girls came aft just as he nosed the boat into its berth and shut the motor off. Amy jumped off to tie up. Claire gathered up the remains of the lunch. He handed her the hoodie without saying anything, and she put it on. He wanted to say, Don’t you ever try that again, but he would have needed the upper hand for that.
By the time they got back to the cottage it was almost seven o’clock. His back was beginning to hurt again. It would only get worse. He wanted to go upstairs into the bathroom and take a Vicodin, but the girls went straight there to shower, so he poured himself a vodka on the rocks and went out on the porch where he put charcoal in the grill and lighted it off. They’d have steak. Amy could make the salad.
But the charcoal wouldn’t burn. It just sat there as if it wasn’t supposed to. He blew on it and rearranged it, getting his hands all black and sooty, and it still wouldn’t burn. First the goddamn wind went down, and now the fucking grill didn’t work! He gave the grill a petulant kick, almost knocking it over as the two girls appeared on the porch, looking fresh from their showers, dressed almost alike in cut-off jeans and T-shirts. Amy stayed back. She knew better than to talk to her dad when he was like this.
Claire stepped forward. “Can I help?”
“No! I can do it myself,” he said, picking up the can of lighter fluid and leaning over the grill.
“Dad, don’t!” Amy said. Too late. Her father squirted much more lighter fluid than he was supposed to on the charcoal.
“Watch out!” Claire lunged forward and pulled him back just before the stuff exploded and a jet of flame leaped up. It would have burned him. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m alright. Can’t you see it’s burning?” he said.
Claire laughed as if she thought he was joking.
“Dad, I’ll make the salad,” Amy said.
He went back into the kitchen, poured himself another vodka and took it upstairs into the bathroom to get the Vicodin. It was still steamy from the girls’ showers. Draped over the shower stall door were his daughter’s one-piece bathing suit and the tiny top and thonglike bottom of Claire’s bikini. Did they shower together? He was very careful not to imagine his daughter naked in the shower, but there was Claire, nude, soaping herself, as clear in his imagination as if she had actually been there. Right then and there, he decided to find a way to make her leave that school. No way was he going to let her corrupt his daughter. He put the pill in his mouth and washed it down with the vodka. Then he combed his hair as best he could since he couldn’t see himself clearly in the fogged-up mirror and went downstairs and poured another vodka. He took the steak out of the refrigerator and went outside and put it on the grill while the girls set the table. With the pill and the vodka in him and a decision made, he felt a little better. He guessed that he’d been coming to that decision all along.
He went to bed early that night, almost right after dinner. He wouldn’t have if he’d had Amy to himself, but it was obvious she was a whole lot more interested in this older girl—who actually lived in a foreign country!—than she was in him. Upstairs in his bed, he tried to read but fell asleep with his clothes still on, and dreamed that he wasn’t asleep—that he was wide awake in his bed and the window was open and the two girls were talking on the porch right below the window.
I didn’t do it with any boys, one voice said.
With who then?
A teacher.
Claire!
And then he dreamed he was only dreaming. When he woke up the moon was shining through the window and a breeze had come up fluttering the curtains. He took off his clothes and put on his pajamas and went into the bathroom where the bathing suits still hung and swallowed an Ambien. It was three in the morning. No voices rose from the porch below.
In the morning at breakfast he said, “Claire?” his voice casual. He’d had a good night’s sleep, he was feeling fine, and when Claire looked up, he said, “Tell me, why did you leave that other school in the middle of your senior year?”
“Because my father was transferred to London,” Claire answered, her expression blank.
But he wasn’t watching Claire’s face. He was watching his daughter watching Claire. It was obvious by her expression he hadn’t been dreaming. He had his ammunition now.
There were lots of ways of finding out things people would prefer to keep secret, and he was good at all of them. All he needed to find out whether Claire had told the truth or had made up the story to impress his daughter was to get his hands on the faculty list of Central Park Academy at the beginning of the previous year, and the revised one that would have been distributed after Christmas vacation.
How hard could that be for a man with his connections?
FIVE
On the same Friday that Mitch Michaels started to host his daughter and Claire Nelson in Madison, Connecticut, Rachel Bickham drove from the campus of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and joined her father, brother and sister on the ferry dock for Martha’s Vineyard. There, just as he always did, her father sighed as if he’d just heard news rescuing him from some unbearable fate, and announced, “This is where vacation begins.” As usual, he spoke for all of them. It was always the same: after the rush to get everything done so they could leave their work, after the packing, after the turning around and driving for miles to be sure all the burners on the stove were out, after fighting through the monstrous Cape Cod weekend traffic, they’d stand on the dock in the salty air clutching their tickets while the tension rose out of them, released to the sky where the gulls called and floated. That Labor Day weekend Friday, each coming from a different place, they arrived almost simultaneously a half an hour before the five-o’clock evening boat. First they exchanged the usual hugs; then they told each other how great each looked, and then they gushed over Rachel’s brother’s bouncy almost-spaniel puppy he’d just rescued from the pound, and then, surreptitiously, they began looking at the oncoming crowd and beyond it to the parking lot for Rachel’s husband.
It wasn’t as if her brother and sister didn’t understand that Bob might have felt he couldn’t leave his work to get there on time, or even not at all. Everybody in her family also worked very hard, each a high achiever like their dad, like leftist versions of Condoleezza Rice. Rachel’s brother, DuBois Bickham, was by day a public defender, by night the author under a pen name of money-making detective novels; her sister, Marian Anderson Bickham, was a community organizer in Detroit, a protégé of a prodigy of Saul Alinsky. She was tone deaf, believe it or not, a condition she confessed only half in jest that she assumed on purpose to claim her own identity.
Rachel didn’t carry the burden of a provocative name because she was the youngest and her mother had insisted this last child would have a neutral one. Her father used to remind her, though, that Rachel was a biblical name, heavy with implication. Her mother had been a stay-at-home mom until Rachel entered New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, where, before he became a famous author, Frank McCourt was everybody’s favorite teacher. From then until her death, her mother was a kindergarten teacher.
Ten minutes after they had greeted each other, and after DuBois’s puppy had lifted his leg all over Marian’s suitcases and she had forgiven both the dog and her brother and claimed that from now on the puppy’s name was Bags, Bob still had not arrived. The boat coming from the Vineyard was now at least two-thirds of the way across the Sound. They watched it move the rest of the way
