Tighter (Page 2)

This should work out perfectly, right? Still can’t believe that I’m writing freckle-nosed Sandy Henstridge’s daughter. Everyone tells me you’re the spitting image of her. Lucky you.

Regards,

M.M.

In my mind, I pictured Miles McRae as a martini-sipping, tuxedo-wearing “Bond, James Bond” type. Maybe because I knew he was rich, and because Mom’s face turned as pink as a peppermint when she mentioned him. Presumably, Miles didn’t know I existed until last month, when Mom ran into him at the Wolfingtons’ dinner party.

“McRae, Miles McRae” might have been surprised to hear that I’d always known about him. Mom had dated Miles a hundred years ago, but she’d kept tabs, the way women do. The way I might on Sean Ryan though he’d left New Jersey to teach high school chemistry in Telluride. No forwarding email—although I’d chased him down online and found him in the school directory.

But Mom’s relationship with Miles had always sounded sweet. Also, his wife had died many years ago, of leukemia, and this had been the sad fact percolating in my mind after Mom had arrived home that night, squeaking with a girlishness that made me feel embarrassed for her.

The widower Miles, “still so good-looking,” had been seated right across the table from her, and at some point between the salad and the blackberry tart, Mom won me my job.

“He hasn’t changed,” Mom had assured me, as if I’d have a clue how to tell the difference. “He’s in Hong Kong overseeing a hotel project, and he wanted to find an au pair—a young person, not his housekeeper—to look after his daughter. To take her to tennis and the beach. Isn’t it perfect? You’d stay at their summer home—they’re in Beacon Hill during the school year.”

The tiniest note of grandeur had crept into Mom’s voice as she exhaled these words: au pair, summer home, Beacon Hill. She’d grown up richer than we were now, in that toity world of summering, and the Wolfingtons were friends from her youth—which was why that night Mom had crunched her toes into heels and salon-styled her hair into a first-lady flip.

“You just want me out of the house,” I’d complained.

“Of course I do. You’ve been mopey, Jamie. And now here’s a job—a paying one, a fun one—that’s dropped right in your lap. At the very least, it’s an adventure.”

“You said it.” While Mom didn’t push it right there, I knew the plan was all but tied up in ribbons. Mopey was Mom’s determinedly cheerful shorthand for the thick-walled depression I’d been trapped behind all spring. A taste of her old life, those carefree days when she’d been freckle-nosed Sandy Henstridge, might be just what the doctor ordered.

Time away. Sea air. No parents. I’d return suntanned and worldly. Pussy cat pu**y cat, where have you been? Maybe Mom was onto something. Maybe that’s how the mopeys got zapped. Of course, my other Atkinson relatives hadn’t exactly mastered solutions for moping. My dad’s brother Uncle Jim had hanged himself on his twenty-first birthday, and my second cousin Hank Wilcox had put a bullet in his brain three years ago after the bank repossessed his house. And what neither of my parents knew was that Uncle Jim and Hank had started to appear to me, claiming me in secret hours as one of their own. My eyes would open into darkness—not in terror, not yet—to find them right there, in my room. The rope skewed around Uncle Jim’s neck and Hank staring blankly, the bullet wound black as a cigarette burn at his temple.

And then I’d wake up for real, in a gasp, my heart beating fast as rain, my newly identified lumbar muscles—extensor, flexor, oblique—pulsing the nerve roots of my spine.

By then, they’d be gone.

Maybe they wouldn’t follow me to Little Bly. It was another hope to hold on to.

The pill and the rock of the train lulled me old mother goose when she wanted to wander would ride through the air and I slept.

TWO

Connie was awful.

She was also my first bad news of the day. Until then, I’d been caught up in the Bly mystique—the water slapping the sides of the ferryboat, the brine-y cup of chowder I’d purchased minutes before boarding and sipped while leaning over the rail, the mineral sweep of ocean and breeze full in my face.

Then there was the Kindly Old Salt who’d helped with my bag and told me I reminded him of a young Audrey Hepburn. On impulse, I’d dressed nostalgically, in an outfit that teenage Sandy Henstridge might have worn, white camp shirt and capris and my ballet flats. Better than pretty, the Salt had made me feel legitimate—bonjour! I summered!—as I popped my nylon wheelie suitcase along the dock, maneuvering around baby strollers and straw bags and ice coolers.

She saw me first. She was short, with a gray poodle perm and matching gray, wide-set shark eyes. “Linen panth,” she said, her voice lisping on her s, a speech impediment I instantly disliked. “One way to tell you’re not a local.” Beneath what she seemed to think passed for a charming opener, I detected an annoyance that she’d had to drive out here and fetch me.

When adults suck, as Connie clearly did, it’s been my experience that you’ve got two choices. You can spend all your time buttering them up, plaster-casting your grin and molding your body language so that it silently exclaims like me, please—I am harmless. Or—and I promise, this is the better idea—you detach. Let them be their own drippy selves, and don’t try to win them over, because you never will.

I slung my bag into the trunk and allowed Connie the full embrace of my small-talk-free silence as we drove along the harbor and then up the rocky coastline. She herself didn’t speak until we turned inland onto a stretch of road bordered by sea grasses long as hula skirts. “Buhth Road’th the main artery of the island,” she told me. “Nearly everything runth off it.”

Not a question, no need to answer. Though I did wonder about the road’s actual name. Both Road? Booth Road?

We stayed silent a few miles.

“Thkylark’th the highetht point on the island,” was her next fact. “Everyone knowth it by name.” Stated with pride. Connie was probably one of those creepy locals who’d never been on an airplane, or, for that matter, had ever left Little Bly.

But Skylark was astonishing. Mom had mapped it online, and then estimated its property worth based on other prime oceanfront real estate, but I still wasn’t prepared for its beauty, its fanciful gables and turrets, its crisp white latticework and trellises of climbing roses. The flat emerald sail of lawn complemented the pressed pearl-gray sheet of ocean behind it. Everything ironed smooth to suit the view.