Mr. Martin swore he wouldn’t write another check to Hamilton College, but I knew he would. He could not stand for Hunter not to go there, not to collect names for his résumé.
The story we told people was that Hunter had decided to defer his enrollment so he could do community service and get some life experience. My father found him a volunteer job at an old age center for the summer. From there, he would spend three weeks building houses in Costa Rica. Then he would come home and find a job and make money, and volunteer somewhere on the weekends. He would also complete a drug-and alcohol-abuse program. It sounded bad, even to me.
There are so many pieces to our story, pieces that, if taken away, might have changed the whole course of it. And it’s not just the big things, like Mrs. Martin having sex with Mr. Martin and leaving our father, or our father smoking pot again and having to give up his fight for custody, or Emma sleeping with that boy from Hunter’s school. There was also Hunter calling her a whore, Emma dropping her dress for Mr. Martin, Mr. Martin giving in to his fantasies and taking a picture, Hunter posting pictures on the Internet. The suntan lotion in St. Barts, then another summer of name-calling and snuggling on the sofa. It also took this last thing—Hunter being expelled and not going to Hamilton after his senior year. And, of course, it took all of us, our flaws and our desires. My hunger for power, which I will get to next. It was all in it, in our story, like the ingredients to a complicated recipe.
I remember the day Emma found out about Hunter being expelled and his admission to Hamilton being placed on hold. She came to my room, where I was doing homework, and threw herself spread eagle on my bed, something she rarely did. I was always going to her room, barging in, begging to be let in, sneaking in. She came to my room only in the night, sometimes when she needed to say things she could not say to any other human being because they were ugly things—things that came from anger or sadness or fear. Emma could not tolerate anyone thinking she was ugly, inside or out, and she knew that I could never see her as anything less than beautiful.
Ha-ha!
She said that a few times and with total glee.
That little prick. That weenie. He thought he could get away with anything. But he was wrong.
She told me what had happened, and I could not believe it. Not because Hunter didn’t do things like that but because he had seemed to me to be invincible—one of those people death would never take, no matter how many bad things he did or how much he deserved it. It seemed to defy logic that he was going to get what he deserved.
I am going to make him suffer. He thought what he did to me in St. Barts was bad. Just wait! Everyone in this town is going to know what happened. He’s going to have to walk around with a bag over his head!
Emma was good for her word. She told everyone she knew—and she knew a lot of people. Hunter didn’t have a chance to spin it, and when he came home the following night, social media was already buzzing about his fall.
Her next move was to be sympathetic, to be his only salvation from the emotional turmoil he was suffering. Water in his desert. But, of course, she was not trying to make him feel better. No one feels good when they need to take a sip of water from their archenemy.
You know what’s like salt in a wound like this one? Being nice. It makes the person feel pitiful because you are giving them pity.
She gave Hunter a lot of pity that summer. She started hanging out with him again, at the house, and out in town. Parties and dinners and walks. She started watching movies with him again. And slowly she moved closer to him on the couch, and in every other way, really, inch by inch by inch.
I don’t know if Hunter was being clever or if this thing with his expulsion and Hamilton College had broken his spirit. But he was now acting like a puppy dog, lapping that hot desert water from Emma’s hands, and Emma mistook it for victory.
Mr. Martin gave him the silent treatment. I don’t think he even looked at Hunter the whole summer. He and my mother went out a lot, and they even went away on trips. When they were gone, I would go to my father’s house. But Emma would stay there with Hunter. This made my father very sad. And very concerned. Even Witt was worried about her.
My mother was in heaven. Mr. Martin had been weakened by the failure of his son, the failure festering on him like a large open wound. He moaned randomly throughout the day as if the thought of what had happened was pouncing upon him and taking him by surprise, causing him more pain than he could bear without some kind of verbal expression. My mother would stroke his back and look at him lovingly. And he would rest his head on her head and hold her tight and tell her how much he loved her.
Like Emma, she gave him pity. She stopped all talk of college in front of him, saving those conversations for secret meetings with Emma behind closed doors. Mrs. Martin was acting toward Mr. Martin the way Emma was acting toward Hunter, and I think they both knew it. Maybe they even talked about it and had strategy sessions in the kitchen when they closed the door or while I was away at my father’s house. Their bond grew stronger as they tended to their wounded men and soaked up whatever power they could from it.
It was strange. The cold war and the hot war between Hunter and Emma had somehow become a war of subterfuge and secret agents. Emma’s secret vindictive self pretending to be Hunter’s friend, and Hunter’s jealous, angry self pretending to have forgiven Emma for telling everyone about his expulsion and rejection. There were times when I thought the war was really over and all of this was in my imagination. But it was not. It far from being over.
*
My father was devastated after they found the island but did not find Emma. We had all gathered at Mrs. Martin’s house to wait for the news. Mrs. Martin stayed in bed, and Mr. Martin was still in New York, so it was just me and my father in the living room when an officer from the state police came inside to tell us. He had just gotten a call from the Bureau. My father cried, but also paced the living room, pulling at his hair with both hands.
“Don’t you see! He took her! He took her again!”
He got on the phone with a desk agent in New Haven, pleaded with them to step up the search, now that Bill and Lucy had been pried loose from their hiding place.
“It’s just like a nest of cockroaches! They scatter and run but that’s when you can find them because they don’t know where to go, they have no nest to return to! This is the time to find those monsters, while they’re still running in broad daylight!”