THERESE FOWLER

Souvenir

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

A Paperback Original 2007

Copyright © Therese Fowler 2007

‘What You Won’t Do for Love’ Words and Music by Alfons Kettne and Bobby Caldwell © 1978, EMI Longitude Music, USA. Reproduced b permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H 0QY

‘Anthem’ Lyrics by Leonard Cohen © Sony/ATV Music Publishing All Rights Reserved

Therese Fowler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847560094

Ebook edition © August 2008 ISBN: 9780007278978

Version: 2018-06-05

Do, for love, what you would not do.

Contents

Title Page Copyright Dedication Prologue Part I Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Part II Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Part III Chapter Thirty-Nine chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Chapter Forty-Four Chapter Forty-Five Chapter Forty-Six Chapter Forty-Seven Chapter Forty-Eight Chapter Forty-Nine chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty-One Chapter Fifty-Two Chapter Fifty-Three Chapter Fifty-Four Chapter Fifty-Five Chapter Fifty-Six Chapter Fifty-Seven Chapter Fifty-Eight Part IV Chapter Fifty-Nine chapter Sixty Chapter Sixty-One Chapter Sixty-Two Part V Chapter Sixty-Three Epilogue Acknowledgments About the Author About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

August 1989

What she was doing was wrong. But then, everything was wrong, wasn’t it?

She was sneaking out to see Carson, even though in thirteen hours she’d be another man’s wife. Brian’s wife. Brian’s wife. No matter how she phrased the words, they hardly made sense to her, even now. They belonged to someone else’s reality. It was as if she, Meg Powell, would cease to exist at the end of the wedding ceremony, becoming some unfamiliar woman called Mrs Brian Hamilton. But maybe it was better that way.

She left her house in the dark and traced the familiar path through the pastures, toward the lake and the groves and Carson’s house. The sun would rise before much longer, and her sisters would wake, excited – Meg’s wedding day! Her parents would find her note saying she’d gone for a walk and wouldn’t be concerned. They’d know she’d be back in plenty of time; she was nothing if not reliable and responsible. A model daughter. Their deliverance.

And she was glad to be those things. If only she could shut down the Meg who still longed for the future she’d sacrificed. This visit to Carson was meant to do that, to shut it down. This part of her mission was appropriate, at least; this was the part she would explain to him. If she knew Carson – and after sixteen years of best-friendship, she knew only herself better – he would accept the partial truth without suspecting there was anything more to it.

She wanted so much to tell him the truth about the rest, to explain why she was marrying Brian. But besides jeopardizing everything, it would make him want to try to fix things. If that had been possible, there would not now be a breathtaking four-thousand-dollar wedding gown waiting in her bedroom like a fairy tale in progress. The thought of it hanging from her closet door, specter-like, made her shudder; she’d read enough fairy tales to know they didn’t always end happily.

Carson lived in a converted shed on his parent’s Florida citrus farm. The McKay farm adjoined her family’s horse farm, sharing an east–west line of wood posts and barbed wire. The fence kept the horses out of the groves but had never been a serious obstacle for Meg or her three younger sisters or Carson. When she was seven or eight years old, they’d found a wooden ladder and sawed it in half, then propped the halves on opposite sides of a post to make their passage easy. Meg wasn’t surprised, now, to see the ladder gone. Climbing the barbed wire, she took care not to get a cut she’d be hard pressed to explain tonight.

Fifteen minutes later she emerged from the shadows of the orange grove and stopped. In the light of the setting moon she could see the shed, its white clap-board siding and dark windows, a hundred yards to the left of the main house. She and Carson had spent most of his senior year working with his father to renovate it, creating two downstairs rooms and an upstairs bedroom loft. They’d called the shed their love nest, not only because they first made love there but also because they meant for it to become their home. Not for always, just for starters. The plan had been to eventually build a new house on the far side of his farm. On the wooded hillside where, as children, they’d hung a tire swing for themselves and her sisters. Where, years later, they had spread an old horse blanket and gone as far as they dared without protection.

This morning, she was purposely – some might say selfishly – no better prepared.

Though the day would grow hot later, the moist air and light breeze chilled her by the time she reached his door. Her feet were wet inside white canvas sneakers, her thighs hardly covered by cut-off denim shorts. She was braless beneath Carson’s John Deere T-shirt, could feel her nipples pulled in tight and small. Her gold chain, his gift to her on her nineteenth birthday two years earlier, lay cool against her damp skin.

She hesitated before putting her hand on his doorknob, imagining what Brian would do if he knew she had come here, imagining her parents’ disappointment and distress if she spoiled the plan, imagining that she might hate herself even more, later – and then she turned the knob.

The door was unlocked, as she’d known it would be. No need to lock your doors out here; everything of value was kept outside the house – for Carson or for almost anyone who made a living off the land. In the implement shed was a new pair of mortgaged tractors that had cost upward of $80,000 apiece. In the barn was a treasured thoroughbred bay – Carolyn McKay’s ‘hobby’ that helped make up for being unable to have more children after Carson. Meg knew the details of the McKays’ lives intimately. But when she left here later this morning, she would do everything possible to forget them.

She stepped inside and eased the door closed, wanting Carson’s first awareness of her to be when she slid beneath his covers. She stood and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. The place still smelled slightly of cut pine and stained wood and curry, one of Carson’s favorite flavors.

When she could see, she crossed the wide front room to the stairs that divided it from the kitchen. Grabbing the railing, she pushed off her sneakers and began climbing the stairs. A tread creaked underfoot and she paused, waiting, her heart loud in her ears, then went on. By the eighth step she could see into the dark loft. She stopped and listened for the sound of Carson’s even breathing. Though they’d spent only a few nights together as adults, they had slept over at each other’s homes innumerable times as children. She knew the sound of his sleeping self almost as well as she did her sister Kara’s. Before Brian and his unexpected proposal eighteen months earlier, Carson had been the son her parents never had, and she had been Carolyn and Jim’s adopted daughter.

Straining to hear Carson, the only sound she could make out was the low hum of his refrigerator, and then the chirpee-chirpee-chirpee of a cardinal in a nearby tree, announcing the sun’s progress. She climbed the remaining steps, cringing at another creak, then stopped, trying to make out his form on the bed at the far side of the room.

‘Does this mean you changed your mind?’

Meg jumped as if stung. There was Carson, sitting in the love seat they’d once hauled away from a bankrupt orange grower’s estate sale. She couldn’t quite see his expression, but she could hear in his voice that he was wide awake.

With all her heart, she wished she could say yes, her presence meant exactly what he guessed. But softly she said, ‘No.’

‘Then why are you—?’

‘Shh,’ she said, going to him and reaching for his hand. ‘Come here.’

He stood, and before he could speak again, she kissed him hard, kissed him until she felt dizzy and brave and determined not to chicken out. She put his hands on the hem of her shirt and, with her hands on his, helped him draw it over her head. In another moment, they were undressed and lying on top of his sheets, the pale light painting them moonlit blue.

One last time. She would savor every touch, every sensation, the fullness of his lips, his squared jaw, the dark stubble as it rubbed her neck and grazed her breasts. She would not forget one moment of this, would always look back and remember how making love with him transported her. She would keep the memory like a priceless, irreplaceable jewel. She would remember how he pressed into her as if his life, their lives, depended on it, as if he could secure eternity.

Afterward, Carson lay on his side watching her, twisting a strand of her coppery hair. ‘What other proof do you need?’ he asked. His eyes shone with determination and hope, and she had to look away. Her first loyalty was to her family; how could it be otherwise? She had to marry Brian for their sake, was resigned to it, would do it and would try to never second-guess herself afterward; this she had already vowed.

‘I know how it seems,’ she said, ‘but that’s exactly why it can never work. We’re too intense. That’s what this proves.’ The lie, same as she’d told him a year and a half before, tasted bitter. Love that had grown from childhood friendship and adolescent curiosity, that had now withstood so many long months of complete separation, could never be a damaging, undesirable thing – and yet that was the story she was selling.

He sat up and looked away. ‘I should’ve made you leave as soon as I heard you open the door.’

‘No,’ she said, touching his back. ‘We needed to do this, so we can put our past to rest.’ This much at least was true, she thought.

He looked over his shoulder at her, eyes narrowed. ‘You think this, one last quick fuck, is going to do it?’ he spat, making her flinch. ‘You thought you could come here and offer something you knew I couldn’t resist, and then marry Hamilton with a clear conscience? You are unbelievable.’ He lunged out of bed and pulled on his jeans, keeping his back to her.

The matter of her guilty conscience – and God knew it was guilty – was balanced by the good she was doing her sisters, her parents. What he said was exactly what she’d thought, and what she would do. She stood up and pulled on her shirt, absorbing his anger, deserving it. Then she reached up and unhooked her gold chain from her neck.

‘I never took this off,’ she told him as she draped it around his, hooked it, then smoothed his wavy brown hair, filing away yet another last sense of him.

‘Not even when he—’

‘Not even then.’

Carson turned and looked down at her. ‘Does he know I gave it to you?’

She nodded.

‘Then he’s as stupid as I am,’ he said, moving away from her to the window, to a view of endless rows of orange trees lit emerald by the early sun.

She loved that view, the way the Earth always looked newborn there in the rising mist. But by this evening, the view would be as lost to her as if she’d left the planet. Brian’s apartment windows did not look out on this, the kind of life she was born to. She would be a businessman’s wife. The man she would see on all her future mornings would not be this rangy one, whose long fingers were equally capable of picking fruit or strumming a guitar – or holding her hand or feeding her pizza or braiding her hair. Once she left here, she would never touch Carson again.

The thought was a gut punch. How, how could she have let this happen?

Her longing to take back her bargain with the Hamiltons surged, so strong it threatened to undo her. She could take it all back, reclaim her life as her own … If Carson would push her just a little, if he tried to persuade her, if he assured her that everything he didn’t even know was wrong would somehow turn out all right, she would come back to him.

But he stayed at the window, his heart already closing to her, and the moment passed.

She finished dressing, engulfed by regret but still daring to hope she would take a part of him with her, if God or fate allowed. Then she went to him and touched his arm.

He jerked away. ‘You better go,’ he said, turning. His face was closed now, too. This shouldn’t upset her – she had it coming, all his anger, all his venom, the chill of such a blank look – and yet she was cut through by it.

‘Okay.’ She would not let herself cry.

‘But here – let me give you this.’ He put his hand on her cheek and leaned in, kissed her with slow deliberation, kissed her with such passion and grace that she could no longer hold back her tears. Then he pushed her away and said, ‘Guess I’ll see you in hell.’

PART I

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.

– James Barrie

ONE

Reminders. Meg didn’t need more of them, but that’s what she got when her father let her into his new apartment at the Horizon Center for Seniors Wednesday evening. He held out a plastic grocery bag.

‘What’s in there?’

‘Notebooks, from your mother’s desk,’ he said. ‘Take ’em now, before I forget.’

He did more and more of that lately, forgetting. Idiopathic short-term memory loss was his doctor’s name for his condition, which right now was more an irritation than an issue. Idiopathic, meaning there was no particular explanation. Idiopathic was an apt term for Spencer Powell, a man who lived entirely according to his whims.

Meg took the bag and set it on the dining table along with her purse. This would be a short visit, coming at the end of her twelve-hour day. Hospital rounds at seven AM, two morning deliveries, a candy-bar lunch, and then four hours of back-to-back patients at her practice – women stressing about episiotomies, C-section pain, stretch marks, unending fetal hiccups, heavy periods, lack of sex drive, fear of labor. And still four hours to go before she was likely to hit the sheets for five. An exhausting grind at times, but she loved her work. The ideal of it, at least.

‘So how was today?’ she asked, taking the clip out of her shoulder-length hair and shaking it loose. ‘Are you finding your way around all right?’

‘Colorful place,’ he said, leading her to the living room. He sat in his recliner – why did old men seem always to have one, fraying and squeaky, with which they wouldn’t part? ‘Pair o’ guys over in wing C got a great system for winning on the dogs.’

The greyhounds, he meant. ‘Is that right?’ she asked, looking him over. He looked spry as ever, and his eyes had regained the smile she’d never seen dimmed before last fall. His hair, once the brightest copper, had gone full silver, making him seem more distinguished somehow, silver being more valuable than copper. Distinguished, but no less wild than before – a man whose mind was always a step ahead of his sense. His diabetes was in check, but since her mother had died suddenly seven months earlier, Meg felt compelled to watch him closely. She was looking for signs of failing health, diabetic danger signals: swollen ankles, extra fluid in the face, unusual behaviors. All his behaviors were unusual, though, so that part was difficult.

The other difficult thing was how he kept confronting her with random pieces of her mother’s life. A pitted chrome teapot. Stiff and faded blue doilies from their old dining hutch. Rose-scented bath powder, in a round cardboard container with a round puff inside. Last week, a paper bag of pinecones dipped in glitter-thick wax. Trivia from a life forever altered by the sudden seizure of Anna Powell’s heart, like a car’s engine after driving too long without oil.

‘Yeah, those boys said they win more’n they lose, so what’s not to like about that? Hey – my left kidney’s acting up again. Steady pain, kinda dull, mostly. What d’ya s’pose that’s about?’

‘Call Dr Aimes,’ she said, as she always did when he brought up anything relating to his kidneys. ‘Tomorrow. Don’t wait.’ He looked all right – but then, she’d thought her mother had too. What a good doctor she was; she should’ve seen the signs of runaway hypertension, should’ve known a massive heart attack was pending. She never should have taken her mother’s word that she was doing fine on the blood pressure medication, nothing to worry about at all.

Her father frowned in annoyance, as he always did when she wouldn’t diagnose him. ‘What good are you?’

‘If you go into labor, I’ll be glad to help out. Otherwise, tell Dr Aimes.’ She would remind him again when she called tomorrow.

His apartment was modest – one bedroom, one bath, a combined dining-living area, and a kitchen – but comfortable, furnished mostly with new things. He’d sold the business, Powell’s Breeding and Boarding, along with the house and all the property, in order to move here. She didn’t know the financial details because he’d insisted on handling that part of things himself. But he assured her he could afford to ‘modernize’ a little, as he’d put it.

Meg looked around, glad to not see much of her mother here. Memories were like spinning blades: dangerous at close range. Her mother’s empty swivel rocker, placed alongside the recliner, would take some getting used to. If her father would just stop regurgitating things from the farm – or send them to her sisters, all of whom wisely lived out of state – she might be able to get comfortable with the new order. Was that his strategy, too? Was he giving things away so that he didn’t have to be reminded of his loss every time he opened a closet or a drawer? He certainly wasn’t much for facing the past, himself. The past was where all his failures lived.

Well, they had that in common.

He pulled the recliner’s lever and stretched out. ‘So yeah, I’m doin’ fine. Whyn’t you bring Savannah over Sunday; we’ll have dinner in this establishment’s fine dining room. They just put in one of them self-serve ice cream machines, you know what I’m talking about? Toppings, too. Y’oughta see the old farts elbowing each other to get there first! If I’d known this place was so entertaining, I’d’ve moved Mom here. This would be her kind of place, don’t you think? Lots of biddies around to cackle with.’

‘Sure, she would’ve liked it a lot,’ Meg said. The farm had overwhelmed her mother perpetually, even after Brian and his father – officially Hamilton Savings and Loan – forgave her parents’ mortgage as promised. In the years afterward, Meg liked to take her mother out to lunch for a break and a treat; she offered her spending money (as she secretly did her sisters too), but the reply was always, ‘Oh, heavens no, Meggie. You’ve done so much as it is. Besides, you know your father.’

She did. Though cursed with a black thumb for profits, he was too proud to let her put cash in their hands. He hadn’t been too proud, though, to let her – to encourage her – to take Brian’s offer. That was different; no money changed hands. Meg hadn’t had to give up anything – Carson didn’t count. It was her choice anyway, that’s what he always said.

‘Hey – whyn’t you bring our girl over here for dinner Sunday?’ He said this as if the idea had just occurred to him.

She stood next to his chair, noting how his invitation didn’t include Brian – intentionally? ‘I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘Right now I need to get going.’

‘Okay, fine, go on, Miss Hectic Schedule. I know, you got things to do. Y’oughta enjoy the ride a little more, though. Now that you can. Don’t you think? I’m fine here, everything’s settled. I don’t know why you don’t just get on with your life.’

Now that she could? What was he talking about?

He continued, ‘You’re not happy. I’ve known that for a long time. Move forward, Meggie, while you’re still young.’

She looked at him quizzically – he didn’t always make sense, but he hated having it pointed out – and kissed him without pursuing it. ‘I’m fine, Dad,’ she said. ‘It’s just been a long day.’

TWO

‘The northeast side’s where the best waves are,’ yelled Valerie Haas, over the sputtering whine of the motorbikes she and Carson McKay had rented for their excursion on St Martin. The West Indies isle, known for its split Dutch and French identity, was one of three islands they were considering for their wedding location, as well as the site of a vacation home. ‘And the nude beaches are there, too!’

‘Where’s a good bar?’ Carson yelled back, ready to be done with the noise and the hot wind and the vibration in his crotch, nude beaches or not.

He preferred riding horses to motorcycles by far, and was riding this souped-up scooter only in deference to Val. She would’ve had him on something much more powerful if it had been available to them – something worthy of a motocross track – and had been disappointed to have to settle for only 100 cc’s. She wouldn’t even consider the little Suzuki SUVs, insisting that the best views were accessible only with the bikes. He had to admit she was right; the roads up the low mountains deteriorated as they got farther from the small coastal towns, and a few times they’d taken mere trails to different points of interest. Val had wanted to locate a home rumored to have belonged to Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston several years back. Though the house wasn’t officially on the market, they were told, she thought it might be fun to buy it if possible – a surefire conversation starter, she’d called it, as if their lives weren’t already full of those. They found the house this morning, tucked into the hills of the island’s French side, but he wasn’t wild about its rocky landscape and lack of large shade trees. Val, raised in Malibu, would have gone for it anyway. Carson thought of the lushness of central Florida, the oaks and cedars and palms and twining, flowering vines, and declared that notoriety wasn’t enough to persuade him.

Now he pointed to the side of the gravel road, indicating that he was pulling over.

‘You’re not done already?’ Val said when she came to a stop next to him.

The sun pressed heavy on his forehead, forcing sweat down the sides of his neck. He wiped it away. ‘’Fraid so,’ he said.

‘We aren’t even close to finishing the tour.’

He snorted. They’d been out since seven-thirty, and it was closing in on two o’clock. Lunch had been fried plantains and some fizzy fruit soda at a roadside stand. ‘Feel free to go on, but I’m heading back to the villas.’ There was a terrific bar there, and, should he happen to consume a drink or two more than made it safe to ride, he’d already be ‘home’.

Val pushed her sunglasses up onto her shaggy white-blond hair and squinted at him. ‘Okay, I’ll go back with you – if you make it worth my while,’ she said, grinning that same provocative grin she’d used on him the night they’d met, in LA at the launch party for his latest CD. He’d seen thousands of come-hither smiles over the years, but hers was different. Confident – but not threatening, the way some women’s were. Some women were so aggressive they scared him. Val, who at twenty-two was already world famous in her own right, had enticed him with a smile that made him feel like he could reciprocate without remorse. He’d had his share of remorse over the years, and a few extra portions for good measure.

He shook his head, admiring her brilliant hair, the long, lean muscles in her thighs and arms that were products of uncountable hours of surfing and training. She’d won her first junior championship at fifteen, had her first endorsement contract a year later. ‘You’re awfully easy on me, you know.’

‘I know,’ she agreed.

‘It’s a real character flaw.’

‘I never said I was perfect.’ She pushed her sunglasses down and turned her motorbike back toward their resort, a collection of luxury villas on Nettle Bay. ‘Catch me if you can!’

THREE

Meg left her father’s apartment and stopped to admire how the setting sun glowed through the moss-draped branches of live oak trees. Spring was in full force, honeysuckle snaking its fragrant way into the trees, azaleas of fuchsia and pink and white and lavender lining the sidewalks and underlining windows. Spring was Meg’s favorite season, but Brian, with his allergies, hated spring. Messy pollen and drifting seeds, messy flower petals. He’d had their home builder clear a fifty-foot perimeter around their house when it was built. Without trees to shade the house, their electric bill was outrageous. He didn’t care; ‘That’s what money’s for,’ he’d say.

In the parking lot, as Meg dug out her keys, she noticed a strange weakness in her right arm. She struggled to raise the arm, to aim the remote at her six-year-old Volvo, feeling as though her arm had become weighted with sand. Bizarre.

A very long day, she thought, walking the remaining twenty feet to the car. That awkward twins delivery just before lunch must have strained her arm – and those damn speculums she was trying out, some new model that was supposed to work easily with one hand but was failing to live up to the product rep’s promises. Three of them had jammed open this afternoon, causing her patients discomfort and embarrassing her – and, she’d noticed at the time, making her hand ache in the effort to get them to close.

She squeezed her hand around the remote, then tried the button again. Her thumb cooperated, and the odd feeling in her arm began to pass. Once inside the car, she sat back with a heavy sigh and directed the vents so that cold air blew directly onto her face. The prospect of a shower was as enticing as diamonds. No, more enticing; diamonds had little practical value on their own, and almost no value to anyone unable to see them. A shower, though, offered universal appeal: wash away your cares, your sins, the evidence, the damage, the residue – whatever it was you needed; she would choose a well-timed shower over a diamond any day.

As she flexed her hand, she looked at the bag of notebooks where she’d set them on the seat beside her. Opening the bag, she saw maybe a dozen blue composition books, a neat stack tied up tightly with the same all-purpose twine she’d seen, and used, everywhere on their farm when she was a kid. Twine was almost as good as duct tape for making what were meant to be temporary repairs, but which inevitably became permanent.

The notebooks looked almost new. Likely her father had found them in a recently unpacked box – leftover office supplies, unneeded in his full-time ‘retirement’. As if he was the one who’d kept the business records to begin with.

The clock on the dash read seven-forty, and Meg’s empty stomach growled in response. She would stop by KFC on her way to get her daughter from the library, where Savannah and her best friend Rachel were hanging out. Supposedly. Supposedly they had a biology project to research, but she doubted this. They could research almost anything from the computer at home. Knowing Rachel – a bubbly girl whose existence disproved the theory that blondes were the airheads – there were boys involved, and the library was just a staging ground that the girls imagined would fool their parents.

Who might the boys be? Savannah revealed so little about her life these days. Somewhere between getting her first period and her first cell phone, Savannah had morphed from a curious, somewhat needy, somewhat nerdy little girl into an introverted cipher. She was nothing like Meg had been as a teen, which was a good thing. Savannah was just as reliable, but not as caught up in all that boy–girl business. Not grafted onto the heart of a young man who would later hate her for betraying him. Not, Meg hoped, destined to live with her own heart cleaved in two.

Razor sharp, some memories were.

She pushed the past away and sat another minute in the air-conditioning, stealing just a little more time for herself before moving on to her next work shift. Food. Kid. Reports. Case studies. Thirty minutes on the Bowflex, if she could dredge up the energy – or maybe she’d just spare her arm, let it have another night off. And now that it was feeling nearly normal again, she put the car in gear and headed for the library.

FOUR

Carson watched the sun easing itself closer to the low mountains, a glass of sangria in front of him on the thatch-covered outdoor bar. Val had gone to work out with Wade, her trainer, leaving him alone with his musings. He was accustomed to being alone with his musings, had produced some of his best work this way. But this afternoon, the musings were neither creative nor as positive as a man who’d just made love with a vibrant younger woman ought to be having.

Though the bar was shaded, he kept his sunglasses on, along with his ball cap – the ineffective disguise of celebrities everywhere. St Martin wasn’t as rife with fans as most stateside locales, but he’d been approached for autographs seven times already in the two days they’d been there. This, however, wasn’t the reason for his moodiness; in fact, he was having a tough time identifying what the reason was. He had no reason to be moody whatsoever: in addition to having just had sex, he’d recently won two Grammy awards, his Seattle condo was under contract for more than the asking price, his healthy parents were about to celebrate their forty-third wedding anniversary, and he would soon marry a woman who didn’t hold his unseemly past against him – a woman who’d done two Sports Illustrated features, who could have pretty much any man she wanted. Maybe it was this last part that was hanging him up.

‘I know doing this is a cliché,’ he said to the bartender, a short-haired buxom brunette, ‘but let me get your opinion about something.’

‘Of course,’ she smiled, her white teeth artificially bright and even. She set a towel aside and leaned onto the bar in front of him, her V-neck blouse straining.

He sat back a little. ‘Why would a woman – young, beautiful, appealing – like yourself – what would make a woman like you want to marry a worn-out guy like me?’

‘You are the rock star, no?’

Rock star. That had been his tag for a dozen years now, and still it sounded strange to him, and wrong. He was a songwriter, a singer, front man for a band that sold out most of its venues – all of that was true. And yes, the music was rock music – though broader in scope than most, modeled after Queen and the socially conscious, always-fresh music of Sting, whom he’d met for the first time last year. Still, he didn’t see himself as a rock star, though he recognized that he lived the life of one. It was a strange disconnection, one he’d been aware of peripherally for a long time, but which had only in the last year or two come into focus. Probably the awareness was a result of his age – that midlife business his manager, Gene Delaney, said stalked men more relentlessly than band sluts. Gene had a way with words. Whatever it was, Carson felt increasingly dissatisfied with the rock-star label: it sounded shallow, two-dimensional at best. He wanted to be thicker than that. He wanted to be substantial in life, had once believed his deeply felt music would make him that way.

‘Right,’ he told the bartender. ‘I’m the rock star. Are you saying that explains it?’

‘Non,’ she said. ‘It is good, yes, mais non pas tout – it is not everything. You have a handsome face, and very good … qu’est-ce que c’est?’ She gestured to indicate his body. ‘And you are not so much an American asshole.’

He raised his eyebrows, and the bartender clarified, ‘Not to hit his woman, or make a woman service him. You are généreux, non?’

He shrugged. He supposed he was generous – he always tipped well above what was expected, news he assumed had spread to all the staff quickly. He donated to several charities, worked with Habitat for Humanity twice a year – some people might call that generous. To him it all seemed like the least he could do when he had so much money that it seemed to replicate itself.

Money management, now that was a job in itself, and he didn’t have time for it. He left that to his mom, who liked to tease him that a wife and half a dozen kids would help him put the money to use. She thought it was a shame Val had so much money of her own. ‘She’ll be too independent, Carson, mark me on that.’ When his parents came to Seattle to meet Val at New Year’s, his mom told her about a seven-bedroom Ocala estate she’d heard was for sale: ‘Plenty of space for you two and all the kids,’ she said, not even attempting to be subtle. ‘Kids?’ Val said. ‘Ocala?’

Carson told the bartender, ‘My fiancée is seventeen years younger than me – not that I mind, but shouldn’t she?’

The woman reached over and laid one manicured finger on his arm. ‘Must be your motor is good, eh?’

‘For now.’

‘Mais oui. What else is there?’

FIVE

When Meg drove into the parking lot of Ocala’s main library, her headlights swept over and past her daughter sitting alone, earbuds in, on a bench near the entrance. Savannah stood, lifting her patch-covered book bag from the bench and swinging it onto her shoulder as Meg pulled to the curb.

‘Hi, honey,’ she said when Savannah climbed in, loudly enough to be heard over whatever was playing on the iPod. ‘Take those out, will you?’

Savannah pulled out the earbuds and hung the cord around her neck. ‘Is that better?’ She turned and shoved her bag and the notebooks into the backseat, then grabbed the plastic bag with the fried chicken and brought it up to the front.

‘It is,’ Meg said, making herself not react to Savannah’s rudeness. She knew it wasn’t intentional, knew from past arguments that the ‘tone battle’ wasn’t a battle worth fighting. ‘What are you listening to?’ she asked instead.

‘Nobody you’ve heard of.’ Savannah began to rifle through the bag.

‘Why don’t you wait – I thought it’d be nice to eat together with Dad, at home.’ For a change. She couldn’t recall, right off, the last time they’d done this.

‘I’m hungry now,’ Savannah said, opening the box inside and taking out a wing. ‘You’re late.’

Meg pulled away from the curb, ignoring the weakness that remained in her arm and ignoring Savannah’s accusatory tone. Ignore whatever doesn’t suit: a strategy she’d learned at her father’s knee. She asked, ‘Where’s Rachel?’

‘Her mom picked her up at eight.’ It was now seven minutes past.

Meg sighed. A parenting book she’d read advised fighting only the truly important battles. The challenge was in how to determine, while her buttons were being pushed, just which battles were important. Yesterday morning, both of them tired after the security alarm had gone haywire and awakened them all at two AM, they’d fought over whether the milk was beginning to sour.

Savannah added, ‘Thanks for the chicken. It’s good.’

There was hope. ‘You’re welcome. Why don’t you hand me a piece? A leg – and a napkin.’ They could eat together in the car; Brian probably wasn’t home yet anyway.

Savannah rummaged in the box and found a leg. ‘Here,’ she said, holding it out. Meg intended to reach for it, started to move her hand off the steering wheel, but her arm felt sluggish again. Something wasn’t right. She thought back to her anatomy courses, considered the networks and pathways of nerves and signals; something must be pinched, torqued out of place by the difficult entrance of that second twin this morning. Janey, the labor nurse, had been rooting for a C-section, but in Meg’s view C-sections were overdone, riskier sometimes than just patiently working with nature. Besides, Corinne, the mother, wanted to do it all naturally as long as the babies weren’t at risk. Meg had been very satisfied, as Corinne had, when little Corey and Casey came through unscathed. The only price for taking the harder route, Meg thought, was this nuisance with her arm – which could probably be fixed with a short visit to Brian’s orthopedist.

When Meg didn’t take the chicken immediately, Savannah said, ‘Mom?’

Meg forced a smile. ‘You know, I think I’ll just wait – keep both hands on the wheel. What sort of example am I setting if I eat while I drive?’ One I’ve set a hundred times, she thought. Well, what was parenting if not a series of inconsistencies and the occasional hypocritical action?

She changed the subject. ‘So, tell me about this project you’re doing.’

‘It’s no big deal. Cell anatomy and function. Pretty boring.’

Meg remembered taking high school biology, studying those same things with her lab partner, Carson. More often, not studying. Savannah, though, was a serious student, curious about everything – or so she’d been, back when her every thought manifested as a question or observation. Presumably she was still the same girl, just quieter. Was she caught up in identity issues? Questioning her sexuality? She hadn’t yet had an official boyfriend; maybe she was gay – which would be fine, Meg would love her no matter what. Or maybe Savannah was just picky; she could be awfully judgmental, the ‘curse’, her fifth-grade teacher once said, of gifted children. In truth, Meg hoped Rachel had persuaded Savannah to meet some boys, if only so that Savannah would start getting her feet wet.

‘Well, did you find the info you needed?’

‘Mostly,’ Savannah said, her mouth full.

The traffic signal ahead turned red, and Meg slowed to a stop. She looked at Savannah, really looked at her, in a way she rarely remembered to these days. The dangling wood-bead earrings, the thick, hammered-silver wrist cuff, the mascara, the slight sheen of lip gloss – when did she begin wearing that? – the swell of breasts inside a snug green tée; all these signs said her daughter was essentially a woman. When had this maturing taken place? Surely it was just last week that skinny, flat-chested, unadorned Savannah was dressing Barbie dolls and perfecting cartwheels on the pool deck behind their house. Yet this week she was a sophomore at a private all-girl high school; a little more exposure to the opposite sex would do her good.

Meg rubbed her shoulder while thinking whether she should ask outright if the girls had been ‘researching’ with boys. But knowing Savannah, the question would be interpreted as an accusation – and she simply didn’t have the energy to defend herself tonight. So instead of asking, she changed the subject again.

‘Hey, I just saw Grandpa Spencer. Do you want to go have dinner with him Sunday? He thought you’d get a kick out of using the self-serve ice cream machine they have there.’

Savannah smirked. ‘I’m practically sixteen. Did he forget the teen part or something?’

The signal light changed and Meg turned the car, heading toward their gated community on the northeast side of town. She left her arm resting in her lap. ‘Be nice,’ she said. ‘The important part is that he wants your company.’

‘Whatever,’ Savannah said.

Meg glanced at her. ‘Is that a yes?’

Her daughter shrugged, slim shoulders signaling noncommitment. ‘Are you and Dad going?’

‘I plan to. I don’t know about your dad.’

‘He never does anything,’ Savannah grumbled.

True as it was, Meg felt obliged to defend him. ‘He has a business to run.’

‘I think I know that.’ Savannah opened the glovebox, shuffled through a few CDs, selected one, and slid it into the player.

Meg waited to hear what she’d picked. In a moment, the sounds of acoustic piano and guitar surrounded them, joined, after a few bars, by Carson’s voice. She smiled at how Savannah had moved from a grumpy thought about Brian to soothing herself with Carson’s music. Meg had done the same thing many, many times herself.

‘Good choice,’ she said.

‘Can I borrow this to upload when we get home?’

‘Sure, borrow it – but make sure you put this one back afterward.’

‘Duh,’ Savannah said as though she’d never forgotten before.

Savannah sang along softly, as invested in the music as if she’d composed it herself. Meg knew why she loved Carson’s music, but was Savannah’s connection inborn? The possibility alternately pleased or worried her, depending on how close the past felt when the thought bubbled up. Tonight, the thought was a bittersweet pleasure – a longing for the simpler life she and Carson and Savannah would have had if things had been different. But sometimes she hoped fervently that Savannah was Brian’s – wished for a clean break from Carson, for pure, open space between her past and the truth of her life now. The deliberate mystery of Savannah’s paternity had turned out to be much more troubling to her than she’d expected.

Probably, she concluded, she’d trained Savannah to love Carson’s music. Inadvertently, by example. Probably it meant nothing.

‘I guess I’ll go to Grandpa’s,’ Savannah said when the song ended. ‘Oh, we have our opening ballgame Sunday at one. I told Dad; he said he has a nine-thirty tee time with some client, so you’ll have to take me.’

Of course. When Brian wasn’t jetting off to some branch or another of the company he’d founded, Hamilton Investments Management, Inc., he was on the golf course. He rarely involved himself in their lives – ironic, considering he’d once been so determined to win her away from Carson that he and his father had spent $387,000 to close the deal.

He just wasn’t the sort of man who wanted intimacy, in the fullest sense of the word. What was surface level was uncomplicated and therefore desirable; he saved his energies for work. He was about accomplishments. Results. The successful pursuit of an ever-higher standard. He collected achievements the way other people accrue trophies. She admired his energy but was cowed by it too; he expected the same from everyone around him and, especially lately, she didn’t have it to give.

‘Well, whether Dad comes with us or not,’ Meg said, ‘Grandpa will be glad to see you; he wants to show you around – “show her off”, that’s how he put it.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s his new home, the people there are his new neighbors – he wants them to see his beautiful offspring.’

‘Which would be you, or Aunt Beth,’ Savannah said. ‘Not me. I’m not beautiful; I got Dad’s big nose.’

Perhaps, Meg thought. Savannah’s nose did look something like Brian’s, and the shape of her face was similar, too; the broad forehead, the wide smile. Meg wouldn’t bet her life on a genetic connection, though. She said, ‘You are absolutely gorgeous. I’d give anything for that wavy hair.’ She wanted to reach over and touch Savannah’s long auburn hair, willed her tired arm to cooperate. Happily, it did, and she pushed some strands behind her daughter’s ear, letting her hand linger. Carson’s low, soulful voice sang one of his early ballads, a song about a pair of young lovers separated by a washed-out bridge.

‘Hey, two hands on the wheel,’ Savannah said.

In the darkness, Meg allowed herself a wistful smile.

SIX

Savannah passed the ninety minutes before her online ‘date’ by working on a new song. Her guitar, a fifteenth-birthday gift almost a year ago, made a good diversion most nights, especially now that her grandparents’ horse farm was sold. But last Sunday, while she was chatting online with her friends, she got a message from someone intriguing. A guy – no, a man – who wanted to get to know her. And at nine-thirty tonight he would be online to chat with her again … she hoped.

She sat on her fuzzy purple stool, trying to improve the final three bars of her song. The purple, the fuzz, annoyed her. Nothing in her bedroom suite felt like ‘her’ anymore; her life didn’t feel like ‘her’ anymore. She’d outgrown the lavender walls and spring-green carpet, the white dressers and desk. Her fuchsia curtains, with their bright appliquéd daisies, annoyed her. A lot of things annoyed her, in fact: most of her classmates, her dad’s refusal to let her get a dog even to keep outside, the stares of the creepy lawn-care guys, the way she still wasn’t allowed to stay home alone when her parents traveled, as if she couldn’t be trusted – just to name a few. It was all so irritating, like a cloud of gnats she couldn’t shoo away. Even this song, which she’d been so dedicated to at first, was getting on her nerves; she just couldn’t seem to get it to end the way she wanted it to.

Finally, at nine-twenty, she gave up trying to concentrate and propped the guitar against the wall, wishing there was some way to fast-forward to a time when she had her own life, her own place. Space that was decorated by her, not by some fussy designer who thought she knew ‘just what smart little girls like!’ Someplace like a park ranger’s cabin along the Chassahowitzka River, where she could do research on manatee populations – that would do her just fine. The gentle mammals were her main interest outside of music. If she could have music and manatees, that was all she needed. Well, music and manatees and a boyfriend who loved those things too. And maybe now she’d found him.

‘Ten minutes to Kyle,’ she said, nervous. Would he show? Would he be as interested in her as he’d seemed last time? She grabbed her laptop and settled onto her bed with purple velvet pillows propped behind her, facing the door like she always did – so that no parent could stroll in and read over her shoulder. Not that they would stroll in. Not that she ever had anything to hide, in particular … until this week.

She signed on and scanned her buddy list for Kyle’s screen name: still offline. Suppose he didn’t show? Suppose he found someone he liked better than her?

Her webpage, where he’d first discovered her, was as appealing as she could make it. She’d fudged a little on the facts, though, including posting photos specially selected to make the case that she was twenty, not a month shy of sixteen. One showed her by the pool, wearing a bikini and holding a highball glass filled with amber liquid meant to look like a cocktail. In reality she didn’t drink at all – she was smarter than that. But success in life was all about presentation, that’s what her dad always said. So her page presented the Savannah she thought would attract the kind of boyfriend she wanted: an older guy whose interests matched hers. Guys her age – the ones she knew, anyway – seemed to care only about sports or money or, like her friend Jonathan, were more into playing video games than having an actual life.

Her page was her portal to the real world. And she hoped – hoped so hard that it made her stomach hurt – that her strategy had worked, that Kyle would become her companion and guide.

She traded IMs with Rachel about the guy they’d met up with earlier at the library. Some senior from North Marion High. She’d gone to the library as moral support, though Rachel, who’d practically licked the guy’s ear while whispering to him, seemed to not need any kind of support at all. Now Rachel was saying he’d promised to call her, but she’d forgotten to give him her number before her mom arrived. In typical Rachel fashion she wrote,

OMG!! wat do i do???? i just no i will never c him agn!!!!!!!

chill, Savannah wrote. In her opinion, the guy was too skinny, and he hadn’t seemed that into Rachel anyway.

Savannah kept up her end of the conversation mindlessly, waiting, waiting, her heart seeming to stall, until the chime of Kyle messaging her jump-started it again:

hi babe, wassup?

To Rachel she wrote hurriedly, its him! gtg.

If what he’d said in their first chat was legitimate, he was twenty-three years old and had a bachelor’s degree in marine biology. He loved music, including some of her favorite bands: No Doubt, Evanescence, Nickelback, and Carson McKay. He sounded perfect.

Everything she’d posted on her page was accurate – well, except for her age: long wavy red-brown hair, 5´8´´ (too tall, she thought, but what could she do?), green eyes, 127 lb. She hadn’t revealed her whole name, just first and middle, wise to the risks of giving too much information. Savannah Rae. If she ever got into professional songwriting or performing in public, that was the name she planned to use.

i’m studying 4 bio quiz, she replied. She’d told him that first night that she was a student at the University of Florida – but only after making sure he hadn’t gone there.

ah, the good old days, he wrote. He was working on his PhD now, doing some kind of research for a professor at Harvard – fieldwork around the western Everglades, only a few hours south of Gainesville, he’d said. Gainesville, where she supposedly lived in an apartment with three girlfriends.

Kyle’s very first message included a picture of himself standing on some decrepit dock wearing only cargo shorts that hung low on his hips, and hiking boots with socks showing above the tops. He was trim and muscled like the Greek sculptures she studied in art history. She thought his body was amazing, but it was his face that really drew her in: his wide, long-lashed eyes looked kind. Caring. Dedicated to his passions – which would include her, she hoped. His dark, curly hair and café au lait complexion made her think he might be part Latino or black – something her dad wouldn’t approve of, but she didn’t really care.

wut r u up 2? she asked.

sos. waiting 4 the wkend. i really want 2 meet in person, he wrote, thrilling her. wut r u doing sat?

it’s my dad’s b-day, she wrote, adding a frowning-face icon. Another white lie, but it wouldn’t be good to sound too eager. She waited anxiously for his reply.

idea: meet 4 may day in miami?

Savannah perked up. wut’s in miami?

my bros. we meet every yr 4 beach party. got a bikini? duh. He’d seen the pictures of her on her webpage.

got a car?

duh, she wrote again, though she wouldn’t have one until her birthday in mid-May, a small detail she could work out later. She wiped her damp palms on the bedspread, waiting to see if he was serious.

Kyle wrote, luv 4 u 2 hang w/us. try?

sure! she replied, though she didn’t have a clue how she could get there without her parents’ permission. Not that they paid close attention to what she did with her time, her dad in particular. They believed whatever she told them. If she planned things carefully, she might be able to make it work. ‘Holy shit,’ she whispered, but played it cool, typing, will check to see if I’m free.

hope so, Kyle wrote. hey babe, gtg – frenz here. Call your cell sat?

Disappointed to be done so soon, she wrote, ok. ttyl! and added a smiley face, to show she was just fine with letting him go. Then she signed off, so that none of her friends could interrupt her glow.

Wow, she thought, snapping her laptop shut: Kyle. Miami. She couldn’t wait to talk to him about it – it would be only their second conversation, the first having been Monday night. They hadn’t talked for long, but long enough for her to determine that he wasn’t geeky or weird. Long enough to discover that his voice, a midrange tenor that might complement her alto if he could sing, filled a hole in her heart – or maybe her soul, she wasn’t sure – in a way nothing else quite managed to. She stood and stretched and grinned.

As she washed her face, she imagined walking with Kyle on soft white sand, holding hands, kissing … French kissing, like she’d done experimentally a few times with her friend Jonathan, who lived two houses over. She was fascinated with the male body and the way she felt when she thought about getting firsthand knowledge of Kyle’s. Now that she’d found a guy worth her time, she was ready to try out a lot of the things she knew most of her friends were doing already. Had been doing since eighth grade, some of them. Her stomach turned a funny little flip when she thought of how it would be to slide her hand inside the waist of his cargo shorts.

She leaned close to the mirror to inspect the few blackheads dotting her forehead and the top of her nose. She’d need to get rid of those before Miami – what twenty-year-old girl would still have blackheads? Getting rid of the freckles banding her nose and cheeks would be nice, too, but that wasn’t going to happen. Her height, her freckles, her smile, and the red highlights in her brown hair were gifts from her mother – that’s what her Grandma Anna used to say; she tried to appreciate them, but what she wanted was to be petite, with blond hair and spot-free skin. Or that’s what she often thought, but now that she’d snagged Kyle’s interest, she might concede that she looked okay as is.

With his perspective in mind, she peeled off her T-shirt and looked at her breasts critically. ‘Average,’ she said, turning sideways, then facing front again. Not like she could do much to improve them, short of getting implants, and she was not an implant kind of girl. She knew girls who were, though – girls who’d already had nose jobs, girls who were all about improving their bodies so they could get better guys. Girls who knew how to flirt. Girls who wore those mini-stilettos called kitten heels, and big smiles for their daddies so they could get more money to shop with.

Savannah knew she wasn’t especially good at flirting, not with boys and not with her dad, but she was a straight-A student, good at figuring things out – which was much more valuable in the long run. Besides, Kyle obviously liked smart women, seeing as how he thought she was a college student with serious career aspirations and all.

She’d just changed into the yellow Earth Day tank top and gray knit shorts she slept in when she heard a tap on her bedroom door.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

The door opened. ‘Hey, sweetie, you ready for bed?’ her mom asked.

‘What does it look like?’ Savannah said, moving her laptop from her bed to her desk in a show of being finished with it. She knew that once her mom left the room, she could play guitar or make a phone call or open up the computer again without any fear of being interrupted. Her mom was nothing if not predictable; once she said good night, Savannah wouldn’t see her again until the next morning. Some kids might take much better advantage of this predictability than she ever had – sneaking out, for example, or sneaking someone in. She never did that kind of thing, never had a reason to, before.

Her mom sat on the side of the bed. ‘You’re such a wise guy. What does it look like? It looks like you’re ready to race sled-dogs in the Iditarod. But I think maybe a good night’s sleep is in order first.’

Savannah sat down near her pillows and pulled her knees up to her chest. ‘Funny,’ she said. ‘Not.’

‘Actually, you look like you might be about to audition for a strip-club job.’

‘Mom,’ Savannah said.

‘What? Those shorts are scandalous.’

‘You bought them.’

‘When you were twelve, if I remember right. What is it with teenage girls and short clothing?’

‘It’s just a style.’

‘Hmm. Well, don’t wear those in public. Dad would kill you.’

Savannah looked down at the shorts, which she was planning to wear in Miami. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

‘So … do you need anything?’ her mom asked, looking around her bedroom in that way Savannah knew parents did when searching for signs that their kids smoked or drank or whatever. This made her feel guilty before she’d even done anything wrong.

She took a bit of her hair and pulled it in front of her face, braiding it quickly. I need my car, she thought. She said, ‘Shampoo.’ And then, seeing an opening, she added, ‘Oh, and I have this question: Remember how, when we were in London last fall with Aunt Beth—’

‘Wasn’t that a great trip? This fall, the conference is going to be in Singapore. Do you think you’d like to go? Dad’s been there and he loved it – well, he loved the golf courses, anyway; the food wasn’t his thing. But—’

‘Mom,’ she interrupted, now unbraiding her hair.

‘Oh, sorry. What about it?’

‘I was thinking it might be cool to fly out to visit her this summer, like, just on my own. Can kids do that, fly alone, I mean?’

Her mom said, ‘Sure. Remember, there were three little boys in matching tie-dye shirts and airline badges on that flight to London?’

‘Oh, yeah. So then, you don’t have to be eighteen or whatever?’ She began braiding again, then caught herself and pushed the hair back behind her ear.

‘Nope. As I understand it, the airlines all have special services for unaccompanied children – they have flight attendants assigned to them, and a parent or relative has to meet them at their destination gate.’

‘So basically I’d be tracked like a convict.’

Her mom laughed. ‘No, you’re old enough to go on your own, the program’s for younger kids. Do you know, I heard on the radio not long ago that Atlanta has the busiest airport in the world? I always thought it would be New York – but they’re not even in the top ten! I think O’Hare was the second busiest, and then Heathrow …’

Savannah listened with half attention while thinking of how to buy a ticket to Miami. Her mom was always taking the long way through explanations, which used to delight her but now often felt unnecessary. Sometimes she wanted to say, Just get to it already. She never did though, maybe because a small part of her still liked seeing her mom as an all-knowing authority. Maybe because she knew that asking questions was a good way to get and hold her mom’s attention – not that she wanted so much of it anymore. She didn’t. She wanted her own life, a life where she fit, a life where no gung-ho dads looked down on low-money career aspirations. A life where she was important to the people around her. To Kyle, maybe. With her Grandma Anna gone now, most of the time she felt invisible. And that was on a good day.

Her mom was still talking. ‘Well, I know Aunt Beth would love to have you, no question. She could tour you around Berkeley, introduce you to some of the other professors – you really should apply there, you’d be a shoo-in. I’m so pleased that you want to spend time with her. What a nice idea!’

Savannah nodded. She probably would enjoy going, though she hadn’t thought about it one way or the other until this minute. And attending Berkeley for its environmental science program was a possibility, if she wanted to work for the manatees through politics and policy. Right now, though, all she cared about was whether she could hop a plane to Miami with nothing more than a ticket and ID. From the sound of it, she could.

‘I’ll talk to Beth,’ her mom said, ‘and if you think you might want to go to Singapore, I should get that arranged before too much longer.’

‘I’ll think about it.’ She was impatient now to be alone so she could get online and look into airline schedules. She gave a smile that was meant to encourage her mom to move alone. ‘So … good night,’ she said.

‘Oh. Okay then.’ Her mom stood, smiling back in a way that made Savannah fear she’d been too abrupt. Again. She never meant to be rude; things just came out that way.

She watched her mom walk to the door, then turn and look at her.

‘Honey?’

‘Yeah?’

‘This weekend, let’s have that chat about birth control I’m sure you’ve been dreading.’ Before Savannah could answer, she was gone down the hallway.

Savannah sat as if frozen, though her face was ablaze and her mind was spinning. Did her mom suspect something? An impulse to forget the whole Miami idea swelled inside her, but then she thought of Kyle, brought that image of him on the dock to mind, and the impulse subsided. It had to be the fact of her sixteenth birthday coming up that provoked her mom’s suggestion. Knowing her mom, the birth-control chat had been scheduled since the moment she heard ‘It’s a girl!’

Suppose during this chat she just up and told her mom that she wanted to go on the pill? Suppose she said she had a boyfriend and they were considering having sex. Right – that would go over well. Going from having had no real boyfriend ever, to the announcement of having not only a boyfriend but also a sexual relationship with the guy … it just wouldn’t work, even if she wanted to tell her about Kyle – which she didn’t. Couldn’t. He was definitely not who her parents would have in mind for her, not by, oh, six or seven years and, in her dad’s case, several shades of skin color.

So no birth control pills for her, not just now. But as soon as she got a chance, she’d pop in to Wal-Mart or someplace where she could be anonymous, to buy a box of condoms. It was no big deal; she knew girls at school who did it all the time. She liked to think that if her parents found out she bought condoms, they’d be proud of her for being so responsible and mature.

What would probably happen, though, was that her mom would feel betrayed and her dad would just shrug and head for the club.

SEVEN

When Brian strode into the living room Friday night, Meg saw he had showered before coming home. Comb marks angled through his thinning dark hair. A lightly starched golf shirt – not the same one he would have worn while playing – was tucked into tailored navy shorts. His waistline swelled over his belt like the top of a muffin. She had never thought him unattractive. His style, though, wasn’t her preference. She liked a more rugged look. Less refined, more adventurous. Brian was so … tidy, she thought. Orderly. Like their home, like their life.

She put aside the stack of blue notebooks, which she’d forgotten in the car until this evening. She’d been trying unsuccessfully to free them from the string, wanting to make sure they weren’t anything important before putting them in a box for Goodwill.

‘Been at the club?’ she asked Brian, to snag his attention. She needed to make an effort more often; in two years, Savannah would be off to college, and then where would they be? Familiar but distant occupants of their six-thousand-square-foot, professionally decorated house. A house with too many unused rooms as it was; how hollow things would be with Savannah away.

Brian stopped and set his gym bag on the polished hardwood floor. ‘Yep,’ he said, perching on the side of an armchair opposite her. ‘Got nine holes in, with those clients from Germany I was telling you about the other day. They’re really bad – don’t know a wedge from an iron – but good-natured about it. We stopped keeping score.’

Meg nodded, empathetic to the German men’s plight; she hardly knew the differences between golf clubs herself. She supposed she should know, golf being Brian’s life outside of work. It just didn’t interest her, and her mind was crowded enough with the things she had to know.

Perhaps he understood this; he never bothered to discuss the particulars of his golf games. Their conversations molded around common interests: the house, Savannah, their families, their careers. A movie, if by long odds they’d seen it together – or separately, if one of them was traveling and caught it on the plane or late at night in a hotel.

Sometimes, now that Savannah was watching many of the same movies, she joined the conversation. If they had all seen the movie and were all in one room or one vehicle at the same time, an occurrence about as rare as conjoined twins.

Manisha Patel, Meg’s partner, assured her that her reality was nothing unusual; Manisha’s family’s worked the same way, which was like that of most other families they knew and was often the subject of talk shows Meg came across late at night, times when she couldn’t sleep. She and Brian and Savannah were planets orbiting a common sun, occasionally swinging into close proximity. Held together by the gravitational pull of a shared address, they had little in common with what had once made the ‘traditional’ family. She felt guilty about this as regularly as she felt defensive about it and figured she’d come to terms with the whole muddy issue just about the time Savannah was grown and gone.

‘You look refreshed,’ Meg said. ‘I’m going to hit the shower in a minute myself. But it feels so good to just sit here.’

Brian smiled in that way he had, slightly condescending and self-affirming. He could put in a full, hectic day and still have the energy to entertain clients and play nine holes of golf, that’s what she imagined him thinking. He was never overtly critical, but still, she felt his judgment, felt the comparison – it was his nature to think that way. She half expected him to give her a Team Hamilton pep talk.

‘Was it a busy day?’ he asked – his attempt to connect, she supposed, given that he knew all her days were busy.

She sighed and put her feet up on the sofa, taking up the space that he might have filled if he’d tried a little harder. If he had wanted to try. If she had wanted him to.

‘Yeah, busy, but also taxing,’ she said. ‘I had a pre-eclamptic mother with back labor who dealt with it by screaming, and then a transverse baby I practically had to climb inside with to get out.’ She rubbed her arm, thinking about that one. ‘And two new high-risk patients this afternoon; you probably know the one’s husband: McKinney? Joseph, I think his name is.’ The surname, when she read it on the chart earlier in the day, had made her think of McKay, of Carson, of how she’d learned a week ago that he was planning a May wedding. To a much younger woman, the news website’s headline announced – ‘Musician McKay Robbing the Cradle for a May Bride?’ – and Meg had elected not to click the link to read the details. Since then, even the weakest prompts called him to mind.

‘Yeah, I know him, Joe McKinney,’ Brian nodded. ‘Partner at Decker McKinney Peterson. He’s pretty good – at golf, I mean – though judging from that little black Ferrari I saw him in, likely at law, too. What’s his wife’s trouble?’

‘She’s forty-three.’

‘Ah. It’s good, though, you getting all these new high-risk patients – obviously you’re building quite a reputation as a specialist. You should raise your rates, take space somewhere a little more … upscale, let’s say.’

‘We like where we are,’ Meg said. She and Manisha chose their office location, a modest brick building downtown, precisely because it wasn’t so upscale that they’d price out women less affluent than the Mrs Joseph McKinneys of the world. Or the Mrs Carson McKays, for that matter, she thought, wondering if pregnancy explained his short-notice announcement. Their wealthy patients came to them because they were good doctors, not because their offices looked like a luxury spa.

‘I just don’t see why you’d choose not to take advantage of an opportunity when it’s practically dropped in your lap,’ Brian said, standing up. ‘You’re savvier than that.’

His criticism, delivered beningly, still stung. ‘What does “savvy” have to do with anything? Just because I don’t feel like I need to earn more money, I’m not “savvy”?’

Brian pushed his hands into his shorts pockets, relaxed and confident in his opinions. ‘Look, ever since I’ve known you, whenever you’ve been faced with an opportunity to better yourself or improve your status, you’ve taken it. I don’t see why you’d stop now.’

He was right, and yet his assessment missed seeing her clearly, as though time had made his memory as farsighted as his eyes. Had he forgotten that her first opportunity was one he’d constructed so carefully that there was no way she could turn him down? Once he’d set the wheel in motion, then yes, she’d tried in every way to better herself. She was practical. There were limits, though, to her ambition. Maybe he didn’t want to believe this about her, or maybe he hadn’t noticed. He loved to tell people what a terrific pair they made, how alike they were in temperament and taste, how accomplished she’d become; he had constructed the reality he wanted in their marriage the same way he’d done for his business.

He had her all wrong.

She was not the woman of his tales, would never be that woman, but was there any value in arguing the point? In part, he didn’t know who she really was because she kept pieces of herself hidden from him. Money couldn’t buy everything.

Before she could frame any sort of response, Brian picked up his gym bag, said, ‘I have to make a couple calls,’ and left the room. She let him go.

He didn’t know, either, that she’d thought of leaving him many times, the way a blond woman might think about coloring her hair black: interested in the possibilities but unwilling to take such a drastic step. What if black hair looked awful? Was black an advantage, or was it just different? If she were the ambitious woman he saw, she would have divorced him as soon as she was earning enough to pay back her parents’ mortgage. She’d have moved ‘onward and upward’, as was Brian’s refrain. But no, she had already blasted apart the one bridge she’d want to travel again, and so because she wanted to keep Savannah’s life stable and she and Brian were as compatible as she needed them to be, she stayed.

Standing, she reached down for the notebooks and felt her left knee begin to buckle. She caught herself with one hand on the sofa’s arm. ‘Getting old, girl,’ she said, shaking her head.

Brian’s voice, persuasive and firm as he talked on the phone, resounded as she passed the kitchen. He was fixing a snack while he talked – warming up brownies, from the smell of it. He’d add vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, which illustrated why she’d had to take his suits in for alteration despite his playing some twenty hours of golf a week. That was the other curse of middle age: a slowing metabolism. Keeping in shape was harder all the time – and she’d skipped her workouts more than she wanted to admit, these months since her mother’s death. There never seemed to be time for exercise; the number of hours in her day had shriveled like an unpicked orange, and she was just too tired to wedge in anything she could excuse as nonessential.

In the master bathroom, she set down the note-books and turned on the shower. While it warmed, she rifled through a drawer for the pair of tiny scissors she used to trim her pubic hair. Brian preferred her trimmed, almost hairless, except for the hair on her head, which he liked long, and the coppery down of her arms. How long since she’d bothered to trim herself up? She didn’t even shave her legs weekly anymore. They hadn’t made love in … what was this? April? Two months. Not since Valentine’s Day, and even then it had been more of an expected gesture, a guilty ought-to rather than an anticipated finally, which, honestly, hadn’t occurred even in the first months – for her, anyway. As steam drifted around her like unsettled ghosts, she took the scissors and cut the notebooks’ binding string, expecting that when she cracked open the first of them, she’d find blank pages filled with nothing more than pale blue preprinted lines.

What she found instead came as such a surprise that she reached into the shower and turned the water off.

A quick perusal showed that each book was filled with neat pages of her mother’s calculations and observations on the status of the farm, the weather, the horses’ health – interspersed, it seemed, with similar comments about Meg and her sisters and father, all done in fine blue or black felt-tip ink. Seeing the curves and loops made by her mother’s hand weakened Meg; she sank to the thick cotton rug and spread the books around her.

Had her father known he’d given her these? These twelve diaries, as in essence they were, spanned close to two decades, ending the day before he woke on a Sunday morning last September and found his wife had slipped away in the night, leaving behind her stilled body … and these words. Of gossip? Of wisdom?

If she had known ahead of time that the notebooks were diaries, she never would have opened a single cover. Why invite pain? Now, she didn’t know what she would do with them. She didn’t want to read them. She didn’t want not to.

A knock on the door startled her. ‘What?’

‘Mom, I need you to sign a thing so I can do the end-of-year field trip.’

‘Can’t Dad do it?’

‘He’s on the phone.’

Meg piled up the notebooks and stashed them in the vanity cabinet. ‘I’ll be right out.’

EIGHT

Meg sat in the kitchen Saturday morning, coffee in hand, notebooks stacked on the table before her. Brian had gone for his usual Saturday breakfast with his cronies, first dropping Savannah at Rachel’s so they could go … someplace; Savannah had told her, but Meg, distracted by the diaries and her ambivalence about reading them, had passed Savannah off to Brian and thought no more about her plans.

The house was peaceful now, which made it easier to decide to try reading an entry or two. Just to prove to herself that they were frivolous, that she could throw the whole lot away without regret.

She paged through, sampling the entries, surprisingly compelled to turn the pages. Even the shortest of her mother’s comments revealed pieces of her past – their past – she hadn’t seen before.

June 8, 1985

Meggie’s been hired on at the bank. We need her here, but we need her there, too. Or somewhere that pays good. The Lord knows the money will be useful! We had to let our health insurance lapse, so I just pray none of us takes sick. Blessed Mother, watch over us all.

So they’d gone without insurance; the very thought of it was frightening, even long after the fact. She remembered her mother’s pinched face from back then, the worry lines ringing her mouth and wrinkling her forehead. It hadn’t mattered how early Meg got up in the morning, her mother was always up before her. No matter how late she stayed up, her mother was still up too. Little wonder her mother’s blood pressure was high.

‘June eighth …’ she said. The day she met Brian.

Her first day of work at Hamilton Savings and Loan. Her training was set to begin at ten, but first she was required to meet her boss – Brian, who was the owner’s son, only six years older than herself. Belinda Cordero, head teller, led her to his office doorway and disappeared, leaving her feeling self-conscious and somehow wrong for this moment in time, as if she’d been dropped into the scene by mistake. Her real life was waiting in the paddocks – horses that needed to be exercised, tack that awaited repair. She wanted to bolt.

Brian was sitting at a desk that looked older and more distinguished than he was. He wore an off-white linen jacket and a pastel pink shirt, à la Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice. His hair was longish and styled just right, meant to dazzle all the women and show the men he was on top of the trends.

He sat back and waved her in. ‘Hi, come on in, Meg. I’m Brian Hamilton.’

She took three small steps and stopped. His office smelled of old leather and young ambition, embodied by an expensive cologne she would forever associate with him. She took one more step and stopped.

Brian folded his hands behind his head. ‘Welcome. We’re glad to have you as part of the Hamilton team. Eileen tells me you’re a rising senior at North Marion High?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Good in math?’

She nodded. She did her best to keep eye contact, the way her father had told her she should, but it was hard. Brian kept smiling at her as if he knew that her black polyester skirt and ruffled brown blouse came from a thrift shop. Her shoes, too – though she hoped he couldn’t see them while she stood there in front of his desk. It was the same outfit she’d worn for her interview the week before, and she suspected Ms Guillen had told him everything.

She’d gotten the job out of sympathy, she was sure. Everyone in Ocala seemed to know how tenuous things were for the Powells; her father broadcasted his failures as loudly as his successes, afternoons at the co-op. She had applied for a position with the janitorial staff, the job advertised in the Ocala Star-Banner, but during her interview with Eileen Guillen, director of human resources, she’d talked about her plan to study accounting after she graduated. Because of that, instead of cleaning floors and toilets in the historic building that Adair Hamilton had rebuilt right after the 1883 fire, Meg would become a part-time teller. ‘We like to give our people the best possible start,’ Eileen had told her. ‘’Specially those who need it most.’

Brian said, ‘I like math a lot, myself. My degree’s in economics, and I’ll have my MBA soon. Do you plan to go to college?’

‘I hope to.’

‘Terrific.’ He clapped his hands, an exclamation point. ‘We like our people to be motivated beyond all this marble and brass.’ He stood and offered his hand. ‘It’s great to have you here. I know Belinda’s waiting for me to turn you back over to her, so I’d better let you go.’

At first Meg thought she’d rather be cleaning toilets; working as a teller meant being visible, presentable, and this was a challenge for a girl whose best clothes were jeans and T-shirts without patches or stains. She and her mother scoured the thrift stores for decent professional wear with some success, but being dressed up in skirts and heels every afternoon was like wearing a costume. A costume that wasn’t quite as nice as the ones the other tellers wore. Brian went out of his way, though, to help her feel like she was a valuable part of the Hamilton team – that’s how he always talked about the tellers, as a team. If her white blouse was dingy because they’d run out of detergent, he overlooked it. If the fake leather on the heels of her shoes was peeling away, he overlooked that too. Was she good with people? Was she careful with procedures and funds? Those were the things that mattered. By the time school started again, her senior year, she’d been converted to permanent employee status, which Belinda said was ‘super high praise’.

Brian made a point to befriend her. He would find her during her breaks, ask the occasional question about their farm or her family, her boyfriend, her aspirations in life. She thought he did this with everyone – they all talked about what a hands-on manager he was, how he was destined to be a big success – and only learned later that he’d singled her out. Sometimes he joined her and a few of the other employees at the Trough, after work – a treat she allowed herself only every other Friday. Carson never went. ‘Too many guys with ties,’ he joked. She went anyway, wanting to fit in if she could. They all talked about their career goals, and once, she admitted that her dream job wasn’t in finance at all, but in medicine. Maybe veterinary, maybe human, she wasn’t sure. ‘I’m used to doctoring everyone and everything already,’ she’d said. ‘My sisters, the horses, our cats … I’ve helped with foaling – and I even gave our pony stitches once.’

Brian slapped the tabletop. ‘Then do it,’ he said, surprising her. ‘Figure out what you want and how to make it happen, and do it.’

But surely he knew how impossible that was for her, for any Powell girl. Every paycheck she earned went to her parents, to help pay for groceries. Trying for medical school of either type was as futile as trying to use her arms to fly.

Brian. He’d known so well how to play her, when the time came.

NINE

At their Nettle Bay villa, Carson watched Val and Marie-Louise, the ambitious French real estate agent Val had picked, pore over photos and property fact sheets on the patio’s café table. He knew he should be as immersed in the activity as Val, knew by the way she kept looking over at him, sitting on the rattan chair to her right, that she thought the same thing. And he wanted to be. He wanted to be fully focused on ideal elevation, proximity to the best surf, amenities such as built-in pools and spas and breeze-catching screened rooms. But his seditious mind kept moseying back in time, to the evenings when he and his father had sat at their square kitchen table and sketched out plans for a very different new residence, one he’d share with a very different girl.

He could see it, as clear as if it happened last week instead of twenty years ago: his dad looking young and capable in the heavy twill pants and cotton button-up shirt he always wore to work in the groves; the kitchen light, a cone-shaped pendant, hanging above the table’s center, its circle of golden light on their outspread papers; his mother singing some ’60s tune while she updated the books at the desk nearby – the Carpenters, he thought, hearing her contralto in his memory. And Meg, sitting close at his left, pushing her long hair off her shoulders and smiling at him, at the future they were drawing with a wooden ruler and pencils sharpened with a knife.

How different a scene that was from what came later.

He remembered his twenty-second birthday, long after the breakup, months after Meg’s wedding in ’89. George Pappas, his good friend and would-be guitarist, had taken him out for lunch and a few beers. They were waiting at a red light in George’s faded brown Chevelle, Pearl Jam blasting on the aftermarket stereo. He didn’t notice the glossy red sports car pulled up alongside the left of them at first. Four or five – or six? – beers since lunch had made him almost oblivious, to his surroundings and to the fact that he was spending another birthday without Meg. It was the first since her marriage, but who was counting?

‘Hey,’ George said, tapping his window. ‘Isn’t that Meg?’

Carson turned at the same moment she looked over, her hand pressed to the glass; they stared at each other as if George wasn’t seated between them, as if they weren’t passengers in two different cars, separated by window glass and harsh words and wedding vows.

George started to roll down his window. What did he think, that they’d all just have a nice little chat? That she’d wish him a happy birthday and throw a kiss? But then the arrow turned green, and the Porsche pulled out, turning left.

George whistled. ‘Nice wheels, eh, bro?’ he said, as the car moved farther and farther away from them, disappearing into the Ocala twilight. ‘She did pretty well for herself.’

‘Fuck you,’ Carson said.

He was jarred back to the present when Val elbowed him. ‘Carson! I think this is the one!’

He cleared his mind of the memories of Meg so that he could be, instead, with the woman he was reasonably sure would marry him. Sitting up straighter, he leaned in to see what Val was looking at. ‘Yeah? Let’s see.’

Val passed him a fact sheet for a charming blue-roofed house, its stucco exterior and arched doorways reminiscent of South Florida’s Caribbean-influenced architecture. Or rather, the Florida homes mimicked the ones here in St Martin, which were influenced by French tastes – which of course was true about many structures in the West Indies. This was, he decided, the architectural circle of life, Caribbean version. It could be a reality show.

Marie-Louise said, ‘That one, it’s in Terres Basses – “lowlands” en français. It is très exclusif.’

For three-point-five million US dollars, it ought to be, he thought.

‘That’s where we were looking yesterday morning,’ Val reminded him.

‘Alors, there is a view of the Caribbean Sea from the stone pool and spa – so nice for romantic soirées, no?’ Marie-Louise smiled her ingratiating smile. ‘But if you get company – maybe your real estate agent, yes? – you have four guest rooms, three baths – and your kitchen, well, it is magnifique!’

He fought to keep from rolling his eyes. Marie-Louise reminded him of the kinds of women he tried hardest to avoid. She would make an ideal host for his imaginary reality show, he decided, viewing Caribbean properties with wealthy couples and booting off the islands anyone whose net worth turned out to be less than ten million dollars.

‘Carson loves to cook, right, Car?’ Val said.

‘“Loves” might be a little strong.’

‘He’s being modest. He’s terrific in the kitchen – his Thai food is killer. Men should be self-sufficient, don’t you think?’

‘Oh, oui,’ Marie-Louise said. ‘They must cook and clean and make the money – it’s what we do, non?’

‘Equality,’ Val said, nodding.

‘L’égalité,’ Marie-Louise agreed, both women looking at Carson.

‘I’m all for it. I’ll cook, and Val can do the dishes.’

‘Not!’

‘Spoken like a twenty-first-century princess.’ Carson smiled. He’d known how Val would respond – she was useless in the kitchen, capable of little more than pouring cereal and pouring wine. It was part of her charm.

‘The Princess de la Mer,’ Marie-Louise declared.

Val took the fact sheet from him. ‘And this house looks like the perfect princess hideaway. What do you think, Car? Want to go see it?’

He considered what might happen if he said no, if he told her he thought dropping any million on a vacation house felt ridiculous and unreal and contrary to what his life was about – not that he could fully define ‘about’; he considered how her smile would falter, replaced by confusion over his uncharacteristic – to her – behavior. She’d never seen him pessimistic or witnessed one of his ‘philosophical jags’, as Gene liked to call the lapses into dark introspection that seemed to sneak up on him now and again. He hadn’t had one since hearing that Meg’s mother had died so suddenly last September, just before he and Val met. Val wouldn’t know what to do with that Carson, much as he usually didn’t know himself. And maybe it was unfair to marry her without her having witnessed one of the spells – though he’d told her about them. Maybe he should make her see his full range, first.

Or maybe, in marrying her, he would effectively short-circuit his melancholy side and they’d live happily ever after. He stood, reached for Val’s hand, and said, ‘Let’s go.’

A few minutes later he trailed the women down a flagstone path to where the real estate agent had parked her late-model Mercedes. The reality of his surroundings – the ridiculous blue of the Caribbean sky, the palm trees so perfect they hardly looked natural, the sculpted shrubbery, the flash of the $79,000 diamond on Val’s left ring finger as she swung her arm – this reality was not the one he had planned for, growing up. It was not the reality he thought he was built for. Yet here he was. He trusted that if he tracked all his life’s events or decisions in the long sequence that had led him to this moment, this reality, it would all make sense. It had to: he was getting too jaded, too tired of the rock-star life to maintain its status quo. This vivacious young woman in front of him in her faded denim short-shorts and snug pink tank wanted to marry him. She was, if not exactly the sort of woman he once thought he’d spend his life with, a very appealing alternative. So, barring brain damage or death, in four weeks they’d return to the island with wedding apparel, parents, and friends, and get the deed done.

Maybe then, he thought as he held the car door open for Val, he could put the past behind him for good and all.

TEN

When Kyle called her Saturday night, Savannah pretended to be busy with family – her dad’s birthday gathering, she lied. Rachel had taught her by example how to string a guy along at first, to get him more interested. ‘But, thanks for calling! Sorry I can only talk for like ten minutes,’ she said.

‘Nah, that’s cool. Nice that they still like having you around.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, wishing they truly did. This morning it seemed like her mom wanted anything but her company, and her dad spent the whole drive to Rachel’s on the phone. ‘So what are you doing?’

‘Thinkin’ of you.’

‘Seriously,’ she said, turning on her stereo, low, so he’d hear background noise.

‘Way seriously. I think about you all the time. I feel like we … you know, like maybe we belong together.’ He laughed. ‘You think I’m a dork, right? But it’s just … you have this amazing effect on me. I can’t wait to see you in person.’

She tried not to give away how flattered she was, though from the sound of it, he didn’t need more stringing along. From the sound of it, he was hooked. What a relief; she wasn’t good at all the boy–girl game-playing that came so naturally to other girls.

‘Yeah, well, I’m really looking forward to seeing you, too,’ she said. ‘Where should I get a room?’

They talked about hotels, and then he asked if she was getting a rental car from the airport.

‘Oh – well … do I have to? Because, um, it’s kind of a hassle driving in Miami, right?’ Especially without a license to allow a person to rent a car in the first place.

‘True,’ Kyle said. ‘I usually let one of my brothers do the driving. So whatever – we can pick you up.’

‘Or there might be a shuttle.’

‘Or you can, you know, bunk with us at my brother’s place, right? If you wanted to save some bucks, I mean.’

‘I can afford a hotel,’ she said. She knew enough to not plan to stay in an unfamiliar city with someone she’d met over the Internet, no matter how great he seemed so far. ‘Thanks, though.’

She asked him about his brothers (he had two, both older and both ‘making the parents proud’), and then they talked about what sorts of things they could do in Miami, including topless tanning, if that was her thing. Not that he was expecting it, not at all. And no, it wasn’t exactly legal. But girls did it. ‘If something like that appeals,’ he said, ‘well, you’re so gorgeous you could fit right in with the other babes on the beach.’

Gorgeous. No one ever called her gorgeous before.

She was savoring the compliment when Kyle said, ‘So, I want to make sure you really do have the bucks for the trip.’

‘Yeah, definitely,’ she assured him, wanting to sound independent, mature. ‘I’ve got tons of money in savings –’ cause my parents, they’re paying for school.’ This wasn’t a lie, they were paying for her private high school. And they’d be paying for college when the time came. ‘So yeah, money’s no trouble. What about you? If you needed, I could help you out.’

‘What, me? Hey, no, I’m good.’

‘Are you sure?’ she asked. He sounded like he was trying to cover.

‘I don’t want to take your money. Anyway, I’ll be bunking with my brothers and all, so it’s cheap for me.’

‘Okay. But I’m definitely paying for my own food and stuff.’

He laughed. ‘One of those liberated girls, right? Hey, I’m good with that. I admire independence – which is why I’m not taking money from my parents anymore.’ He and his parents didn’t quite see things the same way, he said, and so he’d broken ties with them. ‘Good that you didn’t have to go to that extreme.’

Savannah was impressed by his strength of conviction. She said, ‘So far. My parents don’t really get me either, though, you know? Luckily, if things get bad there’s always my trust fund to live off of.’ Part of her dad’s obsessive financial-planning strategy, not accessible until she was eighteen – but of course she didn’t say that part.

‘That is lucky,’ Kyle agreed.

They talked a minute or two longer, during which he told her again how he couldn’t wait to see her, and how he already felt like they were so right for each other. ‘I’ve never felt this way about a girl so soon, you know?’

‘Never?’ she asked, skeptical but wanting to believe.

He said, ‘Trust me, you aren’t like everybody else. You’re special, and I dig that, I see it – bet every other guy does, too.’

When she got off the phone she was glowing – she went to her mirror and checked.

ELEVEN

Sunday morning wasn’t going well. Forty-one-year-old Cristina Lang’s labor had slowed to a crawl after fifteen trying hours, and Meg watched the fetal monitor with narrowed eyes, her mouth a grim line on her pale face. The baby’s heart rate had been fluctuating for the last hour, and was now in a steady downward trend. In a voice low enough that only Susan, the labor nurse, could hear, Meg said, ‘You’re right: I don’t think we have any choice. Get her prepped.’

To the sweat-covered mother-to-be she said, ‘Cristina, you’ve worked awfully hard, but I think we’re going to have to take over. Your cervix doesn’t want to finish dilating, and I’m not sure why yet, but your little guy’s getting stressed. We don’t want to see him suffer any long-term effects, okay?’

Cristina’s husband Martin, a stocky man whose landscape company did Meg’s yard maintenance and many of her neighbors’, looked alarmed. ‘Take over? You mean she can’t have a natural birth?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Meg told him. ‘It was worth trying, but her failure to progress and the slowing fetal heart rate suggest that the baby’s having trouble.’ She turned to Cristina. ‘Sometimes even the most prepared moms have to go with plan B. Susan is going to get you all set up, and I’ll see you in the OR in just a few minutes.’

Cristina reached for Meg’s hand. ‘He’s okay? My baby, he’s going to be all right?’

‘He should be fine, as long as we get him out soon. Try not to worry.’

‘Okay,’ the woman nodded, and Meg read the relief in her eyes. ‘Okay, good.’

Meg squeezed her hand, then gave Martin’s shoulder a pat as she moved past him and out of the room to head to the OR. Her mind was focused on the task ahead as she walked down the hallway and around the corner. When she stumbled just before reaching the door to the OR suite, she recovered her balance quickly and went on to get herself ready to deliver the baby.

She ran the hottest water she could stand and scrubbed all along the ridges of her nails and the creases in her hands. Having to use a scalpel to finish Cristina’s job was regrettable but necessary, and she looked forward to the moment when she would lift the slippery infant out and hand him over to the nurse, a fresh miracle hot and pulsing with the force of all life. The regular opportunity to witness a child’s first shocked breath was why she chose obstetrics; nothing was more wondrous, more startling or fantastic. Every healthy child was a symbol of possibility. All these new tiny people she helped enter the world reminded her that her own life was not terribly significant – and made it easier for her to forget her own disappointments.

Keith, the portly scrub nurse whose own wife was due to deliver their first any day, pushed open the door. ‘We’re just about set. You ready, Doc?’ he asked.

She turned off the water with her elbows. ‘Be right there.’

He nodded and stepped back into the operating suite. Meg glanced through the window as she dried off, considering the baby’s position, previous scar tissue on Cristina’s uterus, how much time had passed since she’d made the decision to operate. Emergency C-sections were her least favorite part of her occupation, the riskiest of all procedures just by their nature. The mothers required general anesthesia, the babies were always in distress – these surgeries felt like crapshoots despite her expertise, despite her absolute dedication to her patients. She only ever had to do them when what was supposed to be predictable and routine became a cascading flow of everything opposite.

She backed into the suite, keeping her hands sterile, and stood still while a tech assisted her with gown and gloves. Her right arm, the one that was giving her trouble, felt a little stiff, sluggish as she held it out for the glove. As soon as the tech stepped away, Meg lifted both arms above her head and stretched.

‘Need a nap?’ asked Clay Williams, the new surgeon who would be assisting. ‘Susan said you all have been at it all night with this one.’

‘We have,’ Meg agreed as she approached the table, where he stood facing her from the far side. ‘But I think I’ll wait on the nap until after we finish.’

‘Well, I s’pose that is the better protocol,’ Clay joked, his mouth hidden behind the light green mask but his smile apparent in his eyes – as was a kind of interested regard that surprised her. Was he flirting? He added, ‘You pros know best.’

He had to be several years her junior, and they’d worked together only a few times, socialized at a couple of conferences, chatted before or after staff meetings now and then; even so, she had the distinct feeling he was attracted to her. Her response was friendly but circumspect: ‘I tried that napping-during-surgery approach and, well, somehow the results weren’t up to American Medical Association standards.’

‘Bah, rules are made to be broken,’ Clay said – alluding to marital rules, perhaps? Or was she just imagining that sparkle of interest, that suggestive tone?

The anesthetist, a serious, middle-aged man named Leo, spoke up then, bringing Meg’s attention back to the job at hand. ‘She’s all set.’

Meg looked closely at her now-unconscious patient, at the draping around Cristina’s iodine-orange belly, at the tray of instruments nearby, checking that everything was in place. ‘What was the last fetal bpm?’ she asked, referring to the baby’s heart rate.

‘Eighty-one, right before we unhooked her.’

Very low, but not absolutely critical. Meg nodded at the assembled team of nurses, technicians, and a pair of neonatologists, and said, ‘Okay then, let’s make a birthday.’

At first, everything seemed to be fine. She reached for the scalpel, grasped it with no trouble, aligned the blade with Cristina’s skin just above the pubic bone. Then it was as if all the strength simply leached out of her arm. The scalpel dropped from her fingers, tumbled onto the edge of the operating table and down to the floor, landing with a clatter. Meg looked up, embarrassed and concerned. There was a baby in distress here; her arm could not refuse to cooperate.

‘Butterfingers,’ she joked, sweat breaking out on her forehead, dampening her armpits and her palms, inside her gloves.

‘Mmm, a candy bar does sound good, but I think another scalpel’s the better choice,’ Clay said.

‘Right, a scalpel,’ Meg nodded, trying to play along. She looked down at her hand. It rested, yet, on Cristina’s belly, on the mound of a baby who was almost certainly fading fast. It took all her concentration to lift her arm and pull it in, close to her chest.

‘Here you go,’ the tech said, holding out a second scalpel. Meg looked at it, its steel blade glinting under the lights, taunting her. The moment stretched out in long, agonizing delay as Meg willed her arm to extend normally. It felt leaden.

Clutching her wrist with her left hand, she stepped back abruptly.

‘Dr Williams, would you proceed?’ she said, feeling the eyes of everyone there watching her with concern. ‘I have a … a cramp. In my hand.’

‘I – sure,’ Clay said. He hurried around to her side and reached for the scalpel. ‘Thanks for the opportunity,’ he added, making it seem like she was staging this as a favor to him.

Marshalling her focus away from her arm and onto the crucial matter of delivering Cristina’s baby, she guided Clay through the relatively unfamiliar-to-him procedure. He worked quickly and with steady assurance, but when he pulled the baby out, it was clear that something had gone very wrong. The tiny boy was well formed but gray, motionless as Clay put him in the hands of the neonatal specialist. Clay glanced at her, his eyes full of dread.

Her own heart had plummeted, but she tried to reassure him. ‘You did everything right.’ Behind them, the specialist and his team worked to revive the baby. ‘Let’s finish up here,’ she nodded toward her patient, who, as difficult as it was for any obstetrician to remember when there was trouble with the baby, remained her priority.

‘Right,’ Clay said. ‘Do you want me to—’

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice low. ‘My arm …’ She frowned behind her mask.

‘No problem.’

‘Thank you.’

She stood by, feeling helpless in every sense. What had gone wrong? She reviewed Cristina’s labor in her mind, recalled the events and procedures of the surgery, thought again about the baby’s heart rate troubles – but as soon as Clay delivered the rest of the umbilical cord and the placenta, the culprit became obvious: a knot in the cord.

‘Shit,’ she said, reaching for it with her left hand. ‘It must’ve gotten looped early in her pregnancy.’ Rarely, but once in a while, a very active fetus with a longer-than-usual cord could manage to loop through it. Rarely, but once in a while, an ultrasound would fail to show it. Then, at some point in the labor, the knot, which had been loose enough not to be a problem, tightened up or got compressed, cutting off the baby’s blood and oxygen supply. In the minutes – literally minutes – between when the monitor had been removed and Clay had reached in to pull the baby out, the baby had crashed. Silently, fading away without a struggle. There was no way for them to know, or to do anything differently even if they had known. Except … except for those forty-five or so seconds after she’d dropped the scalpel: it was possible that those seconds made the difference. Clay nudged her with his elbow, and when she looked at him, he shook his head as if he were reading her thoughts, as if to say, Don’t go there.

She looked behind them, at the slumped shoulders of the group surrounding the warming table, and swallowed hard.

Alone in an elevator two hours later, Clay and Meg rode in silence until he reached forward and pushed the Stop button.

Startled, she said, ‘What are you doing?’

Clay touched her chin, to get her to look up at him. ‘It’s not your fault.’

She looked away. ‘You don’t know that. If I hadn’t screwed up my arm—’

‘You didn’t know it was going to cramp up just then.’

‘I knew it could. It happened once last week.’

‘Once. Last week.’

She appreciated his support, but the truth was that she’d had a hint while getting suited up, and she’d ignored it. And now a baby was dead.

Clay continued, ‘Look, suppose we could have that minute back. The baby might have survived – I double-emphasize “might” – in which case he almost certainly would’ve been severely brain-damaged from what had already occurred, and dependent on his poor parents for the rest of their lives. A vegetable, if you’ll forgive the crassness of the term.’

‘Maybe,’ she acknowledged, imagining Cristina and Mark trying to manage the needs of such a child along with their chubby, charming two-year-old daughter Chloe, whom she had also delivered by emergency C-section, without a hitch. She saw their baby boy with vacant eyes, a permanent feeding tube, a ventilator, no future – and couldn’t wish such a life on anyone.

Clay took her right hand with both of his, massaging it gently, and looked into her eyes. ‘We can’t save them all, you know. Hell, we can hardly save ourselves.’

She knew without asking that he was referring to his attraction to her, a married woman. Saying they had no control, not over death and not over whatever strange forces brought people together, not over love. She let his eyes hold her that way for a long moment, a moment when the comfort and support and affection of someone who truly understood was exactly the salve she needed.

Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. ‘I have to get going,’ she said, the rest of the day’s obligations intruding, reminding her that her world existed outside this tender gesture, that she was wrong to welcome it.

Clay said, ‘Me too.’ But still he held her hand, and she didn’t pull it away. ‘Meg …’

‘Clay.’

He sighed quietly, then let go and leaned over to start the elevator again. It gave a small lurch and began the rest of its journey to the main floor.

He said, ‘You’re a damn fine doctor. Everyone says so.’

‘You did a good job today,’ she told him.

The chime sounded and the doors slid open. She stepped out first, into a crowd of lunchtime visitors. ‘Try to enjoy the rest of your weekend,’ she said.

He nodded, his eyes unreadable. ‘You too.’

She walked away from him then, and away from the hospital, the paperwork, away from the grieving parents who had so graciously already absolved her of wrongdoing – for now anyway. Her other responsibilities were calling: she needed to phone her father and cancel their dinner date, Savannah needed to be picked up from the game Meg had missed, Brian text-messaged her from the golf course, asking her to buy a bottle of Moët for a friend of his who’d just gotten engaged. Self-indulgence, especially with Clay Williams, was a luxury she could not afford.

TWELVE

Savannah and Rachel soaked in the poolside spa while Meg stood at her black granite kitchen counter making a turkey sandwich. The counter was so glossy that she could see her reflection, a tired woman with a deep crease between her brows; she reached up and pressed the crease, stretched her cheeks to erase the scowl. That was better, but she thought she might have the granite changed for something matte; the glossy stuff was obviously meant for Suzy Homemaker types who whistled pleasantly while they mixed and kneaded and dolloped and minced and sautéed, nothing more taxing than making a tasty meal on their minds. A kitchen counter should not remind a woman of her stresses and faults; it was bad enough just to have such a beautiful kitchen in the first place, its underuse a vague but ever-present guilt.

Through the open patio doors she could hear the girls laughing, hear their cell phones ringing every few minutes, while she concentrated on smoothing mayonnaise onto cracked-wheat bread with her right hand. She dipped her knife into the jar, scooped little globs of mayo, spread it easily with the knife’s tip, over and over again without even a hint of weakness. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she said.

When her own cell phone began vibrating in the pocket of her white linen pants, it startled her and she dropped the knife onto the floor. She took the phone from her pocket, saw it was her sister Kara, and answered, her eyes on the knife.

‘Hello, sis,’ she answered, making her voice normal, as she’d done for the girls when she picked them up. How accomplished she was at pretending.

‘Did you see it?’ Kara asked.

‘Did I see what?’

‘The official announcement – Carson’s engagement, what else?’

Kara would be all a-tizz about that. She’d followed Carson’s career and life like a groupie, just as she’d once trailed Meg and Carson over the hills and fields of their farms. ‘I saw something about it on the CNN website,’ Meg said, bending down to get the knife. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘No, no, not that. The Ocala paper’s got the real official thing.’

‘How do you know?’ Meg asked, picking up the knife. Kara lived in Northern California now, near Travis Air Force Base where her husband Todd, a master sergeant three years away from retirement, was finishing out his enlistment.

‘I read it online – how do you think I keep up with what’s going on back home?’ For Kara, who’d had four homes since leaving Florida in 1992, only Ocala would ever be the real thing. She’d told Meg she was trying to talk Todd into going back there when he got out of the service; she wanted to start a plant nursery. She had it all planned out and was certain it would be a hit. Of all the Powell girls, Kara was the most like their father.

‘I assumed you were psychic, obviously,’ Meg said.

‘Oh, I wish! Then I wouldn’t have to ferret out every detail of the kids’ lives. God knows they don’t tell me anything! Well, at least I can read the news – and you really need to see this. You get the paper, right?’

‘We do – but I haven’t read it yet.’

‘You haven’t read it? Jesus, it’s four-thirty out there – what’ve you been doing all day?’

Kara’s innocent question was an ice pick in Meg’s gut, but she made herself stay calm. ‘I had a mom in labor all last night and this morning, then Savannah had a softball game this afternoon. I’m just getting a chance to make a sandwich and sit down for five minutes.’

‘Well, don’t sit yet – get the paper so you can see this.’

While Meg tracked the paper to the den, where Brian had left it after his cursory glances at the front section and sports, Kara asked how their father was doing.

‘Haven’t you talked to him?’ Meg said.

‘Not in about two weeks. He’s being pissy about us not being able to visit this summer. Screening his calls, I assume. But I know he’s fine or you’d have told me.’

Of course she would think that; gatekeeper of information was Meg’s role, had always been her role. Her parents had left her to mind her sisters, and now her sisters had left her to mind their parents – parent, now – and always, she was to keep everyone informed. ‘He’s doing okay. Settling in. His left kidney’s acting up.’

‘Is he eating right? I swear, he’s so stubborn! What’s the deal with the kidney?’

Meg pulled out the newspaper’s lifestyles section, where the engagement and wedding announcements appeared each weekend. ‘I’m not sure; I told him to call his nephrologist.’

‘There you go with the big words,’ Kara teased. She was bright, but not college-educated, having married Todd at nineteen, three years after meeting him at Meg’s wedding, where he’d parked cars for a few extra bucks before starting basic training. Four kids – all boys – had followed. Meg hoped Kara would prevail with her desire to come back to Florida; she missed her sister, who had been her closest friend besides Carson. She and Beth were close now too, and she could visit any of her sisters by plane if she could just find the time. Time, however, hid from her as well as Savannah had done in department stores when she was little. Any more time stubbornly refused to be found.

Returning to the kitchen, Meg said, ‘Okay, so I have the paper – lifestyle section, I presume.’

‘Open it to page two.’

Meg did, and there was the announcement. ‘Grammy winner Carson McKay to wed Miss Valerie Haas of Malibu, CA,’ read the caption beneath a photographer’s picture of the betrothed couple. Meg closed the paper.

‘Well?’ Kara said. ‘Isn’t she just as cute as you can imagine?’

‘Cuter,’ Meg said. She finished constructing her sandwich, grasping the knife again and cutting the sandwich smoothly.

‘I never would’ve pictured him with a professional surfer. Have you ever heard of her? My god, it says she’s twenty-two! And he’s, what? Forty?’

A professional surfer? Meg hardly knew there was such a career, particularly for women. ‘Not yet – he’s thirty-nine until November.’ Her own thirty-ninth was coming up in late June.

‘Wonder what they’ll do for his fortieth. Probably rent an island for a party and invite their hundred closest friends.’

As Kara was saying this, an image of Carson on the old tire swing came to Meg; he was sitting with his legs through it, holding on to the thick rope they’d used to suspend it from a high branch of the oak near the swimming lake. He leaned back and, with bare feet, pushed himself in a lazy circle, while she watched from the shady base of the tree. ‘For your fortieth birthday,’ he said, ‘I’m taking you to Africa on safari.’

‘Are you, now?’ she asked, more interested in watching his naked back than in considering anything that might happen more than twenty years in the future.

He said, ‘Yep. Count on it.’

‘What about for your fortieth?’ she said.

‘Thailand,’ he answered, ‘for lemongrass shrimp.’ He let the tire sway then, peering into the oak leaves like their future was painted there, episodes of their life-to-be displayed for preview on each toothy leaf.

Kara laughed. ‘God. Seventeen years.’

For a second Meg thought Kara was talking about how long it had been since that day. Not seventeen years, she thought. Twenty – no, twenty-one. And then she realized Kara was calculating the age difference between Carson and his fiancée. No wonder they were calling him a cradle robber; his bride-to-be was probably just learning to walk when he’d made his safari promise.

‘Whatever makes him happy,’ Meg said, wanting to be done with the topic. ‘Now tell me, how go your plans for the plant nursery?’

‘Do I detect a change-of-subject attempt here? I mean, c’mon Meggie, you had your shot and you let him go.’

‘True,’ Meg said. Neither she nor her parents had ever told Kara or Beth or the youngest, Julianne, the whole truth about why she and Carson broke up.

Kara sighed. ‘Jesus, if I’d known he was going to get famous, I would have snagged him, for God’s sake. Nothing against Todd.’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, I guess we both fucked up where old Car’s concerned – gotta live with it. But life is good, right? I mean, I have Todd and the boys, you have Brian and Savannah – you wouldn’t trade her for the world, even to have a kid of Carson’s.’

‘Nope,’ Meg agreed, though of course it was fully possible that the two children Kara was referencing – Savannah and a theoretical child of Carson’s – were in fact one in the same. But Kara had no clue that Savannah might not be Brian’s. No clue that Meg had seen Carson the day of her wedding and that she had not been nearly as successful at closing the door behind her as she thought she’d be.

‘Are you doing okay? You sound cranky. Maybe get a nap in. God, I wish I could steal time for a nap! You should see my kitchen counters – do you think Keiffer and Evan could get their lunch plates past the clay mockup of Mt Doom and into the sink? Anyhow, I better go; I hear Tony screaming about something, and Todd’s out in the garage.’

Meg smiled at the happy disorder of her sister’s home. ‘I’m glad you called.’

‘Tell Dad to call me. Kisses to all,’ Kara said, and they hung up.

Meg simply stood there holding her phone for a minute afterward, wistfulness and loss washing over her. She missed Kara and Beth and Julianne, but they, at least, were still walking the Earth. They, at least, were accessible by a half-day’s airplane journey. But their mother, snatched away so suddenly that Meg still sometimes picked up the phone to call her before remembering, was lost to her, to them, forever. How was a girl – all right, a woman – supposed to manage without her mother? The notebook diaries gave her windows through which to view her mother in their past, but what of today, when she needed a supportive arm around her shoulders?

‘Oh Mom,’ she sighed. ‘Is this as good as it gets?’

The dark quiet of the screened porch, late that night, soothed Meg only a little as she sat on a chaise and sipped gin, straight. Brian and Savannah both had been asleep for hours, but she had yet to even feel like closing her eyes. She was tired – so tired she couldn’t even calculate how many hours it had been since she’d slept. But her thoughts swirled and tumbled like river rapids, making sleep impossible.

Her mother, she knew, had lived with turmoil most of her life – she was the youngest of eight kids whose father died in Normandy. Then she married into it; Meg’s father was always launching some half-planned scheme that inevitably failed. The first was a citrus farm like the McKays’, with thousands of young trees that were killed in the second year by some blight he hadn’t known to look for. Next he bought the land that would later become their horse farm and built a huge greenhouse, for the supposedly easier job of growing rare orchids to sell to collectors. Yet neither he nor her mother, who by then was also tending her, could master the expensive, sensitive plants, which died off steadily while the debt blossomed.

Just after Kara’s birth, when Meg was five, he gave up that particular dream; they sold off all the orchid paraphernalia at a loss and built stables, with the goal of not just boarding thoroughbreds but also breeding them. Her father was sure his powers of persuasion wouldn’t be lost on the horses or the people who liked to buy them. He succeeded just often enough to encourage him to sink more money into the venture, and by the time Julianne was born, nine years after Meg, the family was firmly shackled to what would become her father’s most enduring obsession.

She remembered many times – whole seasons, in fact, when all she and her sisters ate for lunch was bread and jam, or eggs from the noisy, skittish chickens they raised. They wore shoes from the thrift store and clothes bought at Saturday-morning yard sales. They learned early how to answer the phone and politely tell the bill collectors that their parents were busy but could they please take a message? She had coached her sisters, the three of them standing in front of her looking like uneven stair steps, each taking a practice turn with the phone. She’d been twelve, maybe thirteen. ‘Show them all,’ her mother had directed. ‘You know how Julianne likes to run for the phone.’ Julianne, at three, was easiest to train – she was happy to imitate, to earn Meg’s praise, while Beth and Kara had asked questions Meg couldn’t answer and knew better than to forward to their parents:

‘Why do the people keep calling, Meggie?’

‘Why won’t Mommy or Daddy answer the phone?’

Only when some large man or another showed up – always in an ill-fitting suit – did her father deal with matters himself. From her bedroom window she would watch the men leave, her father putting them into their nondescript sedans with a smile and a handshake. Making dubious promises that had, a few years later, led to one of her own.

Her affluent adult life could hardly compare with the craziness her mother endured for so many years, but she liked that they shared a steady temperament. For as far back as she could remember, she too had weathered what crises came by trusting that solutions would present themselves – always with the help of the Blessed Virgin, of course, or so her mother wanted her to believe. Meg endured, too busy minding her sisters, or feeding the chickens, or currying the succession of horses her father always insisted were Triple-Crown winners in the making, to do anything else.

Tonight the low chirping of crickets outside the porch spoke of good luck, something she felt sorely short of just now. Yet as quickly as this self-pity reared up, she pushed it down; she had no right to feel sorry for herself, none, and she buried the urge by remembering that, short of the unstoppable medical crises she’d faced now and then as a doctor, she was responsible for everything in her life, good and bad.

Responsible, that was the trait that made her rescue her parents from looming foreclosure and allow her sisters to finish growing up there on the farm, instead of crammed into some tiny, roach-infested apartment. That was the trait that kept her from seeking out a definitive answer to Savannah’s paternity. The trait made her a popular, respected doctor – and tempered her guilt when things went wrong even after she’d done everything right. She was always careful, responsible, even when she didn’t want to be. Almost always.

But in the same way her mother could not, despite valiant efforts, save the family from the ruin that seemed sure until Meg married Brian, Meg’s effort had not been able to save the Langs’ baby. Nor had it secured the satisfying life she’d rationalized would follow her marriage in due time. You could work hard, stick to all the rules, and still fail.

Which made her wonder why, then, she bothered to be so damn careful.

The sweet, musky smell of aging honeysuckle blooms drifted to Meg on the warm night’s breeze. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, putting aside the heavy thoughts, her worry about her arm, the guilt she felt over losing the Langs’ baby, and the odd lack of guilt she felt for having encouraged Clay’s attentions, putting them aside and simply filling herself with nature’s sensual buffet. A warm spring night. Sweetly scented flowers. Damp soil. The smell of wild mint and freshly mowed grass.

The grass brought her back, for a moment, to something Brian said earlier. She’d told him about the stillbirth, and he was, of course, sympathetic. ‘Jesus, Meg, how awful for them,’ he said. But then he added, ‘I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but do you think Lang will still do our lawn?’

Ever practical.

A mockingbird, apparently confused about the hour, began its litany of calls someplace off on the east side of their property, a three-acre estate in a community of similar ones. Meg turned in the direction of the sound, as if it was possible to see the bird at three AM. She saw the silhouettes of towering pines and oaks and magnolias and wondered if maybe the bird, too, was trying to shake off a bad day: some offense by its mate, or a wound inflicted by too zealous a flight. She thought maybe she ought to sing too, despite the hour; singing worked for Savannah. It worked, she supposed, for Carson.

She drew her bare legs up and wrapped her arms around them – both arms behaving just the way they should, go figure. Resting her chin on her knees, she let herself be distracted by thoughts of Carson and the news that he was about to be married.

Probably she should just satisfy her curiosity and go read the details – maybe even plan to send them a gift. Whoever Valerie Haas was, she would have to be very impressive, considering how long Carson had been single, and how eligible he was.

Probably she should get the details about his wedding and his bride so that she wouldn’t be distracted any further, so that she could close that chapter of her life – hadn’t it been open for far too long as it was?

Carson, married. In love – a good thing, even if the thought of it gave her a pang of possessiveness that hurt. Even if imagining him permanently joined to anyone else brought pain like a sharp stone being pressed into her heart.

THIRTEEN

Meg took one of the notebook diaries with her to work Monday, reading it in her office during her lunch break.

December 5, 1987

Carolyn and I were talking about the kids today, over at the co-op. Carson’s thinking of buying Meggie a ring for Christmas. He hasn’t told Meggie. Nothing could be more natural than the two of them married. Caro thinks he means to have an April wedding, since Meggie loves springtime. To be purely honest, the timing couldn’t be better for her moving in with Carson, because if things keep up like they are, we’ll lose the whole farm by May.

But of course it hadn’t gone like that. It was Brian who proposed – in a sense – two weeks before Christmas, a time when she couldn’t fail to see the romance in his gesture.

He hadn’t been her supervisor for several months, but she saw him often. Back in early fall he’d told her that the reason he’d moved himself out of front-end management and into Investments was because he hoped to date her. He wasn’t pushy about it, and he assured her that her job was in no way affected by her firm refusals to do anything more than have a platonic lunch with him now and then. She never let him pay.

This lunch, though, was unlike any that had come before.

They went to Margot’s, a café she couldn’t afford to eat at on her own, by way, he said, of a ‘Christmas bonus – my treat’. The place was done up for the holidays, with swags of fresh holly and twinkling white lights and deep red velvet ribbon hanging above every doorway. Brian sat across from her at an intimate, white-draped table and told her he had an outrageous proposition. Would she just listen and promise to give it some thought?

‘Meg,’ he said, ‘I heard something impressive a while back, one Friday when you weren’t at the Trough. I usually don’t listen much to gossip, but – well, here’s what I heard: Vicki was telling Mark how you give your whole paycheck to your parents to help pay their bills, that you’ve been doing it since you started with us.’

Her cheeks burned; Vicky wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about that – and especially not when someone like Brian could overhear. Her family’s difficulties embarrassed her, made her look bad by association. She said, ‘Yeah, well, they’ve had some money problems. One of the stallions fractured a leg, and—’

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong – I think you’re amazing. That’s so generous. So loyal. What kid is willing to sacrifice their own agenda to help their parents these days?’

Meg shrugged. ‘I have to help if I can.’ The choice was simple to her, automatic as breathing.

‘And, you’ve been loyal to the bank, working here, what? – over two years now? Then there’s your loyalty to your boyfriend – which I’m not so crazy about.’ He laughed.

She shrugged again, embarrassed but flattered, too, which she feared was disloyal, and her face grew even hotter.

He reached over and took her hand in his cool, smooth ones, white-collar hands. ‘I admire you, and you know I really like you, Meg. You work hard, you take care of your family – and Jesus, you’re so pretty. We’ve known each other for a while, right? We worked well together, we get along – and, I know this sounds crazy, but, I … I want to help you out. You have to give me a shot, Meg; you owe it to yourself to see if you think we’re as compatible as I already know we are. And if you do, I want you to consider marrying me.’

She was sure she heard him wrong. ‘You want what?’

‘If you agreed to marry me, well, Dad and I would be in a position to help your parents with their mortgage.’ He held up one hand to stop her protest. ‘I know, it sounds like a bribe, but think of it as an incentive. A bonus.’

‘How do you know about their mortgage?’ Even she knew little about the details of her parents’ finances.

‘We hold it,’ Brian said. ‘They refinanced with us a couple years ago. I’ve had Dad delay the foreclosure proceedings until after I talked to you today.’ He leaned closer, looked into her eyes. ‘Look, Meg, I’m not a crazy person; I’m just a man who knows his mind. We could be really good together, I’m sure of it. Maybe you think you love Carson, and maybe you do love him, in a way. But what is that? Adolescent love, which never lasts. He’s been your escape from a stressful, crazy life, but you won’t need that – him – anymore; you’ll be able to solve your family’s problems. You’ll be the hero.’

Then he kissed her, and she was too astonished to object. ‘Say you’ll think about it.’

She hated to, but how could she not?

She couldn’t tell Carson, Brian said; no one could know, because of the ‘creative financing’ that would take place if things worked out. She didn’t exactly want to tell Carson anyway; the whole situation felt outrageous, unseemly – and yet, it could be a lightning strike of good fortune for her family. Maybe even fate.

She had to save her family if she could. It was the right choice. The moral choice. By choosing Brian, she could save her sisters from a family reputation even lower than it was already. She could lift them up to a higher social plateau, where they’d have a chance to be popular at school and never have to give up their free time just to keep the family in bread and milk. Without the overwhelming debt, her parents would have money for extras: Kara wanted to go with the high school’s Spanish Club to Mexico City; Beth wanted to take piano lessons; Julianne wanted riding boots and an English saddle and regulation jump bars to practice with so that she might compete. The girls could dress better.

As much as any of those things, Meg wanted her mother to be able to sleep nights instead of wandering the house like a restless spirit. So how could she selfishly hold on to Carson and watch the rest of them spiral into misery, deprived of the land that gave them, if nothing else, room to own a piece of sky, a shaggy oak, a footpath to a shallow pond where beautiful, if mostly barren, horses stood in the morning to drink?

So she’d gone along with it, meaning to give Brian a fair try. There was truth in what he said about adolescent love, she couldn’t argue with this even now, on its theoretical basis. But in her nontheoretical life, the answer that had seemed so clean and obvious to her at the time of Brian’s proposal became murkier as time passed. She liked Brian, liked the new work schedule that allowed her to commute to Gainesville three days a week for school, liked the places she got to go with him: New York, Puerto Rico, Washington, DC. But she missed Carson like she’d miss her right hand if she woke up to find it suddenly gone. Though there was no real choice but to marry Brian, she felt so guilty about her decision that she literally ached, as though her heart had weakened but was forced to keep beating. She just could not understand why what was supposed to be right felt so wrong.

Well, she understood better now.

Leaving her sandwich untouched, she read her mother’s entry from the day she married Brian.

August 20, 1989

I’m exhausted, but what a beautiful day we had for a wedding! Thank God the country club’s air-conditioning didn’t wear itself out, or none of us would’ve lasted until midnight the way we did. Spencer was in his element with all those horse people …

Creamy white orchids and red roses and white satin ribbon everywhere, but Meggie was the loveliest of all. Four thousand dollars for just her dress! Heavens, it was beautiful, that strapless style that’s in all the magazines, smooth satin on top, seed pearls and tiny crystals on every inch of the skirt. And the train! I can’t get over it. It was a gift from Nancy Hamilton, Brian’s grandmother, so how could we say no? They are all treating our girl like royalty. Spencer insisted we pay for the girls’ dresses, and they were princesses too. Beth and Julianne were asleep in the car five minutes after we left the reception, and I’ll bezKara won’t last much longer. She’s been on the phone with some boy she met there since we got home half an hour ago. I’m still too wound up to settle into bed, but when I do, well! I plan to sleep until eight! The horses won’t starve if their breakfast’s a little late.

She looked happy. Well, a little dazed, but what bride isn’t? We raised her right, I have to say. She has plenty of poise. I couldn’t stand being the center of that much attention, I know that.

My biggest fear, I admit it, was that people would look at us and know how little we had to do with putting on the wedding. If not for that famous Preakness trainer buying Spencer’s baby, Earned Luck, last week, we wouldn’t have seemed anywhere close to successful enough to pay for such a party. It made it easy to sound like our fortunes had turned around.

Well, they have, haven’t they? She went through with it after all. Bruce took Spencer aside just before the reception, told him it’ll all be taken care of Monday. That’s almost three thousand dollars a month it’ll save us. Three thousand! I hardly know how to sit here and write happy thoughts, when usually I’m just trying to figure out a new way to rob Peter. What good luck Meggie has had.

I remember when she first came to Spencer and me to ask about the mortgage. Was it true, she wanted to know, that we’d been late for seven or eight months in a row? Was it true we’d heard from the bank that they were starting foreclosure proceedings? That we could lose the whole business and the house, too, in just a few months’ time? I felt so ashamed. Spencer hedged, not wanting to worry her with all that mess, but then she told us why she was asking. Told us that Brian wanted to help us out – depending. I was against it at first, but not Spencer. He washed the doubt right out of Meggie’s eyes and mine with his enthusiasm for the idea. It was up to her, of course, but since she was asking, well, we had to say it was a terrific bit of luck that Brian had taken a shine to her. An amazing opportunity for her, if she wanted to take it.

She did look happy today. The more I think about it, the more I’m sure of it. And I’m sure she never saw Carson’s truck parked down the street from the church. He’ll find someone else before too long, now that he’s seen she isn’t ever coming back to him. My heart ached for him, but he’s young, he’ll be fine. They’re all so young. They can make their lives be whatever they want. Isn’t that how it works?

‘Sure. Whatever we want,’ Meg whispered.

Her nurse, Laurie, knocked once and opened the door. ‘Your one o’clock’s here.’

‘Thanks. Give me three minutes.’

She closed the notebook and stuffed it back into her satchel, certain that this foray into the past wasn’t doing her any good. The spinning blades were uncomfortably close right now.

FOURTEEN

On Tuesday, their last morning on the island, Carson woke before Val and lay watching the fan turn lazily above him. Hung over from the night before, he tried to sort out the remains of a dream. Something about Spencer sending him out on one of the mares – to check that she’d been shoed right? Something crazy like that, and as he rode off, he saw Meg standing in Brian’s arms. He tried to turn the horse, but it kept running, and when he looked behind him, he couldn’t even see Meg anymore.

A stupid dream; as it happened, she’d been the one to run.

Val slept soundly next to him, a pillow covering her head, smooth browned arms flung out toward the headboard as if she was surfing in her sleep. He lifted the pillow and looked at her, thinking again how young she was; she looked especially youthful when sleeping, long blond eyelashes against her tan face, no lines around her eyes, lips chapped from salt and sun, just as she must have looked as a teen. Her age – the difference in their ages – didn’t concern him too much, but he did wonder how long it would be before she was ready to slow down some, do the family thing. He wanted kids eventually, would have had them already if not for Meg’s about-face.

He didn’t especially like thinking about Meg, but obviously, with his wedding to Val approaching fast, he could see why all these memories were being triggered. Unfortunately you couldn’t just dump your past to clear the way for your future – although Meg sure seemed to have succeeded at doing just that.

Leaving Val in bed, Carson pulled on shorts and left the villa. After stopping at the outdoor breakfast buffet to grab some coffee and a couple of chocolate croissants, he meandered down to the beach, marveling at the multi-toned clear blue water and the benevolence of morning sunshine – something he had too little of at home in Seattle. He wished his mind felt as peaceful as the scene before him looked. Maybe if he could spend the whole day lying here on a chaise, he’d feel like he was actually having a vacation. That, however, wasn’t in the cards.

Val wanted to stop in Philipsburg to look at wedding bands before their early afternoon flight. Dutch St Martin, or St Maarten, as it was when you crossed the French–Dutch border, was known for having great jewelry at low prices. Already they’d browsed some shops, Val buying platinum-and-diamond tennis bracelets for each of her bridesmaids. He wasn’t eager to have to cram in yet another activity before they headed to Florida for more wedding planning with his parents, but he wanted Val to be happy.

He was a sucker that way, when it came to people he cared about. The last time he’d ventured so far – almost as far as he’d come now with Val – he’d gotten pretty badly singed. Okay, burned; why minimize it?

Though he was looking at the calm water of the bay, he was seeing the past.

It was almost Christmas, ’87. He’d been working for a friend of his dad’s, warehousing fruit for extra money to buy Meg an engagement ring. Later on the day he’d been in town to get the ring – a simple solitaire, less than a third of a carat, set in gold – she called him and asked him to meet her at the tree.

‘Just come over here,’ he told her. By then he’d been living in the shed for two years; they spent most of their free time there.

‘No, I … I’d rather be outside, okay?’

‘Sure.’ Distracted by his excitement about the ring, he missed the tension in her voice. Instead, he thought of how he could give her the ring there at the tree; that was a better plan than the elaborate fancy-dinner-bended-knee thing he’d been thinking of doing. Outdoors, at their spot – a much better plan.

The sun was low, the temperature dropping with it. He threw on his denim jacket, tucked the ring box into one pocket, and hurried through the groves, past the lake, rehearsing his proposal in his head. When he got to the tree, hands in pockets, the box square and promising in his right hand, he saw Meg’s expression and pulled his hands out, empty.

‘What’s the matter?’

She was sitting at the base of their oak tree, arms wrapped around her knees. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said.

‘Waste of time,’ he joked, nervous without knowing why. She shrugged and looked past him, biting her lip. He squatted in front of her. ‘Just spit it out.’ Whatever it was couldn’t be so bad, not for the two of them anyway. Must be it had to do with money and the Powells’ farm – the talk was that Spencer was about to go bankrupt.

‘It’s over, Car,’ she said, looking down at her sneakers. She was about to wear a hole in the left one, at the big toe.

‘I heard. What are they planning to do?’

She looked up sharply. ‘Who?’

‘Your parents. Are they filing for bankruptcy or what?’

She shook her head and stood up. ‘No, I mean us.

I … I’m … Did you ever think how we might actually be bad for each other?’

‘What, are you nuts?’

She looked it, wild-eyed and flushed. ‘No, I’m serious. You … you need to experience other … you know, date other people. We – we’re too close. It’s unhealthy. I mean, you’ve never had any other serious girlfriend.’

‘You like it that way,’ he said, mentally scrambling to catch up to what she was saying. ‘What do you mean, too close? We’re just right, we’re perfect.’ The box in his pocket was the proof that he firmly believed his words. Why didn’t she? Why all of a sudden?

‘No, we’re just … you know – kids. We need to get some space between us and … and … and see what else there is in the world. Who else,’ she added, her voice hoarse.

‘We’re not kids. I just turned twenty, you’re nineteen – both legally adults.’ It was a weak response, he knew. The force of her insistence emanated from her like a magnetic field. Already he could feel the futility in arguing.

She looked around them, as though enemies might be hiding in the brush. ‘I can’t see you anymore,’ she said. ‘It’s for both our good.’ He grabbed her wrist, but she was already in motion, already running away before even taking a step. ‘I love you, but I have to go.’

She broke free, and he watched her run, the copper hair he loved so much streaming out behind her like a wild mare’s mane. He would let her run; she wouldn’t go far, he was sure of it.

Carson couldn’t commit to any of the wedding bands on display in the Philipsburg jewelry shop. Each silky platinum or diamond-encrusted gold band looked good, but he couldn’t quite see himself wearing any of them. Too plain, too elaborate, too gaudy, too wide, too narrow; Val and the salesman, whose English was approximately as good as Carson’s Dutch, frowned at him as he pondered.

He pushed the navy blue velvet tray away. ‘You know, our flight’s in ninety minutes … There’s this nice store in Ocala; why don’t we look there when we get in? I guess I’m just not in the mood for this right now.’

‘But the prices are so much better here,’ Val said.

Carson smirked. ‘You can afford the difference. Come on.’ He stood.

‘Okay, fine.’ But she didn’t look fine. She looked disappointed. ‘If you’re sure none of these work.’

She must have an attachment to one, one that he was supposed to also prefer, that maybe she’d been trying to signal him about and he hadn’t caught on. Well, he was still tired, still hung over; every night here was a party and his middle-aged body was feeling the effects.

Wherever Val went, she collected friends. Young, energetic friends, most of whom surfed. He swam pretty well, thanks to years of racing Meg across the lake, but didn’t surf worth a damn, so what he did most during these parties was observe and drink. Oh, people were intrigued with him, sure, but once they’d declared their love of his music and admiration for his ability to create it, they had little else to say. The conversations, when they lasted, usually turned to Val and her career, a subject of common interest.

Val. No one was more charismatic. He often joked that she’d been given an extra dose of personality, maybe the one his bass player Ron seemed to be missing. She was good to everyone around her, and he hated that he’d missed whatever signal she was trying to send about the wedding bands. So he sat down and took another look.

He supposed she wanted him to choose something in platinum, to match her engagement ring and the band she’d wear with it. When they discussed a ring for him, they agreed his didn’t need to match – that it was most important for it to suit him personally, the way hers was such a perfect match for her. The truth was, he’d made such a ‘perfect’ selection simply because when he described Val to the Tiffany clerk, the woman proclaimed he needed the Schlumberger ring – a very large, round diamond encircled by smaller diamonds and, as a modification, some exceptional aquamarines, set only in platinum – and he went along with it.

Glancing at Val’s ring, he pointed to the band that looked like the closest complement, a wide polished band with an inset sweep of nine small diamonds. ‘How about this one?’

She nodded eagerly. ‘You should try it on.’

He did, and she grinned, and when he gave the consent she’d been hoping for, she kicked him out of the shop to make the purchase, insisting that it was bad luck for him to know the price.

He waited on the sidewalk outside, glad to have satisfied her. That was the more important thing. He could wear the ring, flashy as it was. He’d get used to it. A man could get used to just about anything if he set his mind to it. He’d gotten used to being angry at Meg, gotten used to being without her after all their years growing up together. He’d gotten used to feeling incomplete and had even turned that feeling, and the associated ones, into an incredibly lucrative career. He’d gotten used to living on the road for huge chunks of time, to the sharp smell of sweat and exhaustion that filled his tour bus after a concert, to relying on Gene to tell him where to be and when and for how long. He’d gotten used to the idea of never finding a woman worth marrying.

And while he wasn’t so young and romantic as to believe that Val was his soul mate, the one woman he was meant to be with, the woman he’d waited his whole life for, etcetera, he thought they made a pretty good couple. She kept him distracted and entertained. She was sweet and affectionate, and fun in bed. She was beautiful, in a tomboyish way. And she loved him. It was enough; it had to be.

That evening, Carson and his father, James, walked the fence line of the McKay citrus farm, checking for rotted posts. James, a sturdy, upright sixty-five-year-old with still-dark hair, was gradually replacing the old wooden posts with steel in the steady, conservative manner with which he did everything. The McKays’ was one of the fortunate Ocala-area farms that by luck of diligent grove management and the two small, warm lakes within their groves, lost only a few trees when the freeze of ’89 put so many growers out of business. If it had gone otherwise – if the groves were lost and had to be replanted, as so many had – Carson never would’ve left to pursue his music. Instead, he’d have stayed to replant, rebuild the business. It was funny how things turned out, how you couldn’t predict where luck would land or which kind it would be when it did.

Post-checking was only an excuse, he knew, for his dad to get him alone. As an only child, he’d forged a strong, close bond with both his parents, one that had helped see him through what they all referred to as ‘those years’, and which told him, now, that something other than fence posts was on his dad’s mind. But he knew not to rush the matter, and so he ambled along at his dad’s side through the calf-high grass, appreciating the peace layered all around him: rosy sky, soft breeze stirring the nearby lemon-tree leaves, a trio of horses gamboling across the way on pasture land that had until recently belonged to Spencer and Anna Powell.

‘I see the new people have things up and running over there,’ he said, pointing toward the horses.

His dad stopped walking and looked that way. ‘They do. Kind of strange to see the place active again, after so long.’

‘How long has it been?’

‘What? Since there were thoroughbreds over there?’

‘Yeah,’ Carson nodded. He couldn’t remember, having lived away from here for more than fifteen years, now.

‘Oh, maybe a decade, maybe more. Around the time Julianne married that Canadian fella and moved up to Quebec.’

Carson recalled hearing about it. Meg’s youngest sister, only seventeen at the time, got pregnant just before her senior year and married the father, a college student from Quebec who’d been visiting relatives for the summer. He got the news by phone while he was touring with his first band and wondered, then, how different things might’ve gone for him if he’d accidentally gotten Meg pregnant. She would’ve had to stick with him and try to make a life together, would’ve seen that there was nothing to fear about being so much in love – if that was her real reason for breaking up.

He never did quite buy that excuse, though. He figured she’d fallen for Hamilton, was seduced by the money and just didn’t want to admit it. And that morning before her wedding, all she wanted was a fling for old time’s sake. One last toss with the guy she’d thought was such a good lover but wasn’t worth marrying – he didn’t have money, after all, didn’t have what looked like a life of luxury ahead of him, not then. He’d been nothing but a shit-kicker, a grower’s kid who intended to be a grower himself. He couldn’t compete with Brian Hamilton, couldn’t give her the life she apparently wanted.

‘Carson?’

‘Oh, sorry, just lost in thought.’ Well, whatever, he thought; water under the bridge.

His dad went on, ‘After the youngest left, Spencer sold off the last of his stock and stuck to just boarding. I never did know why.’

‘Maybe he just got tired of failing. God knows he couldn’t seem to make any money breeding.’

‘That’s the truth,’ his dad said. ‘And I wondered about that, about just what was working for Spencer. Because time was when all the talk was on him sliding into bankruptcy and foreclosure – he was overextended everyplace around.’

‘I remember,’ Carson said.

‘But something turned around for him, and I found out just what when I was over to the co-op last week,’ his dad said, turning to continue their walk. ‘Dave Zimmerman pulls me aside. He says, “Hey, what do you know about Spencer Powell?” And I say, “Well, we been neighbors for thirty-some years, till about two weeks ago.” And Dave says, “Then you probably know all about the business with the money.”’

‘What business?’ Carson asked, more to be polite than because he cared.

‘Well, that’s what I said.’ Cause I never heard anything – but you know, I don’t, always; Spencer never let on about the details of things, and I got better things to do than hang around the co-op and gossip like them retired guys. So Dave tells me, “This is all in confidence – I trust you, Jim, not to get me in trouble,” and he starts telling me about the sale of the farm there. Seems that Dave’s wife – you remember Linda, she’s the real estate lawyer – made out a pretty sizeable check when she was putting together all the paperwork – $387,000, which was a little more’n a third of what Spencer got for the place.’

‘So I guess he found some way to borrow against the farm, and that solved his problems.’

‘You’d think. But that’s the funny thing. He didn’t have any sort of mortgage. Hadn’t, according to the title record, since ’89.’

‘Okay … he owed for something else,’ Carson said, curbing his impatience.

‘Nope. No record on his credit of any debt that size – or so says Dave. But get this: the check was made out to Bruce Hamilton personally.’

So, Carson thought, this was what their walk was all about. Something was going on between Meg’s father and father-in-law, and his dad hadn’t wanted to bring it up around Val, believing that anything Megrelated might yet be a touchy subject. It felt a little ridiculous, his dad still trying to protect his feelings about that long-ago trouble; he was done with it, moving past, moving on. To prove it, he would talk about Meg plainly, show that the topic wasn’t worth tip-toeing around.

‘This money stuff ’s not so hard to figure – do you think?’ he said. ‘After Meg married Brian, they must’ve lent Spencer the money to pay the mortgage off the books, you know? A friendly loan between in-laws.’

His dad nodded, one eyebrow raised slightly in what Carson knew was silent acknowledgement of this shift in Meg-related communication. ‘Sure, maybe, but it’s hard to imagine that kind of generosity – Hamilton giving over the title of the land and no guarantee Spencer’d ever pay it back. I mean, we’re talking Spencer Powell here.’

Carson pushed his hand through his hair. Why did they have to keep at this, anyway? Not that he’d admit it after his show of bravado, but all this talk was raising his hackles in a way he couldn’t explain. He said, ‘I bet it just amounts to some shady bookwork on Hamilton’s part – wouldn’t surprise me any.’

His dad nodded. ‘Maybe so. But if that’s the case, I wonder why Spencer paid it back like he did, in a regular check made out to Hamilton personally. That’s a big chunk of income to get all at once – Hamilton’ll get hit hard on his taxes, and it might flag an IRS audit.’

‘Maybe Spencer wasn’t thinking about that, or figured it’s not his problem,’ Carson said.

‘Maybe. I can’t help wondering, though, why Spencer’d pay it back at all, if he didn’t have to.’ His dad scratched his cheek and looked over at the horses, still puzzled by the behavior of a man who’d once been a close friend.

Carson tried to ignore the prod that said there was more to this money thing than what he and his dad could suss out. He was ready to be done with the subject for good.

He said, ‘You know, I always figured Meg married Hamilton for his money, and now it’s obvious Spencer got good mileage out of it, too. I don’t know what’s up with all that, but none of it really matters, does it? I mean, what any of them did or do hasn’t been our business for a long time. And we have better stuff to think about, don’t we?’ He put his hands on his dad’s shoulders and smiled. ‘For example, getting you fitted for a tux.’

FIFTEEN

‘Good job,’ Ms Henry said Wednesday, handing Savannah her graded world history test. The score, in purple ink at the top right corner, read 104 – an A+, short only one of the possible five extra-credit points.

Savannah looked over at Rachel’s test. ‘Eighty-two,’ Rachel said, holding up the paper. ‘Your fault, for not letting me come over and study with you.’

‘Your fault, for not studying enough on your own.’

Rachel, dressed today in a tight yellow shirt that made her look chubby – which she was, a little – scooted her chair closer to the aisle and leaned toward Savannah to whisper, ‘When are you going to tell me who was keeping you so busy last night that I couldn’t even bribe you with peanut-butter cup ice cream?’

It had been a good offer; Savannah was usually glad to hang out with Rachel, and she loved that flavor of ice cream, one of many foods they never kept in her own house because her dad was severely allergic to peanuts in addition to dogs. But she had something else more important to do: finalizing her plans for Miami. ‘It’s not just a “who”,’ she whispered back. ‘It’s a “what” too. And I can’t tell you yet – but I will, I promise.’ At the very last minute, so there’d be no chance of Rachel leaking the plan and screwing things up. Well-meaning as Rachel might be, she was too close to her sister, Angela. While Angela could usually be trusted on small stuff, something like this might bring out her righteous-older-sister side. Savannah couldn’t take that risk.

‘Okay, fine,’ Rachel said, leaning back. ‘Whatever.’

Caitlin Janecke, the most spoiled of all the spoiled girls Savannah knew, said from the desk at Savannah’s left, ‘What’s her problem? Is she pissed about her grade?’

Savannah looked at Caitlin’s pink cashmere-blend shirt and belted khaki Hollister shorts, the matching pink ribbon in her perfect blond hair; Caitlin was perfect down to her slim tanned legs and calfskin boaters. No, Savannah wanted to say, she didn’t want to believe you gave blow jobs to three different guys last weekend – a story that had come from a reliable source: Caitlin’s sister Riley, a freshman in Savannah’s gym class. Riley, by contrast, had been at the same party but done it to only one guy, she said, and ‘Ohmigod, it was the most awful, bizarre thing you could imagine!’ As slutty as the sisters’ actions seemed, Savannah wished Riley had elaborated just a little more.

Now was not the time to get into any of it, so she just nodded and said, ‘She didn’t study.’

‘Did you?’

Savannah lifted one shoulder. ‘Not really.’

‘God. My parents make me study every night, and I only got a ninety-one. Must be nice to be so brainy.’ The compliment, even delivered so grudgingly, surprised Savannah.

‘I guess,’ she said, suddenly chagrined. Maybe Caitlin wasn’t so bad … and having someone so popular envy her out loud pleased her. Brainy was okay, brainy was good – better than her usual tag of ‘hippie girl’, usually delivered with a sneer as though she was smelly and unwashed. This school, filled by girls whose parents had too much money, was made for Caitlin clones. As great a prep school as the place was, originality, unless it was in the pursuit of the finer arts like painting or classical composition, was not so welcome here.

And she still had two more years to endure. If she could somehow make things work out with Kyle – eventually she’d have to confess her true age and hope he’d stick with her – the time would be much more enjoyable.

She liked to think that in addition to being brainy, she was also strong on organization and determination. When she came up to a roadblock, she didn’t turn back; she found a way around it. Ever since she was a toddler, this had been true about her. One of the stories her Grandma Shelly liked to tell all her rich friends was of how Savannah once escaped from her parlor, which was gated off to adjoining rooms, while she, Shelly, had gone to the bathroom. ‘I came back – not two minutes later, you understand – and Savannah was gone. Just disappeared from the room! I looked under the furniture, behind it, all around the house, thinking she could’ve climbed over one of the gates. But no! The child had pushed out a screen and gone out through the window! I finally saw her on the patio, where she had a chair pulled up to the fountain so she could reach the water – she was soaking wet and giggling, pleased as punch!’ Her grandma used this story to show how much Savannah was like her dad, and maybe in some ways she was: results-oriented, single-minded – but she would use her powers for good, not evil, that was how she thought of it.

She packed up her world history textbook and her binder, wondering what her grandma, and the rest of the family, would think if they knew how she was making the Miami trip work; her mom should do a better job of hiding her credit cards. By the time the bill came, she’d have a good excuse to give if she got caught – but more importantly, even if she was caught, she’d have already been to Miami with Kyle.

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