Heat Wave (2 page)

Carley talked with friends, drank a couple of beers, and then she and Rhonda, one of her roomies, started dancing with their shadows.
Oh, that night—the heat of the air, the cold shock of waves lapping over her feet, the sounds of laughter, and the beat of music—she was a primitive thing for a while that night, dancing in and out of the waves that surged up the shore. It wasn’t just the alcohol, it was the essence of the night, the sheer joy of being young, and she felt sassy, free,
eternal
, somehow part of the world and still very particularly herself.

Late at night, a man came over, took her hand, and led her up to a log someone had left on the beach as a seat.

“You need a hamburger,” he said.

Carley threw her head back and laughed. “I need a hamburger?”

“I’ve been watching you. You’ve been dancing for a long time. You’re about to fall down. I think you need a hamburger and some water and if you sit here, I’ll bring them to you.”

As she dropped down on the log, her head spun and her legs suddenly gave way. She landed hard on her bum. “Oops.” She grinned up at the man. “I think you may be right.”

Carley never had been able to drink much. She went straight from sober to pass out on three glasses of wine, seldom enjoying any kind of high. That night she’d only had two beers, or maybe three. She wasn’t exactly drunk. Perhaps she was just a bit tired. And she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten.

The man returned, bearing a paper plate in one hand and a bottle of Perrier in the other.

“Thanks.” She chugged the sparkling water. “That tastes sublime! I had no idea I was so thirsty.” She held the hamburger with both hands. “Yum.”

“I’m Gus,” he said.

“I’m Carley,” she told him.

They didn’t go to bed with each other that night, although around three a.m., when most of the others were dragging themselves away for a few hours of necessary sleep before their workday began, they did begin to kiss. The log was not a comfortable site for romance. Twice they clumsily tumbled into the sand, laughing through their kisses. Rhonda straggled up to Carley, saying she was
driving back to town now, if Carley wanted a ride. Gus asked Carley if he could see her the next night, and Carley had chuckled, feeling warm and dreamy and tired and sexy.

“Yeah, and somewhere with lights might be good,” she told him. “So we can see what we look like.”

The next night, sober, she had liked the way Gus looked. Anyone would. He was striking, with unusual black eyes and thick black hair. He was older than Carley, already a lawyer, working at the family firm on the island. He loved the island, he had grown up here. He knew who he was and what he was, and that impressed the hell out of Carley.

That night, they had slept together. He took her out to dinner at a posh restaurant, then brought her to his apartment. The sex hadn’t been amazing, at least not for Carley, but it had been friendly, and that was very nice. Afterward, Carley joked, “Ah. Seduced by a hamburger.”

Then Gus took her home to meet his parents, and she did fall in love.

Gus was a Winsted, whose family had helped settle Nantucket in the 1600s. His mother Annabel was a Greenwood, and her family had deep island roots as well. Gus’s father, Russell, had grown up on the island in the Winsted family’s enormous brick house on Main Street, gone off to Harvard, and returned as a lawyer. Annabel was the only child in her family, and when her parents died, she inherited the Greenwood house, another historic Nantucket mansion, this one set at the end of a road on a cliff overlooking the Sound. Gus was an only child, too. “It had just worked out that way,” was as much as elegant Annabel ever offered in explanation.

Russell and Annabel were both striking to look at. Tall and slender, Russell clad his storklike body in elegant pin-striped suits and handmade monogrammed cotton shirts that had belonged to his father and his grandfather. At home, he poured his daily scotch from an antique crystal decanter embossed with silver leaves. And he had
that glossy ebony hair, those piercing dark eyes that gave Gus such intensity.

Annabel, Gus’s mother, was a lean beauty with honey-colored hair worn in a careless twist and soft brown eyes. She was Carley’s mother’s age—forty-nine—but she went around in jeans and turtlenecks and Docksiders.

Carley knew her own mother would consider Annabel a lightweight, a frivolous and even selfish woman. But it was hard to measure up to Carley’s mother’s standards.

Marilyn Smith and her friend Bernice ran a day care center in East Laurence, New York. Marilyn was a passionate reformer, trying to bring comfort and affection to as many small children as she could—as long as they were other people’s children. She had been a dutiful mother to Sarah and Carley until they turned ten, then Marilyn considered them old enough to take care of themselves. More than that, she considered them lucky,
too
lucky, and had no interest in any of their problems, which were, after all, only the problems of spoiled middle-class children. Carley’s father, a dentist, worked hard as well, and came home late and tired. The family seldom ate dinner together but made sandwiches or heated up frozen dinners in the microwave.

But Russ and Annabel relished daily life—that was the mesmerizing, seductive quality the Winsteds had. Everything was centered around the home. Life was about family and friends.

Annabel and Russ both loved cooking. They grew some vegetables and herbs and experimented with sauces. They both had brown rubber waders that they wore when they pushed their way over the sand and through the water to pick mussels off the jetties; one of their favorite meals was mussels steamed with garlic, a warm loaf of homemade bread, a fresh salad, and wine. In the summer, Annabel roamed the moors to pick wild blueberries for pies and jellies; in the fall, she picked beach plums and made jam. Because Annabel and Russ were great sailors, Russ was always taking off from his law firm—it was his family’s firm, he could take off whenever he wanted—to go sailing for the day with Annabel on their catboat,
often returning with fish for dinner. They were both gregarious and loved entertaining, filling the house with people who gathered in the kitchen drinking wine and talking while Annabel and Russ put together some of their spontaneous catch-as-catch-can pizzas.

Not that they were obsessive about cooking. Sometimes Carley would drop by to find Annabel curled up on a sofa, reading. “I can’t put this book down!” she’d say. “We’ll have to order takeout tonight.” Annabel and Russ were voracious readers. They attended all the lectures the library and museums gave. They loved art, too, and covered the walls of their house with works by island artists. They were involved in politics, and attended town meetings faithfully. The high school plays brought them out for at least one performance and often more. They were right
there
in their lives. They were not trying to get anywhere else; they weren’t competitive or envious; they were that rarest of human creatures: genuinely happy people.

Of course, they had started off with more than many people ever had. They had each inherited an old Nantucket mansion. Their lives grew out of the island history like a flower from a new dawn rose, climbing, blossoming, part of a thick twisting stem deeply planted in the island’s sandy soil, and proud to be in that sandy soil.

The Greenwood house that Annabel had grown up in—the house where Carley had made her home for the past thirteen years—was a rambling old wooden structure with a definite summer feeling about it. The redbrick mansion Annabel and Russ lived in was the more formal Winsted home. Behind the house, the large yard was walled with redbrick fifteen feet high, making the garden a private enclosure, a little Eden few people ever saw. Here Annabel grew her vegetables and flowers, and played with shaping privet bushes into whimsical shapes, one of her favorite pastimes. Inside, the rooms were large and high-ceilinged, with fireplaces, most of which worked, silk drapes pooling on the floor, and comfortable sofas and chairs mixed in with antique pieces. Like the ones at Carley’s home, the kitchen and bathrooms were ancient, floored with ceramic tiles, fitted with claw-foot bathtubs that would have been delightful if the porcelain weren’t almost worn through. Both
houses required endless vigilance and maintenance, and endless amounts of money.

The first time Carley entered the Winsted house, she didn’t notice the paint peeling from the walls or the faded ancient Oriental rugs. She thought the metal kitchen cabinets with the inset sink, considered “modern” in the 1940s, were charmingly old-fashioned. She didn’t see the cracks in the plaster around the fireplaces or the way the bookshelves, overburdened with books, leaned dangerously sideways. The house had such a quality of excellence and experience and age. It felt like a wise house, a comforting house, a house that had witnessed holiday festivities and political gatherings and the solemnity of birth and death, and had stood at attention, with pride, through it all.

Carley loved the
idea
of the way the Winsteds lived. She wanted to be casually elegant, too. She yearned for Annabel and Russell to like her. She could imagine spending time with Annabel, learning so very much from her.

The older Winsteds seemed pleased by Carley that first night Gus brought her home. Certainly they charmed her, asked her questions, laughed at her slightest attempt at whimsy, treated her with gentle warmth.

As they drove away from his parents’ house, Carley glanced shyly at Gus. “I think they liked me.”

“Of course they liked you,” Gus replied. “Who wouldn’t?”

She smiled contentedly.

Then Gus said, “Although they wouldn’t like it if I got too involved with you.”

“Really? Why not?”

“Because you’re not an islander. Not ‘one of us.’ ”

“Does that really matter?”

“You’d be surprised how much it matters.”

Carley chewed on her lip. She was already worried about something that could be a real problem between them. This made her feel even worse. She decided to wait a few days to tell Gus. She wanted to be sure.

• • • • •

S
he hadn’t been on the birth control pill. The truth was, she’d been fairly naïve sexually. She’d had one serious boyfriend during high school, and no one since then. She hadn’t planned to hook up with anyone on the island. She hadn’t planned to get serious. She hadn’t planned.

Apparently, the first condom Gus used when they were together was old. By the time Carley went to be fitted with a diaphragm, she was pregnant. It was almost impossible to believe. She wasn’t frightened or sad or happy or anything at all. Just confused.

“I don’t want you to worry,” she told Gus. “I—I can deal with this.” Actually, she hadn’t thought how she would deal with it. It still didn’t seem real; it seemed as if, once she left the island, this fantasy land, and set foot on the mainland, the real world, her pregnancy would vanish.

“Maybe you shouldn’t deal with it,” Gus said. “Maybe we should get married.”

“
Married
? My gosh, Gus, we hardly know each other.”

“Yeah, but I like what I know,” he told her. “We seem to get along awfully well. And the idea of having a family appeals to me. I’m ready for it. It will give me
gravitas.
”

Well, she thought, I never thought I’d marry a man who said
gravitas
. The entire situation seemed dreamlike, as if she were trying on a life like a dress she might decide to buy, or not. She was not passionately
swept off her feet by Gus. She liked him a lot. She thought she could come to love him. She thought his immediate response to her announcement of pregnancy indicated that he loved her, even though he hadn’t said as much.

“What will your parents say?” she asked.

Gus winced. “It’s not going to be easy. But we’ll do it together, Carley. We won’t back down.”

Later in their marriage, Carley would wonder if Gus married her as proof that he was not controlled by his powerful, charismatic parents. Was she his rebellion? His glorious revolution? Certainly, until Cisco’s birth, there was dissension in the family.

Gus invited his parents out to dinner. This was unusual. Annabel loved to cook, and Nantucket restaurants were crowded and expensive in the summer. Also, Gus was a partner specializing in real estate in his father’s legal firm, along with Gus’s best friend Wyatt Anderson, so his father knew exactly how much money Gus made. His parents would be just as likely to chastise him for wasting money as to praise him for taking them out.

Carley thought Gus’s intention was to break the news to his parents in public, where they wouldn’t cause a scene, although Annabel and Russell were never the sort to make a scene.

They went to The Languedoc. They were dressed conservatively, the men in blazers and ties, the women in summer dresses. Annabel wore pearls. Carley wore fake pearls. Carley pulled her long brown hair to the back of her neck in a puritanical bun.

Gus waited until the waiter had taken their dinner orders and brought them more wine before dropping the bomb. “Mom. Dad. Carley and I are going to get married. We’re going to have a baby.”

Annabel responded by turning her head to one side, as if she’d been slapped. She cast a meaningful look at her husband.

Russell remained jovial, as if this were a trivial matter. “Well, well. Gus, this is a surprise. You and Carley haven’t known each other very long—”

Annabel interrupted. “And Carley doesn’t know the island
at all
. Do you, dear? I mean, you’ve never been here in the winter. Perhaps you think it’s all pleasure and parties on the beach, but believe me, we have long, lonely, isolated winter months. Even people who’ve grown up here, who
love
the island, find it difficult.”

Smoothly, Russell took up the argument. “Even though it seems we’re wealthy, we’re not, really. I suppose you could say we’re house poor. I mean, what I’m trying to say, what I’m sure Gus has told you, is that we’re not like a lot of people who fly off to some Caribbean island for a month or so in the winter to get some sunlight. We’re stuck here on this windy stretch of sand all during the coldest months—”