Beach Plum Island (4 page)

Everyone in the bar seemed to be with someone but her. Never mind. She was probably more contented with her life overall than most of the couples in here. A lot of them were probably together despite already having realized they’d made bad choices. Elaine took a sip of her drink and tried not to sneeze as the fizz went up her nose.

Finally, after one more tour of the room, she selected her prey: a man considerably younger than she was. He had olive skin, sleek black hair, and fine features. He wore his button-down plaid shirt tucked into his blue jeans, a look that he doubtless thought made him seem more American.

She made a point of standing directly in front of his table. He was seated with three other men in similar outfits. They were clearly friends; she imagined them working long hours in adjoining cubicles, probably in one of those mazelike Cambridge industrial complexes. She swayed to the music with her back to the man, almost close enough to touch, knowing he and his companions would be admiring her shining dark hair, tiny belted waist, and long legs. Then she summoned the waiter over and bought the man a drink.

His companions hooted, urging him to speak to her. Elaine could hear this going on behind her but didn’t rush things. She didn’t even turn around as he approached.

Standing next to him at last, Elaine was pleased to see that the man was half a head taller than she was despite her heels. He smelled of cinnamon and had eyes like melting chocolates in the flickering light.

He asked her to dance and guided her to the crowded floor with one hand touching the small of her back, making her shiver in anticipation. When the band broke between sets, she suggested going somewhere quiet to talk. Elaine would have preferred leaving for his place right away, but she had learned through the years that the stereotype was true: men desired you more if you pretended to be hard to get. You didn’t want to spook them.

They went to the bar upstairs, where the man told her about his job as a software engineer and his family in India. Elaine mentioned only that she worked in marketing. She never let anyone know the name of her company or that she was its vice president. She didn’t have a Facebook page and her Twitter account was under a different name; she made quite sure to be impossible to track.

As the bartender announced closing time, the man invited her to his place for a brandy. He offered to drive her there, but she said she preferred to take her own car: “I’m sure you understand. It’s a new BMW, and I hate leaving it unattended in this part of Cambridge. Besides, this way you won’t have to drive me home.”

These statements had the desired effect. The man was clearly impressed by her new car and now he was acting nervous, probably worrying that she wouldn’t be as easy as he’d thought.

His condo was exactly what she had expected, a tidy one-bedroom, third-floor walk-up in Cambridge with Ikea furniture. This told her that the man was probably a newly minted PhD, spent most of his waking hours at work, and most likely sent half his earnings home to India, where his mother was tirelessly, devotedly scouring the countryside for a suitable bride to join him.

Elaine sipped the brandy politely, complimenting everything from his kitchen cupboards to his sofa pillows, then slipped off her heels and crossed her legs. Her bare feet usually sealed the deal. She was always careful about pedicures, and this week her nails were a pearly, girly pink.

She bounced her foot and laughed at something the man said, then ducked her head a little, letting her hair partly cover her face, playing it shy. “I should probably go,” she said. “It’s getting awfully late.”

This gave him the impetus to make his move. Elaine wasn’t disappointed. Her new lover was eager and delicious, his hairless bronze skin as smooth as a succulent plant, his hands gentle and pleasing as he leaned over to kiss her, whispering, “Stay with me.”

It was just the thing to take Elaine’s mind off sorrow, and loss, and how badly she had hurt Katy. She had meant to do it. Of course she had. She just hadn’t expected to feel so miserable afterward.

T
he Monday after the service, Ava drove her sons to their jobs—Evan to the local supermarket, where he was a bagger, and Sam to the landscaping company in Newburyport where he loaded mulch and gravel into trucks all day, making her tease him and call him “the Incredible Hulk.”

Both boys were saving money to pay their father back for the new instruments he’d bought them at the end of the school year. Evan, quieter and less confident, played bass, and Sam had a bright blue electric guitar. They had formed a band with their friend Les, a drummer, and Ava had recently given them permission to turn her living room into a music studio, God help her.

Back home, she ate her usual breakfast of oatmeal washed down by strong Darjeeling tea, then worked for several hours in the studio. When she’d thrown the last piece, she sat up and stretched her back. She wasn’t used to spending this many hours at the wheel. During the school year, she taught art at the local high school, which meant she was often too busy to pursue her own pottery projects at home. Ava tried to make up for this in the summer months by producing enough pottery to sell throughout the year through local galleries and craft shows.

She decided to take a walk before glazing the pots she’d fired over the weekend. She started south toward the wildlife sanctuary, then headed inland. Here the beach grasses grew in thick tufts beneath twisting shadows of the gnarled miniature plum trees that gave Beach Plum Island its name.

Poverty grass
: that’s what some islanders called the beach heather that grew in thick carpets and seemed to need little more than air to thrive. Without it, there would be no Beach Plum Island, because the shoreline would be eroded by storms and tides. And without Beach Plum Island acting as a barrier, the northern Massachusetts coastline would be carved away by hurricanes and snowstorms.

Ava turned around after half an hour, driven by thoughts of Elaine. She would have been even more furious at her sister if she didn’t also feel guilty. Ava had spent practically every minute of her last two years of high school with Mark, her ex-husband; he was a skinny track star so besotted with her that he had spent an entire summer’s wages to buy her an engagement ring with a diamond chip the fall after they graduated. They had married at twenty, and by the time Dad left, she was too busy with the boys to help Elaine with their mother.

At least that was the way Ava had always tried to rationalize the events of that horrible year. In reality, in the fierce cold light of hindsight, she could have done more. She wasn’t teaching then. She had time on her hands. She never went to see them after they moved to Maine, despite several frantic phone calls from Elaine about Mom’s increasingly bizarre behavior. If she had been around, would things have turned out differently? Maybe. At the very least, Elaine wouldn’t be so angry and hurt now.

Ava continued down the beach, lifting the soft sand with her toes and watching it spray in front of her. As always, thinking about the past made her feel as if a crowd of people were in her head, all shouting at once in languages she didn’t understand. It didn’t help that she was feeling so emotionally wrung out by her wakeful night. She’d been having a recurring nightmare for years. Now, given her father’s last words, she had begun to wonder if it wasn’t a dream at all, but an actual memory. Whatever it was, she was always left shaken by it.

She slowed her pace, concentrating hard, gathering the few fragments she remembered. She saw herself as a small child walking down a dim hallway. She opened the door to a dark room, a room she knew she was never supposed to enter because her mother had forbidden it.

As Ava opened the door, a little boy not much bigger than she was dashed out, grabbing her around the waist and pressing his face against her neck, making strange, snuffling animal noises and saying, “Who you? Who you?” She was paralyzed with fear as the little boy kept clawing at her arms and touching her face, laughing at her until she cried and pushed him away. Only then did her mother come running, soothing her and shutting the other child back in the bedroom, this time locking the door with a hook too high up for a child to reach.

Her friend Olivia would probably say this recurring nightmare was all about her inner child. But Ava woke every time drenched in sweat, her heart pounding. The dream felt as real as her life.

She forced herself to walk faster to shake her ragged mood, then stopped to pick up a mussel shell, admiring its swirling sheen of violet and pink. She wondered if she should glaze her new pitchers that way. She pocketed the shell and continued walking, surprised to see a figure standing on tiptoe near her studio, face pressed to one of the windows.

“Hey!” she yelled. “Can I help you?”

It wasn’t until the figure spun around, climbed onto a bicycle in the driveway, and rode away that Ava realized it was Gigi. What was she doing here?

•   •   •

Gigi wasn’t going back to camp again. Not after seeing Lydia beat the crap out of that poor horse. She winced just thinking about the way the crop had sounded, almost like gunshots, Lydia red-faced and slapping it against the flank of her sweet-tempered bay gelding.

Lydia said she was punishing the horse for not clearing the brick wall, and only laughed when Gigi said, “But he’s a horse, Lydia. He doesn’t know why you’re hitting him now. He’s already forgotten the jump. They have the brains of three-year-olds.”

“Yeah, like you’re such a friggin’ expert,” Lydia had huffed. “You can hardly even
ride
. It must suck to suck.”

It used to be fun, going to the club for riding lessons, or for tennis camp and dinner with her parents afterward. Gigi didn’t mind the club when she was younger, though she was grateful her parents never made her take golf lessons. She’d rather pluck her eyes out with tweezers than waste hours trying to hit stupid little white balls into holes.

Then things started changing, or maybe Gigi did, when Dad got cancer. The other girls acted like she was the one who got sick and it might be catching. They were always polite, except for Lydia, but never invited her to their houses anymore.

That was mostly fine with her. Gigi didn’t want to be like any of them. She wanted to be an artist, or maybe the lead singer in a band. She didn’t have any burning desire to troll the mall or Instagram people. What a freakin’ waste of time and money.

Not that money was a problem. All Gigi had to say at home was that there was another club fund-raiser for Haiti or abused women, and her mother practically emptied her wallet into Gigi’s hands.

Mom didn’t need money now, since she never left the house. This worried Gigi. She’d told Gramma Dawn that Mom wasn’t eating or taking showers, but her grandmother seemed to think this was normal, saying, “She’ll snap out of it, dear, you’ll see.”

Gigi wasn’t so sure, but what could she do about it? Meanwhile, it was easy to write a note to the riding camp instructor in her mother’s handwriting, saying Gigi had carpal tunnel syndrome—she was proud of that excuse—and wouldn’t be attending riding camp this summer because her wrists needed to be strong for field hockey season in the fall.

Ha. Field hockey. As if.

The only problem was that now her days loomed long and empty. Gigi couldn’t hang at the club pool; most kids her age were away at camp, so it would just be her and the little kids. Besides, she couldn’t risk any of the other moms calling hers.

And she couldn’t stay anywhere in the neighborhood, on the very off chance that her mother left the house or that Uncle Simon, the only one in her mom’s family who seemed to think Gigi was worth talking to, stopped by to visit.

So Gigi mostly pedaled her bike aimlessly around. Some days she’d cross the bridge and head into Amesbury, where she sat by the waterfalls and ate frozen yogurt, then maybe went to a matinee at the cinemas on Route 110. Or she would bike south from Newburyport to sit on the banks of the Parker River and draw the great blue herons and egrets in her sketch pad. Once, she had even seen a sandhill crane. She could draw, like, for fifty hours straight, if only her teachers would quit harassing her about things she wasn’t remotely interested in, like physics and algebra.

School was for morons. She couldn’t understand those girls who tested themselves on Quizlet or made color-coded note cards and never missed a help session, posting things on Facebook like
Two tests tomorrow, might as well kill myself now, so stressed!

Today she had ridden her bike out to Beach Plum Island to see where Ava lived. Not that she could even
think
of her as a sister. God, she was older than her own mom! Still, Gigi was curious about her and about Elaine, too, after that freak show at the service.

She had met them before, of course. Mom used to always invite them for holidays or whatever. “They’re family,” she’d insist when Gigi rolled her eyes and pointed out the obvious, that Ava and Elaine wanted nothing to do with them. “They should know they’re always welcome in their father’s home.”

Today, after Ava caught her snooping around the studio—she would have liked to have seen more, but she didn’t need any
lectures
—
Gigi biked over to the beach by the Beach Plum Island lighthouse. This beach was across the Merrimack River from Salisbury Beach on the mainland, a place her mom refused to go, saying it was filled with “transients,” and probably even “real Gypsies.” But Gigi and her dad went to Salisbury anyway.

“Let’s go to the honky-tonk side of town,” Dad would announce on certain steamy summer weekends, and off they’d go to Salisbury Beach, where they’d bodysurf the waves or wander through the chaotic campground with its flocks of sticky kids.

Then they’d hit the boardwalk and hang out at the arcades. Her dad was amazing at the old pinball machines. For dinner they’d eat slices of limp pizza sold out of a window. They’d finish the night with go-karts and fried dough powdered with sugar and so sweet it made Gigi’s teeth ache. Her dad always made her arm-wrestle him for the last bite.

Gigi’s eyes filled. She swatted away the tears, wishing she could smash them like flies. She hated God for letting Dad die. More proof that God sucked. As if the hurricanes and earthquakes, terrorist bombings, and school shootings weren’t enough proof that God was totally insane.

She locked her bike to the chain-link fence by the playground, slipped off her sandals, and carried her sketch pad down to the water, where she sank cross-legged onto the sand and fiddled with her lip ring. She’d gotten her ears pierced when she was twelve. Her mom took her to a doctor and winced when the doctor put gold studs in Gigi’s ears, despite the fact that he’d numbed her ears so completely, Gigi felt like her head was wrapped in duct tape.

After Dad got sick, she’d bribed Miguel, one of the janitors at her school, to take her to New Hampshire in his rusty truck for more piercings. Miguel knew lots of places where people didn’t care how old you were. You could buy tattoos, fireworks, lip rings, and even guns in New Hampshire if you had the money and knew where to go.

She’d pierced her eyebrow and then her lip out of solidarity with her father. By the end, Dad had looked half machine, connected to tubes that dripped medicine into his body like a leaking faucet. Only it seemed like maybe the faucet was dripping the wrong way, because her dad’s life was leaking out of him.

After getting her lip pierced, Gigi had ridden her bike to the hospital. Her lip was swollen and red. At the sight of it, Mom said, “Oh, Gigi, that’s the last straw, honestly, your poor beautiful mouth,” and started to cry. She left the room “to get a little air.”

But Dad, who was having one of his good days, sitting up and drinking something orange with a straw, asked her to sit on the bed beside him. His face was so thin by then that he’d been joking with Gigi about it lately, saying, “Finally, I look like Mick Jagger instead of a fat banker.”

“Does it hurt?” he’d asked, reaching out to almost, but not quite, touch her lip.

“More than my ears or my nose,” she admitted. “That’s okay. I wanted it to hurt.”

“Why, honey?” Dad dropped his hand, his fingers landing on her wrist like a bird’s scaly cold foot.

“I wanted to know what you’re feeling.” She pointed to the needle in his arm that connected to his tubes.

He smiled. “Thank you. I wish I could dye my hair blue and know what you’re feeling.”

“I could dye it for you,” Gigi said, pretending that her dad still had his hair, when in fact his head looked like a baby’s now, pink and smooth, with a few random cottony bits.

“Maybe next time. Listen, there’s something you need to know before I leave you, G-girl. Something very important.”

“Okay,” she said, even though her stomach had knotted. Having her dad die was important enough, it seemed, without having to know anything else. “What?”

“I love you, and I know you love me. But I have a feeling you’re going to forget me after a little while.”

“I won’t!”

Dad blinked hard. “Okay. Even if you don’t, though, I want you to know that you won’t be alone in the world after I’m gone.”

“You’re not trying to tell me to believe in God and angels or anything like that, are you?” she’d said. “Because this would be a really bad time to try and convince me that God has a plan.”

“I hear you, G-girl. No, no. I want you to know you have other people in your family.”

She nodded. “Right. Mom and Gramma are around every day, and now Uncle Simon is back from China or wherever.”

“Yes, but you have other family, too.” Dad took a deep, shivery breath, his whole chest caving in. “On my side.”

“You mean Ava and Elaine?”

“No. I mean your brother. You have a brother, Gigi.”

“I do?” Gigi was so stunned that she’d stopped fiddling with her new lip ring. “You had another wife, not just Mom and Suzanne?” She’d heard all about Suzanne from her mom, who said Dad’s first wife had “gone off the deep end.” This sounded exciting, though not the way her mom said it.

Dad shook his head. One eyelid was twitching like it always did when he got tired. “No more wives. Two were plenty for me. And I could never, ever love another woman the way I love your mom, honey. Never forget that. But Suzanne and I had another child when we were very young, not much older than you.” His voice had faded to a whisper. “Named Peter. He would be so proud of you, honey, just like I am.”