I said, “No, me either.”
Nick said, “But I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to come to you. I had to kiss you today.”
“Okay,” I said. “Yes,” I said. We kissed some more—I could not get
enough
of him—and then he pulled away and turned and left—left me there in the dark park, which was something his brother, the gentleman, would never have done.
A week later, Christmas Day, I went to the Morgans’ house in New Jersey, trembling with anticipation. That morning, Birdie had made our usual holiday brunch of eggs Benedict and sticky buns, and I hadn’t been able to eat a bite. Michael and I drove south to his parents’ house, and I pretended to be napping so I didn’t have to speak. We walked into the Morgan house, which, just like Birdie’s house, was festooned with evergreen garland and smelled like cinnamon. Evelyn popped out of the living room, where there was a roaring fire and a towering tree with dozens of presents piled under it. Evelyn was wearing an embroidered Christmas sweater and red velvet pants. She said, “I’m so glad you made it. Dora’s here, but your brother’s not coming.”
“Not coming?”
“He called this morning. He doesn’t feel well, he said.” Evelyn frowned. “Though he sounded perfectly fine to me.”
Tate came home from her day of solitude at North Pond sunburned and twitching with excitement. Her joy was off-putting. How could Chess confide in her sister about “all that had happened” when her sister was so happy?
Tate said, “Come up to the attic with me. I want to tell you something.”
Chess said, “I can’t. I’m helping Birdie with dinner.” This was true: she was shucking corn. But she had only one ear left.
“I need you now,” Tate said.
Chess sighed. “One second. Let me finish.”
The attic was a hotbox. The tiny window in the eaves was open, but no air passed through it. Tate pulled Chess next to her on the bed.
“Guess what happened?” Tate said.
“What?” Chess said.
“Barrett asked me on a date. To a dinner party on Nantucket tomorrow night.”
Chess was silent. What to say?
“I know he asked you first,” Tate said.
Chess wiggled her toes. “He asked me this morning. He was only doing it to be nice. To prove that he’s not mad anymore.”
“Why would he be mad at you?” Tate asked.
“Oh,” Chess said. She wasn’t sure she could switch gears and talk about Barrett. “Because of something that happened a long time ago.”
Tate crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. She was so childish sometimes, as emotionally crippled as a teenage boy. Tate was her sister, her love was unconditional, but the reality was tough: Tate didn’t possess the maturity or understanding to handle the things that Chess wanted to tell her. Tate was a computer person, not a literary person; for Tate, something either worked or it didn’t. She wasn’t interested in situations that were complex or morally ambiguous. She didn’t want to hear what had happened between Barrett and Chess thirteen years earlier; for Tate, the past was the past, and what was the point of revisiting it? Tate wasn’t evolved enough to understand how, in many ways, the past revealed things. Tate was only concerned with the past few hours, today, tomorrow, her and Barrett Lee together. She was floating, and Chess didn’t want to wield the needle that would pop her balloon.
“You’re going to have fun,” Chess said. “I think you and Barrett will be a much better match.”
“Yes,” Tate said. “We will be.”
A
t two o’clock in the morning, she found herself awake.
She had gone to bed at ten o’clock as usual, after dinner and several glasses of wine and an hour or two spent needlepointing a stocking for India’s grandson.
She had asked India, “Are you excited about becoming a grandmother?”
They were sitting together on the screened-in porch. India was smoking her hundredth cigarette and drinking, she claimed, her eleventh glass of wine. She was drunk and waxing poetic. “I don’t think anyone is
excited
to become a grandmother, heralding as it does the fact that one is officially old. It’s hard to think of one’s self as a sex symbol when one is a grandmother, right? I mean, where did our lives go? It seemed like we were teenagers forever, and then we were young wives and then we were mothers, and then there was that interminable time when the kids were growing up and Bill and I were focused on building his career and taking care of the house and making it all work, and then Bill died, and there was a long stretch of mourning and then me picking myself up and getting on with my life, and for about five minutes, it seemed, I was free and independent and insanely productive, and now all of a sudden, it’s over. I’m going to be a
grandmother.
” She blew out a stream of smoke. “But yes, I think once it happens, I’ll be excited.”
Birdie said, “Well, I’m excited to become a grandparent someday.”
India said, not unkindly, “Oh, Birdie, of course you are.”
Hank was a grandparent, Birdie thought, and he loved it. He was involved in his grandchildren’s lives. He took them on outings to the Stew Leonard dairy and the children’s museum in Norwalk. He picked them up from school every Tuesday.
Birdie sighed. She would like to go just ten minutes, just five minutes, without thinking about Hank. This would only happen, she realized, once she had a nice, long, meaningful conversation with the man. She craved this conversation physically, the way she craved food or nicotine. Tate had made a good point that afternoon: Birdie was calling Hank at a consistently bad time. And so, Birdie thought, she would ambush him. If she woke up in the middle of the night, she would get out of bed, walk to Bigelow Point with the aid of a flashlight, and call Hank then. The idea had wormed its way into Birdie’s subconscious, and voilà!—she woke up.
She felt her way down the stairs. She had left her cell phone and a flashlight next to each other on the counter. She gripped them both. She found her sandals. She slipped outside.
Okay, she thought, as she headed down the dirt path, she was certifiable. Here she was at two o’clock in the morning walking across Tuckernuck to Bigelow Point. She should have taken the Scout, but she was afraid the sound of the engine would wake India and the girls.
There was a waxing gibbous moon, which brightened her way considerably. Birdie shined the flashlight beam at the trail. She wasn’t afraid of wild animals, but she was afraid of tripping on a root or a stone and breaking her leg, or stepping into an unexpected hole and twisting her ankle. She proceeded cautiously, stopping every once in a while to look at Tuckernuck Island in the depths of night. It was starkly beautiful—the trail and surrounding low brush shone in the moonlight.
A simple world. Her complicated heart. She kept going.
It seemed a long way, and at one point, Birdie feared she was lost. Then she approached Adeliza Coffin’s house—even in the moonlight, it was dark and sinister. Her grandparents had told stories about Adeliza standing on her doorstep with a shotgun, scaring away those who dared to trespass on Tuckernuck’s hallowed acres. “She was a formidable woman,” Birdie’s grandfather had said, though it was unclear if he’d known her personally or was simply recounting legend. Birdie hurried past Adeliza’s house—as children, she and India had held their breath and plugged their noses. The good news about Adeliza Coffin’s house was that it was the last landmark before the water. Birdie kept going, and soon she heard waves and saw water sparkling in front of her like a smooth silk sheet. She stepped onto the slender spit of land that contained North Pond: Bigelow Point.
The tide was high. The tip of the point was covered by water. How high was the water? Birdie was in her nightgown, a simple white cotton affair that came to her knees. And she was wearing underwear. India slept in the nude; when she wandered the house, she put on a silk kimono but wore nothing underneath. India couldn’t cross Tuckernuck at night.
Birdie stepped into the water on the ocean side. It was warm, warmer than the air. She waded out toward the tip of the point, and when the water encroached, she lifted her nightgown. The water was at midthigh. The water was so warm, Birdie felt the urge to pee. She would satisfy her urges one at a time, starting with the most important. The most important was Hank.
She called Hank at home. He would be sleeping, but he kept a phone right by his bed in case someone from the facility called about Caroline. Hank was a light sleeper. In the times that they had spent the night together, Birdie never failed to wake him when she rose to use the bathroom or startled from a dream. When the phone rang, Hank would hear it. Hank would answer it.
The phone rang. Four times, five, six, seven. Then there was a clicking noise. It was Hank’s voice on the answering machine. Birdie hung up.
She called right back, praying,
Please, Hank, wake up, pick up.
Again, the machine. Birdie called back again. It was the middle of the night. He might be fast, fast asleep, in the deep REM stage, where he heard the phone but thought it was part of his dream.
Again. Again. Again.
Birdie tried his cell phone next. It was quarter past three. There was no reason for Hank to be
out
at this hour, no way, but he might have been doing sleepover babysitting duty for Nathan or Cassandra.
Hank didn’t answer his cell phone. Birdie called four times. Then, she called his house again, and when the machine picked up she left a message. She said, “Goddamn it, Hank.” And then she hung up.
Goddamn it, Hank:
not very eloquent, but it got her point across. She was tired of this. She wanted to talk to him.
She realized the water was getting higher, and in her frenzy to get ahold of Hank she had dropped the hem of her nightgown and now it was soaked. And her underwear was wet; the water was that high. This being the case, Birdie peed, sweet release, then wondered if her urine would draw sharks. The beach looked far away; she might have to swim, which would leave her drenched from head to toe in the middle of the night two miles from home. And in swimming to shore, she would ruin her cell phone. She started to cry—not because she was wet or afraid of sharks, not even because she was bone-crushingly tired. She cried because of Hank.
As she waded back to shore, she once again did the unthinkable and called Grant. He answered on the third ring in his middle-of-the-night voice, a voice that sounded alert and awake but that was, in fact, buried.
“Hello?” he said.
“Grant?”
“Bird?” he said. She was grateful that he knew it was her. The day might come, she realized, when that would not be the case. “Are you okay?”
“Hank doesn’t love me,” she said.
“Hank?” he said. “Who’s Hank?”
“My boyfriend,” she said. “The man I’ve been seeing.”
“Oh,” Grant said. “Where are you?”
“Tuckernuck,” she said. “Bigelow Point.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” he said.
“I know,” Birdie said. “Hank doesn’t love me.”
There was a long pause. Long enough that Birdie wondered if Grant had fallen back to sleep.
“Grant?” she said.
He started. Yes, she’d caught him trying to sneak back to sleep. He had done this often in their life together. “What do you want me to do?” Grant said. “Beat the guy up? Call him and tell him he’s an idiot?”
Birdie reached the shore. She found the flashlight in the sand and poked the beam into the dark sky. “Would you?” she said.
S
he had nothing to wear. She hadn’t, in her wildest dreams, been expecting to attend a fancy dinner party at some flashy house on Nantucket. She had running clothes, bathing suits, shorts, and T-shirts. But Chess, thankfully, had carted along her entire closet.
Tate said, “Is it okay if I borrow something? If you say no, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Chess said, “Take whatever you want.”
Tate said, “Will you help me?”
Chess huffed, but Tate wasn’t fooled. Chess considered herself to be too
depressed
to help with something as frivolous as outfit selection, but Tate knew that secretly she was flattered and welcomed the distraction. And in this case, outfit selection was everything. If Tate wore the right outfit, she would feel sexy and confident, and if she felt sexy and confident, Barrett Lee would fall in love with her. Tate had been worried that perhaps Chess harbored feelings for Barrett herself, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Barrett Lee fell into the same category with everyone else: Chess was too self-absorbed to give him a second thought.
Chess’s dresses hung from a wooden pole in the makeshift attic closet. Tate selected a white sundress with blue flowers. She slipped it on. Pretty, but maybe a little prim? Chess lay on the bed.
She said, “I wore that dress the first time I met Michael’s parents. Family dinner at the house. Nick was there, and Cy and Evelyn, of course.”
Tate’s arms hung at her sides. Was this how it was going to be? Tate shucked off the dress. She reached for an orange halter dress with white polka dots.
“I bought that for the rehearsal dinner,” Chess said. “Try it on.”
Tate hesitated. Chess had bought this one for the rehearsal dinner? Tate tried it on. It was adorable, cute and flirty, and Tate loved the idea of wearing orange. What a statement; she would liven up the party with a juicy sunburst. But something about the dress screamed,
Chess!
It was the polka dots, maybe, or the ruffle across the top. Chess had bought this dress for her rehearsal dinner. It was off-limits.
“I don’t think so,” Tate said.
Chess said, “I’ll never wear it.”
“You’ll wear it,” Tate said. She regarded the riches in the closet. There were so many dresses! Chess’s life with Michael Morgan had been… what? One cocktail party after another?
“I will never get dressed up and go out again,” Chess said.
“You will so,” Tate said. “Your hair will grow back.” Already a blond fuzz was coming in; Chess’s head looked like a peach.