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.
“I have some really bad news,” he said.
Winnie doubted this was true. One of the consequences of her father’s death was that really bad news no longer existed. For Winnie, the really bad news was that her father had been killed in a plane crash-all other news was only bad news, or usually, not-so-bad news.
“You broke up with Piper?” she guessed.
“No!” Garrett hopped to his feet and lunged like he was going to sock her for even suggesting such a thing.
“Calm down,” Winnie said. She liked saying this. So often it was she who was hysterical and Garrett who was the cool customer. Recently, the tables had turned. Her brother was a nut case. He thought he was so much older than Winnie-getting his license, having sex-but what he didn’t realize was that Winnie was maturing this summer, too. Her friendship with Marcus was helping her to deal with her grief and move on. He was helping her to grow on the inside, as a person.
“Don’t you want to know what the news is?” Garrett asked.
“If you want to tell me,” Winnie said.
Garrett eased back down onto the bed. Winnie yawned, looked at the clock. 1:30. Her heart cried out. The usual time for Marcus.
“I found out something about Mom,” Garrett said. “Something big.”
He was baiting her. He wanted her to jump up and down, begging, “Oh, please, Garrett, please tell me!” But first Winnie considered the possibilities. Something big about Mom. The words had the unmistakable scent of gossip about them. And gossip meant sex, right? So Beth was having sex with David. Winnie had to admit she didn’t love the idea. She wanted her mother to be happy, true, but she wished that happiness would be found in a place that did not involve any man other than Winnie’s father. However, this was childish, and since Winnie now eschewed all childish thoughts and emotions, like the ones Garrett so grossly displayed the other night, she figured she would have to be happy for her mother. She would have to celebrate this relationship with David.
“God, Garrett, grow up,” Winnie said. “Mom is an adult. She can do whatever she wants.”
“She lied to us,” Garrett said.
“Didn’t you listen to what she told us a few weeks ago?” Winnie asked. “That sex is a private thing?”
“Sex?” Garrett said. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a lot more than just sex.”
“Okay, fine, tell me. What is it then?”
Garrett paused. Of course, now that she’d asked, he was going to make her wait.
“Mom was married to David,” he said. “The summer between her junior and senior year in college, 1979. They got married at the Town Building here on Nantucket.” He leaned forward and whispered viciously. “They were married, Winnie, and she never told us. And worse than that, she never told Dad.”
Winnie felt the bottom of her stomach swoop out. This was really bad news because this news altered the way the whole world appeared. Everything shifted, reconfigured. Winnie recognized the reaction in her gut. Her father dead? Of course not. Her mother married before? Impossible.
“Where,” Winnie said, “did you hear this?”
“From Piper.”
“Oh, please,” Winnie said. “Piper is lying. Or she has bad information. Like, if David told her that, he’s the one who’s lying. He probably wishes he was married to Mom.”