“I do? Who is it?”
Here we go, thought Rebecca. From here on in there’s no going back. “Mr. Bennett. He teaches at the high school.”
Alexa looked horrified. “Mr. Bennett, my Intro to the Stock Market teacher Mr. Bennett?”
“Former Intro to the Stock Market teacher.”
“Ew, Mom. Really?”
Rebecca held up her hand. “Maybe this is why I didn’t tell you. This reaction, right here.”
“I’m sorry!” said Alexa. “Sorry, I am. It’s just—I mean. First of all. Do you call him Mr. Bennett?”
“No. Of course not. Daniel. I call him Daniel, which is his name. I just called him Mr. Bennett because that’s how you know him. And I haven’t told anyone. I wasn’t sure if people would think it wasn’t long enough after Peter, or too long, or the wrong person, or what. I just didn’t feel like dealing with people’s questions, or comments. And Morgan—I didn’t think she was ready. Also, if you can believe it, Daniel’s ex-wife is Gina’s husband’s sister. It all just felt too close to home.”
Alexa winced. “Wet sleeping bag Gina?”
“Wet sleeping bag Gina. And I guess the final reason is that even in the middle of all of this, meeting someone new, laughing with someone new, I still miss Peter.”
Alexa took a sip of her drink and then met Rebecca’s eyes. “I know,” she said. “I know you do. I do too.” She paused. “You know, I talked to Peter about not going right to college. Just before he died. I was thinking of it even back then, even before I started Silk Stockings.”
Rebecca was torn between feeling intrigued about that conversation and envious that it hadn’t been with her. “What did he say?”
“He was really supportive. I mean, he wasn’t like, yeah, gap year! Definitely! But he was willing to keep the conversation going. He was definitely willing to think about it. And then all of a sudden he was gone.” She gave a little shuddering breath that again called to Rebecca’s mind the eight-year-old with the self-portrait. “I miss him a lot too, Mom.”
“What do you miss about him?”
Alexa looked like she was thinking about this. “He was so patient when he taught me to parallel park—remember? In that parking lot across from the Towle building? I ran over those cones the first thirty times I tried it and we got chased out of there by the cops because officially the parking lot is private. He was always so—so nice.” She swiped at a tear. “That sounds lame, but it’s the right word for what I’m trying to say. He was so kind. I wish he was my real father.”
“Alexa! He was your real father.”
“Well. But he wasn’t. Morgan was his actual daughter, the one he had from the beginning of her life. I was just this . . . this interloper who was always hanging around. This barnacle attached to you. He couldn’t pry me off, but he wanted you, so he took us both.”
“Stop it. Alexa! That’s ridiculous.” Rebecca considered her daughter. For such a long time after Peter’s death she’d been consumed by her own grief—its inability to be contained, its bewildering peaks and valleys. Her sadness was so unwieldy, sometimes unpredictable, irascible. And Morgan was so young and needed so much. Sometimes Rebecca forgot to acknowledge that Alexa had her own grief that was complicated in its own way. She saw now that this had been a failure of hers. “You know, when your dad and I first split up, I figured there was no hope for me. A single mom with a three-year-old! Even though you were the cutest three-year-old around, I just wasn’t sure.”
“Yeah,” said Alexa, smiling weakly. “I can see how I might have cramped your dating style.”
“I was prepared to be alone,” Rebecca said. “Forever. I thought it would be just you and me, and we’d have this tidy little life, and then you’d grow up and leave me eventually, and I’d just, I don’t know, shrivel up and die or something. Or get a cat.”
“Not a cat,” said Alexa. “Never a cat.”
“The first time I went out with Peter, years later, I waited to mention you until the very end of the evening. Not because I was ashamed of you. No, don’t look at me that way! But just because I wanted to know what kind of person he was before I trusted him with the idea of you. Does that make sense?”
Alexa nodded.
“And then when I told him, do you know what he said?”
“‘No can do’?” said Alexa.
“Stop. No, of course not. His eyes lit up—I mean, they lit up, that’s an overused expression but honestly they did—and he said, ‘When do I get to meet her?’”
Alexa’s eyes were wet. “He did? He said that?”
“He did. The second time we went out, we took you to the Big Apple Circus. You might not remember that.”
“I don’t.”
“You were terrified of the elephant, and we had to leave early.”
“Oh no!” said Alexa. “I’m sorry! Were you and Peter bummed out?”
Rebecca laughed. “Not at all. I think you did us a favor. Barnum and Bailey it was not.”
“I’m so jealous of Morgan sometimes,” Alexa said. “Because she got him from the beginning of her life. She got a good one. And my father—well, he’s just gone.”
Rebecca hesitated. Now would be—could be—the time to tell Alexa that her father had initiated contact. But then she thought about all the times he’d promised to change and hadn’t been able to. She knew he had a disease from which a lot of people never recover. She knew he might not be better.
“I know we haven’t talked about this in a while—” she said. “But when you turn eighteen, the official custody agreement allows you to get in touch with your father if you wish. And if that’s important to you, I’ll help you find him. But there’s no hurry. You have your whole life to do that. Please believe me when I say that Peter was your real father for all of those years you had him. He was as real as it gets.”
Rebecca put her greasy, clam-roll hand over her daughter’s chickeny hand and they sat like that for several seconds while the sounds of the evening settled around them: the cars going by on their way to and from the island, the kid at the next table having a temper tantrum, raucous laughter from a group of teenagers. In this moment Rebecca felt a shift, as quick as the heartbeat of a bird. It was, maybe, a shift toward possibility. Toward a new kind of happiness.
Although there was still the Colby thing. Which wasn’t happy at all. “We’ll talk about the Colby thing later,” she told Alexa. “We are not finished with this discussion.”
Eventually Alexa took her hand back (clearly, enough was enough) and she said, “Are you done with this?” And she gathered up the paper containers and the balled-up napkins and she shuttled them into the garbage.
62.
Alexa
Alexa studied her face in the mirror behind the sun visor in Cam’s minivan. She looked the same, but she had felt different, since things between her and Cam had really heated up. Since the race. They’d hung out nearly every day. They’d gone mini golfing and go-carting and swimming. She spent a night at the Winnepesaukee house, safely installed in one of the guest bedrooms, hoping the whole time Cam would sneak in in the middle of the night—he did, but only until unexpected hallway noises put an end to their tryst. Cam took her around the lake in the speedboat, and they stopped to fool around on the far side of Rattlesnake Island. He’d put in a lot of shifts at Market Basket, and Alexa had done the same at the Cottage. She had continued to record her Silk Stockings videos, even, with Cam’s help, choosing a few topics she hadn’t thought about on her own.
Cam got really into the research. Sometimes too into it, maybe, but it was helpful having someone off whom to bounce ideas, and his assistance freed her up to do more planning for her L.A. move. She found a couple of long-term Airbnbs where she could potentially stay while looking for an apartment.
Every time she put up a new video, Cam posted a salient, adorable comment; it was as if he was competing with jt76 for the award given to the nicest channel subscriber.
The minivan sailed over th
e bridge from Newburyport to Salisbury, and Alexa cracked the window to let the ocean smell move in. They had crested the hill of summer and were heading down, down, down.
They’d also spent a lot of time talking, Cam and Alexa, in a way that she hadn’t talked with another person in a long time—maybe ever. They talked about Alexa’s former friends, and they talked about Tyler, and Shelby McIntrye, and they talked about Cam’s favorite philosopher (some guy named Blaise Pascal), and they talked about Peter and Morgan. They talked about how Alexa tried to pay her mother back the five-hundred-dollar deposit to Colby that she’d put down in April, but her mother refused, because, even though Alexa had the money, it wasn’t about the money. They talked about what it was about: her mother’s disappointment that Alexa didn’t want what she’d wanted, and her fear that Alexa would move far away and never come back.
Now they took the turn off Route 1 and toward the beach, passing the dingy motels with their cracked pools, the newer condos, the defunct ice cream stand where Alexa used to love to go as a kid. Foote’s. Funny name for an eating establishment, but there you were.
Every now and then, but not very often, in hushed voices, they talked about Sherri and Katie, and Alexa learned that it was possible to be scared and happy at the exact same time.
They had kissed, a lot, and more than that too—though not yet everything. This was starting to make Alexa wonder: come September, would she be the only eighteen-year-old virgin on the North Shore? (Cam was such a gentleman. But was he too much of a gentleman?)
“Where are we going, anyway?” she asked Cam now.
“The reservation. I thought we could have a picnic. I picked up a couple of things after work today.” She looked behind her at the center row of the minivan: sure enough, there was a Market Basket cooler bag there.
Even the drive toward the parking lot, with the marshes on the right, and the ocean air suspended around them, was sort of breathtaking, especially at this time of day, when twilight was turning the sky a purplish-mauve.
Most of the beachgoers were headed out as they were heading in, so it was easy enough to find parking—and the lot was vast. They walked together up the long boardwalk with the beach grasses waving at them from either side. They passed the pavilion with benches where a runner was stretching and tapping on the screen of a cell phone. They passed the sign that tells you what to do when caught in a rip current. When they got to the sand, they both kicked off their shoes and left them where they landed. Cam carried the Market Basket bag slung over one shoulder, and he handed her another bag with a blanket in it.
They stood for a moment, deciding which way to go. To the left you walked past the beach houses and toward the Blue Ocean Music Hall and the downtown strip, where people bought squares of beach pizza and ice cream and played in the arcades and listened to live music in the Bands on the Beach series. To the right was more solitude, a jetty, and, eventually, the part of the beach attached to the campground, where people let their dogs run around off the leash.
“Let’s go to the right,” said Alexa. “More privacy.” It was low tide and the beach was flat and gigantic. There were hard, feet-massaging ripples in the sand closer to the water. They walked for a while in silence and then Cam said, “Alexa. I leave for school in nine days.”
Alexa felt a drop in her stomach, and her voice sounded strange as she croaked out, “Nine days?” Had summer really gone by so quickly? It seemed like just yesterday she woke up in Cam’s guest bedroom. Just yesterday, he was an affable stranger in St. Michael’s spirit wear. “That’s it? That can’t be right.”
“Yeah,” said Cam. He stopped and looked out at the water, frowning, so Alexa stopped too, turning to face the waves. “I have to get back early for the team. We really ramp up practice before the semester starts. We have a few big tournaments right away in the fall. It gets pretty intense.” There was a time Alexa might have smirked at the idea of intense golf training, but that time was in the past, and she understood and even admired how seriously Cam took his sport.
She scanned the beach. There were a few people left: the evening picnickers, the kids who’d begged their parents to stay just a little bit longer, the dog owners brash enough to flaunt the rules even away from the campground. Alexa looked out, and out, and out, all the way to the horizon. Full sunset was still an hour or so off, but the sky was changing by the second, going from pink-stripey to dark purple to navy blue. She felt a twist in her heart, a nostalgia for something that hadn’t yet passed.
“And I guess I’ll be leaving soon too,” she said.
“Do you really want to leave so badly?” Cam took hold of her hand and they began to walk along the beach. It was stupidly romantic, with the waves beating against the sand, and the ocean—blue closer to shore, but along the horizon, black and infinite—laid out before them. Cam’s hand was much bigger than hers, and warm, and comforting. “I mean, look where you live,” he said. “It’s so beautiful here.” As if on cue, the setting sun turned the waves periwinkle. “Don’t you ever feel lucky to live here, instead of wishing you could be somewhere else, all the way across the country?”
They had almost reached the jetty before the campground; they’d have to turn back soon.
“Not really,” she said. “I just want to get started on what’s next. I do.”
“You know what Confucius said?”
“No,” said Alexa, suddenly irritable. Must they philosophize now?
“He said, ‘Wherever you go, there you are,’” said Cam.
“I don’t get it,” said Alexa, without really thinking. Far, far out, a sailboat glided along.
“Think about it,” said Cam. Then—“Right? Make sense?” He was smiling eagerly.
Despite her best efforts not to understand, she thought she probably did. It wasn’t that complicated. Alexa in California would just be the same as Alexa in Newburyport, although obviously tanner and probably with much cuter clothes, and, eventually, her own dog.
“I guess so,” she said. She kicked reluctantly at the sand with her big toe.
“All I’m trying to get at, Alexa, is that I don’t want you to miss where you are on your way to getting to somewhere else. It took me a while to learn that myself, but I think I finally have. And I think that might be what Confucius was saying.”
Then Cam was putting down his Market Basket bag, and taking her bag from her to place beside his, and holding her face gently, a hand on either cheek, and he was bending down and giving her a glorious, glorious kiss. He stopped and pulled back for a second and said, “Okay?” She wasn’t sure her voice would work—the kissing was really intense—so she just nodded and willed him to please start kissing her again. She put her hands on the back of his adorable, goofy, sexy golfer’s neck and pulled him closer. He moved his hands down to her waist, and his grip was strong and sure.
Then he said, “No pressure. Whatsoever. But if you haven’t moved yet, if you’re still figuring things out, I’ll be back for Thanksgiving. And maybe before that, if you have a free weekend in October, you can come up to St. Mike’s. I’d love to show you around, and maybe you can come to a tourney.”
Her head was saying, Please don’t say tourney—some words are just not meant to be shortened. But her heart seemed to be saying something different, something—could it be?—nonjudgmental and hopeful. Her heart seemed to be saying, October is not so far away.
And then he took her hand and led her closer to the dunes and spread out the blanket. Her heart was beating so fast she felt like she had a bird in her rib cage.
There were no bad men. It was just her and Cam and the endless ocean, and everything was whole and good and safe.
“What’s in the picnic bag?” she asked.
“Lots of good stuff,” Cam answered. “Some of Market Basket’s finest, if you want to know the truth.” (Market Basket did have an excellent cheese selection.) “But I don’t care so much about the picnic anymore,” he added. His voice was husky. He was backlit by the setting
sun.
She sat down on the blanket, and then she thought better of it and lay all the way down. Cam sat beside her and rested one of his hands on her stomach.
“Neither do I,” she whispered. “In fact, I don’t even know what Market Basket bag you’re talking about.”
And then he was kissing her, and kissing her, and kissing her.
63.
Sherri
Rebecca mentioned Brooke’s end-of-summer party casually. They had iced coffees from Soufflés and they were walking on the boardwalk after dropping the girls at nature camp. They would be sleeping overnight in Maudslay, and be collected at two the following day. Sherri had major reservations about letting Katie sleep outside in the woods—how easy it would be for someone to grab her from a tent!—but Katie had begged and begged and begged.
The day was sumptuous, the air plump and ripe, the river glistening as though it had just been hand-scrubbed. The marina was chock-full; there were boats from Key West and Camden, Maine; from Charleston, South Carolina; from South Padre Island. There was a long line outside the bathrooms at the harbormaster’s hut, and happy, tail-wagging dogs coming off the rail trail.
Rebecca was talking about what she was going to wear. She’d worn her favorite off-the-shoulder dress two years ago to the same party and she couldn’t wear that again. She wished she could borrow from Alexa but Alexa was so tiny. She stopped and leaned against the railing, resting her iced coffee cup on the flat surface of a post.
“This feels awkward,” said Sherri finally. “But I don’t know anything about this party.” She fixed her gaze on the far side of the river, where she could see the big waterfront houses on Ring’s Island.
“Wait, what?” Rebecca said, turning to her. “Are you kidding me? I just assumed—I’m so sorry. I thought she had invited you. She should have invited you! Are you sure she didn’t? It was an actual paper invitation, not Paperless Post or Evite. Are you sure you didn’t just toss it out with the junk mail?”
Two Truths and a Lie Page 25
