Page 33 of High Season

TWENTY-THREE

The morning after the party, Nina goes out onto the terrace just as the sun is beginning to rise.

She has perhaps seen more sunrises this week than she has in the rest of her life put together. She has waited for each day to slide in with a sense of dread and anticipation. But today, she barely notices the mottled pink sky. She barely sees the light begin to warm the silver plains of the sea.

Today, Nina is thinking about her sister.

Tamara would be thirty-seven by now. Nina cannot imagine what she might have been like, cannot assign an adult personality to the few scraps of the teenage girl that she barely remembers.

There are a thousand possible versions of the person her sister might have become.

An overachiever like Nina, with a string of high grades and degrees.

Someone who improvised their way through life, like Blake—always seeming to land on their feet, falling into highly paid jobs and relationships with a succession of beautiful people.

Or, perhaps, she would have rebelled, dropping out of university to go backpacking in Bolivia, or to work a job that her mother disapproved of, or to run off with an unsuitable boyfriend they would all worry endlessly about.

No matter what, they would have been close, Nina thinks.

She has friends with sisters. Women from school or university whose siblings would come and visit, who would reminisce about squabbling over stolen clothes and staying up late comparing crushes.

When Nina heard those stories, she always felt a sense of loss, as if she was glimpsing a world that was unknowable to her.

A relationship she couldn’t quite fathom, but longed for nevertheless.

Nina did not exactly miss Tamara— couldn’t miss someone she had barely known—but she did miss what the two of them might have been.

She felt the absence of her sister in a profound but not exactly painful way, like a nonessential organ.

An appendix, or a singular kidney. A thing that she could manage without, but that she would always know wasn’t there.

As she picks over the remnants of last night—the shattered wine bottle and streak of blood—Nina thinks about how they might all be different, had Tamara lived.

If Nina would have picked some other career.

If she might have friends other than Claire, hobbies other than sharpening every piece of herself until only edges and corners remained.

Blake might have met someone who he would stay with for longer than a year.

Instead, it was as if nobody could fill the space that his twin had left behind.

Evelyn might have found a way to be happy, to be more of a mother to Nina.

Instead, she looked at Nina as if her youngest daughter reminded her of everything that she had lost.

Nina gathers up the pieces of glass, glinting green in the early morning light.

It brings the entire night back to her. Blake holding back her hair as she vomited bile streaked red with wine.

Ryan, furious. Nina, telling him that she wanted to stay.

Telling him that she had spoken to the documentary makers and scheduled in a meeting with them on Monday.

Typing out an email to her new employers that she’s too embarrassed to look at now, certain it will be littered with typos and drunken mistakes, telling them that there’d been a family emergency.

Asking them if she could put her start date back by just a few days.

Ryan had woken up early that morning for his flight home. The room was still dark, illuminated by the light of his phone as he gathered his things.

“You’re really not coming?” he said.

“I’ll be back in a couple of days,” she replied, her voice sounding small. Uncertain.

“This isn’t like you,” he said. “Come on, Nina. You’re more sensible than this. You can’t just not show up to work because of some ridiculous whim.”

“It’s not ridiculous to me,” she said, but she knew it was useless. He hadn’t been listening to her.

He hadn’t kissed her goodbye.

Then there was the video, posted a few hours ago by a gossipy but prominent news outlet. A clip that must have been filmed by a party guest, Nina standing on the stairs, her words slurred. Beneath the clip, comments flooded in so quickly that Nina couldn’t scroll fast enough to keep up.

Fucking nutter.

Nina WHO? Report on some REAL NEWS not these z-list NOBODIES

This girl needs professional help

Nina watched the video three times. The commenters had a point. In her own professional capacity, she could see that she was looking at someone who appeared on the edge of something dark and dangerous.

She was looking at someone who was losing control.

She hoped that Ryan wouldn’t see the video, or worse, her new employers.

She had spent years avoiding the public eye, and now here she was, in the center of the storm.

There was a surreal quality to it, like she was watching someone else break down.

Like the Nina Drayton in the video clip was someone she didn’t know, had never met.

Now, with the sea hazy in the early-morning light, Nina wonders briefly if it’s too late to fix things.

She could, after all, still make an afternoon flight.

Arrive home by dinner, in time to iron her outfit for tomorrow, and check that she has her highlighters and her notepad and the color-coded Post-its in her bag, these talismans for her new, grown-up life.

She remembers how she felt buying them, that tug of anticipation, the promise that everything was falling into place.

It feels so long ago. Now, the thought of moving forward feels impossible. The pull of her past is too consuming, too bottomless. There are things she cannot leave alone; there are things she has to settle first.

When Ryan said she was sensible, Nina had the strangest feeling that he was describing someone else entirely.

She feels unpredictable, brimming with an unexpected energy that’s honest and raw.

For the first time in her life, she’s unconcerned with the expectations of others, the need to be good, and tidy, and well-behaved.

She hears the pad of feet on the terrace behind her, and twists around to see Evelyn crossing the tiles with a mug in each hand.

“I made you a coffee,” she says as she approaches, her voice milder than Nina expected. “It’s absolutely vile, but Sandra isn’t here yet so I had to improvise.”

She sits down next to Nina, bare feet hanging off the edge of the terrace, and hands her a cup.

“Jesus,” she says, taking a sip from her own mug and wincing. “That really is terrible. Maybe I shouldn’t have given Sandra the morning off after all.”

“He’s gone,” Nina says. “Ryan.”

She expects her mother to ask her what she means. Where he’s gone to, and for how long. Instead, Evelyn just nods.

“They always go, darling,” she says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “ C’est la vie , as they say round here.”

Nina is fairly certain that her mother, in spite of spending most of her life round here, doesn’t actually speak any more French than this, but she doesn’t comment on it.

For a moment, they just sit in silence, their eyes on the horizon.

Nina is waiting for her mother to start berating her, to say how disappointed she is.

When nothing comes, Nina speaks instead.

“Does it make you sad?” she says. “Being out here?”

Evelyn doesn’t look at her.

“Nina,” she says. “There are kinds of sadness that you can’t even imagine, until they happen to you. And then they happen, and you forget there’s any other way to feel. Do you mind if I smoke?”

Nina is so taken aback by the request that she only blinks at her mother. Her mother, who doesn’t ask permission for anything. Who is barely seen without a cigarette in her hand, a wreath of smoke around her head.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Evelyn says.

She produces a packet of cigarettes, lights up, and takes a long, thoughtful drag.

“So no,” she says as she exhales. “I don’t feel any sadder here than I do anywhere else. Because it’s everywhere, that sadness. And you keep on moving because you have to. You survive, because you’re lucky to have been given the chance to do so. Because it’s all that you can do.”

In the distance the sea glitters. A bird dips and rises in the air overhead, a lazy, swooping dance.

“Did you think that I was telling the truth?” Nina asks. “About what happened?”

Evelyn looks right at her then. She’s bare-faced, besides the thin, faded tattoo of her eyebrows. For a moment, Nina can see the beauty that she once was. The eighties it-girl, the woman that the world fell in love with. The woman that Evelyn has never quite been able to let go of since.

“I think that in a situation like that,” Evelyn says, “you believe what you have to, to stay alive.”

Nina’s heart sinks.

“So you don’t really believe it?”

Her mother exhales a purple stream of smoke.

“Belief is a choice, Nina,” she says. “I choose to believe in my children. You have to. It would destroy you, otherwise.”

“But wouldn’t it be better to know? Wouldn’t you go looking for the truth, if you were me?”

Evelyn stubs her cigarette out, right on the border where the stones turn a lighter shade. Right where their lives changed forever.

“I think,” says Evelyn. “That the past comes back to you, no matter what.”

Something flickers across her face then. Her features rearrange, and all of a sudden, she looks distracted. Changed.

“Look,” she says. There’s something strained in her voice again. A forced brightness that wasn’t there before. “I didn’t come out here to talk to you about all that. There’s actually something I wanted to tell you.”

She sits up straighter. Rolls her shoulders back.

“I’m selling the house.”

Nina just blinks at her.

“What?”

“It’s been a struggle for years, darling.

You know it has. It’s falling apart, the upkeep is madness.

And my dad’s work will be out of copyright soon, and we’ll stop getting royalties, and…

well. There’s not much left in the pot, otherwise.

” She lets out a strange, strangled laugh.

“You know I’ve never been good with money.

There seemed like so much of it when I was younger and now…

it just goes so quickly, doesn’t it? I should have been better with it really, invested or something, but…

well, you just don’t think about it at the time, do you? ”

There’s a tightness behind her words, as if she’s holding something back. As if, if the brightness falters from her voice, the fear will creep through.

“But you love this house,” says Nina.

For the last few years, Nina has watched as her mother downgraded her London townhouse to a two-bed flat.

As she started to sell her vintage designer pieces.

Let go of staff, until only Sandra remained.

Nina has known for a long time that the money was running out, but she never imagined that her mother would sell the pink house.

It is the focal point of their family. Their legacy.

An entire mythology between stone walls and sea views that Nina assumed would last forever.

“Of course I do. Do you know what it’s going to do to me to sell this house?

The decision alone has nearly killed me.

But it’s impossible, Nina. And I know, I’ve been foolish.

All those bloody divorce settlements, and all the houses, and the parties.

I just didn’t realize the money would run out.

I’ve always had it, you know? I’ve never known any different.

I assumed it would be there forever, even when everything else… even when every one else left me.”

She takes a deep breath.

“And after last night,” she continues. “Well, you said it yourself. Time to move on. To stop living in the past.”

She smiles a wavering, hopeful smile.

“It’s time, Nina,” she says. “I’m moving on. And you should, too. This is going to be our last summer at the pink house. So let’s not let all of these silly rumors ruin it.”

Their last summer at the pink house.

There will be no more nights beneath the bougainvillea. No more birthday parties.

No more avoiding the place where Tamara was pulled out of the water.

But all Nina hears, all she understands, is that there will be no more opportunities to put things right.

That this is, perhaps, her last chance to find out the truth.