Rock the Boat Read online

  “Are you,” Thomas began, reaching across the table for her winter-white hand. Her caramelized skin from Mexico, Kate silently lamented, had blanched as soon as they’d touched down at LaGuardia. “Happy?” Thomas stared at her, waiting for her response, with the bluest eyes Kate had ever seen. Mayflower blue, she liked to joke, because his grandmother never missed an opportunity to mention their Plymouth forebearers.

  “The happiest,” Kate crooned, arching her back to sit up straight, basking in the moment like a cat in afternoon sun.

  “Really?” he said, drawing slow circles on the back of her hand with his thumb.

  “Really,” Kate said. “I am the happiest.”

  She felt Thomas’s hand retreat to retrieve the ring from the pocket in his jacket. But he didn’t reach for the pocket. He just sat back, his eyes so wide that they became two Mayflower blue islands surrounded by an ocean of white shock.

  Thomas held out his hands again and she met him halfway, ignoring some primordial sense of panic. He flipped her right hand over and traced the lines of her veins across the pale underbelly of her wrist. Kate waited. She felt light-headed before realizing she hadn’t taken a breath since she’d said “happiest.” Leaning forward and speaking slowly, in a low voice that would haunt her for months, Thomas confessed: “I’m not happy. I’m really, really not happy.”

  * * *

  —

  Six hours later, Kate’s parents flanked her as they walked out of the Jane Street apartment and toward their parked car, which offended passersby with its flashing hazard lights and yellow Jersey plates. Buckled in the back, Kate closed her eyes and tried to understand what had just happened, how this implosion of her life had occurred.

  In the diner, she’d actually laughed when Thomas had said he wasn’t happy. She’d almost said, This is a weird way to start a proposal. But then Thomas’s eyes had welled with tears and instead of asking “Will you,” he’d said, “This isn’t fair.”

  That’s when time had sped up and stood still.

  Kate had swallowed vomit before bolting from the booth and pushing through the hulking diner door like it was nothing but a string curtain. On the street corner, she’d put her hands on her knees and her head between her legs as Thomas stood behind her and calmly explained he would go to New Hampshire as planned; he was using his vacation days to stay up there for the week so she would have time to pack her stuff and figure out next steps. They’d walked up Eighth Avenue in silence, too stunned to speak. When a subway grate blew the city’s bad breath up Kate’s dress and Thomas looked embarrassed for her—like they were no longer on the same team, no longer a we—Kate broke into a run only to arrive back on Jane Street and realize the apartment keys were in Thomas’s pocket.

  Waiting on the steps, she’d called her sister.

  “Can you go to a friend’s place?” Bernadette asked. “You shouldn’t be in that apartment by yourself—oh, Christ, and tomorrow’s Easter.”

  “My friends are his friends,” Kate whimpered.

  “Is it Nora?” Bernadette dared.

  “He swears there’s no one else.”

  Bernadette scoffed and muttered a string of uncomplimentary expletives under her breath before saying she’d figure something out. They hung up just as Thomas rounded the corner and reluctantly offered that she could come to New Hampshire for Easter, as long as she could keep the weekend drama-free since his grandmother was in remission.

  “He wants me to go with him,” Kate lied.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Bernadette said just as Thomas cleared his throat and clarified that he needed to be alone, that New Hampshire was only an option if she had nowhere else to go.

  “Stay there,” Bernadette growled. “Or book a train home and I’ll pick you up.”

  After unlocking the front door, Thomas grabbed a pre-packed suitcase he’d hidden behind the white couch, kissed Kate’s forehead, and explained he was being cruel to be kind before asking her to drop her Jane Street keys in the mailbox when she left. An hour later and alone in the apartment, Kate had cried herself to exhaustion. Staring up at the ceiling, she listened to the rhythm of the raindrops and Rolodexed her regrets: She should have said yes to that puppy Thomas had wanted the previous summer, yes to another hour at the party the night before, and no to that early SoulCycle class when he’d been sleeping off his week of overnight shifts. The regrets poured down as the rain picked up, and the incessant tapping against the window reminded Kate of her least favorite client, Hal, who liked to express his annoyance by impatiently drumming his manicured fingernails on the conference room table.

  Kate groped for her phone, ignored the incoming call from Bernadette, and composed an email to her boss and her boss’s boss at Artemis PR, who just so happened to be Evelyn Mosby. In three lines, Kate quit her job. She didn’t even bother to read through the memo before hitting “send.” It was over. She’d lost the big investment so it was time to burn it all down. The momentary flex of independence felt good, like the warm licks of a bonfire—until everything inevitably turned to ash.

  “You did WHAT?” Bernadette yelled into the phone five minutes later. Kate heard their parents, Sally and Dirk, gasp in the background when Bernadette relayed the latest bit of breaking news. “Write back and apologize or—wait, no, just put your phone down. You’re out of your mind. Hold on—okay, Mom and Dad are going to drive up right now, but no more emails.”

  It was only when Dirk and Sally Campbell appeared on the Jane Street front stoop and her mom said “Oh Katie” that she let her body go slack and allowed her parents to organize the evacuation. Kate curled up in the corner of their queen bed that she realized was now just Thomas’s and watched the clumsy pile of wire dry cleaner hangers spill off the down comforter and onto the hardwood floor. As her father loaded luggage, her mother worked to dismantle her closet, while Kate pored over Thomas’s social media presence, trying to understand who could have infiltrated their life when Thomas worked all the time. Kate had met the other fellows in his program and felt a shred of comfort that they weren’t his type before realizing she had no idea what Thomas’s type was if it wasn’t her.

  From the closet, Sally scoffed about the kind of people who hung their jeans, knowing full well Thomas had turned her daughter into that kind of person. Locking herself in the bathroom, Kate secretly texted Thomas. If Bernadette had come up with their parents, she would have confiscated Kate’s phone upon arrival to avoid this very situation, but Bernadette was at home with her daughter and so Kate was in the bathroom texting. Thomas replied immediately, proving to Kate that he still loved her and that this was just another dramatic hiccup. Taking a deep breath, Kate opened the message and saw it was the automatic reply she’d set up for him years ago so that he wouldn’t be tempted to text and drive.

  Three suitcases and countless overstuffed trash bags later, Sally barked out directions from the passenger seat like a Marine on a rescue mission as Dirk navigated their way out of the West Village. A sign above the Holland Tunnel warned in flashing lights and far too late, Stay Alert! The city disappeared behind them and the road ahead narrowed into darkness.

  It took several moments for Kate’s eyes to adjust to the blur of white tiles erasing the life she’d built for herself. Leaving the city this way—worried parents in the front, all earthly possessions in the back—felt like a permanent sentence. Driving under the Hudson, away from New York, was the equivalent of crossing the river Styx, only without the romantic promise of an afterlife.

  Emerging from the tunnel, the GPS mechanically welcomed them to New Jersey with as much enthusiasm as one could muster for the state. Dirk and Sally let out a joint sigh of relief as they merged onto 95 South. The sun had set and hundreds of red taillights idled in the stand-still traffic, reminding Kate of worker ants. Fifteen years in the city and she’d never had to commute.

  Merging onto the Garden State Parkway, Kate listened to the steady grunt of her parents’ rusty SUV that was bad for the environment but good for moving two daughters in and out of dorm rooms, group houses, and apartments. She let her forehead thud against the window with every bump in the road and watched with envy as oncoming traffic headed north, toward the city, toward the epicenter of everything. One car’s high beams temporarily blinded all of them and her mom squawked: “It’s like they’re shining a flashlight directly in our faces!” Sally Campbell didn’t know, how could she, but at the mention of a flashlight, the memory rushed at Kate without warning. She closed her eyes and allowed the curtains to lift.

  She’d been dating Thomas for six months when he’d surprised her with a trip to his parents’ vacant ski lodge in New Hampshire the first crisp fall weekend in October. Kate had expected the lodge to smell musty, a thick layer of dust making her sneeze every few seconds, the cupboards bare except for mouse droppings. But when Thomas opened the front door, the exposed wood beams sparkled and a crackling fire in the great room beckoned. This wasn’t anything like her uncle’s double-wide in the Poconos, which he’d optimistically called his lodge—this was what happened when Martha Stewart masturbated to pictures of John Muir for a week and then designed a rustic-themed mansion accordingly. It was outdoorsy-chic, a cozy-rugged cabin meant for early-morning ski runs and twenty-person dinner parties. It was beautiful and all theirs for the weekend.

  “I called ahead.” Thomas shrugged nonchalantly before explaining that the caretaker had swung by.

  After fooling around in the living room, under the direct supervision of a mounted moose head, they got dressed and bundled up for a walk through the idyllic gloam. Thomas wanted to show Kate the boarding school campus where he’d spent his formative years—a stunning hundred-acre sprawl that seemed more like a movie set version of a school than an actual institution. As they walked, Thomas tossed a flashlight to himself like the sweet Eagle Scout he was—he’d brought it so they could find their way home in the dark because an Eagle Scout was always prepared.

  The school’s gothic architecture, beginning with the twelve-foot-high stone wall that surrounded the campus, was designed to intimidate. “Our kids will go here,” Thomas had said, hugging his arms around the flagpole in the center of the quad and grinning at her like a schoolboy with a crush.

  “Our kids?” Kate smirked. They were twenty-one. They were kids. But the vision of her own children attending a place like this…she could feel her insides shift and the throbbing wound from her own high school experience, buried yet still raw after all these years, seemed to finally quell as she imagined crossing this quad as a mother in a responsible green cardigan and espadrilles, a familiar figure heading to the school play, a contributing member of this community. She would belong.

  “Yeah, our kids,” Thomas affirmed. Kate could barely make out Thomas’s outline as he launched himself from the flagpole, pulled Kate into a hug, and nuzzled his face into her neck. She heard him rustling in his pockets right before he pulled out the flashlight and held it below Kate’s chin, clicking it on with his thumb.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I want to see your face when I tell you,” he murmured.

  “Tell me what?”

  “I love you,” he whispered. His lips against her ear as he said it, the way he sounded out of breath, and smiling. She couldn’t see him but she knew the sound of his smile, and because he’d put that dumb flashlight under her chin, he saw that she was smiling too, maybe even tearing up because this was a moment she would remember forever—she knew it then, even as it was still happening. “I love you,” he said again, squeezing her even tighter, “and we are going to make the most beautiful children, and they’ll attend Evergreen, and they’ll have your right brain and my left brain, so they’ll all be valedictorians. But mostly”—Thomas gripped Kate’s shoulders and spun her around so she faced him—“I love you. And I will always love you. Like Whitney Houston will always love you, but with blueberry pancakes and morning sex, even when we’re in our nineties.” He scooped her up just then and carried her across the quad like a groom whisking his bride across the threshold, bellowing “I Will Always Love You” so loud that his voice ricocheted off the stone walls. Thomas had shined the flashlight ahead of them through the woods and back to the cabin, their path clear and bright.

  At the end of the weekend, Kate had grabbed the flashlight and taken it back to New York. It was sturdier and more pragmatic than an engagement ring, but it promised the same thing: I will always love you. For years, they kept the flashlight on their coffee table, a centerpiece they hoped guests would ask after, which they did, until it disappeared during their New Year’s Eve party the previous year.

  “Dirk!” Sally shrieked as the entire car swerved, jolting Kate out of the memory.

  “There was a turtle!” her father yelled back.

  “Did you hit it?” Kate asked reluctantly, peering past her own reflection to outside the window. The Garden State Parkway had narrowed to two lanes and was empty. Tall, narrow trees stood guard on either side. They must be driving through the Pine Barrens now.

  “Sure didn’t,” her father said proudly. “And he was almost to the white line of the shoulder, so I bet he makes it.”

  “Oh, so it’s a he?” her mother asked. “How very twentieth century of you.”

  As her history-teaching parents sparred about pronouns, Kate tried to nestle back into the memory of visiting Evergreen for the first time, but she couldn’t—it felt as awkward as trying to wriggle back into a wet bathing suit.

  Now they took the exit for Sea Point, passing the billboard that reminded tourists in peeling turquoise paint: New Jersey’s Best-Kept Secret! The lighthouse illuminated the raindrops on the windshield so they shimmered like diamonds before continuing its revolution through the darkness. The salt in the damp air and the sound of the crashing waves were undeniable: Kate was back where she’d began. In real life, and in one day, she’d lost Thomas, quit her job, and returned to her least favorite place.

  “Lots of construction happening,” her father said as they coasted through the sleeping town. Kate peered out at the shops and restaurants—the windows that weren’t still boarded up from the most recent hurricane were dark and empty—everyone somewhere warmer, better, until the high season.

  MVP

  For as long as Ziggy Miller could remember, Easter in Sea Point was an aggressive publicity stunt to resurrect the town like it was Jesus’s only stop on his comeback tour. This was the first year, however, that Ziggy found the annual endeavor humiliating. He was sick of pandering to tourists, sick of everyone using his hometown as an escape from real life. Sea Point was not Disneyworld or the front cover of the Williams Sonoma Easter catalog, no matter how many papier-mâché eggs occupied the front lawns of the gingerbread houses on Ocean Avenue.

  They did the same thing at Christmas, when the town took its cues from the likes of Bedford Falls and Whoville and hosted a meet-and-greet with Mr. and Mrs. Claus, a tour of the elves’ workshop, and a highly competitive Shirtless Santa 1k on the beach that usually ended in a Shirtless Santa brawl on the boardwalk. Tourists came from far and wide for the big holidays in the off-season, eagerly escaping to this little fantasy beach town at the edge of the world.

  Carrying a large rock through the empty church the night before Easter Sunday, Ziggy dropped it too close to the ball valve, almost breaking the new filter. One inch over and he would have busted the waterfall he’d spent all night building. He told himself to focus on the project—as ridiculous as it may be. Even if Sea Point was the only town he knew of that had an Easter pageant that included a waterfall and a Bruce Springsteen a cappella group, it was still a real place where real people lived and, as he knew all too well, real people died.

  Ziggy couldn’t believe that Walter Beam, the youth pastor who also ran the Sea Point Theater Troupe, had asked Ziggy to build the waterfall this year. Alone. But Walter had asked, and Ziggy had agreed, “Because yes is easier than no,” Ziggy’s mother used to say the night before school bake sales. She’d open the oven door, squint into the 400-degree heat, and pull out a fifth batch of brownies while explaining that volunteer work rarely involved volunteering but rather preying on those with the greatest sense of obligation or lowest tolerance of guilt. But that had been in another life.

  Stepping away from the project, Ziggy wondered, how was a waterfall any sort of priority? Didn’t Jesus live in the desert? Wasn’t an Easter pageant that included a crucifixion a little intense for kids, even if the Springsteen a cappella group sang “Tougher Than the Rest”?

  Emerging from St. Mary’s Church well after dark, Ziggy cursed the sudden rainstorm as he hustled to his truck. Fiddling with the radio while waiting for the heat to kick in, Ziggy watched a silver Porsche SUV with Pennsylvania plates pull up and honk impatiently. He couldn’t make out the driver’s face in the glint of his rearview mirror, but Ziggy did see two white hands hovering above the wheel, fleshy parentheses of frustration asking the usual question of an idling car in a packed parking lot.

  Ziggy gave the silver Porsche an apologetic wave before backing out and flicking on his turn signal to make a left onto Ocean Avenue. In February, he’d moved out of his apartment above the surf shop and back into his parents’ house—or, rather, his mother’s house—which meant he now had to drive across town, from West to East Sea Point, instead of walking a block to the little oasis he’d given up when his dad had dropped dead. But he had no choice, considering that only last night Bev had attempted to cut her hair again, most likely around four a.m., when the sleeping pill had partially worn off. Before heading out to work this morning, Ziggy had sat across from her at the kitchen table and mustered the grace to dub her hack job “very rock and roll” when it was actually very disturbing.