When she is allowed to go to the cafeteria—only long enough to stand in line and get her food, with Ms. Brudie as an escort—Ainsley declines. She can’t bear the idea of what people will say to her or about her. By now, news of her reversal of fortune will be everywhere. It’s possible—likely, even—that her friends have defended her and possibly even spoken to teachers and the administration in protest. It won’t do any good, but it makes Ainsley feel a little better when she imagines it.
The bathroom, however, can’t be avoided. Ainsley waits until the last possible minute, but then she has to go. She stands and taps on the door. There isn’t a clock in the room, so Ainsley has no idea what time it is; all she knows is that it is after lunch.
Ms. Brudie sets down her book—she’s reading Dostoyevsky, which must be a joke or a prop—and writes Ainsley a pass for the bathroom. “You have five minutes before I come hunting you down,” Ms. Brudie says. “Use the bathroom outside room one-oh-seven. It’s the closest.”
She won’t lie: when she is in the hallway alone, Ainsley feels like running away. Out the door of the school, all the way home, never to return. She will be a tenth-grade high school dropout. She wends her way out of the dimly lit corridors to the main part of the school and finds a clock. It’s only 12:50; there’s still an hour and a half to go. Ainsley hurries to the girls’ room across from room 107, then she realizes that room 107 is her chem class. She looks in the open door of the classroom—they’re in lab—and catches Emma’s eye. Ainsley doesn’t know what she expects. An apology, some sign of contrition or desperation. Maybe Dutch forced Emma to say what she did; maybe he threatened to send her to a convent or even hurt her. But what Emma does is unexpected.
She gives Ainsley the finger.
TABITHA
Eleanor is a demanding and finicky patient. After she is released from the hospital, she and Tabitha repair to the town house on Pinckney Street, a place Tabitha had adored growing up but that now feels stale and glum. The house has a layer of dust throughout; there is a lavish bouquet in the niche in the entryway—a weekly delivery from Winston’s for as long as Tabitha can remember—that has died and browned to a crisp.
“Mother,” Tabitha says, “we need to bring Felipa up here with us. I won’t be your nurse and your maid.”
Eleanor sniffs.
“Or we can hire someone new,” Tabitha says.
“Heavens, no,” Eleanor says. “I can’t have a complete stranger seeing me like this.”
This is also Eleanor’s excuse for not hiring a nurse.
“I’ll call Felipa,” Tabitha says. “She’ll be here tomorrow.”
Eleanor has an actual bell—an antique she inherited from her great-grandmother, who was a member of Boston society and a friend of Isabella Stewart Gardner—that she rings when she wants Tabitha to adjust her pillows or find Law & Order on the TV (Eleanor loves Law & Order, which is convenient, as the show pretty much plays twenty-four hours a day). Tabitha brings Eleanor fresh ice water, portions out her pain meds, and makes three trips a day to the Paramount on Charles Street—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Tabitha would complain about this, but it gives her a chance to get outside. It’s June, and the city is experiencing the most beautiful days of the year. The Common is lush and leafy. New mothers are out with their baby carriages, and there are skateboarders and bikers and joggers with their sinewy muscles; college girls in Ray-Bans and ponytails bob along, talking on their phones: like like like. Carefree. When Tabitha goes to fetch lunch for Eleanor, she ambles through the Boston Public Garden; she can always blame the delay on the Paramount’s perpetual line. The garden is in full bloom—iris, peonies, roses. The pond is clear and clean, and the swan boats paddle along with barely a ripple.
Tabitha’s childhood here had been storybook in many ways. Eleanor had taken Tabitha and Harper to the Boston Ballet to see The Nutcracker, to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Renoir exhibition, and Billy had season tickets at Fenway. As a family, they had a regular table at Marliave on Friday nights because Eleanor loved the Welsh rabbit; they brunched on Sundays at Harvest in Cambridge. Tabitha first got drunk at a party in Grays Hall after the Head of the Charles regatta her sophomore year in high school and late that night puked at the feet of the John Harvard statue.
Her Boston pedigree is impeccable in its details, but after so many years on Nantucket, she now feels like a visitor—and, under present circumstances, a captive.
But she has no choice. She must care for Eleanor. When Harper calls with the news of Ainsley’s suspension, however, Tabitha announces she’s returning home.
“Please don’t,” Harper says. “It won’t change anything. Ainsley is experiencing some pretty wicked backlash from her friends at school, and unfortunately this is my area of expertise. Being ostracized.”
Tabitha is ashamed at how relieved she feels at being let off the hook. She is livid at Ainsley—she hates thinking that her daughter is capable of an act so stupid and cruel—but neither can she bear to think of Ainsley suffering at the hands of the other kids. She sends Ainsley a text.
Tabitha: You okay?
Ainsley: What do you care?
Tabitha: I’m still your mother.
Ainsley: So?
Tabitha: So I love you.
Ainsley: Whatever, Tabitha.
Tabitha reads this exchange over again and again until tears blur her eyes. She wants to go back to Nantucket and shake her daughter—or hug her. But she tells herself that the way to be the best parent right now is to stay away. If Tabitha were to walk in the house and take back the reins, Ainsley would do something even more destructive than she’s already done. Tabitha is sure of it.
Deliverance shortly arrives in the person of Tabitha’s aunt Flossie, Eleanor’s sister, from Palm Beach.
Flossie is a firecracker. She’s eight years younger than Eleanor, but she looks and acts like she’s Tabitha’s age. She is a self-declared trophy wife, married to an eighty-five-year-old descendant of Henry Flagler. She plays tennis, she shops, she lunches, and, in the winters, she works three days a week at the Eleanor Roxie-Frost boutique on Worth Avenue.
When Flossie arrives at the town house on Pinckney Street, she apologizes for not coming sooner. “I was on a cruise when you called, and then when I got home, I still didn’t want to come. Boston is depressing, and my sister is a bitch on her best day. But then I thought about you. No one should be subjected to Eleanor like this. You’ve done enough, Pony.” She makes a shooing motion with her hand. “I hereby set you free.”
Tabitha goes up to her room to pack her things to go home—but then she remembers that she and Harper have a deal.
The thought is not unappealing: she will go to the Vineyard.
HARPER