Page 13 of Dead of Summer
While she laid it out, Orla had taken a Twizzler and chewed on it quietly. The more Alice spoke of it all, the more real moving away became, and the more it secretly scared her. At that age it was hard for her to think about leaving the safety of the island to go somewhere big and unfamiliar like New York. Sensing her hesitancy, Alice turned her head toward Orla, looking at her over the comforter.
“You know who else lives in New York,” she’d said, a devilish grin on her lips. Orla’s heart had stretched anxiously under her ribs.
She felt her face flush. “Stop it.”
“A very rich young man named David Clarke,” she’d said, evoking Orla’s massive crush, the one that had lasted all the way from the first time they’d met him at the beach at the end of sixth grade. That kept Orla waiting to see him summer after summer. “He’ll be in his second year by then. Maybe at Columbia, isn’t that where he said he was applying if his dad let him?”
Of course, Orla already knew that David lived in New York; Orla memorized information about David the way other kids did with celebrities or sports teams. She knew that David preferred dogs to cats, that he had watched every Adam Sandler movie ever made multiple times. She knew his favorite food was rigatoni Bolognese from Arturo’s restaurant. And of course, she knew that he lived in a limestone Upper East Side town house just a few blocks from the Met.
The idea of being close to David Clarke made Orla’s skin prickle. Alice twirled the licorice suggestively around her ring finger.
“You could go see David Clarke whenever you want to if you lived there,” she said in a singsongy voice. Though they both knew it wasn’t exactly true. What Alice really meant was that if Orla lived in New York, she could see David wheneverhewanted her to. But the proximity was enough of an incentive to warm her up to Alice’s grand plan for them.
Alice, on the other hand, wasn’t concerned with local boy crushes; she wanted an adventure. She’d been extra full of restless energy in what would end up being the last year of her life. Sometimes Orla had trouble knowing which of Alice’s plans were realistic and what was a fantasy.
But either way, when it came down to it, what other better things did Orla have to do but to go along with them? And Orla had to admit that Alice’s vision of the two of them was tantalizing, like something out of a movie or a TV show. Real main character energy. Part of Orla always thought that they would ultimately return to Hadley. That somehow, the island was their destiny. How odd that she is here again, but stranger still is how Alice never left at all.
The air inside the house is cold as Orla drops the grocery bags on the kitchen counter. She leans over, putting her head into her hands. When she raises her head, she sees the Xanax bottle sitting tantalizingly on the counter. She picks it up and stares at it before knocking one of them out into her palm.
Orla knows that spending the summer here means she is going to have to face the pitying looks. And the familiar questions from those who are brave enough to ask, a sympathetic tone in their voice that doesn’t do much to cover their titillation.How are you holding up? Poor thing. What do you think made him do it? What do you think he did with the body? Didn’t they say she’d been spending time with him, alone?
That one made Orla seethe most of all. As though Alice had somehow seduced Henry Wright. As if Alice herself were to blame.
Orla had imagined the night Alice disappeared a million times over, playing out scenarios where her friend had survived. Where in another parallel life they were still able to go together to New York and everything had gone exactly as Alice had planned it for them. But how would a fifteen-year-old have survived on her own? How would she have managed to swim across a huge open sound with no one knowing? Whatever happened to her out in the water with Henry, there was nochance that Alice had come away from it. Orla’s fantasies of Alice having somehow made it through were only that, mixed with more than a little survivor’s guilt.
She opens the bottle and takes out another pill, swallowing it down with a swig of cold coffee. Soon there will be nothing more to tie any of her family to this place. They have all suffered enough. The very least Orla can do now is to free them from it.
HENRY
Henry hits the switch on an electric kettle, filthy with hardwater stains. Back when Margie was in her prime, she would never have allowed it to get so bad, he thinks with a flash of guilt, as he pulls a mug printed with a faded image of Hadley’s Osprey Point Lighthouse out of the dish drainer. He glances at the closed bedroom door and tries to make his footsteps lighter so as not to disturb her as he goes to the cupboard for the coffee canister.
Before things took a turn for the worse Margie was always keeping busy, bustling around the house sweeping nooks and crannies and wiping down the edges of things, her sturdy body fussing at the stove or shaking a rug off on the wraparound deck. Henry can still hear her faintly humming along to the radio, a little out of tune. He thought at the time that he could preserve them the way they were forever and keep them safe. That if they were on this rock nothing bad could ever touch them. He was oh so wrong.
Henry carries his mug across the living room past the full wall of windows that face the windward side of Hadley Island. They give him an unobstructed view from the pier in Port Mary all the way to the lighthouse perched on the end of a rocky cliff. Everything in between is within his purview. The telescope stands on its swivel in front of a broaddining table rendered unusable by its cover of newspapers and logbooks, old bills and an assortment of open charts.
Henry takes a long drink of coffee and bends down to look through the lens, noting that the ferry has arrived, disgorging a whole new crowd of tourists onto shore. They wander along the road into town, dispersing at the village, where they check into one of the B&Bs in the old Victorians off the main drag or move farther inland to various rental homes.
With a sharp jab in his chest, he moves the telescope once more to the Gallos’ house. Henry had studied the property this morning, looking for broken branches or soil upturned by footprints, but found nothing in the thick-knit foliage covering the house. He doesn’t know what he expects to see, but through the vines the house remains dark and quiet, the windows gray with dirt.
It must have been a trick of the mind that he saw there, a reflection in the glass cast from a fishing boat offshore. The O’Connors’ house is quiet today too. Maybe the whole thing was just a dream. He is tempted to go back to the entry in his logbook and scribble it out entirely. It would certainly ease some of the anxiety that has gripped him since he woke up.
Henry pans left, following the rocky shoreline until it gives way to the perfectly manicured sand in front of the Clarkes’ mansion. The staff have been preparing the house all week. He’s watched them anxiously zigzagging across the lawn, putting out deck chairs and skimming the leaves off the swimming pool’s surface. But now there is a row of black SUVs in the drive that weren’t there before. The family must have come in last night while he was asleep. The Clarkes are not people to take a ferry anywhere. A private plane is much more their style.
He pauses to make a note in his logbook.
3:14pm. The Clarkes have returned. Will be keeping a close eye on them.
When he goes back to the eyepiece of the telescope, David Clarke is stepping out onto the veranda, his phone pressed to his ear. He islean and tanned, his hair parted and combed into the same timeless, conservative style as his father’s. Henry finds this amusing. The young man has been quite literally groomed for the role. Since the day he was born David has had only one direction in life, which was straight in line behind his father. In business and in life. Margie would appreciate the observation. He’ll have to tell her when she wakes up.
The door behind David slides open and a woman comes out to stand next to him. The hem of her blue dress flutters in the wind as she leans toward him. David turns to her, putting his hand to her hip. Their heads bend together. Henry’s eyes strain as he watches her stand on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. She turns to the water and the sun catches her face. Henry’s heart lurches.Impossible.
A scraping sound nearby startles Henry away from the telescope. He looks out the window down at the small blue boat pulling up to his little weatherworn dock. Jean is throwing a rope over the side. She heaves the boat in, looping the rope around the mooring to secure it. She had been having trouble getting someone to cover for her at the Crab, but clearly, she took care of that. Henry doesn’t know what he’d do without her biweekly visits. She’s been their lifeline, the one connection they’ve had with the outside. Through the window he puts a hand up in greeting. She returns the gesture, squinting up at him.
As Marjorie’s younger sister, Jean has been providing for them for more than a decade, ever since the incident. She never let the town rumor mill sway her. Still, Henry is eternally grateful and more than a little bit mortified by her assistance. She unloads several paper bags of groceries from Danny’s Market onto the dock, then pulls herself out of the boat. He should go down and help. Henry starts toward the door and then at the last moment he rushes back across the room. He covers the logbook with a map and swivels the telescope up, pointing it toward the sky.I’m a stargazer, is what he’d say if anyone ever asked. Though no one ever has.
“Hi, Henry. How’s it been?” Jean bustles in, followed by a breath of ocean air. He takes the bags from her and walks them over to the counter.
“Fine, fine.” He pauses, eager to tell her about the O’Connor girl and the light he saw in the Gallos’ upstairs window. He’d like someone to reassure him. Of course, that might mean he has finally lost his mind out here and is seeing things, an equally worrying development. He stops himself. Jean has no idea about his hobby. Margie has always made sure of it.
