Elin Hilderbrand - Summer People

“Me, either.”

“I missed you so much. I managed twenty years without you, but the last three days almost killed me.”

Beth had no idea how to respond to this. Part of her felt the same way-she had gone to his house ! But, as ever, there was her guilt and longing for Arch. She remembered back to March sixteenth. At night, after all the people went home, she and Winnie and Garrett slept in the same bed. They did that for two weeks.

“David, we have to stop this.”

“I feel like a teenager,” he said. “I used to do this all the time after you left for the summer. I’d drive by your house and imagine you standing inside the screen door, just like you were doing a few seconds ago. It used to make me feel better to look at your house because I knew you’d always come back to it.”

Beth put her hands over her eyes; he was so handsome she was afraid to look at him. The smart thing, she realized, would have been to stay safely inside her house. “We can’t recreate those days, David. Too much has happened in our lives.”

David rubbed his stubbly chin. “We were in love.”

“Yes, we were.”

“Were, Bethie?”

“Were,” she said.

“I’m in love with you now,” David said. “When I split with Rosie… when I read about Arch in the paper… when I saw you at the store… actually, no. Forget all that. I never stopped loving you. I had to live here, Beth. I had to live each day with all of our memories. It made getting over you impossible.”

“You managed fine without me,” Beth said. “You married Rosie the next year. You had kids.”

“It was never quite right,” David said. “Rosie finally realized it and left.”

“You’re not blaming me for your separation?” Beth said. “That’s absurd.”

“It’s only your fault in the larger sense,” David said. “In the sense that during all those years with Rosie, a part of my heart was missing.”

“Don’t tell me that, David,” Beth said. “Your problems with Rosie are between the two of you. They have nothing to do with me.” She remembered the wedding picture she found in David’s bathroom. Something about how it was placed so that there were actually two pictures in the bathroom-the picture itself and its reflection-made Beth understand that the picture was important to David. What it represented was important. After all, Rosie was still alive; her marriage to David was still viable. Maybe he’d go back to her. That would be for the best.

“The past two weeks have been the happiest weeks I’ve had in ages,” David said. “Just knowing I would see you, even for a few minutes.” He leaned over the console that separated the two seats and took her chin. He held her face and hooked her eyes, making her look at him. Making her see him. What did he want from her? Maybe he wanted her to admit the truth-that she felt the same way, that she, too, looked forward, a little bit, to seeing him, that he made her feel less sad, that he provided hope, a glimpse into what might someday lie beyond all this heavy grief. But a second later, Beth understood that what David wanted was beyond words. His face grew closer; he kept his fingers on her chin. He was going to kiss her.

He was kissing her; they were kissing.

Beth forgot herself for a second. She was tired, she’d had a lot of wine, and surely just one second wasn’t going to hurt anyone, one second of David’s lips, which tasted like the best young love imaginable, which tasted like summer, which tasted like home. One second then one second more. David’s tongue touched her bottom lip lightly, and that was enough. Beth opened her eyes.

“Whoa,” she said, pulling away. “Whoa. Wait.”

David stared at her. Her cover was blown, her lie exposed. She wasn’t a woman in mourning after all. She had kissed him back. A hideous blackness gathered behind her eyes and she gazed out the window at the water. She had kissed him back.

“There,” he whispered.

There? As in, take that? Beth wasn’t sure what he meant by “there,” but it didn’t make her feel any better. “Okay,” she said, fresh out of words herself.

“You can pretend that never happened,” David said. “I, of course, won’t be able to.”

Beth’s mind raced around in search of something to say. A kiss! What a perfect ending for today-she had walked through David’s empty house, she had signed her name Elizabeth Ronan, and for my final trick, ladies and gentlemen… the kiss. Only months after the death of her husband, she had kissed David Ronan.

“I’m taking Garrett to get his license tomorrow,” she said. “Once he can drive, the kids won’t need us to chauffeur them around.”

“So we’ll go out alone,” David said.

“We will not,” Beth said. “I know I’m sending mixed messages-and not only to you, but to myself. But I just lost my husband, and unlike you, a piece of my heart wasn’t missing. I loved Arch Newton with my whole heart. I loved him with my mind and soul and spirit.”

David straightened his arms to the steering wheel. “Because you left me with your heart intact,” he said. “ You left me. I was the one who got his heart broken. I was the one who had to face your father at the front door of that house back there and listen to him tell me that you never wanted to see me again and that I’d be hearing from his lawyer.”

“I won’t talk about that,” Beth said. “And I don’t want you to talk about it either.”

“You do remember what happened, don’t you?”

“ Of course I remember what happened,” Beth said. “But guess what? Splitting with you wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me. The worst thing was-”

“Losing your husband,” David said. “I know, I know.”

“You do not know,” Beth said. “I’m offended that you pretend to know.”

“I know about losing the person I loved most in the world,” David said. “That’s what it was for me when you left.”

Beth was quiet. She deserved this and worse, even twenty-five years after the fact. But she felt she needed to address the kiss; she had to let him know that there would be no more kisses and certainly no dating.

“I’m going to ask you to give up,” Beth said. “I’m going to ask you to leave me alone.”

“I will not give up,” David said. “Because some day you’ll recover. And when you do, I’m going to be here. I’m going to be waiting for you.”

Beth bumped her head against the passenger window. She felt sixteen, as emotionally inept as her children. “I’m tired,” Beth said. “Will you please take me home?”

They drove back to Horizon in silence. David let her out at the end of the driveway, but as she walked past his window, he grabbed her arm.

“You never once said you were sorry,” he said. “You broke a solemn vow without explaining why. I figured it out eventually- you were too young, you were scared-but you didn’t even apologize.”

When she looked at him, she saw the past in his eyes. She recognized the look of loss on his face as he stood at the front door of Horizon confronting her father. It was too painful to remember. Beth turned away.

“Good night, David,” she said.

H e’d been on Nantucket for three weeks but it felt like three months. Or three years. His reality had changed. He was now a person who ate steak and lobsters, he was a person who lounged on the beach and took outdoor showers. He was a person who read Robert Ludlum novels and played Monopoly, amassing paper fortunes.

Now that Garrett was dating Piper, Marcus spent a lot of time alone with Winnie. Since the night he found her eating in the kitchen, they’d grown closer. Marcus saw that Winnie was like Arch-beneath her little-girl, noneating, self-pitying facade lay a decent heart. She listened, she asked questions, and she moved through her days utterly devoted to him, Marcus, a black kid from Queens with a now awful-looking Afro. Not because she felt sorry for him, but because she thought he was special. Marcus could tell she was genuine in this.