Elin Hilderbrand - Nantucket Nights

“Why did you give away your baby?” Val asked.

“After she was born I tried to kill myself,” Antoinette said. “I took pills. My neighbor found me and I was hospitalized and social services took the baby. But in the end, I decided to put her up for adoption.”

“Because?”

“Because,” Antoinette said, like it was obvious. “Because I can barely live with my own pain. Taking care of someone else, being that responsible, you know, for another person’s welfare, I’m just not healthy enough. I want to be able to kill myself if that’s what I decide.”

“Please don’t decide that,” Val said. “Don’t kill yourself over a man. They’re not worth it.”

Antoinette kicked her feet. “He wasn’t just some man. He was my husband. Not that I expect either of you to understand.”

“I understand,” Kayla said, though of course she didn’t. But she sensed in herself the power to understand someday, and she realized the magnitude of Antoinette’s confidence. “Thank you for telling us. We thought you didn’t like us.”

“I don’t want friends,” Antoinette said. “Nothing against you personally. I just don’t have the energy. Besides, in a couple of weeks you’re leaving. You’ll go back to your lives; you’ll forget I even exist.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Kayla said. She didn’t realize the words were true until she spoke them. “I’m staying here on Nantucket.”

“I’m leaving for law school,” Val said. “But I’ll be back. Next summer I’ll be back. We can come up here again. We can tell more secrets.”

“I might be dead next summer,” Antoinette said.

“No,” Kayla said. “Don’t say that.”

“You have no idea how I feel,” Antoinette said. “You have no idea how much effort it takes to survive each day.”

“Telling us the truth is a really crucial step,” Val said. “That’s why you brought us up here in the first place. You wanted us to know what happened. You wanted to share.”

Antoinette almost smiled, but instead she dipped her head back and came up spouting water from her mouth. “You white women,” she said. “Share is your middle name. You two can’t even go to the bathroom by yourselves.”

“Friends are important for personal growth,” Val said.

“I lost the only two people who meant anything to me,” Antoinette said. “It’s not like I can replace them.”

Kayla swam over to Antoinette and took her hand. Val joined them, and the three formed a circle in the water.

“We can’t replace them,” Kayla said. “But I agree with Val. I think we should come back here every summer.”

“I don’t know if I’ll make it to next summer,” Antoinette said.

“You’ll make it,” Val said.

“We’ll see to it,” Kayla said.

“I don’t want you future Junior Leaguers on my charity case,” Antoinette said. “You hear me? Don’t knock on my door in the middle of the night to check if I’m still alive.”

“Of course not,” Kayla said.

“And like I said, I don’t want friends.”

“We’ll be better than friends,” Kayla said. She was sucked into the idea immediately: Great Point at midnight, the stars, the chill water, three women sharing the secrets of their souls. “We’ll be the Night Swimmers.”

Kayla picked up Valerie first because she lived closer, on Pleasant Street, near Fahey & Fromagerie. Her house was smaller than Kayla’s, but more attractive-gambrel-style, like a barn, with neat hunter green shutters, pink geraniums in the window boxes, and a healthy violet-blue hydrangea bush on either side of the front door. Two cars in the driveway: Val’s slick, sexy BMW convertible and her husband’s quieter black Jaguar. Race cars, the cars of professionals who could afford landscapers and a cleaning lady, the cars of people without children. After that first summer on Nantucket, Val had accomplished most of what she set out to do: Law Review, clerking for Judge Sechrist, a job as an associate at Skadden, Arps in New York, where she met and married John Gluckstern, a Wall Street superstar. Within five years they had enough money to leave Manhattan behind and move to Nantucket year-round. Val set up her own law practice in an office overlooking the Easy Street Boat Basin. She was tremendously successful, handling all the biggest real estate deals on the island.

John worked as an investment adviser at Nantucket Bank, a job he took so he could meet other islanders with money to invest. Kayla and Raoul had been to see John twice-once when they set up Raoul’s business and then again in June, when Raoul landed the Ting job. John wore a three-piece suit to work, and at first that made one think that John was no different professionally from how he was socially: a self-important, puffed-up jackass. John had run for local office four times and had never been elected. He was unlikable. He was a one-upper, and he didn’t listen. But what Kayla found after going to see him at work was that in his job, he was different. He was eager and excited and friendly, and although he knew everything in the world there was to know about money and investing, he wasn’t pushy. He explained options to Raoul and Kayla carefully, he asked pertinent questions about the kids’ college educations, and he let them make their own choices-choices that made them feel confident, smart, successful.

After their second visit with John at the bank, Kayla wanted to gently suggest to Val that if John treated his friends and neighbors the way he treated his clients, he’d be better liked. But by that point, Val had lost interest in making John seem less reprehensible. Back in April, John ran for selectman for the fourth time and garnered only sixty-seven votes. Val called Kayla from the high school cafeteria in tears, and Kayla went to pick her up. It was a rainy night, and the two of them drove out to die deserted parking lot of Surfside Beach. The rain was so heavy that Kayla couldn’t even see the ocean through the windshield. Val sopped up her tears and slugged coffee and Kahlúa from a thermos that Kayla had brought. Val talked about how humiliating it was to have received only 67 votes when the winner got over 1,300.

“John doesn’t even see what that means,” Val said. “He doesn’t understand that nobody likes us.”

“Everybody likes you,” Kayla insisted, though she knew this wasn’t true. Some people didn’t like Val- they thought she was too uptight for Nantucket, too tough for a woman. She was wealthy, she was powerful, she intimidated people. But Kayla defended Val against the people who muttered bitch or dyke when Val’s name came up in conversation. Val was Kayla’s first friend on the island; she’d known her longer than she’d known Raoul. Still, Kayla was well aware that Val didn’t help John at all in the polls.

“I feel this deadly combination of disgust and pity for John,” Val said. “Actual pity for him because running for office is his passion. How do I ask my husband to stop pursuing his dream? Do I just say, “Honey, please give up your aspirations, you’re embarrassing me’? Is that what I say? Maybe it is. Because I can’t handle another loss like tonight.”

Six weeks later, when Kayla and Val met for coffee at Espresso Cafe, Val told Kayla she was having an affair. Her passions, she said, lay elsewhere.

Valerie came out of her house holding the largest bottle of champagne Kayla had ever seen. It was almost as big as Luke; the cork was level with Valerie’s head, and the bottom of the bottle was at her waist. Kayla flung open the car door.

“What have you got there?” she asked.

“It’s a Methuselah of Laurent-Perrier,” Val said. She set the bottle down on the seat between them. “I brought it back from France for this very occasion. They had an absolute fit in customs, but they made an exception when I told them it was for Night Swimmers.”