The Lucky Ones (2 page)

“We’re going to the dock!” one of them shouted. It could have been all of them, it sounded so full. And nobody yelled, “Come back.”

“S
o! The Heathens have arrived!” King Herbert called in a booming voice as he and Sis came out onto the terrace that night. He raised the huge bottle he was carrying above his head and announced, “Let the summer games begin!”

“That’s a magnum,” Natalie whispered authoritatively as she and Cecile dutifully stood up.

“What’s a magnum?”

“The size of the bottle. It’s champagne.” Natalie smoothed her hair and put her shoulders back, her eyes on King. “Mom let Harry have a glass last year. She’d better let me have one tonight.”

“Me, too,” Cecile said; anticipating the stinging taste of it, she made a face. Her father had given her a sip of champagne from his glass last Christmas. It
tasted sour and sharp; the bubbles had tickled Cecile’s nose and made her sneeze. When she hotly accused him of adding vinegar to it, on purpose so she wouldn’t like it, the grown-ups around the table had roared with laughter.

Jack grabbed Lucy’s hand and pulled her over to stand next to Cecile and Natalie, forming a straggly line. They would stand there, shifting their weight from one foot to the other and grinning, for as long as it took: troops, ready for inspection. The first night of cocktails on the terrace with King and Sis was a summer tradition. The month of August couldn’t start without it.

“King,” Mr. Thompson called from the bar under the awning, “what can I get for you?”

“What you always get for me, Andrew,” said King. He strode toward their father with his hand outstretched, while their mother and Sis met near the door. They leaned toward each other and quickly touched cheeks twice, once on each side, the pearls Sis wore, even in a bathing suit, dangling between them. Cheek kisses, Cecile and Natalie used to call
them, and practice as they rolled, giggling, on their bedroom floor.

Where King was big and blustery, Sis was small and dry. Her thin arms and legs looked bloodless; her pale hair was pulled back so tightly in a bun, it looked as if it must hurt. She wiggled her fingers at the children, lined up and expectant. It was the closest she would come; they gazed coolly back. Mrs. Thompson said something and the two women went to join the men at the bar, Sis swaying slightly as she clutched their mother’s arm.

Natalie and Cecile exchanged quick looks.

King and Sis were the brother and sister who lived in the Pump House near the dock and had grown up with Mrs. Thompson. Sheba told them that King’s wife had run off with Sis’s husband, but the children were far more interested to think King might be a
real
king. For years, they felt a frisson of excitement whenever he came down to the dock or they came across him standing on the drive. “There’s the king,” one of them would whisper. They longed to catch him wearing his crown but never did.

It was Natalie who’d finally discovered the truth.

“He’s called King because he’s a Protestant,” she explained one day as they gathered around her in one of their bedrooms. “Protestants give their children names like that.”

“What’s a Protestant?” asked Jack, who was three.

“The opposite of a Catholic,” Harry said.

“Do Catholics use names like that?” said Cecile.

“Of course not,” Natalie said. “Can you imagine calling Jack or Harry
King
?”

King was bigger than life; they all adored him. He was teasing their mother unmercifully now as they clustered around the bar. She slapped his arm and laughed up at him, playful and happy. Not like that day last summer, Cecile suddenly thought, when King had made her mother so angry.

He’d shown up at the house on the first morning of their vacation in a new navy blue convertible and said, “Watch this.” Waving his hand like a magician, he leaned into the car and jauntily pushed a button on the dashboard. At once, the top rose majestically up from the windshield and started back, revealing a
shiny new dashboard and pristine white leather seats before folding itself neatly into pleats that sank behind the backseat.

Cecile and Natalie had looked at each other, wide-eyed; they’d all been struck dumb. To ride without a top! Their parents would never dream of owning a car filled with such potential disaster. Their mother immediately launched into a story about a woman who’d had her head cut off when she ran into a truck while driving a convertible.

It had made them want to ride in it even more.

Then, wonder of wonders, King had invited them to the fair in Southampton.

“For God’s sake, King,” their mother said. “What do you think I’ve been talking about, you clod?”

“What on earth do you think is going to happen, Anne?” he protested. “I know how to drive. You make me sound like a hardened criminal.”

“Please, Mom?” said Natalie.

“I’ll make sure no one stands up,” Harry promised.

None of them dreamed their mother would say yes, but she did; they scrambled to grab seats before
she could change her mind. The front was willingly given up to Harry; the others squished into the back without bickering. None of them dared to start an argument.

“Make sure they stay seated, and don’t let them put their hands outside the car. Cecile and Natalie, there’s to be no fooling around in back, do you understand?” Their mother directed her glare at each of them in turn. “Jack, you listen to Harry. Harry, I’m expecting you to set an example. And King!” she cried as he started slowly off. “Make sure you put up the top while you’re parked, or they’ll all scald their legs when they get back.”

At the fair, King brought them towering puffs of pink cotton candy on paper cones and boiled hot dogs on soft rolls and let them ride on the Ferris wheel for what felt like hours, handing more tickets to the ticket taker whenever the wheel slowed to a stop. No one threw up and no one complained and when King allowed them each to have their own large lemonade without having to share, they felt as if they were in heaven.

On the way home, King told them to “hang on to your hats” and drove very fast along Dune Road, letting them hang out over the sides of the car and scream into the wind. They came onto the Island like that, having lost all caution. Harry was standing up and shouting, waving his hat in the air at the gulls soaring above their heads, as the car clattered over the slats on the bridge, announcing their arrival.

The fury on their mother’s face when they pulled in front of the house quieted them down like water dumped on flames. The children slunk guiltily out of the car while she yelled at King right in front of them, but even that couldn’t destroy the wonderful day. King hung his head and looked sorry, but when their mother finally turned and stormed back into the house, letting the screen door slam behind her, King did something Cecile would never forget.

“Good day, huh, Heathens?” he said with a grin, and winked.

He had the same look of mischief on his face now as their mother pulled him over to where they stood
patiently waiting. “For heaven’s sake, King,” she said, “look at my poor children, standing at attention. I don’t know how you do it. They never behave as well for me.”

“That’s because you don’t know how to treat them,” King said. “I’m amazed they gave a brat like you a license to have them. But wait!” He stopped, opening his eyes and mouth wide, as if shocked. “People don’t need a license to have children in this country, do they? It’s easier to have children than it is to drive a car.”

“Did you hear that?” Lucy’s eyes were huge. “King called Mommy a brat.”

“That’s because Mommy is a brat,” said Natalie.

“See what you’re doing, you beast?” cried Mrs. Thompson, jabbing King in the stomach. He grabbed her hand and twisted away, but she jabbed him again, laughing. King was laughing, too. So much poking and jabbing, Cecile thought. Like children. “You’re teaching my children to disrespect me, King,” their mother said at last, stomping her pretty foot. “I won’t have it.”

“All right, all right.” Clicking his heels together, King came to attention and said gruffly, “Natalie, behave yourself.”

“Me?” Natalie cried, delighted.

Cecile waited for King to launch into the speech he always delivered the first night, when he declared that this was going to be the summer he would finally “teach them how to speak proper English and instill in them the manners your mother obviously hasn’t.” To which their mother always said, “Take them with my blessings, King, and good luck to you.”

This time he didn’t. After taking a hard look at them, he said, “What? Where’s young Harry? Missing in action?”

Cecile and Natalie cut their eyes at each other.

“Dad got him a job at one of his paper mills in Canada,” their mother said. “He was sixteen in December, you know.”

“Canada?” King’s thick eyebrows rose up like wings above his dark eyes. “Going to make a man out of the prodigal son this summer, is that it?”

“He’s hardly cutting down trees,” their mother
said coolly. “Dad got him a job washing dishes.”

“Washing dishes!” King laughed and slapped his leg. “No more lazing around on the golf course, earning big tips as a caddy, hey? You’re going to toughen him up washing dishes.”

“You’ll have to talk to Andrew about that.” Their mother’s voice was tight. “It was his idea.”

“Oh. I see.” King and she looked at each other for an instant, and then King gave a curt nod. “Right,” he said, twirling around to face the children again. “Enough frivolity now.” He took a brisk step to the left and stuck out his hand. “Jack, good to see you, sir. Are you and I going after those porgies again this year?”

“Yes, sir!” Jack said, jerking King’s hand up and down twice.

“Good man.”

King stepped in front of Cecile. “Cecile Thompson, you’re looking spry this summer.” Cecile beckoned for him to come closer when they shook hands. “Can we go to the fair again?” she whispered into his ear.

King glanced over his shoulder at her mother. “Only if I can smuggle you all out in burlap bags,” he whispered back. “I’ll pretend you’re potatoes.”

Natalie was next.

“My, my,” King said as he took her hand. He sounded surprised. “If you don’t look remarkably like your mother at this age, young Natalie,” he said, bowing his head ever so slightly.

It gave Cecile the strangest empty feeling in her chest to see Natalie blush. How long had Natalie known? Because she did know. Cecile could see it in the way Natalie lifted her chin to meet King’s gaze. The knowledge was in Natalie’s imperious profile, too, so like their mother’s. In the curve of her smile.

Their mother was beautiful; they both thought so. One night, years ago, when Cecile and Natalie had huddled in their nightgowns at the top of the stairs to spy on a dinner party, their great-aunt Agatha, who was very old and beautiful herself, had snuck them up some ice cream. She sat on the top step with them while they ate, her diamond earrings and necklace glittering in the dark like stars. When
their mother appeared in the front hall below, dazzling in a scarlet gown with rhinestone straps, Great-Aunt Agatha had told the awed little girls that the conversation used to stop when their mother was young and she entered the room.

Cecile had instantly felt the thrill of it: the hushed voices, the admiring faces. She’d longed to be beautiful from that moment on. Having King acknowledge that Natalie was felt like the end of a dream. Because King was right. Even though their mother’s hair was dark and Natalie’s light, they had the same ivory skin, dark eyes, sculpted mouths. Cecile hadn’t realized it until now, but Natalie and her mother had both known. The look they exchanged was like the password to a club to which Cecile would never belong.

“Are you torturing my family over here, King?” Mr. Thompson said as he and Sis joined them, drinks in hand.

“Only your wife, Andrew,” said King.

“She might say I do quite a bit of that,” Mr. Thompson said.

“King has been torturing your wife all his life,” Sis said drily. “It’s his favorite pastime.”

“Yes, but when King does it, she doesn’t mind. Drink, darling?”

“Thanks.” Mrs. Thompson took the glass he held out to her without looking at him as she slipped her arm through King’s. “It’s time for Jack and Lucy to get ready for bed. Run and find Sheba, you two,” she said. “And Natalie and Cecile? No dock tonight. It’s been a long day.”

“Troops dismissed,” said King.

“Mom’s awfully buddy-buddy with King,” Cecile said as she followed Natalie into the living room.

“They grew up together,” Natalie said, shrugging. “Besides, Mom’s giving Dad the business.”

“Because of Harry?”

“I don’t blame him for not wanting Harry around. ‘My handsome son this.’ ‘My handsome son that.’” Natalie tossed her hair. “I’m sick of it, too.”

“You’re making that up, Natalie,” Cecile said in a fierce whisper. “Dad doesn’t feel that way.”

“That’s how much you know.” Natalie stopped in
front of the mirror above the table in the front hall. “Don’t worry, when she gets what she wants, she’ll go back to being sweetness and light again.”

“But she can’t have Harry,” Cecile insisted. “He’s in Canada.”

“She has her ways….” Natalie’s voice drifted off; she looked at her reflection intently. Lifting her chin, she allowed a hint of a smile, as if posing for a portrait. “King’s so full of it, saying that I look like Mom, don’t you think?” she asked, raising false eyes to meet Cecile’s in the mirror. “I thought it would never end,” Natalie said, but her eyes were bright, her color still high.

C
ecile was the first one awake. She stretched her arms over her head and reached with her toes for the bottom of the bed. It’s only our third day, she thought contentedly, letting her muscles go slack. We have twenty-eight more to go. When she couldn’t remember how many days she’d been here and didn’t know how many days were left,
then
she’d be on vacation.

She lay on her back in the cool, dim room at the end of the hall that she shared with Natalie and Lucy and watched the gauze curtains on the window behind Lucy’s bed ripple over Lucy’s sleeping body. Lucy was on her stomach; her tangled curls covered her face. She had kicked off her sheets. Her short pajama top was wrapped around her chest, her
skinny brown legs flailed out to either side as though she were a rag doll, tossed.

Natalie had snuggled so far under her white cotton blanket that the only sign of her was her blond hair splayed across the pillow. The blue-and-white canopy bed she claimed would be hers when she got married, because she was the oldest girl, had belonged to their grandmother. Cecile was glad to let Natalie sleep it in; it felt like a dead person’s bed. She pretended to be grudging when she let Natalie claim it every year, but secretly, she was glad. It meant Natalie owed her.

Natalie was dead to the world. Already she’d fallen back into her languid, bored fourteen-yearold self. She wouldn’t wake up until after nine, when she’d drift down to the terrace in her nightgown to eat breakfast, holding out her pinky as she sipped orange juice.

“You are so twelve,” she’d said yesterday morning when Cecile came running back from the dock in her bathing suit to grab a muffin. “You haven’t even combed your hair.”

“You are so a hundred million,” Cecile shot back. She’d already spotted three horseshoe crabs in the shallow water under the dock by then, and netted a slew of clear jellyfish that she piled on the float before gently slipping them back into the water so they wouldn’t die. It made her wild to think of wasting time the way Natalie did.

She would never be as old as that, Cecile vowed. It was horrible the way getting old made people put on such airs. Natalie looked miserable half the time. She heard the faint click of the door to the terrace below their room, and the almost imperceptible rumble of her father’s voice. Then her mother’s clipped response.

Cecile kicked off the sheet and slipped her legs over the edge of the bed. If she didn’t hurry, Lucy would wake up and cry, “Wait for me!” Pulling off her nightgown, she dropped it on the ottoman where yesterday’s T-shirt lay in a crumpled heap. She slid that over her head and stepped into her shorts lying on the floor, pulling them up over the underwear she hadn’t taken off last night.

It was one of their mother’s rules that they should never go to sleep wearing the day’s underwear. Rules about my own underwear, Cecile thought. Ridiculous. She hardly wore underwear on the Island anyway, she spent so much time in a bathing suit. She didn’t brush her hair a hundred strokes both morning and night, either, or brush her teeth for as long as it took the white sand to run out in the tiny hourglass her mother put on the glass shelf above the sink.

Cecile ran on tiptoe down the upstairs hallway, skimming her hand over the smooth banister as she flew down the curving stairs. The dark floor of the front hall was cool on the soles of her feet; the hall felt dim and still, like a cave. Someone had opened the front door; the driveway was brilliant in the morning sun. Cecile pressed her face against the screen and breathed in, testing for the warm metallic smell the screen would have later in the day. All she could smell now was the faint perfume of the roses in the vase on the table behind her.

A pot clanking against the stove meant Sheba was
in the kitchen, making breakfast. Any minute now, she’d push through the swinging door with a tray laden with a pot of coffee and glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice. Cecile had to fly if she was going to get out of the house without anyone seeing her.

She slipped out the screen door and ran toward the dock, her heart racing triumphantly for having so narrowly escaped capture. It was wonderful, not having to sit down to breakfast the way they did at home. Eggs, cereal, milk, toast, use your napkin, please…it was enough to make her scream. On the Island, Harry and she and Natalie used to pretend they were prisoners escaping from jail when they snuck out of the house every morning. Yet another game Natalie now called babyish.

Who gives a care? Cecile’s heart sang. The crushed shells mixed with the gravel on the drive were sharp beneath her feet.

The smell of salt and marsh hung heavy in the air: The tide was out. Hermit crabs by the dozens, so densely packed they looked like a magic carpet,
would be moving around the pilings. That is, until Cecile set one foot on the sand and then they’d be gone—
whoosh!
—scuttling sideways with a speed that never failed to amaze her, each crab disappearing down a hole. Then the beach would be empty except for the squiggly piles of wet sand, evidence of their hard labor.

Cecile ran down the wooden stairs to the wide deck that separated the dock from the drive. The changing cabanas stood empty and expectant on one side. The boathouse on the other smelled of salt and creosote. Someone was standing on the float at the far end of the dock. Cecile halted, disappointed not to be the first.

But wait. It was only Jack, with a green life vest over his pajamas, fishing; he didn’t count. She ran past the empty berths, past Mr. Peabody’s dinghy tied to a ladder with its rope hanging slack, until she came to the top of the short ramp to the swimming float, where she asked, “Does Mom know you’re down here?” in a big-sister voice.

Children weren’t allowed on the dock by themselves
until they were ten and had passed Granddad’s rigid swimming test. It was the one Island rule no one was allowed to break. Disobedience meant being banned from the dock area for a week, a punishment worse than death.

“It’s all right. He’s with me!” Cecile twirled around to see King coming out of the boathouse with an armload of life jackets and start toward them. “Good morning, Miss Thompson,” he said when he reached her. He gave a courtly bow.

“Morning.”

King dumped the jackets on a bench and took off his cap. Smoothing his dark hair back from his forehead, he turned slowly in a circle without speaking, gazing at the scene around them as if he were alone. Cecile took it in, too: the tall wall of marsh grass that hid the complex maze of winding channels that boats took in and out on their way from the bay to the dock. The long roofline of the clubhouse etched cleanly on the horizon on the point to the right.

Behind them, the flag on the shiny white pole that would flap and strain, clinking its metal rope
against the wood when the wind picked up later in the day, hung limp, as if still asleep. Cecile squinted up at King from time to time, patient. He never bothered with them much when the other adults weren’t around. He was the relaxing kind of grownup who’d never had children of his own, so he didn’t have the annoying habit parents had of warning their children against actions they’d never dream of taking, or telling them what to do when they already had plans of their own.

“Why would I tell her not to fall in the water?” King asked her mother one day when Mrs. Thompson came down to the dock and found Cecile, then six, standing with her toes hanging over the edge of the dock at the deep end, watching King ready his boat. “The child’s got a brain. She knows she shouldn’t fall in.”

Cecile had swelled with pride, hearing him say she had a brain. “I have a brain, you know,” she’d say after that whenever anyone in her family told her what to do. She stood beside him now, biding her time until he was through with his inspection so she could ask
him a question. King finally put his hat back on, squaring it on his forehead, just so. “As I told Jack,” he said to her as if their conversation hadn’t been interrupted, “I’ll only be down here for another ten minutes. I’m playing golf with your father.”

“He’s eating breakfast,” Cecile said.

“Is he? I’d better hurry then.” King started back up the dock.

“Where’s the
Rammer
?” Cecile called.

“I don’t expect her until tomorrow evening,” King answered. “Ten minutes, heathens.” He disappeared inside the boathouse.

Cecile walked down the ramp and sat on the edge of the float at a safe distance from Jack’s fishing line. She adored King’s boat. He took the whole family, including Granddad, out on it for a whole day every summer. If it wasn’t at the dock, it meant King had rented it again. People were willing to pay him huge sums of money, he said, to travel in it up and down the coast from Maine to Florida.

“Did he say anything about taking us out for a ride?” she asked Jack.

Jack shook his head.

“Did you ask him?”

“No.”

“He’ll take us.” Cecile swung her feet back and forth in the water. The tide was sweeping the night’s refuse from the inlet out to the bay. Clumps of seaweed, patches of dirty foam, broken reeds; the swift, dark water swirled around the pilings, momentarily thwarted, and then moved on again, its glossy surface broken now and then by a fish coming up for food.

“Look, Jack!” Cecile cried. She pointed to a small circle on the water’s surface halfway between the dock and the edge of the marsh grass. It grew larger and larger as she watched.

“I saw it,” said Jack. “They’re all over the place.”

Seagulls landed on pilings and laughed their mocking, human laughs; boats started up their engines in the distance; water lapped against the dock. The only way you could tell the passing of time was by the sun. Cecile felt it on her back now, warmer than before. The kind of warm that would soon be hot.

After a while, she heard a high, excited voice and the light patter of feet on the dock as Lucy ran toward them. “Be careful,” their mother called. Cecile looked up to see her stop at the door to the boathouse, leaving Lucy to run the rest of the way by herself. Lucy stopped when she came to the top of the ramp and, clutching her bucket and shovel tightly in one hand, grasped the railing with the other. She walked carefully down to the float, keeping her eyes on her feet, the way she’d been taught.

Lucy’s yellow bathing suit was covered with pink flamingos and had bows on either hip; her white cotton hat with the frilly rim was already sliding off the back of her head. “I had blueberry pancakes,” she announced as she squatted down next to Jack’s pail to watch three small minnows that hung, suspended, at the bottom. When Lucy stuck in her shovel, they darted frantically around the edges, as if swimming for their lives.

“Lucy, don’t,” said Jack.

Lucy pulled her shovel out but remained squatting. Their mother had worked her way lazily toward
them and stopped at the top of the ramp. She leaned against a piling.

“It’s going to be hot,” she said as she lifted a hand to shield her eyes. In her pale blue linen shorts and matching sleeveless blouse, with her dark hair held back by a blue ribbon, it really could have been Natalie standing there; she looked that young.

“Did King say which day we’re going on the
Rammer
?” Cecile asked.

“We didn’t talk about it.” Her mother smiled absently down at her. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

“I’m not hungry,” Jack said.

“I haven’t.” The minute she said it, Cecile was starving.

“Come on, you three.” Their mother turned and started back. “Bring Lucy, would you, Cecile?”

“I want to stay!” Lucy wailed, but Cecile scooped her up around the stomach, cutting her off in midcry, and carried her up the ramp, oblivious to her indignant yells and kicking feet. Lucy struck out with her shovel when Cecile finally dumped her on the dock, but Cecile was too quick.

“Last one up is a rotten egg!” she cried. She took the stairs two at a time and ran onto the drive. Only when she could no longer hear Lucy’s wails did she slow to a walk. The air was heavy with privet. The Pump House turret rose behind the tall hedge on her left like something out of a fairy tale. Cecile plucked a blade of grass from the side of the drive and held the palms of her hands tightly together, stretching the blade taut between her thumbs. She blew a sharp blast of air on it; the sound was high and shrill, like a demented seagull.

At the sound of tires on gravel, she looked up. Their car was pulling out of Granddad’s driveway. Her father and Granddad were in the front, King was in the back.

They didn’t look her way. Cecile didn’t call out. She was thinking about the terrace; how cool and quiet it would be now with no one on it. The newspaper would be flung down in restless sections on a chaise, the glass-top table littered with empty cups and plates, the stubs of her father’s cigarettes sending up their last futile drifts of smoke from an ashtray.

And Granddad’s chaise lounge—the one in its special spot in the shade under the awning in the far corner of the terrace that the children knew to leap up and out of whenever he appeared—would be empty. She could stop in the kitchen and get something to eat, and then lie in wait for Natalie to appear in her nightgown, and see her, Cecile, on the throne. Anticipating that moment, and the expression on Natalie’s face, Cecile ran.