Henry and Ava had come from Middlebury for Christmas; Ava’s parents were traveling internationally. Ava had stayed in Sam’s bedroom. Amy was happy to have her. But of course it wasn’t the same as having Sam.
There ensues a long pause, during which Amy looks at Sam and Sam looks back at Amy, and neither of them seems to blink, even to breathe, and then Sam says, “Soooo... I’m trying to get the next ferry. Do you think you could drop me? If not I’ll get an Uber.”
“Of course I’ll drop you,” says Amy. Her voice cracks, but she and Sam both pretend they didn’t hear it. Amy’s unnecessarily full refrigerator, her meager new shopping list, the cramped kitchen: all of these must seem small to Sam, just as Amy fears her life must seem, especially when compared with a famous uncle, an island mansion. How is Amy supposed to compete withthat?
Kona lets out a low, gentle whine, and Amy tells him, “You can come for the car ride. After all, you’re all I have left.”
“Don’t be dramatic, Mom. It’s not like I’m going to L.A. I’ll be right across the water.”
“And you’ll visit, right?”
Sam hesitates, drops oversize sunglasses onto her face. “Um, maybe? Or maybe not. Butyoucan visitmewhenever you want. Life’s more fun on an island anyway.”
“I guess it is,” says Amy, because she doesn’t want to be argumentative, and also because it’s true. One more rule Amy forgot: Be grateful for what you get, even if it’s but a crumb.
Timothy
Timothy sinks into a lounger, stretches his feet in front of him, his arms over his head, and just—relaxes. For a long, delicious moment, he relaxes. He watches the wind turbines turn in the great distance. Seeing their great arms move round and round increases Timothy’s sense of well-being and calm.
“Thank you, Floyd,” he whispers. “Thank you for this.”
The lounger sits on a second-story wraparound deck, and the deck is attached to the house belonging to Timothy’s high school buddy, Floyd Barringer. Floyd, Timothy now understands in a way he hadn’t before, has come a very,verylong way from the punk he was in high school. You’d think skipping school to smoke weed at Mohegan Bluffs would be damn near impossible with only thirty-two students in the high school, total, but Floyd managed to find a way, and usually he coerced Timothy to join him, and Vinny St. James too. (It was the seventies, after all—Floyd and Timothy were trying as hard as they could to develop their very own island counterculture. Never really took.) After Timothy went west, Floyd cleaned up his act, went to college, got an MBA, married his college sweetheart, and acquired a fleet of furniture delivery trucks in Attleboro, Massachusetts. To that he added five investment vacation condos in Mazatlán, Mexico, an off-island building supply store in Kingston, Rhode Island, a wealthy man’spaunch, and, of course, this, his second home (the first is near the building supply store): a breathtaking, Nantucket-style, five-bedroom, four-bathroompalaceon Mohegan Trail, overlooking the blue-gray Atlantic, whose color today, with the sun shining voraciously, giving the whole island a bright, scrubbed-clean look, is actually hewing pretty close to electric blue.
“No AC,” Floyd had said unapologetically over the phone when he first offered the use of the house to Timothy—Vinny had told Floyd that Timothy would be spending the summer on the island. Floyd and his wife are traveling in Scandinavia this summer.
“No problem,” said Timothy, wondering if it was.
“It wasn’t a money thing. Suzie just didn’t want to have a reason to cut off the ocean breezes. There’ll be like two days all summer that you’re going to wish you had it. If there’s a real heat wave, I usually get off the island. Nice hotel in Newport, something like that.”
“Got it,” said Timothy. Thinking about that conversation now he can’t believe Floyd has become someone who escapes to a “nice hotel in Newport” when it’s too hot in his multimillion-dollar island home. He remembers buying Floyd burgers at Ballard’s because Floyd couldn’t afford his own.
He rises and walks to the deck railing, and looks all the way out to the horizon. The ocean goes and goes and goes. You could see, from here, why people used to believe the world was flat. “Floyd, you wily bastard,” he says to nobody.
Timothy, in the years and years he’s spent in Los Angeles, has of course been in houses five times as big as this, or even ten—houses right on the beach in Malibu, or in the hills above; houses so big you might wander into the east wing during a party, never to be seen again; houses where the purebred Alaskan malamutes have their own house nearly as big as Floyd’s on the property of the actual house—butthishouse onthisisland, owned byhisstoner friend, well. Everything about it makes Timothy happierthan anything has made him in a long time. (His ex-wife, Gertie, used to becomeirateseeing those Alaskan malamutes living in Los Angeles, so far in spirit, climate, and geography from their native habitat! Oh, Gertie could go on about that.)
You enter Floyd’s house on the bedroom level, then go up a flight of stairs to the open-concept kitchen and family room. This means the wraparound deck on which Timothy now reposes is accessible from the main story, and sits far above ground level. Besides the three loungers, arranged in a row, there’s a set of wicker furniture, appropriately, evenartisticallyweathered, with off-white, pristine cushions. To the right of the kitchen a panorama of windows surrounds a sturdy oak table to create a breakfast nook. The table isreclaimed,Timothy supposes, although honestly he’s never understood what people mean when they say that. Reclaimed from what? Makes it sound like somebody stole something.
Timothy isn’t always a breakfast person, not in California, but here, in Floyd Barringer’s house, with the turbines beckoning him, the great clay cliffs dropping down to the ocean, he wonders if he might just become one: it would be nice to make regular use of that nook. Maybe, he thinks, as he closes his eyes and begins to drift off, Floyd had things figured out from the beginning. Stay close to home, close to your roots, fight the temptation to go looking for more and more and more. Eat more meals in a nook.
The chime of the doorbell startles him; there must be a speaker somewhere on the deck, to allow him to hear it. It wouldn’t be Sam already—she said she would text once she’d boarded the ferry. He pads into the house and down to the entry level, peering through the window at the side of the door to see...
“Gertie!” He opens the door.
“The one and only!” She leans toward him, lips glossed and puckered, and he turns each cheek to accept the kisses. It’s likethey’ve done this a thousand times, because they have, in fact, done this a thousand times.
“I thought we were meeting at the theater tomorrow. Wasn’t that the plan?”
Without preamble or invitation, without truly giving Timothy time or space to step aside, Gertie ushers herself past him and up the stairs, and there’s nothing for Timothy to do but follow. “That was the plan, yes,” she says. “But, oh, Timothy. We’ve got some problems to deal with, and I wasn’t sure they could wait until tomorrow.”
“What kind of problems?” Timothy is panting gently, while Gertie, who is always in phenomenal shape, could probably recite Ophelia’s monologue from act 3 with no effort.
“Let’s just say, Timothy, that Blake is producer in name only. In reality, he’s got no idea how to put on a play.” She pauses and looks around. “Thisplace,” she says. “Holy hell, Timothy, this place isincredible.” Her eyes have a familiar gleam—nay, a dangerous gleam. A whiff of her perfume remains behind as she passes through to the back of the house, out the slider, and onto the wraparound deck. It’s the same perfume she’s worn since Timothy first met her, nearly two decades ago, on the set ofCommitted People.He’s read that smell is the most nostalgic of all the senses, something about the olfactory and the amygdala, and, yes, now the memory of his early days with Gertie hits him with the force of a brick. God, she was beautiful. Still is.
No, he tells himself sternly. No, no, no. You messed that up, okay? You messed that up like you mess up everything. You can’t go back.
He’s not privy to Gertie’s current cosmetic secrets—nor does he want to be—but to the naked eye Gertie Sanger appears not to have aged so much as a minute in the last decade. The golden undertones of her fair skin, the wavy reddish-blond hair, thegreen eyes, the famously high cheekbones (“the cheekbones that launched a thousand ships,” aVanity Fairwriter had penned in 2005, after Gertie’s stunning turn in the filmHelen After Paris)all look as they always have.
Gertie comes back in from the deck, pauses in the breakfast nook, and makes a little noise of delight. “Oooh, this is nice. Bet you eat breakfast here every day. Or you would if you ate breakfast. There’s just something about the Atlantic Ocean, isn’t there? It’s like in California the ocean is saying,Hey, come right down here, put your feet in the sand, come to my level.But out here the ocean is like,Whoa, buddy! Admire me from afar. I’ll let you know when I’m ready for you.” She laughs. “I love that, about out here. Who’d you say owns this place?”
