The Beach Club (9 page)

“My own desert places.” Bill loved his wife and daughter until his heart and lungs and liver and brain stretched and ached and pressed at their boundaries. But he had one desert place: he wanted a son. Sometimes Bill heard Mack’s voice or saw Mack throw his head back and laugh, and he thought,
My son would be almost this age. This could be my son fixing the lamppost, driving the Jeep. This could be my son. Why couldn’t this be my son?

Mack didn’t have an hour or even fifteen minutes on Memorial Day to meditate about his parents, but he thought of them more than usual. Maribel had asked him late one night, “If you could have your parents back for an hour, would you do it?” The question upset him so much, he turned away from her in the dark. Mack wanted to pluck his parents out of Oblivion and tell them, face to face,
I miss you, every day I miss you, and I love you
. Who wouldn’t want that? But even if it were possible, he would never do it. To have his parents back for an hour meant giving them up after an hour, and that was a loss from which he would never recover. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing them again.

Maribel was the only one to ever ask questions about the night of the accident. Mack had been out with friends, seeing a movie. When his friend Josh Pavel pulled down the long dirt road that led through cornfields to the Petersens’ farmhouse, Mack saw the sheriff’s car in his driveway. There were no flashing lights, nothing like you saw on TV, only the sheriff, a man Mack knew from school assemblies, sitting on the front porch steps, his hat resting on his knees. The sheriff stood up, put his hands on Mack’s shoulders, and said, “Your mother and dad are gone. They’ve been killed.”

“And how did you feel at that moment?” Maribel asked him.

Mack stared at her blankly. “What moment?”

“The moment you learned they were gone.”

He swallowed. “I don’t know. I can’t remember the exact moment. It’s nothing I think about. It was the worst moment of my life. I don’t want to reexamine it.”

“You’ve blocked it out,” she said.

“I remember I threw up,” he said. “I vomited into my mother’s rhododendrons. I remember being embarrassed about that, in front of the sheriff.”

“Did you cry?” Maribel asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You must have cried.”

“I don’t know if I cried right then. I’m telling you, I can’t remember much. I remember the sheriff waiting for me on the porch, his hat on his knees.”

Ever since David Pringle’s phone call, Mack found himself thinking about the farm—the smell of the soil, the barn, the hog pen. The rough, hairy skin of a sow’s back, and the way the pigs squealed like children. To this day, Mack’s house had been left just as it was—Mack’s bedroom with his Iowa Hawkeyes pennants and his 1985
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit calendar hanging on the wall. A valentine from Michele Waikowski thumbtacked to his bulletin board.

His parents’ room too had been left as it was—his father’s Carhartt overalls in the closet, and his mother’s dresses. His mother’s pale hair still in her hairbrush. The food in the kitchen had been cleaned out, except for Mack’s mother’s refrigerator pickles. “Leave the refrigerator pickles,” Mack told David Pringle. His mother used to say they would last forever.

Mack knew it was odd to keep things as they were, crazy, even. He supposed the farm hands gossiped about the house, along with the people in Swisher, along with people simply passing through Swisher; by now, it was legend.
The farmhouse, untouched since the couple was killed in a car crash twelve years ago. Haunted? The woman’s hair still in her hairbrush
. For years, David Pringle had been urging Mack to clean out the house and rent it, but Mack refused. Mack’s life with his parents was, in fact, frozen. The house was a museum of sorts, a museum Mack could visit if he ever found the desire, or the courage, to return.

Because it was Memorial Day, Mack let Love go home early—she’d been swamped all weekend—and he took over behind the front desk and imagined his parents standing there with him.
Here is the lobby
, the quilts Mack hung every year.
Look out at the ocean
, the ferry taking a crowd of people back to the mainland.
Listen to this couple here checking out
. They were sunburned across their cheeks, bike helmets tucked into their duffel bags.

“We had a great time,” the man said, handing over his American Express card. (Mack would
not
want his parents to know how much the room cost.) “Thank you very much.”

“Yes, and thank you for recommending the bike ride to Altar Rock,” the woman chimed in. “It was spectacular.”

The couple went to meet their cab, touching a few of Therese’s wooden toys on the way out, as if for luck.

See? I made them happy. I made them smile
. But when Mack turned around, of course, no one was there.

Memorial Day: a day for remembering. Still, Lacey Gardner had better days for remembering Maximilian—his birthday, August 18, or their wedding anniversary, November 11, even Valentine’s Day, because that, sadly, was the day Maximilian had died. Besides, Memorial Day was for veterans, wasn’t it? Or was Veterans’ Day for veterans and Memorial Day for the rest of God’s people? Darn it, Lacey couldn’t remember and didn’t much care except that she had invited the new bellman in for a drink and he was asking her all kinds of questions about Maximilian, practically forcing Lacey to remember him.

“What did your husband do for a living?” Jeremy asked. (He introduced himself as Jem, but Jem wasn’t a real name in Lacey’s opinion and she told him so. She would call him Jeremy.)

“Banker,” Lacey said. The boy agreed to a scotch, a point in his favor. Lacey poured two drinks and brought them over to the coffee table. Jeremy sat on the sofa looking at a photograph of Maximilian taken the summer before he died. He was tan and healthy-looking in that picture, standing on the deck of their house on Cliff Road.

“Is this him here?” Jeremy asked.

“Indeed,” Lacey answered. “That’s Maximilian Percy Gardner.” She walked back to the kitchen—although in this tiny cottage, living room, dining room, and kitchen were one and the same—and fished through her refrigerator for cheese. She put some brie on a plate with a few Carr’s water crackers. Then there was a knock at the screen door. It was Vance with her bucket of ice. Goodness gracious, she forgot to put ice in the cocktails and hadn’t even noticed.

“The iceman cometh,” Lacey said. Vance didn’t smile—his face remained clenched in the same tight scowl he always wore. It would do the young man a world of good to smile every now and again, but she’d been telling him that for years, and to no avail. Now Vance had shaved his head. What on earth for? Lacey asked him. Some kind of gang? For freedom, Vance told her. He liked to feel the cool breeze against his scalp.

Vance peered into the living room, took in Jeremy sitting on the sofa.

“I’d ask you to join us,” Lacey said quickly, “but I know you’re on duty. There’s nothing like work to ruin a cocktail hour.”

“That’s okay,” Vance said. He set the bucket of ice down on the counter. “See ya.”

“Thank you, Vance!” Lacey called. She took the cheese and crackers to the table and went back for the ice. Having company meant a lot of dashing about. If she’d kept her mouth shut, she would be sitting in her chair, watching Dan Rather.

By the time Lacey reached the coffee table with the bucket of ice, Jeremy had dug into the cheese. Lacey was able to drop into her chair and relax just a minute while he finished chewing. She noticed he left the picture of Maximilian facedown on the sofa. This was quite definitely a strike against him.

“Let’s hear about you,” Lacey said. “Where do you come from? Your family?”

“I grew up in Falls Church, Virginia,” he said. “My father owns a bar.”

“A bar, really?” Lacey said. “Do you have siblings?”

Jem fixed himself another cracker. “A younger sister,” he said. “She’s bulimic. My parents go with her to counseling. You know what bulimia is, right? She stuffs her face with food and then she pukes it all up.” Jeremy popped the cracker into his mouth.

Lacey sipped her drink. The photograph snagged Jeremy’s interest again. “So this is your husband. He looks like Douglas Fairbanks, the old actor. How long were you married?”

“Forty-five years,” Lacey said. “I married late in life. I was thirty-one years old. I had a career, you see, and many people, my father included, thought that was like hammering the final pegs into the coffin of my spinsterhood. But Maximilian married me anyway.”

“So you were married for forty-five years,” Jeremy said. “How many children do you have?”

Lacey wondered if there were a formula for determining how many questions a person would ask before finding the exact wrong question, the question that brought a second too long of silence, the question that caused the voice of heartache to answer. Jeremy had found it early on; Lacey hated to answer this question.

“No children,” she said. “As I told you, we married late.”

Jeremy fixed himself another cracker. “You said you were thirty-one. That’s not too old to have children.”

“It was for us,” Lacey said. She had always blamed her barrenness on her advanced age—thirty-four by the time Maximilian returned from the war—although now she was programs on TV about childless couples and she realized it could have been the result of any number of complications. The fact was, she hadn’t gotten pregnant and she’d wanted to adopt. But Maximilian refused—it was the only time in forty-five years they had argued. They would not adopt! He was so stubborn about this, Lacey could hardly believe he was the same man she had married. By way of explanation, Maximilian told her he once had a chum who adopted a baby, and it turned out the baby was one-quarter Japanese. Who cared if the baby were one-quarter Japanese—or full-blooded Japanese for that matter? Lacey asked. She hadn’t been in the war, Maximilian said. True, this was true; Lacey hadn’t been in the war. But that had little to do with the matter at hand. Lacey had simply wanted a baby.

She looked at the photograph of Maximilian, which Jeremy returned to its upright position. She and Maximilian had a good life—a rich and varied life filled with work, travel, erudite people. But Maximilian didn’t stick it out with her the way he promised. He died in his sleep. He wasn’t even sick; it was as though he were just too tired to keep on living. Too tired! They fell asleep together, holding hands, but Lacey woke up alone. Clearly, when Maximilian made his decision about adoption he hadn’t realized how alone she would be.

“Would you like another drink?” Lacey asked.

“I can fix them,” Jeremy said.

“Good,” she said, settling into her chair. “Because I’m getting comfortable.”

Jeremy made the drinks and when he handed Lacey hers, she tasted it. “Very nice. Now tell me, Jeremy, about your career plans. I hear Nantucket is merely a resting stop for you, on your way to Hollywood.”

Jeremy nodded. “That’s right. I’m headed west in the fall. I want to be an agent.”

Agent, Lacey thought, like the FBI? No, that couldn’t be right. There was that old term, agency man; what had that meant? Or maybe not agent but aged, like hereself.

“Agent?” she said.

“I used to think I wanted to act,” Jem said. “I tried in college and it didn’t work out so well. But I like business, so I figure I’ll go out to L.A. and help people who can act. Represent them. Make them money. Be their friend.”

The world had surely deteriorated if one now got paid for being a friend. “That sounds lovely,” Lacey said.

Jeremy fixed himself yet another cracker. Well, he’d worked all day—it was understandable the boy would be hungry. Lacey was going to heat up a swordfish potpie for her dinner. She contemplated asking Jeremy to stay, but that seemed like too much.

“What do your parents think of all this?” Lacey asked.

A piece of cracker stuck in Jeremy’s throat and he coughed. Perhaps she had stumbled upon Jeremy’s sore spot. Perhaps the bulimic sister was a much safer topic than his parents.

“They don’t know about California,” he said. “My parents want me close to home, especially with my sister all messed up. They want me to find an internship in D.C. or something. So they don’t know about California yet. Do you think that’s bad?”

“To be honest, I’ve never understood why children feel they need their parents’ approval,” Lacey said. “I believe the earlier you stop hoping for that, the happier you’ll be. Look at me—my father went to all kinds of trouble to send me to Radcliffe, but then he sniffed when I pursued a career. But I didn’t let that stop me. I had a career that I adored and a husband, too.”

Jeremy’s face brightened. “Yeah, I figure they might not like the idea at first but once I make it, they’ll be fine with the whole thing.”

“You might be better off not worrying what your parents think at all. Ever.”

“They
are
my parents,” Jeremy said. “They did raise me.”

“All a parent can do is hope for the best,” Lacey said. This was the philosophy she always believed she would have followed with a child. Raise them as well as you can and then let them go. Jeremy looked at her strangely. Maybe he didn’t understand how much eighty-eight years of life could teach a person. She was relieved when he stood up.

“I should be going,” he said. He leaned over and kissed Lacey’s cheek, another point in his favor. “Thanks for the drink and the cheese and stuff.”

“You’re welcome, my dear,” she said. “Come again.”

Jeremy left the cottage, closing the screen door quietly behind him. Lacey stayed in her chair. She could reach for the remote control and turn on Dan Rather, or she could stand up and retrieve the swordfish potpie from the freezer. But for a moment she did neither. She was paralyzed with loneliness, and anger about that loneliness. She kicked the coffee table and the picture of Maximilian fell over with a clatter. This pleased her for an instant and then she felt irritated. Surely there were better days to get angrier than hell at her dear, departed Maximilian than this, Memorial Day.