Silver Girl (52 page)

Connie sniffed; tears leaked out from beneath her sunglasses. Meredith pulled her to her feet, and they crossed the cobblestone street to Connie’s car.

Endings were like this. You could see them coming from far away, but there was one more thing (dinner at Le Languedoc) and one more thing (ice cream at the Juice Bar) and one more thing (a stroll down the dock to see the yachts) and one more thing (an hour with Toby out on the deck, looking at the stars, knowing, finally, that not a single one of them was especially for you) and one more thing (lovemaking, tender and bittersweet) and one more thing (watching the sunrise on the Juliet balcony) and one more thing (a trip to the Sconset Market for snickerdoodle coffee and peach muffins, only they didn’t have peach anymore; fall was coming, they’d switched to cranberry) and one more thing…

Endings, when anticipated, took forever.

And one more thing: Toby and Meredith sat on the floor of Meredith’s room, sifting through the possessions in her one cardboard box. Downstairs, Connie and Ashlyn were packing, and Dan was helping them load the car, which was going back to Hyannis on the noon boat. Dan was taking Toby to the airport at eleven. Toby’s sky-blue duffel bag was packed fat, waiting at the top of the stairs. Meredith was torn between wanting the ending to be over with—just everyone go—and wanting to squeeze the life out of every remaining second.

The first thing out of Meredith’s box were the photographs, which Meredith placed facedown. Too painful. Next, were the boys’ yearbooks and Meredith’s favorite paperbacks—
Goodbye, Columbus
and
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
There was her record album,
Bridge Over Troubled Water.
And finally, her anthropology notebook. Meredith paged through the notebook, ogling her eighteen-year-old handwriting. There was so much knowledge here, completely forgotten.

Toby studied the Simon and Garfunkel album. He pulled out the record sleeve and read her father’s note. “Wow,” he said. “No wonder you kept this.”

Stay with me,
Meredith almost said.
Live here with me for the winter.
It was ironic that Toby would have been free to do that in the past, but now he had a steady job. And, of course, his son. Toby promised he would bring Michael to Nantucket for Thanksgiving, along with Connie and Ashlyn. Dan would come, too, with his sons.

“And when you realize that you can’t live without me,” Toby had said the night before, “you can come and live with me in Annapolis. It’s not Park Avenue and it’s not Palm Beach, but we will live an honest life.”

“Dunbar’s number,” Meredith said, reading from her anthropology notebook. “It says here that human beings can have stable social relationships with a maximum of one hundred and fifty people. One hundred and fifty is Dunbar’s number.”

“Stable social relationships?” Toby said.

Meredith said, “My own personal Dunbar’s number is four. On a good day, seven. You, Connie, Dan, Ashlyn, Leo, Carver, and…”

The phone rang in the house.

Meredith heard Ashlyn cry out, “I’ll get it!” Meredith knew that Ashlyn would be hoping and praying it was Bridget.

A second later, Ashlyn called out. “Meredith?”

Was there any doubt? Meredith looked at Toby, and Toby pulled her to her feet. Out in the hallway, Ashlyn offered up the phone, a look of crushed disappointment on her face.

“Thank you,” Meredith whispered. And then, into the phone, “Hello?”

“Meredith?”

It was Dev. He sounded excited again. Another insidious discovery? More money uncovered? Hidden with the jihadists perhaps, in the Middle East?

“Hi, Dev,” Meredith said. He was her seventh stable social relationship.

“Somehow this woman, Nancy Briggs? At the prison? At Butner?”

“Yes?”

“Somehow she worked it out. Her and the priest. Or her through the priest—maybe that’s what it was, since I’m sure the warden’s secretary doesn’t have any contact with the actual prisoners. But she convinced the priest, and the priest convinced Freddy, and he’s agreed to take your call.”

“He’s agreed to take my call,” Meredith said.

“He’ll take your call,” Dev said. He paused. “That was what you wanted, right? That was what you asked me for?”

“It was,” Meredith said. Toby squeezed her hand, and then he left the room. He knew that there were some things that Meredith had to deal with alone.

Freddy would take her call. What did that mean? That meant he would sit in a room, and someone would hold the phone to his ear or he would hold the phone himself, and Meredith would speak. She would go down her list of eighty-four questions, as though she were giving Freddy a test. Where? When? How? Why?

Why? Why? Why?

She was never going to get the answers she was looking for. Freddy wouldn’t tell her the truth, or he would tell her the truth and she wouldn’t believe him. There was no truth with Freddy. Freddy’s own personal Dunbar’s number was zero. It had always been zero.

“Oh, Dev,” she said.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’ve changed your mind.”

“I can’t believe it,” Meredith said. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t want to talk to Freddy.”

“That’s right,” Meredith said. “In fact, I don’t want any news of Freddy at all, from this point on. Unless, well, unless he dies. You can call me when he dies.” Meredith fidgeted with her grandmother’s engagement ring. This was the ring that she had given Freddy to give to her, a strange transaction in its own right, but now, more than anything, Meredith wanted it off her finger.

Dev said, “Okay, Meredith, are you sure? You want me to call the people at Butner back and tell them to forget about it?”

Was that what she wanted? She imagined prison officials saying to Fred,
You know what? Your wife doesn’t want to talk to you, after all.
What would Freddy think? Meredith didn’t care what he thought. She was going to save herself. She was going to swim to shore.

“I’m sure,” Meredith said.

“Fine,” Dev said. He paused, and then he added. “Good for you.”

“Thanks, Dev,” Meredith said, and she hung up. Downstairs, she heard Ashlyn and Connie and Dan and Toby talking about taking a picture before they all left. Who had a camera? It was one more thing, and Meredith was grateful.

She hurried downstairs to join them.

Autumn on Nantucket was serene and shockingly beautiful. Meredith was able to swim until the twenty-fifth of September. She kept hoping for the company of another seal—a brother of Harold’s, perhaps, or a son or daughter, or a friend or lover—but none came.

Dan Flynn, whose real job it was to know everyone on Nantucket and everything that was happening, found Meredith a beat-up Jeep for $2,000 cash.

“The thing will probably leave a trail of sand all the way down the Milestone Road,” he said. “But at least you’ll be able to get around.”

Meredith loved the Jeep much more than she had loved any of her other, fancier vehicles. It made her feel younger, wilder, freer; it made her feel like a person she had never been. She had taken taxis until she was twenty-eight; then, she and Freddy bought a Volvo wagon, which was quickly traded in for a
BMW
and so on and so on.

The Jeep already had a beach sticker, so Meredith packed herself a lunch—chicken salad that she’d made herself, a ripe, juicy pear, and a whole-wheat baguette from the Sconset Market—and she headed up to Great Point on a sparkling Thursday afternoon. The foliage on the Wauwinet Road was burnt orange and brilliant yellow. Meredith wanted to internalize the colors of the leaves, much like the flower fields of Bartlett’s Farm. She wanted to keep the beauty, even as she knew that it was, and only could be, ephemeral. Time would pass, the leaves would fall, children would grow up. Thinking this made Meredith feel unspeakably lonely.

But there, at the gatehouse, was Bud Attatash. He peered at Meredith and the derelict Jeep suspiciously. Then, once he recognized her, he saluted.

Meredith slowed to a stop and shifted into first gear. “Hello, Mr. Attatash.”

“Bud, please. You make me feel like I’m a million years old.”

Meredith smiled at him. He was checking out the car.

“You’re sure that’s going to make it?” he said.

“If you don’t see me by sundown, you’ll come out and get me?”

“That I will,” Bud said. He cleared his throat. “Young Flynn tells me that you’re staying on island through the winter, and that you’re looking for a job. Something out of the public eye?”

“That’s right,” Meredith said. She needed a job—for the money, certainly, but also as a reason to get out of the house.

“Well, my wife is looking for someone to shelve books after-hours at the Atheneum. They had plenty of help this summer, but everyone has gone back to school.”

“Really?” Meredith said. “I’d love to do it.”

“It doesn’t pay a fortune,” Bud said.

Meredith blushed. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t need a fortune.”

And so, Meredith worked Tuesday through Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m., shelving books at the Nantucket Atheneum. She worked alone; most times, the only other person in the echoing historic building was the Salvadoran janitor.

Louisa, Meredith’s housekeeper and cook, had been from El Salvador. Flashes of Meredith’s previous life surprised her like this.

One day, she read a collection of Gwendolyn Brooks poems before she shelved it.
My God,
she thought.

Her favorite thing about the job was everything. She liked the quiet hush of the building; she liked its dusty museum smell. She loved the Great Hall upstairs—its volumes of Nantucket whaling history, its old New England cookery books. She loved handling books, putting them back where they belonged, in their indisputable proper place. When her workload was light, she would sit and read a chapter or two of books she’d read years before, and they seemed brand-new to her. She always poked her head into the children’s section, which was dark and calm, the wooden trucks put away in their garages, the picture books fanned open on display. Children still read
Goodnight Moon,
they still read Carver’s favorite,
Lyle Lyle Crocodile.
There was a colorful area rug and huge, plush chairs in the shape of zoo animals. Meredith wondered if she would have grandchildren someday.

Those grandchildren would never know Freddy. Thoughts like this haunted her.

She talked to Leo and Carver several times a week. Meredith asked Leo if he wanted Annabeth Martin’s diamond ring, and he said yes. He was planning to propose to Anais sometime in the spring. The house that Meredith had been imagining them in had been sold for profit, and the boys had put a bid on a dilapidated Victorian in Saratoga Springs. They had promised they would come to Nantucket to see Meredith at Thanksgiving.

Meredith bought butternut squash at Bartlett’s Farm and made soup, with Connie on the phone as a consultant. Meredith froze what she couldn’t eat. She met Dan every Monday night at A.K. Diamond’s, and he introduced her to his year-round friends, the carpenters and firemen and insurance agents, and whereas Meredith imagined that his friends would be interested in her lurid back story, most of them just wanted to know how she liked driving that funky Jeep.

The larger world began to open its doors to her once again. Notes arrived at Dev’s office from people who had received their restitution checks, and Dev forwarded these letters to Meredith, though Meredith would sometimes let them sit for as long as a week without opening them. It was difficult to accept praise or thanks when so many people had lost so much. Meredith received a letter from an elderly woman in Sioux City, Iowa, who had received a check for a quarter of a million dollars, only 60 percent of what she’d invested—but still the woman was grateful to Meredith, and at the end of the note, told her to hold her head high.
You did the right thing,
she said.

What right thing was that?
Meredith wondered.

A letter came from Michael Arrow in Broome, Australia, saying that the US government had promised him restitution of $1.3 million. It wouldn’t be enough to buy back his family’s pearl farm, but with the favorable exchange rate, it would be plenty to buy a holiday home somewhere in the south—maybe in Geraldton, maybe in Margaret River. The letter was friendly and informative; at the end of the letter, he invited Meredith to come visit him in Western Australia “anytime.”

She folded the letter back up, baffled. Where had Michael Arrow been before the restitution was promised, when Meredith was living in the dark and didn’t have a friend in the world?

There was no communication from Amy Rivers.

Through Dev, Meredith was informed of interview requests from Diane Sawyer and Meredith Vieira. The manager who had once handled Oliver North wanted to put Meredith on the lecture circuit. Big bucks to be made there, this manager told Dev.

Meredith turned everything down. She didn’t want to make a single penny from her connection to Freddy.

A book offer came in. Undisclosed millions. More than the advance that Samantha had gotten, because Meredith was the wife.

No.

Her passport arrived in the mail. She could go anywhere in the world.

But she didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Meredith talked to Toby on the phone, she talked to Connie. She and Dev discussed how to go about changing her name back to Meredith Martin. It was easier than she thought it might be—fifty dollars, a stack of paperwork at the town clerk’s office, five minutes in front of a very sympathetic judge. Once Meredith had shed the name Delinn like a diseased skin, she thought she might feel like a different person.

But she didn’t. She felt the same. Although she had decided not to talk to Freddy, she sometimes found herself talking to him in her mind.

I let go of your name,
she said. Like it was a balloon that she’d sent soaring up into the air.

Meredith was lonely some nights, and sadness cropped up in her like a virus. It made her sick, it went away, it made her sick again. On cold nights, she lit a fire and she tried to read—she would always have reading—but she wanted someone beside her.
Goddamn you, Freddy,
she thought (zillionth and ninth, tenth, eleventh). One particularly bad night, she checked in Connie’s bathroom for the pills, but Connie had taken them all with her.