by Karin Tanabe
“I bet you’re very good on a boat.”
“I can get by.”
“Get by?”
“Yeah, I’m decent. I like the water. But I grew up in Wyoming and then spent all that time in the desert. The water still surprises me.”
“We’re up here!” Jane’s voice rang across the dock as we walked toward her. I looked up at her standing on the boat in white shorts and a dark green cashmere sweater. “It’s freezing! Tyler, wear more clothes. You’re going to love it!”
I grinned at Tyler, grabbed his hand, and pulled him toward the dock. “Never listen to a woman who tells you to wear more clothes,” I said as we walked. “She’s clearly never seen you naked.”
Carter came over and greeted us as we kicked off our shoes and made our way up.
“Hey, man, good to have you. Sorry about the other night. Try not to punch anyone today.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Tyler, walking past Carter and giving Jane a hug.
“Jane ask you to be nice to him?”
“Of course she did. How am I doing?”
“Badly.”
I gave Carter a kiss on the cheek, waved to Jane, and walked down to the bow, where Brittan was standing in white jeans and a navy sailing jacket. She looked like an advertisement for living well.
“So you brought your prizefighter. I can’t wait to meet him. When is he going to beat up Carter?”
“Maybe later.”
Brittan looked down the boat at Jane and Tyler talking while Carter sailed out of the harbor.
“Good God, is that him?” Brittan lowered her sunglasses and looked at Tyler in his khakis and thin shirt. “You don’t mess around. Lose a job, gain a supermodel? Doesn’t seem like that bad a trade.”
Tyler must have felt us watching him. He excused himself from Jane and came over to us. I introduced him to Brittan, who gave her coolest hello, the kind she gave to people when she wanted them to talk about her later.
“So you’re the mysterious Tyler Ford. It’s just a pleasure to meet you.”
“A pleasure? I think you’re lying,” he said, putting out his hand to shake hers.
“A handshake, how quaint,” said Brittan. She was wearing three gold bangles, just like her sister. I remembered when Jane had started wearing her bracelets in high school and I asked her about them. She had said, “Because four would be too many and two would be too few,” like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“So, Tyler, sail often?” asked Brittan, sitting down and picking up a book.
“He lives on a naval base, Brit,” I said, sitting down next to her.
“But he’s a marine. You’re a marine, right?” she asked, looking up at him.
“I am a marine.”
“Good. I think I like marines better. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever given the topic any thought at all, but I have a hunch I do.”
“Go with it,” said Tyler.
“Jane said you’ve been over to the house, but it didn’t exactly go . . . swimmingly?”
“Swimmingly, aptly put,” I said, looking out at the water.
“Turns out Carter is friends with someone I would like to beat the shit out of,” said Tyler, looking down at us reclining in front of him.
“So I heard. Mike Fogg. He’s a bastard and I never liked him anyway.” She leaned over to her side, stretched out her long legs, and propped herself on her elbow. Jane and Carter were out of earshot, expertly steering the boat out of the harbor. I could see the southern stretch of Aquidneck Island quickly moving out of view.
“He cried once in high school in front of me, if it makes you feel any better, Tyler.”
“That does make me feel better,” said Tyler, laughing. “What did you do?”
“I punched him.”
“Really?”
“No, but I should have in hindsight. Don’t worry, Tyler. He’ll just end up marrying some boring girl and living a very plain life with too much alcohol and monotonous sex. I’m sure you don’t suffer from any of those curses.”
“I definitely don’t.”
Jane walked over to us then, sitting down next to Brittan and letting out a big happy yawn.
“What a perfect day to be out. I love this stupid boat.”
“This is a very beautiful boat,” said Tyler, finally sitting down, too, and taking my hand.
“Let’s sail to Naushon Island!” Brittan called out to Carter, who put his hand to his ear like he couldn’t hear her.
“Oh, that bastard can hear me. He just wants company. I’m not moving.”
“I just sat down! Go help him, Brittan,” said Jane, leaning in toward her sister.
“Eventually. I don’t feel like standing. Plus, you’ll get up again soon, Janey. You’re the nice one.”
“So if you’re the nice one and you’re the—”
“Less nice one,” Brittan offered. “Though I’m awfully witty. Everyone says so. Jane’s the good one; I’m the deviant. But that’s the way it’s supposed to be because I’m just heaps younger than her.”
“Three years, smart-ass,” said Jane in her best bored voice.
“Like I said, heaps.”
“Okay. Then what’s Carolyn?”
“The smart one,” Jane and Brittan said in unison.
“Ha-ha,” I said, looking up at the sky. There were a few thin white lines slowly fading that had been left from a plane.
“She really is,” said Jane.
“I know she is,” said Tyler. I refused to look at him. At that moment, I didn’t want to know how much he knew.
“She’ll ignore you if you say it, just like she’s doing now, but she graduated first in her class at Princeton. First. Do you know how hard that is?”
Tyler propped himself up on his hands and listened.
“And she was hired by Christie’s way before she graduated. She didn’t have to finish with a perfect GPA, she already had a dream job lined up, but she did anyway.”
“And look at me now. I make a hair above minimum wage, I haven’t talked to my parents in months, and my apartment smells like dead people.”
“But you’re happy,” said Brittan, lifting her glass. “I can tell you are.”
“Maybe a little.”
“So Carolyn’s the smart one and what are you, Tyler?” asked Brittan.
“Well, if you’re asking Carter, I’m the violent one.”
“Not funny,” said Jane. “Men are ridiculous.”
“How many people have you killed?” asked Brittan coolly. “Five? Ten?” Brittan was very good at coming off cool, like a Hitchcock blonde without the hair color.
“More.”
“How do you sleep at night?”
“Soundly,” he said before kissing me.
Tyler stood up, grabbed his bathing suit from my bag, and walked away from us, slightly behind the sail. He took off all his clothes with his back to us, his tan body kissed perfectly by the flooding midday sun. He reached down and pulled on his bathing suit.
Brittan sat up to watch, then lowered her aviators again and shook her head at me.
“Jesus. Who cares who he killed. His body is superhuman.”
“It all makes sense now. Carolyn is painfully shallow. Who knew,” said Jane.
“It’s not just the way he looks.”
“Oh, stop trying, Carolyn. It just seems sad when you do. He’s gorgeous. He looks like a G.I. Joe. We get it. You like sex. It’s only normal.”
Tyler walked back over to us, acting like he’d just been in the corner reading Bible passages.
“Anyone want to swim?” he asked our group.
“Obviously not,” said Jane, wrapping a cashmere shawl around her cashmere sweater. “The water is fifty-two degrees. I refuse.”
Tyler looked at
me and Brittan.
“No way,” said Brittan, zipping her jacket to her chin. “Carolyn’s a good swimmer. She’ll do it.”
“It’s too cold,” I said, looking out at the water. “It even looks cold.”
“But what if it was a dare,” said Tyler, pulling me to my feet. “Then you’d do it. You’re the smart one, and the smart one always says yes to a dare.”
“I think you’re thinking of the drunk one. The drunk one always says yes to a dare.”
“Can I offer you a cocktail?” said Jane innocently. “Gimlet? Martini, flaming shot?”
“Fine. Fine. I hate all of you,” I said, grabbing my bikini and going below to change.
“Slow this thing down and come back and get us,” I said to Carter as I walked topside.
“Are you idiots swimming?”
“It’s what idiots love to do,” I answered back.
Jane met me as I walked back to the bow.
“You’re jumping off a moving sailboat in April because someone dares you. I like it. In fact, I like you with him. You seem light.”
“I’m happy, Jane. I don’t know how to explain it but I am.”
“You don’t need to. I get it. Is this, him, better than Alex?”
“Who’s Alex?”
I took Tyler’s hand when we moved over the guardrail.
“You two look like a postcard for bad decisions,” said Brittan, watching us with a camera in hand. She snapped a photo of us holding on to the side of the boat with our toes.
“Ready?” asked Tyler. “You’re up for a little adventure, right?”
“I think Carter actually sped this thing up,” I answered. I ignored his words and let my body tense up with the thought of the water. “Oh who cares, let’s just jump!” I yelled, pitching myself off the boat with Tyler’s hand firmly in mine.
The cold water hit me like a fist. I struggled to catch my breath and as soon as my lungs filled again, I turned around and screamed. Immediately, I felt Tyler’s hands around me.
“It’s glacial! I hate you!”
“But you should always jump if someone says jump.”
“Who gave you that crappy advice?” I said, pulling my hand away so I could tread water.
“My father. See, everything else he ever said to me was bad advice. That phrase, I actually took with me.”
“You should have been a paratrooper. They would have loved you in the air force.”
He swam back over to me, kissed me, and did a few strong strokes before dunking his head under and slapping his palm on the water.
“Feels pretty good, right?”
“Refreshing!” I screamed as he swam circles around me.
My teeth were going to start chattering soon, which Tyler must have noticed, because he glided my way underwater, put one arm around my waist, and kept us afloat with the other.
“I love you, Carolyn,” he said, looking me right in the eyes as he pushed my wet hair out of my face. “No matter what happens, I love you.”
He had said it.
“I love you, too. A lot. Too much.”
“Too much? Who ever told you there was a limit?”
He kissed me hard, the way a person should be kissed, and said it again.
We looked up to see the boat coming back around for us, Jane throwing the buoy so we could move quickly back toward the ladder.
Tyler helped me up by not so subtly pushing my butt vertically and we collapsed on the deck with towels and let the sun dry us.
“Why do you have so many muscles, Tyler?” asked Brittan with her eyes closed when we’d finally dried off.
“Because God loves me. Why do you have so much money, Brittan?”
“Because God loved my great-great-great-grandfather.”
“None of you are amusing,” said Carter, sitting up and taking off his sunglasses. “Tyler, go help Jane with the boat. Prove your salt.”
Tyler kissed my head, grabbed his towel and a beer, and walked toward Jane.
“You can’t just boss everyone around, Carter. It gets very old,” said Brittan by the time Tyler was out of earshot.
“So, is this like showing him how the other half lives or something, Carolyn? Want to put a fire under his ass so he makes something of his life?” Carter asked.
“I’m not that sadistic.”
“Sure you are. You’re a plotter. You always have been.”
“You’ve only known me for six years. Don’t make such sweeping statements.”
Carter poured himself a swig of cognac and lit a cigar.
“That smells like old fat men,” said Brittan, pinching her nose. Her brown hair was flying everywhere but she didn’t bother to tie it back.
“A smell I’m sure you’re more than familiar with, Brit,” he said, blowing the smoke in our direction.
“It’s odd that you like to dismiss Tyler being in the military,” Brittan said to Carter in response. “He has a Silver Star for valor. He was telling us about it.”
“Of course he was! What else does he have to talk about. You know the military is a bunch of crap, right? I mean, they have to convince all these young suckers that they’re going to be instant heroes when they come home or they would never go. If they thought they were going to come back and still be nobodies, but with the added bonus of PTSD and some holes in their skulls, no one would go. No one. It would be an army of one.”
“Aren’t you glad we have a military?” asked Brittan. “You want terrorists to just shuffle step onto our shores and toss a bunch of A-bombs around?”
“I’m thrilled we have a military. I’m just not thrilled it’s on our boat.”
“And all this time I thought this was Jane’s boat,” I said, lancing Carter with his most detested dig.
“I think he intimidates you a little, Carter,” said Brittan, smiling. I could tell her eyes were shining, even though she still had her sunglasses on.
“Why, because he looks like some muscle-head with bad tattoos who grew up sniffing paint out west?”
“I think they’re pretty good tattoos, don’t you, Brit?” I asked.
“They’re very good. Like Rembrandts on skin.”
“You two are monsters,” said Carter, laughing.
“Oh, Carter. Go take a long swim south, would you?” said Brittan, rolling over onto her stomach.
“I think I’ll stay right here. I like watching that buffoon sail.” He puffed on his cigar and let it ash right onto the deck.
Brittan turned her head and watched Jane and Tyler for a few moments.
“You’re just mad because he can sail. He lives on a naval base. What did you expect. For him to hang himself from the line?”
“Maybe,” said Carter, laughing. “Fine, you wenches. I give, I give. Carolyn, date an abusive pauper. Brittan, go get gang-raped by football players. You two do whatever you want. I’ll just stay here and live the good life with Jane. You two can tell me all about what prison’s like every Thanksgiving.”
Carter stood up and walked away from us, toward his wife.
“I hate that he’s amusing, don’t you?”
“It’s his worst quality. Makes it hard to loathe him.”
“I like Tyler, you know,” said Brittan, rising up on her elbows. “He’s actually very elegant for someone who grew up on some dirt road in Wyoming and likes bar fights.”
“Isn’t he though.”
“He is. He’s surprisingly elegant. Probably because he’s so good-looking. He’s almost too good-looking. Makes you think he made some pact with the devil or something.”
“People probably think the same thing about you.”
“But I’m a girl. It’s different with girls. We’re expected to be pretty. His looks are a little . . .” She looked at Jane, who looked happy laughing at something Tyler said.
<
br /> “A little jarring,” said Brittan.
We drank away most of the afternoon with Tyler, leaving the sailing up to Carter and Jane.
“I’m going to marry that cute friend of Greg LaPorte’s. Do you know him, Tyler? Mason something or other,” said Brittan.
“You’re going to marry Mason Dekker,” said Tyler without breaking his poker face.
“Yes. But don’t give him my number. I’m just going to surprise him one day.”
“He’ll say yes.”
“I know. But it might have to be a second marriage. He seems more like second-marriage material.”
“What am I, then?” Tyler asked Brittan.
“Oh, you’re definitely affair material, not marriage. But some girls like their whole lives to feel like affairs, so you’ll be just fine.”
Two days later, the water temperature had gone up five degrees and spring had finally settled in Newport. Tourists were visiting the tennis club, the Vanderbilt Grace hotel was full, and there was a line to get into the Breakers. I smelled the ocean air, lifted toward me. I smelled promise, newness as I walked to work. It was warm enough to open the front window at William Miller’s store and I pulled the heavy wooden frames up and anchored them with solid brass hooks.
The world and all its sounds were being let in, so before I saw them, I heard them. They had those types of voices. The ones that were distinctively male. Not the kind of voices you would hear from fathers at a children’s soccer game or the ones that spoke sweetly when they had women around them; they were the voices of men who were used to speaking with men. Men like them. And when they came in to speak with me, I didn’t grip the table. I didn’t hold my breath. I knew, with Tyler, that I was waiting for something to drop. I just didn’t want it to be so soon.
CHAPTER 12
There were two of them. Both in their forties—one early, one late—with short hair and tough-guy airs of importance. They were wearing suits and frowns. The younger one, with a smaller build, only a few inches taller than me, asked for me first. Before he introduced himself, told me what they wanted, why they came looking for me at the store, I knew I would hear the words Tyler Ford.
Tyler did not toe the line; he shot the line. Two months ago, I would have stayed away from him, even as attractive as he was. But after Elizabeth, after Christie’s and Nina and my big life mess, I wasn’t so careful.
