Page 35 of Under the Stars
Someone started to bang on the door of the phone booth.
Meredith jerked it open and walked two blocks until she came to a park.
Boston Common, she thought. She knew all about it because her father had given her a copy of Make Way for Ducklings when she was little, and she read it so often the pages fell out.
She followed the signs until she crossed Charles Street into the Public Garden and came to the actual pond with the swan boats.
The sight stopped her dead—that shock when you stand before some famous thing in real life.
She stood at the edge to watch all the families in the boats together, feeding the ducklings together, walking around the grassy perimeter together—umbrellas up, cheeks all pink and damp from the drizzle.
Her gaze fell upon a young mother who looked familiar.
She held the hand of a little girl, about four or five years old, who wore one of those smart school uniforms with the pleated skirt and dark tights beneath a coat of navy wool.
Under her navy wool hat, her hair was as pale as straw.
She wanted to splash in the puddles and her mother kept pulling her away.
The mother smoked a cigarette in short, irritated strokes of her arm and kept looking back at the main path, as if she were waiting for someone.
For an instant, her face turned in Meredith’s direction, and Meredith saw in her head the young woman who had sat next to her father and licked an ice cream cone, all those summers ago on Winthrop Island.
How funny, Meredith thought. It must be a trick of her imagination. A wobble of her memory.
But then the miracle happened.
The little girl yanked her hand away from her mother and started running down the path— pell mell, Meredith thought. She flung herself into the arms of a man in a double-breasted trench coat, who had bent down to catch her and lift her high in the air, squealing with joy.
Meredith stared at the two of them while the drizzle crackled against her old umbrella that peeled back from a couple of the rib tips.
The power of her stare must have penetrated the rain because the man, who had carried the girl in one powerful arm to greet the mother with an affectionate kiss on each cheek, now turned his face toward Meredith.
First his eyebrows knit together, and then his eyes widened and his mouth sagged open.
He let the girl slide downward to stand in a puddle at his feet.
Meredith drank in the sight of his bright blue eyes in the middle of his leathery face, all pink and raw from the weather, and the way his attention enveloped her.
She didn’t notice the mother’s irritation until the woman tugged on the arm of Meredith’s father— their father—and snapped the thread that connected Meredith and Clay Monk.
Meredith spun around and strode away in the opposite direction—it didn’t matter where she was going, just that she left.
She had been stupid to come, stupid to think that there was any way to connect the father who came to see her on Winthrop Island with the man who had his own family, his real family, in this world.
The real world. To which she did not belong.
He caught up with her near the fountain as she headed toward Charles Street to cross back into Boston Common.
First he called up Isobel to let her know where Meredith was.
There was a long, tense conversation on a pay phone on Charles Street while Meredith stood outside the glass booth and watched the raindrops race each other down the side.
He emerged with a sigh and took Meredith to a café in Beacon Hill for a bite to eat, then got in his car with her and drove her all the way down to the Winthrop Island ferry terminal in New London, where Isobel stood waiting for her under an umbrella.
When he hugged her goodbye, she inhaled the smell of his soap and his wet raincoat and said to herself, This is the last time.
No way she was going to humiliate herself like this ever again.
—
But Meredith always held in her memory the sight of her father’s face as he stood on the ferry dock and waved to her.
This expression of weary longing for a thing he couldn’t have.
She remembered it now, as she swayed in front of Mr. Walker while her daughter sobbed in the bassinet behind her.
While her arms and legs, her fingers and toes and lips and breasts all craved to turn around and draw this tiny human against her skin.
“You don’t want her, Meredith,” he said.
“Is that what Mrs. Kennedy told you?”
“It’s what I see in your face. In the clothes you’re wearing. It’s what I hear in your voice. You don’t have to do this. You can follow your dreams. Let us take care of her for you. You can always visit. You’ll always have a place with us. But let us give her the upbringing she deserves.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “And that worked out so well for Coop.”
The nice man flinched.
Meredith turned to the bassinet and scooped up her shuddering, bawling daughter. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, inhaling the scent of warm puppies into the middle of her chest, “but Audrey belongs to me.”