Page 8 of Under the Stars

Audrey

Winthrop Island, New York

By the time we reach Meredith’s house, the sun—such as it was—has fallen below the horizon. We pass the driveway twice before Meredith shouts, There it is! and I slam the brakes so hard, Meredith’s toiletry kit soars from the back seat against the windshield.

If any lights once existed to mark the driveway, they’ve burned out. We crawl over the gravel, across a series of increasingly formidable craters. The headlights pick out the weeds. “I guess the landscapers haven’t come by yet,” Meredith says.

“How do you know they ever come by?”

“I pay them.” She fiddles with the zipper of her toiletry kit. “I mean, my business manager pays them.”

“You might want to check with your business manager and see how that’s going.”

On either side of the car rise dark, towering bushes that might be rhododendrons—it’s hard to tell in the lurid glow of the high beams. Every so often, the budding fingers of some enormous tree scratch the roof of the car.

“Seriously, Meredith. It’s like driving through a jungle.”

“It was lots of fun when I was a kid.”

We inch our way around a majestic bend and the vegetation falls away to make space for a vast circular drive. In the center sits a fountain. Dry, of course. The flash of headlights suggests Neptune surrounded by crumbling nymphs. I pull up to the front door and cut the engine.

“Welcome home,” I say to Meredith.

—

To my relief, it seems Meredith’s business manager has kept up with the electricity bill. When I flip the switch in the entrance hall, a couple of wall sconces startle awake.

Meredith drops her Louis Vuitton duffel. “Jesus. Look at the place.”

“When were you last here?”

“I don’t know. Eight or nine years ago. When Mom died. Went through her stuff. God, she was a hoarder.” Meredith runs her finger along the wainscoting and frowns. “We’re going to need a housekeeper.”

“To pay with what money?”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ve got a few dollars somewhere.”

“That’s not what your agent tells me.”

“Well,” she says, “Adrienne doesn’t know everything.”

We leave our bags in the entrance hall and wander through one large, dark room after another.

Sheets drape the furniture, like a houseful of ghosts.

The air is damp and smells of mildew and dead rodents.

Live ones too, you have to assume. Meredith doesn’t say a word.

When we reach the French doors that lead outside to the garden, I cross my arms and peer through the glass.

“What’s out there? A beach?”

“Oh, everything. Lawn, swimming pool. A cove where we used to keep the boat. That’s where my dad taught me to sail. Mom kept a garden over there to the left. Before organic was cool. I used to pick the runner beans right off the stalks and eat them raw.”

She reaches for the slender key that sticks from the lock on the nearest door.

“What are you doing? It’s dark out there!”

“For fuck’s sake, Audrey. Sometimes I wonder if you’re even my child.”

Even unlocked, the door sticks. Damp in the wood, probably. Meredith stacks her palms on the handle and braces the doorframe with her foot, and somehow the door yanks free.

She walks out, leaving the door ajar behind her.

I zip my jacket and follow her outside. There’s nobody else around to save that woman from herself.

—

I’ve heard the stories. Whatever you think about Meredith’s upbringing, it didn’t lack for color.

Every summer, the house would fill up with artists and musicians and writers and actors, none of them overly burdened with bourgeois ideas about moral behavior.

My grandmother herself wasn’t the maternal type, apparently—let’s just say she never showed any interest in seeing me —and I sometimes think that she kept the summer colony going mostly for the convenience of all the unpaid babysitting, plus the occasional bout of no-strings sex thrown in for free.

Just a theory. Never had the opportunity to ask her about it myself.

According to the internet, there’s a full moon nestled behind those clouds, leaking just enough light to track Meredith’s pale raincoat as she meanders across the lawn.

The grass is damp and rough. If I strain my ears, I can hear the sea smashing against some nearby rocks.

For a second or two, my attention wanders to the flash of a lighthouse beam—the one I saw from the ferry, I think.

In that instant of distraction, Meredith disappears.

I call her name. In my head, the word echoes— Meredith!

Meredith! —the way it probably used to echo around here regularly when she was a child.

On the rare occasions Meredith talked about the past—usually after a few drinks—she would tell me how her mother slapped her and scolded her, wouldn’t let her do this or that, and at the time I thought my grandmother must have been a real bitch.

Maybe she was. But now that I’m no longer a child myself—now that I have been parenting Meredith, on and off, since I was about nine years old—I’m beginning to feel a little more sympathy for poor Isobel Fisher, who woke up every morning for twenty years with a mission to keep her daughter alive against the odds.

“Meredith!” I call again, just as some hillock rises out of nowhere to trip my foot and I sprawl facedown onto the lawn.

Shit, I grunt—the sound the wind knocks out of me.

In the shock of impact, I rest my limbs and absorb the night.

The grass is wet and cold beneath my cheek.

Pain spikes upward from my knee, which seems to have landed on a stone, and my mouth tastes of copper where I’ve bit my lip.

To my left, the French doors cast a pretty glow.

You would never suspect the house inside is a mildewing dump in urgent need of renovation.

I rise on my elbows, spitting grass. A sound carries across the damp night air—the distant splash of water.

The sea, I think. Crashing against the rocks.

Then— That’s not the sea.

I stagger to my feet. “Meredith! Meredith!”

No answer.

I dig for my phone in my coat pocket and swipe the flashlight to life. Around me is grass, meadow, sloping down a hill toward the cove, hidden by the night. The sea glimmers so faintly, I might be imagining it.

“Meredith!” I yell her name so hard, my voice cracks.

This. This is why you try so hard not to care.

I limp into a jog, no particular direction, just away from the house. Toward the cove, toward the sea I can’t see. My breath comes hard and fast, too loud to hear anything. Tears sting the corners of my eyes.

You walking disaster, Meredith. All my fucking life.

Another splash reaches my ears. Louder this time. I skid to a halt in the grass and swing my phone flashlight in the direction of the sound. The glow picks out a shape, a building.

Pool. The pool house. Like Meredith used to talk about. The saltwater pool into which her mother famously pushed her when she was two years old, to teach her to swim on her own. Meredith’s first memory.

Already I’m running toward it. Pain stabs my knee each time my foot lands on the grass.

I’m panting too hard to call her name—not from the exercise itself; God knows I’ve been working out like an Olympian the past six months.

From fear. The familiar terror. It’s midnight, one o’clock, three o’clock in the morning—she’s still not home.

A siren keens in the distance. It’s for her, it must be coming for her.

An accident. Fatal. Meredith smeared all over the road. Used up her last life. She’s gone.

How many nights had I lain awake and listened for the sirens?

The pool house comes into focus, the stone wall that surrounds the pool. There must be a gate somewhere, an entrance. I can’t find it. I scramble over the wall and yell, MEREDITH!

“Honeybee? Is that you?”

The light from the phone glimmers on the water. In the middle, Meredith paddles upright with long, elegant strokes of her arms. She’s wearing a dreamy smile and nothing else.

“See? I told you Brenda wouldn’t let me down.”

I gasp—“ Brenda? ”

“My business manager. Look, they’ve filled the pool up. I told her. I said, I don’t care what else, just make sure the pool’s ready.”

“The pool ?”

She turns and resumes her swim to the opposite end. “Come on in and join me!”

“ Join you?”

“I swear I won’t look. I know how uptight you are about your body .”

I watch her swinging arms, her kicking legs, the water that chops around her.

Always water. When I was little, before her career took off, we would walk to the ocean every day from our studio apartment in Venice Beach.

I remember sitting on my blanket, watching her disappear into the chilly Pacific and emerge at the exact instant I had given up hope—long limbs intact, bikini cradling her golden skin.

In my mind, she was Ariel, except blond.

A mermaid princess. Then she was cast as Pepper in Tiny Little Thing, and we moved into a house in Malibu with a pool and a path to the beach. There was always a swimming pool.

“Meredith?”

She reaches the wall and flips like a porpoise to swim back the other way. The light from my phone gleams along her elbows and the curve of her spine.

“Fuck. You.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Audrey. Relax.”

“ Relax? Are you kidding me? You just disappeared . Left me in the dark in the middle of a meadow. Outside. I had no idea where you were. No idea where I was. Then I heard this splashing. And you didn’t answer—I yelled your name and you didn’t answer—”

“Well, because I knew you couldn’t hear me.

” She reaches the wall and clasps the edge with her skinny fingers.

Looks up, so stupid beautiful it hurts your eyes.

Even the red mark near her hairline, where they took out the stitches—how does it somehow become her?

The rest of us look like shit when we’ve wrecked a car, spent four weeks in rehab, and road-tripped across the country over three hellish days at the age of fifty. Not Meredith Fisher.

“I thought you had—I thought—”