Summer People (23 page)

Marcus stood in the doorway of the bathroom. His voice was gravelly. “You’ve been wanting to kick me like that since the first day here,” he said to Garrett. “And I’ve been wanting to punch you for wanting to kick me. Because I, myself, have done nothing wrong. I am not a criminal. All I did was show up. Because your father invited me.
Arch Newton
invited me.”

Everyone was quiet. Beth opened the medicine cabinet and hunted for bandages. God, how she wished she could just keep the kids separated—locked in their own rooms like jail cells, like cages at the zoo.
This is too much!
she wanted to shout, loud enough so that Arch could hear her.
This is too much for me to deal with alone!

“It doesn’t matter what happened,” she said. “I want you kids to get along. For my sake. This is the hardest summer any of us will ever have. The name-calling has to stop. The fighting is unacceptable. If Arch were here … frankly, I can’t imagine what he would think.”

“If Dad were here,” Garrett said, “none of this would be happening.”

“Well, he’s
not
here,” Beth said. “He’s not here and so we have to deal as best we can without him. We
have to deal.
”

Winnie glared at Garrett. “Why can’t you just leave us alone? God, I could kill you!”

“Winnie!” Beth said.

“I’m sorry,” Garrett said. He was suddenly exhausted, and his longing for Piper was worse than ever. He wouldn’t be surprised if she never wanted to see him again. He was a mean, evil person and his head hurt. And his foot hurt from where he’d kicked Marcus, like maybe he’d broken a toe against Marcus’s chest.

“I’m sorry, too,” Marcus said. He snatched a bandage for his foot.
They all think I’m just like her.
He limped back to his room, thinking what he was really sorry about was that he would never get to touch Winnie again, never get to hold her while she slept.

Winnie went back to her room to sweep up the pieces of the lamp. Sniffling, because this was her fault.

Beth put ointment and a small bandage on the cut under Gar-rett’s eye. “Oh, Garrett,” she said. When she first walked into Winnie’s bedroom and saw Garrett bleeding and Marcus looming over him, she thought … well, she thought Marcus had attacked him, and her instincts were to protect her son. But now, she faced a feeling ten times worse: her son was the bully. Her own child was bringing this pain down on his own head.

Garrett missed his girlfriend. Then he missed his father. Then he missed himself—the happy, good-natured person he used to be. He couldn’t even thank his mother for nursing his wounds. He hobbled back to his bedroom; outside, the wind groaned. He deserved to die in his sleep.

Garrett spent the next few days hiding in his room, emerging only for meals. His right eye was swollen shut and mottled purple and green, and his mother, taking pity on him, bought him a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol for the pain. Marcus had a lump on his windpipe and a bruise the size of an egg on his chest. Winnie had broken an antique lamp—the only valuable thing in the whole house if you believed what Beth said. Horizon took on a cautious hush, like a hospital where everyone suffered from hurt feelings.

By the time Garrett’s face resumed its normal shape and color, it was the fifteenth. He woke up on that morning in a panic. He didn’t know when or how Piper was arriving on-island, and he certainly couldn’t ask David. He considered staking out the house on his bike, but that was psycho, and since he was finished with psycho behavior, he decided his only alternative was to sit home and wait.

Which was pure torture, a hell unimaginable—far, far worse than waiting for Piper when she was off-island was waiting for Piper when she was on-island, or might be. The key was to keep busy, and so Garrett joined Marcus and Winnie at the beach. They looked surprised to see him, but they didn’t get up and leave, though he wouldn’t have blamed them if they did. He swam for the first time all summer and the water felt great. He bodysurfed in the waves until his nose stung and his lungs ached and then he headed up to the house and made sandwiches for everyone, including Marcus, who said it was delicious after the first bite.

After lunch, Garrett started to read the third book on his summer reading list,
Animal Dreams,
by Barbara Kingsolver. A
chick
book, he realized after twenty pages, something added to the list to appease all of the neo-feminist girls in Garrett’s class. He put the book down, incredulous that the reading list should be so ill-suited to his tastes, and he checked the clock for the very first time that day. Two-thirty. Garrett went to the front door and looked down the long stretch of dirt road that led to their house. No Piper. He tried to be rational. She would either ride her bike or have David drop her off as soon as she got home. And it was Sunday, so David wouldn’t be working. Garrett stood at the door for a long time, long enough to feel desperation seeping into his skin. Garrett hopped on his bike and rode to Piper’s house, just as he promised himself he wouldn’t.

He cruised by the house, checking for clues. The yard was empty, thank God, since the worst thing, which Garrett hadn’t considered until he sailed past, would have been David out mowing the lawn. But no, the house looked quiet; both of David’s vehicles were in the driveway. Which meant what? Either Piper was already home or not home yet.

It’s fruitless to speculate.

Garrett rode out to Cisco Beach, then back home. It was 3:30.

When she still hadn’t appeared at seven o’clock, he began to feel sick. Sick like he had stomach cancer and was dying. He told Beth he wanted to skip dinner—they were going out for dinner, she said, to Bluefin for sushi, didn’t Garrett remember? No, he answered, he didn’t recall hearing anything about it, and besides sushi would make him hurl. His mother and Winnie and Marcus left without him, which was just as well. He wanted to die in peace.

At eight o’clock, he stood on the small deck of his room and prayed:
Please let her still love me. Please.

At nine o’clock, there was a noise downstairs and Garrett, who was lying in bed listlessly reading his chick book, jumped to his feet. But it was his mom and Winnie and Marcus, back from dinner.

“We brought you some food!” Beth called out.

Despite his deep agitation, he was hungry, and solitude had proved to be more excruciating than company, so he decided to go down and eat. It was fruitless to speculate, he told himself. Maybe Piper had been forced into staying another day, maybe she missed her flight or lost her ticket and was stranded in Hyan-nis. Maybe she decided she didn’t love him after all.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, his mother was standing there, and then the front door opened and Piper stepped in. For a second, Garrett didn’t know what to do or think. He was transported to a state of elation and relief that was beyond anything he’d ever felt. Tears blurred his eyes.

“Mrs. Newton?” Piper said. “I know it’s late, but is it okay if Garrett and I go for a walk on the beach?”

Garrett wondered why Piper was calling his mother “Mrs. Newton,” when before she’d always just called her Beth. Beth may have been asking herself the same thing, but she just said, “Sure. Of course.”

Piper walked down the hallway, through the kitchen, and out onto the deck without acknowledging Garrett in any way. Gar-rett spied the plastic container of jewel-colored sushi on the kitchen table, but his hunger had vanished. All he wanted was to be at the beach, alone, with Piper.

Piper descended the stairs to the beach in a hurry. She was practically running, and because it was so dark, Garrett worried she might trip. But he understood her instincts—to get to the beach as quickly as possible, where they could be alone.

When they reached the beach, Piper jogged to the left. Gar-rett ran after her.

“Hey, where are you going?”

Finally, she looked at him. Her nose ring was back in place, and Garrett took this as a positive sign. “I want to get away from the house,” she said. “Far away.”

She wanted to make love, then, on the beach. Garrett allowed himself a joyful yelp as he raced after her. And then she stopped, and he was able to gather her up in his arms.

“I love you,” he said.

She raised her eyes to him. Her long hair spilled over the shoulders of her jean jacket.

“Let’s sit down, Garrett.” Her breath smelled like cigarettes; she’d gone back to smoking, then, while she was away. But Gar-rett decided not to say anything about it.
You love me, too, right?
he wanted to ask.

“I missed you so much,” he said. “It damn near killed me to be without you for so long.”

She sighed. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “Something big and you’re not going to like it.” She plopped down in the sand and pulled him down next to her.

She was going to break up with him. She went away and decided that she didn’t love him after all. Here, then, was his punishment for attacking Marcus, for being a person so unlike his father that it was hard to believe they were related. Garrett took her hand. “What’s going on?”

Piper fell back onto her elbows as if the weight of her news was too much to bear sitting up. “My mother and I had a long talk while I was over there. A lot of long talks. I told her all about you. I told her your name.”

“Yeah?” Garrett said. “That’s good, right?”

“She knows you’re Beth Newton’s son, Beth Eyler’s son.”

“That pisses her off?”

Piper squeezed his hand so hard he thought she might break his fingers. “There was a reason why my dad didn’t want me to tell my mom your name.”

“What reason is that?” Garrett asked.

“They were married.”

“Who?”

“Our parents.”

Garrett was confused. Piper sounded so grave, and well, so horrified.

“Of course our parents were married,” he said. “They’re our parents.”

“No, Garrett,” she said. “My father, David Ronan, was married to your mother, Beth Eyler. In 1979. They were married for two weeks before your mother filed for divorce. They were
married,
Garrett. This is a huge secret they’ve been keeping from us our whole lives.”

Garrett wanted to tell Piper she was nuts, off her rocker. There was no way that what she said was true. “Did you … ask … your dad?”

She nodded. “Affirmative.”

“Did he have an explanation?”

“An explanation that took three hours and kept us from eating dinner. Do you want to hear it?”

“No,” Garrett said. Could it be true? he thought. His own mother married to David.

“Not only did they keep it from us,” Piper said. “But my dad said, he
said,
Beth told him that your father didn’t even know.”

“My father didn’t know?”

“That’s what Dad said.”

Garrett felt heavy and cold, like a piece of petrified wood. His mother had been married before, married to David, and nobody knew. Arch had been kept in the dark with Garrett and Winnie, dragged along to Nantucket each and every summer, oblivious to what had happened in their mother’s youth.

“What are you going to do?” Piper said.

“I don’t know. What are you going to do?”

“Aside from never trust my father again, you mean?”

“Yeah, aside from that.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Maybe we should run away and get married ourselves,” Gar-rett said. “They couldn’t stop us.”

“No,” Piper said. “They couldn’t.”

In the middle of the night, there was a knock on Winnie’s bedroom door, and she assumed it was Marcus, although he swore that after the scene with Garrett, he’d never, ever come to her room in the middle of the night again.

“Come in?” she whispered.

The door opened. Winnie was crushed and indignant when she saw that the person staring at her through the darkness was not Marcus, but her twin brother, who these days ranked right up there with the biggest jerks she’d ever met.

“What do you want?” she demanded. “He’s not here, as you can see, though it wouldn’t be any of your damn business if he were.”

Garrett sat at the foot of the bed. Winnie rolled away to give him room, though she didn’t summon the energy to sit up.