Tainted (3 page)

She knew she wouldn't, though. Not only because it might affect the wildlife, but also because she didn't want to change anything. Her parents had lived here; she wanted all her memories intact. She'd kept all their weather-beaten old furniture; perversely, she liked the way the cushions absorbed damp on wet days; the musty smell that permeated the house matched the low tones of the foghorns in the Cape Cod Canal. The kitchen, aside from a dishwasher her mother had installed a year before she'd died and a new electric coffee-maker Holly had bought recently, was pretty much antediluvian.

A 1950s refrigerator was always seemingly on its last legs, making continual rumbling sounds of protest at having to keep working well past its prime; there was a separate, chest-shaped freezer which would have the starring part in any mystery story as the natural place to hide a murdered body, cupboards full of faded, chipped china, a toaster so ancient it was now retro-chic, an old, battered oak table and an oven with four electric hobs on top—two of which no longer functioned.

After they reached the house, Holly went into the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboards for peanut butter and jelly to make a sandwich for Katy's lunch. She thought of Jack Dane's face beside hers on the bus, his breath, the smell of him. And she saw yet again his back as it receded into the distance.

Yes, I'm old-fashioned, Jack Dane. I wonder what I'd be like if things had been different. If we hadn't come here that Thanksgiving weekend, if there hadn't been that boat sale, if Billy hadn't come here then too.

“Mommy—do dogs like clams?”

“I don't know, chickpea. Maybe. But clams might make dogs sick.”

“Then we shouldn't give any chowder to Bones. In case. I don't want him to get sick—ever.”

Her little face looked so worried, Holly almost wished Henry didn't own a dog, especially a fairly old one. How would Katy cope when Bones died? She knew Katy had picked up on her own overwhelming grief when her parents had died so unexpectedly. She'd been almost two years old at the time, yet children absorbed the atmosphere, and Holly was sure that Katy knew in some unarticulated, profound way that her mother's heart had been broken.

And she suspected that Katy's serious nature also stemmed from that week when Holly's world had imploded—when her father had had a heart attack at work and died instantly; when, three days later, her mother had fatally crashed her car into a tree after viewing her husband's body in the funeral home.

Grandparents who had been there all Katy's short life suddenly disappeared forever. The fact that life was precarious and arbitrary must have seeped into her tiny brain. No wonder she was more restrained than most children her age: there had not been a whole lot of joy around Katy when she was a toddler. But Holly and Henry were making up for it as best they could. In the oasis that was Birch Point, they swam and went clamming and built sandcastles and watched the plovers nesting on the dike and identified foreign flags on boats and found shells on the beach and read her stories and gave her all the love they both had.

I can keep her safe. I can cushion any blows. I'll be there with her when Bones dies and I'll never let anything bad happen to her—ever.

“Why does Henry keep saying you have to get out more, Mommy? Does he think you need more air?”

“Probably,” Holly laughed. “But I've got plenty of air. I've got all the air I need right here with you.”

In the past, residents of Shoreham used to refer to Birch Point as “Barrett Point” and joke about its similarity to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis. During the 1880s, Holly's family on her father's side had colonized a hundred-odd acres on the southern Massachusetts shoreline, buying up all the land and building summer houses on it.

“Not quite the Kennedy Compound,” Henry would say. “We never had any presidents, senators or absurdly brutal touch-football games.”

Holly had spent her childhood summers on Birch Point with cousins and second cousins, swimming and sailing, in a kind of genetic cocoon. A private, winding, dirt-sand road cut through woods for a mile and a half before reaching the start of the dike; branching off that road were driveways leading to houses of people she was related to, people like her parents who lived in Boston in the winter and came down to Shoreham from June to September.

The dismantling of the Family Compound had been remarkably swift: as soon as one of their cousins broke the unwritten law and sold his house to a “stranger,” others felt free to follow. Money was the issue: what had once been an assumed WASP privilege—a summer house—became something to trade in order to sustain a better lifestyle throughout the year. Those who hadn't sold up for financial reasons bridled at losing “their” point, the terrible prospect of meeting people they didn't know on the beach. They sold out and left.

Holly was thirteen when the exodus from Birch Point started; she missed seeing her cousins but was relieved her parents kept their house. Henry and Granny Isabella had given it to them as a wedding present, at the same time buying the house closest to it, at the very end of the point, which had belonged to a female first cousin who had never married. Now both Holly and Henry lived there year round. So one branch of the Barrett family tree remained in Birch Point, carry ing on the tradition.

Except Henry Barrett was not traditional, not in the Bostonian sense of the word. He may have gone to Groton and then to Harvard, done a stint in the Marines, been a lawyer, but he wasn't the typical WASP. No typical Bostonian WASP was a Democrat with a flair for racy language who didn't join any of the socially prestigious Harvard clubs, who had himself taken out of the Social Register on principle.

Henry hadn't been a huge part of her life while Holly was a child; he and her grandmother, Isabella, came to her parents' house often, but her grandmother took over all the interactions with Holly while Henry kept a distance. To Holly he was both a glamorous and imposing figure: tall, bald, with perfect posture and a forthright manner. He didn't hold back or change when children were around; he said whatever he wanted to say and there had been times, when she was very young, that she'd been frightened of him.

“Are you going to eat the goddamn peas on your plate, Holly, or are you going to let them rot there?” he'd barked at her once, sending her into a cowering state of anxiety.

But there were other times when a distant cousin might say something silly and he'd give Holly a look as though she and he were the only ones in the room who understood each other. Or Holly's mother would tell Holly it was time to go to bed and he'd say, “She can sleep when she gets old, Julia,” which made her feel they had a special link. While Isabella was called Granny Bella, Henry insisted she call him Henry because, as he put it, “Gramps or some such word makes me sound like a baby. And ‘Grandfather' makes me sound ancient. So let's leave it at Henry.”

As she grew older, she'd watch him at family parties, study him from afar. He could be gruff, but most of the time he was just teasing—and, she began to notice, people actually talked to him. Invariably, he'd be in a corner with one person and the conversation would be serious. She could tell, from the expressions on their faces, that it wasn't social chit-chat or family gossip. Henry, without making it explicit, demanded more than the mundane.

In his kitchen, however, Henry was nothing but explicit: he divided up chores as if he were back in the Marines. By the time Holly and Katy arrived, he'd already assigned tasks for the chowder-making: Holly was detailed to the sink where she peeled potatoes, Katy's job was to separate the bacon slices from the pack and lay them out in wait for Henry to chop up after he'd finished peeling and chopping the onions, then she could take the clams off their shells when they'd finished steaming open—meanwhile, the strict “No Talking During a Red Sox Game” rule was in play. Working away silently, they listened to the radio as the first game of a double header finished and the Sox beat the Minnesota Twins 2–1.

“Good start—but we need to take the second. We need to pound them into the ground in the next game. What do you think, Katy? Do you think we'll sweep this one?”

“Yes. We have to win when we play at Fenway.”

Holly, just as she was about to pick up another potato, found herself saying, “Henry? You know that new restaurant in town—Figs—Charlie Thurlow's the manager, isn't he?”

“That's what I've heard. You know I'm not averse to change. But it looks way too fancy-shmancy to me. Yuppie heaven.” He wiped his onion-streaming eyes with the sleeve of his plaid cotton shirt. “A fancy-shmancy restaurant, the new goddamned mall, Jesus H. Christ—I never thought I'd see the day that Shoreham had a Starbucks, but believe me, it's coming.”

“The mall is going to be gross,” Katy pronounced.

“It certainly is. And I hope, Katy, that you are as tasteful when you're a teenager as you are now.”

“What do I taste like now?” she asked.

“Like a little nutcase,” Henry laughed, then went to open the fridge. “Damn it all, we don't have any light cream. But we can use milk.”

“I don't have any cream at home but I can go into town and get it,” Holly said quickly.

“Milk would be a healthier option.”

“But will milk make it not perfect?” Katy asked.

Henry sighed. “Hard to say.”

“It will be better with cream, and light cream won't kill us. I'll go into town. It won't take me long.” She put down the paring knife. “Make sure Henry doesn't mess things up while I'm gone, OK, Katy?”

“OK,” she nodded. “I know the mall's going to be gross, but I don't know why the mall is going to be gross. Does that matter, Henry?”

“Not at all. I'll be happy to tell you why the mall is going to be gross while your mother is getting the cream. But honestly, sweetie, I'm sure milk will be fine. You don't have to go into town.”

“No problem. I'm gone—and I'll be back before the second inning of the next game.”

Holly waved, walked out of the kitchen and then sprinted to her house and the car. She didn't even try to pretend to herself that she had no ulterior motive for insisting on the cream and volunteering to get it. The Cumberland Farms was almost next door to Figs and she could park and walk by, glance in the plate-glass window, just check if he was there. She didn't have to go in or speak to him; she could walk by and keep walking. That's all she wanted. A quick look.

Zapping the windows down on her Honda, she turned up the radio and drove down the road, thankful that as yet the Birch Point residents hadn't had it paved over. If Henry was upset about the prospect of a Starbucks, he'd be apoplectic were cement to replace the sand and grass. And so would she. This had always been a magical road: as a child she'd sat on her father's lap, steering, while he controlled the accelerator and brake. It had been a scary wonderful adventure to be in control of the car for that mile and a half: she'd clench her teeth and hunch her shoulders and stare straight ahead, gripping the wheel with intense concentration. Every bend had felt like a massive arc. Now she rushed down it, avoiding potholes and the odd rock. Going too fast. Going to see Jack Dane.

Just as she pulled into the Cumberland Farms car park, a song came on the radio—“New Kid in Town.” Holly's mother had loved the Eagles and used to play their Greatest Hits album on the car CD when she picked Holly up from school. They'd sing along together, and her mother once said, “Someday we'll enter a karaoke competition at that Chinese restaurant near Shoreham and your father will not believe how great we are. But they serve alcohol there so we have to wait until you're twenty-one. We'll have a big party there, a big karaoke party. How much fun will that be?”

Julia Barrett wasn't alive when Holly turned twenty-one. There'd been no party, no karaoke; instead Henry and she had shared a bottle of champagne and Holly had brought Katy in to sleep with her that night.

“Hopeless romantics, here we go again . . .”

She had been happily singing along to the lyrics until this line. Until its meaning slammed into her head and ricocheted around her consciousness so hard she felt no brain cell had been left untouched.

Hopeless romantics.

Here we go again.

Here
you
go again. Here you go effectively stalking someone you have a crush on. Here you go again making one encounter mean more than it ever could or did.

Billy Madison had been the new kid in town once upon a time. When his family had moved from New York to Boston, and bought a summer house on Birch Point. When she'd been fourteen and first set eyes on him: a teenage boy on the beach pushing a sailboat into the water, his blond hair whirling in the wind. When she'd then seen him at school in Boston in the autumn and spent all her time trying to find out where he would be and “happen” to be there herself. When she'd finally realized that she could have dropped a bowling ball on his foot and he wouldn't have bothered to ask who that girl was who had maimed him.

It was amazing what you could convince yourself of when you were desperate, Holly knew too well. She'd made herself believe that when Billy asked her to dance that night after Anna had ditched him, he'd actually wanted to dance with her—not that this was his way of getting back at Anna. And that perfunctory screw on the beach? It wasn't revenge sex or “take it when you can get it” sex; it had meant something special. Billy cared. And he would have showed how much he cared for her if his parents hadn't been so controlling and disapproving.

Tell your heart lies enough times and it will fashion them into the truth.

The song ended; Holly pulled up to park, turned the engine off and remained sitting, an elbow on the car windowsill, her fingers raking her temples.

“The definition of insanity,” she'd heard on a random TV talk show not long before, “is doing the same things and expecting different results.” A twenty-three-year-old woman walking past the window of the restaurant where a man she'd just met might be was perilously close to a fourteen-year-old girl walking by classrooms trying to catch a glimpse of a boy who was already clearly smitten with her best friend.

Holly left the car, went into Cumberland Farms, bought a small carton of light cream, got back into her car and drove home.

She was a mother now. She might never lie beside a man in bed or find out what it meant to have real, intimate sex, but none of that really mattered. All that mattered was Katy.

As she turned into her driveway, she saw another car parked there, a black Audi. People sometimes drove down the Birch Point Road and parked at Holly's or Henry's in order to get to the dike. They were trespassers on private property and Holly could have called the police and had the car towed as the owners frolicked on the beach, but she never did. Instead she'd write a note informing them politely that this was not allowed, and then make a note of the car license in case they ignored it and came again. If people hiked or bicycled down the mile and a half of private road to the dike, she would never complain, but if she didn't take any action on the cars, on sunny summer days her driveway would end up like a Red Sox parking lot.

She got out of the car, went to the house, opened the screen door, and stepped into the living room.

There was a man standing by the table, his back to her.

Just as she screamed, he turned, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Holly—it's OK, it's me. Billy.”

Paralyzed by fear and confusion, she stood staring at him. Because it couldn't be Billy. She hadn't seen Billy in over five years. Billy was at Stanford. He was in California. Billy didn't exist, he wasn't supposed to exist, much less be standing in her living room. Some wire had crossed in her psyche: she was imagining his presence because she'd just been thinking of him.

“The front door was open. I came in. Sorry. I should have waited outside.”

“Billy?”

“Yes. Billy.”

A guy in a J. Crew advertisement. That's what he looked like. Pink polo shirt, chino trousers, Gucci shoes. Billy Madison, the boy she'd desired so much for so long, the one who had changed her life irrevocably, still looked like a fresh-faced blond boy. As if life hadn't touched him, had made no dent on the teenager who had taken that walk with her on a cold Thanksgiving Saturday.

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you, talk to you.”

“Why?” She could hear the fear in her own voice.
Katy. This is about Katy. I don't want him within a thousand miles of Katy.

“It's obvious, isn't it?” He gestured to the photographs on the table—pictures of Katy. Beautiful pictures of a beautiful daughter he'd never acknowledged.

“I don't understand.”

“Do you think we should sit down?”

“No.”

“OK.”

They stood facing each other, Holly trying to control her shaking body. This couldn't be happening. This was too random. Too absurd. But he was standing and looking around the room in the same way he'd stood and looked around this room when he'd come to ask her out for that walk. With a kind of nonchalance, an expression of vague interest bordering on boredom.

It hadn't been revenge sex, she suddenly understood. It hadn't been “take it when you can get it” sex either. What it had been was “I don't have anything better to do right now” sex.