Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
Tansy threw a boil on the Saturday, two nights after the charter, which is not a thing you schedule so much as a thing that happens to you, and I know this because I tried to schedule it and was overruled by a woman holding a colander.
I tried, God help me, to be useful. I asked Tansy if she had a head count.
Tansy looked at me the way you’d look at a person who’d asked the ocean for a reservation.
“Baby,” she said, not unkindly, “we cook till it’s gone and then we cook the next thing.
That’s the count.” And she handed me the colander, which I understood to be both a job and a sentence, and I took it down to the waterline and stood in the warm dark holding a colander, supervising nothing, for the first time in possibly a decade.
You learn things about people around a fire that the daylight keeps from you.
I learned that Dani, who I’d known for eighteen years, could sing.
Not perform — sing, low and unbothered, harmony lines under whatever Earl’s nephew was picking on a guitar held together with a hose clamp, and she did it without any apparent awareness she was doing it, as she does everything, and when I caught her at it she stopped, embarrassed, and I felt like I’d walked in on something private, which I suppose I had.
I learned that Cam, who had spent the whole flight from Lisbon being magnificent at me, got quiet near a fire — that the volume was a thing she ran on purpose, a generator she kept going so nobody would hear the engine underneath, and that when she let it idle, for a minute, watching the flames, she looked like a woman who had outrun every root anybody ever offered her and was beginning, somewhere she’d never admit to, to wonder what it would have cost to stop.
And I learned what Greer looked like when she was home.
That was the one that got me. I had known Greer corporate — sharp, fast, the best read of a balance sheet I ever saw — and I had known her wrecked, the year everything came apart and she limped down here to lick her wounds.
I had not known her like this: barefoot in the sand with a beer she wasn’t drinking, arguing with Boone about a tide, greeted by name by every single soul who came down to the fire, woven so completely into a place that you could not have told, looking at her, that she’d ever lived anywhere else.
She had what I had driven four hundred miles without knowing I was looking for.
She had a where. And she’d built it, improbably, out of a dead woman’s ice cream stand and a refusal to be sensible, in the exact year I’d have bet money she would come apart for good.
“You’re doing the math again,” Cam said, appearing at my elbow with two plates.
“I can see it. You’re standing at a beach party costing out Greer’s happiness.
” She put a plate in my free hand, the one not holding the pointless colander.
“Eat. You’re allowed. Nobody’s going to revoke your competence if you eat a shrimp without a plan. ”
She stayed beside me, though, instead of working the party the way Cam works a party, and after a while she said, watching Greer laugh at something Boone had said, “I could never do it, you know. What she did.” It came out quieter than Cam says anything, the generator down to an idle.
“Stop. Pick a place and just — stop, and let it have you. I’ve started two companies and sold them both the second they got boring, which is the second they got real, and I left Jo?o on a curb in Lisbon with a ring in his pocket because he wanted to build me a house, Brooke, an actual house, with rooms, that you stay in.
” She ate a shrimp. “Everybody thinks I’m the free one.
You all look at me like I’m the one who got away clean.
And I look at Greer barefoot in the sand getting called by her name by forty people, and I think — she’s the one who got away.
I just got out. Those aren’t the same, and it took me until about this exact fire to know it. ”
I did not have a plan for Cam being sad, because Cam is never sad, Cam is the weather that happens to other people’s sadness, and I stood there holding a shrimp and a colander and did the only thing I have ever seen actually work, the thing the island had been doing to me for two weeks: I didn’t fix it.
I bumped her shoulder with mine, the way Sophie does to me, and I said, “Well. You’re not on a curb in Lisbon tonight.
You’re at a fire.” And Cam laughed, the volume coming back up, the engine catching, and said “God, listen to you, two weeks down here and you’re dispensing porch wisdom,” and turned to go ruin some poor fisherman’s evening — but she’d said it, and I’d heard it, and I filed it somewhere that wasn’t a column, next to all the other things this island kept handing me that I didn’t yet know what to do with.
The shrimp were very good. I want that in the record, because of everything I am about to say, I want it understood that the shrimp were genuinely, transcendently good, peeled hot off a newspaper with my fingers, salt and Old Bay and the specific sweetness of something that was in the water that morning.
I ate them standing up, in the dark, with my oldest friends and a colander I had abandoned to the tide, and somewhere around the third one I stopped narrating the evening to myself and simply had it, which is a thing I had not done, I realized, since before Sophie could walk.
It did not last. These things never last, with me; the lists come back on.
But for the length of a paper plate of shrimp on a dark beach, I was not managing one single thing, and I caught Dani watching me have it, and she didn’t say anything, she just nodded, the way she’d nodded at a fixed door, the small acknowledgment of a craftsman watching a stuck thing briefly come loose.
And then Hollis came down to the fire.
He came as he comes everywhere, unhurried, having heard there was a pot, and he nodded at Tansy, took a plate, and folded himself onto a piece of driftwood at the edge of the light, slightly apart, watching the water do nothing, which even at a party is his favorite thing to watch.
I was aware of him on the edge of the firelight the way you’re aware of a dropped stitch, a small persistent wrongness in an otherwise finished thing.
We’d had the charter two nights before — the gold, the dolphins, the word wife dropped in the dark and left there to send its rings out — and I had spent the days since being aggressively normal about him and had succeeded, I felt, completely.
“There’s your captain,” Cam said, following my eyes, delighted, the whole generator roaring back to life. She’d spent the entire charter calling him “the one who requested dolphins” and had been, she informed me, in love with him since he refused to produce any. “Brooke. Brooke. You went gray.”
“I did not go gray.”
“You went the color of the underside of a fish.” She was beaming. “This is the best night of my life. Don’t look at him. You’re looking at him. Stop looking at him and tell me everything.”
I did not tell her everything. I told her there was nothing, and I served myself another plate of shrimp I didn’t need as cover, and across the fire Hollis lifted his chin at me, once, a greeting and nothing more, and went back to the water — and the maddening thing, the thing I carried home and did not examine, was that the not-being-pursued was so much louder than pursuit.
Every man I had ever known wanted something from me, and announced it, and a man who sat at the edge of a fire wanting nothing and simply let me be at a party was the single most disorienting thing on that beach, more than the colander, more than the shrimp, more than my own oldest friend looking happy in a place I was beginning, against my will and every projection I owned, to want.
We stayed until Tansy hosed the fire and the stars came out hard the way they only do where there’s no town to argue with them.
Walking back up the boardwalk, sandy and full and briefly unguarded, Greer hooked her arm through mine and said, “You don’t have to fix anything here, you know.
That’s the part I keep wanting to tell you.
Down here you’re allowed to just — be one of the people at the fire.
” And I said I knew that, which was a lie, and she knew it was a lie, and she let me have it anyway, because the deck rule holds even off the deck: the heavy thing waits until you’re ready to hand it over, and the wit, the shrimp, and the fire get the first night, always, by law.