Chapter 3
I met Laura Peabody the summer after I turned fourteen. Well, maybe met isn’t the right word. On a small, narrow island like Winthrop, eight miles from tip to tip, about a mile wide at its thickest, every face looks familiar. Even the ones you can’t put a name to.
So when the tall, skinny, dark-haired girl wandered up Poseidon Beach one afternoon in the middle of July and paused in front of me, I knew who she was, all right.
A shy smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I said.
“You’re Lucy Cooper, aren’t you? Mr. Cooper’s kid?”
The beach was one of Winthrop’s many small, mostly deserted stretches of half-sand, half-shingle where you could lie in the sun with a reasonable expectation of not having to deal with other people.
I lay on my stomach on a threadbare blue-and-white striped beach towel, reading my shabby paperback copy of Deathly Hallows for maybe the third time.
I kept the cover flat against the towel so she wouldn’t see it, because maybe Harry Potter wasn’t cool anymore if you were in your teens?
I didn’t know. I didn’t really feel American; I didn’t know what was cool and what wasn’t.
And Laura Peabody was a year older than I was, a year cooler.
“Yeah, I am.” I tried to make my voice sound as American as possible.
“Thought so. I’m Laura Peabody. I live over there? At Summerly?” She turned and pointed up the beach and across a marshy inlet, just before the shore rose up into the bluffs.
“Oh, yeah.” Like I didn’t know exactly who she was and where she lived. “I thought I recognized you.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“Sure.”
She sat down in the sand next to me and stretched out her long, tanned legs. She wore a pair of colorful board shorts beneath a bikini top the exact blue of a swimming pool. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted shell pink.
“I hear you live in Paris,” she said.
“Not anymore. My mom married an English guy about a year ago? So, London.”
“Paris. London. That’s so cool. I live in Dedham.” She turned on her side, facing me. “What are you reading?”
Reluctantly, I lifted the front cover.
“Oh my God, I love Harry Potter,” she said. “I just finished like my third read. I don’t even know what to read now, like everything else seems stupid. Like a copy of the real thing.”
“That’s so funny. This is my third read.”
We looked at each other and smiled for real this time, and from that second through the rest of the summer, Laura Peabody and I were hardly ever apart.
Beaching and bicycling, grabbing burgers at the Mo, playing croquet at the Club, hanging out at the weekly bonfires on Horseshoe Bay with the kids I had only seen from a distance—the tanned, confident offspring of the summer families.
She would sling her arm around my elbow and say This is Lucy, like we were a package deal, and the kids would make room for me on the sand and ask me about schools in England.
When I flew back home in August—Maman was pregnant with Pandora and lived with Uncle Sadiq in one of those gigantic villas in Holland Park, which she had just redecorated—Laura saw me off at the ferry.
We shared floods of tears, texted each other constantly, buddy-read dozens of books, and for the next four years, whenever I arrived on Winthrop in the second week of July, the minute school broke up, Laura sat waiting for me on the porch steps of Windward.
That fourth summer, the final summer, when the Volvo rolled up the driveway, she sprang to her feet and ran to open my door and throw her arms around me. Her whole face grinned—mouth, cheeks, eyes.
“Guess what?” she said. “My brother has the absolute hottest friend staying with us all month. His name is Ben. Ben Ressler.”
—
Twelve years later, Ben Ressler stands on my doorstep in the golden light of a September afternoon, holding a dog. Actual Ben, not a ghost. The shock of him nails me in place.
Punkin flies past my legs. “UN CHIEN! UN CHIEN!” she shrieks.
Ben looks down at Punkin’s skinny arms, stretched to his waist. “Hi, there. You must be Elise.”
I tug her back. “Take it easy, Punkin. This is not our dog.”
Ben grins. He’s grown a few wrinkles around his eyes, and his bulky frame seems—not smaller, exactly, but leaner. Lived in.
The eyes, though. Those eyes are the same pale, bleached blue against his auburn lashes. Color of a hazy July sky.
“Punkin,” he says. “I like it. My mom used to call me Punkin, when I was little.”
Punkin stares up at him, amazed. “You were little?”
“Hard to believe, right? It was a long time ago, trust me.” He transfers the dog to his left arm, juggling a small cardboard envelope, and holds out his hand. “Lucy Cooper. It’s been a minute. Ben Ressler.”
I take the hand. A warm, brief, secure handshake. Ben’s hand. I say cheerfully, “Ben. Of course. It’s good to see you.”
“Mr. Ressler,” says Punkin, in a voice barely under control, “may I please pet your doggie?”
The dog wriggles his tail so hard, it’s like the tail is wriggling the rest of him.
Ben looks at me. “Is it okay?”
“If it’s okay with the two of you.”
Ben crouches down and sets the dog free to lay his paws against Punkin’s chest and lick her face clean. She giggles deliriously and hugs him back. He is of no particular breed—about the size of a beagle, long brindle hair, outsized ears that flop at the tips.
“Will you look at that,” he says. “Maybe she smells like him.”
“Smells? Like who?”
He stands up slowly and removes his cap. What’s left of the grin disappears into his beard. “Your dad. I’m so sorry.”
His hair is shaggy, like he cuts it himself.
The trim beard is a few shades less fiery—the same subdued auburn as his eyebrows.
How calm I am, looking at that ginger hair.
Twelve years ago, my nerves would have been fizzling, standing this close to him.
So close I could reach out and touch the muscles of his forearm.
But I was a teenager then. All hormones and drama.
And he was—well, he was Ben. He was like a god.
“Thanks,” I say. “It was a shock.”
“I came to the service this morning. Just kind of low-key, in the back.”
“Thought I saw you lurking back there.”
“I wanted to pay my respects. He was a good guy. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not. I—I didn’t realize you two knew each other. I had no idea you were even back on the island, actually.”
He shifts his gaze to the corner of the porch. “Been kind of lying low at Summerly this past year. Caretaker lodge was empty. Sedge said I could stay there for a while. Doing some groundskeeping for them, earning my keep.”
“Sorry. You said Sedge invited you?”
“Yep. Anyhow, that’s how I met your dad. We ran into each other a lot. Hung out a bit. I was the one—I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the—about what happened, but I was the one who found him that morning. His clothes, I mean. On Poseidon Beach.”
“Wait a minute.” Reeling a little. “That was you?”
“I asked them to keep my name out of the report. Privacy and all.”
“And you two were hanging out together? All this time?”
“Crazy, right? He was a real kick, your dad. I’m guessing he didn’t mention me at all?”
“No. No, he didn’t say a word.”
Ben sticks his hands into his pockets. The baseball cap dangles from his thumb.
“I just wish I’d been there earlier, you know?
When I could’ve done something to help. By the time I reached the beach…
” He shakes his head. “I’m real sorry, Lucy.
I know you two weren’t that close anymore, but it’s hard. It’s hard losing someone.”
I fold my arms over my chest. “Can you tell me what happened?”
Ben sticks his cap back on his head and looks to his right, where the scrub lawn turns to meadow and billows out toward the sea.
The sun’s begun to set and the colors streak across the water.
“There’s not much to tell. I was out clearing some brush over by the beach roses for your dad—it was getting kinda overgrown over there—and Chief here, he started barking and ran down the path to the beach—”
The dog hears his name and lifts his head. He’s lying on his back while Punkin lovingly strokes his belly. She looks up too. “Maman, maman, pouvons-nous avoir un chien? S’il te plait? Je l’aime tellement.”
“Honey. English, please, okay? We have a guest.”
Punkin looks at Ben. “Sorry. I said I love him so much. I just want a dog of my own.”
He smiles. “That’s up to your mom, honey. But you’re welcome to come over and play with this guy, if you want. I’m just over the meadow, there.”
She stands up and runs to lean over the porch railing and squint through the dying light. “Right over there? Between the trees?”
“Yep. You can practically see it from here. Once the leaves are all off, you can wave to Chief from your window.”
“So we’re neighbors!”
“That’s right,” he says.
Chief bumps his head into the backs of Punkin’s legs. She turns and sits next to him, stroking his ears and murmuring in French.
Ben watches them. “Bilingual, huh? She’s pretty good. Though I guess that makes sense. You living in France and all.”
“I’ve always tried to speak English at home because she heard French everywhere else. It’s just when she gets emotional that she sort of defaults.”
“Hey, I get it. Dogs and girls. Big emotions there.” He turns back to me. “Anyway, I’m sorry to barge in on you like this. I’m sure you’re up to your eyeballs in—you know, all the things. But your dad left me something for you and I wanted to make sure you got it right away.”
“Left you something for me? I don’t understand.”
Ben offers his left hand, which holds a small cardboard envelope, the type you use to mail photographs. “Yeah, it’s kind of a funny thing, to be honest. Couple of days before he died, he knocked on my door and said to give this to you if anything happened to him.”
I stare at the envelope in his hand. “But I thought—I mean, that’s so strange. If anything happened to him? I don’t understand.”