Elin Hilderbrand - Here’s to Us

Later, after dinner, Laurel stood on the front porch with Angie, Hayes, and JP. Angie was having a cigarette, and the rest of them were gazing up at the emerging stars. Buck was cleaning up in the kitchen, and Belinda had volunteered to go upstairs and read to Ellery.

“Well, it wasn’t pretty, but we survived,” Angie said. She crushed the butt of her cigarette against the sole of her clog. She turned to JP. “Thank you for having dinner with us.”

“Thank you for asking me,” JP said. “But I should get home.”

“I’ll walk you to the car,” Angie said.

Laurel and Hayes watched Angie and JP head down the porch stairs to the driveway.

“They would make a cute couple,” Laurel said. “Don’t you think?”

Hayes turned to her. “Mom,” he said. “I have a problem.”

“A problem?” she said.

“With drugs, I think?” Hayes said. His eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

Laurel led Hayes up the stairs. They went into his room, where Laurel closed and locked the door so that they wouldn’t be disturbed.

“I tried to be careful,” Hayes said. He was openly crying now, her handsome, accomplished son, so worldly, so sophisticated, the same little towhead that she tucked into this bed after a long day of sun and sand, half-asleep before his head even hit the pillow.

She let him cry in her lap. She stroked his hair, which was how she used to comfort Deacon.

“What is it?” she asked. “What are you addicted to?”

“Heroin,” he said. “It was an accident, Mom.”

Heroin, Laurel thought. She closed her eyes.

Belinda read Ellery a picture book called A Penny for Barnaby. In the book, Barnaby Bear is on Nantucket and doesn’t want to leave… so he follows the old tradition of throwing a penny off the side of the ferry as it passes Brant Point Lighthouse, to ensure his safe return.

Belinda was Barnaby: she didn’t want to leave.

She lay next to Ellery in the gathering dark and tried to recall her own self as a little girl. She had been skinny with red hair and freckles, intent on learning how to do a one-handed cartwheel and then an aerial; she had practiced after school in the field behind her backyard. She had been obsessed with TV, which her mother called “the boob tube.” Belinda watched I Dream of Jeannie, and That Girl, and The Partridge Family, and she dreamed of being like Barbara Eden, Marlo Thomas, Susan Dey. Then, in high school, she and her girlfriends Judie and Joanne Teffeteller, identical twins, used to spot one another for backflips. It was their dream to become cheerleaders for the Iowa Hawkeyes. Belinda worked the soda counter at Pearson’s Drug Store after school. She wore a polyester dress and a name tag and a hairnet. The soda counter served sandwiches-tuna salad, ham and pickle, chicken salad, and egg salad-and single-serving Campbell’s soup cans that came shooting out of a dispenser when Belinda pulled on the arm. She worked every day except for Thursday; on Thursdays, she and the Teffeteller twins went to the movies. It had been raining, she remembered, on the afternoon they went to see Ordinary People. It had been the first movie to break Belinda’s heart, and she had sat in the theater long after the twins had left to have burgers at the Fieldhouse, reflecting on what she’d just seen.

The summer after they graduated from high school, Belinda and the twins had driven out to California, and Belinda had stayed, using her Pearson’s savings on a motel room on Santa Monica Boulevard and showing up at the ICM offices without an appointment. It could easily have gone the other way; Belinda could have been forced to hitchhike home, or call her parents for bus fare, but she had been lucky because Sally Bloom had been on her way to lunch as Belinda was standing at reception, and Sally had stopped to take a closer look at Belinda. Within a week, Belinda had been cast in Brilliant Disguise. And that, as they say, was that. Belinda had spent her entire adult life pretending to be other people.

Once Ellery was asleep, her breathing deep and steady, her pretty face at peace despite the tumultuous adult day, Belinda slipped from the room and down the hall to Clara’s pathetic excuse for a room. Belinda owned a 750-acre horse farm in Louisville, on which sat the sprawling 5,600-square-foot residence, as well as six barns, four outbuildings, three rings, and a racetrack. She kept a penthouse suite at the Standard in New York and the presidential suite at the Beverly Wilshire. But somehow, she felt more comfortable here in the spartan quarters of Clara’s room, which had nothing to offer but the view from the window. Simplicity, Belinda thought as she lay down on the bed. It’s underrated.

Laurel couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed next to Buck-he had been wonderfully supportive and, with a few phone calls, had gotten Hayes admission to Eagleville Hospital, about two hours south of New York City, for a twenty-eight-day rehab program-but even after Buck descended into slumber, with snores as regular and soothing as rolling waves, Laurel fidgeted. Legs under the sheet, one leg under and one leg over, pillow one way, pillow the other way, left side, right side, back. She ordered herself to put her concerns about Hayes aside. He would get help. They were leaving tomorrow; he would be in professional hands by the evening. There was nothing more she could do, but still the question lingered: why? Had it been her fault? Had she not given him enough love or attention? He told her he’d first smoked opium on his trip to inner China a year ago, and from there it had gotten out of hand. Was it Deacon’s fault? Was it a result of Hayes growing up in a broken home? Laurel knew she was being ridiculous, but the questions presented themselves. Stop thinking about it, she told herself. It was nobody’s fault.

She decided to go down to the kitchen. She needed a cup of chamomile tea or a shot of Jameson-or maybe both.

Scarlett had been in love with Bo Tanner for most of her life-ever since she saw him across the room at Miss Louisa’s etiquette classes when she was in fifth grade.

But that was a story for another time.

At ten o’clock, Scarlett checked on Ellery: fast asleep. Scarlett slipped onto the back deck, tiptoed through the yard, and rolled a bike out of the shed. She pedaled down Hoicks Hollow Road by the light of the stars and half a moon, then turned left onto the Polpis Road. The night air was warm enough that she could ride without a jacket, and it was filled with cricket chatter.

Bo was staying at the Wade Cottages in Sconset. When Scarlett pulled into the shell driveway, she saw him standing in the moonlight, waiting for her. Ever the gentleman. He led her inside.

Scarlett was so distraught about losing the Nantucket house that she nearly asked Bo if he might loan her the money to save it. But she had asked quite a lot of him recently. She had asked him to leave Anne Carter-who had been Scarlett’s friend since her earliest memories-but then, when Bo said he would, Scarlett hadn’t been able to leave Deacon. When Scarlett decided that her marriage to Deacon was over, she again asked Bo to leave Anne Carter, and again he said he would, and he did. While Bo was moving out, Deacon had died.

Bo made a good living as an attorney for wealthy Georgia gentlemen-mostly Savannah based, but some in Atlanta as well-who had business interests up North. But he would be paying alimony to Anne Carter, and besides, Nantucket wasn’t his summertime place. He had always been a Folly Beach boy.

Scarlett bicycled home just after midnight; the dark was velvety and nearly opaque. Anywhere else in the world, Scarlett would have been afraid, but here she felt safe. She shed a few tears on the way home because endings were sad and the day had been filled with emotional fireworks. She had only wanted to apologize to Belinda for the atrocious things she’d said; the others, she feared, might have thought she’d meant to push Belinda off the boat. When JP had surfaced the first time without her, Scarlett’s limbs had turned leaden, and a pool of cold dread had collected in the pit of her stomach. She had her problems with Belinda, but that was a far cry from wanting her dead.

When Scarlett tiptoed back into the house, she saw a light on in the kitchen. There, at the counter, sat Laurel-with a steaming mug of tea and a shot of Jameson sitting before her.

“That looks good,” Scarlett said.

Belinda awoke in the night, certain that she heard voices below her. She strained her ears, but she couldn’t be sure. She gave herself a case of the willies wondering if the murmuring she heard was the ghost of Clara Beck. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing sleep to take her.