Michael held my hand. He pulled me toward the spectacle of Nick and Rhonda intertwined. Her boobs were fake, I thought. Did Nick know this?
Rhonda turned and saw me, and her face came alive with irrepressible joy(!). Rhonda didn’t have a deceptive or mean bone in her body, which was one of the reasons I had befriended her. She would only have been thinking of how excited I would be that she was dating Nick. We had been estranged, and now we were reunited. We would be like sisters!
“Hey!” she said, and she kissed me on the mouth. “Did you see the show? Wasn’t it amazing?”
“It was amazing,” I agreed. “The best they’ve ever played.” How I found it within myself to be so generous, I had no idea. Because my anger at Nick was bowling me over like a mighty wind. This, I suspected, had been all his doing. He had started dating, not just any girl-not the girl who worked at the New York Public Library where he liked to write his lyrics, and not the Thai girl who worked the Tom Yum cart on Saint Mark’s Place-but my friend Rhonda. My closest friend.
Nick looked at me, and it was the same look that reached right inside me and turned my heart like a knob, but it was different, too. He was angry, angrier than I was. He was saying, Now you know how it feels. You’re sleeping with my brother, who has always gotten the best of everything. You are practically living with him. So now there’s Rhonda. We’re even.
I had to leave the greenroom. There was talk of the four of us going to the Spotted Pig for drinks after the show, and I smiled and said, “Yep, that sounds great!” Nick was staring at me. He said, “Do you feel okay, Chess? You look kind of sick.” I wanted to sock him. I excused myself for the ladies’ room. I stood in front of the mirror until another girl jostled me with her oversize Tory Burch bag. Instead of going back to the greenroom, I rejoined the throngs of people on the dance floor. The Strokes were playing “Last Nite,” which was my favorite of their songs. I was lost in a tangle of strangers, a mob of unfamiliar bodies. Rhonda. It had been a stroke of genius on his part. When the song was over and everyone around me was cheering and screaming for another song, I headed for the Exit sign and I was dumped out onto the cool street. Ha! I had been part of a couple for so long, I never acted with a solo conscience. I thought of Michael, who by now would be hovering by the ladies’ room door, enlisting Rhonda to go in and collect me. He would be worried. I didn’t want him to worry, I wanted Nick to worry. I hailed a taxi and headed home. My phone was ringing-three times it was Michael and three times I didn’t answer, even though I knew this was cruel. The fourth time my phone rang I was going to answer it, but it was Nick calling, and I didn’t pick up. Nick knew why I’d left.
When I reached my apartment, I dead-bolted my door and sent Michael a text that said: Got home safely. Good night.
He wrote back, saying: WTF?
And then the phone in my apartment rang and it was Michael. He was ranting. “How could you just leave? What the hell were you thinking? I thought something had happened to you! This is New York, babe. Men are out there with date-rape drugs. I thought someone had hurt you! It was so unlike you, leaving like that-you are not that thoughtless, just walking out, leaving me there. What the hell were you thinking, Chess?”
Tell him? I couldn’t tell him. And I couldn’t ask: Was Nick worried? Did he care?
I said, “I wasn’t thinking, Michael. I’m sorry.”
Michael said, “What the hell, Chess?” His voice was sad and defeated, as though I were always letting him down like this, which was unfair because I had never disappointed him before. I had been a good girl, a good girlfriend. But Michael was no dummy; he dealt in human resources. Maybe he had guessed. There had been isolated moments when he would look deeply into my eyes, brush a hair off my face, kiss the back of my neck, or make some other intimate gesture, and I would flinch. Swat him away.
“What?” he’d say. “What?”
And I would think, I don’t love you enough. I don’t love you that way.
Something had to give, I thought.
She would never have admitted it to anyone, she wouldn’t even write the words down in her journal, but she was anxious for Tate to get home.
It didn’t help that it was raining. Rain in the Tuckernuck house was never good. It started out as a novel and quasi-exciting development. It’s raining! Quick-put the top up on the Scout, close the windows, hunker down! These were the traditional steps, and woe to the person who was outside in a downpour grappling with the Scout. This morning, because she decided that her mother and aunt should be spared the indignity, that person was Chess.
She ran back into the house, soaking wet. Her mother had breakfast going-bacon and scrambled eggs and the sticky buns that she’d been saving for a special occasion. (The rain qualified.) She was making a second pot of coffee and had gone to the trouble of heating up milk on the stovetop. India, meanwhile, was stuffing newspaper, kindling, and sticks into the woodstove.
“She was a Girl Scout,” Birdie said.
“Who are we kidding?” India said. “Birdie was the Girl Scout.”
Chess shivered. She accepted a hot, milky mug of coffee from her mother and she bundled up in the scratchy afghan in the traditional starburst pattern that her grandmother had knitted. India got the woodstove raging and the three of them huddled around it with their breakfasts while the rain came down.
“Do you think Barrett will bring Tate home in this weather?” Birdie said.
“Never,” India said. “He’ll hold on to her.”
Chess felt jealous-not because Tate was with Barrett, but rather because Barrett was with Tate. Tate had been gone for fourteen hours and Chess wanted her back. They had lived together on Tuckernuck for more than a week, and Chess had grown used to Tate’s indefatigable optimism; she took a dose of it every day like a vitamin.
She could see from here how the rest of the day would go: Birdie and India would resort to all of the usual rainy-day amusements-cards, books, Monopoly-and they would smoke and try to guess when the rain would stop. Birdie would make too much food and they would start drinking at noon. All of this would be done without Tate, and so no matter how much fun was to be had (drunk Monopoly?), the day would wobble like a three-legged table. The numbers would be uneven; Chess would be the odd man out. They would all resort to wondering aloud about Tate: Was she having fun? What were she and Barrett doing together? Would this become a bona fide romance? What kind of future did it have? And this would make Chess feel Tate’s absence more keenly. She hated missing people. It was like a disease.
Chess drank her coffee, ate one-quarter of a sticky bun to appease her mother, and retreated to the attic to work on her confession. The rain clattered against the roof. Chess could hear the waves pounding against their little beach. If Tate hadn’t come to Tuckernuck, Chess realized, every hour of every day would be like this.
It was ten o’clock, eleven o’clock. Chess wondered if Barrett and Tate were having sex. Chess’s own sexual desire had wilted like an unwatered flower. She was too depressed to touch herself.
Tate and Barrett. Barrett Lee: one more person for Chess to feel bad about.
Everyone knew about Chess’s ill-fated date with Barrett Lee the summer after Chess’s freshman year of college-Barrett took Chess on a picnic, Chess puked off the back of the boat. Everyone thought that was it. The end. Chess’s feelings for Barrett Lee hadn’t been clear that summer. If pressed, she would have said she felt nothing for him; she could see he was attractive, certainly, but he wasn’t headed to college, and that turned her off immediately. He would become a fisherman or a carpenter and live on Nantucket his whole life, never leaving except to go to Hyannis to Christmas shop and to Aruba for a week in February. He was his father in the making. Chuck Lee was a lovely man, but he was an old salt, and Barrett Lee was an old salt in training. Chess wanted nothing to do with him.