The Children E-Book

Ann Leary

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 387

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

As always, Leary makes dysfunction, pathology and even tragedy completely compelling. - The Huffington Post Charlotte Maynard rarely leaves her mother's home; the sprawling Connecticut lake house that belonged to her late stepfather, Whit Whitman, and the generations of Whitmans before him. While Charlotte and her sister grew up at Lakeside, their stepbrothers, Spin and Perry, were welcomed as weekend guests. But now the grown boys own the estate, which Charlotte's mother occupies by their grace. When Spin, the youngest and favourite of all the children, brings his fiancé home for the summer, she breathes new life into their rarefied world. But as the wedding draws near, and flaws surface in the family's polite veneer, an array of simmering resentments and unfortunate truths are exposed, with devastating consequences.

Leseprobe

The Children

Ann Leary is the author of the memoir An Innocent, A Broad and the novels Outtakes From a Marriage and The Good House. She has written fiction and non-fiction for various magazines and literary publications. She and her family share their small farm in Connecticut with four dogs, three horses and an angry cat named Sneakers.

Dedicated, with love, to my mother, Judith S. Howe

Contents

The Children

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Children

ONE

One August morning in 1956, Whit Whitman sat down to a breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and toast with his grandmother Trudy. They dined outdoors on the wide front porch of Lakeside Cottage. Whit’s father had an early golf game that morning. His mother and sister had gone for a sail on the lake. Although he was only eight at the time, Whit would always remember what he and his grandmother talked about during their breakfast. First, Trudy had described her displeasure at finding the family cat on her bed when she awoke. She had thought it was her sweater and was alarmed when it sprang from her hands. Then they had discussed the weather.

“Isn’t it cold for August?” Trudy asked.

“Not really,” said Whit. He wanted to go sailing and was bitter about being left behind to look after his grandmother.

“Won’t you and your father want to plant bulbs this afternoon? Or is it too soon for bulbs? Didn’t we just plant the tomatoes?”

Whit answered in a dull monotone. It was a bit soon for the bulbs. The tomatoes had been planted in May.

“Oh, didn’t we have the loveliest tomatoes last night?” Trudy asked.

“Yes, Gran.”

“Weren’t they perfectly ripe, dear?”

“Yes, they were.”

“The roses, have they been cut back?”

“I don’t know, Gran,” Whit said, squinting out at the lake in search of his mother’s boat. (Here’s the point in the story where I always see the two white birches, gone now, against a flat blue sky, and the lake spread all around them like a pool of shimmering silver.)

“It’s too soon to cut them back. They’re still blooming,” Trudy scolded, as if it had been Whit who suggested cutting the roses back in the first place.

“Would you like to walk down to the garden, Gran?” Whit asked.

“No, dear, thank you,” Trudy said. “But if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll just go upstairs and die now.”

“Gran, not die,” Whit corrected her. “You mean lie, not die.”

But Trudy had meant die. She walked up the back stairs to her bedroom. She used the servants’ staircase behind the kitchen because she found the carpeted front stairs harder to manage. Then she folded back the quilt on her bed, pressed herself against the cool sheets, and died.

“It was her time. She was eighty-nine years old,” Whit would explain years later, his eyes sparkling and sometimes streaming with tears in the telling. (Whit was unable to laugh properly without crying.) “Still, it was the way she did it—so polite. Well, she was a Farmington girl, after all. One doesn’t just die.”

Whit was my stepfather. My sister, Sally, and I grew up in his house, and we often begged him to repeat this story to us when we were little girls, usually interrupting him with demands for details.

“Did she really try to wear the cat?”

“Was her body stiff when you found it?”

“Did it smell?”

Trudy Whitman wasn’t the first to die at Lakeside. Her mother-in-law, Ruth, died here twenty years prior. According to family legend, Ruth had spent much of her ninety-third summer in bed because she had some kind of heart problem. One night, a rabid raccoon ate its way through the window screen and leaped up on her bed, snarling and spitting blood-tinged foam everywhere, so old Ruth Whitman beat it to death with her book. Ruth didn’t contract rabies from the animal, but instead enjoyed several weeks of renewed vigor, dressing each evening for dinner with very little help from the maid. One night, after tasting her dessert, she said, “That German cook has finally stopped using too much sugar in the rhubarb. It’s quite good.” Then she astonished her family by appearing to forgo utensils and eat her pie from the plate like a dog. In fact, her heart had stopped. She had died, and that’s just where her face had come to rest, there in the German cook’s rhubarb pie.

Whit loved telling family stories, their general theme being that Whitmans are gritty and combative, they live long and then die when they’re good and ready—not a moment sooner. So it must have come as a shock to him to learn that he had cancer at age sixty-five, though it was anybody’s guess how he reacted, as he kept the diagnosis to himself until just a few months before he died. Then he told only our mother, Joan, who neglected to inform any of us kids until after he was gone.

“It’s what Whit wanted,” she had said at the time. It seems that he didn’t think he was going to die as soon as he did. Perhaps he thought the rules of cell division, malignancies, and whatnot, like so many other boring rules, simply didn’t apply to him. Maybe he thought he could opt out of the whole cancer scheme that his doctor had laid out before him. In any case, he did die, less than a year after his diagnosis, leaving Lakeside in a sort of limbo.

Lakeside Cottage is still owned by the Whitman estate. It was left to my stepbrothers, Perry and Spin Whitman, but Whit requested that Joan be allowed to live here for the remainder of her life. It’s all part of a family trust. Sally and I aren’t part of the trust, being May-nards and not Whitmans.

Sally lives in Manhattan now, but I live at Lakeside with Joan. I’m twenty-nine. I know—I’m a little old to live in my mother’s house. I like it here, though, and not just because it’s free, as my stepbrother Perry is always hinting. I work at home. I have a blog, and I’m also thinking of writing a book about Laurel Atwood. Maybe a sort of memoir.

It’s hard to understand what attracted Spin to Laurel, and vice versa, without understanding the Whitmans. You need the whole picture. I stupidly told Joan about the book idea the other day, and now she keeps insisting that she doesn’t want me to write about her. “Go ahead, tell the story, just keep me out of it,” she’ll say, and then she’ll remind me of the time she ran the Boston Marathon, or the time she won the regional women’s amateur open tennis championship.

“Whit’s marriage was over when we got together. People forget that,” she’ll announce suddenly, as if I had asked. “In any event, if you’re going to write about me at all, I think it’ll give a more rounded perspective if you include the fact that I went to Princeton.”

“Okay, well, I’m really focusing on Whit now,” I told her the other day after she offered another writing prompt involving her triumphant goal in a field hockey match sometime in the 1970s.

“Whit? What on earth has Whit got to do with it? He was already dead when Spin met Laurel.”

I don’t leave our property in the day much anymore, but when I do, I stay close to home. I often walk in the woods. I like wooded paths. I like the dark. I can go anywhere in the dark, I just don’t go to strange outdoor places during the day very often. Fields, roads, parking lots, open places like that make me anxious. Vast indoor areas like shopping centers are tricky because of all the people, but at least there you can grab a wall or a railing or something. In open outdoor places, there’s nothing you can hold on to, nothing to anchor you to the earth’s surface. I was always a homebody, a “house mouse,” as Whit used to say. I think it’s just part of my nature, but over time it’s gone from a quirk to something more.

Three summers ago, not long after Whit died, I stood on the town beach of this lake one afternoon and was suddenly undone by its vast, yawning strangeness. I think that’s when I first got this sense of needing to grab hold of something. The ground would have been fine. If I could have crawled back to my bicycle from the lake’s edge, I would have. But there were people at the beach, watching me with all their eyes. I walked away slowly, looking down, each footstep placed deliberately, heel-toe, heel-toe, so as not to scuttle sidelong before the entire group like a crab with no shell. I walked back to the cool shade of the tree where my bike was resting. Once I caught my breath, I pedaled home.

Another thing—I don’t drive, but I’ve always been able to ride my bike on roads that I wouldn’t dream of walking along, especially during the day. Of course, at night, it’s different. I can ride anywhere at night, as long as the weather’s not too cold.

Joan says I need to learn to adapt. I think she’s wrong. I think my problem is that I’m too adaptable. Have you ever seen a large cat fold itself into a tiny shoe box? Or the way a bat wraps its vast wings around its torso until it’s no bigger than a prune? A grown rat can squeeze through a hole the size of a dime. I’m like that. I’m like a contortionist that way. I must have softer bones than most people. I can deflate myself into the tiniest recesses and be quite comfortable there.

“It’s a beautiful day, Charlotte,” Joan said this morning. “Why don’t you go outdoors and enjoy the nice weather?”

I don’t have to go out to know that it’s a beautiful day. I don’t have to walk on the grass to feel it cool and damp beneath my feet. We had a thunderstorm an hour ago, and the lake is almost black. In a moment, the light will shift and it’ll be steely and blue. I don’t need to go out to know that; I can see the weather from here. Now the evenings are getting warmer. I’ll be able to walk down to the lake in the moonlight tonight. I’ll watch my legs sawn off at the ankles, calves, knees, and finally the thighs as I wade into the dark water. When I’m cut off at the waist, I’ll lie back and float like a spirit. I swim only at night now.

TWO

Not everybody has heard of Laurel Atwood—I have to keep reminding myself of that. Not everybody watches reality TV and reads tabloids. The funny thing is, when we first met Laurel, she acted as if she had never watched TV or read anything but books—important books, important literary works, as she liked to call them. And she didn’t read magazines like everybody else. She read quarterlies. She was a writer. She had just gotten her MFA from USC and had received a six-figure advance for her first novel. Her agent had sent the publisher one chapter and an outline. That was all they needed.

Her accomplishments didn’t sound so far-fetched when we first heard about them—the book deal, the training for the Olympic ski team, all before her twenty-seventh birthday. Of course, we didn’t learn about everything at once. Laurel has a way of unveiling herself little by little. I think she tried to give herself a more human scale that way. Spin was always like that, too, before he met Laurel, but his motives were the opposite of hers. He wouldn’t tell people about his accomplishments because he didn’t want people to envy him. Laurel does.

Kindness always came naturally to Spin. He got that trait from his father. Whit was actually a very kind man, but he could come off a little gruff if you didn’t know him. I’d known him since I was two years old. That’s when he and my mother got together. Of course, I didn’t really understand what was going on between them at first. Apparently, no one did. They somehow managed to keep it a secret for over a year. But in the summer of 1988, just before he turned forty, Whit Whitman fell in love with our mother, Joan.

Connecticut had a major heat wave that summer; people still talk about it. The Fourth of July fireworks were canceled because of the fire risk. Some people had their wells run dry. Lawns were brown, streams evaporated, and local farmers watched their tomatoes roast on the vine, but Whit’s memories of those days remained vivid, if not entirely accurate, and in every one of them, the grass surrounding Lakeside was greener and the gardens more alive with color than ever before.

Whit had no recollection of any dry spell that summer because he was always drenched. His clothes clung to his damp skin all day, and each night, he’d leave his wife, Marissa, alone in the house with her drink, her book, and her disdain, and he’d stride, nude and “savagely alive” (his actual words), out across his lawn to the lake. There he’d float on his back, sometimes for hours. He’d search the sky for the Dippers, Big and Little, for Polaris, Orion’s Belt, and the other twinkling constellations that had fascinated him in his boyhood. Now they fascinated him once again. Whit said there were times that summer when he felt that the muscles in his chest weren’t equipped to sustain his swelling heart. His every waking moment pulsed with thoughts of Joan.

It was a thorny situation. Whit was the first to admit that. Joan, though still quite young, had Sally and me, and wasn’t divorced from our father yet. Whit was also married and had his son Perry, who was then about seven. The thought that two families were about to be dismantled was agonizing to Whit, but the thing that tortured him most wasn’t his guilt, it was the humbling knowledge that midlife affairs like his were so common. His love for our mother was anything but common. I know this because he would sometimes shout this information, spittily, at Sally and me—especially if he was into his gin. His love for Joan was the most extraordinary thing he had ever experienced. Suddenly, all was illuminated. He had lived his life thus far as a sort of affable, obedient pet—first to his mother and father, then to his wife. Whit had always done what others had wanted him to do, not what he wanted. College, law school, marrying his first serious girlfriend, joining his father-in-law’s firm in Manhattan (he would count these off on his fingers for us, like crimes), it had all been expected of him, and he fiercely resented the expectations of others.

Whit had never been in love before. He saw that now. His marriage to socially striving Marissa was nothing more than a dull, ill-conceived alliance. It was a sham; there was no other word for it, and it had been from day one. Within weeks of his first tryst with Joan, Whit knew that life was shorter and more exquisite than he had ever imagined, and what was left of it, damn it, he would spend with her.

The surprise of Marissa’s pregnancy, almost a year into the affair, complicated things, but it didn’t alter the course Whit had set for himself. For the duration of his wife’s pregnancy, he stayed in their town house on the Upper East Side. Two months after Spin was born, he moved out for good. He moved up here to northwest Connecticut, to Lakeside Cottage, where his family had spent their summers for four generations. Once we moved in with our mother, Whit had the house winterized so we could live here full-time. Perry and Spin visited every other weekend, certain holidays, and one month of the summer.

This house is huge. It’s old and drafty. In order to cut back on energy costs, Whit would close the heating ducts in the boys’ rooms when they weren’t here, and he’d often forget to open them until after they arrived on wintry Friday nights. So there were the cold beds and, over time, another kind of chilliness that developed between Whit and his sons, especially Perry. Marissa had remarried and remarried well. Her new husband, Peter Sommers, was wealthy, like Whit. Probably not quite as wealthy, but he actually worked. Marissa and Peter held a certain contempt for Whit. Perry picked this up early on, and eventually he absorbed it himself.

Richard “Whit” Whitman (or “Idle Rich,” as Marissa had taken to calling him) was a little eccentric. But he wasn’t really idle at all; he just stopped earning his own money after he met Joan. He had to leave his job at his former father-in-law’s firm, but instead of starting his own practice or joining another, he retired and lived on the interest of an enormous trust that had been left to him after the deaths of his parents in the 1960s. Whit wanted to devote the rest of his life to the pursuit of things that really interested him. He was really interested in American history. To be more specific, he was interested in the history of American bluegrass music.

To be most specific, Whit was interested in banjos.

You could call it an obsession—most people did. He played the banjo. He collected rare banjos. Eventually, he built banjos—beautiful five-string banjos that he carved by hand in a workshop he had set up in a shed behind the old boathouse. Until he became very sick, until those last few months, you could find him working in that shed almost every day except Sunday. Whit sold many of the banjos he made. He had a little mail-order business, and eventually enthusiasts from all over the United States sought his instruments. He was a bit of a legend in the banjo community, but, well, it was the banjo community. It barely existed in the Northeast. In the grand scheme of things, I guess, it barely existed at all.

The Whitman money is old family money, mostly steel money. Whit’s uncle Leander Whitman was the ambassador to Sweden during the Eisenhower administration. A John Singer Sargent portrait of Whit’s grandmother used to hang over our living room mantel. Perry took it after Whit died because (he said) we never lock our doors. We don’t lock the doors because we don’t have much crime here, and even if we had, nobody would have known it was an important painting, because you could barely see the thing. On the mantel below it were always stacks of books, gloves, old dog collars, banjo strings, and guitar picks. Whit hated throwing anything away. He hated new things. He always drove the most beat-up car in this town—a rusty old Volvo. He was very thrifty, and so was Spin, at least before he met Laurel.

Laurel, we learned from Spin, was also a member of an important American family. Her great-great-uncle was Ernest Hemingway. Laurel grew up in Idaho. That’s where her family is from—Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway lived at the end of his life.

In fact, Idaho is where Spin first met Laurel. Spin taught science and music at Holden Academy, the boarding school here in Harwich, and it was during Christmas break of last year that he was skiing at Sun Valley. He and Laurel first met at a lodge at the top of the mountain. She was with some old friends of his from Dartmouth. I don’t know how she knew the Dartmouth group; I don’t know how Laurel manages to insinuate herself into everything, she just does. Apparently, the friends wanted to hang out in the lodge and have another beer. Laurel and Spin decided to get in a little more skiing before the lifts closed. Spin had just bought one of those helmet cams, and he turned it on for their first run together. I’ve watched this video so many times that I have almost every second of it memorized. I keep looking for clues. Sometimes I find them.

For example, the other day I realized Spin says something right after the two-minute mark. I called Sally immediately. It was several hours before she called me back.

“Look at two-oh-four,” I said.

“I can’t,” Sally said. “I’m at work.”

“Write it down. Two minutes and four seconds. It’s right after she comes flying out from behind the trees and almost collides with him. He says something.”

“I’m not watching it anymore.”

“I thought it was just a sort of grunt. For the longest time, I thought he was just grunting, but he says something. He says a word, I’m certain.”

“Okay,” Sally said. “Listen, Lottie, stop watching it.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. It won’t change anything.”

“Also, at the beginning, she turns and flashes that smile at him. But it isn’t really him she’s smiling at. It’s the camera, up on top of his helmet.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sally said. She was smoking a cigarette, I could tell. She told me she had quit.

“He was always so cautious, that’s what gets me,” I said. “We used to make so much fun of him. I mean, I know he’s a great skier, but the way they were speeding through those trees . . . They were flying. He would never have done that without her, he was trying to keep up with her.”

“Okay, stop now.”

“Just call me after you look at it.”

“No.”

“Watch it when you get home. See if you can see what he says.”

“No.”

After we hung up, I watched it one more time.

It starts with just some shaky whiteness. Spin is messing around with the camera, fastening it to his helmet. Then the world swings into view as he lifts the helmet up onto his head. He’s near the ski lift. You can hear the whirring of the motors, the clanging of metal, all those muffled sounds in that rare air at the top of the snow-covered mountain. For a second or two, there’s a glimpse of the steep white slope below and the wooded valley beyond, but then he’s turned away from the slope and facing Laurel.

She’s bent over, brushing something off the top of one of her ski boots for the first twenty or thirty seconds, and then she whips her head up and smiles at the camera. She’s wearing goggles. All you can see is a silver helmet, the blue-tinted goggles, the long, wavy blond hair, and that perfect smile, and somehow you have it all. As many times as I’ve watched this, I’m never prepared for her beauty in that instant, when she faces Spin and we see her for the first time. It’s the moment when I feel I can see her most clearly, when I can finally see her for who she really is. But the strange thing is, you really can’t see her face at all. What’s most noticeable is the reflection of Spin in her goggle lenses. There he is, twice, smiling from each lens.

“I’ll race you down,” Laurel shouts.

“Okay, you start,” Spin shouts back.

“Oh, you think I need a head start?”

“You might,” he says.

And then she turns, stabs the snow with the tips of her ski poles, and she’s gone.

She’s fast, skipping along the tops of the moguls. It’s a little hard to see here, because it’s so bouncy, but she’s wearing a bright yellow parka, and we never let her out of our sight, perched as we are on Spin’s head. He’s finally gaining on her when, suddenly, she cuts into the woods. He cuts in after her. This is the great part. This is the reason Spin sent us the video the same day that he took it. It makes your heart race. He’s carving little lines into some deep, untouched powder, speeding down a steep, heavily wooded trail. It actually looks fake in parts. Sally noticed that when we first saw it. It looks animated, like a video game, the way the trees are whipping past.

First they’re in among the evergreens and you can hear Spin laughing. He quietly curses once, when he snags a branch with his arm. He stays up, though. He’s behind her, and then he’s not; she cuts out of sight and he’s slaloming his way around the trees. The evergreens are gone. The trees have become just trunks; they’re in the deciduous trees now. If they had stopped, Spin would have been able to identify each tree for Laurel. He can tell a maple from an ash, just by the pattern of the bark. Even in the dead of winter, he knows one tree from another. He can closely estimate their ages; he probably would have if they had stopped. But they didn’t stop. Spin must have regretted that gentleman’s head start he’d granted her. We all laughed about that later, when we watched the video together. He had underestimated her.

Suddenly, she flies out from behind some trees on the left of the screen and almost hits Spin. This is the 2:04 mark I was telling Sally about. He says a word, and then he’s skiing very fast behind Laurel.

“She waited until we got to the bottom to tell me she was on the U.S. Olympic team,” Spin told us a few months later, when we all watched the video together.

“Short-listed,” Laurel corrected him. “I wasn’t on the team. I was short-listed. I tore my meniscus during the trials.”

So modest.

Spin definitely says something around the two-minute mark. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before. I watched it. Then I watched it again.

“I’ll get you,” he says. Or maybe it’s “Look at you.”

It’s really something, seeing the world from Spin’s perspective. I think that’s why I keep watching it. You can hear his breath in that video. You can see the tips of his skis pointing left, right, left, right, then straight down the mountain.

Spin always made everything look easy. You should have seen him play tennis when he was a kid. You should have seen him play the guitar or the banjo. Spin made the varsity hockey team at Holden his freshman year, but he’d been skating here on the lake with us from the time he could walk. That’s how I like to think of him now—the way he was before he met Laurel. Out on the lake. Often alone. Practicing stick handling and shooting, his hockey stick snaking along the ice, flicking the puck this way and that. There’s a calmness that’s specific to a frozen place such as a lake or a ski slope. The cold air traps sound. A skater’s edge on crusty ice sounds like the only thing on earth. I can still see him now, gliding backward, skates crossing one over the other so effortlessly. And that thin amber light you get here on the lake on winter afternoons. On weekend mornings, we always had pickup games in front of the house. The loud clacks of the hockey sticks, the triumphant cries, the angry objections and laughter, Whit’s roaring protests. We haven’t played hockey on the lake in years. Kids play at the other end of the lake now that we’re all grown up. The ice freezes here first, but nobody skates on this side of the lake anymore.

When he was at Dartmouth, Spin wrote his thesis on the negative effects of invasive species on New England lakes and ponds. He did much of his research here on Lake Marinac. He majored in environmental sciences, with a minor in musical theory. He was the only one of us who was truly gifted musically; the rest of us had to work at it, even Sally.

The afternoon of Whit’s funeral service, after everybody had finally left our house but the family, Sally kept playing the same melody on her violin. It was Bach, or something grim like that. Over and over and over again. She and I were sitting on the porch swing as she played. I put my hand on the body of the violin for a moment. My intention was to get her to stop, but then I felt the long whine of the bow running through the instrument and into the tips of my fingers. The vibrations went all through me. I felt the pull of the bow across the strings and wished I had learned the violin or cello. We spent a good part of the afternoon like that. Sally weaving the bow up and down, me with my hand touching the body of the violin. It was Spin who got us out of our funk. He brought out one of Whit’s banjos.

The banjo is a happy instrument. Even if you play along with a sad song, as Spin did that day, the rolls that accompany the chords do something. They add humor. Soon Spin had Sally on some other melody altogether. It was a Celtic-sounding thing. Some kind of reel, one of those fiddle and banjo songs you hear on Saint Patrick’s Day. They went round and round with it and were becoming extremely amused with themselves. I walked down to the lake and dove into the cold water. I swam out to the float. I could hear their song from there.

THREE

She’s into yoga,” I reported to Sally the day we learned that Spin had asked Laurel to marry him. We were all completely surprised by the news of the engagement. Spin had met her that January. Now it was April and they were engaged? I work on my computer—I’m on it all the time—so I checked out her Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts as soon as he told us. I called Sally to fill her in.

“Lots of yoga,” I said.

“Does she do it for fitness or is she into the whole energy thing, or what?” Sally asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s just doing poses. Standing on her hands, with her legs up in the air. That kind of swastika legs pose? Over and over. Oh, here’s one where she’s standing on one foot, pulling her other foot over her head. From behind. Like a figure skater.”

“What?” Sally asked. “Why?”

“She’s flexible. Some are selfies, with a mirror.”

“Oh, okay, as long as it’s just a showing-off thing,” Sally said. “As long as she’s not one of those positive-light, quiet-energy, serene, contemplative fuckwads. One of those people who talk about blessings and gratitude all the time and meanwhile, they’re so bitter and angry and self-absorbed, they literally suck the energy out of every room they’re in. As long as she’s not that.”

“She doesn’t really write much on the posts. It’s mostly photos. Thousands of followers. She’s got over ninety thousand Twitter followers.”

“I wonder why so many?” Sally said.

“She has a beautiful body, maybe that’s why,” I said. “I guess from all the yoga.”

“I don’t care how many followers she has as long as she doesn’t talk about being present. About having thoughtful, present mindfulness. I hate that.”

“Lots of selfies. Some are just her face.”

“Is she smiling in them?” Sally was on a break at a recording session and couldn’t look.

“Yeah, most of them.”

“Good, then she’s not trying to look all soulful. I hate that. As long as she’s not into mindfulness,” Sally repeated.

“I do hope she’s not boring,” Joan said later that same day, when I told her about all the yoga. “Yoga people always seem so, well, tedious, don’t you think?”

“No,” I said. It bothers Sally and me how judgmental our mother can be.

“Don’t they always have those glazed eyes?” Joan persisted. “Missy Wentwood is obsessed with yoga, and she always has that little smile and those glazed eyes. Like she’s in a cult or something.”

“I think that’s Missy’s medication,” I said. “I don’t think yoga does that to you.”

“I just hope she’s not one of those people who bores everybody, like Perry’s Catherine,” said Joan a little later. She had actually come up to the attic, where I work, to say this to me. My mother will go out of her way to be a snob. She makes an effort—you have to give her credit for that.

Sally came out from the city almost every weekend during the short period of time between our learning of the engagement and our meeting Laurel. Spin usually joined us for Sunday dinner, and we’d act very casual when he spoke of her. Later, after he’d left, we would dissect every tidbit that we’d been able to glean from him. One night, Joan cooked linguini with clams, and Spin mentioned that Laurel was allergic to shellfish.

“Oh no,” Joan said, her voice conveying a deep sadness, but not because she pities people who have food allergies. Joan doesn’t believe in food allergies. She thinks people have them to get attention. “I’ll be careful never to make them when she’s here,” she said, leveling her eyes across the table at Sally and me when Spin looked away for a moment.

Good Lord, is what her gaze said. This is even worse than we imagined.

Joan worried that Laurel was “needy.” “High-maintenance.” Joan disdains this trait in a person more than any other. And though she isn’t the cuddliest person, and Spin isn’t actually her own son, Joan adores him. She always has.

The plan was that Laurel would move into Spin’s campus apartment with him once the school year ended. The wedding was planned for sometime during the summer. Holden Academy doesn’t like having unmarried faculty or staff living together as couples on campus, so that, we assumed, was part of the urgency. But we were a little bit worried. Everything was happening so fast. They hadn’t known each other long. Most of the time they were together, they were apart. They had met only a few times after the ski trip. Spin flew out west for a couple of long weekends, I think. But they e-mailed and texted every day, and Spin said that through those communications they learned more about each other than they would have in many hours of face-to-face conversation.

I could see his point. When you talk to a person, the surroundings often distract you. You can become too absorbed with the other’s appearance—the person’s beauty or blemishes. When you’re reading texts and e-mails, you’re able to focus on what the other is saying. At least that’s been my experience. Recently, most of my exchanges with other people have been via e-mail and Facebook. And I’ve met a lot of people online whom I consider to be my very good friends, though we’ve never actually met in real life. I met many of these people through my blog.

I started the blog a couple years ago, and this past January I was voted one of the Top Ten Mommy Bloggers by The Huffington Post, which boosted my already high daily page views and brought in a good amount of advertising revenue. No, I’m not actually a mommy; that’s why I can’t reveal the name of the blog. People think it’s real. I’m supposed to be a snarky suburban housewife. I never show photos of Mia, my four-year-old daughter, or Wyatt, my six-year-old son, because I want to protect their privacy rather than exploit them like certain famous mommy bloggers whom I could name. Lots of people follow me just because of that—the fact that I go out of my way to protect the privacy of my children. Instead of photographing them, I write about the adorably crazy things they say. I include rage-filled thoughts aimed at the sancti-mommies at Wyatt’s school, and sometimes at my adorable but clueless husband, Topher. That’s all I’ll say. And I’m not Charlotte Maynard. I have a different online name, a variation of which is also the name of my blog. I have many more Twitter followers than Laurel. Sometimes I wish I could use my real name so that people would know what a following I have.

Advertisers are paying me now. One is a diaper company, and I don’t want to out myself. I frequent online parenting discussion forums; that’s how I learn terms like sancti-mommy, and about vaccination controversies, preschool problems, and kids with special needs. Wyatt has a rare genetic disorder. It’s a miracle he’s alive. I’m able to joke about it, even when he has setbacks, which readers say they love about me—the fact that I can always find humor, no matter what tragedies this life might throw my way. Don’t judge. The blog brings joy to many people; every day I get hundreds of e-mails and comments telling me so.

My point is this: I think you can get to know a person very well even if most of your interactions are online. I said this repeatedly to Sally whenever we spoke of Spin’s engagement. She was a little worked up about the fact that they were already engaged and we hadn’t even met her yet.

Sometimes we’d tell Everett Hastings our latest discoveries about Laurel, and he’d have fun at our expense. Everett lives in the old carriage house on the property. He’s a dog trainer by profession, but he works around here in exchange for his rent. We’ve known him all our lives. His father, Bud, was the caretaker before him, so Everett grew up here. He’s a year older than Sally. Everett doesn’t go on Facebook or anything, and he didn’t understand how we felt that we knew her so well, based on what we had seen there. He thought we should reserve our judgment until we had met her. “There’ll be plenty of time for hating her once you’ve actually been introduced in real life,” he said one warm spring night when he, Sally, and I were out smoking a joint at the end of the dock.

Sally protested. “Who hates her? I don’t hate her. I’ve never met her. What are you even talking about?”

“Just don’t use up all your contempt before she gets here,” Everett said, and laughed.

“We’re not haters,” Sally said. “She’s odd. But we don’t hate her.”

“Right,” Everett said.

That first week or two, we did judge her a little harshly, but that was because we had only been looking at her recent Facebook updates. One day, I decided to look back on her timeline, and what I learned changed our opinions completely.

I discovered that she’d had a terrible white-water kayaking accident in 2004. It had destroyed her career as a skier, ruined her chances for the Olympics. She had been with her sister; they were teenagers at the time. They had been caught in some rapid water and both kayaks had flipped. Laurel was thrown against a rock and fractured her spine someplace up near her neck. It was a miracle that she could even walk, let alone ski as well as we had seen in the video. Unfortunately, the sister had drowned. Laurel had chronicled her recovery on her blog. That’s how she had developed the large following on Facebook and Twitter. She had to put off college for a year for all the rehab. No sooner was she back on her feet than she was working tirelessly to help others with spinal injuries and also with grief over the loss of a loved one. She had experienced both at such a young age. She went to college there in Idaho, and when she wasn’t studying, she volunteered her time working with veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Eventually, she went to Afghanistan with a veterans group. She also kept a journal, and it was this journal that had caught the attention of the MFA program at USC and, later, the publisher.

We were in awe, my mother, Sally, and I. We had judged her too severely. The yoga was no longer seen as show-offy. It revealed her strength and resilience. It gave others hope. Sometimes, in the comments, people would post things like, “I had a C3 fracture two years ago, and you are my inspiration.” Laurel would respond by asking where they were doing their rehab, or what kind of fracture it was. “Water therapy,” she would say. Or, “There’s a study at Johns Hopkins involving stem cells. PM me for more information, I know the doctor who’s heading up the study.”

We, like her many online followers, were humbled by Laurel’s heroism and fortitude. Joan still found her “a little braggy.” Sally and I told Joan that she was a snob. Sally, Joan, and I talked about her, wondered about her, praised her, criticized her, and argued about her. We were proud of her one day, and making fun of her the next. Some of her posts were a little too self-congratulatory and she used outdated acronyms like LOL and STFU all the time. And her sense of humor seemed off at times. She overshared about Spin, too—posting the weirdest stuff about how they’re soul mates and how she knows him better than she knows herself. She didn’t use his name, though; she called him “the Professor.” Perhaps that was why he didn’t object to her posting about his apparently insatiable sexual appetite.

“Teachers at prep schools are not professors,” Joan said when we showed her one of Laurel’s posts. The post had revealed, in very graphic detail, that our Spin was an oral-sex virtuoso. Sally and I were at the kitchen table, laughing uncontrollably while reading it. Joan asked what was so funny. I turned my laptop and showed it to her, just crying with laughter. Joan put on her reading glasses, read it coolly, and then removed her glasses and made the remark about how prep school teachers are not professors.

So, we were a little fascinated with Laurel, to put it mildly. We devoted so much time to the idea of her that we were bound to be disappointed when we finally did meet her in person. But she didn’t disappoint.

It was the second weekend in June. A Saturday night. Joan had gone off to a dinner party. Sally was going to the Pale Horse Tavern to meet some old friends. Everett was sitting on his porch, drinking a beer and playing with his dogs. He has one dog, a Jack Russell named Snacks, and that week he had two others staying with him—a pair of young Australian shepherds who needed some training. I was in the driveway, having just said good-bye to Sally, when Everett gave a low, long whistle. I pretended I didn’t hear him. I’m not a dog.

Then he called out to me. “Lottie? Babe?”

I turned and could see, even from my considerable distance, he had that grin going. He was all horny and high. I could smell the weed from where I stood.

“Come on, babe, come over here,” he said. I shook my head no and turned to our house.

Then he added, “Babe, pleeease?”

Two minutes later, I was in his bed.

I’m in love with Everett; I might as well get that out of the way. I’ve been in love with him for years, really. Since I was a kid. He’s always known it. He hasn’t always felt the same way about me. He had been seeing other women in recent years. He was open about this. We weren’t really in a relationship anymore, so I acted as if I didn’t mind about the others. We still hooked up now and then. Not that often. Once a week. Two or three times, tops. Basically, whenever he wanted. I know, it wasn’t an ideal situation.

Joan thought I should meet other guys. “You’re just stuck on Everett because you never leave the property. Get out a little more, sweetie. You’ll never meet anybody but Everett if you never leave the house.”

I didn’t like her to know how often I went to Everett’s at night, so I usually snuck over when she was out, or waited until after she’d gone to bed.

That night, after Sally left and Joan was at her dinner party, after Everett lured me into his lair and I had his skin against mine, his lips on my throat, I almost cried. I don’t know why; I just always got a little teary in that final moment when I felt his heart pounding against mine and we were suddenly both so still. He had no idea.

That was one of our first really warm nights of the summer, and Everett suggested we go for a swim. I sat up and looked out his window. It was almost dark, the evening sky was faintly streaked with pale pink clouds, and the lake was as still as glass. Every sound had paused, as it does at dusk, when the daytime birds and insects have clocked out and the peepers and owls haven’t started up. I believe I could have heard Everett’s heart beating in that moment if I’d listened hard enough.

“Come on, first swim of the summer,” he said. He turned my face so that he could give me those big, pleading puppy dog eyes.

“No,” I said. “Let’s stay here where it’s warm.” I was tracing this cowlick he has on the left side of his forehead, where the hair turns into a little swirl. I love touching it.

“C’mon,” Everett said, and a few minutes later, we were running across the beach, the three dogs racing alongside. I screamed from the cold when we dove into the lake.

Our spot on the lake is a little inlet. It’s a cove protected on one side by our house and yard, and on the other by some wooded land that Whit deeded over to the town’s land trust years ago. We often swim nude. Nobody can see us from the road, and in the evenings, there’s usually not anybody out on the water. And when I say “we” swim nude out there, I mean all of us. Whit and Joan used to infuriate Sally and me with their nude strolls down to the lake after dinner. “Well, don’t look at us if we’re so hideous,” Joan would say, laughing when we would scream at them to cover up. Later, when we were in high school, it was a tradition among our friends to take off our clothes and jump in the lake when we had been partying.