“I need you to respect my wishes,” Beth said. “I’m not interested in a relationship with anyone right now.”
“You sound ridiculous.”
“Why is it so ridiculous?” Beth said. Winnie turned around with raised eyebrows. Beth smiled at her reassuringly, then lowered her voice. “I need time and space to grieve for my husband.”
“I understand that, Beth.”
“You don’t understand. If you understood, you wouldn’t be here. You would be giving me space.”
“Don’t you ever ask yourself why it’s me you don’t want around? I’ll tell you why. Because you still have feelings for me and you’re afraid of those feelings.”
“I don’t have feelings for you.”
“You love me.”
Beth looked to see if he was being funny. But his eyes gave off a searing heat. He was serious; he was challenging her to deny that preposterous statement.
“I loved you twenty-five years ago,” she said. “Trust me when I say things have changed.”
“It didn’t seem that way the other night,” he said.
Beth didn’t have to respond because seconds later, Peyton found a spot on the beach large enough to accommodate all of them, and then there was the welcome distraction of setting up camp: spreading out the blankets, unfolding the chairs, taking out the food and pouring drinks. David opened a beer and hovered at the far edge of the blanket while Beth took charge of doling out fried chicken, spooning mounds of potato salad onto paper plates, and trying to keep pieces of plastic wrap from flying into the water. This time last year it was the same menu, but there was only four of them: Beth, Arch, and the twins. Arch loved drumsticks. He ate them all-a total of seven-then joked about the poor one-legged chicken that was limping around somewhere. Stupid, maybe, but the kids thought he was the funniest man on the planet, and so did Beth. She put a drumstick on Garrett’s plate, hoping he would remember, but he was too absorbed with rubbing Piper’s arms. She was chilly, it seemed. Well, yeah, Beth thought, that’s what you got when you wore a halter top to the beach at night. When Garrett finally did notice the drumstick, he ate it in three bites without comment. Beth almost said, Hey, Garrett, remember when Dad… but she knew she wouldn’t be able to pull off the happy nostalgia she intended.
As she ate her dinner, she thought about how one day Garrett and Winnie would get married and have families of their own, and Beth would be left to remember all of the funny jokes alone. She watched as David wandered away to talk to some people he knew, waving his beer around in defiance of the open container law. Maybe she should listen to him, otherwise she might end up old and alone, still clinging to her grief.
It grew dark. Beth collected the paper plates and the wadded napkins and passed around oatmeal cookies. David appeared back at the blanket with a box of sparklers and he gave one to everybody, including Beth, and lit them with a Bic he borrowed from Piper. He watched Beth’s face as he held the lighter to the tip of her sparkler and when the sparkler came to life, bright stars dancing and hissing, he said, “There you go, my dear. Now you can write your name.”
Garrett and Piper wrote their names in a heart, as did Winnie and Marcus. Beth turned her back to the group and wrote her name in the dark air over Nantucket Sound. Beth. She hoped that Arch would see it, from wherever he was watching her.
Beth collected everyone’s spent sparklers and the rest of the trash and settled back in her chair in time for the first burst of fireworks. Red, gold, purple. David sat in the chair next to hers and opened another beer. Beth loved fireworks, the whistle and crackle in the air, the smell of cordite, the oohs and aahs. When the sky was all lit up, she watched the silhouettes of her kids- both of them obviously paired up now. Marcus was leaning back on his hands and Winnie sat close to him, resting her head on his shoulder. Piper lay on her back and Garrett lounged on his side right behind her. They were kissing. Beth studied them for a minute, enough time to dispel any illusions about their innocence. They were having sex. Beth glanced at David to see if he saw what she saw: the tongues when they kissed, the way Garrett’s fingers tugged insistently on Piper’s belt loops. Beth didn’t know how to feel about the situation. She and Arch had always vowed to be honest with the twins about sex and the responsibility that came with it. Arch gave Garrett condoms, and, Beth assumed, informed him how and when they should be used. Beth herself had lost her virginity at sixteen with the man sitting next to her, but somehow she had seemed older then, at sixteen, than Garrett did now, at seventeen. She would have to say something to Garrett about the sex this week-and to Winnie, too, if this thing with Marcus developed. It would embarrass all three of them-really, Arch had been much better at dealing with the kids’ emerging sexuality-yet what could she do? Let her kids go wild in the sack without a few words of caution?
Blue spirals shot through the air, enhanced by a bunch of silver flashes that sounded like very loud popcorn. David applauded for that one. Beth was bothered by everything David had said earlier. Okay, maybe she did have feelings for him, but any fool could see that the feelings made her so uncomfortable that all she wanted to do was push them away.
The finale started and the sky was a messy artists’ palette of color, one bright burst inside another. The great thing about the finale was that just when Beth thought the sky was saturated, just when she thought it must be the end, they shot off more. It kept going and going. Beth leaned her head back against the webbing of her chair. She tried to conjure Kara Schau’s words: Don’t think. Smell the flowers. Don’t worry about packing up and fighting the crowds all the way back to the car. Don’t worry about David Ronan in the chair next to yours. Just enjoy.
Beth couldn’t help herself from doing a visual sweep of their area, mentally calculating how long it would take them to break camp. It was then that she noticed Peyton was gone.
She looked at David. He was grinning like a boy, his face catching light from the sky.
“Did Peyton go to the bathroom?” Beth asked.
David checked the blanket. His smile faded and he sat up straighter in his chair. “Piper,” he said. “Where’s your sister?”
Asking this was pointless. Piper couldn’t hear David over the noise of the fireworks. No one could hear him but Beth. Piper was so absorbed with tasting the inside of Garrett’s mouth that anyone could see the whereabouts of her younger sister was the furthest thing from her mind. David concluded as much after a few seconds, and he picked his way across the blanket, over the cooler and between thermoses, to ask Piper again. Piper sat up and looked around. Shrugged. David asked something of Winnie and Marcus, who mimicked Piper’s actions. We don’t know.
Beth stood up. She felt sorry for David-a missing child was a parent’s worst nightmare. Even when the child was thirteen. Even in a place as safe as Nantucket.
“They don’t know where she went?” Beth asked.
“No,” David said. He scanned the patchwork of blankets around them. “How long has she been gone? And how did she leave without my noticing?”
“You went to talk to some people,” Beth said. “Maybe she met up with friends.”
“Maybe,” David said. “Or maybe she just went to the bathroom.”
“That’s probably it,” Beth said. She, too, wondered how long Peyton had been gone. Beth remembered handing her two oatmeal cookies and then offering to refill her lemonade, but that was before the fireworks started. Beth tried to remember if she’d seen Peyton with a sparkler. The sparklers were a long time ago, certainly allowing enough time to go to the bathroom and come back. Unless there was a horrendous line.