The House on Fripp Island

by Rebecca Kauffman

Scott paused briefly to observe the boy. What the hell is that kid up to? Had to be drugs. A “stash,” he had said. Twelve hundred dollars. Well, it was kind of nice, really, to consider that the whiz kid with the full scholarship was into some shady shit, carrying around what sounded like a hefty wad of cash, conducting some sort of drug business on the family vacation. It was quite nice, everything about it. Perfect, actually. Because—and Scott couldn’t believe he was so distracted by wondering what precisely Ryan was up to that the critical detail had almost escaped him—the kid had said twelve hundred in cash. That’s what he’d said, right? Too good. Couldn’t be, could it?

  Scott just had to find it. He didn’t have much time to spare, but how hard could it be?

  He crept into Ryan’s bedroom, where the door was several inches ajar. The room had a pleasant, soupy, lived-in smell. His eyes darted around. Clothing everywhere. Dirty towels. Backpack. Backpack? Nah, too obvious. Glass full of bright blue water on the dresser, a dead crab on top. Weird. Bed stand. He tried to home in on his own instincts, realizing that with all the experience he’d had hiding cash from Lisa, this ought to be easy. Where would I stash twelve hundred dollars? He entered the bathroom connected to Ryan’s room and opened the cabinet beneath the sink. His eyes immediately fell on the toilet plunger, tucked in the back corner of the cabinet. He knew it, he knew it before he even lifted the thing.

  He tipped the plunger back an inch off the plywood surface and there it was, a neat little wad of hundreds, halved and held together with a paper clip.

  Scott could not believe his luck. He smelled the cash and kissed it. Then he counted out four hundreds—no use robbing the kid for all he was worth, he’d only take what he needed.

  He folded up the remaining eight bills, clipped them, slipped them back beneath the plunger. He left the room with his heart in his ears and glanced out the kitchen window to confirm that Ryan was at the beach with the others, before dashing outside to his car.

  It was 11:31. He was going to make it to their place with the full payment and time to spare. And he wouldn’t have to give up his watch! Scott pulled out of the driveway and up the street, the sun on his face, and he was so happy, he sang. He fingered the crucifix at his neck. He didn’t particularly like to invoke the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit in his gambling unless it was an absolute emergency, but he also wanted to give credit where credit was due. He lifted the gold piece to his lips and kissed it.

  Before he was five minutes down the road, Scott began to steel himself against the inevitable temptation he knew would rise within him the moment he was in their presence. The disease. The urge to ride it out a little bit longer. Propose another round of golf or an hour of poker. Or even just a single hand. No. He wouldn’t do it. He pictured Lisa’s face, Rae’s, and Kimmy’s. No more, he commanded himself. Never again. This is where it ends.

  16

  SCOTT, JOHN, AND ALEX all returned to the house around the same time, half past noon, as the sky was darkening to charcoal and everyone from the beach was rushing in, supplies in hand.

  The storm hit with a violent crack, the sky split, warm rain pounded the house in sheets and bursts. Poppy got out the blender for frozen margaritas and started melting butter for the fillets John and Alex had returned with. Lisa set the table and assembled BLTs—“just in case there’s not enough of that fish to go around”—and she also sliced up some pears and tossed them in a bowl with berries and cream.

  Alex and Kimmy raided the game cabinet and pulled out a floppy, falling-apart yellow box containing Guess Who? They set up the game on the coffee table in the main room, where Scott was watching a Jeopardy! rerun on TV.

  John emerged from his bedroom in jeans and a clean T-shirt, hair freshly combed with a neat side part that was sunburned pink.

  Poppy said, “Fish looks great, hon,” as she tossed the fillets into the butter. She had a lime-green, icy margarita mustache, and John kissed it and licked his lips. “How’s your back?” Poppy said.

  “Seized up a little while I was cleaning the fish,” John said. “Doc said I’m fine to take an extra half-pill when it does that. I’m thinkin’ about it.”

  Poppy said brightly, “Let’s not.”

  John stared at her, annoyed at both her words and the chirpy tone. He gestured toward the hallway, and she followed him to their bedroom. He pulled the door shut behind him, spun to face her, and said, “We’ve been over this. It’s fine, I know what I’m doing, swear to God. Your paranoia is starting to get to me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you counting my pills day in and day out for the past three months. You’re about to give me a complex.”

  “Shit,” Poppy said. “I thought I was being sneaky.” She swallowed. “I know it seems like I go overboard, but we know too many people who’ve gone down that path. I get scared sometimes. Doesn’t mean I don’t trust you.”

  “Interesting,” John said. “Can I trust you?” He paused for a few seconds, and when she didn’t respond, he said, “You think I didn’t smell cigarette on you when you got back from your run yesterday morning?”

  Poppy’s eyes rounded with surprise, then went narrow, trapped and defensive. “You didn’t say anything,” she said. “You’re supposed to say something when you catch someone.”

  “I guess I was waiting for the right opportunity.” John laughed at this and offered a hug of reconciliation.

  Poppy stepped briskly aside and out of reach. She knelt to pick up a sock off the floor, then rearranged her things on the top of the armoire: sunglasses, magazines, sunscreen.

  John’s arms were still outstretched. “Oh, come on. Don’t do that, not while we’re on vacation.”

  “Do what?” She picked up a damp towel from the floor and flung it over the TV cabinet door to dry.

  “That thing you do when you’re mad. Start cleaning, all fast and furious. Yes, just like that.”

  “Well I am mad,” Poppy said. “You made me feel stupid.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you knew I was counting your pills all this time and you let me keep doing it. And then you catch me red-handed, smelling like smoke, and you don’t even say so. You just save it to use as ammo . . .”

  “Pop. I let you keep counting my pills even though I knew you were doing it because it makes me feel safe. OK? I get it, even if it bugs the hell out of me. I just hate to see you so worried and so wound up all the time.”

  Poppy tossed the sock in her hand into the suitcase at her feet. Irritably, she said, “I wish I loved you less. I really do. Then I could probably relax and enjoy this world a little more.”

  Back in the main room, Rae was standing at the sliding glass door that overlooked the patio and the path to the beach. She was wearing a white crop top over denim shorts that were frayed to shreds, and glittery flip-flops. She held a bottle of electric-blue Gatorade. Rain slashed the glass before her.

  On the couch behind her, Alex and Kimmy were playing Guess Who? Alex said, “Does your person have black hair?”

  “Nope,” Kimmy said.

  Alex flipped down the yellow squares displaying the faces of three black-haired people on her board. Click, click, click.

  The episode of Jeopardy! had ended, the theme song played, Alex Trebek left his post to shake the hands of the contestants as the credits and disclaimers rolled. Scott tipped his head back and forth in time with the song and harmonized above it. “Doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo . . .”

  He added a flourish with his hand at the cadence.

  Kimmy watched her father, imitated the flourish, then returned to the game. “Is your person making a face like this?” Kimmy said to Alex, and she scrunched her face into a pursed-lipped grimace, brows drawn, eyes narrowed.

  Alex looked down at her own board and laughed. “Yes.”

  Kimmy asked, “Bernardo?”

  “You got it again!” Alex said. “You are really good at this. You know all the people.”

  Kimmy said, “I play it at my friend Ashley’s house all the tim
e.”

  Alex said, “Who was your person?”

  “Maria. She’s my favorite. She’s so pretty, isn’t she?”

  Alex said, “I guess so.”

  “I think she looks like Rae,” Kimmy said. She was quiet for a moment, then she said, “There’s a few kids at my school who call me Bugsy, like because of my teeth?”

  Alex said, “I wouldn’t worry about them. I think you’re really pretty.”

  Kimmy sighed. “Thanks.”

  “You want to play another game?” Alex said.

  Kimmy nodded, and she stared at Maria for a little longer before flipping all of the faces on her board upward for the next game.

  In his bedroom, Ryan was doing some quick math on the back of a National Geographic magazine. The deal had been so easy. He was still tingly at the thought of that fat wad of cash stuck under the plunger in his bathroom. Now that the deal was done, he couldn’t help himself from dreaming up next steps. A bigger operation. He considered how much more product he could grow in the limited space he had available, how much more quickly he could grow it, and how much more money they could charge for it. After all, those people had said that it was the best weed they ever smoked.

  Ryan had spent the past six months perfecting the hydroponic setup in his bedroom closet. It was a large closet, conveniently constructed in such a way that a single jacket on a hanger would conceal the whole operation unless someone was looking. And no one came looking. Ryan was tidy enough that Poppy barely set foot in his room except to give it a quick glance now and then. John wasn’t one to pry. Alex had never been a snoop.

  A classmate who went by Ham had introduced Ryan to marijuana while working together on a group project for science class at the beginning of their senior year. The two of them would smoke shitty joints out of the bed of Ham’s pickup truck after they had finished their work. Ham had come up with the idea of growing and selling their own weed once he saw how proficient Ryan was with the simple hydroponic setup required for their class project.

  It ended up making the most sense for Ryan to grow and Ham to distribute. Ryan would harvest and package the weed in the privacy of his bedroom and deliver it to Ham, who lived a twenty-minute bike ride away, in the evenings or on weekends so that he would never have to run the risk of bringing product to school. Ham took care of the money side.

  Ham wisely decided to sell to kids at the university rather than their high school, and had an easy connection with an older sister and two cousins who were students at WVU. It was a neat and profitable little venture. Six months in and they hadn’t had so much as a close call with parents or law enforcement.

  The Fripp Island deal came about when Ryan had mentioned to Ham that he would be gone for a long weekend on a family vacation there. Ham said, “In South Carolina? You’re shittin’ me, dude.” He made a quick phone call to confirm, and sure enough, Ham’s older brother, Keller, was on Fripp Island for the summer, working as the caddy for some professional golfer who had tournaments and workshops lined up on the island. Keller had been complaining to Ham at every opportunity that he had no access to weed for the entire summer, since he was stranded in a place where you had to have a pass just to cross the bridge, which pretty much kept all the yuppies in and the dealers out. Ham had arranged the drop: Ryan would meet Keller up the beach around midnight on the first night of vacation to swap a couple ounces of weed for twelve hundred in cash. The deal seemed like a piece of cake and worth the extra stress on Ryan to be the in-person hookup, because Ham rarely sold broke college kids more than thirty bucks of weed at a time. To sell that much in one night, all in cash, to someone they knew and trusted—it was a no-brainer.

  Ryan was planning on a quick handoff, not a full-on party, but when he met Keller at the agreed-upon location up the beach, that’s what he found. A whole wonderful mess of people in their twenties and thirties on the patio of a ginormous beach house, a twenty-five-minute walk from where Ryan was staying. Handsome, rich people, athletic people, beautiful and charming people, drunk people, some of them in swimsuits and hatching a plan to go skinny-dipping. It was hot, even at this midnight hour, and the air on the patio was sticky and breathless. The sky vibrated with the alien greenish glow of heat lightning.

  Ryan quickly identified Keller, who bore a strong resemblance to his brother. They did the handoff right there in the middle of the party, like it was nothing. He invited Ryan to stay and party with them. Ryan obliged, rolling up a few joints, which got lit and passed around, so that soon the air was a dense fog, and the green world slowed.

  Keller introduced Ryan to others at the party, calling him “Bryan”—Ryan didn’t care. He met the golf pro that Keller was caddying for, and other golf pros, and their hot girlfriends. Everyone sparkled. The group eventually went for a late-night swim. They drank more, smoked more, shivered in the ocean, laughed, sang, and returned to the house, where someone loaned Ryan a towel. He was loose and dizzy with pot and beautiful people. He shared a kiss with a gorgeous dark-haired girl whom he would pass the next day on the beach while walking with Rae. Ryan had shared kisses with several girls from his high school, nothing more. Ryan would have loved for it to go further with this dark-haired girl, but when she was on his lap, he suddenly felt too silly to kiss. Aware of the size of his tongue. He giggled and she pulled away. Ten minutes later, she was kissing another girl at the party—a much longer and more passionate kiss than she had offered Ryan. Ryan laughed. He felt a great sweetness for the world.

  Somehow, the night edged toward the blue of morning, and Ryan was stunned to realize it was five o’clock. Someone at the party gave him a partially smoked joint on his way out. Ryan trucked it back to his beach house with twelve hundred in cash and a damp stubby joint in the pocket of his backpack.

  Ham had called the house this morning—Ryan had given him the number in case of an emergency change of plans—having not yet been able to reach his brother, just to make sure everything went smoothly. Stupidly unprepared for anyone other than Ryan to answer, Ham was stunned to an awkward silence when Poppy picked up the phone. That single phone call, which hadn’t amounted to anything, had been the most stressful part of the entire ordeal.

  Ryan sat on his bed, scribbling numbers on the magazine in his lap. He thought that he and Ham could increase their price thirty percent without losing any business. He could probably reduce the time from seed to sale by a week or two. The main question was whether it was worth looking into more space at a location other than his house, and that was what he planned to propose to Ham when he got back home.

  After lunch, the adults continued to drink margaritas, and when these ran out, they switched to piña coladas. Everyone was in good spirits.

  Kimmy and Rae had been getting along well. In fact, Kimmy had finally been able to interest her sister in playing a game by first getting Ryan to commit. The four kids set up Monopoly on the coffee table.

  Poppy observed Lisa as she floated around the kitchen, serving up tiki cocktails and looking like an angel in her white linen shift dress, lips freshly stained red, hair sleek, laughter pretty and song-like. Poppy felt free and easy goodwill toward her best friend. Lisa would divorce Scott. That was clear now. Lisa would land a hefty settlement, probably remain in the house with the girls, mourn the end of her marriage for a few obligatory months, then start going on blind dates with friends of friends. Maybe the recently divorced real-estate agent she kept running into at PTA functions. Maybe her podiatrist. Maybe a retired plastic surgeon whose wife had died of cancer or a yogi from her breadmaking class. Maybe a twenty-five-year-old bartender with a ponytail and a degree in photography. Or maybe a fancy equestrian who trained at the stable where Rae kept her horse and went for lessons. Poppy could totally see it. Lisa would fall in love with some fine blueblood with a family estate, move herself and the girls out of D.C. and onto forty acres of farmland, tend a rose garden, bake pies . . . The possibilities were endless. Poppy allowed herself to feel only mildly guilty for imagining L
isa’s bright future without Scott, while seated on a barstool right next to him.

  She glanced sideways at him, trying to assess the level of sadness she would feel when he was no longer in her life. It was not considerable. He looked as self-satisfied as ever, Ray-Bans perched on top of that expensive haircut. Eh, good riddance, Poppy thought. Scott was definitely having an affair, anyway. He had returned from the “car show in Beaufort” in a strangely ecstatic mood, and when Poppy asked him what sort of cool cars he’d seen, he balked and ho-hummed before offering up the most generic answer. Whether or not Lisa would ever have the satisfaction of catching him in the act, it was obvious that’s what was going on, and so Poppy would not mourn the end of their marriage.

  It was still raining heavily when the Monopoly game petered out, so the group put on a movie. They went back and forth between a few before settling on Independence Day. Rae didn’t contribute to the movie debate, but once the decision had been made, she grabbed the VHS box to check it out—she couldn’t remember if she’d seen the film before and wondered if the cover would spark recognition. As soon as she glimpsed the stills on the back of the box, her groin became so hot she had to look down to make sure it wasn’t glowing from within. Andrew Keegan, the long-haired guy in that movie, with the shoulders and the lips and the eyes all swollen like he’d just done sex things . . .

  Rae had to set the box aside and think of other things. This was all too much. It was too much to be vacationing with Ryan, who bore a striking resemblance to Andrew Keegan, now that she thought about it; too much that her bedroom shared a wall with his, that she’d had to spend the past forty-eight hours watching him go from tanned to more tanned, watching him sweat and laugh and roll a toothpick over his lips, which were so juicy they looked like they wanted to be popped. And now she was supposed to sit next to Ryan on the couch and watch the actual Andrew Keegan make out with a girl onscreen . . . Rae’s body ached like she had been Tasered with currents of desire and injustice.