“I met a lot of college boys,” she admitted. “But they weren’t interested in a fourteen-year-old weirdo like me.”
“Stop, Estella,” I said.
“Anyway, no, Robbie wasn’t my first kiss.”
“I knew it! Come on, tell,” I demanded.
She was silent for a long time, and I finally prodded her side, making her yelp and wiggle away from my finger. She looked at me and worried her lip with her teeth. “All right, yeah, it was a college guy.”
“I knew it! Come on, details, I want details.”
“No, you don’t,” she said quietly.
“Jeez, Estella.” I sighed. “What’s the big deal?”
“It was Pretus,” she finally said.
Pretus? I’d only met him a few times: a middle-aged man balding early, prone to wearing bow ties, and startlingly dismissive of anyone who wasn’t in his daily math-driven world.
“Not that kind of kiss, your first real kiss,” I said. She looked at me, and when I saw her face, still and serious, I realized in horror what she was telling me.
“No,” I said.
“Yes.”
“My God, Estella. What happened? When?”
“He came into my room at night,” she said. “He just talked to me at first. He kissed me for the first time right after my fifteenth birthday.”
“Jesus,” I breathed. “Did you say anything?”
“To who?”
“Daddy? Mother? Anyone?”
“Daddy was caught up in the island. All he wanted to hear was how well I was doing. Pretus told me we had to keep it a secret.”
“But—Estella,” I started, afraid to voice the question. “Did he ever try . . . anything else?”
“Not until I was sixteen,” she said.
“Oh no, Estella, no. That bastard, that sick bastard.” My voice shook with the enormity of it. Estella, so vulnerable and shy, thrown into college too young, given over to the protective care of the brilliant professor and his wife. “What about his wife?” I asked.
“I didn’t think she knew at the time,” she said thoughtfully. “But I do now. I think she knew.”
“How?” I whispered. “How could it happen? How long did it go on?”
“It stopped that last summer,” she said.
“But you stayed with them after that, before you graduated.”
She nodded. “I had to graduate. I couldn’t leave, not that close to getting out of here. I threatened to tell, he threatened—”
“What?” I asked, incredulous that Pretus could possibly threaten anything.
She was silent a moment, and then propped herself up. “Connie?” she finally said, looking at me hard, searching out my eyes in the starlight. “Could we drop it? It was a long time ago.”
“But—”
“We can talk about it again, just not tonight, all right?”
I couldn’t help it, I opened my mouth to protest. But the words died on my lips. The clouds slid away from the moon, and in its light I saw the pain in her eyes, the muddled gray of a churning Gulf.
“Please,” she said.
I was disappointed, but nodded, thinking of all the things I wasn’t telling her, thinking of Luke and his twenty-four-year-old barista, of the life Estella thought was so perfect that was actually out of control and on the verge of collapse. Perhaps this was enough disclosure for the night. At least we’d both seemed to agree that Carson was off-limits.
I felt closer to her than I had since we were children, and to my astonishment, it was because of her. I had always thought it would be up to me, that I would have to lay myself bare and beg her friendship. It was a start, made by her, and I was grateful for that much.
“Thank you,” she said quietly and lay back against the dune. I flopped over with a sigh and joined her in gazing into the night sky, desperately searching for something to take her mind off Pretus.
“So. Tate, huh? How was he?” I asked, and she laughed.
“You don’t know?”
“No,” I said, surprised she had to ask. “No, that summer, that was it.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know either. He stopped it. It was pretty humiliating, actually. I went back to Atlanta the next day. This is the first time I’ve seen him since.”
I suddenly understood the tension between them.
“Yeah, well,” she continued. “I guess it all came back, being here.” She glanced at me quickly. “Don’t worry. I’ll get over it.”
“I hope so, because we’re going to Little Dune with him on Saturday,” I said, rolling toward her again.
She groaned. “Give me back my city,” she said. “You two can have all this nature stuff. What’re we going to do on Little Dune? Wrestle gators? Admire Tate while he rows us manfully across the cut?”
“Maybe he’ll take his shirt off,” I suggested with a leer, and she laughed before she pushed me over with her legs, covering me in sand and memories. “Come on,” I said, jumping up, pulling her with me despite her protesting groan. We stood with our opposite hands clasped and I pushed her away and then pulled her toward me, and just like that we fell back into it. We danced in the soft sand, stumbling and giggling and reacquainting our adult bodies with the easy rhythm of the surf and each other.
We worked our way back to the house tethered to each other with our fingers, never breaking contact as we twirled under and around, and followed the moonlight home.
Estella
I feel cleansed with telling her, as though my lungs had been filled with sand and now had finally been blown out. My head is not pounding now, the way it had been since we crossed the bridge. But when I look past the relief, I know we have not talked about what we should.
Connie makes jokes and dances, but it lies between us like the cut between Big Dune and Little Dune. It is a cut itself. It pains me, slit open again like it is. I want to take stitches to it. Scars can be prevented when sewn up with care, but I’ve not been taught that particular skill. My stitches will be ragged, clumsily done. How many will it take?
We have been here for all of three days, and I have to keep pulling them out and starting again. Connie doesn’t even know how I’ve bungled it. She is the patient, out on the table, sedated with her perfect life in Verona.
My head begins to throb again. It is back. I hear the faraway thunks of the front door dead bolts again, hear Connie climb the stairs, thirteen of them.
I close my eyes. Thirteen.
Three facts about thirteen:
The first prime gap of thirteen occurs between one hundred thirteen and one hundred twenty-seven.
A Chinese abacus has thirteen columns.
Thirteen is the smallest permutable prime.
The three facts won’t be enough tonight. I could keep going:
Thirteen is the smallest prime that can’t be part of a Sophie German pair.
The olive branch on the back of a dollar bill has thirteen leaves.
Ptolemy’s treatise, Almagest, is thirteen volumes.
Thirteen is the concatenation of the first two triangular numbers.
I think about Connie and me dancing in front of the dunes and fall asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Estella obviously had a better night’s sleep than I did. I heard her climb the stairs in the morning while I was still trying to stop my mind from racing around her confessions of the night before. My hands felt branded from her touch, as though she’d communicated as much through her sand-covered palms as she had with her words.
She was on the phone when I finally pulled myself out of bed and arrived upstairs. She grinned when she saw me, and I knew the previous night had been real. She pointed to the phone and mouthed Mother.
“So you’re getting caught up on all your work then?” she said, her voice all honey and concern.
I shook my head at her with a smile.
“I’m sorry too,” she said. “She’s right here, hang on.” She covered the mouthpiece. “She’s still under a bit of pressure, po
or thing.”
I took the phone. “Hello, Mother.”
“Hello, dear. Is everything going okay up there?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “We haven’t gotten much done yet, but we’re going to head upstairs as soon as I get off the phone.”
“Has Bob called?”
“No. Why? Do you know something?”
“No, he won’t discuss it with me,” she said, sounding miffed.
I felt a bit of grudging respect for Bob, though I didn’t doubt that he would let plenty slip in the coming weeks.
“And how are you two getting along?” she asked, lowering her voice as though Estella might hear.
I could have said, We’re as different as we always were. I could have said, I have no idea, it changes every hour, but last night gives me hope. Instead, I said, “Fine, just fine.”
“I’m so pleased to hear that, Connie. Have you spoken to the boys?”
“Carson called from camp last night. He seems to be very happy. I tried to catch Gib, but nobody was home.”
“Well, that’s how teenagers are, I suppose, always out with their friends.”
“I suppose. We’ll call you later in the week, Mother. Love you,” I said. She reminded me once again that she wanted the oil paintings and finally allowed me to hang up. Estella slid a mug across the counter and poured me a cup of coffee.
“I’m going for a swim,” she said. “Do you want to come?”
I looked out the sliders and saw the next-door neighbor warming up on the beach. “Sure,” I said. “No swimming for me, but maybe I’ll talk to your friend. And then we have to get to work.”
“Her name’s Vanessa,” she said. “And she’s from New Zealand.”
Vanessa had a charming accent, and she was considerably older than I had thought. She stretched and swayed while I sat nearby with my coffee and watched my sister struggling in the Gulf. By the time Estella flopped down next to me, sending little droplets of water showering to the sand, I had made plans for the two of us to watch the sunset from Vanessa’s widow’s walk that night. Estella was breathing heavily, and I looked at her chest heaving up and down in concern.
“Are you all right?” I asked her as Vanessa carefully rotated an invisible ball and set it on the sand in front of her.
Estella flapped her hand at me. “Fine,” she panted. “I’m fine, just out of shape.”
When she finally caught her breath we headed back to the house, showered, and with twin grimaces climbed the stairs to the library. Estella started with Daddy’s desk while I pulled paintings off the wall and stacked them downstairs. My calves were screaming by the time I got all eleven of them. Estella hauled down a few bags of trash from the desk, and then we spent the rest of the afternoon checking off books on Daddy’s records. There were almost seven hundred volumes, filling six bookcases.
Most of Daddy’s collection, easily triple what was currently in the room, had been put into storage before the estate had been auctioned off. He and Estella had spent weeks going through them, choosing which ones to take to the new house on Big Dune.
I’d watched from the doorway, consumed with jealousy, remembering that before he foisted me off on my mother he had told me that one day we would open a bookstore together. I held on to that fantasy for years after I’d given up on Daddy being my partner in it. I loved the feel of the books, loved the smell of them. Now, as I went through the list with Estella, I thought of it again, wondering how much it might take to set up, if it could be profitable enough, if people even bought rare books anymore.
It was the first time since my twenties that I considered what I might have done differently with my life. I fell into the fantasy the way I once imagined that Daddy and Estella would grow tired of each other and math and would return to being my ardent admirers and playmates.
“How did you and Daddy choose these?” I asked.
“It wasn’t very scientific,” she said with a smile. “He made me choose three subjects. Every book that fit in them, I got to pull out. He chose three subjects too.”
“What were yours?” I asked.
She gave a nervous little laugh. “I hardly remember,” she said.
“Come on,” I pushed.
“Um, well, I remember I thought anything having to do with islands was appropriate. And math, of course.”
“And what was the third?”
“Music.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised. She shrugged and turned away from me.
“I thought you might like them sometime,” she said. My heart nearly stilled. I wasn’t sure I believed her. But how I wanted to. She turned with three books in her hands. “Look,” she said, holding them out to me.
I looked at the titles: Antonietta, Works, and The First Violin. I’d never read any of them.
“Daddy said they all had something to do with violins, one way or another,” Estella said as I handed them back to her.
“What did Daddy pick?” I asked.
“The sea, in general—that’s why The Awakening is here—astronomy, and the South. But he had pretty broad parameters. It didn’t have to be about the South, exactly, he just had to remember something specific in the book about the subject. If he could remember it, we saved it.”
“And he remembered things in all of these?” I asked, impressed by my father. Over the years, I had developed a sense of how others had seen him, and his father before him, and it wasn’t very flattering. When we were children and listened in on the parties, our father had seemed like the most influential of men, but once the estate was gone he had been diminished—not just in the eyes of society, but in my eyes as well.
He disappointed me, year after year, and I hardened my heart against more hurt by developing a weary, dismissive attitude toward him. It had been faked at first, but over time it had come to be a part of me. I was ashamed that I felt genuine surprise when faced with having to remember the things that had impressed me to begin with.
“He says he did, but he stopped opening them to find the passage he was looking for soon enough,” Estella said, betraying her own doubts about him. “I swear Mother knew more about his books than he did,” she continued, pulling an empty box from the back wall and heading for the first bookcase.
“Mother?” I asked.
“She knew where every one was. She had her own little Dewey Decimal System right in her head. He’d remember a title, but have no idea where it was. He was incredibly unorganized for a book collector. He’d call her in, and she’d point to the right shelf and just toss off to the left, or in the middle. And there it was, every time. I thought, even back then, that I got my number thing from her. Of course, I never said that. Daddy would have keeled over. To tell the truth, I really am sort of sorry she’s not here. I would have liked to ask her about it, how she knew all that.”
“It’s probably better that she’s not,” I said. “We wouldn’t get as much done.”
She stopped packing for a moment to look at me. “Did you two have a fight or something? Is that why she didn’t come? Why won’t you just tell me?”
I bit my bottom lip. “No, not exactly. I think she just didn’t want to come back here.”
She shook her head. “There’s something you’re not telling me. Is it me? She acted like she wanted to see me. Did I do something?”
“No. No, it’s not you.”
“Then what’s the problem, Connie?”
I owed her. I owed her for last night. “Did Mother ever tell you about her parents?”
She shook her head. “Just that they died when she was young. A hurricane, right? They drowned? God, it’s awful that I don’t even remember,” she said, looking up at me in astonishment.
I checked my watch. “I’m starved,” I said. “You want to get cleaned up and go to the mainland for lunch?”
“Connie,” she said in exasperation. “What do you know?”
“I’m going to tell you, but it’s too big a story to tell like this. Let’s go to th
e Oyster Bed and eat oysters and drink beer till we pop.”
She stared at me speculatively for a moment and then looked around the library with a sigh. “We’re never going to finish this.”
“Yeah, we will,” I said. “Besides, we can send Mother the paintings while we’re over there.”
We loaded the paintings in the Escalade, carefully layering bubble wrap between them. By the time we arrived at the Oyster Bed we both felt as though we’d accomplished the first step of making the house ready for sale. Rather than feeling uplifted by it, though, I felt a profound sadness. It had truly begun.
I wished I had brought the boys. I wished I had turned around at the gates and marched back up to Mother’s and carried her to the car, hatbox and all. It was hard for me to believe that this was it. The end of the beach house, the last place I had memories of Daddy. The end of my marriage, the end of my family as I knew it.
Estella seemed subdued too, and she didn’t press me to tell her the story until after we’d ordered. The beer was cold, and the first one went down quickly, loosening my tongue. Estella was a perfect audience, and I stretched the story out, perhaps elaborating little details, but staying true to what Mother told me, ending with the feel of the little shoes in my palms.
“I can’t believe it,” she said when I finally finished. She had stopped eating her shrimp roll halfway through the story, and now she looked at it as though unsure of how it had appeared in front of her. “When did she tell you this?”
“The week before I left,” I said.
“But what—I mean, why, after all this time?”
I thought about telling her. About Luke, about all of it. “Going back to the island,” I finally said. “I guess I should have realized that she was trying to tell me that she couldn’t go.”
“I just can’t believe it,” she repeated. “And Daddy never knew?”
“Mother says he didn’t. He just plucked her up, swallowed their story, and never gave it a second thought.”
She crunched into her shrimp roll and chewed, swallowing before she spoke. “He really loved her though, didn’t he?”
I nodded. “I think he did.”
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