I don’t know yet that I’ll regret drinking so much, and the way that habit has made me a lazy thinker. It clouds my judgment and makes me a more selfish, dimmer version of the person I might have been. I don’t know yet that I will wonder, in my forties, whether my son Johnny is dead partly because I am such a drinker.
I don’t know any of that.
I just sleep.
25.
LET ME TELL you another fairy tale. It is not a famous one. I first read it in our family’s copy of Grimms’. And I read it to Rosemary again, the summer I am seventeen.
This is my version.
The Stolen Pennies
ONCE UPON A time, a man went to visit a friend. This friend had several children and a wife.
On the day of the guest’s arrival, they all sat down to a meal. As the clock struck noon, the front door of the house opened.
In walked a girl of about ten years old. She wore a white dress and no shoes.
No one in the house paid any mind except the guest. They all just kept eating.
The girl walked silently past the family at the table and into the next room. She did not look around. “Who is that child?” asked the guest.
The family told him they saw no one. They returned to their meal.
After a time, the child walked back out, past the family and through the front door.
“Who is that child?” asked the guest again. “The one with no shoes?”
But again, the family saw no one.
The next day, at precisely noon, everyone was eating together again when the front door opened. The girl walked in. As before, she walked silently past the family and into the next room.
No one else saw her.
This time, the guest followed. Through a crack in the door, he saw the child on her knees, scratching with her fingernails at the floorboards. She became frantic, digging. He feared she would injure her hands.
The guest told his hosts what he was seeing. He described her tangled hair, her round face, the mole on her chin.
Now they revealed what they had hidden from him during this strange, tense visit: one of their children had died four weeks ago, of a sudden illness. She was a ten-year-old girl with tangled hair, a round face, and a mole on her chin.
The parents went into the next room. They wrenched open the floorboards where the ghost child had been digging and found two pennies.
And now the mother knew the story. She had given the money to her daughter so that the girl could give it to a beggar who was asking for food in the street.
The girl had pocketed it.
“She probably wanted to buy zwieback cookies,” said her mother. “So she kept the pennies for herself.”
The ghost nodded.
“I will donate this money now,” said the mother. “It will help someone in need. My daughter should not worry or feel sorry any longer.”
When the guest turned to the corner where the ghost child had been standing, she was not there anymore. She was at rest in her grave.
* * *
—
THIS IS MY story. I am the guest.
I am the one who can see the ghost of a ten-year-old girl. Rosemary has come back to get my help as she searches for rest.
The guest is the truth-seer, the truth-speaker, the one who can see and acknowledge the pain, thereby absolving the family. So that is me.
I mean, I would like to be the guest.
But let me be honest.
If I am telling this story right, really telling it the way I need to, I am not the guest, after all. In this story, the story of the stolen pennies, I promise you, I am the
ghost.
26.
PFEFF DOESN’T SHOW up at the dock at eleven.
I busy myself with the boat. I check the anchor and the life vests. I make sure there’s gas. I have a shopping list from my mother and a cooler for the ice cream she’s asked me to buy in Edgartown.
Did he change his mind? Or did he forget?
My father taught us not to wait for latecomers. “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late” is one of his favorite quotes. It’s from Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Not that I’ve read it, but Harris told us.
I leave at 11:10.
It’s stupid, it’s silly—but tears prick my eyes as I start the boat and pull away from the dock. I’ve been stood up.
I want to be the kind of girl a guy would remember to meet. The kind of girl that boys will wait hours for.
Penny’s boyfriends always wait for her. Lachlan and the boys she had before him. They come to her tennis matches. They stand outside her classrooms so they can go to lunch with her and save her a seat at assembly.
Anyway. I won’t think about it. I’ll buy soap and sunblock at the drugstore, plus magazines for us all to read on the beach; I’ll get fudge at Murdick’s; a new beach umbrella to replace the one that’s broken. I’ll buy myself a strawberry milkshake and drink it looking at the boats in the harbor.
It doesn’t matter.
It was just a kiss. Two kisses.
Kissing is nothing to a boy like Pfeff, who has no doubt kissed a million girls, even gone to bed with them. He was just caught up in a moment last night. I was caught up in the moment, too.
I shouldn’t care. I don’t even know him.
I am motoring past the Tiny Beach when I hear my name over the roar of the engine. “Carrie!”
I slow down and squint. Pfeff is ankle-deep in the water, wearing board shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. Waving his arms.
I cut the motor.
“I just woke up,” he calls. “Is it too late?”
I am not sure I want to see him at all anymore. Every word he speaks will remind me: He isn’t interested. I’m not worth waking up on time for.
“Carrie!” he calls again. “Hold on! I’m coming.”
He runs forward, diving into the gentle waves.
He is swimming to the boat. In his hoodie. His freestyle is strong but messy. I’m farther out than he thinks.
I watch him for a moment, taking it in. Pfeff is putting forth a lot of effort. To get to me. He’s nearly out of the cove, so I restart the boat and move slowly toward him.
“You’re making bad choices,” I tell him, when he hauls himself up the ladder.
“That is a thing I do pretty often,” he says, shaking his head to get water out of his hair. “God, this sweatshirt weighs a ton.”
He pulls it over his head, along with a soaked T-shirt.
I do not know where to look. He is so close to me. His shoulders are tan. He has just a little hair on his chest. He wears a thin chain around his neck with a dog tag hanging at the end of it. “Thank you,” he says. “For not just driving away when I was making that long-ass grand gesture.” He leans in, soaking wet and naked from the waist up, and kisses me lightly on the cheek, right by my jaw. His lips are very cold. “Okay, let’s motor.”
A kiss. But not a kiss. I don’t know what to make of it, so I pretend I barely remember last night. Like I’ve kissed a thousand guys. Kissing in the moonlight is just how I spend my average Friday evening and nothing means anything in the morning.
I drive toward Edgartown.
Pfeff leans over the edge of the boat, wringing out his shirt and sweatshirt. “We’re going to have to buy me shoes,” he says. “I left my flip-flops on the shore.”
“Do you even have a wallet?” I ask.
“I do.” He unzips the pocket of his shorts, pulling out a blue canvas wallet, thoroughly soaked. He opens it to reveal several wet twenty-dollar bills and a wet bookshop gift certificate. “Oh, harsh.” He refolds the wet paper and returns it to his wallet.
We have to yell to converse with the boat going fast, so we don’t talk much after that. It’s nearly an hour to the Vineyard. By the time we tie up at the dock, Pfeff is dry and his clothes are back on.
“Hey,” he says, touching my arm as we walk up the dock into town.
“Yeah?”
“I’m—ah—I’m sorry I slept so late. And made you think I wasn’t coming.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Okay.” He smiles at me. His dark eyes are merry. “Let’s shop. Are you ready? I love shopping.”
27.
IN EDGARTOWN, THE sidewalks are brick. The buildings nearly all white shingle. Picket fences line the streets, draped with climbing rose vines. You can walk from one end of town to the other in ten minutes.