Silver Girl (47 page)

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me what happened in France,” Meredith said. “Did our friendship mean nothing?”

“Wait a minute,” Connie said. “We’ve both done damage to the friendship. It wasn’t just me. I didn’t tell you about Freddy because, at the time, my best judgment told me to let it go. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“Not as sorry as I am,” Meredith said.

“I’m not Samantha Deuce,” Connie said. “You’re angry with Samantha. Not with me.”

At that moment, Toby came downstairs. “What’s going on?” he said. “Did someone break a glass?”

“Connie,” Meredith said.

Toby turned to Connie. Connie could speak, but Toby wouldn’t hear her. This was her house—where, it might be pointed out, both Meredith and Toby were guests—but she had no voice.

“I’m going to bed,” Connie said.
Dinner,
she thought. She foraged through the pantry and selected a Something Natural herb roll, which she took a bite out of like an apple.

Meredith said, “No, the two of you stay up.
I’m
going to bed.”

Old habits die hard,
Connie thought. It was exactly nine thirty.

Connie spent the night on the living-room sofa. After growing accustomed to sleeping in a real bed, she felt that the sofa offered as much comfort as an old door laid across sawhorses, and when she woke up, Connie felt like she had fallen from a ten-story building. Her breath stank of onions from the herb roll. She had forgotten to pour herself a glass of water, and her lips were cracked. She needed lip balm. She needed to brush her teeth.

She stood up, gingerly. She decided she wouldn’t think about anything else until she took care of these small tasks.

Water. Chapstick. Toothbrush.

She cleaned out the sink—carefully removing the shards of glass with rubber gloves. She made a pot of coffee. She was okay. Her heart hurt but she was functioning.

Her cell phone was there on the counter, charging, and because she couldn’t help herself, she checked for missed calls or messages. She was thinking of Dan, but really she was thinking of Ashlyn. There was nothing new. The voice mails from Iris and Lizbet lingered, unheard.

The coffee machine gurgled. Connie got a mug and poured in half-and-half and warmed it up in the microwave. She poured in the coffee and added sugar. She could remember drinking coffee for the first time with Meredith and Annabeth Martin in Annabeth’s fancy drawing room at the house in Wynnewood. Connie and Meredith were wearing long dresses. Connie’s dress had been red gingham with a white eyelet panel down the front that was embroidered with strawberries. Connie remembered thinking,
Coffee?
That was something adults drank. But that was what Annabeth Martin had served; there was no lemonade or fruit punch. Annabeth had poured cream out of a tiny silver pitcher and offered the girls sugar cubes, stacked like crystalline blocks of ice, from a silver bowl. Connie’s coffee had spilled into her saucer and Annabeth had said, “Two hands, Constance.”

And then, when Connie got home and told her mother that Annabeth had served them coffee, Veronica had said, “That woman is trying to stunt your growth.”

Connie smiled now, remembering. Then she felt a heaviness gather inside her. She and Meredith had been connected since her earliest memories. She didn’t want Meredith to be upset with her. She couldn’t lose another person.

She took her coffee out to the deck. There were a few clouds on the horizon, but the rest of the sky was brilliant blue. Nantucket was the kind of place that was so beautiful it broke your heart, because you couldn’t keep it. The seasons passed, the weather changed, you had to leave—and return to the city or the suburbs, your school, your job, your real life.

Connie drank her coffee. She thought,
I can’t lose anyone else.

She turned and saw Meredith standing in the doorway, holding a cup of coffee. She was in a short white nightgown. She looked like a doll. Her hair was lighter.

Connie spoke without thinking. “Your hair is lighter.”

Meredith said, “You’re just saying that because I’m mad.”

“I’m saying that because it’s true. It’s lighter. It’s blonder.”

Meredith took the seat next to Connie and reached for her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Connie said.

Meredith narrowed her eyes at the view. Her face was tanned, and she had a spray of freckles across her nose. She said, “I would have died without you.”

Connie squeezed her hand. “Shhh,” she said.

Later that morning, the phone rang. Toby said, “Geez, the phone has rung more in the past two days than it has in the past two weeks.”

Connie threw him a look. Meredith was upstairs getting dressed. There were no reporters out front, so Connie and Meredith were going to run to the grocery store, and if that went well, to Nantucket Bookworks to stock up on novels. Dan had called; he was taking Connie to the Pearl for dinner, so Meredith and Toby would be on their own at home.

Connie checked the caller ID. It was the law firm. Connie picked it up. The fifteen-year-old attorney asked for Meredith.

Connie said, “Just a moment, please.”

Connie caught Meredith coming down the stairs. She said, “It’s your counsel.”

Meredith said, “I wish we’d left five minutes ago.”

Connie said, “I’m going to run up and brush my teeth. We’ll go when you’re off the phone?”

“Okay,” Meredith said. She had her wig in one hand. They were back to the wig.

Goddamn you, Freddy,
Connie thought.

She climbed the stairs slowly because she wanted to listen. Toby was right there in the room, probably unabashedly eavesdropping. Connie heard Meredith say, “Hello?” Pause. “I’m doing okay. Do you have any news for me?”

Connie stopped in her tracks, but she was near the top of the stairs, and she didn’t hear anything more.

He wouldn’t talk to her.

“I asked everyone in the system at Butner,” Dev said. “Everyone gave the same answer: Fred Delinn won’t take your phone call, and they can’t make him. They can’t even make him listen while you talk.”

Meredith felt her cheeks burn. She was embarrassed. Humiliated. She was dying a living death. “Why won’t he talk to me?”

“It’s anyone’s guess, Meredith,” Dev said. “The guy is a sociopath, and he’s deteriorated mentally since he’s been in. Everyone at the prison knows what happened with Mrs. Deuce. They understand why you want an audience. Mrs. Briggs, the warden’s secretary, personally pushed for Fred to face you on Skype and at least be forced to listen to what you have to say, but that idea was shot down. It’s against prisoner’s rights. They can lock him up, they can make him go to meals, they can make him go out into the yard at nine a.m. and come in from the yard at ten a.m., they can make him take his meds. But they can’t make him talk, and they can’t make him talk to you.”

Meredith reminded herself to breathe. Toby was somewhere in the room, though she wasn’t sure where. Her right knee was knocking into the table leg. “I should go down there and see him in person.”

“He won’t see you,” Dev said, “and they can’t make him. You’ll go down there for nothing, Meredith. It’s a romantic idea, like in the movies. I get it. You go down there, he sees you, something clicks, he offers up all kinds of explanations and apologies. That isn’t going to happen. He’s a sick man, Meredith. He’s not the man you once knew.”

She was tired of this idea, even though she knew it to be true.

“So you’re telling me I can’t go?”

“I’m telling you you shouldn’t go,” Dev said. “Because he won’t see you. You can travel down there to hot and desolate Butner, you can plan on enduring a media circus, you can meet with Nancy Briggs and Cal Green, the warden, but they’re just going to tell you the same thing that I’m telling you. He won’t see you. He won’t talk to you.”

“I’m not going to yell at him,” Meredith said. “I’m not going to hurt him. I’m not going to go on some kind of crazed jealous-wife rampage. I just want answers.”

“You won’t get answers,” Dev said.

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She had thought that perhaps the prison would make it difficult for her to talk to Fred. But from the sound of it, they wanted to facilitate the phone call but couldn’t—because Freddy refused. It was the very worst thing: He had stolen everybody’s money, he had lied to the
SEC
and single-handedly put the nation’s economy in the toilet. He had cheated on Meredith for six and a half years with a woman she considered to be their closest friend. He had lied to Meredith tens of thousands of times—fine. But what she couldn’t forgive was this, now. What she couldn’t forgive was this stonewalled silence. He
owed
her a conversation. He
owed her the truth—
as egregious as it might be. But the truth was going to stay locked up in Butner. It was going to stay locked up in the sooty black recesses of Freddy’s disturbed mind.

“Fine,” Meredith said. She slammed down the phone. She was furious. Furious! She would make a statement to the press vilifying the man. She would take down Freddy and the undisputed harlot who was Samantha Champion Deuce. (She wrote her own
Post
headlines:
CHAMPION
HOMEWRECKER
,
CHAMPION
TWO-FACED
LIAR
.
) Meredith
would
file for divorce, and three hundred million Americans would support her; they would raise her up. She would regain her position in society; she would hit the lecture circuit.

She turned around. Toby was standing there, and something about the look on his face made Meredith’s anger pop like a soap bubble.

She said, “He won’t talk to me. He refuses. And they can’t make him.”

Toby nodded slowly. Meredith expected him to take this opportunity to say,
He’s a rat bastard, Meredith. A piece of shit. What further proof do you need?
But instead, Toby said, “Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

Meredith smiled sadly and headed for the front door to meet Connie in the Escalade. They were going to the store. Meredith had planned on wearing her wig, but this suddenly seemed pointless. The wig was meant to protect her, but she had just suffered the ultimate blow. Nothing anyone did could affect her now; the wig had been rendered useless. Meredith left it on the stairs. When she got home, she would throw it away.

Toby was being kind about Freddy because he could afford to be. He knew, as Meredith did, that Freddy would never change his mind.

That night, before she left for her date with Dan, Connie made dinner for Meredith and Toby. It was a crabmeat pasta with sautéed zucchini in a lemon tarragon cream sauce, a stacked salad of heirloom tomatoes, Maytag blue cheese, and basil, sprinkled with toasted pine nuts and drizzled with hot bacon dressing, and homemade Parker House rolls with seasoned butter.

Unbelievable,
Meredith thought. Connie had showered and dressed. She looked absolutely gorgeous, and she had made this meal.

“I feel guilty,” Meredith said. “You should have served this meal to Dan.”

“I offered,” Connie said. “But he really wanted to go out.”

Without us,
Meredith thought.

“And I wanted to cook for you,” Connie said.

Because she feels sorry for me,
Meredith thought.
Again.
But there was something almost comforting about reaching this point. Nothing left to lose, nothing left to care about, nothing left to want.

The outdoor table was set with a tablecloth and candles. There was a breeze off the ocean that held a hint of chill.

Fall was coming.

Connie wrapped herself up in a pashmina and said, “Bon appétit! I’m off for my date. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Dan’s on the noon boat.”

“This is lovely,” Meredith said. “Thank you.”

“And there’s dessert in the fridge,” Connie said.

“Have fun,” Toby said, pushing her gently to the front door.

She left, and Meredith had the feeling that Connie was the parent, and she and Toby were teenagers on a date. It was supposed to be romantic—the candlelight, the delicious food, the ocean before them like a Broadway show. Meredith should have dressed up, but she was in the same clothes she’d put on that morning: a ratty old T-shirt from Choate that Carver had worn his senior year, and her navy-blue gym shorts. She knew it was possible that she would sleep in these clothes and wear them again the next day. She didn’t care how she looked. She didn’t even care, anymore, about her hair.

Thirty years of marriage, and he wouldn’t talk to her. So many dinners at Rinaldo’s she had sat with Freddy the way she was now sitting with Toby, and she had talked about her day, and Freddy had nodded and asked questions, and when Meredith asked him about work, he’d run his hands through his hair and check his BlackBerry as if a pithy answer would be displayed there, and then he’d say something about the stress and unpredictability of his business. Meredith had no idea that Freddy was printing out fake statements on an ancient dot-matrix printer, or that he was spending his lunch hours with Samantha Deuce at the Stanhope Hotel. Freddy had pretended to live in awe of Meredith, but what he really must have been thinking was how blind and gullible and stupid she was. She was like… his mother, Mrs. Delinn, who toiled at providing for Freddy and giving him love.
He’ll pretend like he can get along without it, but he can’t. Freddy needs his love.
And Meredith had been only too happy to take over the care and maintenance of Freddy Delinn. He was a rich man, but she was the one who rubbed his back and kissed his eyelids and defended him tooth and nail to those who said he was corrupt.

There had been one time in early December when Freddy had called out in the night. He had shuddered in bed, and when Meredith rolled over, she saw his eyes fly open. She touched his silvering hair and said, “What? What is it?”

He didn’t speak, though his eyes widened. Was he awake?

He said, “David.”

And Meredith thought, “David? Who is David?” Then she realized he meant his brother.

“It’s okay,” Meredith said. “I’m here.”