“Divorced, two kids, owns a software company in San Francisco. He asked me how you are, if you’re single.”
“If I had married Aaron, we’d be cousins.”
Rachel snorted into her wine.
As Holly Golightly climbed out of a cab with her coffee and croissant, Madison felt the warmth and the comfort of the house slowly sink into her bones.
Chapter 10
Alice Madison, fourteen, ties her hair back in a ponytail with a pink elastic band and slips her kayak into the water from the rickety pier that juts out of the narrow beach. She raises her arm and waves at her grandmother, who’s watching her from the deck by the kitchen; her grandmother waves back. Sunday, 7:30 a.m.
Alice paddles south for a few minutes; she sticks close to the shore, but that instant of freedom on the water is totally intoxicating. In a world of curfews, homework, and adult supervision—before any of her friends has even begun to fantasize about driving lessons and owning an actual car—sliding into the cool gray and feeling the paddle slice into the water is just as grown-up and independent as it gets. Never mind that she’s wearing a red life jacket with matching helmet.
A couple of gulls float by. It feels “tranquil,” as Alice’s English teacher would say. She had felt her grandparents’ apprehension all week as the day had approached. Father’s Day. She wanted very badly to reassure them but didn’t know how.
Alice trails the tips of her fingers in the water and lies back as far as the kayak will allow. The sky is like the inside of the shells she picked up last summer on Ruby Beach. Mother-of-pearl. The name made no sense, she had thought at the time.
A mallard flew overhead, the sleek green head almost black against the sky.
“Helloooo! Alice, grab my hand, quick.”
Rachel.
Rachel Lever, fourteen, wears an identical life jacket and helmet; her kayak slides alongside Alice’s from the opposite direction. Alice grabs her hand, and the kayaks stop so that the girls are facing each other, each in her own fiberglass canoe.
“Sorry I’m late,” Rachel says.
“I only just got here myself.” Alice knows why Rachel is late. Breakfast in bed and a Father’s Day card for Mr. Lever. He’s a nice man; he deserves breakfast in bed.
Out of the blue she realizes that she has been waiting to tell Rachel for months.
“I don’t know where my father is,” she blurts out. “And it’s probably a good thing.”
Around them there is nothing but water and cool June air. “The summer I came to live here, I had run away from home. I was traveling for a week before the state troopers stopped me.”
“A week?”
“Yes.”
“One whole week?”
“Yes.”
“But that was two summers ago! You were twelve two summers ago!”
“I was.”
“What happened? Was he mean to you?”
“No, he wasn’t mean. He wasn’t like your dad, but he wasn’t mean, either.”
“Then why did you run away?”
“A few months after my mom died, we were living in Friday Harbor. He took my mother’s things, all we had left of her, and he used them to gamble. Poker.”
“My dad plays poker. He has poker nights with my uncles.”
“My dad plays in Vegas.”
“Las Vegas?”
“He’s a pro. He taught me.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
“Sheesh, Alice. And he gambled away your mom’s things?”
“I found out, and I got so angry, I took my baseball bat and smashed pretty much everything in my room.”
Rachel’s eyes are wide now. Alice presses on—it’s now or never.
“Then I went into his room, and he was asleep. He had a switchblade knife. And I stood there with the knife in my hand until a dog barked in the yard next door. I stuck the blade into his dresser, as deep as I could, packed a bag, and left.”
They were still grasping each other’s hands.
“He didn’t put up a fight when my grandfather said he’d bring me here. We haven’t spoken since. And sometimes I dream about that night, about the knife.”
There, it was all out now.
The kayaks move gently in the tide. Rachel mulls it over. This is beyond her experience. Life in junior high, her brother’s bar mitzvah, and Uncle Harold’s divorce: those are things she understands. This is another world. Two things are clear: Alice has never told this story to anyone else before, and if Rachel chose to withdraw her friendship, Alice would accept that, and she’d slowly become just one more face in the school’s corridors.
“He didn’t take very good care of you,” Rachel says finally. “He didn’t take very good care of your mom’s things.”