The Identicals(39)

There is no escaping.

It’s okay, Harper thinks. She can do this. Maybe Mrs. Donegal knows who she is and what she’s done—but maybe she doesn’t. Smile and the world smiles with you. That had been one of Billy’s favorite sayings.

Harper smiles.

“Hello,” she says.

Both Brendan and Mrs. Donegal stand up.

“My mom,” Brendan says.

Harper offers her hand. “Mrs. Donegal, it’s lovely to finally meet you.”

“The pleasure is mine,” Mrs. Donegal says. “And please, call me Edie. Brendan has told me so much about you. You’ve been such a good friend to him in a dark time.”

“Oh,” Harper says. This is the opposite of what Harper expected. She expected Mrs. Donegal, Edie, to be protective and territorial. Does Edie think that Harper and Brendan have been sleeping together? She hopes not. She doesn’t want Edie to see Harper as a woman taking advantage of Brendan but rather as what she is—someone who is attracted to the stillness of Brendan’s mind and the gentle nature of his soul. “I’ve known Brendan for nearly twenty years. We used to hang out together at South Beach.” She flails for a second. She and Brendan don’t talk about the days when he used to surf. She probably shouldn’t bring it up now. “I was happy to reconnect with him.”

Edie nods and offers a warm smile. “You’ve made quite an impression.”

At this, Brendan springs to life. He reaches out for Harper’s hand. “I thought you were lost,” he says. “Lost to me.”

Harper’s heart cracks. “Lost to you?” she says. She looks him in the eyes; his are a kaleidoscope of blue and gray. “Never. Okay? Never.”

“Okay,” he says. He holds her gaze for an instant, then stares down at his feet. He’s wearing flip-flops. His feet are pale; his toenails need cutting.

“Shall we sit?” Harper asks. “Would that be okay?”

Brendan and Edie settle on the bench, and Harper sits next to Brendan, closer than she might have if they were alone. They’re still holding hands, which is also something that never happened before.

“My father died last week,” Harper says. She looks at Edie. “He was an electrician here on island. Billy Frost.”

“I didn’t know him personally,” Edie says. “But I knew of him. He was spoken of very highly.”

“Thank you,” Harper says. Is this true? Billy was known mostly for his carnival-barker presence at the bar, although he also would take a service call at nine o’clock on a Sunday night, making him popular and well loved by his clients. Harper sighs. “In addition to my father dying, my mother broke her hip, so I’m leaving tomorrow for Nantucket.” She tries to catch Brendan’s eye. “I may be gone for a while.”

“A week?” he says.

“Probably longer,” Harper says. She envisions being on Nantucket for a week or so, and then, once Tabitha has figured things out, she’ll move on, maybe go to Vermont or Maine. She will have to come back at some point to close on her father’s house.

“I love Nantucket,” Edie says. “We rented a house on the beach at Cisco for three or four summers when Brendan was growing up. Do you remember that, Brendan? That’s where you and Sophie learned to surf. On Nantucket, at Cisco Beach.”

Slow nod from Brendan.

Edie says, “We bought you a white surfboard with a green stripe down the middle.”

“From Indian Summer,” Brendan says. “The owner had a dog. A Great Dane.”

Edie smiles at Harper. “Yes.”

“We drank mudslides at the Atlantic Café,” Brendan says.

“Good,” Edie says. “You do remember Nantucket.”

Brendan turns to Harper. His eyes take on a sharp focus; Harper sees a lucidity. “Come back,” he says. “Please.”





AINSLEY


She is a sixteen-year-old left to fend for herself.

Make no mistake: Tabitha is far from domestic. She and Ainsley eat takeout or go to restaurants nearly every single night, and when they do stay home, it’s cereal or cheese and crackers for dinner. Tabitha never cooks, and Eleanor is even worse—she has never prepared a meal in her life.

Neither does Tabitha clean; she has Felipa for that. Four days a week, Felipa is the “housekeeper” at Eleanor’s, but on Wednesdays, she cleans the carriage house tits to tail. She changes the sheets, does all the laundry, cleans the kitchen—including, once a month, the inside of the nearly empty refrigerator—and she dusts, vacuums, straightens and plumps the pillows, and replaces the vases of fresh flowers.

So on Wednesday when Ainsley gets home from school, the house is clean and quiet, Ainsley’s bed has been made up with fresh sheets, and all the clothes strewn across her room have been folded and put into her drawers.

In Ainsley’s top drawer is a bag of weed and rolling papers. Ainsley has a ten-page paper about Zora Neale Hurston due in the morning, but she can hardly be expected to worry about her schoolwork when she is dealing with family emergencies and a breakup.

She rolls a joint, smokes half of it, then takes the keys to Eleanor’s house off the hook in the kitchen and walks down the white-shell driveway to Seamless. It’s three thirty, which means Felipa will be in her room watching Gran Hotel, the Latino television series she’s addicted to. Ainsley eases open the front door and tiptoes into the living room. The house smells like lily of the valley and lemon Pledge; the only sound is the ticking of Eleanor’s clocks. There’s the grandfather clock, the grandmother clock, two banjo clocks, a beehive clock, and a brass carriage clock on the mantel. Every fifteen minutes, these clocks provide a mini concert of chiming, which Ainsley used to find mesmerizing, but now that she comes into her grandmother’s house only on surreptitious missions to steal alcohol, cigarettes (her grandmother keeps a delft-blue cup filled with individual cigarettes on the coffee table, as though it’s 1955), or cash (crisp hundreds in an envelope in the secretary), the chiming nearly always gives Ainsley heart palpitations, and the ticking makes her feel like she’s walking through the inside of a time bomb. One day, she assumes, she will get caught.