The Clairvoyants(34)

David Pinney was new to our group, someone to pay attention to that summer—his shock of blond hair, his lean, tan torso, his daring on the diving board. I’d seen him at the Spiritualists by the Sea camp a few times when I’d gone without Del. He’d be on the beach with his friends, and we’d watch each other. I’d become friendly with Reverend Earline, and we met to talk in the temple, and sometimes I’d see David Pinney walk past the open doors and peer inside. Looking for me, I’d thought. Not all of the cottage owners were Spiritualists, and David’s family probably viewed the old camp as a novelty, the spirit circles and the organ music quirks of the community. What had once been cart paths were now narrow, tarred roads with rustic street signs on wooden posts: Osprey Lane, Sea Breeze Way, Nehantic Path.

It was hot the summer David died, and the sun had burned the grass. The heat of it along the pool’s concrete rim scalded the backs of our legs. The meadows were filled with black-eyed Susans, and overhead the horse chestnuts and honey locusts swayed. There’d been the sound of the wind through the leaves, and the Spiritualists by the Sea’s organ, its notes almost mournful. Reverend Earline and I had a falling-out—I’d accused her of being a fraud, and she’d been hurt and confused, and decided we should no longer meet. That had been weeks before, in June. The day I’d left, walking home tearful and angry through the woods, David trailed me. When I stopped to confront him he paused as well, lit a cigarette, and then walked back the way he’d come. He appeared at our pool the following afternoon, and no one questioned his arrival. A month later it was as if he’d always been part of our group.

The neighborhood boys in the water performed for us, the girls, rimming the pool in our bikinis. Dragonflies dipped near the blue, chlorinated water. One boy, Curtis, had the best pot. He kept it hidden in a plastic bag in his towel, and after he swam he’d pull it out and roll a joint. Not everyone smoked with him, but those of us who did became closer than the others—me and Del and Jane, a girl named Katy Pepperill, another boy, Paul Grant. David didn’t smoke. He kept to the fringes, mostly kept to himself. People took other drugs they didn’t share—Jane would show up, her eyes glassy from her mother’s Valium. Paul would bring beer in a cooler, or a stolen bottle of Captain Morgan rum, and someone would ride a bike to the beach clubhouse and get Cokes, and I’d slip into the old house for glasses. We’d swim, and then sit on the patio with our drinks, like imitations of our parents.

That summer became a foggy, blurred succession of days—all of them blissful, filled with laughter, with our own clever mocking of one another. It was July when girls began to disappear with various boys—usually into the barn, or around to the back patio, where my grandfather’s flower beds had become overrun with weeds. You’d notice someone was there a moment before, and then you simply forgot about them. No one looked to see who was with whom—and it was only if they were caught appearing together from around the corner of the house, holding hands, or a boy’s arm thrown over the girl’s shoulder, or a girl’s bathing suit bottoms on inside-out, that we’d know anything at all had happened.

I didn’t like any of the boys that way—they were boys I’d grown up with, friends. But I noticed David Pinney, simply for his sun-bleached hair, his habit of hanging out beneath the diving board, watching everyone in his quiet way.

“He’s mysterious,” I told Jane.

It was the first week of August, the heat unbearable, and we were all in the water, Jane and I lounging on the steps. She’d stolen a bottle of Krug champagne from her parents’ anniversary party, and we’d chilled it, secretly, in the freezer. Every so often I slipped inside and refilled our glasses, and then the bottle was empty, and I brought it out of the house and threw it into what we’d begun calling the “bottle pit,” a patch of woods behind the barn that bordered one side of the golf course. It hit another bottle, the sound of shattered glass carrying, and Del came around the side of the barn and stood, staring at me, her hands on her hips.

“Why didn’t you share?” she said.

“It wasn’t mine,” I said. I came unsteadily up the hill to the edge of the barn and joined her.

“You’re drunk,” she said.

She had on Leanne’s pink bikini. She’d been sunbathing on the lawn and had the top undone, and she held the strings up on either side of her breasts. Her blond hair was long and loose down her back. The boys loved Del, but she didn’t pay any attention to them yet. We joked that we were the vestal virgins; we needed to remain pure so as not to corrupt our clairvoyant powers.

“Mother is going to have a fit,” she said.

Our mother had suspected we’d been drinking last week and had given us a warning.

We came around the barn and Jane was swimming her laps, and a few of the girls were on the hammock in the shade with Paul, and David Pinney was under the diving board, watching everyone. Del returned to her towel, and I slipped from the edge of the pool into the water at the deep end. It was so cool, I wanted to stay submerged. Jane’s legs, white under the water, kicked up little waves. David Pinney’s navy blue suit trunks and the lower part of his tan torso wavered in the deep end. And then he slid down into the water, and we were suddenly looking at each other, and I knew for sure he had picked up my interest in him, like an electromagnetic wave. We both surfaced at the same time, and I swam over to the board and looked at what he saw from that spot—the whole of the house against the sky, the points of the copper rods, the canopy of trees beyond, the lawn rolling out in all directions, the windows glinting with the sun like mirrors sending messages.