Silver Girl (36 page)

When they walked in, Meredith was sitting at the head of the table. She saw them and stood up. She was wearing white shorts and a black tank top and she was in bare feet. Her hair was in a ponytail. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but her face was tan. She looked, graying hair aside, like she was sixteen years old—tiny and compact, a blue-eyed elf.

When she saw Toby, her eyes narrowed. She poked at her glasses, and Connie wanted to say,
Sorry, he’s real.
Meredith looked at Connie, and then back at Toby. Connie had known Meredith since the age of four, but she had no idea how the woman was feeling right now.

Connie said, “Look who I found at the town pier.”

Toby dropped his duffel and took a few strides toward her.

Meredith glared at Connie. “Do I seem like a woman who needs more surprise news?”

Toby stopped in his tracks.

Connie opened her mouth.

Meredith raised her face to the ceiling and let out a squawk. “Waaahhhhhh!!” Then she faced Toby. “Hello,” she said.

He smiled nervously. “Hello, Meredith.”

She took a baby step forward, and he opened his arms and they hugged. The hug was brief, but Connie thought it was real. Knowing each other for nearly fifty years counted for something. Connie wanted them both here, and somehow, by virtue of her own scatterbrained negligence, she had managed to get them in the same room.

She was proud of herself for that.

Meredith felt the same way now that she’d felt at Connie’s wedding. And Veronica’s funeral. She couldn’t bear to be near him; she only wanted to be near him. She was at a standoff with herself.

“How long are you staying?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She was angry enough at Connie to threaten to leave right that second—but where on earth would she go?

“Does anyone want lunch?” Connie asked brightly.

He looked good, but this only vexed Meredith further. She couldn’t find her balance. There was so much she was dealing with already, and now Toby. Here, in person. He was wearing a green shirt and khaki shorts. His hair was the same, his face was the same but older, with lines and sun spots, but he was still a gorgeous golden lion of a man. Were they actually the same people who had kissed against the tree on Robinhood Road? Were they the same people who had made love in the Martin family library? There were two answers to that as well: They were. And they weren’t.

“I’d love some lunch,” Toby said.

“Meredith?” Connie asked.

“No, thanks,” Meredith said. She could barely breathe, much less eat. “I might go up and lie down.”

“Don’t let me chase you away,” Toby said.

“You’re not…” Meredith wasn’t quite sure what to say.
You’re not chasing me away. You don’t have the power to chase me away. You don’t have power over me at all.
She was light-headed now. She said, “We’ve had a rough couple of days, as I’m sure Connie’s told you. I’m exhausted.”

“Stay down here with us,” Connie said. She was already in the kitchen, toasting bread for sandwiches, slicing a lemon for the iced tea. “Even if you’re not going to eat, come sit outside.”

“You guys enjoy your lunch,” Meredith said. “Catch up with each other. Do the brother-sister thing.”

“Meredith,” Connie said. “Stop it.”

Toby put his hands on both her shoulders. Meredith closed her eyes and tried not to think. “Come out with us,” he said. “Please.”

The three of them sat at the outside table. Connie and Toby were eating sandwiches worthy of the front cover of
Bon Appétit.
Meredith’s stomach complained, but she would sustain her hunger strike. She sipped at her iced tea. Her back was to the ocean. She couldn’t stand to look at the water. Thoughts of Harold with his throat slit, blood everywhere, as thick and viscous as an oil spill, pervaded.

“So… I’m here because I sold my boat,” Toby said.

Meredith nodded.

“I’ve had her almost twenty years, so it was hard,” he said. “But I tell myself that, ultimately, she was just a thing.”

Just a thing. Well, Meredith could identify there. She had lost so many things: the Range Rover, the Calder mobile, the Dior gown. Did she miss any of them? Not one bit.

“It’s hard imagining you without a boat,” Connie said.

Meredith nodded again. Whenever she’d thought of Toby over the years, she’d thought of him in the cockpit of a sailboat, ropes in hand, the sun on his face. She’d thought of him toting all of his worldly possessions in the very same blue duffel bag he’d walked into the house with today. His parents had given him that duffel bag when he graduated from high school; Meredith had been sitting right beside him when he opened it. Little did she know then, it would become a symbol for Toby’s life: He wanted to be able to carry everything he owned with him in that bag, so that he was free to get up and leave, move on to a new place, new people. No commitments.

But yes, one commitment, right?

“Tell me about your son,” Meredith said.

“Michael is ten now,” Toby said. “He lives in New Orleans with his mother and her new husband.”

“Ten is the best age,” Meredith said. All of her ached: her past, her present, her future. Because, suddenly, there were her memories of Leo and Carver at ten. Leo had asked Meredith and Freddy for a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, and Freddy had made him earn the hundred and thirty-nine dollars by doing jobs for Father Morrissey at the church. Meredith had gone to check on him and found him on his hands and knees, scraping candle wax off the wooden floors. Meredith had instinctively gotten down on her hands and knees to help, and Leo had said,
Don’t, Mom. This is my job.
And reluctantly, Meredith had stood up and left him to it.

Carver had started surfing at age ten. He wore a leather choker with a white shell woven into it, and green and black board shorts that reached past his knees. Meredith could picture him so clearly—his young, tanned back, the emerging muscles under the smooth, clear skin of a boy, a boy whose voice had yet to change, a boy who still called her Mommy.

Mommy! Watch me!

“How old are your sons now?” Toby asked.

“Leo is twenty-six and Carver is twenty-four. They’re in Connecticut. Leo has a girlfriend named Anais.”

Toby nodded. The shirt made his eyes look very green.

Mommy! Watch me!

“Leo was working for Freddy, and he was under investigation for months. But my lawyer called a couple of days ago to say he’s been cleared.”

“That’s good news,” Toby said.

“The best news,” Connie said. She swatted Toby. “Leo’s my godson, remember.”

“I’m sure you did a great job with the spiritual guidance through this crisis, Aunt Connie,” Toby said.

“I was a basket case about it,” Meredith said. “Your kids come first, you know.”

“I know,” Toby said.

“I’m still under investigation, however,” Meredith said. She smiled weakly. “So enjoy me now, because I might be whisked off to jail at any moment.”

“Meredith,” Connie said.

“I don’t mean to be maudlin. We’ve been having a pretty good summer, considering.”

“Except for the dead seal,” Toby said.

“Harold,” Meredith said. “He was like our pet and they murdered him.”

“And don’t forget the slashed tires and the spray paint,” Connie said. “Meredith spent the first part of the summer hiding inside.”

“Wow!” Toby said. “There’s a lot to talk about, but it’s all really painful!”

Meredith stood up. Every time he opened his mouth, she thought about what had happened at Veronica’s funeral. It made her dizzy. “I’m going upstairs to nap,” she said.

“Please stay,” Connie said.

“I can’t,” Meredith said. She realized this sounded harsh, so she said, “I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

“Okay,” Connie said. “If you’re sure.” She reached for Meredith’s hand. Connie was being very sweet. Certainly she was worried that Meredith would be mad. Was Meredith mad? She was something. She needed time to process this.

She went upstairs to her bedroom, and cracked open the doors of her Romeo and Juliet balcony. She could hear the murmur of Toby’s and Connie’s voices. What were they saying? Meredith wanted to know. She stood in the stripe of sunlight between the doors and listened. Connie said, “Well, you didn’t show up at Chick’s funeral…”

“… always felt bad about that. But I was a kid…”

Meredith flopped on the bed. Her memories of Toby and her father were all jumbled up. One moment, she’d had them both. She lost one first, then the other, and like that, her childhood ended. She thought about her father and Toby in the front yard raking leaves, or in the den watching football. She thought about her father taking Toby aside for “the talk.”
Respect my daughter. Be a gentleman.
She thought about Chick inviting Toby to sit in on the poker game and how thrilled Toby was to be included. It had been his passage into manhood. She thought about Chick and Toby heading off to the roast-beef station during brunch at the Hotel du Pont. She thought about her graduation from Merion Mercy. She had stood at the podium to deliver her salutatorian’s speech, and when she gazed out at the audience, she found Veronica and Bill O’Brien, Toby, and her father and mother, all in a row. She’d daydreamed about her wedding day at that moment. Her inevitable marriage to Toby. But less than twenty-four hours later, Toby had packed up his proverbial bag and announced that he was moving on, leaving Meredith behind. Meredith remembered the driving lessons with her father in the gathering dusk of the Villanova parking lot. The smell of hot asphalt and cut grass, the shouts of the few university students who remained for the summer, the unbearable knowledge that Toby was at the beach, and that the mainsail and the jib and his freedom were more important to him than she was. Chick Martin had said, “I can’t stand to see you hurt like this,” and at a loss for further words, he’d played the Simon and Garfunkel song over and over again.
Sail on Silvergirl, Sail on by.

Meredith sat up. She couldn’t sleep. She yanked her lone cardboard box from the closet and unfolded the flaps. On top were the photographs. Meredith pulled out the one of her and Freddy at the Dial holiday formal. They looked like kids. Freddy had weighed 165 pounds, and his black curly hair went past his shirt collar. There was a picture from their wedding day. Freddy’s hair was cut short then, in the manner of all stockbrokers. Those were the days of his first suit from Brooks Brothers, a huge extravagance. For their wedding, he’d rented a tux. When federal marshals stormed their penthouse on the first of July, they would have found six tuxedos and fourteen dinner jackets in Freddy’s closet.

Meredith could have spent all day on the photos, but she was looking for something else. She dug down to the paperback novels that were on top of the boys’ yearbooks that were on top of the copy of her Simon and Garfunkel album. Meredith pulled out the record sleeve and there, in her father’s handwriting, it said:
For my daughter, Meredith, on her sixteenth birthday. You always have been and always will be my Silver Girl. Love, Dad, October
24
,
1977
.

She’d had her wedding to Toby all planned. Her first dance with Toby was going to be to “The Best of Times,” and her dance with her father was going to be to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

Meredith stared into the dim, nearly empty closet. She couldn’t remember what song she and Freddy had danced to at their wedding. Freddy didn’t care much about music. Freddy only cared about money.

And yet, years and years later, he’d bought her a star and he’d named it Silver Girl, after the song. It had always bothered Meredith that he named the star Silver Girl—because he never knew her father, and he’d never heard her father play that song for her. The name and the song and the story were Meredith’s, Freddy was only a guest to it, and yet in buying that star, he co-opted the song and made it his own. He stole the name from Meredith in order to give it back to her as something else.

Meredith rummaged through the cardboard box to the bottom, where she found a manila envelope that held her important documents. She had taken only the lasting things: the children’s birth certificates, her marriage license, her Princeton diploma—and, for some reason, the certificate for her star. She pulled it out. It was on official-looking cream-colored paper and it said “NASA” across the top.

She had received the star for her forty-fifth birthday. Freddy had booked a private room at Daniel. He had invited thirty people—New York friends only—Samantha and Trent Deuce, Richard Cassel and his new girlfriend (young), Mary Rose Garth and her new boyfriend (younger), their favorite neighbors from the building, and some people that Meredith and Freddy didn’t know all that well but whom Fred had probably invited in order to fill the room. The dinner had been elegant, everyone else got bombed on the extraordinary wines, but Meredith stuck to her glass and a half of red, and Freddy stuck to mineral water. And yet, he had been more effusive than usual, a manic, overeager master of ceremonies. Something was happening after the meal, Meredith picked up on that, and it had to do with her birthday present. Meredith experienced a flutter of curiosity; for her fortieth birthday, Freddy had arranged for Jimmy Buffett to sing to her on the beach in Saint Barth’s. She thought this year would be something like that—Elton John, Tony Bennett. They had all the tea in China and so purchasing gifts for each other was a challenge. What could Freddy give her that would be creative and meaningful and unique, that she wouldn’t just go out and buy for herself?

Right after Meredith blew out her candles, Freddy chimed his spoon against his water glass.

“Attention, attention!” Everyone quieted down to listen.

“It’s Meredith’s birthday,” Freddy said. He mugged, the room chuckled. Meredith thought about the things she really wanted. She wanted her children to be happy and successful. She wanted more time with Freddy. She remembered looking up at his salt and pepper curls, his piercing blue eyes, his fine-cut suit, and thinking,
I never see this man. I never spend time alone with him.
She remembered hoping that her present was everyone else in the room going home.