Elin Hilderbrand - Silver Girl

Connie sent the text. Then she hurried downstairs. She had a lot of pots on the stove.

The kitchen was hot. Connie rescued the butter from the stove. She dropped the corn into the second steaming pot and turned off the heat under the lobsters. She drizzled the dressing over the greens and tossed them. She poured the butter into a small ceramic pitcher. Her bare feet felt good against the cool floor. She had to pour Meredith more wine.

She hadn’t lost anything, she reminded herself. There was no Ashlyn now, but there had been no Ashlyn before. She would try texting.

“Okay, we’re ready!” Connie said.

Why was the kitchen so hot? The oven was on, that was why. But Connie had forgotten to put in the potatoes. Goddamn it-there they sat on the counter, in plain sight. She’d just overlooked them. Laugh out loud, she thought. But tears sprung to her eyes.

Meredith came in from the deck and said, “What can we do to help?”

Connie dissolved in sobs.

Meredith said, “Connie, what’s wrong?” She sounded genuinely alarmed. But she wouldn’t understand. Meredith, quite famously, had made it through a national crisis without shedding a single tear.

“I forgot to put in the potatoes,” Connie said.

Connie recalled only snippets of dinner. She allowed Dan to lead her to her chair, and he cracked open her lobster and pulled the meat from it, as though she were a child. Her corn lay on her plate untouched. Her shoulders caved in, like her bones were melting, and Meredith rose and brought her a sweater. There was bright banter between Dan and Meredith, on what topic, Connie couldn’t tell. The salad was weepy with dressing. Connie could only manage one bite.

“Eat!” Meredith implored her.

In the place where Connie expected to find her wine was a glass of ice water with a slice of lemon. She drank it gratefully, remembering how they used to pull this very same trick with her own mother and how Veronica usually fell for it, but one time spit the water all over the table and demanded her gin. Connie’s eyes were closing, her head bobbed forward like it used to sometimes in the movie theater, when Wolf took her to the long, harrowing art-house films he liked. She was hoping that either Meredith or Dan would have the foresight to put the blueberry pie in the oven to warm it up, though she was doubtful about this. She was the only one who thought of such things. But she was far too tired to stand up and tend to it herself.

Ashlyn didn’t realize how cruel she was being. She wouldn’t understand until she had children of her own. She may not have any children of her own, ever. And whereas this would be a shame, it would also be a blessing. Wolf, Toby, Freddy Delinn, Danforth Flynn. Connie’s head fell forward to her plate, but she snapped it up again, alert and conscious. She stared at Meredith. Did Meredith know what Freddy had said and done to Connie in Cap d’Antibes? Certainly not. That man told her nothing.

Connie felt a pressure in her armpits. She felt herself being lifted. She was in Dan’s arms. She could smell him; she could feel the weave of his white shirt. Linen. Who ironed for him, she wondered, now that his wife was dead? She was floating, much the way she’d been floating in the water today.

She heard the words “a lot to drink.”

Meredith said, “And she barely ate anything.”

She landed in softness, too novel yet to be familiar. Her bed, as lovely and luxurious as a bed in a five-star hotel. She felt a kiss on her cheek, but the kiss was feminine. It was Meredith.

Connie’s eyes fluttered open. It was still light outside. There was something Connie wanted to tell Meredith, but Connie couldn’t stay awake another second.

She said, “Wolf’s dead.” The words sounded funny, garbled. Had they made sense?

Meredith said, “I know, honey. I’m sorry.”

When Meredith awoke the morning after the boat ride, her body ached. Specifically, her torso: the spaces between her ribs were stretched and sore.

The diving.

Meredith felt guilty even thinking it, but yesterday had been a good day. Was this possible, really, considering her current circumstances? Certainly not. But yes. Yes. It had been a day when Meredith had been present in every moment. She had thoughts about Freddy but those thoughts had been intentional; they hadn’t sneaked up on her. She had thought about the boys, too, but the day had been so brilliant in its every aspect that Meredith’s thoughts about Leo were more optimistic than usual. She wondered what Leo and Carver were doing and decided that they were most likely enjoying the weather and not wasting their precious hours thinking about Deacon Rapp.

The good times had started with the diving board. Meredith had felt herself transform as she pulled off her wig and climbed onto that board. She hadn’t taken a dive in years-decades-and while she expressed doubts to Connie about her ability to flip and twist and enter the water headfirst, inside she knew she could do it. There were dives still trapped inside of her, dives that had been waiting for thirty years to get out.

Meredith had been meant to dive at Princeton; it was one of the things that led to her admission. Coach Dempsey had one other diver-a junior named Caroline Free who came from California and who was breaking all kinds of Ivy League records. But Caroline Free would graduate, and Coach Dempsey wanted to bring Meredith up in her wake. But when Meredith’s father died, Meredith lost all interest in diving. It was amazing how one of the most important things in her life suddenly seemed so pointless. Coach Dempsey understood, but he came right back to her sophomore year. By sophomore year, Meredith was ready. She had gained ten pounds her freshman year from the beer and the starchy food in the dining hall and the late-night fried chicken sandwiches with Russian dressing that Freddy made for her in the Dial kitchen. Back home in Villanova for the summer, she had returned to the Aronimink pool and swum laps alongside her mother, wearing one of her mother’s hideous bathing caps festooned with lavender rubber flowers over the right ear. The laps had worked; Meredith was back to her slender, petite self, and she meant to stay that way. Plus, she wanted to dive. She missed it; it was part of who she was.

When she told Freddy, he went straight to work talking her out of it. If she dove for the Princeton team, he said, it would be all-consuming. There would be early-morning conditioning practices and regular afternoon practices. There would be home meets and, more sinisterly, away meets-whole weekends at Penn and Columbia and Yale with the squeaky-skinned, green-haired members of the swim team. He predicted that Meredith would miss the Dial holiday formal-a look at the team’s schedule confirmed this-and with Meredith gone, Freddy would have to find another date.

Meredith took the opportunity to ask him who he’d taken to the formal the year before.

He said, “Oh, Trina.”

“Trina?” Meredith said.

Freddy studied her to see if there were going to be any mildly annoying follow-up questions. They had, of course, talked about Trina early on in their relationship, and Freddy had corroborated Trina’s story-though it had felt to Meredith like the corroboration of a story-that Trina was his tutoring student and not much else. Those had been Fred’s exact words, “not much else.” Now, Meredith found he had taken her to last year’s formal! She didn’t think she even needed to ask the annoying follow-up questions.

He said, “I didn’t have anyone else to ask, and she was good for things like that. She presents well.”

Meredith knew she shouldn’t care about something as frivolous as the Dial holiday formal, but she did. Holiday formals at the eating clubs were glamorous events with twinkling lights and French champagne and sixteen-piece orchestras playing Frank Sinatra. The prospect of missing the formal and of Freddy going, instead, with Trina was enough to seal the deal: Meredith met with Coach Dempsey and gave him her regrets. He begged her to reconsider. Princeton needed her, he said. Meredith nearly buckled. She loved the university with near-militant ferocity; if Princeton needed her, she would serve. But Freddy laughed and said that Dempsey was being manipulative. Freddy was the one who needed her. This was his senior year. He wanted to spend every second of it with Meredith.

Meredith gave up the diving. Her mother, as it turned out, was happy. She had feared that diving would distract Meredith from her studies.

Meredith hadn’t dived in any structured or serious way again. Freddy didn’t like her to. He was jealous that she excelled at something that had nothing to do with him. He wanted Meredith to focus on sports they could do together-swimming, running, tennis.

And so, that was where Meredith put her energies. She and Freddy swam together in the Hamptons, in Palm Beach, in the south of France-which really meant that Meredith swam in the ocean or did laps in their sapphire-blue, infinity-edge pools while Freddy talked to London on his cell phone. They had played tennis regularly for a while, but ten years into the marriage, Freddy was far too busy to ever make a court time, and Meredith had been left to play tennis with women like Amy Rivers.

Diving from Dan’s boat the day before had been a pleasure long overdue. How many other forty-nine-year-old women could pull off a front two and a half somersault? Meredith could have gone even further; she had been tempted to do her front one and a half with one and a half twists, but she didn’t want to seem like a show-off, and she didn’t want to injure herself. Dan Flynn had been impressed by her diving, which was gratifying, and Connie, reverting to high-school type, had been proud and proprietary. I used to go to all of Meredith’s meets. It was fun to remember those meets, especially home meets where Connie always occupied the same seat in the pool balcony and used hand signals to assess Meredith’s entry into the water. A little over. A little short. Two palms showing meant Perfect 10! There had been one meet when they had been down a judge, and after much conferring, Meredith convinced both team coaches to allow Connie to fill in. Connie knew the dives inside and out, and Meredith knew Connie would be fair. Connie had ended up being harder on Meredith than the other two judges, but Meredith won anyway.