Page 17 of Under the Stars

“So what happened?” Coop asked.

“What do you mean, what happened?”

“With your mom and dad. Why they didn’t get married.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.”

“Look, Coop,” she said, “I will tell you the whole soap opera if you take me back to shore. Right now.”

“What if I don’t want to go back? What if I want to just sail around the world with you and never go back? Make our own food and babies and shit?”

“Jesus, Coop. Can you please get a hold of yourself? This is so stupid. You’ve had too much blow, okay? You need to turn around—tack or whatever—at least drop anchor—”

“Stop!” He held up his hand. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“It’s like—it’s like a bell.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Listen!”

Meredith forced herself to stillness. Though the night was warm, she shivered under the sheet. Sea air, she thought. In the distance, the lights of New London winkled through the haze.

“Do you hear it? Clang…clang… Like a church bell. Close your eyes and listen.”

Meredith sighed and closed her eyes. The wind brushed her cheek; the mainsail shivered above her.

She heard a splash, like a bird catching a fish.

The motion of the ship was steady and sweet, and her body still hummed from the sex and the beer and the speck of coke, the whole adventure, Coop and his boat and his chestnut trees, his family that was even more fucked up than hers.

Maybe they belonged together, after all.

Maybe she should just sail around the world with Coop.

She’d always wanted to leave, right? Leave her old life—her batshit mother, her threadbare bedroom, Greyfriars, Winthrop itself—the rocky boundary of her tiny world.

Coop was good-looking, he was rich, he was smart.

He was kind of an asshole, true, but all men were assholes.

Like dogs, they fixed their whole attention on you until you had delivered what they wanted; then they wandered off to fix it on someone else.

Did it even matter which one you hooked up with? You could always find a new one.

—

Meredith was nine years old when she realized that she shared her father with some other girls.

Until then, she’d accepted his presence in her life as it came and went.

He would appear out of the blue, carrying some present—a doll, a box of cookies from some fancy bakery in Boston.

Sometimes Meredith would catch him by the pool with her mother, making out like teenagers, laughing, unable to keep their fingers from each other’s skin; sometimes Isobel would icily open the front door and call out, in her doom-stricken voice— Meredith, your father’s here!

In the middle of winter, he might arrive unexpectedly in an overcoat and stay for a few days, sleeping upstairs in Mom’s bedroom like they were husband and wife; then Meredith wouldn’t see him again for a month.

Sometimes in the summer, he would visit almost every day in his worn loafers and pleated chino shorts and his soft polo shirts that smelled of golf.

He would swoop her up in his arms and swing her around, kiss her cheeks and hair, tell her how pretty she was; he would take her by the hand for swimming or sailing or maybe Monopoly when the weather was bad.

But always at Greyfriars. Never beyond the long, overgrown driveway that linked them to the rest of the island.

Once she asked him where he lived when he wasn’t at home with them, and he said he had his own house, he had a job in Boston, but he loved her very much and came to see her whenever he could.

And she thought this was normal, that this was how all fathers knew their daughters.

From a distance. Stopping by when they could.

You had his full, adoring attention—his sun on your face and your shoulders—and then you didn’t.

So when she spotted him in the harbor one afternoon, while she and Mike were out riding their bikes, she lost her mind.

At first she couldn’t even comprehend that it was him.

She recognized him by his shirt—the faded ocher polo shirt into which she had buried her face so often, inhaling his essence.

He was sitting on the bench outside the general store, eating an ice cream cone—so far, so Dad—and beside him sat a woman who seemed fully mature to Meredith, but who she later learned was his daughter Jacqueline, his youngest child by his wife Livy, aged around twenty-two and just graduated from college.

Meredith spared her no attention. She jumped off her bicycle and let it fall on the sidewalk behind her while she pelted toward him, shouting Daddy!

She remembered how his face underwent a series of transformations during the ten or twelve seconds it took for her to reach him.

First a kind of startled confusion—yay, she was surprising him!

—followed by an instant of delight as he recognized her, replaced almost immediately by horror and, finally, confusion or possibly embarrassment.

He shot to his feet, but instead of opening his arms to his darling daughter Meredith, he sidestepped in front of the woman next to him and held out his palms the way a football player would, blocking a member of the opposing team.

Meredith skidded to a halt right in front of him. “Daddy?” she said, because all of a sudden he didn’t seem like her father at all—looked like him, dressed like him, but maybe she’d made a mistake, missed some detail, and this wasn’t actually her own daddy.

“Now, honey,” he said. That was all.

At this point, Mike rolled up next to her on his bicycle and said, “Hey, Mr. Monk!”

Now she knew she’d made a mistake. Her mother called her father Clay, and their own last name was Fisher, so this man couldn’t possibly be Daddy.

Her face went hot. She turned and ran back to her bicycle, hoping the earth would crack open and gulp her down before she reached it.

She heard the man call helplessly after her, in a voice that sounded exactly like her father’s voice— Honey, wait a second!

She got on her bicycle and pedaled as fast as she could, until the hill on West Cliff Road defeated her and she slid off to walk her bike the rest of the way home.

By the time she reached Greyfriars, her mother had heard about the whole thing.

She stood in the doorway and opened her arms—not her usual way of greeting her daughter—and hugged her until Meredith’s bones felt like they were bending under the weight of her mother’s grief.

Then Isobel led her to the kitchen table and cut her a slice of cake and explained that Daddy had his own family, a wife and three other daughters; that she and Daddy loved each other but had decided long ago that they couldn’t live with each other—a peculiar idea that made no sense, but only in the way that the adult world often made no sense to Meredith. A riddle you just accepted as truth.

Meredith finished her cake and dried her tears, and that was that.

Only when she went to bed that night did she remember something else—the expression on the face of the woman next to Daddy, his other daughter, who (Meredith now realized) was really her sister.

A pretty face that echoed Daddy’s own face, but softer and rounder and curled with disgust.

—

Of course, Meredith was over all that now. She understood that you didn’t pelt toward men with your arms wide open—you struck an alluring pose and waited for them to come to you. Like Coop Walker had.

Now he wanted to sail around the world with her. Maybe she would let him.

Meredith opened her eyes. “Can we go back now?”

But the seat was empty. Coop had vanished.