Page 34 of Under the Stars

“You are prickly, aren’t you?” He shook his head and levered himself away from the window to take a few steps toward the bassinet, close enough to see Audrey’s face peeking out of her blankets but not to reach out and touch her.

He put his hands in the pockets of his trousers and said softly, “Then, of course, I heard about the baby.”

“ What? Who told you that?”

“I spoke to Mrs. Kennedy, at the inn.”

“When?”

“The day before yesterday.” Mr. Walker patted his jacket pockets like he was looking for something—a pack of cigarettes that wasn’t there, or an important paper.

“I didn’t mean to intrude. My wife can’t understand why you wouldn’t speak to us—she’s angry about everything, these days—but I thought it was best to allow you your privacy.

I just wanted to retrace Cooper’s footsteps.

Experience his final hours for myself. I took the ferry over in the morning.

I thought I would never set foot on Winthrop again, but there I was.

Walked to the inn. Sat down at the bar and bought a drink.

When I went there before, in the autumn, a nice young gentleman served me—”

“That’s my boyfriend. Mike.”

“I know. But this time his mother was tending the bar. She was eager to answer my questions.”

“I’ll bet. What did she say about me?”

“She said you weren’t cut out for motherhood. She didn’t like your influence on her son. And she thought you knew more about Cooper’s death than you were letting on. Said—how did she put it?—you only got cozy with Mike after the night Cooper disappeared.”

“That’s ridiculous. Mike and I have been together since we were sixteen.”

“Except when you were with Cooper.”

She shrugged. “We weren’t joined at the hip. We sometimes saw other people. But I ended up with Mike that night. That’s the truth.”

“You never had intercourse with my son?”

Meredith locked eyes with him. “Cooper and I fooled around, that’s all.

It was stupid. I felt guilty. So I went back to Mike and we had sex and Mike didn’t wear a condom.

Is that specific enough for you? It was late and we were both a little drunk and horny and we didn’t take precautions.

So I got pregnant. And there she is. Mike’s kid. ”

On cue, the baby began to stir. Little hiccups that deepened into meows.

Now they’d done it. How could a single creature express so much discontent?

Meredith braced herself on the chair arm and rose so she could see inside the bassinet, where Audrey tossed her head from side to side and worked her lips into angry butterflies.

“I think she might be hungry,” said Mr. Walker.

Meredith stepped in front of the bassinet and crossed her arms. “ She is none of your business.”

“Meredith, please. I’m only asking—”

“Look, I’m not stupid. You want this baby to be Cooper’s.

You want some piece of him to survive. You want something else to love, right?

To heal your existential grief. To be the dad you wanted to be the first time around.

I get it. I’m sorry I can’t help you. You need to walk out of here and find something else to love. Not this kid.”

“Are you saying, Meredith, are you really saying you want to care for the child yourself? At your age? Look at you. You’re all dressed and ready to leave.

You’re about to walk out of here and leave this poor baby to…

to what? To be raised by some teenaged boy on an island that doesn’t have so much as a supermarket? A teenaged boy—”

“He’s twenty. Not a teenager.”

“A young man, then, that might or might not be its real father? I can give this baby a future, Meredith—”

“She’s not yours.”

“You don’t understand. I don’t give a damn if my son fathered her or not. He might have, that’s all I need to know. My wife and I, we’ll give her all the love she needs. Every possible advantage. For God’s sake. You don’t even want her.”

A little dizzy again. Behind her, Audrey’s mewling strengthened into sobs. Meredith’s breasts tingled against her bra, her T-shirt, her baggy sweater that smelled of Woolite. An urge took over her arms and legs and stomach—to turn around and seize the baby, to cradle Audrey next to her skin.

Hold on. Hold the fuck on. What was she thinking?

What was she doing, standing in front of this bassinet with her arms crossed against this perfectly nice, well-meaning man, this broken man whose grief oozed from his eyes down the clenched muscles of his cheeks, this rich man who could buy Audrey anything she wanted, send her to the best schools, teach her to ride a horse or race a convertible or sail a yacht.

What Meredith ought to do was to step aside.

Let Mr. Walker scoop up Audrey into his strong arms, swoop Audrey off to his house in New Canaan, his summer cottage on Watch Hill, trips to Europe, safaris in Africa, while she, Meredith, did what she’d meant to do all along—walk out the door of the hospital to the New London Amtrak station and a train that would swoop Meredith off to her new life.

Her fresh start.

—

Meredith was just shy of her thirteenth birthday when she went to visit her father in Boston.

He didn’t know she was coming—how could he?

She didn’t have his telephone number or his home address, and while she knew the address of the law firm from which he sent his periodic communications of fatherly goodwill—gifts, letters, birthday cards, the occasional book—she knew better than to try to reach him there.

She knew he lived somewhere around Boston, that was all, and that his family ran the chain of department stores that bore his name—the evolution of a business that had begun with a New England textile mill founded by his great-great-grandfather on the river that ran through his land.

Long story. Meredith knew it because she’d written a research paper on the subject for school and read it aloud to the class.

The conclusion was met by an awkward silence. The teacher had given her an A.

She had ridden her bike down West Cliff Road, carrying her school backpack and Isobel’s usual packed lunch of canned tuna sandwich on homemade brown bread with carrot sticks.

Her schoolbooks she’d left in her room. Instead, her backpack contained a change of clothing, toothbrush and toothpaste, a tube of ChapStick, ninety-three dollars in ones and fives, and the chewed copy of Flowers in the Attic that had made its way around the adolescent female population of the Winthrop Island school that year.

When the ferry docked in New London, she’d walked down the harbor to the Amtrak station and bought a ticket to Boston.

She emerged a little over an hour later at South Station into a crowd of more people than she had seen in her entire life.

Swarming and buzzing about their business.

Meredith had to sit on a bench and watch them move across this metropolitan landscape, each one carrying a whole history of parents and siblings, houses and neighborhoods, schools and churches, wives and friends, husbands and lovers, work and heartbreak, deaths and births, first cigarettes and first beers and first kisses, books and movies, car rides and beach days, all packed inside a wool coat or trench coat or parka (it was a cold, drizzling day in early March) and maybe a hat, a pair of shoes or boots tucked beneath a pair of pants or dress and stockings, light hair or dark hair, pink skin or brown skin, man or woman, plain or pretty or interesting—the outside world, the real world, the world she had studied in two dimensions but never experienced.

For a couple of hours, she sat and watched until she got used to the multiplicity of persons, until her senses calmed down and she climbed up some stairs and out of the station into the cold, drizzling March air.

She had brought a map, but she didn’t need it—she had spent so many hours staring at the plan of Boston that her course lay in her head.

The streets were nothing like the map. She thought of Daryl Hannah in Splash, negotiating the traffic of New York City.

Well, she wasn’t going to act like that.

She wasn’t some dumbass naked mermaid. She read the street signs, she walked and stopped according to the changing signals, until the bronze doors of a beautiful building stood before her, a palace in whose enormous windows could be seen every wonderful thing you could imagine.

She placed her hands on the bar of the revolving door in the middle and pushed her way inside.

Needless to say, she did not find her father there.

She went from floor to floor, room to dazzling room, screwed up her courage and asked a lady in a clingy red knit dress at the customer service desk where she might find Mr. Clayton Monk, the owner of the store.

The lady looked bemused and said you would probably find him in the corporate offices on State Street.

By now it was the middle of the afternoon.

According to the map, State Street was some distance away.

Meredith had eaten her tuna sandwich and carrots on the train and now she was hungry again.

Hungry and stupid. What in the world made her think she could waltz into the flagship Monk’s department store in the middle of Boston and find the great-great-grandson of its founder dictating memos from some magnificent desk on the top floor?

She’d had this idea in her head, that was all. Like a scene in a movie.

She walked back out of Monk’s—almost getting stuck in the revolving door, thanks to a mistimed lunge—and back out onto the sidewalk, where she found a phone book and looked inside.

There were probably a hundred listings for Monk; they were a prolific family, as she already knew from her school report.

None of them said Clayton Monk. Resolutely she started calling each one from the top, but most of them hung up on her and one of them threatened to call the police.