Splendor (13 page)

“I am
famished,
” she said, “and
this
is what they’re serving.” She shook her head and her pretty curls bounced jauntily. Unaffected by the uncertainty that had kept me standing, Lily plopped down into the seat next to Gunner. “Come on, Scarlett, sit next to me.” I made my way around the table, noting with amusement that the place she cleared for me was
not
between her and Gunner, but rather on her other side.

“So,” she said, turning the full blaze of her Lily glory onto Gunner, “tell us what it’s like to live somewhere cool.”

Gunner laughed. “Your island isn’t cool?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lily said. “This island is like a holding area for cattle that aren’t quite ready for processing. We’re stuck here with the buffalo until June when we’ll be set free. I, for one, will never look back.”

Honestly, I was a little annoyed. “It’s not like you’ve really got it so terrible here, Lil,” I said. “Your parents adore you, you can get whatever you want shipped two-day delivery, and you go on regular, fabulous vacations all over the world.”

“With my
family.
” Lily practically spat the last word.

“Family’s not such a terrible thing to have,” I argued.

“I have to agree with Lily,” Gunner said. “Family can be a royal pain in the arse.”

“Isn’t it cute how he says ‘arse’ instead of ‘ass’?” gushed Kaitlyn. Anything to be part of the conversation. All three of us ignored her.

“What’s so terrible about family?” I asked Gunner.

He lifted and dropped his shoulders, the laziest shrug I had ever seen. “They’re fine at holiday, I suppose, and when you need someone to clean up a scrape you find yourself in. But other than that, they’re not a very good ROI, are they?”

“ROI?” asked Connell.

“Return on investment,” Gunner clarified.

“What do you have to invest in them that is so valuable?” I asked.

“Time,” he answered. “And really, that’s the only commodity we truly have.”

“I agree completely,” said Lily. Her curls were nearly
quivering
with agreement.

“Gunner, are you rich?”

Down the table, I heard Kaitlyn gasp.

Connell chuckled. “Smooth, Big Red.”

“Scarlett!” hissed Lily. “You can’t just come out and
ask
something like that.”

“Why ever not?” said Gunner. “I find it refreshing. Very American.”

I remembered Lily’s theory that Gunner must have a real thing for Americana as I felt her deflate a little next to me.

“I suppose by any measure, the answer would be yes,” said Gunner. “I am well-to-do.”

“You mean your
parents
are rich,” I said.

Gunner shook his head. “That isn’t what I mean. They
are
well-off, yes. Father is in parliament—he’s running for reelection this year—and Mum comes from old money. But I have my own wealth. Mum’s father died several years ago and he left me a very generous legacy, along with a sizable art collection.”

“Well, there you go,” I said. “It’s fine to be cavalier about family when everything is easy for you. You don’t rely on others so much, to pull together.” I was thinking about the summer Dad and Ronny had dug the fishpond. They hadn’t hired anyone to help, and Mom and I had been busier than usual inside without them. The four of us worked hard, all summer. Looking back, with my brother dead and my mother gone, I realized that had been the happiest summer of my life. “Not to mention,” I said, “you wouldn’t have your money at all if it weren’t for your family.”

“Touché,” said Gunner, his smile spreading like warm honey.

I guess that meant I won, but it didn’t feel like it. Because I wasn’t trying to say that family is valuable because of what it can do for you or give you. What I
meant
was that family is important in some other, not-so-easily quantified way.

“Well, with all that
money
and
art,
” I said, saying the words like they were something dirty, “what are you doing
here
? There’s not much of either of those things on our little island.”

“Come, Scarlett, don’t sell your island so short. I’ve seen the art deco murals at the casino; quite lovely. And your friend Lily is moneyed, at least comparatively. But I’ve plenty of my own. I needn’t look here to fill those needs.”

“Then what need
does
our island fill?” I got the feeling he was avoiding my question.

Gunner pulled his legs in from their sprawl, sitting up straighter. “It’s not
my
need that this island fills, but my father’s.”

“Your father needs our island?”

“You recall I said my father was running for reelection?”

I nodded. So did Lily, and Connell, and the rest of the table. I guess all of us were wondering what could have brought Gunner Montgomery-Valentine to Catalina.

“Well,” Gunner continued, seemingly oblivious to the table’s collective focus on him, and speaking just to me, his marbled eye almost hypnotic, “there was an incident with a girl. My father found it convenient for me to disappear for a while. Your island is a good place to become invisible.”

I was thinking of how Will had come to Catalina the year before for a similar reason—to disappear from his abilities.

“Didja bang her?” asked Connell. “Didja knock her up?”

Gunner turned his attention from me to Connell, who looked a bit uncomfortable by the intensity of Gunner’s focus.

“Very American,” Gunner said as he pushed back his chair and stood up. Before walking off, he dropped his apple core on the table. It was beginning to brown, and one clear imprint of his bite faced upward like a crescent moon.

“U
p, down, up, down, keep the rhythm, that’s right, heels down, shoulders back, up, down…”

I stood in the middle of the arena, tethered to Delilah by a longe line. She trotted around me in slow circles, her ears rotated to hear my voice drumming out the rhythm of her pace. Her hooves carved an endless loop into the sand around me. I was the circle’s center; the longe line, the radius. Here they were again—the curve and the straight line, the two shapes Sabine had told me constituted everything.

Henry, properly helmeted, sat astride my mare. To Delilah’s credit, she didn’t really seem that annoyed by the way he flopped and flailed as she trotted. I was trying to teach him how to post—how to stand and sit in rhythm with Delilah’s trot to mitigate its bounciness.

As an Arabian, Delilah had an especially bouncy trot, and the situation probably wasn’t helped any by the fact that both Henry and Jasper, who was hanging on the arena’s rail and watching, were dealing with a serious case of the giggles.

“You’re gonna bruise your nards!” called Jasper.

“I…already…did!” Henry laughed.

Delilah looked annoyed. It seemed her tolerance had found its limit. Nard jokes. She slowed to a walk and then stopped. I flicked the longe whip at her hind fetlocks, but all she did was swat her tail at it. She wasn’t moving.

Normally I wouldn’t have let her get away with that sort of insurrection, but I couldn’t really blame her. I’d been putting up with the twins for close to twenty-four hours, and I was about done with them, too. And now that the sun had finally made an appearance, I wanted to get Delilah cleaned up before it got chilly again. The forecast called for evening rain.

“All right, Henry, go ahead and slide on down.” I gathered the longe rope, folding it back and forth across my palm as I crossed the arena toward Delilah.

Henry did more of a jump than a slide and landed on all fours in the sand, which sent both him and Jasper into another round of laughter. Delilah didn’t kick him in the head, though, so that was something.

“Let’s take her to the washracks and give her a bath, okay, guys?”

This sounded like fun to the twins, who ran out of the arena whooping and hollering, in direct opposition to the rules I’d laid out before driving them to the stable—no running, no sudden movements, no loud noises.

Rather than yelling after them, I just sighed and patted Delilah’s neck. “Pretty soon you’re going to have one of those of your own to chase after,” I told her. “Just be glad it’s not twins.”

Delilah snorted as if she agreed and followed me to the washracks. The boys had a great time spraying each other with the hose and thumping the lathered sponge against each other’s backs. Idly, I wondered if I could count this activity as their evening bath. They seemed to be getting wetter and soapier than Delilah.

It was Saturday, around two in the afternoon; I was halfway though the weekend.

“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” I told Delilah. She looked incredulous, a line of bubbles trailing down her forehead.

Laura had called me two days earlier, after dinner on Thursday night. “Scarlett, hon, are you busy this weekend?”

I’d told her that I’d had plans to visit the mainland.

“Oh,” she’d said, disappointed, “to visit your mom?”

Not the type to lie unnecessarily, I’d told her that actually I was going to visit some friends of Will’s family.

This brightened her mood considerably. “Well, then maybe I can ask you after all.… Any way you could switch your visit to another weekend?”

She and Jack wanted to go away for a couple of days with just Lily. “We think it would be good for her, you know, to have some real one-on-one time with us. Jack thinks I’m silly, but…I worry, Scarlett, that she’s changing.”

I’d wanted to say no, I couldn’t shift my plans, but the hitch in Laura’s voice stopped me. “Sure, Laura,” I’d said. “No problem.”

So after school on Friday I’d met the twins as they came out of their classroom. We’d walked back to their house for snacks, followed by video games, followed by more snacks, followed by dinner and a movie on their giant flat-screen TV, followed by more snacks.

To break the monotony of snacks and screen time, I’d dragged them out of the house after lunch on Saturday and we’d driven to the stable. I’d made each of them wear a sweatshirt, which they protested loudly, but the mid-November air had a distinct cold snap to it. They thought it was bad enough that I forced them into long pants; I tried to explain that you don’t ride in shorts, but logic held very little interest for them. I think it was the fight they relished, more than anything. It gave them something to do.

Planning ahead, I decided we’d have pizza for dinner that night; feeding the twins two nights in a row seemed too herculean a feat to expect of myself.

The night before I’d offered choice after choice—mac and cheese? Chicken? Sandwiches? But getting Jasper and Henry to agree on a meal was impossible. Just as with the fight over the sweatshirts, it was almost like they were
trying
to thwart me.

Finally, I’d fried up a couple of eggs for Henry and nuked a frozen burrito for Jasper before flopping down on the Adamses’ enormous couch and feigning sleep so that the two of them would have to work out which movie to watch without me running interference.

They’d chosen something with zombies and had laughed hysterically as the undead ate their way across greater Manhattan. So clearly I should have offered brains for dinner.

On the way back down the hill, I told them we’d order in pizza. When they hollered in excitement, I miscalculated and asked them what toppings they’d like, setting off a ten-minute fight—pepperoni versus sausage.

“We’ll get half of each,” I said.

A perfectly reasonable resolution, I’d thought, until Jasper said, “As long as the pepperoni is on the
right
side.”

“No way!” whined Henry. “I want
sausage
on the right side!”

“A pizza is
circular,
guys. Either side can be the left or the right, depending on how you look at it.”

They didn’t believe me, or they didn’t care. Finally, I ordered two pizzas—one pepperoni, one sausage. They could eat the leftovers for breakfast.

Watching them tear into the pizzas, I smiled. As annoying as they were, I liked these kids. I’d been around them all their lives. They probably thought of me more as a cousin than their sister’s friend.

Really, it was a shame that Lily didn’t seem to take much interest in the boys. I tried not to compare our situations, but if I’d been as lucky as she was—to have brothers, alive and breathing, even if they
were
giant pains in the ass—I think I’d appreciate what I had instead of being so irritated by them.

Of course, this was easy to
say,
I reflected, looking at the boys’ sauce-stained faces as they lay crashed out on beanbags in front of the TV. Who knew what I’d actually
feel
in Lily’s situation? After all, I’d wanted to strangle them myself more than once over the weekend.

But Lily was always rolling her eyes at them and closing her bedroom door whenever they walked down the hall. She hadn’t been like this forever; when the boys were little she’d played with them a lot. I tried to put my finger on when, exactly, she’d grown so annoyed by her brothers—and her parents, too, come to think of it.

Really, it hadn’t happened overnight, more like over the past couple of years. Pretty typical, probably. I tried not to feel preachy or judgy about it. I wasn’t Lily. I’d never been Lily—not that anyone else
could
be. I was just me, and my experience was all I knew.

Still…it seemed that if I were in Lily’s shoes, I wouldn’t take it for granted. All of it—the brothers, the home, the warm feeling, and the smells in her kitchen. Food prepared just for me rather than for the people we called “guests” but who were really customers.

And parents who noticed what the hell was going on in my head. Parents who wanted to spend the weekend alone with me.

Maybe that wasn’t entirely fair; my mom
had
been trying. She’d left me two messages last week asking—timidly—when we could get together again. I hadn’t returned either call. So maybe I
could
understand Lily. Maybe none of us can really appreciate what we have.

I wrapped the leftover pizza in foil and slid it into the refrigerator. With the twins asleep, the house seemed cold and quiet. Outside, the promised clouds had gathered, darkening the sky before its time. The heater clicked three times; then warm air filtered down from the registers. I realized I’d never been in Lily’s house like this before—without the noises and rhythm of the family filling it.

Images from the zombie movie came back to me. I wasn’t the kind of girl to freak out over scary movies or being home alone. Actually, I was pretty levelheaded. But tonight I felt jumpy. Maybe it was the latte I had downed when we’d gotten back into town after riding Delilah. I’d felt like I needed something to get me through the afternoon with Jasper and Henry, but now I was regretting it. My stomach turned slow flips, and I suddenly wished I weren’t alone.

As if in response to my wish, a slow knock beat against the front door.

I waited a moment in the empty kitchen to see if the sound would repeat; it did not. I crossed the room and made my way to the front hall, peering first into the family room to see if the boys were still sleeping. They were.

I flipped on the porch light, then unlocked the door and pulled it open.

He was facing away from me. Still, there were so many ways I recognized him—the slanted set of his shoulders, the left pulled slightly lower than the right; the silky soft fabric of his black shirt—different than the others I’d seen him wear, but beautiful; the tight slimness of his hips. The smell of him—spicy, smoky.

I felt a flash of heat radiate from my stomach downward and I hated myself for it.

Then he turned and smiled at me. In his hand he held a satchel, the dark leather one I’d seen him carrying around school. “You’re not Lily,” he said.

“Gunner. Hi. Um…no, I’m not Lily.”

“But this
is
her house.” He peered over my shoulder, as if looking for proof.

“Yeah,” I said. “Lily and her parents are out of town. I’m babysitting the boys.”

“Ah,” he said. “The boys.” Then, smiling, “Well, do you have room for one more?”

I led him into the kitchen. “Do you want something to drink?”

“Anything.”

In the refrigerator I found apple juice, sodas, a couple of Jack’s energy drinks. I grabbed two sodas and filled two glasses with ice.

Gunner had sat himself at the table.

“So,” I said, pouring the sodas over the ice, “what are you doing here?”

He shrugged. “Maybe I have the wrong night. Lily and I were going to work on a project together. For economics.”

I’d taken Econ over the summer, online through a junior college on the mainland; Lily, of course, didn’t believe in summer school, so she was stuck taking the class this year.

“Maybe Lily forgot,” I said, knowing as I spoke that there was no way Lily would forget a date with Gunner, for a school project or not.

“This is fine too,” he said, as if it didn’t make much difference to him one way or the other. He reached into his satchel and pulled out a silver flask. He unscrewed the lid and poured a stream of honey-brown liquid into his soda. Without asking if I wanted any, he poured some into my glass, too.

I wasn’t much of a drinker. The one time I’d gotten really drunk hadn’t ended well, and I could still remember the particular pain of the headache that followed. But a little alcohol wasn’t such a big deal, I told myself as I pulled my glass across the table and took a sip.

Gunner wasn’t watching me. He’d leaned back in his seat in that way he tended to do, scanning the kitchen. His gaze landed on the book I was reading. It was another Agatha Christie; I’d exchanged it for the first one I’d borrowed when I’d last visited Martin and Will’s house. That day I’d sat for a while in the living room. It had been quiet, like an invitation for introspection.