Island Girls: A Novel Read online

  “I always thought you were treated like Cinderella in that household. After the babies were born.”

  Meg laughed. “You did? I guess you’re right. But with sickly twins, Mom needed the help, and I was crazy about those little boys when they were babies. When they got older, not so much. They were all about each other, their own exclusive club. Then I got sent to boarding school, and at first I felt hurt by that, so shoved away.… That was a couple of years after The Exile.” The lightness of laughter fell away from her face as her memories returned with their burden of sorrow. “I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. That no one wanted me.” Tears filled her eyes. “Shit, I hate remembering those days.”

  “I’m sorry I brought it all up,” Arden apologized.

  “It’s okay. Boarding school turned out to be good for me. I made some really close friends, and I learned I was hardly alone as a discard. At least half the kids I knew were from divorced homes. A lot of the kids whose parents were married didn’t want them around, either. They were too busy traveling or working or something. I fit right in. I found my own little club.” Meg’s smile returned. “And I discovered I was smart. I hadn’t known that before. I got a scholarship to Smith. That was just cool beyond measure; I can’t begin to tell you what that did for me. For one thing, I didn’t have to rely on Tom for a penny. Dad helped financially, of course. I worked waiting tables all summer, so I had enough money for clothes and stuff. I got a fellowship at Lesley University for my master’s in English lit, and I started teaching at Sudbury College shortly after that. I’ve always been a hard worker. Independent.”

  “You should be proud,” Arden told her.

  “I wish …,” Meg began, then stopped and started over. “Mom and Tom and the boys came to my high school and college graduations. I think just that much was hard for them. The twins were a handful as children. Not bad boys, but active and mischievous.” Meg smiled smugly. “They gave quiet old Tom a real workout. When they were in high school, they got into a lot of trouble—not serious stuff, but wrecking cars, skipping classes, that sort of thing. Now they’re in college and doing well. They’ve settled down.”

  “Well, I’m glad for your mother’s sake.”

  “I called Mom about our July Fourth party. She can’t come. She and Tom have become social butterflies. With all the kids gone, they’re partying with their own gang. She sounds happy and busy.”

  “So there you are,” Arden said. “We know of one good man. He might not have been a good stepfather, but he wasn’t abusive, and he’s been good to his sons, and faithful to his wife.”

  Meg laughed scornfully. “That’s a sad definition of a good man.”

  “Nobody gets everything,” Arden pointed out. “Someone told me once to make a list of the ten things I want most in life. If I get the top three, I should shut up and be thrilled.”

  Jenny returned to the table. “Hmm. Interesting. What are your top three things? Husband, children, and what else?”

  “Are you kidding? Husband and children?” Arden tossed the dish towel down and threw herself into a chair. “No children for me, thank you very much. I’m thirty-four. I decided a long time ago, when my father left me to marry Cyndi and be Meg’s dad, that I’d never inflict the kind of pain on a child that I had dumped on me.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Meg said softly. She looked at Arden, whose perfect face was momentarily marred by bitter lines, and wanted to comfort her. “We had a lot of fun when we were little girls, remember? You were really nice to me when you came for weekends.”

  Arden looked surprised. “I was?”

  “Don’t you remember? You brought me so many baby dolls—”

  “Yeah, but they were secondhand. Plus, I didn’t like dolls—”

  “That doesn’t matter. You gave them to me. I was a little girl. It was a huge thing for me to get them! You brought me Barbie and Ken, and you gave me all the clothes you’d outgrown. Because you were three years older, I thought you were the coolest thing around. I’d wear your clothes even if they didn’t fit. And you invented the best games. Remember our secret clubhouse behind the furnace in the basement?”

  “I do.” Arden burst into laughter. “Remember our babysitter, Patsy?”

  “Oh, gosh, I’d forgotten about her. She was awesome! Remember how when Mom and Dad went out to dinner or something, she’d dress us up in stuff she brought over and put on music and we’d do music videos? Remember when Patsy brought over all those bangles—”

  “Walk like an Egyptian!” Meg warbled, undulating her arms.

  “ ‘Everybody Have Fun Tonight’!” sang Arden. “We thought George Michael was so hot.”

  Meg cackled, “You wanted to marry him when you grew up.”

  “Okay, remember, I was, what, eight? Nine?”

  “Bon Jovi,” Meg crooned. “The band, the man, the hair!”

  “I had a crush on Seal,” Jenny confessed.

  “Everyone had a crush on Seal,” Meg said.

  “Then suddenly it was all Alanis Morissette and people whining and complaining,” Arden remembered. “What happened?”

  “We grew up,” Meg sighed. “What was that song she sang? ‘You Oughta Know’?”

  Arden snorted. “Well, now we know.”

  Not wanting to be left out, Jenny offered gently, “The three of us did have one nice summer together.”

  “We did?” Arden looked doubtful.

  “Yeah,” Meg agreed. “That first year we were here. Before the second bad year. We had fun.”

  “Wait, are we on the same planet?” Arden asked. “That first year, you and Jenny went into a teenybopper bonding thing and spent all your time painting your nails and sneaking into my room to try on my lip gloss. Then Justine would get mad at me for letting you wear it.”

  “I kind of remember that.” Jenny planted her elbows on the table, resting her chin in her hands. “I know you had to babysit us a lot so Dad and Mom could go to parties and stuff. But that was always fun. We played statues in the backyard.”

  “Right!” Meg said. “Remember, Arden, you’d swing us around and we’d land in these ridiculous positions?”

  “Some nights, especially if there was a storm, we’d play Spook. Meg and I would hide and you’d go through the house looking for us—”

  “With special sound effects,” Meg giggled. “You’d make creepy voices, Arden, and stomp hard like a monster coming up the stairs. I was really scared.”

  Arden grinned. “Yeah, I remember that. You two would scream like crazy when I found you.”

  “The show we did for Dad!” Jenny chirped. “Remember? We wore grass skirts and plastic leis over our bathing suits and did the hula to—gosh, what was that song?”

  Meg shrieked with laughter. “ ‘The Dock of the Bay’!”

  “Oh man, I remember now,” Arden said. “Michael Bolton! His hair was longer than yours, Meg.”

  “But the song is so good,” Jenny said. “And our dance was wicked cool.”

  Meg hummed a few notes of Otis Redding’s quietly emotional song. Arden sang along, swaying in time, lifting her hands in a drifting motion.

  Their voices faded. For a moment the kitchen was silently alive with memories.

  “We told Dad we were island girls,” Jenny said softly.

  “Island girls.” Meg nodded, a smile turning her face young. “Yeah. I remember.”

  “He loved our dance,” Arden recalled. “He smiled so much, and when we told him we were island girls, he got all choked up.”

  “We made him happy then,” Meg realized.

  Again, they were all quiet, lost to memory.

  Jenny spoke up. “You’re right. We were all happy that summer. You know what else? The night of the meteors!”

  “Oh yeah,” Meg said. “That was, to use the word properly, awesome.”

  Arden sat for a moment, searching her mind.

  “How can you forget that?” Meg demanded of Arden. “You sneaked us out of the house! W
e went down to the beach and lay on the sand and watched all these meteors whizzing through the sky over our heads.”

  “It was like being in a spaceship,” Jenny breathed. She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “We have meteor showers every August, but that year it was sensational. I think I really began to believe in God that very moment.”

  “Yeah,” Meg said, “because so clearly something else is out there, it was like messages written in star dust.”

  “And, Arden.” Jenny opened her eyes and sat up. “We wouldn’t have seen it without you. Remember? Mom said we couldn’t stay up till midnight; that’s when the showers began. So you stayed awake, and you tiptoed into my room and woke me.”

  “Me, too,” Meg added.

  “We didn’t wear shoes. We stayed in our pajamas. We crept down the stairs—” Jenny shot a conspiratorial glance at Meg, and they both flushed with laughter at the memory of disobeying the strict Justine.

  “We went out the back door. We didn’t make a sound until we were a block away from the house.” Meg put her hands to her mouth, caught in a warp of old gleeful guilt.

  Jenny snorted. “Yes, and then we laughed so hard we almost peed our pants!”

  “Let’s go out for a walk now!” Meg suggested.

  Arden rolled her eyes. “Duh. It’s not August. No meteors.”

  “We don’t have to have meteors. We can just look at the lights of town and the lights on the boats in the harbor. Maybe have an ice cream cone.”

  “Good idea,” Jenny said, standing up. “I’d love some ice cream.”

  Arden hesitated for one long second, then smiled. “Me, too.”

  THIRTEEN

  Okay, she was an idiot, no doubt about it. Arden ripped open a new bag of Fritos with such fury the chips exploded all over the table.

  Pride goeth before a fall, and her pride had sent her tumbling head over heels into disaster.

  “Ernest,” she’d invited, so sweetly, so sure of herself, “please come down to our Fourth of July party. I want you to meet some people. Some people with fab summer houses they want me to simplify on my show. You’ve got to meet them.”

  She’d wanted the Channel Six program director to see her in action, to get it, how good she was at convincing the hotshots and luminaries who summered on the island to allow her to redo a room in their house and let it be shown on Simplify This. She wanted Ernest to realize that no new kid on the block could hope to compare with her.

  “I’m busy that weekend, Ard. You know how the wife ties me up with social engagements. But tell you what, I’ll send Zoey down. She can learn the ropes straight from the horse’s mouth. Ha-ha, talk about a mixed metaphor.”

  “Oh.” Arden thought fast. “We don’t have any room for her to stay in the house, Ernest.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll have the station put her up at a hotel.”

  So there she was, the size-zero darling, flitting around the backyard, batting her long, dark lashes at all the men, pretending intense fascination at their conversation and allowing them to check out her perky cleavage.

  “She’s sweet,” Meg had said earlier, when the Independence Day party started.

  “You think everyone’s sweet,” Arden had muttered.

  Meg blinked at Arden’s harsh response. The three women had gotten along so well all day Sunday, getting ready for the party, making lists, double-checking supplies. They’d baked cheesecakes and topped them with strawberries, grapes, and blueberries in a red, white, and blue design. They’d gotten hysterical as they attached tiny lights to the hedges that walled in the backyard, only to discover they were miles away from any electric supply. Jenny had jumped in her Jeep and zipped off to buy heavy-duty extension cords. Then they’d had to put the tables over the cords so no one would trip on them, and that threw off their carefully devised layout. They’d worked like a team, excited and just a bit overwhelmed by all the people who’d accepted their casual telephone invitations.

  Arden’s best friend, Serena, came down for three days, sleeping on the living room sofa, keeping her clothes in Arden’s room. Meg’s colleague Liam Larson—blond, handsome, and, Arden suspected, from a wealthy family—traveled to the island and happily used the sofa in the den because Jenny’s friends, James and Manuel, were staying in the front bedroom, the master bedroom. The guests had been great, helping set up lawn chairs—and rushing off to buy more—covering the old picnic table and the card table with cloths, filling new garbage pails with ice, beer, wine, and soda. James and Manuel had made several bowls of sizzling salsa and a huge bowl of guacamole.

  Jenny came in from the backyard, carrying an empty basket.

  “Oh, good, you’ve got more chips. We should just have had the Doritos truck back up to the yard and dump a load.”

  Arden laughed. “It’s almost twilight. We’ll start walking down to the Jetties for the fireworks anytime now.”

  They leaned over the sink, gazing out at the backyard.

  “Good party, huh,” Jenny said.

  “It’s a great party,” said Arden. “Except … Oh God, there she goes, I knew she would—Zoey’s sucking up to Palmer White.”

  Jenny watched for a moment. “She’s not as cute as she thinks she is. Or as smart. Besides, Palmer White’s got the serious hots for you.”

  “And that should thrill me, why?” Arden glanced sideways at Jenny. “What about you and Tim?”

  “What about us?”

  “Speaking of serious hots. I think he’s really into you.”

  “Please. He hates me. I hate him. I’ll tell you who I think is interesting—that Liam Larson guy of Meg’s. He’s so handsome he almost looks gay.”

  “PC much?” Arden joked. “Forget him. He’s all over Meg.”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t seem to notice him.”

  “We need to talk to that girl.” Arden wrenched herself away from the window and dumped another bag of chips into the basket. “Here. Let’s take these out.”

  It was almost miraculous that this July Fourth was humid but not foggy. Almost all Independence Days over the past twenty years had been plagued by thick fog, postponing the fireworks for a night or two, but today was perfect.

  As Arden set the chips on the food table, she felt a soft arm embrace her shoulders as a floral perfume swept around her.

  “Oh, Arden, you are the best!” Zoey cooed. “I’m so grateful you invited me down to this party! I was just talking to Palmer White. Palmer White! He told me he introduced you to Ariadne Silverstone. Ariadne Silverstone! Oh, I would die to meet her.”

  “Well, we don’t want that to happen, now do we?” Arden replied dryly, sliding away from Zoey’s arm.

  “What?”

  “You said you’d die to meet her.” Arden could see Zoey was still confused. “Oh, never mind. Listen, we’re all going to walk down to the beach in a few minutes to see the fireworks. I’d suggest you use the john. It’s not a long walk, but the streets will be congested with people so it takes forever to get there and back.”

  “Oh, you are so thoughtful!” Zoey trilled, and raced into the house.

  “Dear God, am I really so old?” Arden spoke aloud, shaking her head.

  “Not old,” a man said. “Just experienced.” Palmer wore preppy patchwork shorts and a red polo shirt. In the dimming light, his white teeth gleamed. “I suspect little Zoey’s gotten a long way on her charm and pretend naïveté, and I’d bet money you employed those same tricks when you were her age.”

  “That’s cynical,” Arden said.

  “Tell me you’re not cynical, too,” Palmer dared her.

  Arden had to smile. “Okay. I am cynical. But in a good way.” She considered this for a moment. “But I didn’t use any tricks when I started out. First of all, to be honest, I never ever was as sweet and naïve as she seems to be. I was always ambitious.”

  “Zoey’s ambitious, too. More ambitious than you are.”

  Arden stared at Palmer. “How do you know? What do you mean?”
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  “Think about it. You’ve got your Brad Pitt guy over there and your Ryan Gosling guy down at the end of the lawn. Not to mention quite a few other men and women. Who has naïve little Zoey spent the most time with today?”

  “You?”

  “Me. Once I told her I owned air space and stations, she was glued to my side.”

  Arden narrowed her eyes. “Come on, don’t be so jaded. Zoey’s interested in the industry, and you know everything about television—”

  “I’ll make a bet with you. I’ll bet that by the time the fireworks are over, Zoey will come back to my room with me.”

  Arden’s eyes narrowed. “You’re disgusting.”

  Palmer pretended innocent surprise. “Because I want to take a shapely young woman to bed?” Leaning close to Arden, he whispered, “How did you react when you met me? You’re in the industry, too. Did you play up to me?” Before Arden could answer, Palmer continued, “You are the woman I’m interested in, and I’ve had to pursue you and bribe you with parties to get you to go anywhere with me.”

  “W-well,” Arden stuttered, suddenly flushed with a peculiar, unexpected tingling at Palmer’s words, “there you are. You had to bribe me with parties. So I’m just as ambitious as Zoey.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you that. But you’ve got a softness to your ambition.”

  “I am not soft!” Arden told him.

  He held up his hands to placate her. “Sorry, wrong word. How about kind?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” This man was getting under her skin.

  “Let’s take Ariadne Silverstone. I went through her house with you. I saw you in action. Which room in her house is the most cluttered and chaotic?”

  “Her study.”

  “Right. Which room did you offer to help simplify?” Arden had to smile. She knew where he was going, and she was surprised and pleased. “The kitchen.”

  “Why?” Palmer asked.

  “Because her study is her safe place. It’s her sanctuary. I could tell at once, and I didn’t want to violate that. Besides, she knows what all those piles and scattered papers are; she could find anything she wanted in a moment. But she doesn’t care about the kitchen. She really doesn’t even care about the entire summer house. She’s a lawyer. She cares about her work. The summer house is for entertaining guests, lobbying, having her children and grandchildren for a week or so. The kitchen is for staff. Ariadne doesn’t even care what she eats. She lunches on saltines and V-8 juice and usually has dinner out with her husband or orders takeout. But she needs a decent coffeemaker that makes one cup at a time instead of the monster the staff uses for parties. The kitchen needs to be simplified so that much of the equipment can be stored when she’s there alone with her husband.”