Instead, it whipped onto the SUV’s windshield, caused Kushi to make a wide swerve and trundle onto the road’s steep shoulder. He’d righted himself quickly, but everyone had jolted forward and been snapped back by their seat belts, save Lainey, who wasn’t wearing hers.
“Shit, is everyone okay?” Kushi turned the flashers on with one hand and reached the other back to take Alice’s hand.
Adam had grabbed Lainey and she’d only bumped her crotch against the console between the two front seats. She adjusted herself and dug around for the ends of her seat belt, tucked into the cushions.
“Why weren’t you wearing your seat belt?” Alice asked.
“It was such a short ride! I’m squeezed in back here,” Lainey said. Sitting bitch, she thought, a term she loathed.
“A huge percentage of auto accidents happen on short rides!” Alice said, her voice shaky.
“I’m fine, thanks for the lecture,” Lainey said, and made a show of clicking her seat belt before turning to look at Alice, at the tears on her face.
“Oh, no!” Lainey said. “Are you okay, Alice?”
Kushi had hopped out of the car and was crouched beside Alice’s seat now, in the road.
Margaret and Mac approached.
“Oh, my God, what happened? Are you all right?” Margaret opened the door to the passenger seat just as Ji Sun turned around to look at Alice.
Alice gasped, and then Adam, and Lainey, though it was only a small trail of blood on Ji Sun’s philtrum. She put two fingertips beneath her nostrils and more blood streamed loose.
“It’s the strangest thing,” Ji Sun said. “My head barely jerked forward—I don’t think it’s even related!” She looked at the red blossom of blood on her fingers, and back up at them, as though they might have the answers. Adam found a napkin in his backpack and passed it up to her.
“Should we go to the hospital?” Adam asked.
“For a nosebleed? I’m fine!”
Alice shook her head, “No, no, I’m fine, too. It was just . . . jarring.” She had her hands on both sides of her face, and Lainey couldn’t tell if she was imagining it, or if Alice’s scar was pink, inflamed.
“Sorry I was such a bitch about my seat belt,” Lainey said. Sitting bitch.
“No, it’s fine, I’m fine,” Alice said, and started laughing and crying from what seemed like relief. “It was just unexpected. Let’s get going.” She pointed at Mac’s car. “You’re stopped in the middle of the road!” She laughed again, and snot flipped out of her nostril.
Lainey watched Adam peel another from his stash of napkins. He must have taken them from the ice cream shop, she thought, and felt a wave of tenderness, only a cresting tip of irritation, how even now, blood and snot all around, he was hoarding a few away. She leaned over and kissed his cheek.
“No one else goes on this road,” Mac shrugged. “I’ll go really slow this time.” He looked at Kushi, who nodded but sniffed.
“It was the scarf,” Kushi said. “I don’t think—never mind. Great, yes, let’s go slowly.”
They rode without the radio on, stones popping beneath the tires. Light twinkled from the tree canopy, everything sunny and golden and dappled in honey-washed green. The trees grew taller, but their shadows heavier, so as they drove they felt enclosed by the road, ferried by forest to a place quite distant from the world they knew.
Chapter 29
The sensation of being removed from reality only increased once they arrived and sunk into the languor of the long summer days, rotated from the pool to the lake to the house, whose long, lacquered-wood halls led to rooms with beds whose white sheets had high thread counts and a fine coating of the sun dust that comes from lack of use. The closets had lavender sachets on their shelves, along with soft robes and more clean towels than they would ever manage to use.
Mac’s grandmother had visited the Gamble House in her twenties, and when she remodeled her Connecticut place, she’d used it as her vision, down to stained-glass trees on the enormous leaded glass doors. Together with leaves from outside winking from the high windows, walking the halls felt like exploring a treehouse mansion in some sleek, Art Deco future.
The lower half of the house hadn’t been part of the extensive rehab, and looked more like the 1970s basement of any rich Republican. They spent most of their time together on this lived-in level, its service kitchen better stocked and more inviting in its signs of wear than the one on the main floor. There was a large rec room with sliding glass doors that opened to the pool deck, and a massive fireplace that they sometimes turned on along with the air-conditioning, in a show of excess that Lainey couldn’t help but remark upon each time someone flipped the switch and set the glass pebbles alight with blue flames. Mac’s cousin Bart and his wife, Clémence, stayed in the guesthouse, but the bedrooms on this basement level were occupied by their children, Colette, seventeen, and Laurent, newly thirteen.
Laurent had had a belated birthday celebration with his American relatives at the house, and there were still crepe streamers and slowly deflating balloons in one corner of the den, half a sheet cake with what looked like Transformers battling cowboys in the fridge.
“Did Laurent choose this theme? Is this a bald eagle?” Ji Sun asked, licking the frosting from her finger at breakfast. She understood the appeal of this kind of sugar bomb of a sheet cake only when paired with strong coffee, couldn’t believe her friends enjoyed their slices with milk or juice, ice cream.
“Teenagers,” Mac said from his place at the stove. “Who wants bacon?”
Seeing him in his apron softened Ji Sun’s sense of him, as had these days poolside, when he’d bring drinks out to the deck for them.
“Living the dream, eh, ladies?” he’d smiled and said to Ji Sun the day before. “I can’t tell you how much Margaret has been looking forward to this. She needed this.”
“What do you mean?” Ji Sun asked.
“Oh, just that she misses, you know, the gal-pal days. When you all lived together. College. Think it’s sort of an ongoing adjustment, you know? To living with me. Being a grown-up.” He laughed and showed his overlarge teeth.
“Right,” Ji Sun said, and looked at Margaret, floating in the pool on a silver raft. It bothered Ji Sun less that Mac said things like “gal pals” when he kept bringing out bottles of chilled rosé, crisp and nearly clear.
At breakfast now, Mac slid the meat from his skillet onto a tray. Laurent appeared, hair in his eyes, and slunk low into a seat, reached for the bacon.
“Perfect timing, bud,” Mac said.
“Oui, ça sentait tellement bon.” He looked at Mac, added, “I smelled it.”
“Meillure odeur,” Kushi said, though he didn’t eat meat.
“That’s so dope!” Mac said, and shook his head at Kushi. “Bacon, bro?”
Despite his heritage, Mac didn’t speak any French. Ji Sun tried not to burst a blood vessel at how delighted he was that both she and Kushi did. This was always the case with Mac—she would warm toward him, and he’d promptly unravel her goodwill. It was just so with the way he smelled now, standing behind her. Since Margaret had started working at the shop, Mac smelled gorgeous. He often wore something that skewed feminine, orange blossom and white flowers, and it mixed with his sweat and musk to become nearly narcotic. Ji Sun still didn’t want to talk to him much, but she minded standing near him less. Now, neroli and sunscreen mixed with the grease and smoke of bacon, old beer that always rose off his pores, stale coffee breath. He rubbed at his stubble and she felt as though the thick little hairs were loosed into the air, onto her skin, where they itched. The frosting on her tongue turned to paste.
“I wish I spoke French,” Margaret said, looking at Laurent. “Still working on English, though.”
“Motherfuck!” Mac shouted at the same time there was a loud bang. “Fuck me!”
He’d dropped the skil
let, and he bent now to take his foot in his hands.
“Oh, no!” Margaret leaped up from her seat.
“Did it land on a bone?” Kushi asked, and got up from the table.
“No, the pan didn’t hit my foot. Just the grease, it splattered,” Mac said. “Fuck!” He sucked in a breath. “Pardon my French,” he said to Laurent, who had also jumped up when he saw Mac was hurt, strip of bacon still in his grip.
“Oh, good, that’s good,” Kushi said. “Let me take a look?”
Ji Sun glanced at Mac’s foot, specks of blackened meat on streaks of red like the scratch of a big cat along his bones.
“Ma mère a une bonne onguent,” Laurent said to Kushi. “Biafine? I’ll go and find it.”
Laurent had slunk in looking like a teenager, but he darted off like a child, lips greasy and limbs scrawny. He wore an oversized Bart Simpson T-shirt that Mac had said used to be his, and swim trunks that hung from his hips. Being around him this week had occasioned them to talk about what they were like at thirteen, for the others to feel a surge of protectiveness and familiarity at how their friends described themselves at that age, to wonder if they would have become friends, alike in their lonelinesses even as they were so different in ways that seemed to matter so much then.
“Looks pretty superficial,” Kushi said.
“Hurts like a motherfucker,” Mac said.
Alice wrapped ice in a dish towel, and Laurent returned bearing a tube of ointment.
“Put this on it for a bit after you clean it.” She handed Mac the ice. “And I’d stay off it for today.”
“Aw, man, but we were set for a rematch after breakfast!” He reached for Margaret. “She destroyed me yesterday.”
“Oh, love, there’s plenty of time for tennis! Today you can put your feet up,” Margaret said, her gauzy white swim cover-up transformed to a nursemaid’s garment. “You deserve a break anyway.”
“I’ll play with you,” Laurent said, eyes on Margaret as they had been on the bacon.
“He may not look like much, but he’s pretty mean on the clay,” Mac said. “I’ll be line judge.”
Laurent watched as Margaret rubbed the ointment into Mac’s feet, Kushi and Alice overseeing, a conference of caretakers for this minor grease burn.
Ji Sun remembered the way that Margaret had sliced the underside of her foot in the grass so soon after they’d met, how they’d raced together to the infirmary. She knew that Conner had been there, and carried her friend, but in her memory he had already blurred, was close to vanishing. She saw herself and Margaret, racing through the thick grass of the lawn, holding hands, laughing, Margaret’s wound somehow healing itself through the force of their newly forged friendship alone.
Chapter 30
Three nights before they were set to leave, as Kushi snored beside her, Alice heard the ping of a text message, sent by Lainey to their group text chain:
MMMmm need nachos. Meet n kitchen?
Lainey, Ji Sun, and Margaret had smoked a bowl of stale weed from Mac’s pipe after dinner, giggled, and told Kushi stories about what Alice was like in college. Alice had broken up the fun a bit early to retreat with Kushi to their room, to have sex and put her feet on the wall for forty-five minutes. Neither of them had smoked, swearing off as they had anything that might contribute to compromised sperm motility or a less-than-fecund uterus.
Alice snuck into the hall just as Lainey closed her own door loudly, laughed, and covered her mouth. She took Alice’s arm and they approached Ji Sun’s room together, heard a rustling, and waited until she came out, wearing oversized men’s pajamas that made her look gamine and glamorous.
The three of them snuck through the house like they’d planned a heist.
“Do you think they even have tortilla chips here? Did we bring some? French people have the worst snacks. They don’t even, like, eat snacks!” Lainey said in her stage whisper. She never could keep her voice down.
“Is Margaret coming?” Alice whispered.
“She didn’t write back.” Ji Sun glanced down at the glow of her phone. How nice it felt to be together in the night, unencumbered by lovers, on their way to forage for snacks and find more wine.
Margaret and Mac were staying on the other side of the house, nearer the lake.
“We’ll just wait for her in the kitchen,” Lainey said. “I’m starving.”
They passed by Laurent’s room, its door partially open.
They stopped before they heard Margaret’s voice, or before they could place it as hers. Maybe they heard it as music, or as the voice of one of the lawyers on the cheesy legal drama Laurent liked to watch, and would recap at tedious length whenever given a chance. Each of them had sat beside him at some point on the trip, nodded politely as he summarized the premise of the show, which they’d all by then seen enough of to need no such summary, as he turned it on whenever he was in from outside, lounging in the rec room. Flopped on the couch, soggy from the pool, a bag of corn chips open in his lap, he’d laugh his funny adolescent laugh, snorts teetered just between the abandon of a child and the self-consciousness of a teenager.
But there was a light from the room that seemed wrong, a sense that they shouldn’t pass that door without either opening or closing it.
They couldn’t help but look inside and so they saw Margaret there, on Laurent’s bed, her face and his face—was this, was this a kiss?
“What!” Alice gasped.
It was a kiss. Their faces moved together; they kissed.
Could they have seen what they did?
Alice pushed the door all the way open. Ji Sun and Lainey followed. They couldn’t have seen what they did!
“Margaret! What’s going on?” Alice cried. “What are you doing?”
The pair flung apart like two north pole magnets, like someone had taken a blowtorch to the air between them, Laurent with such force that he fell off the bed, clutched at his midsection as though he’d been kicked.
Margaret stood and covered her mouth. She ran out of the room, pushed Ji Sun and Lainey, who still stood in the open door, aside.
They watched as she fled in her white nightgown down the dark hallway, its skirt catching blades of light.
“Margaret!” Alice’s yell came out like a hiss.
Lainey started laughing again, scraps of giggles she hadn’t gotten rid of yet.
“Are you okay?” Ji Sun asked Laurent, who was still on the floor.
“C’est bien,” he said, his face red and wet. “Get out!”
Lainey shut his door and took Ji Sun’s arm. Alice was off after Margaret.
“Get back here!” Alice called.
Margaret emerged from the dark hall and came into the den.
“Please stop yelling, Alice,” Margaret said. “You’ll wake everyone up.”
“What the fuck was going on in there?” Alice said, not lowering her voice.
Margaret stood in front of the fireplace, shook her head, one hand over her closed eyes. She opened her eyes and, seeing her friends still there, closed them and shook her head again.
“Hello, Margaret, what was going on in there?” Alice asked, and then turned to Ji Sun and Lainey. “And you two, can you talk?”
“Please quiet down,” Margaret said. “Follow me, let’s not do this here.” She pointed down the hall, toward an unoccupied bedroom with two small twin beds.
Once inside, Margaret pulled the door closed and paced along the wall, where there was a window seat and a picture window that looked out at the dark black glass of the lake, the mirror of a bright, full moon.
“Stop pacing, Margaret!” Lainey said. “You’re making me nervous.”
Margaret smoothed her nightgown beneath her and took a seat on the edge of the bed. She put her head in her hands again and began to cry. No one went to comfort her, and after a moment, she spoke.
&
nbsp; “It wasn’t—it was nothing, it wasn’t. Let me explain.”
“Please do,” Alice said, and glared at Lainey and Ji Sun, who, chastened, sat on the window seat.
“He kissed me,” Margaret said. “And I just didn’t stop it, not fast enough, I mean. I didn’t right away.”
“What were you doing in his room, in the middle of the night?” Lainey asked. She still felt fuzzy, like this was sort of funny, though she could see on her friends’ faces that it was not.
“We were just talking! We ran into each other, in the kitchen.”
“Okay, but why did you go in his room?” Ji Sun asked again, as though there was any satisfactory answer that Margaret could at this point provide.
“We were laughing, being loud. We just took snacks in there,” Margaret said, face flushed deep red, eyes wild. “Please don’t tell Mac.”
“He’s a child, Margaret,” Ji Sun said.
“He’s not a child! I’m a child—I mean, neither of us, I know it sounds so bizarre, but I, I feel like, well, when I was in his room, I felt, I became a thirteen-year-old, too, just for that split second and—”
“None of us have any trouble believing that,” Lainey said.
“It’s not funny!” Alice shrieked. “He’s a little boy.”
“He’s not a little boy!” Lainey said.
“He is! He is a child! Are you actually defending her? Jesus Christ, Lainey. Snap out of it. What if Adam had been kissing Colette? You’d want him in jail!”
“Jail? It’s Margaret—”
The red rose in Margaret’s cheeks at the mention of jail. She stood from the bed, frantic. “I made a mistake. We only kissed. It will never happen again, and it’s never happened before. I just—I just—please just let me try and explain. He’s a teenager, and I, I am telling you, I time traveled, I was a teenager, too, when I was in his room,” her voice was frenzied, her breathing hysterical, “it was as if I became his exact age when I entered his room, and sat on the edge of his bed, it was like time travel. Truly—”
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