Page 3 of Under the Stars

Audrey

New London, Connecticut

Meredith elects to stay in the car.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say. “What if the ship sinks?”

She shrugs and stares at the minivan ahead of us, from which about two dozen children (give or take) tumble out, one after the other, under the supervision of an exhausted mother in a messy blond topknot.

“Like a clown car.” Meredith snorts with laughter. “Doesn’t it make you think of one of those clown cars? That little car—the Volkswagen. Or the French one. Citroen, that’s it. And the clowns keep coming out.”

“Except they’re cute little kids, Meredith. Not clowns.”

“At that age, honestly? There’s no difference.”

I flip down the visor to examine my eyes in the lipstick mirror. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee.”

“Good luck with that . This isn’t the fast ferry to fucking Nantucket. This is the Winthrop Island ferry. The cheapskate old-money ferry.”

I open the door and shimmy into the sixteen inches of space between Meredith’s blacked-out Mercedes and the ten-year-old Volvo wedged in next to us. “Maybe it’s upgraded from your day.”

“Fuck around and find out, honeybee. You always—”

I slam the door shut behind me.

—

To be fair to Meredith, she’s in her fifth week of withdrawal. Also, were she to be spotted by some member of the public with a smartphone—and let’s face it, every member of the public has a smartphone, down to the toddlers with their iPad pacifiers—this entire operation would be compromised.

Still, it’s good to be out of that fucking car with her.

Forgive my language. It’s just that we’ve been driving— I’ve been driving—since California three days ago.

Not counting potty breaks and sleepovers in a pair of bafflingly identical Hampton Inns outside Amarillo, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, we’ve been sharing each other’s company for forty-one and a half hours, which is forty-one hours more than our recommended yearly limit, even in the days when Meredith’s raw wit was pickled in vodka.

Take away the booze and we have nothing left to stop us from killing each other.

Up on deck, I fill my chest with salt breeze and lean both elbows on the railing.

Except for a man who stands along the starboard side, staring at the opposite shore, I am alone.

Meredith was right—there’s no concession stand, not even one of those vending machines that spit out instant coffee with powdered creamer.

Inside the deckhouse, the passengers huddle on wooden benches and sip from Stanley mugs in primary colors.

I prefer the open air. In the absence of alcohol, Meredith has taken up vaping.

Lord, give me your damp chill huddled under a blanket of nimbostratus. Anything to clear my lungs and my head.

Below me, the deckhands guide the last vehicles aboard—in reverse, so we can roll straight off when we dock on Winthrop Island.

A Stop on the right, the Thames River crawls into Long Island Sound.

Meredith was aghast when I pronounced it Tehms, like the river running through London, England.

We had just taken the exit from Interstate 95 and I said, That’s a little cute, don’t you think? New London on the Tehms River.

“ Tehms? Jesus Christ, Audrey. Where’d you learn to say that ?”

“I don’t know. Like, England ?”

“Well, it’s pronounced Thames, ” she said. “The way it’s spelled.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Repeat after me, Audrey. Thames. ”

“That is so wrong.”

“Not around here, it’s not,” Meredith told me. “And if you go around calling it the Tehms River, someone’s going to shove that stick in your ass right up out through your mouth, and trust me, I’m not going to stop them.”

I kept my mouth shut after that.

There is a choreography to launching a boat that I may not have appreciated until now.

The deckhands shout their lingo to each other.

Much ado about cables. Everyone is so surefooted; everyone understands the assignment.

The wind’s whipping up a bit, sticking the ends of my hair to the remains of my lip gloss, and I’m thinking about ducking back into the deckhouse with the sensible passengers when a little car careers across the train tracks and into the ferry lanes toward us.

The car is one of those vintage convertibles from some obscure European marque, painted in a shade I once heard somebody call British racing green .

The top’s down, exposing satiny leather upholstery the color of bone and a dark-haired driver wearing a pair of obnoxious sunglasses—I say obnoxious because I’ve been driving all day and haven’t spotted so much as a postage stamp of blue sky since grabbing a Starbucks outside Wheeling, West Virginia.

You can imagine the state of schadenfreude in which I settle back on my elbows to watch this scene unfold.

The deckhands have already drawn the chain across the bow and raised the ramp.

The engines grind away. Up swoops the convertible, three full minutes past our scheduled departure, and I observe with an earthy, almost orgasmic pleasure as the man on the dock—big shoulders, wishbone legs, neon-orange visibility vest—struts up to the driver’s side to tell Douchebag to go fuck himself.

The money on that island, Meredith used to say. So old they keep it in a museum instead of the bank. They go to visit sometimes, but they sure as hell don’t take it out and spend it.

But a car like that is worse than flashy, don’t you think?

There’s a whole other league of arrogance to driving a car whose astronomical value would only be evident to another rich person—like you couldn’t be bothered showing off to the peasants.

Why not be a man of the people and dazzle everybody with a blacked-out Range Rover?

The driver takes off his sunglasses to speak to the deckhand.

He has a wide smile and the jaw of a wooden nutcracker.

The draft in that convertible must be bone-chilling but he’s not wearing a coat, just a fleece tech-bro vest over a colorful button-down.

His overgrown hair tufts in the wind. He and the deckhand exchange some pleasantries.

The deckhand tilts back his head and laughs from his belly.

What in the actual damn universe, I think.

Down clangs the ramp. Some member of the ship’s crew unfastens the chain and waves the driver down a lane. The vintage engine throttles and purrs as Sunglass Man spurts around in a quick two-point one-eighty to back aboard over the ramp, saluting the deckhand with his left hand.

No wedding band. Figures.

My outrage wants company. I call to the man standing at my right, “Did you see that? Unbelievable!”

The man turns to me. He’s a little over medium height, with a wide, spare face topped by a close crop of silvery hair. He wears a short coat of navy wool over a turtleneck sweater. He offers me a smile and shrugs. “It makes no difference.”

“But, like, the arrogance. Making us wait? The entitlement .”

“I would guess he lives on the island. The ferry’s for their convenience, isn’t it? Not ours.”

He speaks in a lockjaw drawl, a man from another era. A courtly air floats about him, a leisurely patience. He should be smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper on a club chair, next to a table just large enough to hold a martini and an ashtray.

He leans his elbow on the railing and tilts his head to the dock. “Anyway, it’s the last sailing of the day, and his companion looks as if she’s older.”

I swivel back to the deck, but the car’s already slipped out of view. “Oh? I didn’t notice a passenger.”

He smiles. “The old are invisible to the young.”

“That’s not true. I just—well, the guy seemed like such a tool, I couldn’t look away.”

“Tool.” The man turns back to lean his elbows on the railing. “What makes you think that?”

“His car. And his attitude.”

“Well. You must be a keen judge of human nature. All I saw was a young fellow driving his grandmother somewhere, trying to catch the last ferry home. A man who’s cordial to the members of the crew.”

I stare at the pink tip of his nose and blink back the tears that have sprung, without warning, to the corners of my eyes. “Wow, sorry. I guess I’m the asshole.”

“What? No. I didn’t mean that.” He looks back at me over his shoulder, the smug little fuckface with his Be Kind bumper stickers. His sympathetic smile. “I’ll bet you’ve had a long day, haven’t you? Or maybe he reminds you of someone?”

“You know what?” I push off the railing and shove my hands into the pockets of my coat. “I’m just going to find another spot where my mean-girl energy won’t kill your vibe, okay?”

He straightens to face me. In his seventies, I guess, maybe eighty. Like the man in the convertible, he wears no wedding ring. Not that I checked on purpose. I just happened to notice.

Because the absence of a wedding ring doesn’t prove anything, trust me. I’m not wearing one myself.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” he says. “I was headed inside anyway. You’ll excuse me?”

He turns on his heel as the horn blasts, long and loud enough to rattle my ribs. The ferry jolts as it parts from the dock, but the man’s stride doesn’t falter.

I guess he must be used to ships.

—

Now I’m stuck outside. Through the silted glass windows of the deckhouse I spy not just the elderly guy from the railing, settled by himself with a frayed paperback, but a tall, dark-haired man wearing a fleece vest, guiding a little old lady onto one of the wooden benches.