Reunion Beach

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Even in the dark, she can see Larry grin. His teeth are so white, she wonders if they’re fake. “I’m not square,” he says. “I was putting you on. Of course I want a line.”

  Ha! Oh boy, Kirby is relieved. She had a vision of Larry tattling on her to Mrs. Winter or, worse, Kate, and then it would be straight to rehab for Kirby. She had thought twice about bringing the cocaine to Nantucket because no one on the island partied this way, but now her gamble has paid off. She is going to fly high with her teenage crush, Larry Winter.

  She taps out a bump for Larry and he hoovers it right up, then sniffs, waiting for the rush to hit.

  “God-damn!” he cries out at the ocean. He turns back to Kirby, who has capped the vial and tucked it back down her dress. “Is it all right if I kiss you?”

  Hell, yes! Kirby thinks—and a second later, she and Larry Winter are making out. But something is wrong. Larry’s mouth is open too wide; it feels like he’s trying to swallow her. Maybe it’s the drugs, or maybe he’s just completely inept. They clash teeth, which makes a plasticky sound, and Kirby thinks, Definitely false teeth.

  She pulls away. “Easy there, Cowboy.” She can feel Larry’s erection through his tight polyester pants. The Cosmo girl in her is mildly intrigued, it’s bigger than she imagined—but Kirby can’t decide how far she wants this to go. She finds herself in this position all the time when she’s out. She’ll be dancing with some guy and he’ll want more and if he’s cute, or ugly but confident, she’ll lead him to her secret alcove and kiss him. But she always remains in control of the situation. Occasionally this leads to sex in Kirby’s loft—she never goes home with anyone and she never, ever has sex in the club. Part of being a liberated woman, she tells the girls at the magazine—they hang on Kirby’s every word—is remaining free to walk away at any moment.

  Larry grabs the back of Kirby’s head and puts his sloppy mouth on hers like she’s a Big Mac. She pushes him off again. “Whoa, buddy, let’s slow things down a little.” In an attempt to be tender, she reaches up to touch his long, feathered hair. It’s soft and silky between her fingers. Larry Winter has good hair—like David Cassidy—and hasn’t Kirby always wanted to have sex with David Cassidy? She moves her hands so that she’s stroking Larry’s long mustache. He used to be so clean-cut—he was an Exeter squash player when he dated goody two-shoes Blair—that Kirby can’t help but be delighted by his transformation into a modern man. He isn’t stuck in Camelot like everyone else on this Land-That-Time-Forgot island.

  They start kissing again but it isn’t any better and Larry’s hands are sliding down her back toward her . . .

  She pulls away. “Larry.”

  He says, “You are so . . . cool, Kirby. You give off this incredible vibe—sexy, fun, fascinating. I can’t believe I spent so many summers mooning over Blair. I should have been with you.”

  The music from the bonfire floats down the beach. “Rebel, Rebel” by David Bowie. This is Kirby’s song. You tore your dress! Your face is a mess! Who is Kirby if not the rebel of her family? She was the one who protested the war, swore at the cops, got arrested, got pregnant out of wedlock, and dated a rainbow of men, including the “one who got away,” Darren Frazier. Darren ended up marrying Kirby’s best friend, Rajani, and they now have four beautiful children, which was what motivated Kirby to leave Boston and move to New York—where she has managed to push herself even closer to the edge. Misbehaving is the only way Kirby has ever been able to steal the spotlight from perfect achiever Blair, only golden son Tiger, and Jessie, the precious baby.

  But now, here is Larry Winter telling Kirby that he prefers her to her older sister. All of the longing and jealousy that fourteen-year-old Kirby with her braces and her acne felt are vanquished—poof!—in that moment. Her attraction to Larry Winter was never about Larry Winter, she realizes. It was about how she felt about herself. The satisfaction at being acknowledged as a sexy, fun, fascinating (this adjective gives Kirby a particular thrill) woman is more powerful than any drug.

  “Hey, thanks, Larry,” she says. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time I got back to the party.”

  8

  Looks Like We Made It

  Tiger can’t believe it when Magee asks him to bring her a cold beer from the keg and he’s even more surprised when she chugs the entire thing without stopping. Who is this woman and what has she done with his wife?

  She emits a ladylike burp and hands him the empty plastic cup. “Another.”

  “Another?” Tiger says. “Seriously?”

  “Please?” she says. “I want to get drunk.”

  “You . . . ?” Tiger can’t believe this. “Are you sure?”

  “Your grandmother is dead,” Magee says. “And do you know what advice she gave me?”

  Tiger is afraid to ask. “What?”

  She said, “When you don’t know what else to do, have a good, stiff drink.”

  Yes, Tiger thinks, that does sound like Exalta.

  “And I don’t know what else to do,” Magee says. “We’ve tried everything.”

  “But you’ve been so careful with your health . . .”

  “It’s not working!” Magee says. “So I’m going to try the opposite.”

  “Okay?” Tiger says. He’s skeptical but he fetches Magee another cold beer and when she finishes that, another. That’s three beers, but Magee isn’t finished. She wants something more, something stronger.

  “Something stronger?” Tiger says. “There isn’t anything stronger at this party.”

  “The flask,” she says. “In your glove compartment.”

  “Ha!” Tiger says. Guess he should have known he couldn’t keep a secret from his wife. There’s a flask of Wild Turkey that Tiger keeps in the glove box of the Trans Am. Tiger offers the flask to any Vietnam Vet he happens to meet.

  Magee is a veteran of sorts, he supposes. She put in all those hours of service to Exalta.

  “All right,” Tiger says. “I’ll get the flask.” He grabs it from the car and he and Magee both take a pull. Magee doesn’t cough or sputter; she doesn’t even grimace. She is tougher than half the guys in the Fourth Infantry.

  LATER, TIGER AND MAGEE dance in the sand. The song is the Bee Gees, “Tragedy.” But instead of a tragedy, the night feels like a miracle. Magee is joyfully, ecstatically blotto. She raises her hands in the air, she twirls around, sings along. It takes no convincing for Tiger to lead Magee down the beach with one of the kilim rugs rolled under his arm. They lay the rug out in a secluded spot in the dunes and they make love in a way that they never have before. Magee is uninhibited, carefree, wild. She leaves scratch marks down his back, bites his ear, thrusts right along with him until she screams. Screams!

  Tiger falls back on the rug, breathless.

  Best of my life, he thinks.

  “Did that feel . . . different to you?” he asks.

  “Oh, yes,” she says. She props herself up on her elbow and grins at him. “Mark my words, Tiger Foley: nine months from now, you’re going to be a father.”

  9

  Reunited

  Jessie didn’t learn what she knows about love from being with Theo Feigelbaum. No—Jessie’s first teacher in lessons of the heart is the man with the shorn head who is now sitting next to her: Pickford Crimmins. Pick.

  Jessie jumps to her feet. “Pick?” she says. “I thought you were in . . . Africa?”

  “I was,” Pick says. “I got home to Cali last week. And then I called Bill and he told me about Exalta, so I hitched a ride with a buddy who was going to Philadelphia and I took a bus the rest of the way.”

  “I can’t . . . I don’t . . . wow.” Jessie needs to get a grip. “So . . . how was the Peace Corps? You were in . . . ?”

  “Kenya,” he says. “I worked in Nairobi for a while, digging wells. Then I was sent out to the Mara, the Kenyan savannah. It was incredible, Jess. It was like an episode of Wild Kingdom every day. We saw a giraffe give birth, a cheetah kill, prides of lions, baby elephants, the black rhi
no. For six weeks, I lived with the Maasai villagers. I learned how to shoot a bow and arrow, I drank cow’s blood, I learned the tribal dances.”

  Jessie nods dumbly. She thought it was amazing that she got an A in her Torts class and managed to successfully transport two pastrami sandwiches on the subway.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t have any time to write letters home,” Pick says. “I’m sure Bill thought I dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “He’s proud of you,” Jessie says, which she’s sure is true though Mr. Crimmins never says much about his own family—probably because his daughter, Lorraine, who lives on a commune in California, has caused so much anxiety and confusion to the Foley-Levins. Jessie knew Pick went to Africa with the Peace Corps and she’d been glad to hear that, hadn’t she? Partly because she liked knowing that Pick was contributing in a positive way to the world and partly because Africa was so remote that Jessie’s lingering feelings for Pick became a moot point.

  Pick settles back in the sand and Jessie follows suit. The party rages behind them but Jessie doesn’t care. Pick is here.

  “So,” he says. “Tell me about everyone. Actually, forget everyone. Tell me about you.”

  “I live in Greenwich Village,” Jessie says. “I’m a second-year law student at NYU.”

  “Law school,” Pick says. “Like your dad.”

  “I guess,” Jessie says. The law that David practices—corporate litigation—is last on Jessie’s list of interests. “I want to practice immigration law. Or maybe work for the ACLU. I want to help people.”

  “That’s my girl,” Pick says.

  Jessie wonders if she’s trying to make herself sound altruistic in order to impress Pick. She has never before mentioned immigration or civil rights law out loud. If she’d said this to Theo, he would have gone on a diatribe about Jessie’s “privilege.” She could afford to practice immigration law, hell, she could become a public defender—because she had a trust fund. But as for Theo, he was looking at a big firm, big money future. He wanted to be in-house counsel at a Wall Street bank.

  “I made Bill promise to tell me if you got married,” Pick says, “so I could come home and disrupt the wedding like Benjamin in The Graduate.”

  Jessie smiles. “You did not.”

  “I did.”

  “Well, I’m not married.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Theo,” she says, and even though Pick is sitting a foot away from her, she can feel him tense up. “But we broke up. He cheated on me.”

  “What an idiot,” Pick says.

  Jessie nudges him with her elbow. “You’re one to talk.”

  “What?”

  “That summer you lived with us, you left me in the dust for Sabrina.”

  “Sabrina who?”

  “Sabrina was . . . the girl you worked with at the North Shore restaurant. You started dating her.”

  “Oh,” Pick says. “I don’t remember Sabrina.”

  “You don’t?” Jessie says. She finds this unfair. Jessie had been crushed when Pick introduced her to Sabrina one fateful day at Surfside Beach; it was a moment that has both haunted her and served as a cautionary tale. When you fall in love, your heart opens in a burst of flower petals and gossamer streamers. But beware—because that same heart can just as quickly be cored like an apple, the most tender piece of you extracted and thrown onto the compost pile of the unrequited. For the past ten years, “Sabrina”—not the girl herself but the specter of someone prettier and more desirable—has haunted Jessie, inspired her even.

  “You kissed me,” Jessie says. “Twice. You really kissed me.”

  “Yes,” Pick says. “That I do remember. Upstairs, in the cottage.”

  “And then a couple of days later, you were dating Sabrina.”

  “I’m the idiot, then,” Pick says. “All I remember is that you were young—too young. I thought I’d get in trouble if anything else happened. The dynamic between me and your family was weird. I didn’t know why at the time, but I know now. And I’m assuming you know?”

  “That Wilder Foley was your father?” Jessie says. “Yes.” Wilder Foley was Kate’s first husband, the father of Blair, Kirby and Tiger, who had an affair with Lorraine Crimmins and got her pregnant. So Pick is a half sibling to Blair, Kirby, and Tiger, just like Jessie.

  “When my mother and I left Woodstock that summer, I told her I wanted to go back to Nantucket to live with my grandfather. And she said we had burned that bridge forever.”

  Jessie takes a breath. Conversations like this happen all the time at funerals and weddings and baptisms, she knows. Secrets are revealed; there are reckonings.

  “How is your mother?” Jessie asks, desperate to change the subject.

  “Oh, fine,” Pick says. “Busy with her organic farming, which is actually starting to make her some money. She fully believes organic produce is the future.”

  Jessie hasn’t the foggiest idea what “organic” produce is, but she doesn’t admit that.

  “Now tell me about everyone else,” Pick says. “Blair, Kirby, Tiger.” He laughs. “Our siblings.”

  The phrase is so surreal that Jessie is stymied for a moment. But then she laughs along and starts to talk. Blair and Angus divorced . . . Angus in Houston, Blair and the twins in a suburb of Boston . . . Kirby writes for Cosmo, if you pick up any issue at the grocery store checkout line, you’ll see her byline, she lives in Soho, housesitting for this famous artist, Willie Eight, yeah, I’d never heard of him either, the only artists I know are dead except for Andy Warhol, who Kirby has met, she has a Polaroid of them together, she hangs out at Studio 54 and Limelight, dancing the night away . . . Tiger is married to Magee, they don’t have kids yet, Tiger owns five bowling alleys and he drives that Trans Am you probably saw . . . He’s a good person, my brother, I just want him to be happy. Jessie finds her eyes are burning with tears as she says this. I want them all to be happy, and if I had a magic wand, that would be my first and only wish—for Blair, Kirby, and Tiger to be happy.

  “What about you?” Pick says. “Don’t you want to be happy?”

  Jessie isn’t sure how to explain it. She knows, somehow, that she is stronger than her three siblings. This is a bold statement because the three of them are big personalities; her sisters are beautiful and smart, and her brother is a war hero. But Jessie worries about the three of them in a way that she doesn’t worry about herself.

  “I am happy,” she says. “Though I could use another beer. And you should mingle. I don’t want to monopolize you.”

  “I have to tell you something,” Pick says. He gets to his feet and offers Jessie a hand to pull her up. “I’m moving to New York.”

  “You are?” Jessie says.

  “I was offered a job with the Economic and Social Council at the UN,” Pick says. “Which probably sounds fancier than it is. The pay is peanuts. I’m going to have to live in Brooklyn.”

  Brooklyn? Jessie tries not to cringe.

  “That’s great!” she says. “We’ll be neighbors.”

  Pick is still holding onto Jessie’s hand. “Hopefully more than just neighbors,” he says. “You know, when I was in Kenya, I had this recurring fantasy.” He pauses. “Want to hear it?”

  Fantasy? Jessie panics, thinking of the one awkward evening when Theo insisted on reading Penthouse “Forum” letters aloud to her. “Sure?” she says.

  “My buddy, Tremaine, who I shared a tent with out in the Mara, had this tape recorder and three cassette tapes, one of which was The Stranger by Billy Joel. He played it all the time and do you know that song, ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’?”

  “‘Bottle of red’?” Jessie sings.

  “‘Bottle of white’!” Pick cries out. “Yes! So I always thought of you when I heard that song and I dreamed about meeting you in New York City at a restaurant like that. Red-checkered tablecloths, a single candle dripping down the Chianti bottle, the whole deal.” He shrugs. “I thought it would be romantic.”

  Me,
Jessie thinks. He dreamed about meeting me.

  “So when I get to New York, can we do that?” Pick asks. “Can we meet at a place like that?”

  “Of course,” Jessie says. She doesn’t eat out at restaurants; she has no money. But the instant she gets back to the city, she’s going to find the best Italian place in all of New York. Oh, man, you’d better believe it.

  10

  We Are Family

  The kids are all at the bonfire, which leaves Kate and David at home alone. They watch the sunset and David opens a bottle of Pol Roger champagne. When Kate raises an eyebrow at the significance—is David celebrating Exalta’s death? They did always have an uneasy relationship—he says, “Something to cheer you up.”

  He’s right, as always: the bubbles cheer her. It’s an unusually warm evening, so they drink with their feet dangling in the pool, the bottle in an ice bucket between them.

  Kate’s thoughts wander. Where is Exalta now? Anywhere? It seems impossible that she’s gone and yet, that’s what happens to all of us, eventually. It’s a reminder to live while we can and take care with the legacy we’re leaving behind. Kate feels proud of this house, this property, the decision she made ten years ago to move out here to the wilds of Madaket, to build a summer retreat where she can shelter her entire family. It had seemed radical at the time, Kate remembers.

  “Do you want to go out to dinner?” David asks. “The Mad Hatter? DeMarco’s?”

  “It’s too late,” Kate says. “Everyone stops serving at nine.”

  “We could still order a pizza from Vincent’s,” David says. “Or skip dinner and get ice cream.”

  Kate says, “Let’s do something crazy.”

  She can tell from the way his face brightens that he thinks she means sex there in the pool—or scouring Kirby’s bedroom for a joint to smoke.

  “I’m game,” he says.

  “Let’s crash the party,” Kate says. “We’ll pick up Bill and take him with us.”

  It feels like a joy ride, even in David’s staid lawyer car, the Cadillac. They have the windows down, Elvis on the radio, and Bill Crimmins—who Kate thought might be hesitant to join them—relaxing in the backseat, enjoying the fine leather.