at night, the two boys would sneak onto the lake, where’d they’d live like the other half, for a few hours at least.
But when Sam was truly being honest with himself, he admitted that the real reason he’d kept Gabe around all these years was simple. Gabe came the closest he’d ever felt to having a friend, to genuinely believing that he liked someone.
Now, outside the house, Sam listened to the clack of his new heels on the pavement as the sound echoed through the crisp evening air. What he’d give to be at one of those camps right now, to be at the beginning all over again. At the corner, he turned toward the house. He could see Gabe’s silhouette in the first-floor window, lit up against the light from the hallway. He raised a hand to wave. Gabe waved back, his stare, even in the dark, so intense that it stopped Sam in his tracks.
*
At the stroke of eight p.m., Wendy stood on the marble staircase and toasted everyone at the benefit. She looked resplendent (a word Sam had long wanted the opportunity to use) in a violet-colored dress, velvet for the season. Her hair was perched on top of her head in a terrifying ball that threatened to explode. Sam stood in the crowd below, while Wendy kept to the speech she’d prepared about providing educational opportunities to returning vets. He looked over to the corner where Jamie Williams stood by himself drinking a beer from a bottle. The former soldier had worn his uniform like Sam had asked, along with his purple heart. Sam promised himself to make his way over there eventually.
At the end of the speech, Wendy raised a glass and encouraged guests to bid “often and generously” in the silent auction. Around them, the guests applauded and dispersed into the ballroom, where the string quartet began to play, and an army of waiters swooped in. Sam had to remind himself not to stare at the Sargent hanging in the foyer, or the butler, or the clothing, or the people. Already this felt like a night where anything that could go right would. The guests were as he’d imagined, the strapping young men and tarty women that Wendy collected. Sam piled a half dozen crabbies onto a cocktail napkin as the din of conversation ros
e around him. He said hello to Dymond. Across the crowded room, Wendy glanced at him over a bare shoulder. Her earrings sparkled in the lights. She’d seen him earlier, right when he’d arrived, and had whispered, “Find me if you’re feeling lonely,” as she’d squeezed his hand.
He raised his glass to her. She tilted her champagne flute in his direction and smiled, and then returned to her conversation.
“How long have you been here?”
Felicia appeared at Sam’s side. She wore a silver blouse and matching heels that she could barely stand in.
“Only a moment,” he said, kissing her chubby cheek. “You look like you’re about to topple over. Have you ever considered flats?”
Felicia shot him a glare. “Didn’t you get my texts?”
Sam imagined her texts piled up, each one angrier than the last. “Now you’ve found me,” he said.
She snatched a glass of champagne from a waiter passing by. “Welcome to society,” she said. “These people all talk to me like the hired help.”
Which, Sam nearly reminded her, she was. “Have you bid on anything?”
“I can’t afford anything.”
“That’s why they treat you like the help,” Sam said, taking her hand and leading her through the crowd. He’d made it, into this house and into this life, and even Felicia’s mood couldn’t dampen his spirit. People spilled from the foyer to the ballroom to the dining room. They sipped champagne and whiskey. Sam sampled caviar and mini lamb chops and steak tartare.
“Brennan!” Felicia said a moment later. Already blushing, she tottered up to a tall, bland-looking man in a navy blazer whom Sam recognized from a LinkedIn photo as Brennan Wigglesworth. Sam had used the site to learn that Brennan had gone to Columbia undergrad and Harvard Business School, and now, like Wendy, managed his family finances. Sam had also pulled up the Columbia web site and memorized dorms and professor’s names and curricula. He’d learned as many rowing terms as he could. He stuck out his hand and let “Brennan Wigglesworth,” trip off his tongue. “Good to see you again,” and when Brennan seemed confused, added, “Aaron Gewirtzman. No reason you’d remember me. Columbia. You were a senior when I was a first year. You captained the eight-man, and I barely made the four.”