Page 15 of High Season
“You have fun down there,” he said.
She took the plate, aware of the brush of her hand against his.
“Hey,” he said. “What are you doing tomorrow night?”
She shrugged. She was supposed to be tutoring; a family who were renting a property down by the beach for the summer had gone to great lengths to tell Hannah how important it was that their children were fully immersed in the culture.
“Nothing much,” she said.
He tilted his head to one side so that his hair fell in his face.
“I think it’s time we showed you girls what a real party is.”
SIX
2024
When the sky is golden and Nina’s head is hazy from heat, she crosses through the garden room at the side of the house. Outside, a set of stone steps leads down an entire story to the terrace where once a pool stretched out toward the sea. Below it, beneath the balustrade, a meandering garden that used to bloom with rose bushes and lavender, a second set of steps that lead all the way down to the beach. Now, the grass is scrubby, the bushes overgrown. Evelyn hasn’t hired gardeners for a very long time.
It’s the time of day when the air thickens, soupy and warm, so dense that you can almost taste it. Salt and honey. Charcoal left smoldering after grilling meat outdoors.
Nina leaves the house through the same door that she ran through all those years ago. Screaming. The eyes of a dozen adults turned toward her.
She remembers it. She does.
Or, at least, she thinks she does. She can see it now. A little girl, her sandal torn, a tear-streaked face. One hand pointing in the direction of the pool.
She can visualize the entire thing.
Whether or not that is the same as remembering it, she isn’t exactly sure.
Nina has spent much of her life grappling with this fact. She has read books. Attended lectures. Earned degrees. Sat on a dozen therapy couches and been told over and over again that what she is experiencing is normal, for someone who has been through what she has. She has spent years trying to understand this strange confluence of memory and truth, grappling with the idea that these things are not exactly the same. She knows about false memory, and about how trauma can create great, gaping holes in your vision of the past. She knows that people’s memories are the most accurate in the eleven months immediately after the event, and then become hazy afterward, complicated by retelling and rehashing a story. She knows that she should be reassured by the speed with which she was interviewed by the police. The clarity that she apparently possessed back then.
And yet, no matter how many books Nina reads or how many letters get added on to the end of her name, nothing quite delivers the certainty she longs for. She has never quite managed to quell the hum of uncertainty that loudens whenever she thinks of her sister.
Ryan is out on the terrace, pacing across the tiles, his phone held close to his face. When he sees her, he shoots a thumbs-up. He points toward the handset.
Work, he mouths.
He rolls his eyes, both a performance and a promise that he won’t be long. He didn’t know the Draytons, all those years ago. He doesn’t realize that he is standing in the exact spot where they pulled Tamara out of the water, her skin glistening, her face an unnatural, terrible shade of gray.
Nina remembers that. She’s sure she does.
“You won’t make yourself feel any better, coming out here, you know.”
Her brother, so close behind her that she can feel his breath tickling her cheek.
She turns and reaches her arms out, and he’s there, ready to pull her into a hug.
“Why do you always sneak up on people like that?” she says, her voice muffled against his shoulder.
“Habit,” he says. “Mum’s just come down from her pre-dinner nap and is requesting martinis. You want one?”
He nods back toward the house. Toward the other terrace, with its quiet and its safety. A place where they can pretend that this terrace doesn’t exist, and the events that took place here twenty years ago, didn’t happen.
“Or,” Blake says, seeming to catch Nina’s hesitation. “I can get us an incredibly expensive bottle of wine and we can drink our troubles away very far from our mother.”
Nina exhales. She didn’t realize how tight her shoulders were until they release. How desperate she is to be away from everyone else.
