Amy blushed. “Oh no, that’s fine.”
“Please do,” Kate said. “You’re family.”
Amy blushed again, and Ryan got the distinct impression she’d rather eat in the kitchen. But Kate sat down next to Margaux and made space for her, so she took off her apron and joined them.
Sean took his penknife from his pocket and used the corkscrew to open the wine. Everyone passed up their translucent plastic cups, and he poured it out, Ryan noticed, like it was his fucking bottle and not Ryan’s.
“You can always count on Sean to have the right tool,” he said.
“Oh, hush, Ryan. Honestly,” Mary said. “Thank you, Sean.”
Liddie stared down into her glass. “What should we toast to?”
“Mom and Dad,” Margaux said. “Come on, guys, one last time.”
They raised their glasses, knocking them against one another, the plastic making a hollow sound. “To Mom and Dad.”
Ryan took half the glass down in one swallow. It was awful. It must be that wine his father had started making from those kits you could get at the wine store. “I can make a whole bottle for twenty-five cents!” he’d told Ryan once, as if that were something to aim for in life. When Ryan was living with them that summer, he’d gone to the wine store and stocked them up properly because spending a summer with his parents and shitty wine was too much.
“What happened to your ankle?” Ryan asked Liddie.
“I twisted it running when Margaux scared me.”
“What is it with this family and people sneaking up on each other?” Mary asked.
“That’s from Dad,” Kate said. “Remember how he used to wait in your room so he could leap out of the closet and get you to jump?” She looked at Amy, nudging her arm. “You remember, Amy. He used to do it to you too.”
Amy looked at her plate. “He used to hide in the food shed.”
“That’s just bizarre,” Liddie said. “A grown man, acting like that.”
“He liked his bit of fun,” Kate said.
“Look at you,” Liddie said. “Defending him.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because they used you as cheap labor for ten years, then pulled the rug out from underneath you. For starters.”
“Seems like a pattern, doesn’t it?” Ryan said. He could tell he was slurring his words, but he didn’t care.
No one had anything to say to that. Ryan finished his glass of wine and reached for the second bottle. He was beyond caring what it tasted like.
“So which of you think I did it?”
“Ryan!”
“What, Margaux? Are we supposed to sit here and pretend that it’s not what everyone’s thinking about?”
“I wasn’t thinking about it.”
“Right.”
“I was thinking about Amanda, Ryan, you asshole. Not everything’s about you.”
Margaux looked as if she was going to cry. That got to him. His whole life, the only thing that ever upset him was a woman crying. Or a girl.
“I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry.”
“Is that a confession?” Liddie asked. “Because that would make everything a whole lot easier.”
Ryan caught Amy’s eye. She colored again and looked down at her plate.
“You know what’s going on, Amy?” Ryan asked.
“Leave her alone,” Kate said.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Fantastic. Should we let everyone know? Send it out in the next newsletter? Instagram a photo of the letter? I know, let’s tell everyone at the memorial on Sunday!”
“Cut it out.”
“No, Margaux. I’m allowed to be angry. So yeah, for those of you who didn’t know, I admit it, I was there that night, on the Island. We hooked up. Amanda and me. But I’m not the reason she ended up in that boat at Secret Beach. She was alive and well when I left her. I was back in my bunk by one, and Ty can vouch for me. Ty did vouch for me. It’s possible to have been with Amanda that night and not be responsible for what happened to her, right, girls?”
He looked back and forth between the twins. They were staring at him with identical looks—dread, anger, guilt.
“We were twelve, Ryan,” Liddie said.
“So?”
“You really want to go there?” Liddie said.
Kate reached out to Liddie. “Hush, Liddie. Don’t play his game.”
“This isn’t a game,” Ryan said. “This is my life. My future.” He pushed back the bench, almost sending Margaux flying to the floor.
“What the hell?”
“You guys should vote,” Ryan said.
“What?”
“Now. Vote now.”
“We’re supposed to vote on Sunday,” Mary said.
“So what? You’ve all made up your minds, haven’t you? Let’s vote and get it over with so I can go.”
“You’d leave?” Kate asked. “Before the memorial?”
Ryan ignored her and stormed into the office. There was a heavy old desk in there, full of colorful Craft Shop papers. He even found a pair of scissors and a box of Sharpies.
He left the office and returned to the table. “You can do it anonymously. No one has to worry about me hurting their feelings. I mean hurting my feelings. Whatever.” He picked up the scissors and quickly cut four squares of paper. He gave one to each of his sisters with a Sharpie, then went to the wall near the door and lifted the mailbox off it. “Just write ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ on the paper, fold it, and put it in the box. Write it in block letters so I don’t know who’s who.”
“Ryan, come on,” Mary said. “Calm down. Eat your dinner. We don’t have to do this.”
“But we do. We do have to do this. This is what Dad wanted, so let’s get it done.”
“I’ll do it,” Liddie said.
“I knew I could count on you. How about you, Kate?”
“I’d rather wait until Sunday.”
“Course you would,” Liddie said. “How can you make up your own mind if you don’t know what everyone else is going to do?”
“Fuck off.”
“That’s my girl.”
Kate grabbed her Sharpie. “Fine, I’ll do it. Are you happy?”
Ryan looked at Mary. “Mary?”
“Sure.”
“That’s it?” Margaux said. “Sure?”
“It’s about him, Margaux. He should be able to decide.”
“This only works if you all do it, so what do you say, Margaux?”
Margaux looked uncertain.
“Go on,” Sean said. “It’s for the best.”
She picked up her Sharpie. Ryan felt a tight bundle of nerves in his stomach, the liquor and red wine roiling around in a toxic brew. He picked up a fish stick off his plate and shoved it into his mouth.
“I’ll be out on the porch. Call me back in when everyone’s votes are in the box.”
He picked up his plate and carried it and the second bottle of wine through the screen door. He sat on the rough wood bench against the wall. He ate the rest of his dinner rapidly with his hands, both starving and knowing he needed a layer of food to soak up the alcohol. He’d always hated this dinner. Go figure it would probably be his last one at camp, maybe his last dinner anywhere once Kerry got through with him.
He put his plate down and looked up at the sky. It was fully dark now, and the stars, the stars were amazing.
“Ryan!”
He couldn’t tell which of his sisters was calling him back. He stood up, wobbled, steadied himself on the wall. He paused in the doorway, looking at his family. The twins with those same identical looks on their faces. Margaux, resigned. Mary, impenetrable. And the two outsiders, who he knew as well as the rest of them, Sean and Amy. What were they thinking? He met a guy once who worked as a jury consultant, someone who could t
ell from micro-expressions what decision a person had made before you heard the verdict. But he didn’t have that kind of training. He only had his gut telling him that he was out.
He stepped inside. Sean rose and handed him the mailbox. He looked down through the slot. He wondered what had happened to all those letters he’d put through it to his grandparents, deliberately leaving off a stamp or getting the address wrong just to piss off his parents. What a little shit he was. Maybe he did deserve this.
Except he didn’t.
He handed the box back to Sean. “You read them.”
“You sure, man?”
“Yeah.”
Sean opened the lid and pulled out four pink folded pieces of paper.
Kate buried her face in her hands.
“Feeling guilty, twin?” Liddie asked.
“No, I just don’t want to look.”
Amy patted Kate on the back in a gesture that was both maternal and familiar.
“Read ’em, Sean.”
“Read ’em and weep,” Margaux said. “Sorry, sorry, old habit.”
Sean unfolded the first one. “Guilty.”
Ryan felt the bile rise in his throat. The fish sticks were going to taste even worse coming out than they did going down.
“Guilty,” Sean read again.
Two down, Ryan thought.
“Guilty.”
Kate was crying now, and Ryan felt tears pricking his own eyes. This was it, then.
“There’s one more,” Mary said.
Ryan unfolded the final piece of paper.
“Read it already.”
“Not guilty.”
“Oh,” Margaux said. “Oh.”
“What, Margaux?”
“We’re not unanimous. This didn’t solve anything.”
Ryan sank to his knees, his strength leaving him like when Liddie had knocked him in the balls. No one rose to help him. No one said a word.
The only sound was that of Sean ripping the votes into confetti and the moths, drawn to the ceiling light, hitting it over and over because they didn’t know any better.
SATURDAY
CHAPTER 18
HANGOVERS AND OTHER MIRACULOUS CURES
Margaux
Margaux woke on Saturday morning with a splitting headache to the sound of her cell phone buzzing insistently on the nightstand.
She grabbed it without checking who was calling.
“Hello?”
“I thought you said there wasn’t any cell reception?”
She cursed under her breath. It was Mark, because he couldn’t trust her, apparently, to tell him the truth. And here he was, being proven right by some errant pocket in the cell network that had allowed his call to come through. She felt angry with both of them, but most of all with herself. For leaving the phone on, for answering it, and for that third bottle of wine she’d retrieved from her parents’ stash and drunk after the votes had been tallied. That had been a mistake, but not as big as the fourth bottle had been.
“Normally, there isn’t.”
“Oh, normally . . .”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She pushed herself up, and the world started to spin. The sky was barely light outside the gauzy curtains. What time was it, anyway? She checked her watch. It wasn’t even seven.
“Nothing, nothing.”
“What’s going on, Mark?”
He sighed, a long, slow sound she knew too well. She could picture him, sitting at their kitchen table with the phone tucked against his shoulder. He was probably wearing the same shirt he wore to sleep in most nights, full of holes and soft to the touch. When they’d first started dating, she used to steal that shirt, wear it around the house for an entire weekend, happy to be encased in his smell. At some point she’d stopped doing that. And then, a few years later, she’d asked him to throw it away because why did he need to wear a shirt full of holes? He could afford a new one. One that wasn’t so bound up in the past.
She had to break up with him, she realized. All she’d been doing since yesterday—no, scratch that, since longer than she could remember—was criticizing and cringing about the most basic aspects of him. His favorite shirt, for Christ’s sake. The thing he felt most comfortable in in the world bothered her. That wasn’t fair to him, or to her either. But good lord, how was she ever going to do it?
“I miss you,” he said.
“I only left yesterday.”
“So you don’t miss me?”
And then there was that, too, because she didn’t. She used to. She used to be the one who would ask him to admit he missed her, who’d get annoyed when he’d smile and be coy about it and say may-be. She’d punch him in the shoulder and tell him he was being mean, and then he’d do something, like rub the crick in her neck when she was grading or bring her a cup of tea, that made her know he did miss her, that they were even in their relationship. Where had that feeling gone? Because right now she felt as if she didn’t care if she ever saw him again.
What had happened to them?
“I do,” she said, because it was easier to lie than to start pulling everything apart. “It’s just chaos here.”
“Ryan wants to sell?”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
She got up, thunking her head against the sloped ceiling. “Dammit.”
“What happened?”
“I knocked my head.”
She rubbed at the spot on her skull that was already rising. She felt an uncharacteristic urge to cry.
“Ouch,” Mark said.
“Yeah, ouch.”
“Why don’t you let me come get you? You don’t need to stay there.”
“The memorial’s tomorrow.”
“I’ll stay for that, and then we can leave and, I don’t know . . . go somewhere.”
“Where would we go?”
“How about the Gaspé? We always talked about taking a trip up there.”
She put the phone on speaker and put it down on the bedside table. She had one bar of signal. One bar that flickered when she took her hand off the phone, then stabilized. She was naked except for her underwear, her clothes in a rumpled mess on the floor next to the bed. Her head was pounding, from the knock and the alcohol. She felt like shit.
She rummaged in her suitcase for a clean pair of underwear.
“Margie?”
“I’m here.”
“You sound far away.”
“I put the phone down for a minute.”
She swapped out her underwear and slipped on a clean T-shirt.
“What?”
As she picked up the phone, she thought she saw movement outside her window. What the hell? She leaned forward to pry it open. She needed both her hands to do it; the window was caked with years of paint. She tucked the phone under her chin and used all her strength to push it up and open. It gave way with a crack. She stuck her head outside and looked around. No one was there, though the trees were rustling despite the lack of wind.
“Margie? What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing. Sorry, I got distracted.”
“What about the Gaspé?”
She tried to concentrate on the conversation at hand. Maybe it had been Sean or one of her sisters. No big deal. But yet, with everything, it still sent a shiver down her spine.
“A trip now? We have school.”
“We could play hooky for a couple of days.”
“You’ve never played hooky in your life.”
“There’s always a first time.”
She heard another noise outside and froze. She felt exposed, standing there in her underwear and a T-shirt that didn’t cover much. She tried to listen past the fuzz in her ears, but once again there was nothing. It was probably one of her sisters, moving around in
her sleep. But it didn’t sound like it was coming from their room.
It was outside. Definitely outside.
“Marg?”
“Still here.”
“It seems like you’re a million miles away.”
“I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
“What?”
She wanted to end the call, but she knew Mark. The easiest way to get rid of him would be to fill him in and assuage his fears. When all this was done, when it was decided what was happening with Ryan and Sean and the property, she’d end things. Or, she didn’t know . . . Did she have to be that drastic? Maybe they could go to therapy and work on it. Figure this out, because that’s what people should do when they’ve spent five years together. Right?
So she told him about the day before, her father’s ridiculous letter, the fights, and the vote. She left out the bottles of wine she’d shared with Sean and Mary, sitting around the stone fireplace in the lodge while Sean fed logs one by one into the fire. That was precisely the sort of thing that would get Mark to climb into his ten-year-old Prius and drive to camp, which despite her early morning confusion was the one thing she knew she didn’t want.
“You were the not-guilty vote,” he said when she finished.
“Yes.”
“But he did it, didn’t he?”
“No one knows for sure.”
“Someone knows.”
She chewed at the end of a strand of hair. It smelled like cold fish and bad wine. God, she was hungover. She hadn’t had that much to drink in years, and she should’ve known better, but that was the thing about alcohol, wasn’t it? Half a glass of anything bleached away your memories of the last time you drank too much, even if it was the night before. And the other half made the next drink beckon like a fresh lover.
“I guess.”
“You should find out. You know, investigate.”
“Why?”
“So you can make the right decision.”
“I already made my decision.”
“You should reconsider. I mean, if Ryan’s responsible . . .”
She grimaced at herself in the mirror over the beaten-up dresser she hadn’t bothered to put her clothes into. She looked old and worn out, but she was clear enough to know what he was getting at. He’d never liked Ryan because Ryan was the kind of guy who’d probably tortured Mark in high school. But why did Mark care if Ryan got a piece of camp or not? It didn’t affect her portion either way.
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