In the morning Jamey jogs. He runs like an athlete—light and unerring. The road cuts into the rocky coast over the ocean. The sea throws up plumes of water—viciously cold.
No one’s here this time of year except caretakers: often alcoholic friends of the family who can’t handle society, who hide and take care of mansions and animals.
He knows every family on this route. The Galloways over there have albino peacocks. The birds usually strut by the old eggplant-purple Mercedes, maybe because they’re narcissists and they like their dull reflection in the paint.
Here’s the pale-gray castle where the widow Rutherford, last of her line, throws bridge parties and grand dinners at the age of eighty-six. She remembers Jamey whenever he takes his turn greeting her, small as a girl in a wicker throne shaded by lilacs and robins.
The Tennyson house, blocked by tall privet hedges, was the site of a sad birthday party. Jane Tennyson was turning twelve, and her best friend, Eileen Choward, dove into the shallow end and broke her neck, paralyzed for life. Jamey still thinks about these two girls, almost every day, and he doesn’t know why.
He runs by Sarah Stanhope’s house, his best friend in their early summers. They traded books at the beach club. Now she wears gold bracelets and a topknot, and he thought for a while she’d be the person to love. At a wedding on St. John’s, they tried it, while jasmine-spiked moonlight leaked through the window, and drunk guests squealed on the beach, but he felt like he was kissing his sister.
His hair is damp and cold as he runs on the cliff.
He runs past the pier where he’s launched and docked many a sailboat. This is where family and friends have evening drinks, sitting in captains chairs on the wharf, smoking, having wandered down in loafers from their homes with their own drinks in their own glasses.
Jamey often sailed alone, and they all got quiet when he approached to dock the boat. Jamey was the promised child and the cursed child. The sun would set through his sail as he got close, and he would loose the mainsail to luffing by turning the bow into the wind, and make a perfect landing.
They always helped tie her up.
His young body was intended for sailing—he moved like a cat on a hot roof—he looked to his relatives as they exchanged rope, and his uncle or second cousin bent to cleat the line with one hand while holding a scotch in the other, and no one looked back at him.
It wasn’t a cruel silence. They were all just waiting. Jamey continued growing, changing, his mother’s otherness maybe showing in his skin, in his full mouth, his elegance. He should be the family legacy, and they want him to properly and exclusively claim his Hyde blood. They don’t shun him. They just don’t know what to do with him yet. Someone offers him a hand off the boat. He takes it, steps to the dock, letting the boat gently rock behind him. Atta boy, someone says.
He starts to become aware now as he runs, conscious of his moving parts, of the unlikelihood they’ll continue to interact. Synchronicity ends.
In a class last month, the professor conducted an experiment by telling students not to think of a white bear for five minutes. To suppress that image. And then to record how often they thought of the white bear.
Not only did Jamey think of the white bear a hundred times in five minutes, he thought of it for the rest of class. Then the rest of the day. Then that night. The white bear sits in his head now, like Jamey’s skull is a circus ring and there’s no ringmaster. The bear cracks a whip and grins with yellow teeth.
When Jamey gets back to the house, he pulls off his sneakers, wet with sand, walks quietly through the rooms.
He finds Elise in a bedroom, bending over a vanity table where many girls have cut bangs and tried on their aunts’ earrings and whispered and squabbled.
She’s looking in a jewelry box.
He wonders what’s in her pockets. The second he suspects her, a phantom hand—his own—slaps his face.
“Hey.” She smiles.
“Hey.”
“How was your run?”
“Fine.” He looks at her.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing. What are you doing?”
“Looking for a safety pin to hold my stupid bra together,” she says.
“Oh. Yeah, there might be one in there.”
He wonders, as he showers, if she heard the real question: What do you think you’re going to find?
He doesn’t really know her; it’s his right to speculate. Isn’t it? She’s a stranger.
As he towels dry, looking at a Dior perfume bottle next to a conch shell on the glass shelf, he thinks of a scene at his dad’s place in the city, years ago. Alex was yelling at a housekeeper, who’d brought her daughter along that day. The girl was ten or eleven. She’d taken a perfume bottle off a dresser and the cook had caught her hiding in the pantry and trying it on.
“I don’t care that she gave it back—she gave it back because she got caught,” Alex was saying to her mother.
The girl looked up and Jamey didn’t want to see the poor thing’s eyes; he expected humiliation. He was surprised to see pinwheels of pure hatred spinning in her face.
Photographs line the walls of a hallway. Jamey stands behind Elise as she looks, and he wonders—Do I really want her to understand all this?
“That’s you!” she says, pointing to a kid in a Brooks Brothers blazer by a Christmas tree.
“Yeah, in Palm Beach.”
“And this one! Look at you, so skinny,” she says of Jamey—he’s alone in a bathing suit, his body painted with the cobalt shadow of blooming rhododendrons. Braces and a pale chest—even at his most awkward, he was awkward with grace. It’s funny that, grown-up now, groomed and charming enough, he still identifies most with that boy, with that photo, with that moment of gloom and radiance, possibility—and solitude.
He watches her scan pictures, sees her realize the woman in the snapshot there is Nancy Reagan, and that it was taken in the dining room of this house. Elise doesn’t say anything.
His dad as a prep-schooler in a rowing shell, his grandmother on a Technicolor golf course. Many weddings, but not Jamey’s parents’.
“Where’s your mom?”
“Nowhere,” he says. “According to them, she never existed.”
Adults on a sailboat, laughing, off a blindingly white beach. Square-jawed women in gowns with baby-faced men in tuxedos at balls in Manhattan, Boston, London. Children on a ski slope, black trees in the background. Newborns, eyes looking glassily from a bassinet.