Bittersweet. Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
himself. In the mouth. Last week,’ she said finally, what seemed like hours later, when we were lying beside each other under her four-ply red cashmere throw, staring up at the cracked ceiling as if this was what we did all the time. It was a relief to finally hear what had happened; I had started to wonder if this cousin hadn’t walked into a post office and shot everyone up.
‘Last week?’ I asked.
She turned to me, touching our foreheads. ‘Mum didn’t tell me until last night. After the reception.’ Her nose and eyes began to pinken in anticipation of another round of tears. ‘She didn’t want me to get upset and “ruin things.”’
‘Oh, Ev,’ I sympathized, filling with forgiveness. That was why she had snapped at me after the party – she was grief-stricken.
‘What was Jackson like?’ I pushed, and she began to weep again. It was so strange and lovely to be lying next to her, feeling her flaxen hair against my cheek, watching the great globes of sorrow trail down her smooth face. I didn’t want it to end. I knew that to stop speaking would be to lose her again.
‘He was a good guy, you know? Like, last summer? One of his mom’s dogs, Flip, was running on the gravel road and this asshole repair guy came around the curve at, like, fifty miles an hour and hit the dog and it made this awful sound’ – she shuddered – ‘and Jackson just walked right over there and picked Flip up in his arms – I mean, everyone else was screaming and crying, it, like, happened in front of all the little kids – and he carried her over to the grass and rubbed her ears.’ She closed her eyes again. ‘And afterward, he put a blanket over her.’
I looked at the picture of the gathered Winslows above my desk, although it was as silly an enterprise as opening the menu of a diner you’ve been going to your whole life; I knew every blond head, every slim calf, as though her family was my own. ‘This was at your summer place, right?’
She pronounced the name as if for the first time. ‘Winloch.’
I could feel her eyes examining the side of my face. What she said next, she said carefully. Even though my heart skipped a beat, I measured my expectations, telling myself that was the last I’d hear of it:
‘You should come.’
DO THEY KNOW WE’RE coming?’ I asked as Ev handed me the rest of the Kit Kat bar I’d bought in the dining car. The train had long since whistled twice and headed farther north, leaving us with empty track and each other.
‘Naturally.’ Ev sniffed with a trace of doubt as she settled, again, on top of her suitcase under the overhang of the stationmaster’s office. She regarded my orange copy of Paradise Lost disdainfully, then checked her cell phone for the twentieth time, cursing the lack of service. ‘And now we’ll only have six days before the inspection.’
‘Inspection?’
‘Of the cottage.’
‘Who’s inspecting it?’
I could tell from the way she blinked straight ahead that my questions were an annoyance. ‘Daddy, of course.’
I tried to make my voice as benign as possible. ‘You sound concerned.’
‘Well of course I’m concerned,’ she said with a pout, ‘because if we don’t get that little hovel shipshape in less than a week, I won’t inherit it. And then you’ll go home and I’ll have to live under the same roof as my mother.’
Her mouth was set to snarl at whatever I said next, so instead of voicing all the questions flooding my mind – ‘You mean I might still have to go home? You mean you, of all people, have to clean your own house?’ – I looked across the tracks to a tangle of chickadees leapfrogging from one branch to the next, and sucked in the fresh northern air.
An invitation marks the beginning of something, but it’s more of a gesture than an actual beginning. It’s as if a door swings open and sits there gaping, right in front of you, but you don’t get to walk through it yet. I know this now, but back then, I thought that everything had begun, and, by everything, I mean the friendship that quickly burned hot between me and Ev, catching fire the night she told me of Jackson’s death and blazing through the spring, as Ev taught me how to dance, who to talk to, and what to wear, while I tutored her in chemistry and convinced her that, if she’d only apply herself, she’d stop getting Ds. ‘She’s the brainiac,’ she’d started to brag warmly, and I liked the statement mostly because it meant she saw us as a pair, strolling across the quad arm in arm, drinking vodka tonics at off-campus parties, blowing off her druggie friends for a Bogart movie marathon. From the vantage point of June, I could see my belonging sprouting from that day in February, when Ev had uttered those three dulcet words: ‘You should come.’
Over the course of the spring, in each note scribbled on the back of a discarded dry-cleaning receipt, in each secretive call to my dorm room, my mother had intimated I should be wary of life’s newfound generosity. As usual, I’d found her warnings (as I did nearly everything that flowed from her) Depressing, Insulting, and Predictable – in her way, she assumed Ev was just using me (‘For what?’ I asked her incredulously. ‘What on earth could someone like Ev possibly use me for?’). But I also assumed, once my father reluctantly agreed to the summer’s arrangement, that she would lay off, if only because, by mid-May, Ev had peeled her Winloch photograph off the wall, I’d put the bulk of my belongings into a wooden crate in the dorm’s fifth-floor attic, and my summer plans – as far as I saw them – were set in stone.
So the particular call that rang through Ev’s Upper East Side apartment, the one that came the June night before Ev and I were to get on that northbound train, was surprising. Ev and I were chopsticking Thai out of take-out containers, sprawled across the antique four-poster bed in her bedroom, where I’d been sleeping for two blissful weeks, the insulated windowpanes and mauve curtains blocking out any inconvenient sound blasting up from Seventy-Third Street (a blessed contrast to Aunt Jeanne’s wretched spinster cave, where I’d spent the last two weeks of May, counting down the days to Manhattan). My suitcase lay splayed at my feet. The Oriental rug was scattered with sturdy bags: Prada, Burberry, Chanel. We’d already put in our half-hour jog on side-by-side treadmills in her mother’s suite and were discussing which movie we’d watch in the screening room. Tonight, especially, we were worn out from rushing to the Met before it closed so Ev could show me her family’s donations, as she’d promised her father she would. I’d stood in front of two swarthily paired Gauguins, and all I could think to say was ‘But I thought you had three brothers.’
Ev had laughed and wagged her finger. ‘You’re right, but the third’s an asshole who auctioned his off and donated the proceeds to Amnesty International. Mum and Daddy nearly threw him off the roof deck.’ Said roof deck lay atop the building’s eighth floor, which was taken up entirely by the Winslows’ four-thousand-square-foot apartment. Even though I was naïve about the Winslows’ money, I already understood that what summed up their status resided not in their mahogany furnishings or priceless art but, rather, in the Central Park vistas offered from nearly every one of the apartment’s windows: a pastoral view in the middle of an overpopulated city, something seemingly impossible and yet effortlessly achieved.
I could only imagine how luxurious their summer estate would be.
At the phone’s second bleating, Ev answered in a voice like polished glass, ‘Winslow residence,’ looked confused for an instant, then regained her composure. ‘Mrs Dagmar,’ she enthused in her voice reserved for adults.