Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
brUNO
Somehow, we’ve ended up on the small forward deck, where I rarely spend time, both in bathrobes.
Hers is four sizes too big and she is swimming in it and it’s white and she keeps cinching the belt, and I want to carry her back to bed, but she’s intent on having breakfast out here. It’s her favorite deck.
I would’ve inspected it when I bought this yacht, but it’s possible I never returned.
Could that be right? But why would I have? It’s smaller than the aft deck on the other end of the yacht, with a small table and chairs setup and a few loungers. A little bit cozier; I suppose that’s the kind of thing that Kelsey likes.
She sips her coffee. “I can’t believe you don’t breakfast out here all the time. It’s unbelievably beautiful.”
“A ways up that way is a shipping lane.”
“Oh my God. Please. Is that the kind of thing you learn in military school?”
“Shipping lanes? No, that’s the kind of thing you learned from living on the ocean.”
She looks thoughtful. “What was it like growing up at a boarding school like that?”
“It was like being raised by wolves,” I say.
“In what way?”
“A lot of rules. A lot of drills. The coffee was terrible.”
Annie appears with a tray of fruit and pastries that turn out to be rosemary blueberry scones. She has folded the napkins into some kind of shape—a bird, I think. Kelsey makes a big fuss over them and the fact that the captain just found out he’s going to be a contestant on Jeopardy next November.
Kelsey is thrilled. “You have to watch him!” she says after Annie leaves. “You’re going to have to get Sadie to hook you up for it. You could watch it with the crew!”
“That’s not something I’ll be doing.”
“Okay, grump meister.”
It’s the kind of thing she would do; she’d watch it with the crew. There’d be popcorn and beer.
“After I leave, are you going to snap it all back?”
“Of course,” I joke.
“No!”
She throws a scone crumb at me, and I feel myself smile. Since when do I like having scone crumbs thrown at me?
I don’t care about what snaps back and what doesn’t. My mind is on Kelsey and how I don’t want this to end. I want her in my life even though I don’t do things like have women in my life. Or have people in my life really. I don’t even know how.
“How are you doing?” It’s such an insipid little question that people ask each other, but I find I want to know. “With the family thing, I mean. How are you doing with it?”
She sighs and looks out at the water. “It’s devastating. To be honest.”
“I can imagine.” This is a lie. I don’t have either of my parents in my life, and I like it that way, and I don’t care that my brothers think the worst of me.
“They don’t believe in me—that’s the part that keeps hitting me. Not that they were wrong about the tiara—I mean yes, that, but it’s bigger. They don’t know me. They’ve been looking at me for thirty-some-odd years, and they have no idea who I am.”
I say nothing. I’ve learned this week that if I say nothing, she keeps going.
“And then there’s this weird sense of relief underneath.
Because so many things were wrong at that wedding, and I explained them all away, but it really didn’t add up.
Nobody even expressed any regret for all the time we lost together.
Well, nobody except me. I’m glad it all makes sense now because I felt a little bit like I was taking crazy pills. ”
She’s looking at the horizon, hair shifting in the breeze.
“And Granny Ernie,” she says. “I think she really wanted me to be there, but to force everybody into a lie. What did she think was going to happen? I guess I’m glad that I know now, but it hurts to actually face the fact that they don’t love me or maybe even trust me, especially my mom and dad.
These people who raised me, who I grew up with.
At least I’m not sitting around waiting for them to invite me back for Christmas or for Danielle and me and our husbands to go on boat outings together, which was a sort of stupid dream of mine. ”
“That was a dream of yours?”
“Yes. And then later on, we do boating things with our families. Specifically, a big catamaran. You know how you get those pictures of your future life?”
I give her a vague smile. I don’t have a lot of pictures like that. Other people do?
She says, “Having your family in smoldering ruins is a kind of freedom, I suppose. But it hurts.”
I’m amazed at how she can just say it and accept it. My family has been in smoldering ruins since I was seven, and I never told a soul. And I never will.
“What if they figured it out?” I ask. “Your innocence. Say they found proof it was somebody else, and they apologized. I know it’s too late, but would you like it just so they could see how wrong they are?”
She narrows her eyes. “Like would it feel good to have them come crawling to me apologizing and be vindicated?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I don’t want that family. I really meant what I said at the hotel—if they need proof to believe me after I told them over and over that I didn’t do it, and they were willing to playact to my face for money, making a fool out of me, I really have lost them.
And so what if I show them some proof that it wasn’t me?
And I get invited back to Christmas again and all.
Is that what I want? These people who supposedly know me think I’m the kind of person who would rob the family and destroy a beautiful heirloom for money and then play me for a fool.
And the sad thing is, I know I would be tempted to make myself believe it’s real.
You saw me this weekend, how bad I wanted to believe.
I don’t want to be somebody who makes herself believe in bullshit. ”
I reach out and settle my hand over hers, admiring the hell out of her. I should tell her so, but I don’t know how. Maybe I’m not equipped for any of this. I spent a long time believing in bullshit myself. Specifically about my mother.
“What’s the opposite of a vote of confidence?” she asks. “A vote of inadequacy? That’s what needing the report would be for me. A vote of not believing in myself. A vote of not being worth anything.”
She goes back to her coffee and scones.
First chance I get, I wander casually to the railing. I pull out my phone and I text Laney Waller.
Kill the investigation. I’ll still pay the full amount.
It takes her less than ten seconds to reply.
Report filed this morning.
So Sadie has it. I don’t need it. I don’t want it.
I reach out to Sadie and tell her I don’t need the report. I instruct her to pay Laney the full amount and discard the thing.
I wanted to punish the family for not believing her, but I wasn’t thinking about Kelsey at all. How can her family not see her heart? I can see it loud and clear. I won’t be the one to give her the vote of not believing in her.
“Work fire?” she says when I come back.
“You’re worth it to me,” I say.
“What?”
“You’re worth it. To me. A lot. You’re worth everything. Anyone who can’t see that deserves whatever misery they’ve got coming.”
She climbs out of her chair and into my lap and arranges herself across my thighs.
“The misery of not having me in their lives?” she says. “Having to eat their scones without me there throwing the crumbs at them?”
“How can anyone endure it?”
She’s smiling, not quite a joke-smile. “So you don’t think I’m too much?”
“Too much of what?”
“You know like the phrase, ‘too much,’ as in, she’s a lot. She’s too much. Because I know I can be a lot. It’s kind of a growth area for me.”
“Who would think that?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. A lot of people think it.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
She smiles happily. “Believe it. A few of them have even told me that to my face.”
“Who the fuck would say that?”
“That’s not important. I’m just giving you an example for illustrative purposes.”
“Whoever said that,” I hear myself growl, “is a fucking idiot.”
She snickers. “That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.”
“I’m serious. If anything, I want double of you. Or triple.”
“I feel like we’re getting into dirty fantasy territory.”
I kiss her. It’s soft and brief, and her forehead stays on mine for a while after, and I can feel her breathing.
“Same,” she says, after a minute.
“Same what?”
“Can’t get enough of you,” she says. “I’ll take extras. When this is over, I want to see you again. But you live on a yacht.”
“You think I can’t figure that out? We’ll do dinner next week. What do you think?”
She’s into it. We’ll look at calendars.
“Is the water cold out here?” she asks apropos of nothing.
“It’s not freezing but it’s June. Not exactly tropical.”
“Is there a way to get our feet in it? Like drag our feet from the back or something?”
“You know this isn’t a rowboat, right?”
“But isn’t there a ladder or something? What good is the ocean if you can’t even touch it? It might as well be a movie screen.”
I look out over the water. It’s calm, with gentle swells, but it’s still the ocean.
I send the captain a text.