Summer People (37 page)

“But when I do …”

“We’ll bring you here,” Garrett promised.

The next morning, Beth woke at six and went downstairs to tend to the last details of leaving: a note for Carl Drake, the caretaker, breakfast for the kids, all of the trash taken out. Beth looked at the ocean as often as she could. Impossible to believe that tomorrow it would be Park Avenue. But that, really, was the story of her life.

Marcus was the first one to come down.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” he whispered. He was wearing the same white oxford cloth shirt he’d worn the day they arrived—Beth didn’t recall seeing it at any other time this summer. She closed her eyes and remembered opening the door to their apartment in New York and finding Marcus there, wearing this shirt, carrying his black leather duffel bag, which now was packed and waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The son of Constance Bennett Tyler, convicted murderer. But he was more than that, as Arch had promised. This was a fine young man— smart, considerate, good in a way that so few people were good anymore. When Beth opened her eyes, she realized how much she would miss him. He had become like a third child to her.

“Is there anything
I
can do to help?” Beth asked. She wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that—all she knew was that she wanted to make the rest of Marcus’s life easier for him, as easy as his days on the beach here had been.

Marcus wondered if Winnie had said anything to Beth about the five hundred dollars, because her words sounded like an offer of money. But he’d already made up his mind to get a job as soon as he returned to Queens. He sat down at the kitchen table and let Beth pour milk on his cereal. “There’s no way I can thank you for this summer,” he said. “This summer saved me.”

“Oh, Marcus.”

“It gave me peace. And it gave me love.”

“Well, you gave us things, too, you know,” Beth said. “You gave us yourself.”

“That doesn’t seem like much in comparison,” he said.

Except it was. At that moment, Beth understood that Arch hadn’t invited Marcus to Nantucket for only Marcus’s sake. Arch had invited Marcus to Nantucket for all their sakes—Beth’s, Gar-rett’s, Winnie’s—so they could learn from him about character. About how to rise above.

“You have to promise to come see us,” Beth said. “You have to promise to let us know how you’re doing.”

“I will.” He dug into his cereal with gusto. All summer, Beth had loved to watch him eat because he was so enthusiastic about the food she put in front of him. She remembered with an ache in her throat the way he’d tied the bib around his neck before eating his first lobster. It was going to be a huge loss to have him leave their midst. She would wonder about him all the time; she would worry.

“We’re coming back here in March or April, when the baby is born,” she said. “Just for a week or so. Will you come back with us then?”

“I don’t know if Garrett wants me here,” Marcus said. “He might just want family.”

“Marcus,” Beth said. “You are family.”

Marcus smiled, gracing the room with his dimples. Beth could tell he felt as she did—that as long as there was a bright spot on the horizon, they might make it successfully through today.

“Sure,” he said.

And so they went: out to the car, which was packed to the top, once again. Garrett sat up front and Winnie and Marcus climbed in the back. Beth stood in the front door—first looking at the car and then turning and looking at the empty house.

“See you in the spring,” she said.

She locked the door and tucked the key under the mat.

The scene at Steamship Wharf was as chaotic as one would expect for Labor Day weekend. The standby line was twenty cars deep. Beth was grateful for her reservation. She pulled into a spot for ticketed cars and let the engine idle. They still had a few minutes before boarding.

“Do any of you want to use the bathroom before we get on the boat?” she asked.

No response. In her rearview mirror, she saw Winnie asleep on Marcus’s shoulder. Garrett was in outer space somewhere, and who could blame him?

A few minutes later, the car in front of theirs inched forward in anticipation. Beth herself was exhausted—she wanted to get the car onto the boat, then pull a pillow out of the back and sleep for an hour. The drive home was always so draining, followed by the torturous business of delivering Marcus to Queens, then unloading all of the stuff from the back of the car and hauling it onto the freight elevator of their building. How would she ever make it through the day?

Finally it was her turn to go. A steamship worker with a grizzled beard motioned her forward. Just before Beth drove up the ramp onto the boat, she saw David’s van and then David himself sitting on the bumper. Wearing khaki shorts, a green polo shirt, the flip-flops, sunglasses. Grinning at her, he lifted his coffee cup in her direction—a toast.

There was no point in analyzing why she felt so happy to see him or how touched she was that he found time in his day to see them off, or how safe she suddenly knew she was—there was someone in the world who cared for her, who probably even loved her, and who would be here on island, waiting, the next time she returned. For now, David was what she needed most: he was her friend.

She decided not to wave; she didn’t want the kids to notice him. He wasn’t there for the kids, anyway; he was there for her. Beth did put down her window and turn her face in his direction. She wanted to give him something to hold on to while she was gone—the memory of her smile, warmed by the summer sun.

T
he most amazing aspect of life, Beth thought, was the way that time passed—the days, the months, one following the next without slowing down or stopping for tragedy or triumph.

They returned to New York and—how else could she say it?—resumed their lives. It took two weeks for Beth to readjust to New York, but then one day she woke up and realized everything was back to normal. The laundry was done, the apartment had been cleaned, the last of the Nantucket bread and tomatoes had been consumed—now the kids were devouring bags of apples and gallons of cider, almost faster than Beth could buy them. Winnie had her first physics quiz and she rattled off formulas in a cheerleader’s chant. Garrett had his first soccer game at the end of the week, plus his application for Princeton was due soon, if he wanted to qualify for early admission. One night, Beth found him in Arch’s study on the phone—odd, because he normally took calls on the cordless in the kitchen. He was sitting at Arch’s desk doodling on a legal pad, and with his head bent, he looked so much like Arch that Beth caught her breath, inadvertently announcing her presence—she had planned to slip out of the room unnoticed. But Garrett looked up and saw her and she asked, “Who are you on the phone with, honey?” The typical response whenever she asked either of the kids this was, “None of your business,” but this time Garrett moved his mouth away from the receiver and whispered, “Piper.”

Beth stood in the doorway for a beat. She wanted to ask,
How’s she feeling? How’s the baby? What does the doctor say?
She wanted to talk to David. The phone line led directly to Nantucket, and although she was now back in New York, Beth yearned to transmit herself there. Instead, she nodded and closed the door.

Winnie started her senior year at Danforth a changed woman. She was no longer the naive goody-goody spoiled brat child of privilege whose life had been torn apart by the untimely death of her father, she was no longer a girl who thought it was okay to wear her father’s Princeton sweatshirt as though it were a mourning band or torture her body by denying it food. And she was no longer a virgin, physically or emotionally.

While it was true that her relationship with Marcus changed— there was no way to keep up the intensity of their friendship when they lived apart—it ended up being okay for both of them. Winnie’s time was occupied by school. She nurtured the friendships that she’d all but ignored as of March sixteenth, and she tried to foster friendships with one or two of the African American kids at her school, although she soon realized that just because these people were black did not mean they had an excellent character like Marcus. Winnie did her best to eat as much as she could and three afternoons a week she worked out in Danforth’s weight room as she prepared for the upcoming swim season. She was going to surprise everyone on her team by trying the butterfly this year.

Marcus’s life got incrementally better. During the summer his father had cleared the apartment of most of Constance’s things, which helped. Marcus had school which he took seriously; he studied hard. He, too, went to the gym three afternoons a week, and he got a job working two evenings plus Saturdays at a pizza shop in the student union at Queens College. It was a job that could easily have gone to a work-study student, but Marcus’s old boss at the grounds department put in a good word for him, even though he knew about Marcus’s mother. Marcus didn’t actually make pizza—no tossing or spinning of dough, no painting of sauce or collage of toppings—but he did become proficient with the pizza peel, the pizza cutter, and the cash register. He made $6.75 an hour and by mid-October had saved almost two hundred dollars toward his debt to Dome Books.

On Sundays, Marcus took the seven line into Manhattan to watch the Giants game at Winnie’s apartment. Those afternoons on the leather sofa were a quiet fantasy. They snuggled under a fleece blanket, and although there was no opportunity for sex— Beth was always around—they reveled in the warmth of each other’s body, just as they had on those nights in Horizon when they’d done nothing but sleep. Beth served them Cokes from a silver tray and made delicious pub food—potato skins, chicken fingers, mushrooms stuffed with sausage and Parmesan cheese. Sundays that autumn made Marcus glad to be alive.

Thanks to Beth, he’d met four times with Kara Schau, who actually traveled to Benjamin N. Cardozo High School to speak with him during his study hall. Mostly, he talked and she listened, but she left him with a few helpful sentences:
You can be related to someone who’s done a bad thing and not be a bad person. You can love someone who’s done a bad thing and not be a bad person. You can even
be
someone who’s done a bad thing and not be a bad person.
It helped Marcus to think this way, and he cut a deal with his father— sometime before the holidays he would go up to Bedford Hills to see Constance. He refused to partake in the weekly phone calls with Bo and LaTisha. When he was ready to talk to Mama, he told himself, he would do so face to face.

The first Saturday in November he rescheduled his work shift and he and Winnie went to the prison together, on the train. They were as solemn as they would have been at a funeral, holding hands and gazing out the window as the last of the fall leaves in Westchester County passed them by. Since Marcus had never been to the prison before, Bo told him what stop to get off at and how to catch the free bus to the prison grounds.

“It’s not a pretty place,” Bo said. “You know that, right?” Marcus knew it intellectually, but that was different from actually
seeing
the Bedford Hills Correctional Institute—the barbed wire, the armed guards, the stench of lost hope, the absolute concrete and metal desolation of the place. It was hell on earth. When Marcus and Winnie stepped down from the bus, they were herded into a huge waiting room filled with other visitors. Marcus gripped Winnie’s arm and led her to a space on a vinyl couch. There were glass-topped coffee tables with torn magazines and coloring books and broken crayons—because the waiting room was filled with little kids. It could have been a pediatrician’s office except for the edgy way the adults acted, sneaking glances, both shameful and interested, at one another. Everyone in the room loved someone who had done a bad thing.

During the wait, Marcus nearly fell asleep. He felt his body wanting to check out, shut down. Because it was too much to handle—the prospect of seeing his mother. Winnie was reading her English assignment,
Macbeth,
and Marcus wished he’d brought something to read, though he doubted anything would distract him. Finally, over the buzz of the room, Marcus heard his name. He helped Winnie up and walked toward the heavy black woman who was waiting for him. He tried to clear his mind as he would before a swim meet.

Constance, when he saw her, was behind glass, but Marcus marveled at how familiar she was. His
mother.
Mama. He’d expected her to look sad or tired; he’d expected her to look older. But, in fact, she looked much the way she had his entire life— with smooth brown skin, wide brown eyes, and the hair she always claimed she could do nothing with. At home, she wore silk scarves over her head, but here she made do with a navy blue bandana.

In those initial moments of studying her face—and yes, she looked as terrified and unmoored as he did—he waited for his anger to surface. This was what he was worried about—his anger. But instead he felt a profound sadness—his mother had ruined her life. Marcus’s life—as the summer had taught him and as his father had promised—would move on past the murders. But for Constance this prison was the last stop.

Constance sat and Marcus sat and they both picked up the phone.

Her voice was the same soft-and-scratchy tone, forever irritated by constantly explaining the basic tenets of the English language to kids who didn’t want to learn.

“Hello, child,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”

When she spoke, Marcus remembered one of the words Kara Schau had given him: “acceptance.” He didn’t have to forgive, he didn’t have to understand. All he had to do was show up. And here he was.

“Hello, Mama,” he said.

Winnie was standing a foot or so behind Marcus, a mere observer to the proceedings, but she teared up as she watched Marcus and Constance. She wondered what it would be like to see her father again for fifteen minutes. She would be tempted to give him news—about falling in love with Marcus, or about Beth being married before, or about Garrett becoming a father himself—but then she realized that she would do what Marcus was now doing: telling his mother he loved her.

Winnie couldn’t hear Constance’s voice, but she read her lips:
I know, child, I know.
Just the way Arch knew, wherever he was, that Winnie loved him and would keep him alive every way that she could.

It might have been the sound of Winnie crying that brought Marcus back to himself. He pulled Winnie forward, closer to the glass.

“Mama,” he said. “This is Winnie Newton, Arch’s daughter.”

Winnie had imagined this introduction twenty times the night before as she tried to fall asleep. She imagined Constance falling to her knees in gratitude, waxing on and on about what a great man Arch was. But now, in the actual moment, when Marcus handed Winnie the phone so that Constance could speak to her, what Constance said was, “I would have known you anywhere. You look just like your father.”

And this, of course, endeared Constance Tyler to Winnie forever.

By holiday time, Piper was six months pregnant. As Garrett moved through the days of his life—classes, the end of soccer, the beginning of intramural floor hockey, weekends with friends at the movies, even the occasional date (which he kept secret from his mother and sister)—it was easy enough to forget that the first girl Garrett had ever loved and might still love a little was suffering physically and emotionally as Garrett’s child grew inside her on an island thirty miles out to sea. At times—when Garrett took Brooke Casserhill out to dinner at a Peruvian chicken place, for example, where they were able to smuggle in a bottle of wine lifted from Brooke’s father’s wine
cave
—Piper seemed far away and less than real. She seemed like folklore. But at other times, mostly in the dark hours when Garrett should have been sleeping, Piper and her plight took on a gravity that nailed Garrett to his bed.

He tried to figure out what she expected from him. She accused him of being a kid. Well, yeah—he was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, just like she was. Had she wanted him to marry her?Raise the child?If that was the adult thing, and maybe it was, then Garrett conceded: it was out of his reach. He couldn’t do it.

He called her every month after her doctor’s appointment, and their conversations consisted almost entirely of the clinical: how much weight had she gained?(Fifteen pounds.) What was she measuring?(Twenty-four centimeters.) Did the AFP screen come back normal?(Yes.) Did she test positive for ges-tational diabetes?(No.) When would she sign up for Lamaze classes?(After the first of the year.) The baby kicked all the time now, Piper said, and the girlfriends who’d shunned her when they found out she’d let that
summer kid
impregnate her were now the ones who were most eager to lay their hands on the firm sphere of Piper’s belly and feel the baby drum from the inside.

Garrett had had no idea that a single baby could consume so much mental energy; always, in these conversations with Piper, it seemed like there were a hundred small points of discussion all revolving around the baby. In history class, Mr. Rapinski spoke of women in Third World countries who excused themselves from the assembly line of whatever factory they worked at, gave birth in the restroom and handed the infant off to a family member to care for at home. But it was nowhere close to that easy for a couple of white American upper-middle-class teenagers.

Garrett didn’t tell anyone in New York about Piper or the baby, and he forbade Beth and Winnie to mention it to anyone but Kara Schau. His mother understood. “Every man, woman, and child is entitled to one secret,” she said. “I had mine, now you have yours.” Garrett hated putting himself in a similar situation to his mother, and he wondered if the adult thing to do was to come clean, confessing to everyone he knew that he had impregnated his summer girlfriend and then left her to deal with it by herself. Then he could accept blame; he could wear the scarlet letter.
You want to be back in New York where you can pretend none of this ever happened,
Piper had said. She was right! Garrett didn’t want to be whispered about; he didn’t want the information fermenting his teachers’ opinion of him as they wrote his college recommendations. He didn’t want to lose any friends. He couldn’t wait until March when Piper would birth the baby, then give it away, and the ordeal would be ended.