Track 10 Up on the Roof
Track 10
Up on the Roof
Renee
“Did you get the eggs?” Renee Tucker, the bride-to-be, asked her oldest friend despite witnessing her dramatic entrance.
“I dropped the eggs,” Bea managed.
“Oh, that must have been embarrassing. Was it the last dozen?”
“Did you invite my sister to the wedding?”
“What? Of course not!”
“Well, she’s here, with a hanging bag.”
There was little reason to come to Fire Island with a hanging bag unless it was to attend a wedding.
“That can’t be. Sit down.” Renee pulled out a chair and poured Bea a glass of water.
“I think I could use something stronger.”
Matt came bounding down the stairs to say hello. It was obvious from the look on their faces and the way Bea had rushed in that something was up. Still, his and Bea’s visits hadn’t aligned in years, and he was delighted to see her.
“Matty!” Bea stood, clearly trying to refocus and match his enthusiasm.
“It’s just Matt now,” his mother corrected.
“I know, I know. Your mom sends me all your articles. I share them with my students sometimes. You are the perfect answer to the question, ‘What am I going to do with an English major?’?”
Her hands were shaking.
Renee poured her a glass of wine. She took a large gulp and fell back into a state of panic.
“I’ll kill my father if he set me up like this.”
“Bea thinks she saw Veronica in the market.”
“I don’t think I saw her. She’s here. My whole chakra is off.”
“I didn’t know you were a yogi,” Matt remarked, one eyebrow raised.
“I’m not. But I know I’m off-balance, and I know she’s here. She’ll be minutes behind me unless she stops to hook up with one of the market guys in the stockroom—again.” Bea couldn’t resist this cheap shot.
Matt blushed and smirked.
She added, “Sorry, Matty. My sister brings out the worst in me.”
Renee nodded in agreement, before asking Matt, “Did you hear anything from Shep about Veronica coming?”
“I didn’t, but we could see everything from the roof.”
“I’m not going on the roof four days before my wedding,” Renee protested.
“Yes, you are,” Bea ordered.
Bea absconded with the bottle of wine. Renee and Matt followed, and for a hot minute it felt as though the absurdity of them climbing out on the roof like three incorrigible teenagers would override the sister drama. It didn’t.
Matt grabbed his binoculars and instructed his mother and her friend on the best way out the window (flip onto your stomach so that your hands can hold the sill and wiggle out), and the best angle to sit (at the top of the roof slope), and ran a little drill on what to do when someone looked in their direction (lie flat, don’t move). It was obvious that he and, most likely, his best friend—and soon-to-be stepsister—Dylan did this often as kids.
“Where was I when you guys were hanging out on the roof?” Renee asked, grabbing the wine bottle from Bea and taking a big swig.
“I don’t know,” he said, motioning to Bea by cocking his head, “but her parents rarely wore swimsuits in their pool.”
They all laughed, perched together on the highest point of the roof like three birds on a wire. Until they saw her.
The three of them watched in silence as Veronica Silver sashayed down the block wheeling her Louis Vuitton suitcase and matching garment bag.
“I’m shocked she didn’t bat her blue eyes and get someone from the market to scoot her over in a golf cart,” Renee couldn’t resist saying. Realizing she wasn’t helping the situation, she pivoted. “Maybe she’s changed.”
Veronica seemed to look in their direction.
“Lay flat,” Matt barked with authority. They did.
“If she comes to your wedding, I swear I’m going to have her thrown overboard,” said Bea.
“She’s not coming to the wedding,” Renee assured her.
Matt surveyed the scene. “You can sit up now if you want. The coast is clear,” he said.
They watched Veronica arrive at the house diagonally across the street. With her back to them, she knocked on the door.
“Why is she knocking?” asked Renee. “It’s her house.”
“Neither of us thinks of it as our house,” said Bea.
The estranged sisters had grown up in a different, smaller house from the one their parents later built catty-corner to Renee’s. Their childhood home was now inhabited by Ben and Addison Morse and their two daughters: a sweet family of four. Ben had been married to Renee’s other best friend, Julia, who had tragically passed away years earlier. Renee and Julia had been summer sisters, just as she and Bea had been when they were young. It was hard to believe how long ago it was that Julia died—over twelve years now—but that was a whole other story.
Bea grabbed the binoculars from Matt as Shep opened the front door and greeted his younger daughter with open arms. It was obvious from his expression and reaction that her arrival was not a surprise to him. Bea’s face contorted in anger.
“He set me up.”
“Matty, can you maybe go over there and do some investigative reporting?” his mom asked.
“Sure.” Matt looked at the two women. “You should come inside, though.”
“I’m not going anywhere till this is cleared up,” Bea insisted.
Her eyes were crazy and her tone erratic. Crazy and erratic were not words one would normally use to describe Beatrix Silver. The roof may have been a bad idea, thought Matt, sharing a concerned look with Renee as he climbed back through the window.
Bea lay back down, staring at the clouds. Renee sensed she should leave her be—maybe give her time to come to her senses. She wondered if Bea was playing out in her head the thirty-year-old incident that had first come between her and Veronica, or the many unfortunate interactions—and missed interactions—that had since fueled their great divide. When they were young, Renee, as an only child, would sometimes feel jealous of Bea having a younger sister who worshipped her. She remembered Veronica as a sweet little kid, just happy to be included with the two older girls. She was always willing to be Skipper when they played Barbies or take the weird white-flavored Freeze Pop when there were only two blue raspberry or watermelon left. Things began to sour when Veronica became a teenager, until they famously imploded.
Renee knew the story by heart, as did most everyone on the island. Back in the summer of 1995, Beatrix had lost her virginity to the notorious lifeguard Chase Logan, and proceeded to fall head over heels. In her mind, it was much more than a summer fling between a college coed and a hot lifeguard. By the time July rolled into August, Bea was fantasizing about spending her life with Chase. She was sure it was true love. A couple of years older and wiser, Renee had warned her at the time that she was getting carried away, but she didn’t listen. She lay in bed at night dreaming of having his blond-haired, blue-eyed beach babies and raising them on Fire Island. She pictured herself teaching at the island’s only school, Woodhull Elementary, which served about forty kids from all over the island, while Chase did off-season construction for one of the local contractors. She imagined them having the perfect life, one that could only be dreamed up in the mind of a young woman in love for the first time, happy to ignore that there were more red flags with this lifeguard than you saw on the roughest day on the ocean.
As the August days waned, leaving everyone scratching their heads over where the summer had gone, Beatrix had decided she wanted to give Chase something special to remind him of her over the winter. They hadn’t yet had that long-distance relationship conversation that she had heard couples have at summer’s end, and she figured that gifting him a token of her affection would be a good segue to “the talk.” She went to town to buy him a surfboard pendant on a leather rope, which had become the hot accessory on the island. The artist who created them, a New York City schoolteacher named Kenny Goodman, had recently opened a little shop that was quickly dubbed the Cartier of Fire Island. A constant presence at the beach and a man who knew everything and everyone, Kenny helped her choose one of his silver surfboard charms with a heart carved into it.
“I’d like to inscribe it,” she said.
“OK, to whom?” he asked.
When she told him, he looked at her funny and tried to dissuade her from having “B.S. C.L.” carved onto the face of the charm.
“It’s not returnable when you do that,” he warned. They went back and forth about it until Kenny gave in. The interaction was odd, Bea thought, but she had no idea why.
She wrote a beautiful card filled with her feelings and dreams for them both and set out to find Chase at the big end-of-year bonfire on the beach.
“Haven’t seen him,” his best friend told her.
“He went home,” the one kid who didn’t know the real deal informed her.
She practically skipped to his house in the next town. She was so excited to give him the necklace.
Ocean Beach was even more of a bungalow colony than Bay Harbor, with many of its small beach cottages dating back to the 1930s. Chase spent his summers in one such cottage with his mom and older brother. It was his grandmother’s house, but she’d been living in a nursing home on the mainland, close to where Chase and his family lived in the off-season.
Bea let herself in, which was common local practice, and headed right to his bedroom.
Beatrix was the last one to know that her sister was screwing her boyfriend. Yes, even Kenny Goodman had gotten word of the betrayal. She threw the necklace at him and ran from the house in tears. She never had the chance to confront her sister in person, because Veronica stayed away until Beatrix went back to college a few days later.
And that was officially the end of Bea and V.