by Meg Donohue
“So what happened?” Dani asks, except it sounds more like “sowahapin?”
“Yeah,” Kate says. She can’t help herself. “What happened?”
Vanessa’s gaze drops down to the table. “He cheated on me.”
“What?” Kate can’t believe it. “Drew slept with someone? Who? When?”
“He kissed someone,” Vanessa says.
Kate is stunned. All this time she thought her friend had, if not a perfect marriage, at least a strong one. Even though Vanessa is drunk, Kate can see that she is embarrassed by the situation, the turn her relationship has taken. Kate reaches out and squeezes her hand.
“Oh,” Dani says. Kate cringes at her tone—she sounds disappointed and a little bored. But then Dani lays her head down on the table and Kate wonders if she even meant to speak at all.
“No, not ‘Oh,’ ” Vanessa says. She pulls her hand from Kate’s and sticks her finger into the air. “Not ‘Oh.’ He’s my husband and he kissed another woman. We’re married. He’s not allowed to do that.” She starts to cry and Kate tries to put her arms around her, but Vanessa shakes her off. “Whatever, Kate. You wouldn’t understand.”
Vanessa is going to forget she even made this comment, but it’s going to stay with Kate forever, and this pisses Kate off.
Vanessa peers at her and her face softens. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
“Maybe,” Kate says, “but you meant it. You think Dani and I are the same—that neither of us could make a relationship stick if we tried.”
Dani lifts her head and releases a bleary grin. “I never try!” she says, and then lays her head back down.
Vanessa stares at her and opens her mouth to respond but all that comes out is an enormous, sickly sounding hiccup. She looks as if she is about to vomit.
Kate has no idea how any of them are going to find their way home.
11
Vanessa
The next morning, Dani trudges into the kitchen wearing the same black T-shirt she wore the day before, the one she flew across the country in and got drunk in and slept in. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Vanessa had wondered if Dani still wore the same outfit for days on end, and now she has the answer. She has the urge to demand that Dani take a shower, the way she would if Drew came home smelling of sweat after a steamy ride in an un-air-conditioned bus.
Dani eyes her warily and lifts her hand in greeting.
“Morning,” Vanessa says. They fought last night, but she cannot remember why. She thinks it was about Jeremy Caldwell. Or Dani’s father? She has no idea why she would think this; it doesn’t make any sense. She had thought she might run into Jeremy at the Princeton, but she hadn’t. Or had she? She would remember at least that much, wouldn’t she?
“You made coffee,” Dani says. Her voice is croaky. She stands in front of the coffeepot, holding an empty mug, blinking. Vanessa wonders if she is still drunk.
“I did,” she says.
Dani fills her mug and then sits beside Vanessa on a stool at the breakfast bar. Behind them, a wall of sliding doors is open to the deck, and the sky is so bright that the beach seems almost white below it. The ocean shimmers flat and silver like a mirror. Dani’s father’s house is so beautiful, so comfortably elegant, that it takes Vanessa’s breath away. Looking around, she wonders how much of Dr. Lowenstein’s taste—and the time she spent in this house and his equally well-curated condo in Rittenhouse Square—is to thank for sparking her interest in art and design. She thinks of her own apartment, the foundation of Dr. Lowenstein–esque creams and contemporary furniture that she has layered with intensely colored textiles collected during her travels with Drew. If her parents had owned this beach house, they would have filled it with mismatched furniture collected at thrift stores and garage sales; decorating would have been a chore for them, a necessary evil to ensure they had a surface on which to play Scrabble.
Spinning her stool slowly back to the breakfast bar, Vanessa realizes this is the first time she and Dani have been alone together, sober, in eight years. She takes a sip of her coffee and when she lowers it, she sees that her knuckles are nearly white.
“Where’s Kate?” Dani asks, as though reading her thoughts.
“Out for a walk with Gracie. Two walks, actually. She returned to tell me what a beautiful day it is and then she went back out.”
Dani squints over her shoulder at the beach and turns back to look down into her coffee. “So beautiful it makes me want to vomit.”
Vanessa laughs despite feeling certain that she and Dani are still fighting about something—something new at least, though this does little to reassure her. “Coffee first, beach later,” she says. The day stretches out in front of her—no snacks to pack or toys to straighten or swings to push, just a day on the beach.
Downstairs, the screen door opens and shuts. They hear flip-flops being kicked off and Gracie’s nails clattering against the floor. Then Kate is stomping up the stairs, taking them two at a time. When she reaches the top, her cheeks are pink and her chest is heaving. Gracie loudly laps water from a bowl on the floor and then splays out on the kitchen tile with a groan. Without lifting her chin from the floor, the dog looks up at Vanessa, one eyebrow raised, her tail thumping slowly.
“Were you running?” Vanessa asks Kate. “In flip-flops?” It seems to her that Kate has two speeds: zero (when she’s spread out on a couch—any couch will do—watching a movie or sleeping) and sixty (the rest of the time).
“No, just walking. I picked up breakfast.” She looks back and forth between them in a way that makes Vanessa and Dani look at each other and shrug. Their fight last night must have been pretty bad because Kate is clearly relieved to find them sitting side by side, their hands far from each other’s throats. Kate digs into a white paper bag and pulls out two wrapped bagel sandwiches. Her peppiness is a little annoying. How is she not hungover? Vanessa can’t remember how many shots they did the night before; she lost track at three. “I didn’t get you one, Dani,” Kate says, handing Vanessa a sandwich.
“I don’t want one,” Dani says. Vanessa can tell she too finds the sight of Kate all freshly scrubbed and full of energy annoying.
“I know,” Kate says. “That’s why I didn’t get you one.” Dani never eats breakfast. She says her brain isn’t capable of sending her jaw “the chew signal” until at least 11:00 AM. This has been the case for as long as they’ve known her—she used to arrive at school and immediately hand Kate the cereal bar that her father insisted she put in her bag.
“Hello there!” Kate says to her bagel sandwich, unwrapping it. She takes an enormous bite, and then another before she’s even swallowed the first.
“My God, woman, slow down,” Dani says. She really does sound disgusted. The contrast between the grayish circles below her eyes and the greenish tint of the rest of her face is getting starker by the minute.
“Eating delicately is for wussies,” Kate says through a mouthful of bagel. Vanessa and Dani laugh. “It’s almost time to go to the beach,” she says, as though there’s some plan to which they’ve all agreed. Leave it to Kate to have a plan for their lazy beach weekend. “Dani, does your dad have extra tags?” The beaches aren’t free in Avalon—Dani’s father always bought a bunch of season passes at the beginning of each summer so the girls never had to buy their own.
Dani nods. “In the basket next to the coffeepot.”
The beach. Bathing suits. Vanessa looks down at the bagel sandwich. She’s only had a couple of bites, but she wraps it back up and puts it in the fridge. When she turns around, Dani is watching her in a way that drives her crazy; it’s a look that’s half judgment and half recording device. Vanessa has never read Dani’s book, but she suspects if she did, she would find a caricature of herself in its pages: a biracial, married, former gallerist with a wandering eye and an obsession with trivial subjects like weight and clothes. Victoria, maybe. Or Veronica. The thought makes her deeply uncomfortable. Angry, even.
“What?” Vane
ssa asks, glaring at Dani.
“Nothing,” Dani says, then adds, “Crunch crack.” When they were sixteen, Kate accidentally drove over Dani’s bike in the driveway of the beach house. She’d come running into the house, crying and babbling in her particular Kate way about how she’d had no idea the bike was even there until she ran over it and heard “crunch crack.” Ever since, it’s what they say when someone says or does something that seems to come out of nowhere or that one of them feels is unjustified.
“How’s Lucy?” Kate asks, always ready to change the subject at the first whiff of tension.
“Good. I checked in this morning and . . .” She trails off. She is hesitant to talk too much about Lucy with them. Kate wants a child someday and now that Peter has broken up with her, who knows when that will happen? Vanessa has no idea if Dani wants to be a mother; they’ve never discussed it. How strange that the two women who used to know her best now understand so little about her life—the world of motherhood. “They’re going to the playground.”
Dani stands and stretches. “And I’m going to take a shower.” She leaves Vanessa and Kate alone in the kitchen and walks out onto the deck. They can hear her footsteps on the outside staircase. Dani only uses the outside shower in Avalon.
“I’m glad Lucy and Drew are having fun,” Kate says. Vanessa senses something off in her tone. She knows that Kate has had a little crush on her husband ever since the night Vanessa introduced them and Drew wore a Vineyard Vines tie with tiny black Labradors all over it. Kate’s pale cheeks had immediately brightened into pink starbursts. She probably would have liked Drew even without that tie; few boys failed to spellbind her. That summer before their senior year of college, Kate had attended to Colin’s Lehigh friends like a hostess at a cocktail party in the 1950s, clearing empty beer cans and offering bowls of pretzels. And Vanessa still remembers the look in her eye when Vanessa mentioned, during the wedding shower that Kate threw for her in Philadelphia, that she would never cook meat for her future husband. Kate had pressed her lips together in a way that Vanessa knew meant she was appalled. But Vanessa is a pescetarian—she hasn’t eaten meat since the day her mother brought those chickens home to live in their yard—and she’s not going to cook meat for anyone. Ever. Kate, on the other hand, is allergic to shellfish but would probably cook bouillabaisse for a man. She’d probably eat it, too, in the hope that he would hold her hand on the way to the hospital.
A snort of laughter cuts through the air. Vanessa looks over, and Kate points at the kitchen counter, her eyes crinkled and glistening as her shoulders shake. In the fruit bowl, someone has suggestively rearranged a banana and two oranges. Dani. She used to do this all the time when they were growing up—in all of their homes, the school cafeteria, even the nursing home where they sang holiday carols in middle school. No fruit bowl was safe. Vanessa is surprised by the force of her own laughter. She can’t seem to stop it. She and Kate laugh together, a fresh wave building each time their laughter seems on the verge of lagging.
Her phone vibrates on the counter and her heart skitters when she sees it’s a text from Jeremy Caldwell. She picks up the phone, covering its face with her hand. “I’m going to take a quick shower too,” she says. “And then the beach, I promise.”
Kate is still smiling. “I’ll be out on the deck,” she says, “waiting for you slugs.”
Vanessa sits on the edge of the bathtub and looks at her phone.When can we get together? Jeremy’s text reads. She scrolls up and is surprised to see that he is writing in response to a text she sent him at 2:00 AM that morning. I’m in Avalon, she’d written. Staying at Dani’s house. It is a small relief to see that, even drunk, she is a woman of few words.
The air in the bathroom moves, and though she knows it’s just a breeze through the open window, she feels the presence of Lenora Haysbach. She met Lenora once, months before she and Drew kissed at that party, when she’d brought Lucy to the show’s studio in Hell’s Kitchen to meet Drew for lunch. Lenora was fresh out of college and an unremarkable shade of pretty—highlighted blond hair, athletic build, a string of pearls at her neck that she’d probably put on in the hope it would make her look sophisticated. Those pearls only made her look prudish, like an uptight twenty-two-year-old. Not at all Drew’s type. Vanessa had not felt even the slightest twinge of concern when Drew introduced them. Later, after the “indiscretion” (Drew’s word), when Vanessa pressed her husband for more information, she learned that Lenora was bright and ambitious and had a dry sense of humor that made her a favorite with craft services. She’d felt plenty of twinges then—one for “bright” and one for “ambitious” and another for “humor.”
In the shower, Vanessa’s thoughts turn to Lucy. Whenever her daughter takes a bath, she says the word “shampoo” over and over again, laughing her sudden bubbling laugh. Vanessa’s stomach roils with guilt and hangover. She misses Lucy so much it makes the air feel thin in her lungs. She hopes her daughter isn’t missing her. She hopes Lucy is happy in the moment and is not thinking about what—or who—is missing.
Did she remind Drew that Lucy was not allowed to bring her rings into her crib? Her daughter was obsessed with a stack of tiny rubber rings that the dentist had given her during her recent first visit to his office—a horrible reward for a small child given that they could so easily be swallowed, but Lucy loved them. She would wear them to bed if no one stopped her, two pastel rings on each chubby thumb, the danger of which causes Vanessa’s chest to clench. She makes a mental note to text a reminder to Drew and wonders what other critical details of Lucy’s care she had forgotten to share.
So here she is, alone at last, thinking only of her daughter. When she is with Lucy, she fantasizes about having a weekend to herself; when she is away from Lucy, she misses her so much it takes her breath away. She no longer expects to feel completely comfortable in either world. It’s been this way since the day Lucy was born; this is motherhood. Even as she has these thoughts, Vanessa hears the voice of Dani arguing that this inability to feel satisfied in the present moment is not in fact Vanessa-as-Mother, this is simply Vanessa. Period.
She jumps when she hears the door click open. “V?” It’s Kate.
“We’re not knocking?” Vanessa peeks around the shower curtain and sees that Kate is blinking back tears. “Oh, Kate. What’s wrong? Hang on.” She turns off the shower, wraps herself in a towel, and pulls back the curtain.
“I was sitting out on the deck by myself and I . . .” Kate begins and then stops, biting her lip to keep herself from crying. She seems to have lost her train of thought and Vanessa gives her a moment to see if she’ll find it. “It’s just,” Kate says, sinking onto the toilet seat, “everything.” She rubs her knees, looking all of ten years old with her skinny legs sticking out from her khaki shorts and her bikini straps tied behind her neck and her sunglasses tucked like a headband into her humidity-crimped hair. That summer before their senior year of college they had worn sunglasses every waking hour, surprised to find them perched on their heads, still holding back their hair hours after the sun had set.
“I know it must be hard for you to be here,” Vanessa says. Last night, or at least the part of last night that Vanessa remembers, Kate had seemed in a strange mood—swinging from nervous chatter to periods of quiet so unusual that Vanessa had almost wondered if she was about to fall asleep. It’s the first time she’s seen Kate since Peter broke up with her, and her friend is dealing with the emotions of being back in Avalon on top of everything else. Vanessa worries that the combined weight of these things is too much to bear. “I’m still not sure this was the best idea,” she says.
Kate nods without looking up from her knees. “Do you remember that movie Sliding Doors? I keep thinking about it. I keep thinking one version of me is in Philadelphia planning a wedding to Peter and one version of me is here in Avalon, brokenhearted.”
Kate is obsessed with romantic movies. Vanessa wonders if she should remind her that these movies are for entertainment; th
ey’re not meant to mirror life. Peter probably isn’t going to show up outside her window holding a boom box.
“Technically,” Vanessa says, “one of you would be in Vegas right now.”
“Well, that’s true. I’d rather be here.”
“Even with what happened to Colin?” These words just come out. Kate looks up from her knees and stares at Vanessa. “I’m sorry,” Vanessa says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Kate blinks and reanimates. “It’s fine. I’m glad you said it. We’re allowed to talk about Colin. People are so terrified to say his name to me—like they’re afraid to remind me he existed. Like I’ve forgotten. Like I don’t think about him every single day and still manage to function.”
Vanessa does not say anything. Losing a twin must be like losing a piece of yourself. It would be like losing Lucy—a thought she barely allows herself to have, her heart aching for the pain her friend will forever carry. She has an urge to track Peter down and yell at him for breaking her friend’s heart. Vanessa knows how to take someone down a notch; this skill is coiled neatly inside of her, stealthy and patient, ever ready to strike.
“Anyway,” Kate says, “the answer is yes. Even with what happened to Colin, I’m glad we’re in Avalon. He did something incredibly selfish and stupid, but he doesn’t get to ruin this place for us. For me. I love it here.” Vanessa can hear the crack in her voice. It sounds to her as if Kate is trying to convince herself of something. Vanessa is proud of her for trying—it’s a valiant effort.
She pulls Kate from the toilet and puts her hands on her shoulders. “Let’s go to the beach,” she says. “Get a little tan on that ghostly lawyer skin.”
Kate looks in the mirror and frowns. “I don’t tan. I freckle.”
“I know,” Vanessa says.
They are on the beach all of fifteen minutes before Dani runs back inside to throw up. When she finally returns, she is wearing an enormous pink sun hat that must belong to Susanna because it certainly doesn’t belong to any of them. Vanessa still can’t believe Dani’s father is planning to marry that woman. She can’t imagine growing up the way Dani did, knowing her mother was out there somewhere with another family, pretending Dani didn’t exist. What kind of mother did that to her daughter? The whole thing makes her blood boil. As much as Dani puts up a good front with her barbed jokes and armor of black, all you have to do is look at her when she is reading to see the truth. She reads like a starving person who has been handed a plate of food, her big Bambi eyes quivering over the page.
