The High Season(94)

    “Can you call her girlfriend? She’d want to know. Lark Mantis.” Shari’s jaw wobbled, and her teeth began to chatter. “Doe has been staying over there in East Hampton all summer. They’ll want to know, right?”

Ruthie had already tried to call Mike, but he wasn’t answering. She didn’t have Adeline’s cell number in her phone. Finally she did the only thing she could think of. She texted Joe.


At hospital no news yet. Jem is ok. Not even a sprain. Can you tell Adeline and Mike what happened? Mike not answering. Also Doe’s girlfriend is Lark Mantis. Can you alert them? Thx



The text came back immediately, he would do it, he would come to the hospital if she needed him, how was Jem, could he do anything.

She stared down at the text. He was the last person she could ask to help carry her through this night. When she’d run to the car to drive Shari to the hospital, the painting had been gone from the car roof. Who else but Joe would have taken it?

The story would unravel. The forgery, the theft, Lucas. Tomorrow would happen. The sun always does come up. She would realize that the fear and panic she’d lived with through most of August had been nothing.

But that was tomorrow. Tonight Jem had leaped into thin air and survived. Now she sat next to her, her knees up under her chin, her face pale, her jaw working. Something was wrong with Jem. If Shari was holding herself still, Jem was frozen, except for her jaw. Everything in life had funneled down to this, sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital waiting room as minutes passed, each one ticking closer to a reality no one wanted to face.

    She could feel time move in her pocket. When she had caught Jem after the jump and held her while Doe had flown away, while everyone had screamed and shouted, while she had gasped and shuddered, she’d put one hand down on the grass and she had found Lewis Berlinger’s watch, right there, as though waiting for her.

How it got there she didn’t know, and she never would. She would take it as the miracle it truly was. She must have been mistaken, in her distraction. She must have worn it to work earlier in the summer. The band had always been loose, it had slipped off her wrist. Finding it again…it shouldn’t have happened to her, something that lucky, not to that frantic, pathetic creature focused on something so stupid. A house. A house instead of a child.

The automatic doors opened and Mike and Adeline rushed in. When Jem saw her father she started to cry. He ran and she stood and hurtled herself in his arms.

She had never seen Mike look so helpless.

“It’s all my fault, Daddy!” Jem’s face looked like her baby face, as though it had compressed into a tight ball of misery, mouth open, cheeks red and slick.

“No, dear,” Adeline said. “It is not your fault.”

The authority in Adeline’s voice! It filled the room, the air, their bodies!

Ruthie wanted to kneel at this woman’s feet and thank her, because Adeline had spoken and stopped Jem’s tears.

She put her hand on the top of Jem’s head, cupping it. “It is everyone’s fault but yours,” Adeline added. “You hear me?”

The inner doors to the ER swished open and a woman strode out, dressed in scrubs and clogs. The authority said doctor and the gaze was on them. They knew, and they stood. Ruthie grabbed Shari’s hand, and her hand was squeezed so tight she felt her bones come together.

“Mrs. Callender?” The doctor reached out and put her hand on Shari’s shoulder, and the humanity of the gesture telegraphed the worst news so clearly that Shari, for the first time that night, cried out. Her knees started to go and the doctor hurriedly said, “She’s okay,” even as she helped ease her backward into the chair.





62


THE RIDE HOME felt so long. It was four in the morning. Gray light. Sunday morning, and the rain had stopped, and the world was slumbering. A season was turning.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Ruthie said. “Adeline is right.”

“Doe jumped in to save me,” Jem said. “She saw what was happening and she jumped in.”

Ruthie knew what every parent knew. She was in the perfect place to have this conversation: the car. It was the place teenagers told their secrets, because it was the place they did not have to meet their parents’ eyes.

“What was happening?” she asked. “I mean, before.”

Jem jerked her head and looked out the window. “I liked Lucas,” she said.

“So he was the boy.”

“Yeah. I know he was too old, okay?”

Ruthie’s hands tightened on the wheel. She was grateful for the past tense, but she would kill him anyway. She had a whole list of crimes on her sorry docket, why not add one more?

    “Were you…seeing him?”

“No! He came to the farm stand to see me. And I saw him a few times. Not a date or anything! Just, like, walks around Greenport. He’d buy me ice cream or whatever. We texted a lot. Tonight I just wanted…I thought…I don’t know what I thought. But I started it. I said, Let’s go into the castle before they take it down. I just wanted to be alone with him. We went in together and we just sort of fell, the way you do in a bouncy castle. He said it was like a waterbed. And so we kissed and stuff.”

And stuff. What a wide load of possibility in that. Ruthie thought of the bra, revolving in the wind.