Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I recognized you from the video,” he told me as we settled into a living room that featured a chipped wicker table and a sagging tweed couch.

  “The video?”

  “From the bar. With the man.”

  “Ah.”

  “Drue must have played it for me a dozen times. She showed me all of your Instagram posts. She was so proud of you. She said, ‘That’s my friend!’ ”

  “Oh,” I said, as my heart shuddered and my eyes filled. “I didn’t know that.”

  “She would tell me, ‘I could never be that brave.’ She admired you a great deal.” Clasping his hands in front of him, he said, “I’m sorry that I ran from you. But I wasn’t invited. Not to the party, or to the service. It was… complicated.” He bent his head and said, very quietly, “But I wanted to be there. For Drue.”

  Nick handed me a Kleenex that he’d gotten somewhere. When Aditya went to make tea, I looked around, at the cheap furniture, the profusion of plants in clay pots in the single south-facing window, a framed picture of Lord Shiva on the wall, and on a side table, a copper statue of Ganesh with his elephant head and a mouse at his feet. The mantel over the bricked-up fireplace held a single framed photograph, a picture of Drue and Aditya at Fenway Park. They were both wearing red Boston Red Sox caps and grinning from seats way up in the bleachers.

  “Ah,” said Aditya, returning to the room and following my gaze.

  “She looks so happy.”

  “It was a wonderful day.” He handed out mugs and put a plate of Parle-G biscuits, the same kind that Darshi’s mother sometimes served, on the coffee table. I took a sip as he sat down in a battered armchair, laced his hands across his belly, and sighed. I knew that I was staring, but I couldn’t make myself stop. Part of it was how much he looked like my father, and part of it was how I could not picture Drue, glamorous, gorgeous, rich, beautiful Drue, with a guy like this. Had Drue climbed those stairs beneath the ceiling’s peeling paint, and breathed that musty, cabbage-y smell? Had she sat on this couch; had she slept on the futon that I bet myself was in Aditya’s bedroom, and cooked with him in the galley-style kitchen, and watched movies with him on this tiny old TV?

  “You are wondering what she saw in me.” Aditya’s tone was good-humored, but his eyes were sad. Darshi started to say something, then stopped as Aditya shook his head. “No, don’t apologize. I wondered, too. Every day we were together, I felt the same way. Like it couldn’t be real.”

  “How’d you two meet?” asked Darshi.

  “Drue was volunteering two nights a week at a high school in Boston. She was helping the kids write their college essays, fill out their applications, prepare for their tests. That sort of thing.”

  “Wait. What?”

  Aditya nodded. It made my heart ache a little, seeing the pride on his face. “She would joke about it. She’d say that if anyone in her high school could have seen her, they would have thought she’d joined a cult. It was important to her, she told me, to give back, and do some good.”

  Before I could ask what he meant by that, and what Drue was making amends for, he said, “I noticed her right away. Drue was impossible not to notice. She was lovely, and intelligent. One of the women who ran the program told me her last name and who her father was. We were all told to treat her nicely, because the business had a charitable arm, and maybe they’d give us a grant. I would have never approached her. I would have been content to just see her those two nights a week.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Drue asked you out,” said Nick.

  Aditya nodded, smiling a little at whatever he was remembering. “We both stayed late to clean up one night, to return the desks and chairs to where they’d been, and she asked if I’d go with her to the Isabella Gardner Museum. It was May.” His eyes went soft. “A lovely afternoon. In the garden, there were lilacs and honeysuckle. We sat on a bench, beside a statue of a satyr, and we talked. I had no idea it was a date, of course. I thought she wanted advice, or a reference for a graduate school application. It was the only thing I could think of. I couldn’t imagine that someone like Drue was interested in someone like me, and when it became clear that she was…” He cleared his throat. “…interested, I assumed that she had to want something.” He smiled, a terribly sad smile. “She told me that she liked me. She liked how I was interested in her mind, not her money or her status. She said that I reminded her of someone she’d known when she was younger.”

  I swallowed, pressing my lips together hard, feeling sorrow pierce me. I remembered how it felt, to hardly believe that this lovely, beautiful, effortlessly perfect girl was interested in me. And I remembered Drue telling me how great my father was, after our eating excursion. You’re lucky. I remembered the picture in Emma’s bedroom, a little girl perched on her father’s shoulders, and I remembered what Lily Cavanaugh had said about Drue and her father—she wanted him to love her. My eyes stung with tears as I thought about my father, who had always had time for me, and about Drue, whose father was never around. Drue, who’d had to hold on to a day’s worth of memories of my dad, because her own had given her so little. Lucky, I thought. God, I was so lucky.

  “We were together for a year,” he said. “I never would have believed we’d last even that long.”

  “And then what happened?” I asked.

  Aditya slid his sandaled feet back and forth along the beautiful rug. “I used to think, sometimes, that there were two Drues. Two people inside of one. There was the girl who was happy with me, volunteering and going to Red Sox games and sitting in the bleachers, or staying in and cooking. Going for walks or bike rides because I couldn’t afford much more, and I wouldn’t let her pay for everything. We would visit museums on Wednesdays, when admission is free. We’d buy discounted student tickets for plays. We took the ferry, once, from Boston to Provincetown. We ate oysters for lunch, walked along the beach, and stayed in her parents’ beach house that night.”

  I nodded, wondering if, for Drue, being with Aditya felt like role-playing: Marie Antoinette in her shepherdess costume, petting her perfumed sheep before going back to Versailles.

  “Then there was the other Drue. The woman she was raised to be. Her father’s good right hand. Her mother’s daughter. A woman who would be photographed at charity balls, and for newspapers and magazines. A woman who very much wanted her father to love her, which meant that she had a certain image to maintain.”

  “And you didn’t fit the image,” I said.

  He smiled sadly, making eye contact with Darshi before shaking his head. “No,” he said in the same flatly definitive tone Darshi had used to answer the same question. “Not even if I had all the money in the world.”

  Aditya’s belly shifted as he sighed. “And so I knew there was no future. No happily ever after for us. But I let myself love her. Because I wanted to believe. I wanted it to be true.” He pressed his lips together and refolded his hands in his lap. “A year ago, Drue came to my apartment. We went to lunch, and she told me she couldn’t see me any longer. That she had reconnected with an old boyfriend and was making plans to marry him. That was how she said it: making plans to marry him. I asked her if she loved him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I love you.’ ” He twisted the dish towel, clutching it tight in his hands. “She told me that she was sorry, but that she was doing what she had to do. She said that I was the best man she’d ever known, and that she would always love me. She promised that she would come back to me, when she could, and that we would be together. But that she would understand if I chose not to wait.”

  Nick and Darshi were both looking at me. I could guess what they were thinking—did Aditya have any idea that there’d been an arrangement? Should we tell him? Would it help him to know that Drue hadn’t loved Stuart, that the marriage had been for money and the engagement just for show? Or would that just make things worse?

  “Did she talk about when?” I finally asked. “When she’d come back?”

  He wiped his cheek and shook his he
ad, his expression resolute. “I never asked. It was a fantasy. A dream on top of a dream. She was going to marry someone more appropriate, and that would be that. I couldn’t let myself keep hoping for something that would never happen. And then, to go to the house… to the party…” He shook his head again. “Madness. But I had to see her. And then, after the fight, I saw her run up the stairs, and I thought… I thought that maybe…” He closed his mouth. I remembered him, in the darkness, in his white shirt and his red shorts and with his glass of ice water, standing in the dark outside of Drue’s bedroom, waiting. Waiting for her to need him; waiting for her to say Take me home.

  “I knew she would never change her mind. Or at least, I knew it was unlikely. I only wanted to see her. Maybe to convince myself that it was really over.”

  “And the memorial service?”

  He sighed. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

  “Did Drue ever mention that she had a half sister on Cape Cod?” asked Darshi.

  Aditya shook his head again, looking surprised but not shocked. “Was that the girl the police were questioning?” he asked. When Nick told him that it was, Aditya said, “Drue knew that her parents had been unhappy. She knew that her father had affairs, that he’d been with women on the Cape. I know she suspected there were other children. She mentioned wanting to do something for them, to give them money. She said it wasn’t fair that she’d grown up with such advantages, and they had not.”

  I listened, thinking that this was a Drue I’d never seen—one who saw her own privilege. One who was trying to do better.

  “So who do you think would have wanted to kill her?” I asked.

  Aditya gave me a sad smile. “She hurt people. As I believe you know. The Drue I’d known would not. But the girl she’d been—that girl did harm.” He smoothed the dish towel over his lap. “She told me what she’d done to you. It was one of the reasons she was so impressed with your video. She said you’d taken what had been a weakness and turned it into strength. She admired that a great deal.”

  I swallowed hard. Nick put his hand on my shoulder.

  “And she felt guilty about what she’d done in her life, the damage she’d caused. She gave money away, to places where it made a difference. And gave her time. That was why she was at the tutoring center. She told me that in high school she’d gotten a girl to take the SATs for her, and when it was discovered, the other girl was the only one to experience any consequences.”

  I remembered Stuart’s sister telling me about a scandal at Croft. This had to be it. “I heard that the school hushed it up.”

  “Do you know if the girl who took the test was a Croft student?” I asked. “Was she a classmate of Drue’s?”

  He shook his head. “Drue didn’t like to talk about it. She only told me the story once, in the middle of the night, in the dark. I wanted to turn on a light, but she wouldn’t let me. She said…” He sighed. “She wanted to tell me, but she couldn’t stand for me to look at her while she did. She was very ashamed. The other girl had been a scholarship student, and Croft had been her big chance. After what happened, Drue wasn’t sure if she’d ever gone to college at all.”

  Darshi was already googling, but searching for Drue’s name plus “Croft School” and “SAT” and “cheating” and “expulsion” yielded no results. Which was no surprise. “Those prep schools know how to clean up their messes,” Darshi said.

  “Let me see if I can find a list of girls in her graduating class,” said Nick. A moment later, he was reading off a short list of names. “Any of them sound familiar?”

  I shook my head. So did Darshi and Aditya. We divided up the list, and searched for the next twenty minutes, scrutinizing one social-media profile after another. The Croft girls were graduate students and medical students and law students. A few of them had already been brides, two were already mothers. On Facebook and Instagram, in shot after shot, I saw college graduations and beach vacations and Christmas trees, Tough Mudder races and rugby games, baby showers and christenings and first-birthday parties and happy couples beaming, holding SOLD signs next to new homes. One girl posted Paleo diet recipes; another, nothing but right-wing political screeds. One girl, Kamon Charoenthammawat, had no social-media profile at all. “Aggravating,” I heard Darshi murmur.

  “Okay. We’ll keep looking for the test-taker,” I said.

  Aditya nodded. “My best guess is that it will turn out to be someone like that. Someone she hurt, inadvertently or not. Someone she knew from Harvard, or someone from your high school, or from the one she attended after. Someone from her travels; someone from her sorority, or her job.”

  A lot of someones, I thought. My heart sank.

  He left us with a list of eight women; names where he had them, descriptions when he didn’t. Sorority sisters whose money or term papers or boyfriends Drue had borrowed in college; a classmate whose car she’d crashed. There was a former friend whose brother Drue had slept with; another former friend whose father she’d seduced.

  None of the names or the descriptions sounded familiar, or lined up with anyone I remembered meeting at the wedding. A cursory google with words like “Drue Cavanaugh” and “car accident” and “Cambridge” and “2012” didn’t help, and of course, looking for “Drue Cavanaugh” and “stolen boyfriend” wouldn’t help.

  Darshi went to use the bathroom. Nick rocked forward, then back as he worked his phone, with the couch squeaking beneath him. Aditya gave another belly-shifting sigh. “I should have pushed her to make more amends, I suppose, if only because it would have given her some relief.”

  “She apologized to me,” I said. “And she left money to your charity, and to her father’s other children. I’m sure she planned on doing more.”

  Aditya gave me a sad smile and no answer. I bent back over my phone. My temples were throbbing; my stomach was in knots. I was wondering if Detective McMichaels had decided to return his focus to me, or to Nick; if he’d be waiting for us when we got back to the city.

  Aditya reached across the coffee table to take my hand. Gently, he said, “She loved you, you know.”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “She told me about a day she spent with you and your father. I wanted to impress her, so I asked what a perfect day for her would look like. I was so sure she’d say hearing her favorite opera in Vienna, or taking a private plane to Paris, but she told me about how you’d eaten dumplings and ridden the subway, and you’d gone to a coffee shop to read. She said it was more time than her father had ever spent alone with her, and how jealous she was that you got that every Sunday. She said it was one of the best days she’d ever had.”

  I nodded. Oh, Drue, I thought, and started to cry.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “What now?” asked Nick. After an hour and a half on I-95, we’d finally hit the West Side Highway. Nick was at the wheel. I was beside him, and Darshi had ridden in the back seat without saying a word. Between her silence and the disgusted expression she’d worn since we’d left New Haven, I hadn’t had too much trouble reading her mood.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I have office hours.”

  “Daphne, how about you?” Nick asked.

  “I’m thinking,” I answered. Actually, I was trying not to think. I was keeping my mind blank. “I’m hoping an answer’s going to swim up to the surface of my brain, like one of those blind cave fish.”

  “How’s that working out?” asked Darshi.

  I cracked one eye open to glare at her. “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Yes,” she said. “My idea is that we stop this. You didn’t do it, and the police are going to find whoever did. And I’m all out of sympathy for Drue. She made her choices.”

  “And so what? You think that she deserved this?” I asked.

  “I think,” said Darshi, her words clipped and precise, “that if you use people your entire life, if you manipulate them and take from them, and throw them away when you don’t need them anymore, then yes,
there are consequences. Bad things happen.”

  I opened my mouth and then closed it. I couldn’t tell Darshi that she was wrong; couldn’t tell her that Drue hadn’t behaved in exactly the manner she’d described. Drue had used Aditya and thrown him away, just like she’d done to Darshi. Just like she’d done to me. And karma might be a hashtag for Westerners, but Darshi had been raised as a Hindu. She believed that actions had consequences, in this life or the next.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right.”

  Darshi didn’t respond. The car hummed with tension. Finally, in a voice so soft I could hardly hear it, Darshi said, “You chased after her when she was alive. Are you going to keep chasing now that she’s dead?”

  I thought about how to answer and what I could possibly say. “Everyone deserves justice,” I finally said.

  “You have to let her go,” said Darshi.

  “I know.”

  Darshi obviously disagreed. She clicked her teeth, looking frustrated and sad, but she didn’t respond. The uncomfortable silence stretched until Nick pulled off the highway onto Ninety-Sixth Street.

  “Can you drop me off here?” I asked.

  “Where are you going?” asked Nick.

  “I’m going to walk for a while. Sometimes I think best when I’m moving.” It was just after seven o’clock. “I’ll walk, and I’ll think, and I’ll meet you back at my parents’ place in an hour or so, okay?”

  “Are you sure? If you wait, I can walk with you.”

  “No,” I said. “Thank you, but no. I think right now I need to be alone.”

  “It’s getting dark,” Nick pointed out.

  “Broad twilight. L’heure bleue. Seriously, I’ll be fine. And I have my phone.” Not only did I have my phone, but I needed to use it, to respond to some of my followers, to make sure all the links that I’d posted were working. Maybe I’d even finally write back to that poor girl who’d asked me how to be brave. Not like I had any more of an answer now than I’d had the day she’d posted her query, the day I’d met Leela Thakoon.