Page 56 of Under the Stars

Meredith

Winthrop Island, New York

It was Meredith’s sister who’d broken the news of Clay Monk’s death. Her half sister Barbara—the middle daughter, not Jacqueline who had been eating ice cream with their father on the bench in front of the general store when Meredith was nine years old.

She mumbled hello.

“Am I speaking to Meredith Fisher?” asked a voice that came straight out of Meredith’s childhood—a female voice with a slight Boston twang to the vowels, a stilt to the syntax.

“Who’s this?” Meredith demanded.

A long sigh. Then—“My name is Barbara Monk. I understand we share the same father?”

“Monk,” Meredith said. “You mean Clayton Monk?”

“Yes. And I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Meredith, but I thought you should know. I thought you should hear it from the family—”

“Oh, God. Oh, no,” said Meredith.

“I’m afraid he passed away last night. A heart attack or a stroke, we’re not sure yet. I found your number in his phone. I hope you don’t mind my calling like this.”

“No. Not at all.” Meredith was too numb to think. Could not quite wrap her head around this idea, that her father was dead. Gone. And this woman. Barbara. Her sister. Sounded so calm, so matter of fact. Like she didn’t even care.

But that was the way they were, the summer families. Stiff upper lip, like the Brits. Like her mother.

“I want you to know that he was proud of you,” Barbara said in her ear. “We used to talk about you. He went to all your movies.”

“Why,” said Meredith. “Why are you telling me this?”

There was a little laugh. “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I just figured it’s time somebody acted with a little mercy, that’s all.”

—

Mercy. That word stuck in Meredith’s head for some time. She didn’t go to the funeral, didn’t speak to Barbara again after that phone call. But the word came back to her from time to time. Beckoned her in another direction, toward a country for which she had no map.

Mercy.

It comes back to her now.

She opens her eyes and looks directly into Mr. Walker’s strained face.

For some reason, she sees Audrey. Audrey in a hospital bed.

Not now —back when she was in boarding school at that progressive place outside Santa Fe and fell off a horse.

Broke her wrist and hit her head on a rock.

The blow knocked her out. Concussion, the works.

When Meredith saw the helmet afterward, she was horrified and grateful and sick to the stomach.

Also, the doctor was worried about a possible spine injury.

That turned out to be nothing. Still, Meredith borrowed somebody’s private jet (she was on the faux ranch in Montana at the time, plenty of billionaires nearby) and arrived in the hospital room at half past ten to find Audrey lying in a bed, so white and motionless she might be dead, except for the purple-black bruise to her orbital socket that extended past her cheekbone, the swelling that reduced her eye to the kind of slit your caterer might cut into a raw tenderloin to insert a clove of garlic.

And Meredith remembers this idea she had then, staring at her daughter’s battered body, that if Audrey should require a head transplant she would volunteer to decapitate herself that second.

The vision clears. The face before her belongs to Harlan Walker, strained with longing.

“I went out on the boat with Coop,” she says. “We had sex. Took some drugs. Then he cast off and sailed us out of the harbor.”

“And then?”

Meredith closes her eyes again and watches another scene on her eyelids. The girl and the boy. Meredith and Coop. His voice.

I mean it, I could die right now. Die with you.

Isn’t it funny how she remembers the exact sound of Coop’s voice? Like he’s speaking in her head. And she only knew him for a couple of hours. She knows the father better than she knew the son.

“A storm came up,” she says. “One of those sudden July squalls. The boat capsized—”

“I don’t understand. He was a good sailor—”

“Because he was trying to save me.” She opens her eyes. “It was my fault. I fell out of the boat. I was drunk and high. He was trying to save me and went under. That’s what happened.”

The last of the sunset washes from Mr. Walker’s forehead. The dusk turns him gaunt. Finally his lips move. “This is the truth?” he whispers.

Meredith meets his gaze and nods.

“This is the truth,” she says.