Everybody Rise (38 page)

The attendant ran his finger around the brim of his USS
Kearsarge
cap as he looked at Evelyn. “Sometimes it's good just to take a train somewhere else,” he said.

There was a screech from the parking lot, and Evelyn looked out to see the navy Jaguar with the
BIGDEAL
license plate. She stuffed the brochure back into the display, and the attendant said something in response, but Evelyn was already out the door, not wanting to make Camilla wait. Evelyn opened the back door to place the bags of party supplies there when Camilla vaulted out of the driver's seat and put a hand out to stop Evelyn, like she was a little kid who needed to be prevented from wandering into the street.

“Evelyn, there's a problem,” said Camilla. “Look, this is sort of awkward. I wish you had called or something before you got here. I don't think it's going to work.”

Evelyn stood up. “What's not going to work? I did call.”

“You, here, this weekend.”

Evelyn gave a half laugh, hoping this was one of Camilla's jokes, but Camilla was standing steady, her sunglasses on.

“I'm already here,” Evelyn said, dimly.

“Well, you should have double-checked before you got on the train.”

“I texted you.”

“Did you? I didn't get it, I guess.” Camilla flipped the car-door handle a few times, letting it thunk against the glossy navy of the car. “Look, Evelyn, maybe you should watch what you do, okay? Prancing around the ball and Jaime de Cardenas, but I guess you already know his last name. It's probably in your file on him or something.”

Evelyn pulled on her earlobe so hard she almost dislodged her earring. “Jaime,” she said faintly. “How is he?”

At this Camilla took off the sunglasses and looked directly at Evelyn. “Yeah, I didn't really think you two had kept in touch after your whatever it was. Jaime's girlfriend is a great girl. A great girl. She was captain of the field-hockey team at Andover and played at Yale and has a Fulbright.”

Evelyn stayed very still. An Andover-Yale field-hockey player? Jaime must have thought—she was just a joke all along—

“And, I have to say, Nick isn't exactly thrilled that you were throwing yourself at poor Jaime while you were dating Scot,” Camilla said.

“How does Nick … Oh, God.”

“What about you promising that your father would support my event basically just so you could embarrass me? You were never going to get him to give that check, were you? Your father's going to prison, so, um, I don't think it's going to happen. I don't know why you wanted to do that to someone who has never been anything but nice to you, and who gave you a hand and lifted you into this world. I've been working with my therapist on being direct, and he thought this would be a good experience for me to come here and tell you this myself. It's not easy for me.” Camilla swished the sole of her flip-flop against a speck of gum ground into the parking lot. Evelyn looked down to the grimy gum, now almost as flat and gray as the asphalt with all the dirt and shoe mud it had absorbed. Back, forth, back, forth went Camilla's toe, unpainted and rather gnarly.

Back, forth. Jaime had a girlfriend. Camilla and Nick knew, and therefore they knew that Jaime had wanted nothing to do with her after their hookup, and the stuff with her father was coming out at last, too late for her to do anything, and her class was stamped on her as obviously as a tattoo. Maybe Scot; maybe she could still get to Scot before everyone else did.

“Nothing really happened with Jaime,” she said finally.

“Look, Evelyn, I don't really need details, okay? It's just better if you go home.”

“There's only one train back on Fridays and it was at noon. I have all this stuff.”

Camilla looked it over. “I'll take the party stuff,” she said.

“But—”

“I'm sure you've wormed your way into some other families up here. Surely one of them will take you in.”

“Camilla, this is just a misunderstanding. Your mom wants me to race tomorrow.”

“Evelyn, it's not a misunderstanding. And you're not racing. Back down. For once.” With that, Camilla hopped in the car, shut the door with a firm click, and hit the gas. Evelyn realized then that Camilla hadn't even turned off the motor to talk to her.

Evelyn, glancing back to make sure the station attendant hadn't been watching, took her duffel and walked to the service road behind the strip mall next to the train station, so no one driving to or from town would see her on the main road. She walked by the unadorned backs of the grocery and the video-rental shop, both of their Dumpsters bursting. She walked by the touristy furniture stores and the motels and the boat-repair shops with their propped-up hulls. As town got closer, she walked by the ice-cream parlor, and the motel, and the hotel that was a step up from the motel, and the flower shop where all the summer brides ordered their bouquets. From this side, they were all the same, with giant garbage bins and cigarette butts and cars parked at odd angles in lonely lots.

Evelyn felt that if she could just keep moving, it would be all right and she could keep these things at bay. Camilla would backtrack; Jaime never mentioned a girlfriend, so something must have been amiss between him and this girl already; Scot didn't necessarily know for sure yet, and she could convince Nick and Camilla not to tell him; she'd see Preston and he would see she was sorry; her father, her father, they couldn't all know about it, it wasn't possible. But it was possible.

After she had walked for three-quarters of an hour, a small hill demarcated the start of town from the strip-mall outlying parts. Evelyn pitched down it, hot and smelly, with a sore shoulder from where the stiff leather duffel strap had been digging in, looking for somewhere to land. After checking that no one she knew was in sight, Evelyn took a break next to the marina. So she had lied a couple of times. So she had violated Camilla's rules. She had worked hard to get here and deserved to be here and wasn't going to be defeated because Camilla decreed it so.

The marina was lively for that time of day on a Friday and, in preparation for the Fruit Stripe, was crowded with trailers holding single sculls, double sculls, fours, and eights. Some collegiate crews had shown up; a foursome carrying a boat down to the water for an evening row wore Yale jerseys. Evelyn remembered crew at Sheffield, the races on the Schuylkill and on Quinsigamond where they'd sleep in motels the night before and carbo-load. Two people were stringing up a banner: F
RUIT
S
TRIPE
R
EGATTA
2007
—
H
EAD OF THE
F
RUIT
S
TRIPE
. Evelyn was just under the Lake James Marina wooden arch when she saw Scot.

“Oh, my God,” she said, tired, happy, relieved. She ran to throw her arms around him. “I'm so happy to see you. You don't even know.” She shut her eyes and pressed her ear against Scot's beating heart, so glad he was there, so solid and warm, as if she'd summoned him, and it was three blissful seconds before she wondered why and how he was there.

“Jesus,” someone said, and Evelyn looked behind Scot to see Nick, arms crossed.

“Nick?” she said.

“I think I can say with some confidence that Scot doesn't want to see you right now,” Nick said, stepping out from behind Scot's shadow; Scot was gnawing at his thumb. “Camilla said you weren't coming.”

Her stomach started to simmer and pop. “Scot's going with you? To Camilla's?”

“That's the plan.” Nick began to steer Scot off toward the motorboat dock, until Evelyn grabbed Nick's shoulder.

“I'm sorry, Nick, but I'm allowed to talk to my boyfriend. You're not his bodyguard.”

“No, Evelyn, I'm his friend. You need to go home.”

She was a few inches shorter than Nick, but she managed to force him back and squeeze in between him and Scot, who looked like he had been teleported from apartment 5G. Nick moved toward her, but Evelyn put both hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. “I'm sorry. You understand.”

“What the fuck?” Nick said as Evelyn guided Scot to a bench by a garbage can.

Scot sank onto the bench, still not making eye contact. She tiptoed to him, her hand hesitating until she rested it on his back. He flinched and moved his body away. He was not looking at her and had raised one hand to shield his eyes. She put her hand on his back again; it was warm. His hand now shot down from his face and chopped her arm away.

On the shore, she heard a cheer of “Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow, wow wow!”

“You should leave,” he said. His voice was low, lifeless.

“I can't leave,” began Evelyn, who was focusing on the dark line where the bench met the hedge behind it. The sentence hung there as the idiot Yalies on the shore shouted, “Eli, Yale!”

“I don't want to see you.” His head was in his hands, and his voice sounded too low and too empty.

Evelyn wrapped her arms around herself when she heard him and asked a question she knew the answer to. “What's this about? Can you just tell me that?”

“It's about you sleeping with Jaime.”

She pulled her arms tighter, digging her nails into her upper arms, and moved back from him. “Okay. Okay. We talked about that already. So you're just going to believe a rumor about me?”

“Don't.” Now his voice was filled with fury. “Don't do that.”

She felt like each word, if chosen wrong, could leave a lasting liability, and left long gaps between them. “I'm not … I…” She covered her mouth with her fingers, pinching her lips as though that would massage out a response. “It wasn't what it sounds like. I was … we were…”

“What? You were what?”

She couldn't find an end to this sentence, and the sun shone brighter and brighter.

“I was so drunk I didn't know what I was doing,” she said finally.

“You're lying. I defended you, like a naive idiot. I nearly punched Nick.” He pulled his knees in now; his huge body curled into a ball looked too vulnerable, and she had to look at the lake again, where someone was waving a Yale banner. “Why?”

“It was dumb. It was so dumb. Scot, things were, are, falling apart with my family, and I thought—” She put a tentative hand on his upper arm and he flung it off.

“Don't touch me.”

The silence between them was now beating, threatening to grow, even as the cheering onshore intensified. “I just—I did something dumb, and I don't want to ruin things between us—”

She saw something fly; he had kicked off his shoe. “Get out of here.”

“Scot. Please.” Her voice was high now, pleading, like a child's. “Please. We can figure this out.” She didn't know what to say next. “Scot, you're wonderful. You're so smart. And so kind. Please.” She had to find something to say that would pull him out of this awful posture.

“So smart? You didn't even think I knew about your father, did you? You thought I was just that stupid? Such a rube? I knew, Evelyn. I was trying to give you time and space to tell me.”

“I would've told you. I did. I tried. Camilla said that investigations, that indictments, that they weren't, that it wasn't—”

“Stop it. Stop. Leave. I was at Sachem. That morning. When you…” He swallowed. The noise roared around her, the sound of a conch shell at the ocean. She was desperate for him to crumble, for him to hug her and let her wet his shirt with her tears.

“I made a mistake,” she said. “A big mistake. I'll fix it. Please.” A feeling of tenderness and a sense of loss swelled, and she knew what she had to say, something she had never said before, not to any boyfriend. “I love you,” she whispered.

“How dare you,” he said, his voice barely audible. “How dare you.” He issued a bitter chuckle that was so far from his usual gentle snorts that it sounded like a new, awful side of him, a side she had excavated from underneath his sweet exterior. He rose, and she tried to walk with him. He put his hands on her arms like he was going to kiss her, but then she felt his fingers dig into her tricep muscles and she whimpered. He let go, and Evelyn wished he didn't have to bend to pick up his shoe, as she knew it would make him feel more ashamed. He walked toward the water and Nick.

“We can talk later?” she said. Her eyes were bright and she spoke fast.

He didn't turn around.

She stood, watching him get smaller and smaller until he stepped into a motorboat with Nick, and they went skipping along the lake, Sachem bound. His fingers had left a painful kinetic imprint on her arms, and the boats and the people moved around her, and it started to get dark, and it started to get cold. She had been looking at, without seeing, the bow of a boat, and she blinked, then blinked again. It read M
ILDRED'S
M
OMS
M
ANIA.
Clutching at her phone so aggressively she almost dropped it, she shouted into it, “Yes, do you have a listing for the Hacking residence in Lake James, on Mt. Jobe Road? Yes, please connect me.”

Bing picked up, almost causing Evelyn to drop the phone, but she instead deepened her voice. “Yes, Jean Hacking, please,” she said, not that Bing would recognize her voice.

“Hello, is this Mrs. Hacking? Mrs. Hacking, it's Evelyn Beegan, from Sheffield. I'm well, thank you. No, no, I'm just over at the lodge with a group of people. I do, I really like the renovation. Preston? I was … I was planning on calling him, but it's been—he's been hard to reach. No, no, I have his cell phone. I actually hoped to talk to you. Listen, this is so forward of me, but I couldn't resist. I heard you were organizing a group for the Fruit Stripe tomorrow, and I just wondered, I love rowing so much, and if you need a last-minute fill-in. Yes, I rowed lightweight at Sheffield. I did! I did. Sculling? Okay, sure. I can scull. I will, I will definitely say I'm a Mildred's Mom. Really? That's fantastic. I can't tell you how much I miss rowing. Oh, that's just great, Mrs. Hacking. So seven
A.M
. tomorrow at the marina. I'll be there. I can't wait.”