When Adam remained silent, she went on. “I was tired. Adam had some friends down from New Hampshire, and he wanted to show them around town. So I said I’d just crash on the couch for a while till he got back. It was a pretty normal thing. Adam and I were close then. I was here a lot.” She waited, as if expecting an argument. “Oh, I see—Adam has nothing to say. Fine. Anyway, I was tired, like I said, and I fell asleep. When I woke up, Ross was all over me. He was stinking drunk, but he was still strong….” Her voice faltered.
“I don’t think you have to tell us any details.” It was Seth, speaking for the first time. Summer had almost forgotten he was there.
Diana seemed grateful. But she plowed ahead in her low, bitter voice. “Most of my clothes were torn. I had…he hit me, so I had a black eye.” She pointed to her left eye and pressed it tenderly as if somehow it still hurt. “Anyway, that’s when my hero came riding to the rescue. Adam came back. He pulled Ross off me. Isn’t that right, Adam?”
Adam remained perfectly still, arms crossed over his bare chest, looking down as if vaguely concerned by some pattern in the rug.
“What did you…did you call the police?” Summer asked. She felt herself draw slowly away from Adam.
“The police?” Diana echoed hollowly. She raised her face and shot a look of cold disdain at Adam. “Did I go to the police, Adam? No, I didn’t go to the police,” she said. “How could I? I had no witnesses. It would have been my word against Ross’s.” She made a twisted, bitter smile. “My word against Ross’s…and Adam’s. See, Adam was very sorry about what had happened.” Diana slipped into an anger-drenched parody of Adam. “He was so sorry. He felt my pain, really he did. But, see, I had to understand how it would be if I accused Ross Merrick of trying to rape me. See, the Merrick family, well, gosh, it has so much influence, and darn it if Senator Merrick wasn’t the kind of loyal father who would stand by his son. And really, after all, what choice would Adam have but to stand with the family, to deny anything had happened? Good old Adam, my one true love, well, he’d have no choice but to back up Ross.”
Throughout Diana’s story, Summer had felt a growing chill, a grim feeling that seemed to radiate from her heart and spread over her. She wanted not to believe Diana. But Adam stood silent. And Diana’s words were too loaded with hurt and betrayal and anger and…some other feeling. Some feeling that made her look as if she were being eaten away inside.
Guilt, Summer realized. Guilt. Diana blamed herself somehow. And that lit the fire of Summer’s own anger. She’d seen this kind of guilt before. It had never stopped eating away at her own parents.
“Is this true, Adam?” Summer asked.
Adam stuck to his silence.
“I said, is…it…TRUE?” she snapped.
The others all looked at her in surprise. No one could quite believe that tone of voice could come from Summer Smith. Adam looked stunned. His eyes met Summer’s gaze, then flickered and darted away.
“It’s still true,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I just told Diana what would happen if she attacked the Merrick family. It’s not my fault. It’s just the way things are. If she attacks us, we’ll end up destroying her. I don’t like it, Summer. But I have no choice.”
“If she attacks you?” Summer almost laughed. “She attacks you? I think you have it backward, Adam.”
But Adam had relapsed into silence.
It was as if he were shrinking before Summer’s eyes. As if he had grown small and far away. Miles separated them already, light-years, compressed into just a few feet. She almost felt dizzy, disoriented. The world had shifted around her, and nothing was what it had been just moments before.
The silence stretched for a long time. Finally it was Seth who spoke. “Let’s just get out of here.”
Marquez nodded agreement. “Yeah, this place stinks. It smells like a pathetic little boy who doesn’t have the cojones to be a man.”
“You don’t understand,” Adam said, almost whispering.
“I think Marquez understands perfectly,” Seth said evenly. “I think we all do. Summer? Are you ready?”
Summer looked pleadingly at Adam. Wasn’t there something he could say to make everything all right? Just hours before, she had gone to sleep thinking that maybe she was in love with him. Now, in the blink of an eye, he seemed to have become a completely different person.
Then she remembered Ross, leering and drunk at her door. She shuddered. Adam had known what Ross was capable of. And he had brought Summer here, just the same.
“Yes,” she said, with a heavy feeling in her chest. “I’m ready.”
2
Aftermath and Before Morning
“So, I’m guessing no one wants me to put on any music,” Marquez said, joking lamely as she started the engine of her parents’ car.
Summer didn’t answer. No one answered as they drove down the long, winding crushed-shell driveway.
“No, guess not,” Marquez answered her own question.
Summer had ended up in the front, with Marquez, thinking only that she didn’t want to be near anyone. Marquez would leave her alone. Alone was good at the moment.
Diana was in the back with Seth. When Summer glanced up in the vanity mirror she could see that Diana was leaning against Seth, her head buried in the collar of his shirt. His arm was around her.
Summer felt like a fool. Now that the initial shock was beginning to wear off, she felt like an idiot, like a not-very-bright kid who gets into trouble and has to be rescued by the adults. She knew she should be feeling sorry for Diana, or perhaps raging at Adam, but what she felt most was humiliation. To be dragged out of her bed, away from Adam’s house, jerked out of her ridiculous romantic daydreams and be given this nasty, hard slap of reality…
Part of her was angry. She knew it was unreasonable of her, but she felt as if Diana had maliciously stolen something from her. Summer had been on a wonderful ride, floating along with Adam. It had been a great story. Here she was, the inexperienced, average girl from an average town who’d ended up going with the handsome, sexy, charming billionaire. It was as close to becoming a princess as was possible in a country without royalty. It was as if she were Princess Di, chosen by Prince Charles.
Bad example. Another unhappy Diana.
Now the big fantasy was over. Crash. Bang. Over.
Even in the soap operas it didn’t happen this fast. The reality shift was never this total. How could she have been such a fool? How could she have fallen so far for a guy without ever seeing what he was?
And now Diana was crying in Seth’s arms, and Summer had no one’s shoulder to cry on. It was unfair. It was…
Summer grimaced, angry at herself for having these thoughts.
It was sickening. She was actually resentful of Diana for coming to rescue her. And Diana had come to rescue her, despite the pain it had forced her to face.
Summer felt the sting of the humiliation fade, a little at least.
That Diana had come to save her was something not to be forgotten, Summer knew. Not ever.
However humiliated Summer felt, Diana had to feel worse. This wasn’t the time for self-pity. She took a couple of deep breaths and brushed off the beginnings of tears.
Summer turned in her seat. She reached back and placed her hand on Diana’s arm. “Thanks,” Summer said. “Thanks for coming to get me. I know…I mean, I can guess how hard it was.”
To Summer’s surprise, Diana put her own hand over Summer’s. It touched Summer’s heart. She and Diana had never exactly been close.
Summer’s gaze met Seth’s. He still held Diana close, offering his shoulder to cry on, knowing that she needed one.
He mouthed a soundless question—are you okay?
For some reason, at that moment, the tears she had held back began to fall. Was she okay, he wanted to know? Seth still had another shoulder, if Summer needed to cry about losing the guy she had chosen over him.
Many perceptions had changed i
n an instant. Diana was not the person Summer had thought she was. Neither was Adam.
And Seth?
Summer looked past him out through the rear window, watching through blurry tears as the Merrick estate, big as a castle, receded into the night.
Marquez dropped Summer and Diana at the Olans’ big house, then took Seth to his own more humble house. She parked in the alley behind her home. She closed the car door carefully, not wanting to wake anyone upstairs. All she needed now was for one of her older brothers to start cross-examining her about why she was out so late. Her younger brothers wouldn’t care, but her older brothers were not quite as Americanized as she was. There were some habits—overprotectiveness being one annoying example—that they had retained from their childhoods in Cuba.
Marquez went in through the front of the house. It was a three-story brick building. Her own room was on the ground floor, a huge expanse of territory that had once been an ice cream parlor. She still had a plate-glass display window at one end, and the long, low soda counter fronted by round upholstered stools. Down one wall were the glass and mirror shelves that had once held banana split bowls and milkshake glasses and now held her books, CDs, and assorted bits of clothing. A former hot fudge warmer overflowed with her panties.
The other walls were bare brick, coated by layer after layer of her own extravagant spray-painted artwork. Wild depictions of flowers and bushes and sunsets, and in one corner a tall palm tree that spread its vibrant green fronds across the ceiling. Entwined throughout it all were the graffiti-style names of years’ worth of friends and acquaintances, and even a couple of enemies.
The largest name written there was two letters—J.T. Her boyfriend. Okay, ex-boyfriend.
Marquez peeled off her clothes and let herself fall facedown on her bed. She felt a dampness on the edge of the cover, where, earlier, Diana had sat shivering and wet with rain.
“What a night,” Marquez groaned aloud. Diana and Seth and Adam and Summer. Jeez. Way too much stuff going on. Too many complications. Too many consequences. Too many tears. Why couldn’t people just deal with things and not let them get so complicated?
Summer had been pretty cool. She’d been upset, that was clear, but there was something strong and not easily shaken at her core. Maybe that was the way all the people were in whatever sleepy, boring, party-free Midwest town Summer was from. “They got nothing else to do there, probably, except grow character,” Marquez muttered. Summer kept saying they had the largest mall in the world. “Sure,” Marquez said, “no beaches. You got to have a mall when you have no beaches.”
She moved back to the counter and shuffled through the messy pile of CDs, some in their boxes, some not, some in the wrong boxes. Death Cab for Cutie. Yeah, that was about right for her mood. Something mellow and nocturnal. She stuck in the CD and flopped back on her bed.
No, wait. Wrong song. This was all about not wanting to love someone but loving him just the same.
J.T. stood out on the wall, the letters drawn large, in relief, so they jumped out like a 3-D beacon. She should paint over it. A couple coats of white and it would be gone. He would be gone. Him and his problems. It would make him disappear from her life.
Except that in too few hours she had to go to work, where she couldn’t avoid him. There he’d be with all his scrambled priorities, all his doubts. Another tortured, unhappy fool like Diana. What was it with people? It was easy enough to be happy. Just let the crap flow off you. Just don’t let it reach you. What did it really matter if J.T.’s parents weren’t his real parents? What did it matter if Summer had lost a brother long ago? A brother named Jonathan? Why should Marquez let the two facts coalesce in her mind and form this nagging core of doubt? It wasn’t her problem. That’s why she had broken it off with J.T.: Marquez didn’t need a neurotic, messed-up boyfriend. It absolutely wasn’t her problem. Any more than Diana’s sick tangle with the Merricks was Marquez’s problem. It didn’t matter to her. Marquez had her own life and her own goals. She was going to college and law school and on to a life as a respected lawyer. Briefs and motions and hours in the law library.
Tomorrow she would paint over J.T.’s name. Two coats, maybe three coats of white.
She drifted into sleep and dreamed of J.T. wearing his white cook’s uniform, emerging time and again from them, covered, then uncovered, flesh materializing, vibrant and real as each new coat of white failed to make him disappear.
Adam Merrick sat for a long time thinking of nothing, leaving his mind blank. His eyes focused without seeing on the huge stone mantel that dominated one end of the room. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to analyze the situation.
Instead his mind wandered back to the small stretch of private beach, where, earlier that same night, he and Summer had sat roasting marshmallows over a fire while the tide threatened to chase them away.
Roasting marshmallows. It was the kind of thing you did with Summer. A simple, unexciting thing. But it hadn’t been boring. With her it had seemed transcendently sweet and perfect. It might have been the most perfect evening of his life.
Gone now. Never to be recaptured.
He had cared about two girls in his life. He had gone out with, what? Hundreds? Yes, at least a hundred: here, at the New Hampshire house, away at school, at the parties his father dragged him to. He’d even spent a week in Hollywood squiring a bimbo starlet from a sitcom.
But he’d cared only twice. Diana. And Summer.
And both had been ruined for him by Ross.
Adam slammed a fist down on the arm of the couch. Ross. Passed out in his room upstairs now, all the damage done.
How hard would it be to go into his room, take a pillow, and press it over Ross’s face? People would say he’d suffocated accidentally, a result of too much booze. Their father would make sure the coroner didn’t report anything that would embarrass the family. After all, it was just a year to reelection.
The thought made Adam feel sick. Sick at his own hatred for his brother. His impotent, powerless, pointless rage.
He got up and paced rapidly to the stairs, then ran to the top. The hallway was lined with doors on each side. His own room. His brother’s room. The many guest bedrooms.
Yes, Ross was passed out. Helpless. Defenseless. Enjoying a dreamless sleep. Adam knew he would do nothing to disturb his brother’s peace. Ross was family. Family was everything.
Adam opened the door to the room Summer had slept in. Her overnight bag still lay on the dresser, open. He looked inside. Shampoo. Conditioner. A brush. A small assortment of makeup, toothbrush and toothpaste. A pair of panties. Socks. Allergy pills. He hadn’t known she had hay fever.
Her clothes, the ones she had worn earlier, were draped over a chair. They smelled of smoke from the bonfire.
He would have to return all this tomorrow. He could drive over in the boat. Or maybe the next day.
It surprised Adam a bit to realize it. He’d reached a decision, without even really thinking about it. He was going to get her back. This time Ross would not win.
Adam sat on the edge of the bed. The pillow still showed a crumple where her head had lain.
He lifted the pillow to his face and smelled her lingering scent, a mix of coconut shampoo, vanilla, and smoke. He pressed the pillow against his face. Then he lay back and pulled the blankets over him.
No, this time he was not giving up. Ross was not going to win.
He would win Summer back.
Diana went to her private bathroom and undressed, leaving her rain-damp clothes lying on the tile floor. She adjusted the water to the highest temperature she could stand. Then she climbed in, wincing at the hot spray against her chilled flesh.
Diana slowly lowered herself until she was sitting on the floor of the shower, letting the spray hit her bowed head and wash down over her face.
It was just what she had done that night, a year earlier. She’d sat here, just like this, letting the water pour over her. She had felt powerless and betrayed. She had hated
Ross and Adam. And she’d hated herself. The sight of her own naked limbs, tan against white porcelain, had filled her with revulsion.
Diana let the familiar emotions wash over her. It was a ritual by now, one she was familiar with—the memories, and the many layers of “could have,” “should have,” “why didn’t I” regrets.
A year of it. Hoping it would all go away. Realizing it never would. Falling again and again down the long, black hole of depression. Each time climbing slowly back out, only to fall farther the next time and emerge more slowly still. She was losing the battle.
Diana stood up and turned off the water. The mirrors were steamed so that her reflection was no more than a suggestion of pink flesh and dark hair. Good. She hated the sight of her body.
Downstairs, in her mother’s medicine cabinet, was the brown bottle half-filled with the pills Diana had counted again and again and again—her security blanket. Her reassurance that there would, in the end, be a way out of the black hole.
But not tonight.
Tomorrow was her day to volunteer at the Dolphin Interactive Therapy Institute. A sad little girl named Lanessa would be expecting her.
So not tonight, though she could feel the black hole opening wide to welcome her in. Not tonight, but before her mother came home. Before then, Diana reassured herself. She would end the pain before then.
3
The Closeness of Stars
Summer lay on her second strange bed of the night, in her second strange bedroom, and listened to all the tiny night sounds that were different here. She wished desperately that she could be down in her own shabby little stilt house, hearing the reassuring sounds of the water as it lapped against the pilings. But the stilt house was a mess at the moment. Seth, who had been hired to fix it up, had gotten a bit overzealous, and for the moment, at least, the house was unlivable.