The High Season(8)
She was family. She knew Kim hated her sister, she knew Annie was having a hard time at school, she knew where the green glass pickle dish went.
Since Easter, Kim had cooled. The back door stayed shut. She hadn’t asked her to babysit in weeks. Doe knew how to sidle herself into friendship, how to be cheerful and available and helpful and see what the person or the family needed and supply it. The flaw was, she never knew when or why people started to turn.
“No, thanks, she has her bike. Doe, we really need to talk. I got your check, but…summer rates start in June. You know that.”
She couldn’t afford summer rates; she could barely afford winter. If she didn’t supplement her income with occasional photo sales she wouldn’t make it. Museums paid dick.
“I know. I thought maybe you’d give me a pass and I’d double up in August. Summer is when I pick up my extra income.”
“Well, sure, Doe, we’re not going to put you out on the street.” Tim shifted his feet. “I mean…but we really need the money. Kim wants to put it on Airbnb.”
Yeah. Here was the problem with her world. Everybody always needed the money.
“Oh,” she said. “If you could give me another couple of weeks…”
“Sure. Anyway,” he said, “I get the impression you’ll always land on your feet.”
Doe clicked her smile into place, but she felt the burn. Senior year of high school, when she’d practically moved into Jassy Chasen’s house, tiptoeing barefoot past Mr. and Mrs. Chasen’s bedroom and hearing, Don’t you get the sense that she’s quite the little operator, though?
It was weird how the things she did to make herself indispensable ended up making her dispensable. Like eventually she ended up highlighting some dividing line she was trying to cross. The pathetic truth was that she’d loved the Chasens and she loved the Doyles. Doe got crushes on happy families the way other girls got crushes on the bass player.
Tim backed out of the driveway in his truck. He didn’t wave goodbye.
Shannon and Shawn appeared out of nowhere like spooky ghost twins. They swayed side to side, in that creepy twin motion they had. “Mom said the bird was probably stunned,” Shannon said.
“She said a bird gets knocked out but then they fly away again,” Shawn said.
“There was no pulse,” Doe said.
“Birds don’t have a pulse.”
“Yeah, they do,” Doe said. “I know. I trained to be a vet.”
This appeared to be something they couldn’t fight, so they went away to ask Mom. Doe took the opportunity to get in her car.
She drove the short distance to Ruthie’s. Mike’s truck was in the driveway as well as a black Range Rover. Doe climbed out of the car and dumped the basket on the porch, but couldn’t resist a peek into the window. From this angle she could see into the open kitchen. Adeline Clay leaned against a counter, laughing. Mike stood next to her, holding up a bunch of radishes. Jem cast a quick glance at a barefoot guy in shorts sitting in a chair, his back to Doe. His fingers tapped on a coffee cup. She could read his boredom.
Something about the scene was creepy, like a Gregory Crewdson staged photograph come to life. Almost like a family dynamic, all that emo pulsing around and under the waving radishes. She wished she could snap a photo. Not for Instagram, for herself. Instead she beat it back to her car.
She checked her phone. The Daniel Mantis photo already had thirty-six likes.
Doe had snapped this photograph two weeks before, on a rainy May weekend. Pure luck. She’d first recognized Stephanie Terrell, an anchorwoman on CNN, and then scrutinized the man she was with. He kept his head low, and was wearing a baseball cap. They were under an enormous red umbrella. She’d followed them for several blocks until they lowered the umbrella to duck into Ralph Lauren. Just as he opened the door she got the shot. The glinting silver rain, and Stephanie Terrell putting her hand over his as he held the door…Instagram-worthy, right there. Stephanie looked beautiful and windswept, and Daniel looked furtive. Doe had held the photograph until now, Memorial Day weekend, when it would make the biggest splash.
Mantis was known—discreetly—for having two girlfriends at a time. They were always serious women, journalists and UN attachés and businesswomen, and they all knew about one another. This year, one of those women was Adeline Clay.
Summer! When things got hot. Her season.
Mantis was a billionaire, an art collector, a financial raider who did yoga and wrote the bestseller The Mindful Shark. He was rumored to be thinking about political office, now that you didn’t need experience to run. He was throwing a huge party on Sunday afternoon, which she was planning to crash. Traffic would be road-rage-worthy but it would totally be worth it. Rihanna might be there, and the cream of the Hamptons crowd.
She was sure she’d pick up at least one good shot. She was going for one million followers this summer, minimum.
Her ambition was simple: to become a thing.
She’d pissed off a lot of people last summer, but since the account was anonymous, she could just let it build. It only meant new followers (469,000 and counting!). Beautiful people on their fifth glass of rosé, celebrity couples looking glum for just a moment, the better for gossip blogs to speculate on their “last stages.” Last summer the account had jumped by 23,000 after she’d posted the picture of supermodel Polina throwing up on a lawn in Montauk.