Elin Hilderbrand - Summer People

Once Marie left the room, there was an awkward silence. Piper swabbed the gunk off her skin, then handed the tissues to Garrett.

“What am I supposed to do with these?” he asked.

“Throw them away.” She nodded to a trash can near his feet.

He slammed the wad into the can with all his strength.

“You’re angry,” she said.

“What?”

“You’re furious with me. You think this is my fault.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Of course you do.” Piper stood up from the table and tucked in her shirt. “You think it’s my fault I’m pregnant. But I have news for you, Garrett. You have to accept fifty percent responsibility.”

“Fifty percent responsibility but not fifty percent say in what happens.”

“You saw the baby floating around on that screen,” Piper said. “Do you honestly want to kill it?”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“I’ll tell you what you want. You want to be back in New York where you can pretend none of this ever happened. Where you can pretend I don’t exist.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true. But you know what’s funny?I don’t care. I don’t care that you knocked me up and now you don’t love me anymore. It doesn’t bother me! All I care about is doing the responsible thing here, the adult thing, and I’m doing it! I’m taking responsibility for this child without compromising my future. You never would have made this decision because it’s too hard and you’re not strong enough. This doesn’t fit into the life plan you concocted for yourself. Well, guess what, Garrett?Part of being an adult is learning that sometimes in life, pieces don’t fit.”

“We’re not adults, though,” Garrett said. “We’re kids. We’re kids having kids.”

“You’re a real summer person,” Piper said. “I realized that when this whole thing started.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You show up here for three months of the year when the weather is nice and the water is warm and you use the island. You use it up. Then in September you go back to wherever you came from and forget all about this place. Because you don’t really care about Nantucket or the people who live here.” Piper’s voice was high and shrill; her face was flushed. “You probably won’t even come back here for the birth.”

Garrett stared at her. “Of course I’m coming back for the birth.”

“You are?”

“Yes.” He actually hadn’t given it a moment of consideration, but he would not stand here and have this girl call him a coward and be right. If his child was going to be born here, he would be here. And his mother and Winnie, too. They would all get a chance to see the baby, to hold him or her, then say good-bye.

“Well, fine, then,” Piper said. “But you’re not going to be my labor coach. Peyton has already offered.”

“You’re going to have a thirteen-year-old labor coach?” Gar-rett said.

“By March, she’ll be fourteen,” Piper said.

The door swung open and Marie stepped in, holding an envelope. She looked between them. “Everything okay in here?” she asked.

“Sure,” Piper said.

“Here are the pictures. I got two for you-” She handed two to Piper. “And one for you.” She handed one to Garrett.

Garrett scrutinized his picture, grateful that he had gotten a good shot, where the arms and legs were visible and he could see the dark spot where the baby’s heart was.

He looked at Marie. “This is my baby,” he said.

She clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a lucky man.”

At home, Garrett found Beth in the kitchen packing up the place mats and napkins, the coffee grinder, the food processor. She had saved the Zabar’s shopping bags and was filling them with the things they couldn’t get in New York: loaves of Something Natural herb bread, containers of smoked bluefish paâteé and clam chowder, huge beefsteak tomatoes from Bartlett’s.

She smiled indulgently as he walked into the kitchen. “How’d the appointment go?”

He shrugged. “Okay.” The picture was in his shirt pocket- he’d pulled it out twice after dropping Piper off to look at it. “Here, want to see?” He handed the photo to his mother.

Beth held it up to the light.

“These are the arms and legs,” Garrett said. “And this dark spot?That’s the heart.”

His mother turned the picture and squinted. Despite her most fervent wishes, a few tears leaked from her eyes.

“I know you’re disappointed in me,” he said.

She wiped her tears away quickly. “I wasn’t thinking that at all. I was just thinking of all of the things your father is going to miss.”

“Can we come back for the birth?” Garrett asked. “The baby is due March twenty-seventh.”

“This house doesn’t have heat,” Beth said. “And it’s going to be tricky with school. I don’t even know when your spring break is.”

“Please?” Garrett said.

Beth handed him back the picture. “I guess we’ll figure something out,” she said.

With only two days before they were to leave, Beth became very busy. First, there was packing-and when Beth looked around the house, she saw things everywhere that had to be put into boxes. It overwhelmed her. She got up before dawn and made herself a pot of coffee. When Arch had come at the end of August, they used to awaken early all the time and watch the sun rise, brightening the water. It was Arch’s favorite time of day, the time when Nantucket, to him, seemed its most at ease.

Beth poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. She heard a groan, followed by the splintering noise she’d been fearing all summer, but before she could steady herself, the chair she was sitting on crashed to the ground. Beth hit the floor with a tremendous wallop-her whole body vibrated and there was a sharp pain in her right wrist. The surprise and the pain of it was enough to make her cry, but all Beth could think was that the ancient chair finally breaking was some kind of message from Arch. Things can fall out right from under you and you will survive. Beth picked herself up. Brilliantly, her coffee remained intact on the kitchen table. She took a long sip, then rotated her wrist a few times. It still worked.

She inspected the chair, wondering if it could be salvaged, but decided, in the end, it should go into the trash. Furniture was one of those things that could be replaced.

She left the house for a run before any of the kids got up, inhaling the air like she might never breathe again. She ingested the sight of the land-the flat blue pond, the green dunes, the gold sand, the ocean.

She didn’t want to leave.

Of course, she felt this way every August-but in previous Augusts, Arch had been around to help, and he was very matter-of-fact about packing up. He washed and vacuumed the car- three months of accumulated sand and grime from driving on these dirt roads-then he brought the empty boxes up from the basement and he packed while Beth cleaned. It took them twenty-four hours. Arch double-checked their reservation at the Steamship. They gave all of their perishables to Mrs. Colchester three houses down who stayed until Columbus Day; they ate their final dinner at the Brotherhood, locked the house, tucked the key under the mat, and left. Beth had been sad to leave since she was five years old, old enough to realize that the island had a soul that she loved as much as she loved a real, living person.

Why were they going back to New York?What waited for them there?The kids had another year of school, the most critical year. Beth had the apartment, her position on Danforth’s advisory board, a few friends who would allow her to be a third or fifth wheel at dinner parties. She had Kara Schau. She had her gym, her hairdresser, the best Chinese food in the world at the Jade Palace, the museums, which she rarely visited anymore, though she felt encouraged by their stately presence in her neighborhood. There was Arch’s mother, Vivian, on Fifty-ninth and Sutton Place, whom they would see once a month for a lunch of roast beef and watercress sandwiches. It was a bleak picture.