EASTER WEEK OF 1985, in Sesuit on Cape Cod. That rarity of rarities—early spring in New England.
I could have had my own room, but that would have kept us too far apart. We slept together in Skye’s wide bed under the eaves, a world away from her parents, whom we saw only in passing—glints of their hands, waving good-bye as we sped through the house on our way into each day’s halcyon light.
The sun went easy on us. Temperatures that forbade chill, even when we tied a plastic bag around my arm and dove into the frigid water, screaming as we ran back out. We paddled kayaks to Sandy Neck, looking for whales. We smuggled good wine up to Skye’s room, then crept back out, riding our bikes to Maushop Lake. We tried to skinny-dip under a full silver moon, but the still water was nearly as cold as the ocean, and we bundled back into our damp clothes, shivering. We had brought the coke along, and sprinkled it like salt onto the sides of our thumbs, snorting it off damp skin. Then sat on the pier, talking at warp speed, our sentences tumbling out and crashing together, blending. My cast already ruined, fetid and violently itchy.
We brought our tape player down to the bluff, blasting “Sugar Magnolia” and dancing on the sand in mad, whirling circles.
“Did you call my name?” she asked. “That night I was missing?”
“No,” I said. “We didn’t think you’d hear.”
“Don’t you know how sound carries across the water?”
She cupped her hands around her mouth and called her own name across the wide, black bay.
“You see?” she said, turning back to me. “They heard that all the way over in Ireland.”
We threw off our shoes and ran into the waves—freezing water washing over our knees.
“Skye,” we shouted, the music blaring behind our voices. “Skye!”
The word reverberated out into the night, as we waited with illogical expectancy for some manner of reply.
THE NEXT MORNING I introduced Skye to John Paul’s mushrooms—spreading them into thick peanut butter sandwiches, which we choked down with determined grimaces—before we bicycled all the way to Provincetown.
The world spun by in threads of gray, blue, green: swirls of tree-tops, cloud formations, and passing cars. We stashed our bikes in the dunes and made our way down Commercial Street. The good weather and Easter weekend had only barely wakened the town from its winter hibernation. A scattered collection of tourists, cross-dressers, and scowling old Yankees made their way down the sidewalk, blinking into the sunlight. We saw three little girls eating ice-cream cones and realized we were starving. Up a flight of warped wooden stairs we found ourselves on a rooftop, eating fried clams and french fries under a green umbrella, the sea assaulting all five senses no matter which way we turned. From across the table, Skye looked as if she’d been spun from seaweed—rippling mermaid hair and eyes the color of algae. As the waiter presented the check we dissolved into uncontrollable laughter, at the preposterous notion of his accepting mere paper in exchange for our fried feast.
Afterward, we wandered back out to the street and found the source of the ice cream. Skye ordered a strawberry cone, I ordered chocolate. We traded halfway through.
“Nothing has ever tasted this good,” Skye said. “Nothing will ever taste this good again.”
“Don’t think like that,” I said, and grasped her hand. She nodded obediently, her chin tilted into the breeze. Her face solemn but entirely open. Eager to drink up whatever moments came next.
Fewer people now. The sky began to pulse from purple to blue. We walked out to the lighthouse and dared each other to dive off Cape Cod’s fingertips—that easternmost point on the continental United States. With the sun gone, we both shivered slightly, and to my surprise even Skye backed down. At some point boys appeared, also on Easter vacation—presumed handsome because of the way their skin reflected moonlight, but never clearly seen. Our hands held bottles of beer, the world calmed to thrilling perfection. We each retired to a different length of sand, a different stranger’s cold bare hands beneath our T-shirts. I willed myself not to long for John Paul and lost myself in the salty skin of another tribesman.
Then Skye tickled my feet, and I rolled the boy off of me. We said our good-byes and made our escape, traveling back to the bicycles, wobbling back over hours and hours, sneaking into the palatial house as dawn crept over the windowsills. Pretending when we woke—the sun high and bright over the ocean—that we’d returned, as promised, before midnight.
I suppose there’s no way to explain. That all of this—in its own odd and natural way—seemed magical and wholesome as the Hundred Acre Wood.
THE SAME DAY Susannah and Drew boarded their flight to Venezuela, Skye and I returned to Esther Percy. Letters from colleges had arrived. I got into Amherst, Bryn Mawr, and Middlebury and was wait-listed at Dartmouth and Cornell. I opened the letters one at a time, surprised at my lack of excitement or disappointment. Any future of my own still seemed such an abstraction; I barely considered these choices or imagined myself at any of these schools.
Skye got into Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Oxford. “Merit scholarships,” she said. We stood in line for milk lunch, the graham crackers and boxes of milk served at a dining-hall window every morning at ten. “I wonder if I’ll be allowed to use them. I just want to feel like I’m paying my own way.”
I understood this. But still it seemed a terrible waste—when tuition to private universities would be such a painless expense for the Butterfields. I hoped Skye’s money would fund someone more financially deserving—someone like John Paul. But I didn’t say anything.
“It would be nice to go to Oxford,” Skye said. “Somewhere far away where I could start over. Where nobody knows who my father is.”
“Or who you are,” I said, imagining her exotic status. Even without the preexisting renown, she would become instantly famous: the redheaded American girl who quoted Shakespeare.
“But Harvard’s a good school, too,” she said, and we laughed.
The weather had turned cold again. Skye wore her old, tailored wool coat, abandoning my groovier clothes in favor of a more familiar, preppy look. It was a surprising relief to see her in garments that actually fit.
We carried our snacks to a low stone wall. “I want to get serious when I start college,” Skye said. “No more drugs. It’s been fun. Especially the Cape. But soon I want to get serious. I want to accomplish things.”
She brushed graham cracker crumbs off her lap and sipped some milk. Wiped the mustache away with the back of her palm. I thought how similarly I’d felt starting Esther Percy, and wondered if while walking by the Thames or the Charles, Skye would encounter someone like herself, brimming with temptations. But I knew as soon as the idea formed, should such a person appear, Skye would resist easily.
“All this time, I’ve wanted to get back at my father,” she said. “But maybe the best revenge—the most productive revenge—would be to make him proud. Who knows? Maybe I’ll grow up to be the person he couldn’t be.”
I imagined Skye under the waterfall of confetti. Possessing all the unvarnished idealism her father pretended to. Forests saved. Disarmament treaties signed.
“I got rid of Mr. November,” Skye said. “Next I’m giving up the drugs and alcohol. I’m going back to my original self. Only better. Wiser.” She peered into my face, the admonishing look of a disappointed analyst, and I wondered if this were her way of breaking off our friendship.
“You should think about it, too,” she said. “Cleaning up.”
I stared back at her, amazed at her oblivion to thwarting my plans to do exactly that. I thought about saying something, but before I had a chance she said, “I think you should give me the rest of the cocaine. For safekeeping.”
“I wouldn’t do it alone,” I said. “Besides. Why not just flush it? If you want to keep us from doing it again.”
“Well, just in case. We don’t want to be purists, Catherine.”
She plucked a cracker from my untouched stack and bit into it, scattering cinnamon and crumbs.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON I found Ms. Latham on her hands and knees in the White Cottage common room, searching under the furniture.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“My American Express card,” she said. “I can’t find it anywhere, and I’m always leaving my coat in here. I think it might have fallen out of my pocket.”
“When did you lose it?” I asked.
“Who knows? I never use the damn thing.”
I knew instantly how Skye had been paying for expensive lunches and new clothes. I felt a rush of guilt. My mother had probably spent more on my Vogel boots than Ms. Latham had on her entire wardrobe. I wondered if Skye planned to give up Ms. Latham’s credit card along with drugs and Mr. November.
“You should cancel it.” I peeked under the sofa cushion in a lame imitation of assistance. She stood and wiped dust from the knees of her jeans.
“I guess I’m not going to find it here,” Ms. Latham said.
“I guess not.”
“It’ll turn up,” she said, shrugging.
“My mother lost her card once,” I said quickly, as she started to turn away. “They charged nearly five thousand dollars.”
“But I haven’t had it anywhere besides school,” she said. “I can’t imagine anyone here would steal it.”
Her trust made the veins in my neck ache.
“How’s your arm?” Ms. Latham asked.
It had just been reset. The cast now came up to below my elbow, so I didn’t have to wear a sling. The mud-stained cast with Senator Butterfield’s signature had been sawed apart and thrown away. I wished I’d thought to save it for Ms. Latham.
“It itches,” I said, and she smiled.
“You and Skye are friends again,” she said. “I’m glad.”
She was the first and only person to express this sentiment, at least on my behalf. I smiled back at her, sad that Skye would never know how to appreciate her good wishes.
She reached out as if to ruffle my hair, then changed her mind. She patted my shoulder instead, and I felt disappointed by the less affectionate gesture. I noticed that the Mondale/Ferraro button was finally gone, a delayed but final acceptance of defeat. And I knew that I should hate her—on behalf of Skye and Mrs. November—but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I admired her small kindnesses, not the least of which was her determination to overlook Skye’s dislike of her. I resolved to find her credit card in Skye’s belongings and cut it to shreds. But that plan became just one more thing that I didn’t do.
SUSANNAH’S COLLEGE ACCEPTANCES waited for her back at Waverly, locked and lulled during Easter break. About this time, she and Drew floated along the Orinoco Delta, her father only a few miles away, with no idea of her proximity.
Before Venezuela, Susannah’s father had never taken her out of the country. But when she was a child, he had brought Charlie and her on weekend birding trips. They had visited osprey colonies on the Westport River. They had looked for brown-headed nuthatches in the woods of North Carolina. And while they’d never been unusually close—not in the way Skye and her father were—since his defection, Susannah had noticed a marked difference in her feelings toward him. As a child she had taken him for granted in the way of imperatives: bone marrow, oxygen, her father in the next room. Now she couldn’t help her own refusal to accept or respect him. His leaving had forged a chasm that no amount of late-night confession or shared coke could bridge. The more overt his attempts to reach her on her own level, the greater the sense that this new South American father had replaced the old one—the one she’d believed would be around forever.
With Drew it was different. Later she told me about floating down the river while she pointed out everything her father had taught her about the region. It struck Susannah that since she’d found out about Skye—once her anger had dissipated—her feelings remained more or less the same. Drew never seemed like a new person. She didn’t trust him less. She didn’t love him less. The discovery had not affected her feelings toward him so much as clarified them.
And she wished it were anybody else, sitting in the boat beside her, floating down the murky green river, swatting away the mosquitoes and flies. She found herself formulating plans that would allow me to accompany her instead of Drew, as if the trip weren’t already well under way.
“Look,” she said to Drew, pointing to a ragged osprey nest. She heard a hoarse catch in her smoky voice as she recited what her father had told her—information she’d pretended not to hear. She told Drew that the young ospreys would spend a year in warmer climates before beginning the migration whose rhythm would dominate their entire lives. She didn’t tell him because she thought he’d care but because the knowledge her brain contained longed to escape, to be shared with the person closest to her, even if closeness referred to mere proximity.
She told Drew the birds she knew. She told him about the trogons and the blind oilbirds. The yellow-shouldered parrots. “Look,” she said, again and again, pointing toward the amazing colors, the prehistoric silhouettes, the shocking wingspans. The curassows, quetzals, and parakeets. Susannah could recognize and identify them all.
“You’re amazing,” Drew said, sincere and regretful.
“No,” she said gently. “It’s not me. It’s this place.” It’s my father, she wanted to add, almost wanted, but not quite enough. Still, the thought echoed in her head: It’s my father and everything he’s taught me.
Their boat puttered toward a white puddle duck, who suddenly disappeared in an explosion of feathers. Susannah and Drew let out simultaneous shrieks as a caiman’s eyes rose and then sunk beneath the surface. Then they laughed—sad, horrified, and exhilarated. Susannah climbed back onto the bench beside Drew, and he put his arm around her shoulders.
Everything moved more slowly in the sticky climate. Along the riverbanks, clotheslines held faded garments, ruffling in the warm breeze. Even with his fingers pressing against her smooth, bare clavicle, Drew couldn’t help staring at the pretty brown-skinned girls, unpinning dry shirts and dresses. Susannah looked away, knowing for the hundredth time that she was finished with him. She saw an ocelot crouching behind a tree, its predator’s glare fixed on a small, hapless iguana.
It was all so beautiful and scary and strange, she wrote to me, from her shabby hotel room in Caracas. And I missed everybody. I missed my mom and my brother and my dad and the family we used to be. I missed you, of course. I even missed Skye, and Drew—though he was sitting right beside me.
At the same time she felt happy. If she’d gone back to school that very day, her schoolmates’ money still bundled in her backpack, the connection with Rico and Alan never made, she would have felt her journey had been complete.
IT WAS RAINING in Ciudad Guayana. Susannah and Drew lunched on steak and rum in a small café. The rain danced and drummed on the tin roof. Susannah listened to its music and watched Drew with increasing dispassion. She appreciated the rare opportunity to assess a person who would soon be exiting her life. To look at him and think about the things she liked, the things she would miss. She waited for a bittersweet twinge in her chest but felt mostly the gentle buzz of the rum. The meat thick and knotted in her unaccustomed stomach.
She looked at her watch. “Why don’t you finish,” she said to Drew. “I should probably meet Rico alone, anyway, since I’m the one he knows.”
Drew put down his glass and pushed the hair out of his eyes. Susannah reached out and smoothed one strand behind his ear.
“You’re handsome, you know.” She realized as she spoke the words that she’d never told him before.
“Is it safe?” he said. “To walk around here by yourself?” Susannah nodded, and he left his protest at that.
Outside, the hood of her slicker pulled up over her head, her Guatemalan sundress brushing her knees, Susannah thought she was probably safer than most Americans. Black hair and sun-browned knees, so little besides her freedom at one o’clock in the afternoon to differentiate her from the local schoolgirls. She stopped to pet one of the pointy-eared dogs, crouching under the porch of the general store. The animal cowered and then closed its eyes, its bulging rib cage trembling blissfully. Stepping away, Susannah held her hands out under the rain, letting the water gather in her palms. Scrubbed them together as she walked up the stairs to the store.
She saw Rico immediately, unloading a case of Fanta onto the sparsely stocked shelves. She reached out and touched his elbow. He turned and looked at her blankly, waiting for her to ask a tourist’s question.
“Remember me?” Susannah said. She pulled back her hood. Shook her hair. “My name’s Susannah. My father is Señor Twining, from the Orinoco Delta.”
Rico pushed the box of soda aside with his foot. He let his eyes travel up and down Susannah, registering her form more than leering at it. His face eased into a wide, white-toothed smile, and Susannah realized that the compliment she’d given earlier to Drew really belonged to him.
Because afterward at the café, where Drew sat slumped beside the near-empty bottle of rum, he didn’t look handsome at all, only disheveled and young. Susannah imagined his mother in a department store, picking out his polo shirt and khaki shorts. Sewing printed name tags inside.
“Did you get it?” Drew asked, as she walked up to the table. Susannah thought that John Paul would never have let a girl wander off alone in a foreign city, in the rain. Not even her brother, or her father, would have done that.
“We’re going to his house for dinner tonight,” Susannah said. “We’ll get it there.”
RICO’S WIFE, MARIA, was even smaller than Susannah—sharp elbows and knees, dark braid, childlike feet in flat leather sandals. Impossible to think of her carrying the five children who gathered quietly together in doorways, staring at Susannah and Drew.
The house was low and sad and cozy—green stucco walls and endless stacks of laundry. Susannah emptied her and Drew’s backpacks of everything: Levi’s and American T-shirts. Mosquito repellant and Adidas. Her raincoat. The two of them could go home in the clothes they were wearing.
Alan arrived, and they all sat down for dinner—beef and sausage and rice and rum. They laughed and toasted. One of the little girls sat in Susannah’s lap while she ate, stealing sips of her coconut milk.
It was civilized, Susannah wrote me in her letter. It was beautiful. After dinner, Rico took Susannah onto the cement patio that constituted his backyard. More clotheslines, tiny dresses fluttering in the damp night air. When she zipped the coke into her empty backpack, he bent down and kissed her on the lips. She could hear his family’s laughter through the open windows, feel the dim red lights shining behind her. The oropendola again, from a tree nearby. She couldn’t help wondering if it were the same bird that trilled the first night they met. And she kissed him back, because he was handsome and because the air was fragrant with sauteed spice and mariposa. And because she didn’t love Drew but forgave him: understanding moments like this, arising in a split second of opportunity. Beautiful, lawless, and ephemeral. She tried to transfer this generous exoneration to her father but found the moment trading its softness for hard and jagged edges. So she dispensed with the idea immediately, that his abandonment would ever be excusable.
“You can never tell my father I was here,” Susannah whispered to Rico.
And Rico answered, as if he knew everything, “Of course.”
Inside, everyone hugged good-bye. Susannah carried Rico’s name and address in the pouch of her backpack, so that she could send dresses and T-shirts to the children when she returned to the States.