“Honey,” said Tripler, mock patronizing, “that says more about your dating history.”
“This whole thing is preposterous,” Jake interrupted. “And it’s poor taste to discuss it here. You girls should know better.”
“What’s disgraceful,” said Tripler, “is the way she carries on when he’s around. She’s Lila’s maid of honor, for Christ’s sake.”
“Ah,” said Pete. “So that’s what this is about. You wanted Lila to ask you.”
Tripler turned to her husband with profound loathing. To say such a thing in private was criminal, but to say it in front of all of their friends was an unforgivable betrayal.
“What’s disgraceful is the way you trash your friends. Talk about vicious,” Jake said. Ironically, he was, by all accounts, the most unscrupulous among them.
“You’re all full of it,” Oscar declared. He had been conspicuously quiet up to this point. “Has anyone considered something really bad?”
“Like what,” said Annie.
“I don’t know.” Oscar shrugged. “That he drowned or something worse.” He paused, reluctant to voice the next thought.
“What would be worse?”
“I don’t know. Drowning. On purpose.”
Annie turned to Weesie suddenly like an outraged customer demanding service. “Oh my God. What if he’s dead?”
“Now we’re just being dramatic,” said Jake.
“Dramatic or realistic?” asked Oscar. “It’s irresponsible not to ask the question.”
“You always have to stir shit up,” Pete snapped. Tensions between the boys were slower to flare than those between the girls but were more heated when they did.
“Someone had to say it,” said Oscar. “We’re not all as callous as Tripler.”
Tripler’s eyes widened at the attack—its cruelty and unexpectedness.
The group took this as their cue to disperse, anxious to part before the tiff turned into a brawl.
Laura began to breathe again as she reached the end of the lawn. She stopped just before the grass ended in a ledge, surprised by the distance to the sand. It was a drop of at least six feet, and she had no recollection of descending this height when she had trudged down on her way to the dock. But perhaps this was a function of her distractedness. Of course, she knew the tide was a constant in coastal life, but she had never bothered to think much about it. She only knew, on some vague level, that the tide went in and out, that the schedule of these two things meant it was either high or low, and that one was of great importance to the boats that speckled the horizon.
Standing now, she could only imagine that the ledge was at its highest point—and the tide at its lowest. A sturdy cliff plumbed the ninety-degree drop to the rocky beach. The water lapped every several seconds without managing to touch it. The feat of the cliff’s construction was even more impressive considering the force of the tide. It was less a tide and more a gentle pulse that increased and decreased with the wind and weather, a lovely contribution to ambient noise, a decorative facet.
Aesthetics aside, it paled in comparison to real, formidable waves. It would surely have failed to impress those who expected drama and recreation from their ocean, just as Gardner’s Bay elicited scoffs from hard-core Hamptonites, and the ripples of the Gulf of Mexico amused true Atlantic surfers. But the height and solidity of the cliff succeeded in impressing Laura. It broadcast the formidable power of the water just beyond the bay, boasting its ability to construct and destruct with unerring consistency. It was as though the tide had been sent as the emissary of the ocean, to convey its power, when appropriate, to wreak devastation.
Undaunted, Laura lowered herself to sit with her feet hanging off the ledge, then jumped the remaining distance from the grass to the sand. She walked into an approaching ripple, emboldened by her recent dip, and stood like this, waiting for the next wave, staring into the darkness. As she waited, she kicked herself for her lack of originality—all she needed was a penny to throw into the bay, then to make a heartfelt wish. But she forgave herself for staring as she confronted the enormity of water. It never ceased to awe and terrify.
Perhaps it reflected poorly on her that her first association with the ocean was death. Surely, this was a clear indication of pathological pessimism. But, she couldn’t suppress the sentiment. It was a reflex, like some people’s aversion to snakes. Perhaps she could blame her lack of exposure to the water at a very young age. Unlike her friends, she had not grown up frolicking in a bay, tying and untying sailing knots, buttoning well-starched shorts. She had no basis for the common association between water and pleasure. When she swam in the ocean, she felt agitated, exposed. She was braced for contact with jellyfish—was there a more repugnant, slimy creature in the world? And this awareness took all the fun out of swimming, forcing her to keep constant watch on the shore, should she need to make a quick escape. What was the fun of that?
It was not long before she began to indulge yet more morbid thoughts. As she stared at the black water, she imagined Tom floating underneath, his eyes wide with the shock of a sudden gruesome death. In her hideous apparition, a fluorescent jellyfish floated past, blinking with a cadaverous green light. It was outlandish, to be sure, but it wasn’t as though she thought he’d been mauled by sharks—were there even sharks in Maine? But there was a lurking possibility in her mind that Tom had come to some harm. And it was pure hubris on her friends’ part, she felt, not to entertain this possibility. Tom had been comprehensively smashed when they saw him last, had long surpassed the level of intoxication that would impair his ability to walk or swim in reasonably rough water. And even worse, though he was known to drink with some frequency and intensity, alcohol had always had a strange impact on him, acting on his moods as both a tonic and a poison.
In fact, it was this that scared Laura more than any of the earlier considerations. It was not that he drank more than most, but rather that it affected him more potently, making him intermittently deliriously happy or suicidally depressed. Once, freshman year, after a particularly wild bender, he had hoisted himself through her dormitory window and onto her fire escape, claiming that he would jump if she didn’t swear to marry him right then and there. And then, there were the countless soggy nights they’d passed together at house parties and Brooklyn dive bars during which he betrayed slightly more weakness for whiskey than the average guy. It’s not that she ever believed he would make good on his threats to use his necktie as a noose, more that she was alarmed by the speed of his transition from reason to recklessness.
Laura did her best to curb her negative thinking. Tom was fine, she decided. He was an intercollegiate champion. She had cheered for him at countless victorious swim meets in school, that is, until Lila supplanted her as his number one fan. She pictured him now, hurtling toward the shore, swimming his unbeatable butterfly like some sort of mythological beast, half-man, half-porpoise. But he would not have swum the butterfly tonight. He would have swum the crawl. And his crawl, though reliable, was his least favorite stroke. Water in his ears, he used to say—a strange complaint for a swimmer—always tripped him up.
But this was nonsense, catastrophic thinking—and she told herself as much. She was certainly prone to letting her imagination run rampant, but she knew better than to give too much weight to improbable notions. She harbored one other yet-more-implausible idea, a theory so absurd and far-fetched she shuddered to acknowledge it. Even so, she allowed it to take shape in its full, grotesque glory. Somewhere, deep within, she hoped and wondered and, yes, in some way, suspected that the brief time she and Tom had spent together tonight—to be fair, it was not true time together, just time in each other’s presence—had been as cataclysmic for him as it had been for her and that it had suddenly and completely toppled his worldview, necessitating that he stop in his tracks and change the course of his life forever.
They had not exchanged many words before she walked away from their conversation. And surely, awareness of the group’s curiosity
had kept them from speaking freely. But it was clear, even in this short time, from the desperate look in his eyes—she could not have hallucinated it—that he was wild with terror and that she had provided a small source of comfort. The coexistence of these two things—terror and comfort—would drive anyone crazy. It was equivalent to being prisoner in a locked cell and spotting a key just beyond the bars. Though it pained her to see Tom in this state, it gave her some satisfaction, not because she wanted Tom to suffer, but because it verified that her own suffering had perhaps been merited. If there was any better definition of true love, she had yet to hear it.
Still, she subjected her theory to a thorough analysis, reviewing every coded moment of their time together—every syllable exchanged, every eyelash fluttered, every repressed desire. And, of course, there was his strange declaration, his contribution to the drinking game. Had he meant it as a warning, or was it just eerily prophetic that less than an hour before vanishing into the bay he had informed the group of his reluctance to attend his own wedding? Laura’s spirit improved wildly with every new consideration. Smiling now, she experienced an entirely foreign sensation. This one felt nothing like the familiar constriction in her chest. Now, she felt utterly weightless, as though her brain had distilled into smoke that hovered above her body, instructing it to move and feel but from a comfortable distance.
And rather than shun this bizarre sensation—her hazy recollection of freshman psychology yielded the word “depersonalization”—she focused on it, courted it as a monk courts meditation. Hope, she realized, felt unlike any other emotion. And traveling from fear to hope in the span of thirty seconds felt something like flying. It was so intense—at once so exhilarating and unnerving—that she instinctively sought to curb it. She walked towards the bay and stepped into the water as though to extinguish a fire. The temperature brought her back into her body and ostensibly back to earth just in time for her to brace for a new arrival.
“This must be really hard for you,” said Chip. He lay on the beach, a few feet from the ledge, propped up as though preparing to watch a movie.
Laura deepened her gaze at the water. She entertained an idle and unlikely thought: Perhaps a triumph over blinking would somehow amount to triumph over Chip.
“You drive halfway up to the North Pole to watch the love of your life marry the bane of your existence, and this is how they thank you.”
Laura closed her eyes, shook her head.
“It’s ironic,” said Chip, sitting up. “Asking you, of all people, to find the groom and convince him to show up for his wedding.”
Finally, Laura blinked. Better to blink than scream.
“Your friends seem pretty calm.” He sniffed. “Very nonchalant. Seems like they’d rather turn this into a game than let it put a damper on the evening.”
“Honestly, Chip.” Laura turned to face him, making a heartfelt appeal for silence.
“I personally don’t think he drowned. Not our intercollegiate champion. My bets are on the harbor sharks. They’re no match for the tough guys in warmer waters, but those suckers can bite.”
At this, he burst into hysterical laughter and fell onto his back. He remained like this, cackling fiendishly, until he became distracted by the sky and stared at it, muted and perplexed. A blur of clouds obscured the stars he had come to expect above his house on a summer night, and their absence struck him as both a surprise and an inconvenience. He had come to think of the stars above the lawn as a part of Northern Gardens’ property, and so viewed the obstruction with a proprietor’s annoyance, like a farmer watching a swarm of locusts descend upon his crop.
“I’m going to walk down the beach toward the Gettys’, see if he overshot the house or got pulled by the tide,” said Laura.
“I wouldn’t go that way,” Chip said. “It gets rocky right after the property line. And then it turns into forest. Trust me. You don’t want to get lost there at night.”
Laura stared at Chip for a moment, evaluating his sincerity. “If you don’t want to come, that’s fine.”
She paused, daunted by the thought of dense trees in the darkness, then started down the beach anyway, bolstered by the possibility of losing Chip for good. Better to be lost in a haunted forest than spend the rest of the night with him.
“I don’t blame you,” he called out. “My sister’s pretty awful. But he’s no better. At least, not anymore. Before, I could see what you saw in him. The wild, unpredictable rebel. The fiery temper, the Irish good looks. But now he’s a shadow of his former self. A submissive, humorless, kept man. He might as well hold out his hands for cuffs. And the fact that he knows it makes it so much worse.”
Laura stopped against her will, unable to ignore the performance. Some part of her—the lowest, the least admirable part—took pleasure in hearing someone else voice her complaints about Tom.
“Don’t worry. I’m not gonna sell you out. I guess I just wish you had higher standards. I always looked up to you, you know.”
At this, she started walking again. And walking seemed to help. She had spent precious few moments alone since she had arrived, and the privacy was almost as exhilarating as air against her face.
It was not that she didn’t like people. She was comfortable enough with most types. But after being with her friends for extended periods of time, she felt the distinct need to recuperate, just to sit in silence for a little while and revisit her thoughts—to draw a chalk line around herself as though she were a piece of evidence. She wondered if other people felt this way and simply recovered faster, or if she alone suffered from a rare social disorder. Luckily, spending time by herself usually recharged her quickly. With every passing step, she began to feel safer, more protected, so much so that she was totally taken off guard when someone threw the full force of his weight onto her, tackling her to the sand.
Shock and adrenaline combined to disorient her for several moments.
“Tom,” she whispered.
“Yes,” said a voice.
They lay in a heap, recovering their breath. Being close to him was such a surprise, such a welcome comfort.
“We thought you were lost,” she whispered.
“I was,” Chip sneered, “until I found you.”
His voice finally revealed what his body had not. It was Chip, not Tom, of course. Alarmed, Laura struggled to push him off, but Chip pushed her back to the sand.
“Get the fuck off,” Laura shouted. She jammed her elbows into his ribs, loosening his grip.
Gravity conspired with Chip. He pinned her down with a clumsy shove, then pushed with all of his weight.
“Chip, I’m serious,” Laura yelled.
Chip said nothing and tightened his grip around the top of her arm. Then, confirming she had no hope of escaping, he buried his face in her hair.
In all the years she’d known him, Laura had never considered Chip a threat. He was often annoying, inappropriate always, but, for the most part, harmless. Now, as she lay trapped under him, she suddenly felt panicked. It seemed feasible that Chip was capable of something depraved, that the twisted heart of his college years had rotted and decayed, that she had no control over him, and he had less of himself. The lights of the house glowed in the distance, but they might as well have been miles away.
She lay like this, one cheek lodged in the sand for what felt like several minutes. She tried to loosen his grip with her nails, but he bore down with new determination. Even drowning, Laura decided, would be preferable to this fate, and the thought sent a rush of rage up her spine, causing her to elbow Chip in the groin and stunning him just long enough to escape.
SEVEN
There were few things Tripler Pane loved more than a good emergency. Even as a child, she thrilled in a crisis, shepherding classmates during school fire drills, appointing herself the additional lifeguard during free swim at summer camp. In college, she was known as a benevolent busybody, a supervisory presence whose leadership skills usually benefited the group. It was Tripler who org
anized the biannual study review that enabled her friends to pass their finals, Tripler who divvied up the syllabus—often, she alone still had it in her possession—assigning various readings and lecture notes. It was Tripler who organized the late-night study sessions, ordered the pizza, bought the candy and Coke, roused the others to digest a semester’s worth of work in the span of one night.
It was Tripler who saw the business opportunity when the quality of these study sessions circulated throughout the student body, and Tripler who conceived of the idea to charge admission to the review. Tripler collected the proceeds and deposited the profits into an account at the New Haven Savings Bank that eventually accrued to pay for a spring break blowout in St. Bart’s. Tripler had scheduled and organized every group gathering, with the exception of weddings and funerals, since graduation. Tripler collected money for the crappy ski condos, the joint birthday presents, the New Year’s Eve booze. Tripler bought the extra witches’ hats—just to have them on hand—for the yearly Halloween bash.
But she had not assumed this post simply because she was the most competent organizer. She did it because she was, she felt, the most competent friend. Her evidence was a staggering list of emotional crises that she had helped her friends to navigate with dignity. It was Tripler who rescued Lila freshman year when she called from a closet in Skull and Bones, having found herself, after five glasses of champagne, the only remaining female in the building. It was Tripler who encouraged Weesie not to drop out of school when she decided, fall of freshman year, that she was not cut out for Yale. It was Tripler who took it upon herself to confiscate Annie’s Ritalin when a supply meant to bolster a midterm paper was replenished long past the middle of the term.
It was Tripler who soothed whichever sniveling soul was suffering her latest heartbreak: Weesie, when Jake broke up with her, Jake, when Weesie broke up with him, Annie, when Oscar cheated on her, and Laura, when Tom broke her heart and then reappeared, hours later, to pick up Lila for a date. This auspicious track record contributed to Tripler’s suspicion that she knew her friends better than they knew themselves. Unfortunately, this had no correlation to her knowledge of herself.
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