by Ann Leary
“Yeah, I was studying journalism. The piece I wrote about the food wastage was well researched and fact-checked and—stop laughing at me—it was true. So it wasn’t really stealing. It was just using food that would have been thrown away.”
I was laughing, too, at this point. It’s a weak argument, I know.
“You said Everett moved in with you and Sally?”
“Yeah, so we had been together as a couple most of the time that I was in high school, and—”
“He’s older than you. Right?”
“A couple of years,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “He did a semester at UConn and then … well, he had to take some time off and he never went back. He was working for a contractor, learning masonry, and he’d come down to the city on weekends. Eventually, he ended up staying there, too. So it was Everett, me, and Sally.”
“Did he ‘take’ courses, too?”
“No, Everett worked as a dog walker. He’d make twenty dollars a dog and he’d often walk five dogs at a time. He got kind of a big clientele right away.”
“I’ll bet he did,” Laurel said.
“Yeah, he’s great with dogs, and a lot of people have dogs on the Upper West Side, where we were living. Morningside Heights. Upper East Side, too. Those were sort of his territories.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Laurel said. “He’s so good-looking and he’s got that super-flirty, laid-back thing going for him. That’s hot as hell. I bet all the housewives went nuts over him.”
“I have to get back to work,” I said, standing again. Her words had struck a nerve and I had a feeling that she had meant them to, but she jumped to her feet and reached for my hand.
“Charlotte, I’m sorry. It seems like everything I say is wrong. I meant that as a compliment to you—this is just the way my girlfriends and I talk.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling my hand from hers to push my hair away from my face.
Laurel continued, “I’ve known we were going to be friends, you and me, from the minute we met. I mean, I love Sally and your mom and everyone, but I feel we would be friends if we just met at some random party or something, you know? Like, if I never met Spin. Don’t you feel that way?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”
Truthfully, I hadn’t felt that way in the slightest until she said those words. But now that she had suggested that we had a bond that went beyond the obligatory familial one, I felt it, too. I was flattered that she thought of me as a friend. I spent too much time alone, I suddenly realized, and it was nice having a woman besides my mother and Sally to chat with, somebody who saw me and my situation with Everett from a fresh perspective. I felt a little guilty that I hadn’t been more pleasant and sociable with her since her arrival. Circumstances had forced her to be plunged into our family with no time to acclimate herself to us. In normal circumstances, someone like Laurel would meet her fiancé’s family before moving in with them. She would receive them in small doses—a dinner here, cocktails there. When Aunt Nan used to swim in the lake, she always started by standing, ankle deep, on the shore for a few moments. She would bend her thick white knees and splash water onto her thighs and shoulders. Then she would take a few more steps, stop, and repeat the splashing of her body before she finally spread her arms wide and let the lake lift her into her slow, languorous breaststroke.
“I need to get used to the water,” she’d explain when we asked her about this splashing ritual. “It’s a shock to the system the way you girls go running in. You shouldn’t let your body experience such a rapid temperature change.”
I realized now that Spin had submerged poor Laurel into our family without giving her time to get used to us. We can be a little icy.
“I think you’re lucky to have each other, you and Everett,” Laurel said.
“Thanks, Laurel,” I said. I had to blink to keep the tears back now.
“What’s the matter? Sit down,” Laurel said. “I’m sorry. Tell me what the problem is.”
“There’s no problem. It’s, you know, what do they call it? A ‘friends with benefits’ situation, that’s all,” I said.
“Is he in a relationship with anybody else?” Laurel asked.
“No,” I said. “Just random hookups. He likes to party, he’s pretty popular.”
“It’s interesting that he hasn’t committed himself to anybody else, though,” said Laurel. “Maybe that’s because of his feelings for you? Or is it because he lives here and it would be too awkward?”
“No,” I said, “that’s not it.” Laurel was my friend; I wanted to open up to her, so I told her the truth. “Everett is actually in another relationship. It’s with a married woman. He doesn’t know that I know about it.”
“See! I thought so. Do you know who she is?”
“Yeah,” I said, and now I looked off at the lake to see if Spin and Harry were still in sight. “She’s married to a big New York attorney. They built a weekend house on the other side of the lake. She comes up during the week sometimes. I guess she’s an artist or something. That’s when he sees her. When the husband is in the city.”
There they were. Spin and Harry were motoring around the point on the far side of the lake. You could barely see the two of them; the little skiff looked like a toy.
“How did you find out?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Hacked into his phone?”
I didn’t say anything,
“Charlotte, you need to change. Everett’s not going to change. You need to change.”
“I know, I’ve heard it from everybody. I need to set boundaries. I need to tell him I’m not going to have sex with him anymore unless he’s monogamous. I’ve tried that, and he just ended up getting all sneaky. He hated it. He said he felt like he was married, and he doesn’t want to be married, he’s too young. This was last summer, actually, and he said he wanted to move out. He didn’t like the fact that I could see when he didn’t come home at night. So, you know, I stopped making an issue out of it. If he moved, I’d never see him.”
“So how do things stand now?”
“Like I said, he pretends that he’s just casually dating. But … I know he’s involved with this woman.” It was hard not to tear up when I said this. I was pretty sure Everett was in love with her.
“What’s her name?”
“I’d rather not say. Her husband’s kind of a big deal.”
Laurel stretched out on the porch floor until she was flat on her back and then pulled her knees up to her chest. Then she straightened her legs, pointing her toes up to the ceiling. I wondered if she was going to do a whole yoga routine, but she didn’t. She hugged her thighs, then lowered them to the floor and sat back up, her legs crossed in the yoga sitting position. I don’t know what it’s called, the yoga serenity position or something.
“You can make him yours, you can make him commit to you,” Laurel said.
“Indian-style” is what Whit called the position she was sitting in. He used to tell me to sit Indian-style on the floor when he first taught me how to hold a banjo. I always thought Indian-style meant Native American Indians. I assumed that’s how Native Americans sat around their campfires. Now I wondered if Indian-style was actually a reference to Indians from India and Hinduism and yoga.
“You’re being too passive,” Laurel said. She was looking out at the lake. Each foot rested on top of the opposite knee, and her hands were relaxed, palms up, on top of them. I was very impressed with how straight her back was.
“You have such great posture,” I said. “I could never sit like that, and I’ve never had a back injury.”
“I didn’t sit like this before I broke my neck,” Laurel said. “Practicing yoga, learning to straighten my spine, is what helped me recover. You can’t just wait to get better after a trauma. You have to work at it. You have to go beyond your comfort zone every day.”
I hoped she wasn’t going to try to teach me yoga positions, but she just sat staring at the lak
e as I rocked in the old swing. It was late afternoon, the time of day when the sun angles in under the porch roof and there’s no escaping it unless you go inside. We’re on the eastern side of the lake, so we get the sunsets, but also the intense late-afternoon rays. There was a nice breeze off the water that afternoon, though, so I just closed my eyes and saw brilliant orbs of gold and white spinning against my eyelids. I heard a motorboat speed by and then the rapid splashing of its wake against our dock.
“Change, go outside your comfort zone,” Laurel said quietly.
I heard the dull drone of a bee. I heard the leaves of the dogwood tree rustling in the breeze. Whit planted the sapling when he was a Boy Scout. Now it towers over the porch. When there’s a storm, it claws at my window. It produces white flowers in June, every other year. It had burst into full bloom just days before Laurel arrived, and now its branches were laden with white blossoms. When I opened my eyes, the petals were drifting in the air all around us, white as snow.
“It makes me anxious, the idea of his leaving,” I said quietly.
“That’s a feeling. It’s not real. I hate when people let feelings control them. I don’t understand it. On the other hand, people seem to enjoy fear; sometimes I wish I had that.”
“Haven’t you ever had anxiety? Fear?”
Laurel thought for a moment. “I guess when my sister and I had the accident. I was afraid then. I thought I might die. But I don’t understand why people fear random things.”
“I guess that’s what made you such a good skier. Learning not to be afraid of getting hurt.”
“I never learned it, I was just never afraid of getting hurt. I don’t pay attention to feelings. I don’t really believe in them. To me, feelings are like ghosts. Nobody’s ever been killed by a ghost. Nobody’s ever photographed one. But people fear them. I think people like to be afraid. In fact, I know they do. Isn’t that funny?”
I felt the blood pulsing against my eardrums.
“He’s not going to change, Lottie. He needs to be scared, that’s all. You just need to scare him a little. Like I said, most people enjoy danger. It’s a turn-on. You can use that.”
Laurel’s hands still rested on her knees. She sat straight, tall, and perfectly at ease.
FOURTEEN
Joan was having dinner at the club. Spin and Laurel were heading off to the Pale Horse Tavern.
“Why don’t you come along, Charlotte?” Laurel asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m pretty tired.”
“Lottie doesn’t go out much,” Spin said. “When’s the last time you went out for a meal? Huh, Lottie? Two thousand and ten?”
“No, it wasn’t that long ago,” I said.
“Well, come with us,” he said, and he crouched down and grinned at me. I knew what was coming and screamed with laughter. I turned to run, but he tackled me the way he used to when he was in high school, driving his shoulder into me like a linebacker. Laurel gave us an indulgent smile as he lifted me onto his shoulders and pretended he was carrying me out of the house.
“Jesus Christ, Spin,” I cried out. “Put me down.” I was weak with laughter. Finally, Spin put my feet back on the floor and I swatted him playfully around his head. Then I followed them out to the porch and waved them off.
It was after six on a Monday and Everett wasn’t home. I wondered if Lisa Cranshaw had stayed at the lake for the week.
I was supposed to write a listicle for BuzzFeed. They wanted a few for the twelve-to-sixteen-year-old female consumer, so I took my laptop down to the kitchen and wrote “23 Beauty Hacks for Hot Summer Days.” I just rehashed stuff I had written multiple times. (“Use waterproof mascara on the tip of an eye pencil for waterproof eyeliner! Get ‘beachy’ hair by mixing table salt with water and spraying the solution on your hair while still wet!”)
Then I cruised the Web for images of kittens and puppies and came up with “These 12 Kitties Are Having a Really, Really Bad Day.” The kittens all looked adorably forlorn. There seems to be a breed with very small ears and sad faces. They’re great click bait, very appealing to the female teen. Well, everybody, actually. I had just sent those off when somebody knocked on the screen door. The door is right next to the table, but I had my back to it and I jumped out of my chair. Really, people don’t just stop by very often.
It was the trooper.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting anybody.”
“No, no, I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said. He just stood there on the other side of the screen, smiling.
“It’s Washington, right?” I asked.
“That’s right. Good memory,” he said.
I opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. “Easy name to remember, because, you know … I remembered that it was Washington.”
“I’m actually looking for Everett,” he said. “He wasn’t home.”
“Yeah, I don’t know where he is. Do you want to leave him a note?”
“Oh, I just have a situation over at my uncle’s.”
“Yeah, right. You’re staying at Ramón’s,” I said.
“He took my aunt and cousins to a wedding yesterday in New Jersey. They’re staying down there for a few days. It’s right there on the shore, really nice. Anyway, last night … It’s okay. I can come back later, when Everett’s here.”
“No, please. Go on.” I was curious.
“Well, last night a bat came in the house and tried to attack me.”
“It tried to attack you?” We have brown bats in this area. They eat a lot of mosquitoes, but they don’t typically attack anyone.
“I have this thing. I’m fine with anything. You know, throw anything my way and I can deal with it. Except bats. They … I’m … I don’t like them.”
I was trying not to laugh. “Are you afraid of bats?”
“No, not generally, no. I mean, I don’t mind if they’re flying around outside, but this one came in the house. It came after me, I swear. That’s why I look a little rough. I slept in my car last night.”
“Can’t you call one of your trooper friends?” I asked.
“I don’t have any friends up here. These guys aren’t thrilled that they sent me up here from Bridgeport—kind of an old boys’ setup here.”
“Do you have a tennis racket?” I asked.
“No, I don’t play. I’ve always wanted to take it up, though. Why? Are you looking for somebody to play tennis with?”
Now I laughed. “I can’t believe you grew up here and don’t know the first thing about bats.”
“I didn’t grow up here, I just lived here during high school. My mom sent me to her brother’s because the schools are better up here.”
“Come in,” I said. “You need a tennis racket.”
I grabbed one of Joan’s tennis rackets from the front closet and handed it to him.
“Yeah, okay, so what do I do? I swing at it? Do I serve? Is it like what Serena Williams does or what?”
“That does it,” I said. “I’m coming with you. I’m afraid you’re going to kill the poor bat.”
And then I did this remarkable thing. I followed him right out to the car and climbed into the passenger seat, as if I get in cars with people I don’t know every day. Washington Fuentes got in and started up the car, and off we went, right down the driveway, right past the massive stone pillars where the iron gates used to be.
I’ve thought about this a lot. This is what I think happened that night.
Everett trains some dogs at their homes, but the real problem dogs spend a few weeks with him here. Everett says living with the dogs helps him sort out what’s really wrong with them. A couple of years ago, he took in a slightly neurotic Great Dane. I was at his house when the owner of the dog came to pick him up. This woman was a sort of nervous soccer-mom type. When she stood on Everett’s front steps, the dogs all barked with excitement.
Everett told the dogs to shush and they all piped down. Then he invited the woman inside.
“Blue, come,” Evere
tt said, and the giant Great Dane trotted across the kitchen floor.
“Oh my GOD! BLUE!” The woman shrieked and the dog jumped up on her and would have knocked her over with his massive paws if Everett hadn’t blocked the dog and made him sit.
“It’s important to know how to curb the dog’s enthusiasm,” Everett explained. “You need to lower your energy level, and he’ll lower his.”
“I’m just so shocked at his transformation!” said the woman.
“I haven’t even shown you what he’s learned,” Everett said.
“But the floor. The tiles! He would never walk across a tile floor before, or any hard, shiny surface. He was petrified. He always was phobic about hard floors.”
“Oh.” Everett shrugged. “Didn’t know that.”
“But how did you get him over his fear?”
“I didn’t know he was afraid, so I guess I didn’t reinforce anything and he just forgot he was afraid. You must have been reinforcing his anxiety.”
“I don’t think I was.”
“You wouldn’t notice, but your dog did. I expect dogs not to be afraid of floors. I’ve actually never known a dog to be afraid of floors, so I guess he picked that up from me.”
I think that’s what happened that evening when I drove off with Washington Fuentes. I really don’t leave the property very often. Joan, Sally, Spin, and Everett are all aware of this, and though we’ve never discussed it, they’re very careful with me when there is talk of going anyplace. “If you’re up to it,” they’ll say. “There’ll hardly be anybody there.” Maybe they were reinforcing my fears? I’ve had anxiety attacks that they’ve all been witness to. I sometimes need to get home in a hurry, and in the past year or so, I’ve found it easier just to stay home.
So maybe it was the fact that Washington didn’t know any of this. Maybe it was the conversation with Laurel. Feelings aren’t real. They’re like ghosts. I reminded myself of this when our house was no longer in sight. When Fuentes drove up East Shore Drive, cheerfully commenting on how scenic it was, I found myself agreeing with him. I pointed out landmarks—the inlet where Chief Marinac had once lived; Mine Hill Road, which leads up to the old iron mines; the old inn on the left, which is now a house.
