Elin Hilderbrand - Silver Girl

The interior seemed brighter than it had the last time; muted light shone through the stained glass windows. Meredith stuck ten dollars into the slot, a small fortune, for despite all that had happened, she still believed.

She lit a candle for Connie first, then Toby, then Dan. She lit candles for Leo and Carver. Then she lit a candle for heartbroken Ashlyn and one for the baby inside her. Then Meredith lit a candle for her mother and her father. She had one candle left. She thought about lighting it for Dev or for Amy Rivers or for Samantha. She considered lighting it for herself. Of everyone she knew, she needed a candle the most. One thing was for sure: she was not going to light a candle for Freddy.

She pushed the button and thought, For Dev. He had been so good to her.

She slipped through the double doors into the vestibule, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the church. She rummaged through her purse for another dollar bill and went back and lit another candle-for Freddy.

Because that was how she was. She couldn’t seem to abandon him.

No matter what.

Out in the sunny world, Connie waited on a bench.

Connie said, “Did that go okay?”

Meredith said, “I lit candles.” She didn’t tell Connie that she’d lit a candle for Freddy-but who was she kidding? Connie already knew.

“I got you something,” Connie said. She handed Meredith a big white shopping bag with cord handles from Nantucket Gourmet. “Sorry it’s not wrapped.”

Meredith peered inside. It was an eleven-cup Cuisinart food processor. “Of course you can use the one in my kitchen,” Connie said. “But this is one of your very own. A graduation present”

Meredith was so overwhelmed by the perfection of the gift that she closed her eyes. She thought back to the cruel summer weeks right after Toby had broken up with her. Connie had dragged her to a party at Villanova, and Meredith had drunk too much, and Connie had carried Meredith home on her back. This summer was like that night times fifty billion (this was the largest real number Meredith could think of). This summer, Connie had carried Meredith on her back once again. She had carried Meredith all the way to safety.

“I almost lit a candle for myself in there,” Meredith said, nodding at the church. “But then I realized I didn’t need to.”

Connie put a hand up. “Don’t say it, Meredith. You’ll make me cry.”

Meredith said, “Because you, Constance-you are my candle.”

Connie sniffed; tears leaked out from beneath her sunglasses. Meredith pulled her to her feet, and they crossed the cobblestone street to Connie’s car.

Endings were like this. You could see them coming from far away, but there was one more thing (dinner at Le Languedoc) and one more thing (ice cream at the Juice Bar) and one more thing (a stroll down the dock to see the yachts) and one more thing (an hour with Toby out on the deck, looking at the stars, knowing, finally, that not a single one of them was especially for you) and one more thing (lovemaking, tender and bittersweet) and one more thing (watching the sunrise on the Juliet balcony) and one more thing (a trip to the Sconset Market for snickerdoodle coffee and peach muffins, only they didn’t have peach anymore; fall was coming, they’d switched to cranberry) and one more thing…

Endings, when anticipated, took forever.

And one more thing: Toby and Meredith sat on the floor of Meredith’s room, sifting through the possessions in her one cardboard box. Downstairs, Connie and Ashlyn were packing, and Dan was helping them load the car, which was going back to Hyannis on the noon boat. Dan was taking Toby to the airport at eleven. Toby’s sky-blue duffel bag was packed fat, waiting at the top of the stairs. Meredith was torn between wanting the ending to be over with-just everyone go-and wanting to squeeze the life out of every remaining second.

The first thing out of Meredith’s box were the photographs, which Meredith placed facedown. Too painful. Next, were the boys’ yearbooks and Meredith’s favorite paperbacks- Goodbye, Columbus and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. There was her record album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. And finally, her anthropology notebook. Meredith paged through the notebook, ogling her eighteen-year-old handwriting. There was so much knowledge here, completely forgotten.

Toby studied the Simon and Garfunkel album. He pulled out the record sleeve and read her father’s note. “Wow,” he said. “No wonder you kept this.”

Stay with me, Meredith almost said. Live here with me for the winter. It was ironic that Toby would have been free to do that in the past, but now he had a steady job. And, of course, his son. Toby promised he would bring Michael to Nantucket for Thanksgiving, along with Connie and Ashlyn. Dan would come, too, with his sons.

“And when you realize that you can’t live without me,” Toby had said the night before, “you can come and live with me in Annapolis. It’s not Park Avenue and it’s not Palm Beach, but we will live an honest life.”

“Dunbar’s number,” Meredith said, reading from her anthropology notebook. “It says here that human beings can have stable social relationships with a maximum of one hundred and fifty people. One hundred and fifty is Dunbar’s number.”

“Stable social relationships?” Toby said.

Meredith said, “My own personal Dunbar’s number is four. On a good day, seven. You, Connie, Dan, Ashlyn, Leo, Carver, and…”

The phone rang in the house.

Meredith heard Ashlyn cry out, “I’ll get it!” Meredith knew that Ashlyn would be hoping and praying it was Bridget.

A second later, Ashlyn called out. “Meredith?”

Was there any doubt? Meredith looked at Toby, and Toby pulled her to her feet. Out in the hallway, Ashlyn offered up the phone, a look of crushed disappointment on her face.

“Thank you,” Meredith whispered. And then, into the phone, “Hello?”

“Meredith?”

It was Dev. He sounded excited again. Another insidious discovery? More money uncovered? Hidden with the jihadists perhaps, in the Middle East?

“Hi, Dev,” Meredith said. He was her seventh stable social relationship.

“Somehow this woman, Nancy Briggs? At the prison? At Butner?”

“Yes?”

“Somehow she worked it out. Her and the priest. Or her through the priest-maybe that’s what it was, since I’m sure the warden’s secretary doesn’t have any contact with the actual prisoners. But she convinced the priest, and the priest convinced Freddy, and he’s agreed to take your call.”

“He’s agreed to take my call,” Meredith said.

“He’ll take your call,” Dev said. He paused. “That was what you wanted, right? That was what you asked me for?”

“It was,” Meredith said. Toby squeezed her hand, and then he left the room. He knew that there were some things that Meredith had to deal with alone.

Freddy would take her call. What did that mean? That meant he would sit in a room, and someone would hold the phone to his ear or he would hold the phone himself, and Meredith would speak. She would go down her list of eighty-four questions, as though she were giving Freddy a test. Where? When? How? Why?

Why? Why? Why?

She was never going to get the answers she was looking for. Freddy wouldn’t tell her the truth, or he would tell her the truth and she wouldn’t believe him. There was no truth with Freddy. Freddy’s own personal Dunbar’s number was zero. It had always been zero.

“Oh, Dev,” she said.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’ve changed your mind.”

“I can’t believe it,” Meredith said. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t want to talk to Freddy.”