Elin Hilderbrand - Summer People

Beth dusted the bedposts and the top of Garrett’s dresser. The urn of Arch’s ashes was sitting on the dresser and Beth spoke to him in her mind. I’m in way over my head here, babe. Sex, alcohol- God knows what else. You’re supposed to be here to help me. This is the heavy lifting. I can’t do it on my own. It didn’t help that it was now August, the part of the summer when Beth would begin to anticipate Arch’s two-week vacation. He didn’t love Nantucket the way she did, but she adored having him on the island for those two weeks, even if he did spend too much time at the dining room table working.

Last year, on the night he’d arrived, he was the most relaxed she had ever seen him. He’d come off the plane wearing his Nantucket red shorts and his Yankees cap backward, his white polo shirt untucked. He convinced Beth to take a walk on the beach with him after the kids went to bed. There was a half-moon hanging low and phosphorescence in the water. They held hands and caught up on what had happened the previous week- this time last year Arch was defending a major magazine conglomerate against charges of lifestyle discrimination, a case he eventually won. They talked about what they wanted to do with the kids over the next two weeks-picnics and outings and lobster night. Amid all this happy chatter, Arch stopped and presented her with a velvet box-but shyly, nervously, like he was about to propose. Beth took the box, knowing that whatever was inside of it was way too expensive and absolutely unnecessary, but marveling, too, at the butterflies in her stomach-even after twenty years. Romance!

The diamond ring. The “We Made It” ring. Because it was a moonlit August night on the beach below their Nantucket cottage. Because Garrett and Winnie were healthy, bright, well-adjusted kids. Because Arch had a successful career. Because after twenty years they were still in love.

“We made it,” Arch said as he slipped the ring on her finger. “It’s easy sailing from here.”

Beth wondered if she was remembering wrong. She didn’t think so. Everything had been that perfect, momentarily. It would be two months later that Arch took Connie’s case. It would be seven months later that his plane crashed.

Tears blurred Beth’s eyes as she lifted the urn off the dresser. It was lighter than she remembered; it was light enough to make her pry off the top and check inside.

The ashes were gone, and in their place was a piece of paper. Beth set the urn down on Garrett’s dresser and unfolded the paper. It took her a minute to realize what she was looking at, but then the names and dates, typed in their little boxes, came together. It was a marriage certificate. Hers and David’s.

The room was very hot and close and Beth felt like she was going to faint. She flung open the door to Garrett’s small balcony and stepped outside, sucking in the fresh air and the sight of the ocean. Beth considered hurling the urn off the balcony onto the deck below. But instead she clung to the empty urn, the urn that once contained the remains of her husband, and she carried it downstairs. A glass vase of zinnias sat on the kitchen table, and Beth removed the flowers and carried the vase outside to the deck. It wasn’t a particularly good vase, but it had been in the house for as long as Beth could remember. It was a vase that Beth’s grandmother used for her favorite New Dawn roses, which had climbed up the north side of Horizon until Gran died and the roses withered from lack of care. It was a vase that Beth’s mother used for the flowers Beth’s father always brought on weekends from their garden in New Jersey. Beth lifted the vase over her head and flung it against the deck. It was satisfying, the honest sound of breaking glass.

Let them cut their feet to ribbons, she thought. She then filled the urn with water and arranged the zinnias inside, placed the urn on the kitchen table, where they couldn’t miss it. She thought about ripping the marriage certificate to shreds and leaving that on the table, too, but instead she just crumpled it up and threw it in the kitchen trash with the coffee grounds and eggshells.

They knew about David and they had scattered the ashes without her.

Her instincts told her to get out of the house. She couldn’t see the twins; she would kill them. Strike them, at the very least. Garrett had the Rover, and so Beth changed quickly into running clothes, tucked two bottles of water into her fanny pack, and took off down the dirt road.

It was hot, and before Beth even reached the end of Miacomet Pond, she stopped to drink. How dare they-that was all she could think. How dare they delve into her past, how dare they unearth her secret, and how dare they punish her for it. They never thought what it might be like for her. They never considered how difficult each day was, each night alone.

She had visualized scattering the ashes at sunrise on the morning of their last day-out in front of Horizon, into the sand and the dune grass. She had planned to say something meaningful; she had wanted to write a prayer. Well, it hardly mattered now. The twins had stolen Arch from her.

Beth reached a section of dense woods on Hummock Pond Road. She wanted to disappear among the cool trees. Let the kids raise themselves since they thought living was so easy. Let them get from age seventeen to middle age without making any mistakes. Then Beth heard Arch’s voice in her head: Your mistake isn’t the problem, honey. It’s that you concealed it. She had hidden the truth from him, too, her own husband, dead now. On the ride home from the Ronans’ cocktail party six years ago, she had almost told him. Her joints were loose from too much wine, and just the fact that they’d spent three hours in the same house with David made Beth want to confess.

There’s something I want to tell you about David, Beth had said to Arch, as they sped through the night toward home. Something you should know.

Arch chuckled. I liked the guy well enough. You’d better not say anything or you might change my mind.

Even though she was drunk, those words registered. There was no reason for Beth to bring up the unfortunate, unchangeable past. There was no reason to upset Arch or herself. For years, she had felt her brief marriage to David Ronan was too private to share, and that was how it would stay. Her private history.

When she got home she was dismayed to find the Rover in the driveway. She had downed both bottles of water, she was slick with sweat and her vision was blotchy. She needed to eat, she needed rest. She couldn’t bring herself to face her children. What would she say? Where could she possibly start?

When she walked inside, the house was quiet and Beth removed her socks and shoes on the bottom step of the stairs. She might be able to forego lunch and just pull her shades and climb into bed. She was so overwhelmingly tired that she knew she could sleep until morning. But then she heard whispering and she forced herself to tiptoe down the hallway and poke her head into the kitchen.

Garrett and Winnie were sitting alone at the kitchen table staring at the urn now filled with flowers. The broom and dustpan were out, and beyond the twins, Beth could see the deck had been swept clean. When the kids looked up and saw her, Beth had a hundred simultaneous memories of their faces. She remembered seeing them for the very first time, when they were an hour old, sleeping in their incubators in the hospital nursery. She pictured them on their second birthday, their mouths smeared with chocolate icing. She saw them at age ten, the first time they ever took the subway alone-the six line down to Union Square where Arch was going to meet them. She visualized them in the future, walking down the aisle at Winnie’s wedding-Garrett in a tuxedo and Winnie in a pearl-colored slip dress, arm-in-arm, Garrett giving Winnie away. More times than Beth could count in the last five months, she had thought, It should have been me who died. But now, gazing at her children and the urn of flowers, that sense of guilt, guilt at surviving, vanished. She was their mother. They needed her more than they needed anyone else. Including Arch.