If I Forget You(35)

But after a dinner of grilled lamb chops, a salad, bread, and much wine, it rushes back to him. Deborah says he should feel free to stay with them as long as he likes, and they don’t mention the very real possibility that he might be going away for a while in a few weeks when he returns to court.

“I’m going to go home tomorrow,” Henry announces.

“To Providence?” David asks.

“Yes,” Henry says. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Deborah reaches across the table and puts her hand on his. “You will get through this, you know?”

Henry nods. “I hope so,” he says, and as soon as he says it, he realizes he isn’t thinking about the possibility of prison, or whether Bannister will let him back in, and he isn’t thinking about his future at all, which just a day ago seemed as clear and as promising as mountain water.

Instead, the only thing he can think of is Margot, and right now there is a hole in his heart, where earlier in the same day she used to live.

After Deborah and Dave retire to their bedroom with their books and cups of tea, Henry picks up the phone in the kitchen and dials information and asks for a number for Thomas Fuller on Martha’s Vineyard.

“I have one in Chilmark,” the operator says. “Hold for the number.”

A woman answers the phone on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Is Margot there?”

There is a moment of silence. Then the woman says, “I know who this is. If you ever call here again, I will call the police. Do you understand?”

“I just really need to talk to Margot,” Henry says. “Please.”

There is a click and then Henry is left listening to the metronomic emptiness of a dial tone.





Margot, 1991

Her mother hangs up the phone in the kitchen. Margot has drifted in, having heard it ring, and is there long enough to know who was on the other end of the line. And long enough for her mother to know that she knows who was on the other end of the line.

“Clarity is important here,” her mother says. “You know that.”

Margot nods. She is feeling oddly grown-up and responsible suddenly, though perhaps that is just indicative of how eternal this day has been. She thinks of her father at Mass General in Boston, refusing to be treated anywhere else, the speeding drive to the airport in Syracuse and then Kiernan instructing the pilot to take them to Boston. Her father, following surgery, stuck with his jaw wired shut and her knowing that this man who has made all his money peddling sugar water around the globe will be on a diet for more than a month, when all he will be able to take are liquids. The very virility cut out of him as easily as a knife slices into a peach. And that Henry was the one who did it.

“It was my fault, really,” her mother is saying. “I never should have let you go up there. I mean, who goes upstate in the summer?”

Margot tunes her mother out. She feels now like she might be sick, the hangover, the wine from the night before in a place that feels like a world away, the whirlwind drive to the airport, the two plane flights, first to Boston, where her father was taken to Mass General, and then refueling the Gulfstream before it took her alone to the Vineyard, where her mother was waiting for her.

Maybe, though, it is her mother who is nauseating her. Her mother in her pink Izod with the collar turned up, her gold necklaces and rings and bracelets, her white capri pants snug on her ample ass and the overwhelming floral smell of her, turned up to hide the cigarette she had an hour ago, which Margot still faintly smells, like the sad undertone of sex in a motel room.

She then thinks of Henry, and suddenly her stomach is churning with the stress of it all. She remembers Kiernan making the call from the Town Car on the way to the airport and then his turning to her while her father held his face in his hands in the backseat.

“You can forget him,” he said. “He’s going to prison.”

Now her mother is prattling on, and the bile is rising in her throat. Margot cannot hear her anymore, just empty maternal blather, and now she knows she is about to throw up, and she moves as quickly as she can to the bathroom off the kitchen and gets there just in time to have the vomit land in a torrent in the toilet bowl.

“Christ, Margot,” her mother says behind her. “You’re not one of those bulimics, are you? A lot of the girls are, I hear.”

Margot is about to answer her when she dry-heaves. Emptied, she spins her head toward her mother. “No, I am not.”

“I mean, it’s okay if you are.”

“Mom, no. I’m hungover. I got drunk last night. I should have done this hours ago.”

“Okay, dear. I just meant you can tell me.”

Margot simply glares at her and stands up and straightens herself out in the mirror. She desperately wants to be outside now, like these walls are closing in all around her, and she has a pang of memory as she remembers last night amid the vines, the dewy grass against her pants and the feel of Henry beneath her.

“I’m going for a walk,” she says to her mother.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, I really just want to be alone.”

Margot goes through the French doors and out onto the patio and then past the curated landscape and through the narrow path between the half-moons of dunes and onto the beach. The sand is soft and deep here, and she takes off her sandals and holds them in her right hand as she leaves the dunes behind and walks out on the broader beach.