“Not that sort of accident,” he explains quickly.
They should’ve sent him a list of words not to use around me:accident, car, inheritance, leg.
The driver’s wearing a well-tailored dark suit and tie, his white collar starched and bright. He takes my bag from my hand—I do carry my own luggage, even if I don’t always pack it myself—and leads the way to the Range Rover without missing a step. His gait is brisk and efficient.
I stuff my hands into the pockets of my overcoat. According to my phone, it’s twenty-seven degrees, but it feels colder. The wind off the ocean, maybe, so much sharper than the wind rushing between skyscrapers in Manhattan, more than one hundred miles west of here.
Why can’t you send me someplace in the city?I’d asked last month, my arms folded across my chest, standing lopsided beside Anne’s desk in the drawing room. I wanted to sound authoritative and reasonable, but I felt like a little boy begging his parents to let him stay awake an hour after bedtime.
Anne scoffed when I referred to Manhattan asthe citylike a local, though I’d been living in Tribeca since being asked to leave Columbia’s campus fiveyears ago. I’m not sure, honestly, whether I still live there. The family might not let me go back.
Facilities inthe citycould never guarantee your anonymity like this place.
I couldn’t argue, knowing the paps would hound me across New York City given the chance. But I wasn’t about to let Anne know I agreed with her.
Don’t they all guarantee anonymity? It’s called AlcoholicsAnonymous,right?
You can’t go to AA meetings!Anne hissed.How anonymous can it be whenanyoneis welcome to join?
She sounded so much like Dad then that I laughed out loud, which only enraged her more.
Do you know how many celebrities and aristocrats have been helped by these people?
No.
Exactly,she said.Anyhow, I thought you’d feel more at home there.She sounded so sweet that for a split second I thought she might actually mean it, but when I looked at her face, I could see she was trying not to smile. Sending me here—to this particular part of the world—is Anne’s idea of a joke.There isn’t a more discreet center on the planet. Even when things go awry, no one finds out.
Maybe nothing’s ever gone wrong.
Anne scoffed, and I heard the words she didn’t say:With people like you getting sent there,of coursethings go wrong.
Only Anne—and our father—would see a place’s ability to conceal its fuckups as an asset.
“What kind of accident?” I ask the driver now, following him to the car.
“One of our guests got off at the wrong train station,” he explains. He hasn’t told me his name. People do that more often than you’d think, diminishing themselves because they think it’s more comfortable to be waited on by a nameless person in a nondescript black suit than to acknowledge that the person opening your doors and carrying your luggage is a human being with a name and a home and a family.
Anne is careful to learn everyone’s names, and the names of their spouses, their kids, their dogs. She says it’s part of the job, and she is very good at her job.
The driver continues. “The guest exited the train at East Hampton rather than Bridgehampton, where a car was waiting for her. It’s very coldoutside, and unfortunately there’s no indoor waiting area at the station—this area is more equipped for summer travelers than winter, as I’m sure you know.”
He pauses so I can catch his meaning: The driver knows exactly how well I know the area. He knows when I was here last and what happened and why I’ve come back. At least, he knows the version Anne released to the public.
“So this guest, you see, we’re so close now, though of course it’s an unpleasant thing to have to ask—”
I realize I’m supposed to invite some stranger, some daftidiotwho got off at the wrong station, to join me in my car.
I imagine the anonymity Anne held in such high regard vanishing into thin air.
“Of course.”The more the merrier,Anne would say, and the driver wouldn’t be able to sense the irritation behind her words. Anne is all smiles in public, no matter whether she’s comforting a stranger in a hospital ward, attending a banquet after articles about our father’s sexual peccadillos are splashed on the tabloids’ front pages, or arranging yet another meeting about her troubled baby brother. I’m surely not the first member of my family to have an issue with alcohol, but I am the first for whom it’s a problem rather than a charming personality quirk.
The driver beams. “I’m so glad you understand, sir.” I can practically see him thinking that perhaps I’m more like my beloved sister than the rumors about me (selfish, spoiled, shallow) have led him to believe.
I get into the back seat, and the driver turns smoothly onto Highway 27.
The first time I came to the east end of Long Island was for the Hampton Classic the August I turned fourteen. In summer, the trees are bright with leaves, planted so thickly they join over the highway. At the time, I didn’t notice the safety hazards: one-lane roads carved into the woods with no shoulder for idling cars. In the high season, the streets are packed with inexperienced city drivers speeding around town in expensive cars they rented for the summer. People who grew up in Manhattan are so used totaking cabs and subways that they barely know how to drive. And surely some of them, like me, grew up with security guards to drive them.
Now, it’s January and the trees are bare. The streets are nearly empty without vacationers to crowd them. I look through the Rover’s moon roof, gazing at the trees’ bare branches stretching over the road like skeletons. It’s hard to imagine they will ever be green with life again.
