The Lies They Tell(2)
A momentary hush as people turned to look at the Garrisons. Asking a piano prodigy like seventeen-year-old Cassidy to “play a little something” felt like asking da Vinci to join in a game of Pictionary. Some reluctant applause followed.
Sloane whispered to her daughter. From where Pearl stood by the Christmas tree, it looked like she squeezed Cassidy’s knee under the table. Placidly, Cassidy pushed her chair back and walked up the risers to the stage as everyone clapped again, relieved.
Slender and erect, Cassidy sat, shook her hair back, placed her fingers on the keys. She may as well have been carved from ivory, cool and flawless beneath the recessed lighting, long pale hair streaming down the back of her midnight-blue dress. She didn’t look like any seventeen-year-old Pearl had ever seen, and Pearl had just turned eighteen last month.
“Gloria in Excelsis Deo” unfolded from Cassidy’s fingertips. She sang in Latin in a clear, glass-bell voice, words that Pearl couldn’t understand, but felt anyway. They made her eyes sting again, this time not unpleasantly, as she stood back among the twinkling lights and German blown-glass bulbs, witnessing what nobody knew would be Cassidy Garrison’s swan song.
The room didn’t breathe until the last note faded into the eaves. This time, the applause was thunderous. People stood. Cassidy said “Thank you” softly into the mic and returned to her family, who waited, unmoved by yet another command performance from the girl who’d brought down the Boston Symphony Hall at age eight.
The Garrisons left soon after that, shrugging on coats made from cashmere and the finest wool, Joseph laughing once, audibly, before the lobby doors closed between them and the night.
Gradually, the evening ended, members signing credit slips and wishing one another a merry Christmas on their way to the coat check. When Pearl went to the kitchen to put in a final dessert order, the kissing ball was gone and the doors were shut; the help was hangdog, meeting no one’s eyes. Meriwether had been here. The fun had been sucked from the premises like sunlight into a black hole.
At closing, Pearl waited by her car to make sure Reese was okay to drive. Ski cap on, hands tucked into the pockets of her Carhartt coat, she shifted from foot to foot, watching the back door.
When Reese came out, he was leaning on Indigo, much of his face lost in the thick faux-fur collar of her coat. Whatever he whispered in her ear made her laugh. Unaware of Pearl in the dark, they passed his car in favor of Indigo’s old Skylark.
Pearl sank into her driver’s seat, working her lips over her teeth, the familiar resentment back again, eating away at her. She started her engine when Indigo started hers.
She followed them down Harbor Road, the ocean a massive, brooding presence to her left. She kept her distance, watching the silhouettes of their heads in the headlight beams. The Skylark fishtailed lazily. Leave it to Indigo to drive on summer tires year-round. She was nineteen, living on her own, doing whatever she damn well pleased.
Pearl lived on Abbott Street, Reese on Ocean Avenue, but they wouldn’t turn in there, she was certain. She stayed on them until the stop sign, where the Skylark went into a slow spin, swinging into Main Street and stalling out in the path of a plow truck. The horn bellowed. Pearl reached out as if to catch them, her lips parting without sound.
The Skylark rumbled, gunned, and reversed into the opposite lane, dodging the plow by what looked like no more than a foot. It sat cockeyed for a few beats; then the tires spun, and it drove on.
Pearl released a shuddery breath. Knowing those two, they were laughing right now. Look what we almost did. Look how close we came.
Or maybe they were laughing at her. Maybe they’d known she was there all along, stalking them through a nor’easter with her heart pounding, nose running, clothes full of the smell of roasting duck, only to confirm what she already knew: they were going back to Indigo’s apartment, to her bed, and what they did there would be more than Pearl had ever done with anyone, because the only person she’d ever wanted to do it with was Reese.
She went home to the silent little house on Abbott. She showered, left a light on for Dad, who wouldn’t be back until four a.m., then curled up under the covers, staring at the wall. She’d never been so sick of herself. She wanted to wriggle out of her skin and kick it away like a clammy bathing suit, somehow erase the memory of kissing Reese back, right in front of everybody, the perfect, desperate fool.
Sleep shunned her until almost midnight. Outside Pearl’s window, snow continued to fall.
At the same time, on the other side of Tenney’s Harbor, the Garrisons were burning in their beds.
Two
Six Months Later
THE BOYS HAD been in the sun—tennis, maybe, or just back from the yacht club. Their brows were damp, postures loose, recuperating. They sat around the table like young guys do, taking up a lot of room, unconcerned by the stares they drew from members and waitstaff alike, lips moving in whispered conversation.
Pearl watched them, breathing shallowly, feeling panic, exhilaration. He never sat in her section. Now here he was with his entourage, the boys of summer, owning the place.
She gathered three menus and went to them, playing the part. “Can I start you gentlemen off with some drinks?” Her voice sounded stiff, an octave higher than usual.
If Tristan Garrison knew her, he gave no sign. That was the way with summer people; they were perfectly comfortable not knowing the locals who prepared their food, changed their sheets, or those, apparently, who were drowning in the undertow of their personal tragedy. “Water, please.” His voice was quiet, dismissive. He did not look at her.