Summer People (16 page)

“Jennifer’s dead,” she said. She turned off the TV and sank back into the pillows. “I love that movie but I always hope that it will end differently. Of course it never does. We should get up. The kids’ll be home soon. They’ll need to eat.”

“Jade Palace?” Arch said. “Pu-pu platter for four?”

“After that lunch, I thought I’d skip dinner,” Beth said. “But I could go for a pu-pu platter.”

Now, at Horizon, Beth poured herself the last of the wine. She remembered that dinner, the four of them at Jade Palace eating potstickers and spare ribs and crab rangoons. She remembered Arch and her sitting in the backseat of the cab with Winnie on the way home—Arch in the middle with his arms around both of them, saying, “I love my girls.” She remembered getting home and listening to the phone messages—one message from Arch’s secretary, Polly, with his travel arrangements for the next day, and one message from Caroline Margolis inviting them to a dinner party on Saturday.

“Tell her we’ll come if she makes her key lime pie,” Arch said.

The day ended with Beth calling Caroline to accept, the kids going to their rooms to do homework, and Arch disappearing into his office to prepare for his trip to Albany. Later, Beth and Arch climbed into bed and read for a while.

“This was the perfect day,” Beth said. “Thank you.”

Arch kissed her. “If I could, Beth, I’d spend every day with you just like I did today.”

He was gone in the morning before she woke up, but when she rolled over she found one of the flame-colored roses on his pillow.

The painful part about remembering all the details from her last day with Arch was that these same details were cruelly present two days later—she didn’t find out Arch’s plane had crashed until very early on the morning of March 16th. Beth was wakened by the phone at quarter to six in the morning, and when she noticed Arch wasn’t in bed, she yelled to him to answer it. She didn’t realize he wasn’t home. He’d called the night before to say his flight was delayed because of weather and he’d be home late, and Beth assumed he came to bed then got up early to work in his study. When the phone didn’t get answered and the machine picked up, Beth groaned and reached for the phone through the fog of her sleep. That groan, that action of reaching, was the last innocent moment before learning the awful truth. At times, she wished she could freeze time and stay there, half asleep, in the not-knowing.

It was Trent Trammelman on the phone, the managing partner of Arch’s firm. The authorities had called him first because it was the law firm’s plane.

Beth screamed like she was falling into a hole she knew she would never escape from. And then, the absolute worst thing she’d ever had to do in her life: tell Winnie and Garrett, who were in their rooms getting ready for school, that their father was dead. Winnie was in her bra and panties, shrieking with embarrassment when Beth opened her bedroom door. Beth didn’t remember speaking any words, but she must have conveyed the news in some way because Winnie crumpled to the ground like she’d been hit by a bullet, and Beth sank to her knees and covered Winnie’s body with her own, the two of them moaning. Garrett found them there and he, too, started wailing, which really pushed Beth over the edge: her strong teenage son crying like a baby.

Before she knew it, the apartment was filled with people. People from the law firm, friends, Arch’s mother, kids from Danforth. In Beth’s mind, this happened instantly. The apartment was filled with people and the smell of coffee and cell phones ringing and talk of the black box, and there was Beth still in her nightgown, like one of those bad dreams where she was throwing a party but had forgotten to get dressed. The buzzer from downstairs rang again and again—the florist with sickly-sweet arrangements, her neighbor with a ham, Caroline Margolis with a key lime pie. Was she imagining this? It was all happening so fast, so soon, these condolences, that Beth grew confused. She was waiting for Arch to walk through the door to the apartment and send everyone else home. By evening, hysteria set in. Arch was never coming home. She would never see him again.

One of the people who came that first day was Dr. Schau, who was Trent’s wife’s therapist. She showed up after office hours and gave Beth a shot and finally everything slowed down. Beth was able to see the horrible things in the apartment that no one else could see: the eleven orange roses, the boxes with two brand new pairs of men’s shoes, the leftover moo shu pork in the refrigerator.

The vision, when she closed her eyes, of Oliver sitting alone in the snowy park.

By midnight, Beth had finished the wine but she was still wide awake. She would be forced to take a Valium, but first she stood up and went to the screen door. It frightened her to remember how raw her grief had been. Now, after four months, she had coping mechanisms in place. The thing that helped the most was that she was here on Nantucket. Not only was Nantucket quieter than New York, it was darker. All she could see were the stars and a couple of tiny lights from her neighbors’ houses in the distance. Then, a pair of headlights approached. Kids headed to the beach. Drunk, probably. Beth shuddered: when she woke up, she would have to take Garrett to get his license. As the car drew closer to Beth’s house, it slowed down. Beth switched on the porch light. David’s truck. She blinked twice, certain she was hallucinating. Too much wine. But no—it was David, driving by her house in the middle of the night. Beth’s first instinct was indignation, until she realized it was no worse than her walking through his house that afternoon. She opened the door as quietly as she could and tiptoed down the shell driveway in her bare feet. She climbed into the truck.

David was in a T-shirt and shorts. His hair was mussed. Without a word, he drove toward the water. When all that was in front of them was ocean and night sky, he stopped. He undid his seatbelt and slumped against his door. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me, either.”

“I missed you so much. I managed twenty years without you, but the last three days almost killed me.”

Beth had no idea how to respond to this. Part of her felt the same way—she had gone to his
house
! But, as ever, there was her guilt and longing for Arch. She remembered back to March sixteenth. At night, after all the people went home, she and Winnie and Garrett slept in the same bed. They did that for two weeks.

“David, we have to stop this.”

“I feel like a teenager,” he said. “I used to do this all the time after you left for the summer. I’d drive by your house and imagine you standing inside the screen door, just like you were doing a few seconds ago. It used to make me feel better to look at your house because I knew you’d always come back to it.”

Beth put her hands over her eyes; he was so handsome she was afraid to look at him. The smart thing, she realized, would have been to stay safely inside her house. “We can’t recreate those days, David. Too much has happened in our lives.”

David rubbed his stubbly chin. “We were in love.”

“Yes, we were.”

“Were, Bethie?”

“Were,” she said.

“I’m in love with you now,” David said. “When I split with Rosie … when I read about Arch in the paper … when I saw you at the store … actually, no. Forget all that. I never stopped loving you. I had to
live
here, Beth. I had to live each day with all of our memories. It made getting over you impossible.”

“You managed fine without me,” Beth said. “You married Rosie the next year. You had kids.”

“It was never quite right,” David said. “Rosie finally realized it and left.”

“You’re not blaming me for your separation?” Beth said. “That’s absurd.”

“It’s only your fault in the larger sense,” David said. “In the sense that during all those years with Rosie, a part of my heart was missing.”

“Don’t tell me that, David,” Beth said. “Your problems with Rosie are between the two of you. They have nothing to do with me.” She remembered the wedding picture she found in David’s bathroom. Something about how it was placed so that there were actually two pictures in the bathroom—the picture itself and its reflection—made Beth understand that the picture was important to David. What it represented was important. After all, Rosie was still alive; her marriage to David was still viable. Maybe he’d go back to her. That would be for the best.

“The past two weeks have been the happiest weeks I’ve had in ages,” David said. “Just knowing I would see you, even for a few minutes.” He leaned over the console that separated the two seats and took her chin. He held her face and hooked her eyes, making her look at him. Making her see him. What did he want from her? Maybe he wanted her to admit the truth—that she felt the same way, that she, too, looked forward, a little bit, to seeing him, that he made her feel less sad, that he provided hope, a glimpse into what might someday lie beyond all this heavy grief. But a second later, Beth understood that what David wanted was beyond words. His face grew closer; he kept his fingers on her chin. He was going to kiss her.

He was kissing her; they were kissing.

Beth forgot herself for a second. She was tired, she’d had a lot of wine, and surely just one second wasn’t going to hurt anyone, one second of David’s lips, which tasted like the best young love imaginable, which tasted like summer, which tasted like home. One second then one second more. David’s tongue touched her bottom lip lightly, and that was enough. Beth opened her eyes.

“Whoa,” she said, pulling away. “Whoa. Wait.”

David stared at her. Her cover was blown, her lie exposed. She wasn’t a woman in mourning after all. She had kissed him back. A hideous blackness gathered behind her eyes and she gazed out the window at the water. She had kissed him back.

“There,” he whispered.

There?
As in,
take that?
Beth wasn’t sure what he meant by “there,” but it didn’t make her feel any better. “Okay,” she said, fresh out of words herself.

“You can pretend that never happened,” David said. “I, of course, won’t be able to.”

Beth’s mind raced around in search of something to say. A kiss! What a perfect ending for today—she had walked through David’s empty house, she had signed her name Elizabeth Ronan,
and for my final trick, ladies and gentlemen …
the kiss. Only months after the death of her husband, she had kissed David Ronan.

“I’m taking Garrett to get his license tomorrow,” she said. “Once he can drive, the kids won’t need us to chauffeur them around.”

“So we’ll go out alone,” David said.

“We will not,” Beth said. “I know I’m sending mixed messages—and not only to you, but to myself. But I just lost my husband, and unlike you, a piece of my heart
wasn’t
missing. I loved Arch Newton with my whole heart. I loved him with my mind and soul and spirit.”

David straightened his arms to the steering wheel. “Because you left me with your heart intact,” he said. “
You
left
me.
I was the one who got his heart broken. I was the one who had to face your father at the front door of that house back there and listen to him tell me that you never wanted to see me again and that I’d be hearing from his lawyer.”

“I won’t talk about that,” Beth said. “And I don’t want you to talk about it either.”

“You do remember what happened, don’t you?”

“
Of course
I remember what happened,” Beth said. “But guess what? Splitting with you wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me. The worst thing was—”

“Losing your husband,” David said. “I know, I know.”

“You do
not
know,” Beth said. “I’m offended that you pretend to know.”

“I know about losing the person I loved most in the world,” David said. “That’s what it was for me when you left.”

Beth was quiet. She deserved this and worse, even twenty-five years after the fact. But she felt she needed to address the kiss; she had to let him know that there would be no more kisses and certainly no dating.

“I’m going to ask you to give up,” Beth said. “I’m going to ask you to leave me alone.”

“I will not give up,” David said. “Because some day you’ll recover. And when you do, I’m going to be here. I’m going to be waiting for you.”