Silver Girl (14 page)

Meredith was borrowing a white linen dress from Connie; it was too long, it hit her midknee, but what could she do? She wished her skin had a little bit of color. She slipped on the dress first, then did her makeup, then put on her wig. It didn’t matter what she looked like, she reminded herself. She was the sidekick here, the tagalong. She was Rhoda to Connie’s Mary Tyler Moore. She was Mary Ann to Connie’s Ginger.

Connie looked absolutely drop-dead gorgeous in a celadon-green silk sheath. She looked like a mermaid who lured sailors to their death. She had on sparkly silver Manolos (Meredith had once owned a nearly identical pair) and she wore Guerlain Champs-Élysées and smelled like a garden in Provence.
Oh, perfume!
Meredith nearly asked Connie for a spritz, but she refrained. It didn’t matter how she smelled.

There was a knock at the door, and Dan Flynn materialized in the foyer. He was a very handsome man to begin with, and he cleaned up incredibly well. He wore creased white pants with expensive-looking loafers and a blue-patterned Robert Graham shirt.

Connie floated down the hallway. From her perch on the stairs, Meredith could see Dan’s eyes pop. It gave Meredith a vicarious thrill, watching Dan feast on the vision of her lovely friend. They embraced awkwardly, and Meredith suppressed a smile. Then Dan noticed Meredith and said, “And here comes my second date. Am I lucky or what?”

Connie and Meredith climbed into Dan Flynn’s strawberry-red Jeep. The soft black top was accordioned down, and Dan said, “Here we go! Hold on to your hair!” This was a joke about Meredith’s wig—and surprise!—Meredith laughed. She did, indeed, hold on to her hair. The wind and the sun in her face were intoxicating. Dan played some Robert Cray. Meredith felt relaxed for the first time in months. She had made a deal with herself in the upstairs bathroom that she wouldn’t spend the evening musing about what the boys were doing, or about Freddy. Freddy, she had to assume, was fending for himself, and she, Meredith, was left to do the same. She was determined to be a sparkling dinner companion, witty and interesting—and not the complete downer that Dan Flynn, no doubt, expected.

“We’re starting with drinks!” Dan said. “Champagne!” Yes, Meredith loved champagne, although it gave her a regrettable headache. They arrived at the Galley Restaurant, which looked out over Nantucket Sound; they took their champagne onto the sand, where they lounged across low-slung wicker furniture covered with creamy linen pillows. It was a scene straight from the south of France. Meredith listened to Connie and Dan talk about Nantucket—the way it was now, the way it used to be. Dan Flynn had been born and raised on the island, and his father before him and his father… back five generations. At one time, he said, his family had owned nearly a tenth of the land on the island, but they had sold some of it off and donated some to conservation. Dan was a fisherman and a clammer and the owner of twenty-five lobster traps. He owned the power-washing business, and he managed his family’s fourteen properties, though his real job, he said, was to know everyone on the island and everything that was going on. In the off-season, he traveled. Just like the whalers of the 1800s, Dan Flynn had seen the world. He had ridden a motorcycle through China; he had backpacked through India, contracted malaria, and spent months convalescing, with the help of some psychedelic drugs, on the beach in Goa. He had hiked with his wife and three sons to see Machu Picchu.

Connie was beaming, and it looked like real Connie beaming and not fake, polite Connie beaming. Dan was a charmer and a gentleman. When Meredith tried to slip him a twenty-dollar bill for the drinks, he said, “Put that away. Everything tonight is my treat.” Meredith felt a relief she would have found absurd only a year before: she didn’t have to worry about money.

They left the Galley and stopped for another round of drinks at 21 Federal. Even Meredith, who knew next to nothing about Nantucket, had heard of 21 Federal—which meant she had to be on high alert. She would see someone she knew—but, she reassured herself, no one would recognize her. The wig, the glasses. Dan had been instructed to introduce her as Meredith Martin.

Dan knew everyone at the bar at 21 Federal, including both of the bartenders. He ordered more champagne. The bar was dark and sophisticated; the clientele was attractive and convivial. But it was in gracious, genteel places like this that the Delinn name got kicked around. These were the people who had lost money or who knew people who lost money.
We’re changing our last name,
Carver had said.
You should, too.

Meredith wondered if the boys had followed through with this. Would Leo be able to change his name while under investigation? She worried that if they did change their name, they would slip away from her, and how would she ever find them?

She had to bring herself back. Stay present, no musing! The people next to her were talking about horses. Dan and Connie were talking about sailing.

Connie said, “My husband used to sail. And my brother, Toby, is a sailor.”

Toby,
Meredith thought. God, she remembered when Toby had seemed like the dangerous one.

Meredith excused herself for the ladies’ room, even though this meant walking past people seated for dinner, people who might recognize her. She glanced surreptitiously at faces: she knew no one. She eyed the door to the ladies’ room warily. Amy Rivers could be on the other side of that door.

She wondered if she would ever outlive this particular anxiety.

The ladies’ room was empty. Meredith peed gratefully, washed her hands, adjusted her wig, and briefly studied herself in the full-length mirror. Somewhere in this disguise was a girl who had been able to execute a flawless reverse one and a half pike, a woman who had read all of Jane Austen’s novels except for one, a daughter and a wife and a mother who had always acted out of love. She was a good person, though no one would ever see her that way again.

Goddamn you, Freddy Delinn,
she thought (zillionth and fifth). Then she took it back, because that was how she was.

The Company of the Cauldron was, as Connie had promised, the most romantic restaurant on earth. The room was small, charming, cozy. It was lit only by candles and decorated with dried flowers, copper pots, antique farm implements, and kitchen utensils. There was a harp player, and the sound of the music made Meredith think that even if everything she’d been told about heaven turned out to be false, there had better still be a harp player. Dan knew the owners of the restaurant, and so they were given the table in the front window, where they could look across the cobblestone street. Connie and Meredith sat next to each other, and Dan sat across from them. There was a rustic loaf of bread on the table, and a dish of garlicky white-bean dip. Dan ordered a bottle of wine, and when the waiter left to fetch it, Dan reached for Connie’s hand. Connie and Dan were holding hands, this was their date that Meredith was crashing, and yet Meredith didn’t want to be anywhere else.

As their food arrived, the conversation grew more serious. Dan talked about his wife and her ten-year battle with breast cancer. Her name was Nicole, she found a lump when she was forty years old and her youngest child was four. She went through chemo, and then a double mastectomy, and then five years on tamoxifen. Nicole had taken every possible precaution, including putting herself on what Dan called “a nasty macrobiotic diet,” and just when they thought she’d beat it—she was in great shape, doing long breast-cancer walks across the state—they found the cancer had metastasized to her liver. She was dead in two months.

“I’m so sorry,” Connie said. Her eyes were shining with tears.

“The kids?” Meredith said.

“It was paralyzing for the boys,” Dan said. “Especially my oldest. He ditched his plans for college, stole my old pickup truck, and lit out for California. I hardly ever hear from him.”

That makes three of us who aren’t in touch with our kids,
Meredith thought.

Connie took a breath. “My husband died of prostate cancer that metastasized to the brain,” she said. “But I can’t talk about it. I’m just trying to survive each day.”

Dan raised his wine glass. “To survival.”

Amen,
thought Meredith.

The three of them touched glasses.

The evening might have ended with the tiny, seductive chocolates that came with the bill, but Dan Flynn was one of those people who never stopped. (Freddy had always been in bed by ten o’clock, and preferably nine thirty.
The stress!
he used to say, when Meredith begged him to stay out later.
There’s no way you’d understand!
) Dan pulled Connie and Meredith down the street to the Club Car. There was more champagne ordered for the ladies, while Dan drank a glass of port. Meredith was tentative at first—again, scanning the old Pullman car for people she knew. (On the way, Dan had told Meredith that this Pullman car had once been part of the train that ran from Nantucket town out to Sconset.) But Meredith was drawn to the back end of the car where a man played the piano and people gathered around him singing “Sweet Caroline” and “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da.” At one point, Meredith caught sight of Dan nuzzling Connie’s neck at the bar. This was the romantic end of their date; they would both want to be rid of Meredith soon. The piano player launched into “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues,” and Meredith belted it out, thinking of Sister Delphine at Merion Mercy, who had trained Meredith’s voice for four years in the madrigal choir. Now here she was, a rather drunk torch singer.

The piano player turned to Meredith. “You have a great voice,” he said. “What’s your name?”

She had to make up a name. She touched her wig. “Mary Ann,” she said.

“Okay, Mary Ann, you pick the next song,” he said.

She picked “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, since survival had become a sort of theme for the evening. A theme for the summer.

On Monday morning, Connie woke up and didn’t know where she was.

Then she laughed, uneasily.

She was in her bed.

She was in her own bed, tucked between the crisp white sheets, her head sunk into a cloud of a pillow. Light spilled in through the windows. The ocean seemed so close it felt like the waves were lapping at the bottom of the bed.

Connie’s head was heavy but not throbbing. She noticed water in the glass carafe on her night table, with a thin slice of lemon, just as she liked it. She had no recollection of fixing it herself. She looked circumspectly over her shoulder to make sure the other side of the bed was unoccupied.

Okay.

Her clock said 5:30. God love Nantucket, the Far East of the United States. Morning came early. Connie put a second pillow over her head, and closed her eyes.

When she reawoke at ten minutes to eight, she thought,
My God, I’m in my bedroom! I’m in my bed!

She had done it. She had faced down some kind of demon and slept in her own bed. But this pride was quickly replaced by guilt. She had slept in her own bed when
not
sleeping in it had been a tribute, of sorts, to Wolf.

Connie pulled a feather pillow to her chest as memories of the previous night came back to her. She had held hands with Dan Flynn, and just that act—holding hands with a man—had felt sinfully good. All her life she had had boyfriends; in high school and college she left one for the next. She hadn’t been alone for five minutes, she realized, until Wolf died. That she had survived for so long without male attention seemed amazing, like going without hot food or good books. At the Club Car, Dan had put his mouth on her neck, and something inside of her stirred, as if returning from the dead. She had to shake off the chill, but she was doing it; she was warming up! How long since she had given her physicality any thought? With Dan, all she wanted to be was a body.

Once they were home and Meredith had stumbled up to bed, Dan and Connie had gone into the kitchen—ostensibly for a nightcap—though what Dan had asked for was water. Connie didn’t remember water, what she remembered was soft, deep kissing that sent her into the stratosphere.

And Dan, the gentleman, had kept it to just kissing. Connie had cried, she remembered that now, when she told Dan that she hadn’t kissed a man since Wolf died. She had believed that her days of being kissed were over. Dan didn’t offer a parallel sentiment. He didn’t say that Connie had been the first woman he’d kissed since Nicole died, which probably meant he’d stanched the bleeding of his heart with the kindnesses proffered by other women. He’d had sex with a woman from Nicole’s yoga class when she brought over a brown-rice casserole, or he’d allowed himself to be seduced by the children’s twenty-one-year-old nanny. Men were different creatures. If Connie had been the one who had died, Wolf would never have spent two and a half years sleeping on the sofa. He would already be remarried to some younger, prettier, less seasoned version of Connie. Of that she was sure.

Connie drank down the water and slipped out of bed. She would leave it unmade; she liked the way it looked rumpled. Finally, the bedroom looked inhabited.

She brushed her teeth, washed her face, inspected her skin in the mirror. She was still pretty. Big whoop. She had always been pretty, but this morning she was grateful for her looks. Dan Flynn had kissed her. He had left it at kissing—maybe because he wanted to take it slow, or maybe because today was Monday and he was scheduled to work at a house on Pocomo Point at 8 a.m.

Yes, that was it. That was what he’d told her.

It was
Monday.

Connie gasped. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. She… she couldn’t even say it. A realization came to her that was so slippery, it shot right out of her grip, ricocheted around, bounced, and oozed before landing with a big, ugly, stinky splat on the floor of her mind.

She hadn’t called Ashlyn yesterday. It had been Sunday, and she hadn’t called.

Connie looked at herself in the mirror with wide eyes. Her eyelashes stuck together with clumps of the previous night’s mascara. She had gone on a date with another man, she had kissed that man, she had slept in her own bed for the first time in two and a half years. This was all noteworthy. Indeed, startling.