Edgewater (34 page)

25

EDGEWATER

WE PUT EDGEWATER ON THE MARKET A FEW DAYS
after Mom's funeral. Not even twenty-four hours later, it was sold—to Richard Deighton. Apparently Deighton wanted to expand his Break Run empire. At first I didn't want to let him have our house. He'd spent so much time decrying the state of Edgewater, and now I felt protective of it. It seemed cheesy and clichéd to walk around thinking,
If these walls could talk
, but that's what I did. My family had laughed and wept and been together in this house. It was wild—it was nearly unfathomable—that after three generations, and so much work, and so much pain, it was about to be over. Just like that. All that time, and suddenly there'd be no more.

Susannah was the one who convinced me that it didn't matter who bought the house; the bottom line was, it wasn't going to be
our
house anymore. And maybe there was even some kind
of poetic justice to Richard Deighton and his family walking the same halls we'd walked.

“He'll probably tear it down,” I told her.

“Even better,” Susannah said. “Richard Deighton doesn't deserve to live in Edgewater.”

To sell it, we needed Gigi's approval. Susannah and I brought the papers to the hospital for her to sign, then got on with packing up our lives. Out front in the driveway was a dumpster the size of a small planet. I'd spent weeks that summer trying to clean the house. Susannah, Lennox, and the moms had pitched in recently, too, but of course it was a bigger job than we could handle. Allyson did some online research and found a cleaning crew willing to finish it up. Not an ordinary cleaning crew; this one specialized in crime scenes. Island Crime Decontamination boasted that they'd seen it all—blood, guts, and gore. But I did find it strangely satisfying when Dave Cooley of Island Crime Decontamination walked into the house with his associates for their first day on the job and admitted he'd never seen anything quite like Edgewater.

The dumpster was filled until it nearly overflowed. The rest would be donated or put in storage until Gigi was released from the hospital. She wasn't going to be prosecuted for anything connected to Mom's death. Yes, a crime had been committed, but Gigi had been under no legal obligation to report it. The fact that Gigi knew about the accident and kept quiet may not have been laudable, but it wasn't criminal. She herself didn't do anything to cover it up, and she never lied to the authorities, so there was no obstruction-of-justice charge.

However, she'd never paid taxes on all the money she'd
received from the senator, which was a crime—tax evasion. But very quickly a judge approved a settlement, to be paid with proceeds from the sale of the house. No one wanted to see Gigi sent to prison. After all, she was a victim, too.

The moms had scoped out a town-house development called Wildflower Hills in a neighboring town. Each unit had its own patch of grass out front, and in the back each had a patio. Brown and white cookie-cutter homes. My grandfather would be rolling over in his grave, or so the expression went.

But actually, I didn't think so. I thought about the dead all the time now, and I decided that even if they had some sort of inexplicable knowledge of what happened after they'd gone, I didn't think they'd care so much, at least not about all the stuff we tend to place value on during the course of our lives. Six feet under, what did it matter if my grandfather had designed a one-of-a-kind beachfront estate or if he'd lived out his days in a boxy apartment? The ones left behind honor the dead simply by doing the best they can.

And what I came to understand was, all that time she was raising us, Gigi really
was
doing the best she could. I'd softened to her, realizing how she'd tried to give us everything we wanted, and to teach us things, from meditation to power poses, to help us move through life. I think some of those lessons even worked. The moms kept saying that, despite some of the awful choices she'd made, Gigi had managed to raise two remarkable girls. I didn't feel so remarkable myself. But Susannah sure was. And as for me, I was doing the best I could, too.

I drove out to see Wildflower Hills, and I agreed that when Gigi got out, she should go live there, or someplace just like
it. Of course, she'd remain under a doctor's care, too. Once a week the community gardener would come to water lawns and clip hedges, taking care of the outside. Susannah and I decided we'd hire a housekeeper to come in once a week to help Gigi with the inside of the town house. But neither of us would be living there with her.

Susannah had found a farm in upstate New York that hosted high school students. In exchange for helping with various chores, she'd get free room and board. Once September hit, she'd begin her sophomore year at the school a mile away.

I looked at the pictures of the farm Susannah showed me online. “I don't know,” I told her. “You'll be sharing a bunk in a barn with three other strangers.”

“And what did you do when you went to boarding school?” she asked. She had me there.

The moms drove Susannah up to visit and agreed to sign off on the arrangement, as long as her grade point average stayed steady. Before she moved, she made flyers to find homes for her dozens of cats, and she personally met with each of the new owners to be sure they'd be the right fit for her babies.

So Susannah left. And then so did Lennox, back to Hillyer for senior year. She had to go a couple of weeks before classes officially started, because months earlier she'd signed up for the advisor program for incoming freshmen. “Come with me,” she'd said. We were in her room at Dream Hollow, and she was packing up the vintage presidential-campaign posters she'd ordered for her dorm-room walls:
LET'S BACK JACK KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT
and
ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ
. She'd pull them out of their tubes, hold them up to admire them, then reroll them,
put them back into their tubes, and gingerly place them in her big trunk, as if she was laying a baby in a crib.

“Kathleen Strafford filled my spot weeks ago,” I reminded her. She unrolled a picture of an owl and held it up to show me. “The Wise Old Bird Says ‘Hoo, Hoo, Hoo-Hoo-ver,'” I read aloud. “Definitely my favorite.”

“You haven't even tried to see if Strafford is willing to squeeze you back in, so you don't know for sure that she wouldn't.”

“True.”

“Get on it, Hollander! You were at Hillyer for the last three years. Don't you want to finish up high school where you started it?”

I couldn't say money was the issue anymore, and Lennox knew it. Even with Gigi's tax settlement, there was still a nice chunk left over from the sale of Edgewater. Plus, the senator's will had been read, and Susannah and I were both named in it. There was a trust fund, a real one, with an executor chosen by the bank. All our expenses would be vetted through him—not Gigi. If I wanted to, and if Ms. Strafford could find a spot for me, I could go to the executor to approve my tuition payment.

“They all feel bad, you know.”

I did know. Among the flowers that had arrived for me at the Sackler-Kandells' were two enormous arrangements from Hillyer. One from the headmaster, and one from Kathleen Strafford herself. Both made mention of “your Hillyer family.”

“That's not it,” I told Lennox. “For the first time in my life, I don't want to run away from home. I think that means I'm supposed to stick around for a while.”

I'd made plans to live at the one place in Idlewild that still felt like home—Oceanfront. It had been Naomi's idea. She said there was plenty of room in the house, and she could use the company. I had no idea if she really meant it; Naomi didn't strike me as the type of person who ever got lonely. But I decided to take her up on her offer nonetheless. She had let me choose between two guest bedrooms at the top of the stairs. I picked the smaller one, painted yellow, with a bookshelf taking up the length of the longest wall and a window that looked out to the barn so that when Orion stuck his head out the back window of his stall, I could see him.

My Orion. He'd be living in Idlewild, too. Not because of Underhill's payment—I wouldn't have taken anything from Underhill Enterprises, even if the police hadn't frozen the company and all its assets. But I'd called Beth-Ann to see about buying him back myself. She'd flat-out refused, even though I offered ten percent over the purchase price, then twenty percent. “Name your price,” I'd told her.

“He's not for sale,” she said.

Those words were familiar. We hung up, and it wasn't even five minutes before I got a call from Clayton Bracelee, Beth-Ann's dad. I could have Orion back, and a refund of the sale price was just fine—no need to inflate it. He'd even take care of the shipping costs. He proceeded to give an interview about it—free press for the candy company. But I didn't care. My horse was coming home.

Lennox stuck the owl poster into the trunk, pouting. “I thought we were starting senior year together early this summer. I didn't know we wouldn't get it at all.”

I knocked her in the ribs. “You'll have Nathan,” I reminded her.

She rolled her eyes. “I don't know what I ever saw in him,” she said. “And, regardless, he's no substitute for you.”

“No, for that you have Violet Tabachnick.”

When I said Violet's name, Lennox wrinkled her nose as if she'd drunk milk gone sour.

“Sorry. Is she that bad?”

“So far we've only e-mailed to work out which one of us is bringing the mini fridge and which one is bringing the throw rug. And I know you're going to tell me I should give her the benefit of the doubt until I meet her, but what kind of person do you think wouldn't have a roommate worked out for senior year?”

“Who has two thumbs and is holding an ‘I Still Like Ike' poster?” I asked her.

“This girl,” Lennox said softly. She looked at me, tears brimming in her eyes. “Aw, man, Lorrie. I'm really going to miss you.”

My own eyes grew moist. “I'm going to miss you, too.”

“What if I bag this advisor thing? There are plenty of people who want to be freshman advisors, and we'd get a couple more weeks of summer together.”

I shook my head. “You should go,” I said. “You'll be a great advisor, and October break will be here before we know it.”

Lennox closed the trunk and pulled me into a hug. “This is the first time I'll be at Hillyer without you—or Pepper.”

I squeezed her, too, tightly, and then broke away and wiped my eyes. “I hope I didn't pressure you into leaving him.”

“No, you're right. Jeremy is a better rider for him. Pepper will get to show what he's made of, and the moms love the idea of owning a horse that might win big.”

“You can always change your mind,” I told her. Though for Jeremy's sake, I hoped she didn't. “And I'll look after him, too.”

“I know you will. The truth is, I love Pepper, but I haven't loved riding in a long time. I never loved it as much as you did. I rode for you, you know. I rode him to stay close to you.”

“That's an expensive pastime, just to hang out with your best friend.”

“You were worth it.”

CHARLIE CALLED TO SAY HE WANTED TO SEE ME.

“Not somewhere public,” he said.

Because people would see. I understood. The last photo we'd been in together, standing in the center of the parking lot of the Idlewild Cemetery, had been in newspapers around the world. I imagined people in other countries picking up the paper. I imagined one particular person in one particular country—my mother—grabbing the morning's paper
as she walked through King's Cross to catch a train. She'd find her seat, flip it open, and see me. Her long-lost daughter. Or rather, I wasn't lost; I'd been in the same place all these years. I wondered if she'd recognize the five-year-old she knew in the seventeen-year-old I'd become.

Of course I knew that Mom was dead, that she'd never been in England. But I still pictured her there. I couldn't help myself.

I had a few days to pack up what was left at Edgewater, and I told Charlie he could stop by the house. It was perfectly safe and private, save for the occasional car that would slow down
at the bottom of the driveway just to gawk at the house. But the press had packed up their cameras and left a couple of days after Mom's funeral. I guess they'd finally taken enough pictures of the house where Mom no longer lived. The pile of flowers at the end of the driveway was also gone, courtesy of Island Crime Decontamination. Though before they disposed of them all, Susannah ran down to rescue a bouquet of pink sweetheart roses. She pressed them between the pages of a thick old book and brought them upstate.

IT WAS ANOTHER CHARACTERISTICALLY GORGEOUS
Idlewild day, and I'd thrown open all the windows that I could reach. The house was flooded with natural light, and I felt like I was outdoors, but not in the way I used to. Instead of the outdoors creeping in unwanted through the floorboards and invading the sanctity of our home, it was all air and freshness. A breeze swept through, rustling the curtains and brushing my cheek like a kiss. It was wishful thinking—I knew that—but I hoped it was a sign from my mother, and it was the happiest moment I'd had in Edgewater since she'd been gone.

I had downloaded
James Taylor's Greatest Hits
onto my phone, but I hadn't been able to listen to it. Now I plugged it into a set of speakers and scrolled down to “How Sweet It Is.”

Just after noon, I heard the car drive up. The James Taylor album was playing in a loop as I bubble-wrapped my grandmother's delft china. A bunch of the pieces had been broken and were now in the dumpster out front, but what was still intact was coming with me to Naomi's. She'd said I could bring a few things that felt like home, and the blue and white china had
long been a favorite of mine. Decades ago, my grandmother had purchased the set for display, and part of me thought it was a little bit crazy to put them in the cabinets of the barn house and use them for everyday things like waffles and spaghetti. I heard a voice in my head that wasn't my mother's, couldn't be my mother's, but that sounded like hers all the same:
What are you saving them for? Just use them. Use them!