Edgewater (35 page)

Life lessons from a box full of plates.

I taped up the salt and pepper shakers with the peacocks on them and put them in the box. Then I headed downstairs. Charlie was coming up the steps of the porch when I opened the door. Behind him, in the driveway, was a navy-blue BMW. I wondered if it was another from his dad's collection.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.”

He gave me an air kiss on either cheek. There was his Julia Copeland training. Plus, he'd finally gotten that haircut his mom wanted so badly. No more bangs, just short hair all around, so thick that the strands stood up on their own like individual fibers of carpet. The new cut made his hair look darker, almost the color it was when it was wet. I could see the tops of his ears for the first time.

Other things seemed different about him, too. I regarded him, trying to put a finger on the features that had changed. I realized that he stood a bit stiffly, as if the effects of the haircut had trickled down all over him.

“I'm glad you came,” I told him, feeling oddly formal myself. “I never got to properly thank you for the watch.”

“It was nothing,” he said. “It was the least I could do.”

“How did you know where to find it?”

“I don't know if I should tell you.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I've been racking my brain these last few weeks, trying to remember if I ever told you about pawning it. I know I didn't, and Lennox swore up and down that
she
didn't tell you. She didn't even know herself until after you gave it to me, when I was obsessing about it.”

“You were obsessing about it?”

My cheeks warmed. “It was nice to have a different kind of mystery to think about,” I said. “Anyway, the only possible explanation I can think of is that you were following me.”

“You're close,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“Victor Underhill was following you,” he said.

I remembered the sedan that I'd seen on my way into the pawnshop and on my way out again. Underhill had been behind those tinted windows, no doubt.

“He wanted to keep tabs on your family,” Charlie continued. “I'm sure you read about his involvement.”

“Yeah, I did.” The police had interviewed Underhill following Gigi's confession. He admitted he'd been the guy to step in and arrange a middle-of-the-night repair job on the guardrail. He'd come up with the story about Mom and Nigel moving to London and taken care of the details. But afterward, he'd had a crisis of conscience, or so he claimed, and he'd urged the senator to turn himself in. That was when the senator had ousted him from the inner circle.

Then, when Julia decided to run for Congress, he'd been called back. The senator had recently been diagnosed with
Pick's disease, a brain disease that causes dementia. It wasn't alcoholism the family was covering up. Julia was afraid that if news of his illness got out, she wouldn't be elected, and it was her turn, she maintained. After being the supportive political spouse all those years, she didn't want to have the public thinking she should stay home and care for her ailing husband.

Underhill said he hadn't known Gigi had been in the car all those years ago. It was the senator himself who started to make secret payments to Gigi to buy her continued silence. Who knew why he chose to keep that one detail a secret from his formerly trusted advisor? Maybe he was worried Underhill would do something to Gigi, or to Susannah and me. Or maybe he was just ashamed. Whatever the reason, due to his illness, he'd recently forgotten to make the promised payments. Underhill didn't learn the whole truth until Gigi showed up at the Compound the night Susannah was burned, and once he did, he told Gigi he'd take care of things, as long as she kept me away from Charlie. That was why the money for Orion's board had come in.

“Victor wasn't about to turn my dad in, because he was sick and all that,” Charlie said. “But when he figured out who you were, he just wanted to be sure you wouldn't make any trouble for my mom.” He shook his head. “I'm sorry. I just wanted you to have your mom's watch back. Even if the way I knew about it was totally sleazy. I guess I didn't really think through the fact that you'd ask me, or I would've come up with a better excuse.”

“There have been a lot of secrets and lies between our families,” I said. “I think we should stick to the truth from now on.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The truth sounds good to me, too.”

“I used to pretend I didn't care about my mom's things,” I said. “But I always wore the watch, and I'm happy to have it back, however you found it. So, thank you.”

“You thanked me already.”

“I mean it so much I said it twice,” I told him, and I put a hand over the face of the watch and pressed down briefly. It was a new habit I'd developed, touching this thing that Mom had touched. I wondered, if you dusted for prints, whether her fingerprints were still on it. God, how I hoped so.

“Cool,” Charlie said. He nodded, as if he was assuring himself. “Cool. So, this is your house.”

“For another week it is,” I said. “We just sold it. It's weird, though. I've lived here my whole life. Well, my whole life since my mom . . . you know. And even before then, this house has been in my family for decades. I'm going to miss it.”

And that was true: I actually would.

“I like seeing the house where young Lorrie
Hollander
spent her days.”

I gave a hard nod at the mention of my real last name. “I spent a lot more time at Lennox's house. I was always looking for excuses to get away from here.”

Charlie regarded me. “Can I come in anyhow?”

“Oh, sorry, yes, you can,” I said. I grinned and opened the door wider. “Yes, you can.”

“You said it twice. I guess that means I'm
really
allowed to come in.”

“You really are,” I said. He stepped across the threshold. “I
can't believe you're here,” I told him. “I can't believe you're in my house.”

Charlie Copeland, standing in the foyer of Edgewater. A cleaned and dusted version of the Edgewater foyer. But still, a few weeks ago I couldn't have imagined inviting anyone into my home.

Things change. Even when you think they couldn't possibly. It was an amazing thing to know.

“Why is it so hard to believe I'd come over?”

“It's not you. It's this house. I never let anyone come over. Not even Lennox. It was such a mess.”

“I don't think your friends would care if your house was messy,” Charlie said. “At least, I wouldn't.”

“
Mess
isn't the right word for what it was,” I said. “It was a disaster area, a health hazard. Have you ever seen the homes they have on those hoarder shows?” Charlie nodded. “It was like that, but on steroids.”

“I'm sure it wasn't
that
bad.”

“It was,” I said. “But I don't care anymore. As a matter of fact, I feel like I deserve some kind of badge of honor for making it through twelve years.”

“If I'd known that's what you wanted, I would've brought you one,” Charlie said.

“I was so ashamed,” I said. “I wasted a lot of time worrying that people would find out and think terrible things about me. You know, judge me because I lived here.”

“When I think about what my dad did to your mom, and how he kept it a secret . . . I just . . .” Charlie shook his head.

“He was trying to control what people thought of him.” It was strange to realize I had something in common with Franklin Copeland, but there it was. “There's a part of me that gets that,” I said. “I mean,
I
wanted to control the story people had about me.”

“But you didn't hurt anyone in the process,” Charlie said. “I'm so sorry, Lorrie. I think I'll be sorry about it for the rest of my life.”

I didn't know what to say back to him. I couldn't just say,
That's okay
. Because it wasn't, and it never would be. But it wasn't Charlie's fault. Just like Edgewater wasn't mine.

“People thought he was so good,” Charlie said. “And now they think everything about him was a lie and that he was all bad. I guess it's easier to categorize things like that: white versus black, good versus bad.” Charlie paused and shook his head. His hair stayed stiff and still, like it wasn't his own. “Sometimes . . .” he said. “Sometimes even I think of him as all bad. There's less to figure out that way.”

I nodded. It was easier for me to think that way about the senator, too; the same way it had been easier for me to think that way about Mom. For years I thought the fact that she'd left was the only thing about her that mattered. It was the story I told myself, and my sister, and my friends. It was the story I put out into the world.

But it was
my
story, and it turned out it had very little to do with my mother. There are the stories people tell about your life, and then there's the truth about it, which is completely your own.

“I know what you mean,” I told Charlie. “I know exactly what you mean.”

James Taylor's voice wafted down from above. “My dad loved James Taylor,” he said.

“My mom, too.”

“I wonder if they listened to him together.”

“I guess we'll never know,” I said.

It was a long list of things I'd never know about my mother. I looked at Charlie's face, the lean nose and the square jaw and his eyes squinting in discomfort. Not for the first time, I wished my mom were around to talk to her about what I felt for him.

“You must be so angry,” he said.

“Sometimes.”

“Me, too. And it feels so weird, because I also miss the hell out of him. I dream about him. And during the day, basically anything and everything reminds me of him—the view of the Point, obviously, and also the sound of the waves, and the way the light hits a certain painting on the wall, and the stupid prize at the bottom of the box of cereal.” He smiled sadly. “I just have so much to ask him. I found out so much I didn't know about him, and now I only have more questions. Isn't that crazy?”

I shook my head. People were like icebergs. There was so much more than you could see. Everyone had secrets below the surface. “You once told me that people are complicated,” I said.

“I'm pretty wise.” He paused. “When did I say that?”

“In the tree house, on the Fourth of July,” I said. “You said it about Lennox and Nathan, and I think it's the truest thing you could say about anyone. Like, even my dad. I know where he
is now, and clearly he knows where I am, but he hasn't reached out. I wonder if he's too mad to come back, or if he's too embarrassed. Or maybe he's still drinking. I don't know. But I think I'll send him a letter or something. Not today, but soon. I'm sure there's more to his story than I've been told, and I'd like to find out. I haven't told anyone else that. What do you think?”

“I think you should,” Charlie said. “Maybe you'll be disappointed, but at least you would've tried. I wish I'd tried harder with my dad. When I was a kid, he wasn't around that much, but when he was home, he'd always grill me about what was going on in the news, and he'd get annoyed because I couldn't have cared less about any of it. I just wanted a dad who, I don't know, coached Little League or something. And then he started to change. It happened so slowly at first. You could barely tell anything was wrong, up until these last few weeks. My mom just wanted to wait until after her election to go public. And my dad, well, he'd stare out at the Point. For hours, he'd stare. This was a man who never used to stand still for anything. Once, he grabbed my hand and told me I had to go down there and bring flowers. He had a bouquet of flowers. I had no idea where he got them or why he wanted me to bring them, but there was something in his voice . . .” Charlie's own voice trailed off. “Anyway, I didn't question it. I just went.”

So it was Charlie that Lennox and I had seen that day at the Point, my first day back in Idlewild. And it was Charlie who'd left the flowers. Of course it was. I wasn't even surprised.

“But even at the end he remembered your mom,” Charlie said. “Writing you and Susannah into his will was probably the
last sane thing he did before he got too sick.” He shook his head. “I'm having the hardest time believing he's gone.”

“Susannah used to have such a hard time saying good-bye to her pets,” I told him. “Even saying good-bye to animals that weren't her pets. I didn't get it. I told her that once something was dead, it was dead. But now I understand her wanting to hold on a bit longer. It's funny, because she seems to be adjusting pretty well to everything now. She's going to school upstate. She made all the arrangements herself.”

“And you,” Charlie said. “You going back to school?”

“Not to Hillyer. It's a long story, but the bottom line is, I'm gonna do senior year here in Idlewild. Naomi has a spare room at Oceanfront. That way I can visit my aunt and be around Orion and the horses. What about you?”

“Correspondence school,” he said. “I just have a few credits left. This way I can do them online from wherever I am.”

“That's good,” I said. I toed the floor. “And are you back with Shelby?” Charlie looked at me funny. “I mean, you said you guys were taking a break for the summer, and then she texted . . . that day.”

“We're friends,” he said. “But we're not right for each other. Not that way. Mostly I went out with her because it drove my mother crazy. But I was hoping . . .”

“What?” I asked. “What were you hoping?”

“I've wanted to tell you this for a while, but it's been so hard. There's only one person I've wanted to be with since the day I met you.” He stuck out a finger and pressed it lightly into my breastbone. “You, Lorrie.”