“Get to what?” Louisa’s heart goes zip zip.
“To what I have to tell you.” It would be hot in Charleston, and humid, but Louisa imagines Franklin dressed in some sort of dapper seersucker number, sockless feet in fashionable loafers. He’s probably sitting in his air-conditioned living room, whose floor-to-ceiling windows look out on King Street, sipping a glass of sweet tea. “Somebody else is writing about Pitcairn.”
No.No.“Wait, what? What do you mean?”
“They’re reexamining the Pitcairn sexual assault trials of 2004 in light of the #MeToo movement. I was asked to peer review a paper that I’m pretty sure is on track to get turned into a book. I just read it, and I texted you as soon as I was done.”
Louisa’s stomach drops. Of course she’s going to address the trial, when six men, including the mayor, were convicted of sexual assault offenses. But a whole book about the trial, with the added context of the #MeToo movement, is guaranteed to get attention. It’s an important topic! Relevant. And Louisa didn’t think to write it herself.
“Who is it? Who’s writing this?” She searches her mind. Which school would produce a scholar who would produce this work? She should know this. Think, Louisa.Think.
“You know I don’t know, Lou. It’s a blind review.”
Louisa lets a little wheedle enter her voice. “Come on, Franklin. We all know blind reviews aren’t really blind.” They are, ostensibly, but academia is a small world. Once you’d read enough work written by your peers—in journals, in conference papers, in books or chapters of books—you started to recognize a person’s writing style, and the reviews became not so much blind as slightly blurry.
She hears a whoop from down on the rocks—it’s Abigail, going all the way under the water and emerging triumphant, arms above her head.
Franklin sighs. “Lou Lou Lou. I can’t even hazard a guess. I couldn’t possibly.”
“You can hazard. You candefinitelyhazard.” She waits. She knows she has him.
“But if I had to? Like, with a gun to my head had to take a guess?”
“Gun to your head,” says Louisa. “Big, big gun.”
“Then I suppose the name Phoebe Richardson might come to mind. Possibly.”
Louisa makes a little noise of dismay. Phoebe Richardson is twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine, newly minted out of Berkeley. Phoebe Richardson is poised to be a superstar. Louisa met her once, at a conference last year. Louisa was prepared to hate her and irritated to learn that she was actually sort of nice. And a little bit funny. And very pretty.
“No,” she says. “That can’t be true. That doesn’t even make sense.” Pitcairn was so very, very remote, so small and unpopulated. Why is anyone besides Louisa even thinking about Pitcairn?
“I’m not saying it’s definite,” says Franklin. “I’m saying gun-to-my-head guess. I could totally be wrong.”
“You’re never wrong about these things, Franklin. Your sense for other people’s writing styles is uncanny.”
“Well,” says Franklin modestly. “Obviously I don’t want to blow my own horn. But, yes, that is one of my talents, along with folding fitted sheets and restarting tape rolls when the end of the tape slips off the thingy that holds it.”
“Pitcairn ismine,” says Louisa. “It’smine.Phoebe Richardson can’t have Pitcairn.” She remembers devoting at least three minutes at last year’s conference to staring at Phoebe’s shoes, which had a spiky heel and a narrow toe and a complicated lizard pattern.
“You might be okay, darling.” There is a pause, during which Louisa is certain Franklin is taking a refreshing sip of his sweet tea. “It’s a submission for a conference paper. It’s not a book yet.”
“But you said she might be turning it into a book.”
“She might! Then again, she might not.”
Louisa hears a shriek from the direction of the rocks. “Franklin, I have to go,” she says, with a small measure of relief. “Emergency here.” She disconnects, drops her phone onto the side table, and runs across the grass.
Claire is coming through the gate up to the yard. Her knee is bloodied and there are tears running down her face, mixing with the dried yogurt left there from breakfast. She wipes savagely at her eyes and says, “I slipped on the stupid, stupid seaweed.”
“Oh, honey,” says Louisa. She crouches down and opens her arms. Claire puts her wet face into Louisa’s neck and her whole body shudders with a sob. “That seaweedisstupid,” says Louisa. “Come with me. We’ll get you all fixed up.” She puts her arm around Claire’s spindly shoulders and leads her up the porch stepsand into the house. She may not be able to keep fancy-pants Phoebe Richardson from reexamining the Pitcairn trials of 2004 in light of the #MeToo movement. But she can get a Band-Aid and some Neosporin from the medicine cabinet in the small downstairs bathroom, the one with the handprints, and she can patch up Claire temporarily at least, and that’s something.
18.
Kristie
After Danny leaves for work Kristie stays in bed. He has left her a cup of coffee on the nightstand, placed carefully on top of a coaster. He is so thoughtful; she can’t believe how lucky she is. Will his thoughtfulness change when he learns about the pregnancy?
She can’t drink the coffee. It turns her stomach, and anyway it’s not good for the baby. She places her palms on her stomach and thinks,Baby.She goes over the timing of her last period. It was in the middle of May, before she left Altoona for Maine. It was right after her mother died. She remembers because she had cramps when she was talking to the woman in the billing department at UPMC Altoona. She met Danny in early June. So that timing tracks; she would have gotten pregnant right away. Probably the first night they slept together, after the ice cream at River Ducks.
