Chapter 22 #2
Mary didn’t seem offended, just quiet. She picked up a piece of pizza and devoted her full attention to it.
Anna watched her friend, the way she folded the little triangle before biting, the way her nose nearly touched the end of her food and how she didn’t even care.
The truth was that they hadn’t known each other for very long, and if you had to put one friendship up against the other, she was always going to take the lasting, resounding one, the friend who had been there for every twist and rumble of her life.
Those childhood days when she was stuck in her attic bedroom, grounded for one reason or another, sneaking onto the extension landline, coiling a telephone cord around her index finger, talking in whispers into the night so that her mother wouldn’t catch her.
When she met Denny, Di was the one she had called first. “I don’t know if it will last,” she said.
“It’s probably just a summer thing.” But Di told her to trust the sweet summer breeze and to drive out to Gin Beach in Montauk and to believe that love could last for longer than just the summer.
She believed Di when she told her that you could build a life and a love and a marriage from the scaffolding of those pink and hazy summer days.
Just kids, she had been thinking. But it’s only ever just kids, Di told her.
And Anna believed that because Anna wanted to have something to believe in.
“Do you think that maybe you’re just jealous of Di?” Anna said. She could feel bile rising in her throat. It was the wrong thing to say, or it was the right thing to say, or it was just a thing to say.
“If you have a question for me, just come out and ask it,” Mary said.
“I thought I just did.”
“I’m not jealous of you and Di.” Mary sighed and put her hands in her lap. “You know, if anything, I’m . . . as worried for myself as I am for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Anna asked.
“It means that I have kids, too. You’re not afraid of these women, but maybe you should be.”
“Then you can be afraid for both of us,” Anna said.
It sounded ridiculous, being afraid of Mimi Mar.
Being afraid of Di! If anything, Di had been irritated with Anna, but hardly in a dangerous way.
And anyway, that was a long time ago. Field hockey: a bust. Anna was in New York with an exciting life while Di was back at home, and if she had ever been jealous of the big life that Anna was living, well, she hadn’t exactly said so.
She didn’t want New York, she didn’t want the Hamptons, she didn’t want to be exceptional; that’s what she always said.
She only ever wanted to be comfortable. Anna never really spent much time thinking about what it was her friend did want; she took her at her word—but sitting in Vera, she did think about it, for just a minute.
“We can get the check,” she said. “I’m ready to go.
” She would pay. During their short friendship, she had already grown accustomed to the discomfort in Mary’s face when the bill came at more expensive restaurants, despite her husband’s job at Baupost in the city.
She watched Mary fumble for a wallet for just a second too long before relieving the tension.
“I’ve got it,” Anna said. “Let me get it.”
On the way home, it began to snow, an unexpected spray of flurries along Route 1.
By the time they reached Ipswich, the houses were already covered with a tidy first layer of snow, like frosting.
The crumb layer, the bakers called it. Anna was always surprised by how moved she was by an evening snow flurry, by how stark the beauty was.
You could see it a million times, that first cover of snow in darkness, and never tire of it.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Mary asked. The silence had all but consumed them, ever since dinner.
“Not really,” Anna said.
“I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I really didn’t mean . . .”
“It’s fine.”
The roads were all roads that she had driven down with Di a million times, smoking joints way back before weed was legal in Massachusetts, driving down back roads in a beat-up Volkswagen Golf in the late ’90s, speeding in the snow in winter, stopping just as the headlights hit a flicker of light in a deer’s eye, just in time to see a whole herd cross the road in the puddle-black of a winter’s night.
They had driven off the road one of those nights, lost their grip in the snow, looping too fast around a turn right around here, on a night not unlike this one.
With the car settled in a ditch, they called a friend on a flip phone and he hooked a tow hitch from his Jeep Wrangler onto the back of the car and flipped their car out like it was a little toy.
Back then, they had been having the time of their lives.
Wild. Untethered. Unattached. No consequences.
They worked as cocktail waitresses in the summer after college and tucked wads of cash into the black cloth aprons they wore around their waists and went out to the Thirsty Whale after work and played Golden Tee with the local boys and drank ice-cold Bud Lights and smoked Parliament Lights inside, because you could still do that then.
They drove home with one eye open, tracking the lines of the roads with the headlights, not sober, barely surviving, living off French fries and egg sandwiches and iced coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, keeping spare bathing suits and towels—it all smelled like mildew—in the car, even well into the fall, for drives out to Plum Island in summer.
It all jumbled together: fall, spring, summer, winter.
Anna had come back for one year after college, tumbled around before she got her life together again.
Going nowhere. Swearing she would get it together again.
And all that time, she knew Di as well as she knew herself, could see in her friend her own reflection, knew the disappointments and the thrills.
Or she thought she did. Looking at this same stretch of road all these years later, Anna was starting to wonder how much she really knew, how much she could trust about herself and about her memory, what was real and what was imagined.
For all these years, she had constructed a life around the people she knew and trusted, and now she was beginning to have her doubts.
They crossed into Hamilton. The snow was beginning to accumulate. Anna slowed down, watched the trees sway in the night wind.
“It’s pretty,” she said, mostly to herself.
Mary nodded in the dark. “I’ve always loved the snow at night.”
“They’ll cancel school tomorrow, I think.”
That much was probably true. A snow day.
Magical, maybe. A respite, like when she was young, a day unspooling without plans.
Pulling up to Mary’s house, Anna felt clear-headed again, reborn in a winter storm, a person full of possibility.
In the morning, all of this—a white world—would be sullied with footsteps and car tracks.
But now, it was still, perfect, clean. Mary opened the door, leaned in as if she was going to say something, thought better, raised her hand in a little wave.
She walked back toward her house and, when Anna looked up again, she was gone in a swirl of white.