Page 46 of Under the Stars

Meredith

Winthrop Island, New York

On Meredith’s wall is a calendar. Audrey keeps everything on her phone—contacts, schedules, notes, itineraries—but Meredith likes to stand in front of a wall and stare at the month ahead. See the big picture.

This one features photographs of firemen and was sent to her by the actor who co-starred with her in Her Last Flight .

You know the one. He sends her a calendar every year—it’s their thing.

That movie was his first big role, way back when he was still closeted, and the arrival of the calendar in the first week of January always reminds her of filming on location in Kauai, how beautiful he was, how beautiful she was, how everyone thought they were fucking but they were really just having a good time together.

The friend she’d been looking for all her life.

Neither the distraction of sexual energy nor the drama of sexual competition. She could be herself. Whoever that was.

The July fireman is sultry and dark-haired and brazenly naked against the backdrop of a fire engine, except for the safety helmet he holds before his crotch.

There is a hose coiled around his feet and a Dalmatian with crisp black spots cocking his head next to the coils.

This is also the calendar’s cover image.

Each night, she crosses out the day with a red Sharpie, and a green circle encloses the last day at the bottom, the thirty-first.

On that day, she’ll finally be out of this prison. Back where she belongs.

Then maybe these stupid nightmares will go away.

—

As she swims her laps, she hears that damn cartoon fish chant in her ear. Dory. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming. Dory’s not wrong, but she irritates the hell out of Meredith.

Swimming does a lot of things. It keeps you fit, for one thing. Very important, at her age and in her profession. Two, it keeps you busy. You don’t have nightmares when you swim; you don’t even have intrusive thoughts.

Three, it keeps the drink out of your hand.

But you can’t stay in the swimming pool forever.

Your skin will pucker. After the hundredth lap, Meredith lifts herself dripping from the deep end—good for maintaining muscle mass, which is so important as you hit the big five-oh, as her personal trainer used to tell her before that impulsive investment in the exercise app went south and she couldn’t afford a personal trainer anymore.

(Oh, the irony.) As she straightens, she hears a car barreling down the driveway.

She snatches her towel and wraps it around her naked body. All right, so she swims in the nude when Audrey’s not around. So sue her. Who’s going to notice, the hummingbirds? Now some damn intruder.

Slam, goes the door of an ancient steel car. A truck or something.

The salt water runs down her legs and between her breasts. She hurries to the pool house, which is badly in need of renovation—or at least the replacement of about a thousand cedar shingles—and shimmies into her cover-up.

Someone booms out her name in a big male voice, like she’s in trouble.

Mer -edith! Mere- dith?

Meredith stares at the door of paper-thin shipboard. The chipped white paint. Her heart smacks against the paper-thin linen that covers her chest.

Mer -edith! Meredith Fish -er!

He’s getting closer. Like he knows where to find her.

Meredith casts around her and spots a geriatric hardcover copy of Executive Orders, swollen with damp. She grabs the tome with both hands and waits behind the door.

Meredith?

The door cracks open. A man steps through. She raises her arms and bashes him in the back of the skull with Tom Clancy.

“Ow!” he says, rubbing his head. He turns around and grabs her wrists just in time.

“What the fuck, Meredith?”

“Mike?”

He drops her wrists. She hits him in the stomach with the book. “You scared me! What the hell did you think you were doing, sneaking up like that?”

“I wasn’t sneaking! I was calling your name! Jesus. Didn’t you recognize my voice?”

She tosses the book back on the changing bench. He follows and picks it up.

“Holy crap. So that’s where I left this thing.”

“Probably. I can’t think of anyone else around here with a taste for Tom Clancy.”

He grins and tosses the book back on the bench. “You say it like an insult. The dude knew his shit. You know, that thing might be worth a lot of money now.”

“Please. They must have printed at least a million first-run copies. Trust me, it’s not going to fund your retirement. Now answer my question. What’s the emergency? Is Audrey okay?”

“Audrey’s fine. It’s you I’m— we’re worried about. Someone stopped by the taproom today and left his card for you. Guy by the name of Harlan Walker?”

—

If Meredith could have chosen anywhere else in the world to detox, she would have done it.

Anywhere but Winthrop Island. As soon as Audrey merged onto Interstate 10 outside Palm Desert and the car began its flight eastward, in the opposite direction of Los Angeles, she thought she had maybe made a big mistake.

Three days later, when she sat in the passenger seat of her own damn Mercedes (she was not allowed to drive, that was part of the deal) and watched the Winthrop Island ferry approach the dock in New London, she knew she had made a big mistake.

Her heart began to thud against her ribs.

The blood raced up and down her arms and legs.

She couldn’t make her lungs behave. Only by practicing the deep breaths and meditation exercises she had reluctantly learned at the therapy classes in rehab was she able to regain control of her ordinary physical functions.

Half an hour later, as the ferry passed Little Bay Point on its way to the dock in the main harbor, even though she closed her eyes, she could have sworn she heard that fucking bell.

That night, in her mother’s old bed at Greyfriars, the nightmares began.

It was funny, she’d never experienced anything you could call a nightmare in the days and months and even years after the night on Coop Walker’s boat.

Maybe because she was so young; maybe because it was the kind of night you could push away at first, block out, before it came back in fury to haunt you.

Probably therapists had a word for that.

Some type of delayed PTSD. Anyway, whatever it was, she had that.

In her nightmares, she wasn’t exactly reliving that night.

That would’ve been too easy, right? And it’s not like memories work that way.

When she does remember what happened— if she’s remembering what happened and not just what her brain decides to recollect (Meredith read an article once about all the ways your mind processes memories, the tricks by which it outsmarts itself for your own good, apparently)—it comes to her in flashes.

Bits and pieces that, put together, form something less than a completed puzzle.

Sometimes a new piece drops from the blue sky, and she can’t figure out where it fits.

If it fits. Maybe it’s just her imagination.

Her subconscious, trying to make sense of it all—literally making shit up .

Her subconscious that edits together these disquieting shorts in its underground studio and then screens them on the inside of her skull when she’s only trying to get a little sleep, for fuck’s sake.

Like the one where Coop’s dead grinning face floats in the greenish water and his eyes flash open, and somehow she’s stuck in his embrace, even though he has no arms to hold her with, and she can’t move to free herself.

Or the one where she’s straddling Coop on the bow of his sailboat, hovering on the brink of an orgasm that never comes, except Coop is an old man helpless under her gyrations.

Or the one where she’s supposed to be sailing the boat and she doesn’t know how to sail, she’s trying to figure out which rope to pull, which sail to unfurl, where to point the fucking ship, while Coop lies on the deck and stares at her naked, frantic body, jacking off to the beats of her confusion.

At some point, as each wacky film reaches the point of ultimate tension, she wakes up, sweating. The only air-conditioning at Greyfriars is the breeze that hurtles through the window from the nearby sea. It will be some time before she cools off enough to go back to sleep.

—

As it happens, she had that dream about straddling Coop on the sailboat just last night, so a guilty flush stains her cheeks at Mike’s words. She disguises it as confusion.

“Harlan who? Am I supposed to know who that is?”

Mike sighs. “Babe. The kid’s dad. The kid who drowned. You know who I’m talking about.”

“Well, that’s strange. He must be an old man by now.”

Mike screws up his face to do the math. “I guess so.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“You’d have to ask Audrey. She was the one who talked to him.”

Now the hackles stand up on Meredith’s neck. “He talked to Audrey? What did he say?”

“Mair, what did I just tell you? No, I don’t know what he said to Audrey. He took off. So I came here to make sure you were okay.”

“ Me? What, you thought I was in mortal danger or something? From an old man?”

Mike strokes a hand through what remains of his hair. “I don’t know. I didn’t think. I just came.”

“Well, that was your problem all along, wasn’t it?”