Olivia shrugged. “I think so.”
“Did she say anything else about starting kindergarten?”
“Just what everyone says. That it will be good for her, having to communicate for herself. Miss Griffin says I am her crutch.” Olivia pursed her lips.
Jake did not comment on this. He knew better. There had been times when he’d wondered aloud what would happen if Olivia would only pause instead of answering on Luci’s behalf when someone asked her a question. Perhaps that might encourage her to speak for herself. It had ignited Olivia’s indignation that he should question her, Luci’s mother. As if he possessed some knowledge about mutism that she did not, after years of reading every book or article she could amass, and questioning every doctor she could seek out. From pediatricians, to neurologists, to therapists. They all arrived at the same conclusion: ultimately, Luci would speak when she was ready.
Jake’s casual suggestion had irked her, causing an argument. Jake was not a parent; he had no meaningful experience with kids beyond his niece and nephews. But on the other hand, Jake was very much a people person. Quite the opposite of her, he sought out large groups and stimuli with the same zeal with which she avoided them. His social appetite was adventurous in ways hers was not, accommodating of things she would not tolerate. Like some of his bachelor friends who came to visit for a night, and ended up “crashing” for two weeks. Like the lifestyle he’d led up until they’d met, happy to wander from place to place and see what kind of work he could find. Untethered and unafraid.
Olivia was very much tethered and, since becoming a single parent, often afraid. She had no time for staying out drinking all night, as some of his old high school friends often invited them to do. Olivia did not desire to go for a drive through the hills of New York, just because, on a fall day. When she wasn’t working for Ben, she was taking care of Luci: taking her to the library, toddler music classes, speech therapy. Her days were carved out by routine. The very thought of seeing a non-Disney movie in a theater was foreign. Even her bed was not her own space; most nights she was awakened by Luci clambering across the blankets and slipping beneath them against her. Since giving birth, Olivia had not had autonomy over her time any more than she’d had it over her body with Luci’s pregnancy. From the beginning, there had been no reason for Olivia and Jake to come together as a couple. And yet they did.
Although their differences had been challenging, Olivia was beginning to learn to embrace them. Jake was the first man who listened intently, no matter what she was talking about, whether it be the curve of a clay bird’s wing she was sculpting or the daily concern she held for her child. Every day she reminded him of their differences, and every day he reminded her that in spite of them, his instincts were telling him to let things unfold between them. To give it a shot. And his instincts had been good, so much so that Olivia had eventually allowed him to meet Luci. Never before had she introduced a man to her daughter. What was the point?
Now life had brought her to Washington, Connecticut, a rural hamlet of artists and families. Just outside of New York, but oh how far outside it felt amid the greenery and the hills and the lakes. Jake turned to her and squeezed her hand. “Is that the Big Dipper?” He pointed up at the sky and she followed his gaze.
“I think so. The north star is just above it.”
“My father used to point out the constellations to me from the boat. On warm nights we’d go out to the middle of the lake, turn off the engine, and just float beneath the sky. He could name them all.”
Olivia pictured it. “That sounds nice.”
“Will you do that with me this summer?” Jake asked.
She smiled at him gratefully. “I might.” Right now she relished the thought of going in to bed. Not of making love, something they’d often done, but of something they so far never had: falling into the cool, crisp sheets together, with her resting her head against this wonderful man’s broad chest. She relished the thought of him staying overnight so that they’d wake up in the morning together, when Luci could come bounding in and jump into bed with them. Like a real family. She blinked in the growing darkness.
“There’s something else I need to ask you,” he said.
“About the constellations?”
“About us.”
And before she understood what was happening, Jake rose from his Adirondack chair and promptly knelt beside her own. He took her hand. “Olivia Cossette. You are more exquisite than any of the stars in the sky. I have fallen in love with you, and I don’t want to spend another summer without looking up at the stars by your side. Will you marry me?”
Olivia gasped.
From his shorts pocket Jake retrieved a ring that sparkled in the light from the firepit. He slid it onto her finger.
Olivia stared at the man kneeling before her in the firelight. Then back at the cottage, where Luci was tucked in her bed sleeping, then back at Jake. She started to cry. “Yes!”
Jake pulled her up onto her feet and she threw her arms around his neck.
“I can’t wait to tell our families,” he whispered.
Tears slid down Olivia’s cheeks. Luci would have cousins. And aunts and uncles. A big boisterous family for holidays and birthdays. Who sang Christmas carols and argued at the dinner table and played board games and went boating on the lake. Finally, she and Luci would have a family.
As she stood in Jake’s arms, she recalled the day she told her father that she was moving to Connecticut with Luci. Pierre’s expression had crumpled.
Leaving the city was unthinkable. “Why would you leave New York?” he cried. “Here, there is everything! Everything a person could need. And me.” His sharp brown eyes had softened with sentiment.
She’d taken his hands in her own, large calloused hands dotted with Band-Aids from kitchen work. “Connecticut is just next door, Papa. This job will be good for me. And for Luci. Think of the things she can do in the country.”
“Bah.” He’d pulled his hands away, crossing his arms and staring across the stainless steel expanse of the empty kitchen. It was late afternoon. Soon the prep workers would file in to start on the evening’s menu.
“I will come back,” she promised. She retrieved her apron from the back of the meat locker door and tied it tightly around her waist. “You’ll see.”
Pierre shook his head wistfully. “Non, ma chérie.You will fall in love.”
Fall in love? She had not known if he meant with the Connecticut countryside, or the job, or a man. Indeed, she had gone and done all three.
Emma
The school bus lumbered down her neighborhood road, and Emma glanced up reluctantly from her book. Almost home.
She gazed out the window. Stately white colonials sat atop grassy rises, their pillared entrances flanking Belgian block drives. The lawns were all the same: blunt-edged and freshly shorn, with sharp rows of boxwoods sheared into submission beneath gaping picture windows. Up the street, her own house was just as unyielding in its bland conformity. Across the aisle Laura Brentwood cleared her throat for at least the tenth time, a nervous tic that Emma tried to ignore. They were the only two sophomores riding the bus. A handful of freshman boys had staked out the back-row seats and inhabited them loudly, probably relieved to flex their muscles in an upperclassman-free zone. Emma got it, but she was also over it. You wouldn’t catch an upperclassman dead on the bus; every junior or senior in this neighborhood had a license and a car, or friends who did. Emma sighed. Next year she’d escape it, too.
Outside the bus window she caught glimmers of her lake peeking out from behind the waterfront houses and foliage. She was still staring out the window when she heard the horn. Amanda Hastings’s silver BMW roared up alongside the bus in the opposite lane. The top was down. There were two girls in the backseat, their hair blowing behind them in a tangle of brunette and blond. Courtney Alcott and Jen DeMaio, two of Amanda’s groupies. Emma couldn’t make out the boy seated between them, but she had no doubt who was up front in the passe
nger seat next to Amanda. Sully McMahon glanced up at the bus windows, his expression cool. Emma ducked.
The horn blared again.
“What the…?” The bus driver slammed on the brakes and the BMW blew past and cut in front of them. One of the girls waved.
“Assholes!” yelled a freshman from the back. Emma pulled her knees up against her chest. Amanda Hastings was an asshole.
Across the aisle, Laura Brentwood sputtered in disgust. “The speed limit is twenty. And it’s illegal to pass a bus.”
Emma thought the strict community speed limit was a joke. But it was a jerk move of Amanda’s, who lived a couple of houses up from Emma, by the clubhouse and tennis courts. Emma wondered what they were all doing. Probably sneaking Mr. Hastings’s beers from the pool house fridge and hanging out at the pool. Not that Amanda had ever invited her. Emma had only seen the sprawling setup last summer when the Hastings family hosted a neighborhood BBQ. Back when they were little, the two girls had been somewhat friendly, riding bikes with other kids on the road. But these days Amanda kept to a tight circle of upperclassmen who clogged the hallway around her locker, and sat at a head table with the football and lacrosse players in the cafeteria. Her parents always seemed to be traveling, and Amanda made good use of their absences by throwing keg parties, though that was something Emma learned of after the fact through the rumor mill. To be honest, Emma didn’t care what Amanda Hastings did. But she couldn’t help but wonder about Sully.
Sully McMahon was also a sophomore, and he sat in front of her in geometry. Emma had spent the better part of the school year staring at the soft dark curls at the nape of his neck. On the rare occasion he turned around to pass back a paper, or borrow a pencil, her cheeks burned. Other than that, Emma was sure he had no idea who she was. As the BMW sped out of sight, she slumped back in her bus seat. Why would he?
As soon as the bus dropped her off, she walked up the circular driveway and punched in the keypad code. Her mother would be at her office for another hour at least, and her father wouldn’t be back until dinner. She was used to being home alone. As long as she had her book, she preferred it that way. What she didn’t like was surprises, and just as she was reaching for the door handle it opened.
“How was school?” Her mother held the door ajar. Emma forced a smile. She was pretty sure Amanda Hastings’s mother wasn’t greeting her at the door.
“Good.”
She dumped her backpack in the marble foyer and kicked off her tennis shoes.
“Just good?”
“Pretty much,” she said, pausing at the kitchen island to grab a plum from the fruit bowl. “Just end-of-the-year boring stuff.” She was eager to get down to the dock, where she could dip her toes in the water and hunker down with her book.
“I got an email from your band teacher today about the spring concert. I’m planning to come, and I forwarded it to Daddy, too.”
“He won’t make it.”
Her mother sighed. “It’s his firm’s busy season with summer concerts, honey, but I know he wants to. Maybe it will work out.”
“Sure.” It never did. Her father was always working, which he liked to remind them allowed them to live the way they did. It wasn’t that Emma didn’t appreciate their nice house or their gated community. She liked both. She knew other kids at school thought she was lucky; her family had money. She could buy whatever she wanted at Abercrombie & Fitch or Hollister. Her parents had taken her in to see Broadway shows even as a child.” They ate out at nice restaurants. They had a boat. Not just any boat, but the boat her father had longed for since childhood: his Chris-Craft. Which he had finally bought last summer, and they’d maybe used all of three times since. But there were vacations: they skied in Utah, scuba dived on St. John’s, rented a house on the Vineyard every summer. All nice. But the thing was, Emma didn’t really care about those things. Except for the lake. It was her escape.
“What about a snack? I can make cheese and crackers or something,” her mother called after her as Emma slipped through the patio doors barefoot.
“Not hungry.” Free at last, she trotted across the backyard and down the steps to the lake, two at a time. Weekday afternoons on the dock were sacred. It wasn’t just the lake, which was serene in a way it never was on weekends. It wasn’t just the warm weather, or the sun that dappled the shore in molten gold. Nor was it the fact that she could swing her legs over the edge of the dock and drag her toes through the water, a sensation she longed for all winter. It was that she had the lake to herself. And once there, she could curl up on the sun-warmed wooden boards with her book and be alone. The same dock that her father had painstakingly stained that spring in preparation for the summer he would barely enjoy. But he’d be darned sure it would be in pristine condition. Emma didn’t understand it. Her father worked so hard to afford things he never even got to use.
Never mind, the dock would be well used by her, she thought as she set down her blanket and book. Voices carried from up the shoreline. Emma groaned. She’d hoped to steal at least one afternoon of peace. The voices grew closer, coming through the grove of pine trees that separated her house and the neighbor’s. Everyone on the lake side of the street had sweeping backyards edged by woods, for privacy. Small beach paths wound through them to the water. Her father liked to remind her that when he was a kid, the paths were simple dirt trails worn down by bare feet and flip-flops. Nowadays those paths were handsomely crafted wooden stairs that angled down to the water, like her own. Some were fussy stone steps and pavers set by masons; others had contemporary posts and metal railings. She liked her own, which was more rustic.
Now Emma glanced up the lake as the voices grew louder. Two docks north of hers, a group of people emerged at the waterline and began walking down the pier. Amanda Hastings and crew.
Emma squinted in their direction, shielding her eyes. Sully and another boy held a large red cooler between them. Amanda, who’d changed into a white bikini and cutoff shorts, stepped out on the dock first. Emma watched as she moved around the boat, unsnapping the cover and rolling it back. Eventually everyone hopped into it, and Amanda settled herself behind the wheel. The purr of the engine carried across the water, and Emma watched them reverse away from the dock. Everyone had taken a seat, except for one of the girls. The boat idled briefly and then Amanda took off, causing the girl to tumble backward onto the seats. Everyone whooped and laughed as they sped off into deeper water.
For about an hour Emma tried to ignore them. The engine whined in the distance as they cut across the lake in large arcs. For a while, they took turns waterskiing. Then they cut the engine and floated. Probably drinking or getting stoned, Emma thought. She wondered what they talked about. She wondered if Sully and Amanda were a thing.
By that hour, the sun had moved to the western edge of the sky. Soon a shadow fell across her reading spot, and Emma stretched, rubbing her eyes. Her mother was right—she was getting kind of hungry. She had just begun gathering up her towel and book when she heard a sharp voice. Up the shore, to her right, Mr. Hastings stood at the edge of his dock, hands on his hips. He stared at the ropes strewn about the floorboards and threw his hands up. This was interesting.
He pulled his phone from his back pocket and began barking into it. Moments later came the purr of a boat engine from her left. Emma watched the Hastings boat taxi around the rocky peninsula, this time at a much slower speed than when it had left. Impatiently, Mr. Hastings waved it in.
As they neared her dock, Emma cracked her book open again, and stared into her lap. There was no reason for them to hug the shoreline so close to her, but they were. Emma glanced right toward the Hastings’s dock, then left toward the approaching boat. Amanda stared straight ahead, her mouth fixed in a thin line as she navigated the water and kept her father in sight. It was the boy leaning over the side of the boat who caught Emma’s attention. Was he waving at her?
Emma drew her knees up as the boat nosed its way closer. “Hey!” Sully McMahon was dragging on
e hand in the water, but his eyes were on her. Emma watched in disbelief as the boat drew up sharply alongside her dock. Amanda didn’t even glance her way, but Sully was definitely trying to communicate something. She narrowed her eyes.
Just as they pulled up, Sully lifted his hand from the water. He held out a brown bottle.
“Take it!” he hissed. The boat drew up so sharply, so close, she feared it might hit. In slow motion it glided past, mere inches away. Emma sucked in her breath, and Sully thrust the bottle in her direction.
Suddenly Emma found herself reaching. As he glided by, Sully pressed the bottle into her hands, their fingers bumping together. She looked up and Sully smiled. “Good girl.” And then they were gone, taxiing up the lake toward Mr. Hastings, who was now pacing.
Emma clutched the wet bottle to her chest, watching as they tied off the boat and disembarked. Amanda was waving her hands in explanation, talking loudly to her father. The others scurried past them, eyes down. Emma watched in disbelief as Sully stopped and offered Mr. Hastings a handshake. For a beat, it seemed to break the tension. She was even more surprised when Mr. Hastings actually took it.
Quickly, she stood and gathered her things, keeping the bottle concealed in her blanket. Amanda Hastings was in trouble, and as much as she loathed her, Emma actually felt a pang of sympathy when her father resumed his vocal chastising. She wondered if he’d seen them hand off the bottle to her. At the bottom of the stairs she risked a last look in their direction. From across the way Sully McMahon hesitated at the edge of the dock. He glanced back at her, before he, too, disappeared into the thicket of woods.
It wasn’t until she was halfway up the stairs that Emma paused and looked down at the sloshing bottle in the folds of her blanket. Wild Turkey. A lake breeze stirred the leaves in the treetops; Emma shoved the bottle of Wild Turkey behind a thick bush, snagging her fingertip on a pricker, and then ran the rest of the way up to the house.
The View from Here Page 5
