Page 21 of Songs of Summer

The estranged sisters had grown up in a different, smaller house from the one their parents later built catty-corner to Renee’s. Their childhood home was now inhabited by Ben and Addison Morse and their two daughters: a sweet family of four. Ben had been married to Renee’s other best friend, Julia, who had tragically passed away years earlier. Renee and Julia had been summer sisters, just as she and Bea had been when they were young. It was hard to believe how long ago it was that Julia died—over twelve years now—but that was a whole other story.

Bea grabbed the binoculars from Matt as Shep opened the front door and greeted his younger daughter with open arms. It was obvious from his expression and reaction that her arrival was not a surprise to him. Bea’s face contorted in anger.

“He set me up.”

“Matty, can you maybe go over there and do some investigative reporting?” his mom asked.

“Sure.” Matt looked at the two women. “You should come inside, though.”

“I’m not going anywhere till this is cleared up,” Bea insisted.

Her eyes were crazy and her tone erratic.Crazyanderraticwere not words one would normally use to describe Beatrix Silver. The roof may have been a bad idea, thought Matt, sharing a concerned look with Renee as he climbed back through the window.

Bea lay back down, staring at the clouds. Renee sensed she should leave her be—maybe give her time to come to her senses. She wondered if Bea was playing out in her head thethirty-year-old incident that had first come between her and Veronica, or the many unfortunate interactions—and missed interactions—that had since fueled their great divide. When they were young, Renee, as an only child, would sometimes feel jealous of Bea having a younger sister who worshipped her. She remembered Veronica as a sweet little kid, just happy to be included with the two older girls. She was always willing to be Skipper when they played Barbies or take the weird white-flavored Freeze Pop when there were only two blue raspberry or watermelon left. Things began to sour when Veronica became a teenager, until they famously imploded.

Renee knew the story by heart, as did most everyone on the island. Back in the summer of 1995, Beatrix had lost her virginity to the notorious lifeguard Chase Logan, and proceeded to fall head over heels. In her mind, it was much more than a summer fling between a college coed and a hot lifeguard. By the time July rolled into August, Bea was fantasizing about spending her life with Chase. She was sure it was true love. A couple of years older and wiser, Renee had warned her at the time that she was getting carried away, but she didn’t listen. She lay in bed at night dreaming of having his blond-haired, blue-eyed beach babies and raising them on Fire Island. She pictured herself teaching at the island’s only school, Woodhull Elementary, which served about forty kids from all over the island, while Chase did off-season construction for one of the local contractors. She imagined them having the perfect life, one that could only be dreamed up in the mind of a young woman in love for the first time, happy to ignore that there were more red flags with this lifeguard than you saw on the roughest day on the ocean.

As the August days waned, leaving everyone scratchingtheir heads over where the summer had gone, Beatrix had decided she wanted to give Chase something special to remind him of her over the winter. They hadn’t yet had that long-distance relationship conversation that she had heard couples have at summer’s end, and she figured that gifting him a token of her affection would be a good segue to “the talk.” She went to town to buy him a surfboard pendant on a leather rope, which had become the hot accessory on the island. The artist who created them, a New York City schoolteacher named Kenny Goodman, had recently opened a little shop that was quickly dubbed the Cartier of Fire Island. A constant presence at the beach and a man who knew everything and everyone, Kenny helped her choose one of his silver surfboard charms with a heart carved into it.

“I’d like to inscribe it,” she said.

“OK, to whom?” he asked.

When she told him, he looked at her funny and tried to dissuade her from having “B.S. C.L.” carved onto the face of the charm.

“It’s not returnable when you do that,” he warned. They went back and forth about it until Kenny gave in. The interaction was odd, Bea thought, but she had no idea why.

She wrote a beautiful card filled with her feelings and dreams for them both and set out to find Chase at the big end-of-year bonfire on the beach.

“Haven’t seen him,” his best friend told her.

“He went home,” the one kid who didn’t know the real deal informed her.

She practically skipped to his house in the next town. She was so excited to give him the necklace.

Ocean Beach was even more of a bungalow colony thanBay Harbor, with many of its small beach cottages dating back to the 1930s. Chase spent his summers in one such cottage with his mom and older brother. It was his grandmother’s house, but she’d been living in a nursing home on the mainland, close to where Chase and his family lived in the off-season.

Bea let herself in, which was common local practice, and headed right to his bedroom.

Beatrix was the last one to know that her sister was screwing her boyfriend. Yes, even Kenny Goodman had gotten word of the betrayal. She threw the necklace at him and ran from the house in tears. She never had the chance to confront her sister in person, because Veronica stayed away until Beatrix went back to college a few days later.

And that was officially the end of Bea and V.

Track 11

What’s Going On

Matt

Unlike Veronica, Matthad no problem walking right into Shep’s house. Shep was more of a grandfather to him than his own blood relations, and he knew Shep felt like Matt was family too.

“Matty boy!” he exclaimed, bringing him in for a hug.

While Matt would often stop into Shep’s house or his other neighbor, Ben’s, immediately on arriving on the island, he hadn’t this time. Truth was, after Dylan, Shep and Ben were Matt’s closest friends here. Age was irrelevant on Fire Island, where Matt’s bonds with Shep, a retired nonagenarian, and Ben, who was pushing fifty, didn’t seem odd.

Both Shep, Bay Harbor’s literal Greatest of All Time, and Ben, a sportswriter and author now with two kids of his own, had had a big effect on Matt’s path in life. He might not even have become a journalist if it weren’t for Ben’s mentorship.

Veronica swept down the stairs. Matt had little memory of meeting her in the past, but her reputation seemed on the money.

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