Page 58 of Golden Girl
Should she do it?
“Let me buy you a drink,” she says.
“All set,” he says, holding up a Miller Lite.
At that second, a little blonde in a Lilly Pulitzer shift dress grabs Marshall’s hand. “Let’s dance.” She turns and sees Carson. “Hey, boo,” she says and Carson resists the urge to smack her. “Sorry, he’s mine tonight.”
Marshall shrugs and lets the pipsqueak pull him through the crowd.
Carson has no right to feel rejected—Marshall asked her out; she turned him down and threw away his number—but she does. He was looking good and felt exactly like what she needed, and she lost him to a blond chew toy.
She waits a second to see if Marshall will come back. When he doesn’t, she turns to leave. Some guy grabs her ass on the way out and Carson is so dejected, she can’t even be bothered to hiss at him.
Back in her Jeep, she checks her phone. Nothing from Zach. He’s definitely sleeping. Well, he needs to wake up. She texts again:WYD?There’s no response. There isn’t going to be a response; he’s asleep. He won’t answer his cell and she can’t call the house.
She decides to do a drive-by; it’s on her way home. She eases around the small rotary, on the lookout for the police. The way her night is going, she’ll probably get pulled over and given a Breathalyzer. She takes Hooper Farm down to Parker and turns right off Parker onto Gray Avenue. The Bridgeman house is set back from the road about a hundred yards. It’s gambrel-style and has a detached garage with a small apartment upstairs, where Zach’s son, Peter, now lives. Peter is away at camp. He’s been going since he was eight years old, and now he’s the head counselor. Zach says that Peter fits in at the camp in a way he never fit in at Nantucket High School. Carson has heard way too much about the trials and tribulations of raising a teenager, considering that Carson is practically one herself.
She pulls over into the parking spot of the deserted horse barn across the street. From here, she has a clear view of the house, which is dark except for the porch light and a light over the garage door. Carson is tempted to knock on the front door or throw pebbles at Zach’s window. She looks at her phone again. Nothing.
The heart is a lonely hunter,she thinks. Her namesake, Carson McCullers, had at least that much right.
She leans back in her seat and closes her eyes. What is shedoing?And how, oh, how, did shegethere?
The affair started the previous November. Carson enrolled in a bartending class in South Boston. She would stay in Savannah’s town house in Back Bay; Savannah was doing fieldwork for her charity in Dakar, so Carson would have the place to herself. She had recently turned twenty-one and was ready for city life. She planned to run along the Charles, grab coffee from Thinking Cup, choose a museum or an outing for each afternoon, go to her bartending class, then eat out every night. She made a list of restaurants: Pammy’s, Mistral, Area Four.
She was flying from Nantucket to Boston on Cape Air on a nine-person Cessna. Zach Bridgeman was also on her flight. When Carson saw him in the terminal, she waved and he waved back and smiled. She wondered if she had to go over and say hello or if she could just sit down and get lost in her music. The Bridgemans—Zach, Pamela, Peter—were now related to Carson through Willa. Seeing Zach was like seeing a distant uncle or a cousin twice removed.
She thought it was good luck when she was assigned the seat behind Zach on the plane because there would be no need for conversation. As they were boarding the plane, they exhausted their only topic of conversation—where they were going. Zach was going to an air traffic control conference at the Boston Harbor Hotel. (“Oooh,” Carson said, genuinely impressed. “Fancy.”) Carson told Zach that she was taking a bartending class and staying in Savannah’s town house on Marlborough Street. (“I should have been a bartender at some point,” Zach said. “That has always felt like something I missed.”) Carson was reminded then that Zach was friendly and kind. Carson steered clear of Pamela because she could be confrontational and negative. She likely would have told Carson to go back to school, get her degree, and make something of herself.
The plane hit weather somewhere south of Boston—Plymouth, maybe. Carson always tried to pick landmarks out on the ground to mark their progress, but all she could tell before they hit the squall was that they were somewhere over Route 3. The plane bounced around and the rain sounded like gravel hitting the window. They were “in the cotton ball”—all Carson could see out the window was dense, dark cloud. The woman sitting behind the pilot reached for her barf bag. Carson was unconcerned. It was kind of fun, actually, like an amusement-park ride.
Sure enough, the plane emerged from the clouds into clear sky, the ground once more visible beneath them. Carson saw the skyline of Boston in the distance. Everyone relaxed.
The pilot turned east, out over the water.
Carson was jolted awake when the plane slammed down so hard that Carson thought they must have landed—but no, they were still in the air, back in the cotton ball. The turbulence was unlike any Carson had ever experienced. It felt like the plane was a cup of dice God was shaking. Carson’s bag flew forward, the man to her left lost his file folders, the woman in the front seat puked again. The plane tipped sideways and went into a nosedive. They were plummeting and bouncing; Carson watched the pilot fight the wheel to raise the nose.
The plane was going down. They were going to die. She reached forward and, almost involuntarily, grabbed Zach’s hand.
“It’s okay,” he said. “He’ll get us down. And if I see him get in real trouble, I’ll assist. I can land this plane.”
Carson was only somewhat comforted by this. She bent her head forward against Zach’s seat back and let a stream of profanities fly. She thought of her mother, her father, her brother, and her poor sister, who had just miscarried for the second time. They would never recover. But that was only part of Carson’s anxiety. The real meat of her fear was that she was so young and would never get to do so many of the things she wanted to—live alone for three weeks in the city, eat at Pammy’s, get her bartending certificate so she could be a boss at the Oystercatcher the following summer. She wanted to travel to London at Christmastime, ride a motorbike across Thailand, see Serena Williams play in the Australian Open. She wanted to earn enough money to buy a little speedboat that she could take over to Coatue whenever she wanted. She had just turned twenty-one and had a lifetime of drinks to legally buy. She wanted to fall in love. Getting married and having children and sending out an annual Christmas card with her family’s names printed in script across the bottom held zero appeal, but she liked the idea that someday she would find a man to be both friend and lover. So far, her men had been either one or the other.
The plane tilted so far to the left that Carson was afraid it would start to spin.
Zach said, “We’ve caught the edge of a funnel cloud.”
“A tornado?” Carson said. She could feel how unstable the air was around them. She was holding on to Zach’s fingers so tightly that she feared she might break them, and yet she could not let go. His wedding ring, made from a dark metal, pressed into her skin.
The man who had lost his file folders was saying a prayer in Spanish.
“Fix this,” Carson said to Zach. “Can you?”
The plane was rumbling like a truck over a bumpy road and bouncing not only up and down but sideways as well. The woman up front was crying. The pilot punched buttons and moved levers; Carson could see his lips moving. He was talking to the control tower in Boston.
“I think he’s got it,” Zach said—but just then the plane dropped and everyone was bounced out of his or her seat. Carson’s head grazed the ceiling. She started crying, too, and praying. She saw her life end in fiery ruins or in a drowning when they crashed into the ocean.Please God, let this end. I’ll go back to school, I’ll study, I’ll contribute to society, I’ll be a good person, I’ll win citizenship awards.
Suddenly the runway appeared in front of them, and the plane, although still wobbly, headed right for it. The plane lowered. They were going to land.
