Summer People (21 page)

“Oh, thank God,” Beth said. The girl looked defiant—arms welded across her chest—but fine, otherwise. David chatted with the officer at the wheel for a second, clapping him on the arm, and then the police car drove off. Beth opened the door for them.

“What happened?” she said.

Peyton glared at Beth, a look so hateful that it startled her.

“I’m going to bed,” she spat.

When she disappeared, Beth looked to David. “Where was she?”

“One of the cops found her sitting by herself on Steamship Wharf,” David said. “She was waiting for the early boat so she could sail to Hyannis to see her mother.”

“Why?” Beth said, though of course, she knew why. “What’s wrong?”

“She thinks everyone is paired up but her. The other kids, and you and me. She felt left out, so she ran away.”

“Ouch,” Beth said.

“I reminded her that she was my date tonight,” he said.

“You didn’t treat her like your date,” Beth said. “You kept trying to get rid of her so you could talk to me.”

“Ouch,” David said.

“It’s true,” Beth said. “And I hate to open your eyes to other unpleasant realities, but when I got here a few minutes ago I found Garrett and Piper locked in the upstairs bathroom together. One doesn’t have to be a Rhodes scholar to figure out what was going on in there.”

David’s face fell. “I guess not.”

“We have to keep our families separated. Maybe the girls
should
go visit their mother.” Beth put a hand up to stop his objections. “I’m not telling you what to do with Piper—”

“Yes, you are.”

“I just want you to know that the Newtons will be keeping a low profile at Horizon for a while.”

Garrett appeared then, eyes cast to the floor.

“We’re going,” Beth said. Garrett was already headed toward the door, which David held open for them.

“At least everyone’s safe,” David said. “Happy Fourth of July.”

“And
don’t
drive by my house tonight,” Beth said.

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Bethie,” he said.

J
ust like that, Piper was getting shipped off to her mother’s house—not for a long weekend, not for a week, but for ten whole days. Garrett was grounded from the car to boot, because his mother had caught him and Piper in the bathroom together.

“What were you two doing up there?” Beth had asked him as they drove home from the Ronans’ house.

He couldn’t believe she was embarrassing him like this. He’d held out hope that she would be cooler, that she would just let the issue drop. “It’s none of your business what we were doing,” he said. This, he suspected, was the answer Piper would give, and she was a master at handling her father. “If you want details of somebody’s sex life, get your own.”

Beth slammed the brakes of the car and they both pitched forward. “Out,” she said. “You’re walking home.”

“What?”

“I do not want you in this car. Get out.”

Garrett opened his door and the light came on. Beth’s face was a block of ice. “I’m going back to Piper’s,” he said.

“You can try,” Beth said. “But David won’t let you set foot in that house.”

Garrett stepped out onto the gravel road and slammed the door. “Bitch,” he muttered. The Rover took off sending a spray of stones and dust from its tires. “We were having sex!” Garrett called out after the car. He stood where he was, waiting to see if his mother would stop, but she didn’t. She kept on going, leaving him there.

“Well,” he said, to nobody except his father, he supposed. “What do you think of that?”

He headed home because he suspected his mother was right about David. It had been Piper’s idea to fool around upstairs, to hurry up and do it before his mother returned. Garrett was nervous and it took him a while to relax and concentrate on her body. Then, when his mother knocked, he was so startled that he pushed Piper away and made a mess of the condom and everything. Piper laughed at his nervousness, then she got angry. “God, Garrett, calm down. We’re practically adults. Anyway, this is
my house.
Your mother is trespassing.” Garrett felt ashamed at himself for acting so flustered. Piper was right. His mother
was
trespassing, trespassing on his life.

As he walked, Garrett thought back to the previous autumn when Arch had taken him and Winnie to Central Park to give them the “sex talk.” Arch warned them in advance that this was going to be the topic of discussion and so they should think up all the questions they had and Arch would do his best to answer them. Winnie was nervous about it—she did everything in her power to get out of going along—but it ended up being the best conversation Garrett could have dreamed of. Arch was funny and honest and realistic.
You two will probably have sex in the next few years. Enjoy it. Use condoms. Be considerate. And, most importantly, don’t mistake sex for love. They are two different things that feel the same in the heat of the moment.

Reviewing this advice, Garrett felt a little better. He’d followed it to a “T.” He wasn’t sure what his mother’s problem was. He’d done nothing wrong.

He wasn’t surprised, though, when all hell broke loose the next day. Marcus went to the beach early to swim in the waves, and as soon as he left, Beth began to lecture Garrett and Winnie about sexual responsibility.

“It’s a private thing, an
intimate
thing between two people,” she said. “It’s not something you flaunt in front of your mother or anyone else.”

“I hear you, Mom,” Garrett said. “But you walked into Piper’s house. You were, technically, trespassing.”

This sent Beth into a flurry of expletives, at the end of which she grounded him from the car. Two weeks.

“Good,” Winnie said. “Because I want to go for my license and I can’t practice with Garrett hogging the car.”

“What about Winnie?” Garrett challenged. “Not flaunting sex in front of Mom’s face means Winnie can’t have sex with Marcus.”

“We’re not having sex,” Winnie said. “Why don’t you figure out what you’re talking about before you open your big mouth, lover boy.”

“This is bullshit,” Garrett said. He walked out the front door and considered taking the car—but that was a line even he wouldn’t cross—so he hopped on a bike and pedaled to Piper’s. Garrett rode as hard as he could, over the dirt road, hitting all the bumps on purpose. He hadn’t ridden a bike since the year before, and it felt good to get the exercise. He’d have to be in shape for soccer in September. He should start jogging, like his mother. But Garrett didn’t want to think about his mother or September, when he would be separated from Piper. Nor did he want to think about the sex in the bathroom, although his mind kept returning to the subject, as he tried to gauge how much of an ass he’d made of himself. Pushing Piper away, disengaging, fumbling with the condom, trying to hide the evidence as he heard his mother pounding on the door. At the time he hadn’t thought of Beth as trespassing; he’d thought of his
mother
catching him having sex with his girlfriend. That was enough to make anyone act like a moron.

He reached Piper’s house in less than ten minutes, but when he arrived, he was chagrined to see that both David’s pickup and the painting van were in the driveway. Meaning, David was home.

And not only home, but right there in the kitchen, sitting at the island with Piper and Peyton, the three of them drinking coffee. Garrett knocked on the frame of the screen door, although he had an urge to eavesdrop on the conversation. It looked serious—it was serious, definitely, if David stayed home from work.

All three of the Ronans looked up at the knock. Garrett expected Piper to run to the door, but seeing him seemed to cause her physical pain. She winced.

David was the first to speak. “Come on in here for a second, Garrett.”

Garrett sensed that his timing was bad. “I’m interrupting?”

“Not at all,” David said. “Because we have something to tell you. Both girls are leaving this morning to see their mom in Wellfleet. They’ll be gone until the fifteenth.”

“The fifteenth?” Garrett repeated. He tried to locate himself in the month. Yesterday was the fourth, today the fifth. The fifteenth was ten days away—ten precious summer days that he would not be spending with Piper. He gazed at her, asking her with his eyes if this was anything she had control over, but her face was deep in her coffee cup. So he guessed not. This was more parenting gone haywire.

“You and Piper may talk for five minutes in the driveway, alone,” David said. “And then she’s going upstairs to pack and I’m taking her and Peyton to the airport.” He checked his watch and carried his coffee cup to the sink. “Understood?”

Garrett, speechless, was already outside. He kicked at the pebbles of the driveway and waited for Piper to follow him out. Instinctively, they walked to the very end of the driveway, which was shielded from the house by a Spanish olive tree. Garrett took her in his arms and noticed for the first time that she’d taken the diamond stud out of her nose, revealing a sore-looking divot.

“What happened?” he said.

“I have to go. He’s seriously pissed this time. Because you and I were upstairs, but also because of Peyton. He thinks you and I, whatever, our
behavior
was one of the reasons Peyton ran away last night. He called Mom and they talked for, like, two hours. They both think this is the best thing.”

“You don’t think it’s the best thing, do you?”

She dropped her chin to her chest. “I don’t know, Garrett.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” he said. “Do you
want
to be separated for ten days?”

“Not really.”

Not really?
Garrett felt like his heart was going to explode. He wondered if she thought less of him because he acted like such a buffoon in the bathroom.

“I love you,” he said, and his father’s words popped into his mind:
Don’t mistake sex for love.
But Garrett wasn’t mistaken here. He did love Piper. Just the thought of not seeing her for ten days made him want to do something drastic.

She didn’t respond to his declaration. He’d always been good at reading other people’s thoughts, but here he was drawing a blank.

“You love me, too, don’t you?” he asked.

She touched her nose. “Yes.”

Garrett let out a long stream of highly relieved air. Then, he felt buoyant. They were in love!

“Five minutes is up!” David yelled from the house, though clearly it had only been three or four minutes. “Inside, Piper. Pronto!”

Piper kissed Garrett on the mouth, but chastely. “I’ll see you when I get back,” she said.

“Wait,” he said. “Give me your mom’s phone number. I’ll call you from town. I’ll call every day.”

She took a few steps backward, shaking her head. “I don’t think you should,” she said. “I’ll see you when I get back.” She waved, but in a way that looked like shooing.

Garrett watched her retreat to the house. His lungs ached; he felt like a scuba diver descending deeper and deeper where the pressure of the water was unbearable and there wasn’t enough oxygen to survive. Ten days! He waited until Piper reached the door, hoping she would turn and wave, but she didn’t. She stepped into the house—or was pulled in, Garrett couldn’t tell— and the door closed very tightly behind her, leaving him with nothing to do but climb on his bike and pedal morosely away.

Under certain circumstances, ten days could seem like a very long time. For example, Garrett imagined that ten days in prison would seem like a long time. Ten days of hard manual labor would seem like a long time. The first ten days after Garrett’s father died had seemed like an eternity. But even that didn’t drag on quite as long as ten days without Piper. Especially when Gar-rett’s favorite pastime became reviewing those minutes with her in the driveway in his mind.

On the bright side, Piper had told him she loved him. On the dark side was her response of
not really,
when asked if she wanted to be separated for ten days, and the fact that she didn’t want him to call her, and the more awful fact that when she left she didn’t kiss him with any kind of passion. The conclusion Garrett drew—the only conclusion he could live with for ten days—was that David had said or done something to scare Piper right out of her normal personality. She was sheepish, she was
timid.
Without the diamond in her nose she hadn’t even looked like herself; she was Wonder Woman without her magic bracelets. The only part of the conversation Garrett could really take to heart was the part when Piper said she loved him—because that one word, “yes,” had sounded completely sincere.

Garrett called up a favorite saying of his father’s:
It’s fruitless to speculate.
Garrett would simply have to wait until the fifteenth. There would still be plenty of summer left. In the meantime, he tried to make it through the hours. The mornings dragged, even when he managed to sleep until nine, which wasn’t often now that he was falling asleep shortly after nine at night. The sun rose at five and a stripe of light fell across his face around six-thirty, and that usually woke him. He figured he might actually knock a couple of books off his summer reading list. He finished
Franny and Zooey,
which he liked, even if he didn’t fully understand it, but then he got bogged down in
A River Runs Through It.
Talk about a boring book! Ten days would seem like a very long time if you were standing knee-deep in cold water trying to catch a fish without any bait.

The worst punishment for Garrett was having to spend time with Winnie and Marcus. They were so happy, so obviously a couple now, that it turned Garrett’s stomach. Winnie practiced driving the Rover with Beth in the passenger seat and Marcus in the back; he went along for moral support, Winnie said. Garrett thought meanly that Marcus would probably never get his driver’s license; he would never own a car, and could probably count on one hand the number of times he’d taken a cab. Still, Marcus joined the driving lessons, leaving Garrett alone in the house to contemplate the injustices in his life.

On the fourth day without Piper, Beth asked where she was. Garrett was shocked by the question. Although he hadn’t told anyone about Piper being banished to Cape Cod, he counted on Beth, at least, to intuit it. Why else would he be moping around the house?