Summer People (3 page)

Arch told Winnie all this as he sat across from her in EJ’s, moving hash around his plate, but not eating because he was too nervous to eat.
If I save this woman,
he said
my life will have been worthwhile.
Trent Trammelman, the managing partner at Arch’s firm, discouraged Arch from taking the case. It would bring too much unwanted publicity—every time the damn case was written up in the papers, the name of their firm would be mentioned. Arch countered that no publicity was unwanted, that the majority of New Yorkers were against the death penalty anyway. He was taking the case and that was final.
Trent knows that when I say final, I mean final,
Arch had said. Winnie understood that her father had power. He was a full partner and a top earner, and yet when he was with her, he was just a dad, motioning to the waitress for more coffee for both of them. Then he said,
Connie has a son, you know. A son your age.

Does she?

She does, and that’s another reason I took her case. She has a son who’s on the swim team at Cardozo High School. You’d like him, Winnie. You two have a lot in common.

Winnie wasn’t sure what sparked her interest. It was everything, probably, in combination. She liked swimmers. Her last and, truth be told, only boyfriend, Charlie Hess, was on the swim team with her at Danforth. Charlie was all arms and legs, lean, muscular, pale. She liked the way he looked when his goggles were on top of his head and his wet eyelashes stuck together. But she hadn’t been serious about Charlie Hess. When swim season ended, they broke up.

Winnie also saw Marcus as her ticket into her father’s new, consuming passion. She championed this boy whose circumstances were so dire. When her father got home from work at night, she asked about Marcus as though he were an old, dear friend.

Winnie had loved him before she ever laid eyes on him.

His actual person won her over permanently. Marcus was six feet tall with gorgeous brown skin and hair shaved close to his head. He was a man, not at all like the boys she went to school with. He had dimples when he smiled, although Winnie had only seen him smile once—when Winnie and Garrett went with their father to Marcus’s apartment. As they were leaving, Arch made a joke and Marcus smiled, thus the dimples, which had now taken on the fleeting, mystical properties of, say, a rainbow. One of the reasons Winnie was thrilled to learn that Arch had invited Marcus for the summer was that she might, with good luck, get to see his dimples again. And yet every time she was around him she felt stupid and talked too much and couldn’t locate her sense of humor.

Not only was Marcus beautiful, but he was kind. He escorted his younger sister to the memorial service and they sat in the row behind Winnie and her family. Winnie heard Marcus crying. When she turned around to peek, she saw Marcus with his arm around his sister, wiping his sister’s tears. She decided right then that Marcus was a person to whom goodness came naturally. Unlike Winnie herself, who was selfish and mean-spirited at times, and petty. She tried to be good, but again and again she failed. There was a nagging part of her that suspected these flaws had caused her father’s death. That she somehow deserved it.

Marcus dropped his black bag on the floor. That was all he’d brought, just one bag. “The room’s fine,” he said. “It’s good.”

“You have your own bathroom,” Winnie said. “Well, toilet and sink. The bathroom with the shower’s down the hall. And there’s a shower outside. Actually, this used to be my room.”

“Did it?” Marcus sat on the edge of the double bed and bounced a little, testing the mattress. The room, just like the family and the population of the island, was white. White walls, white furniture, white curtains, white bed. He tried to imagine writing a memoir of darkness and death in this room; it wasn’t ideal.

Winnie noticed Marcus’s eyes falling closed, like she was boring him to death. He looked way too big for the bed with its white chenille spread. The bed, and the room in general, were too dainty. But all the other bedrooms had two singles, except for the master bedroom which had a queen. Winnie thought she was being generous by giving Marcus her room, but now she wasn’t sure. He didn’t look happy.

“Aren’t you happy?” she asked.

Marcus sat perfectly still, his hands resting on his knees. He wasn’t sure yet what kind of responses these people expected of him.
Happy?
There was a word that had lost its meaning. All he could think about was setting his feet free from these damn shoes and putting on his pool flip-flops with a pair of tube socks. “I’m just getting used to it here,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s different from where you grew up, huh? Different from New York, I mean. That’s why Mom likes it. It’s quiet. There isn’t even a phone in the house. Which is going to be a problem, I guess, if you want to call your family? Your dad? Or … do they let you call your mom?”

“They let me,” Marcus said. “But I don’t call.” His voice was dead; he had no desire to talk about his mother. He liked the idea, though, of no telephone, no TV, no papers, no connection to the outside world. He liked the idea of three months isolated at the edge of the water. He needed it. Arch had known he needed it, and that was why Arch invited him here.

The room, Winnie realized, was stifling hot. “Maybe we should open the window,” she said. “Maybe you’d like some air, for, you know, breathing purposes.” She checked for the dimples but Marcus just stared at her.

“I can do it,” he said.

“Right,” Winnie said. She could make a pest of herself no longer. Her mother always referred to the things “any self-respecting woman” would or would not do. In this case, any self-respecting woman would leave Marcus alone for half a second so he could get adjusted.

Winnie backed out of the room. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you, I guess? I mean, obviously, we both live here. Want to swim later? I’m on the swim team at Danforth, you know.”

“I know,” Marcus said. “Your dad told me.”

Winnie’s mouth fell open. She was filled with an incredible emotion that she couldn’t name: her father talked about her to Marcus. Bragged about her, maybe. “Did he?”

“He said I’d like you,” Marcus answered, truthfully, because Arch was always telling him that.
My daughter, Winnie, you’d like her.

“That’s what he said to me about you,” Winnie said. “Those were his exact words.”

Marcus didn’t respond except to nod almost imperceptibly.

“Do you?” Winnie asked.

“Do I what?”

She almost said,
Do you like me?
But she felt her self-respect about to fly away forever, so she made herself leave the room. “Oh, nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”

Beth did feel better although she’d planned on saying so regardless, for the kids’ sake. Was it possible that Arch’s spirit resided here, that his soul had slogged through the icy waters of Long Island Sound to wait for them on Miacomet Beach in Nantucket? When Beth looked out over the water she felt a sense of peace, she heard Arch sending her a distinct message,
It’s going to be okay, honey. It’s all going to be okay.
That was, perhaps, just the healing property of water, of clean air, of open space. Of being, finally, in the place that she loved more than anywhere on earth. Her family’s house on Nantucket.

The house, the house. The house was named Horizon by Beth’s grandfather, her mother’s father, who bought the land and built the house in 1927. Beth had been coming to the island every summer since she was in utero, but her memories started at age five, the summer of 1963, when her grandfather bought a cherry red Volkswagen bug convertible and drove her around the island with the top down, while she ate lollipops in the backseat. She remembered sitting on Horizon’s upper deck with her grandmother at night, looking at stars, her grandmother singing, “Mister Moon.” Ordering take-out fried shrimp dinners from Sayle’s and eating them on the beach at sunset. The summers lined up in Beth’s mind like the scallop shells that she and her younger brothers collected and left to fade on the windowsill all winter. Starry nights, shrimp dinners, long days at the beach, outdoor showers, rides in a convertible with a fresh lollipop, bonfires, her first cold beer, falling in love, blueberry pie, riding the waves all the way back to shore, cool white sheets against sunburned skin—every detail that defined an American summer— that was what this island meant to Beth.

In honesty, Beth wasn’t certain that either of her kids felt the magic of Nantucket the way she did. Arch never understood it: he joined them every weekend, and for two weeks at the end of August, but even then he set up camp at the dining room table and worked. Even then the FedEx truck rumbled out to their spot on West Miacomet Road every day but Sunday. No, this was Beth’s place.

If they could just make it through the first day, Beth thought, things would be all right. If they could just settle into a routine. But that wasn’t going to happen instantly. Beth wanted to dive right in, she wanted to be in her bathing suit lying on the beach with a sandwich and a cold Coca-Cola five minutes from now, listening to the pound and rush of the surf, listening to the twins and Marcus, poor Marcus, playing Frisbee, laughing, getting along. But there had to be process first: pulling the cushions for the furniture from the dank basement and airing them out on the deck (she could ask Marcus to do that; she needed to start treating him like one of the other kids, and less like a charity case that Arch had left her to handle). They had to unpack—put the kitchen supplies away, move their shorts and T-shirts and sandals from their suitcases into the empty dresser drawers and closets that smelled like old shelf paper and mothballs. They had to let the hot and cold water run in all of the spigots to clear the residue out of the pipes. Beth would clean—dust the bookshelves that were crammed with bloated and rippled paperbacks, vacuum the floors, and convince Winnie to beat the braided rugs with the long-handled brush that hung in the outdoor shower.

Before Beth could organize her thoughts—new ones kept materializing like clowns popping out of a car—Garrett collapsed in one of the wooden chairs at the kitchen table. The chair groaned like it was an inch away from breaking.

“Mom,” he said.

Mom,
Beth thought. The one-word sentence that both Garrett and Winnie used all the time now. It had so many meanings and it was up to Beth to decipher which one was relevant at any given time.
Mom, I’m angry. Mom, I’m bored. Mom, please make the pain go away. Mom, stop harassing me. Mom, please stop crying, you’re embarrassing me. Mom, why aren’t you Dad?
Beth twisted her diamond ring. The “We Made It” ring. A constant reminder of how sadly ironic the world could be.

“You have to be careful with this furniture,” Beth said. “It’s old and you’re big. You’re the man of the house now, don’t forget.”

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“Me, too,” she said. The McDonald’s in Devon, Connecticut, where they stopped for breakfast, seemed like another lifetime ago. She had to shop for food, cleaning supplies, paper towels. She had to go to the store. That would be first. “There’s cheese and stuff in the Zabar’s bags. Some bagels. Can you just make do for now? I’ll go to the store. You should really unpack. It would make me happy. Has anyone shown Marcus his room?”

“Why are you so worried about Marcus?” Garrett asked.

“Because he’s our
guest,
” Beth said.

“He’s not my guest,” Garrett said.

“He’s your father’s guest,” Beth said. “And we have to respect that.” The subject of Marcus made Beth anxious. As if, she thought, as if we didn’t have enough to deal with. Now there was Marcus, a casualty of a complicated and excruciating murder case. But Arch adored the kid, and Beth suspected that he used Marcus’s merits to justify taking Connie Tyler’s case at all. Certainly a woman with such a fine son was worth spending months of unpaid time saving. Arch bragged about the kid—how he won second place in the All-Queens Invitational in the two hundred meter butterfly, how his grades hadn’t faltered since the murders and he hadn’t missed a day of school except to attend Connie’s important court dates. This was all leading up to the big announcement—only a week before the plane crash—that Arch had invited Marcus to Nantucket for the summer. Arch was glowing when he told Beth, so happy was he to be able to give yet more to this poor family. Beth, however, was not happy. First of all, Arch hadn’t asked her. Not only had they agreed long ago to confer about all important family decisions, but the house on Nantucket was
her house.
Furthermore, she was the one who spent the summer there while Arch worked; she wasn’t exactly thrilled at the idea of a third teenager to keep track of—fine young man or not. But Beth bit her tongue and said nothing, which was how she’d handled the Constance Tyler matter since the beginning. She let Arch fight Connie’s fight since it inspired him the way his regular work did not. Then, after Arch died, Beth felt obligated to re-extend the invitation to Marcus for the summer since it definitely fell under the category of “What Arch Would Have Wanted.”

The twins knew this as well as she did.
Marcus is here out of
respect to your father.
She hoped she didn’t have to repeat this phrase too many more times.