Her mother hangs up the phone in the kitchen. Margot has drifted in, having heard it ring, and is there long enough to know who was on the other end of the line. And long enough for her mother to know that she knows who was on the other end of the line.
“Clarity is important here,” her mother says. “You know that.”
Margot nods. She is feeling oddly grown-up and responsible suddenly, though perhaps that is just indicative of how eternal this day has been. She thinks of her father at Mass General in Boston, refusing to be treated anywhere else, the speeding drive to the airport in Syracuse and then Kiernan instructing the pilot to take them to Boston. Her father, following surgery, stuck with his jaw wired shut and her knowing that this man who has made all his money peddling sugar water around the globe will be on a diet for more than a month, when all he will be able to take are liquids. The very virility cut out of him as easily as a knife slices into a peach. And that Henry was the one who did it.
“It was my fault, really,” her mother is saying. “I never should have let you go up there. I mean, who goes upstate in the summer?”
Margot tunes her mother out. She feels now like she might be sick, the hangover, the wine from the night before in a place that feels like a world away, the whirlwind drive to the airport, the two plane flights, first to Boston, where her father was taken to Mass General, and then refueling the Gulfstream before it took her alone to the Vineyard, where her mother was waiting for her.
Maybe, though, it is her mother who is nauseating her. Her mother in her pink Izod with the collar turned up, her gold necklaces and rings and bracelets, her white capri pants snug on her ample ass and the overwhelming floral smell of her, turned up to hide the cigarette she had an hour ago, which Margot still faintly smells, like the sad undertone of sex in a motel room.
She then thinks of Henry, and suddenly her stomach is churning with the stress of it all. She remembers Kiernan making the call from the Town Car on the way to the airport and then his turning to her while her father held his face in his hands in the backseat.
“You can forget him,” he said. “He’s going to prison.”
Now her mother is prattling on, and the bile is rising in her throat. Margot cannot hear her anymore, just empty maternal blather, and now she knows she is about to throw up, and she moves as quickly as she can to the bathroom off the kitchen and gets there just in time to have the vomit land in a torrent in the toilet bowl.
“Christ, Margot,” her mother says behind her. “You’re not one of those bulimics, are you? A lot of the girls are, I hear.”
Margot is about to answer her when she dry-heaves. Emptied, she spins her head toward her mother. “No, I am not.”
“I mean, it’s okay if you are.”
“Mom, no. I’m hungover. I got drunk last night. I should have done this hours ago.”
“Okay, dear. I just meant you can tell me.”
Margot simply glares at her and stands up and straightens herself out in the mirror. She desperately wants to be outside now, like these walls are closing in all around her, and she has a pang of memory as she remembers last night amid the vines, the dewy grass against her pants and the feel of Henry beneath her.
“I’m going for a walk,” she says to her mother.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, I really just want to be alone.”
Margot goes through the French doors and out onto the patio and then past the curated landscape and through the narrow path between the half-moons of dunes and onto the beach. The sand is soft and deep here, and she takes off her sandals and holds them in her right hand as she leaves the dunes behind and walks out on the broader beach.
Once she is away from the protection of the dunes, the wind picks up and blows her hair back and presses her clothes against her body. The beach is empty. Where the ocean meets the sand, the surf slaps hard against it over and over.
Looking up at the expanse of ocean stars, Margot finds it hard to imagine it is the same day. That a single day, one rotation of the planet, can contain an abundance of lives, the way the sky can contain stars that stretch and curve away from her toward Europe somewhere far out beyond the blackness.
She remembers then a night—could it have been a week ago?—when she sat outside the small cabin near the lake with Henry. They sat cross-legged on the grass with a bottle of wine open and he had his arm around her waist and they looked up at the sky, the same sky she is looking at right now, almost as pronounced, though the black of the ocean at night does something to draw the stars even closer than they were under those open fields.
She remembers looking over at Henry and in the dark his face was tilted toward the firmament, the wide gauzy stripe of the Milky Way, and the expression he wore was one she recognized and loved, half wonder and half amusement and just pure poetry, his mind spinning like a clock, rotating and whirring as he took in the possibilities.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“They’re fucking amazing, aren’t they?”
“The stars?”
“Yes,” he said. “Do you think if we could see the backs of them, they would look the same?”
“The backs of them?”
“Yes,” Henry said. “The backs of the stars.”
Margot shook her head. “How do you come up with this stuff?”
He didn’t answer with words. He just turned and kissed her.
Now, looking up at the great, ineffable beyond, she listens to the crashing of the waves, and she walks on the sand hardened by the endless beat of the swells, and the hard truth that she will never see Henry again, can never see Henry again, rolls over her, heavy and unyielding as the surf.