She frowns. I know she hates to be rude.
“They’ll brighten up the place,” I add. I don’t have to mention Rosemary, but she knows that’s what I mean. Rosemary not being here, that’s what needs brightening. “It could be fun,” I continue. “You know, for me and Penny. We can take them out in the kayaks, and like Harris said, on the sailboat. We could do a tennis tournament or something.” I’m selling her on wholesome group activities.
My mother folds her arms.
“Please, Tipper?” I say, putting my head on her shoulder. “Best person, nicest mother in the world. Let me have some good distraction. I neeeeeeed it.”
She sighs, but I can tell I’ve won her over. “I really have a very full plate,” she snaps at Dean. “I’d be grateful if you wanted to man the grill. Tonight. And often. As soon as you’re settled.”
Dean grins. “Always glad to man the grill.”
When Dean is gone, my mother turns to me. “Make sure they have a good time, okay?”
“The boys?”
“Of course the boys. If they’re staying, I’m going to be a good hostess. You take them down to the beach, show them the kayaks. And make sure they understand how the VCR works, the washer, that stuff, so they’re comfortable. I can’t believe Dean’s nerve.” She shakes her head. “Three boys and no warning. I haven’t even got the beds made up in the cottage. You’ll do that for me?”
Major, George, and Pfeff. I can feel them from here, like a pulsing or a heart beating, over in the guesthouse. Testosterone, entitlement, cold beer, and laughter.
I tell her yes.
17.
WHEN I GET to Goose, it is all kinds of chaos. In the yard that opens off the wooden walkway, George and Major are playing Ping-Pong, having dragged an old table from the garden shed, where it has languished for years. They have their shirts off. George is muscled and evenly tan to match his beige hair; Major pale and lithe. Their boxer shorts peek out of their waistbands. George’s are Black Watch plaid, clashing wildly with his red plaid shorts. Major’s are a simple blue.
“Ho!” George grabs the ball to stop the game. “Carrie, is it?”
“Yeah.”
The duffel bags are piled on the porch. Clothing bursts out of them. Tennis rackets, bags of taco chips. A typewriter is open and a piece of paper stuck into it.
Pfeff sits on the porch with his back against the house, a Coke in one hand, the blue kitchen phone in the other. Its curly cord stretches through the window. “I’m sorry…. I’m sorry…. I said, I’m sorry,” he’s repeating. “I know, but I’m calling you now…. Yes, George’s girlfriend, Yardley. She invited us.” He looks up at George and Major. “When did Yardley invite us?”
“Me, a while ago,” says George. “You two hosebags on Tuesday night.”
“Tuesday night,” says Pfeff into the phone. “No, I don’t have her dad’s number. He’s like, in a different house than we are. We’re in a guesthouse…. Massachusetts, I think.” He looks up again. “We’re in Massachusetts, correct?”
“Correct,” I tell him.
“Yuh-huh,” says Pfeff into the phone. “She said—Major, how long are we staying?”
Major shrugs. “Forever, maybe. This place is amazing.”
“Maybe forever,” says Pfeff.
“His mother,” George explains to me. He tosses the Ping-Pong ball in the air and catches it again.
“I know I’m a terrible son,” says Pfeff. “And I know you deserve a delightful son, so it stinks that you got me, but I also know you love me anyway…. Of course I love you. So can we be friends?…Also, I’m a legal adult. That means I don’t have to come home. Okay.”
“I’m here to show you how to work the washing machine and whatever else,” I say.
“Yardley showed us all that,” says Major.
“We’re fully up to speed,” says George.
And maybe it’s the two shirtless boys, because I can’t stop looking at them. Or maybe it’s the way they’ve already disrupted everything about how Goose Cottage usually feels. Or maybe it’s just because it’s baking hot out—but I surprise myself. “Let’s go swimming, then,” I say. “You haven’t really been to Beechwood until you’ve been in the water.”
“Hell yeah,” says George. And Pfeff hangs up with his mother.
Beach towels are in a cupboard by the door. The boys find their swimsuits, Pfeff riffling through his duffel, tossing shirts and jeans across the porch in his search, then changing in the mudroom, yelling, “Don’t come in and look at my weenie.”
Major yells back that it’s not the kind of weenie anyone would be interested in, and Pfeff says “What on earth does that mean?”—still from the mudroom. “It’s a perfectly normal weenie. A good weenie, even. Oh god, now Carrie’s going to think terrible things about me. Major, you’ve never even seen it. Carrie, he’s never seen it. Seriously.”
George tells him to shut up and Major says he doth protest too much. The two of them change quickly upstairs in the bedrooms. George phones Yardley, who is over at Pevensie, and together we troop down the long wooden staircase to the Tiny Beach.
* * *
—
TWO O’CLOCK IS the perfect time to swim on Beechwood. The sun has heated the water all day. The cove is protected from the wind. The shore is rocky. The sand on the Big Beach is nicer, but there is a private feeling to the Tiny Beach that’s magical.
All three boys run whooping into the water, diving under the gentle waves as soon as they hit knee-deep. I stand for a moment and watch them. The muscles in their backs ripple. Their shoulders are sleek with water. They flip their hair out of their eyes and splash each other. George swims a serious-looking crawl toward the sharp rocks that edge the cove, then stops to tread water and look around. Major floats on his back, looking up. Pfeff shouts and swims out to join George.
“You coming?” Major asks me. “We won’t bite.”
I strip down to my swimsuit and go in. The codeine I took earlier blocks all thoughts of what happened to Rosemary in this very same water. Instead, I hear the echo of the waves, feel the warm drumbeat of the sun and the cucumber cool of the seawater against my skin.
I am awake. I am expanding.
The nerves in my fingertips cry to touch someone, the pulse in my veins jumps.
They are here on our island, these boys. Transforming it. Possibly desecrating it.
They may last a week.
They may stay forever.
18.
BEFORE SUPPER, I put on one of several white cotton dresses I own. I feel too old for yellow, and for the Lemon Hunt, we all must wear yellow or white. I comb my hair and dust blush on my cheeks.
The black pearls sit on my dresser, still there from several nights ago, and it occurs to me that I wasn’t meant to keep them. Tipper will be cross that I didn’t return them sooner. She can be sharp about things like that, small breeches of etiquette that she thinks mean you don’t appreciate something. “Manners are kindness,” she always says. She feels they show you value other people; that you consider their time, their possessions, their creative effort.
I know she is downstairs, apron on, working with Luda in the kitchen, so I write a short note.
Dearest best mother, loaner of pearls,
Thank you for the chance to wear these, and for saying they will someday be mine.
With love,
Carrie
* * *
—
MY PARENTS’ DOOR is open. The room is empty except for Wharton. She lies sleeping on a cotton blanket at the foot of the bed and doesn’t stir when I come in.
Harris’s clothes are tossed over an armchair. His bedside table is cluttered with a couple pairs of eyeglasses, books (The Fatal Shore, Lonesome Dove, a book about the CIA), nasal spray, tissues, and an orange plastic jar of prescription sleeping pills. Halcion, they’re called.
Tipper’s table has only a pretty glass container of scented hand cream and a small dish where I know she puts her earrings.
I stare for a moment at Harris’s side of the bed.
He uses nasal spray.
He needs pills to sleep.