Chapter 2
I drive around in circles for too long, and by the time I feel ready to face Henry, there is no space left on PT’s street, or the street before that, or the one before that.
I park in the lot for the science building, an almost-too-long walk from PT’s waterfront painted Victorian at the edge of campus.
For a while, when PT talked about his lake house, I assumed the Victorian was the house he meant.
But when Henry and I became a couple toward the end of sophomore year, he explained that when PT said he was going to the lake house, he meant the one located on the shores of Lake Wanika, a private community in the Adirondacks, about four hours west of the colleges, to which Henry’s and Campbell’s families also belong.
I was envisioning a cushy chalet with snow-covered eaves until Henry brought me there and introduced me to the curious nuances of East Coast generational wealth.
The cabins were only accessible by boat, and they were humble, sure, but not without antique Turkish rugs on the floors and thoughtful finishes in the kitchen.
There was limited electricity by design.
Just enough to power some interior lights and the fridge, and even that they could only run a few hours a day.
That was the first time I realized that not only will wealthy people pay to live like they’re poor, but they’ll call it a vacation too.
The front door to PT’s home-home is propped open to welcome mourners, and at the threshold time collapses in on itself.
I can see straight back to the patio doors that open to a private dock where PT’s wife used to keep their sailboat shrink-wrapped in winter.
Sarah was the coach of the girls’ crew team, and the foyer was usually jammed with rowing shoes that clipped into racing shells.
During the pandemic, when my husband and I acquired a Peloton along with every other intially optimistic workaholic in the country, I would look down at my feet in my red-and-black cycling shoes and think of all the evenings I stepped out of my snow boots in this foyer.
PT and Sarah used to host movie nights, usually between Thanksgiving and Christmas when PT would receive DVD copies of either movies that had been in theaters but weren’t available to rent yet or, even more exotic, movies that had not yet come to theaters.
Now that I’m a member of all the guilds—actor, director, writer—I get them every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas too, though now instead of DVDs they send you QR codes to scan.
PT’s dog, a tubular, squat thing already memorialized in the brass doorstop next to my foot, throws back his head and howls as an ambulance races north on Main.
The house is packed with people, but for a moment the grim revelry wanes as everyone listens to the dog lose his mind with small, sad smiles.
The irony that the tragedy is already here.
The president of the colleges notices me, comes over, and embraces me with open arms. We exchange condolences for the various ways we get to call this our loss.
“Professor Toner was our longest-serving member of the faculty,” the president tells me.
For a moment we stare silently at a photograph of PT and Sarah on their wedding day at the courthouse down the street.
Sarah was fifteen years younger than PT, and normally that sort of thing irks me, but there was something about the pair of them that looked right together.
Sarah was a stout woman with muscular legs and a big, booming voice, messy topknot, and chewed-off nails.
Even on her wedding day she did not have a manicure.
“They were happy,” the president says now. The grief on his face is acute, and I look around the room at all the people gathered here, and it soothes me to see that you don’t need to have children to matter deeply to people.
I am introduced to a trustee in a sweat-wicking golf vest whose daughter is a fan, and on our way to the bar, we collect the director of financial aid, and then at the bar another trustee in a baseball hat.
I still remember the first time I was the only woman in a standing conversation with all men in a professional setting.
It was the moment I realized I’d gone from being someone recognizable to someone who had financial influence, and that those two things were decidedly not the same and I’d been an amateur to think they were.
I had swayed on my feet, dizzied like I’d woken up in a different body, Freaky Friday style.
I don’t dare look around, but my private hope is that Henry is watching me float through the room like a lightning bug, invisible until my sudden flare attracts yet another board member holding a mason jar.
My captors deposit me in the dining room, where Corrine Holland is sedating herself with a clear, deadly drink.
“Faye, wow,” she says with bland surprise, though she must have known I was coming.
“It’s good to see you.” Corrine is the lucky little girl who married Campbell straight out of college, an aloof blonde who eschews makeup in favor of a tan, a real one that has prematurely crinkled the skin beneath her eyes.
She is tall and triangle-shaped, like an Olympic swimmer, and nowhere near as good-looking as Campbell.
I might ascribe this to Campbell’s decency—the sort of guy who falls for what’s on the inside—only that Corrine is a rarefied bitch.
“You too,” I say, and then we stall out, wondering if we should hug, and whatever we decide we wait too long and miss the moment. We stand there, smiling unpleasantly at each other, until Tookie comes bounding through the room to save us.
“Mom,” Tookie pants. He looks like he’s been running around outside, screaming in that way children do that could mean they’re having fun or someone needs to dial 911. “Where’s Dad?”
“I don’t know, Tooks.”
“But he has my wand.”
Corrine stares at Tookie’s grass-stained knees, chewing hard on a piece of ice. “Have you seen Uncle Henry?”
Uncle Henry. My pelvis throbs like an open wound.
“He’s in the kitchen.”
“He’s probably with him.”
Tookie dashes off. “His wand?” I say. “Is he into magic?”
“It’s his lacrosse stick,” Corrine says with a snort. “He’s not very good. He used to have blond hair,” she adds, apropos of nothing. Here she takes out her phone and begins to show me images of Tookie from when he was first born. “He was the most stunning baby.”
“Beautiful,” I agree, and then I ask her to show me more, but what I’m really doing is studying the wistfulness in her face as she gazes at her child before he entered his awkward stage, and I’m trying to commit the moment to memory because, of all the things I do, I consider myself a writer first and the steal never stops.
“Anyway.” Corrine puts her phone away and rolls her eyes at herself. Enough of my mom shit. “I haven’t seen you in forever. Congratulations on, well,” she laughs, uncharitably, “everything.”
“Thank you,” I say in the same half-assed tone that she used to congratulate me.
“I keep meaning to go back and watch your show,” she says. “It came out right when Tookie was born, and I could barely keep my eyes open. Nothing personal—I missed like three seasons of The Bachelorette. It’s still streaming, right?”
It is. On the big one. But I wave her off.
“It won’t be your cup of tea.” The show is about a group of young women trying to make their way in Los Angeles.
They live in seedy first apartments and date unkind men and work soul-crushing assistant hours that leave them with vitamin D deficiencies.
It was a full-scale cultural phenomenon because it touched on something true, though not for everyone, and certainly not for someone like Corrine, who arrived at the colleges more or less betrothed to Campbell, her boyfriend since freshman year of boarding school.
Not that long ago, my interior designer dragged me to some art show—I have a staircase landing with a blank wall begging for a statement piece that can be seen from the front door—and I got to talking with the artist and discovered she had grown up with Corrine.
Does she still write? the artist had asked me, and for a moment I was sure there had to be a mix-up, something to do with Corrine’s maiden name, that we were not in fact speaking about the same person, but the artist had been resolute.
Corrine Holland was the editor in chief of their boarding-school literary magazine, and not only that, but her father published the Newport Daily, Rhode Island’s oldest newspaper, and her mother was their art critic.
That’s a shame, the artist said when I told her that I never knew Corrine to be a writer.
I think she met Campbell and decided she wanted a different kind of life.
Really, it’s less that my show isn’t Corrine’s cup of tea and more that she does not want it to be.
“You might be right,” Corrine agrees, no offense taken. “But you know who loved it?”
I stare at her indifferently.
“My brother. Who is demanding we bring you to Sig Phi after this.”
“Oh God,” I say with a shudder. “How can he live at Sig Phi when he’s only twelve years old?”
Corrine nods in a commiserating way. “We got old, Faye.”
It must be something children do to you, make you feel like your time is over and theirs has just begun.
Because I don’t feel old at all. I’m in it, this is my time, and what floors me is the people—the person, really—who is watching time bleed me dry like that is his kink.
To waste me. Maybe, partly, that’s why I came.