Kat crossed her arms and closed her eyes tight. When she opened them again, she looked very angry. “Hunter, what the fuck? Why are you out getting drunk and talking to people about this?”
“Kat, I swear to God I haven’t said a word about anything to anyone. I never will. She just brought it up out of the blue!”
“But doesn’t it seem weird that you guys just met and she had all these ideas about Kyle? Doesn’t it seem fucking weird, Hunter?”
It did seem weird. “I don’t know. I guess so. I don’t think she was, like, following me, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
The look on Kat’s face changed to disgust. “Oh, you don’t think so? Because your judgment is so reliable? Did it ever occur to you, Hunter, that this would be a good time to give it a rest with the girls? Sorry, the women. I don’t usually care if you fuck your way through the whole island, but now you’re putting us in danger.”
Hunter knew she was right. But her tone...it was too cruel. His whole body stiffened in defense. “Well, what should I do, Kat? Should I stay home and rot in my house forever like you? Just hide out until the last few friends I have give up on me? I mean, what’s your plan here?”
There was a noise at the street level that they both ignored.
“Fuck you for trying to turn this on me, Hunter! This is all on you.” She began collecting dirty dishes from the counter and putting them indelicately into the sink. “And now this woman knows something...or she suspects something... Fuck it, I’m going to the cops. I can’t do this.”
There was that sound again, a knock.
“You’re not going to the cops,” Hunter scoffed. “You know exactly what happens if you try to tell your nice little story to the cops now. So just stop threatening me with that. This is as much yours as it is mine. If you really wanted to come clean, you would have done it that night. But you didn’t. And you won’t.”
The thumping stopped, a door creaked and then there were footsteps pounding up Kat’s stairs. They were Sean’s footsteps.
He got to the top of the stairs and looked from Kat to Hunter, then back to Kat. “What’s this? What’s going on?”
Kat let forth a burst of exasperated air and ran her hands through her hair.
Hunter said nothing. He was waiting for her.
“What’s going on, Kat?” Sean demanded.
“It’s Hunter’s drinking,” she blurted. “Have you noticed that he’s kind of spiraling right now? I thought someone should say something. That’s what we’re arguing about.”
Hunter shook his head and looked out the window toward the black ocean. It wasn’t fair that he should be the foil, but he understood the importance of keeping Sean out of this. It was a good lie, but it felt awful.
Sean’s cheeks were red. He looked like maybe he’d had a few drinks himself. “I don’t think that’s what you were arguing about.”
“It is,” Hunter said.
Kat nodded.
The three of them stood looking at each other in the middle of her tiny, cluttered apartment.
“I don’t think so.”
Kat should go to him, that was what Hunter thought. She should put her arms around Sean and burst into tears, maybe accuse Hunter of coming on to her. That would really sell this story. But she didn’t do that and, although their secret was in peril, Hunter was glad.
“No.” Sean clenched his fists at his sides. “No, I get it. I knew about you guys. I saw it, but didn’t think you’d really... But clearly I’d underestimated... You know what, fuck you, Hunter! And you, Kat...” He swallowed and shook his head.
Kat looked panicked. “No, Sean, that’s not it! Hunter and I would never.”
“For real, man,” Hunter said. “I wouldn’t. I swear.”
Sean’s eyes darted back and forth between them. It seemed like he was almost there. He wanted to believe them. But Hunter recognized that sick, suspicious sense that the world might be keeping secrets from you. Sean wasn’t wrong about that; they were keeping secrets from him.
“No,” Sean whispered. “Fuck you both.”
He thudded down the stairs. Kat went after him, though not as fast as she could have. Hunter could hear her calling after him into the dark from the doorway. She was barefoot. Running after him would have been a dramatic gesture. It might have been a good idea, but she didn’t do it.
Hunter couldn’t decide if he wanted Sean to believe their story. He knew he should. Sean was his friend and it had been awful to watch him feel so betrayed. Plus, he wasn’t sleeping with Kat. There was no betrayal. But it was also true that Sean was in the way. Kat and Hunter needed to get through this time on their own. They needed to get to the stage when Kyle’s death was a closed case and distant memory. Then—maybe—things could get back to normal between the three of them. Until then, Sean was a threat.
“I’m sorry,” Kat said when she returned. “I didn’t handle that well.”
“I’m sorry too. Do you think you guys...”
“I think he’ll come back. I hope.” She sat down at the table and rubbed her face. “The sad thing is, I’m more worried about everything else right now than Sean. I’m worried about this scientist.”
“Ashley.”
“Yes, Ashley.” She stretched the name out slow and sarcastically. “So what are you going to do about her?”
“What can I do?”
Kat considered the question. “You can keep sleeping with her. Keep an eye on her, you know?”
Hunter sat down. God, he was tired. He looked around the kitchen.
“I don’t have anything to drink,” she said.
He shook his head. “It’s fine. That’s not... Anyhow, I don’t think I can sleep with her again. She scares me a little.”
“You can take her to dinner.”
“Yeah, I could do that. I was thinking about doing that anyhow, before all this, so maybe it’s not a completely dishonest thing to do.”
“I think you have to.”
He nodded, strangely grateful for the assignment. Hunter generally considered himself to be more of a burden than a help to the people around him. He was certainly a burden to his family. He was occasionally a burden to his friends—something he’d learned early in life could be alleviated through extreme generosity. But he did not take this burden lightly. It was a source of great shame, in fact. And so when opportunities for sacrifice presented themselves, Hunter tried to take advantage of them. It seemed stupid to consider sleeping with a beautiful woman a sacrifice, but he wanted badly to never see Ashley again, and so it actually was. It was his contribution to their safety.
The thing Hunter could never adequately explain to Kat was that even this mess with Kyle had been, in a way, an attempt at sacrifice. Not Kyle’s death—that was a mistake. But Hunter’s decision to keep it quiet was intended to be an offering to his father. He knew his father wouldn’t want him to go to the police. He knew all the ways in which he’d be fucking things up for his father’s reelection campaign, his awful stepmother’s social standing and the esteemed Briggs family name if he went to the police. He actually wanted to go to the cops and just pay the price of a clear conscience. But he’d screwed up so many times in recent years, and he felt that the least he could do was give his father the choice for how to move forward. No one thanked him—and no one should—but he believed in his heart that keeping quiet was a small peace offering to his family.
Kat thought he did it because of the money. Hunter told her he’d be cut off from the family if he tanked the campaign, which is probably true, but it wasn’t the reason he did it. It just seemed easier than trying to explain that his asshole father was still his father, and if there was a chance to do the right thing—or not really the right thing, but the diplomatic thing—he wanted to try.
Kat stood up, so Hunter stood up. It was midnight and they both looked like hell. He f
orced a thin smile of solidarity. It was just the two of them now. There were only two people in the world with this secret.
And then Kat leaned in and let her forehead smash into Hunter’s shoulder. She pressed hard and exhaled. He could feel her breath through his shirt, a shuddering, pained breath, like she’d been holding it in for days. It would have been normatively acceptable to put his arms around her upper body at that moment as a gesture of comfort, but he couldn’t do it, not moments after being accused of betrayal by Sean. Kat probably understood. So he just stood there, with the weight of her head on his shoulder.
When all the breath had been drained from Kat’s body, she sank back into her chair.
Hunter turned off a few lights in the apartment, walked down the stairs and out the door.
Every night ended alone, no matter how long he put it off.
Chapter 6
The sun was just appearing above the high tide, which meant that Sean had been sitting on the dock of the boatyard for about six hours. He had two wool blankets wrapped around himself, and a hat on his head, but he was still freezing in the deck chair. The sun’s return was a relief.
Sean couldn’t stop thinking about the sound of their voices as they’d argued. Kat’s resentment and sarcasm, Hunter’s seething pauses. It wasn’t the sound of platonic friends fighting. Sean was absolutely sure that what he walked in on the night before was something intimate, even if it was angry intimacy. He was less sure of what it meant.
There was only one logical response to what he’d seen, and that was to accuse them of an affair and storm out. But an affair seemed unlikely to Sean...more likely now, but still improbable. Hunter might be capable of such a thing; it wasn’t a pleasant thought since Sean had really grown to trust the guy. Kat, on the other hand, didn’t have such deceit in her. He was almost sure of that. And it wasn’t just the deceit. Kat wasn’t one to squander a good thing. She had a strong sense of gratitude and everyone who knew her knew that she was grateful for the life she had on the island. It seemed so unlikely that she would do something as self-destructive as cheat on him.
And yet, he’d seen what he’d seen. There was something exclusive between Kat and Hunter. Maybe they were considering an affair, or he was propositioning her and she was declining. Maybe something had happened already and they were considering how to break the news to dumb, oblivious Sean.
That was how Sean spent the night at the boatyard, going around and around with his thoughts. Every time he began to relax and consider that what he’d seen was a mirage, his imagination would kick in again and the terrible possibilities multiplied. He imagined their naked bodies together, her smooth skin against his. Worst of all, Sean imagined them laughing to themselves about what a fool he was for not knowing. He couldn’t go home alone and he didn’t know who to talk to about it all, so he’d just sat down in a deck chair and drifted in and out of nervous, frigid sleep on the dock of the boatyard all night long.
A blurry figure walked down the beach toward Sean. As it drew closer, he realized it was his mother on one of her early morning walks. She started taking those walks when his father died years before. She’d walk up and down the beaches, along the grassy pathways and boardwalks, sometimes for miles. Vineyard beaches weren’t the sort you could jog mindlessly along. They demanded more attention than that—an intricate and changing series of sands, cliffs, marshes and craggy rock borders. Orla liked the distraction.
As soon as she recognized him, Orla climbed up the dock and went to her son. “Early day for you, love.” Her forehead wrinkled in concern.
“Yeah. Late, early, I don’t know.”
She tilted her head and a salt-and-pepper lock of hair blew across her face. Orla had a weathered, unadorned beauty that Sean thought exquisite. “Sean, what is it?”
He looked away from her at the water. “I don’t really know. I don’t think I want to talk about it until I know what it is.”
“Something about Kat?”
“Yeah.”
Orla nodded because that was enough for her. She had always needed fewer words than Sean, less of a crowd, more time in her head with her art. It allowed for a very low-key parenting style, which had felt alternately liberating and aloof to his younger self.
“Maybe a walk?” she asked.
Sean agreed and hoisted himself out of the deep chair. He wasn’t eager to feel the movement of his frozen bones and stiff muscles, but he needed to do something.
Orla led the way along the concrete path that snaked through overgrown bushes. Beneath their feet was a dusting of the coarse, ubiquitous Vineyard sand that Sean hardly noticed anymore. That sand lived in every pocket of every pair of pants he had ever owned. It collected in the heels of his shoes. Sometimes it was in the center of a fresh sandwich or a crevice of warm skin. Sean figured he was about one percent sand by now; no point in fighting it. If you live on the Vineyard long enough, the borders between you and the land start to blur. Nothing felt impermeable to Sean anymore; that was the lesson of the sand.
“Looks like that storm spared us,” he said from behind his mother. “Just kept moving eastward.”
“Thank God. We can’t take any more of those storms.” Orla’s steps sounded more labored than usual.
“Because of the cliffs, you mean?”
She sighed. Orla was anxious about it. They all were. Sean meant to revisit the question of their collapsing bluffs, but he’d been so wrapped up in Kat’s baffling behavior that he’d briefly forgotten.
His mother was still in a state of denial. She wasn’t ready to really think about the unsteady earth their glass shop sat upon. To broach the grief of her threatened shop would mean broaching other grief too—the memories of her late husband, the futility of her life’s work. She wasn’t ready for that.
“You and Kat can figure this out,” Orla said, changing the subject. “Whatever it is, you guys can figure it out.”
“Mom, I know you love Kat, but it’s complicated.” For the first time, Sean was beginning to resent Kat’s closeness to his mother.
“It’s more than that, Sean. She’s also wonderful with Weeta. And she’s a thoughtful person. She’s focused and serious. I like that too.”
Sean knew this. But he didn’t know it all. He didn’t know that Orla had planned the next chapter of her life around an assurance of Kat’s presence. Orla was passionate about her art, but levelheaded about life, and she knew what happened to so many old people on the island. They disappeared. One day, apparently, you just decide that the air is too cold or the medical services too thin. Maybe an adult child drives you to a pleasant apartment complex in a Boston suburb, one with ramps at low levels and MedicAlert buttons in every unit. Regardless of how it happens, it seemed to Orla that the whole world had conspired around this idea that there’s a day upon which island life is no longer appropriate.
Well, not for Orla. No way. That day would not come. She was going to live every last day on the island and die there like her husband had. It would have sounded morbid to explain, but the idea made her happy. Orla would stay until the earth or the ailing cells in her body took her. She wanted her final move to be from her Vineyard home to wherever it was her husband now resided. Heaven, probably, though who knew what really happened after death; she didn’t bother much with religion anymore. But this plan would only work if Sean didn’t stand in her way and there was someone to take over the glass shop...if it was still there when the time came.
And Kat, like an angel sent from heaven, could help her with both of those things. She could have Island Glass when it was time; she should have it. Kat was better than anyone she’d ever worked with. She was better than Orla. But she also understood something that Orla’s own son did not. She understood the idea of making one’s fate her own. There was a knowing in Kat—a knowing what she needed and wanted in this world—that Orla shared. And Orla was confident, irrationally perhaps,
that Kat would respect that about her. She was sure that when it was her turn for the great elderly golf cart roundup, Kat—and thereby, Sean—wouldn’t make her get on it. Kat would be an advocate for Orla when that day came.
Sean didn’t know any of these things about his mother’s plans. He only knew that he loved Kat, and Orla loved Kat, and they were all supposed to be a family. Until now. He wasn’t so sure now.
“Who’s that?” Orla put a hand up to block the sun in her view.
In the distance, they saw a small woman kneeling in the sand twenty feet from the water’s edge. At first it looked like she was praying, or perhaps crying, until they saw the tiny containers lined up before her. She was working on something with great attention.
Orla stepped off the boardwalk into a patch of dense bushes and walked toward the woman. Sean followed. It wasn’t the sort of thing they would have done in July, when the hordes of unfamiliar faces took over their island. But in late October, unfamiliar faces were more of a curiosity. One stranger on an empty beach demanded investigation.
“Hi there,” Orla yelled.
The woman looked up, startled. Her blond hair was tucked into a red woolly hat. “Hi!”
“What are you doing out here?”
The woman stood up and dusted sand from her backside. “Sedimentology. I’m just collecting samples right now... Hey, I remember you guys!”
There was something familiar about her, but Sean couldn’t place it.
“From the beach,” the woman explained. “I was down there on the morning of the buckling. That was your waterfront, right? I’m sure you don’t remember me. You were probably completely shocked that morning.”
But Sean did remember her now. It was the way she spoke, fast and expressive. He had the vague sense that he’d been rude on that morning.
“I’ve been meaning to track you down, actually,” the woman went on, packing her things into a knapsack as she talked. “I really need to get onto that beach to take some pictures and samples. The Vineyard cops still have it cordoned off.”
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