The Winters(10)

“Oh, that was Rebekah’s idea. She was canny like that,” he said. “Always thinking of next steps, always thinking of things that might benefit the family, or Asherley, pushing me to make more of myself. No one knows more about local politics than you, she said, and owning Asherley means you want to have a say in the decisions made in the county. And she was right.”

Then he showed me a picture of Dani, who looked much older than fifteen, and posed in such a knowing way that I struggled (and failed) to find something to comment on beside her looks.

“She’s very beautiful,” I said. She was beautiful, the house was beautiful. Jesus.

“She’s a number of other things, too, including expensive,” he said, putting his phone away. “Now I sound like one of those assholes from the club.”

“Hardly,” I said. I could have listened to more, but the gap in the conversation prompted him to check his watch.

“Time flies fast in your lovely company. You could do me a great favor by dropping me in town. I have a meeting in less than an hour. I’ll cab back.”

The only thing I minded was that we were closer to George Town than the club, which meant less time in his company. I pulled up anchor and turned the boat around. At the city dock, he didn’t say goodbye, he said, “See you tomorrow,” to which I replied, “Okay,” and waved, not asking when or how I would see him, so long as I did.



* * *



? ? ?

I sped back to the club, feeling depleted by his absence, the motor kicking up walls of water behind me. My mind retraced our morning, how he lit up talking about Dani, dimmed with Rebekah. I thought about the laughter, the food, the conversation, how it flowed easily from subject to subject, and how we each seemed to intuit when to press and when to back off, a dance whose steps we already knew.

I docked the boat sloppily, deciding to clean it at the end of my shift to take advantage of the empty office. John-John was probably still out with the wedding party. I fired up the computer to satisfy my awakened appetite for more about Asherley, about Max and Dani, but mostly Rebekah. When I entered her name and clicked “Images,” the screen flooded with her face.

I knew she’d be beautiful, but she demanded more attention than I was prepared to give. Her wide eyes meant your own had to travel back and forth between them to take them in, their vaguely blue-green color varying from picture to picture. And her hair seemed undamaged by the chemicals required to achieve that blond hue. She had about her a carnality that was hard to ignore, especially the way her lips (often wearing the same shade of brick red) remained slightly parted whether she was smiling or not. The slight variations of her expression, that mouth, the white-blond hair, the flashing eyes, the pale shoulders and long, lean arms, duplicated over and over again with every click, gave the impression that there was a virtual Rebekah factory out there somewhere, still churning out perfect models even after her death.

At first I couldn’t bring myself to open the news links about her death or look at photos of the blackened car wreck and the flattened acres. But they were the first stories that popped up, her death covered numerous times by the New York Post, the stories detailing how Rebekah’s car had careened into an ancient oak on a particularly treacherous part of the road that led to the causeway connecting Winter’s Island to Long Island. It had been an unusually hot summer. The ensuing fire took out several acres of old-growth forest before smoke was spotted from the mainland, the sirens rousing Max from his sleep. By then the car was engulfed, Rebekah’s body so badly burned they could only be certain it was her by the diamonds from her melted wedding ring. Days later another story featured a picture of Max and Dani, both wearing dark glasses, entering an old church outside Sag Harbor. Then another story about how Max almost dropped out of the senate race, but even a break from campaigning didn’t prevent his landslide victory that November.

I was fascinated by Dani’s Instagram account, which boasted thirty-one thousand followers, an epic number, it seemed to me, for a fifteen-year-old girl. It looked as though she enjoyed free rein to post whatever she wanted, the recent ones from Paris an unsettling collage of girlish antics, moody tourist pictures, and sexy poses, all pursed lips, arched back, and airbrushed skin. Sometimes she was alone and sometimes she posed with a friend, with whom she seemed to imply a coyly sexual relationship. Even in her photos with Max there was a flirty, possessive quality to her embraces. Scanning much farther down her feed, I hit the mother lode, dozens and dozens of pictures of Rebekah with Dani, their likeness jarring. They had identical hair, similar style, their closeness unmistakable. With their arms draped around each other in loving ownership, they implied that theirs was an exclusive club, no other members allowed, not even Max, it seemed.

How often does Max find himself doing this, looking at pictures of his dead wife? When his pain became too much did he have a laptop resting open nearby? Had he bookmarked the tragic stories, or does he look for his favorite photos, hoping to be reminded of happier times? Perhaps his favorite was the one of Rebekah in that red-checked sundress from Town & Country. Or maybe he revisited the Vanity Fair spread of them together over the years, Max handsome in forgettable tuxedos, Rebekah in various gowns, the most striking a harsh chartreuse that would look ugly on anyone else. Or were his favorites the ones in The New York Times Magazine, taken by a famous photographer when Max launched his state senate campaign, the caption “Our Future First Lady?” There was a snarky reference to her Russian roots, and how in her twenties she contemplated anglicizing the spelling of her name “to better fit into her adopted country.” The story described the Winters as being “low-profile for such a high-powered couple.” Rebekah said if Max won she would use her role to highlight causes close to her heart, like land stewardship and conservation, having fallen in love with the island’s untouched forest and Asherley itself. The family hoped to keep the island pristine and undeveloped, despite its being worth more than a hundred million dollars. Rebekah described her biggest accomplishment, besides her daughter, as restoring Asherley to its former glory, a project that took her the better part of a decade.