Chapter 3
Zooey looked at her friend’s beautiful face, now lightly lined with age, as it turned away from hers. Keeley’s mouth softened and her tip-tilted blue eyes became heavy lidded as she went off into her own private la-la land staring at the water.
Oh, no, not now. She would get her answer if she had to shake it out of Keeley. It was why they were here. Not because of Daniel. Because of Hannah.
“Keeley? You are going to talk to her soon?”
A flicker of irritation crossed Keeley’s face, her nose wrinkling. “Oh, come on, Zo. Give me a break,” she sighed, still looking off at the beach.
Zo looked to Pam and Amy for support, but Pam seemed to be engaged in cleaning something off of the t-shirt stretched over her substantial bosom, and Amy was gazing off at the beach like Keeley while sipping her drink. Poor Pam had started growing those enormous knockers when they were only ten and had been in a perpetual battle with them ever since, so maybe she was simply distracted, but Amy wasn’t the stare-off-into-space type. She was a doer and a problem solver, usually. She fought hard and she fought fair and you could count on her to have your back, no matter how much the opposition towered over her tiny frame. Where Pam was massive and muscular, Amy was small, doll-like and disarmingly innocent looking. You’d never guess there was a pit-bull underneath that sweet veneer.
Right now, Amy looked particularly wide-eyed as she took another sip of her drink, looking off at the water. Fine, don’t pitch in or anything helpful like that, Amy, just stay out of it as you usually do when it comes to me and Keeley.
Zo turned back to Keeley. “Oh, come on, nothing,” Zo said, fighting to keep her voice modulated. “You just can’t go on not-“
“Fine! I’ll talk to her, I’m sure! Just not right now!” Keeley said, turning away from the beach, still not looking at Zo, and then reached for her drink. “Don’t I have a right to be pissed off?” Sipping her drink, she finally looked at Zo over the salted rim of her glass, giving her the puppy-dog look that usually worked. But this was about Hannah, and Zo wasn’t going to back down.
Zo nodded, “Yes, be mad…, at that woman who wrote the review! Not at our baby. Call her, and we’ll sort out what to do about the reviewer separately.”
“We should sue the paper for slander!” Amy said, suddenly paying attention again, “It’s the only solution.”
Zo shook her head at Amy. She didn’t want to change the subject away from Hannah. “I don’t know about that-“
Keeley put her drink down again on the table and straightened up, sitting very tall in her seat, her face closing off defensively as she stared down Zo. “What do you mean, you don’t know? It’s slander, right?”
Pam, having given up on her shirt, put her hand out and waved it in the air between them. “Hey, I don’t think a lawsuit’s the solution, either.”
Zo said, “Well, it’s just that I read it, Hannah’s book, a little of it, and it’s just so…, real-seeming. The reviewer was probably fooled by it. Anyway-”
Keeley’s face went slack with surprise. “What? You read it? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What?” Pam and Amy asked in unison.
Zo had been dreading this moment since August. And now the words had just popped out of her mouth. She still didn’t know what to say. Why hadn’t she told them? She hadn’t said anything to Hannah either, and holding herself back with her had been almost physically painful.
Of course Zo had been the one to start reading the book first, the avid fiction reader of the group, and the one who had spent countless hours reading stories to Hannah when she was little, the two of them curled up together like spoons. She couldn’t wait to see their baby’s - her dreamy fairy-girl’s - novel. As soon as Keeley had opened the box containing all of their copies, Zo knew she wouldn’t be happy until she sat down and devoured it. She frequently read books in one sitting, closing the book finally and awakening from the dream with regret. This was true mostly with good books, great books, and of course Hannah had to have written something amazing.
It had been in the beginning of August this year, right after they arrived for their annual month-long vacation together. Early one morning, they had all gone back to the Barefooter house after scaping crabs along the boardwalk. They had been lucky enough to catch not one, but two soft-shells - real softies that had just shed their shells and were perfectly tender. As was the custom on the island, they rushed home to cook and eat them for breakfast before they turned into “leatherbacks”, the name for crabs growing new shells. Overly chewy, islanders spurned eating leatherbacks and would rarely order soft-shell crabs in restaurants as invariably that’s what they were. Better to crack a crab or eat it as a real softie.
On their way to the Barefooter house, Keeley stopped by her and Ben’s house and picked up some strawberries and a large brown cardboard box. Over a breakfast of lightly breaded and fried soft-shelled crabs, Pam’s killer home fries, and ripe strawberries, Keeley had opened the box and distributed the books to each of the Barefooters. They had grinned at each other with pride and wiped their greasy hands thoroughly before inspecting their copies.
Zo was breathless holding her copy, staring at Hannah’s name on the cover, desperate to be alone with it. As soon as they finished breakfast, cleaned up, and left their shared house to return to their own larger abodes that fit in husbands and children and assorted summering relatives, Zo practically ran all the way to her house up-island and her favorite reading chair on the porch.
It was only a half-hour later when Zo slammed the book shut, feeling ill. Something about it really bothered her. Her lips were raw from biting them unconsciously. It was such a dark scary thing, Hannah’s book. Yet so real. This was what Hannah chose to write?
She put it down on the little table next to her reading chair and looked at it for a minute. And then, she really didn’t know why, she stood up, picked up a glossy fashion magazine from nearby table, and put it on top of Hannah’s book, covering it completely. It stayed there on the table, untouched and covered with the magazine for the rest of August. She had packed it up with the rest of their things when they left and it sat now, in a pile of other books, on her bedside table at home in Westport. She had been meaning to pick it up again.
Zo felt her face grow hot as she saw the look of shock her friends were giving her. “I don’t know why I didn’t say anything. Really! I guess…, because I never got a chance to finish it?” Boy, that was pathetic.
Amy shook her head and said, “I can’t believe you didn’t tell us.”
“At least you could have told me!” Keeley said. “Especially when that review came out! I’ve been going nuts!”
“Hey!” Zo said, her embarrassment morphing into anger. “Since when it is just my responsibility to read our daughter’s book? I would think all of us would’ve read it by now. Did any of you even pick it up?”
Pam cleared her throat, nodded enthusiastically, and said, “No, and I meant to. I will! I can’t wait!”
Amy said, “I…I’m so not a fiction person. You guys know that! I’ll read it, but it’s going to take me awhile.”
Zo turned and stared down Keeley, who was still staring right back at her. “Well, have you read Hannah’s book? Any of it?”
Keeley’s face, which had that walled-off look she got in any situation where negative feelings were involved, revealed nothing. “I don’t…, I’m not…, we’re not here to talk about Hannah’s book. We’re here to talk about her and Daniel. The letter,” she said, and flicked her hand out at where it lay in Zo’s lap. “That’s why we’re here. I may be mad at her, I may never be able to talk to her again, but I’m not going to sit back and watch her throw away the very thing I threw away with Michael.” Her eyes welled when she said his name.
Pam reached over and put her hand on Keeley’s knee. “You were just a kid. Forgive yourself already.”
Keeley shook her head and turned to look at Pam. She said softly, “I can’t. I’ll never forgive myself.”
Zo looked at them, watched Amy reach over and rub Keeley’s arm. And you’ll never forgive me, none of you. Or have you already? Are we all always just putting ourselves in our own private prisons?
Doubt nagged once again, her shoulda-woulda-coulda nighttime companion, and she brushed it away. Daytime was for action, not for wobbling about filled with worries. She had a mission here. “Keeley. Hannah wouldn’t be talking about not getting married to Daniel if you were talking to her. Just call her. Go see her! The reviewer made a mistake in judgment. That’s what clearly happened, and she was morally and professionally wrong to put her assumptions in her review. But let’s not forget that the book is a novel. A work of fiction! A dark spooky piece of work, I admit, but a story nevertheless. Please! You owe it to…us.”
Keeley looked up at Zo again and then away, reaching for her drink. “I can’t,” she said.
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“Now, you guys,” Pam said.
“No, Zo has a point,” Amy said, sitting back in her chair, folding her arms over her chest, and looking at Keeley. “Why can’t you?”
Keeley shook her head slightly, and took a sip of her drink, licking the salt off the rim of the glass delicately. She didn’t answer.
“Keeley?” Amy said, in her no-nonsense voice she used with her boys when they were out of line. “Answer my question, please.”
Keeley sighed loudly, still looking at her glass and not at her friends. “I will, I promise. But not right now. I’m just too angry and I know I won’t be fair to her.”
“Oh, come on-“ Zo said.
Pam waved her hand in the air. “Wait! I think we should call a truce. Keeley said she would talk to Hannah, and I’m sure she will very soon, so let’s talk about the letter and Daniel. I don’t know, but just sounds like she’s getting cold feet. That’s all, right? Cold feet is pretty normal?”
“Very normal!” Amy said, “And it doesn’t mean things aren’t going to work out. In fact, I think it’s a good sign. Look at me and Gus! I was terrified, remember? Remember how I was going to drive to Mexico that night I freaked out? You were all going to have to visit me in my hacienda by the sea from then on. And I would have had to. After all that money my parents spent – they would have disowned me.”
“Ah, well,” Zooey said, “I had cold feet every time, and we all know how well those marriages worked out.” Thinking about it made her want a drink. It always did. She picked up her Mean Green and sipped it, the salt stinging her tongue, her mouth filling with the lime-laced tequila and shooting a torpedo down to her stomach.
Keeley finally looked up at them. “I didn’t have cold feet with Ben, and I’m happy as a clam. But I don’t think this is about cold feet. Zo?” Keeley said, looking at Zo, her face soft again, her eyes sparkling. Zo felt the warmth spread through her. Every time, it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds, like the first tender days of spring when everything felt good. And every time, she felt her heart respond, fill and brim over with love for Keeley. God, she loved her.
“Yes?” Zo said.
“Would you give me the letter? There was something she said in it.”
Zo plucked it off of her lap reluctantly, she had wanted to read it one more time, and handed it over.
Sipping her drink, Keeley quickly scanned the pale blue sheet of stationary. “Here it is. ‘Runs to the core of who I am’. She really thinks something’s wrong with her. She’s said that to me about us, that she doesn’t have friends like us.”
Pam laughed and said, “Most everyone envies my friendship with you guys. Actually, my mom always talked about it. She was so majorly jealous.”
Zo said, “There’s nothing wrong with Hannah. She’s just a loner, that’s all. I understand that completely. That’s me. Well, before you guys hijacked my life.” She smiled at the last.
“But that’s it,” Keeley said. “No one’s hijacked her life. She always wanted friends, but didn’t, wouldn’t, try to make them. She was always jealous of us. It was unnatural after a while. That’s why I kept her out of our house once she got old enough. Too old, really. I wanted her to go and make friends with the other kids on the island, find her own gang of girlfriends. I thought if she wasn’t latched on to us all the time, it would just happen.”
Amy sighed deeply, and said, “But it didn’t. The only friend she made was that Mary Ellen dingleberry.”
“I don’t get it, either,” Pam said, shaking her head and reaching for the bowl of chips. “She’s the sweetest kid ever.”
“But it’s not about that,” Zo said. “She’s a loner. It’s just who she is.”
“That would be fine if she was okay with it herself,” Keeley said. “But she’s jealous. She wants in. She never forgave me for kicking her out of our house.”
“You meant well,” Pam said through a mouthful of tortilla chips and guacamole, shielding her mouth with her hand.
Zo remembered Hannah as a girl, always looking up at them with bright eyes, hope shining off of her. Her delight when they would grab her up and make her dance and sing with them. It was just like those first summers when the Barefooters were becoming friends, the way that Zo soaked up the other three girls, was buoyed along by their energy and enthusiasm. When Hannah turned moody and difficult at twelve, Zo had blamed it on hormones. But that was the same summer Keeley told Hannah that she was banned from their little clubhouse at the southern tip of the island.
“I know!” Zo said. “Keeley, Hannah asked for information about our friendship for her next book, right? In her other letter? What about the Barefooter house? Why not give her a key and invite her to go there now? And she could bring Daniel with her!”
Amy bolted upright in her seat. “Wait, that’s it! That’s perfect! Awesome, Zo!”
“Wow,” Pam said, leaning forward and putting her beefy arms on her knees. She nodded slowly. “That is. Daniel loved Captain’s. He’s a natural islander, you can tell. And, Keeley, you have to admit it would be a good intermediary step between now and when you two talk. Maybe you could go out to the island and talk to her in person when you’re ready.”
“Wait a second!” Keeley said, shaking her head violently as if trying to shake something out. “Wait! That’s our house. No one goes there but us. And Hannah, she’s gotten used to it now. That would mess everything up. Next thing we’d know, our husbands would be hanging out there. No more Barefoot retreat! This is a terrible idea! Are you guys kidding?”
Zo said, “No! No! This would just be now, just for her next book. Just for her and Daniel. We could make it a condition about Daniel, too. He has to spend time on the island with her or no dice.”
Amy said, “Yes, but he probably won’t be able to be there the whole time. Maybe not even half. He told me he’s got a pretty heavy flight schedule.”
“Hello?” Keeley shouted and waved her hands in the air. “Can anyone hear me? This is all wrong. We’d be breaking our tradition, and that’s a slippery slope, you know. I’m serious. I just don’t think it’s a good idea. And we wouldn’t be there, and that’s who she wants to be with: us.”
“Aha!” Zo said, seeing her chance and diving in. “It may be true that she wants to be with us, but she was looking for anything about us, and if there’s a place on this earth that is more about us than our little house on Captain’s, I don’t know where it is. All those photo albums and things we’ve collected over the years she could look at! And I could talk to her if she needs to ask any questions about the stuff there. Amy? Pam? Will you guys talk to her if she wants to ask questions?”
Pam smiled and nodded. “Of course, count me in!”
Amy’s smile faded. “I’m sorry you guys. But I’m a little mad at Hannah myself. I’m the one who co-signed on that lease of hers, and gave her my old Honda, and she never called me to explain what happened with the review. Well, not until Keeley had already ripped her a new one. I’m here for you guys and Hannah, but I really think Hannah’s got to learn to be a little more considerate of other people. And I’m going to tell her that. I promise. I’ll be calling her. But giving her the Barefoot history? No. Not right now. I’ve given her a lot lately and I’m worn out.”
“You’re worn out?” Keeley said, slapped down her drink on the table, and sat back in her chair, her arms folded over her chest. “I hear ya!” She paused and looked around at each of them, looking last into Zo’s eyes. She asked, her voice soft. “So this is what we should do? Is this the right thing?”
Zo looked into her friend’s eyes and said in an equally soft voice, “Yes, it’s the right thing.”
Pam leapt to her feet, holding her glass in the air. “To Hannah and Daniel and the Barefooter house!”
Amy jumped up, too, and stretched her arm high to touch her glass to Pam’s. Zooey unfolded herself from the low chair, hearing her knees crackle and pop, and stood. She grabbed her glass from the table, touched it to her friends’ glasses and looked down at Keeley, who was still seated with her arms folded. “Hear, hear!”
Keeley looked up at them and remained seated. “What about the weather? It’s going to be cold soon and there’s no heat. What about a bed? Where are they going to sleep?”
Pam said, “They can stay at my house, we’ve got all of that. It’s only six houses down.”
“Perfect!” Zo crowed. She looked down at Keeley. Please. Let this work. “Keeley? We need you on this. It’s going to have to come from you.”
Keeley looked down at her lap.
Zo felt her heart shoot down through her feet. No!
Keeley reached over, picked up her glass, and stood up. She looked directly at Zo and in her eyes was a plea. Then she smiled. “All right! Let’s do it!”
Relief swept through Zo. Thank you, God. Thank you, All that is Powerful.
“To love!” Zo said. She still believed in soul-mate love, even after everything, after all the disappointment and heartbreak. And their Hannah might get it, catch that shooting star.
“To love!” the others agreed, clinking their glasses together loudly and drinking. They smiled at each other, grins that were wide and expectant, their youthful hopes and dreams for Hannah still in their hearts, as relentless as the waves upon the beach below.