The Love Season (12 page)

Dead noon

The wind whipped Renata’s hair into her face as she roared down Milestone Road in Miles’s convertible Saab. She could never have predicted that defiance would be this fun. Pure defiance! She’d left the Driscoll house without a note, and she did not bring her cell phone. No one knew where she was, who she was with, or how to get ahold of her, no one except for Miles, who was so capable and self-assured it was making her dizzy. He had grabbed a twelve-pack of beer from his apartment over the Driscolls’ garage, and now they were driving too fast in the midday sun. Renata unbuckled her seat belt and eased the seat into recline position. She wore only her bikini and a little skirt. Miles glanced over at her and she wondered what he was thinking. Did he like what he saw, or did he think she was being obvious and silly? Renata saw his eyes catch on her diamond ring. She was engaged. Did this make her more desirable to him or less so? She wanted to believe it made her more desirable; a girl of nineteen who was already engaged must be the most desirable woman on earth.

It was too loud for conversation, and that was for the best. If they had talked—about Miles’s job, the Driscolls, Cade—Renata’s guilt would seize her like a fever and make her sick. As it was, they were two actors in a silent movie. Two kids on a summer day headed for the beach.

Miles hit the brake, hard. Renata gripped the sides of the seat.
Police?
He downshifted, hit his turn signal, and whipped a right so tight that Renata pictured the car tilting, turning on only its right tires.
Screech
. She sat up, readjusted the seat, buckled her seat belt. An airplane took off right over them.

“This is the way to Madequecham?” she said.

“We’re picking up a friend.”

Renata smiled mildly, as her spirits plopped at her feet. He hadn’t said anything about a friend when he invited her, or when they left. It felt like a deception. She had thought they were going alone. This was probably better; Renata could only imagine what Cade and Suzanne Driscoll would say if they found out Renata had disappeared with Miles alone.

Miles headed down the road toward the airport. The planes were so low in the sky, Renata could see their pale underbellies; she could taste the fumes. To her and Miles’s left was a massive storage facility, some baseball fields, a lot of construction machines.

“I didn’t know anybody lived out here.”

“Not everyone on Nantucket is rich,” Miles said. “Some of us have to work.”

“Right,” Renata said. “Sorry.”

“No need to be sorry,” Miles said. “I can tell you’re just an innocent bystander to the great spectacle of the Driscolls’ wealth.”

“Not so innocent today,” Renata said.

“No?” Miles said. He gave her a sneaky sideways look and grabbed her leg with two fingers, right above the knee. She yelped and started laughing. She felt like something was going to happen, and she tried to quell her exhilaration. She turned her diamond ring so that it caught the rays of the sun.
Cade
, she thought.
Cade, Cade, Cade
.

Miles slowed down and turned onto a bumpy dirt road bordered on both sides by scrub pines. A mosquito bit Renata’s arm, then her neck.

“Where are we going?” she said. “I’m getting eaten alive.”

“Almost there,” he said.

Another fifty yards down, he turned into a gravel driveway. There was a small gray-shingled cottage with two dormer windows. The front door was painted a very feminine pink, and the window boxes were planted with spindly pink geraniums. The front lawn had just been mowed; it was shaggy with dried clippings and littered with big-kid toys: two mountain bikes on their sides, a white surfboard, a brilliantly colored box kite. Miles honked the horn. A few seconds later, the pink door opened and a girl came out. Renata thought
girl
, but really she was a woman. She was striking—tall, slender, with long auburn hair cut in angles around her face. She wore a black bikini top and black and pink board shorts. She had a dark green tattoo around her right ankle, silver rings on her toes; a tiny round mirror dangled in her pierced navel. She picked up the surfboard as she walked toward the car. Renata was stunned. He had said
friend
and she had thought male, not female, not a queen bee like this.

“Hey,” Queen Bee said, in a sexy-scratchy voice. She was smiling at Miles. Renata felt invisible. This was not better at all. This was awful, a travesty. Ten minutes ago, Renata was perched on a decadent mountaintop, as self-satisfied as she’d ever been in her young life. Then boom, just like that: eclipsed.

Miles turned to Renata. “Can you climb in back?”

“Huh?” Renata said. He was asking her to
move?
“Sure,” she said, fumbling with her seat belt, trying to keep dismay from painting itself on her hot cheeks. As she crawled between the seats, her bag snagged on the gearshift and her tiny skirt hiked up, revealing her backside. She was
making an ass of herself quite literally, while Queen Bee waited with an expression somewhere between amused and impatient.

Renata settled into the very cramped backseat. It was so tight that she had to sit on the right side of the seat and put her feet on the left side. There was no seat belt even if she’d wanted one, and to make matters worse, Miles used his backseat as a trash can—there were crumpled Dorito bags, empty CD cases, and lots of sand.

“Here comes the board,” Queen Bee said. It seemed she was addressing Renata because suddenly the fin side of the surfboard was shoved into her face. What was she supposed to do with it? There was no room.

“There’s no room,” Renata squeaked.

“Like this,” Miles said, and he balanced one end of the surfboard on top of the windshield and the other end on the back trunk. It sliced right through the backseat, making it impossible for Renata to see Miles, or her own feet. She could turn a few inches to the right to see outside of the car, or she could stare straight ahead at the back of Queen Bee’s auburn head. “Now hold on to it.”

“Yes, hold on to it,” Queen Bee said, as if that were the reason Renata had been invited along: to hold the surfboard.

“I’m Renata,” Renata said, thinking that maybe an introduction would make this situation more bearable, but as she spoke, Miles turned the radio up full blast for an old Sublime hip-hop anthem and backed out of the driveway. Renata’s words were left behind, overturned in the yard, like the bikes.

This was, she thought a minute later when they were back on the Milestone Road rocketing along at unsafe speeds, a bed of her own making. No sooner had she digressed from her proscribed course than punish
ment was meted out. She should be at the yacht club picking at a BLT while Suzanne Driscoll stopped every other passerby to introduce Renata. (“Cade’s new fiancée…we’re so excited!”) She should be with Cade, holding hands, whispering, instead of here, trying to keep a ten-foot surfboard from becoming a projectile missile and decapitating the people in the Audi TT behind them. Up front, Miles and Queen Bee were chatting easily—Renata could hear them talking, though she couldn’t make out a single word they said. She ached for Action, who would have handled Queen Bee and Miles in just the right way. For one thing, Action would never have agreed to climb into the backseat.
Where do you think we are, Alabama 1961?
She might even have asked Queen Bee, right off, if she dyed her hair. Action would, however, be proud of Renata for escaping Hulbert Avenue. Vitamin Sea,
bah!
And yet Renata could not cultivate this devil-may-care attitude. Each minute at celestial speed on this road was taking her further and further from where she was supposed to be. She was at Miles’s mercy; she was at the mercy of her own idiotic decision. With her free hand she reacquainted herself with the contents of her bag. No money, no phone, no lotion, no bottled water.
No brain
, she thought.
No common fucking sense
. All she had brought was a towel, her sunglasses, her book, and Suzanne’s list, which was crumpled into a little ball. Renata was captive, a hostage, stranded with two people she didn’t know. What was Miles’s last name? She had no idea.

He slammed on the brake again and took another turn at breathtaking speed. Renata held on to the surfboard, but she was no match for the forces at work.
It’s going to fall
, she thought. She didn’t care. Queen Bee’s hair was flying backward, stinging Renata between the eyes. Miles let out a whoop and Queen Bee grabbed the front of the surfboard, her slender arms tensing, revealing taut, toned muscles. Renata was mesmerized by
the arms and by the side of Queen Bee’s breast, perfectly round and pale and smooth. Renata didn’t see the surfboard swing back. It smacked her in the jaw.

Renata yowled. Pain, mixed with rude, rude surprise. Her jaw was broken; it felt like her back teeth had been jarred loose. Renata’s vision was blurred by tears. She let them fall. What did those two care if she cried? They wouldn’t even notice.

They were driving down another dirt road; each rut and bump stabbed at Renata’s jaw.

“Slow down!” she called out. She tasted blood.

Miles sped up; they careened down a road that was ridged like a washboard. Renata panicked. She wanted to escape, but she would never be able to make it back to Vitamin Sea by herself; now she wasn’t even sure which direction they had come from. She could hitchhike maybe, pray for some kind person who might deliver her to the Nantucket Yacht Club by twelve thirty. But as they rumbled farther and farther from the main road, Renata’s hopes plummeted. The sun burned her shoulders; she hadn’t thought to put on lotion. This was awful; this was hell.

And then, for some reason, Miles slowed down. Queen Bee said something; she was pointing. Something on the side of the road. An animal? Renata looked out. A white cross stuck out of the low brush. Renata’s jaw pulsed.

“Look,” Queen Bee said. “Someone died right there. I think it’s so morbid, those crosses, don’t you?”

“Stop!” Renata said. She wedged an arm under the surfboard and managed to make contact with Miles’s shoulder. “Stop the car!”

He hit the brake. Dust enveloped the car. “What?”

“Stop,” Renata said. “I’m getting out.”

“
What?
” he said.

Renata extricated herself from the backseat. Dust coated the inside of her mouth. She hopped down onto the road and walked back to the cross, watching her feet as she went. Her toenails, painted “Shanghai sunset,” became filmed with dust.

It was just a white cross, just two pieces of wood nailed together; the paint was peeling. Renata stared at it. Was this it? The marker for her mother? There was a grave in New York, a large, simple granite stone that said:
Candace Harris Knox, 1955–1992, Wife, mother, friend
. Renata’s father put flowers on the grave every week; he took a pumpkin in the fall, a wreath at Christmas. But this cross spoke more loudly to Renata. It screamed,
Here!
Here, on a pocked and rutted dirt road, among blueberry bushes, brambles, and Spanish olives. Here is where it happened. Candace was hit, in February of 1992: It was icy; the electric company truck had been going too fast; the driver had been drunk at ten o’clock in the morning. Candace had slipped, or the truck had skidded; it had never been made clear to Renata what had happened. But now at least, she knew where it had happened. If this was indeed a cross for Candace. Renata supposed there might have been other deaths out here; it was impossible to tell if the cross had been there fourteen years or two years, or forty years. There was no writing on it, no hint or clue, except for Renata’s intuition. This was it. Would Marguerite know for sure? Would Daniel?

“What are you
doing?
” Miles called out. “Come on; we’re going.”

“You guys go,” Renata said.

“
What?
” Miles said. “You have to stay with me. If you get lost or whatever, the Driscolls will
kill
me.”

“No,” Renata said. She sounded preternaturally calm, firm, confident.
This is what I was looking for. Part of it, anyway
. She knelt down in front of the cross. She felt like praying. She had been motherless for so long, it had come to define her. It was like being blind or deaf, or mentally
retarded. She was missing something essential, something everyone else in the world had. Growing up there had been no one to braid Renata’s hair, no one to bake muffins with, no one to shop for the bra or the nylons or the dress for her confirmation, her prom. There had been no one to read her
A Little Princess
or take her to
The Nutcracker
, no one to buy the Kotex, no one to tell about her first kiss, no one to tell about Cade. There had been no one to rebel against. The mothers of Renata’s friends tried to reach out, to fill in. They picked Renata up from riding lessons when Dan worked late; they offered to take her jodhpurs home and launder them. Once, Renata’s tenth-grade art teacher took offense to a skirt Renata was wearing.
It’s see-through!
she said. But the next day, the teacher came into class with an apologetic look on her face and a brand-new slip in a Macy’s bag.
For
you, she said as she handed the bag to Renata.
I’m sorry, I didn’t know
. When Renata was little the kids teased her; one girl called her an orphan. Then, once Renata’s friends were old enough to understand, they asked nervous questions.
How did it happen? What is it like, just you and your dad?
As they grew even older, they claimed to envy Renata.
My mother is such a pain, such a drain, such a bitch. I don’t even talk to her anymore. I wish
she
were dead
. After Renata gave her valedictory speech in front of a hundred graduates and their families, her father alone walked to the podium with a bouquet of roses. He received a deafening round of applause.
So smart, so accomplished, and her mother died when she was little…. A beautiful woman
, people whispered when they caught sight of Candace in pictures.
Such a shame
.