A Summer Affair (44 page)

As dinner was being cleared, Lock stood up from his place. Claire’s stomach clenched; she wasn’t ready for this. Lock took a microphone from one of the production guys and said, in a booming voice that quieted everyone, “Good evening!”

Applause. People were feeling good now; they had been warmed by the cocktail hour, and they’d eaten. The evening was about to take off like a rocket ship.

“I’m Lockhart Dixon, executive director of Nantucket’s Children, and I would like to
thank you
for coming to our summer gala!”

More applause.

“Nantucket’s Children was founded in 1992, when it came to the attention of our late founder, Margaret Kincaid, that the face of Nantucket was changing. There were children of working islanders whose basic needs were not being met. The island needed affordable housing options, better after-school programs, day care . . .”

Lock went on; Claire knew the spiel. She looked around at the attractive, wealthy people surrounding her. Did
they
get it? Nantucket’s Children was about kids whose parents worked as hard as they could to make a life here. Nantucket’s economy depended on this workforce; the island had a responsibility to care for these children. Lock finished his speech and raised his hands, and the lights in the tent dimmed. The video started on a screen that dropped down over the stage: kids of all shapes, sizes, and colors playing ball, studying, riding bikes, walking in groups on the beach. The sound track played “Lean on Me,” and Claire misted up. A picture of J.D. flashed on the screen, showing him sitting with a special-needs preschool student, a book open between them. The Read to Me program, funded by Nantucket’s Children. Claire felt conflicted: to cochair this gala had been so hard, so draining, and it had led her to such a complicated place. She looked at the kids’ faces on the screen. The point of the gala was to raise money; money would make a difference. She had taken the job as cochair because she wanted to help, because she wanted to return some goodwill to the universe. But it had backfired. Or had it?

Claire’s nerves attacked her thighs, her knees. She knew what was coming. She looked over at Isabelle’s table and was alarmed to see Isabelle stand up, push her chair in, and stroll to the back of the tent. Where was she going? Didn’t she know the thank-yous were next on the program? Gavin stood and followed Isabelle out.

Adams ambled up onto the stage and took the microphone from Lock. Claire turned around, searching in vain for Isabelle. She was gone. Claire tried to signal to Adams, but he was off and running on his president-of-the-board speech. He thanked Gavin—polite applause, though now Gavin was missing, too—and then he thanked Lock, and Lock returned to the stage to take a bow. Claire looked at Daphne—she was, as ever, scowling—and then Daphne stood up and walked out. The applause was deafening, or so it seemed to Claire. She was gripped with fear. Here was the moment she had been waiting for, or one of the moments, and she was dreading it.
No!
she thought. Her face blossomed into two red posies.
Calm down
. She had done harder things than this. She had kept her cool while they performed an emergency C-section and pulled Zack out: Living? Dead? Healthy? Impaired? She had been introduced during the unveiling of
Bubbles III
at the Whitney Museum; she had been photographed by the
New York Times.
She had banged the tambourine against her hip in front of a packed house at the Stone Pony. She must have had chutzpah then. Well, if she’d had it, she’d lost it. She worked alone in the hot shop, she raised her family; she was not the kind of person who could accept a bouquet of flowers in front of an intimidating crowd like this. Her heels would snap, she would fall, there would be a stain on her dress in an embarrassing place, there would be something stuck in her teeth. She checked again for Isabelle—gone. In the bathroom. And Daphne, gone. And Matthew, too, would miss her shining moment. Was it even worth having a shining moment if the right people weren’t there to watch?

Isabelle!

“It is now my distinct pleasure,” Adams said, “to introduce the two women who made this evening possible. These women have been working for nearly a year—they have raised money, called in favors, turned over their lives in service to Nantucket’s Children and the summer gala. Please put your hands together for our gala cochairs. Ladies and gentlemen, Claire Danner Crispin and Isabelle French!”

Later, Claire would say she’d heard the crash. The sound was trapped in her subconscious. The sound of glass breaking. And so even as Claire walked up onstage to accept an armload of lilies and delphiniums (prom queen, Academy Award, Miss America), her spirit was in a free fall. About to land with a sickening thud.

The plan for the auction was as follows: Pietro da Silva would walk in from the back of the tent, holding the chandelier aloft. And for additional drama, Ted Trimble had rigged a battery pack so that the chandelier would be illuminated. Pietro da Silva was a professional auctioneer; he moonlighted for every charity on the island, and he liked to make things interesting. Strolling through a darkened tent with the precious chandelier aglow had been his idea. Auction as theater. Why not? The price would go up.

Claire was in a state of heightened agitation. The flowers of the bouquet brushed against her face. She was aware that Isabelle had
not
come up onstage with her; Claire had posed for the photographers of both island newspapers with Adams alone. Did the audience find it strange that Isabelle was missing? Claire wasn’t sure, nor was she quite sure what was wrong inside her heart, but something was definitely wrong. Onstage, with the lights in her eyes, she tried to locate Jason. Where was Jason? She thought of Jason as she had first known him, his young face glowing warm and orange from the bonfire up at Great Point; he had brought a cooler of cherrystone clams, and he shucked them there on the beach and fed them to Claire, each one a tiny, sweet, perfect present. That Jason was gone, and in his place she now had . . . what? The man who had grabbed her hand when Zack took his first steps, who kissed her throat, the man who had returned to sleep beside her, even though she had strayed so far away from herself. Jason! Where was her husband? She felt that something awful had happened. One of their children had burned to cinders in the hot shop! Where was Jason? His spot at their table was empty. Shea was throwing up in bed, all alone; Ottilie had been stolen from the house by a stranger who had been stalking her for months. In the back of the tent, all the way in the back, Claire saw Siobhan, her face as pale and pinched as a pie crust, genuflecting in her white chef’s jacket. Someone was dead.

When Claire stepped off the stage, Lock was waiting for her with a stricken face.
Everything tends to go wrong at the last minute
. Here it was, the last minute.

“The chandelier fell,” Lock said. “It broke.”

It fell,
Claire thought.
It broke.

“Broke?” she said.

“Smashed,” Lock said.

Not possible,
Claire thought. The security guard had been hired specifically to make sure that nothing happened to it.

The crowd quieted as Lock led Claire out of the tent by the arm. They did not know what had happened, but they sensed tragedy.

Adams spoke into the microphone with rousing enthusiasm. “Enjoy your dessert! Max West will begin his concert in a matter of minutes!”

It was not a tragedy: the chandelier, after all, was only a thing. And yet when Claire saw it, lying lopsided in the grass—broken, smashed, ruined—she cried out, and then she just plain cried, blubbered, sobbed. She turned to Lock and said, “Where is Jason?”

Hands came around her. “I’m right here, baby. God, I am so sorry.”

Claire collapsed into him. She was crying so hard that Jason couldn’t understand what she was saying. She had to concentrate on taking a breath, repeating herself.

“I want you to call the babysitter. Ask her. Are the kids okay?”

“I’m sure they’re fine.”

“Call her!” There was something terribly wrong; Claire felt it. The lighter! J.D. had set the house on fire with the goddamned lighter. He had been flicking it on and off under his covers. Claire should have taken the evil thing with her when she left the house. The covers of his bed caught fire, and the rest of his room. The rest of the upstairs, where the children were sleeping. They would die of smoke inhalation. Hannah, the babysitter, had decided to crash the concert after all. She had left the children alone, and now they were dead.

Jason called. Claire was limp against him, shivering. Everyone gathered in a loose circle: Lock, Adams, Ted and Amie Trimble, Brent and Julie Jackson. Not Siobhan, though Claire had seen her a few moments earlier. Not Isabelle. Not Gavin. Not Daphne.

Jason hung up his phone. “The kids are fine,” he said. “They’re all asleep.”

“Even Zack?”

“Even Zack.”

“And Hannah’s there? You talked to Hannah?”

“Hannah’s there, Pan’s there. The kids are safe.”

Okay. She was allowed, now, to let go—her anger, her rage, her disappointment, her heartbreak. The house was not on fire; her children were safe in bed. The chandelier was only a
thing,
an inanimate object, a
thing,
Claire! She chastised herself for her hot fountain of tears, but they were not to be stopped. Hundreds of hours of work, all that stress and strain, a trip to the hospital—she’d nearly
died
because of that goddamned chandelier! She’d returned to the hot shop only to create it, it was a labor of love, the best kind of charity, and now it was gone. She turned on the gathered crowd in fury.

“How did it happen?” she demanded. “Who knocked it over? It didn’t just fall over all by itself! And where is the security guard? He was supposed to be
watching
it!”

No one answered. Isabelle, Claire thought. She left the tent, and then, seconds later, the chandelier fell. She had been so disillusioned with Claire from the beginning . . .

“Where is Isabelle?” Claire asked.

“She’s back in the tent,” Adams said. “Eating dessert.”

“I can’t find Gavin,” Lock said. “I thought he was having a cigarette, but I’ve looked everywhere. He’s vanished.”

Vanished?
Claire thought. Gavin wasn’t her favorite person, but there was no reason for him to break her chandelier. Topple it and run, like some kid who had put a baseball through a window.

“Someone probably knocked it over by accident,” Jason said.

By accident? Claire thought. By what, carelessly swinging a purse? It would have to have been a pretty big purse. By carrying a tray loaded down with dessert samplers? Siobhan had been in the back of the tent, crossing herself:
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you not care about your soul, Claire?
Claire had seen her—but now where was she? Where was she now, when Claire needed her? Siobhan was angry; Claire knew it. She was resentful. She had not wanted to cater the gala. She had wanted to be eating and drinking and wearing her sexy black dress, not waiting on everyone hand and foot, like a servant. She had sat in judgment on Claire; she had quite possibly decided on her own to make Claire hang.

“I can’t believe nobody saw what happened,” Claire said. “Where was the security guard?”

“There were crashers,” Adams said. “A bunch of girls trying to get in without tickets. He was dealing with them.”

Claire strode up to the bar and cornered the bartender. Hunter, his name was. He had worked for Carter and Siobhan for years. “Did you see who did it?” Claire asked him. “You must have seen something.”

He held up his palms. “My back was turned,” he said. “I saw nothing.”

T
here were only a few people who had seen what happened, and one of them was Max West, who had been standing outside the door of the greenroom, drinking a cold, stinging Tanqueray and tonic. Max had had his eyes glued on the opening of the big tent; he was trying to hear what was being said inside.

The blue Solo cup was filled to the top with forbidden gin. Everything, for Max, was swaying and shimmering. He had finally arrived at that place he liked to visit when he was drinking, that place where he wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t, that place where the world and the people and events and circumstances in it seemed to have been created for his bemusement. Constantly, while drunk, he tilted his head in wonder.

He had seen the chandelier fall, had seen who knocked it over, but he was afraid to open his mouth, to blow the whistle, because it just as easily could have been his fault. He had been lurching after only a few steps; he, too, was capable of causing a catastrophic accident. The chandelier fell, it smashed in the grass, although the word “smash” indicated sound, and all Matthew heard was a muted crunch. Matthew looked at the chandelier in the grass. Should he pick it up? He thought
, I have to stop drinking
.

Back in the greenroom, he threw back two shots of espresso and tried to get Bruce on the phone. Bruce was at the gym in Burbank, on the treadmill; he was hesitant to get off. (He had to lose twenty pounds, his doctor said, or he was going to have a heart attack.)

“Is this an emergency, Max?” Bruce said.

Matthew said, “Yes.”

Matthew tried to explain it as concisely as he could: The auction item, a chandelier that Claire had
made,
had broken, and the charity would need something to auction in its place. What can we give?

“It has to be something really good,” Matthew said. “They expected this chandelier to go for, like, fifty grand.”

“Fifty thousand dollars?” Bruce said. “Jesus, Max! Haven’t you done enough for this woman? You’re playing a free concert. And you bought her table, right, for twenty-five grand? That’s enough, Max. That’s plenty. Why do you feel you have to give her anything else?”

“I don’t have to,” Matthew said. “I want to.” How to explain it? He would do anything for Claire. He was on a mission here! “What can we give them?”