Silver Girl (30 page)

“So then she got sick…” Connie said.

“Then she got sick,” Dan said. “And it was a complete crisis. We didn’t tell the kids any more than they needed to know, but they clung to Nicole even tighter. And during the first battle when it looked like we might lose her”—here, Dan stopped talking and drew a few breaths—“I thought that maybe the boys had intuited that illness would claim Nicole, and they were jamming all their love in while they still had a mother to love.”

Oh, God. Sad.
Tears stung Connie’s eyes.

“I mean, Charlie was only four when Nicole got diagnosed, so basically from his earliest memory, he’d been in danger of losing her.”

“Right,” Connie said.

“This is a long way of saying that all three boys were closely aligned with Nicole—but especially Joe. All three kids had the predictable struggles with Nicole’s illness. But the problem with Joe happened when Nicole got diagnosed the second time, with cancer of the liver. The prognosis was bleak. It was, well, it was fucking terminal was what it was, and Nicole knew that, and Joe and Donovan and probably even Charlie knew that. Nicole had always been into holistic medicine and alternative treatments. But the pain with liver cancer took her by surprise. She got a doctor’s prescription for…”

“Marijuana,” Connie said.

“Marijuana,” Dan echoed. “And I’m not going to lie to you. I was surprised Nicole would even consider it. She was such a health nut. She did yoga. Even after the liver diagnosis, I’d find her in downward dog, and she drank these revolting shakes with wheatgrass and God knows what else. But for the pain, she smoked weed. Pure, medical-grade ganja. So her last months with us, she was always high.” He cleared his throat. “That might have bothered me in and of itself. But what really got me was that Joe started smoking it with her.”

“He did?” Connie said.

“She allowed it,” Dan said. “She encouraged it.”

“Encouraged it?”

“She was lonely. She wanted to be less lonely, and having Joe with her in her sick room smoking with her made her feel less lonely. Never mind that the kid was only seventeen, a senior in high school. Never mind that smoking dope for him was illegal. They were communing on a ‘higher’ level—that was her joke. She made it sound okay, she made it sound beautiful. But for me it was
not
okay, and it was certainly
not
beautiful.”

“No,” Connie said. “I imagine not.”

“It led to some pretty destructive conversations at the end of Nicole’s life. She was so worried about the boys. They were her sole focus. What about me, I asked her, your husband of twenty years? She said, ‘You’ll remarry. You’ll find another wife. But the boys will never have another mother.’ ” Dan looked at Connie. “I can’t tell you how that hurt me. I was being dismissed. The boys were her flesh and blood; I wasn’t. I was cast as some kind of outsider, and then it occurred to me that I’d always been an outsider.” Dan picked up another stone and sent it skipping; it hopped like a bean in a hot pan. “The dying can be so fucking righteous. At some point, Nicole passed into this place where she felt she could say whatever she wanted, no matter who got hurt, because she was going to…”

“Die,” Connie said.

“Die,” Dan said.

Nicole died, Dan said. (Connie was interested by his tone of voice. He said it like he still couldn’t believe it, which was how Connie felt about Wolf.) Donovan and Charlie handled it okay. Joe did not handle it okay. He continued to smoke dope in the house, in front of his brothers, and Charlie was only twelve. Joe had “inherited” a huge stash from Nicole, Dan said. Dan hunted all over the house for it but couldn’t turn it up. There were fights. Dan was angry about the marijuana; Joe was angry at Dan for picking fights with Nicole about the marijuana.

“She was dying and you were yelling at her,” Joe said.

“What she did was irresponsible,” Dan said. “Letting you smoke.”

“The marijuana was for the pain,” Joe said.

“Her pain,” Dan said. “Not your pain.”

Joe continued to smoke—though, in a small concession, not in front of his brothers. He had been accepted to Boston College, but after Nicole died, he decided to defer a year. He talked about going to California and working on a campaign to legalize marijuana. Dan told him that no way in hell was Flynn family money going to be spent subsidizing a drug odyssey in California. If Joe wanted to go, that was his choice, but he had to pay his own way.

Joe’s answer to this was to steal Dan’s pickup truck while Dan was out on his boat. He put it on the ferry and was halfway across the state of New York before Dan figured out what had happened. He could have had Joe tracked down and arrested, but Dan knew Joe was in possession of marijuana, and despite his anger and his hurt, he didn’t want to see his kid go to jail.

“And so that was it,” Dan said. “He’s gone, he’s in California, he contacted me the one time for money. He sent a goddamned e-mail. I said to myself, If he has the stones to call and ask me for money, that’s one thing, but I will not answer a goddamned e-mail. But then, of course, I did.”

“Does he talk to his brothers?” Connie asked.

“He might, but they don’t tell me. In our house, his is the name that shall not be spoken.”

“But you’d welcome him back?” Connie asked.

“In a heartbeat,” Dan said.

They had turned around at the part about Nicole being prescribed marijuana, and now they were headed back. Connie was afraid to ask what time it was. She didn’t want this walk to end.

“Do you feel better, telling me?” Connie asked.

“You know?” he said. “I do. You may be the only person I’ve told the story to that way—start to finish like that. That’s the problem with growing up in a place like Nantucket and still living here. Everyone feels like they already know what happened because they were right there watching it. Most people think Joe is a pothead who stole my truck and lit out to California to live a life even more liberally oriented than his mother’s had been. But those people bother me because it wasn’t
entirely
Joe’s fault. I’m to blame as well, and Nicole is to blame, although
no one
wants to blame Nicole because she’s dead. I haven’t had a chance to step far enough away from what happened to see it clearly.” He laughed sadly. “That’s the problem with an island.”

“I guess,” Connie said.

“So tell me about your daughter,” Dan said.

“Isn’t one tale of woe enough for one day?” Connie said. “No, I would tell you but I don’t want you to be late for work.”

“Work can wait,” Dan said. He sounded like he meant it, and Connie felt something unfamiliar bloom inside her. Wolf had been the most wonderful man she’d ever known, but those words—
Work can wait—
had never once crossed his lips. Now, if Wolf were here to defend himself, he would point out that power washing and caretaking and lobstering were not the same as being a nationally renowned architect.

Connie ceded this point to him silently while still feeling pleasure about being put first. “I’ll tell you another time,” she said.

“No, tell me now. Please,” Dan said. “Otherwise I’m going to feel like I failed. Like I didn’t allow you to climax.”

Connie froze, shocked. Had he really just said that? The idea of her and sexual climax in the same sentence was much more foreign than it ought to have been. But not wanting to call attention to that fact, Connie laughed.

Dan said, “I’m sorry. That was
very
inappropriate.”

She said, “You caught me off guard. But I like that.”

“I like that you like that,” Dan said, and he took her hand.

They had about a hundred yards of beach left before they reached their shoes, and they were holding hands. Just a little over an hour before, Connie had been sure she was being given the brush off in aisle ten, and now they were holding hands. And Dan had made a joke about bringing Connie to climax. She wasn’t sure she had the concentration to proceed.

“Okay, remember what you said about naming Joe after Nicole’s father and then feeling like he belonged to her? Well, in my case…” Here, she drifted. She was about to revisit emotional territory she had decided to abandon decades ago. Why go back? Well, on the one hand, Dan had been achingly honest with her, and she wanted to reciprocate. But, on the other hand, she didn’t know if she could
be
achingly honest. “I got pregnant with Ashlyn by accident. Wolf and I had been dating for less than six months, and he invited me here to Nantucket for a week, which turned into two weeks. And I’m pretty sure that Ashlyn was conceived in the back of a pickup truck at the Madequecham Jam.”

“No way!” Dan said. “You were at the Madequecham Jam? What year are we talking about?”

“Eighty-two,” Connie said.

“I was there,” Dan said. “I was definitely there. How’s that for weird?”

Weird, yes. Though, now that Connie thought about it, it wasn’t terribly surprising. Everyone in the universe, it seemed, had been at that beach party. There were hundreds of girls in bikinis and Ray-Ban Wayfarers and guys bare chested wearing board shorts. The soundtrack was Journey and Springsteen and Asia. There were volleyball nets and horseshoes and kegs sitting in tubs of ice, and hibachis with burgers and dogs, and actual dogs catching Frisbees and chasing after tennis balls. There were chicken fights in the water—Connie and Wolf had participated and won handily, Wolf being so tall and Connie so ruthless. The jam had started in the morning and continued on late into the night—there were bonfires and guys strumming guitars and people singing and more beer, all taking place in a miasma of marijuana smoke. Couples drifted off to have sex in the dunes. Wolf and Connie had tried to have sex in the dunes but found them occupied, so they had nestled down in the back of a pickup truck owned by one of Wolf’s buddies. Connie didn’t remember the sex, though there were things about that night that remained with her—the stars in particular, the obscure constellations that Wolf pointed out: Cygnus, Lyra, Draco. Connie had felt pinned to the earth, one small person, negligible compared to the ocean and the sky, yet she was in love with Wolf Flute, and this made her feel significant in the turning world. Love made her matter. These were deep drunken thoughts. Connie had no idea she was conceiving a child. But yes, looking back, that had been the night. Connie had been nominally “on the pill,” though she was lazy about taking it, and she had, in fact, forgotten her pill pack back at her parents’ house in Villanova.

The gravity of what had happened that night didn’t present itself to Connie until over a month later—Labor Day weekend. She was back on Nantucket with Wolf, only this time his entire family was vacationing at the cottage, as was their tradition. The Flute family believed that the final weekend of summer was superior to all other weekends, and that the last family to leave Nantucket for the season won some kind of intangible prize. (The Flutes regularly stayed until the Tuesday or Wednesday after Labor Day. As a child, Wolf had consistently missed the first day of school, and he’d been two weeks late matriculating at Brown.) In the house that weekend was Wolf’s brother, Jake, Wolf’s parents, and Wolf’s grandparents. It was a weekend that included sailing and badminton, a lobster bake on Saturday, and lobster bisque made from the shells on Sunday. (It was a Yankee household; nothing went to waste.) The Flutes were athletic, hearty, seafaring people, but they weren’t drinkers. The only person to have a drink at dinner was Wolf’s grandmother, and that drink was a tiny glass of cream sherry. The rest of the family drank ice water or unsweetened iced tea, and Wolf and Connie complied. This being the case, Connie couldn’t fathom the reason for her queasy stomach or leaden exhaustion. And yet, as she faced the first incarnation of the lobster and then the second, she had raced to the cottage’s lone bathroom—which was no bigger than the bathroom on a ship and had to be shared among the seven of them—and vomited. The times when she wasn’t expected at the family table or on a boat or on the beach for some camp game, Connie flopped across her spinsterish single bed in the third-floor guest room originally designed for the governess or nanny, and slept the heavy, sweaty sleep of the dead.

Near the end of the weekend, she awoke to Wolf rubbing her back. “You’re sick,” Wolf said. “My mother heard you retching in the bathroom. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Connie buried her head under the feather pillow. She hadn’t said so because she didn’t want to ruin Wolf’s family vacation or bring light to her infirmities (the fact that Mrs. Flute had heard her “retching” mortified her). She hadn’t said so because, part of the time, she felt just fine. She hadn’t said so because somewhere inside her, the knowledge lurked: she wasn’t sick.

“I’m not sick,” she told Wolf.

“You’re not?” he said.

“I’m pregnant.”

Wolf didn’t react one way or another to this news, and Connie was glad. She couldn’t handle anger or despair, and she couldn’t handle joy. She thought nothing about the situation other than she had finally gotten what she deserved. She had been sleeping with boys since Matt Klein in eleventh grade, and she had never been assiduous about birth control. She had expected the boy-guy-man to be assiduous, and when she discovered they often weren’t, it was always during the height of passion and she sometimes—too many times—took her chances. It was amazing she hadn’t gotten pregnant before this.

When Wolf finally did speak—it took him so long that Connie had drifted off back to sleep—what he said was, “Wow. Okay. Wow.”

The word “wow” bothered her. Connie had no intention of keeping this baby. She was only twenty-two years old, Wolf five years older. Wolf had a job as an architect with a firm in D.C., and he had a small apartment in Dupont Circle, but Connie still lived at home with her parents. She had been renting an apartment in Villanova, but one of her roommate’s drunk boyfriends had punched a hole in the plaster and they lost the security deposit and Connie’s parents had insisted that she live at home and save money until she proved she was responsible enough to live on her own. She had been working as a waitress at Aronimink and had, in fact, waited on her own drunk parents and her own drunk parents’ drunk friends, a situation that Connie found humbling enough to bring her to tears. She couldn’t handle caring for her own apartment, and she could barely handle her menial job, so how was she supposed to handle having a baby?